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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-where-alines-show-debuts).

**John August:** Hey this is John. So today’s show we have a clip from a movie that has some strong words in it. Not the F-word, but other words. So, if you’re driving with kids in the car, that is a warning. That is going to be our third segment of the show today.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 219 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to be talking to Aline Brosh McKenna, our favorite podcast guest, our most repeated podcast guest. She is here to tell us about the launch of her show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she discussed way back on the Christmas episode last year. She’s the best.

Are you excited, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, she is and will always be our living Joan Rivers.

**John:** Yes. So, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show with Rachel Bloom, that debuts — it debuted yesterday if you’re listening to this on Tuesday.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting.

**John:** But we recorded this before it came out, so who knows. Maybe things went crazily wrong. But they didn’t, because the show is great. We’re also going to be talking about Indian screenwriters who have gone on strike and what that means and sort of what they can look forward to. And we’re going to be looking at three pages from this aspiring writer who I think, you know, we’ll see if he has a career ahead of him. His name is Scott Frank. And we’re going to be taking a look at these three pages he wrote and also a scene he shot that was in a movie he shot that people love. And it’s a good look at sort of how the conflict on the page between two characters in a scene with dialogue can translate into a movie and sort of what you look for in writing on the page.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. And this should be an excellent show. I have a good feeling about this show. We have Aline, so you know we’re — I mean, she’s about to come and we’re going to have a ton of bizarre mixed metaphors and analogies.

We have some interesting follow up stuff that we’re about to get to. And then I’m really excited to sort of tear this scene apart in a good way and really analyze bit by bit how these things happen. Because, you know, it’s been a while since we’ve really gotten super crafty, so.

**John:** Yeah, this will be a crafty episode.

**Craig:** Crafty crafty.

**John:** So, let’s start with the follow up. The t-shirts for Scriptnotes are now out in the world. And so as I was going to see — I saw Sicario and The Martian over the weekend. I was walking from the restaurant back to go see The Martian and I saw one of the purple Scriptnotes shirts out in the wild, like a guy on Sunset Boulevard was wearing it.

And so he saw my double take and he goes, “Hey John.” I’m like, hey. I was just so surprised to see the t-shirt out there in the world. So, if you are out there in the world wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, that is fantastic. If you want to #Scriptnotes or #ScriptnotesTee on Instagram or Twitter, that’s also fun and fine.

If you are overseas, it’s a chance that you’ve not gotten your shirts yet. If you’re in the US, it’s more likely that you’ve gotten your shirts. They all went out last Friday, so a week ago as we’re recording this. So, people should be having them in their hands ready to wear.

**Craig:** Spectacular. It is fun to see those shirts around. I do occasionally see them. If you are walking around with a shirt and John crosses your path, you too can have a conversation with John that begins and ends with, “Hey John. Hey.”

**John:** I think there’s going to be a lot of those in Austin.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Speaking of Austin, the Austin Film Festival is coming up very soon. There will be two Scriptnotes sessions. There’s going to be a live Scriptnotes show on the Friday and there’s going to be a Three Page Challenge on Saturday. We were able to use our collective muscle to move the Saving Mr. Banks conversation between Kelly Marcel and John Lee Hancock, so it’s not at the same time as Scriptnotes anymore.

So you can go to both the live Scriptnotes show and to Kelly and John’s discussion and be happy.

**Craig:** As well you should. Yes. There was a little bit of a — I don’t want to call it an uproar, because it was about four people. But those four people were very upset, so we took care of them.

**John:** Yeah. We took care of those folks. So come join us for all those things if you’d like to. I don’t know our venues yet. I don’t know anything more about our shows, but I’m excited to be going to Austin and performing those shows with Craig and folks.

**Craig:** I think they said that we’re doing the live podcast in a church.

**John:** Yeah. And so the church last year, Craig wasn’t there last year. The church is a lovely venue, except last year we were seated on the — so, there’s pews, but we were seated on the floor. We weren’t up on risers. And it was actually very hard to see. So, I will do my best to make sure that we are up high enough so you can actually see us in that church.

**Craig:** No one wants to see us. They listen to us. It’s a podcast, for god’s sake.

**John:** Absolutely. Really what you can do is you can just put your blinders on and just pretend — like listen to it live before everyone else can.

**Craig:** Really what we’re saying is fly to Austin so you have slightly better audio.

**John:** That’s really what we’re going for. Actually, maybe worse audio, because now that Craig has a good microphone, we’re all set.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. So, a couple episodes ago we talked about how would this be a movie, and one of the things we brought up was the French train heroes, so basically these three Americans who were on a train in France and they ended like taking down this guy who was shooting at the train. And they were hailed as heroes.

A weird bit of follow up that happened this last week is Spencer Stone, one of the three guys, ended up getting stabbed repeatedly in Sacramento. And there was video of it. It was just a really strange incident.

So, it wasn’t related to the French train attacks directly, but we were really wondering as we were talking about the French train possible movie, well, what would the second act be? How do you structure that? And maybe that’s a possibility of how you would think about what the second and third acts of that movie would be is basically what happens after that.

If that big incident happened in the first act, what is the life like for those guys moving forward? And as those 15 minutes start ticking down, interesting to think about sort of what happens when this heroic person goes home and whether that becomes a factor in other things of his life.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little reminiscent of the Chris Kyle story, who was murdered here in the United States by an unhinged friend. This guy seems to have been stabbed in sort of just a random incident of guys out at night. And maybe getting into an argument or a fight or something.

He’s going to be okay from what I understand. It doesn’t feel — I mean, if I had passed on this movie initially and then someone came back to me and said, “Well what about now?” I’d say it’s still a pass.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s still a pass, too. And I don’t want to sort of make light of the real plight of what happened to this one true guy, Spencer Stone, by saying like, oh, well, it changes the plot of the story. Obviously we’re talking about sort of a fictional movie about maybe some fictional people. But I think it was an interesting way to think about sort of what happens next, if you structured this kind of story with the big dramatic train incident happening at the start. What is the ongoing story of these three young men?

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. You have a bit of follow up here about Craig and Ezra and Marissa. I don’t even know what this.

**Craig:** I know, isn’t this is exciting? So, I have the craziest. A couple of nights ago, Chris Morgan and I went to the guild to speak to a group that was sort of a hybrid group of Writers Guild members and members of the Universal Emerging Writers Program, which essentially it’s designed to promote diverse writers, African American, Latino, Asian American, LGBT, the whole — the usuals, right?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, like okay, these are the folks. And it was interesting because they expanded that beyond just the people who had gone through the program to Writers Guild members in general. And I’m not sure exactly how they expanded it, but it was by far the most diverse room I’ve ever seen in the guild, ever. I mean, it was actually really encouraging.

And so we had this really nice talk about stuff and then afterwards Chris and I went over to Canter’s, because I haven’t been to Canter’s in — you know, I used to live around the corner from Canter’s. It’s been like 12 years.

**John:** I’m going to pause you for a second, because people who don’t live in Los Angeles have no idea what you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Oh, Canter’s. Canter’s Deli is an institution. It’s been around since the — I’m guessing the 20’s? 30’s?

**John:** It feels like 20’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an old, old building in the old Jewish district of Los Angeles, which isn’t really — eh, it’s kind of still Jewish.

**John:** It’s Jewish and Ethiopian in a weird way.

**Craig:** Right. It’s Jewthiopian. But it is an old school deli. And it is unchanged. And it’s just a neighborhood institution. And I used to go there all the time. It was the closest thing that I could find to sort of New York Jewish comfort food.

And it is New York Jewish comfort food. It’s just in LA. So I’m sitting there and Chris and I are chatting, and then he gets up to go to the restroom. And this guy comes over to my table, young man, nice guy, millennial mustache. I love the millennial mustache.

**John:** It’s fun.

**Craig:** He introduces himself. His name is Ezra. And he says, “I’m sorry to bother you. Is your name, Craig?

“Yes.”

“Are you Craig Mazin?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a fan of Scriptnotes.” And he’s super nice. He’s wearing a Mets hat, which I don’t like, and I tell him —

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** We talk about that for a bit. And then he says, “By the way, my girlfriend is sitting over there. Her name is Marissa. Her family owns Canter’s.”

**John:** Crazy.

**Craig:** And I was like, what? This is awesome! So I just went over and sat down with Marissa. Her mother is Jackie Canter. And we talked about Canter’s. It was the craziest — it’s like the coolest thing to meet nice people. I feel like all of our listeners are super nice. They are dating people that own classic restaurants, which is a huge plus for me because Jackie did send over some free black and white cookies and rugelach to Chris and to me.

**John:** Aw. That’s very nice. My similar kind of Scriptnotes adjacent story is a friend of mine was talking about he went to his barber who is in the Valley, I believe, and they were talking. And it turned out the barber said he was really tired because he has to stay up late after his shift because he’s a screenwriter and he wants to work at night. And he said like, “Have you ever heard the show Scriptnotes?” And he was a big fan of the Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So I just love that we have barbers in the Valley who listen to the show as well. If you are that barber in the Valley, hi, hello.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know what? Ezra, I just want to say thank you for coming over. You were an incredibly nice guy. I loved how much of a fan you were. And thank you for interesting me to your wonderful girlfriend, who should become your wife, Marissa. Because, let’s face it, Canter’s.

**John:** So when I saw this on the Workflowy, the outline of the show, I was like — so I was thinking is this Ezra Miller? I’m trying to think who is an actress who could be the Marissa. I was thinking too much is really what I was thinking.

**Craig:** It turns out to be a very simple but beautiful story.

**John:** A similar simple but beautiful story is really the Aline Brosh McKenna story, who is our first and — she was our first guest. She’s our first guest on the episode today. She’s first in our hearts. Let us welcome Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m very happy to be here.

**John:** So, Aline, we are recording this on Saturday, but on Monday your show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, debuts.

**Aline:** It does.

**John:** And people are listening to this on Tuesday. So, it’s this weird state of being both before and after the moment. So, tell us about what you’re feeling right now, two days before your show premieres?

**Aline:** Well, I’m feeling quite after about the pilot, because we started shooting it a year ago. And we finished it around Christmas of last year.

**John:** You were actually on the Christmas episode and we talked about your pilot.

**Aline:** So, at what point in the grieving was I there?

**John:** It was pre-grieving. So, at this point you were like, “Oh, we’re a Showtime show and everyone loves us.”

**Aline:** Yeah. I think they did love us before they set us free. I think I’ve talked about the fact that the pilot sort of hung around for a while, got picked up by the CW. It was a shock to us how quickly it happened. We didn’t know we were going to be on the fall schedule. So we geared up very quickly. And the pilot we did a little tszuj on the pilot. We added some material and we edited out some profanity. And I’m excited that people are going to get to see it, considering how close it came to living on a shelf, or in a bin, in some garbage.

**Craig:** And so now you have this interesting thing. You ever see that — sometimes I’ll notice in a movie when I can tell when they’ve done a pickup or a reshoot because a bunch of times come by and the actor looks slightly different. With all the time in between, does everything still feel like, okay, from episode one to two does it still feel like, oh yeah, it’s still the same person, it’s still the same vibe?

**Aline:** Well we had a lot of the same crew come back, so we had a lot of people who were familiar with everybody’s look. And then one character was completely recast, so we didn’t have to worry about that. And there was one set, which is quite important to the series, but you only see it once in the pilot. And we were able to completely rebuild that. And that’s one that we use a lot.

So, I think you’d have to be a pretty fine careful student of the pilot to see the differences.

**Craig:** It’s the only way I’ll watch TV, just so you know. [laughs]

**Aline:** With a microscope.

**Craig:** With a microscope and a checklist.

**John:** Now, Craig doesn’t watch any TV, so the real question is going to be whether Craig actually watches your show. So far the critics have said that he should watch your show. This is Brian Lowry of Variety writing, “One of the fall’s most promising hours, full of infectious energy.”

Willa Paskin at Slate writes, “Charming, ambitious, utterly singular show.”

And there’s also a New York Times article which I’ll link to, because you guys have done a ton of press on this show. You’re actually one of the shows that people are singling out as being sort of groundbreaking and unique and something people are excited about.

**Aline:** Again, all the more gratifying. We’re very grateful. But all the more gratifying considering how close we came to being garbage.

**John:** I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and I was talking with an executive who works, I think, at CBS, and she was saying how much she loved your show and how excited she was. It’s so complicated, but CBS and Showtime are related, and so is CW. And so I said like, “I’m so happy and excited for Aline and for Rachel, but I’m also hoping that — I’m both hoping for their back nine and I hope that they don’t have to do the back nine,” because I’m just trying to think how will you possibly survive 22 episodes of your show.”

Because, you’re shooting what episode right now?

**Aline:** We are just in the middle of seven.

**John:** Great. And so you are only a third of the way through it. You must be exhausted already.

**Aline:** Well, I’m not thinking about it, because we don’t have our back nine order. They ordered five extra scripts. But we’re just kind of chugging through these first 13. You know, and it is what everybody says it is in terms of the workload is quite intense. But it’s been so fun. And it’s been such an interesting different kind of job for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. So, you know, as tiring as it is, I really don’t dwell on that. I’ve really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** I would love to know how you guys — I mean, look, any TV show is a difficult march. But how do you continually create new songs that rapidly and that frequently?

**Aline:** It’s, yeah, I mean, it’s quite something. We, Rachel and I, had thought about this show in quite a lot of detail when we thought we were a Showtime show. So, we had a bunch of stuff backlogged and that helped us. And when we started we hired — Rachel did the music on the pilot with her friend, Jack Dolgen, who now writes on the show and writes additional music.

But we hired this guy, Adam Schlesinger, who is halfway to an EGOT, among other things. He was in the Fountains of Wayne.

**Craig:** I love Fountains of Wayne.

**Aline:** He composed a Broadway show. He’s written a lot of comedy songs, including Broadway’s Not Just for Gays Anymore. And we picked him up at the beginning of this, when we got picked up. And he has been writing with Rachel, and with Jack. And they kick out the songs very quickly.

It’s funny. That has not been as much of an inhibiting factor. Sometimes we switch out the song that we want to do in a given episode, because while the songs are kind of standalone pieces in a way, they have to fit emotionally into the show. So, if the show gets rewritten, sometimes the songs change.

But Rachel and Adam, once they have an idea for a song, either separately or together, and then Jack as well, we’re able to kind of cook through those once they know what they are.

**John:** I have friends who write on other network shows, and they will get studio notes and network notes, and they’ll have to quickly scramble to incorporate those notes. And it seems like it must be an incredibly bigger challenge when you have so many other pieces that are depending on it. So, you have — not only you have Rachel being so busy, but you have the writing of the episode, you have the writing of the songs, you have the choreography. You have so many things dependent. So to try to make a simple, what seems like a simple change, would be incredibly difficult for your show.

Have they been mindful of how challenging that gets?

**Aline:** We hand the demos in as soon as we get them. And the songs — we try and get the songs with the lyrics into the script. Sometimes we’re behind. But conceptually they know where we are, song-wise, most of the time. And most of their notes reside in the storytelling, in the traditional aspects of the show. So, they’ve been tremendously cooperative. And I think people also people are real fans of the music, so they’re very excited to get those demos. And I think that is the funnest part of the show, for everybody who works on the show, including the crew. It’s just always fun when we have a day when we’re doing a video and there’s music and dance on the set. Sort of everybody wants to come down and participate. Those are fun days.

**John:** Talk to us about the writing. As you are figuring out an episode, there is a written document you’re turning in that is sort of for approval. Is that an outline? What does it look like? And how long is that?

**Aline:** Well this is new to me, because in features I try to avoid written outlines, because I find that people get bogged down and you end up in outline cul-de-sac. But in TV there’s really no other way to do it.

So we do two documents. We do a short document, which is like sort of a pre-outline, which is a couple of pages. We send that in. And then we get notes on that. And then we do a fuller outline. And then we try and make that as detailed as possible, so that when the writers go off to script they have a really detailed roadmap.

But I have found that I don’t mind the outlines as much when I know I’m in production. I think in movies what I never liked about those outlines is they just seem like it’s so theoretical. It’s so many steps to get to before you get to your job. Whereas in TV you know you’re making these things, so they seem like just necessary consensus builders, because not only do the networks need them, but every department needs them to sort of anticipate who is coming up casting wise, costume wise, art direction wise, and in all departments.

**Craig:** That’s the other edge of this brutal scheduling sword. I mean, they can pour notes on you and they can ask for outlines and all the rest. But the train is moving. So, their ability to influence things is limited as well. You’re right, in features, you turn an outline in and you could argue about that outline for a year if you feel like it. You can’t do that, for you.

And obviously the outline helps you — I’m going to use a phrase that I think fits you. It allows you to impose your creative will upon others. So, you’re in charge of this room now of writers, yes?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** What is that like coming from our world where you are in charge of your room, which is you, to now being in charge of all these people and now you have to be accountable for yourself, but you also have to be accountable for what they’re doing? It’s a huge transition.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve loved it, because I’ve always struggled against the isolation and the claustrophobia of screenwriting. It’s always been a challenge for me. And it’s why I did TV early in my career.

We really have a lot fun. Our staff is six women and three men. And then we have two consultants. I have to say, it’s really fun to be writing in a room with smart people who are kicking in ideas and jokes. And it’s much more social. I really have enjoyed that. And I have enjoyed collaborating with all of the departments.

It is, you know, one of the things about — I’m definitely busier, but I’m definitely — I’m less stressed. And my husband has been noticing this. I think a lot of the stress that I experience as a screenwriter, obviously your days are not as grueling. As a screenwriter, the stress for me was always trying to get your, you know, it sounds pretentious, but getting your vision up on screen when it has to be mediated through a director. If you’re not directing yourself, you know, it has to be interpreted through a director or producer. And you’re not really the person making the decisions.

I think I have found that enormously more stressful in my life, because I am a very direct person. And so being a screenwriter, communicating when something is being made, there’s a lot of indirectness built in. And it really, if you have access as a screenwriter, it’s by virtue of the relationships you had, or you’ve built. But as a showrunner, your access is a natural part of the process. So, I feel like I’ve traded in some of my leisure hours for a more directly satisfying process.

**Craig:** Good answer, Aline. Good answer.

**John:** I was having breakfast with a showrunner on Friday, and he was at the end of his 10-episode season. And so he was now in the editing room. And so it was such a change for him because this whole time through he’s been in the writing room, and then suddenly when you’re in production you’re doing all of these jobs at once.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And so now he was really relieved to just like, “I could focus on doing one thing rather than three things.” What is your favorite part of this process right now? Are you enjoying the cutting room, or the writer’s room? What do you like?

**Aline:** That’s a really good way to describe which is, you know, there’s a writer’s room happening, there’s a production in progress, and there’s a post-department in progress. And all those things are happening at the same time. And I can’t speak for other people who do this job, but for me it’s about finding ways to empower other people to help you do this job. And I have amazing people who work with me who are very, very able to cover me on set, and can also cover me in post as needed.

I have found that the writer’s room is the beating heart of the show. If the scripts don’t work, nothing else works. And I think everybody knows that, especially on a show like this that has a very specific voice. And so I spend most of my time in the writer’s room, even when I’m rewriting. Some showrunners when they rewrite they go out of the room and do it themselves. I rewrite in the room with people, so that I get their input.

My biggest challenge, which is somewhat unique to our show, is that Rachel who is, you know, the show is not my voice or her voice, it’s our voice. And she’s full time in the production department. I mean, she’s in probably 80% of the scenes, 85% of the scenes. So trying to get Rachel’s viewpoint/involvement/writing style, all of those things inculcated into the scripts at every point is our biggest kind of institutional challenge.

**John:** So that it feels like it comes from one brain, even though it’s coming from both of your brains simultaneously. And since she’s on set, it’s sort of like Lena Dunham being on set. She can see whether this is not a choice that makes sense for the show, and call you in when she needs help on that kind of stuff, too.

**Aline:** Well, you know, the good thing is — I’ve never collaborated with an actor who was also writing with me. Obviously that’s an unusual situation. But I never worry about if there’s someone on set who understands the intention of these scenes, because she always understands the intention of these scenes. And if she doesn’t, she and I can huddle pretty quickly. So that’s really wonderful to have an actor who is your partner in that way. And we really love that. But we were laughing yesterday that when the show got picked up we thought, oh, we’re going to spend so much time together. Isn’t that going to be fun? And yesterday was a rare moment where we were walking across the stages together. And it was after the writer’s room had closed. And it was during a turnaround in the shooting where she was getting changed. We suddenly had 15 minutes together, which it felt like — you know, we always feel like we’re lovers sneaking around trying to find an extra moment together.

She’s shooting most of the time. So particularly when we’re on location, we actually don’t get to see each other as much as we would like. Ironically.

**John:** So the show will have debuted yesterday. What will your phone calls be like on Tuesday morning? Have they given you any sense of sort of what the expectations are? What you need to be able to do? Because it feels like you’re in this kind of nice spot, where people really like your show, but you’re also sort of the underdog. You’re like a well-regarded underdog going into the situation. So you just have to sort of clear the bar and get people to come back.

**Aline:** Well, you know, one of the things that’s been nice is I’ve been doing the other job, being a screenwriter, for many years. And I’m new to this job, so every day is a new thing for me. A lot of the people I work with have more experience than I do, so I’m often asking them like, “Now what happens?”

In terms of the reception of the show, I mean, obviously we hope people love it. I don’t have a lot of expectations. I mean, whatever you’re doing when a movie is coming out and you’re looking at tracking, which I try not to do too much anyway with a movie. But with a TV show, I mean, I don’t see why or how I could worry about that. There’s virtually nothing I can do.

My Facebook page is not going to help drive people to the show. So I’m not thinking about ratings and those things. I will be thinking — on Monday I will be thinking, okay, what do we start shooting this week. That’s what I’ll be thinking

**Craig:** Good for you. That’s the way to be. You know, because the truth is the world will do what the world will do. You know, for movies, our stuff is done by the time the release comes around. There is no possible creative impact that obsessing over tracking and box office can have on the movie itself. Not the case for television. And if you’re sitting there spazzing over numbers, I could see where it starts to get in your head and maybe influence how you’re doing it.

You know, I agree with John. I feel like my sense is this show — I don’t understand exactly what the parameters are for success and failure, but I know there is a breadth there. And clearly they like the show, because they’ve given you this extra vote of confidence. And it’s different, you know. I would be surprised — honestly would be surprised if — look, I mean, obviously if the ratings come in early and they’re terrific, then all’s good to go.

But if they come in and they’re not like over the moon, so what, they’re going to give you time. I do believe that.

**Aline:** Yeah. It’s an unusual show and so it might take people a little while. I mean, one of the funny things is I don’t have any of the familiar screenwriting excuses. For starters, their marketing has been phenomenal.

**John:** They really have done a great job.

**Aline:** So I cannot blame the marketing. And the other thing is it’s been a really interesting experience because this network in particular for whatever reason is extraordinarily supportive of women. They have a tremendous number of female showrunners. And they have shows with female content. And they’re so considerate of women that it never comes up. You know, that’s how kind of pervasive it is that no one is ever saying to me, talking to me about the women’s audience or girls, or their perspective. They’re just treating you like you’re making a show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** They don’t look down at the audience. You’re not ever gaming that point of view. They just want you to make a good show. And it never comes up. You know, we do jokes about female-driven stuff frequently. And it’s not even part of the conversation. So that’s also been a really wonderful experience.

I didn’t plan on doing television. And I think you guys, I’m sure, have been on conversations with me over beers where I’ve talked about why I wouldn’t do it, but now I think we’re in a time where you just go where the satisfying work is. And it doesn’t really matter what the format is. I feel like even the word television in a way is sort of a misnomer now because people are watching it in so many different formats.

You know, for me this has been one of the best experiences because I never made a decision to do any of it.

**Craig:** Right. It just sort of happened. I love that.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And you were ready for it. I know you have to go, but thank you for joining us for this segment. Because you’re Aline Brosh McKenna, you’re allowed to do one thing out of sequence if you’d like to. So, if you have a One Cool Thing or anything you want to share with our audience, you can do your One Cool Thing midway show.

**Aline:** Well, I do want to do a One Cool Thing. Thank you for asking me. I’ve worked on movie crews and they’re amazing. And you guys, I know, feel the way I do that crews are incredible. And I so admire what they do. But I’d never seen a television crew in process and they jam. I mean, they’re working so fast. We’re shooting so many pages a day. And I just am so impressed —

**John:** How many pages do you shoot in a day?

**Aline:** Seven or eight.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yeesh.

**Aline:** And I’m just so impressed with everybody, just sort of the alacrity, and they’re on top of it. And they’re moving quickly and they’re anticipating stuff. And the crew has really blown me away. And I wanted to give a particular shout out to — we have a person who is to Rachel what Tony Hale is to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Veep.

**John:** Bag man?

**Aline:** Yeah. We have — and her name is Bola. And she’s fantastic. I mean, she gets Rachel everywhere she needs to be and anticipates her every need. And she’s a huge Scriptnotes fan —

**Craig:** Yay.

**Aline:** And she geeked out when she met me because she’s seen all the episodes and she was excited. So my One Cool Thing is the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend crew, with a shout out to Bola.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice.

**John:** Aline, congratulations, good luck, we’re so happy to have you with your new show.

**Aline:** Thanks guys.

**John:** And everybody tune in, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on the CW in the US. If you are overseas, you should find a way to pirate it so you can watch it yourself.

**Aline:** It’s on Hulu the next day, I believe.

**John:** Oh great.

**Aline:** Yeah. And I think it’s also —

**Craig:** Do not pirate it. It will be available. It will be available.

**John:** What I will say is that so often these shows are put up online so people can see them for free. And clever Internet users can find a way to see promotional episodes.

**Aline:** Well, here’s the other thing. It’s on free TV. It’s a network. So you don’t you have to pay to see it the first time. You can pay to see it the second time if you want.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s free!

**John:** And you should buy all the products that are advertised on the show to support the show and tell them that you’re buying this brand of whatever because of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Aline:** You know what? Particularly Hyundai. Hyundai was our first product placement. They were the first people to come to the table. And we have a big shout out to them in the show, obviously.

**John:** We’re you able to form a rhyme with Hyundai in a song?

**Aline:** No. They’ve not made it into a song. But let it be known that if we find the right advertiser with deep enough pockets…

**John:** It’s a good day for Hyundai.

**Aline:** There will be a song.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Aline:** All right. Thank you, guys. I miss you guys. All right, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** We miss you too, Aline.

**John:** And that was Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Ugh, I’m exhausted.

**John:** A national treasure.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** Similarly exhausting is the process of making a movie, and especially a Bollywood epic. And this last week there was news that the makers of Bollywood films were going on strike. There is a sort of general strike against Bollywood, but writers were a particular focus in this issue. And, Craig, you put this on the list, so tell me what you know about the Indian writer’s strike.

**Craig:** Well, this is really bigger than an Indian actor’s strike. This appears to be an Indian movie business strike. So you have directors, actors, music directors, cinematographers, all other technicians, junior artists, screenwriters, lyricists currently on strike, meaning everyone.

We are more familiar with the terms of writer’s deals and what it means to be a writer working under various jurisdictions. So, Anjum Rajabali is the — this is an interesting title — convenor of the Film Minimum Basic Contract. So, they have a union of some kind. I don’t know what labor law is like in India. I suspect quite a bit different than here.

They have something, it just seems to be either very week in areas, or completely disregarded and contravened by the behavior of the companies. Now, interestingly, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about, but the United States is unique among all nations when it comes to copyright. We have work-for-hire law, which says that somebody can commission a unique work from someone and the commissioner can own the copyright entirely. And the person who actually creates the work has no copyright.

No other country has it the way we do. Every other country is protected by the moral rights of authors, including India. And yet they’re still getting around this stuff, which is amazing. So, what it boils down to is that Indian writers don’t have essentially any of the creative rights we have here. They keep copyright, but it is essentially —

**John:** Worthless.

**Craig:** Worthless. It’s stripped down. They don’t get any royalties, because apparently they’re forced to sign them over, or something ridiculous like that, or waive them, which this gentleman argues is illegal. They don’t have any creative rights when it comes to credits. And they’re not guaranteed any credit at all. And this is — and this is amazing to me — they’re not guaranteed credit on screen for work that they share copyright in by law. That’s remarkable and incredibly abusive.

And I just think that those of us here in the United States who work in the intellectual property industry of all sorts should be watching this carefully and supporting the Indian filmmakers and Indian crafts people who are involved in making because it’s an enormous film industry there. Massive. And it is just remarkably exploitative, if this is correct. And I have no reason to think it’s not.

**John:** Yeah, so we will link to the article in the Times of India that talks through what’s going on there. And I can’t pretend that I understand very much about how the Indian film economy works, much less how the labor market in the Indian film economy really works. To me it was just interesting to see and to be reminded of the fact that things are different here and things that are sometimes annoying here, well, they could be much worse. And this a situation where things are much worse, where you have a film industry which is obviously incredibly vibrant and actually very productive, but it’s not necessarily productive in ways that are beneficial to people who do what I do for a living. And that is a real challenge.

So, I mostly read this as a, wow, let’s make sure we don’t slide back from the things we’ve already gained here. And look for like what are the possibilities of the things that do work here, how to spread those out to other places around the world.

**Craig:** No question. It’s a nice reminder of what we have. And all too often I will hear people in our union in their zeal to improve things denigrate what we have to the point of dismissiveness, first world problem whining, et cetera. And here is somebody saying, you know, even — he’s literally saying even the Writers Guild had to strike to get to their enviable position.

So he calls our position currently enviable. And it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s a remarkable thing. It’s good to be reminded of it.

**John:** Yeah. As listeners who are listening overseas, there are Writers Guilds in other nations, but they’re often more guilds of artisans, and they’re more sort of about the craft of things and promoting the craft of things, rather than a true labor organization the way that the Writers Guild of America is.

They may not be able to do any of the protections that something like the Writers Guild can, because they’re just not set up that way. And we could probably point you to which ever episode that Craig really talked through part of why it’s different in the US because of the nature of copyright law and work-for-hire, which seems like an abusive thing, but it allows for writers to be covered in labor unions, which would not be possible if copyright were something that we held onto individually. If we were not employees of a corporation, we couldn’t get some of the things we do get.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And it’s interesting, the Indian situation is remarkable. They have 23 separate unions covering workers in their movie business. And I don’t know exactly how the definition of union there. But I’m just going to say presumably it’s similar. But of those 23 unions, there is one what they call the mother body, FWICE, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees.

So, there is some kind of overarching body that we don’t have here that is coordinating this massive inter-union strike. All 23 unions are on strike. This is precisely the kind of thing that calls for a strike. And I’ve always said the only strike worth taking is the one that you have to take because the only thing worse than it is the alternative, which is essentially death. Union death.

To me, if they don’t get this, they are effectively union dead.

**John:** So, what this massive union reminded me more of than anything else here is IOTSE, which is the union which covers many of the trades in the film industry. And they cover some things which are writing. They cover some animation writing. They cover things that many of our listeners may be involved with. And especially because we have many listeners who also work below the line. And certainly happy that there is IOTSE protection for so many of those job. But the IOTSE protection for crafts like screenwriting and animation writing, they’re not as strong as what the Writers Guild is able to provide for those writing services. And I hope that in the zeal to get all Indian film people paid fairly and treated better, and that the creative rights of the writers, directors, lyricists are at least given more than lip service. So, I’ll be curious to see how this shakes out.

And I’m not sure I will necessarily understand how it shakes out because I won’t have a great picture of what it is like right now.

**Craig:** Right. Well, we’ll follow it. And I think once there is a resolution of some kind, hopefully that resolution will make it clear what’s changed. And by looking at what’s changed, we’ll probably have a decent sense of what it was and what it is now.

**John:** Great. So, I’m so excited for this next section, because this is something Craig has recommended. This is actually something you talked through way back when. You had a site called Artful Writer, which if you try to visit artfulwriter.com right now you’ll get redirected because the page has gone away. But through the wonders of Internet archive, Craig was able to find what he wrote about this scene. And the scene is written by Mr. Scott Frank, who we know from Out of Sight. This movie is The Lookout. But he is a screenwriter’s screenwriter. And he is known for writing amazing scripts, but also helping to write a lot of other movies you’ve seen out there in the world.

And this was a scene that you picked out of his movie, The Lookout, and I’d love for everyone to sort of read along with us, but we’re also going to play the clip from the actual finished movie. So it’s not going to be one of those classic Three Page Challenges where you have to download the PDF and read along at home, although that link we’ll be there. We can actually listen to this scene.

But first, I think Craig should set it up, because I watched it without any setup and I was a little bit confused.

**Craig:** Sure. So, The Lookout is essentially a movie about a young many who has a promising future ahead of him. He comes from a wealthy family. And he gets into a terrible car accident. And as a result, he suffers lasting brain injury which is impairing him. It’s not impairing him physically as much as it has disrupted his ability to concentrate, his memory, and to some extent it has damaged his personality. He is a bit of a broken guy.

He actually has to live with another gentleman who is in the same kind of rehabilitation, or I guess you would call it adult monitoring program that he’s in. And this other guy is blind, so that’s his issue. So, you have a blind man and a brain-injured man, both living in an apartment together, kind of helping each other, and looking out for each other.

But The Lookout is not about that. The Lookout is about the fact that this young guy, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and remarkably the character’s name is Chris Pratt.

**John:** Yeah. I found that hilarious.

**Craig:** Isn’t that wild? This movie came out, I want to say, gosh, 2005 maybe, something like that. 2007. So, in 2007 nobody knew about Chris Pratt. [laughs] And so Scott Frank wrote a movie with a character named Chris Pratt. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt. And Chris Pratt is at a bar. His job is he’s the night caretaker at a bank, at a small branch in a rural bank.

And he meets up with an old guy he sort of knew from high school, but doesn’t quite know, and his memory is not working very well. And this guy realizes that Chris works as the night watchman at this bank and slowly starts to pull him into a plan where the bank is going to be robbed, Chris will be the lookout, and he will get a share of the money.

And at this point in the movie, Chris who wasn’t necessarily interested in this has kind of fallen for a bit of a baited hook. The bad guy’s girlfriend is a woman played by Isla Fisher and her name is Luvlee, Luvlee Lemons. And she just thinks Chris is the best. She’s falling for him, and he can’t believe it. And, in fact, she’s come back to the apartment that he shares with Jeff Daniels, who plays the blind gentleman named Lewis. And she has just had sex with him and everything is pretty great.

**John:** With Chris Pratt. With the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character.

**Craig:** Correct. She’s just had sex with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He thinks everything is wonderful. And that’s all really all that Lewis, Jeff Daniel’s character, knows is that something is up. And that’s pretty much it.

**John:** All right. So let me do some descriptive storytelling for people who are listening to this clip, but not watching the clip. So this clip is going to have Isla Fisher and Jeff Daniels. Jeff Daniels is mostly in shadow. Isla Fisher at the start of the scene is at the refrigerator. Then she comes over and sits across from Jeff Daniels as they have their conversation. There are moments at which we cut away and you’ll hear the audio shift. And that’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt listening in the other room to this conversation that’s happening in the main room.

But everything else is just these two characters talking, which is why I think it’s a good scene for our radio theater of Scriptnotes. So, let’s take a listen to the clip.

**John:** All right. And that’s our scene. So, if you want to read along with the script, which is very much like the scene, but there are a few changes in dialogue, you can. That’s also in the show notes, johnaugust.com. There’s a link there for the YouTube if you want to watch the YouTube and see sort of how it was shot.

So, Craig, talk us through what you see in the scene. How you think it’s working and what got you excited about this scene.

**Craig:** Well, to me the scene is really valuable as an instructive tool. We are always looking for examples of good scenes to show to people. Most of the time, what ends up happening is we show them exciting scenes. But exciting scenes are capable of hiding certain deficiencies because they’re full of fun. It’s a little bit like on a cooking show, it’s one thing to say, “Look at this. I made this remarkably complicated soufflé,” versus, “I made you a scrambled egg, but man, it’s a great scrambled egg.” Right?

So, what I loved about this scene was it was paired down to almost the barest minimum you can have in a scene. There is literally I think one or two lines that occur while Luvlee Lemons is walking into the room, but then she sits down and that’s it. It’s just two people sitting, they barely move, and it’s just talking. And, yet, I think it’s a great example of conflict and of what I would call scene harmony.

People will say sometimes, you know, it would be good if your writing were a little tighter. And it’s hard to understand what the hell that means. And what I think it means is that things are serving more than one purpose at a time. So sometimes I think about scenes as moving on three different axes. There’s whatever is going on inside the main character, there is whatever is going on between two characters or two or more characters, and then there is whatever is going on in the world.

And there are wonderful scenes that have only one of those things, but the best scenes to me have all three working together and affecting and impacting each other and kind of unfolding like a little puzzle. So I really thought that there was just some wonderful stuff going on here, and I would love to — I mean, I would literally go through this bit by bit and talk about what I love.

**John:** Great. Let me restate your three things just to make sure that I understand them and maybe anchor them more in people’s minds. So, in any scene, let’s say this is a scene with two characters, you’re looking at what is the inner state of that character, you’re looking at what are they trying to do, what’s driving them, both in the immediate term, but also longer term. So that’s one level of what you’re looking at.

Second level you’re looking at what is the conversation, what is the external thing that they’re showing. So, in this case, it is the ball that they are hitting back and forth. It is their conversation. And so it’s the nature — the scene is really just them talking. So, what words are they choosing, how are they responding to what each other character is saying? How are they both alive and present in that scene, pushing back and forth?

And that third thing is what else is happening in the world. What is the nature — it’s all the scene description, really. It’s the non-dialogue part of this story, which is what is the setting, what are the other sounds, who else is observing this. How does the situation present itself? What is the movement? All those other things that you’re seeing in the scene that aren’t part of the dialogue itself.

Are those these axes you’re looking at?

**Craig:** Yeah. Essentially we’re talking about internal, interpersonal, external.

So, the external ones are the easiest ones. A car crashes into your car. Things happen. Gun shots ring out somewhere. We tend to focus most of our work on the interpersonal. Scenes tend to be mostly about relationships and how people are, like you say, ping-ponging off each other. But there are some wonderful scenes where people are alone and realize the thing.

All of your good revelation moments generally are internal, but we understand them.

The fun of thinking about scenes this way is that you start to focus in on a really important question when you’re writing a scene, every scene, scene after scene after scene. At least one of these states — an internal state, an interpersonal state, an external state — at least one of them must be different at the end of my scene. Or this scene is not a scene. And it doesn’t belong in my movie.

And that’s where we talk — when you and I talk about intention and purpose, this is where the intention and purpose starts to happen. The changing state. What has changed inside of you? Nothing? Fine. What has changed between you and her? Nothing? Fine.

What has just changed in the world? There are times when you can get all three working kind of nicely. And I love that.

**John:** Yeah. Do you want to talk about Scott Frank’s intention as the author as we start this scene, or what the two character’s intention is? Because I think they’re both really interesting things to look at. I mean, Scott Frank has a checklist of things he sort of needs this scene to accomplish narratively and why it needs to fit into the story.

But we can also look at sort of what each of these characters is trying to do over the course of the scene.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s actually a great question to ask. And here’s the nice part and the good news for everybody else. Scott does not have complicated intentions here. Your intentions really never should be that complicated.

Here’s what he’s hoping to accomplish with this scene. He wants Luvlee to be confronted by somebody quite a bit wiser and smarter than the dupe. And he wants that person to start making her feel guilty, because she is guiltable. Whereas her boyfriend, the bad guy, and poor Chris Pratt doesn’t know that that’s her boyfriend because he’s a little brain damaged — her boyfriend is not guiltable. Her boyfriend is just a bad guy.

She’s being used here, too, and so he’s — that’s what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not Lewis is going to become the superhero of this movie to try and stop her. It’s entirely about having her character have a moment where she’s caught and needs to start contemplating a big choice. Am I going to follow through with this plan, or am I actually going to start honor the legitimate feelings I’m having for this dupe I’m supposed to be duping.

**John:** Great. So that is a goal for Scott Frank with his character. So it’s a change he’s trying to effect in Luvlee’s character.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And as much of a change he’s trying to effect, he’s trying to raise the audience’s question about sort of what her real motivations are and whether it’s possible to shift those motivations.

**Craig:** Exactly correct. And that’s key. Because in this moment, he is essentially creating an expectation for a resolvable drama. It’s a question of will she or won’t she. Is she going to do the right thing or the wrong thing? Does she really love him? Does she not really love him? Is she redeemable? Is she not redeemable? What is going to happen to the lookout?

And it all comes out of this scene. But what I find so wonderful about the way Scott has written this is that he took it upon himself to entertain us the entire time. And his entertainment revolves around revealing information about a character, the dreaded backstory, the dreaded exposition, that normally we’re trying to hide and bury. Here, actually works in service of his greater intention.

**John:** Yeah, the backstory he’s trying to reveal here is that issue of like how he became blind, which is one of those sort of like origin stories that weirdly is not so important in the movie as I recall. It never really comes back around. But it helps to explain how he recognizes the kinds of people that she is and that Gary is. That he’s been around those types of people before.

**Craig:** That’s correct. Suddenly his character starts to come into view as somebody that is more than we thought. He seemed like an avuncular, nice, blind fellow who out of brotherly love was helping this poor kid. And yet now we realize perhaps he sees more than we thought, no pun intended. And his revelation of this puts her in an interesting spot. Her response to it is what starts to make us learn about her.

So I want to talk about this interesting little moment here. The way this begins, she’s coming into the kitchen after post-coital to get something to eat. And it’s dark. And he startles her by saying, “Luvlee, I presume.” And he’s sitting at the table, but in the dark, because he doesn’t need lights.

And she sees him and he says to her this kind of nice — I call this Colombo stuff, like I’m going to lure you in by just being a nice guy. I recognize the perfume. Can I offer you some pie? It’s not homemade, but it’s very nice.

And then he says, “Got to watch your figure, I imagine, your line of work. Nice name by the way, Luvlee Lemons.” This is the first time anyone in the movie has mentioned that she’s a stripper. Or that she was a stripper. Oh, this is how he recognizes the perfume. He’s seen her before, sort of, like he’s been around. He knows that she’s a dancer, even though he can’t see.

And she admits it now very casually. And I love this. And this is when I talk about subtext and dialogue, a lot of times new writers struggle. They have a response. This guy has just picked at this little scab, this thing that she thought was hidden away. And he’s right away in a very pleasant, unassuming manner just gone, oh, I noticed you have this little scab here. Let me pick at it.

Of course, if we put ourselves in the point of view of a character hearing that, we immediately get defensive. And we want that person to be defensive. But in reality, if you think about the way you are with people, when someone puts you on the defensive, if you are a certain kind of person, a capable person, the first thing you do is immediately attempt to mask that you are defensive, because you understand inherently, but to show that is to show weakness.

**John:** So her line back to that is, “I don’t dance anymore. I was never very good at it.” It’s a way of throwing away a reaction to it. Just like, oh, that doesn’t bother me at all.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oh yeah, no, that’s right. Yeah. I was a stripper. I wasn’t very good at it. See, I can play the casual game, too. But already now, and for those of you who write three pages and send them in, think about how much we have learned in a half a page. An enormous amount, not just about who she was as a person, but about who she is now as a person.

And, then, there’s some comedy, which is great. She waves her hand in front of his face. This was a big laugh in the theater because she starts moving her hand in front of his face and he says, “Please tell me you’re not waving your hand in front of my face.” Big laugh. And it’s funny. But also why is she doing that? And you learn something else about her character now. She’s not willing to take it on faith that he really is blind.

What a fascinating thing to reveal about somebody, because now just casually — and by the way I do believe that when we’re in an audience we don’t necessarily pick it up overtly, but it seeps into us that she is suspicious. And who is suspicious of a blind man? Maybe somebody who is a little bit of a con-artist themselves.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing which this is doing is showing that sort of third axis you talked about, which is what is the actual situation giving you. And so this is the setting, this is — it’s what it’s really like to be in that space. And she’s not convinced he’s blind. He’s already sitting in the dark. And so she’s doing a very natural human reaction which is is he really seeing me and he gets to hit that ball right back to her.

**Craig:** Right. And notice that at this point we don’t necessarily know what Lewis’s goal is. But, as every scene is a little mini-movie, the protagonist of the scene has a goal. The goal, the intention, is what is driving everything in the scene. It is driving his point of view. Everything he says. How he responds. And for the performer, how they are going to play the part.

He has a goal right now. We don’t yet know what it is. So then she says, “Have you been blind your whole life?” And it’s a perfectly bland question. And you might think, well why is she just asking a bland question right now?

What I get off of it is that this is a smart person. I notice that the way she answered his stripper question. She’s playing dumb. She’s playing innocent ingénue, because that’s the safest move. And he says, “Most of it.” And she says, “How did it happen?” And he says, “I looked at the sun too long.” And she says, “Wow, you hear about that.”

Now, another big laugh. When she says, “Wow, you hear about that,” here’s what he doesn’t say, “Uh, I think you know that I didn’t go blind by looking at the sun too long.” He lets it go. Instead he says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?”

Now I love this. So, again, playing at home, for your Three Page Challenge, and by the way, Scott cheated. It’s actually 3.5 pages, but fine. We’re at the top of page two. And by the top of page two I now know that she is a not trusting person. She is crafty enough to hide her defensiveness. I know that she used to be a stripper. I know that she likes to play dumb to avoid being held accountable. And I also know that he notices that she’s doing it and is going to move right by it, because he’s now interested in upping the ante. He’s chasing something and he feels like he can get her.

We are watching a fight, whether we know it or not. This is good as karate as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** So the next phase here is the “let me ask you a question, what’s your real name? Why, you going to Google me? If I did, what would I find? Probably nothing.” Here you’re making clear what is the intention of the scene, that Lewis actually is approaching the scene with some agenda, which is to try to figure out who she really is. And she is deflecting these questions. She’s answering a question with a question, which is a very classic technique to sort of avoid answering anything.

I think our expectation is that he’s going to keep asking her questions when in fact he doesn’t really care about the answers to those questions. He mostly wants to demonstrate that he’s on to her.

**Craig:** Right. Great point. So, what is the value of demonstrating that you know you’re on to somebody? You start to see what his real purpose is. He doesn’t really care, because he already — I mean, he doesn’t really care what she’s up to, because he knows it’s no good. He already knows it. He knew it before she walked in the room.

What he wants to do is make her know that he knows it, and make her start to question whether she wants to go through it. Whatever it is, he will not know at the end of this discussion what these two are doing. So, she again continues to play dumb. And he says, “If I did what would I find?” “Probably nothing.”

And that is a poor me. You know, like I’m no, you know, I’m no good. Now she’s trying a little sympathy. And he doesn’t pick it up. And he says, “And what happens if I Google Gary?” That’s the bad buy. That’s the boyfriend. And she goes, “I don’t know.”

“How’d you meet Chris?” Great. Great.

Now, I mention this because a lot of times when I read screenplays by new writers, or seasoned writers, arguments become very much to the point. And oftentimes in life they are very much to the point. It’s a rare thing to have a fight with your wife that goes like this. They don’t. But then again, fights with your wife, fights with your husband, they’re fairly mundane and low stakes. Or if they’re high stakes, they’re between two reasonable people who are not trying to entertain anyone with a narrative.

These two people are dancing. So much fun to watch.

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about just the words on the page, because this is basically just a two-hander, just dialogue conversation. But Scott is breaking up the page with these interjections.

So, Lewis asks, “And what happens if I Google Gary.” In the scene description, “She shrugs, hums ‘I don’t know.'” So this is a case where there’s sort of dialogue being put in the scene description, but it’s basically helping us show what it is that she’s trying to avoid saying, the I don’t know.

And also just keeping us from being just a solid gutter of dialogue on the page.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the shrug and the hum as an action does help us understand a little bit better as we’re reading it. This is let’s say we have not seen the movie. We’re thinking about making the movie. It helps us get a little bit more of what she’s really doing there with this clear change.

Now, another wonderful moment here.

“How’d you meet Chris?” Nine out of ten writers would say, “Why are you changing the subject, Luvlee?” Because that feels fun. But I love that Lewis just answers it. Because he’s better than she is at this. He has no problem being a little patient here. Sometimes in chess you move your piece backwards. Great. This is jujitsu.

You know, there’s times to punch, there are times to feint. A lot of writers forget about the feinting part. So he answers. “Center put us together a few years ago.” She says, “And now he’s your best friend.” Lewis says, “He’s a good friend.” And she says, “Maybe your only friend?”

Now, by the way, this is now at the 1.5 page mark. Let us review. She used to be a stripper. She is suspicious. She knows something about con men or at least has that instinct in her. Lewis is insightfully determining that she’s up to something, he’s not sure what. And he’s not going to let her off. She tries to play dumb. It doesn’t work.

She tries to get sympathy. It doesn’t work. She tries to change the subject. It doesn’t work because he lets her change the subject which takes the power away from it. So now she’s going to stick it to him. This is the first moment where she jabs back and lets him know don’t think that this is going to be that easy.

And so what is his response, John?

**John:** “Hey Luvlee, that thing about the sun, it was a total lie, total bullshit.” So this is, okay, you’re going to hit me with this, then I’m going to lay down a few more of my cards here on the table. And it’s a change that we’re seeing here. Now I want to acknowledge that I am not as much of a fan of this middle section of the scene as I think you are. And I think there is a way this could have been taken out and we could have gotten a slightly better through line on this.

But I do like it more on the page than I liked it staged in that what Scott chooses here on the page, that may be your only friend, I could imagine a line reading of that where the energy really shifted dramatically in that scene. As filmed, I didn’t feel that shift as much I felt the possibility of that shift here on the page.

I think the transition from the earning “that may be your only friend,” and then getting to how he’s getting to “Hey Luvlee,” I really see the possibilities here on the page. I didn’t see it actually performed as much as it was cut together.

**Craig:** Look, I do love the scene as it is, but I understand what you’re saying. This is where the craft of screenwriting can be frustrating. Because, let’s put it this way, the person who staged and shot the scene is the same guy that wrote the scene.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So now imagine what it’s like when you write the scene and somebody else — I mean, the way that things are imagined are often so different, for those of who write them, or those of us reading the writing than they are from what we see. And there will always be those things.

But I do love how Lewis — so on the page she says, “Maybe your only friend?” He doesn’t answer that. Finally leans forward. Okay, I was waiting for you to show that you had a stinger. You did. Thank you. Now let’s talk real. Let’s get to it.

We’ve been dancing, feinting, and jabbing for a page and a half. You’ve now finally admitted that we’re in a fight and that you’re capable. Fine. Here we go.

So he says I’m going to now tell you the story of — he tells her the story of how he went blind. And what’s fascinating is we were not expecting this at all. We had no idea how he went blind. In fact, I remember watching the movie thinking I just assumed that he was blind. I didn’t know that there was a moment he became blind. And, in fact, when he said I stared at the sun too long, I presumed that was just his snarky way of saying I was born blind, duh.

But, no, and now he tells this story. And the story that he tells says that he went blind because he was one of the people cooking meth back before cooking meth was fashionable, and back before people knew what they were doing cooking meth. And he did not know that working with those chemicals in an unventilated room could blind you.

And he says something which probably could have been avoided had I just stopped and bothered to ask a simple question: what am I doing here. Mm-hmm. And at last, right, he reveals his goal. Not only does he reveal it — so, I just love the synchronicity. I love the harmony. What is happening here?

We have learned something that is a fact about our character, his back story. We have learned something about his internal life. Suddenly, this guy has become a different guy to us. He is not just a nice sweet blind man who is worried about his friend. He’s a criminal. Once a criminal, always a criminal. He’s a bad guy, too, in his own way.

And we now know why he’s blind and we have a certain appreciation for the tragedy and drama of that. We now know why he’s protective of Chris, somebody who is innocent and not a criminal and yet on the verge of becoming one. And we now know why he sees her for what she is.

And we also get all of that to change their relationship, which has been changing throughout to something very, very different.

**John:** So, he is telling this story about himself, but he’s putting her into the place of the story. He’s saying, like, you know, I did these criminal things and I should have stopped to ask myself what am I doing here. And that the I pronoun is really meant to be for her. Like what is she doing here? And that she should be asking herself that same question. It’s a way of very classically you tell a story about yourself hoping that the other person will see themselves in the story that you’re telling.

And it’s a smart move for Lewis to do that I largely believe, because he’s able to sell it as if it’s answering her question about how he became blind, but it’s moving forward his agenda with her.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And his — as his tactics have shifted, we arrive at this fascinating one, because the initial tactic was to be gentle, and then it was to be snarky, and then it was to be challenging. And now it’s to be empathetic. When he tells her this story, he’s revealing something of himself almost in trade. What he’s saying is I’m you. Don’t think of me as not you. I’m actually in the thieves guild, too.

So, pay attention now. You’re not getting hectored and lectured by a do-gooder. I’m trying to save you here. Then her response to that is, “What a sad story, if it’s true.” He hasn’t gotten her —

**John:** Yeah. So, once that story, if it’s true, that feels like a recall to “maybe your only friend.” It’s her finding backbone again. My — if I have an issue with Luvlee in this scene overall, it’s that she’s being asked to play dumb and smart simultaneously. And so I look at her lines at the bottom of page two, when he says, “It was a lie. Total bullshit.” She goes, “Oh…” “We started to make money.” She asks, “You blew yourself up?”

And, again, it’s hard to separate myself from the performance that I saw before I read the page, but it seemed like an earnest question, like she’s asking with a sort of baby doll voice, “You blew yourself up,” as if she really believed it. Whereas that doesn’t seem to track with the intelligence that I saw with “maybe your only friend,” or at least what her intention was with “maybe your only friend.” Does that make sense?

**Craig:** It does. The way I got it, I mean, when I watched the movie and the scene again, is that this is her move. Every character has a move, and this move has worked for her a thousand times, a million times. This is someone who has stolen a lot of money and manipulated a lot of hearts while she has lived a sad life. She’s probably also lost quite a few bites in her day.

And she is a stripper and she is using her body and she is using her wiles to survive. And she can’t help but presume that her best shot, her right hook, is going to be the one that will take this guy down. And so she’s going to keep going back to it, like a fighter with a bad habit who can’t believe it’s not working.

So, you know, you can look at her kind of choosing to do the same thing and expecting different results as a flaw in the execution, but you can also look at it as a flaw in her character, which is the way I do. That she can’t stop. But when she says, “What a sad story, if it’s true,” you’re right. That is her coming back to, okay, let me drop that tactic, it’s not working. Let me try a different one.

And also let me reveal that my initial suspicion of you, waving the hand in front of your face, hasn’t gone away. I don’t know — I’m not willing to let you in yet, give you the credibility to make me feel something that I’m probably already feeling. And this is when Lewis finally just says, “We’ve arrived.” We’re at page 2.5 now. “Tell me, what are you all cooking, sweetheart? Why are you here?”

And this is also just craft now, folks. He’s cooked food. She’s going to eat the food. He’s already eating the food. He’s a meth cook. What are you all cooking up here? Subtle. It’s not a big deal. It just makes things feel like a piece, which I like.

**John:** Yeah. It’s rhyming. It’s rhyming a word literally. I mean, it’s rhyming an idea. And using that to make it clear that there’s intention behind the words that Lewis is choosing.

**Craig:** Correct. And so we enter act three. Because I really think of that — that’s like let’s talk about the scene like a movie, act one presumes, and we get into act two when Lewis says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?” That’s the beginning of act two. The end of act two is, “Tell me, what are you all cooking?” Now we begin the climax.

She is now in full struggle mode. She’s losing. And she’s going to just start now throwing wild punches. “Same reason you are. Chris Pratt.”

He says, “Sweet. Of course, not quite as sweet as meeting at a bar, or giving someone a cellphone.” He knows things. She’s squirming.

Now she just says, “Gary wants to help Chris.” That’s out of nowhere. That was a mistake, right? Like you know how, I don’t know if you ever looked at the chess column in a newspaper where they analyze a game, or a bridge column. They report the moves. And when they get to a move that’s a mistake, they put a question mark next to it. This gets a question mark next to it. She made a mistake. And he’s got her now. And he says, “I’ve known lots of Garys. A few Luvlees, too.” [laughs] It’s so good.

She says, “Meaning?” But it’s over. And he says, “Meaning that something tells me you don’t really believe that you’re going to be invited to the next Pratt Thanksgiving.” Ow. Right? Just like, look, you’re a stripper. You expect me to buy this bullshit that the wealthy Pratt family is going to welcome brain-damaged Chris’s new stripper girl into the house? You don’t believe that. You don’t think anyone would ever believe that. That’s not what you’re up to here at all. This is about Gary. What are you doing?

And she says, “Well I could be.” And he says, just in case you didn’t get it, “Sometimes I wake up, I think I can see, until I walk into a door. The Luvlee Lemons of the world don’t end up with Chris Pratt.”

And she says, “Well thank you, asshole.” That’s it, right? She’s, okay, I’ve lost. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of admitting I lost. I’m just going to revert back to hurt girl and I’m going to stick with my lie.

And so now he has a problem. Because she’s pulled the rip cord and she’s exiting. And this is a great thing to think about when you’re writing arguments. When we have arguments with people, we’re in three states. We are pressing. We are sparring. Or we’re retreating. An argument is going well when you’re pressing. It means you’ve got them on the ropes and you’re just hitting them, right? Sparring means you’re in that ping pong zone. You guys are going back and forth. It’s an even match. Retreating is when you know this is not going well for you.

And when we are losing an argument, everyone has a strong instinct to say something that will get them out of it. They’re trying to run away now. So this is when people say things like, “I don’t know what you want from me.” Or, “What do you want from me?” Or —

**John:** “Let’s agree to disagree.” Yeah, the closers. Yeah.

**Craig:** Get me out of this. What makes this stop? And the problem is it’s effective. The person who has been pressing suddenly now knows they’re getting out of the ring now. Or the bell is about to ring and the round is about to end. I need to just throw the punch, the only punch that I have left. And so here, at the very top of page four, he says, “Sad but true, but it takes me back to that original question, Luvlee. So tonight, in the dark, let me help you out. Help you out. And ask it again: what are you doing here?”

And she has no response. At which point he gets up and says, “There’s some killer chicken salad in the fridge. My secret is the apples. Gives it a nice texture.” He’s like, all right. That was it. I’ve got nothing left for you.

But we get that his goal has been achieved to some extent. We can see it in her face. He’s planted the seed now. And it’s not a seed of you’re a bad person. And it’s not a seed of stop what you’re doing, or tell me what you’re doing. It’s a seed of using guilt to make her reconsider whatever the hell it is.

**John:** Yep. So, let’s talk about the differences between the scene we’re reading on the page and the scene as staged. And so one of the big differences is that in the scene in the film itself, we cut away to see Chris Pratt is listening to some part of the conversation. And so that is not reflected in these pages. So he’s overhearing some of this, which definitely changes the nature of our audience focus, because we’re always going to be sympathetic to our hero, and sort of what our hero knows. And it changes how Chris is perceiving both this girl and his roommate.

And so it really shifts the nature of the scene to insert that cutaway. It takes away from the sparring match to a certain degree. It’s like every time you cut away to an audience member in a boxing match. Like, well, you’re not in the boxing match to some degree. And it does change the nature of this conflict, because a scene about two people is now a scene about three people.

That’s one thing I noticed. I don’t know at what point during the process the decision to include Chris in that shot occurred.

The other thing I want to take a look at is if you’re watching the scene on YouTube, the conversation between the two of them, once they’re seated at the table, is very much the tennis match. It’s very much I hit the ball, you hit the ball, I hit the ball, you hit the ball. And doesn’t change a lot over the nature of the argument. There’s no — while there’s some pauses, the film itself doesn’t reset itself for some of those other moments and shifts along the way. So it’s a very straightforward way of covering this, which may be the best choice for it. But you can imagine a director taking other ways to sort of visualize what the shifts are in the conversation.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I suspect that the cutaways to Chris were something that they worked out maybe as they were planning how to shoot that. Because they needed to know that they were going to be in his room and shooting him listening. But it’s not on the page here, so I suspect it was a later decision. It’s an interesting one. And it’s also interesting and brave that Scott has this scene dialed in as carefully as he does, and yet is okay with losing some of the words, even in the audio, to really focus on Chris and how this is sinking in.

But it is an interesting choice and I actually think it pays off well, because we want to know that he also is starting to be concerned. And we want to know that this can set up conflict between him and Lewis.

It’s only interesting for Luvlee to do the right thing if she knows that she can get away with it. And so seeing Chris make a choice to believe her puts her and us in a more interesting dramatic state of mind.

The execution of the scene editorially, you’re correct, is very much about competing singles. You know, it’s funny, I remember talking with Scott. It was actually during the process when he was editing A Walk Among the Tombstones. And he said that he kind of had this big epiphany moment in post where he made a concerted effort along with his editor to reduce cuts and try and stay in takes as long as he could, especially in moments like this. And there are some excellent moments.

Another really, really good movie I think, A Walk Among the Tombstones, if you haven’t seen it. Some really good interesting conversations in that movie. And, yes, I agree that when we cut the audience will not necessarily make the conscious calculation that you’re cheating, but it starts to sink in. We know that the rhythm is being manufactured rather than actually being played. It’s a huge thing in comedy.

I mean, one of the great rules of comedy I learned from David Zucker is if you’re going to do a physical gag and it’s a thing where something happens that causes someone to get hurt, it must be in one. You cannot show the thing that’s going to cause them to be hurt and then cut to them being hurt. You’ve lost the credit for rigging the gag.

And similarly here, I do think that there are a couple of spots where it would have been better had it been in one long shot, to see that the two of them actually have that rhythm. Of course, who knows? See, the thing is —

**John:** Yeah, we don’t see the footage. And we don’t know what the actual day was like and sort of what the —

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This may have absolutely been the best version of this scene with what they had, and that’s totally great. And there may be reasons why these were the performances that really landed. And so I can’t sort of second guess what that is.

Just in the hypothetical version, I love that you were talking about the physicality of her, and her stripper body, because I think that’s a real potential that her nature is — it would actually help sell some of those lines I had an issue with. If her nature is just to go to her baby doll voice and sort of use her body and then — I would love to see the moment of recognition where she goes, oh shit, I can’t do this because he’s blind. He can’t see my tits. So this is not — I need to stop doing this thing.

That is a potential, but that only can play if you have a little bit wider shots to sort of see what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I wish I could round up movie reviewers and force them to sit and watch movies be painstakingly created, I wish they could see this. There are times when for whatever reason you can’t do what you want. It’s not that you didn’t know. It’s that you could do it. One of the things that comes up all the time when you’re shooting is well how will we cut this. Will it cut together? But, you’re also — when you’re doing takes you’re thinking where do I get the scissors in here? And can I get the scissors in? And do I need to get the scissors in?

Some of the most valuable direction that I’ve seen directors give actors is, “Great. Let’s do this again. And now let’s do it faster.” Because if there is a rhythm to this that is at the tempo I want, I won’t need to cut. But sometimes they flub a line. Stuff happens. This is life. So, I would have been fascinated to have been there that day.

But for people that are writing scenes, what’s so fantastic about this is that it really does focus everything down to — it’s as if Scott has pulled away every easy trick available. There are no guns. There’s no chasing. No one is entering or exiting once it begins. There’s literally barely light. It’s just two people and it’s entirely about the internal and the interpersonal.

And then at the end it is creating an external. It is creating this state that is going to either occur or not. And we know there is going to be a choice in this movie that’s coming down the line.

So, so well done and really worth studying.

**John:** Yeah, I think Scott Frank has a career ahead of him if he keeps writing at this level. We should all be so lucky.

So, Craig, thank you for that suggestion. I think it really is great to look at some finished — we’ve done episodes where we’ve looked at finished movies and we’ve talked through Raiders and Ghost, but this is great to look at sort of the words on the page, the scene, and be able to really focus in on just one specific moment.

I think it’s now time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually just a simple thing you can do if you’re ever traveling overseas. You will tend to have a little bit of extra money in whatever native currency as you head back to the US, or head back to your home country. A great thing to spend that on is iTunes gift cards. And the reason why you may want to do that is there will often be situations where you want to watch something that is not available in your home country.

So, for instance, we love to watch Downton Abbey. And we love to watch it when it comes out in the UK, not when it comes out here. Because we have some iTunes gift cards from the UK, we’re able to set up a British iTunes account and use those to fund it. And so we’re able to spend that money to watch Downton Abbey. Sometimes even a movie will be available on iTunes UK and not be available here. And so we spend that iTunes money to do that.

So, really useful if you’re traveling to — if you’re an American traveling to the UK, traveling to France if you love French movies, or Spain, to spend that leftover $25 you have to buy an iTunes gift card.

If you are traveling from overseas to the US, by all means do the same thing because it’s a way to get some of those shows like very soon Crazy Ex-Girlfriend before you might be able to see them in your home country.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a One Old Cool Thing. It’s Games Magazine. First of all, it’s a magazine. My wife gets Bon Appetit. She loves Bon Appetit. She has actually a very cool thing. They have like a club of people in my town that get together on a particular like one day out of the month and each one is assigned a thing from Bon Appetit magazine. And I actually think Bon Appetit is great. But other than that print magazine, everything else is gone except for Games.

Games Magazine has been around forever. It was around when I was a kid. And David Kwong, my favorite magician, and I — who we’re constantly doing puzzles together — he said you’ve got to just get Games Magazine again, because they have really good puzzles. And they do.

So, I love that I can still support a good old paper magazine that shows up at your house once a month. I forgot the fun of a surprise subscription. You know, when it comes in the mail it’s like, oh my god, I got Games Magazine. So, that’s my One Cool Thing this week, Games Magazine.

**John:** Fantastic. So, you’ll see links to the things we talked about on the show at our show notes at johnaugust.com/podcast or /Scriptnotes. Both will get you there. We are on iTunes. So, if you’re listening to the show through the website, better that you go to iTunes and actually subscribe, that way we get credit for you subscribing and other people can find the show.

We have an app for Android and for iOS. You can find that in their respective app stores. Through those and through Scriptnotes.net you can access all the back catalogue, so you can listen back to episode one, or to the Christmas show where Aline first talked about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with Rachel Bloom.

If you would like to send us a question, you can write short things on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, write in to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you have a t-shirt that’s on its way, give it an extra few days. And if it has not shown up then write into orders@johnaugust.com, and that’s what Stuart checks to make sure people have actually gotten t-shirts in right.

Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth, who has written many of our great outros. If you have an outro for us, just write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to wherever you have it on SoundCloud or wherever and we will put it in the hopper. So thank you for everyone who has sent in those great outros. And that is our show this week. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/2015-panels/)
* [Train hero Spencer Stone stabbed](http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article38180571.html), and [Scriptnotes, 214](http://johnaugust.com/2015/clerks-and-recreation)
* [Canter’s](https://www.cantersdeli.com/home)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular), [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular) [152](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90), [161](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-cheap-cut-of-meat-soaked-in-butter), [175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes), [180](http://johnaugust.com/2015/bad-teachers-good-advice-and-the-default-male) and [200](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-200th-episode-live-show)
* The New York Times on [The Great American Musical, Side B, in ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/arts/television/the-great-american-musical-side-b-in-my-crazy-ex-girlfriend.html?_r=0)
* Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgen (and Aline) on [Scriptnotes, 175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes)
* [Bola Ogun](https://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm4459589/?ref_=sch_int), and the full cast and crew of [Crazy Ex-Girlfriend](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4094300/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) on IMDb
* [Bollywood to go on indefinite strike from October 3](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Bollywood-to-go-on-indefinite-strike-from-October-3/articleshow/49183357.cms) from The Times of India
* Scott Frank on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Frank) and [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291082/)
* The Artful Writer on [Scene Harmony](https://web.archive.org/web/20120323053754/http://artfulwriter.com/?p=216)
* Three Pages by [Scott Frank](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/luvlee.pdf), and [the scene from The Lookout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmYaR_ZllQ)
* [Use gift cards from other countries to make purchases in foreign iTunes stores](http://www.elftronix.com/easy-method-make-us-itunes-purchase-from-any-country/)
* [Games Magazine](http://gamesmagazine-online.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/back-to-100).

**Present John:** Hey this is John. I am traveling this week, and Craig is super busy, so we haven’t been able to find time to record an episode this week.

Longtime listeners know that I listen to a lot of podcasts, while Craig listens to exactly zero. Or one, if he listens to Scriptnotes, which I’m not convinced he does. So, Craig will have no idea that a lot of podcasts, like Planet Money, do episodes where they take old shows and record new stuff to provide updates on what’s happened since it first aired. So that’s what I want to do today. I’m going to be breaking in a few times during the show to fill in additional details about things that have happened.

Since we’re quickly approaching our 200th episode, I thought we’d travel back to our last centennial: episode 100, recorded live in front of an audience in July 2013.

This episode remains one my favorite experiences making Scriptnotes, because it was the first time we realized holy shit, actual people are listening to the show. Which reminds me, there is swearing in this episode, so parental guidance is recommended.

So let me set the scene. We’re in a giant warehouse space that used to be a yoga studio, but at the time was owned by The Academy, who used it for special events. If you know Hollywood, we’re right next to the Arclight theaters. In fact, that space is now the offices for BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which in 2013 would have seemed insane.

We have about 250 people in the crowd, and because there was free alcohol, they’re especially enthusiastic.

As we start the episode, you’re going to hear theme music created by Matthew Chilleli. At the time, I’d never met him, but he’d later become the editor of the show — including the episode you’re listening to right now.

The announcer is a guy named Travis, who I found online. He’s great. Here’s a tip: if you ever need a voiceover for a project, Google Voiceover and you’ll find great freelancers. You Paypal them some money and they record whatever you want.

Craig had no idea there was going to be intro music, which was part of the fun.

**Announcer:** Live from Hollywood, California, it’s the 100th Episode of Scriptnotes.

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are inTEResting to screenwriters.

Thank you so much for being here. We’re live here in Hollywood at the Academy Lab Space Theatre. Thank you to the Academy for having us here. It’s kind of amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you. I’d like to thank the Academy. I will never say that again. Never have a chance, ever to ever say, I’d like to… — God, I’d like to thank the Academy. Let’s just do it a bunch of times. I — I — I’d like to thank the Academy.

**John:** I feel like we need to have Dennis Palumbo here to help talk you through the emotions you’re feeling right now.

**Craig:** It would be good.

**John:** Yeah. Specifically, I need to thank Greg Beal and Bettina Fisher for putting this together and their tremendous stuff.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you so much — because Craig and I talked in a very general sense like, “Oh, you know we’re going to hit 100 episodes at some point.” And so then we actually looked at the calendar, it’s like, “Oh, it’s going to be some time in the end of July. We’ll both be in town and we could theoretically do a live event.” We sort of put it out in the universe in sort of a The Secret kind of way like maybe somebody will want us to do a live event. And it was the Academy. So this is amazing and thank you very much for having us here tonight.

**Craig:** It’s pretty awesome and that Nicholls Fellowship and Nicholls, you know that wonderful screenwriting, the one screenwriting contest that matters frankly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is sponsoring all the food and the wine and the beer. So…

**John:** Yeah. I think in some ways like we’re a fundraiser for them but they’re kind of fundraising for us and it’s kind of amazing. It’s an educational outreach. So thank you very much for this existing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, this is our hundredth episode.

**Craig:** One Hundred.

**John:** And it’s kind of remarkable. Do you have a favorite episode of the episodes we’ve recorded?

**Craig:** Well, I’m kind of partial to the one where I opened my heart up and bled all over the keyboard there…

**John:** The dark night of your soul.

**Craig:** The dark midnight of my soul.

**John:** After the terrible reviews.

**Craig:** Yeah. After the terrible…

**John:** Which of the two movies?

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** Yeah. Right.

**Craig:** All of them. That was good. That felt good, actually.

**John:** It felt good. Yeah.

**Craig:** I actually got something out of the podcast for once which was nice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I really liked, even though it was the one that we just did so it feels a little bit like a cheap, and I don’t know if you guys have heard podcast 99, but that’s the one we did with Dr. Dennis Palumbo and that was great.

**John:** That was great. And so that was our sort of psychotherapy for screenwriters and that was a… — It’s recent to you but we actually recorded it like three weeks ago and we knew, it was like, “God, that’s really good.” It was one of those situations where we’re actually live in a room like, “Wow, that’s going to be a good episode.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m happy that turned out really well.

**Craig:** But…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Favorite podcast out of the one hundred?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Raiders.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Raiders.

**John:** The Raiders episode was probably my favorite too because it was the first time we were doing something just completely brand new. We were just focusing on one episode. And what I liked so much about Raiders is we could talk about the movie that we were watching but we could also look back at the transcript and see like, “This is the process they went through to make that movie that we loved so much.” And I thought tonight we could actually go back and do the transcripts of how this podcast came to be.

**Craig:** Because it’s as important as Raiders.

**John:** Yes. Maybe as seminal an event in film history. And so this afternoon I went through email archives and found the four emails between me and Craig Mazin about this podcast. So this is the entirety of the planning for the original Scriptnotes. So this is actually what happened.

So this is June 27, 2011, 1:17 pm, I wrote to Craig, “Subject: Podcasts. Do you listen to any? I had dismissed them as a fad but now I find myself listening to several, wondering if you would have any interest in doing a joint podcast on screenwriting?”

**Craig:** “I don’t. But then again, I didn’t read any blogs either and then I wrote one for five years. A podcast would solve my ‘I want to talk about screenwriting but I’m tired of writing about screenwriting’ problem, so, yes, count me in. What sort of thing were you thinking?”

**John:** This is at 3:04 pm, “I was thinking a weekly thing in which we would talk about the Issues of the Day for screenwriters and the film industry, loose, not edited. The first couple would probably be a cluster-fuck but we’d get better at it. Then we would go in with a mutually agreed list of things we want to discuss. Most of these podcasts seem to be done remotely on Google Talk or some such. I’ll have my guy Ryan,” — Ryan Nelson! — “look into them to see what would be involved. My guess is that at most you’d need headphones with attached mic to plug into your computer. Some of the best podcasts are the ones Dan Benjamin does on 5by5 [url]. This is the one he does with the John Gruber of Daring Fireball [url].”

**Craig:** I should mention I did not listen to any of them but 16 minutes later I wrote back, “Perfect. Sounds like it is easy and fun! And easy! And fun! At this age, that’s all I care about. I’ll check out the podcasts you cite below for inspiration.”

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lie. The first of many lies in our relationship over the course of making the show.

**Craig:** And you can see a theme emerging here at the beginning. He had the idea and then had all the details and I said, “Sure!”

**John:** Yeah. “Just tell me when to sign on.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that was the initial sort of a spark of the show and now we’re a hundred episodes later.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** And tonight we get to talk about the same stuff that we’ve been talking about for hundred episodes which is screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** To screenwriters.

**John:** Tonight we’re going to talk about…

**Craig:** Wait, wait, hold on.

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I have to say it’s really cool that you guys showed up. I really do. I mean, I have to say…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just cool. I’m a little verklempt because people really do enjoy the podcast and it’s great and I often tell people, “It’s just John and I. I always look at it as like we’re having a phone conversation for an hour each week.” But it’s great to see a little love reflected back and I really appreciate all the people, you guys bought tickets. I mean, granted, it was five dollars and so I’m not going to give you that much praise for it but still, you know, you parked, right?

**John:** Yeah. You drove to Hollywood.

**Craig:** You drove to Hollywood and you parked. Nice.

**John:** Ah! Nice.

**Craig:** And that’s the kind of ethic that we support.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So thank you guys. That’s great.

**John:** Craig, this is an honest conversation here. Did you ever consider bailing on the podcast?

**Craig:** Not once. No.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Right around in the 50s.

**Craig:** Was it because of me? [laughs]

**John:** No. I just had sort of, getting tired of it.

**Craig:** I mean, here’s the truth. You know I’ll never bail on it because you make it so, so easy for us. So it it’s like I just show up and there is food in front of me and I eat it. I mean, you and Stuart. — Stuart is real. The guy here tonight who is playing Stuart, we have a different guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where’s our Stuart?

**John:** No, it is a real Stuart?

**Craig:** Where’s the Stuart tonight that we have?

**John:** Stuart who’s here tonight. Can you raise your hand. There is he, here’s tonight’s Stuart.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s tonight’s Stuart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not, I mean, basically we’re like, okay, we just go, they have books of like we need a curly-haired ginger and then we get one.

Stuart does so much.

**John:** We hired Stuart from the Disney Channel. He’s actually one of the… — He was a kid actor who aged out and then that’s who we got.

**Present John:** So, Stuart Friedel is officially a real person. He’s my assistant and he also produces the show. And It’s strange that this sort of the “cult of Stuart” has arisen, really probably starting with this episode. Because people will hear his name and know that he works on the podcast. He has a sort of mythical quality that happened. He’s sort of our Snuffaluffagus, like is he a real person or is he not a real person. And it’s just weird that this sort of Stuart Friedel meme has occurred.

But people will recognize his name. Like, he was in New York and he was at a bar talking to some folks and he said his name was Stuart. It was like, “Oh wait — you’re not Stuart Friedel from Scriptnotes?” And he is Stuart Friedel from Scriptnotes. And that will probably haunt him for quite a long time.

I don’t have any plan on fixing his being haunted by Scriptnotes, but we’ve been talking about when do you actually have Stuart on the show as a real person who introduces himself and answers questions.

And that will probably come whenever it is time for Stuart to move on. He’s a writer himself; he’s written some really great scripts that are going to pull him out of this office pretty soon.

But whenever that happens, we will have him on for an exit interview, and we will talk through all the secrets of Stuart and Scriptnotes and how it all works.

So: Stuart Friedel, this is for you.

**Craig:** He aged out. Exactly and so we caught him before he went full Amanda Bynes and… [Audience: “Ohhhhh.”] — Oh, okay, well she’s crazy. It’s not my fault. Anyway, no, I’ve never thought about it, but please don’t leave me.

**John:** All right. I won’t. I won’t.

**Craig:** I can’t quit you.

**John:** We’re good. Actually, as I was putting together the music for tonight I put together a lot of sort of like the break up songs just to try to set up that idea that maybe this was going to be the end.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It was actually the last episode of Scriptnotes, but it’s not now. So we’re good. Fine.

Tonight, we’re actually going to talk about some things that are interesting to screenwriters including something that Craig calls Screenwriter-Plus.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll get into that.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** We’ll talk about that Slate article that literally everyone in the audience tweeted me saying like, “Hey, you should talk about this” Yeah. We know. We will talk about this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s Slate article about how…

**Craig:** It’s fun. There is like you get that tweet of, “I’m sure everyone’s mentioned this to you,” and that is the one you get 15,000 times.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I’m sure everyone has mentioned.” Well then, if you’re sure…

**John:** Yeah. Well, so we will talk about that thing because that would be useful to talk about. Before we get into that though there is a little bit of housekeeping, because there’s always housekeeping on our show.

**Craig:** Always housekeeping.

**John:** There is always a little housekeeping.

We switched our server that the podcast is on. So if for some reason episode 99 did not show up properly in your feed or your device or your app or wherever you expect it to be, that’s probably because your system logged in at just exactly the wrong moment when Ryan was switching stuff over and so if that happens delete the thing that you have there and re-add it in iTunes or however you add it into your thing. It’ll be there; it will be magic.

The reason why we switched stuff up over is because there is some cool new stuff that’s coming next week that you’ll see that we had to go to a newer server to support. So, enjoy that.

Secondly, Craig, I have here something that you’re going to be so excited to see. This is the Golden Ticket. So, when we sent out the t-shirts we said, “Oh, you know what? There should be a Golden Ticket that’s provided with one t-shirt.” This was your idea, Craig.

**Craig:** I had one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I had an idea.

**John:** It didn’t work out so well.

**Craig:** Here’s why…

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So the idea was somebody would open up their t-shirt package and there would be this Thank You card that everybody got and then they would turn it over and it would have the special message just for them, there was one of them.

**John:** Yeah. It was handwritten.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Stuart and Ryan — it’s fair to say Stuart and Ryan, or not that guy, but the real Stuart and Ryan — they never sent it out.

**John:** Yeah. Okay. But let’s talk about why it never got sent out. So, Craig, there is this big box of the postcards that went in with t-shirts and so Craig is like, “Well, let’s do this” and so, “Okay. That’s a good idea.” It seemed like a good idea. This is when we were recording the Dennis Palumbo episode. And so we’d sign all these cards, it’s a lot of cards to sign. And so we did this one special card and Craig put it back in the box, so like, ah, I have no idea where it is in the box.

**Craig:** Right. That’s the point.

**John:** It should be the point. It’s magical and like you don’t know where it’s going to be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then finally like no one was writing in. So like I said, “Guys, look through the rest of the box,” and there it was.

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of a bummer. What was the idea behind the golden ticket?

**Craig:** Well, the idea was you would get the golden ticket and on the back, well, here, I’ll read it.

**John:** Yeah. Well, it didn’t really quite say, but…

**Craig:** Oh, you’re right. Oh, yeah. “This is the golden ticket, email ‘Prairie’…”

**John:** Prairie was the magic word.

**Craig:** “…’Prairie’ to ask@johnaugust.com to tell us that you got it.” And then what we would tell you is, “John and I will read your script and we’ll talk to you about your script.” And we’ll, I mean, we’re not going to help you really. But we’ll give you feedback and stuff. You know.

**John:** Yeah. That would be nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s too bad. There is no…

**John:** I mean, would that have been a good thing? I mean, who would have been excited to get that? Yeah? Craig, I wish there was a way we could do that. I mean, we got to find another way to do that. I mean, whenever life sets challenges for me I usually think, “What would Oprah do?”

**Craig:** Oprah!

**John:** And it’s got me through so much.

**Craig:** What would Oprah do?

**John:** Well, you know what she would do? She would tell people to look underneath their chair; there might be something under one person’s chair.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** In the audience tonight.

**Craig:** So maybe they should look under their chairs.

**John:** Maybe everyone should look underneath their chairs.

**Craig:** Take a look under your chair.

**John:** Take a look under your chair. Take a feel under your chair.

**Craig:** Because one of you might have it. Look under your chairs.

**John:** Someone in this audience might have something that’s different than everyone else’s.

**Craig:** Someone has it. Anyone? Anyone? No?

Ya!

**John:** Oh my god! Come on up here and the audience can meet you.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** What’s your name?

**Matt Smith:** My name is Matt Smith.

**John:** Matt Smith, I’m John August.

**Matt:** Hi, I met you in Chicago.

**John:** Oh, yeah! So, great.

**Craig:** What happened in Chicago?

**John:** We made a musical called Big Fish. You don’t really keep up with this…

**Craig:** Hey, hopefully you don’t have a script or anything like that. Do you?

**John:** Are you a writer?

**Matt:** Several.

**Craig:** Oh geez.

**John:** All right. So, do you have a script that you think would be appropriate for us to read?

**Matt:** Sure.

**John:** All right.

**Matt:** It’s like a pilot.

**John:** Oh pilots are great. We love.

**Craig:** It’s shorter than a screenplay!

**John:** [laughs] There’s a reason!

**Matt:** I could give you a short film if you want a short one.

**Craig:** What’s the shortest thing you got?

**John:** Yeah.

**Matt:** 130 pages.

**John:** So it’s a pilot?

**Matt:** Yeah.

**John:** I love a pilot.

**Craig:** Great! Awesome! Can we read it?

**Matt:** Sure.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So the guy who is playing Stuart is going to track you down later on. He’s going to give you a magic email address that you’ll email to and…

**Matt:** Awesome.

**John:** We’ll talk about it.

**Matt:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** You just got Oprahed! Awesome.

**John:** All right. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** I’m glad that worked out.

**Present John:** So, a few weeks later, we read Matt’s script. And we didn’t record it as an episode; it didn’t feel like it wanted to be an episode, and he wasn’t ready to share his script with the world.

I kind of remember it — I think it was a pilot, it was a summer camp. And there were things we liked about it and things that really weren’t working about it. And that’s sort of the nature of all scripts.

A really valuable experience I think for Matt, but also for us. It was just a phone call that wasn’t recorded, but it became the template for how we would talk about an entire screenplay on the podcast, which — many episodes later, in episode 190, we looked at KC Scott’s This is Working. And that really kind of had its genesis in the Golden Ticket that was found underneath Matt Smith’s chair.

So next up, we have our first guest who truly was our first guest: Aline Brosh McKenna. She was our first guest on the episode way back when in a live show we did. She’s had the most apperances on the show to date; she probably always will. She’s the only person who Craig has given me permission to bring on the show if he’s not available to record.

We call her our Joan Rivers because, well, she is indispensable in that way.

**John:** I was terrified that was not going to work out. Yeah.

**Craig:** Some guy is going to be like, “Nah! It’s never me. I’m not looking. I won’t look under my seat.”

**John:** No. No. No.

— I’m really not just checking Twitter. This is where all my notes are here.

It’s time to get onto the real meat of our show. And our first guest, and when I say first guest she really is our first guest. She was our first guest at our live show —

**Craig:** She was.

**John:** — in Austin, Texas. This is the writer of Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, the upcoming Cinderella. She is a friend of the show, a fan of the show. She’s kind of…

**Craig:** She’s our Joan Rivers.

**John:** She’s our Joan Rivers. This is Aline Brosh McKenna. Come on up.

**Craig:** Come on, Aline. Steps. You get yellow microphone.

**John:** Ooh!

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** You don’t have your wine.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** We talked about this before we started, because the ideal amount of wine to have before recording a podcast is…

**Craig:** Between one and two glasses.

**Aline:** Craig said between one and two glasses. So this is the half.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s your, you’re onto your half

**Aline:** That’s my half. I’m on my half. I did it.

**Craig:** I did a full. I did one. That’s technically.

**Aline:** You did? Okay.

**John:** I did a little less than one. It’s a lot, so…

**Aline:** So I’m going to be way more entertaining.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Than both of you.

**John:** Let’s get to our first topic which is…

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig suggested this topic which is what is called Screenwriter-Plus. So what is a Screenwriter-Plus? What are you talking about here?

**Craig:** Well, I’ve been thinking about this lately because as we talk to people about the way our business is changing it occurred to me that there’s been this kind of huge change and I’m not sure anyone is really specifically talking about it in nature and that is what I call screenwriter, the job of Screenwriter-Plus.

When I started in the business, and we all pretty much started at the same time, it was fairly common for feature film writers to write a screenplay and then turn it into the studio and the studio and the producer would talk to you about your screenplay and then one day they’d say, “Okay, we’re interested in making this. We’re going to go find a director and a movie star.” And then they found those people and those people would talk to you maybe briefly or not. Maybe they would have somebody else come in and do a little thing or not. And then they go make the movie.

And you would show up at the premiere. That was kind of a routine sort of thing, not always, but often. It is so different now and there is this new position, there is just like a new way of thinking about a screenwriter and that is a screenwriter who — and forget titles — don’t worry about producer, producer-director, screenwriter. Just screenwriter. A screenwriter who writes a screenplay works with the studio and the producer, works with the director, works with the actors, is there during prep, is there during shooting, is there during editing, is in meetings talking about marketing, essentially as involved as the director is and maybe even more so because they pre-date the director often.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what you guys think about, is that real? Is that something that’s definitely happening and if it is, is it something that you need to be doing as a screenwriter and if so how do you get into that sort of thing, particularly if you’re trying to break into the business?

**Aline:** Well, I think partly the reason that’s happened is because of television and because there is such an ascendancy of television, so people are used to writer-producers. So they’re used to writers performing those functions. And I also think it’s because there are just fewer jobs, they’re less likely to bring in multiple writers on movies now. They kind of want to get their money’s worth and towards the end your steps towards the end you’re getting paid less money and they’re like, “Oh, we have this guy and he’s around. We’ve already paid for him and he’ll do this and maybe he’ll come look at this and look at some footage and …”

So, I’ve definitely notice that. And also as we were talking about earlier, there are a lot more writers who have become producers, who really have become officially producers and produce their own stuff and produce other people’s stuff. So I’ve definitely noticed that, but I think it’s any time you’re in a position to really protect your own work and to have input, it’s a great thing whether you get the title or not.

**John:** When you said showrunners I immediately was thinking about the guys who are doing these jobs right now and Damon Lindelof comes in on a movie, he was a showrunner, he comes in like Kurtzman/Orci, they come from that TV background where the writer is responsible for the script but also for this is the whole package, this is the everything, this is the marketing, this is the running of the show. Simon Kinberg, who you worked with, is the same kind of guy who does just features but very much is that guy. You think of him as much as being the guy who sort of delivers the movie as much as the guy who is putting the words on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are guys like Chris McQuarrie who have really done almost only features but they do this kind of thing. There has also been an interesting change in the way writers and directors work with each other because there was a kind of a weird antipathy between the two camps when I first started in movies. It was, I mean, sometimes you had directors that were really imperious, sometimes you had directors that were really cool but they almost felt like it was part of their job to exclude the writer. It was like their peer group essentially pressured them to sort of say, “Well, if you have a writer on the set you’re a loser, you’re not a real director” That seems to have changed almost to the point of being obliterated and gone the other way where they want you there, which is great I think.

**John:** A writer can be the director’s best ally, because the writer is there remembering what the intention was behind things and can be someone to back you up. So if you have a great relationship with the director that’s an incredibly useful thing.

I was thinking back through sort of my own movies and there have been movies which I’ve been in that function, sort of that writer plus. My very first movie Go, I was there before we hired Doug, I was there for every frame shot in second unit, I was in the editing room the whole time through; that was very much that function.

And Charlie’s Angels was that, too. I was there before McG was there and I sort of came back in. And even though a zillion other writers worked on that movie I was the guy who sort of captured the vision of things around because I had a relationship with Drew to sort of steer through.

But the Tim Burton movies, not at all. The Tim Burton movies I’ve been the writer and I show up to give them the script and help in pre-production but I’m not there…

**Craig:** Well, that’s interesting because that’s almost a generational thing because that Tim Burton does sort of — he became powerful in the 90s when that was still going on but, you know, like so I worked with Todd Phillips. He’s not like that at all. Seth Gordon is not like that at all. Marc Forster is not like that at all. So it just…

**Aline:** I mean, it’s always been confusing to me because I don’t understand why everyone isn’t clamoring for a writer on the set. I always feel like don’t you want the guy who’s just going to sit in his trailer and then things happen, you’re on location or something is not working out with an actor, you have a costume change, whatever, don’t you want to be able to run to that guy and have them fix it and change it? Because there are situations where the director who has so much to do is trying to figure out how to figure out a new piece of dialogue to cover something. And I think it’s strange that it’s not the other way — that they’re not begging us to be on set.

**Craig:** Well, I feel like they are now in a weird way. I never understood it. A lot of screenwriters would sit around and talk about this. I remember Phil Robinson said once. He said something to me and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great point.” Like, okay, we can grouch about how we’re not there but I guess the director, they have their thing, whatever. He’s like, “There is a standby painter, there’s a guy who literally just stands there and if something has to be painted…”

**Aline:** In case there needs some painting. Yeah.

**Craig:** In case something needs to be painted. But there is not somebody to be there in case a line needs to be written? It’s kind of crazy. And it never made sense and I kept waiting around for somebody to make sense of it for me and it seemed like instead the business went, “Oh, yeah, oh, no, it doesn’t actually make sense.”

**John:** But we talked about sort of who the directors are and some of the generational shift that they may be more inclusive of the writer and I think to J.J. Abrams who is having those guys around all the time because he came up in the television world.

**Aline:** Well, he came up in both. I mean, I would say that the guys who do that come out of two things. One is TV and the other one is production rewrites. So the production rewrite guys, which is Simon, and J.J. was that guy too, and McQuarrie, you know, the kind of high end guys, they’re accustomed to being on a set, solving problems, really being there in the same way as a TV writer-producer. So those guys are really accustomed to solving problems in a production situation.

Not all writers know how to do that, really, and it’s something that I know you’ve talked about and worked on, you have to kind of be there and get that experience and if you’ve been in television or you’ve done production rewrites you’ve been on production, some of the other — if you — before you’ve done that — we’ve had this conversation before where writers don’t always know how to comport themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** And then there is this other kind of fascinating thing that I always think about which is there is this tremendous blind date that happens in the middle of your movie getting made which is you write a script and then it goes out to directors and it’s always like, “Well, I hope this goes okay.” Like you bring in a guy, you have a meeting, they say something. It’s like, “It sounds good. I don’t know. It seems okay.”

**John:** But it’s not even really a blind date though; it’s really an arranged marriage. Like, “This is good, this is going to work out. Right? This is going to work.”

**Aline:** Right. That’s true. A blind date implies choice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re not going to throw acid on my face, right?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Something stupid like that.

**Aline:** Yeah. But it is this incredible thing where like it’s not just creatively what they want but it’s also how they like to work and do they want writers around? Is that something that they want? Every guy is different, guy or gal.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. And I think also that if you’re writing comedy you will likely end up in a situation where you get some of that experience because there is a certain immediacy with comedy and a lot of comedy writers end up on set trying to make things work if things are going a little sideways.

But I guess that brings up the question for all these guys. Okay, you’re starting out and the old narrative is, write a screenplay and then someone gets attached and someone gets attached and then it goes into the black box and a movie comes out. But that’s probably not going to really — that’s not necessarily what you want to aspire to anymore. What you want to aspire to is be part of the filmmaking process. To that end, it doesn’t make sense to say to budding screenwriters and aspiring screenwriters, “Don’t be — don’t settle just for I’m writing a great script. Learn how movies are made because if you don’t you’ll never know the other half of the job.” It’s like you’re a plumber that works on stuff until they turn the water on, but…

**Aline:** Well, we’ve seen that a lot of times. We know people who just — they just don’t know what to do when they get on the set. They don’t know how to behave, they don’t know where to get the food, they don’t know where to sit, they don’t know how to act… And the other thing is, younger —

**Craig:** Food is…

**Aline:** — Yeah. It’s important to know where it is and not to put your hand in the cereal box.

**John:** No. Dump out.

**Aline:** Yeah. So…

**Craig:** That happens?

**Aline:** Oh, I’ve seen that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But the other thing is younger people have access to production in a way that we did not.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Aline:** I mean, those guys are all making movies. Everybody has made a movie; everybody is making a movie, everybody’s shooting a video. I mean, I’m working with a young woman now who shoots and produces and directs and does her own shorts; and so they have a lot more experience with production then I think we did when we were coming up and that’s great. You really have to understand how it’s made and also how to contribute, how to really make a contribution in a positive way to being part of the crew.

**John:** The general advice I would say for the aspiring writers who wonder sort of, “How do I become the Screenwriter Plus?” First you have to be a screenwriter, you have to be able to write generally to start, but you also have to really think of yourself as a filmmaker and so your function of filmmaking is to create that initial screenplay but to also be able to change and roll with it as things happen and so a lot of times the problem-solving you’re doing on the set isn’t because of a difficult actor, although a lot of times it’s the difficult actor. It’s because you lost a location or like suddenly we can’t make this thing work. So if we have this location versus this location, how do we make this scene work in this space?

**Aline:** I think it’s helpful to say, “It’s perfect. Just do it.”

**John:** Yeah. Don’t change the line.

**Aline:** I’m kidding.

**Craig:** Sometimes that actually works.

**John:** Sometimes you do. Sometimes that is the right answer but sometimes you need to be able to explain back and so I think I often credit you with saying this but I think you may not have been the first person that…

**Craig:** He is wrongly crediting you for a thing.

**Aline:** What did I say was brilliant?

**John:** The screenwriter is the only person who’s already seen the movie.

**Aline:** I don’t think I said that but I’ll pretend I did.

**John:** Okay, the useful thing to remember as a screenwriter is that you as a screenwriter have already seen the movie and the director and everybody else has not seen the movie because they didn’t write it, and they didn’t have that in their head and so sometimes they’ll make a choice that is not the right choice because they’re just still not quite getting the movie that’s in your head. And so if you could be there to help explain that in a very tactful way about what the intention was…

**Aline:** And also just you have custody of the story. It’s like Craig said, you know, there is all these like department heads and they have custody of certain parts of it and you have custody of the story.

I once had a director call me and he said, “I’m standing here on the set and there is a character in the scene. I don’t think he’s supposed to be here…”

**John:** [laughs]

**Aline:** “I think he’s supposed to have already gone home but I’m really tired.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Aline:** “And I can’t remember if this guy is supposed to be here or not.”

And I was like, “No. He’s drunk. He was walked home before that scene.”

He was like, “Thank you.” Just to have somebody around who actually knows, that’s all you have thought of.

**John:** It’s a call sheet mistake. Like his little number got put on the call sheet.

**Aline:** Right. But that’s why when I feel like a confident filmmaker is happy to have a writer there in charge of the story department to ask questions, but part of that is I think we need to acclimate directors and producers that we are going to behave in a helpful productive manner.

**Craig:** That’s right. And then ultimately the director is responsible for what’s going on to the film or the flash drive and because they’re responsible they have to have authority. You can’t have responsibility without authority. If you can figure out how to have a respectful relationship with that person and acknowledge that they have authority and accountability for what they’re doing you’ll be the greatest help to them.

One exercise that I would suggest is if you have some material, little something short that you want to shoot yourself, even if it’s just with your phone and you have somebody that you know who is also trying this, swap and see what it’s like to interpret somebody else’s work, and watch how many choices you make and watch how off you can be from what they thought it was supposed to be. Not necessarily bad, right, but start to understand what it’s like to be in those shoes.

And the more you can understand the nature of production, the psychological nature of production and also the procedural nature of production the more useful you will be to it and the more useful you’re to it the better chance you have to actually protect what matters.

**Aline:** Yeah. I also want to say those guys like J.J. and Alex, Bob and Simon, those guys are really as they produce stuff, even producing stuff that they didn’t write, they’re just invaluable on set because they’ve done the other job, too. So they understand how to communicate with writers. I mean, that’s why I’ve really enjoyed working with those guys who are producers but were writers first because I feel like they speak writer and I have such a good shorthand with them and they understand how to solve problems in a way that I understand. So I really love that. I think those guys are uniquely equipped to deal with the writing part of it is as producers.

**John:** Well, let’s get to next topic which is talking about the writing itself. And to join us on this topic I want to invite a gentleman who was one of my first assistants. He is a frequent suggester of material for our podcasts. He is the one who suggested 15 is the new 30 and which was a whole topic that we talked about. He’s also made some movies. He wrote and directed this movie called Dodgeball, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He has this movie called We’re the Millers which comes out really soon. So, maybe you should go see that movie.

**Craig:** Couple of weeks.

**John:** Couple of weeks. August 7th I believe. So maybe we can hype that. This is Rawson Marshall Thurber. Rawson get up here.

**Present John:** So I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but Rawson Thurber was actually one of my very first assistants, way back in the day when I was doing a terrible TV show called DC for the WB network.

I hired Rawson — he was a Starkie, he was interning at William Morris in the mailroom there. And so I first met him, he was wearing this ill-fitting suit, and it was the last time I saw him in a suit. I guess I’ve seen him in suits for like his wedding and other things, but he’s not a suit wearer by nature.

So Rawson Thurber at this time of recording the episode, he had just directed We’re the Millers. We didn’t know then it was going to be a huge hit — it was a huge hit. And it really changed the trajectory of his directing career.

He had done some other movies beforehand, but this really put him on a lot bigger lists for bigger movies.

The one he’s directing now is Central Intelligence starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Heart. It’s shooting in Boston right now.

Rawson is always awesome.

**Craig:** Rawson! There he is. And Rawson for those of you who don’t know is the best-looking male screenwriter.

**Aline:** Yeah. There is a competition ongoing. There’s a calendar…

**Craig:** Well, we had a little chit-chat about it. There is a calendar. One question about the calendar, that we didn’t know, and you guys just mull this over, in sexy calendars is it supposed to get sexier as you go through the year? Is December better?

**Aline:** Well, there is this thing where there are lot of screenwriters who were…

[Audience member: Yes!]

**Craig:** Yes. She says yes.

**Aline:** Are there? Is it really…?

**Craig:** She says December is the hot one.

**Aline:** Is December hotter, is better than January? I don’t think so. But a lot of the good-looking screenwriters were actors.

**Craig:** Right, but he’s not.

**Aline:** And that disqualifies them. So that rockets Rawson right up there.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rawson Marshall Thurber:** Thank you. That’s so kind.

**Craig:** We don’t count, like, so he’s made a movie with Jennifer Aniston, she’s married to Justin Theroux. He’s a screenwriter…

**Aline:** Does not count.

**John:** Does not count.

**Craig:** But he’s an actor. Doesn’t count. That’s it. It’s not fair to us to include actors.

**John:** We have to be judged against your own cohort.

**Craig:** Right. And against his own cohort…

**John:** Also pretty good. What’s weird is that I think of Rawson as like this young child who came in to interview for an assistant job and you were working at the William Morris mailroom. You came in dressed in like a suit that did not fit you very well.

**Rawson:** No.

**John:** This is at Dick Wolf’s company and like you were on like a lunch break from William Morris and you kept being so insistent about like, “What my salary is going to be…?”

**Rawson:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** I think your dad had sort of drilled that into you, too, didn’t he?

**Rawson:** And gave me the suit. It was both of those things.

**Craig:** “Son, two bits of advice: wear my lucky suit and demand a salary over and over.”

**Rawson:** Yeah. I think I was just being paid so little at William Morris that I was like, “Look, if I’m going to leave I just, I want be able to it eat…”

**John:** Like that was it.

**Rawson:** It was really hunger. The hunger and shame. I think both of those things. The beats of a screenwriter.

**John:** There is no hunger but there is certainly some shame in the article that we’re going to be talking about from Slate. This is an article by Peter Suderman in which he argues that — I’m kind of reading of my phone here because that’s how I can read things — he argues that the reason movies feel formulaic these days is because there is a formula, a template, described by Blake Snyder in his 2005 book, Save the Cat.

This is a quote of what he said, “When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed beat sheet: 15 key story ‘beats’ — pivotal events that have to happen – and gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.”

So before we start our discussion I want a show of hands of this audience, how many people have read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat? It was a lot, I mean, this is common for aspiring screenwriters. Did any of you read it?

**Craig:** No!

**Rawson:** Never read it.

**Aline:** The explosion that ripped through Hollywood, I missed it when I was online shopping and eating pizza. I missed it.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Oh, did you hear there was an explosion that ripped through Hollywood the other day? Yeah, apparently now it’s a minute by minute break down.”

**Aline:** I totally missed it. I totally missed it.

**John:** Yeah. And so this article was on Slate. And a general rule I do follow is I never read the comments on articles but I figured like well, people are going to be responding. I’m curious how they’re going to be responding to this. And so the very first comment on this was from a guy name Shagbark and this is what Shagbark says. He says, “Also, other screenwriters including John August and Thomas Lennon, now quote Snyder’s numbers re. which page of the script each thing should happen on, without mentioning Snyder, as if they were universal truths instead of made-up numbers.”

Okay, first of all, fuck you Shagbark. To throw me in with this article saying like, “Oh John August got that thing from Blake Snyder…”

**Aline:** Anybody who’s a careful listener of this podcast knows that John August, who is the nicest person in the world, is secretly very angry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not really a secret. I’m famous for letting it out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** There is so much niceness over it that when it comes out, it’s a delight.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m Shagbark. You know that.

**John:** Oh yeah. You totally are Shagbark. Craig has been trolling me for the whole hundred episodes. So to say like, “Oh, John August said and took it from Blake Snyder.” I did not take it from Blake Snyder, I took it from like the fact that certain things tend to kind of happen at certain places.

**Craig:** Wait, wait are you saying maybe Blake Snyder took from something? Like the history of movies?

**John:** Maybe. Perhaps. Perhaps.

**Craig:** Or the history of storytelling, that either started 3000 years ago or in 2005?

**John:** I want to let our guests speak. [laughs]

**Rawson:** Thanks!

**John:** This is Rawson Thurber. So you’ve not read Blake Snyder’s book?

**Rawson:** I’ve not. No.

**John:** Are familiar with the book? Have you heard of this book?

**Rawson:** Only by title, until you sent me the article and I read the article, of course, and all the supplementary material, but I have not read the book.

**John:** Okay. And so what is your impression? Do you think there is a formula? Question: Are movies more formulaic than they have been or than they should be, is question A and if so, is there a formula?

**Rawson:** Well, I guess, I mean, I would say, are movies formulaic? I mean, yes and no. There are certain moves that need to happen in a three-act structure but, I mean, I feel like the article that — is it Peter, is that right? — that he wrote, I thought it was largely horse shit, frankly.

I think that it’s easy to kind of put all those touchstones and those beats retroactively back in and say like, “Look at Olympus Has Fallen, look at The Lone Ranger, look at all these things.” It’s really easy to do that and whether that’s right or wrong is one part of the article. The other piece that I thought was absolutely not true in my experience is that that is something that professionals in Hollywood are actively doing, which is fallacy and, I mean, I guess it makes a good article but it makes no sense. I’ve never ever in a meeting had anybody talk to me about any of these terms in any way like that.

**Craig:** Ever.

**Rawson:** Ever. Not even close.

**Craig:** Ever. Where do they make this? Is there some building where these people get together and say, “Let’s all agree that we don’t know shit and now let’s start assigning each other topics?”

**John:** Yes. It’s the new journalism. So really it’s a question of like whether it’s — if it’s journalism then you would actually interview a screenwriter to see if there was any basis of reality but it’s essentially an opinion piece based on sort of like one idea which is like a blog post…

**Aline:** Here is the thing. Here is the thing. There are tropes. There are tropes and there are things that reappear and there are people, you know, there are modes of storytelling that become fashionable and people adopt it but the idea that, I mean, when I looked at that I thought, I went to the 15 beats and I thought, “Oh maybe this will be helpful.”

**Rawson:** Yeah. I did the same thing.

**Aline:** Yeah. I was like, “Oh, maybe there is something good in here.” And you go and it’s like, it’s the same crap that everybody always says. And my feeling about those things is buy one book, buy Adventures in Screenwriting, buy Syd Field, buy this, buy one, take one class. There are sort of some basic principles and — look at Craig, he looks so horrified. There are some basic principles of storytelling that are good to sort of have run past you but the idea that anyone has — if it worked, people would do it.

**Rawson:** Of course.

**Aline:** If you could slavishly follow those things and they would work, they don’t. But I don’t think his contention that people are following it more and then it works, particularly he said it works better for male characters and then he said J.J’s whole canon is that and I really take exception to that because J.J. did Felicity and Alias and it has really nothing to do with that. No one consciously retrofits it. There are certain tropes of storytelling in the culture that will filter in; no one has ever consciously…

**Craig:** Yeah, there always have been. Narrative has, I mean, read Poetics. Aristotle talks about this stuff in Poetics. We might as well say that Poetics exploded through Hollywood in minus-2005, right.

**Aline:** “Oh, this protagonist.”

**Craig:** Right and apparently there needs to be a catharsis. Yes.

**Aline:** Whatever.

**Craig:** Yes. Storytelling — oh, we have a spider hanging out!

Sorry, I was distracted for a second.

Storytelling has a purpose and anything that has a purpose therefore will have a form to fit its function. This isn’t new and movies will vacillate in and around various different kinds of form to match their function, but I just want to be really clear for both the writer of this nonsense and anybody else that might have been susceptible to it. Nobody professionally in Hollywood, to echo what Rawson said, nobody talks about this book. I’ve never, no one has ever mentioned it to me and I mean anywhere, on any level, at any place. That’s how thorough that is. And anything inside of it that may be of some use to you is only of use to you in that regard. That it’s of use to you however it may do, but don’t think…

**Aline:** Good God, don’t mention it in a meeting.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, please because by the way that is literally like you might as well just stamp “rookie” on your head like, “Well, I read in Save the Cat…”

**Rawson:** I had one experience with Save the Cat, actually. There was an actor on a movie that I was directing who kept coming up to me, like about a week in he would come up and have these very strange ideas and questions about what we’re doing and where it was going. And I didn’t, you know, I would answer them and walk away sort of scratching my head. I didn’t quite understand like where this is all coming from. And he had an assistant named Jim, no Jimmy, and he would come up to me, the actor would come up to me and say, “You know, Jim was talking to me about” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it all sounded super suspicious to me and I’m like, “Okay, okay.”

And then one day at wrap, they were leaving and I said goodbye to the actor and Jim was driving home and I saw in the backseat of Jim’s Prius was Save the Cat. And I went — Oh, you’re fucking kidding me! Of course! So that’s my only experience with Save the Cat which…

**Craig:** It’s deeply frustrating.

**John:** And how was Nick Nolte other than that?

**Rawson:** [laughs] No. It wasn’t Nick.

**Craig:** I just want to say also, just one thing that makes me nuts about this.

**Aline:** Umbrage, umbrage, umbrage.

**Craig:** It’s happening.

**John:** You know we actually seeded the article in Slate this week specifically so that it would …

**Craig:** The sad thing is like I know that and it’s still working. The purpose of these articles really if you think about it is to go, “These screenwriters, these filmmakers are just, they’re just machinists. They’re building IKEA furniture, you guys. There’s nothing special about what they do.” It’s all like, “Let’s demystify their nonsense.”

You know, I’m not going to say that we’re all amazing Mozarts, we’re not. But go ahead, Peter whatever, pick up that book and you go just as a goof, as a goof, follow it and write a screenplay. I’d love to read it and see just how amazing this explosive affair is.

**Aline:** Well, when you do pick them up, like when you do pick up those books or when you look at that I always find it so inscrutable and difficult. It’s like, “Here the hero either transcends or does not transcend the gate which he does or does not pass at which point he does triumph or does not triumph with a sidekick or without one.” And I’m always like…

**Craig:** There. Done. Problem solved.

**Rawson:** Writes itself.

**Craig:** It writes itself.

**Aline:** I wish it gave me something to use. I always find it like, “Has he crossed the threshold of the mighty river?” I don’t know. She’s got a job at a magazine. I don’t know. Is that the mighty river? It might be. I’m not sure.

**John:** My frustration with it is really the false causation, it’s the sense that, “Here I’ve noticed a pattern and therefore because I’ve noticed a pattern everything — I’m magical.” So it’s like saying like, “Many pop songs have a structure of one, six, four, five and like therefore every pop song after that point is following my structure that I identified.” No, it’s not. That’s just how songs work.

**Aline:** That’s analysis.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the difference between reading and writing.

**John:** And so the reason why I’m willing to say three-acts for a movie is because like movies have beginnings, middles and ends. They just do. The projector turns on at a certain point, it turns off at a certain point. Like there are phases of a movie and it’s useful to be able to talk about those phases with terminology, but everything else is just inventions.

There was one thing I — because my function in the podcast is to play devil’s advocate — there is one thing I will say devil’s advocate. He calls out the, which is kind of just thrown in, but he calls out the villain who gets himself caught deliberately.

Guys, we need to stop doing that. We just need to stop doing that. It’s become the air duct.

**Aline:** And he’s in a glass room.

**John:** Yes. Right. Exactly. So, like, you know, we’ve caught the bad guy but no, no he meant to be caught. No, uh-uh. Stop. I want a ten-year moratorium on that.

**Craig:** It was cool when Heath Ledger did it.

**John:** Yeah. It was, it was great, remember when he did that?

**Craig:** I do remember that. That was awesome.

**Aline:** But that’s what I was talking about like there are these tropes that kind of filter through where there was a whole thing for a while when there were cop movies where it was like they were partners but they were shadow images, mirror images of the same person and their lives are really similar but wasn’t. That was a huge thing and culminated in Face/Off. There are kind of vogues in storytelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s normal. That book won’t even help you chase. And you know my whole thing is: never chase. You write what you write, I’ve said this a hundred times. The only thing interesting about you is what’s specific to you. That’s it. If you’re writing something, if you’re just chasing the market, there are 50 people ahead of you in line who just better writers because they’ve been it longer. So don’t that, that’s crazy. But this book won’t even help you do that. It’s useless.

**John:** Useless

**Craig:** Useless!

**Rawson:** I think what Aline is saying is right is that there are tropes at work and you’re saying there is always a beginning, middle and end and one of the ones in the list that made a lot of sense to me is the sort of Dark Night of the Soul at the end of the second act, right, where everything looks like it’s lost.

**John:** The worst of the worst.

**Rawson:** That’s right. So when John and I, we both went to USC and we had, I think, the same instructor and she talked a lot about the three-act structure and how it works typically and the big moves in it. And that’s been incredibly helpful to me in my career. And so I don’t think you shouldn’t pay attention to these things but it doesn’t mean that they’re gospel and they have to be followed lockstep. But I do think there is some value there but if you pin your hopes to it you’ll be working at Ralphs.

**John:** I was watching a movie on the plane…

**Rawson:** — Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

**John:** Good to be working at Ralphs.

**Craig:** Would have been great if like four people just stood up, “Fuck you. It’s a decent living.”

**John:** I will say there was a movie I watched on the plane as I was flying back from Europe this week and it was really well executed, like the performances were really great but like the movie just didn’t quite hold up right. And I did look at it and say like, “You know what, the problem here is that it’s kind of not doing the things that it needs to do. Like your hero, your protagonist, she’s just not actually changing that much; you’re not making things difficult enough for her. It’s never reaching a real crisis.”

And so those are the kind of things that this book would point out. And so if reading this book makes you think about story in that way that’s useful. But also a smart person reading your scripts who knows about movies would also say the same thing.

**Craig:** Yes. Agreed.

**John:** Let us go to One Cool Thing which has been a staple of the show I think since the beginning. I think we started…

**Craig:** For you it’s been a staple. For me it’s just a nightmare.

**John:** Yeah. Every once in a while Craig will remember and sometimes they’re good. But, Aline would you kick us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Aline:** I will. I found a thing that had been I believe on PBS and then I found it on iTunes and I read about it. I didn’t watch it when it was on PBS and I just watched it recently. It’s three one-hour episodes, it’s a documentary, and I gobbled it up and each episode seemed like five minutes to me and I was in tears through most of it. And it has a very bad title. It’s called Making: The Women who Made America, or Who Make America.

It’s not a good title but it’s called Making and it’s the documentary about the women’s movement and it is so well done. And the interviews are so good and it’s so well balanced. And they talked to Phyllis Schlafly and they talked to Gloria Steinem and it’s incredibly well done and if you have interest in that subject matter it just whizzes by and I loved it.

**John:** Cool. Rawson Thurber.

**Rawson:** Yeah. This is, you might not like this one, but my One Cool Thing is actually this podcast which I love dearly.

**Aline:** Oh my god. Oh, he’s not your boss anymore! You don’t have to suck up anymore.

**Rawson:** I know. I know. But sincerely, it’s the truth. Like what you guys do every week for the screenwriting community is amazing. I listen to it all the time; I know a lot of friends do. And it’s really, really cool.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Also you guys are really good-looking.

**John:** We’re built for audio podcasts.

**Craig:** Yeah. Faces for radio.

**John:** My One Cool Thing: So my go-to pen — I’m not actually like a person who like tries to have, like obsess about sort of things like, you know, light coming through a window at certain thing, but I hate a terrible pen. And so I like a good, cheap pen that I don’t care if I lose. So my go-to, cheap pen has been the Pilot G2.

[The crowd cheers]

**Aline:** Wow!

**John:** It’s a good pen.

**Craig:** Are you serious?

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** Holy shit.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Rawson:** That was amazing.

**Craig:** I also…

**John:** Spontaneous love for the Pilot G2. It’s a really solid good pen and I love that pen. So wherever Stuart will like hand me a pen that’s not that I’m like, “Stuart, no.”

**Rawson:** Is it .05 or .07?

**John:** I like the .05 or the .07. Really the .05 is fine…

**Rawson:** That’s how I roll, too. The .05. I think I might have gotten that from you, the G2 .05.

**John:** It’s good. Well, this week…

**Craig:** They came out with the G3?

**John:** No. But Pilot has a new pen and it’s actually kind of an amazing pen. So it’s the Pilot Frixion.

**Aline:** It’s not a vibrator?

**John:** It’s not. Doesn’t it sound like it could be?

**Craig:** Aline has lost interest.

**John:** Although it has, Aline, it has a rubber component. So, here is the thing about the Pilot Frixion.

**Aline:** The Pilot Frottage.

**John:** Up until now you can only get them in Japan. You can now get them in the US on Amazon.

**Craig:** Or vibrating.

**John:** Yeah. You can get it on Amazon. They’re fairly cheap. If you lose one you’re not going to feel sad about it. They are erasable and like you would think like well an erasable pen would suck. All erasable pens have always sucked, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, like the kind in fourth grade.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** They were terrible.

**Craig:** Paper Mate or whatever.

**Rawson:** They were terrible.

**John:** They were terrible. So the way this pen works is it writes just like a normal gel pen and it’s not quite as awesome as the G2 but it’s really solid and good. It’s a good solid pen and it can erase. And so when you erase it, it’s actually, the little rubber tip — I know this sounds really pornographic — the rubber tip creates heat and the heat actually makes it go invisible.

**Aline:** This is like a John August bit. This is like somebody wrote a John August bit.

**Craig:** I could not write that perfect. That was really — that was good.

**Aline:** It heats up, it gets a little bigger.

**John:** It gets a little bigger. And so my daughter has become obsessed with it, too, now because…

**Rawson:** Oh Jesus. Good night folks. Good night.

**John:** Here is the thing, because it can erase and if you’re a kid you make mistakes and you erase. Although, if you stick it in the freezer the hidden text comes back!

**Craig:** I mean, you’re just, you’re doing this on purpose now. “Although, if you put it up your ass…”

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** “And on the surface of the moon it’s amazing.”

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of great!

**Craig:** Frixion.

**John:** You got something better than that, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** I have something so different than that.

**Aline:** I hope you have a vibrator.

**Present John:** So I want to point out that in episode 196, Craig’s One Cool Thing is the RocketBook Indiegogo project that is basically just the Frixion pen and a notebook.

So he is mocking me, and I’m just way ahead of the curve.

And for the record: I still like the Frixion pens. They’re not my most favorite go-to pen, but they’re still a solid pen; I would recommend them.

**Craig:** I have Two Cool Things.

**John:** Oh, yeah, he’s breaking the rules again.

**Craig:** Breaking the rules again, as always. So I don’t if you guys, on one of the podcasts we talked about our origin stories, like how we got started in the business because people often ask that question.

So tonight there are two people here, my first job, they gave me my first job in Los Angeles. It was 1992. I had just turned 21. Well, technically, my first job was temping at William Morris, typing their employee manual. And because some secretary had typed it, literally on a typewriter in the ’50s, and so I put it into Word Perfect.

But the next job I got was at this little ad agency and these two took a chance on this kid and, you know, I say all the time like luck — people overemphasize luck, chance favors the prepared and all that. And that’s true. But this was legitimately lucky that these were the people I met instead of total assholes because you there’s a lot of those, too.

And you can’t really replace what it means to be supported and valued by good human beings. So Nancy Fletcher and Julia Wayne could you please stand up?

**Aline:** Wow!

**Craig:** 21 years later. And also they would buy me lunch a lot which was really nice because I had no money. It’s great. So, you are my two. Oh, and also Julia and I, I’m not going to say what it was but she did something in front of me that is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, ever. Nothing will ever be funnier. Sometimes when I’m sad I think about it and I still laugh again. So thank you for that.

**John:** Aw. I have a couple of special thank yous, too. Stuart Friedel, or the man playing Stuart Friedel, please stand up. This is the man who edits our podcasts and makes us sound coherent when we’re drunk. I also need to thank Ryan Nelson who I think is in the very back of the room.

**Craig:** Ryan!

**John:** Ryan Nelson. Oh Ryan is up here now. He is the actual Ryan Nelson who designs all our apps. Along with Nima Yousefi who is also up here.

**Craig:** Nima!

**John:** Where’s Nima? Nima, the magical elf, who is just this week a full-time employee at Quote-Unquote Films. So hooray!

I need to thank everyone here for coming to this thing. We really, really wondered whether anyone would show up.

**Aline:** Awesome. So awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you did and that was so cool and it really means a lot. I’ll get sort of verklempt and weepy. But since that won’t happen, because I won’t let myself get verklempt…

**Craig:** I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry.

**John:** I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry. I’m just going to thank you and we’re going to applaud and then we’re going to do some questions. So hooray!

**Craig:** Woo!

**Present John** So, that’s episode 100! Almost 100 episodes later, the podcast is largely the same, but some things have changed.

For starters, our audience has gotten a lot bigger. We were probably 15 thousand per week back then. Now we’re about 50 thousand. And that’s about three times as many — more than three times as many. And that’s great. So thank you for listening to the show.

Our audio has also improved. This was a live show, so it doesn’t really count, but if you listen to a normal episode of the show now versus episodes ten or twenty — oh, it’s a huge difference. Some of that is better microphones, but a lot of it is Matthew Chilleli, who has been editing and mixing the shows, and they’ve just gotten so much better. So thank you, Matthew.

The last thing that’s changed is really the nature of podcasts itself. As they’ve become more popular, you’ve started to see these marquee titles like StartUp or Serial that are bringing people into the world of podcasting.

But I think the form itself is also evolving. In the second hundred Scriptnotes, we tried some very different types of episodes. We’ve done those deep-dives episodes like 183, where we looked at Gravity, 129 where we sat down with the makers of Final Draft, and episode 190, where we took a look at KC Scott’s This is Working.

They’re very different kinds of shows than just me and Craig talking about stuff. But I think the show is really at its heart about me and Craig talking about stuff. So over the next hundred or howevermany more of these we do, it will mostly be those kinds of shows. But I still want to continue experimenting, trying some new things. And I hope you’ll join us for whatever it is that comes next.

As always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel — the real Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli, who also wrote our outro. You can find links to some of the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust.com, along with transcripts to every single episode of the show, including the 100th episode that we just listened to.

If you’re listening to us on the blog, do us a favor and please click over to iTunes and subscribe, and while you’re there, leave us a comment so other people can know we’re worth listening to.

Last week on the show, I mentioned that I have a Kickstarter up for a brand new game called One Hit Kill.

We’re all funded now! So thank you everybody who baked us on Kickstarter. If you would like a copy of the game before anyone else, you have about two weeks to get in on the Kickstarter and get your copy of the game now.

So head over to Kickstarter and search for One Hit Kill. You’ll get to see the video that Ryan Nelson put together, along with the music that Matthew Chilelli wrote, which is great. So take a look at that, and a listen.

If you have a question for me, find me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com, and we will check the mailbag every once in a while for your questions there.

So for Craig Mazin, I’m John August. Thank you for listening to Scriptnotes, and we will see you next week.

Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, the 100th Episode](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode)
* The Academy [Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/awards/nicholl/) in Screenwriting
* [Scriptnotes, 190: This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/2015/this-is-working)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on IMDb
* [Rawson Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on IMDb
* Slate’s article on [Save the Cat!](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/hollywood_and_blake_snyder_s_screenwriting_book_save_the_cat.single.html) (and Stuart’s [review of the series](http://johnaugust.com/2012/in-which-stuart-reads-the-save-the-cat-books-and-tells-you-what-he-thought))
* [Makers: Women Who Make America](http://www.pbs.org/makers/home/) on PBS
* [Scriptnotes](http://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes): A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters
* The classic [Pilot G2](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001GAOTSW/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and the brand new erasable [Pilot Frixion](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009QYH644/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Stuart](https://twitter.com/stuartfriedel), [Ryan](https://twitter.com/ryannelson) and [Nima](https://twitter.com/nyousefi) (and [Matthew](https://twitter.com/machelli))
* [One Hit Kill](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/one-hit-kill) is on Kickstarter now
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/you-cant-train-a-cobra-to-do-that).

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

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

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

Today’s episode, we will talk about last week’s episode, follow-up on K.C. Scott’s This Is Working and what people had to say about it and what more we now know about K.C. Scott, also known as Kurt. We’re going to talk about craftsmanship. We will talk about camera direction. We will answer two listener questions.

But first, we have some news. We have things that happened in the town that we need to talk to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been a busy, busy week. This is a jam-packed show, by the way.

**John:** It’s a lot of different things. But that’s sometimes a good mark of an episode. Lots of different things to talk about.

**Craig:** I think strap in, guys, because this one’s going to be cray cray.

**John:** I don’t know if this is going to be a long topic or a short topic. CAA lost several of their agents to United Talent Agency, UTA. And, Craig, does it matter?

**Craig:** For us? I mean, for feature writers, I would say not at all. Not at all. For television writers, possibly because, you know, in television they do all this packaging. But even then I’m not sure that the packaging of shows is exclusive to their clients. I don’t even know how that works. I mean, I find frankly that my interest in the who’s getting fired, who’s going where is essentially at a zero. It’s never been that high.

When Amy Pascal got fired and then there was the, “Who’s going to take over? And, oh, it’s Tom Rothman,” it was like everybody was talking about this at lunch. I couldn’t have cared less. Adam Goodman got fired. I don’t care. Somebody has replaced him. I don’t care. I’m just over here doing my job, you know.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. The only thing Craig does really care about when it comes time to talk about firing and agents is Craig wants to fire your agent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It’s really Craig’s favorite thing in the world to do.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, I am here for you at a very reasonable rate for $500. I’ll get on the phone and fire your agent for you.

**John:** You know, that’s actually kind of a great little sideline business.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig would do a fantastic job. He would just call up the person and say like, “You have this client? He’s not your client anymore.” The client doesn’t have to explain why. It’s just done, move on.

**Craig:** Yeah. The strategy is when they pick up the phone, you say, “Hi. So listen, I’m going to get right to it. I’m letting you go.” So, in the case if I were firing your agent for you, I’d call him up and say, “Hi. So just let me get right to it. John August is letting you go. You’re no longer his agent. Let me just briefly tell you why but the decision is final.” Now you’ve cut the — there’s no wind in their sails. They’ve got nothing. And the best part is if this becomes a real business, then they’ll know just because I’m calling them, they’ll know. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. They will never return your calls.

**Craig:** Literally. It’s like give me $500, I will log a call to your agent and that will be all it takes. I won’t even say a word.

**John:** It’s all done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Craig would need to have a little bit of a pre-interview where he was like — so his little checklist where he would just like you know he marks off, like, “Which are the reasons why we’re firing him? Okay, great. All done. All set.”

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. It’s a web form, honestly. Just fill up my web form. I don’t need to hear your sob stories about why. Just check off these things. And then, you know, when they give you a comment box but it’s like, “Okay, you can describe anything else you think we need to know but you have 200 characters.” We’re telling you we don’t care. That’s why we’re limiting you to 200 characters.

**John:** We’re telling you it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** We’re telling you we’re not going to read it. But go ahead, if it makes you feel better.

**John:** We’re creating new businesses even as we speak. Franklin Leonard has The Black List, you’re basically The Dead List.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Just tell us which agent you want to fire, it’s done.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m The Kill List.

**John:** So we initially recorded the podcast on a Thursday and right here on the podcast is where we talked about the death of Scripped.com which was just a breaking story at that point. That next day, on Friday, we recorded a whole interview with the co-owner of Scripped.com which became a special episode on Saturday. So most of what was in this portion of the podcast is no longer relevant.

But I wanted to save one little conversation Craig and I had about how you keep multiple backups of things even if you are doing stuff on your own computer. So this is a portion of what we talked about originally on the podcast on Thursday.

And I’m also probably a little too reliant on Dropbox. The other thing I would take sort of personally is that all of my stuff, you know, that I’m working on currently, you know, it’s on Dropbox. So granted Dropbox is both local and it’s in the cloud, but I probably rely a little bit too much on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad you brought that up. First of all, I’m in the same boat. I have the scripts and because you and I got started around the same time, I would imagine we had the same technological issues. Because when I look back, for instance, at my initial work, you know, way, way back when. So like RocketMan, so that was the first movie I did. Well, when I look at the files for that, which I have, they are unopenable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m looking at files like — and I think they were Final Draft 2 files that now show up as exec files. [laughs] The system has no idea what to do, even the Microsoft Word files are no longer openable. And we’re talking about like for instance this one that I’m looking at here was created November 1st, 1996. It’s gone, you know. However, because everybody now moves with this, we know, okay, if there’s a format change we kind of change our files along with the formats. I think we’ve probably gotten past that.

My worry is this Dropbox worry because like you, that’s how I do my work. I have everything locally but it’s synced to Dropbox. Well, I know if I go into Dropbox and I delete a file there, it deletes on my local drive. Well, let’s say there was a problem at Dropbox and instead of everything just going kaput, somebody went in and just started deleting stuff.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s gone, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So that brings me to my next point. Well, I’m going to put this out there for our listeners. How can I essentially double sync backup my stuff? Wouldn’t it be great if I could — on my hard drive, I’m writing something and it knows to sync it both with Dropbox and save with Google Drive, so I’m double backed.

**John:** Yeah. So in some future world in which this podcast has advertising, one of the very, very common advertisers who is always advertising on podcasts are services like Backblaze. And what they do is basically they make a copy of your hard drive and they store it in the cloud. That would take care of your situation in this case. So anything that’s ever on your hard drive is also in the cloud. You can download it back off the cloud.

**Craig:** By the way, how sick would it be if this was in fact our first ad? How insidious of us.

**John:** [laughs] It would be incredibly insidious.

**Craig:** It would be so insidious.

**John:** And we guarantee you it is not our first ad.

**Craig:** It’s not. We are not being paid for this. But it’s called Backblaze? Well, they should advertise with us because I’m going to go check them out now.

**John:** So if you’re listening to some of the tech podcasts, they’re a common sponsor. And there’s another company, or several other companies that do similar kinds of things. So that would be a solution for that type of scenario.

What I do realistically is I do backup from one hard drive to another hard drive. And I try to do that weekly, which isn’t really enough. But that would at least give you a snapshot of where you were at. And that’s been fine for sort of our stuff.

There’s also kind of lazy backup because sometimes I’m sending stuff to Stuart. And so in those emails back and forth to me and Stuart, that’s a way I could find some of those files. Again, nowhere close to perfect.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, you know, helpful.

**Craig:** Helpful, yeah. Well, I used to have a Time Machine, you know, where you would save all of your stuff on that. They just never worked very well. I just found Apple’s Time Machine —

**John:** They would never work great for me either.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I don’t know if they’ve gotten better at that or if there’s some other solution. Because I think actually and, you know, buying some cheap-o external hard drive that’s — I mean, now you can get a terabyte for what, $20 or something stupid? And just having that and doing some kind of regular backup to that is probably a good idea.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But god, I mean —

**John:** Especially for the working folder, the thing you’re actually working on most commonly, that’s the one you really want to make sure you’re keeping a good clone of.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now I wanted to also back up to what you were talking about with, you know, you have these old files, these old Final Draft files, these old Microsoft Word files that you can’t open. That was really one of the big motivations behind Fountain which is this plain text file format we have is that it is just text. So you will never get stuck with that with a Fountain file because you’ll always be able to open it. As long as there’s something that can open any text document, you know, you’ll be able to get to that stuff that’s in those files.

**Craig:** Can you get to it if you’re using Final Draft, John?

**John:** You could get to it using Final Draft. Final Draft can actually import Fountain just fine.

**Craig:** Oh, they can?

**John:** They didn’t mean to. It just happens that they can.

**Craig:** [laughs] But they’re hard at work to see if they can undo it.

**John:** I will say that the good folks at Final Draft who obviously we have had some disagreements, they have engaged on some level to Fountain. They really can kind of import it. It’s not a deliberate thing on their side but we sort of designed the format in a way that Final Draft could just get it also. So it is helpful on those fronts.

And I would say also Highland, the other app we make, we don’t ever advertise that we can open old Final Draft files. But if you have an old Final Draft file that you can’t get to open or even open in Final Draft, if you change the extension to FDR and throw it on Highland, Highland will take a sledgehammer to it and smash it and try to put it back together. And so that’s a thing you might also try with those very old files.

**Craig:** Even something from 1996?

**John:** Even something from 1996.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

**John:** Mr. Nima Yousefi, our coder, is very clever and he will smash things up and he will try to put it together.

**Craig:** He is clever. I’ve looked in his clever eyes.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s the thing. If I’m sitting here worrying about Dropbox and Google, you should definitely be worrying about anybody else. I mean, I can’t imagine Google in particular, I just don’t — essentially, it’s like when they talk about earthquake insurance in California.

So earthquake insurance in California is regulated because basically no insurance company wanted to ever give anybody an earthquake insurance in the States and you have to. And here’s what it is. It’s called the FAIR Plan. And the FAIR Plan is you pay a whole bunch of money every year and then if there’s an earthquake, they will take care of damage to your structure. But after you pay a 20% premium, that is 20% of the value of the home.

**John:** Yeah. It’s huge.

**Craig:** You know, and so what I was always told is, “You know, if the earthquake’s that bad, you got bigger problems than insurance. Like, basically everything is gone.”

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I was always told about, especially land in Los Angeles is that the land itself is what’s worth money, as to your point, the structure isn’t. So the structure will be destroyed but the land is still the land. And the earthquake is not going to destroy the land probably.

**Craig:** Probably. [laughs] Exactly. But it’s the same idea like —

**John:** Anyway, you’ll be dead. It will be totally fine.

**Craig:** You’ll be dead. But if Google goes down, I think it’s essentially Mad Max follows that. Yeah.

**John:** [laughs] By the way, how good is the new Mad Max trailer?

**Craig:** It’s actually concerning to me because I loved it. But what concerned me was, “Oh, no. Now this is the thing.” Like it’s how they keep figuring out in the food industry to jam more calories into a thing and more flavor into a thing. This is the most engineered — it’s crack. They made crack, right?

**John:** They made crack.

**Craig:** Like Guardians of the Galaxy, they’re, “Stop drinking coffee. We have this new thing called cocaine and you can freebase it. It’s freebasing cocaine.” And now Mad Max it’s like, “No, no, no. We mixed it with baking powder and we cooked it into a thing and now it’s crack.” It’s scary. I just worry that this is the thing everyone’s going to chase because that movie is going to open huge and it should. It should.

**John:** It should. So our good friend Kelly Marcel had some hand in it. I don’t know if she’ll ever want to come on the show and talk about what her involvement was. But it sounded just like madness to make it. It’s been in post for forever and I’m just so excited that it looks like it’s so good.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I understand why it would have been in post forever. Everything looks like a processed shot. Processed shot, I sound like an old man. Everything looks like a VFX shot.

**John:** But it wasn’t effects. So that’s the whole magical thing about it. So like most of what you see, they actually did. So all those cars flipping and everything going nuts, that all actually really happened. So except where like the giant —

**Craig:** Well, yeah. No, that is happening.

**John:** Except for the giant storm.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Apparently, it’s like crazy real.

**Craig:** But everything looks like something needed to be done in post. In other words, yeah, we definitely shot that car doing that but there’s going to be things we have to paint out. Or the whole background world needs to be painted in. Or it just seemed like — I don’t know, it just seemed like there was a lot of work.

**John:** They were in Namibia for forever making that movie. So I was excited to see what they did.

**Craig:** Sick. It looks sick.

**John:** It looks so good. Our next bit of news news. So last week we recorded the episode and I almost mentioned it on the episode last week but I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to launch. So Writer Emergency Pack which was the little deck of cards for writers when you get in a jam and you sort of get stuck. It was a Kickstarter we did back at the end of last year. They’re now finally available in stores. So you can find them at WriterEmergency.com. You can find them at the John August Store. You can also find them on Amazon. So just search for Writer Emergency Pack and we are there on Amazon.

So I wrote a Kickstarter update where I talked through sort of the whole process of how you actually put things on the store in Amazon and how you ship things out because it was crazy. It took me three months to sort of put it all together. Like literally just clicking the buy button in the John August Store, there’s like six different companies involved to like make that transaction happen, which has just been nuts.

But it’s actually working. And people are buying them and people like them. So they are available and out there in the world. So if you missed the Kickstarter and you want one, you can now go get one for yourself.

**Craig:** Spectacular. If it’s on Amazon.com, can I get it through Fresh Delivery? Will it show up in the morning before I wake up?

**John:** I don’t think it will show up with Fresh Delivery. But you can get Prime Delivery.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So you can get that sort of sweet ass Prime Delivery even the next day delivery. So that’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Prime is gorgeous.

**John:** So, before, we were talking about like sort of stealth advertising and whether we want to do advertising. This is a perfect chance for us to test whether advertising will be annoying on this podcast if we were to add it.

So let me try to do this properly. Our practice sponsor this week is Writer Emergency Pack, an illustrated deck of useful ideas for writers to help you get unstuck. Last year, it was the most backed card project in Kickstarter history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now it’s available for anyone to buy. It makes a great gift for writers, which I suspect is pretty much anyone listening to this podcast.

You can find Writer Emergency Pack on Amazon. Just search for Writer Emergency. But we have a special offer for Scriptnotes listeners. Go to WriterEmergency.com and click the buy button to buy it on the John August Store. When you check out, use the special promo code Scriptnotes to save 10% on your order and help us figure out whether our listeners will actually use promo codes.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So our thanks to Writer Emergency Pack for helping to practice sponsor our show this week.

**Craig:** I mean, my character in the advertisements is going to be Golly Gee guy. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. I didn’t know that was possible. [laughs]

**Craig:** What? Save $10? No, I’m still on Backblaze over here. And we’re not getting paid for that at all.

**John:** So last week we talked about K.C. Scott’s script, This Is Working. And I just loved that conversation. I went back and listened to the episode. I was just delighted with it. Have you listened to it again?

**Craig:** I listened to it and I thought it was really good. And we did get a lot of really good feedback. People seemed to want this some more. They, you know, “Do it every week.” Well, no. Look, you can’t have your birthday every week, you know. This kind of thing or when we break down a whole movie, it’s actually work. And we have our own work. So —

**John:** And it’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** Yeah. We already have jobs. So that’s something that we will do not quite as frequently as many of you would hope. But I was really encouraged by all the positive feedback. And I thought it was particularly good to have Franklin on because it was nice that we had that other perspective, the non-screenwriter perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So we got a lot of great comments on Facebook and Twitter. So thank you all for sharing your thoughts.

It was also fun. A couple of people wrote in, like before the episode, saying like, “These are my thoughts.” Like one woman did her sort of breakdown analysis of where she thought the work was and her notes on it before the episode aired. And she was right on. So it was great to see that there was excitement and consensus about it.

So, yeah, I would love to do this again too. I think it’s not going to be a very often thing because it is a lot of work. But it was really a fun challenge.

And Kurt, K.C. Scott, was just fantastic. So I wanted to share a little bit more about the emails we had back and forth after the episode aired. So, a little more detail about Kurt.

He writes, “I’m married. We’re expecting our first child in August. I spent most of my career in progressive politics and now I do research for a labor union. I’ve been writing for a while, a mix of short fiction and sports blogging mostly until three years ago when I began writing feature length specs. TV is intriguing but my passion is film.”

And that was a question, like is he a TV person or is he a film person? And he says he’s a film person.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “As my screenwriter career goes, I’m willing to be patient but also aggressive, whether that means flying to LA for meetings or taking time off from my day job for assignments. With a child on the way, economic security means something to me. But both my wife and I are on-board with this, so whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

“As far as travel to LA goes, the good thing about my job is that I’m there once a month for work. We have an office in Commerce City, plus I get to bank Southwest miles, and I have a Southwest credit card, and buddies will put me up if I need to stay for a few days. I’m working every angle to cut costs, no choice really.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. You definitely want to cut costs. People sometimes feel like they need to invest in a new place to make it seem real. It’s that syndrome of, “I’m starting a business, so I’m going to spend a ton of money to make that business look like a real business. And now, I just need customers.” Well, with screenwriting, you don’t need to spend anything. So if you have to come, if you have to travel to LA, you know, and you don’t have a lot of money or you have people that are relying on you, like a child on the way, then I just always advise to be as cheap as you can.

Just be cheap. Spend nothing. Spend as little as possible. There’s no value in — and by the way, no romance in being the person who is putting hotel rooms on credit cards because you want to feel better about yourself.

**John:** Yeah. What I loved about Kurt’s follow-up email there was that he’s both all in but he’s not sort of like all in. He’s not, you know, “Oh, I’m going to quit everything. I’m going to move to LA and start over, start fresh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, I think you have a moment where you can do that right after college, where like there’s really you have no commitments to anything. So like, “Well, why not? You got to start somewhere, why not start there.”

So here’s a guy who has a kid on the way. He has a pretty good job in Oakland. He’d love to become a screenwriter, but he’s doing exactly the right things. He’s sort of iterating. This wasn’t the first thing he wrote. He’s written a bunch. He’s sort of built up his experience he sort of has. By the time he shows up in LA, he’ll have some sort of screenwriting capital. He has stuff he can show. He has a plan for what he wants to do next.

But he’s also being smart. And he’s not like getting himself a fancy apartment on the west side. He’s like going to sleep on some couches, and take those meetings, and get stuff started. And I think that’s going to be a key to success for Kurt.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. So I actually was talking to a friend of the podcast, Mike Birbiglia, today, or as I call him, Mike Burorgaberbium. And he listened to that podcast and really enjoyed it. And he said, “I bet this guy’s phone is going to start ringing now.”

Now, I wasn’t sure because, you know, he’s got to rewrite his script and people are going to want to read the script, and eventually he’ll put it online at The Black List. But what do you think? Do you think his phone is going to start ringing?

**John:** Well, his phone would have literally started ringing because his phone number was on the cover page originally.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I emailed him saying like, “Hey, do you really want your phone number there?” He’s like, “Yeah, maybe let’s take that off.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So he sent a cleaner version that has his phone number off of it. But I hope that he would be getting some direct emails from folks who liked it and folks who want to pursue him. If I were a junior agent, not just in a big agency but really kind of any agency or a manager, I would say, “This guy seems like he sort of meets the criteria of like he’s a really good writer and he’s really smart and seems to get it.” These are the things you want if you’re an agent or a manager.

So I think a month from now, let’s follow up with him and see —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll reach out to him and sort of what is happening next for him.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess we’ll find out if anybody listens to this show.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. So the thing I appreciate I think most about Kurt’s work is that he had good craftsmanship. Like the work was good on the page, but he also seemed to be approaching it from the right perspective. And over the spring break, I read a book that kind of reminded me of the same idea. It’s this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, and I’ll have a link for it at the show notes.

But what I liked about it was he was reframing this argument about sort of, “What do you want to do with your life?” Rather than saying like, “Oh, you should follow your passion. Like there’s a dream job out there, you just have to find your dream job,” he said, “Instead, what you need to do is figure out what is it that you are good at by just doing it and seeing how it all sort of works out.” So saying like some people will make themselves miserable by switching from job to job or like they’ll get stuck in sort of the hard part of it and never realize there’s a place beyond that they’re trying to push to.

And what I liked about what Kurt was doing was he was at it every day and he was clearly focusing on getting the best things he can written and not trying to pursue screenwriting as a sort of lottery career, the sort of this dream of winning it. At no point in our conversations does Kurt ever bring up the idea of like, “Oh, you know what, I thought I’d write this script and sell it for a bunch of money and then be a screenwriter.” That’s never been part of the conversation.

**Craig:** No. I mean, he’s doing that thing that I talk about where you take your plan A and make a plan B, take your plan B, make a plan A. My guess is that he’s probably pretty darn good at his job. And even if that job is in terms of his long-term view, plan B, if his plan A is be a screenwriter, he’s probably made that plan B job as plan A.

He shows up on time, he does his work, he thinks, he applies himself, he has energy, he supports a family, helps support a family. And then he also does this, which is how I think it should be done. I love this advice about follow your passion being flawed.

It’s a little bit like saying, “Look, if you want to have a marriage that lasts your whole life, follow your passion. When you meet somebody and your heart is pounding and you’re sweating and you have that like rush, that chemical rush of just falling head over heels, that’s it, get married that day.” No. That’s not what love is. That’s just infatuation, right? Love is the product of the work. It’s the product of the commitment.

**John:** Yeah. Falling head over heels, that is, you know, lust and attraction. And it’s wonderful. And there’s a reason why we have so many great things written about that. But that’s not marriage.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Marriage is, you know, the getting up and doing it again every single day. And so figuring out how you can be good at being married is like how you can be good at being in any kind of career. It’s like how do you make the situation that you’re in as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean settling for a bad situation.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It means looking for what it is about the situation that you can work on it and sort of continuously kind of get better at.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And thinking back to sort of all of our friends who have become screenwriters and trying to find unifying themes, because so often the knock becomes, “Oh, well, you had this access, you had these sort of magical things that happened.” You know what, some of those things are true, and some of those things were luck, and some of those things were, you know, starting on, you know, second base.

But some of it is also just the constant practice. And when you sit down to write, that first 10 minutes for me is generally kind of awful. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, if I can push through to 15 minutes, then I’ll be done.” And then I’ve written an hour. It’s the same thing with finishing that first script, and then finishing the second script, and then finishing the third script.

No one that I know sold their first script. No one sold the first thing they ever wrote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if that is the standard, then people are going to start their career and be disappointed and look for reasons that aren’t their own reasons about why it didn’t happen.

In this book that I was talking about, the Cal Newport book, he talks about the difference between people who were in like a high school band and the people who — you know, like a high school rock band and the people who became big musical stars. And it tends to be people who were just disciplined about practicing.

They were looking at every day how can I get better. They were looking at like how can I have fun. They were looking at how can I do this really hard work and be better at it for having done the really hard work.

And I think that sometimes we don’t, especially in screenwriting, we never see that really hard work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we just assume like, “Oh, it must have been easy for them.” And in most cases, it wasn’t easy at all.

**Craig:** That’s right. A lot of this is about shedding our romantic understanding of what success is, our romantic understanding of what it means to be a professional, and our romantic understanding of what passion is all about. What he says here is the better you get at something, the more it becomes a passion, a true passion.

When we are children, we fall in love with things and we do them for a month or two and then we stop. And you have a daughter, I’m sure you’ve seen her go through these phases where she becomes obsessed with something. And then —

**John:** Oh, yeah. Rainbow looms. Oh my God, like she could not get enough rainbow looms and making these little elastic bracelets. And then suddenly she never wants to look at it again.

**Craig:** That’s right. My son was obsessed with rocks for five months. I have a drawer full of these rocks. [laughs] But he don’t look at the rocks anymore. But that’s normal. That’s part of growing up.

What I see sometimes in a distressing way in people who are recent college graduates is that they’re still doing it. And the mistake that they’re making is they’re mistaking initial excitement and novelty and the romance of the what-can-be for something that’s real. What is real is the day-after-day work that exists when the novelty is long gone.

There is nothing new about writing a screenplay for you or for me in a sense. But because we are professionals and we practice and we try and get better, we are inspired to do better. There is something beyond the rush of the novelty. There is a true professional joy, I think. And that just requires commitment.

**John:** So I’m just speculating here. But I’m looking at sort of other people who work in our industry. So you look at agents. And so you’d never just become a talent agent. There’s a whole hierarchy you go through.

And so you start in the mail room, and you work your way up to a desk where you’re answering the phone for an agent, and then you might become a junior agent, and you might finally have clients of your own. That training ground, those initial steps are terrible. And they’re sort of deliberately terrible. And it is not to punish anybody, but just so you can actually see from the ground up this is how it all works, this is how it all fits together.

And so if somebody bails on it saying like, “I hated being in the mail room,” well, okay, you hated being in the mail room but that really wasn’t what you were trying to do anyway. That wasn’t what being an agent was. That was just the initial thing. And if you can push through it, if you can look for like what are the ways in being in the mail room that I can figure stuff out, you are the person who’s going to move ahead.

I remember having an internship at Universal, the summer between my two years at Stark Program, and I had the most boring job. I was the intern below three assistants to the head of physical production at Universal. And there was literally nothing for me to do but like file a couple of papers every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one of the things I recognized I could do is there was this moment, like there were 10 minutes after lunch where my boss, Donna, was sort of in a happy place.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so during that happy place, I’d go —

**Craig:** [laughs] You mean drunk?

**John:** [laughs] She was just sort of like sedated. Like there were like no crises for like just a little while.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought she just had like a three martini lunch or something.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve told you some great stories from that summer.

But one of the things I recognized is I’m filing all these papers and there’s all these budgets. At that time they were shooting Greedy and The Flintstones and a few other movies. And I was reading through all the budgets because the budgets are in front of me, I’m going to read them.

And if I saw things I didn’t understand, I could ask her like two questions. I could ask her those two questions. And if they were smart questions, she would say like, “Well, that was actually a good question.” Like she could see that I was actually paying attention and was moving forward. I was getting something out of this. And that helped me there and it got me a better internship at the end of the summer.

**Craig:** What’s interesting is that these other job paths in Hollywood will quickly burn out, I think, the dilettantes. You can say you want to be a filmmaker, you direct a film, you go through that exhaustion and that misery, you come out the other end, and you don’t want to do it anymore, I understand. And if you do, you do.

Working at an agency, working at a studio, there is that long military march through the ranks. But not so with screenwriting. It’s the one gig. It’s like the — I guess, acting, a little bit, too. Acting and screenwriting, you could just keep banging your head against that wall for a while.

**John:** But here’s where I think there is an opportunity for writers. And maybe this is part of the reason why television has gotten so much better. If you look at television, there is that system where you work your way up through. So, yes, you’ve gone off and you’ve written your own specs and people are hiring you based on material you’ve written before, but there’s also people who get hired on as writers’ assistants or get hired on as sort of the script coordinators, the ones who are like sort of around the writers all the time but are not actually being allowed to write the scripts.

And those are the jobs in which if you can show that you are a smart person, that you’re adding value, that you are getting your job and understanding how to push beyond past it, that’s a real opportunity.

I have friends who are on the fourth season of a TV show and they are remarkably capable. And because they’ve been capable, they’ve been given more and more responsibilities in terms of like not just being on the set, but like shadowing the director and getting to do things that a writer in their position wouldn’t normally get to do. Because they have not only done their job well, but they’ve recognized, “You know what, I see what this next thing is and I can ask those smart questions and I can be trusted to do those next things.”

**Craig:** We don’t have that in features, obviously.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But what’s interesting is you’re describing somebody that seems remarkably free of a sense of entitlement. And that is a lot of what the problem is. When we say chase your dream, when someone says, “I’m going to keep chasing my dream because it’s my dream and I believe in it and I know that it’s what I’m supposed to do,” what I hear is “I’m entitled to this. I’m entitled to it. I’m just going to keep chasing because I’m supposed to have it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re not supposed to have anything. You get what you earn. And there are remarkable stories of people with extraordinary talent who squander it because they’re just waiting for somebody to give them something. And of course there are people who have no talent who are also waiting.

And, you know, when you talk about that TV room, it sounds to me like none of those people got there and said, “Well, look, just privately, I’m smarter and better at this than the people that are my bosses. So, you know, I’m going to wait for them to realize that.” Okay. [laughs] Good luck. Good luck.

**John:** This all reminds me of like sort of the final thing that Cal Newport’s book points out called “The Law of Remarkability” which says, “For a project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.”

And this thing, it makes me think back to Kurt’s script because, you know, we’re talking about sort of in the preamble to it, we’re talking about how scripts get passed around and how the Black List formed. And that really is something like you need something that you think is so good that you comment on it to other people. And, you know, the network of Hollywood is set up in such a way that things can get passed around. There’s a venue for it.

So if Kurt was just writing his scripts in Oakland and never showed them to anyone, there would be nothing for anyone to remark about. There wouldn’t be any sort of venue for that to be happening in. So by sharing it with us, but also sharing it in screenwriting competitions or blcklst.com or other places, sending it out there in the world, it gives people a chance to talk about, “You know what? This is really good.”

**Craig:** Well, I like that second point. It must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. And part of what that says to me is that the venue has to be authentic. It has to be valid and meaningful because in general in Hollywood and I think in every business, people remark on things that have been given some sort of imprimatur. Somebody that they trust has said, “I like this.”

So the Black List service essentially is that, right? It’s a venue that was designed to be trusted by the people that remark about things.

I think that what we do with our Three Page Challenge, we’re trusted I think. So hopefully, people will see our opinions as trustworthy. And it doesn’t mean they have to like what Kurt did. But what it means is that they’re going to take it seriously.

It’s also my problem with a lot of the contests and pitch fests and all the stuff that go on because what they’re doing is they’re selling themselves as a legitimate venue when they aren’t really compelling. You’ll see people say things like, “Well, you know, I was a quarter finalist at the, you know, blah blah blah contest.”

And I’ll think no one cares. No one cares if you win that contest. I think they care about Nicholl. I think they care about Austin, the, “Oh, I was selected as a top ten pitch at the pitch fest blah blah blah.” Nobody cares. No one cares.

And so, you know, the endless refrain of caveat emptor on this podcast, when people tell you, “Give us money because we’re going to offer you a legitimate venue that real professionals are watching,” almost always that’s not true. Because they watch very little. Frankly, if they watch even one venue, that’s more than most of their co-workers.

So I think the blcklst.com, Nicholl, Austin, that’s — I don’t know. Any other ones?

**John:** I don’t know if there’s any ones that are meaningful enough that I can recommend them.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But this also reminds me of what your advice was to Malcolm Spellman and Tim Talbott when they came to with Balls Out. They were writing as The Robotard 8000. They came through with this crazy script.

And I think you recognized two things. First off, that it was remarkable enough that people would talk about it because it was just outrageous and it had a compelling thing, it had hooks to it that people could talk about which is great. Second, you said, “You know what? Put it up on the web. Put it up on the Internet. Let people see it and let people talk about it and let it get it out there in the world because it is, you know, special and remarkable.”

And so not to worry about selling this as a spec script but letting people see what this thing was. And so I think you had both of these instincts from the start.

**Craig:** Well, that one was an interesting case because I felt — I wasn’t thinking in terms of venue but trying to put it into context of what Cal Newport has written with his book. That seemed to me like they should create their own venue, that their whole, their entire aesthetic was, “We’re not like anything you’ve ever seen. We’re not called what you think, we don’t write what you think. So we’re going to create our own thing.”

And they did and the website that they made, so their own venue featured — is it Gamera? Was that the turtle? [laughs] It looks like it was a turtle.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** It was like a huge monster turtle swinging on a gymnastics thing. It was so bizarre and just right. And then from there, they got picked up to the Black List, not the service, but the actual annual Black List. And they made the annual Black List. So that was the second level of legitimacy.

And curiously enough, we just did a reading of that script, Balls Out, for the Black List and it’s on a podcast that’s coming up. And so I did the narration. But really good actors read the parts including Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas. So you should check that out. It came out really well, I thought.

**John:** Craig Mazin is recommending another podcast. So something unusual is happening —

**Craig:** I don’t know the name of it. [laughs] So I feel like I’m still okay.

**John:** Stuart will research the name and we’ll put a link in the show notes so you can find —

**Craig:** It’s going to be on a thing —

**John:** Craig’s narration for Balls Out. Do you get to say filthy words?

**Craig:** Oh, my God. There were a few of those where I just thought, “Well, if people complain, I’ll just say I was reading what I was handed.”

**John:** So Craig also wrote up some great bits of advice on the outline that I thought were terrific. So this is camera directions for screenwriters. Craig, talk us through what words screenwriters should be using if they’re using camera directions in their script.

**Craig:** Well, I thought this was only fair. I mean, here we are, we’re the guys saying, “Oh, ignore these people with their stupid rules. Like never put camera directions in scripts.” But it’s not fair. I don’t think for us to say, “No, no. Go ahead and do it,” if we don’t talk about how you should do it. And this all comes under the general title, “You can’t pan up.”

So I’ll see this in scripts all the time, “Pan up to find.” Okay, so let’s just talk about some of these terms and what they mean. None of them, the mistakes that you could make with this are going to ruin your screenplay. Don’t get me wrong. If you write a terrific script, nobody will care. But some of these things are just binary, they’re right or wrong.

So panning. You can’t pan up. A pan is essentially the camera version of shaking your head no. The camera is on a spot and it doesn’t go up or down. It hinges left and right. The opposite of that is tilting. You can tilt up and down. That’s the camera equivalent of nodding yes, right? So sometimes you want to tilt up or tilt down.

But just think about in your mind a head moving no or a head moving yes. Think about how that means the camera’s moving in relation to what’s in front of you. A lot of times, that’s not really what you want. What you really want to do is keep the camera pointing forward in a certain horizontal way, but moving the entire camera to the left or right or up or down.

So in that case, what you want to talk about is move right or move left. You can also say dolly right or dolly left if you want. And then for forward and backwards, you can say push in, pull out. By the way, dolly right and dolly left, those aren’t technically right either. You’re supposed to dolly forward and dolly back, and truck right and truck left. But trucking is a weird term that nobody uses really.

**John:** Yeah. No one ever says truck.

**Craig:** Right. So I think dolly is okay there. Sometimes I will see this mistake, people will say, “Zoom in on.” And I think, “Well, do you mean zoom in or do you mean push in?” So two very different things. John, I’m sure you know this.

**John:** Yeah, if you’re making a ’70s paranoia thriller, then yes, zooming in is absolutely correct. But rarely we call that a zoom. You know, there might be some case where you really want that effect of, you know, the zoom, or you want sort of the vertigo zoom. You know, if that really is appropriate to your moment, call it out. But that’s rarely — what’s called a dolly zoom, that’s often what that’s referred to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a dolly zoom.

**John:** If that really is appropriate, that’s fine. Go and do it. But most cases, you know, you are moving in, you are, you know, revealing. A lot of these things I find in my own script, I will say, “Move to reveal.” That way, I’m not saying it has to be a dolly or a pan or whatever else. It’s just like the camera does something to show us something we did not see before.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. You’re not there so you’re not sure if it’s going to be right or left or back or forth. But the point is move the camera to reveal something.

So when you’re pushing in, you’re moving the whole camera forward. And that means that everything in the screen starts to — you get closer to everything sort of at the same time.

A zoom is a lens. On a zoom, the camera doesn’t move at all. Instead, the camera operator is turning a lens and changing the focal length of the lenses they turn. So what happens is it’s almost like you’re blowing up the image. Rather than moving, you’re blowing it up.

So if you want to see an example of zoom in — Quentin Tarantino will still use them to ironic effect in Kill Bill when the Bride shows up to train with Pai Mei, he does lots of zooms on Pai Mei’s face because he’s — the whole thing, I mean, even the film has been treated so it’s supposed to look like it’s a ’70s karate movie. So that’s a zoom. You generally aren’t going to be zooming.

If you want the camera to go up or down without tilting, right, then you could talk about booming up or camera rises or crane up or crane down or boom down.

And then let’s talk about some angles. There are times when you want to be looking down on something and there are times when you want to be looking up at something. You can say we look down on or we look up at. Or you can also say high angle on, low angle. Low angle means you’re down low looking up. High angle, you’re up high looking down.

**John:** If you ever get confused just think a giant is high. What would a giant be looking at? A dwarf is low, what would a dwarf be looking up at? That’s the difference between high angle and low angle.

Again, you’re not likely to have to call these out very often. I mean, it would be a very specific case that really needs to be in the script if you’re going to be using either one of those.

**Craig:** Well, that brings me to the cardinal sin of camera direction. And the cardinal sin of camera direction in your screenplay is not, “Don’t use camera direction…” The cardinal sin — that’s my impression of these idiots. The cardinal sin of — “Give me money now.” The cardinal sin of camera direction is unmotivated camera direction.

Unmotivated camera direction is a bad thing to do when you’re making a movie, as a director, as a cinematographer, you don’t move the camera pointlessly. You want to move it for a reason, right? Okay, what’s your reason? Maybe your reason is just to create a feeling. Maybe your reason is to see something specific.

As a screenwriter, you want to make sure that if you’re calling out a specific camera move or angle, it’s for a purpose. Ask these questions, why does the camera need to move? Why do I have to see what it is showing me? What information do I learn from what it showing me? And through those, the answers to those questions, you will have intentional motivated camera direction.

**John:** Absolutely true. And I was thinking back to recent things I’ve written. And in Scary Stories there’s a moment where a character leaves the room and we stay behind the room. The camera turns around and very slowly creeps in on something. That’s the definition of intentionality. It’s like there’s nothing making us look over in that direction so the choice to do that makes it really clear something very big and unsettling is about to happen and be ready for it. That’s motivation. But so I have to write all that stuff into the script.

But in most cases, you’re not going to do that at all. And so it’s not going to matter to me whether something’s a two shot or a single shot or how we’re dollying or how we’re moving through these things.

Sometimes, you want to call out a general style for how things are supposed to feel. And so there’s moments in the script that definitely have a different feel. And I would talk about sort of like there were times I would say sort of very loose documentary style footage. That’s great, but rarely am I calling out stuff otherwise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So in the script I’m writing now, there are two characters who are scared to go somewhere. They’re scared to cross something. And they decide the only way they’re going to be able to do it is if they do it together. And so they sort of push themselves together and start walking slowly.

And then I call out a shot on their feet to see how close their feet are kind of and how trembly they are. You know, look, you can watch movies and see a shot like that and go, “Oh, you know what? It’s nice to occasionally look at the feet. That’s cool.” Not good enough. Why am I looking at feet? What am I learning from the feet? I need to know.

So unmotivated camera direction is just like unmotivated dialogue or action. Don’t talk to me if I don’t need to hear the words or they don’t mean a damn thing. And don’t show me something that doesn’t mean anything.

So that stuff needs to be built in. But if you have a moment where you know why you want to do it and you know what the audience is going to get out of it, here’s a sense of what the vocabulary is so you don’t write pan up.

**John:** Don’t write pan up. Never write pan up.

**Craig:** You can’t pan up.

**John:** So on the topics of the words on the page, Dave wrote in with question. He’s writing, “My protagonist is traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood. For my scene headings, should it be as generic as EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD — DAY and EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD- TODAY? Or do I need to be more specific?” Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I think you need to be much more specific than that. First of all, there’s no such thing as neighborhood. Even if you were in one neighborhood, I wouldn’t write neighborhood. That means nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is a vanilla pudding description. So I want to know where he is. You need to define my space. EXT. BLANKETY..WILLIAMSTOWN — DAY , a da-da-da kind of place. Fine. He crosses out of Williamstown into EXT, da-da-da, a new kind of place. Here’s what it’s like.”

No, of course I need to know. Neighborhood is, that’s like EXT. BUILDING.

**John:** Absolutely. Or INT. ROOM.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What is a room? I have no idea what a room is. So what Craig is pointing out is that you’d probably have both in your scene header something that encapsulates the idea of what the place is, so a name for like it’s Williamstown. And then the first time that you are there, you’re giving us a sense of flavor of what this thing feels like. The next time we see Williamstown, we’re like, “Oh, it’s that neighborhood.” But you have to be really specific in those scene headers so we know what it is we’re looking at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t want it over describe in the scene header. Don’t throw us 15 words in the scene header. But just give it a name so that once we — so that sticks in our head. And it may be a very good idea to make sure you’re not naming two different locations really similar things. So if you have Williamsport and Williamstown, we won’t be able to tell the difference.

**Craig:** Correct. Now, if you have a situation where your character is on a bus or a train and the ideas is they’re traveling rapidly through, you know, from place to place or it’s montagey, you can shorthand it because we’ll never know, we’re never going to be there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we don’t know the name and we don’t need to know the name and we could just say, you know Jim looks out of a train as it passes through, you know, urban blight, suburban blah, blah, gentrification, whatever. Describe, give me a flavor of it. So just think to yourself, some locations scout has to go out and figure this out. Where am I sending them? They need to know. You know, neighborhood 1 and neighborhood 2 tells nobody anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** 100% agree. Next question, Brian writes, “I’ve written an animated pilot script and I’m wondering if I should denote anywhere in the script that it is in fact animated. I made the mistake at an early table read of not indicating this and most of the notes I received assumed it was live action. Like, ‘It would be impossible to make,’ or, ‘You can’t train a cobra to do that,’ et cetera.”

**Craig:** [laughs] You can’t train a cobra to speak.

**John:** “As my script is now getting in the hands of agents, producers and et cetera, I’m wondering if there’s anything I should add in the script itself to make it clear to the reader immediately that we’re talking about a cartoon to avoid any confusion?” What would you do Craig?

**Craig:** Very simply. Let’s say the title of this were, you know, John the Cobra, then I would say John the Cobra an animated pilot by Brian, right? Just put it right on the title page, put the word animated pilot and this way no one will even get to page one without knowing it’s animated. I mean, yes, for sure, I think you’ve got to just call it out.

**John:** I think you got to call it out too. But I’ve had this actually happen to me. There’s a project I wrote recently, you know, I say recently, three years ago, and people who read it were like, “Oh yeah, so this is animated, right?” “Like no, no, no, I really mean for this to be live action.” They’re like, “Oh.” And it’s like, “Oh, I really should have told you that before I had you spend, you know, 90 minutes reading the script.” So, that’s also a great case for whatever we’re going to call the intermediary page between the title page and the first page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you have something to talk about like this is the animation style that it’s going for, that’s the perfect place to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but no, you need to make that clear. You can’t train a cobra to do that.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** That cobra is having a discussion with a rat. [laughs] How do we do that?

**John:** But Craig, could you train cobra to fight polio?

**Craig:** No, but I’ll tell you what. You can train polio to fight glioblastoma multiforme and that is my One Cool Thing. Look, it’s like now Segue Man has gotten a sidekick? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely, Segue Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Segue Boy.

**John:** Transition Boy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m Transition Boy. My parents died in a fire.

**John:** Transition Boy started as Transition Girl but —

**Craig:** Yeah exactly, transition — no, then I’ll be Post Transition Girl. So I’m Transition Boy.

**John:** Transitioning Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Transitioned Boy. Anyway, so here’s my One Cool Thing. Polio, so here’s a crazy idea, take a disease that used to kill and paralyze millions of people and was finally eradicated by vaccines and use it to treat glioblastoma multiforme. Glioblastoma multiforme is pretty much the worst diagnosis you can get from a neurologist.

**John:** I don’t know what it is. So tell me what that is.

**Craig:** Glioblastoma multiforme is a kind of brain tumor. It is malignant, it is incredibly aggressive and it essentially becomes inoperable. And here’s why — it’s operable. It’s very operable, but pointlessly operable. Because what happens is they’ll go and they’ll take out as much of it as they can. But it’s impossible to get 100% of it. So they can literally remove 99% of this glioblastoma multiforme tumor and the tiny remaining cancer cells will just go bonkers again. It is incredibly aggressive.

And the deal with glioblastoma multiforme is that if you were diagnosed with this, you’re looking at anywhere from four months to four years. Nobody makes it past five years, period, the end. This is terminal. And it is super bad. And that’s with surgery and radiation and chemo. And the chemo, they say, will give you maybe two months. I mean, it’s the worst.

Well, so [laughs] a group of brilliant people have come up with this idea and it’s showing early promise. It’s not perfect yet but it’s showing early promise. What they’ve done is they have engineered poliovirus. They’ve taken poliovirus and they’ve genetically altered it. So, if you are afraid of genetically modified organisms, I’m so sorry, they’re wonderful. And they actually spliced it with some genetic code from the common cold. One of the things about polio is that it’s really good at replicating itself.

Well, this polio isn’t so good at replicating itself but what it does do is it attaches to these very specific receptors on the cancer cells themselves and starts to destroy the cancer cells without infecting healthy cells. It’s kind of brilliant. It is incredibly painstaking. They have to figure out exactly how much to put in. They have to surgically implant it in there. Then they’ve got to wait. And essentially what happens is the polio isn’t really killing the cancer cells because it’s a weakened poliovirus anyway. What the polio is doing is turning the cancer cells which normally exist like ninjas that the good guys can’t see and they’re basically shining a light on them, so that the immune system which normally cannot tell that the cancer cell is bad, now sees, “Oh my God, it’s polio”.

And it goes rushing in to kill the cancer cells and they’ve had some initial very positive results, not perfect yet by any stretch. But this could be a big deal as in they could, if this is refined, this could actually cure a number of — and it seems to have already cured a few people and this was an incurable disease so that’s just a remarkable breakthrough and I hope that it pays off in the way that they’re thinking it eventually will.

**John:** Yeah, I hope it works well. I just have this real flashback to Emma Thompson at the very start of I Am Legend. And it has one of the best intros to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s basically this CNN interview with Emma Thompson and she’s like — so the interviewer says like, “So you’ve cured cancer?” It’s like, “Yes, we’ve cured cancer,” and then smash cut to the end of civilization and basically they genetically modified something that became the disease that killed everybody.

**Craig:** Well, this is where Hollywood makes me angry because it’s easy for us — that’s a great way to get into a movie and it is. The problem is that what is narratively convenient for us is actually damaging the credibility of really good science. Because in truth, that’s not what we should be scared of. What we should be scared of is glioblastoma multiforme, not these fascinating treatments to cure it.

So, yes, ever since War of the Worlds, I mean we’ve always dreaded the virus, you now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now, we dread vaccines, or at least some idiots do. Because we’ve been taught that science is messing with the primal forces of nature. Yeah, well, that’s how we got aspirin and that’s how we got Advil and that’s why don’t all die when we’re 40. So I’m entirely in favor of these things.

And by the way, if you read about this polio treatment of glioblastoma, you’ll see that it was subject to some of the most rigorous controls by the federal government. And they were really careful.

**John:** Oh, I could imagine why.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were really —

**John:** It’s polio.

**Craig:** It’s polio, you know, so they were really, really careful. And they did a spectacular job. So, here’s hoping.

**John:** Hurray. My One Cool Thing is the resolution of a lawsuit about Three’s Company and an Off-Broadway play called 3C which was a parody of Three’s Company or a very specific satire based around Three’s Company.

So what happened is a federal judge in New York, her name was Loretta A. Preska of the U.S. District Court, a rule that the play 3C did not violate the copyright of Three’s Company. So, it’s a complicated situation, so essentially there was this Off-Broadway production of this play called 3C and it was essentially a parody of Three’s Company.

And from what I understand, I never saw it but it was happening in the same time we were doing Big Fish, is — so basically all of the constructs of Three’s Company, so like the set and the basic characters and sort of what their situation was and played it as if they were all really real. So like what if Jack Tripper really were gay and were around all these sort of homophobic insults. And like what if all this leering and all the stuff this happened sort of around him.

And so it was a very pointed thing. And it got sort of mixed reviews. But it also got a lot of concern by the copyright holders. So it’s a company called DLT Entertainment owns the copyright, owns the rights to remake Three’s Company. And they said, “Uh-uh-uh.” And they filed a cease and desist.

And so this playwright was stuck in this weird situation where the play closed. And he couldn’t publish the play, he couldn’t find other stages for the play, he couldn’t do anything because there was this specter that this other company might come after him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, he went and sued them and basically this is the first rule and it says, you know what, this was fair use. This was a fair way to sort of take this existing property and, you know, satirize it the same way that an SNL sketch can satirize Scandal or any other sort of popular cultural thing. So, I thought it was really fascinating. I could feel for both sides of the situation as a person who might create the thing that gets parodied. Like, “Well, at what point do I have the opportunity to sort to say like, ‘You can’t do that, that’s my thing?'”

**Craig:** Well, pretty much no point. I mean, that’s fair use. It’s pretty clear about the parody exception and then the Supreme Court expanded that concept as well to include what it meant to parody public figures.

As somebody that did parody, you know, we wouldn’t have been able to do a thing if we didn’t have that fair us. I mean we were copying things down to – when and we did the — here’s how close we were. We, in Scary Movie 4, part of the parody was the movie Saw. So, we recreated the bathroom, the iconic bathroom from Saw. And we did it so well that when they went back I think and made another Saw, they used part of our set.

Because people buy sets back and forth from each other all the time. And I think we even had part of their set when we made ours. So the key is, is there any chance that people are going to confuse these two things? There’s no chance that people are going to go see the play that you just described and think, “Ah, this is Three’s Company but on stage.” No, it’s not. It’s clearly not. It’s clearly parody and I’m not surprised. I don’t like it when people try and get heavy-handed about copyright stuff because I do believe in copyright. And I do believe in the rights of intellectual property holders.

So, when they truly are bullies, I think it weakens the general cause because there are people out there who want everything to be free all the time, you know. And I’m not one of those people. So, I’m glad that this prevailed. I presume it’s going to stay this way because it just sounds like a classic case of fair use to me.

**John:** I agree. It sounds like fair use. But part of the reason why I want to bring it up is because if you were this playwright, you know, he was correct and was ultimately vindicated but this is two years where he has not had the ability to actually show his play to anybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so just as a warning that if you’re going to walk into dangerous waters, you might ultimately be right. You might have the law on your side, that won’t necessarily help you for a period of time until you get those decisions back.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, you know, he would much rather not have had to file a lawsuit and then be able to make other plays and he wasn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And some of these cases, unfortunately the way the law is set up, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. What we found was that if you ask a company for the right to parody a product by let’s say, “Can we please use your logo to parody you?” And they say no, it starts to fall out of fair use because you’ve essentially demonstrated that you didn’t think it was fair use. So, you kind of just proceed like it is fair use.

And then they come after you and then you go, “Oh, what? Well, fair use.” And you usually win. But you’re right, this is the cost of doing business. And this is why in general, you’re better off with somebody big behind you when somebody big comes after you. Obviously, that isn’t always possible.

**John:** Yeah. So it was pro bono representation in this case. So thank you to whoever lawyers who stepped on his behalf.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** That is our show this week. So you can respond to me or to Craig on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We also have a Facebook page which we sometimes check and we actually looked at some of the things on Facebook this week. So you can find us at Facebook/Scriptnotes. We’re on iTunes. You can find us there, just search for Scriptnotes. That’s where you can subscribe and listen to all the episodes. You can also leave us a comment. We look at those comments as well. If you are on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app that is available for iOS, for iPad and for iPhone. That’s where you can also get to all the back episodes of the show.

The service is called Scriptnotes.net. That gets you back to episode one, all the way back to the beginning of this very show where we didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It has an outro by a very talented listener, but we haven’t decided which one yet. So, if you are a listener who has an outro for our show, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to it. And that’s also where you can send your questions, like the two questions we answered today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you would like to buy a Writer Emergency Pack, you can go to the store@johnaugust.com or just writeremergency.com and click the links there. The special code this week, and it’s actually good for this whole month, is Scriptnotes and that will give you 10% off your orders.

**Craig:** 10%!

**John:** 10%. That’s savings.

**Craig:** It’s all that guy. 10%? Wow.

**John:** That’s unbelievable.

**Craig:** Tell me more.

**John:** And we will be back next week. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Okay, bye.

Links:

* The LA Times on [the CAA to UTA exodus, and CAA’s resulting lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-takeaways-caa-lawsuit-uta-20150403-story.html)
* [Scriptnotes, 191: The Deal with Scripped.com](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-scripped-com)
* [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/) and [CrashPlan](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/) online backup services
* [Fountain](http://fountain.io/) is future proof
* [Mad Max: Fury Road trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8)
* [Writer Emergency Packs are available now](http://writeremergency.com/) (use the code “scriptnotes” at checkout on the John August Store for 10% off through May 1st)
* Writer Emergency Kickstarter update on [how online retail works](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck/posts/1182012)
* [Scriptnotes, 190: This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/2015/this-is-working)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), by Cal Newport
* [The Robotard 8000](http://www.therobotard8000.com/Robotard_Main/Main.html)
* [Announcing The Black List Table Reads](http://blog.blcklst.com/2015/04/announcing-the-black-list-table-reads/)
* Forbes on [Duke’s Polio Virus Trial Against Glioblastoma](http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2015/03/30/60-minutes-covers-dukes-polio-virus-clinical-trial-against-glioblastoma/)
* [Play Reimagining ‘Three’s Company’ Wins Case](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/theater/play-reimagining-threes-company-wins-case.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0&referrer=) from The New York Times
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener JT Butler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/this-is-working).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 190 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

190 episodes in, we are doing something for the very first time today. We are going to be looking at an entire screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a 111 Page Challenge.

**John:** It is. So this is a script called This Is Working. It’s by K.C. Scott. And back in episode 187, we looked at the first three pages of this script and we thought they were terrific. We also thought K.C. Scott was a woman. So we referred to K.C. Scott as a woman through the whole thing.

But he’s a guy. His name is Kurt. He lives in Oakland. His Twitter handle is @BlackSitcomDad. And I emailed him and asked him, “Hey, would you want to share with us your entire script so that we could talk about it on the air and talk about how a whole script works?”

So if I have done things properly, I have put this up the Friday before this episode aired so you guys could all read it and have this in your heads, as you’re listening to this podcast, so we could all discuss this script together.

**Craig:** And I know that there’s a fair chance that a lot of people will not have done their homework and will not have read it. But that’s okay, because I think we’re going to talk about some things that are specific to K.C.’s script but we’re also going to talk — I mean, does he like to be called K.C. or Kurt? I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s call him K.C.

**Craig:** Okay. I think we’re going to be talking about things that are specific to K.C.’s script. But we’re also going to be talking about things that are useful for anyone in terms of writing and what it means to make it in Hollywood and what do you do when you have a script and how do you approach fixing scripts. So it’s best if you’ve done your homework. If you haven’t, think about maybe reading the script and then listening to this in the car. But if you haven’t done your homework, don’t flip out.

**John:** Everything will be okay. And here to help us make everything even more okay is one of our very first guests on the show ever. This man created The Black List. Not the TV show, but the actual The Black List of like the best screenplays in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah. The less profitable Black List. [laughs]

**John:** That’s it. The increasingly profitable blcklst.com.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** He is also a former development executive, so he’s been on many sides of the table and read many, many scripts in his life. Franklin Leonard, welcome to the show.

**Franklin Leonard:** Hello everyone. Thank you, guys, for having me.

**John:** So Franklin joins us from New York City.

**Craig:** Did you hear, he sounded just like Bane there. “Hello, everyone. Hey, Batman.”

**Franklin:** I blame my microphone.

**John:** Yeah. So he’s recording on Skype on a little ear bud microphone. But we welcome him and welcome his opinions on this script. Because my hunch is that it was just the right script for us to have on the show, because there’s stuff that I thought was delightful about it, there’s also stuff that needed a lot of work and attention, and I think we can all learn a lot from this script.

**Craig:** I don’t plan on learning a damn thing.

**John:** Before we get started on the actual details of this script, I just want to talk through the kinds of people who read screenplays and sort of the different things that they’re looking for. Because, you know, we are readers looking at the script in the context of a podcast and trying to give advice to this writer. But there’s many different kinds of people in Hollywood who reads screenplays. And so let’s just quickly kind of go through who those kinds of people are.

So one place that a writer might want to read their script is an agency or a management company. In your guys’ experience, what are agents and managers looking for? If this script landed on their desk, what would they be looking for?

**Craig:** Franklin?

**Franklin:** I mean, look, I think with agents and managers, first and foremost, they’re running a business and their product is the writing talent that they represent. And so I think, you know, a critical calculation for them is can I sell this script, one. And two, is this script representative of the kind of work that can get this writer employed elsewhere, be it in film, in television. Like can I send this person into a room? Is this a script that if I send it out, people are going to be very excited about it and call me and say, “Hey, I have to meet with this person immediately, I have a project they would be perfect to write”?

I think that it’s a pretty clean calculus for them. Because even in cases where they’re just awed by the art of something, they are awed by knowing that other people will be as well and that that will eventually put money in their pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree with that. Let’s talk about the laziest agents and managers who I suspect probably comprise 90% of agents and managers. It’s just the way of the world and humans.

Lazy agents and managers will say, “Okay, do I know somebody that wants something like this?” “Can I sell this quickly?” “Do I know somebody that’s been asking for this sort of thing or buying this kind of thing?” “Is the topic hot?” They’re just thinking 10 feet ahead of them.

The best agents and managers are people who don’t worry about what the market is telling them that day but instead look at somebody and think, “I’m going to tell the market that this is where they should be.” And those are the agents and managers that are ideal. Granted they’re few and far between but every now and then, there’s this wonderful marriage between somebody who’s new and interesting and somebody who’s brave.

So if you are writing certain kinds of material, it’s okay to encounter the lazy agent because they’re a lazy dream come true. You’re writing a fighting robot movie, about vampires, and that’s what’s exciting at the moment. If you’re writing something like this script for instance, you are going to need somebody who believes in you and is willing to make the argument to people, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is different,” and that’s good.

**John:** Now, Franklin, the original incarnation of The Black List, it’s a list of the best screenplays picked by the people who are reading a lot of screenplays, largely people who are running ,or, you know, junior executives at development companies, they’re at studios, they’re producers. What are they looking for? If this script landed on their desk, how would it get there, what would they be looking for as they’re flipping through pages?

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, typically, it would get there via an agent or manager who called and said, “I have a new client, this is what the script is, I’d love to send it to you, I’m really excited about it, will you read it? ” You know, as a sample. Or it will be sent as a spec, you know, sort of sent out on day and date released to a number of different production companies or studios saying, “We’re selling this script, read it tonight, and then if you’re interested, you can buy it tomorrow.”

There’s actually a lot of overlap I think between going out with scripts in those two ways because sometimes you’ll have scripts that are not likely to sell but will still be framed in terms for being sent to a producer or to a financier and say, “Hey, this is a really exciting piece of material, you should read it immediately,” in the hopes that someone will decide to buy it the next day or in the weeks immediately following.

**John:** Yeah, sometimes, scripts end up there because someone else likes it. And so, a junior executive of this company liked it, they talked to their friend over at this company. Said like, “Oh, have you read the script? You should read the script.” So that pass-around is also a crucial factor as well, isn’t it?

**Franklin:** That pass-around is actually, yeah. Thank you for mentioning that.

The pass-around is actually really critical and that’s actually responsible for the birth of The Black List. It was me realizing as a development executive that a lot of the best stuff I was getting was not coming from agents and managers who obviously had a vested financial interest in convincing me to read the script, and was coming from people, you know, who I was having breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks with, who when you sit down and say, “What have you read that’s good lately,” they’re going to tell you honestly the stuff they love, not necessarily the stuff that they think their boss is going to buy or that they think is going to make money.

And I think that ultimately The Black List ends up being, at the end of every year, you know, a snapshot of all of those conversations about the things that are sort of being most traded amongst development executives.

**John:** Cool. Now in blcklst.com which is the site where writers can put up their scripts and have professional coverage, they can also have people read their scripts, you know. People who are members of blcklst.com can download their scripts, read their scripts and see what is out there in the town.

**Franklin:** Yup.

**John:** What are your professional readers of blcklst.com looking for if they’re reading one of these scripts? If K.C. had put this on blcklst.com and paid the money to have it read, what would that reader be doing?

**Franklin:** Yeah. Our readers are actually told explicitly not to consider the commercial prospects of a script in their evaluation of it. There is a brief section where you can talk about the commercial prospects and the qualitative portion. But in terms of evaluating that quantitatively, they’re told point blank, “Do not consider that.” They are reading screenplays as samples and they’re told to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how likely and enthusiastically they would recommend it to a peer or superior in the business.

So the website really does sort of depart from that same core idea of the annual list which is forget the financial component of the business for a minute, just what are the things that you’re reading that you just have to tell someone about, which I actually think is sort of the nature of subjectivity in art, right? Like when you see something amazing, you kind of want to share it. And we’re trying to capture that with our readers as well.

**John:** Great. Well, before we get into the details of this script, just tell us our sort of snapshot opinions of this script that we read. This is K.C. Scott’s This Is Working. Sort of our first impressions and sort of the overall framework of what we want to talk about when we talk to K.C. about his script.

Craig, do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, I loved it. I’ll just say flat out I loved it.

Here’s what I generally loved. I’m always saying to all the people that come and talk to us at our live events or write in when they say, “How do I get an agent? How do I get noticed?” Da-da-da-da-da. And I keep telling them, “Just express your unique voice. And if it’s interesting, they will come. If it is not, they won’t. But whatever you do, don’t copy because you won’t copy very well. And the people that are making the originals are here already.”

Well, K.C. has an original voice. K.C. is palpably intelligent and K.C. has also written a movie that is a character study that I haven’t seen before. It’s a character I literally have not seen before in this way, expressing this thing. It is arched. There is a tone to it that is reminiscent of — it’s kind of like an Oakland Wes Anderson. [laughs] I don’t know how else to describe it.

**Franklin:** I think that’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s easy to criticize the story and we can certainly get into it where it does get very kind of story-light and episodic. On the other hand, I could say the same for some Wes Anderson movies. There are times when you read a script and you think, “I’m not really sure this is going to bear that much criticism because I don’t think the person writing it would care,” in a good way, because they’ve expressed something that is true to them and unique.

So there are some areas here and there where I feel strongly that K.C. should make some changes and there are some areas where I want him to think and expand. However, in the whole, I thought this was terrific. And this is a script that I’m glad that this is our first one that we’re doing because I want people to read this script.

I think K.C. should be working in Hollywood right now. I think depending on the nature of K.C. and his temperament and what he wants to pursue, I think I could easily see him working on a TV show right now. And I could easily see him perhaps taking an assignment based on this work. This script itself would be an independent film.

So that’s my general snapshot-y vibe.

**John:** Yeah. I overlap a lot with you in terms of really liking the script, really loving the character who I thought was unique and new. And I think as we get into story, being frustrated at times that the story itself gets really familiar and not as special as the character he’s created. And I think he has the ability to create really great, unique, interesting moments, and I want to highlight some of these great moments as we start to get into them. The script is sort of existing in a no man’s land between — it feels like some really great single camera comedy, you know, TV characters are sort of like bumbling through a movie and not really quite able to take the reins of the movie that they’re in. I have some really specific concerns about the women in the movie and there’s some terrific insight, but sometimes the themes aren’t pushed quite enough.

I so much agree with you that I think K.C. should be working in Hollywood soon, and this script I think is going to be a great sample for him. But the better version of the script will be an even better version of showing what he can do.

Franklin, where did you come at with the script?

**Franklin:** I’m very similar. I think I’m probably a little bit more in John’s camp than I am in Craig’s. But there’s no question to me that K.C. has a voice. His voice is one that I very much enjoy. The characters, not only did I enjoy them, I identified with them in many ways which does say more about me than I think the script. And also there were lines that made me laugh out loud and for anyone that reads a lot of scripts, you know just how rare that is.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. Me too.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Franklin:** And there were a lot of lines that made me laugh out loud.

And I think Craig’s point about working in TV is a really good one. I can imagine K.C. writing for a TV show tomorrow and being valuable in a room, you know, whether it’s a show — for some reason, Brooklyn Nine-Nine kept coming up for me tonally. There was just very funny stuff that I could imagine him, if he can sort of dish out comedy like this on a consistent basis, he’s going to be an additive quantity to a writers’ room.

I actually felt like, you know, if it’s going to be Oakland Wes Anderson, and I think that’s an apt description, I actually wanted it to be a little bit more arched. I think that though the first three pages and really the first 30 odd pages set the tone nicely, I thought that tone receded somewhat in the back two-thirds of the script. And I would have liked to see more tone-setting with the script, so that I as a reader, producer, executive, agent, whatever, know exactly what I’m seeing on the screen rather than just this exceptional character work.

But I enjoyed it. I think it needs work. I think that it’s a good sample now that could be an exceptional sample pushed to where I think it can go.

**Craig:** And I would just add that the funny thing is that the less I like a script, generally the less I have to say about it. I could probably talk to K.C. about every single page and give him 12 notes on every single page. I don’t want K.C. to misunderstand me. I think that I could have him working on this for a long time and revise it for a long time to make it better for sure. There is a lot.

You can see that he is new. The generally scene craft isn’t happening yet. So you have scenes where — I call them ticker tape scenes where it’s just strips of dialogues. So if our folks are playing the home game, look at page five and six, they’ll see essentially just strips of dialogue.

That’s an indication that you haven’t really written a scene. You’ve written a conversation, which is fine for a sitcom, no-no for movie. Even if it’s a walk-and-talk , I need to feel — even if nothing is happening action-wise in the scene, I need it to be broken up so that you’re giving me something about them. I need to see changes and things happening with them. So there are scene work issues.

I have character issues actually outside of Byron who I think is really well-crafted. I have Amanda issues. But let’s get into all of it.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Let’s start with the characters because I think that’s what we all responded to. And the Byron character who we first met in the Three Page Challenge is this kind of unique character that I haven’t seen before. And I’ve loved sort of hanging out with him.

So Byron is our hero of our story. He as a protagonist I would argue he doesn’t necessarily protagonate as much as I would love him to, you know, grow over the course of the story. But he is a guy who is a talented illustrator who we sort of had a hint of this in the three pages but this became his real character definition. There are women who tell him what to do and he’s sort of just come to accept that he just does what these women in his life tell him what to do.

It’s set up very ably in the very first scene about the waffles and that becomes a factor throughout the whole story. We see, you know, his progression from this company to leaving the company, to finding an apartment, to his relationship with his girlfriend, ultimately leading us to moving back in with his mom in a way that I didn’t necessarily love. But I loved him.

If I had concerns it was with Amanda who the movie plays almost like a two-hander. It’s not a romantic-comedy. It really — it’s supposed to I think be Byron’s story. But she is the other main character and she reminded me of the Ilana character on Broad City. I don’t know if you guys watch Broad City.

**Franklin:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** And that she’s really verbal and really direct in ways that were wonderful and funny. And yet I had no belief that she existed before I saw her on page two.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I didn’t have any good sense of who she was or sort of why she was in this, what her movie would be if it wasn’t this movie.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. I agree with that. I think that Byron — well, first of all there’s a question, who is the actual protagonist of this movie? And I love scripts that make me wonder about that because I’m not sure if it’s Byron or Amanda.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** And you can argue either way because, you know, Byron is passive. He is defined by his passivity which I love by the way because I love anybody that gives the middle finger to the rules. And it was fun to watch. It was fun to watch him refuse to change. [laughs] It was fun to watch him exist as this thing that could not be changed despite everybody’s desire for him to change. it was, I thought, a very touching and true portrait of somebody living with Asperger’s syndrome, you know, and possibly autism. He was so clearly socially off and yet had this brilliant focus and a certain savantism which I thought was wonderful.

I think John you put your finger on my issue with Amanda. I really enjoyed spending time with her. I need to know what the deal is. I don’t think K.C. can get away with what he’s gotten away with.

Byron we understand has a life and a past. We start to learn about his past. We learn about it from other people. We learn about it from him. Amanda was born on the planet on page 3. And I don’t know what has she had, other boyfriends, what went wrong, why is she doing this job, what’s her problem.

I mean, there’s wonderful movies about two damaged people finding each other and attempting to make something work and failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding. And I want that here. But Amanda is currently not a fully realized character in the way that she must be if this is going to work properly.

**Franklin:** Yes. I completely agree. I mean, she feels more device than character. And not to sort of invoke the Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing but I do think it’s relevant here like you see it oftentimes with scripts usually written by men about a woman who is meant to, you know, reawaken their perspective on the world and motivate them to do something.

But, I do sort of like that here Byron doesn’t become motivated. He sort of becomes motivated briefly and then decides not to be. But she does feel more device than person whereas Byron feels like a wholly-rounded individual.

And I feel like K.C. was also trying to pull this thing where Amanda doesn’t want to talk about her past. She doesn’t like — her past isn’t of interest to her and that’s why we don’t get to know anything about her. But I think that the character and the scripts suffer as a consequence.

**John:** I hundred percent agree. I wrote down Manic Pixie Dream Girl also. But weirdly there’s sort of second Manic Pixie Dream Girl which is Rosa who shows up.

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** We see her earlier on, then she shows up later on and she’s like much more literally like a pixie. She’s like the tiny little fire plug. And she serves that function as well.

A thing I enjoyed late in the story was Amanda ultimately becoming so frustrated by Byron’s passivity that she hates herself from becoming this monstrous thing that she’s sort of becoming, that have to boss him around. And so she’s been this person telling Byron to stand up for himself this whole time. And finally she becomes this woman who’s controlling him that she doesn’t want to become. I think that’s a really interesting idea.

And I haven’t seen that before in a movie or certainly not in a movie with these kind of characters. And it wasn’t until that I got to that moment in Amanda’s character that I really believe like, “Oh, yeah, maybe there’s a movie here.” And this isn’t just a very long pilot to a TV show.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned that because I didn’t see that coming either. And I think part of it is that we have this default assumption that, you know, our protagonist which I did interpret as Byron is the one who’s sort of morally right in the world. And so, you know, he’s dealing with his girlfriend who’s a little bit sort of demanding, he’s got this mother who’s really difficult that sort of bosses him around.

And they’re like, “Oh, this guy should sort of just be left to his own devices. He’s a good guy. He’ll figure it out.” And then the person who is supposed to be helping him figure it out is like, “No, you were insufferable. Get it together.” And that I did not see coming. And there is definitely something interesting there but I think it needs significantly further mined — it needs to be significantly more further mined in order to really work.

**John:** I want to get back to this idea of who’s the protagonist. Because the reason why obviously I identified Bryon as protagonist, he’s the first guy we see, we sort of see his struggle. We’re seeing things through his eyes. And Amanda sort of appears as an antagonist trying to cause him to change.

And the first change we see is when he decides to leave Jane and shows up at Amanda’s apartment. And that’s actually one of the moments I really loved is that like he doesn’t quite know why he’s there but he knows he needs to be there. That moment really worked for me. And I felt like, “Oh, and now our movie is starting. And now we’re going to start on this journey.”

And then we sort of spin our wheels for quite a long time. And ultimately it feels more like Amanda is the character who changes along the way.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I think that it does feel like wheel spinning unless you kind of go along for the ride of that there’s a bait and switch here because Byron actually never does anything. Amanda does everything. She really does, I mean, it’s true that we start with Byron on page one but Amanda is seen on page two. And she’s already peaking at his drawing.
And she essentially drives everything. She is the one that tells him what to do at work. She tells him to quit. She essentially draws his eye away from somebody else. She starts their business. She tells him what’s wrong with him. She argues with the real antagonist of the story I think which is Byron’s mother.

And ultimately we start to realize that the guy that we thought was the moral center is in fact a problem. And maybe he’s the antagonist. [laughs]

**Franklin:** I think if anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like stories that go ahead and play around with this stuff because if you can’t play around with it now when you’re writing your original screenplay, they’re never going to let you play around with it when they’re paying you. So you might as well do it now.

**John:** Let’s look at templates though. So, you know, obviously, the classic romantic comedy, when you look at When Harry Met Sally there you have two characters who, you know, are sort of entwined and they are each other’s protagonist and antagonist. Like they’re pushing each other towards places. And I honestly think this movie could go there.

As I was reading through it the first pass-through I really saw this more as like a Working Girl where I saw, you know, Byron being the Melanie Griffith character sort of like finally sort of coming into his own and standing up for what he believes and sort of showing what he was worth. So standing up to these people who are controlling him in his life. That ultimately doesn’t seem to be the movie that K.C. is interested in doing.

Or I sometimes wonder whether K.C.’s ability to just like write funny scenes and, you know, write these characters, he just sort of wrote them in this direction and we sort of ended up where we ended up.

You said, you know, Oakland Wes Anderson. I wrote down sort of Whit Stillman Comedy of Manners. And that these characters sort of existence in this slightly heightened world. I thought the advertising agency was arched in a way that felt more almost like that ABCs sitcom Better Off Ted. I didn’t sort of believe the universe of it.

**Craig:** All right. So there is the thing that K.C. I’m just going to insist on because that’s just wrong. There are things that are occasionally just wrong. So the ad agency is a big, big mistake. You have these characters that are pushed and we talked about this all the time in development if you are pushed you need something to push against.

First of all, his job is ridiculous, that’s not a real job. The fact that he thinks that people would want to see a hummingbird torn apart is insane.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So he’s mentally ill at that point in a way that I can’t get onboard with. He’s boss is ridiculous. The way the office runs is ridiculous. That’s starting to feel like Office Space. So like in Office Space, the office was ridiculous, our heroes were totally normal people struggling against this insanity. You can do one or the other.

And in this case I find that our characters are the kind of quirky, interesting ones. The work space must be grounded and real. It has to be and his job has to be real. And what’s his trying to do has to be real or this thing is just going to feel fake as F.

**Franklin:** See, I’m going to disagree actually. I just I think that it has to be more finally tuned if you’re going to do that. I think you can have a world where the environment is still eccentric and a bit skewed, it’s just that it’s a much, much higher tightrope. I think that that K.C. doesn’t really nail it.

But again, I mean, look there were things that amused me about it sort of coming out of the corporate world that actually didn’t feel that sort of crazy to me whether it’s the sort of yes men and women analysts, whether it’s sort of Pete, the guy who doesn’t really know how to run anything and is constantly asking his employees, “Okay, what should we do?”

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I’m on board with that. And I love the fact that he would site Steve Jobs all the time. That all felt real. What doesn’t feel real is that he’s 22 and also doing all that stuff. It’s the joke on a joke syndrome. At some point you start to feel like that’s not a real place. Everything is a goof, you know, even the details of the hummingbirds.

**Franklin:** Well, the hummingbird thing I just didn’t really see that at all honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah, you just need to —

**Franklin:** But the 22-year-old VP thing unfortunately that that doesn’t —

**Craig:** I didn’t. You know what, here’s the deal. Then that’s your one thing but then make him actually really brilliant. You can’t do the joke on a joke on a joke thing. You just can’t.

**Franklin:** You can’t have a 22-year-old who’s incompetent, who’s also, okay, that’s fair.

**Craig:** Citing Steve Jobs, who also asks everybody else what to do. Who also is talking about an insane actual campaign. You have to pick some places where you push against things otherwise there is nothing there.

**John:** Yeah, another example that came up a lot for me was Silicon Valley.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** If you look at Silicon Valley you have heightened characters in a heightened world. But it’s very carefully balanced so that it doesn’t just feel completely crazy pants the entire time through.

And here K.C.’s ability to create some really unique and interesting moments between his two main characters I think it’s sometimes being undermined by this heightened world he’s created around himself.

The other challenge I really had with the workplace set up was having Jane be his boss but not his boss. That felt just too convenient and you can sort of hear the sound effect or the needle scratch as she walked into the room. It didn’t feel true to me.
So I’m kind of fine having her be part of the universe. But the actual scene in which Amanda comes in and sort of saves the day and sort of does all the stuff and sort of makes everything possible felt way too movie and not nearly real enough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I actually when I saw that Jane was his boss I went, “Oh, okay. This could be good.” But really what I then wanted again was some, you know, when people are sort of spiraling out you need somebody in the middle going, “What the hell is going on here?” You know, “Who is this woman? Why is this? Who is this woman and why is she here? And why are you talking to her?”

And Byron, you know, you should be zeroing in on this. It’s insane. And yet the woman actually comes up, this Amanda woman comes up with something that’s undeniably good that Jane is forced to accept. But Jane seems also nuts.

**John:** Yeah. So an argument on Craig’s behalf that Amanda is really the protagonist of the script currently is that there are many scenes that involve Amanda and one of the other women that don’t involved Byron at all which is strange. And some of the scenes are actually delightful. So I’m not suggesting that we cut them.

But it’s just I think this weird thing where you have like there’s scenes between Amanda and Jane where they’re having these sort of really specific discussions and like these really cool power plays or between Amanda and Byron’s mother. And they’re fascinating and I haven’t seen them quite before. And that’s what I liked it so much. But it felt they would land for me so much better if I believed that Amanda existed before page three.

**Craig:** I totally agree. That’s why I actually prefer her to be the protagonist of the movie. That’s the thing. Amanda could be spectacular here, you know, if I just had a little bit more. And if I understood — I need to understand why somebody is in a circumstance that the typical person would find extraordinary.

She says she’s a freelancer but we kind of pick up that she’s not really working much at all. She clearly doesn’t have much money. She is the sort of person that insinuates herself really aggressively into other people’s conversations and lives. These have all the hallmarks of a personality disorder.
And since we can see that Byron has all the hallmarks of a spectrum disorder, I’m in. I’m in. I just want to get more out about Amanda’s situation. I want to understand what’s going on here because where this could go ultimately is a really interesting anti-romance between damaged people and they’re damaged in a very modern way. [laughs]

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know how else to put it.

**Franklin:** But it’s interesting on that modern question too, right, like there’s no scene where Rosa is like I Googled her, here is who she is.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, nobody ever Google’s Amanda. Exactly.

**Franklin:** Right. But it actually just occurred to me that no one — like this woman just appears and she just shows up and is in everyone’s lives all the time. And no one says, “Is she on Facebook like what’s the deal with her?”

And if you’re going to do something in that world and again in sort of a contemporary world especially in San Francisco I feel like you need to either have an excuse for why that question doesn’t come up like though she’s a coder she’s rabidly anti-social media and like scrubbed her Google history, or you need to like address it and move on. Or have it be something that motivates the plot, come to think of it.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. Because when you have somebody, say, “Oh, yeah, I couldn’t find you anywhere.” “I scrubbed my social media history entirely.” “Oh, okay. Why?”

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** Well, if I wanted you to know why, I would put it on social media. But I’ve scrubbed my social media history, you see. It’s like there’s the mystery, you know. There’s got to be something going on here.

**John:** Yeah, but the minute we introduce that idea, you’re going to have to pay that off.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The minute the words are given to it.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But that could be great. And it could be lovely to see what that is. And clearly, if she is insinuating herself into his life at the restaurant, this is a pattern. This is something that she does before. And we should see her do it again over the course of this movie. We should see her sort of pick another Byron and change that other person’s life too. And that could be a great source of conflict.

I think my biggest frustration story-wise, I guess we’re really segueing into story and plot here, is I felt there wasn’t enough conflict between our main two characters. Once they sort of got their apartment, things are just kind of chugging along. And there’s little moments, but there’s not — I hate to use the word stakes, but it didn’t feel like there was a lot of challenges ahead. They lose their money because of the fight with the mom. But even that’s like not a very big deal.

A thing I think happens a lot of times with newer writers is they love their characters because who wouldn’t love Byron? And they don’t want to see their characters suffer. But your characters need to suffer. And it didn’t feel like K.C. was willing to put either of his, you know, two lead characters into quite enough of a predicament.

**Franklin:** Well, I mean, Byron is really never in a predicament, right? Like worst case scenario, even when he loses the money, we always believe that he can just go back to his mother who is wealthy and where his 30-something brothers still live. And Amanda, because we don’t know anything about her past, we don’t know whether there are any consequences to her being out but she seemed to be doing fine prior to her relationship with Byron. So, losing the money that she didn’t have isn’t really a loss either.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the stakes are going to be. I mean, this is definitely what we would call a low stakes movie no matter what the stakes are going to be. I’m alone again or I failed again, or I’m not going to change, I’m going to be stuck in a sort of depressing route. This is how a lot of smaller movies, well, we’ll call them art movies. I don’t know, I think all movies are art movies regardless. This is a low stakes movie, and that’s okay.

I enjoyed the fact that these two people rushed headlong into an idiot hipster fantasy. Because I, you know, like a lot of rational people, I find those to be amusing. [laughs] And of course, there’s a certain amount of almost Schadenfreude as you watch the idiot hipster fantasy start to disintegrate. But then, you also see that they’re fighting for it. Now, these two people are suddenly fighting for something, which was touching.

But I completely agree that there is currently no price for failure because our punitive protagonist, Amanda, didn’t have a life before this and there is apparently no life after this. I don’t know anything about her. It’s the biggest thing that I think K.C. has to work on.

**John:** You know, we often talk about want versus need. And in the case of these two characters, I have a hard time articulating what either of them wants and/or needs.

**Franklin:** I was just going to say that.

**John:** I can sort of apply my own sense of need to like where these characters need to sort of grow up. But, you know, if this were a musical, Byron would have his I want song. It would probably be really, funny. And it would probably be sort of self-defeating in a really charming way. You know, Amanda clearly seems really driven, but I don’t actually have a good sense of what her end goal is. So it becomes frustrating along those lines.

I also want to circle back to Craig’s diagnosis that Byron is somewhere on the spectrum. I didn’t feel that at all. I felt what was so fascinating about Byron as a character is that he was, you know, a pushed version of where I think a lot of American men are these days. And they’re just sort of like these big man-babies. They sort of never really fully grow up and never take ownership of their lives. And he was just a sort of extreme example of that.

Where I did notice, I think, of what Craig’s describing is Byron’s voice changes sort of based on situations. He could be really, really articulate in some cases, but more often, he’s like he is in the first three pages where he’s just like sort of kind of mumbling his replies to things. And I didn’t necessarily believe that it was the same character page-to-page based on the words he was using.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I mean, my diagnosis of him, which is, you know, anytime you diagnose a character, you’re just guessing. And who knows.

**Franklin:** Do you mean because they’re not real people?

**Craig:** Probably. [laughs] That’s probably what it’s about. I’m not sure that any of you are real people either, frankly, so I don’t really know. But he has an extraordinary artistic talent. He tends to fixate on details in front of him. He is easily overwhelmed by things. He vomits at the prospect of having to, you know, change his routine. He seems socially awkward in all phases. And everyone around him is accustomed to taking care of him.

Now, this brings up another question for me for K.C., which is just how much of a genius is this guy, because he’s attracting people left and right. He is considered special by almost everybody. This is another area where I think grounding the workplace could be of great value to K.C., because if I understand that this is a guy that has a history of generating money for a company and succeeding for a company, then all of his weirdnesses and strangenesses are worth it.

Then I would believe that it’s okay that he walks into a room and sells them on this ripped up hummingbird because you know what, he’s done this before and then he was the guy that redesigned the Diet Coke can. Whatever it is, I need to know that he’s valuable and a genius, because I’m not quite sure why everyone is fighting over this chubby, passive — [laughs]

**Franklin:** You mean chubby Basquiat, scruffy Colin Powell and big —

**Craig:** Right, exactly, exactly.

**Franklin:** And my favorite, big boned Drake?

**Craig:** Yeah. That one’s great, big boned Drake. I mean, all of that stuff is so smart. I mean, this is why I love K.C. because he’s so smart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s just this palpable intelligence coming off of this thing. All the things we’re talking about now are things you can either learn or just grind out or whatever. You know, you can’t teach smart.

**Franklin:** No, no. And I also like the callbacks on the description thing are hilarious.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** I also think that the question of his genius and sort of why the company has him on board actually solves another problem which is the stakes question and the want/need thing. Okay, this is just a guy who’s a savant and is sort of like he works at this company and the company is milking him dry and he doesn’t believe in it. And he just kind of wants to go paint.

Then we understand that like he’s not the kind of person who can actually make a decision that’s in his own best interest. He’s got this job, it’s a fine job. He’s, you know, he’s sort of valued, but what he really wants and needs is to be doing something that he cares about, but he lacks the ability to actually make the step to do it. That’s interesting to me.

As is the dynamic of this sort of, you know, this guy who everyone’s obsessed with because he does generate amazing work who then has to step away from that because he wants to choose his own path. That’s a much more interesting conflict for me. And it also creates the possibility of conflict in the second and third act as the company tries to get him back into the fold. Maybe Rosa is sent in to bring him back. Maybe his mother is somehow connected to bringing him back.

You know, you don’t want to make it too plot-heavy, but at least then your low stakes movie has real stakes about who is this person and what is he going to do with this life, and what is he going to do with his extraordinary talent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If the movie is about his journey, if the movie is about the two characters’ journey, then I think you may want to steer away from that sort of plotting and really get back to the fundamental issue of like, you know, he refuses to change. And I love very late in the story she has a line, “You’re just this big squanderer of women’s lives.”

**Franklin:** That’s a great line. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great line. It’s a great thematic summation of sort of the frustration everyone feels about him. And at the same time, I get him. I understand like maybe he just kind of wants to sit in this room and paint. And like everyone has all this pressure for him to do other stuff. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And that’s kind of a great character too.

**Craig:** Well, the idea of the artistic squanderer of women’s lives is a — that’s a really interesting and time-tested motif. I’m thinking of the Scorsese segment of New York Stories and the notion of a tortured artist who burns through women until they inspire him, because he has to suffer to create. And of course, they are nothing more than fodder, although they don’t realize it at the time. And the cycle repeats.

There is something there. I mean, what we’re watching is essentially somebody saying, “I don’t want to be that. I’m different. I’m not going to be that for you.” But I don’t necessarily get the sense of what Jane does for Byron, because we don’t need — I mean, while Jane is clearly watching what he eats, I need to see that there’s a little more utility there for Byron.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, Jane is using him as an asset. She’s watching an asset. And she may care about him the way you care about, you know, a pet but not as a boyfriend.

**Craig:** But I also want to know how that started too. In other words, if we’re getting to a place where Amanda’s saying, “I’m not going to be the next in this long list of people for you,” then I need to know how Jane fit into that list. Did Jane inspire him? Did she discover him? Was she the one that found him in a gallery and put him into a job? And he says, “She hired me,” but I don’t understand like what did she? How did that love affair begin? How did it go wrong?

It’s fun to watch somebody say, “I don’t want to end up like the two of you, but I feel like that’s exactly what you’re doing to me right now is pushing me in a place where I end up like her. And then, you just go on to the next one.” There is something really interesting there, but again, it really hinges on us getting why Amanda is different, because she is.

**John:** The last big story point I want to hit from my side is the lack of sex in the movie, because I felt like Byron was this weirdly asexual creature. And it felt weird that by the end of the movie, I’m not quite sure they ever had sex. And that feels strange for me for this kind of movie.

**Franklin:** I think they had sex —

**John:** It’s clearly R-rated.

**Franklin:** In between the two periods, like at the very end it just jumps forward and they’re all living in his mother’s house. They had sex in between those two periods.

**Craig:** Yeah. When he texts her and says, “Put your pants on,” I presume that this means at some point they’ve had sex. But, yeah, it was a weird choice. I noticed it, too, and I didn’t quite understand it. I didn’t also understand why you would have a scene where somebody goes, they have the crazy I have to kiss you thing and then they don’t have sex. That’s not how —

**Franklin:** Oh, no. They definitely have not had sex when he texts her to put her pants on because his mother asked directly about it.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Franklin:** And she —

**Craig:** Oh.

**Franklin:** And she’s like, “I am amazing in bed but your son doesn’t know.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. Yeah. So what is that?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know what that is.

**Franklin:** I don’t know what it is either.

**John:** I don’t think it’s helping, because I think within Byron’s man-babyness, we don’t actually want him to seem like he is, you know, literally a special needs, you know, character. I mean, you don’t want to sort of make him so childlike that you’re like, “Okay, now everything is just weird and creepy.” You want him to be able to have something to him.

**Franklin:** Maybe this is a film set in the asexual movement.

**Craig:** Well, we would need to know that. I mean, that is a thing. I mean, that’s very modern. And we would need to know that. And that would have to be a thing. But that almost feels like it deserves its own movie. I mean, I agree with John. I found that very odd. I particularly found it odd when he came to her place and kissed her. And then she kissed him back. At that point, that’s the scene.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s where you have sex now.

**Franklin:** No, it’s when you go to a diner and talk, come on.

**Craig:** Well, but, right. I mean, the thing is it’s such a great cutaway to — like she says, “We need a break. Yes, are you hungry?” But they should , they kiss. It’s only been two days, they kiss and then they should have sex. We don’t have to watch it, there’s ways to do it.

**John:** Yeah, I would argue against it. We don’t necessarily have to have sex at that moment, but whatever the first moment they have sex is, that’s going to be a really good scene. And so to not give us that scene is crazy.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where adults have sex, I think. [laughs] But regardless, whatever, I think it would be really funny for them to have so that we hear them having sex and the next shot is then in a diner eating huge waffles. That’s a huge laugh. That’s a huge laugh, much bigger than the laugh now, because we would understand that not only — they’ve now satisfied both major desires. [laughs] And it would just be very funny.

**Franklin:** But I actually think you want to see these two characters, you know, not actually the actual intercourse, but I think you want to see what their dynamic is at this highly intimate moment between the two.

**John:** Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, and you can play that out that way as well. But if we’re going to do a modern love affair, this is the — I mean, we talk about, I give this criticism all the time. So I’m sent comedy screenplays all the time and half of them, when I send back, I just say, “This is a ’90s script.” This is a 2016 script as far as I’m concerned. Like I got to give K.C. a ton of credit. This thing feels so right now. And so I really loved how that was working. And I’d love to see how the right now of their sexuality works. And this is really on point.

**John:** Yeah. So we’re not going to have time to get to all of our little page notes because I circled a whole bunch of little things, but I thought maybe we’d flip through pages and as we found stuff that we really loved or things to think about, we could just highlight and flag some of those moments. Sound good?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** All right, from the very start. I flagged just “Jane’s car. Jane drives. Byron’s in the passenger seat, still drawing. They’re both dressed for work.” We’re still on page 1. A little bit more detail that shows us what dressed for work looks like. I just want a little bit better sense of who these characters were so I could picture them in my head. So, is he the kind of guy, like what does Byron dress like? If I saw an image of what he was like at the very start, I’d have a better, more concrete version of who Byron is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Flipping?

**Craig:** Yeah, flipping. I mean, just a similar thing on page 2. When I meet Amanda, I need to know more that she’s white and 30.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Well, that was actually another thing that I mentioned. And it was definitely something that I noticed immediately is that every single character is described in terms of their racial backgrounds. Which I think ended up having value down the line, but it was jarring the extent to which it was always parentheses white something. So even the waitress is white, perky.

**Craig:** Well, that was my fault. I asked for that.

**John:** That’s Craig’s fault.

**Franklin:** Well, there you go.

**Craig:** In the Three Page Challenge because he didn’t know — that was one of the few characters, well, I don’t know. It was all on Page 1 and 2. I kind of wanted to know, I mean because the waitress is talking about African-Americans and diabetes, I was like, “It’s a totally different vibe if she’s white. It’s a totally different vibe if she’s black.”

**Franklin:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** You know, I needed to know. I actually have no problem with this. I feel like this script was like racially true.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That it felt like a script where not — people weren’t theorizing about race or being like really weird about it, but they’re actually being a like race the way that people are in reality about it.

**Franklin:** Don’t tell Nellie Andreeva.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** Oh, who’s — what, why?

**John:** There was a Deadline article this from Nellie Andreeva and everyone tweeted at it saying like, “Oh, you have to have Malcolm on to respond to it.

**Craig:** What was it about?

**John:** A thing I learned this week is sometimes the best response is just not to respond at all.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Well, listen man, I had a guy call me a liar on something about I don’t know — don’t even get me started. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. That’s why I’m not getting you started.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to get to page 6. There’s a moment where Amanda and Byron are both walking and she’s like, faster. Like I’m here at my coffee shop. And it was this moment of really false urgency. It sort of felt like they were on a bus and she’s getting off her stop, but there’s no reason why she needed to go in there right then. So, if you’re going to create a reason why the characters need to stop talking in that moment, I need to believe that reason. So it could be that she had a phone call scheduled at a certain time or there’s some reason why they couldn’t stand there forever. And I didn’t believe it the moment on page 6.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be the ticker tape scene for sure —

**John:** Yeah. On page 7 is the first time we’re entering into the PET CORP conference room and I wrote “sitcom.” And just the way the dialogue played and sort of the pithy one liners back to things. Like I was suddenly in a sitcom and it wasn’t a sitcom I loved.

**Craig:** Yeah I agree, this is my whole tonal issue with PET CORP. And also, I would say to K.C., this is an area where you want to do a pass through of this thing where you don’t think like a writer. Now you say to yourself, “I’m directing the movie. Okay, I’m directing the movie.” Maybe you won’t, but think you are. Now, how visually do I want to do this? How do I want to make this interesting for people? I mean, you’re going to cut from a dead shot of Byron on the street, to a dead shot of a conference room?

No, no, no. Let’s be a little cinematic here. You could do it, it’s cool. Spend a little time. There’s other stuff to cut in the script anyway. So, you want to look at your transitions. This is just simple craftsmanship, how you get in and out of places. Every introduction of a place or a person needs to be its own mini movie. Really think that way about all this stuff.

**Franklin:** That advice about a pass, specifically focused on transitions and character introductions is incredibly good advice. Like every writer should take that time before showing their script to anyone.

**John:** Yes, on page 11, Amanda says, “This is how people get kidnapped on 24, no, thank you.” 24 is just a too dated reference. You know, I like her idea that she doesn’t want to come with them, but 24 felt just weirdly a time machine.

**Franklin:** Yeah, you could use a more dated reference and have it work weirdly or a contemporary one, but 24 is sort of in that valley where it’s just like the script was written while 24 was still on the air and you’ve, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. So, like Colin Powell will be acceptable forever and [laughs] Basquiat is acceptable forever. Actually, I frankly avoid current. If you can avoid current or near current references, you’re always better off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Drake will be around forever so it’s fine.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Drake is endless.

**Craig:** Just killer. That’s —

**John:** He’s the alpha and the omega. Page 16. Here is a moment that’s stutter stop, I had to read it a couple of times. So, Rosa is saying to Byron, “Actually, one of the directors had a conflict, so they bumped it up. The meeting starts in 90 minutes.” Byron pukes again. Amanda bursts through that back door. “There you are. You realize the meeting starts in two hours?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, Rosa had information that Amanda didn’t have. And so Amanda is saying old information but as an audience, we’re just confused. Like, when does the meeting start? Do I care when the meeting starts?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I actually, what I wanted there was Rosa goes — so Byron says the meeting starts in two hours. Rosa says, “Actually one of the directors had a conflict, so they bumped it up. The meeting starts in 90 minutes.” He pukes, we laugh. Amanda burst through the back door. “There you are. You realize the meeting starts in an hour?” “What?” “Yeah, they called. They just bumped it up. One of the directors — ” [laughs] I mean like I want —

**John:** That’s escalation. Comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want — and then he pukes again. I get that, you know. Yeah, you don’t want to kind of unsharpen your pencil there.

**John:** On page 17, Amanda asks, “Are you too young to have seen The Godfather?” Rosa says, “I’ve seen episodes…” That’s a great, great line. Amanda says, “For Christ’s sake.” No, no, no, don’t undercut the joke with a line back. That’s like, “I’ve seen episodes…” Let that be the joke and let’s move on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think as you’re doing that pass for, you know, character introductions and for transitions, also do a pass through to say like what lines can I cut after jokes, so that we can keep moving on and that’ the kind of thing that you’re going to cut.

**Craig:** I’m a big fun of just penciling in reactions. You know so, “I’ve seen episodes…” Amanda stares at her. Wow. You know, anything.

**Franklin:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Then I understand the rhythm of the scene and then, you know, she’s about to say something when, “I’m okay, Rosa, you should probably,” bwah or he pukes right then and there, whatever it is. But John is right, you don’t want to do that.

**John:** Yeah, on page 20, hopefully this scene will not exist anymore, but there’s a lot of numbers and prices. Numbers and prices if they’re in dialogue, it’s usually helpful to spell them out rather than have digits for them because that way you can actually control what is being said. And people just don’t make weird random choices for how they’re going to say things.

**Craig:** Yes, I mean, so, what we have here is essentially four, four-and-a-half pages where he’s doing something we’ve seen before. We have seen this scene before where somebody starts pitching something and it seems to be going south and then they pull it out with some little brilliant twist. And that’s great presuming that things are a little more grounded here in the office. It’s just too long. It can be compressed down for sure.

**John:** And we’ve also seen evidence of the script that Byron can write completely new scenes that are unlike anything we’ve seen before, so, why give us a scene that’s kind of like the scenes we’ve seen before?

**Franklin:** I also think that for moments like this, they need to not be super on the nose, but they need to talk about the theme of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** I mean I keep going back to the slide projector presentation in Mad Men and how this idea of nostalgia and the sort of longing for home becomes an undercurrent for all of Mad Men. And I feel like if you’re going to do something like this, like hummingbirds and all this stuffs feels very arbitrary. And the sort of Canadian Snowbird thing, just, it feels irrelevant. And it’s tacked on. And I love to see something that actually like talks about and that sort of elucidates who Byron is and then the reaction from Jane and Amanda, we can learn more about them as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. There are times when you can be thematic and not on the nose. Let us figure it out or let us just — even if we don’t figure it out, just osmotically, we’ll start to sense that there’s something emerging here.

**John:** From Byron’s point of view, if the product is something about like taking control of your life or like, you know, you know, taking ownership of things, you know, there’s probably a way you can, you know, capture some aspect of what is the theme.

**Craig:** You could also like, if for instance, the problem is that that hummingbirds, we design this thing that has to move around but they don’t want to move around. They want to sit still. The hummingbird’s fine, it’s the thing that we designed around it that needs to change. You know what I mean?

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like somehow or another, he doesn’t even understand that he’s talking about [laughs] himself but he is. He’s making a plea to his girlfriend to leave him alone but in doing so — and then Amanda backs it up, and then Amanda comes later to kind of regret this philosophy. It’s that kind of vibe that I think could be really useful there. Yeah.

**John:** On page 26, Byron introduces his cousins. “Amanda, this is Jane and her cousins Grace, Faith, and Yunjue.”

[laughs]

**John:** “They threw in a Yunjue. Cool.”

**Craig:** So funny. I laughed at that.

**John:** It’s such a great line, I love that moment.

**Craig:** That killed me.

**John:** Then through the rest of the scene, though, those cousins stick around. Don’t call them cousin 1, 2 and 3 anymore —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just say like, Jane, cousin one, Yunjue. Even if you put their names in parentheses, just so we could keep them straight.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Because the cousins never show up again. So I think in that level it’s fine to keep labeling them as cousins, but give them their specific name.

**Craig:** Yeah. On page, middle of page 27, Amanda has a long run and that felt not up to snuff for the other stuff that K.CK had done. It was a bit forced and I — and it had that kind of rambly, I’m going to give an impromptu speech. It felt written and so much of the other stuff didn’t. So, that one probably — it would be better if it were shorter. Amanda works really well when she gives little tiny bullets.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** So here is a great tiny Amanda bullet on page 28. So, this is just Jane and Amanda having a conversation. “I do my best to make him see he has the tools to really do well for himself if he pulls it all together…” Amanda says, “Well, it’s obvious he adores you.” “Is it obvious?” “I mean. Sure.”

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** And so it was, I mean period, sure period. It’s so telling, and it’s so encapsulates where those two women are coming out at that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So good.

**Franklin:** The other one that I have also is he and Jane are living together and does she have no idea that his mother is filthy, filthy rich?

**John:** Yeah. I guess it only comes up when he finally checks his bank balance and that’s when he explains that there is this trust. I actually like the discussion like, you know, “So you’re a trust fund kid.” It’s like, “No, no. I just — ”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. And he starts defining what it means to be a trust kid. There was something to — again, this is why I started to diagnose Byron because he is unaware that he has six hundred some odd thousand dollars to his name. And didn’t even know how to login to the site to see it. And that feels — that is such a specific choice to not even know. Forget like, “I’m uncomfortable with it. Yeah, it’s something like this but I don’t really know.” No, he has no clue. That is so infantilized and it should be maybe more of a red flag than it is, you know.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean it’s kind of shocking.

**John:** So here’s a great thematical speech that Jane gives. And I think it’s fun to look at the movie from Jane’s point of view, because clearly she’s puts a lot of time into Byron and sort of like keeping his shit together. Jane says on page 55, “Listen to me. There will always be someone to tell you that you’re special and quirky and deserve more than you have, and that if you burn your life to the ground, you’ll have something new and better in its place. But there are only so many of us who will tell you the truth, you’re a child, and there’s nothing rare or special about children.” It verges on being overwritten, but it’s such a clear statement of where she’s coming from and if I could feel those kind of moments from the other characters in the movie, there would really be something special here.

**Franklin:** I actually really liked that line. I actually didn’t think it was overwritten, because I sort of view Jane as like sort of type A. Like she’s been mentally preparing to have this, to give this speech to him through some significant part of their relationship, I feel like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** And it’s also why, you know you’re also sort of surprised by the fact that, you know, not too much later, you’ve got Amanda basically being like, “Jane is right. You are a child and there is nothing very special about you,” because you’re setting up this idea again, that sort of Byron is this misunderstood guy who’s dealing with this woman who doesn’t treat him special and whatever and then you can completely invert that by the end of it and you’re like, this is a guy who basically moves his girlfriend into his mother’s house and that’s the end of the movie.

**Craig:** I half loved the speech and half had a huge problem. Love the front half because that is a great summation of what temptation is. The second half, I had a problem with because it essentially negates their relationship entirely. I have no idea why she’s interested in being with this guy, why she even has a problem, why she even tried to defend their relationship. She’s literally saying, “There’s nothing rare, special about you. Everybody is telling you you’re special and quirky and deserve more than you have, they’re all not right. You’re just…you’re nothing.”

And that’s a mistake. And this goes back to my point about why was Jane with him in the beginning? And why is Jane defending this? If Jane is kicking him out of the house before he can leave, I get this. If Jane is fighting to keep this relationship, then I want her to essentially articulate, “And you are special and quirky, but you don’t deserve more than you have. This is exactly what you deserve. This is the best you will ever get with me. And if you burn your life to the ground, you won’t have something new and better in its place.” Then I would get it. But this second part of it rang false for me.

**John:** I hear you there.

**Franklin:** That’s a good note.

**John:** Page 63, we go into a printing shop and we meet Emeka who’s going to show up in later scenes. But throughout this whole page, we don’t know and Emeka is an ambiguous enough name, I didn’t know if that’s a man or a woman. And it changes how you sort of read the scene. And so ultimately we’re going to learn that it’s a man, but that needed to be established right from the very start.

**Craig:** Wait, Emeka is a man?

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really? Oh.

**Franklin:** I think it technically is pronounced Emeka. I only know that because of Emeka Okafor, the basketball player.

**Craig:** Oh, Okafor. Great.

**John:** Okay. Except that, the reason I say Emeka if you actually look at how his name is spelled in the dialogue below, it shows up a couple different ways. There’s Emekea.

**Franklin:** Oh, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, that may be a…that’s a typo I think.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a typo twice.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Anyway, just let us know that it’s a man because it helps us out a lot. Give us some visual description.

**Craig:** Now, this scene by the way, I remember thinking, “Okay, here’s a scene that needs to have a point,” and it’s not that it’s pointless right now, it’s halfway there. This is a place where I go, “Something’s wrong with Amanda.” And I want Byron to see [laughs] that something’s wrong with Amanda and I want Amanda finally at this point, an hour into the movie, to admit that she’s not just haha funny confrontational. She has a problem. There’s something wrong with her.

**John:** I think she got released from some sort of mental facility quite recently. I think there’s something — I think that she could be rapidly, you know, bipolar. It’s something that could be really fascinating and really wrong about her.

**Craig:** There’s something there. Yeah.

**John:** I would love to see — I’d also love to meet those character who knew her from before because it feels really strange like, why do you have no friends?

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] No friends. No family. No life.

**Franklin:** Yeah, she does have her own apartment, though.

**Craig:** I will tell you that if at the end of the movie it turns out that Amanda is his invisible friend and it’s a Shyamalan twist.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You wouldn’t have to rewrite much, I mean that’s…and that’s a bad sign.

**Franklin:** I actually thought that was where we were headed for a while —

**Craig:** A bad sign. A bad sign. Yeah.

**John:** I really love the moment on page 80, with Byron and Rosa. And Rosa showing up there and Rosa has this long speech, which is I kind of believed, which is basically like, you know, she’s just sort of fascinating and intrigued and she’s a little bit Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but I loved that character coming in at that moment. And if I really understood Byron and Amanda before then and believed them, her entering into the picture could be really fascinating. So I dug Rosa when she comes back in.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was good. And it was made plausible by the fact that she was high. So, they’re wasted and that works. This is one area where I want K.C. to really think carefully. When we watch Byron start to fall for Rosa, in the way that he fell for Amanda, the same way and then he kisses her, we all I think in the audience if we’re watching this movie go, “Oh, no. Oh no.” It’s not just that he’s just cheating on this girl. It’s that we realize that his interaction with Amanda isn’t special, that she thinks it is and it’s not.

He is that guy that falls in love every day. It’s like a twilight zone episode. It’s chilling and I think it’s traumatic and K.C. runs backwards from that conflict as fast as he can. And I think that’s a huge mistake because we want Byron be held accountable there and this is really cutting to it where Amanda has to suddenly realize, “Oh, no. I’m not special. This is just what he’s…” It’s like that moment in Glengarry Glen Ross, they just like salesmen. You know?

**John:** I mean, in many ways I think that’s pointing towards what it is like for these two characters is like Amanda interjecting herself into a situation. That’s what Amanda does, and so we need to see — we see her do it at the very start. We need to have a sense that she did it before then and she’s going to keep doing it.

Byron is the guy who whenever some woman will come in and sort of take care of him, he will gravitate towards that woman because that’s what he does. And that can be the question of the movie is like, “Can these two characters stay together when their basic natures will always try to pull themselves apart?”

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, and similarly, just as you have Rosa coming in as Byron bait, is there somebody else that’s Amanda bait. I mean, that’s an interesting idea here. You want to — this is where, I mean, and I was like, “Okay, great.” It’s page 82 and this is where the conflict should begin to emerge. We should start hitting the bell because we’re entering into the final lap. But then K.C. backs away from it entirely and the balloon deflates and it’s the worst time in a script to do that.

**John:** Here is a possibility to consider. It’s like maybe Rosa can be sort of both of their projects. So essentially, pushing a little bit further than how it is currently in the script where Amanda sees Rosa having a problem. Like, she’s in a terrible relationship or whatever. And so, she intercedes and pulls her out of that relationship. And sort of brings her to the apartment. And then, of course, Rosa becomes this center and the focus for Byron. That might be an interesting way to sort of like, they both have a — there’s a love-triangle aspect there that could be great.

When we get back to Byron’s mother’s house, I just felt like the movie was trying to wrap itself up and didn’t kind of know what it was doing.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, I don’t think going back to Byron’s mother’s house would be where we want to end up in the version of the movie that we think can happen.

**Craig:** I mean, I will say that I thought it was very brave. And for that reason, I liked it. It’s the kind of ending you talk about. Now, you go into a test screening, this ending will kill you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this isn’t a movie designed for test screenings clearly. And it’s shocking. I mean, in terms of like a writing sample, it’s the craziest like weird horror movie ending. So I kind of loved how brave it was. The problem I think is that we’re not quite sure what to think at the end and maybe that’s okay, but I wouldn’t necessarily dismantle this. There is something fascinating about it.

**John:** I think there is something fascinating about going back to the scene of the crime. Basically, like, how did Byron get to be so messed up and just see what that is is potentially great. And for him to make the choice to sort of go back into that place is great. But maybe then it’s shorter than where we actually are, because I feel like we’re back at that house for a long time and I didn’t necessarily believe how Amanda fits back in that. It just felt like a new little movie was starting and was like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Oh, but we’re kind of done with this movie.”

**Franklin:** I also didn’t understand the dynamic in that house. It just seemed so utterly preposterous to me that it felt either insufficiently described to be the scene of the crime. Like I don’t understand how Byron ends up as Byron having grown up in that house.

**Craig:** I agree. Yes, yes, and I think that that’s a mistake. I don’t think there should be siblings. I think that this feels like such mama’s boy story. And mama’s boys or mama’s boys because mama has one boy, not three or four or I think one of these is a girl. I can’t remember.

**Franklin:** I think it’s all boys.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re both boys?

**John:** I think it’s all boys.

**Craig:** Okay, yeah, so I thought that that was a mistake and I didn’t get anything from the siblings that mattered anyway. But I think part of what doesn’t work about the end is that it involves Amanda whom we don’t yet understand. But there is an interesting story of two — a woman coming to rescue a man-child. And then we start to realize, oh, she’s a woman-child. And they’re both children and then they both end up back with a mommy. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** It’s kind of fascinating but I need to know where Amanda came from if I’m going to believe this ending.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Franklin:** I also think we need to know more about the mommy in that case, in that dynamic too. Because I think she is very much presented as a device right now as well.

**Craig:** But she’s hysterical —

**Franklin:** Oh, she’s amazing.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, the way that K.C. described her is wherever she sits it looks like a throne.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I saw her immediately. Like I didn’t need — I could draw you a picture of her.

**Franklin:** Totally agree.

**John:** Yeah, she’s doesn’t need to move quickly ever.

**Craig:** And the flowing, whatever the shawl.

**Franklin:** The shawl.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s like, “I got it.”

**Franklin:** Which Amanda actually specifically mentions.

**Craig:** I know [laughs] It’s so great. And I got to give K.C. a lot of credit. The scene between Amanda and the mom is a — here’s where K.C. just has a natural gift. K.C. understands what is said between what we say.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** He’s really good at that. And that confrontation was very well done. It was the kind of thing that actors would love to do, because it’s tactics. John and I did the episode about conflict. This is a quiet, silent fist fight. And he really does it well. So that’s why I know that he can do this. The other, I mean, look, he picked a very whimsical, indie-flowing structure, la-la-la kind of thing to do here as a movie. So no one is going to buy this script and make it at a major studio, never in a million years, right? Somebody might fund this and make it as an independent which I think would be really cool. But we’ve always said on the podcast, the goal with scripts like this isn’t that somebody buys it and makes it at Warner Bros. The goal is somebody reads this and goes, “I want to represent you.”

**Franklin:** Yup.

**Craig:** “I want to hire for this. I want you to meet some people.” You tell me Franklin, and I know you can’t predict these things, but I think that other than the, yeah, the support we’re giving him here on the show that he would do very well on The Black List website.

**Franklin:** I think he would. I think that the script needs to — he needs to make all the adjustments that we’re talking about. Like, I think that, because even in these sort of indie free-flowing scripts, the best versions of them are ones that bring the level of sort of psychological study and focus that the scene between Amanda and Byron’s mother but they bring it to every single scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Right? And that deliver the kind of like “every seat she sits on feels like a thrown” to every character introduction. And I think if he can bring that kind of quality work to all aspects of this script, the office space, how the third act evolves if we’re calling it a third act. Then yes, I think this is absolutely the kind of script that does well on The Black List. By the way, I think it’s the kind of script that done — the best version of it is the kind of script that people pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** That people are quoting in offices like, “Oh, did you read that script? Oh, my good, the big boned Drake line is hilarious.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Franklin:** Like these are things that you actually do. You sort of quote, you dialogue check this kind of work. I just don’t think it’s all the way there yet. And I actually think that K.C. is best served by going back and doing like a heavy — not a heavy rewrite but like a really focused scene-by-scene rewrite so that every scene is written at the quality that the best work is.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about some specific advice for K.C. This script now exists in the world for lots of people to see. We’ve had this discussion. He’ll have some exposure, you know, people reading this script based our talking about this script. What would be our advice to him for what his next steps are? Craig, what do you think his next steps are in terms of pursuing a writing career? Right now he’s living up in Oakland, what do you tell him to do?

**Craig:** Well, we’ve kind of stepped in to his puddle here. I don’t think we can ignore what we just did. So if I were him, my next step would be to contact us and then ask us, “Can you help me with this?” And I would say, yeah. I would love for K.C. to come down and there are a couple of people that I think, you know, we could try and figure out if he could meet and might be interested in taking him on maybe a manager or if he doesn’t have an agent maybe find him an agent or have an agency read the script and maybe meet some people that might just give him some general advise. I’d love to know about him first what his situation is, I mean, his Twitter handle is BlackSitcomDad.

**Franklin:** Which by the way I loved and even just on the cover page alone I was like, “All right. I want to like this.

**Craig:** [laughs] So cool. But is he actually a father? Does he have a family? Are they situated in Oakland? What’s going on up there? What’s his job? How does he make his living? What’s his flexibility? All that stuff that we would need to find out. I would urge him to go on The Black — Franklin, can you just give him — can’t you give him like three free months?

**Franklin:** Yeah, I’m happy to hook him up with three free months and three free reads. But with one caveat, which is I do think it needs a rewrite.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. No, for sure, yeah.

**Franklin:** I think for his benefit. And, you know, I’m uncomfortable saying this but it’s like, if you are an agent or a representative or manager or somebody listening to this podcast, you will read this script and there will — I think you will have a similar reaction to what we’ve already had. And you will definitely see the talent here. I think K.C. is probably — it is best for him if he does a rewrite on the script before he goes aggressively seeking that representation.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And I was really encouraged by the fact that he, you know, incorporated some of the notes that John and I had from the first three pages. I could see that happening. I do think he needs to rewrite as do we all, right? I mean, a first draft is a first draft.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know what draft this is here but it’s the first draft as far as I’m concerned. So, yes, a rewrite. But once he’s kind of gone through and gotten this a little more down the line towards polished, I think he should put it on The Black List. I think it will get some good attention there.

**Franklin:** And when he does, it would be for free. Here’s the other thing I’d say —

**Craig:** Nice.

**Franklin:** And I think this is something that like is maybe a broader conversation. I’m sure you guys have discussed it before. It takes a heck of a lot of courage to allow someone to do this with your script.

**Craig:** Huge.

**Franklin:** And I think it’s the kind of courage that you see reflected in the writing and the choice of subject matter. And I think it speaks incredibly well of his potential future to be a risk-taking writer, both in terms of his career and how he chooses to go about it. Which for me, as somebody who used to work on the sort of producing financier side and was once an agency assistant, it’s something that I think that all people working in the industry desperately want to see because those are the people that end up doing things that we all want to be associated with.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, my enthusiasm for K.C. basically turns on this. It’s less about, “Oh, he’s written a script that is perfect or 80% of the way there.” My enthusiasm is based on what I see is a very high ceiling for him because I would much rather read a script like this which needs a lot of work but indicates inherent talent than I would a script that is just perfectly crafted and all the nuts and bolts are screwed in tightly and it’s whatever.

**Franklin:** Are you saying you don’t want to read another Taken rip-off?

**Craig:** I haven’t read any of them. [laughs]

**Franklin:** Congratulations. That in and of itself is an accomplishment.

**John:** Yeah, see, that’s a luxury that we have, Franklin. So we don’t have to read scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s the nice thing. And I would say that this is where like the lazy manager will go, “Well, if it were another Taken, I could sign…” right? But the smart manager will look at this guy and say, “Here is a diamond in the rough.” And those don’t come along very often. And we don’t know what will happen here. There’s a lot of diamonds in the rough that never turn into diamonds in the not rough.

**John:** So my question for K.C. and, you know, what I would talk about with him when I talk with him because I will talk with him at some point is we described him both as like, well he could get staffed on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Blackish or he may be the Oakland Wes Anderson. And those are two different people. And you shouldn’t try to do both. I think if you try to do both, you’re going to not succeed in doing either one of those especially well.

If he perceives himself as a filmmaker, that’s awesome. And then this is a script that maybe gets into Sundance Labs. You have that whole route ahead of you. Trust me, I have done a lot of Sundance Labs. We would be delighted to have a script like this that has an interesting voice, has interesting things to dig into. That would be fantastic. And I can totally see that working.

I don’t staff TV shows and I certainly don’t staff half-hour shows. But I got to think that if you were reading through a lot of samples, if you read this sample, you’d be like, “Wow, this guy is kind of pretty good. And he might be a right person for our show. Now, does he have any real experience, you know, working in a room, doing all that stuff? Maybe not but I might have a meeting with this guy because he seems interesting, he seems good.”

And so, again, I’m not a person who’s staffing those half-hour shows but I have to think that these people love to read good voices, good characters, and I think he’s showing that here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to make an assumption that because his Twitter handle is BlackSitcomDad that he’s black and that is going to be something that he just has to prepare that Hollywood will naturally go, “Here are some black movies. Here are some black shows. Why don’t you do those?” Because that’s what they do. I mean, we talked about it with Malcolm.

I mean, Malcolm told the story — I don’t know if he told it on the podcast or he just told it to me, but early on in his career he had gotten his initial attention off of a script that wasn’t a “black script”. And he had general meetings and he came in and somebody said after the chitchat, they were like, “So, look, here’s the thing. We don’t really do black movies here.”

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s like, “But I also don’t do them. And so, what?” And so, yeah —

**Franklin:** My response to that would have been, “You don’t want to work with Will Smith? That’s cool. Okay, fine.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, yeah.

**Franklin:** Or Denzel or —

**Craig:** We are presuming that this individual, his mind was not expanded appropriately.

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s something that K.C. has to be aware of. I think what’s interesting about this script is that he’s essentially saying, “I’m in my own peg over here. I’m a peg in this hole. It doesn’t fit in any of those holes,” right? But just be aware, that’s what they’re going to push him towards. And if that’s not what he wants, he just has to be really clear and firm to that because racist Hollywood [laughs] will do it every time. Set your watch.

**Franklin:** They will. Well, on the bright side though, I think that that peg, he’s not the only sort of peg in that hole, which is to say I think that the notion of the kind of work that African-Americans and people of color can do in Hollywood is expanding semi-rapidly. You look at something like Dear White People which is still a movie with, you know, themes about what it means to be African-American is very much in the sort of Wes Anderson tradition in terms of its design, its style of comedy and things like that.

So there’s a rising wave, I think, of change in that regard. But, yes, you will absolutely have to be very, very clear about what it is that you want to do and possibly turn down opportunities that are financially very lucrative because they could force you further into that, I don’t want to call it a ghetto, but —

**Craig:** Pigeonhole.

**Franklin:** Yeah, a pigeonhole that is not representative at all of who you want to be as an artist.

**Craig:** And just to be clear, I’m not saying that K.C. is in the special place of a black writer who writes this kind of movie. I’m saying that he’s in the K.C. place. Like I think [laughs] K.C. has written a movie that’s a K.C. movie. I don’t know other people that write this. I don’t know [laughs], you know, it’s very, very specific to him, which I think is actually the — that’s the double-edged sword, right, is that it is unique to him. And so he automatically becomes very interesting. On the other hand, it’s unique to him, so people are like, “Well, but that isn’t a genre yet,” [laughs] you know?

**Franklin:** Right, no, but I mean, look, the default is, I mean, like you could literally have written Grand Budapest Hotel and walked into a room if you are African-American and there is a significant percentage of Hollywood executives there that would be like, “So we have this Tyrese movie. You want to write that.”

**Craig:** [laughs] We have the Tyrese biopic.

**John:** So good. So we’ve given K.C. some really specific advice but if you’re just a normal listener listening to this podcast who read the script, who listened to this conversation, what do we want the take-home for them to be? Like what should you gain from reading the script and hearing this discussion?

**Craig:** Well, for me, it’s to be creatively brave, to not over calculate and attempt to homogenize your script to whatever the world of rules are. I mean, clearly K.C. doesn’t give one sweet damn about what people are looking for in specs. And good for him because I think what “people” are looking for in specs isn’t what actual people in Hollywood are looking for in specs. If you are writing in a certain genre, then, sure. But K.C. has decided, has opted to be original and brave. And while he is far from perfect here and has all sorts of challenges to overcome with the script, guess what, so does everyone, including all the people that have followed the rules and calculated.

Everybody will have issues that need work, everybody. But K.C. has been brave. So I would just say to people out there, no matter what genre you’re working in, even if you are writing in the fighting robot or teenage vampire genre, be brave, because if you don’t stick out, even if you stick out with some of the crazier choices, you won’t stick out.

**John:** Franklin, what do you think our listeners should take with them from this discussion?

**Franklin:** A lot of that, although, I do think that, you know, the black Aspergers anti-romantic comedy is very much in vogue right now.

**Craig:** [laughs] There’s like a hundred of them.

**Franklin:** There’s so many. I really —

**John:** Everyone is trying make one.

**Franklin:** I really feel like, you know, that’s the new thing. But no, I think that’s right. I think it’s be creatively brave with the subject matter that you choose and how you choose to tell the story. I think the importance of voice, I think even within the subject matter, K.C. has moments, inconsistent moments where you can see that in any environment, he’s going to come up with a point of view on that material that is uniquely his and it is very much on display. And I think that that should be the goal of every writer because if anybody could do it, why should you be the one that does it?

And then lastly, I think it’s also the importance of craft and what Craig was talking about earlier, go back and look at your transitions, go back and look at your character introductions, go back and look at all of these sort of scenes of dialogue and make sure they’re as strong as your strongest scenes because, you know, any one of those three things is not going to get you all the way there. You can have all the craft in the world, but if you don’t have an interesting point of view and an interesting subject matter, you’re not going to get there. If you have an interesting point of view, but you don’t have interesting subject matter and you don’t focus on craft, you’re not going to get there. And if you have a great idea, congratulations, so does literally everyone else.

**John:** Yeah. I think my take home would be that we respond to original characters and we will follow those characters kind of anywhere. And so a lot of the script didn’t work. And I think we were pretty honest about the things that didn’t work for us in the script. But the reason why we’re so enthusiastic is because there was something really special underneath there. And you sense this writer had real talent and could write these characters doing anything, and could probably write many other movies and that was exciting for us and that’s why we spent 90 minutes going through all these details.

So again, I want to thank K.C. for being super brave and giving us this script to talk through. That was awesome.

**Craig:** Sure paid off for him, didn’t it?

**John:** I hope. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is another podcast called Lexicon Valley. And one specific episode, which is all about Try And. And so in a sentence like I’m going to try and write three pages before lunch. So is that grammatically correct or incorrect? How does that feel to you guys?

**Craig:** You mean, in terms of a plan?

**John:** I’m going to try and write three pages before lunch.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean like try to as opposed to try and?

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s fine. I mean it’s grammatically correct. I’m going to get to try and write three pages before lunch. But I prefer to. I like to try to.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I would assume that try to is correct because if you try to, that doesn’t mean you will. But if you try and, that’s suggesting that you both try and are successful.

**John:** Yeah. So this podcast sort of digs into the Try And. So the podcast overall talks about sort of quirks of language and sort of where words come from. But it turns out that try and actually is an older form, at least in current research, is an older form than try to. So in most cases, you can substitute try to for try and. But what’ weird about try and as a phrase is like, you can only do it with those two specific words. So you can’t say, “Tries and,”. You can’t put it in the past. You can’t put it in a gerund form, “I’m trying and,” you know, make something. it’s just a weird quirk of language.

And it’s one of those things, it’s sort of a marker of a native speaker versus a non-native speaker. You can’t really explain why it works a certain way in English. It just does work that way in English. And so basically, I want to give people permission to say try and if it makes sense to them, they don’t have to go the try to. But I can’t explain why.

**Craig:** Neat. Works for me.

**John:** Neat. So there’ll be a link to that. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing today is a subreddit called WriteResearch. So we’ll put a link in, but it’s just the capital Write, capital Write, capital Research, all slammed together. And it’s fascinating what they’ve done here. There’s a guy named ParallaxBrew. That’s his Redditor handle.

**John:** That’s one of the most classic Redditor handles —

**Craig:** ParallaxBrew. And he’s the moderator. And the idea of WriteResearch is that it’s a Reddit where they have created a database as they of hard-to-find or exceptionally useful information for writers. In that database, they also interview professionals to gain insights into what they do and they allow users to request information on a profession or character trait.

So they’ve essentially built up this repository of research aimed directly for writers who are trying to essentially make their characters more believable. And because of the way Reddit works, their voting system has kind of curated it down, so they have sort of the best stuff there. They don’t do Wikipedia as a general link. And I’ve just sort of flipped through it and it’s fascinating. I mean they have all this stuff — I mean it’s just an amazing resource. And of course, it’s searchable. I just thought it was remarkable actually.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** And I kind of wished I had known about it.

**Franklin:** Is it stuff like what it’s like to be a CIA agent or like what it’s like to be over 7 feet tall?

**Craig:** Well, I’ll just read a few of these things. Cults and cosmic, consciousness, religious vision in the American 1960s, cult, placing the Stockholm syndrome in perspective, victim, kidnapping. Then there’s job description, custodian, Sharp v. Baltimore Police Department, letter from Department of Justice to BPD.

**Franklin:** Wow.

**Craig:** Then they have things like self-awareness to being washed and socially desirable behavior, a field experiment on the effect to body wearing cameras on police, human reciprocity among the Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. K.C. should check this out because they have a ton of these things on personality disorders.

And then you have information requests, like for instance, here’s one. Request information about hobbyist light aircraft flight, request information about Al-Qaida, request information about working on a military nuclear launch site. [laughs] If all those three people are the same person, we have a problem. But hats off to ParallaxBrew and his other moderators for putting this thing together. It’s kind of crazy. It’s cool.

**John:** Franklin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Franklin:** Sort of. I have a one very cool thing, but the details of which I cannot reveal, but they will be revealed tomorrow if you’re listening to this on March 31st. And I know that’s April 1st but it is not an April Fool’s joke. So check us out on social media @theblcklst with the blcklst part has no vowels or me @franklinleonard on Twitter. Go to our website on April 1st. It’s a very cool thing. It’s something that we at The Black List are very excited about.

Craig is initially involved as are some other friends of the Scriptnotes podcast. And hopefully it will be something that everyone will be very excited about. And will provide hours upon hours upon hours of entertainment.

**Craig:** [laugh] It will be mirthful.

**Franklin:** It will be mirthful. I think that’s very well said.

**John:** Awesome. So Franklin, thank you so much for being our guest on this inaugural episode of we were calling this Full Script Challenge. I don’t even know what to call it. But this experiment in going through and entire script. If you are listening to the podcast for the very first time, you should probably subscribe to us. We’re on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re on iTunes, you can also search the App Store for the Scriptnotes app. That gives you access to all the back episodes dating back all the way to episode one. At Scriptnotes.net is where you can sign up for that premium feed that gives you bonus episodes and gives you access to the very ancient archives.

I am on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is on Twitter, @clmazin. K.C. Scott is on Twitter, @BlackSitcomDad. So you might want to tell him what you thought of his script. You should tell him only like nice things. Don’t be a jerk.

**Craig:** Just don’t be a jerk. I mean just, people are such jerks.

**John:** People are jerks. People are also really jerks when they like link you to something and like —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Someone wrote a really nasty review of Big Fish in Boston and then like just mentioned me in it. I was like, “Why would you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s a really — that’s a dick move.

**Craig:** Yeah, people send me this like, “Gee, look what I found. This lunatic is saying stuff about you. Gee, don’t send me that.” Thanks, I don’t need to — I’m not going to read it.

**John:** If you want to send us nice things, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the place where you can send in your questions. Those are always lovely. If you have a Three Page Challenge, like how we found K.C. Scott’s script, just go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And that is where you can find a form to submit your Three Page Challenge.

Stuart Friedel is the person who read through all those Three Page Challenges and found K.C. Scott’s script. So our producer, Stuart Friedel, needs to get kudos for that.

**Craig:** You know what, let him out of his box today.

**John:** [laughs]For at least 20 minutes he’ll have some free yard time.

**Craig:** Yeah, give me some yard time.

**John:** Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. Thank you, Matthew. And we will be back with a normal episode next week.

**Craig:** Instead of this abnormal one.

**John:** Thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Franklin:** Bye, everyone.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* K.C. Scott’s [This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/THIS-IS-WORKING_screenplay_2015.pdf)
* K.C. on Twitter, [@BlackSitcomDad](https://twitter.com/BlackSitcomDad)
* [Scriptnotes, 187: The Coyote Could Stop Any Time](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-coyote-could-stop-any-time) featuring This Is Working’s Three Page Challenge
* Franklin Leonard on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Leonard), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/franklinleonard), and on Scriptnotes episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Lexicon Valley episode 56 asks, [Is “Try And” an Acceptable Substitute for “Try To”?](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/03/lexicon_valley_english_grammar_quirk_in_which_an_infinitive_morphs_into.html)
* Reddit’s [r/writeresearch subreddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/writeresearch)
* Follow [@theblcklst](https://twitter.com/theblcklst) on Twitter for tomorrow’s announcement
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))