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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/photoplays-and-archetypes).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 143 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Claire, why Claire? What is the reason behind Claire Schaeffer?

**Craig:** Claire Schaeffer is a senior, a 12th grader, at Flintridge Prep here in La Cañada and she is a devoted fan of our show apparently. My son, I believe did a musical with her and she’s a fan of the show and so I promised Jack that I would give her a little shout-out.

**John:** Well, that’s very, very nice. I worried that there had been news in your life that I had missed out on. Huge life decisions had happened in between our weeks of normal recording the show.

**Craig:** You know that if I wanted to be a women, I would have just simply hurdled into surgery. I don’t…

**John:** Craig Mazin doesn’t stop and think. He just goes right for it. He finds the best surgeon and if that’s too expensive then he finds the second best surgeon and that’s the one he uses.

**Craig:** Sometimes the second best is the worst one. You know that whole theory of the most overpriced bottle of wine on a menu is the second most expensive one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because nobody wants to buy the most expensive one so they buy the second most expensive one. Everyone knows that so they jack the price of that one up.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Many restaurants will actually deliberately stick an incredibly overpriced bottle on there so they can keep moving the second most expensive one.

**Craig:** It’s a real-estate agent trick. They’ll take you to a house that they know is wildly overpriced just to completely throw you off so that when you see one that’s normally priced you think you’re getting a deal.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s a world of lies out there basically. [laughs] It’s just lies. We’re surrounded.

**John:** [laughs] The screenwriting advice here is that if your script is a little bit long, make sure that people are reading really, really long scripts right in front of yours and then your 130-page script will seem like, oh, that’s reasonable.

**Craig:** Breath of fresh air.

**John:** Yes. It’s benchmark setting.

This is going to be one of those shows, Craig, that is almost completely random. You and I both have many tabs opened in our browser because there are so many little thing to talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we’re going to try to get through all of them today. We’re going to talk about the first screenwriting book ever from 1912. We will talk about tropes and archetypes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will talk about Barry Levinson and his unhappy credit arbitration situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’ll answer a question about managers. We’ll talk about film critics who are watching screeners rather than a big movie on a big screen. They’re watching a little movie on a little screen. We’re going to talk about keeping secrets from your readers, how you keep something on the page that’s different than what people might see on the screen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll talk about what happens to a Broadway show after it leaves Broadway which is the situation we’re in now with Big Fish which is really interesting and so different from anything in film or television. And, finally, we will do some more One Cool Things from the archives. We will look at which One Cool Things are still cool and which ones we’ve completely forgotten about.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is that show, that show with so much. And in all those things that didn’t even include the things we’re doing follow up on. So there’s still more.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hydrate here. This is going to be rough.

**John:** While Craig is hydrating I will say that voting is open now for the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday when the episode comes out, you can vote on Tuesday or Wednesday until noon for your favorite of the 57 entries for the Three Page Challenge, so they’re all at johnaguust.com/threepagelive, all spelled out, all one word. And you can see all those entries from different people. You can read them all and you can vote for up to three of your favorites. And one, two, or three of those will be discussed on the live show Thursday along with our special guest panelist judge, Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Are there still tickets available for this event?

**John:** You know, it’s completely unclear. I watched the website this morning. We’re recording this on a Friday and it still showed the ability to purchase tickets, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday and you’ve not otherwise seen me tweet that it is sold out, I’d say come, because they’ll be able — we’ll find a seat for you. So come to the show. It’s at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yay. One of the interesting things about having all of these 57 samples all showing up at once is that they were just sitting in a folder on my desktop. And I thought, you know what, I wonder what screenwriting software people are using to write these different entries. And so I looked at all the metadata and figured it out. So, Craig, what percentage of these entrants would you guess were written in a Final Draft?

**Craig:** I have to say a number that’s going to bum me out, but I’m going to say 90%.

**John:** Ooh, it’s quite a bit lower than that.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** It’s about 54%.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s spectacular news.

**John:** So that 54% is when you add together Final Draft 8, Final Draft 9, and Final Draft 7. And so I kept them separated in little charts. There’s going to be a link to the chart in the show notes.

Essentially, Final Draft 8 was by far the most common thing; 18 out of the 57 entries were written in Final Draft 8. But a wide range of other software showed up there. So Fade In showed up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Strong. Slugline was there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Screenwriter, Celtx, Highland, even some ones were written like TextEdit or Word were there too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was interesting that people were trying different things.

**Craig:** Well, that is. I have to say that number is exciting to me. I want to see that. I mean, listen, I’m sure the people at Final Draft are like, “Oh, my god, is this guy really doing this again to us.” But, you know, there’s no reason that Final Draft should have even 50%. Final Draft should have 5%. It is simply not the best available option out there. I don’t believe it is the best available option. But it is the most expensive available option. So that to me that should intersect around 5% of people that just bought it once a long time ago and don’t feel giving up.

**John:** I would say that, you know, 58 scripts is a very small sample size but it was an interesting sample size because I feel like the people who are going to be applying or answering in to the Three Page Challenge are going to be aspiring screenwriters. And aspiring screenwriters are people who probably bought screenwriting software recently or services in the case of things like WriterDuet or Celtx. So they’re honestly sort of in that next wave and if that next wave is not fully embracing Final Draft, that’s a change for that application.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I can also say in sort of anecdotally because I sell one of the apps that actually is there, we do keep track of the rankings of the different apps in the App Store. So all the screenwriting apps that are sold through the Mac App Store we can look and see where they’re ranked in the productivity category. And actually we have applications that chart sort of how we do. And the last couple of weeks things have actually changed and so for the first time Highland is sometimes surpassing Final Draft in number of units sold.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is great. We are priced a lot less than Final Draft, so our actual total gross is a lot less but it’s nice that people are using it.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I am happy to see competition doing what it’s supposed to do.

**John:** Yes, creating an ecosystem is a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have a follow up from Matt Selman who is a writer who is an executive producer of The Simpsons.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he wrote in to say, “Hi, guys, Scriptnotes’ listener Matt Selman here. I was enjoying your bit on Alloy and fan fiction and vampires. It’s a couple episodes back. And I just had to chime in about a Simpsons episode we did on just that topic, sort of. I produced a show called The Book Job in which Lisa is disillusioned again to find that her favorite Tween kids books are just product pumped out by an Alloy-like publishing house. Then a lot of crazy Oceans 11-type stuff happens. It’s actually a show about the challenges of authorial creation, business versus originality, the perils of procrastination, and an attempt at justifying/invalidating the joys of group writing which is the majority of what I do when I’m not writing emails to you instead or finishing a script.

“Maybe your listeners would get a kick out of watching it or at least it merits a link in the show notes. Sorry, it’s only on iTunes for The Simpsons Season 23 or they can pirate it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] He wrote that and I didn’t add the whole, “Or you can pirate it” thing.

**Craig:** Oh Matt. First of all, Matt I believe is the showrunner of The Simpsons. He’s a spectacularly good guy. He’s a smart guy. And he is — I’ve come to know some Simpsons writers over the years, Jay Kogen who’s sort of all the way back from the beginning but guys along the way like Daniel Gould and so on and so forth and Matt is, he just fits that, the guys who work on The Simpsons are just smart guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not funny and great writers who also happen to be smart. It’s all connected, you know. There is a culture of intelligence there and Matt is a terrific dude. He really is, just picture a nervous man. That’s Matt. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** What does a nervous man look like? Sort of thin, like kind of kooky hair, looks nervous.

**John:** So I first met Matt Selman because we were shopping for a new house and we were going to open houses on a Sunday which is usually when open houses are happening. And we were in one of these and there’s a guy who sort of recognized me and you could sort of tell when someone recognizes you because they make an eye contact and they make an eye contact again. And it’s like they’re like trying to make sure/confirm if they really did recognize you.

And so he came over and introduced himself and he said, “Oh, hey, I’m the guy who wrote that Simpsons episode that was based on Go or not based on Go but that sort of like used Go in it.” And it’s the episode called Trilogy of Error and it’s an episode where time keeps repeating on itself and sort of like how Pulp Fiction works and how Go works, and there’s actually one whole plot line which is very much taken from Go. And that was my first introduction to him was that he had written the episode that was sort of inspired by Go.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s just a good guy. I’m not sure where, I think I might have met him at a roundtable or something somewhere along the way, but I’ve just always loved him and he was very nice to invite me to a table reading that they did of an episode a couple of years ago. And that was just really fun to watch the cast do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just fascinating. It’s just very cool. What an amazing institution to be a part of and a good guy, Matt Selman. So thanks for writing in, Matt. We’ll put a link in there. We don’t want people to pirate your show.

**John:** No. They should buy it for real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you said about roundtables is actually very applicable because my next bit of follow up was at the live show we did at Nerdmelt where we did the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Panel, I talked a little bit about that I was going to go in on this panel. I was actually leading this sort of roundtable on a rewrite for a script and I was excited but also a little bit nervous about sort of how it was going to go and it was this week.

And it went really well, I think. And so I just wanted to talk through a little bit what that process was like because it was the first time I had ever kind of done one of these things.

I’d been in sessions that were much more like a little punch up where it’s just like what’s the new funny joke we can do here. This was after our first draft, and the writer was in the room, thank god, because I wouldn’t have really wanted to do it if the original writer weren’t there to keep going on to the next thing.

But the discussion, there’s a total of five writers in the room, was really about what are the possibilities of the next things we could do and really looking at what sort of what are the functions of each of the characters, how can this all work together. And so the day it was structured where I suggested that we actually just read the whole script allowed to begin with. And that’s sort of tedious. That burns like two hours. But I thought it was really important because otherwise there’s this chance that you’re all kind of reading a different script.

You’re all sort of reading the scripts you read a week ago or three drafts ago. It’s hard to focus on what specifically the movie is in front of you unless you actually sort of like read the movie that’s in front of you. So we all divvied up parts. We read the whole thing aloud, including all the scene description which is the worst part of the table read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was really glad we did it because for one thing it gave that writer a chance to really hear his work all together out there like and sort of celebrate like this is what was there and like the stuff that was really good was really, really good. And in some ways, I think, that can help us sort of move past it and sort of look at it like that was that and what are the opportunities we have sort of kept on going here.

The stuff that felt long reading was probably needed to be addressed and the stuff that was really, really good, well, what was special about what was really, really good and how can we use those characters, those situations to best effect. So it ended up being a pretty good situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve never done that in, I mean, I’ve been to roundtables where there was a cast read through prior to it but in a lot of times if it’s early in the process there is no cast. And I’ve never done that. I’ve never done a reading. Usually we just start talking about the script and reactions and things, but, you know, I always feel like the — in the end those are difficult days for a writer to go through because you have everybody kind of coming out at it with all of their different opinions and feelings and you have to figure out how to parse out what makes sense and speaks to you truly and what just may be somebody’s opinion.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And that’s tough sometimes.

**John:** What I think is interesting about a roundtable that’s really driven by writers is that everyone who’s been at that table has had to implement these kind of changes. And so every time we talk about a possibility, we’re talking about it in a way of like figuring out like how do you actually write that, how do you actually get that thing to manifest; rather than sort of pie in the sky dreams, it’s like, what’s actually doable.

It’s like talking about building a building with people who build buildings. And so you really understand what is possible there. The challenge for me as like the leader of this group was to make sure that it didn’t all become like a volleying back and forth with the original writer who was there because there’s a natural instinct of trying to address your suggestion to the person who’s going to write next. And I try to make sure to try to stay a conversation among all of us, not just the guy who is going to go off and do the next pass.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is one thing about those roundtables that I don’t like and I try and guard against. And that is this strange thing where writers have almost, some writers have internalized a kind of very bland note style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where suddenly they’re talking to a fellow writer like the world’s worst producer giving them these very obvious notes and pushing it towards formula. And I’m always careful when I’m in these things to never talk about things that I think are going to grind the edges off of a piece or to take away that which is unique.

If anything sticks out in a fascinating way but it seems like it’s not integrated, then maybe I’ll just say that. I’ll just say, how do we, this is a moment. This is the kind of thing that’s special about this movie. Don’t round that edge off, but let’s talk about maybe how to have it not feel like it’s unmoored from the rest of the movie. But I sometimes get dismayed listening to my fellow writers because it just feels like they’ve suddenly become the world’s worst director of development.

**John:** Yeah. It was interesting, I was happy to see this studio in this case, the writer I think initiated the idea of doing this panel. I was glad that the studio stepped up and did it because had they done another draft or two more drafts, I think there would have been some burn in and some burn out honestly on what was happening in the script.

And rather by doing it now, when it was still, it was formed but it was still fresh, it was, I think, much easier to look at the different ways we could go and to sort of chart a course because we hadn’t spent so much time trying to implement notes that were maybe the wrong notes. So I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a cool movie and it was a really good process, so I just wanted to — I’ll never actually say what the movie was or who the writers were, but they were actually fantastic. And so I was, I really enjoyed that process.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah, I love doing those things. I think they’re fun days.

**John:** Cool. So let’s move to our new stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the first thing is, and I can’t find a link of who sent this to me but thank you whoever sent it to me, I think tweeted this link to perhaps the first screenwriting book ever written. It is a 1912 book by Herbert Case Hoagland called How To Write A Photo Play. And I thought it was just great. And so there’s a blog post on it, so we’ll link to both the original text which is on archive.org but also my blog post about it. It was just so cool. I’ll read a little snippet from it. “To write a photo play requires no skill as a writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “But it does require a quote constructionist. It requires the ability to grasp an idea and graft, please using the botanical sense, a series of causes on the front of it and a series of consequences on the other end. An idea so graft it will surely bear fruit; and to learn the art of this mental horticulture is necessary. First, to understand in a general way how motion pictures are made and what is done in the studio, in the field, and in the factory. Let us learn something of these things and begin at the beginning, in the office of the scenario editor.”

What I loved about this paragraph was that it just, first off, it’s just like, “You don’t have to have any skill as a writer” is just fantastic. And also the term scenario editor. What’s so great about Hoagland’s book is that, so he was a scenario editor I’m gathering based on certain introductory pages of the book. They were just in a completely different system. And so when they’re talking about a scenario, they’re not really quite talking about a screenplay. It’s really just a series of shots that is going to tell a story. And because they don’t have dialogue, because they don’t have a lot of normal film conventions, it’s just different.

And, you know, so they say, like, you could write a scenario in 10 minutes but more likely you’ll spend a week thinking about it. And so it really is just a very different world and yet so many of the same kinds of things apply about simple things like screen geography or a sequence of events.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just thought it was great.

**Craig:** Well, Herbert Case Hoagland reminds me of, I’m trying to remember the name, I think it was something Pritchard, the man who’s written the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Who, you know, has his chart of how to evaluate poetry. You can see here at the very beginning of Hollywood moviemaking the very well-intentioned desire to help creative people work in a very structured format. We’ve said it many times, screenwriting stands apart from all other artistic pursuits as something that requires artistic skill and creativity and yet is not meant to be actually appreciated by anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be transformed into a movie. It’s a very specific thing. And so naturally everybody is trying to come up with ways to help you do that. However, we also see here the birth of a terrible, [laughs], and apparently long-standing tradition of reductionist thinking when it comes to screenwriting and the overabundance of rules and caveats and “it’s really simple, press A, pull tab B.”

This is the thing that screenwriters have struggled with forever and god knows how many questions we get that are of a “should I pull tab A or when,” you know, these questions of ” is the midpoint break that comes before the second and a half act pinch point necessary for the downward motion of the reversal?” And you just sit there going, oh, my god, just tell a story. Tell a story.

**John:** There’s a moment in the book where it talks about sort of scene geography and it all has to do with hats. And so, basically, like, if a man puts on his hat and takes his coat, the next shot needs to be of him like arriving in a different house, because otherwise if he puts on his hat and coat and he’s still walking in the house, we’re like, well, why is he walking in a house. He should have left the house.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s absurd and yet at that time you have to think about sort of what these movies were like at this point, that probably was actually good advice to some degree because we just weren’t sophisticated enough to sort of understand how these things could work. It was all just shot by shot by shot by shot.

I also love that in the sense of like things never change. Here’s his warning about submitting your work to different places. He says, “Don’t send biblical stories to a manufacturer who makes the specialty of Western stuff. Study the needs of the firms producing pictures and direct your scenarios accordingly. On another page, the class of a story might be sought by the different studios it has touched up. And ambitious writers cannot do better than to subscribe to the Moving Picture World or some other trade paper and carefully study the comments on the films that appear week by week.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, so there is the beginning of chase the market. [laughs]

**John:** Basically it’s like, read the trades, chase the market, but he’s also saying, know your buyer which is absolutely true.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, sure. No, of course, and at that time, in an era where there was even less information than was available to us when we were pre-Internet, it’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were companies that just concentrated on one kind of picture and to send them a screenplay for a different kind would be pointless. But even so, you know, it’s just classic. It’s just because every stupid thing that people are currently trying to charge you money for,[laughs], it turns out that Herbert Case Hoagland wrote those stupid things already in 1912.

**John:** Yeah, and 1912 was really fascinating because like that’s really genuinely the very, very beginning of anything we want to consider a motion picture industry. I think Birth of a Nation is 1914 if I’m right. So it’s really, things are just beginning here. You’re moving out of the sort of the Nickelodeon time into the kind of full-length movie and that there was already this kind of book I think is just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, like right there in the beginning there was somebody telling screenwriters what to do. [laughs] It’s just genius.

**John:** And it strikes me that a lot of times when you’re at the beginning of something, you know, you’re still kind of figuring out the rules of things, you’re figuring out sort of what stuff is like. And so, I could imagine like the early like how to make a webpage books would have almost exactly the same kind of things that seem really obvious or weird about like, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t use blinking text and it’s like, well, you should never say that but of course you had to say that at that time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this, Hoagland had no idea what movies were going to become, and yet weirdly he sort of anticipated what aspiring screenwriters would be like and the questions they would ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the truth is what he did here is actually very impressive considering that it is 1912. What is sort of sad to me is that there are people in 2014 who are basically saying this stuff, the same stuff that is 102 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But pretending that it’s interesting or insightful or worth spending money on. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sad, sad.

**John:** As we close out here, I also want to, you know, point people towards archive.org because — so archive.org is the Internet archive. And basically, they take snapshots of websites over a period of time, so a lot of times if you go to a website and you can’t find, and you’re curious like what that website was like four years ago you can enter that same URL in archive.org and find what that was like. But they also have these other great sort of treasure trove of just old materials and things that have fallen out of copyright. And so I bless them for putting stuff like this up online where people can dig at it because it’s just great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Next up is a less happy topic, Barry Levinson and his arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. We don’t know of course all the details on this but we know that this is about the Philip Roth novel The Humbling. And Barry Levinson wanted to share screenwriting credit with Buck Henry and Michal Zebede or Michael Zebede. I don’t know how he pronounces it. And there was an arbitration. Barry Levinson did not like the outcome of that arbitration and left the guild or went fi-core in the guild. But just basically, Craig, how do you define fi-core?

**Craig:** Well, financial core is a state of what you would call a financial core non-member. You are no longer technically a member of the union. You can’t vote on collective bargaining agreements. You can’t vote in elections. However, if you’re working in a close shop state like California, you’re still subject to the collective bargaining agreement, which is why “quitting the union,” and going fi-core kind of isn’t worth it because in the end here’s what happens: you still have to pay dues. Your dues are reduced by the amount of expense that the guild puts out towards things that are unrelated to collective bargaining which isn’t much. So instead of paying what you and I pay, you’d maybe pay 93% of that rate.

**John:** But, Craig, then you wouldn’t get Written By magazine.

**Craig:** Ah, you don’t get Written By magazine which is a huge, yeah, that would be a huge bummer obviously, [laughs], for those of you wondering with what you should line your cat box.

**John:** I guess you could still buy it at the newsstand. So there’s some…

**Craig:** Yes, you could buy it at the newsstand. And there’s a big call for that. But the really ironic part of this is that if you go financial core you are still subject to credit arbitrations.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This doesn’t get you out of credit arbitrations. It’s kind of crazy. I’m not really sure how — I understand if you are incredibly frustrated that you would want to take action or do something. The problem is when it comes to this there is in fact nothing you can do.

**John:** Yeah. So George Clooney I believe on Leathernecks left the guild or went fi-core in the same way.

**Craig:** That’s the rumor.

**John:** Out of frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the frustration, but I don’t if that’s, I wouldn’t know the details in that situation either. And I bring, I sort of mention this because people asked me on Twitter about the whole situation and the arbitration. The only thing I would add to it is that having been through arbitrations and sat on arbitration panels basically been one of the people who’s deciding credit, I can almost guarantee that Levinson himself has never served as an arbiter because I think if he had he would have been really, really frustrated but he wouldn’t have gone fi-core.

Because having been an arbiter I can tell you it’s really, really hard and yet everyone I’ve ever encountered in an arbitration has worked really hard to do a great fair job. The arbiters don’t know the names of the people involved in the thing. You’re only reading writer A, writer B, writer C, writer D and things that might appear incredibly obvious to Levinson are not obvious to the arbiter because the arbiter is just looking at the words on the page. And that is a real difference.

I’ve been through arbitrations where I’ve sought credit and lost and been really, really frustrated and wished I could convince other people of the logic of like why the decision was wrong. And yet, having been an arbiter myself, I recognize that that’s just the way it goes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when you look at the situation here, it’s important to understand that we’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you do arbitrations, one thing that becomes very evident is that writers are delusional about their — not always delusional but frequently delusional about the nature of their contribution to a script. Because as an arbiter you get the scripts but you also get the writer’s statements. And many times I’ve done an arbitration where I’ve had three different writers, each of whom are stating very clearly that they deserve sole credit and it’s obvious. And you just shake your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you read the scripts and realize, wow, two of these people are nuts. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of them is correct. So we’re hearing one side of this. And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that he didn’t get credit and what he’s angry about is that he asked to see the arbiter’s statements which is our right if you’re contemplating a policy review board. You can see the arbiter’s statements. And when he looked at those arbiter statements, he didn’t like what he saw particularly in one of them that denied him credit.

He thought that this person had written a “muddled critique that made no sense. It was just way too messy and inaccurate and I asked the board to have this person read the stuff again because I couldn’t see how this was a qualified judgment and they said no.” Well, you know, Barry Levinson’s opinion of the quality of that statement is not necessarily something upon which one can turn a system of jurisprudence.

I will say this, here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know, first of all, I don’t which guild administered this. The Writers Guild West tends to administer most of these things but in cases where a number of the writers are Writers Guild East members, the East may run it. I know that the West staff is really good about reviewing the arbiter statements and making sure that they comport with our rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We don’t have a guarantee that an individual arbiter is going to be a genius.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The staff does try and not call writers who they think are just bad at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t want that either because they don’t want this. They don’t want a story like this. There were some comments on Deadline that were predictably way, way wrong, just factually incorrect. Some people seem to think that directors faced some sort of 75% threshold in order to get credit. Now, directors are essentially treated like everyone else, especially now, we did change a few rules, so there’s no — they would be looked at the same way everybody would be looked at in the situation like this. It’s an adaptation. Everybody has to hit 33%. 33% was Barry Levinson’s threshold which obviously is a guideline because there’s no such thing as a percentage like you’d actually figure out.

And two of three arbiters thought that he didn’t. Some people thought that the arbiters should be allowed to talk with each other and that it’s not fair that they don’t. They do talk to each other —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a case like this, again, that was a change that we instituted. So if it’s not a unanimous decision, they talk. They have a teleconference in which anonymity is maintained and they discuss it. And if they can’t — if at that point they are still not unanimous but two of the three agree on something then that’s that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He doesn’t like this decision. I get it. He thinks one of these arbiters was a knucklehead. He might be right. I don’t know. All I do know is that he’s gone financial core and that changes truly nothing, not even for him. I wish that he had thought to do what I did when I got a credit decision that I thought was terrible. I decided to run for the board. I decided to form a committee. I decided to change the rules. I did change the rules. I decided to do it again. I did do it again.

I actually did the work. Oh, and I served as an arbiter. And Barry Levinson apparently has decided that in his union, if he doesn’t immediately get what he wants or what he perceives as fair, the only recourse is to quit. And, frankly, I just find that to be babyish.

If you’re on a boat and you see a leak in the boat and everyone is telling you it’s not leaking, fix the leak anyway. Convince them. Don’t just jump off the boat and swim away. It’s stupid. It just doesn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get frustrated sometimes with this attitude of like, “Oh, my union did this to me.” There is no union. There is just a bunch of people. That’s it. We’re all in this together or we’re not, you know.

**John:** Yeah. People do bring up the idea of like a director has different qualifications for it. And so, what I want to stress is that this is an adaptation, this is the rules are set up in a way that the director only has to hit 33% just like any other writer. What is different about a director in an arbitration situation is the director, correct me if I’m wrong, Craig, it’s an automatic arbitration situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** So, because he is a director or a producer on the film, it has to go to arbitration. There’s no sort of just like everyone just shakes hands and agrees on it. It has to be arbitrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was another thing a few people got wrong on the Deadline comments. There is no situation here where the writers could have all agreed amongst themselves. And that rule has been there since the very beginning and it’s a good rule and no one has ever really convincingly challenged its value. And the idea being if you have one writer who has the ability to hire and fire other writers, then it makes sense that you would want to just essentially require an arbitration to avoid situations where a powerful director who holds somebody’s economic life in their hands saying, “I think we should all agree that I should be credited here.”

**John:** Yeah, you don’t want that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in other cases where no one is production executive or a director on the project, you can actually all as writers talk and there’ve been many cases where I have talked with the other writers and we’ve figured it out ourselves and has not had to go to arbitration. And in many ways, that’s the best scenario where you actually just figure it out and people end up feeling happier about it because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. And even in situations where there is no automatic arbitration or there is an arbitration where there are five writers and four of them agree and one doesn’t, you can also write joint statements.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or statements in support of each other. There is no reason that this is necessarily as combative as people think. What ends up happening in these situations is everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts screaming about how this system is imperfect and they are absolutely correct. It is imperfect. The thing that I hear most from people who have gone through this and with which I completely agree is that we would be better off if we weren’t serving as arbiters for each other or at least or at least solely comprising the arbiters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We would be better off if there were some independent voices in there who were the kind of people that are routinely called as dramaturgical and literary experts in plagiarism cases or infringement cases in courts of law to help make these decisions because, frankly, knowing how to write a script is not the same Venn oval as knowing how to analyze components of literary contributions. It’s just a totally different skill. And, frankly, the other problem with our system is we’re busy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And with fewer and fewer screenwriters working, the idea that, you know, you’d want your jury pool to mostly be made up of people that are writing screenplays and active screenwriters and we’re busy and sometimes these arbitrations come in and they’re asking you to read eight drafts and a novel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s just — it’s a burden. They’re desperate, constantly searching for people to do these things. It’s rough.

**John:** I got two calls this last week about arbitrations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I couldn’t. I’m too busy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s also partly because it’s TV time. And so because the TV shows are being picked up and announced, those credits are having to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a fun thing to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right, to our next thing. Several people wrote in with this kind of cool animated chart called the Periodic Table of Storytelling, or at least I thought it was cool. So basically it takes a bunch of tropes and ideas that exist in storytelling, various forms, largely cinema but also sort of general storytelling and kind of rearrange them into a chart that looks like a periodic table.

And the general categories which would be sort of the, you know, the columns on this chart are things about structure, settings, story modifiers, plot devices, heroes, character modifiers, archetypes, villains, meta tropes, production and fandom and audience reactions. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s a fun timewaster for awhile.

Two of the things I really enjoyed on this chart were Flanderization, and Flanderization is defined as, this is obviously Ned Flanders, but it’s when you take characters that are kind of normal and then over time you exaggerate qualities in him so much that he doesn’t resemble a normal person at all anymore. So in the case of Flanders, he was just like sort of the nice neighbor next door. And then they made him a little Christian, then a lot Christian, and then he ended up being sort of super-crazy Christian. And that’s just the arc that that character sort of took over time.

The other thing I liked was what they call the anthropic principle which in general the anthropic principle is that we are perfectly suited for the earth because if we weren’t perfectly suited for the earth we wouldn’t be here. Story-wise, the story equivalent of that is what we really call the “buy” is that like if it weren’t for this thing there wouldn’t even be a movie. So you’re willing to take as a given one or two things about the nature of this world because if it weren’t for these one or two things there wouldn’t be a story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a cool chart. I mean, it’s very thorough.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s got a ton of stuff in it. I, from the point of view of somebody that tries to write things, I never really — these things I just find more amusing. It’s really, they are what they seem to be more than anything is a fan’s compendium of stuff they’ve noticed. But I don’t, I wouldn’t see any value here to somebody that was actually trying to write something.

It’s just more of a — it just feels like a very, [laughs,] I say Aspergers all the time. And I don’t want people to think like Aspergers is bad. Aspergers is awesome actually. I mean, people with Aspergers basically save our lives and, you know, figure out every bit of technology in our lives. But this is a little Aspergersy to me in a way that’s maybe not that useful.

**John:** Well, what I find useful is there are certain things on here that I will throw out in sort of casual conversation and then I will recognize that people don’t actually know what I’m talking about. So Chekhov’s Gun is an example of that and there’s a good entry on Chekhov’s Gun. And actually I should say that all the entries actually link back to TV Tropes which is a great way to waste about six hours of time just going through TV Tropes. Like Chekhov’s Gun which is a classic example of like if you establish a gun on the wall early in the story that gun has to go off or else everyone is going to be frustrated.

I think those are important things for writers to know and having a shorthand like Chekhov’s Gun is a good way of talking about like why something isn’t working right or why setting an expectation that is not fully met.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. Yeah, look, Chekhov’s Gun was described by Chekhov.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are things that are literary notions that have been given to us by great writers and I always think those are useful and we should know those things. But here, I think it may be a little bit lost in some other stuff. I mean, I got a little suspicious when the, you know, now they start combining these periodic story elements into molecules that are, you know, movies or episodes of things and the examples are Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dilbert, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony, Here Come the Bronies, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which I assume is something anime, Firefly, Death Note, Wall-E and Ghostbusters. That’s some hardcore cheese doodle stain nerdism there. And I love almost all of those things. Not the Bronies stuff, but I love almost all that stuff. I just feel like this is a bit too , it’s a bit too dorky for me I have to say. And I love chemistry. I love the actual periodic table. I love writing. This actually drifted into just too dorky for me. I apologize.

**John:** Well, let’s step away from that chart to another chart because I was up in Seattle this last weekend. And Seattle by the way is awesome. So if you live in Seattle, congratulations. You live in an awesome town. So at the Experience Music Project, EMP, the big museum, they have great music exhibits but they also have like a lot of other really cool stuff there and two of the ones we went through were archetypes of fantasy and then there’s also a sci-fi, horror section. These are all sort of down in the basement and they are fantastic.

In the archetypes of fantasy, they had very nice, both animated on screen but also sort of as you walk through displays set up talking about the different sort of archetypes of fantasy you see in everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter to The Wizard of Oz, like sort of all these kind of things.

And I’ll include a link to a photo I took sort of that shows a chart of how many, 20 different archetypes they have, from the night to the shadow, to the unlikely hero, to the hero’s muse. And when you look at it just as little charts it’s like, well, yes, okay, that’s a thing. But what’s so smart about the exhibit is they actually then took a look at like who are those kind of characters in actual stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it makes it real for people when they see like, oh, okay, that character is — like Robin Hood is that type, but also Han Solo is that type. And the sense of the commonalities we see across our sort of mythic stories. In some ways it may be a little bit more useful for the person who is writing a movie to really think about these characters and the kinds of roles they could play.

Again, not in a prescriptive way, like you have to have the barbarian face off with the trickster, but a way of thinking about what functions are your characters serving in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s lots of good stuff there out in the world that delves into this topic of commonalities between stories and narrative. I mean, narrative is just a — all narrative is is a symptom of being human. So, naturally there should be these archetypal things because there’s stuff in all of us that’s archetypal. You have fear, and bravery, and honor, and justice, and all these things that then emerge in the forms of people, flat characters, or complicated characters.

You should read those things. Look, everyone will tell you you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, and I always think, well, yeah, that’s great. You should. I mean, watch The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but — the thing he did with Moyer. But, read the myths. You know, when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just did nothing but read Greek myth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was awesome. You read those myths and you start getting pure undiluted narrative because that’s what that stuff is.

**John:** Yeah. I went through a very hardcore mythology phase, actually probably a couple of phases. There was one in sort of early elementary school. It hit again later, and then sort of got into my Bulfinch’s Mythology in sort of late junior high/high school. And what’s fascinating about when you actually go back and really look at the myths is like there’s so much overlap and so many, like, you know, it’s almost like fandom or sort of like competing versions of how things fit together, like Demeter, and Ceres, and Persephone, and the underworld. It’s different kind of every time. And so there’s so many versions of what that story is. There’s no one completely archetypal true version of like what that thing is.

And in some ways seeing the multiple telling of it and how they different they all were sort of gives you permission as a storyteller to really think about what are the other ways I can tell this kind of story. And what is common between all of these versions of what is so different between all of these versions.

**Craig:** The New Testament is —

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Is basically that. It’s Rashomon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just that everybody agrees that Jesus was awesome. But Bulfinch’s Mythology is — that’s a book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Every writer should read Bulfinch’s Mythology.

**John:** At Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago I bought myself, they have these really nicely bound special bound versions of The Great Tales of Mythology. It’s not a Bulfinch’s, but it’s a good mythology reader. And then the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I’d never actually read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and basically never fall in love because you’re going to die is essentially what you sort of learn.

**Craig:** They’re grim.

**John:** They are in fact grim. What’s also so fascinating about Grimm’s Fairy Tales I discovered is that almost, at least half of them in the first few sentences there will be like some throwaway random thing about his father was a bull, blah, blah, blah. And it just keeps going on. Or like there will be a curse that’s set up that’s never actually paid off. It’s really weird to sort of notice which of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales have sort of survived into modern culture and which ones are just like, “I’ve never heard of that one before and I can see why.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It didn’t work out. The Brothers Grimm collected these stories, basically German peasant stories. And I had a roommate in college, not Ted Cruz, but my friend Eric Leech whose mother was German and she had given him at one point a book, a German book of those old stories and along with these illustrations. And children were constantly being injured on purpose or as a result of their misbehavior.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They would lose their fingers and blood would spurt out. The stores, I mean, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were in a race to harm as many children as possible. [laughs] It’s horrible.

**John:** What I also found so fascinating about the Grimm’s Tales is that so rarely do you actually see — in Grimm’s Tales it’s actually kind of rare for its protagonist to take an action that saves him or herself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** More likely it’s that somebody takes pity on them and then marries them. Or someone else basically rescues them in so many of the stories in a way that’s a little disappointing.

**Craig:** Well, they are there to serve a social construction that was, I guess, important at the time, or necessary to survival. But how many of those old stories involved stepmothers? Stepmothers were this enormous problem apparent, [laughs], that just asshole stepmothers.

**John:** I was looking in the introductory pages of this book, whatever the scholar was who was setting stuff up. He explains that stepmothers are actually sort of a bad translation of what the real concept is here. So, sometimes it was really just bad mothers, or second mothers, or stepmothers, or just other women who were around. But because in English we just have the word “stepmother,” we always take it to mean the woman who came in after mom died. And that’s not necessarily always what it was supposed to be in the Grimm’s stories.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ah-ha! The same way that I think French has different words for like a cousin on your mom’s side and a cousin on your dad’s side. I may be making that up, but like different cultures describe relationships differently. And so we have the word stepmother, but there’s actually more subtle ways to talk about some of these things in other languages.

**Craig:** Well, look, as long as some kid gets his nose chopped off by a woodsman’s ax then I’m satisfied.

**John:** I am satisfied as well.

So, this last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, there was a New York Times piece called Memos to Hollywood. And the conceit behind it, which is not actually at all true, but the conceit behind it would be that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis and other critics at the New York Times were writing emails to different people and they were just going to print what the emails were.

Well, one of them I found really fascinating because it actually touched on something that I never really considered. Or, I guess I considered it in the back of my head but never thought this could be real problem. So, I’m going to read one from Manohla Dargis. It’s directed to two directors. She writes:

“Do you know that, increasingly, your labor of love — the movie you spent months and probably years of your life on — is being reviewed by critics who are watching it on their computers? For years, the cost of striking and shipping film prints as well as renting theaters for press screenings led cash-strapped companies to simply supply DVDs to reviewers. Some reviewers have been happy to comply, and of course, the blurring between the big- and small-screen viewing, and the closing of theatrical windows, hasn’t helped. After all, if a movie is being released in theaters and on demand the same day, why bother watching it on the big screen ó or so the bottom-line thinking goes.

“These days, though, some companies don’t even bother to send critics DVDs: They’re only supplying Internet links that often have the reviewer’s name watermarked on the crummy-looking image, and even come with distracting time codes. So that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies.”

And, yeah, I think they really would. I’ve seen some of those sites, like I remember for Star Trek when we did — I did a panel at the Academy and we had a clip from the second Star Trek movie. And so they sent me a link that had like my name burned into it so I could just watch it ahead of time. If I had watched the whole movie that way I would not have liked it the same way I liked it when I saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you are trying — if you care enough to send a movie to film critic I guess you care enough about their review, then you should send them a nice looking thing. That said, no one actually cares what they think. [laughs] The directors do, but the studios don’t.

When she says “cash-strapped companies are simply supplying DVDs to reviewers,” they’re not cash-strapped. They don’t care Manohla, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care what A.O. Scott thinks. They don’t care what any reviewer thinks whatsoever. They know perfectly well that when they have a movie that they think critics need to discover and love in order to get people to go, trust me, you’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice copy of it somehow or another. They’ll care.

But if it’s Star Trek, I mean, they couldn’t give a damn what you think. And, you know, these memos John —

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you strongly there. I guarantee you J.J. Abrams would not —

**Craig:** No, J.J. Abrams does. I’m not talking about J.J. Abrams. I agree, the directors would freak out. I’m talking about the people that are actually sending them, which is the studio, the bean counters, and the distribution and marketing and publicity departments. They don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** I think that’s why this memo is directed towards directors. I think the fact is that a director might not even know that this is happening —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And this is pointing out that you really, in many cases you really don’t want that to happen. Now, I think there’s also some logic to some cases it doesn’t really matter. And there are movies that are coming out on TV at the same time and for those people maybe it’s fine to just provide the link because it may be the difference between getting your review and not getting your review at all. You probably want a review for a small indie film, something like, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Short Term 12. That’s the movie that you want to make sure it gets reviewed. You send a link, you’ll do whatever just to get them to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and look, she points out — it’s a bit dismissive about movies that are talking heads, so apparently talking heads are bad unless I suppose it’s My Dinner with Andre in which it’s great. Look, you know, I read this — I read the whole thing. I read this whole thing. And I just kept laughing the whole time. It’s like two people that truly have no idea that nobody gave a damn what they think, going at length in America’s “paper of record” about how people should be listening to them. And they’re writing these memos to people that just don’t care.

We don’t care. I mean, listen, directors should want anyone, not just critics, anyone to see a nice version of their movie. Of course. And, you know, I don’t know — I know that these people go on these junkets. I’d rather frankly have a reviewer, if it were up to me, watch the movie on their own than watch it in a room with all of these other critics and their weird herd-like junkets as they convince each other that something is good or bad.

But nobody really cares. I mean, these people are writing these memos about superhero movies like anyone cares. [laughs] And then they’re writing letters to their fellow movie critics complaining about them. This is such a critic’s thing. Let’s just talk about stuff we don’t understand and complain about it. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about, John.

**John:** I was surprised you took so much umbrage here. Really. Genuinely. Because I was going to save that thing they read about the superhero movies for our superhero show. But, obviously now we can’t do that, so I’ll have to find another way to make you angry.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just…these people…they write:

To: Television

Cc: Movies

Subject: Get over yourselves

And then this nonsense about movie and television and how one, oh, “Current conventional wisdom holds that television has entered a golden age while movies are in a period of decline. Those are dubious notions…”

Nobody cares. Shut up. Just watch the television you like. And watch the movies you like. And stop talking about this nonsense. Nobody cares. These people, my god, is there any naval too small for them to not gaze at?

Thank you.

**John:** [laughs] Next, a question from Twitter. Bobby Bearly wrote in, and I don’t have his actual tweet so I’m just going to summarize what his tweet asked, which is, “How do you keep secrets from your readers in a script,” which is a question we haven’t really talked about on the show.

And so I think what Bobby’s referring to is there will be sometimes where there’s going to be a reveal in a movie, but the reveal in the movie isn’t going to make the same kind of sense on the page. And sometimes it will be about who a character really is, what somebody looks like, and that it’s really the same person the whole time through.

And so how do you do that in terms of what are the words on the page to show that you’re keeping a secret there. And are you in some way violating the trust of the reader by not being upfront about what was happening there?

**Craig:** Well, we’re supposed to violate trust to some extent. The existence of a movie is already the violation of a trust because you are portraying events to somebody as if they are happening in real time, or happening linearly, when in fact you who are presenting these things know exactly how this ends.

The entire thing is a betrayal of trust.

When it comes to secrets, tricks, gimmicks, twists, reveals, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is you cannot get away with the following statement: I know my movie seems really boring for 50 pages, but then when the big secret happens it will all make sense and be cool.

No. We were just bored for 50 minutes. You cannot use twist or revelation as an excuse for everything prior to that twist or revelation being boring. In fact, the reason that good twists and good reveals are so exciting is because they shock an audience who has been enjoying what they’ve been watching without it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, very famous and somewhat recent examples of movies that have big twists, are remarkably enjoyable on their own terms prior to that twist.

**John:** Exactly. So, I think both Fight Club and Sixth Sense though bring up interesting issues about what you actually put on the page, because in both those cases — especially Sixth Sense — you want to make it clear that Bruce Willis is not actually touching anybody else.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And portraying that on the page can be really crucial and yet you don’t want to tip it too far. And so it’s one of those things where like with a camera you would do it a certain way. With just words on the page it’s sort of harder to show what the nature of that —

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** That physical geography is. The other case which comes up quite often is — and I guess this is Fight Club to some degree — but where you’re going to see like a shadowy figure and then ultimately down the road you’re going to reveal who that person really is. It’s the degree to which a screenplay is a plan for shooting a movie. Well, that character was in these scenes all this time and we shouldn’t see him. And so usually you develop some sort of terminology for what that thing is, what that character is, like the man with the gray coat. And then eventually you will reveal the man in the gray coat is actually this person, this other character who we’ve been seeing the whole time through. Like, Susan is the man in the gray coat. There’s going to be that reveal later on.

On screen we’re going to see that. On the page, sometimes that’s actually a little harder to catch. And so that’s one of those cases where if you’ve been conservative and not bolded or underlined things, this is the time to break out and actually bold or underline something so the reader is caught up with where a viewer would be, so they really can sense like, “Oh my god, they’re actually the same person.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to, as you’re going through we’ll call your — there’s the pre-twist and then there’s the moment of the twist. Your pre-twist stuff you have to make sure that when the reader goes backwards, and they often will — they’ll get to the twist and they’ll go, “What? Hold on a second.” Then they’ll go back because they think they’ve caught you in a mistake.

You want to have covered your tracks well. So, in Fight Club there’s a scene where the main character is acting as an interloper in an argument between Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden’s girlfriend. And then Tyler Durden is at the bottom of the stairs in a basement and she’s in the kitchen and, in fact, if you go back and look at how that scene plays out and how it would be written you would go, “Oh my god, oh, my god, it actually works with that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you want to be careful about all of that stuff. The moment of the twist when you write the twist and you make the reveal you use the page. Give yourself page space. Let it really sink in. Make a deal of it. Use white space.

If you feel like putting nothing on that page except the reveal, do that. The page will show the emphasis. And use that space creatively, otherwise it’ll just be another action description. People will just literally go, “Oh, well I guess it’s as important as the fact that somebody walked into the room with his hat.”

**John:** Ah-ha! All right. We have a question from David Dunne who writes, “Part one, I don’t currently have an agent but my so-so manager of a few years has given me notes on a few different scripts and they sucked.” I assume the notes sucked, not the script sucks.

“He offered vague generalities, better this, bigger that, not feeling this/that, and virtually nothing constructive. I like this but take it further. Dig deeper here. This character is interesting but flat.

“So how much of his inability to give useful notes weigh in my decision to drop or keep him? If he were an all-star maybe I would overlook the shortcoming. We’re talking just so-so here.

“A related part of the question. A good friend sold a cable network show that’s going and he wants me on his staff. Should I drop the manager before joining, or if I keep him should he get a fee? How do you handle this in the most professional way?”

**Craig:** [sighs] Well, let’s run down the facts. Your manager is, as you call him or her, so-so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All we have to judge is the behavior you’ve given us which is that his notes are bad, at which point my argument would be they’re not so-so, they’re bad. But either way it doesn’t sound like you’re getting anything out of this relationship. How important is it to have a manager who gives you good notes? It’s as important to you as it is. If you want a manager to get you work and you don’t care what they think about your script then it doesn’t matter. If you’re looking for somebody to help you grow and get better, then it does. And it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for.

You have somebody that’s offering you a job. And you don’t like your manager and you think they give you bad notes and this manager didn’t get you this job. My advice would of course be to fire the manager. [laughs] He’s done nothing.

**John:** When Craig Mazin wakes up in the morning he sits up, he says, “Fire your manager.” It’s your first instinct for everything, right?

**Craig:** I mean, normally, yeah. A lot of times people ask a question, like the prior question was about how to handle a secret in a screenplay. And my answer, my instinctive answer is, “Fire your manager.” But I control that.

**John:** [laughs] You do. But your second answer I thought was better in that case.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to go back and stick up for the manager just a tiny bit, but then ultimately I’m with you. Managers can serve two functions. There can be managers who are really good at helping you get your writing to the best state and they can sort of serve as a proxy for like what a producer might think. They could be reading every draft. They can sort of help you get your stuff in the best shape.

And there are some managers who do that who are really good. Not a lot of them, but there are some of them, and that can be useful.

A manager can also help you get work. And that sounds more like what you were using this manager for, hopefully, but in this case the manager didn’t get you work. It sounds like you weren’t working. It sounds like this friend is going to hire you on a show independent of what the manager did. So, I would also fire your manager. And then wait a few weeks and then sign on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No brainer to me. I mean, he even says he’s not a super star. My guess is this is a marginal — there are so many of these people on the margins of Hollywood who, if you think about it, they’re posing as experts in the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not. So, it’s a bit like you’ walking around with a festering wound and you like in a town where the way you know someone is a doctor is that they call themselves doctor. And these people call themselves managers. That word means nothing. It means that they can afford letterhead.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we don’t even know if they can afford letterhead. That may just be credit card debt.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all emails now anyway.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** So, yes, we think you should fire your manager in the part one of the question. And then in the part two of your question, if you’re going to get this job staffed on a TV show, congratulations. Once you’re on board there that might be a great time to look for an agent because agents love people who work and who get hired to work. And if you are working on a TV show then you are by definition a working writer. And that might be a very good way for you to get started with an actual agent.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** Our next topic in our big, multi-tab episode, I want to talk about Big Fish and sort of what happens to a Broadway after Broadway.

So, Big Fish closed right at the end of the year and in the time since then we’ve had the cast album come out. But we’ve also started to announce that there’s actually a bunch of stagings of Big Fish happening this next year. I think there are 20 announced so far. The biggest one for Southern California, Long Beach actually bought out all of our costumes and props and things like that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so they’re doing a big production here.

**Craig:** Including the elephant butts?

**John:** I think they bought the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I’m not sure on the elephant butts. Those are pretty big, but they bought stuff. So, I hope they have that, too.

So, that’s going to be kind of more like the Broadway version of the show. So, it’s like what you might have seen on the main stage on Broadway. We’re also going to be doing, the only one that Andrew and I are going to be sort of directly involved in is we’re doing a new staging in Boston at the Speakeasy Theater which is a really stripped down sort of 12 chairs, maybe no sets kind of version. We’re both going in and rewriting stuff designed to bring it down to a much smaller cast, a much smaller orchestra, which is actually really exciting. I get a chance to do that, again.

What’s so odd about this process is that I’ve done film and I’ve done television, and in film and television once something is done it’s just kind of done. You might go to a retrospective screening of Go or you’ll be flipping through channels and you’ll see the Big Fish movie on HBO, which is there a lot, but you’re sort of done. And weirdly here you’re not just done because Andrew and I control copyright on Big Fish and so everyone who wants to do a future version of Big Fish comes to me and Andrew and says, “Hey, I want to put on your show,” and we get to say yes or no.

And we sort of made the decision to just say yes a lot, like a lot a lot. And so we’re licensing it to these bigger places like the Speakeasy and in Long Beach, but also there are high schools that are going to be doing it next fall.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great.

**John:** There’s religious groups that are doing it. There are churches. And I won’t see most of these productions, but it’s fascinating to think that these things are going to exist sort of independently of me. It’s kind of cool.

**Craig:** That is cool. I really like that you guys are opening it up to high school productions because both of my kids are big — they’re really involved in musical theater and they love it. And you do tend to get the same kind of thing happening in high school productions. And rarely do you get something that’s new, because if it’s new typically the rights holders want to kind of exploit the higher end of it, or they jack up the rates to such that high schools can’t really afford it.

For instance, Jack’s school was going to do Cinderella, which is an old play.

**John:** Yeah, it’s been out so it’s more expensive.

**Craig:** But now suddenly because it was revived they couldn’t afford it. They just couldn’t afford it, so they had to go to Once Upon a Mattress, which is about as overdone a high school production as you can get. I mean, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, and they did a great job, but Once Upon a Mattress is right up there with Fiddler on the Roof which my daughter will be in, [laughs], in a couple weeks.

So, it’s nice to see something fresh and new with modern music and interesting themes and storytelling, you know, and hopefully you can get out to some of those churches, John. [laughs]

**John:** I’m very excited. So, Liberty University is actually doing a Big Fish —

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, hold on. You guys, the two of you —

**John:** Us. The two of us.

**Craig:** The two of you licensed your show to Liberty University?

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** I’m against this.

**John:** I didn’t even know that it happened until it happened. But I’m actually kind of excited. I honestly feel like Big Fish is the kind of show like we could probably run in Branson, Missouri for a good long time.

**Craig:** Well, you could. But, I mean, I just have to ask the question — I mean, was there at no point did you guys say, “We’re licensing our production to an institution that is just like off the charts homophobic?”

**John:** Uh, you know, it honestly happened, but like I found out that it was happening after I think the deal had already been signed. So, I’ll give you a little more backstory as to what the actual process is like. So, people can come to me or Andrew but we would ultimately say like, “That’s fantastic that you want to do it. Here’s where you go.” And so it’s a company called TRW who does the licensing for this show and a lot of other shows.

And so they’re ultimately the ones that are doing it. And so in our initial conversations with TRW about the places we were excited to see it, we really strongly — or I, I guess honestly I’ll put this on me — I strongly stressed that I really think the religious community will dig this show and will probably like it a lot. And so I said Utah and the South. And so they took me at my word and we have a staging in Orem, Utah and we have a couple stagings in the South.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, we have like Abilene Christian University and Liberty University. And then here is the thing: I’m not quite convinced it’s actually Liberty University. It’s the center that is next to their campus, but it may not actually be part of the campus itself. The website is not Liberty University.

**Craig:** Oh, well, those people love gay folks. [laughs] Oh, the people next door to Liberty University.

**John:** Oh, they love them. It’s just the best scenario.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**John:** But in a weird way I feel — I feel kind of okay with that. It’s hard for me to explain why, but it’s just the show should work for people of , you know, across the board.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It’s a very family friendly show and it’s a very kind of wholesome, I mean, the word wholesome comes to mind. It’s about small town America in the ’50s and ’60s, that kind of idyllic time that a lot of socially conservative people yearn for.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, there’s no question it will work for them. But, you know, hey, look, I guess one way to think about it is that you are quietly putting some gay into Liberty University.

**John:** I think there’s already plenty of gay in Liberty University.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you’re right!

**John:** So, just to wrap this up, so we’re finished on Broadway and while I would love to still be running on Broadway, it’s also sort of nice to put a little of it behind me on some stuff. We’re not quite done yet. We’re up for some Drama Desk Awards, which is great. I was especially — Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz who were so fantastic in the show, I was happy to see them get singled out for their great work.

And we’re actually up for best musical on Broadway.com, which is sort of the People’s Choice Awards of Broadway.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** So, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to stuff the ballot box for Big Fish I won’t say no. And you can vote for Big Fish as Best Musical if you choose to.

**Craig:** You know, the People’s Choice Awards, that’s the only award I ever get.

**John:** [laughs] You and me, together at last.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk some One Cool Things. So, we’ve been going through, we had two earlier sessions where we talked through old One Cool Things. And we got up to number 80, so should we start?

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** So, my number 80 was Unfinished Scripts which was a Twitter feed where it was sort of screenshots of terrible screenplays. And there is also Unfinished Screenplays which is the same idea. I’m not sure which one came first. They’re both kind of funny. I don’t really follow them much anymore, but I see them every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah, mine was EyeWire which was a little web-based game that actually helped neurologists map the brain. I think they were rat brains, but still they’re trying to come up with a good map of that stuff. And I did that for awhile. It was fun. Then I stopped. But I think the idea was that you don’t play that every day. So, I had my time with it.

**John:** My number 81 was StageWrite for the iPad which was actually developed by the associate choreographer on Big Fish. And it is a way of keeping track of everyone on stage and sort of where they’re moving from set to set to set, to scene to scene to scene. And it’s great software for that. So, I don’t need to use it, because I’m not choreographing anything, but I see people using it still.

**Craig:** And mine was Kiva, which is a microloan website where you can essentially loan money to indigent people across the world, mostly in third world countries. And I still do that to this day. I basically have an amount that I just roll. And as people pay me back then I just roll it off to somebody else. And it’s a great thing to do. And I urge everybody to check it out at Kiva, I believe it’s Kiva.org. It’s super easy to do. And it’s a good thing.

**John:** My number 80 was Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier. It was a book I read. I liked it a lot when I read it. I liked it a fair amount when I read it and there’s been a lot more discussion of Big Data in the time since I remember reading that book. And sort of how much you can zero in on the individual person if you combine enough data sets and how that can be great but also troubling.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Motors Forum, along with the username FlasherZ who is an electrician. And I check in there all the time to get little bits of news and blurbs and stuff. Very useful. Very useful forum.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you like your car?

**Craig:** It’s not really car, John. It’s everything. [laughs] It’s everything to me. Everything.

**John:** From your helpful forum I needed to point to my helpful forum, this is number 83, this Lifehacker post on using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX. And this came up because we had Derek Haas as a guest on the show and needed to be able to connect two microphones to my laptop and it was really confusing to figure out how to do that And god bless the internet that there was a little thing on how to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has thought of everything. Mine was the Animal Specialty Group which is an animal hospital in Glendale that saved the life of my dog who is currently prancing about in the yard as I speak. They are wonderful people. I hope to never have to see them again, but if I do they will be there for me.

**John:** My 84 was tips for singing the National Anthem which if you take nothing else is the lowest note you possibly can sing it should be the third note of the National Anthem. [sings] “Oh, say”…that say should be the lowest note you can possibly sing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That way you have the range to be able to go to the top, hopefully.

**Craig:** The word that you should be afraid of is “glare.” And “the rockets’ red glare.” Glare will be the highest. If you don’t start low enough you will never get to glare.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Mine was BioShock Infinite. What a great game. I really enjoyed it. That — it’s funny, it ties back to our little twist conversation. There’s a huge reveal in it and frankly it was very complicated and I didn’t quite understand it at first. I needed to play through the game again really to appreciate it, which actually to me says they didn’t do that great of a job on that. It was almost too rich. You know, whereas the first BioShock when the twist happens everything suddenly kaboom in your head.

And yet also I have to say that the depth that Ken Levine provided through the game is — it’s essentially the most creatively and philosophically ambitious video game I’ve ever played on a console. It was really well done.

**John:** Mine for 85 was Ulysses III. It’s a Macintosh text editor. I like it but it’s not my go-to text editor. I use By Word most days.

**Craig:** Mine was That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC. Those guys are awesome. I still will occasionally amuse myself by just watching clips of those guys. They’re very, very funny.

**John:** My number 86 was the Internet K-Hole, which was a collection of photographs that this photographer woman has assembled on a website. And you cannot just not look at it. It’s just great. And it’s photos from sort of a punk rock lifestyle over 40 years maybe. It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Pretty cool. Mine is Slacker Radio. I use it every day in my car, also known as the Everything.

**John:** My 87 was Stag’s Leap, a book of poems by Sharon Olds. I still think about it. It’s actually a great collection of poems mostly about the disintegration of her marriage and just really brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Mine was ITER which is I think a French consortium coming up with a way to provide us with unlimited pollution-free energy. I’m pretty sure they’re still working on it. I’d love to see that happen.

**John:** Yeah, has that happened? That’s great. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I think they are still working on getting some bugs out.

**John:** My number 88 was FilmCraft Screenwriting by Tim Grierson. Tim Grierson did a series of books on screenwriting, on cinematography, and other things. And I’m actually in the book on screenwriting and it was a well put together book. It still sits on my coffee table. I think I’ve read the whole thing. But, I read my little part, so that counts.

**Craig:** That’s good. I had nothing that week.

**John:** [laughs] My number 89 was Scandal Revealed episode 221 from Matt Byrne.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you had so many.

**John:** There were so many. It was a weird episode. I don’t know why — basically all my old assistants are linked to different things.

**Craig:** And I had just a fact really that the LA Times reported that studios donated film set materials to Habitat for Humanity which is very cool. And also this was the first time that Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang did their American Heart Association thing where they offered to read your script to raise money for research into heart disease.

**John:** Great. Let’s stop there. Man, we got a lot of these.

**Craig:** What do you say —

**John:** We bang out ten a week we’ll get through them all.

**Craig:** This is like — this podcast had everything.

**John:** Lord.

**Craig:** I got upset. We covered like 100 topics. I don’t know if we should continue. [laughs]

**John:** I think we’re basically done. Although I have a One Cool Thing for this week.

**Craig:** Me too. What’s yours?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is, oh, you’re going to love this, Craig. You’re salivating.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** You’re going to love this so much.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It is the WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand.

**Craig:** I mean, oh god.

**John:** So, it’s not for me, it’s for Stuart. Because Stuart who works downstairs, he works on a laptop and I see him slouching in his chair. I’m like, Stuart, that’s not good. He’s like, “I know it’s not good.” And so I said Stuart if I get you a stand for your laptop so you can stand up when you want to stand up, would you like that? He’s like, “Sure.”

And so I got it and I bought this one off Amazon. It was really good. He uses it right now.

**Craig:** He’s just shutting you up.

**John:** Well, he’s standing up while he’s shutting me up, so that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I think you get more work out of Stuart if he’s in pain.

**John:** Ha! Crippled over in agony.

**Craig:** Yes. My, by the way, I’ve been playing Monument Valley a lot. It’s really, really good.

**John:** Isn’t that beautifully done?

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Actually you can’t kind of play a lot because it’s really short.

**Craig:** Well, so I play a chapter and then I just put it down. So, I’ve spreading it out. But my One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, as often is the case, called Sometimes You Die.

**John:** I’ve played Sometimes You Die. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Really cool. It is very minimalist. The game play is — basically it’s a platform of sort, except sometimes you die. Sometimes you have to die. And when you die your little body, which is just a cursor, it’s just a carrot —

**John:** A square block.

**Craig:** A little square block. Your body is left behind and you can use your past dead bodies to get to where you need to go. But where the game is really kind of fascinating is in the sound of it and the look of it and the text on screen. It’s essentially saying what are you doing, why are you playing this?

And so in that regard it’s very, very cool. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

**John:** It reminded me a bit of portal, and not in the sense of like the fancy mechanics, but just the sense of kind of it’s talking back to you and it’s sort of — there’s a quality of existential doom to it that was actually quite fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think I played to the end but I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten to the end.

**Craig:** You haven’t because I did a little reading. I played to the end, too, but every time you play thought it you get a little thing. And the idea is that at some point you will have collected a couple of little super powers that allow you to play through the game without dying.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t know if I noticed when you played all the way through, now you’re allowed to turn your phone and your little carrot will — gravity will work on your carrot.

**John:** Ah, okay. So, now —

**Craig:** And then there’s another one later when you play through again where you get a pause button. So, there’s all these things that happen and the idea is eventually you can complete the game without dying.

**John:** That is genius. You’ve basically made a new game for me by telling me these secrets.

**Craig:** Voila.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, you can find links to things we talked about in the show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also there where you can find transcripts for previous episodes. Just by the way, Craig, I had a listener who wrote into me on Twitter today who was thanking me for the transcripts because he’s deaf. And because he’s deaf the only way he can experience the podcast is through the transcripts. So, that was just really great that he took the time to write in.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site, the most recent 20, or the older ones you can find on scriptnotes.net. The ones that are on scriptnotes.net you can also find in the app, both for iOS and for Android. You search your applicable app store for those.

We have occasional bonus content things, so those show up if you’re subscriber to all the back episodes. Subscribing also gives you all back to episode number one when we didn’t know what we were doing.

We have a few of the USB drives left. They are at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Worseldine.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And if you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, send it to us. Send us a link. Put it on SoundCloud and send us a link. We’d love to hear it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, you can find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we answered today you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are on iTunes just randomly and you want to leave us a comment or leave us a rating, go for it. Knock yourself out. It helps other people find the show. And that’s it.

Craig, next time I see you it will be the live show. I can’t wait.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Hey, hey John.

**John:** What’s up?

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Next time is going to be live.

**John:** It’s going to be amazing. You can see Craig Mazin do that voice live on stage.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Yeah. This is Craig. Yeah.

**John:** And he promises to dress the part, too.

**Craig:** [laughs] Always.

**John:** You don’t want to miss that experience.

**Craig:** Nothing is sexier than a 43-year-old man in J. Crew.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right. See you there.

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig. Bye.

Links:

* [Voting for the Live Three Page Challenge is open](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) until May 14 at noon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* John’s blog post on [which apps screenwriters are using](http://johnaugust.com/2014/which-apps-are-screenwriters-using)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 141: [Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* Matt Selman [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman)
* The Simpsons, Episode 492: The Book Job, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job) and [Amazon Instant Video](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B318N8/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* The Simpsons, Episode 266: The Trilogy of Error [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_of_Error)
* John’s blog post on [How to Write a Photoplay](http://johnaugust.com/2014/how-to-write-a-photoplay) and [the book on archive.org](https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00hoag)
* Deadline on [Barry Levinson leaving the WGA](http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/barry-levinson-quits-wga-over-sloppy-credit-arbitration-on-screen-version-of-philip-roths-the-humbling/)
* [The Periodic Table of Storytelling](http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/)
* Seattle’s [Experience Music Project Museum](http://www.empmuseum.org/), and [John’s photo of the Archetypes of Fantasy chart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/archetypes.jpg)
* Joseph Campbell’s [The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577315936/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and his and Bill Moyers’ video series, [The Power of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A4E8E1O/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Bulfinch’s Mythology](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1440426309/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Memos to Hollywood](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/movies/critics-weigh-in-on-patriarchy-and-the-vanished-film-print.html) from The New York Times
* Big Fish’s [upcoming shows](http://www.theatricalrights.com/big-fish)
* Vote now (for Big Fish!) for the [Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards](http://awards.broadway.com/buzz/2014/5/5/votebway-vote-now-for-the-winners-of-the-2014-broadwaycom-audience-choice-awards)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand](http://www.uncagedergonomics.com/workez-executive/) and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9HGHPU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Sometimes You Die](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sometimes-you-die/id822701037?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Sam Worseldine ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

**John:** Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/frozen-with-jennifer-lee).

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

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** And my name is Aline Brosh McKenna.

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

Now, for the first time in forever Craig Mazin is not here. Craig Mazin is, well, what actually happened to him?

**Aline:** Well, if you mean not here, there are sounds coming from the closet. I think he might be waking up. But he’s not actually in front of a microphone.

**John:** A good hit with a heavy object will knock him out. So, Aline Brosh McKenna, our Joan Rivers, has stepped in to be a co-host. Aline, thank you so much for being here.

**Aline:** You are so welcome. I actually saw Joan Rivers last week.

**John:** Ah! Tell me about Joan Rivers.

**Aline:** Live. And it was amazing. And I’m going to work very blue today and I’m going to do a lot of celebrity clothing fashion stuff, just to add some Joan Rivers to it.

**John:** I think it’s an incredible choice. I have one question for you first, though?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you want to build a snowman?

**Aline:** It’s so exciting that the entire podcast Scriptnotes listenership can watch me tackle someone that I’m a huge fan of.

**John:** Our guest today is Jennifer Lee. She is the writer and director of Frozen and the screenwriter of Wreck-It Ralph. Thank you for being on our show.

**Jennifer Lee:** Thank you for having me. I’ve been a huge listener. Well, I’m a huge — that made me sound huge. I have been a listener for a very long time and love Scriptnotes.

**John:** Well, thank you very much.

So, previously on an episode Craig and I took a look at The Little Mermaid and we did a deep dive on The Little Mermaid and spent the entire episode on that. But we didn’t have the benefit of having the screenwriter of The Little Mermaid here to answer our questions as we talked through things.

So, I just want to sort of dig deep and really talk about the story and the really surprising things in the story, because Aline and I were both talking that there are things you would never anticipate being in a movie like Frozen in the movie Frozen.

And so warning to listeners: we’re going to spoil everything.

**Jennifer:** Oh, that’s so much. It’s so hard to talk about the movie and you can’t talk about the movie.

**John:** Because there’s actually a lot of twists that you don’t see coming in this movie and really starting with the nature of the underlying relationships.

I want to get a little sense of history about when you came into this project, because I know that an idea of doing a movie about The Snow Queen, the Hans Christian Andersen story, had been around for a long time. But when did you first get involved with the project?

**Jennifer:** Well, it had been, I mean, rumor is that Walt Disney wanted to do it way back and there’s a production number for The Snow Queen. That’s all we know. Nothing survived. There were some paintings by Marc David for a ride called The Ice Palace, I think, or The Snow Palace that had The Snow Queen. And throughout the decades people kept bringing it up again and wanting to try it.

And then finally Chris Buck pitched it five years ago to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull and it was just the — it was seductive, of course. The concept of a snow queen is seductive. And then setting it in ice and snow and he right away pitched it as a musical, which Disney hadn’t done a big musical since around The Lion King. They have done songs in, but not what a full musical has to be.

And they green lit it and then it got put on the shelf at one point for a whole year, and then brought out again, luckily. And right when it was brought out again I was writing Wreck-It Ralph. And what we do at Disney is anyone who has dealt with animation is very familiar with this. You screen the film and storyboard for them several times and you get a lot of notes from anyone in the studio. And I was giving notes on Frozen whenever they were doing a screening and they would give notes on Ralph.

**John:** Let’s talk about this. So, you’re watching an animatic. You’re watching the cut together boards for something and this was with temp voices, with real voices?

**Jennifer:** Some of it was temp.

**Aline:** You were not yet working on — ?

**Jennifer:** I was not.

**Aline:** Not yet working on Frozen. You were working on Wreck-It Ralph?

**Jennifer:** I was on Ralph, yes. And we were pretty far into Ralph at that point. When I started giving notes on Frozen I think we were a year out on Ralph. And you go in and sometimes it’s temp voices, like Josh Gad hadn’t been cast but Kristen Bell had been. And she is so amazing. She was one of those rare actors who can do the entire script in one recording.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Jennifer:** And over the course of a day and often we just bring them in in small chunks, but she’s incredible. So, her voice was there. But, no one else was cast. Even Idina, I think they wanted Idina but didn’t know if the character would be the right character for her. The Snow Queen was sort of spinning in this one-dimensional chaos of evilness, you know.

**John:** When you were seeing these animatics, going to these screenings, was it still called The Snow Queen? Had it already moved over to being called Frozen?

**Jennifer:** It was Frozen, when I came to Disney — I came to Disney in, god, when was it? Spring of 2012, no, ’11. I’ve lost all track of time with these two films.

**Aline:** Did the Frozen title come from Tangled? Was it inspired by that?

**Jennifer:** I think to some extent it was just in the fact that it was a great sort of all-encompassing title. But I think — and I’m kind of remembering back to what they’ve said — but the real reason was that they weren’t sure how true to the original story they were going to be. And, in fact, they were a lot farther away from the original story than we even ended up, which is saying a lot, because we’re still mostly just inspired by.

But they knew that the Frozen Heart was going to be there. That was a concept and the phrase, sort of an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart.

**Aline:** That was amazing.

**Jennifer:** That was the hook they had.

**Aline:** That was amazing.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely. And that’s what kind of drove the story. We always knew that there was going to be — and this came right from Chris Buck — that we were going to look at true love in a different way. They weren’t sisters. There was so much that hadn’t been figured out, but that was, I think, really what got the movie going.

**Aline:** When you say look at true love in a different way did you know it was not going to be romantic love?

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**Aline:** You knew that?

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** But you didn’t know it was going to be a sister thing?

**Jennifer:** Right. We hadn’t discovered that yet and we knew that Anna was going to save Elsa. We didn’t know how or why. And it was more of a redemption story at the time because Elsa was evil.

But it was a struggle. We were struggling a lot with tone. They were struggling a lot with good versus evil can take over the story. And it was just feeling — it was hard to make it fresh or different. And so they had a lot of problems, but at the same time you could see the potential.

And I had gone in to give notes. As I was winding down on Ralph I was sort of helping on other projects, just giving notes. And that was the first time Bobby and Kristen were a part of it. And we kind of really connected with what we were thinking.

**John:** So, at this point you’re watching these cuts and had Bobby and Kristen already written songs that were attempted in there.

**Jennifer:** They had done two songs which are not in the film. A portion of one, I think, is on like the deluxe soundtrack that you can hear. But one of them, there’s another song that someday people will hear, but it is so far from Elsa and who she ended up being, we found it hard to release it because we kind of, you know, right before you give the movie out — it feels like a betrayal of her, because she was so evil. And it was hard for us because we’re so protective of her as a real person, [laughs], which I guess you get right at that end before you give it to the world, you know.

**Aline:** I know you are trying to go carefully through the process, but I wanted to jump ahead just a little bit, because this idea of who is the villain in the movie is really interesting.

**John:** It’s fundamental.

**Aline:** It’s really fundamental, because sometimes when you’re working on stuff with a villain they’ll push, push, push to make it darker and more stark and less human. And there are sort of several antagonists in the movie, but there isn’t really a single clear bad guy because she is so nuanced and you know her. So, even though she is sort of the engine of the things that are opposing, she isn’t really a villain.

And then there are the other two sort of villain-ish characters, but that’s so interesting. How did that come about?

**Jennifer:** I feel like that was one of the biggest breaks that took the longest to get to. And it was that the story would fall into the same sort of tropes, like you just — it was really hard the minute she became evil it would take over. And, plus, Elsa being the Snow Queen, any time she’s on the screen she owned the scene. There was no secondary character to her. And it became very difficult to balance the two sisters, the story, and Anna as an interesting character. Because Elsa was just, you know, she’s larger than life and she would take over.

And then you’d make her evil and it was like that was the whole film. And one of the things that was a really big challenge for us was we wanted to get to that ending where Anna makes her choice to help her sister. Well, in order to get to that you have to buy into her going to Kristoff and do it in such a way where she doesn’t seem fickle. Like, it was just a nightmare to have to have these parallel stories and to support both in such a way where it’s that surprising but inevitable thing.

**Aline:** Right. Well, the thing you have to do which is amazing is you have to build to both things.

**Jennifer:** Right.

**Aline:** It’s sort of like the end of Casablanca or all those famous — also in that movie Suspicion, in the Hitchcock movie Suspicion they didn’t know if he was going to be the murderer or not, so they had to make the movie so that both endings would work. And that’s a funny thing because I thought, okay, she’s going to kiss him and that’s going to be…I’m okay. I’m all right with that. I like him and he’s unusual and they had a nice courtship and I enjoyed enough about it. And I’m all right with it.

And I didn’t really see another avenue, frankly. So, I was thinking, okay, here he comes and there’s going to be… — And so then that thing which really, I mean, we talked about it on the other podcast, on the live podcast, that was really the thing that just blew my mind. But you did it by — I don’t know how — I mean, I’m really curious how the process affects that. Because I don’t know how you’d get that through a conventional studio process.

**John:** Yeah, I really want to get into the process because this is so different than how most screenwriters would work.

**Aline:** Absolutely.

**John:** Usually you’re not seeing a version of something. There’s no sort of temp version of the movie that you’re trying to make. So, it’s all just the stuff on the page and then you hope it works on the page.

But you got to see something. You got to see something on the screen and say like, well that’s not working. And everybody sort of knew it wasn’t kind of fundamentally working.

So, what is the conversation you have with the people who have been making this thing up until this point to say, “This is what I think you need to do?” Was it a spoken conversation? Did you write up notes? What was your process?

**Jennifer:** Most of it is spoken and it was not me alone. Like once we show a screening, and we’ll show it to a lot of people, sometimes hundreds of people in the studio. A screening, just to give all departments a sense of what we’re doing because building the world is its own struggle in animation and takes a lot of time. So, they have to be working even when the story is not finished.

**Aline:** So, you need to carve out things that they can work on that you know are set.

**Jennifer:** Exactly, like building the environments and the artistry of it and the technology. So, they’re working on that simultaneously. But about 40 of us go into a room for several hours.

**John:** This is called an offsite?

**Jennifer:** That’s not even the offsite. Oh, the offsite.

**John:** I’ve heard legends of offsites.

**Jennifer:** Oh, gosh. I hope to take a break. We’ll go in a room for several hours, you know, John Lasseter is there, Ed Catmull, and all the other directors at the studio. Sometimes some Pixar directors. They’ll come down occasionally. And the other writers who are in the studio. And we will sit there and get bombarded with every note under the sun. We joke, it’s like they take your car apart completely and then they walk away.

**Aline:** They leave it on the lot.

**Jennifer:** And they leave it on the lot. And so you just have to take it. And what you’re looking for really are patterns and you’re looking for sort of what is the — usually it’s you can tell this character is not well developed yet because it’s all about this character: “I don’t know who she is; I don’t know what she wants; I don’t believe her; I don’t care about her.” So, they will call you out on everything.

And then you’ll get the random question of like, “What if there are dogs?” You know, they will say anything.

**Aline:** This is a good thing that I think is relatable to listeners of this which is when you’re in a situation that all writers have been when you’re getting bombarded by notes, if you’re a nice person also you have a tendency to be like, “I’ll do that, and that one, and that one, and that one.” And they’re often so competing. How did you cull that feedback to know, yes, this is right, and yes, this is…

— Because sometimes people are pointing at something and that’s not, it’s like a doctor, their knee hurt but it’s because they have some other really unrelated problem in their arm.

Like, you have to also diagnose, okay, this is what they’re saying.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely. And I think that’s the key. Because what’s also interesting about animation is a lot of studios didn’t have screenwriters traditionally. The story artists together would form the story. And part of it you look at some of the stories were much simpler. What was needed to build a full feature was much more straightforward. And not to belittle them, but just say it was a different time.

What audiences want now is much more complex films and that have what a screenwriter brings. And it has taken a bit to convince animation of that, but luckily —

**Aline:** Had you worked in animation before Ralph?

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

**Aline:** You had never worked before Ralph. That was your first experience with animation?

**Jennifer:** That was my first. And it was overwhelming coming in because there was this weird feeling of almost like the writer had the least authority in the scope of everything, and yet the writer was the one who had to solve the problems if they couldn’t be solved otherwise by a collective group. And that’s how it felt coming in.

The nice thing for me was that Rich Moore had worked in television. He really believed in the writer and I was working with Phil Johnston as well who is a nice strong, not afraid to stand up for things kind of guy. Taught me a lot. And so you really had to — my first experience with Ralph was a lot of time convincing a group of people that this is what the story needed.

And if I couldn’t knowing that’s not right. I mean, obviously if I can’t then there is something wrong with it. And it was a lot of — I had to trust that I was the one who knew the whole. I was the one protecting the characters. I was the one who that was my job and I had to do that, but then at the same time people would come in with this shiny new toy idea that if it’s entertaining or if it can add something unique you want to try to put it in.

And so you have to be flexible. And Ralph was like the best boot camp ever, but exhausting. And what made Frozen very different was two things. One is we had a very intense schedule. Ralph took about three years to make and Frozen, when I came on we essentially started over and we had 17 months. So, we were in a place of a lot of choices had to be made fast. And were given sort of —

**Aline:** And that can be great.

**John:** That can be great.

**Jennifer:** It can be.

**Aline:** I think it is. Yeah.

**John:** Deadlines are a huge help. But what you’ve described though, the life of a screenwriter is often as much your ability to convince other people or to hear other people and echo back what they’re saying in ways that actually serve the story and don’t serve that other interest. So, most of your time as a screenwriter wasn’t spent with you at a laptop staring at it, “What lines should Elsa say?” It was figuring out these bigger things with other people. And that collaborative nature is crucial.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

And I think that to me that was one of the biggest things I didn’t realize coming into the business, but I’m not afraid of anymore and I think thanks to Ralph and Frozen, but I think it’s crucial understanding that I think we — particularly when I work, because I was at Columbia just, I graduated in 2005, and how precious things are. And how dogmatic we can be about “this is my vision, this is what I need to hold onto,” and forgetting the side of it that to make a film is such a big collaborative experience, and there are a lot of stakes, and there’s a lot of money invested, and there are a lot of risks being taken. That if people can poke holes, and they will, it’s up to you to repair it.

And if you can’t, they’ll find someone who can. [laughs] You know, it’s like realizing that the writer’s role is tenuous.

**Aline:** But there also have to be moments where you say, “You know what? I appreciate that feedback, but I know that this is okay the way it is and I want to give this a shot and let’s see how this…”

You know, that’s the tricky balance because I do think most of us who do this were grade grubbers and we want that acknowledgment. And it takes a long time to say, you know, to think with your heart in addition to your head and sort of say to people this is what I feel.

**Jennifer:** But I think what John said, too, is the key, because he’s saying how it’s about convincing and getting better at that. I had an idea for Anna from the very beginning and it took almost a year to articulate it in the right way to get everyone on board.

And once I did, everyone was 100% on board. But what was driving me nuts is I knew it was right for her, but it was not resonating with anyone. And so I knew —

**Aline:** I’m not articulating as well.

**Jennifer:** And part of it is I would try the other things because that’s the nice thing about animation. Because you put it up on reels several times you can try things and say, “Sure, we’ll make her want this,” and then you know that it’s not going to work but it might lead to the answer.

But for me there was a day where I stood up with a little sheet of paper and I had this is Anna, this is what Anna’s journey is. No more than that. No less than that. This is Elsa. This is what her journey is. This is what the movie is about and why I want to make this movie.

**Aline:** Wow. I got a chill just hearing that.

**Jennifer:** But I had to do it. And it’s good when you have John Lasseter on your side, because I had met alone with him first and said, “This is what I want to say.” [laughs] You know, and he was very encouraging. But it taught me a lot about how to say it is just as important as what you’re trying to say. And I like to babble and I think everyone is coming along for the ride and they’re not. So…

**Aline:** Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about formally and maybe this gets you into your John Augustinian pieces of paper that I see here. What I loved, because again, like John, I did not know what the movie was except that it seemed like it would kill some of the family holiday time. And then I was so blown away by it. But one of the things that I think is a lesson you keep learning and is really valuable to people is something happens in that movie right away, right away.

I mean, there is a little prologue with the ice, but something happens with them right away. She almost kills her. Her power is uncontrolled. And you see their relationship and how much they love each other and how much they like to play.

And then something really dramatic happens right away. And people forget about that and you’ll read these scripts where it’s like the thing that happens is on page 18 and you’re just asking so much of people and I thought it was so — you revealed some character, and then something disastrous happened, and then you continued to — and it’s very confident to not lay out everything you have, every card, every piece of silverware on the table.

You introduce them. Then something happens. There’s this amazing narrative event. And then you continue to reveal sort of what’s going to happen between the two of them.

And that was so confident. I just thought breathtaking story wise because that’s a thing that people really — they forget about in stories is that you have to start off with an event that really has pretty big magnitude, you know.

**John:** Let’s start with how the story begins. What I would love to do is just take a look at the movie as it is finished and sort of look at what’s actually up on the screen and go through sort of why it’s working in story and what the goals are. And if we need to sort of go back in time to talk about sort of how stuff happens, but let’s pretend that we’re watching this movie that’s on the screen in front of us and sort of what’s going on there.

The very first shot of the movie is a really strange shot. It’s blurry and you’re not quite sure what it is. And ultimately it’s a saw coming through the ice and it’s people cutting these ice blocks apart. And it’s setting up your world and also the colors of your world. Because you think of Frozen being blues, but it’s actually a lot of pinks. And it very much sort of sets up what the world of our movie is going to be like.

So, we start with a song. The song is Frozen Heart. And it’s not my favorite song in the whole world. And it’s very much a Fathoms Below kind of song.

**Jennifer:** That’s exactly what it is. Yeah, you’re right.

**John:** It establishes the world. And no one remembers the —

**Jennifer:** And the Dumbo song, the work song in Dumbo. Those are two sort of —

**Aline:** I missed completely that the little boy —

**John:** Kristoff and Sven are in there.

**Aline:** I missed it completely. And my kids were the ones who pointed out, “Oh mom, he was there in the very first scene.

**John:** So, in the very first scene we see these men carving up the ice blocks and sort of the idea that you would carve up ice. For some kids it’ll be the first time they see that as a thing that you could possibly do.

But we see this little boy and a cute little reindeer and we think they’re going to be significant characters because they’re adorable. They’re chasing after — but we’re essentially establishing them in the world because they’re going to become important later on.

Then we go to nighttime. We see Anna climbing up into Elsa’s bed. They’re adorable. They’re incredibly sweet. They’re sisters. “Do you want to go play?” That’s when we first learn that Elsa has these powers and it’s just sort of matter of fact. There’s not a big whole talk about it. Just suddenly she’s able to do all these things and that’s just the way of it. Talk me through that process about her powers and figuring out how to explain them in the world. How much you were going to try to articulate what the limits of her powers were.

Also, I’m curious, the decision about when to age them up and sort of how long to keep them kids.

**Jennifer:** Sure. I’ll back up just in the sense of the opening with that song was — what we wanted to establish, we wanted the audience to know is people are going to sing, first off.

**John:** Crucial.

**Jennifer:** It’s like you have to know what this world is going to be.

**John:** This is a world where people do sing.

**Jennifer:** They sing. And then the symbolism of ice. This is going to be — ice is going to be physically here and it’s going to be symbolically here. And so they’re singing this song about sort of beware the frozen heart and this concept that ice is more powerful than men. So, buried in it is a lot of sort of “this is the film you’re going to see” without saying it, you know? It’s just kind of — and then the setting of going up into the Northern Lights and saying we’re somewhere north. And starting to build this world without saying it was important to us.

And also with Kristoff, what’s interesting, we have little Kristoff in there because what I love that I always think if you do watch it again is that in a weird way Anna, the choice that she made that night leads him to his family.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Jennifer:** And that there’s a connection between them, but yet it’s not in your face, but it’s just something that… — Because what I always loved about, particularly Pixar films for me, was that everything just added up. And everything had a special little, “Oh my god, oh my god, wait, and that, and that!” And it was my favorite thing and we wanted to make kind of every time we had a scene trying to say what is that that’s maximum, why is it here. If there’s anything extraneous we got to get rid of it.

But yet adding all that flavor, so that’s why. But to move onto Elsa, it was an exhausting process coming to the simplicity of her powers. At times we had a narration by a troll, who used to have a Brooklyn accent for no reason other than I miss Brooklyn. You know, no reason. But, we had this whole explanation like when Saturn is in this alignment with such-and-such on the thousandth year a child will be born and blah, blah, blah.

And then —

**John:** Ultimately you almost throw it away with one line. So, the line is just like, “Was she born with the powers or was she cursed?. And it’s born with it and that’s the last piece of it.

**Aline:** It’s so great.

**Jennifer:** And that’s it. But I think part of what it was is if anything about us felt like it was like, “Oh, god, like okay, we have to say this,” then we didn’t want to say it. And then also we found the more you explained the more questions you had about magic and the rules. It was like, argh. You know?

**Aline:** That’s so interesting. Having worked on stuff that has that, you drop a tiny seed of that it goes kerplunk, it explodes and takes over very quickly.

**Jennifer:** In a huge way.

**Aline:** So, you have so little of it but it’s so clear. And don’t you find that in the development process people are always trying to get you to explain, explain, explain.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely. Huge. And the first act was really what actually we produced last, except for the scene where Anna meets Kristoff, I mean Hans, in the boat. That was one of the earlier scenes that went into production, but everything else in act one was the last thing that we did.

**John:** Let’s move forward in time so we keep with the narrative of the actual story.

So, Anna and Elsa are playing. Elsa is building all these amazing snow things in the house, ends up zapping her sister. Her sister falls unconscious. Calls her mom and dad. You go and see the trolls and it’s the first sort of time we’re seeing there’s other magic in the world, so it’s not just the human world. There are trolls. There is something else that’s going on out there.

We get the warning about her powers. The one line of setup about her powers, that she was born with the powers. And the caution that they can save her this once, but she shouldn’t use these powers again. And she should be afraid of her powers. And really establishing the central theme of her journey which is to be afraid of who she is.

**Jennifer:** Well, and we always do, like to me that’s the scene. His name is Grand Pabbie, the troll, that he states the theme of the film. He just states it in reverse. He says fear will be your enemy. And in the way he has displayed it meaning fear will destroy you like as an external fear. And it makes her even more frightened. But what’s interesting about Pabbie and Bobby Lopez and I like to be slightly twisted sometimes, and that was one of our things where if you really listen to Grand Pabbie, he’s not telling her to not use her powers. He’s just saying you’re lucky it wasn’t her heart. And we’ve just got to remove it all because if we don’t there might be some left and that could hurt her, so I just want to remove even the memories. Let’s just clean her out.

And he says to her there’s beauty but also danger to your power. So, he’s just laying it out as it is and not saying you shouldn’t do this. But the humans go right there. And that tends to be — and as a parent sometimes you see it, because your instinct is my two children are together. One of them has issues controlling themselves and they hurt my other child. You start setting boundaries. And, of course, in this case it’s more extreme. But, what I like about the trolls is they kind of tell it like it is, but if you read into it it’s really the — if you look at it it’s really the parents making the decision for Elsa that we’re going to live in fear then. We’re going to do exactly what he just warned us about, which is fear will be your enemy, and we’re going to live in fear.

So, and it’s just, I think, a very human thing to do is to go to the negative reaction as the caution.

**Aline:** And the parents never get to learn the lesson.

**Jennifer:** No. Although there’s a whole fan base that has decided they crash on an island and they gave birth to Tarzan actually.

**John:** They’ll come back.

**Jennifer:** So, they die then.

**John:** Oh, that would be perfect.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, but that Tarzan — that’s my favorite of the connections.

**John:** So, one of the biggest narrative asks you make of the audience is that these memories are taken out, and so Anna remembers the joy she used to have with her sister but not that her sister has powers. And then as Elsa sort of essentially shuts the door and sort of gives her sister away, not wanting to hurt her, that Anna sort of loses her sister.

And so I’ve heard criticism both ways. Basically people saying like, well, that’s unrealistic, but I’ve also heard people say like that was my relationship with my older sister.

**Jennifer:** Well, it’s funny because that moment was the — I think every now and then we have to make these decisions where just have to do what you have to do. And I remember the screenwriters of Monsters Inc. and Monsters University, Dan and Rob, they — I was frustrated about dealing with the fact that I wanted to Anna to… — If the girls can’t remember, if Anna can’t remember the joy they had together, then there’s no reason to root for the relationship because it doesn’t mean anything.

But, we have to — if she remembers that her sister has powers people felt that she seemed selfish anytime she did anything for herself or stood up to her sister later. And so they said what I thought, it was the best thing just to get us through, was sometimes you just have to do what you have to do but just make a real point of it and the audience will go with it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** And it doesn’t always mean it. And I’ve always, like, “No, but…but…,” but the moment —

**Aline:** I think the best thing you can do in those situations is, you know, I’ve said if you can’t do it well do it quickly.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, and that’s the other thing.

**Aline:** Just do it. And also what I think people do is sometimes when they reach a narrative thing where there is a big buy they add a lot of corollary details. You just state it. That’s the way it is. She can remember this and not that.

Let’s keep going.

**Jennifer:** And let’s keep going. And that was the best advice just because even if it wasn’t — and I’m never going to think it’s perfect because I’m always going to personally bump on it — everything else went where it needed to go.

**Aline:** Works completely.

**John:** It was a necessary thing to do. And I think you couldn’t have done three of those in a row. We would have lost faith in you and the movie, but you got one and you used it really, really well.

**Jennifer:** That’s what they said. “Here’s your wild card. Go. We’ll buy it.”

**John:** And I think also it segues us nicely into the terrific first song, which is Do You Want to Build a Snowman? Which is both — this is really Elsa’s wish song. One of your protagonists, I’m going to say that — would you consider it a two protagonist story?

**Jennifer:** We do. We joke it’s a little, not to have the gall to say this, but just technically to say this, it’s a little Shawshank-y where it’s Anna’s story but it’s really about Elsa.

**John:** Exactly.

**Jennifer:** So, it is that. We go through her eyes, so she’s technically the protagonist, but the whole time it was that relationship.

**John:** But our heroine gets to sing her wish, which is Do You Want to Build a Snowman? And it’s a really terrific number. And my favorite moment that gave me goose bumps even as I was watching it and sort of like, “Well, that was well done,” at a certain point the mom and dad go off to sail to a foreign place and you see the waves, and you see the ship in the waves, and the waves come up higher and then the ship is gone. And that’s all you needed to do.

That shot plus really great music let you know that they were gone and that they were lost at sea. And you didn’t have to talk about it ever again.

**Jennifer:** But what’s so funny about that, and this is where I think Frozen is in this weird place, all of that wouldn’t — it’s like here is this story that kind of turns some sort of fairytale things on its head, and yet those fairytale things allowed us to do things that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. You know, her falling in love immediately, we buy it —

**Aline:** It’s a trope.

**Jennifer:** Because it’s a trope. The parents dying, it’s a Disney movie. [laughs] And the parents are going to die.

**Aline:** They’ve got to be dead. I find it shocking they’re not already dead. Yeah.

**Jennifer:** And it’s like there are things that we were able to do that we didn’t have to overdo.

**John:** Well, I think talking about tropes and expectations is really crucial because it’s both a princess movie and it’s defeating the expectations of a princess movie, but it has to sort of be the princess movie so it can overcome it.

**Jennifer:** Overcome it.

**Aline:** That’s what David Frankel’s term for this is. It’s the “cake and eat it, too” movie. Where you get to do all the things that are in the genre and then you get to completely spoof and work against them. And that’s a great gift because the genre expectations kind of — the audience likes them but dreads them in a way because it feels expected. And so the fact that you’re also working against them gives you that sense of inevitable and surprising, which is what you’re always working towards.

And, really, that was the thing that blew my mind about it was how many times it does that. How many times you think, “Oh, I’ve seen this before…oh, this is completely different.” That’s what blew my mind about it.

**John:** What’s also fascinating about Do You Want to Build a Snowman is that because it’s a song you can build a longer sequence. So, it’s not just a bunch of little short scenes. And so you can go through a period of many years. You can age the character up and so you go from the little girl Anna to a teenage Anna to the Kristen Bell Anna over the course of a song, which is just remarkable change.

**Jennifer:** What’s amazing to me, that song was cut and everyone missed it so much. And the reason it was cut was the first versions of it were so sad. The whole thing was sad. And it was so — there was so much exposition that we couldn’t split it up. And it was just too complicated. But, nothing was resonating and it was such an important sequence.

You had to establish so many things, like who is Anna, what kind of girl is she. What is Elsa’s life like now? Her shutting her out, what does Anna want? Like you had to do all of this. If it hadn’t been a song it never would have worked. But what the song had — what we had to do, I remember the day Bobby flew out for it, Bobby Lopez, and we sat down and said what does Anna sound like. And then it was the [hums], and then it’s like what does Elsa sound like?

**John:** [hums]

**Jennifer:** And it’s got a little bit of Let it Go in it. And they were two separate things. And they worked with Christophe Beck as well. So, we had Anna’s story, Elsa’s story, and it was different music. So, we were able to start segmenting the storytelling. Then, with the first two first versus really what we were trying to show was Anna’s personality. Even though you know what her want is, the way she would sing into the keyhole —

**John:** That’s a crucial moment.

**Jennifer:** And then how she would throw herself over furniture and that her friends are these portraits. All of that setup is what made us be able to save the song because we were all like “I want to kill myself” by the end of that song because it was so like —

**Aline:** So you made it less sad by making her sort of an imp.

**Jennifer:** Yes. And saying this is the girl that you’re going to go on the journey with. These are things about her that you can laugh in her loneliness, I mean, and that’s very Anna. But that was the hardest, I mean, a lot of songs came and went, but that one was the one we all believed in and couldn’t make work for the longest time. And it was because it was so much. It had to do so much.

**John:** But it ends up being a crucial song later on.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**John:** Because it’s the only song that you really reprise heavily and change the lyrics through new circumstance.

**Jennifer:** Throughout the, yeah.

**John:** So, coming off of that we have the grown up characters, it’s going to be the coronation of Elsa. She is going to become the queen of this place. I’m sure there was talk at a certain point like who the hell was running the kingdom in all this time. There was some sort of regent —

**Jennifer:** Ha! We did have a regent. We had him. He turned into, and I love it because I wrote a character and I wrote it for what’s his name, Louis C.K. I wanted him so badly in the film. I just wanted him in the film. But the first act is so heavy, it’s still heavy. There’s so much in it.

One of the issues with the film, and this jumps to the end for a second though —

**John:** What are you defining as the first act? Are you defining when you she runs off into the mountains is the end of the first act?

**Jennifer:** The end of the first act is, yes, when she goes after Elsa, and right before Let it Go. And Let it Go is kind of this in between, because really the second act starts with Anna, as it should, but yet we have this song. But the end, that last moment where she sacrifices herself for her sister, I remember, Ed Catmull when I started on the film he said, “You can do whatever you need to do the film, anything you want, but you’re earning that moment.” And we still didn’t know how we were getting to it. At that point it was some big battle scene between snowmen. It was such a weird route to get to that moment.

But he said you can do whatever you want, but you have to earn that moment. And he’s like, “And if you do, it will be fantastic. And if you don’t, the movie will suck.” And that’s the only, he’s like, “Bye,” and it’s so him to say that, but I mention that because part of the reason the first act was so hard was because we were telling a much more complex story than really we felt like we could fit in this 90-minute film.

So, everything in the first act was over-analyzed, over-scrutinized. And it’s the maximum it can be without being more. And that meant things like who was in charge — we don’t have time for that. It’s not important to the story so we have to get it out. So, there are a lot of little things like that.

**John:** And that’s a case where I think Disney princess logic actually really helps you a lot, because you don’t have the expectation that anyone actually has to run the kingdom.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And the funny thing to me. I’m like, she’s 21. Why not 18? Well, because I want Anna to be 18. You know, it’s like those little things that we just had to do to say what matters to the story versus being logical, but it’s hard because you’ve got 15 people who part of their jobs in the story room is to beat on the logic of your ideas. So, that was fun.

**John:** That was fun. But, for the first time in forever the gates are going to be opening up. There’s new people coming here. It’s the first time we actually see a bunch of people. It’s a busy city and you sort of see what the universe is like.

You establish Elsa’s fear. She’s trying to hold the scepter without it turning to ice. She’s worried she’s going to freak out. but then Anna meets the cute boy and they fall in love and they have a very literal meet-cute with a horse and a boat and all this stuff.

At what point did Hans become a villain? And, I mean —

**Jennifer:** [laughs] Hans is a villain from the minute he hits her with the horse, in my mind.

**Aline:** Really?

**Jennifer:** But I am slightly a sociopath, I think. He’s just calculating from that moment. Go ahead.

**John:** But I assumed in the second viewing — first off, I was really surprised at the ultimate reveal that he’s a villainess character. But I thought like I must have misremembered. And so then I watched it the second time through and it’s like you gave us nothing.

**Jennifer:** No, I know. I know.

**Aline:** But you know what? That is another example of “cake and eat it too,” because the truth is some of those prince/princess romances are creepy. It’s creepy how generic those men are. And it’s creepy how fast the princesses fall for them. And it’s creepy that nobody questions it.

**Jennifer:** We buy it. Right. Exactly.

**Aline:** And it is amazing how in those movies often that’s the thing that makes you kind of roll your eyes is like this sort of instant connection. And there is something kind of, you know, if you met those guys there would be something a little too perfect and creepy about them. And so it has that thing where it does exactly what you want the genre to do, but it actually unveils this kind of seamy side to those guys.

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s interesting was it was a big — there was a lot of debate about that, not when to give it away. And John Lasseter particularly really didn’t want to. He loved it so much not to that he would push to the extreme sometimes where my sociopathic mind would break down because I’d be like, no, no, no, he wouldn’t do that because he’s calculating.

So, I had to literally walk through every scene, what’s going on in his head for real, and at least I could — like when he says, the first time when he finds out she’s princess and drops to his knees. Before that she’s just a girl. But the key moment is when she says, “It’s just me.” And he goes, “Just you?”

And that’s like inside he’s going, “Ooh, you don’t think very highly of yourself, do you? Well, I’m gonna…”

**Aline:** Terrific. Great news for a narcissist.

**Jennifer:** It’s all very sick and twisted deep down.

**John:** But clearly he’s a very talented sociopath.

**Jennifer:** He’s very talented. He’s charming. He mirrors everyone. And actually the original story had a lot to do with mirrors. And in many iterations of the story we talk about mirrors and we bring them up. And so I held on a little to that, what Hans is is a mirror as a lot of charming, but hallow or sociopathic.

**Aline:** And she’s also so lonely.

**Jennifer:** She’s lonely.

**Aline:** That it’s like she’s falling in love with her reflection in the pond, yeah.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, exactly. And he mirrors her and he’s goofy with her. He’s a little bit more bold and aggressive with the Duke, because the Duke is a jerk, so he’s a jerk back. And with Elsa he’s a hero.

**Aline:** I really like it because their love song is so quick and so declaratory that I was thinking, “God, I mean, I’m buying this. I’m buying this because I’m enjoying this, but man this is awfully fast.” And then I thought, well, this is just a trope of the genre, so it’s okay. So, I’m thrilled that it turned out to be, because that really is —

**Jennifer:** It’s another song that we had to have and I was going nuts, because to me there was one too many songs in the beginning and I — if you talk about like can’t find your way out, I couldn’t my way out of it. I just couldn’t find a way that we didn’t need everything we had. So…

**John:** Because really For the First Time in Forever and Love is an Open Door, they’re the same kind of song overall.

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re basically sort of like what it feels like to be me. But there’s the fun cute two-hander. We haven’t seen that kind of thing. Their chemistry was really terrific. You’re establishing sort of what it is. And you’re buying that this girl might say yes at the end of this song. That’s the crucial thing is she’s going to say yes to a proposal.

**Jennifer:** Right. She’s so lonely.

**John:** Because like, yeah, it’s a great idea. This is a fantastic idea. And the luxury you have is that not 20 minutes later someone is going to hang a lantern on like, “Wait, this is a stupid idea. How can you possibly do that?” which they never say in a Disney movie which is so remarkable.

**Jennifer:** Right.

**John:** So, Love is an Open Door, the proposal happens, they tell Elsa, “Oh, we’re going to get married.” “That’s a stupid idea.” She freaks out. Big catastrophic snow icy thing. Her powers are revealed and she runs off.

This is the moment where, I don’t know, I guess Hunchback of Notre Dame has the same quality where like he seems like the villain, the community believes that he is the villain. What was the discussion around this point?

**Jennifer:** It was another scene — the scene where Elsa flees, we call it, there was a lot of debate of that scene and then the one after where Anna goes after her about what needed to be and how much of a monster should she feel like, how aggressive should people be.

And really we ended up giving a lot of it just to the Duke as a representation. And this is where we talk about the villain and not having a villain.

**Aline:** He’s villain-ish.

**Jennifer:** It’s having these antagonistic forces and to us like the real villain is fear. And so what we did is take all the characters and as antagonistic characters they hang off of fear. So, he goes to the ultimate fear, she’s a monster, points fingers. And Elsa lives in fear —

**Aline:** A fear of her own self.

**Jennifer:** Fears herself. And then there’s someone like Hans who exploits it. I mean, he exploits love, too. So, every character plays off of — I should say fear and love. And Kristoff is the honest goods. Anna is fearless, actually, and all her faith is in love but she has to learn what that is.

So, it was our way of creating the constant villainess forces. But we felt like just having the — people could be frightened, but just having the chatter of “Get her!” or something, it just was, it was too complex. And it was too like why are they going right there? Why do they hate her? And just giving it to the Duke just gave Elsa the signal to go.

And from there I don’t think she sees herself as —

**Aline:** Well she doesn’t know what she’s done, which is really interesting.

**Jennifer:** That’s why. Because she doesn’t know what she’s done.

**Aline:** Does not realize what she’s done for a good portion of that. She thinks she’s just going off to hide.

**Jennifer:** [Crosstalk] I think if Anna — if it were much more of an extreme reaction Anna wouldn’t have just thought, “I’ll just go and bring her back.” It would have been too complicated. So, I – just like, just keep it about this moment as the girls being divided and being separated from each other.

**Aline:** It’s gorgeous visually. It’s amazing.

**Jennifer:** Oh, thank you. I will say our head of story, Paul Briggs, came up with one of my favorite things in the movie which is the run across the water.

**John:** It’s beautiful.

**Aline:** Amazing.

**Jennifer:** And turning into ice. And that moment. And that was the second sequence to go into production from the first act was that one because when we had that we were like —

**Aline:** Home run.

**Jennifer:** We were like that has to be it. [laughs] It can’t be anything else.

**Aline:** The sound of the ball hitting the bat heading for the bleachers.

**John:** Let’s talk about Let it Go, because it’s clearly a crucial thing. Without that moment you don’t understand who Elsa is or sort of what her journey is. And what point in the process did Let it Go come to be?

**Jennifer:** Let it Go came in about 15 months from finishing. It was the first song that landed in the film and was in the film. And it was an amazing moment. I remember, you know, we had spent a lot of time talking about Elsa and we were still going on the villain journey, which was killing me to try to figure out how to make that work and then redeem her. And have a love story. I was dying. [laughs]

And we just said, “Let’s talk about who she is. What would it feel like?” And Bobby and Kristen said they were walking in Prospect Park and they just started talking about what would it feel like. Forget villain. Just what it would feel like.

And this concept of letting out who she is that she’s kept to herself for so long and she’s alone and free, but then the sadness of the fact that the last moment is she’s alone. It’s not a perfect thing, but it’s powerful. And they came in with the demo of Let it Go and it’s exactly word-by-word the exact song.

**Aline:** Wow. You’re kidding.

**Jennifer:** Exactly. And we — half of us were crying. And then I just went, “I have to rewrite the whole movie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Jennifer:** I really, it was — I was just like I’m going to go lie down for a couple minutes. But it was the best thing. We knew we had the movie.

**Aline:** It captures such a moment for girls and women which is sort of the — really is the song where you go in your room and you close the door and you sing to yourself in the mirror, you know, “I’m going to be who I’m going to be. I don’t care about anybody else.” I mean, it really, really captures such a great I think particularly female moment.

I have a question about it which is in the sort of thing where she transforms herself she becomes so sexy.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Aline:** And what I had sort of admired up until then was how kind of sporty they were, especially Anna, how sporty she was. And then all of a sudden she was sort of pageanty and she has the slit and everything. Tell me about that.

**Jennifer:** Well, I can tell you. What’s interesting, that actually we did a lot of push and pull. There were two things we were feeling. One is that freedom moment where you strut and you just go for it. And I was fine with that and that was great. There was a lot of pull of, I will say from the guys, of loving her as the — every man in the studio, and some of the women, were in love with Elsa.

We used to joke like just put Anna in a closet. Just push her. There was one shot where someone was like, “Can you push Anna further back, further back?” And I was like, “Just take her off, just get her out of the stick. Just go stick her outside.” Because Elsa was — everyone was seduced by her. And so there was this tug of war I think, a bit, of letting people have a little — people who wanted to have that a little and not be afraid of it, but not make it a sexual statement. It’s more a moment of, for me, it was like you strut and you say nobody is looking, this is what I’m going to — I’m not going to be afraid of my sexuality. I’m not going to be afraid of who I am. I’m not going to be afraid of anything about myself.

**Aline:** But her sexuality is definitely part of it. It’s text.

**Jennifer:** And it’s definitely become, I think what we have found is the reaction to it has been bigger than what we had thought it was. But, that’s okay. It’s a moment that was — so many people worked on it that it was, yeah.

**Aline:** It’s the way she’s walking and the way it’s lit, it feel different. The depiction of the women’s bodies feels different in that moment.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** Even before or after that.

**Jennifer:** It’s so funny because also it was animated — half of it was animated by a woman, half was animated by a man. And my favorite thing about it though is the actual model for doing it was John Lasseter. Not a woman. Because we got him — he was so moved by Let it Go. He knew every line and what he thought it meant. And he was a huge help in talking through how we translate that emotional journey, not just with Idina’s voice, but with the animation. And for him he got up and he’s like, “Let’s, all that uptight, bottled up down and her hair goes, and she transforms, and she struts,” and he’s doing it. He’s acting it out.

And so it was really, he was the inspiration which his ironic —

**Aline:** To picture him in that dress.

**Jennifer:** Well, I have a lovely caricature by John Musker of John in that dress.

**John:** Ha!

**Aline:** Oh, you do?

**Jennifer:** Someday maybe I can share.

**Aline:** Oh my god, that’s great.

**John:** Well, what’s fascinating is it’s a sexual outfit, but she’s not actually a sexual character.

**Jennifer:** No, she’s not.

**John:** She doesn’t even talk to a boy other than Hans for a brief second. So, it’s not that she’s trying to seduce a man. There’s man around for her to seduce.

**Jennifer:** But I do think it was a moment that we weren’t hiding from the sexual aspect of it, but it wasn’t the statement, but people have seen it that way so I think we have to own that. Like saying, yeah, it was there.

**Aline:** Also, it’s the story of your older sister is coming into this time in her life and you kind of need to be separated from her because she’s going through things that you don’t understand and that your parents are sort of like that’s none of your business, honey, don’t look at that.

**Jennifer:** That’s true.

**Aline:** And then all of a sudden she’s coming to this flowering and the younger sister doesn’t understand it and there is this divide that happens. I mean, a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl —

**Jennifer:** It’s huge.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** And, you know, I didn’t want to shy away from — the thing is the original material is actually a lot about sex. And it’s about the sexual awakening.

**John:** Because all Hans Christian Andersen stuff is about sex.

**Jennifer:** I know. It’s true. It’s true. And we weren’t going there. I mean, that’s not the story we were telling, but at the same time I think my whole thing with this film was wanting sincerity. So, even though like I say we take tropes and then we spin them upside down, even in the tropes of sincerity —

**Aline:** You’re not spoofing.

**Jennifer:** Not spoofing. And that in every one of these things there is that mix. And I wanted these girls to feel real. I mean, even Anna’s sort of romantic relationships, it’s like the one with Kristoff, I like at the end that she kisses him first and he asks permission. And it feels a lot more real. But she’s not — I mean, she’s out in public. She kisses him on the dock. Like it’s a little — she’s pushing it. I don’t think there would be one second where she wouldn’t say, “We shouldn’t kiss here,” because that’s not Anna.

**John:** That’s not Anna.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** And I think we didn’t want to make these girls uptight, but at the same time I wasn’t certainly trying to make a sexual statement. But it just wasn’t trying to avoid, I guess you could say. But you could tell in the studio there was — the boys loved he I will say. Let’s just say that.

**John:** Let’s talk about Kristoff because we’re just about to meet him.

So, we sort of get into our Romancing the Stone aspect of the journey which is that she hooks up with a guy who can take her up the mountain to find her sister. And so this is Kristoff. He has his reindeer, Sven. Reindeers are Better than People. Does Sven ever talk?

**Jennifer:** Sven does not talk. Kristoff is talking for him.

**Aline:** I loved that.

**Jennifer:** That came…we wanted…because here’s the theory, and this I think came from Chris Buck is you only need one special talking thing per movie, meaning like if it’s all the animals the animals it’s all the animals. But you’ve got a snowman who’s magical and he talks. And it’s like — and then Sven talked, too. That’s where you say you put too magic on top of —

**John:** Hat on a hat.

**Jennifer:** Hat on a hat. But we were saying how do we — we knew we wanted to have him pantomime and things. And you don’t want to not do that in animation. You want to exploit it. It’s so much fun to do. It’s like if you didn’t the animators would just be like, “Why am I even here?” You know? [laughs]

But were just talking one day about confessing how a lot of us talk for our pets. And I’m like, I talk for my cats. And Chris has different voices for his three dogs. And that’s the kind of thing a lonely guy who lived in the woods with his reindeer would do. So, that’s where that came from. And it was just something we hadn’t seen, you know, which is always the hard thing, I think, where you haven’t seen.

**John:** Absolutely. And this is also where we meet our second male character. We met our snowman…

**Jennifer:** Olaf.

**John:** Olaf. I forgot his name. Olaf is his name.

**Jennifer:** That’s okay.

**John:** And Olaf is great.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**John:** Olaf is so just odd and cheerful and his song is not necessary in any way, but just delightful. So, his song, In Summer, is one of my favorite things.

**Aline:** Oh my god. I really had one of those, you know, when you’re watching a movie where I’m like I’m really loving this, this can’t get any better. And then it goes into that. It was just…

**John:** It was like a clean South Park moment.

**Aline:** Yeah! I mean, it was unbelievable.

**John:** We have a character who is so deluded about how the world works, and yet is just completely chipper and cheerful.

**Aline:** Oh my god, and I have boys, a 10-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy, and they just like, wow, when that happened. And just the spirit of him and the comedic strength of him. I just watched them just go like, wow.

**Jennifer:** That’s amazing.

**Aline:** Really magically interesting to them.

**John:** On a second viewing I did look like, well, what if you took Olaf out of the whole thing. And there are ways you could write it, there is a way you could write him out of the movie completely. But yet he provided that extra sort of — that just extra little something that was so important. Because things would get so dark without him to just be happy, and bright, and smiling.

**Jennifer:** The thing about Olaf is he was by far, for me, the hardest character to deal with. And I say that because when I came on, when I went to see a screening, people are going to hate me, when I saw the screening — I wasn’t on the project yet — every time he appeared I wrote, “Kill the f-ing snowman.” I just wrote kill him. I hate him. I hate him.

And part of it was, you know, we didn’t have Josh yet. And that’s a huge thing, obviously. And it wasn’t the scratch artist, he was great, but it was that he was — he wanted to be a shoulder because Elsa had these guards. He was half-good and half-bad. He was acerbic. He was a little, I don’t know, he just was kind of mean at times. And I didn’t know why he existed and I didn’t like him.

**Aline:** He does a funny thing that I don’t think I’ve seen. This is not even a trope that I haven’t seen. He’s sort of doing Mystery Science Theater on the movie from inside the movie, and I can’t think — can you think of anything else like that where he’s sort of doing a running commentary on everything that’s happening?

**Jennifer:** And so what happened with him is we really had to start over and we said sort of how does a snowman think? You go that, like snow is pure, so we started thinking innocence. And that’s what led us to him being sort of a representation of the girls when they were little. That they create this, “Hi, I’m Olaf and I like…” They create the snowman together when they’re the happiest.

**Aline:** He’s that spirit.

**Jennifer:** He’s that spirit. And so when she creates him magically, not realizing he’d come to life, he had to be a kid. And there was a while where we almost had, we were looking at younger, like is it a teenage boy, is it a young boy? But, I think we found just, no, when they built him they built this snow Man, so he’s encompassing what that fantasy play was for them.

**Aline:** But it’s another great fun thing of the genre which is, well, guys, we’ve got to have a sidekick, a comedic sidekick. We’ve just got to do it.

**Jennifer:** And he definitely started as that, totally.

**Aline:** And so give that and given that that is such trammeled ground, you know, every animated movie seems to do that in a different way, I could see that you were looking for ways to use him in ways that he hadn’t been used before, because he doesn’t really deliver a lot of the sort of homilies that you think are going to come from that character.

He doesn’t have that.

**John:** He has no deep well of wisdom that’s —

**Aline:** Which normally that character would. Just to me it’s sort of like an alt comic that wanders into the movie and does this commentary. And it’s funny because I think it makes the movie safer for boys, for sure.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** Which is why he’s so prominent in the marketing.

**Jennifer:** We wanted to get to him a lot sooner and have more of him. Obviously for those kinds of reasons. But, again, whenever, and I’m sure you guys find this, too. Whenever you try to force something on, it’s obvious for every second of it that you’re doing that. And he just didn’t belong until he showed up. And he belonged to me, him showing up was the moment for Anna of hope again. It’s that moment of like you’ve just survived this wolf chase. What are you doing? I hope you know what you’re doing.

And they walk ahead and there is everything of why she’s doing it. It’s her sister. I mean, that childhood innocence.

**Aline:** But they also parent the snowman.

**Jennifer:** And they parent, yeah.

**Aline:** So, it’s a big part of their romance.

**John:** It’s a way of bringing them together.

**Jennifer:** Totally. And to me it shows — that’s where you start to see there’s more to this guy. And he is not perfect. He doesn’t try to flirt. He doesn’t try to be anything but what he is, but the more you get to know him then you realize, like they say finally in the Troll song, he’s the honest goods. And I think Olaf helps with that.

So, for me he very much earned his place, and yet I was terrified because he is a character that I think — and Josh thinks this, too, we’ve talked about this a lot. He works when he plays off of other people. That’s just what he is. Because that’s his whole reason for being. He brings joy to other people. He exists because of this relationship. And then when you take him alone he just doesn’t have that same — you don’t feel the same thing. And so it took us a long time because wanted to say, “Let’s put Olaf and make him a host of this, and do this.”

And for us, both Josh and I were like, “We’re feeling wrong about it.” And the minute we add one of the other characters, it’s a joy. And so I love that we figured that out, because it was like we kept trying to say why where for so long did he not work for us and then all of a sudden he did. And it was like he just fits with this group and he is somebody who brings — it’s like he brings joy to other people. He’s not in and of himself some sort of iconic character.

**John:** So, one of the most surprising things that happens next is Anna gets to Elsa, which you sort of think of the quest of the movie, well eventually they’re going to get there and it will all be resolved by then. But at the midpoint of the movie —

**Jennifer:** That’s a good point, yeah.

**John:** They actually get there and they have the conservation and The First Time in Forever and then like things seem like they’re going to be okay.

**Aline:** God, another great tip for writers which is you can just go and do it.

**John:** Don’t delay it. Actually just start it. And it surprises you because you’re not expecting, you know, you establish a journey. So, like, oh, the journey is to get there. And like, oh, but we’re here. And so what else can happen? Well, she can shot in the heart with it and Elsa can refuse to change and shut them out and build an abominable snowman and sort of become more monstrous herself.

She doesn’t attack them literally, but she builds something that does attack them and sort of sends them down, back down a mountain.

**Jennifer:** Well, I think it shows you the part — for me it was like showing you the part of her that is still damaged. And like a lot of us, get damaged by moments in childhood. You know, being free felt wonderful, but she has right in the present “I could kill, I could hurt, and you have to go.” And then that fear takes over so much that obviously it hurts her and then it literally chases her out, in a way, if you look at it that way.

And that’s where you understand that, oh, we’re nowhere near resolving this relationship or, and wait a minute, things are — it’s the side of her powers that say there’s a great danger to them. And we had just done the beauty and we had seen her dangerous as a little child, but it’s still whimsical and accidental, but to see the fact that her emotions could create this spinning storm that hurts Anna you start to go, oh god, what more can she do?

And it is where I feel like her powers become villainess, but she doesn’t. But in having it — what’s interesting is the heart moment, where her heart is struck, was originally in the first act, and it was deliberate. And it was when she was evil and it’s when the girls were divided in a different way. But the whole second act was about Anna trying to get to Hans and to kiss him and then Elsa trying to stop her. And that was the whole second act.

**John:** That would have been a terrible movie. I’m glad you didn’t make that movie. That would not have worked.

**Jennifer:** [laughs] Well, the issue — the biggest thing I’ll say is it was an action-adventure film and that’s not — you can’t make a musical with that.

**John:** No.

**Jennifer:** And so it had to change, but we loved the concept of Frozen Heart, symbolically, and when we moved it to the midpoint is when we were like, oh, we can keep it because we wanted it at some point.

**John:** It’s the right idea, just that wouldn’t have worked —

**Jennifer:** It couldn’t sustain a whole film. That’s what we found.

**John:** So, leaving here we go back to see the trolls again. We see Kristoff’s adopted family and that’s when we realize that this early moment we saw where the boy was looking at the stuff, they actually stayed with those trolls and the trolls are real to him and all that stuff.

We talked about sort of the alt comic who walked into the movie, this is another great moment with Olaf, you know, whispering out the side of his mouth, “We need to get out of here. I’ll stall. You run.”

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s good is that was another John Lasseter moment though. Literally to the point where — because we were saying the joke is — there’s no joke because we know that the trolls are going to wake up. We’ve seen them wake up. And there was a time where pitched sort of you never saw them wake up so when you go there you didn’t know. But it just was like — the beginning is so complicated and it raised too many other questions.

But we said watching Olaf misunderstand we can have a lot of fun. And John Lasseter is the one who literally acted out the side of his mouth. And I caught him in the hallway because nobody was getting it. I’m like, “Could you just do it?” And I videotaped him doing it. And the animator had that and watched that. So, we will all watch it and we see John in that moment. [laughs]

**John:** What I like about this moment, this is the moment when I first watched the film when I realized like, wait, do I want her to end up with Hans, or do I want her to end up with Kristoff? And that’s a strange thing to happen in a princess movie, because a princess movie there should be like one prince that she should be with. It should always be the prince. But there’s this other guy and they’re trying to push these two together.

**Aline:** Again, that’s a trope which is the you meet the perfect guy and then you meet the kind of weather-beaten, not as handsome guy, you meet Jon Cryer — with Andrew McCarthy and then you meet Jon Cryer.

**Jennifer:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yes, but when those happen I should have already disliked the perfect guy. I should have already seen his flaws. I should have seen why he’s not perfect. And yet every time that we’re going back to see him —

**Aline:** But Pretty in Pink is a good example because initially she ended up with Duckie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** I knew it!

**Aline:** They changed that. They changed it. And so he was actually — whatever villainous stuff they had with Andrew McCarthy they must have pulled out. But he’s the same thing. It’s that slightly bland, handsome-y guy.

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s interesting about it for us is it wasn’t just about withholding Hans’ reveal. We knew where we were headed, which was her trying to get to Kristoff. But if you feel it too early then you’re just waiting for her to kiss Hans and it doesn’t work. Like you’re just waiting for it, and you’re not invested in it. But so it had to be this slow build where you really don’t feel — in my mind I never quite felt that moment until when she looks back at him and he looks at her through the door, right before Hans.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** And the goal was to — it’s coming, but is it?

**Aline:** You don’t feel like you’re ahead of them like let’s just get together already. Yeah.

**John:** But by establishing the expectation in people’s mind that like, oh, she thinks she’s going to have to kiss Hans, but she should really have to kiss Kristoff, you’re not thinking of any other options.

**Aline:** That’s the great thing. You think that’s the twist.

**Jennifer:** You’re not thinking about the…that’s the key. And we needed to feel that —

**Aline:** Double twist.

**Jennifer:** What you need to feel is her feeling something but not quite understanding it so that she doesn’t then seem like, “Well he doesn’t love me, I’ll like him.” What it is is there’s an awakening and you’re sensing it, but it’s not 100%. Because the minute it is it deflated. And that’s what made, to me, the Fjord moment we were headed for so hard. It wasn’t literally until we screened it in June — that was our last screening — so the last change. And Ed hadn’t seen it, because we had done an internal screening but he wasn’t there.

And then we screened it in Arizona for two audiences and he was there. And it was still only half animated, but the story was there. And he came out and he just said, “You did it.” And I went, boom, I mean, not literally, but emotionally I collapsed because — and it was because it was so nuanced. Anything we tried, it’s like you tip it and then it would suck, and then you tip it and it would suck. And it was just like can we build it?

**Aline:** How do you keep your sense of what’s working and what’s not working after you’ve been exposed to the same material so much over time, over time, over time? How do you do that?

**Jennifer:** God. I guess, I don’t know. How do you? I feel like it’s just trust. Because there are things, like for me Olaf was so challenging that I never could get that out of my head as to — never say is this working. I only knew what it needed to be. And I had to have faith and people were reacting right to it. But, I think that — and that’s always a danger in animation because we joke it’s the “Shiny New Toy Syndrome.” You get tired of a sequence and you want to change it because you’ve seen it so many times. But I think it’s a trust of —

**Aline:** Yup.

**Jennifer:** And it’s also a desperation of like —

**Aline:** Also true in comedy. You get sick of your own jokes. And then you start to look for other stuff. And they’re still —

**Jennifer:** And I’m still learning comedy. I mean, for me, I was a dramatic screenwriter. Everything that I’ve done is an independent, my options, nothing was a comedy. And Phil Johnston only worked in comedy, but we worked together all the time.

We met every week in school and then after school even, once we graduated, and we gave notes on each other’s material and we worked on each other’s stuff. So, there was this understanding of each other’s sensibility. But Ralph was the first comedy I worked on and then to have Frozen just me, without him, I was terrified.

And I still, you know, I still can’t — I cringe, I’m freaked out, and so I think comedy is the most insanely hard. It’s the craziest thing to have to do. It’s torturously hard. For me, anyway. I don’t know, maybe not for you.

**Aline:** No, it is. It’s very hard. But I think it is hard when you work on material over, and over, and over again, you have moments of being like, well, I don’t know. I have no idea.

And I’ve definitely had moments on stuff that was good where I tried to cut it, or get rid of it.

**Jennifer:** Oh, I did that a lot.

**Aline:** I saw an early cut of one of my movies and I went back and said, “Well this has to go, and that, and that, and that, and we’re cutting this and that and that.” It’s like I wanted it to be a 13-minute movie because there were only a few things that I liked. And I really admire, there are people who can read a script over again and watch a movie over again with fresh eyes and that’s very hard to do. It’s something you have to train yourself to do. Sort of like wipe out all your associations with something and try and feel it again. It’s tough. It’s tough.

**Jennifer:** I had a hard time. And it was always Olaf for me. He was the hardest. And I think possibly because he is a true comedic character and I’m not comfortable. I can do it, but it’s hell.

**Aline:** So, he improvised “I have no skull and no bones?”

**Jennifer:** No, that I did. I will say I did write that. [laughs]

**Aline:** Okay that, because I had read somewhere that that was improvised. That — if you wrote that — that is A+, A+.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That seems like it’s improvised. That is an A+…

**Jennifer:** How I could always get around, it’s a cheat I felt like, was because I love and I personally love — state the obvious humor that’s — and when you say it’s like he’s constantly, it’s like he’s doing this running commentary. I just personally like it. In Wreck-It Ralph I did a bit with Felix and with this character Gene.

**Aline:** That’s a joke that’s so good that I laughed through the whole scene. That scene ended and then the other scene started and I was still laughing about that line. When I watched it the second time I realized how much stuff I had missed just because I was so — it’s one of those things where you’re just really in the movie. You’re like so in the movie to be able to make that comment in that moment and to nail that character and have him say that in that moment.

That’s an amazingly funny joke.

**Jennifer:** Thank you. I’ll take that because there would be so many that — and there are a couple that I still would want to pull out and I see them and they fall flat every time. No one laughs. And I knew it and I wished I had pushed. But, what are you going to do?

**John:** Now, a strange thing happens in your musical at about this point. There’s no more songs. No more characters sing their songs. And it’s I guess common in movies where there’s fewer songs. You establish everything and then the action just resolves. But it is a strange thing where like no one sings —

**Jennifer:** It’s surprisingly — oh, go ahead.

**John:** I saw a cut where someone had built a version of Do You Want to Build a Snowman at the very end, like a reprise of it. Did you talk about adding more songs through the end?

**Jennifer:** What’s interesting, we worked with Chris Montan who is the president of music at Disney. He has been there for all the musicals over the years. Lion King. The most major ones, iconic ones as well. And Bobby and Kristen had never done a film before. They had done Winnie the Pooh, but that’s not a full-on musical. And that’s actually traditionally what happens. There are no more songs after the end of the second act.

**John:** Okay.

**Jennifer:** And, I think for me the reason it’s so much more obvious in Frozen is because it’s so song-heavy in the beginning. It’s got one more, maybe two more songs than even the traditional musical does. So, it kind of exposes itself a little more. But the reprise, now, we had a reprise. It was not Do You Want to Build a Snowman. There was a different song that got cut called Life’s Too Short. And that had been the song at the midpoint that became a reprise.

And there was a reprise of that where the two girls are — Elsa is in prison and Anna is in her room alone and they’re singing. But what’s incredible, and this is why — and I love that watching that moment the fans created, but the reason it wouldn’t work for the film where we did it, and I know they put it in a different spot actually.

**John:** They put it with Elsa singing it, yeah.

**Jennifer:** The reason it didn’t work where we put it is it gave away the ending. The minute you retied the girls together the movie was over. So, then —

**Aline:** You need to keep that tension open.

**Jennifer:** You had to keep it. And as soon as she thought about regret for her sister I knew the solution of the film was going to be her sister. And that was — if the solution of the film is buried in the Fixer Upper song when she says, “People make bad choices when they’re mad, or scared, or stressed, but throw a little love their way, you’ll bring out their best.”

Well, that’s the answer to the film. The solution to the problem, but it’s hidden. And it had to stay hidden. But also the issue of had Elsa sung at that moment a lot of us felt it would start mocking itself.

**John:** It would get syrupy.

**Jennifer:** We couldn’t do it. But to do it the way the fans have, I think we can enjoy it because you can always add after the fact and have fun. But, yeah, we did — at least we did talk about it, but it was that fear of —

**Aline:** That is true also with a lot of comedies, the first two thirds or three quarters have a lot of jokes, and then the resolution is a drama.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s also, too, you’re so invested in the story, that’s when you feel the stop of a song. You go, “Halt.” [hums] It’s like, no, you can’t do that.

**John:** Stop singing!

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And Bobby and Kristen were very conscious of that and we would always do that.

**Aline:** But they also as a tribute to the fact that the stakes were really working so that you’re not really noticing, that you’re so immersed then in what’s going to happen and how it’s all going to work out that you’re sort of okay with being past that, because you’re trying to puzzle out how is this puzzle.

The two things that I think are really great about this movie. One is that you’re sort of emotionally invested, but you’re also thinking, I mean, maybe just writers are thinking, but I’m thinking, “How is she going to get out of this?” There are so many moving parts to resolve in that ending. And so I didn’t really feel the absence of the song because I was so immersed in seeing how is this going to work out. And the emotional/dramatic resolution of a love story, you know, I’ve said this a lot: there are so many love stories in the world that are not girls and boys, that are not a man and a woman. And I think we’re getting better about that.

But, I think people are just always so excited and grateful that there’s something that just isn’t just about idealized romantic love.

**Jennifer:** Idealized. Yeah.

**Aline:** And this is what — almost everybody has a great love story in their family. And those sibling emotions, those sibling relationships are so deep. And almost everybody has that.

**Jennifer:** What was so weird for us with the — not weird, but it was a nice surprise was that with the — everyone we worked with, none of us can remember who said it. We were all in the room together. We all remember being together, and we keep saying you said, no you said it, said the “what if they were sisters?” And I remember that moment so distinctively because that was like when the film mattered all of a sudden to me.

I could not see this movie before it at all. I actually was very —

**Aline:** They were not sisters at all?

**Jennifer:** No, they weren’t sisters until about maybe one screening before I came on is when they tried the sisters. But the first screening I saw they weren’t related in any way. And part of why —

**Aline:** What were they?

**Jennifer:** Part of why Idina was not cast yet is it was more of — Elsa was more of like a Bette Midler kind of character. She was that more iconic older Snow Queen. And they were not related or connected in any way. And it was making them sisters was the first breakthrough I think.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Jennifer:** But what I loved was everyone suddenly could feel it. They could feel the film. Even if you don’t have a sibling, but just understanding that kind of — what you go through with your family is something you don’t go through with anyone, or rarely go through for anyone else.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** But you get it. And part of because what happens as a child, you know, to you, that bond as a child even if it disappears you never let it go.

**Aline:** Right. But going back to that sort of subtext that I kind of see with the flowering with the older sister’s adolescence, you do feel when your older sibling goes through that. You feel like you’ve lost them. And as the younger sibling you just feel like, “I’m still here. I still want to be your friend. I know that I’m not wearing the right jeans and I’m not at the cool parties, but I’m still…”

So, I think that people really connect to that feeling of I want to do something. And I have two kids and the younger brother — the funny thing in our family, we are all younger siblings, except for my older son. My husband, and I, and my younger son are all younger siblings. So, that feeling of “let me prove myself to you, let me prove that I can be something and that I can do something.” And Elsa has been dealing with all of these issues on her own. And then the person that she doesn’t want to turn to — she doesn’t want to burden her, but yet becomes her savior. It’s just so incredibly moving.

**Jennifer:** And I’m the younger sister, too. I have an older sister. And she was a big inspiration for Elsa for me, because I think there was a lot of the shutting out. And like you said, it’s not that contrived. It happens even if it’s not for a big reason. It really does happen. And I remember a moment, too. We didn’t become close until I was in my twenties. And it was almost like one day, and I had gone through something very tragic and lost someone, and it was like she looked at me as a human being, an adult, and I became real again to her.

It’s like I’d lost her, and then all of a sudden we kind of arrived at the same place together. And then from that moment on she was like my champion. She was always there for me. And it was — that scene, having to like lose each other and then rediscover each other as adults, that was a big part of my life.

**Aline:** So relatable. So relatable.

**Jennifer:** And I think a lot of people…

**Aline:** So relatable. Really so relatable.

**John:** So, I want to focus on one last moment in the movie which was this reveal that Hans actually is up to no good. How nervous were you the first time you saw that with an audience with kids in it?

**Jennifer:** Oh, I thought they were going to hate me and Chris and hate us. It was a hard thing. Definitely.

**John:** Because it’s such a grown up moment. It’s that thing that I’ve never seen before in a kid’s movie where a character you assume is good completely pulls the rug out from underneath you. And that’s — it’s shocking.

**Jennifer:** What was interesting, I mean, we’ve gotten a couple — there have been a few Op-Eds of people saying how dare we teach as children not to trust anyone and saying good guys are bad. And I’m like, you know, I can’t — part of me is like, okay, I respect that people have that concern.

But for me what I think people always under — they underestimate children. And what we found is when we screen, it happened on Wreck-It Ralph as well and it was eye-opening for me, because you do a screening and it’s a family audience with real little kids and then you do older audiences to see how they react. And for both Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen the kids are like this is the theme. This is what they want. Well, he really loves her, but she doesn’t love him. Well, you know, she didn’t know him. Why would she marry?

And Frozen it’s like it’s about fear versus love. And, you know, well, she just met him and married him. Of course you don’t know him. He could turn out to be horrible. You got to get to know someone.

It’s like they go right to it.

**Aline:** Yes, she’s made that mistake. And the funny is anytime you’ve ever dated anyone who turned out to be a creep, it’s not like in the beginning it was awesome.

**Jennifer:** It wasn’t like he was like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

**Aline:** Right. No, in the beginning he’s actually — the creepy ones almost seem the most charming and the most prince-like. You’ve taught girls an important lesson.

**John:** To me the important lesson is that if you’re unhappy in your life and you’re feeling shut down and no one understands you —

**Aline:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** You’re going to fall for the first guy who seems like he understands you.

**Aline:** Boy, that’s it.

**Jennifer:** Yes.

**John:** And everything is going to seem wonderful and perfect, but it doesn’t mean that he’s actually a good guy.

**Aline:** That’s exactly right. She’s latched onto something for those wrong reasons.

**Jennifer:** And we all do. And I think — I have to say, I mean, I grew up on Disney. I was a Disney kid. Like, I wanted to be an animator. I was an escapist, so Disney was perfect. I could escape right into that.

But, as much as I love them — now I work for Disney — it would have been nice to have the one that says, “Don’t do that.” And for me, I mean, maybe I would have learned it a lot earlier in life and not at 40. [laughs]

**Aline:** I actually have to, when I look at those things, I actually have to force myself to look at the prince as something other than a man or a love story, because some of those movies which are so wonderful, they just are selling romantic love, so over-selling it to a point that you don’t really want to say that to girls.

**Jennifer:** No. I agree. I mean, I have a ten-year-old daughter.

**Aline:** That’s an aspect of the love you’re going to experience in your life, but there’s going to be —

**Jennifer:** I wish someone had said, “Your best friend is probably the one who’s right for you as the guy,” instead of saying, “It’s the hot guy who looks at you those ways.”

**Aline:** Well, you did say that.

**Jennifer:** The saxophone.

**Aline:** You said that to the tune of $765 million so far. And I do think, I mean, one of the reasons I was so elated when the movie was over is it’s just so rare to see a movie that tells a story about women’s lives and girl’s lives that has this other emphasis to it and doesn’t say — you know, she ends up kissing a boy. It’s not, because sometimes you have the other thing which is it’s a very empowering movie about women but they weirdly kind of end up alone and an addict somehow.

And other people go off and have boyfriends, but the Tom-boy heroine doesn’t.

**Jennifer:** Exactly. Well it’s the point of like not wanting to preach or make statements, but letting it evoke itself. And that’s the key I felt like with Frozen because anytime we — and even with Elsa like teetering on is she sexual, is she not, it’s like anytime we — if we had not given her any, too, there might have been that statement of like, “She has no sexuality. That’s a statement you’re making.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** It’s like we’re not making that statement. These are real to us. And it’s like these are real characters.

**Aline:** But that’s a great thing what you said. Another great thing for young writers to hear which is what you tried to go with was sincerity and reality.

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And saying what is emotionally sincere here. And that is your guide. Not sort of thinking about it from the outside.

**Jennifer:** You can’t. And I used to say this thing, and we talk about in the room when you’re trying to sort of sift through all the notes, or fight for things. The key to me was always like you’re controlling her. Like don’t control Elsa. Don’t control Anna. Because the minute you do, the audience is gone.

Because I always feel that way. I can tell when I’m being manipulated in that the character’s motivations don’t — I don’t buy her. I don’t believe her. Or I feel like she’s turned for the sake of someone else, not for herself. And that’s the hardest thing to do, I think when you are doing something so collaboratively. And it’s to protect — your favorite moment is actually when you hear them go, someone else in the room go, “Elsa wouldn’t do that.” And you’re like, ooh, thank god! We’re here.

**John:** Jennifer, because you’re here I can actually ask you a question that was on my mind from the very start. On the podcast we’ve talked about the Bechdel test which is —

**Jennifer:** Oh yeah.

**John:** The classic statement of the Bechdel test is is there more than one female character with a name. Do these two or more characters talk to each other over the course of the film? And do they talk about something that is not a man?

**Jennifer:** Yes.

Aline : The question here, does it pass the male Bechdel. Yeah.

**John:** Your movie actually barely passes the reverse Bechdel test, which is one of the first things I can actually say.

**Jennifer:** Really.

**John:** Within your film actually as I looked through it the second time, it’s very rare to find, it’s almost impossible to find a scene that has two men with names who talk to each other.

**Aline:** Well, Snowman is a man. Olaf is a man.

**John:** Oh, I guess we count Olaf as a man.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** I guess if you count him.

**Aline:** Yeah, but otherwise.

**Jennifer:** Then it passes, but, yeah.

**John:** There’s a little moment at the very end of the story where they are throwing Hans and the [Briggs] and they talk about —

**Jennifer:** Yes. They talk about the brothers.

**John:** The brothers. But that’s the only time other than… — If Olaf really counts…

**Jennifer:** Do they have to be alone onscreen, because I’m like maybe the bargaining with Oaken, but Anna is there, so I don’t know if that counts.

**Aline:** She can be there. They just have to —

**John:** Or they’re talking about like going off to get Elsa, or something like that, so they’re really talking about a girl.

**Jennifer:** No, right, that’s true.

**Aline:** That’s thrilling.

**John:** So, it almost passes the reverse Bechdel test which is just fascinating. Or it fails —

**Aline:** Fails.

**John:** It fails the —

**Jennifer:** The thing I will say is that completely just happened to be that way. I have to say that even I didn’t remember. I know I’m like, I just assumed we were going to pass because we had two female leads, but I hadn’t thought about it through the whole thing until I was like, oh god, did we pass? But I never thought of the reversal.

I was happy that we were doing a film like this where it is two female leads. And there was a point where there was that concern of like is there anything in it for the boys, but people just really got around the girls and the story.

**Aline:** We also have to talk about the big snow monster.

**Jennifer:** Marshmallow. That’s his name is Marshmallow.

**Aline:** Which the kids enjoyed also. It gives you some of that.

**Jennifer:** What’s interesting about him, and this talks about sometimes you’re asked to do these weird, almost impossible things. Is there was a test done with the Snowman chasing them, and it was just a test to learn the animation. We were so late in production, I mean, this movie was so tight. There was a time where they said, “Do you think you can make that scene work? So actually use the scene, because we might not have time to animate.”

And I was like, oh god, and it was that scene.

**Aline:** Amazing. Oh my god.

**Jennifer:** So, I wrote it in and I found a way —

**Aline:** It’s like you’re juggling six balls and someone gives you a banana.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And we had to reverse into how Marshmallow would fit and why Elsa would make him.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Jennifer:** And Olaf was a bit of an anchor with that. She’s like, if I can make that, I can make this. And if you won’t leave, I will make you leave. And so he’s kind of — we had to make him a bouncer, but then it had to be Anna who pissed him off or it would make Elsa too mean.

So, there’s all this stuff, but the funny thing was at the end of the day we had to actually go back and reanimate because we had changed Anna’s character so much that it was driving me insane. Because the first, the test version which went out at some point, and I was like, “No!” is Anna is at the edge of the cliff going, “Oooh,” you know, scared, holding her hands together. “He’s coming! Hurry. Hurry. No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.”

And that was the —

**John:** That’s a different character.

**Jennifer:** An Anna version way back. And I was like it doesn’t fit in the film. If she’s fearless she can’t do it. So, we had to reanimate it anyway. [laughs] And they did it, though. But by that point luckily we had done much better in production than we thought we were going to do. We had scheduled a lot of redo’s that —

**Aline:** That you didn’t need.

**Jennifer:** That we didn’t have to do. So, that allowed us to do it. But I remember begging for that moment I guess.

**John:** It all turned out pretty well.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**Aline:** I think we can agree.

**John:** This was an amazing conversation.

**Jennifer:** This was so fun, thank you.

**John:** This is our longest episode over.

**Jennifer:** Oh my god. See, I told you I can talk. I just —

**John:** Well, between you and Aline, we got a conversation covered. But thank you so much for coming and talking. And, Aline, thank you for being our amazing guest host.

**Aline:** I’m thrilled.

**Jennifer:** Thank you for having me. This is so much fun.

**Aline:** I hope it’s creepy that John and I have probably seen the movie twenty-five times combined. [laughs]

**John:** We have kids. That will be our excuses, that we have kids.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**John:** So, like all of our episodes, if you want to know about things we talked about, Frozen, oh, and thank you for putting the script for Frozen up online. That is so terrific and I’m so glad that people do that these days.

**Jennifer:** I love that, too. I love getting to read them myself, all the scripts.

**John:** So, we will have links to stuff about Frozen and the script to Frozen up on johnaugust.com.

If you are listening to us on a device that supports podcasts, like your iPhone, you can find us on iTunes. We are there. Just search for Scriptnotes. And we will be back next week with a normal episode featuring Craig Mazin.

**Aline:** I’m going to get Craig out of the closet now.

**John:** All right. I heard him stirring there a little bit. So, we’ll let him out.

**Aline:** The drugs are wearing off.

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

**Jennifer:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [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) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Jennifer Lee on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1601644/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lee_(filmmaker))
* [Frozen](http://movies.disney.com/frozen)
* The [Frozen final shooting draft](http://waltdisneystudiosawards.com/downloads/frozen-screenplay.pdf)
* Let it Go [in 25 languages](http://video.disney.com/watch/let-it-go-in-25-languages-4f06e85c30ce6b18db34b461)
* Our episodes on [Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark) and [Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/the-little-mermaid)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular).

**Franklin Leonard:** Hello. My name is Franklin Leonard.

**Rawson Thurber:** Hi, my name is Rawson Thurber.

**Lindsay Doran:** My name is Lindsay Doran.

**Kelly Marcel:** Hey, I’m Kelly Marcel.

**Richard Kelly:** Hey, my name is Richard Kelly.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Hi. My name is Aline Brosh McKenna. And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

**John:** And this is the Holiday Edition of Scriptnotes. And I am so happy to have six of our favorite guests here with us tonight to talk about things that are —

**Craig:** They are, in fact, our six favorite guests.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** Not “of our.” These are our favorite guests.

**John:** Wow. Right now people are doing the calculations like, oh god, who got left off of this list.

**Craig:** Everybody that’s not here.

**John:** Wow. People are going to feel really bad about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we actually have, obviously you can tell, a lot of guests. We have three topics — that’s common for Scriptnotes. We have a microphone back there so we’re going to do a Q&A at the end of this. So, we have a lot to do tonight.

So I thought we wouldn’t dilly dally too much, Craig, unless you have some holiday topics you want to talk about.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wanted to talk about the eggnog situation.

**John:** Okay, let’s talk about some eggnog.

**Craig:** And how disgusting it is.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t see you drinking any eggnog.

**Craig:** No. But I noticed people were nogging it up. Noggy mouths.

**John:** Okay, a show of hands. Who out there actually tasted the eggnog?

Oh my god, that was a lot. And so by applause who liked the eggnog?

Yeah. That’s only about half the audience who liked the eggnog. So, a lot of people tasted the eggnog and did not enjoy it.

**Craig:** Gross. It’s drinking mayonnaise. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. I’m done with dilly dallying. Let’s go.

**John:** Craig has done his contribution to the weekly podcast. So, Craig…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pick on you.

**Craig:** No. That was accurate.

**John:** Yeah, I sort of nag on Craig and I shouldn’t. Actually that can be a resolution for the New Year is I won’t nag on you so much.

**Craig:** Don’t patronize me, August.

**John:** Because it is. Actually when I say I’m going to do nice things, it actually comes across as patronizing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because it is.

**John:** That’s how it is.

So, Craig, this will be our 123rd episode of Scriptnotes once this goes live on Tuesday, which is a lot. So, thank you all for listening.

And I realize while we talked about a lot of topics on the show, one of the things we never actually spoke about is what happens when people say yes. What happens when people say like, “Oh yeah, I really like your script. I want to buy your script.” We haven’t really talked about that process.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems like all you do is hear no, no, no, no, no, no, and then one day you hear yes and it’s not the fake yes, it’s the real yes. And go out to dinner and you tell all your friends and you get drunk. And then the next morning you wake up and, oh no, here comes trouble.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff that happens when someone says yes. It’s a luxury problem, but let’s talk about some luxury problems. And who would be better to talk about luxury problems than Franklin Leonard. Come on back up here.

**Craig:** Impresario of the Black List.

**Franklin:** Hello. Hopefully I can get this part right since I screwed up the introduction.

**John:** No, don’t worry about it. We’ll do a take two and it will all be fine.

**Franklin:** Excellent. [Crosstalk]

**John:** Franklin Leonard, creator of the Black List, a person who deals with a lot of writers who are suddenly hot.

**Craig:** Suddenly hearing yes.

**Franklin:** That’s the hope, yes.

**John:** Our other guests for this segment would be Rawson Marshall Thurber.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Rawson Marshall Thurber who last time you were on the show you had this little indie film called We’re the Millers that ended up doing pretty well.

**Rawson:** Yeah. It did okay.

**John:** Yeah, you can set your wine anywhere. Don’t worry about that.

**Rawson:** Thank you. Sorry. Hi everybody.

**John:** Hi Rawson! So, Franklin let’s start with you because this year’s Black List just came out.

**Franklin:** It did. On Monday.

**John:** So, the Black List is an annual assessment of the scripts that development people liked the most. Is that —

**Franklin:** That is a perfectly accurate description. Yes.

**John:** And so talk to us about this year’s Black List. Were there any changes you noticed? What was the tenor of this year’s list?

**Franklin:** It was an odd list this year. I mean, I think fascinating subject matter. I’ll run through some numbers. There were two scripts about the making of Jaws. There were two scripts about Mr. Rogers. Two scripts written by identical twins, which I think is the first time that’s happened.

**Rawson:** That’s just cheating.

**Franklin:** I suppose it is. Right? It’s like two of the same brain generating one piece of material.

If there was a big trend I think it was bio pics. We saw a ton of adapted stories of a moment in a person’s life, with whom a lot of people are familiar.

**Craig:** We call that the Marcel.

**Franklin:** Ah, yes. Lots of Marcels. Are they as good as the original? Certainly not.

**Craig:** No. No. Maybe.

**Franklin:** I don’t know. I haven’t read them yet. There’s one about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing, which I’m particularly interested to read.

I think that was the big trend. But I think what’s really exciting as we’ve seen every year is that when you ask Hollywood development executives the scripts that they love, not the scripts that their boss loves, or the scripts that they think will make tons of money, it is a really eclectic list of really ambitious storytelling that very often succeeds in the execution of that ambition. And it’s not big four quadrant movies that don’t have a soul. It’s an attempt to do something that reminds us —

**Craig:** So there is a place for those.

**Franklin:** There is. No, there absolutely is. I’m a fan of those movies.

**Craig:** And everybody has a soul. But they still want to be entertained.

**John:** Now, how many of the scripts on the list this year are already set up someplace, like someone is trying to make this movie?

**Franklin:** A third of the scripts that were on the list this year already have a financier attached. About two-thirds have a producer attached. Leaving one-third having neither a producer or a financier.

**Craig:** Well, you know, when we think about the questions that we ask when we do a live show I’m always thinking about the folks that are here and coming up with questions that relate to where they are right now in time. And one thing I have to say, you know, I started out with the Black List where my position on it was “do not attack.”

**Franklin:** Which was still the greatest praise we’ve received so far.

**Craig:** But I really now am in favor of it. I am positively in favor of it.

**Franklin:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s a great service that’s getting results and I like to think that there are people here, there’s somebody here, if not one, two, maybe even ten, who are going to write a script that will get on the Black List, will get them noticed, and then someone is going to say yes.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** When you see this happening and I think you are in an interesting position to see it happening to people that may not know what the hell is going on.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** What happens? Tell them what they’re in for.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s a case by case basis. But the way that the Black List website is set up, you know, someone downloads your script and reads it. And we sort of step aside at that point. We sort of joke about the website being eHarmony for people who make movies and people who write movies. And just like you won’t see that guy from the commercials at your wedding night being like, “Where’s my 10 percent?” you won’t see us after we make the connection.

So, a lot of times it can be an email out of the blue like, “Hi, I’m a producer at this company. I’m interested in talking more.” Or, “I’m an agent, I’d like to talk to you.”

And I think at that point, you know, get on the phone with them initially, and then I think trust-but-verify is probably a good rule of thumb. And then the other thing is we — our membership are all legitimate Hollywood people. Like if you’re getting an email from someone who says they read your script on the Black List, again, still trust-but-verify, but in all probability they are a legitimate person who can do something significant with your career, otherwise we wouldn’t have approved them for membership.

But, that’s actually a good time, especially if you develop relationships with other people in Hollywood, to then triangulate that information with them and say, “Hey, I just got a phone call from so-and-so. What do you know about this person? Would you like to read my script now that other people are interested?” I think taking advantage of that is always a good idea.

But I’m loathe to give blanket advice generally.

**Craig:** Yeah, but think specific now.

**Franklin:** But specifically in this case, I actually am loathe to, because I think it really does depend on each individual’s sort of circumstances and who it is that’s contacting them. But trust-but-verify is a good rule of thumb.

**John:** I want to just zoom in on that moment of someone says yes and they say we are going to make an offer on your script, because that’s a moment that sort of gets every writer’s heart pitter pattering. But what does an offer really mean and what is it that you would actually do when that situation happens?

So, Rawson, I remember you were working for me when Dodgeball sold. That was your first script sale —

**Craig:** You were like, “I’m out of here, August. Oh, up this.”

**Rawson:** “I never liked you!”

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait for my turn.

**Rawson:** What did you say?

**Craig:** I said I can’t wait to also tell him I don’t like him at all.

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Rawson:** “I quit this podcast!”

**John:** Indeed. You need to direct like two big successful movies and then you’re totally free to do that, Craig.

**Craig:** Wow. Beat me down.

**Rawson:** Instead of write like half a dozen successful movies.

**John:** So, Rawson, what were those last — the last week, the last day, the last hours. Tell me what that feels like.

**Rawson:** I don’t know. I guess I’d always hoped it was going to be that. Like, you know, the balloons would fall from the ceiling and you’d get hit in the face with confetti. And then someone would hand you a big novelty check and you give everybody the middle finger and you’re gone.

But never, at least for me and for most people that I’ve talked to about this, it doesn’t really — it doesn’t usually happen that way.

**John:** So, Dodgeball, this was Ben Stiller’s company became attached to do it. And they made a deal at Fox because their deal was at Fox. There was like a competitive situation for that.

**Rawson:** Right, well it’s significantly worse than that. [laughs] Lots of stuff happened beforehand. Everybody sort of passed on it. And then we sent it to Ben’s company, Red Hour, and the receptionist there, Will, read it and liked it, who gave it to the junior executive, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Stuart Cornfeld, Ben Stiller’s producing partner, who read it and liked it, who gave it to Ben, who read it and liked it, who met me and liked me.

And then they — well Red Hour, his company, had just left 20th Century Fox and had just made a deal with DreamWorks. And DreamWorks said, “Look, we don’t really get it, but we just made this deal with you. And we want to start off on the right foot. So, here you go, here’s…”

I mean, I think it was whatever is like minimum and then a little less than minimum, [laughs], or as low as they could go.

**John:** So, not scale plus ten, but just scale.

**Rawson:** Yeah, scale. And then please wash our cars, you know, also. And I said, “Yeah, great. Whatever!” So, it was not — and then it was — so then it wasn’t even a sale, it was like a really low option. Like I don’t think you could buy a Kia for like the option price.

**Franklin:** I think the Kia Option is a car.

**Rawson:** Is that right? [laughs]

**Franklin:** I’m not sure, but it should be.

**Rawson:** At any rate. And the check, and then you get to the part where like you’ve got to actually do it.

**Craig:** Kia Option! [laughs] Sorry, he’s funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Rawson:** And then that’s the weird part where you actually like go from prospect to employee and then you kind of have to — you got to step up and do the work. And I rewrote Dodgeball with Ben and Stuart for a year and a half. And we kept turning in drafts to DreamWorks. And Adam Goodman at the time was the executive and John Fox was the junior. And they were kind of saying like, “Wow, this is getting better.” And we’re like, yeah, it’s not like a homework assignment, like we’re trying to make a movie.

And then they said, yeah, we’re not going to make it. And then the very quick summation is we took it to Fox and we took it there because there was a fantastic executive named Debbie Liebling who was there. And she found — she had just come over from Comedy Central. She had found Matt and Trey. And she read the script and loved it and got it and sort of stood up in like the Darth Vader room at Fox and like the long black table. And at the time told Tom Rothman like, “This is the kind of dumb movie we need to make.” And so then they took it from DreamWorks.

**John:** So, let’s talk about this last week you set up another pitch which was a very different experience.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Completely different. Well, for me, a couple reasons. One is I was attached as the director, not the writer. Simon Rich was and is the writer, a very talented guy from New York, wrote for SNL for a few years, New Yorker, et cetera.

And so we went around town and pitched everywhere in town. He had this idea based on underlying material written by Steve Breen, a sort of comic — a collection of single panel comics. It didn’t really have a narrative to it. Simon came up with one and we went around town and pitched.

And the town was split in half with two different producers, which was really awkward for us, for everybody really. And then we pitched and people really liked it. And it was the first time that I had ever been involved in I guess what amounts to a bidding war. There was like, I think, five different studios wanting the same thing.

I’d always heard of this sort of thing, but I’d never actually been a part of it. And it was really cool. And also awful at the same time, because what I didn’t think about for whatever reason is that you can only say yes to one person. And at this point, you know, I know a lot of the people at the studios and they’re friends and we’ve done other things together and both producing entities are fantastic. And, yeah, it was great. It was bittersweet, I guess.

**John:** It’s like The Bachelor. You can only give the rose to one girl.

**Rawson:** We had the final rose ceremony. And it was —

**Craig:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**John:** It’s just like The Bachelor.

**Rawson:** It is. It is.

**John:** Craig, have you had bidding war situations? Have you had like a thing where you went out on the town and had to meet with multiple people?

**Craig:** Yeah, early on in my career all I did was go and pitch. And that was all the movies that I was doing were based on pitches. And there was one that an executive that I’m very close with to this very day didn’t talk to me for three years because I didn’t pick him. And, you know, and when he was yelling at me I remember I said, “But you have passed on stuff I’ve offered to you before and I don’t yell at you.”

**Rawson:** That’s exactly right.

**Craig:** And they don’t care. They don’t care.

**Rawson:** I mean, that was part of the fun. The shoe was on the other foot this time, for once.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing and this is why it’s touch. We are actually just nicer people. I’m so sorry. We’re nicer people.

**Franklin:** By the way, I agree with you. I mean, it’s like you could have said —

**Craig:** Oh, don’t jump on our [crosstalk].

**Franklin:** You could have also said, “But they’re paying more money,” and I’ll bet he still would have yelled at you.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, probably. I mean, but it’s hard to make those choices. One thing that’s interesting about the first time you hear yes, and I get it from your story about the scale or the near scale, don’t — I don’t want anyone to think that there’s any such thing as breaking in. I know everybody thinks that there’s a rolling in. There is an endless dribbling in. [laughs]

The first movie that I pitched and sold was with a writing partner and our deal was for $100,000. So, I got $50,000, which means I got $45,000, but really means I got $42,500, I think. And then after taxes and it took like a year and a half. And they took eight months to pay me.

**Rawson:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** So by the end I think I got $20,000.

**Rawson:** Yeah. Gold Lobster. Let’s go. Awesome.

**Craig:** You know, and so I don’t want anyone to think that that first time is going to be some amazing thing. The angels don’t sing, usually.

**John:** The thing I’ve learned over the course of a lot of pitches being set up and stuff, and not really competitive situations usually, is that when you hear the words “business affairs,” that means like, oh, something is actually really happening. So, that’s just not like idle executives talking about stuff, like, “Oh, we’ll call business affairs.” It’s like, Ooh, they’re going to actually bring real people who make money deals into our situation.

**Craig:** Which is great, but then you find out that the business affairs people are awful.

**John:** They’re awful. [laughs]

**Craig:** All the passion, and the love, and the excitement about what you said and you did, that’s real for the people that really want to make a great movie. But then there is this other place that’s cold. And those people, their job is to pay you the least amount possible. And so somebody in a room — And it’s so schizophrenic, because you’ve seen it on your side.

**Franklin:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** Somebody in a room will say to a writer, “You’re amazing. I’ve always wanted to work with you. I need to make this movie with you. We want this movie. Please, please, please. You’re amazing.” And then your agent will get a call from business affairs guys like, “We don’t think that they’re really worth that much. At all.”

**John:** Yeah. “We see this as a one-step deal for about half their quote.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. That’s literally what —

**Craig:** “Oh, did someone tell you that they liked them? We don’t.” Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so the challenge of a writer — if it’s your first day you’re going to end up kind of taking whatever you can take, which is sort of the nature of it. But the challenge of it is that you felt all that enthusiasm in that room. You felt like, oh, this is going to be a thing. I sold a movie. And then it ends up being three weeks of drudgery while that thing gets figured out. And that can be a very long time.

**Rawson:** Three weeks if you’re lucky. Sometimes it’s longer.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I was going to say. Three weeks, you’re very lucky.

**Rawson:** That’s fast.

**Craig:** It can be a year.

**Franklin:** But I think the other thing that’s important to remember, and I say this as someone who is on the other end of the table —

**John:** You were an executive at Overbrook before.

**Franklin:** Yeah, I mean, I was an executive at Overbrook, which is Will Smith’s production company. I was an executive at Universal. I worked for Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. I worked for Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella.

And on the other side of that table I think it’s important for writers to remember that the moment when someone is interested in your material but you still own it is sort of the apex of your power.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** And once the studio owns it, you have virtually no power. And so essentially make sure that what you are getting for your work, whatever it is, is something that you are okay with seeding the power that you have over the work that you’ve toiled endlessly over to someone who then really won’t feel as though they owe you anything.

And that’s sort of the price that every writer, every person, whether you work as an accountant for a big corporation, or whether you work as a writer, has to determine for themselves. At what price your soul or in this case your writing?

**Craig:** And that is the moment when they will work the hardest to convince you that you have the least leverage.

**Franklin:** That’s absolutely right.

**Craig:** Because they’re smart. They are. Don’t underestimate these people. They’re not smart about story a lot of the times. But they’re smart about this stuff though.

**Franklin:** I would even argue that they’re not so much smart as that they have almost all of the power, because they have the purse strings.

**Craig:** And a total lack of scruples.

**Franklin:** Right. But like I would love to see, for example, an environment where if you had a spec script you could put it onto the market with a timeline and people would have to buy your script like eBay. Because there’s nothing that sort of throws me off more than this idea that the studio is blocking —

**Craig:** Buy it now.

**Franklin:** Exactly. Buy it now, at this price, and if the price goes up the price goes up. And you are as a writer able to see…

**Craig:** ScriptBay.

**Franklin:** …every single offer.

**Craig:** You should do that.

**John:** Well, no, what he’s really bringing up though is the idea of a deadline. And so we see the giant sales that happen, it’s usually because there’s been enough interest in the town that an artificial deadline has been set. Where the agents have called around and said, “We are taking offers until 5pm. And then we’re done.” And that’s crazy.

**Craig:** Is that what happened to you?

**Rawson:** Well it was almost the reverse or the inverse, I guess. So, the first studio N said here’s our offer and it expires at 6:30.

**Craig:** They love doing that.

**Rawson:** And Simon Rich and I share the same agent. And I got to — at the end of the day, we pitched Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thursday night we went to CAA and we like sat in his office and watched as emails came in and he was on the phone. It was really kind of fascinating to watch. But I mean he’s done this before. So, he said, “Look, I can’t honor that. Don’t tell me that time because I can’t get to all the parties and get you an answer by that time, so that won’t work.”

He deflected it in such, I thought, a really elegant and sophisticated way. But it’s interesting when they put the other — and then they came back in after that. So —

**John:** Was it the first party who came in who ended up getting the script ultimately?

**Rawson:** No. No, no, it wasn’t. Yeah. That was tough.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I like it when that happens.

**John:** They have to squirm and sweat.

**Franklin:** But here’s the interesting question is that who cares who came in first at the end of the day? At the end of the day it’s like who are you willing to work with who is going to pay you the most money to do it? And I don’t — yes, I respect somebody who says I love this, here’s an offer. But if they’re going to explode the offer at a certain time, that’s a negotiating tactic. They’re trying to limit how much money you make.

**Rawson:** But I also made, oh sorry, I also made a mistake with that. There was another project that was like based on a graphic novel and I set it up and I had two different studios that wanted it. And I went with the one that was going to pay me more. They’re both great studios, great people, et cetera, and I went with the one that paid me more versus the one that said we really are going to make this thing.

**Craig:** Ah!

**Rawson:** And I regretted it. I regret it now. I completely made the wrong choice. And sometimes it’s hard to see that at the time where you feel like, oh, well these people say they want to make it, too.

**Craig:** It’s a mistake everybody makes.

**Rawson:** Yeah, it’s just, you never know I guess is all I can say on that.

**Franklin:** I think that’s true.

**Craig:** Nobody knows. So, that’s bleak.

**John:** A sobering thought of nobody knowing anything.

**Craig:** And we’re talking about success!

**John:** I want to thank our first panelists, Franklin Leonard. I’m sorry, you have a last thought?

**Franklin:** Oh, one thing.

**Craig:** Franklin has a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**Franklin:** I have a little Christmas gift for everybody.

**John:** A holiday present. I’m sorry.

**Franklin:** Craig mentioned that maybe one, or two, or ten people in the audience may have a script on the Black List and end up sort of oozing their way into Hollywood.

**Craig:** Dribbling.

**John:** Here’s a question for our audience right now.

**Craig:** Painful, burning dribble.

**John:** First off, is anyone in this audience on the Black List that was just published this last week. Do we have any people who got that award?

**Craig:** Oh, those people are way too busy to show up to this.

**John:** Yeah, they’re too busy. They’re fielding all the calls that Rawson’s agent was taking. Is anyone here currently on blcklst.com?

**Franklin:** Does anyone have a script on the Black List?

**John:** Oh yeah. Very nice. Very good. So, for people who don’t…

**Franklin:** For people who don’t, and everyone who does I’ll be standing outside afterwards with the coupon for a free month of hosting for a script on the Black List.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Franklin:** You get a script! You get a script! It’s my Oprah moment.

**John:** Franklin, you are our Oprah.

**Craig:** It’s like t-shirt gun kind of…

**Franklin:** I asked for a confetti cannon to shoot them out of and I got a response that I can let Craig clarify.

**Craig:** I talked about my confetti gun.

**John:** [laughs] And Craig made it pornographic is really the answer to that email chain. Franklin, Rawson, thank you so much.

**Craig:** It’s colorful.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Who is next?

**John:** We’re going to talk a bit. So, Craig, I’m writing now. I’m actually writing a screenplay, which is such an unusual experience for me.

**Craig:** What’s that about?

**John:** It’s really fun to write a screenplay, but really hard because you have to have all these characters, and you have to like do stuff.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, not at all? Oh, you write comedies, I forget. You basically make a little outline and then Zach Galifianakis says something funny.

**Craig:** That’s not entirely inaccurate.

**John:** All right. So, I’m writing this screenplay and it’s going good.

**Craig:** Oh, look. Look who is angry at you. My little pit bull.

**John:** Oh, Kelly Marcel is angry with me.

**Craig:** Well, Marcel will deal with you later.

**John:** She’ll have her moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I’m going to be totally honest. I’m having some challenges where I know I want to be able to articulate what the two main characters sort of want at any moment. Both what they would publicly say they want and what they sort of ultimately kind of inherently want. And I’ve been wrestling with it. And there’s stuff in the second act that I’m like leery about getting into because I don’t kind of know the answers to these things. I don’t want to write stuff that I don’t have the answers for.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, we have two panelists here who will tell us the answer and they’re going to come up and it’s going to be awesome because they’re going to be helping a lot. Lindsay Doran, the amazing Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran!

**John:** And our inaugural guest, our Joan Rivers —

**Craig:** The Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes. Aline Brosh McKenna. And I should say that for all of the stick I give our brothers and sisters in the studio suites that Lindsay really is —

**John:** Lindsay is kind of amazing.

**Aline:** Let me talk about Lindsay.

**Craig:** She’s pretty amazing. I mean, she is — she is the exception that proves the rule, frankly, that people like you are terrible, but you’re not.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, thank you.

**Aline:** I wanted to say two things before we started this topic. The first is this is a holiday party and I’m really glad you guys dressed up. And you can tell they’re dressed up because Craig is not wearing a hoodie.

**Craig:** No, my wife has it over there.

**Aline:** And John is wearing a hoodie.

**John:** I’m wearing a hoodie.

**Aline:** And that’s how you can tell that they’re all dressed up.

**Craig:** You really are the Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes.

**John:** We basically invite you on to insult us is basically…

**Aline:** Yes. The other thing I want to say to insult everyone is you’re very lucky to have Lindsay here, because she is the closest, one of the closest that Hollywood gets to having a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**Aline:** And she is a guru.

**Craig:** She is.

**John:** Hooray.

**Aline:** So enjoy.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, guru, help me out. This is literally the problem I’m having right now. So, I have two characters who are sort of a key relationship. They’re not a love interest relationship but a key relationship. Each of them has different things they need to do. And in trying to articulate what it is, it’s like what would Sandra Bullock in Speed say her — what is she trying to do? If you’re carried along on a ride in a story, what does she say she’s trying to do? And how do I get that out? Does that make sense at all?

**Aline:** How does she articulate her wants.

**John:** How does she articulate her wants?

**Craig:** Isn’t she trying to just go faster?

**Lindsay:** “I don’t want to crash.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “I have to go faster than 55mph.”

**Lindsay:** Is that so hard?

**John:** Sandra Bullock was a terrible example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let me step back.

**Craig:** I’m feeling better about myself right now I have to say.

**John:** What does Demi Moore in Ghost want to do?

**Lindsay:** She wants to, wow, that’s hard, isn’t it?

**Aline:** Is she the main want though? Is Patrick Dempsey, oh Patrick Dempsey. Patrick Swayze.

**John:** Wouldn’t it be amazing if Patrick Dempsey was in that. Patrick Swayze has an easier —

**Craig:** Swayze wants to save her.

**Aline:** Yes, he wants to —

**Lindsay:** The good news is that it changes, right?

**John:** It does, yes.

**Lindsay:** At the beginning she wants this Whoopi Goldberg woman to go away and leave her alone to her grief. She wants her husband back. She can’t get that. She wants this woman to leave her alone. And then at a certain point she wants to believe. And that’s when we can break her heart and show that Whoopi Goldberg is just some fake con artist and then we have to win her back again. So, it’s a long bunch of stuff.

**John:** Does she want to believe? Does she ever consciously realize she wants to believe? Or is it an inner thing that sort of comes out? That’s a want/need question.

**Lindsay:** There’s a remarkable moment, something that we used in the trailer to great effect, where Whoopi Goldberg is trying to persuade her that she’s sitting there having a conversation with Sam and she gets up to leave. And Patrick Swayze says to her, “Tell her that I love her.” And he says it, “Tell her he loves you.” And she turns around and she says, “Sam would never say that.” And it’s so viscous and real when she says that. And in the trailer —

**Craig:** Because he didn’t in the beginning. He couldn’t say.

**Lindsay:** That was the whole thing. He would always say, “Ditto.” And it was in the trailer. It was like, oh god, this is a real movie about real people with real relationships. And then eventually, yeah, you do track points at which she really wants to believe. There’s the thing with the penny coming up into the air. And that’s the moment when she finally does believe.

But, yes, it is difficult. She’s not the protagonist. It’s really easy what Sam wants. But if it’s interesting to anybody, we had a really interesting thing with Ghost because in the pitch, which was very, very long, I had to as the executive in charge get that down to about a 30 second pitch for the head of production. And in trying to reduce it I realized we had a problem.

And I went back to the writer and said Sam wants to be alive, of course. He wants to tell his wife that he loves her, of course. But it’s not concrete. We need something that drives the story. And so it became he has to save her life.

**Craig:** The crime angle.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** We have to do something with the guy sneaking into her apartment so it looks as though he has to save her life. So, that was the thing. He comes back from the dead to save his wife. And it’s in the trailer. [laughs] It was in the pitch. It’s barely in the movie. Barely. It was so scrunched in there. But it became, it was so concrete and important as opposed to something as misty as he wants to tell her that he loves her.

**Craig:** That was pretty misty.

**Lindsay:** And it made a good thriller premise as opposed to just a romantic —

**Aline:** It kind of hardened the wants.

**Lindsay:** Yes. It hardened the… — Ooh, that’s good. Harden the wants.

**John:** Oh my god. Aline Brosh McKenna. She nails phrases that become like iconic. Things about squirrels and robots. That’s why we have her on the show.

**Craig:** I mean she really is —

**Lindsay:** But I don’t know if any of that helps you.

**John:** It helps me tremendously in the sense of I always wrestle with the degree to which characters are aware of what they need, what they want and what they need, and the ability to have characters to articulate what it is they’re actually trying to do.

**Craig:** Well, I always feel like what they want and what they need should be in complete opposition in the beginning of any movie, of any story, because what they want is for the movie to not happen. And you’re going to force it on them. That’s why the movie is interesting. Something is forced on them.

And what they need is to go through this very painful thing. Nobody wants to get a splinter pulled out of their finger. Nobody. They want to just not be in pain. But what they need is for the splinter to be pulled out of their finger. So, I like to think of those things in opposition. I like to think of a movie as a progression where want and need slowly finally become the same thing. You know?

**John:** I like it. I like it.

**Lindsay:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Thanks. Yeah, I believe you.

**Lindsay:** I’m a guru.

**John:** Aline, talk to me about characters in films you’ve written. Devil Wears Prada, or as you have a protagonist, are they able to articulate what they’re going for at the start of the film? And is it true to what the actual story is or just what the character is feeling at that moment?

**Aline:** Well, I agree with Craig that the thing, the stated goal, is often not the actual goal. But one thing I’ve been thinking about lately that I think is helpful for this, and might be helpful for the people in this room, is when you first write a script you’re just trying to have it make some sense. You’re just trying to have the goals be really super clear so that, you know, there’s that — what was that song? Things That Make You Go Hmmm, or something.

You want your script to not be things that make you go, huh, and a lot of your first scripts are really that. Where you don’t really know what people want. That’s usually the issue. And then when you get some skill going you can sort of depict like what people want, but it’s a little flat. It’s a little bit direct, so people say, “I want to get the briefcase there by noon on Thursday.” And then you’re watching everyone do that. And it’s very flat. And one thing that I’ve sort of realized in my own writing is — I’m sorry, are we boring you, Craig?

**Craig:** No, no, no, just you.

**Aline:** One thing I’ve noticed is you want to have an evolution in what the want is and you want to have some sort of epiphany moment for the character but also for the audience. And I think a great example of this is in Frozen. In Frozen you kind of think you know what she wants. How many people have seen Frozen? A lot of people have seen Frozen.

**John:** Yeah, good.

**Aline:** I just loved it. And you think you know what she wants and I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but you think you know what she wants and you see the guy going towards her.

**John:** Who?

**Aline:** The main character. The younger sister. And you see the guy coming towards her. And you’re sort of okay with that want. And you sort of have signed off on that want. And it would work perfectly well and it would track perfectly well and it’s in keeping with what her expressed goal was. And then the movie does this amazing thing where she has an epiphany, we have an epiphany, and it does something which I think is miraculous where it takes the theme and the character to another level that you hadn’t imagined. And I really think that’s what separates a good script from a great script.

And in that moment you have this incredible insight into her, but also this incredible insight into the world that she’s created thematically. And that’s the other level to get to. I think the first level to get to is just to make sure that the audience is not confused about what people want. And then the great thing you can get to is if there is an evolution, an epiphany for the character and for the audience. And if you can do that you’re really well ahead of it.

**Lindsay:** You have to think a lot about what does the audience want. That’s what I — it’s like what do you want the audience to want? Because in Frozen you want them to think they’re invested in that relationship, but you don’t want them so invested in that relationship when you turn the tables on them that they go, wait, what happened to that relationship? And I’ve certainly been in previews where you go, oops, they wanted — I bring up Pretty In Pink all the time. Oops, we wanted them to make the transition for her to be in love with Duckie and guess what, they never got there.

**Aline:** Right.

**Lindsay:** They wanted her to be in love with Andrew McCarthy and we had to change the ending. So, you have to be really, really clear. And a lot of decision making has to go into making sure that you’re tracking what they want and how you’re going to pull the rug out from under them and they’ll go with you.

**Aline:** And there needs to be an evolution in, as Craig said, the difference between the want and the need. There needs to be this evolution between what they think they want and the thing that they really need. And so that is often that little twist where the character makes a shift. It goes past what we think their actual goal is.

And that happens to Sandra Bullock in Speed. I mean, she thinks she wants a certain thing. She just wants to live. She just wants to make it through this day. And then she starts to really want to save this guy and want to save these people and it evolves. And your wants and needs should evolve. If they don’t, you’re going end up with something… — What happens I found once you clear the first barrier of trying to have clear goals is they become flat. And you’ll have these scripts which feel a little flat.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want a movie where you’re just waiting for somebody to do the thing they said they were going to do on page five.

**Aline:** Exactly.

**Craig:** People don’t actually want to do what they’re supposed to do. Nobody wants to exercise. Nobody wants to eat better. Nobody wants to, you know, address the things that were uncomfortable or painful in their lives.

What we do want to do is take pills, and sleep, and do things that are generally papering over the problems that we have. We are really good at just taking the path of least resistance.

**John:** And so the challenge, the screenwriter needs to find ways that the characters are not going to be able to take those paths of least resistance, to continually escalate the stakes to burn those bridges behind them so they can’t go back to those safe [crosstalk].

**Craig:** That’s the fun of it. And Pixar does it so much better than everybody. It’s so simple to see what Marlin wants. Marlin wants to keep the one surviving member of his family alive. The one that’s the hardest to keep alive because of his bad fin. That’s what he wants. It makes total sense. To the point where he will refuse to let anything happen to that kid. But look where he is at the end. What he wants is to let him go and do these things, even at the risk of dying.

That’s, to me, that’s the fun of movies. That’s the fun of storytelling is watching somebody finally realize that what I want isn’t what I need.

**Aline:** And it’s fascinating to me that animated movies, lately, are the ones who really have dug into this storytelling thing in a way that’s really fascinating. I mean, they really kind of take it to the wire in terms of having these stories which are really interesting and complicated, where the characters change their wants.

In some ways I feel like they have a rigor. And it may be because they can do so many iterations.

**John:** That’s what I think it is. Because an animated film goes through scratch reel, so you’re seeing it being built up again and again. So, you get to watch the movie, it’s like, “Well that doesn’t work.” And so then you’re able to change a story and do it again and again.

Even Frozen changed tremendously over the course of their shooting. I remember the stories of new songs go in, new things come out. Suddenly the reindeer could talk, the reindeer can’t talk. You figure out what the movie really wants to be because you get to see the movie in front of you which is a luxury that we rarely have in live action.

Although you can reshoot also. You can —

**Craig:** Yeah, but much, much easier to do in animation. Plus, also, I mean, you have a lot of experience with animation. I mean, I would imagine one gift of animation in terms of making stories is when we make a live action movie the actor has an enormous amount of power on the day. Either I’m saying it or I’m not. You know?

And we, this is it, we’re here once, you know? And in animation we can just try. We can just try. Try it this way, try it that way.

**Lindsay:** Yeah, it’s true. And because I come from live action I’m always saying, “But why couldn’t somebody just write Toy Story and then make it? I don’t understand why it’s been four years getting to that screenplay. I don’t understand it.”

And the argument that came back to me originally from Chris Miller and Phil Lord was, yeah, but look at the number of great animated movies compared to the number of animated movies. And at first I bought that argument. But then I thought, wait a minute, when I’m working in animation, these are the goals: It has to be funny — laugh out loud funny; it has to make you cry; it has to be universal — it has to be so universal that kids all over the world will understand; it has to appeal to children and adults; and it has to have a theme that you want the whole world to understand.

Well, if that’s where you start, of course you’re going to make a better movie. Of course you’re going to have a better — because your goals are so high. They’re so high. On every single one I’ve worked on, and I’ve worked on about twenty now, that’s where you start. And you’re always articulate.

**Aline:** But I always think of that thing that Michael Arndt said in the New Yorker which is we work on our — he says, “We work on the Pixar movies for five years and they suck for four of them.”

**Lindsay:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. But I keep thinking, why can’t —

**Aline:** There’s so many times in the live action movie —

**Craig:** Just get it right the first time.

**Aline:** There are so many times in a live action movie where you’re thinking, oh, if we only had this line covered this way. If we only could reinterpret this. If we could only get him coming from this side saying this. And you just don’t have it and it’s so hard to get. So, the fact that they have this ability to make those changes is really such an advantage. But I don’t know that that accounts totally for — I think what you said, which is the goals that they set out with are so concrete and so specific and so really what storytelling is.

**Lindsay:** Well, I know when I was at Austin this year I was on a panel about theme. And somebody said, “Does every movie you work on have a theme when you’re starting out?” And I went, “Every animated movie does.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Lindsay:** It’s not particularly true of every live action movie, but when you sit down that first day on an animated movie, theme is foremost in everybody’s mind. Who does that?

**Craig:** I do it.

**John:** Craig does it.

**Craig:** I do it and everybody makes fun of me.

**John:** [laughs] I never make fun of you, Craig.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** Nah. Never.

**Craig:** I know.

**Lindsay:** Does that help you, John?

**John:** That helps me a lot. I guess my last question for you and writers up here as well is to what degree before you started writing the script do you have answers to all those questions about what the character would say he or she wants at this moment? Because this is one of the first times I’m really challenging myself to do it before I write those scenes. And do you have an outline that would really articulate that? Or are you just going by gut feeling that like, “Yeah, she knows what she wants.”

**Aline:** For me an interesting thing was in writing Devil Wears Prada was what she wanted was just to survive that year so that she could do something else.

**John:** And does she articulate that?

**Aline:** And survive that year is not an incredibly propulsive narrative goal. And so it was very difficult to always get to her through the thing where she’s just trying to get through this, trying to get through that. But that is a movie where she takes the thing that is the most important thing and she throws it in the fountain. She literally takes the thing which is her stated goal and just kind of forgets about it and moves on from it.

And that was a good sort of object lesson for me in exactly that thing which is the thing she needed was to see that the world was different from the way she understood it. And that was different from what she wanted which was to have everyone tell her she was a genius.

And so what I think is really interesting about the theme is you can start out thinking something in particular, but I always find that as I write it I think, oh, I thought it was about this, but it’s actually about this. That always happens after the first draft that you really kind of find your theme. And I have found that countless times.

It’s very interesting — that is one of the many weird intangibles about writing is, and it’s not that the characters say it, or they teach you or whatever, but there’s sort of an emerging message that comes out of the script and it’s sort of the script knows that that’s what it wants and the characters start to tell you that.

And it’s almost impossible to know that when you go into it.

**John:** It’s like you know what happens and then finally you realize why it happens. It is just like I know this thing is this way and then ultimately like, oh, this is the reason why it’s happening this way. This is why this character is in this moment.

**Aline:** One thing I would say though which is maybe a helpful crafty thing is if you find yourself, I was just watching a movie where they had a character that was there just so that the lead character could say this is what I want and this is what the movie is about. If you find yourself doing that, try and cut that person out completely. Because it should be completely visible in the action.

And if you find yourself wanting a character who is going to show up and explain, you know, the best friend character, or the kindly train conductor, or the super helpful telemarketer, or somebody who is going to try and draw out those thematic goal things, something is wrong with your storytelling often. And you have to try and get those… — You know, you can get so much about what a character wants from action and that’s really what you want to do.

And I think when you find yourself having people say, “This is all I want is…” there might be something a little hanky in the way you’ve set it up.

**Craig:** I got to tell you I do think about this from the start. I organize my story around this very thing. I really do think about the story as a hero who is not always heroic wants simply to maintain their life of acceptable imperfection. And then the movie happens to them and they slowly start to become aware that there’s something wrong with their organizing philosophy of life, the way that they have — what they have decided their life is about, and that there may be another way to live.

And they get glimpses of it and they get hurt by sort of moving towards it. And eventually must act in accordance with faith in that thing.

**Aline:** But does that change when you’re writing it ever?

**Craig:** It can. But what that — but at least to start with and I know this: my story is connected to my character fundamentally. And if it changes I will change it so that both change together. But there is not character end of story. That story is for that character.

And, by the way, I haven’t always done this, but I’m doing it now. It’s something that I’ve come to and I believe in. So, I would say to you if you’re thinking about that, think about how the only difference between your character in the first scene where we meet her or him and the final scene is that they’ve changed their mind about this most fundamental philosophical question.

**Aline:** And here’s a question I ask maybe Lindsay at what point in the writing process did they write, “I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man.” You know? I don’t think they wrote that on day one.

**Lindsay:** Well, when I was working for Sydney Pollack, but not when he was making Tootsie, after that, but he said, you know, when he was asked to do it, because it was supposed to be Hal Ashby or something, and pretty close to production Hal Ashby dropped out and suddenly Sydney was dropped in. And he said that was thing about being a better man by being a woman, that theme was when he sort of decided to do the movie.

He said, “Once I knew that, I knew what to do with everything. I knew there had to be a baby over here so we have a baby over there.”

**Craig:** It tells you what the story is.

**Lindsay:** Yeah. It was like I knew exactly how to —

**Craig:** It tells you what the challenges are. It tells you how it should end.

**Lindsay:** How to organize it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** But can I tell you a really interesting thing? Sometimes you go to make the movie and the director has a different idea of what the theme was.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And I was just talking to somebody who wrote a movie which is a great movie and is up for Oscar buzz and stuff and he was saying that his idea of what the movie was about was different from what the director’s movie was about. And he said to me, “I think my movie is still in there.” But it really is this thing where because that is the intangible, you can always say to someone, well, they need to get the briefcase to Moscow by noon, but if you say to them this movie to me is about someone who understands that love is more important than money, you maybe be giving it to a filmmaker who thinks something completely differently.

**Craig:** Yup.

**Aline:** And what’s really interesting to me is I have made movies where I thought, oh, they’re still going to see what I wanted to do. They’re still going to see what I wanted to do. I know it’s in there. And it wasn’t in there. And it can be the same similar scenes and similar characters and similar dialogue and the thing that made you want to write the movie and the thing you were trying to say can disappear down the bathtub drain. And that’s one of the very strange things about being a screenwriter.

**Lindsay:** One of the things I’ve learned as a script whisperer, because I do all this consulting on things, when I come in on high level, high priority development, is I have everybody in the room, the producer, the writer, the studio executive, the director, whoever is there take a piece of paper without showing it to anybody else, say what is the most important relationship in this movie.

**Craig:** Oof.

**Lindsay:** And frequently I get four different answers.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Lindsay:** And that conversation is where you discover what everybody thinks the movie is about, what the last scene should be. You know, somebody said, your Devil Wears Prada, it’s about her and the boyfriend. You go, wow, that’s a different movie than if it’s her and Miranda, and that’s a different, you know what I mean? Or it’s Stanley Tucci. It’s like all of those are interesting movies, but everybody has to know who that last scene is about.

**Aline:** And I would actually say in some respects you know you’re in a good process when everyone is saying the same thing. If you actually looked at someone’s piece of paper and went like, “Ooh!”

**Lindsay:** And when that happens they don’t need me, because it means they are all on the same page. And it’s like only when —

**Craig:** What a bummer for you when they know and they’re like, “Get out!”

**Lindsay:** But usually the reason I’m there, the reason that everybody is having problems is that they haven’t quite all figured out that they’re making different movies. And then it’s about everybody figuring out what movie they want to make.

**John:** Well I know that we need you both very much. So, thank you very much for this discussion.

**Craig:** Thanks guys. Thank you.

**Aline:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Now it gets weird.

**Craig:** Now it gets weird.

**John:** Because we know the history on these things.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here we go.

**John:** You’re going to set this up because I don’t even know what to say. You like it when I’m drunk and you saw me drunk.

**Craig:** I love it when you’re drunk. Austin John August is the best John August. We just had the best time with these two. I would love for them to get married.

**John:** Oh my god!

**Craig:** Because then Kelly Marcel would become Kelly Kelly, which is so exciting.

So, we have — I’d like to welcome up here for a discussion of good and bad habits, mostly probably bad, but maybe a few good. Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame and Kelly Marcel of Saving Mr. Banks.

And normally, I mean, this is just working out great because I’m sure you haven’t been busy or anything.

**Kelly:** No.

**Craig:** Kelly’s film opens wide tomorrow.

**John:** Tomorrow! Woo!

**Craig:** And it’s really good. Really good.

**John:** Yeah, so Kelly when you were on our last live show in Austin I had not seen your film yet, and so I got to see it right after Austin. It was fantastic.

**Kelly:** You were my date.

**John:** I was your date. What was so wild is you’ve been basically promoting this film that entire time since we last spoke.

**Kelly:** And the month prior to Austin as well. Three months.

**John:** So, that’s a thing we have not really talked about on the show is what the writer’s function is in promoting a film, an award-caliber film that you’ve written.

**Kelly:** I had no idea that you had to do this much stuff to open a movie. I don’t know if it’s the same for every writer. And I think it’s been like this — I think it’s been this crazy because it’s a film that’s got a lot of award buzz. But, we worked out, John Lee and I worked out the other night that we’d had five days off including weekends in three months.

So, I’m a little bit tired. This is the last night of anything I have to do.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** It’s Kelly’s last night everyone!

**Kelly:** I’m going to get so drunk…

**Craig:** Well, this means that we could probably get her to say anything tonight. I feel like this is the night.

**Kelly:** This is the night.

**Craig:** Where she calls Walt Disney a Nazi.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Kelly:** [Gasps]

**Craig:** Tonight!

**Kelly:** Melissa! Beat him up.

**Craig:** Oh, no, she’s not going to help. No, no, she loves this chaos. She loves chaos. That’s my wife, Melissa, she’s over there. It’s my wife. I’m married!

**John:** She’s a real person.

**Craig:** Just wave so they know you’re real.

**Kelly:** She just said no. [laughs] No.

**Craig:** That’s it? We’re done?

**John:** She’s gotten embarrassed of this podcast.

**Craig:** We’re done? Yeah. All right. Well…

**John:** And Richard Kelly, we got to hang out some more in Austin, too, and I had known you before Austin but I didn’t kind of really know you until Austin.

**Craig:** And I still don’t know him really. Can you know Richard Kelly?

**Richard:** Yeah, it takes some time. Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So, since we had a great conversation about Donnie Darko, but you like Kelly are sort of strongly identified with the films you’ve made. And so does it become exhausting at a certain point to be the ongoing representative of the Donnie Darko franchise, of this thing you made?

At what point are you allowed to sort of say like, “You know what? I made that movie, that’s awesome, and now I’m going to go be Richard Kelly over here by myself.”

**Richard:** Yeah, well I mean, listen, it’s a blessing to have a film that stays with people and it continues to haunt you and be tattooed somewhere on your body, or on other people’s bodies usually.

**Craig:** He’s so weird. So weird. I love it.

**Richard:** I’ll take it. I’ll take it. But, listen, it’s all about constantly just evolving and trying to reinvent yourself. And not write the same movie over and over again, or not direct the same movie over and over again. And I think that’s tricky in this business because they always want to, like I said, put you in a category or a box, so to speak.

And for me in sort of trying to evolve as a writer I’ve been trying to just venture out into different kinds of stories. And change things up. You know, it’s like when you work out at the gym you’re supposed to change your weight lifting habit every few weeks.

**Craig:** We do that.

**John:** Yeah, that’s us. That’s us totally.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You can tell here that this…

**Richard:** But it’s constantly just like changing the way you’re exercising your muscles or your brain. And I don’t know, it’s just switching up the process I’ve found.

**John:** Well, and we’re approaching 2014, so are there any things you want to change up for 2014, or any things that you see in yourself that you want to do differently for 2014, especially in terms of you’re writing, your craft, your filmmaking. Is there anything?

**Richard:** Well, I’ve been writing for myself for probably three years. I’ve written probably three or four scripts over the past three to four years of all different kinds of genres. And I’ve been pushing into new territory. But I think for me it’s about getting back behind the camera, obviously, but in terms of writing, I think venturing into a place where I’m doing like two to three hours a day of really essentially work and that’s it.

I used to try to think I needed to write all day.

**Craig:** Not possible.

**Richard:** That I needed to. And it was just a mistake. I was writing too much. I was over-thinking things. I was creating too many characters that were extraneous. And it was actually an unhealthy process. So, I think I’ve learned now it’s like you just need to make sure when your brain is the most functional, what time of day is that, what environment do you need to be in. It’s a very almost — it’s like a dietary exercise thing in a lot of ways. Not to be too physiological.

**Craig:** No, no, totally applies to us as well.

**John:** Not at all.

Kelly, how about you? Your 2014. Do you have any things you are looking at doing now or in this new year that are different?

**Kelly:** Having a little sleep.

**John:** Sleep is so good.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**Kelly:** Really just want to do that mainly. No, I think I’m going to do some television next year.

**John:** That would be great.

**Kelly:** There was a TV… — When I sold Terra Nova, that brilliant show, [laughs] I also sold another show, I told you tonight’s the night I can just say anything.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Kelly:** I sold another show called West Bridge to Showtime which went into development but never got made and now because of Banks it’s been picked up. And so we’re going to do it as like a closed end series. So, that will be exciting.

**John:** So, talk about your writing though during this time, because you’ve been so busy doing —

**Kelly:** There is no writing.

**John:** There’s no writing at all?

**Kelly:** There’s no writing.

**Craig:** Very disappointed to hear.

**John:** But I’ve not done as much writing during the whole Big Fish thing as I wanted to, so it’s been exciting to get back into it. But are you on the Richard Kelly plan of a couple hours a day, or what’s your thing?

**Kelly:** I’m trying to do what you told me to do, [laughs], in Austin which is just do three hours a day. And it doesn’t matter which three hours that is. Just do three hours. But, you know, really the way my life works at the moment is I wake up, the phone starts ringing, I do press, I do phone interviews, all that —

**Craig:** Don’t forget the hair and makeup people.

**Kelly:** The fucking hair and makeup people. Swear to god if someone comes near me with another makeup brush! Um, yeah.

**Craig:** We also have a lot.

**John:** Yeah, you can tell. You can tell.

**Kelly:** They call it “grooming,” like I’m a dog.

**Craig:** Yes!

**Kelly:** You need to be groomed.

So, phone interviews happen all day and then I don’t think there’s been a night this week that I haven’t done a Q — I was on this stage last night doing a Q&A. It’s every single night.

**Craig:** And that is, I mean, I have to just say, one of the worst things about Q&As, when you’re doing Q&As for a movie is that you will be asked the same question over and over and over and you start to lose your mind. It’s a weird form of mental torture to be asked the same question over and over and over.

**Kelly:** Yeah. I started to make things up.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, what’s the one? What’s the one that is driving you the most crazy so that I can now ask it.

**Kelly:** Ha! Normally the Banks questions are kind of what they are, but obviously everybody wants to know about Fifty Shades of Grey. So, I’ve started to tell everyone I’m a virgin and that I don’t really know —

**Craig:** You’re not? I bought that.

**Kelly:** No, that’s true. Yeah. And that a really good friend of mine had told me that, you know, when you have sex like what you have to do is sit on a rabbit or a duck and then you rub a bald man’s head. And then you either get pregnant or flowers. And that doesn’t seem to going down too well with the studio funnily enough.

**Craig:** Walt Disney is not impressed.

**Kelly:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, are you a two or three hour, you’re a two or three hour work person. And what are your two or three hours, because I’ve started to try to make it the morning so that I can get stuff done. The first thing I do when I get in the office, I don’t do anything until I’ve written stuff.

**Craig:** I’m not that way. But what I will do is my plan is as I’m going to bed I’ve actually found a pattern. I didn’t realize I had one, but I found one. As I’m going to bed I start thinking about the next day’s work. And then I fall asleep. And I don’t worry about writing anything down because we all know when your dreams are nonsense.

But then when I wake up and I take a shower, I take a very long shower and in the shower I start to think about the scene. Once I’m out of the shower I should — I usually have a sense of what it is I’m going to write. If I don’t, I know it ain’t happening that day. But if I do, then I know I have all day to pick the three hours. And it’s just waiting for the moment. And then I do it.

**John:** So, Melissa, how long are the showers?

**Craig:** [laughs] She’s not in there with me when this is happening.

**John:** What’s a long Craig Mazin shower?

**Melissa Mazin:** Oh, I don’t know.

**Craig:** That’s my wife. There you go. 15? No.

**John:** Only 15? No.

**Craig:** No, no.

**Melissa:** 20 minutes. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Do you live with me? [laughs] It’s never when she’s there by the way. Here’s the other thing: She wakes up at 6:30 in the morning. I’m going to bed sometimes at 6:30 in the morning. So, she wakes up, she’s gone. So, now I’m talking like 9:30 or 10 I go into the shower. Easily sometimes I’ll go for a half an hour. Easily.

**Kelly:** Why does she get up at 6:30 and you get up at 9:30?

**Richard:** Uh, because he’s a writer.

**Kelly:** This is bullshit.

**Craig:** I got to go. [laughs]

**John:** Because she’s the parent who gets the kids off to school I bet.

**Craig:** She’s the responsible one.

**Kelly:** So you don’t help taking the kids to school or anything like that?

**Craig:** This is neither the time nor place, [laughs], to discuss this matter. We’ll talk about it later.

**Kelly:** I’ve got your back, Melissa.

**Craig:** I regret everything. Everything! This is kind of where it was eventually going to go.

**John:** You still have like the benefits of a bachelor writer life.

**Craig:** I do. Actually she’s great about that. Actually, I will say that if you have somebody that you share your life with who understands what you do and gives you the flexibility and space to do, that’s wonderful.

Now, if six years go by and you haven’t sold anything, that person is going to get super grumpy…

Yeah, she’s like, “Yeah!” She’s like, “I am super grumpy.”

**John:** What is the difference between like an aspiring screenwriter and a freeloader? It’s a really fine line.

**Craig:** It’s so…it’s right there. But, you know, assuming that you are actually earning a living then it’s nice to know that you’re living with somebody who kind of gives you the space you need to do the crazy job that we do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Like sleeping in?

**Craig:** I am so uncomfortable.

**Richard:** Well, the thing is if you’re only really required to work three hours a day, sleeping in is not that big a deal.

**Kelly:** Right.

**Craig:** Thank you, Richard Kelly!

**Richard:** And you need the sleep to rest your brain so you can make those three hours count.

**Craig:** Great point, Richard Kelly!

**Kelly:** No, but my argument is if it’s only three hours a day then there’s all the other hours in the day to help out, right?

**Craig:** That makes no sense.

**Richard:** There’s things like Angry Birds.

**Kelly:** And that’s how you make films.

**John:** And the gym. Don’t forget to go to the gym. That’s another crucial thing here.

**Craig:** Right. Although I’m also forgetting to go to the gym.

**Richard:** It takes a good hour and a half to go [crosstalk].

**John:** Yeah.

**Kelly:** Look at those guns.

**Craig:** I actually think I could fill enormous wads of my day with nothing. I don’t even know what happens. I don’t know what happens. But I do say, look, if you are writing a screenplay I will say this: I’ve never missed a deadline in my career. Not once. I am really responsible. I don’t know how. I just know that by this day it’s happening. And I’ve always gotten there, so I am very responsible. I’m very routinized in certain ways. In other ways, maybe not so much. What the hell! [laughs]

I mean, ugh…

**John:** Well, we’ll be able to ask more questions about Craig and his life during the Q&A.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, Kelly, congratulations on your movie. Congratulations on all you’ve done with this part of it.

**Kelly:** Thank you.

**John:** Kelly Marcel, you don’t naively think that you’re done doing press?

**Craig:** Oh no.

**Kelly:** What?!

**John:** No, there will be more.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** But for now you’re movie is coming out and congratulations, that’s awesome. Richard Kelly, thank you again for being here.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly. The great Richard Kelly.

**Richard:** Well, thanks for having me.

**John:** You guys can get up because we’re going to start our wrap here.

**Craig:** Get off. [laughs]

**John:** We have so many people to thank.

**Craig:** You especially. [laughs]

**Kelly:** Ha!

**John:** We need to thank the Writers Guild Foundation, the giant logo behind us. So, thank you very much for hosting us again. LA Film School for this venue, which was great, and so helpful —

**Craig:** Thank you LA Film School.

**John:** I need to thank Matthew Chilelli. Matthew, are you here? I never actually — he’s right there. He wrote a lot of the best outros you’ve heard. He also wrote the Christmas —

**Craig:** This guy is cool.

**John:** He’s pretty great. He also wrote the opening music that you heard tonight, sort of the holiday remix of the [hums Scriptnotes theme].

**Craig:** It’s amazing what you’ve done with such a mundane tune. Thank you so much.

**John:** Yes. It’s really remarkable what you’ve been able to do. So, thank you again for writing these for us. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. Wait, what about, are you going to get to them?

**John:** I’ll get to them eventually. We’ll thank Stuart Friedel. Stuart Friedel —

**Craig:** Stuart! Stand up, Stuart!

**John:** Tonight the role of Stuart Friedel will be played by this —

**Craig:** Stuart is played by this actor, Brett Goldfarb.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, he’s fantastic.

So, the Writers Guild Foundation who is this giant slide behind me, every year they have this holiday sale of Extraordinary Experiences, which you can find on their website, so wgfoundation.com.

**Craig:** This is the charitable. They are not part of the union. They are a 501c3 not-for-profit charitable organization. Great organization.

**John:** They do great work with veterans groups, with other aspiring writers, schools, all sorts of special programs. Once a year they do the sale of Extraordinary Experiences where you can have lunch with a certain given writer, or coffee, or someone will read your script.

So, if you go to the website you will see the Extraordinary Experiences that they have up for sale. This year some of our panelists will be also offering new special things after tonight, because we will strong arm them. So, I would encourage you to go there because it’s a great organization and it’s a great way for them to raise some money to pay for the eggnog you had here tonight.

**Craig:** Argh!

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** It coats your mouth.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good if you have like hot spicy food though. Insulation.

**Craig:** No, because you’re putting heat next to milk. It’s disgusting.

**John:** Well, at least we’ve bookended the show with the talk of eggnog.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Craig, thank you, and have a very happy holidays.

**Craig:** I thought you actually meant that.

**John:** See! I can feign sincerity when I need to.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas to you, John.

**John:** Aw, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** I always mean it.

**John:** And thank you all very much for being here.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [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) and [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing)
* [Franklin Leonard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Leonard) on episode [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes)
* [Kelly Marcel](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2813876/) on episode [115](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Lindsay Doran](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/movies/lindsay-doran-examines-what-makes-films-satisfying.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) on episode [68](http://johnaugust.com/2012/talking-austen-in-austin)
* [Rawson Marshall Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on episodes [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode) and [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show)
* [Richard Kelly](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0446819/) on episode [118](http://johnaugust.com/2013/time-travel-with-richard-kelly)
* The [2013 Black List](http://list.blcklst.com/story/7887) and [blcklst.com](http://blcklst.com/)
* The New Yorker on [live action versus animation](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_friend?currentPage=all)
* [Saving Mr. Banks](http://movies.disney.com/saving-mr-banks) is in theaters now
* Thank you to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [LA Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting
* Support the Writers Guild Foundation and get something awesome from their [Holiday Sale of Extraordinary Experiences](https://www.wgfoundation.org/holiday-fundraiser/)
* [Intro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Fred Tepper