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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-air-duct-of-backstory).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 67 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh man, I’m good. We’ve got one more week of shooting to go so I’m hanging on. I’m kind of hoping that I don’t get that weird body let down thing when you — it seems inevitable after you shoot you get a week or two off and you get sick.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your body was so tensed up, it’s like it couldn’t possibly get sick, so it sort of sequestered all the germs. And then once you possibly can get sick you just get super sick all at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m hoping that doesn’t happen because I get basically a week to relax and then, you know, vacation stuff and traveling.

**John:** I always found in college I would get sick right when I came home for Christmas. It was like I was able to get through the semester, make it to my finals, and then I would get sick.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s a great way then to avoid your family at Christmastime.

**John:** Perfect. And I love it. Now, what is your family’s tradition around the holidays? Do you do Christmas? Do you do Hanukkah? Do you do other stuff? I don’t even know.

**Craig:** I’m so glad you asked that question because it allows me to go on a mini rant.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** So, I’m Jewish. I’m not religious at all, but I’m ethnically Jewish, and I was raised in the Jewish tradition.

**John:** Ethnically Jewish or culturally Jewish? Is there a distinction between those for you?

**Craig:** Well there is, yeah, because Jews are both a people and a religion/culture. So, there is a genetic component to being Jewish. That obviously is affixed to me, and happily so. But culturally speaking, even though I grew up in a culturally Jewish home and in a vaguely religious home, sort of moderately religious — I suppose we were religious the way that most Christians are religious. Sort of Christmas/Easter type Christians. You know, we were Hanukkah/Passover type Jews. Or, I should say Rosh Hashanah/Passover type Jews.

But now I’m not religious at all. It’s just not part… — I never felt connected to religiosity in any way. When people talk about being spiritual I literally feel like an autistic person who doesn’t understand something like emotion. I don’t even know — I know what the word means technically. I have no actual connection to it.

I am the least spiritual person in the world. I don’t believe in such a thing. So, I’m not religious at all. [laughs] My wife is also not religious, but she comes from an Episcopalian background and we celebrate Christmas in our house because Christmas is an awesome holiday.

And frankly also from a storytelling point of view, the story of Jesus is an awesome story. It’s a great, great story with wonderful…

**John:** It has good Star Wars elements to it. It feels, you know, desert, and someone comes out who is chosen. It’s nice.

**Craig:** And then the idea of enduring terrible things as part of sacrifice to save others who had condemned you. That’s all good, rich stuff. Whereas Old Testament stories tend to be far more simple and odd, like, “You all lied. I’m killing you.” [laughs] “You’re all drowning now because I don’t like you.” Stuff like that.

**John:** Well, also the Old Testament stories are so sort of transparently interpretations of very classic myths. Like all those things existed for a long time, they were just sort of woven together to become the Old Testament, but you find the exact same kinds of stories in other cultures at the same time, too.

Whereas the Jesus story at least has a lot of new elements to it even though there were other outside savior figures. And you can find the roots of the Jesus story in other cultures as well. It is newish.

**Craig:** It’s newish. I mean, if you read the story of Krishna it will shock you how Jesus-y it is. I mean, the idea of a virgin birth, someone who dies for your sins. Someone is convicted unfairly and who is perfectly sweet and good, that did pre-date Jesus.

But, that said, the story feels like a more modern story in part because it is.

**John:** But also it has three acts. It has an arc to it which is unique and different. I mean, there’s a saga to it that doesn’t exist in sort of the other Old Testament stores which is nice.

**Craig:** It’s true. I mean, there’s a saga to Exodus. That is, I think, the most interesting Old Testament story because it has the plagues, it has an adopted child who grows up in the family that he then rebels against. And then there’s plagues. And finally the Pharoah relents. But then there’s a reversal because he decides, “No, you can’t leave, I’m going to chase you down and kill you.”

But then God comes with a pillar of fire. But then fascinatingly and anti-dramatically then they just wander around for 40 years.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not so dramatic.

**Craig:** It’s a really bad third act. [laughs]

**John:** So, like you, my family is — we celebrate Christmas and we do all that stuff. We’re not sort of actively religious. And so I always sort of never kind of wanted the Christian label on me, but then when I was in Africa years ago working with this charity group, everyone was like, “Oh, are you Christian?” And it’s like you’re just sort of Christian — if you’re not anything else you’re Christian. So, I’m fine sort of being culturally Christian. That’s why I asked the difference between ethnically and culturally, because I’m ethnically nothing. But culturally, yeah, I come from a Christian culture. So, even though I don’t actively practice any of those religious tenets on a weekly basis, eh, culturally I’m Christian.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think all Americans to some regard are culturally Christian because, for instance, I consider myself in a weird way culturally Christian as well, because I really love Christmas, and I like Easter. It’s fun, I like those things. But I’m not at all a spiritual or religious person in any regard toward any religion.

I will say that Hanukkah is dopey. Hanukkah is a lame-o holiday. It was an event that is of almost no religious or historic importance to actual Jewish people. When I say “actual Jewish people” I mean like actual students of Judaism. Hanukkah is incredibly minor. It’s on par with Jewish Arbor Day.

**John:** But it got elevated just because it was so close to Christmas and it felt weird that they didn’t have an equivalent holiday around that time of year.

**Craig:** It is totally manufactured in the way that Christians manufactured Easter out of pagan holidays. And so the bunny is a part of Easter because it was the Spring Fertility holiday and they kind of just glommed in. It’s the same deal.

And Hanukkah is just dopey. I mean, the whole thing is that there was a minor miracle involving a couple people who they got lights on for a little bit longer than they should have.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your iPhone battery lasting a really long time.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Uh, let’s have a holiday.” It’s ridiculous. The whole eight-presents-over-eight-nights is ridiculous, because really you only get one good present and then a bunch of dinky ones. So, basically, really all they’re doing is spreading out the stocking stuffers over seven nights.

You know, it just — I mean, I understand why it was important for us as kids to have something, but you know, frankly, Christmas is so much more religiously significant to Christianity than Hanukkah is to Judaism that even as a Jew I’m like, “I don’t even like the idea of putting up the Menorah next to the Christmas tree in the mall.” You know, I just feel like, no, just do the Christmas tree.

If you want to be properly-Jewish, then at Passover and Easter — which are connected because, of course, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder — do something there. That’s important.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** So, anyway, that’s my religious rant for today.

**John:** Cool.

Today I thought we would talk about perspective within scenes and sort of perspective overall in a story and sort of how screenwriters work on shifting perspective and telling a story with a clear perspective. And then get into three more examples — actually four more examples of our Three Page Challenge, because we’ve had so many good ones come through and Stuart picked out four new ones for us to look at.

So, that will be our agenda today.

**Craig:** That’s our day.

**John:** That’s our day.

So, a small update on the last podcast, I talked about how for this ABC pilot I’m writing I wrote it all in Fountain for the first time. And I used this beta of a new software program that’s coming out which is really good and I liked it a lot. And so just an update on that: So I finished, and so stuff is handed in.

And so I ultimately ended up using Highland to convert the Fountain to Final Draft so I could go through Final Draft, because I needed to do starred changes. And that’s one of the things that’s still problematic to try to do in Fountain or any of the sort of non — any sort of plain text thing — is when you need to mark what’s changed from one draft to the next draft, so if I’m sending pages through to Josh I can say like, “Hey, just look for the starred changes.”

That’s a thing that Final Draft is really good for. And so while I think these writing tools are really great and really helpful, I’m still very much acknowledging that there’s things that big professional applications like Final Draft are really good at. And starred changes is one of the things that it does really well. Screenwriter does it well, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Did you see that Fade In actually has built in Fountain exporting and importing I think?

**John:** Yeah, which is terrific. And where I find stuff missing, and I’m not talking about Fade In specifically, but as I was working with this draft in Final Draft I was making small changes, and so like literally just adding a few lines of dialogue, and I found it really maddening suddenly to have to use Final Draft Syntax for adding characters and stuff. Because I found myself typing I was like, “Well, that’s in parenthesis so of course that’s a parenthetical. Why are you making me go through and select it and tell you that it’s a parenthetical? It’s a parenthetical.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things that in my fantasy Final Draft would just have a little mode, a little tick box you could set that’s like, “In the Fountain mode,” and it would just be able to interpret. It’s actually very hard to.

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting one because it’s the one thing about Movie Magic I love the most. When you’re in dialogue and you hit parenthesis, or if you are — before you type, if you have parenthesis it puts it in parenthetical.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because their point is, and they’re right — how often do you have to type a parenthesis that isn’t a parenthetical?

**John:** Yeah. Or, how often is the parenthesis going to be in the very start of the line of dialogue?

**Craig:** Right. Just know open parenthesis means go command-4 into Parenthesis Mode.

**John:** Yup. Should be. So, anyway, it’s been interesting to sort of see that process sorting itself out.

And for people who are curious about Fountain we actually have a new Glassboard setup to talk over Fountain issues. Glassboard is a sort of semi-private message board system. So, if you have issues that come up in Fountain or questions about Fountain, myself and the other developers of Fountain are there to answer questions or talk about new stuff that can come up.

So, there will be a link to that new Glassboard for Fountain on the links for Scriptnotes at the bottom of this podcast. So, always just johnaugust.com/podcast and you’ll see a link for that.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, let’s talk about perspective because this actually came from you. You were talking about how with what you’re working on right now with The Hangover 3, there’s issues that come up sometimes about really conveying what the perspective is within a scene.

**Craig:** Well, it occurred to me because I’ve been — now that we’re getting close to the end I’ve been sneaking away from the set and spending time with the editors, just trying to kind of help get a few of the scenes together in shape for when Todd comes in and really starts working on his assembly. Because I’m there and I do it with him I know, “Okay, this is what he intended for this,” or “This is what he intended for that,” sort of like hopefully we can hand over an assembly-plus as opposed to just an assembly.

And one thing that I noticed is that a lot of times when editors are assembling all the footage, what they’re doing is following the lines. So, let’s say you have a scene where three people walk into a room to talk to one person. They will sort of follow the dialogue. But, of course, when you’re editing you have a choice. You don’t necessarily need to show who is talking. You could show somebody else.

And sometimes what ends up being missed is where the perspective of the scene is away from the dialogue. Sometime you’re writing a scene where people are talking but one person is staring at the person that’s being talked to. And that person is not saying anything. That person is falling in love; that person is growing angry; that person sees something in their hands; that person realized they’re lying. That’s what I mean by perspective.

And it started to occur to me that it’s something that we bake into our scenes a lot, but if you’re not you should be. And the notion that the scene, no matter what’s going on in a scene, ultimately the reader must be emotionally connected to a specific singular relationship — a person to another person; a person to an object; a person to an event.

And things should be going on around that. But there has to be a focal point of concentration for the reader and then ultimately for the audience. And it doesn’t have to be with who’s talking. Sometimes it’s not at all with who’s talking. And it’s important for us to think about where that perspective is and then come up with interesting ways to draw us out of it and switch it if need be.

**John:** So, the exact case that you’re bringing up is very classically what you want to do. The center of the scene, the most important person in the scene, the base of a scene, is not necessarily the person who has the most lines in the scene. And in many movies that will be kind of obvious, because if your hero is in a scene — if Indiana Jones is in a scene with other people who are doing more talking, well obviously it’s Indiana Jones’s movie, so we’re going to spend most of our time with him, so it’s really natural that we’re going to favor him in the cutting and in our head as we’re sort of shooting the movie in our heads. We always know that Indy is the most important person in that room.

With your movie, because you have multiple protagonists and you have a lot of stuff going on, it might not necessarily be clear who the important person is to follow in this thing and who should be at the center point of the scene. So, how would you bake that in on the page? What would you do to convey that? Are you just saying, like, hold on this person and throw the other dialogue in OS? How would you convey that on the page?

**Craig:** Well, you shouldn’t. I mean, in a sense you want to be able to shoot everything because you don’t know what you’re going to want to play off camera and what you’re not going to want to play off camera. But in action description you should do what you normally do, that is to say emphasize what matters. So, while one person is talking you could say, “While Jim rambles on, Sandra can’t help but keep staring at the man’s withered hand.” Okay?

**John:** Yeah, or “Sandra burns a hole through him with her eyes.”

**Craig:** Yes. Now, when it comes time, of course, you know, again, editors may make a mistake, but that’s okay. Everybody gets their first and second drafts, and the point is that the filmmaker, the director, should understand what the perspective of the scene is as well. But their understanding of it is going to come from the script and from their discussion with you, which is why it’s so important to emphasize perspective.

In fact, as I often do, I got angry [laughs] on DoneDealPro because somebody was saying, “How do I — I want to sort of describe how the camera is moving here.” And really it was about emphasizing perspective. And people were like, “Don’t put in camera directions. Don’t direct with script.”

No. No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead and put in camera directions if it’s important if that’s what’s going to convey the intention of where the perspective of the scene is. It’s important to know where the camera is going if it’s not doing what would be expected.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay? So, if we’re watching two people and it’s a spy thriller, and they’re having this discussion, and the intention is that we slowly pull back and away from them to reveal the back of a man’s head at another table listening, and he has a little thing in his ear and he can hear what they’re saying, it’s important for you to put that direction in.

Because it’s about figuring out what the perspective is and who we’re supposed to be with. I mean, think about the scene in The Godfather where Michael goes to have dinner with Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. I think it’s McCluskey.

And his mission is he’s going to kill both of them. And he’s nervous because he’s never killed somebody up close like that before. He’s never committed murder like that before, even though he’s a war hero. And he’s sitting here in this restaurant, and the two of them begin talking — not him, the other two are talking — and while they’re rambling on we just stay with him and he’s just staring quietly. He even starts nodding in answer to what they’re saying, but we don’t even see them anymore because it’s all about that feeling you get in your head when you begin to swim in your own thoughts and you start to panic internally.

Well, you have to describe that on the page. You have to. And if you don’t, I think you’re missing the point of what it means to bake in the perspective of the scene.

**John:** I agree.

Now, as we’re talking about perspective, we’re talking about perspective within a scene. Also, a whole movie has perspective, and in the movie which characters are telling the story and which characters have storytelling ability.

One of the things I’m working on for the ABC pilot is we limit perspective very strictly to the four members of the family. So, every scene has to be driven by one of the four members of the family which is a huge opportunity and obstacle that we present for ourselves, is that we only have information that the four people in the family can see.

And when you setup those kind of limitations, you have to really think about like, “Well, how are we going to get this information across to the audience and which of our four people can have that information?” But, by limiting yourself to that perspective and letting it be clear that we’re never going to go off with the villains and see what the villains are doing, it changes the nature of it.

And the times when we sort of bend the rules and we can sort of follow this little bit of a conversation with people who weren’t originally in the scene, that’s nice; it gives you tension.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good to — just the fact that it is part of how you’re approaching the show conceptually forces you to think about it. And I see sometimes when we read bad pages, a lot of times it seems like whoever is talking, that’s where the camera is supposed to be. And we just follow line to line, like a play.

**John:** And because we have limited perspective to these four people, obviously if there’s only one of our four family members in the scene, they are the most important person in the scene. There would be no question that someone else is going to be dominating that scene. It has to be our person. Even if our person is not doing the main talking, we know what it is. And it draws you in closer as an audience to those people because you’re seeing them all the time. You’re not going off and hanging out with other people.

**Craig:** Right. Good.

**John:** Cool. Great. Well, thank you for talking about perspective. Let’s get into perspectives on these four Three Page Challenges that we got in this week.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** Awesome. What do we want to start with? Do you want to start with Hunter?

**Craig:** Hunter? Did you say Hunter?

**John:** Hunter. Hunter Altman.

**Craig:** Hunter did…is that the one with the swamplands of Florida?

**John:** Yeah. Why don’t you start with Hunter in the swamplands of Florida.

**Craig:** Okay. So, in these pages here, I don’t believe we have a title for this, we begin in the swamplands of Florida and we realize we’re in, it almost seems like the Everglades or something. An alligator surfaces and we move past the swamp to find an old, small old minor league baseball stadium. This is the home of the Swamp Gators and it’s pretty run down and pretty small-time. It’s at night. Everyone has left. Nothing there but the sound of the sprinklers over the fields.

And then we find groundskeeper Tony, who is 50s, and he’s cleaning up and he’s alone. He switches off the lights, hears a noise, turns back to investigate with his tiny little flashlight, and then sees something inhuman staring at him from the bullpen. The thing pounces on him and kills Tony.

**John:** And that’s three pages.

**Craig:** That’s our three pages. So, you want to start?

**John:** I’ll start. I like it. I thought Hunter has a very good ability to describe things. He uses that ability a little too much. I thought he had really good specific details about this place. I felt like I could sort of see it, and smell it, and live it, and breathe it. And for a horror movie, like, it’s kind of accepted that we’re going to be sort of a slow start. And you’re just going to be, like, painting the world. There was just a little too much painting for me. I could have just gone through and edited a little bit of this out.

But, he really has skills at sort of describing things, so good on him for that. My biggest issue with it was Tony, our guy. Because we’ve seen that trope of the groundskeeper who is there alone at night and hears a noise and goes out to investigate. It’s just so stock that I feel like you need to push back against that and give us something else more specific or more interesting to be doing here.

Because if you’re sticking with the idea that he’s a groundskeeper, okay, but give me something else. Is he hitting a few balls of his own at night because that’s the only time he gets to do it? Is he dying of emphysema? Is he cooking meth in the back room? Is he super Christian? Does he collect one kind of thing that he finds in the stands?

Just give me something more specific than just, like, he’s the guy who cleans up and then he finds some monster out in the fields.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with everything. I mean, to continue your theme, the initial theme of praise, good writing here. In particular the beginning, I really liked, “Around it, insects buzz, frogs croak, birds call. You can feel the sticky humidity just by looking at it.”

Well, what’s nice about that is I can feel the sticky humidity now just by reading that. So, that’s good. I felt there — I felt I was there. I liked the touch of how rundown the scoreboard was. But then I would say, okay, there’s only so many times you can make me read stuff. So, you have me read, “THE SWAMP GATRS THAK YOU FOR COMING. DRIVE HOME SAF,” which is bulbs burnt out — it was a nice touch.

Then I have to see the banner that says “1987 is The Year Of The Gator!” Then I have to read “Hit one over the Gator and win a free seafood dinner!” There’s a lot of reading going on. So, by the time I got to the bottom of page one with the sprinkler — the sprinkler sound was great, but then there were three more paragraphs describing what the stadium looked like and it was not required.

Yeah, absolutely, everything that happens on page two and three we have seen a billion times. The old disposable character gets eaten by something. And, you know, I understand to some point there’s only so much character building you can do there because the dude is about to get eaten, but I think John is right; you want to try and maybe give us some twist on the same old thing.

I would say that, a couple of suggestions for you, Hunter. One is on the bottom of page two, “He’s not more than 20 yards from the glowing EXIT sign, when he hears — [/] — SOMETHING. He’s not sure what. He turns back.” Well, someone’s going to have to record that later, Hunter, [laughs], so can you give us a little more, buddy? It’s got to be more than “SOMETHING.” Is it a clank? Is it a cling? Is it a growl? Is it a shuffling noise? Is it a drip-drip-drip? But it can’t be “SOMETHING” in all caps. That’s just malpractice.

**John:** That’s cheating. I agree.

**Craig:** And then, finally, the death itself comes exactly as you would imagine it. There’s absolutely no question that he’s about to get killed by a thing that he’s investigating, but it comes from the front of him, it doesn’t come from above, or from behind, or from below. There’s no misdirect. There’s nothing. It just sort of happens as it should happen. But I like the touches that you did. “A smeared brown trail.” I like the way his page is laid out.

Like if you look at page three — for those of you who are new writers, take a look at page three of Hunter’s pages. It is divided up perfectly. It’s the perfect proportion of scene headers, description lines, dialogue. Short. Punchy. Lots of good caps where it needs to be. That’s the way you should write. That’s the way it should look.

**John:** Agreed. Some of the dialogue wasn’t spectacular but I liked the breakup of the page a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, here’s what I’ll say about this trope is we have the maintenance guy, the minute he sort of calls out to, “Hey kid, park’s closed,” I would love to see that guy not go out and investigate but actually get out of there and call the police or call security. Just not do exactly what we expect him to do in this kind of movie. And I think to the degree you can surprise us, that’s great.

Also, in the middle of page two, this is — again, you need to go back through and really proofread. It says:

Well, we’ve just established this power box twice, I think. Or maybe there were meant to be two? It’s confusing and not necessary. And, honestly, think about the cut. And literally the cut would just be like you put in the key to unlock something, or you turn something off. You don’t have to sort of establish that there is something and then have someone do something to it. Just have them do something to something and that will establish that exists in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s great advice. Think about the cut. Because that’s exactly what I was thinking about when I started feeling like there were too many things to read. Because, you know, I don’t want to just keep looking at signs. So, you get to look at one sign briefly. And, you’re right. The notion — for instance, another possibility is he goes, you know, “You kids, park’s closed,” and have him walk towards the bullpen and there’s a kid there. And they’re playing. And he gets rid of them.

And then he hears another thing, [laughs], do you know what I mean?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We have choices here of how to kind of subvert people’s expectations. But in these particular pages we just did the most expected version.

**John:** Yeah. And I should have said as we started this whole thing off is for people who want to read along with us at home, links to all four of these PDF samples will be at johnaugust.com/podcast for this podcast. So, you can pull them up and read along with us as we look through them.

So, the next one we’re going to take a look at is by Kevin Wolfe & Adam DeKraker. And, again, we don’t have a title on this, but here’s what happens:

We open in an operating room with a screaming pregnant woman. There’s two doctors, Juliet Abbas and Jonas, and they’re working on a delivery and they’re arguing about a C-section. As they cut the woman open Jonas gives an “Oh my god” as his eyes go wild in excitement. The EKG flatlines.

Next, we’re on a rooftop garden in Brooklyn with Ronnie Van Dam, a 30-year-old Hitchcock blonde. We see her condo building, her unit, her amazing kitchen. We see a New York Magazine cover that calls her the “Queen of Green.”

Later, as she’s cooking, she’s watching a syndicated talk show with Paula Cruz, whose first guest is Dr. Abbas from the first scene, who is a fertility specialist.

And that’s our three pages. Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you want me to start?

**John:** You can start.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Okay. Well, look, the dialogue here on page one is pretty bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, the coming in mise-en-scene in this — in medias res, whatever the phrase is, in medias res.

**John:** As stuff is going on.

**Craig:** In the middle of it, sorry. It’s not mise-en-scene. It’s medias res. Coming in the middle of this woman, she’s screaming. This is the first line of the movie:

This would the first human being that ever said, “Stop! Please! Why are you doing this?” while people cut her. It’s just so wooden. I don’t understand what’s happening frankly in this operating room.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** They’re doing what appears to be a C-section, however the woman is not anesthetized. I don’t know why. If that’s a point I think that needs to be called out. If it’s not a point then anesthetize her, for the love of god. “A steady drip of BLOOD trickles from the table and pools around their feet.” What hospital is this where that is allowed? [laughs] That doesn’t happen in hospitals, I mean, unless you’re in trauma surgery.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s nurses to pick that up. Is it just the two doctors and there’s no one else in the place?

**Craig:** Well, and also, blood doesn’t trickle from operating tables. You have suction. I mean, it just doesn’t work that way. I just doesn’t trickle like a horror movie and pools around their feet. I’ve never seen such a thing.

And then we have, you know, this dialogue. Dr. Abbas says, “Scalpel.” Dr. Jonas, who’s wearing wire-framed glasses, apparently that is super important in the middle of all this…

**John:** Yeah. I think he’s a Nazi.

**Craig:** Apparently. Pleads in a thick accent, “We need to slow the hemorrhaging.” Dr. Abbas says, “Focus on the delivery.” Dr. Jonas, “We can still save the mother.” Dr. Abbas, “Scalpel.”

Doctors don’t do this.

**John:** [laughs] And the woman is apparently still conscious to be hearing this.

**Craig:** Conscious. Yeah. [laughs] Not saying anything. Now she’s interested, I guess, in what they have to say.

**John:** So, it’s possible, is she being bound down to the gurney?

**Craig:** I don’t know!

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on.

**Craig:** I don’t know! And then Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’ hand. So, now you have a doctor handing tools to another doctor which, again, speaks of complete ignorance of how surgery is done. And Dr. Abbas lifts back a flap of skin to reveal the womb. Dr. Jonas, “Oh my god.” Dr. Abbas is wild with excitement. But she drops the scalpel which hits the floor with a clang. Well, you don’t do that when you’re excited. you do that when you’re shocked or horrified. The others step back in horror. The EKG flatlines.

**John:** But the others step back in horror. Well, what others are there?

**Craig:** What others? Yeah.

**John:** There aren’t any others in the room.

**Craig:** Well, no, there’s “Four figures in surgical scrubs and masks huddle over a pregnant woman.” But two of them are doctors and the other two are just huddlers.

**John:** [laughs] Those mysterious huddlers.

**Craig:** But it gets worse. It gets worse from here. [laughs]

**John:** Why don’t we talk about this first page just because I don’t know if we want to go back through and look at these things twice. Here’s an example of the Dr. Abbas and Dr. Jonas — the character names and the headers over dialogue, get rid of the “Dr.”s because it actually makes it more confusing because it’s harder to tell them apart with those. So, those should just be labeled as “Abbas” and “Jonas.”

Now, so Dr. Juliet Abbas, we get Juliet is a woman, so that’s okay, fine. But “DR. JONAS (late 30s), wearing WIRE FRAME GLASSES, pleads in a thick accent.” So, I assume like, oh, Dr. Jonas, I guess is a man. But then the next paragraph of scene description, “Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’s hand. For a split second, the light catches a TINY JADE TURTLE CHARM on her wrist.”

And that made me think, “Well, is Dr. Jonas a woman?”

**Craig:** Right, does she have a turtle charm?

**John:** Yeah. The “her” isn’t connected to either one of them.

**Craig:** This is an example of a mess. And, guys, I’m sorry — or ladies — I don’t mean to be mean about this, but this page is a mess. It’s a mess. You wouldn’t want to watch this the way you’ve written it. I don’t how else to put it. It’s kind of a mess. And tonally speaking it’s playing as high camp, and I don’t think that’s what you want, because then on page two we suddenly enter into a Nancy Meyers movie.

So, now I’m really confused because now we have this woman at a rooftop garden in Brooklyn and she’s the queen — we know this because a magazine tells us — she’s the Queen of Green, meaning that I guess she grows stuff. And she really wants to be pregnant. And I know that because in the elevator she looks at a pregnant neighbor and then she watches a show about pregnancy and has a reaction to the doctor saying, you know, “We can get people pregnant when they’re not pregnant.”

But there’s better ways to show me that somebody wants to be pregnant than that. That’s about the goofiest way.

**John:** Yeah, I also want to maybe make a new challenge to all screenwriters in the world: Let’s stop doing the thing where we show a magazine cover to establish who somebody is. It’s just so hacky to do that. Because you always have this fake headline that would never actually be on the magazine. It’s always people who never would be on the magazine anyway.

It’s just a terrible way to do things. It’s the air duct of backstory.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is the air duct! It’s the air duct of backstory and exposition. And, also, it’s so weird that they have at their own — like if you were on the cover of a magazine, to casually leave it around your own house is so weird.

**John:** I was on the cover of Written By Magazine, but I don’t leave it around the house just sitting out there.

**Craig:** No, it’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** And it would be even weirder to read it. And what happens is you start — something like that, just so that people understand. She comes in from her rooftop garden with her basket of stuff, her beets. Her basket of beets. She plops the basket onto the kitchen counter. “A carrot tumbles out and lands on a copy of NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Ronnie is on the cover with the headline ‘THE QUEEN OF GREEN.'”

Nothing can take me out of a movie more than a magazine cover with our character’s name on it with the fact describing that she’s the queen of gardening while a carrot that she just gardened tumbled onto it. Everyone in the audience will be thinking, “Oh, look what the movie’s telling us.” They’re not in the story at this point. There’s got to be a better way to get that information across.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Must be. And then this talk show, you know, again, while we’re calling for moratoriums can we call for a moratorium on the introductory talk show that tells us who someone is?

**John:** Yeah. It’s not good.

**Craig:** So, we have a talk show now. And the talk show host, “Welcome back, doctor. We always love having you here and you know why? Because we love babies!” Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eh, I don’t know what to say about all of this.

**John:** I would say it’s just not especially promising. So, this seems to be some sort of like mad pregnancy thriller, I think. That’s a valid genre, sort of. It feels a little bit Lifetime-y, but that’s a valid genre to do.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just think this didn’t start off in a very promising way.

**Craig:** No, it’s just playing incredibly campy right now. And you don’t want to be campy, unless you want to be campy.

**John:** Unless you want to be campy, but this isn’t the right kind of campy. This doesn’t feel like it’s going…

**Craig:** No. This is feeling pretty goofy. I think you guys need to really take a step back and if you’re writing a movie that’s sort of like Rosemary’s Baby or Coma or something like that, find your tone. This stuff is really over-the-top right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** That’s okay. We agree. I think they were brave to send it in.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you for sending it.

**Craig:** It’s the attendance award of Scriptnotes. You were brave for sending it in. [laughs]

**John:** Next up let’s talk about The Transcendentalist by Scott Gorsuch.

**Craig:** All right. Are you summarizing or am I summarizing?

**John:** You’re summarizing this one.

**Craig:** I’m summarizing this one. Okay. So, this story opens with the image of a small boy slipping down through water in a lake, fully clothed, apparently drowning, blood gushing from his head while a voice over asks, “Ever think about past lives? What you might have been?” As the boy disappears into the depths the man’s voice, voice over, “I didn’t used to.”

And now we’re back now, and presumably that little boy has grown up, we think, and he’s woken up with a shock on a bus. He looks sad, a little bit out of place. He walks to his house. There’s some furniture missing and it turns out his girlfriend has left him. She’s moved out, left him a note. He calls up his friend Steve to say, “Hey, can we meet for a drink? Lydia has moved out.”

The two of them share a couple of beers in a pub. They talk about the fact that she moved out. And talk about why it may be that David had sort of failed here. That’s our character, David. And those are our three pages.

**John:** They were kind of a dreary three pages. And dreary, partly intentional. I mean, you’re opening with a good image of a boy drowning. That’s bleak. You’ve got a guy on a bus, like a sad George Bailey. That’s kind of dreary. But I just felt like I was slipping into a dark and not especially inviting place reading through these pages.

And there were a lot of specific sort of problems on the page that I want to talk about, because we don’t get a lot of sense of plot here yet, so there wasn’t a lot to sort of get me there in terms of talking about story, but just the words on the page could be better and could help me out a lot.

Right from the very start, the small boy slips down through the water — SMALL BOY should still be capitalized, even if that’s a character we’re going to meet later on. If it’s an actual person, give us some uppercase there.

Capitalizing “Winter” mid way through the page felt weird to me. I know, technically I guess we’re supposed to capitalize “Winter,” but it felt weird to me. It stuck out.

And we do this weird thing at the bottom of page one where we’re outside the house and then we’re inside the house. And then he’s like, “Lydia, are you home?” And he’s been wandering around the house. But we never really got inside the house and so I kept waiting for like, “What, are we looking through the door? Oh, no, I guess we really are walking through the house.” Give us a new scene header there. So, “EXT. DAVID’S HOUSE – FRONT PORCH.” He can do the “‘Lydia? You home?’ No one answers.” Next, new scene header, “INT. DAVID’S HOUSE.” Then you can walk around.

And once you’re inside the house it’s fine if the style you want to use is that you’re just doing little slug lines for the different rooms of the house. That’s cool, that’s a valid style. But if you’re going from EXT to INT, those really are different places. Give us a scene header for those.

It has a really unrealistic phone conversation on page two. So, I’ll read it aloud here for you:

So, it just started weird. Like on one just starts talking into a phone. And so there wasn’t a sense of, like, he called somebody and acknowledged who it was that he was talking to. That’s not how phone calls work. And so you could slip a jump cut in there and that would be valid. If you just gave me like, “JUMP CUT,” I’d believe that some time had passed. But it didn’t feel real in the moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked the opening. I didn’t mind the dark, sort of glum tone. Maybe this is going to be a cool mumblecore movie, who knows. I mean, I really enjoyed the opening visual. I thought it was well-written. And I liked him being on this bus and I liked how sad he was.

And I liked the way that he found out initially that Lydia had left him. “He scans the room. There’s an empty silhouette on the wall where a painting had been and impressions in the carpet from a missing chair.” Those are really nice details.

“He thinks maybe someone has broken in. He snatches an umbrella, creeps into the kitchen.” By the way, I agree with you about the slug lines. We have to be INT here, “INT. HOUSE.”

He comes around it, now there’s a note stuck to the fridge. And then on the note we hear the voice over of her reading the note and that I did not like. Frankly, I don’t think you need that at all. I don’t think you need the note at all. And I totally agree with you about the conversation. Really I would have loved to have picked that up in the middle. So, in other words, “He comes around the corner and he sees a note stuck to the fridge.”

We don’t have to read the note. The next thing we should see is him already on the phone. “I know, I’m sorry about that. Been really busy.” So, it’s a little bit of a mystery what’s going on. And then he says, “Listen, Lydia’s moved out.” And then we get the answer when he tells Steve. Don’t give us information twice.

You have information? Play the mystery of it. You gave away a gift you had built into the setup of the scene, if you think about it.

**John:** So, here’s an even more drastic cut that I serves you even better. So, “No intruder. A very conspicuous note is stuck to the fridge.” So, can either pull it down or you can just leave on the note. “Cut to: INT — PUB.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s with Steve. And Steve is holding the note. Because right now the note happens about halfway through it and its this whole shoe leather to get the note out. Steve is holding the note and all he has to say is, “While you were at work? That’s harsh.” We know what happened then. And then you can have the conversation about Lydia. Like you don’t need to say her name before that point.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Or, or, let’s go even further. So, he sees this note. The next thing is he’s in a pub with his friend. And let’s go back to our discussion about perspective. His friend is rambling on about something we don’t care about while David just sits staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Then he finally looks up and says, “Lydia walked out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See, I mean, there’s 100 different ways of doing this, but this isn’t an interesting way. This is a very boring way of doing it. So, even in these things think about drama and think about teasing the audience along.

It’s great to leave them confused for 30 seconds. 40 seconds. A minute. You don’t want them confused for five or ten minutes, because then they’re not watching what they’re supposed to be watching. But confusion for a short burst that you can then satisfy is good to do.

The discussion that he has with Steve is boring. I don’t know what else to say about that. it’s just boring.

**John:** So, back to your issue of confusion and satisfaction: that’s what I want people to take out of this is that it’s great to be confused for about ten seconds and be trying to figure it out. Like basically you want people, your audience and your readers, to be curious enough to want to figure out what’s happening. “Oh, I figured it out!” And they get that little burst of dopamine when they’re like, “I figured that out. I’m so excited. I’m so smart.”

And you’ve rewarded them for figuring that little thing out, for figuring out like, “Oh, his girlfriend left him!” That’s great. And the trick of writing is anticipating how you’re going to get those little bursts of insight in your reader and your audience as they put the puzzle pieces together.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? Part of the fun of screenwriting is to keep the audience wondering if you’re in control or not. Because if you just lay everything out for them and spoon-feed them it’s boring. But if you let them think for 30 seconds, or however long, that maybe you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and then you go, “No, no, no, no, no. See, I had you the whole time.” They start to trust you. And it becomes comfortable. And it becomes fun to watch, you know, because you know the movie is not going to let you down.

You’re not going to suddenly — because we’ve all had those moments in movies where we realize, “Oh no, I have no idea what the hell is going on, and neither do they.” Or, “They thought I would, and I still don’t.” That’s terrible. And it means that they’ve lost control.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a movie I was helping out on recently that really managed that problem where most of the movie was working really well, but there was this subplot which was just, like, from Mars and just didn’t fit in the rest of the movie. And so every time you cut to that subplot you’re, like, you lost a little bit of faith in the film because that does not make any sense. And if that thing that doesn’t make any sense is part of your movie, then your movie doesn’t really make any sense. And I don’t know if I trust this movie to get me to a solid place.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, our final script of the day is So We Had a Three-Way by Shawn Morrison, which is a great title. I just love that title.

**Craig:** Great title. Love it, too.

**John:** Let me give you a quick summary of this, and it’s going to be super quick because it’s almost all dialogue. We open at an Indian restaurant where 30-year-old married couple Daphne and Lucas Gilman are checking out the menus. We see that Lucas is a bit neurotic. He’s talking about should I have the Mango Lassi but he really wants a ginger ale. And he’s sort of talking himself into and out of things.

Daphne suggests they have sex in the bathroom. So, they go to the bathroom and they try to have sex. Lucas has a hard time getting aroused, partly because he’s nervous about touching the dirty walls. And there’s dialogue that’s happening as all this is going on. So, it’s really just a three-page dialogue scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it.

**John:** I liked it a lot, too.

**Craig:** And that’s nice for me because you know I tend to get hardest on comedies, and this is certainly a comedy. But, let me talk about why I liked it.

First of all, how convenient for me that so much of this initial scene over their Indian food is about perspective. So, this is what I’m talking about. Lucas is going on. He’s rambling on about what he should order. Should he order the chicken? Should he get the Mango Lassi? Should he get the ginger ale, because I can always get the ginger ale but I can never get the Mango Lassi. And she is lost. She is not in the moment at all. She’s somewhere else.

She’s staring at her bread and she’s looking at the bread. And she’s looking at the bread. And then suddenly her face lights up. And the way that Shawn wrote this, I get that the perspective is between her and her idea, and not at all about this guy yap-yap-yapping. It’s an interesting way for her to reveal what she’s about to say which is “Let’s do it.” And he doesn’t’ understand what she’s talking about until she makes it clear, and then he doesn’t understand when. And then she makes it clear and she convinces him to do it.

Inside the bathroom we get the comedy of — we get a very real kind of comedy. And that’s the collision between an exciting fantasy that you think would be fun and the unfortunate realistic circumstances you’re dealing with to actually do it. And there have been a zillion movies where two sexy people go into an airplane bathroom and have sex. But airplane bathrooms are not sexy. And I don’t even know how you have sex in an airplane bathroom. And I don’t know why you would want to have sex in an airplane bathroom. It’s hard to pee in an airplane bathroom.

And so this is really about that. It was about juxtaposing sort of fun, spark-of-the-moment with the reality of it. And then also playing off the comedic differences in their personality. She’s obviously just like, “Let’s go for it, let’s do it.” And he’s a germaphobe who’s freaking out about the walls. And then layered on top of that you have additional comedy of two waiters just listening to dialogue off-screen.

And this is — from somebody that has to sit and edit comedy — it’s a gift to structure scenes where you can hear things through the wall like that, because it gives you such wonderful options when you’re actually shooting and editing. You can do almost anything. The waiters could hear anything they want to hear there.

But what they heard was interesting. And there was great — the way that she kind of escalates her talk was really funny. He starts worrying about the curry smell. It’s the little details that seem so real. I know this guy. And I get what she’s doing.

But what’s the best part to me was at the end of page three when she says — I’ll read this:

So, [laughs] she’s boasting about something, also giving him information that he didn’t know. Now he’s thinking about other guys she had sex with. And then when she finally delivers she’s terrible at it. This is all very good. I mean, this is really well-written. I thought they were great pages.

**John:** Let me back up to the first page. And I’ll read the scene description. “DAPHNE AND LUCAS GILMAN are the only people in the place. Daphne is 30, pretty, dressed like she’s from Vermont.” Which is great description. I don’t completely what that is, but it feels specific.

**Craig:** It’s like LL Bean, you know? I get it.

**John:** Exactly. “She idly pulls apart naan bread, mind adrift. Lucas studies the drink menu. He’s also 30 with a sensible beard and soft kind eyes.”

I get what that is. I can picture that guy. And then his first line of dialogue, “I hope their chicken is all white meat.” Tells you so much about Lucas.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** He’s just adventurous enough to go to the Indian restaurant, but he doesn’t actually really want to commit to the Indian restaurant. Now, the rest of the dialogue — you pointed this out, but I want to be really specific here — he gets all the first couple of lines but it’s broken up in a very smart way. And so:

So, by putting in that line of scene description it shifts the perspective back to Daphne. It also lets Lucas’s Mango Lassi thing all be one block and feel like one idea.

It’s just such a smart way to break up that thing which you could do all a one block, but the jokes wouldn’t play right if you didn’t have the scene description breaking that up.

**Craig:** Right. Because we wouldn’t know that we’re not supposed to give a damn about his Mango Lassi discussion. Without the breakup, without keeping perspective on her, we might think that this author actually wants us to care about this guy’s drink dilemma.

Interestingly, by the way, my take on Lucas from that first line was this is actually a hipster guy who goes to Indian restaurants all the time because he’s hipster and he eats adventurous food. He’s just also very fussy in a hipster way because he doesn’t like bad Indian food. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? I got like a whole other level off of him. I don’t know if it’s true or not.

**John:** I love a good, fussy, hipster.

**Craig:** Yeah. A fussy hipster with this beard and his eye. I mean, it was just all — I thought it was really well done. Three really good pages. I would definitely read more. And I also thought that these two together, and obviously we get from the title where this is going, and I like it.

**John:** Yeah. I like it, too.

**Craig:** I want to see what happens. And this is… — Okay, larger point about comedy, and I kind of brought this up a little bit before when we were talking about the Margarita Moms script, or Margarita Night. People will roll their eyes sometimes and say, “Oh, god, they’re doing a movie and the concept is this.” Yes, concepts are concepts. Okay. They’re going to have a threesome. It’s going to go poorly. It’s not going to be what they thought. It’s going to hurt their marriage, and it’s going to help their marriage, and they’re going to end up together okay or not. Whatever.

We all get where this is going. The point is it’s not where you’re going and it’s not what you’re doing, it’s who you’re doing it with and where they end up. And it’s the characters, especially in comedy, it’s the characters. And I like these characters. I thought Shawn did a really good job. Nice work.

**John:** Yay Shawn!

Yes, I mean, obviously we don’t know sort of what’s going to happen 20 pages from now, 30 pages from now. We have some sense of it by the title, but I’m rooting for this. I think it can work.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Great.

Now, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Ah! See, I know those reminder emails are doing their job.

**Craig:** They are doing their job. Maybe that will be my One Cool Thing one day is your reminder emails. I opened up my One Cool Thing to Twitter suggestions, and you guys can keep bombarding me with those because I’m going to need them as we move forward.

But this week I found my own Cool Thing. And it doesn’t exist quite yet. It’s not going to exist apparently for purchase until the end of next year. But, I love it so much because it combines two of my great loves. One is medicine and the other is gadgetry.

John, have you heard of Scanadu?

**John:** I don’t know what it is. Tell me everything.

**Craig:** Okay, Scanadu is basically a tricorder. It is, if you’re a Star Trek fan; I don’t know if you are.

**John:** Oh my…yes!

**Craig:** So, Dr. McCoy would have his tricorder. He’d wave it in front of you and go, “This man has a blockage in his left intestine and he’s going to die.”

So, Scanadu is intended to be a $150 palm-size device. And it will scan your vital signs in under a minute and give you a diagnosis on your phone. [laughs] Now, you might say, “Whaaaat?” Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. It is going to be combined — so it’s going to do very simple things like it’s going to measure things like heart rate; electrical heart activity which is basically a little EKG; pulse transit time; temperature; heart variability; and blood oxygenation. And then transmit all of that to an app on your phone which will then be able to essentially comb through it and say, “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” “You got a little something to worry about.” “Oh my god, get to a hospital.”

But, it’s then going to be combined with two additional tools. Once called ScanaFlu and the other one called ScanaFlo. So, ScanaFlo is basically a pee strip. And it’s going to give you a ton of variations to measure your pee and tell you what’s going on, particularly if you’re a woman there’s a bunch of things like pregnancy issues and preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes. But also can look for everybody — kidney failure, urinary tract infections, and stuff like that.

There’s also going to be ScanaFlu which will use your saliva and test for strep, flu, both A and B, Adenovirus and RSV, which is a particularly annoying respiratory illness that most children will eventually get.

What’s so cool about all of this is that it’s basically going to handle a lot of the nuisance stuff that puzzles parents. Your kids get sick and there’s really that, “I hope this isn’t a bad thing. It could either be a nothing or it could be something horrible. I don’t know. Is it strep or do you just have a cold?” Do you know what I mean?

And it’s so cool to be able to put these tools in people’s hands and have them be completely non-invasive. I just kind of love it. And I can’t wait to have one. I want it! I want Scanadu, ScanaFlo, and ScanaFlu. That is something I will pee on every day.

**John:** [laughs] Just pee on your iPhone. That’s really what you should just do.

**Craig:** [laughs] Eventually.

**John:** Because the iPhone already has a little dot inside the headphone jack to know if it’s been submerged in water. You know that? If iPhone is submerged…?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, but you can just pee on your iPhone and it will tell you something.

**Craig:** That’s ultimately where we’re going. But I just love — and first of all, for $150, just to un-clutter pediatrician’s waiting rooms, you know, so that you can basically literally text your doctor and say, “Here are the ScanaFlu results. It’s strep.” And then they can write a prescription. You don’t even have to go in. It’s amazing.

**John:** Great.

So, my One Cool Thing actually exists. You can buy it today. I suggest you do buy it today. It’s an application for both the Mac and the iPad called Soulver. And so what Soulver does is somewhere between a calculator and a spreadsheet. And it’s really good for when you need to figure something out, or especially if you need to figure something out and sort of go back and change the variables later on.

So, it can do some natural language things where you can say like 15% of $60, or you can sort of build sentences they can sort of solve. I tend to use it on just different lines, just sort of setup where your variables are and then you sort of move things around.

I needed to use it this last month. We were figuring out stuff for Big Fish and box office stuff and number of seats. And there were a bunch of little variables we needed to sort of figure out. And you can stick those things in and then you just very easily change any of the variables in it. And I can save that and reopen it at any time. It’s great for those situations where you really don’t want to build a spreadsheet because it’s not like you have multiple columns of things. It’s just pretty simple equations, just there’s a lot of steps. It’s fantastic for that.

So, it’s available for both the iPad and the Mac. I really recommend it. I find myself using it at least two or three times a week. Soulver.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Yeah, it’s Solver, but just with a U in it.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Soulver. It’s soulves your soul.

**Craig:** Mm, nice. I’ll check that out. And, well, no, I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m going to try it and then it will be my next week’s One Cool Thing. There’s another app I’m hearing good stuff about.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah, from our Twitter brigade.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. People who want to read along with any of these samples, again, go to johnaugust.com/podcast and you will see links to these PDFs. You will also see links to the other stuff we talked about like the Scanadu.

**Craig:** Scanadu!

**John:** And Soulver. And Fountain. And the Fountain Glassboard. And I will talk to you again next week, Craig.

**Craig:** See you at the next podcast.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dramedy-deadlines-and-dating-your-writing-partner).

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

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

**John:** And this is a special episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s special because we have two guests in our room to talk about their experiences, Abby Kohn…

**Abby Kohn:** Hi.

**John:** …and Marc Silverstein…

**March Silverstein:** Hello.

**John:** …who are screenwriters and TV writers as well, mostly known for Never Been Kissed, He’s Just Not That Into You. Guys, welcome.

**Abby:** Thanks.

**Marc:** Thanks for having us.

**John:** Tell us about yourselves. You are a writing team. Have you always been a writing team? Give us some back story here.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Yes. We’ve always been a writing team.

**Marc:** We met at grad school at USC, mid-90s. Early to mid-90s. We had to partner, like second semester they force you to partner with somebody to make a short, and we did that.

**Abby:** Well, you can do, you can each make a five minute short you can direct and the other person can shoot it, and then you switch. Or — nobody else did this but us — you can combine your five minutes and five minutes and make one ten minute film that you co-direct. And nobody took them up on that option, but Marc and I did.

**John:** Oh, very nice. This was the graduate screenwriting program?

**Marc:** No. Production.

**Abby:** Production.

**John:** So, what worked in that partnership and why you two together versus other people in the same class?

**Marc:** I mean, I think initially in that scenario you couldn’t shoot something.

**Abby:** Oh, yeah. I don’t think Marc was confident with me being his DP, so therefore…

**Marc:** Right, I was way more technically savvy and she was much more of a writer really at that point.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And so we had sort of complementary skill sets.

**Craig:** Did you know that when you looked across the room, I like constructing these romantic things…

**Abby:** Well, you know, we were a couple for [crosstalk].

**Marc:** We started dating, too.

**Craig:** Whoa, hold on, did you date prior to that moment, or did that moment…?

**Abby:** We met literally our first day of the graduate program, the first like get-to-know-you, or not even, it was just like an orientation. And we sat next to each other in that moment and I made some crack about the squeaking of the chair. Literally, that was the moment we met. And we were the only two, I think, in the program who had come straight from college, so we were the youngest in the program, and we kind of bonded in that way.

**Craig:** Gravitated towards each other?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And we were dating within a month or so of that.

**Craig:** And did you sleep with each other after the dating or did that happen during the dating?

**Marc:** Oh, that all happened at the same time.

**Abby:** During, yeah.

**Craig:** And, now, just because I’m fascinated by this and I know John won’t ask these questions…

**Abby:** Okay, no, you bring it.

**Craig:** This is already the best podcast. You’re not together now?

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We are not.

**Marc:** We are separately married.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m just going to jump to the fun stuff, and we’ll get back to craft.

**Abby:** We were engaged and we lived together and we worked together for seven years.

**Marc:** Seven years.

**Craig:** Wow. And then you decided, “Okay, that’s not for us.”

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** But, this survived.

**John:** The professional part of it survived.

**Abby:** It did.

**Craig:** Which is spectacular to me. So, obviously I’m just going to keep asking, because he really doesn’t care and he won’t ask these questions and I do care.

**John:** The thing is I do care, I just wouldn’t ask.

**Craig:** I’m that guy?

**Marc:** Yeah. That’s why you’re a good team for a podcast.

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** I disagree, but, what were the challenges of something like that because I’ve talked to, I have a lot of friends who are in partnerships where they are married and they write together, and they’re married and that’s that. But, for you guys, when the romantic aspect of it ended, was there a moment where you thought, “We’re just going to break up?”

**Marc:** I mean, we didn’t have much choice initially because we under an overall deal and we were about to start a pilot, or shooting a pilot.

**Abby:** I think we were in pre-production on a pilot at the time.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marc:** And we lied. Our agent told us to lie for… — We lied to the people we were working for for about six months, because we had a wedding date…

**Abby:** The pilot was about a young married couple and I think he thought it would be a bummer if like we were engaged and broke up during this making of this thing about young love. So, we, I guess lied about it for a couple of months.

**Marc:** They kept saying, because we had a date — a wedding date — and they’re like, “So, how is that going?” And we’re like, “Uh, we’re too busy. We’re just going to push it.”

**Craig:** Yeah, just pushing it a little bit.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, then through that process actually start to realize, maybe did it get better as friends?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Through that process I think because we were sort of forced to continue working, by the end of the making of that pilot we were like, “Oh, we can do this, this is fine.” Had our feet not been held to the fire in that way I don’t know what would have happened…

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** …but by the end of that, by the end of that it was fine.

**Marc:** It was. And I think the thing was it went on for seven years relationship wise because we were working together. I think if we were just dating it would have ended sooner.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** But we didn’t know if we could choose. I don’t think we knew how to get out of one or the other or what was not working.

**Abby:** We were very enmeshed and we were living together and working…

**Marc:** And you just work all the time. You’re never not working. So, I don’t think we knew if we could do one without the other and then we were just forced to. And they were like, “Oh, okay, good.”

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And now it’s great because we’ve been through literally everything.

**Craig:** Well, thank you, that satisfies all of my really creepy curiosity.

**Abby:** If anything else comes up you just ask.

**Craig:** It will.

**John:** Now, in working together, what is the relationship? Who does what parts of it? Are you in the room together to write everything, or do you write separately? What’s your process?

**Abby:** We have an office that we have together and we both come in pretty much every day. And our process changes depending on the thing that we’re working on. You know, we have worked on several things that are these multiple story arc movies, and so that was the first… — When we started working on some of those that was the first time ever we wrote simultaneously because things were, stories could be broken out. And other than knowing the intersecting times, and knowing we’d need to check in and make sure things were hitting at the same time, a lot of the stories could be written, they could be plunked out, and written, and plunked back in.

So, we wrote simultaneously during probably all of those kinds of…

**Marc:** But our normal process for like a linear screenplay is just to loosely outline together, kind of hash out the broad strokes together, but then one person will start, write five, ten pages, send it to the other person, I mean, send it across the room to each other, or email it to each other. Go back, rewrite, go a little further, back and forth, back and forth.

**Craig:** And just revising?

**Marc:** Yeah. Because we’re not really, the way we work, it’s not, like we can’t be like, “You take that scene four from now,” because we don’t even know what that is really.

**Craig:** Yeah, I get that.

**Abby:** And for comedy, too, I think having things that are called back and that seem funny because they really come out of character, it seems really hard to decide what those things are before you actually write that scene.

**Marc:** Well, and also, and even starting a scene. I don’t even know where to start the next scene if I don’t know where the other one ended.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Like so much of the rhythm…

**Abby:** I think that’s, too, the rhythm of comedy, it’s very hard…

**Craig:** I’ve never met any comedy team that did it differently, honestly. I write on my own usually, but when I’m writing with Todd Phillips that’s exactly what we do. We do, you take the first, you know, we outline — you take the first six, I’ll take the second six, then we swap back and forth.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** And our outline is really barebones. Like we have…

**Marc:** It’s gotten less and less.

**Abby:** It’s less than two pages.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** I literally just tape it to my desk because among the other shit, and like there are chicken scratches all over it, but it’s usually two pages because we’re there. We’re in the office together. So, we go to the thing and then we talk about it as we go, even though we know what the major points are.

**Marc:** But we used to be way more detailed.

**Abby:** Sort of.

**Marc:** I feel like we were at least four or five pages in terms of knowing stuff, but now we kind of have just a looser roadmap.

**John:** Now, can each of you write individually when you need to write individually? Like, if something goes into production or one of you gets hit by a bus, do you feel like you can do that?

**Marc:** Yes. We’ve done it.

**Abby:** Yes. I mean, unless there’s like a scene about baseball, then I feel like no. But, yes, as long as there are things that I know, yes.

**Marc:** Yeah. We’ve had to do that. When you got married, I had to finish that one pilot.

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** How was that? Tell us about that? When she got married?

**Marc:** We went to the wedding…

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** But she was gone for a week.

**Abby:** It was during the honeymoon.

**Craig:** It’s so fascinating. Normally when you’re with somebody for seven years, and then you split up, and then they get married, and you’re like, “Oh, a little bittersweet. I will go to the wedding, it’s a little weird.” You’re just more like, “Ugh, I’m stuck doing…”

**Marc:** “I’m stuck doing work.” Yeah, I’m annoyed about a bunch of other things.

**Abby:** I think people have a hard time, like we are best friends. We spend all our time together. And we spend time on weekends together. And our families, we vacation together. We spend our time… — So, it’s like I think sometimes people, when you know our history, it’s hard to understand what that relationship is later. But his wife and my husband are good friends. Our daughters are like sisters. They see each other multiple times a week. It’s very close, so it’s not like now it is this professional thing where it used to be a personal thing. It’s still a personal and professional thing, just not a romantic thing, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** It does actually. I mean, it’s obvious how comfortable you guys are with each other. I mean, it’s very cool. It’s obviously a unique circumstance.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’m sure you get asked about it a lot. But it is… — I can only imagine that it makes the creative partnership that much stronger.

**Marc:** It does. I mean, there’s nothing we can — we don’t hold anything back. We’re not scared of saying anything to each other which is good.

**John:** So, let’s go back to USC. You guys are partnered up to make this little short film together. Did it turn out well, did it turn out poorly?

**Abby:** It was a learning experience.

**Marc:** That one was okay. But that was like non-sync 16mm, like brutal.

**John:** Yeah, I remember that at USC. A lot of hand-wringing, long looks, some twitches.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Are any of those good? I don’t know if…

**John:** No, not really. None of them were good.

**Marc:** No.

**John:** Zemeckis made a good one.

**Marc:** Yeah, he did.

**John:** Way back in the day he made a really good…

**Marc:** The Lift? Was that that one?

**John:** The Lift, yeah. If you go to USC you get to see The Lift.

**Marc:** That’s when they show it to you, yes. And then you’re like, “I’ll never be able to do that.”

**John:** So when did you guys start writing together. Was that shortly after?

**Abby:** Well, that first project that we did was like in our first year of film school. And we were in the MFA program, which is three years. And in our third year we made another film together which we…

**Marc:** Which was a thesis.

**Abby:** Which was like our thesis. And we shot it on 35mm, and it was like 25 minutes long. And it was much more in our, in the tone that we wanted to write, and it was a romantic comedy.

**John:** It was building your wheel house.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Yes. It was called Fairfax Fandango, about a hip girl who lives in the Fairfax neighborhood who gets obsessed with her next door neighbor guy who happens to be an Orthodox Jew. So, it was like a little love story. And that really was the first thing we worked on together that is sort of more like what we do.

**John:** Was that short film helpful at all?

**Marc:** Yes.

**John:** So, that got attention?

**Marc:** It got everything.

**Abby:** It did. It did.

**Marc:** It was, I mean, pre-internet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it was First Look Festival.

**Marc:** First Look.

**Abby:** Yeah, it was back in the day when that thing at the DGA was packed, you know, with assistants, and we were both working as assistants at the time, by the time it showed. We were trying to like make back all the money we spent.

**John:** So, some context for listeners who aren’t USC Film School graduates. At USC when you make a certain level of student film, once or twice a year they show all the student films to people in the industry, so agents, and producers, and managers, and everyone comes to see it. And it’s a big deal. And it was a much bigger deal before…

**Abby:** It was. It’s a beautiful, giant theater, the Directors Guild, like really nice theater, nice sound, nice everything. And it was like standing room only in those days.

And like I said, we were both working as assistants and we had the kind of machine where you had to call into your machine at home. And we were living together at the time, and at our assistant jobs…

**Marc:** The day after.

**Abby:** …the day after it, and Marc called me from his assistant job to my assistant job. And he’s like, this is probably ten in the morning, and he’s like, “There are 25 messages.”

**John:** Holy cow.

**Marc:** He’s like, “I have to erase, it’s full!” And so he deleted them. And then he called back at lunch and he’s like, “There are 25 messages on the machine.” Like it just kept — It was, I guess, a different era where we just like…

**John:** Pre-email.

**Marc:** Yes. Pre-email, where I think in the program that they gave at the First Look Festival they had a contact number, which was our apartment, and that was it. So, we found our manager — who we’re still with — in that that time, right after we, yeah.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So, moving from there to writing, being paid to write, what was the next step for you guys?

**Marc:** Again, sort of a weird step. We didn’t know what we were going to do; and we had an idea for a movie that we just kind of told our manager, like, “Let’s go pitch it.”

**Abby:** Like we thought we were pitching it him, like we’re going to write this movie now after our show.

**Marc:** We had no writing sample. We had a short and an idea. And he’s like, “No, the short has got enough,” so we did a first round of meetings, like generals, for like a month, with just all of those calls. And then we picked a handful of those people and pitched them the idea and we ended up selling it.

**Abby:** So, that was Never Been Kissed. That was our first thing that we did. And we sold that.

**John:** And you sold that to Flower, Drew Barrymore’s company?

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We sold it to another producer who had a deal at Fox at the time. And then they come on once Drew wanted to do it, and it was Flower’s first film.

**Marc:** They had just formed basically after we sold it and when we were writing it. It was a quick process. That was crazy. We like — we sold it, and it was in production a year later.

**Abby:** And we had to write it.

**Craig:** Those are the best stories, the ones where… — You know, I have my theory that there are movies that will not ever be made and movies that you can’t stop from making.

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, it’s good to get one of those, “You just can’t stop this train.”

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yeah, but we were, you know, it was a very — it was not an accurate representation of what is going to happen to you. After that first one we’re like, “All right, here we go.”

**Craig:** What’s the next one?

**Abby:** Right. Next year we’re going to have another one.

**Marc:** And we didn’t get a job for a year after that. Like it was assignments and all that like placing stuff and…

**Abby:** Oh, pitching to get those assignments.

**Craig:** The worst, right? The worst.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, here’s a question for you guys, because I’m always interested in how people fall into the kinds of comedy that they fall into. You started with romantic comedies.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the first thing that you did after the independent work for the studio was a romantic comedy.

**Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** Did you think, “Okay, well, this is just, we sort of like romantic comedy, but we like this, this, and this, but now we’re stuck in romantic comedy.” Or were you always just sort of “that’s our thing.”

**Abby:** I feel like it’s not cool to say but that’s always been my thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally cool.

**Abby:** And people feel like they’re slumming it in romantic comedy and I can’t understand why.

**Craig:** You love it.

**Abby:** Because I love it.

**Marc:** But we love it when it’s good.

**Abby:** Well, of course. You know, the Jim Brooks movies that I saw, and the Woody Allen movies that I saw, those are the movies that I — to me — were the pinnacle. I mean, and being in film school at USC, I was definitely in the minority. That wasn’t, you know, those weren’t the filmmakers that were revered. But that was always what I loved, so, why wouldn’t I like aspire to do that thing, you know?

**Marc:** Well, and we also had, like in the Venn Diagram of our tastes, those movies were there. I’m a little more left of center and she’s a lot more commercial than I am, and we kind of meet somewhere in the middle. But we also weirdly shared when we got to film school in like ’93, like indie movies at that time were not dark. They were romantic comedies. They were like early Noah Baumbach movies.

**John:** Party Girl, yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah, Party Girl, Kicking and Screaming, Sleep with Me, Mr. Jealousy. Like, those are the movies we loved.

**Abby:** Like those are what we would go see on weekends and we both really, really liked them.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** So, we wanted to write movies about people, and it just ended up being like for studios that’s romantic comedies. And indies got dark, so there was nowhere else to go.

**Craig:** But you guys, I assume, get sent a ton of romantic comedies that you read that are atrocious.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Terrible.

**Craig:** And does it ever get you down on the genre? Do you ever think the genre is lost? Is it still savable?

**Abby:** It doesn’t get me down on it, but I guess it bothers me that people don’t seem to make a delineation between the smart good movies, these are just — I mean, you can call it a romantic comedy, but it’s really a comedy about characters that are good, with a great story, and something that makes you laugh out of the characters.

I don’t feel like people often make a distinction between that and the formula, by-the-numbers rom-com that they know they can put out and get a certain amount of money with a certain amount of casting. And I feel like am I the only one who notices that there is a real divide, you know? So, that does bother me because I feel like a lot of stuff just gets lumped in together.

**John:** It ends up being we combine the “she’s pretty when she takes her glasses off” kind of movie and the Jim Brooks movies that you’re talking about.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Absolutely.

**John:** And it’s like that’s a very wide range of things.

**Abby:** Absolutely. And so I feel like there should be another genre set aside for the…

**Craig:** Good romantic.

**Abby:** Right, you could call it that.

**John:** Or a comedy that has a strong aspect of romance to it.

**Abby:** Right. I like to call it a character comedy, and there is romance to it as there are with a lot of the stuff that I like, but…

**Marc:** But it’s also hard to, just even from the stage where you start to where the movie ends up, it goes a long distance from where you wanted it to be.

**Craig:** Naturally.

**Marc:** And sometimes, especially in the studio system, movies just become what they are going to be, like what that marketing is going to be. It just becomes a rom-com because that’s what…

**Craig:** And then casting is huge.

**Marc:** Casting is the whole thing. And so no matter why, you know, we decided to… — I was reticent to do He’s Just Not Into You when we started. And then we talked about it and I was like, “Oh, this is cool. It could be like this is an anti-romantic comedy.” And that title is not romantic at all. But you write it, and it gets cast, and it gets made, and then it’s just a romantic comedy. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** [laughs] You can’t avoid it.

**Marc:** You can’t avoid it.

**Craig:** You can’t avoid your fate.

**Abby:** Yeah, I do feel like as we have written romantic comedies and they go out to directors, I do feel like there is a little bit of a “in the beginning of my career I’ll do those, but hope to elevate to something else.” And I truly do not feel that. I truly feel like this is my…

**Craig:** That’s what you do.

**Abby:** …this my passion. This is my movie passion.

**Craig:** I love that. I love that.

**John:** Let’s talk about romantic comedies, and the engines of romantic comedies, because tomorrow we’re sitting down with Aline Brosh McKenna. And I was looking at her movies and I would describe them as like “want-coms,” where you have a character who comes in and they want a certain kind of life for themselves and everything keeps pushing them away from that life and they’re steering towards that.

Romantic comedies tend to be two-handers. You guys are two people , so you can sort of [crosstalk].

**Marc:** And we both have two hands also.

**John:** So you can represent those two voices in the room.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. One-handed people cannot write romantic comedies. Or, people who have no hands at all.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** A no-hander.

**John:** It just won’t work for them.

Well, what is the engine of a good romantic comedy, like of a movie that you like in the genre? What are the conventions you expect and what are the conventions you push against?

**Marc:** I mean, for us I can tell you the conventions that we get pushed against all the time, which is tough.

**Abby:** We also want to start them off more losery.

**Marc:** Yeah. Desperation. It’s such a double standard and we fight against it all the time. Guys, the lead males in movies, can be the most desperate people in the world and it’s funny. Like Steve Carell, and Jason Segel have built careers on being sad sacks, and that’s hysterical and great.

But we want, we’ve always tried — pushed — for female characters in that vein in the first acts, and also “stalkery” comes up. All those words where people really feel like it makes them uncomfortable when you try and portray women… — I mean, that was the problem with He’s Just Not That Into You, it’s like, people were uncomfortable but we just kept saying, like, that’s how it is. You know what I mean?

And the truth is if we could push it to where we wanted to you’d be way more uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Abby:** And we’d be excited about.

**Marc:** Have you been in a hair salon? Have you listened to women talk? There’s that person in everyone’s office where you’ve heard that same story about that same guy 15 times in different scenarios. Like, it’s a real thing in the real world, but it makes people uncomfortable. So, that’s definitely something we’re always trying to explore is just the reality of that, sort of the opposite side of romance, the sort of desperate side of it. The need.

**Craig:** What is that? Because I always feel like, and I get this a lot, too, because I love characters that are wrecks, and I’ve been writing more movies lately with either female protagonists or two-handers, not necessarily romantic comedies, but even in the non-romantic comedy genre there is this weird thing where the studios are concerned about female characters being pathetic.

**Marc:** Yes!

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** That’s it. Pathetic.

**Craig:** And, I mean, I have a theory, and I want to run it by you guys because you’re the experts on it. And my theory is that traditionally studio films hold women up as a moral ideal for men. So, the idea is men are broken, women are fixed. So, even if you have a female protagonist the problem is not her, the problem is the men around her.

**Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** And so you can’t have a broken woman.

**Marc:** You can’t blame the woman.

**Craig:** But that’s not good drama.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** No.

**Craig:** The whole point of drama is that you are broken.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, my theory is right?

**Marc:** 100%.

**Abby:** I think so.

**Craig:** That’s the greatest compliment. You never tell me 100%.

**John:** No, no. Most he can get is 95%.

**Abby:** And also I think a little bit of it, a little bit of this thing that somehow we’re doing a poor social service by reflecting what we see and what’s funny. Somehow that’s bad for women, which I really don’t believe.

It’s not a guide book. This isn’t the lesson for how to be a woman. I’m simply seeing the things around me that I think people can relate to and are funny and reflecting them back, in I hope, a funny and relatable way.

**John:** Well, you look at Kristen Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids, that’s a prime example…

**Marc:** But that’s super frustrating to us, because unless you’re Judd Apatow you can’t get that done.

**Craig:** But I think it’s great that she did that to sort of say, look…

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** …it’s super helpful for us, because, you know, for those of you listening who aren’t screenwriters yet, there is this game that goes on where you present your material to the studio and they give you criticism. And you say, “Well, but, here’s a movie that was a hit that contradicts your point.” And then they’ll say, “Well, that’s different.”

**John/Abby/Marc:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But it’s not different. It’s actually really the same. But it was great that that happened because you could sort of say, “Look, the whole point is I don’t care about the win, you know, I don’t care about the victory at the end.”

You know, I liked While You We’re Sleeping. I liked it. It was a good movie. But by the same token she was just this improbably beautiful woman…

**Marc:** Who works in a toll booth.

**Craig:** …who works in a tool booth. And the movie just said she’s alone.

**Marc:** Yes, for no reason. She has no problem.

**Craig:** You can’t walk down the street, I don’t care what you’re made up like, what you’re wearing, that woman can’t walk down the street at 10pm on a Friday night and not get hit on.

**Abby:** Right.

**Craig:** So, it was like a fairy tale. You know, all of his things were very fairy tale like. And, so, I think it’s great that you guys, you should keep pushing that.

**Marc:** We’re pushing. And we are. And we like broken people. Like, that’s the fun, and the thing we’re writing now, or just finished, we have been pushing that character to be as broken as possible. And it has stayed for now.

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Great.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Good.

**Marc:** And I think but the weird thing is I feel like to a certain extent studios only care about casting, really, and if they thought about it, that’s what actors want to play. They want to play things that are broken.

**Craig:** Completely.

**Marc:** They want to play characters that have a full, you know…

**Craig:** Especially the women I’ve spoken to.

**Marc:** Yeah, 100%.

**Craig:** They really do. Because they see like, no one questions Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa.

**Abby/Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** You know, where he goes, “Ha, ha, that’s hysterical.”

**Abby:** Right, right.

**Craig:** But, God forbid a woman should be drunk and a mess and you know.

**John:** You look at Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and every actress would love to be able to play that character.

**Marc:** 100%.

**John:** And it doesn’t have to be as dark a comedy as that was, but a character who comes from that place of her life, is messed up in a way that all men in comedies get to start at a very low place.

**Marc:** Yeah. And that’s what we see. And I feel like people get dark in relationships. And people get sad, and desperate, and things don’t work out. And it can be funny if it’s relatable.

**Craig:** Well, that leads me to a tone question, and that is do you find that comedy has gotten realer, because you guys have been doing it for awhile — has the tone changed?

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** I think it has. Yes, I think it’s gotten realer, in good ways and in bad ways. I feel like the overall tone is, “We want to approach real,” but I think there is a reticence to allow broad things into movies now that I think could still work and be funny if they were allowed to be in there. And I think people sort of recoil from things that might just be funny or might just be a little weird. And I think Bridesmaids succeeded in that way, too, which was super broad.

**Craig:** Apatow kind of famously put that one scene in there.

**Marc:** Well that, but even just like the airplane scene. I watched that scene and I was like, “If we wrote that for a studio they would be like, ‘Really, she’s drunk on the plane?'” It would read super broad but you let a really talented actress do it and it’s really funny.

**John:** Let’s talk television, because you guys have also written television.

**Abby:** We have.

**John:** And comedy, you’ve only done half hours? Or have you done hours also?

**Abby:** We’ve only shot three pilots, and all of those were hours. But that was also we were doing dramedy hours.

**John:** It was a slightly different era.

**Abby:** Slightly different era. There was maybe a little bit more opportunity for those then and now I feel like there’s even less. Even then there wasn’t a ton.

**Craig:** You mean like the Ally McBeal sort of thing?

**Marc:** Yes. But even less with that, because that still had an engine to it. That still had the law component.

**John:** Parenthood is probably a good example [crosstalk].

**Marc:** Which is a super throwback. They don’t really make those much anymore. But, yeah, so we did three…

**Abby:** Ours may be a little bit more comedy than Parenthood just on the tone meter. But, yeah, in that vein.

**Marc:** We did three in the early — so like right after Never Been Kissed, or right when that started shooting we thought it seemed like an opportunity to get in. We were working there, we just didn’t get a movie job for awhile.

And it was great, especially coming out of film school, it was as hands on as you want it to be. Whereas with Never Been Kissed we just wrote it and then they went off, we didn’t have anything to do with it.

**Abby:** Yeah, coming out of film school, when the biggest thing we had ever done was like my mom making frozen burritos for the crew and all of a sudden you get like here. I mean, literally, we pulled off the freeway, on our first day of shooting our first pilot — it was in Pasadena — we pulled off the freeway and I was like, “Oh my god, there’s something else shooting right here.”

And Marc was like, “That’s our thing.”

I was like, “Nooooo! That’s not true.” But it really was. Those were our fucking trailers — oops…

**John:** No, no, that’s fine.

**Abby:** I’m sorry. They’re our trailers. I mean, it was such… — Exactly, for kids who were a couple years out of film school to be involved in a production of this size was unbelievably great and fun and, you know.

**John:** I remember feeling really guilty eating craft service on the first set. It’s like, “Oh, but someone should — I shouldn’t eat all of this craft service.”

**Marc:** I remember off-handedly saying, I learned a lesson that first week, remember in the gym? And there was like a bunch of soda there. And I was like, “Oh, there’s no Coke.” And I just like walked away, because I don’t like Pepsi for some reason. And like literally half an hour later someone walked up with like a Coke. And he said, “Coke is over here now.” And I was like, okay…

**Craig:** It makes me so uncomfortable.

**Marc:** I know, I was like, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant like, “Oh, I don’t want…”

**John:** The worst is when you hear it being called on the Walkie. It’s like, “They really want some…” I’m like, oh, no.

**Craig:** I always say before I ask somebody for help I’m like, “Listen, if you have to go to the radio for this, don’t do it.” Because if you say, “Oh my god, have you seen so and so? My glasses are dirty. I have to get those wipes.”

“Uh, can we get eyes on wipes?”

“Oh, they’re driving up from,” you know, “with a box of wipes.”

**Marc:** But, so, yeah, we did three. The first one got on the air.

**John:** What was the show?

**Marc:** It was called Opposite Sex. It was the year of high school shows, Freaks and Geeks was that year, Popular was that year, our show was that year.

**Abby:** It was a show about an all-girls high school that goes coed and the first three boys that come into an all-girls high school.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** I went to an all-girls high school.

**Marc:** It was really fun…

**Abby:** It was really fun.

**Marc:** …but it was midseason and there was a president change at the network and it ended up getting burned off. But it was a great eight episodes to make.

**Abby:** It was a great experience. It was so fun. We shot at the Ranch at Warner Bros, which if people don’t know, it was like…

**Marc:** We built a campus.

**Abby:** Yeah. We built an outdoor campus and it was like being at summer camp. It was amazing. It was really, really fun.

**Marc:** And then we made two more, but by the end of the third, which was our best — we thought — and it didn’t get picked up, we were like… — I mean, they tell you, you know, a TV writer is king and you have a lot more power and all that stuff, which is true, but you get your heart broken. And you spend a year and a half on these things and then you just get killed.

And in some, our second one especially, by the end of it when we were shooting, like I don’t even know what this is anymore because the process is really brutal development-wise.

**Abby:** And the one that Marc is talking about, the last one we did, the third one was a pilot called Splitsville that we also did for Fox, which was about us and about our breakup. So, that one I think was really personal and…

**Craig:** And then they’re telling you things like, “We just don’t believe this. This couldn’t happen. We don’t like these people.”

**Marc:** “No, listen…”

**Abby:** We tested, as you do, you test shows. And so we had to test our show. Marc’s character tested amazing.

**Craig:** Noooo!

**Abby:** My character…

**Marc:** Oh no!

**Abby:** Reviled. And people were specific saying it’s not the actress it was actually the character.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**Abby:** Hate it.

**Craig:** A little part of you was like…

**Marc:** I was like, “I knew it!”

**Craig:** “Remember all those fights where I said, ‘No, I’m right.'”

**Marc:** “‘I’m right.’ I was.”

**Craig:** There are people with dials telling you that I’m right.

**Marc:** Their dots are dropping.

Craig; That’s right.

**John:** If in real life…

**Marc:** A fight dial. Can we test…

**Abby:** Right, when we’re pitching, we got our own dial and it was pitching better. So, after that experience it really was, I think for me especially, just a total heartbreaker. We had been told that the show was going to get on the air by people who clearly didn’t know, and we felt like it had so much opportunity, we were so happy with the tone of it, with sort of our comedy/drama, just heart of it. And so when that didn’t go I think it was time to take a little step back and focus more on doing movies.

I guess in movies I never really expect it to go. So, there’s not really that kind of pain. It’s a happy surprise when it does. And in TV, I guess, you’re just pushing towards the upfronts, and you’re pushing towards getting it made, and you’re pushing towards getting it on the air and it really does feel like a real blow, or at least it did for me. I called the actors to tell them it wasn’t going to air. I was crying and they were trying to tell me, “It’s going to be okay.”

**Marc:** “We’ve done this before.”

**Craig:** “Because you are awful. I tried everything I could to make you likable.”

**Abby:** Totally.

**John:** But it strikes me now that in the half hour world the kinds of things you were doing are really popular now. You look at the New Girl, you look at The Mindy Project, those are the kinds of things you hope you could see in features but they’re happening on television.

**Abby:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Trailblazers.

**Marc:** Yes. Which is why we’re doing another pilot this year. [laughs]

**Craig:** And now they’re like, “Eh, they’re kind of copycats.”

**Marc:** It’s going to feel that way, yes, for sure. But, we got, well, we wanted to and a good situation came up where we’re going to try again, ten years later.

**Craig:** If somebody said to you, “Look, we can wave a magic wand and you have a choice. You are going to be successful either way,” I mean you already are, but like permanently successful. But, “either movies, or TV.” What do you pick?

**Marc:** God, that’s a hard choice.

**Abby:** I mean, if I can also define the experience of movies, then movies, because like the experience we had on He’s Just Not That Into You was amazing. The director we worked with was great.

**Marc:** The only writers, yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah, we were the only writers, which I think you don’t get the chance to do very much, and so we really felt ownership of that project. We were close with the producers, who we also loved, and we were able to be just involved. So, if we could write movies and have that level of involvement and really feel like part of a team, then for me that would be the answer.

**Marc:** Yes. I sort of agree. I mean, I feel like a great TV show, to be able to do that would be super fun. But the lifestyle seems pretty brutal.

**John:** The lifestyle of a television writer is brutal. I’m friends with Damon Lindelof and like I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything.

**Marc:** That’s what I fear. And I fear, I don’t know, especially with the internet now, the audience and shows that people love, it’s such a love/hate thing going on. And you’re constantly feeling like you’re writing to very specific people and in success I feel like it would wear on you. Whereas like project to project, it’s nice to just do something else.

**John:** My fantasy would be to write features on sort of a TV schedule.

**Marc:** “You’re making this.”

**John:** “You’re making this.” Or, if you’re not making it, it’s a clear decision that you’re not making it, it’s done. Because it’s the endless, you just don’t know. You can just go on forever.

**Abby:** But there’s also a positive to that that like they could call from that studio where you wrote that script nine years ago saying, “Weirdly, some guy was looking over it and now Charlize Theron wants to do it.” Like, you never know. There is always — I mean, I don’t spend days at home hoping that, but there is always that possibility. Where with TV there is not. Nobody is calling me about that pilot I wrote nine years ago.

**Marc:** Which is weird.

**John:** Actually, they have started going back though…

**Abby:** A little bit. A little bit.

**Marc:** But they should. I mean, the amount they buy and the amount that is there.

**Craig:** It’s kind of crazy.

**Marc:** You think they could take one year and not buy anything and be like, “Let’s just make stuff we didn’t make before.”

**Abby:** [laughs] Totally.

**John:** Have you guys reacquired anything you wrote for TV? Because your Splitsville thing, it feels like that could be a movie if you guys tried to…

**Marc:** We talked about it.

**Abby:** We talked about it. We wrote a TV pilot, a half hour about summer camp that was on the cusp of going and didn’t. But that’s something we talk about. That’s something we talk about seeing if we could get that back.

**Marc:** Yeah, but we haven’t looked into it.

**John:** Has having — you both have kids now, right?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** We do.

**John:** Has that changed at all your perspective on the kind of comedy you’re writing?

**Marc:** [sighs] I mean, no. Yes and no. We did a rewrite over the summer that was more like parental/parentally…

**Abby:** But not for kids.

**Marc:** It wasn’t a kid’s movie, but it was involving, you would need to have had kids I think to really like it.

**Abby:** Like a comedy of…

**Craig:** You needed that perspective. Right.

**Abby:** A comedy of parenting kind of.

**Marc:** So, that was something we wouldn’t have had before. But I think our taste hasn’t really changed that much.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** And I don’t really have much interest in family movies, or like I know a lot of people who have kids are like, “I want to write something I can see with my kids,” and I don’t have that.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. I’ve had the opposite. I started writing, my first movie is a Disney movie. And when I had kids I suddenly realized, now I just want to write movies for adults.

**Marc:** Well, I also feel like you see more movies now for kids and you’re like, “I don’t want to live in that world anymore, because I’m watching them.”

**Craig:** That is absolutely true. It’s constantly running. I’m trying to get away from it as much as possible.

**Marc:** Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** So, Never Been Kissed was your first movie. You did a pilot. Next movie you got going was which one?

**Marc:** Well, the next movie that got made was He’s Just Not That Into You.

**John:** Oh, years later.

**Marc:** So, that was, I mean, it was ten years it took for them on releases.

**John:** So, it’s not clear I think to people on the outside is that you’re working that whole time. You’re getting paid to do stuff.

**Abby:** Well, we were under two overall deals for television, so we were three years at Warner Bros and I think two years at Fox.

**Marc:** Right. But then we also wrote a bunch of movies in that time.

**Abby:** And we did. We rewrote some movies, and we wrote some movies during that time.

**Marc:** And we had a movie, the next thing we wrote that we worked on for literally seven years.

**Abby:** Yeah. We had this movie, Date School, that was always threatening to go but never did. It was just one of those…

**Marc:** I mean, honestly, did seven drafts for different actors, six drafts for different directors.

**Abby:** Four different directors I think. [Crosstalk].

**Marc:** So, it was at DreamWorks…

**Craig:** That’s one of those movies you can’t — that will not be made.

**Marc:** It will never be made.

Craig; And then there are the other ones you can’t stop.

**Marc:** Well, no, here’s the thing. We wrote a draft, a rewrite, and it was not long after, this is really basic — There’s Something About Mary had come out like a year or two before. They got Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz to be in it, and Greg Mottola was directing, and it didn’t go.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marc:** And once that happened, it was like…

**Abby:** It was never going to go.

**Marc:** …it was never going to go.

**Abby:** If it’s not going to go with that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. If they can’t surmount the… — I mean, that’s pretty remarkable.

**Marc:** Right, so, and there were three or four other iterations of those, like of that, enough momentum.

**Craig:** What studio was that one?

**Abby/Marc:** DreamWorks.

**Craig:** DreamWorks, yeah.

**Marc:** And then now, and then Paramount. But then it became Paramount. Like we thought we could get it back and it was one of the weird ones that Paramount kept from DreamWorks, so, I mean, it’s never going anywhere.

**Abby:** So, yeah, I mean, yeah, we were working all during that time. Making the pilots. Writing other pilots. Writing movies. But…

**Craig:** Rewriting other movies.

**Abby:** Rewriting other movies.

**Marc:** Yeah, and we sort of felt like, well, we had one. Like, we don’t know how we’re going to replicate that again.

**John:** But when you were talking to your aunts and uncles over the holidays, it just doesn’t seem like it. “But you haven’t had another movie? Oh, I’m so sorry it’s not working out for you.”

**Abby:** Right, totally. Totally.

**Craig:** My parents do this thing to me where they’ll say, “So, what are you working on?”

I’ll say, “Um, this movie.”

“Oh, when’s that coming out?”

“Next May.”

“And then?”

So, it’s not even out and we’re already doing “and then?!”

**Marc:** That’s what we were just saying…

**Craig:** It’s like they’re just sort of like if you’re a carpenter, “Well, what are you doing?” “I’m making a table.” “And then?” “A chair.” “And then?” “A bureau.”

**John:** And you’ll still need four chairs to go with the table.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** But, yeah, we were just saying to someone today, we had a movie come out in February, we’re like, “We’ve got a couple years now.”

**Abby:** “We can ride that. ”

**Marc:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Abby:** You just read it? Come one, two years.

**Craig:** Dine out for a long night out.

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Marc:** Nothing else.

**John:** Well, thank you guys so much for talking with us.

**Marc:** Sure. It was fun.

**Abby:** Yeah, it was fun.

**John:** This was neat. Our sort of sit down…

**Craig:** Well, not only is it our first interview, but this is the first podcast — we’ve done how many of these, 57 or so? This is the first time we’ve ever been in the same room together.

**Marc:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** I mean, doing the podcast. We’ve been in the same room together for other stuff, but never the podcast.

**Abby:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Wow.

**John:** So, we’re always on Skype.

**Abby:** We’re part of history.

**Craig:** You’re part of history in so many ways.

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** In so many ways. The least likable character in testing history.

**Abby/John/Marc:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m really hoping people write in.

**Abby:** Yeah, it’s the god’s honest truth, you guys.

**Craig:** “We liked John, we liked Marc, we liked Craig.”

**Abby:** I mean, it is totally the truth. And I feel I’m a likable person.

**Craig:** That’s the best part.

**Abby:** But I actually think I am when I’m so clearly wrong.

**Craig:** You should go into the room while they’re turning down the dials. “No, look at me!”

**Marc:** Likeable people can do unlikable things. It happens.

**John:** So, if people want to see your work, what do you recommend most they look for? What’s the definitive Kohn/Silverstein…

**Marc:** I don’t know if that’s been out there….

**Abby:** I think we haven’t written it yet. Or, if we’ve written it, it hasn’t been produced as such. But, um…

**John:** Would you guys direct a movie together?

**Marc:** Yes, that’s the next plan. I think there were parts of He’s Just Not That Into You that are close.

**Abby:** Oh, He’s Just Not That Into You is definitely the closest. But if I was going to say, like, I feel like there is still something that we have yet to say that will really define our tone, but that’s for sure.

**Marc:** In moments.

**Abby:** That’s for sure as close to it as we have.

**Marc:** The scene with Jennifer Connelly and Luis Guzmán.

**Abby:** Oh yeah.

**Marc:** Just that one scene. That’s it. That’s all we got.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Cool. Thank you guys so much.

**Marc:** Sure.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/mystery-of-the-j).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 63 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, I notice a change in your voice. I think you have location sound, is that correct?

**Craig:** I’ve got location sound. Wherever I go, [laughs], actually I bought a pretty nice headset/mic thingy because you know when we record and we’re talking what we — how we are going to do that, it is part of today’s podcast, but we have nice microphones, relatively nice microphones. But I can’t lug that around really.

So, I got this like headphone/mic combo thing of the sort that people use when they’re playing Modern Warfare and stuff, and it’s gone. Somehow someone in my house, some little person, has ferreted it away, so I’m using the — this is the built in microphone on the MacBook Pro.

**John:** All right. You’ve used it before and it sounds okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll be fine. But we should talk about our normal setup before we get into our actual business of the day, because people have been asking on Twitter, and I feel like every week I’m answering some sort of question about how we actually record this podcast.

So, usually Craig and I are not in the same room. In fact, the very first time we were recording the podcast live in the same room together was at the Austin Film Festival. Usually we are talking via Skype, which is what we’re doing right now. Usually you’re at your office in Pasadena. I’m here at my house in Los Angeles. And we are both talking into the same kind of microphone. I have this Audio Technica AT2020 something.

**Craig:** Yeah. The 2020. 2020? I don’t know.

**John:** I think it’s 2020, which is a good podcast microphone. It was recommended by Dan Benjamin, who runs the brilliant 5by5 podcasting network. So, we each have that kind of microphone. We each have good headphones. I have these Sony headphones that are sort of big cans that fit over my ears and they make me look like Princess Leia. And record.

And so the crucial things we learned early on as we were doing this podcast separately is that it’s important that we don’t have audio leakage, so that when we’re trying to put these two tracks together ultimately Craig is not talking — you don’t hear Craig talking on my side and you don’t hear me talking on Craig’s side. So, that’s part of the reason of good microphones and good headsets.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then the idea is we can hear each other while we talk via Skype, but we’re also simultaneously recording just our side of the conversation on GarageBand. So, we end up with two GarageBand projects, one that just has me talking, one that just has John talking, and then Stuart waves his magic wand and puts them together.

**John:** And actually figuring out which was the right application to put those together took some time, because originally we were just cutting the two tracks together in GarageBand, which worked, but wasn’t ideal. The best solution we’ve found so far has been the old audio editing app that used to come as part of Final Cut Studio, called Soundtrack Pro. And it’s fine. It doesn’t feel like quite a modern Mac app, but it’s getting the job done.

I think there’s room in this space for a better two-track editor to do what we’re doing, but it’s working fine for us right now.

**Craig:** So far so good. Eventually it will be awesomeness, with full stereo feel effects, surround, lasers.

**John:** All that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And one of the things you actually learn about podcasting is you don’t want a big stereo split between the two sides. Every once in a while you’ll hear a podcast where they left it in a stereo that’s not a happy kind of stereo, so you hear one person talking in one ear, and one person talking in the other ear, if you’re in your car or if you’re wearing headphones. That’s really bad, so don’t do that. You want things mixed together so it’s happening in the center of your head.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be annoying. I mean, a little bit — I don’t know if Stuart ever like slightly pans one of us one way and one of us the other way, but full split left and right is just stupid.

**John:** It’s not good. So, today I thought we would talk about, we’re going to do more of our Three Page Challenges, because that’s a very popular feature on the site. And so we would do some more of those, but before we got into those I wanted to do a little bit of follow up on stuff we talked about on previous weeks.

First off, last week we talked about Star Wars and Disney, and some of the speculation is like well who is going to make these new movies? What filmmakers would be involved? And we have part of that answer this week is that they’ve hired Michael Arndt to do treatments for the first three movies of the new trilogy, which I think is a really terrific idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, it makes total sense. I guess it wasn’t — I don’t guess, I know — it wasn’t something that I had premeditated. Premeditated is the wrong word. I had not foreseen this. But, once I read it, it made total sense. Michael Arndt, aside from being a really, really good writer, has shown that he can write across a number of genres. He can be both funny and dramatic. And, most importantly, he’s very, very familiar to Disney because he has been working with Pixar not only on Toy Story 3, but on Pete Doctor’s latest movie.

So, he’s part of their family. He’s an excellent writer. He’s got a terrific pedigree. An Oscar award, of course, never hurts. I mean, the fan boy in me would have loved to have seen them give Larry Kasdan a call, but of course, this is the first step of a very long, long journey.

I mean, I’m always rooting for a writer to take the ball and run it from a punt return to end zone. But, who knows what will happy. I mean, Larry sort of was brought in and other people worked on things. And let’s see how it goes.

But, I thought it was a very smart choice. And he’s a great guy.

**John:** He’s a great guy, too. That’s why I feel no scriptenfreude about his being hired. It’s, like, he’s actually a really good guy. And you and I met him I think for the first time together. Because I remember, so we were putting together this Fox writer’s deal which we got a group of nine writers together and we made this deal at Fox to write original scripts for them.

And Michael Arndt was one of the people who was suggested to us, so we met with him. I think it was at the Grill in Beverly Hills. And so we just sat down with him, and chatted with him, and he was just completely lovely and nice. And at that point he had written Little Miss Sunshine and was still working on Toy Story 3. So, it was kind of a case where, “Well, you’ve written this little tiny indie movie; I don’t know how much, you know, you don’t seem like a big Hollywood writer.”

And then he wrote an absolutely fantastic script for Toy Story 3. So, I feel like he’s a great choice for this.

**Craig:** Well, obviously you and I both understood that, you know, you buy low, sell high. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And, see, we should be running a studio because we knew.

**John:** Exactly. Although I don’t think he’s written his Fox movie yet.

**Craig:** Well, neither have I, so there. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Done.

Second thing from a previous show, we talked about Karateka, which is the video game that Jordan Mechner and I did. We launched and we’re on Xbox. And so it was so exciting — this week, I could actually fire up my Xbox and see the game available for purchase and download. So, that’s been a good and weird and fun experience.

I had sent you the trailer for it, which is now up online. Adam Lisagor did an amazing job directing the trailer for our little show. And it was so strange to be spending time six months before release trying to figure out what this teaser trailer would be, but it was tremendously fun. So, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well, since it’s now actually out there in the world to see.

One thing that is different about Xbox which I’m discovering is we have an app that we’re releasing through the Mac App Store or the iOS App Store. You get stats — you can check stats every day to see how many people are downloading it and you can become sort of addicted to those stats. And it’s very clear how many you sell each day.

With this, you’re just sort of flying blind. And officially Microsoft gives you quarterly results on how your sales are going, which is not useful or helpful. So we’re trying to pull through faster numbers on that. But we’re ultimately going to be going onto some platforms that have more rigorous reporting, and so Steam, and PS3 and iOS. So, it will be exciting how that sorts out.

**Craig:** Awesome. Congratulations.

**John:** Yay! Also, a mutual friend of ours has a very big week as well. Derek Haas, who with Michael Brandt is a writing team, they created the show Chicago Fire which is on NBC which just got its back nine order.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. Now they get their full season of shirtless men fighting fires.

**John:** [laughs] So, the show was originally picked up for 13 episodes, which is very common, which you love to be picked up for 13 episodes. And you’re hoping to get that back nine. That back nine brings you to 22 episodes, which is in modern world considered a complete seasons. So, very exciting for them to be having a full season order, but Derek by himself also has a brand new book which is hitting stores right now, and is available on Amazon, called The Right Hand.

Have you read this book yet, Craig?

**Craig:** I have not read this book.

**John:** I have not read this book either.

**Craig:** I read The Silver Bear and the follow up to The Silver Bear, but I haven’t read this one yet.

**John:** So, this is a new franchise he started that is more CIA/espionage oriented. And apparently it’s pretty good. Publisher’s Weekly said this about it: “This hard edge contemporary spy thriller from Haas covers a lot of ground with a great narrative economy. Forceful cinematic scenes show off the lean grace of Haas’ prose. Cleverly placed plot twists and spy craft details help make this a standout. Readers will hopefully see a lot more of Clay,” the protagonist, the hero.

**Craig:** A name that’s also Derek’s brother’s name, Clay. By the way, the first time that, what, “grace,” “lean,” what was that? It was “lean graceful prose?”

**John:** Oh, it said “the lean grace.” It’s the first time he’s ever been described as having “lean grace.”

**Craig:** As being lean and graceful. But I will say this: Derek is one of the — first of all, one of my best friends in the world. One of the greatest guys in the world. One of the most relentlessly positive, optimistic, good people. I just love — I like watching good things happen to people I love. It’s fun. And he’s had a great week. So, congratulations Derek. We love you.

**John:** Aw. And my mom actually really likes Derek’s books. Because I’ve had one of Derek’s books, like the hardcover version, just randomly, and I brought it with me to Colorado and I left it there, and so she just read it. And she loved it. And she reads these kinds of books, so she’ll be very excited this is coming out.

So, that’s enough reviews of Derek Haas’ work. Let’s get to some reviews of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** So, Three Page Challenges for people who are brand new podcast listeners, because there will be some of those, is we have invited our listeners to send us three pages from their scripts, and it doesn’t have to be the first three pages but it almost always is the first three pages. And we will look at them on the show.

And by look at them we mean that Craig and I will read them, but you as the audience are welcome to read them, too. There will be links to all of these Three Page Challenges attached to this podcast, or if you go to johnaugust.com/podcast and look for this podcast, you can download the PDFs and read along with us and see what the hell we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Before we get started here, we have looked at 19 different installments one the show so far, 19 different samples. But, Stuart — God bless Stuart — Stuart has read 511 of these.

**Craig:** Good god.

**John:** So, there have been 511 accepted entries. And by that we mean people who have actually followed the procedure — and there will be link to how you actually can submit these things — they followed the procedure and put the proper header in and gave us just three pages and didn’t throw in extra stuff.

So, 511 submitted. Of that, 78 were submitted by women. And two by teams that are half female. So, it’s 80 out of 511, or approximately 15.7%.

**Craig:** Wow. It seems like it’s getting worse.

**John:** No, it’s actually better.

**Craig:** Oh, it is? Okay, good.

**John:** So, the second wave increased to 18%, so we did bump up. So, 18% is still not high, but it’s better than it was.

**Craig:** Remarkable. Okay.

**John:** Actually the first batch was 12%. The second batch was 18%. So, it increased 6% over the last wave.

**Craig:** How are we doing with Irishmen? Are we getting enough Irishmen?

**John:** I don’t know if we can break that out, but Stuart did notice an interesting pattern and I tweeted about it last night. And I got some possible answers, but I want you to tell me what you think is actually happening here.

Of the 511 entries, 119 of the submitted names start with the letter J. So, that’s almost 25%.

**Craig:** You mean the last name or first?

**John:** First name. So the Johns, Jacobs, Joshuas, Jeanines, Jennies. So, that’s over 23%, which is much higher than the USA percentage of J first names, which is 11.9%.

So, do you have any theories about why that might happen?

**Craig:** Well, maybe it’s a generational thing. I mean, I would imagine that most of the people sending these in are aspirational which would put them in their 20’s, and curiously both of my children have names that begin with J, and you have a name that begins with J.

So, maybe it’s generational.

**John:** It could be generational. I think we would need to look more specifically about, like, most popular names of the ’80s and ’90s. I think demographic, the male/female split may be part of it, too, because I suspect there are more men’s names that start with J. Not enough maybe to tip us in that direction, but maybe.

I would also look at maybe our readership base. It is international; we have a fair number of international people who are submitting. And so maybe there’s a reason why internationally Js are more common.

**Craig:** It could also be that Stuart is just lying. I mean, we always have to remember that Stuart is in complete control here and he could just be making it up.

**John:** He could be our Keyser Söze.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Our Keyser Söze. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m stupid. I’m stupid. But, you know, we had some interesting pages this week I thought.

**John:** I agree. I was going to suggest we start with Dammed by Mark Cowling. But if you have one that you wanted to start with that’s fine.

**Craig:** That’s good. Today I’m on iPad, so I’ve got it.

**John:** Great. So, let me give you a synopsis of Damned by Mark Cowling. So, we open in Minnesota at midnight where a rust-speckled station wagon smashes through a padlocked gate in front of a church. A man races out of the car; his name is John Cooper. He pounds on the door to the cottage behind the church, waking up Father Sweeney.

He wants to be baptized ASAP and offers a handful of cash. In the church they’re just beginning the baptism when a nice lady named Mrs. Wilkins enters. Only she’s actually some kind of undead screaming monster.

We cut to three months earlier where we meet Kevin Harris, a photographer at a failing pet photography business. As the three pages end he is trying to strike up a conversation with a Goth receptionist.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Mm-hmmm.

**John:** Craig, talk to me.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know about you, but I struggled just to get through the first bunch of description. And it’s not that the pages were bad, per se, but this first chunk of description is a really good example of something that we’ve talked about before which is not punishing your readers right off the bat with kind of dense overwritten action.

So, the very first line to me kind of is a signifier. This is the very first line: “Barely visible through the heavy falling snow, St. Jerome Church sits some way off the road.” And, you know, we could just say, it says, “EXT. ST. JEROME CHURCH, MINNESOTA – MIDNIGHT. Snow. The church is chained and padlocked.”

But instead we have, “Barely visible through the heavy falling snow, St. Jerome Church sits some way off the road. A chained and padlocked gate blocks the path up to the small building.”

[sighs] Then…

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little Dungeons & Dragons description.

**Craig:** Very much. And then, “A rust speckled station-wagon veers violently off the road and smashes through the gate. But this exertion proves too much for the battered old car, which shudders to a halt.” This is just over-written.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not for a novel, maybe, but for a script I think this sort of thing is over-written.

**John:** I would agree. I’ll take back Dungeons & Dragons. It is a little bit novely.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So Derek could use it in his book, but it’s not good for here. I have a lot of certain nitpicks on ways to make for a better read, but I don’t want to sort of lose, bury the lead. I actually really kind of dug how this started out. I mean, I liked the idea of like waking up the father to get baptized right away. It had mystery. It had drama. It had suspense. You sort of know that the woman coming in is going to be some sort of monster, but that’s kind of okay.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And then when we cut to this earlier thing, I get it. A little bit over-written, and like I had some problems with the actual — the scene where we are sort of meeting our guy, because when you meet a guy who’s doing nothing that’s not a very interesting way to meet stuff. But it was specific in a way that I really dug.

And so I thought there was a lot of potential here, which is when I really nitpick and rip apart a lot of stuff it’s because I actually really thought this had a lot of potential. I liked — I had a sense of what kind of movie this was. And this was probably some sort of monster movie that had a sense of humor to it, which I love.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m calling this out, because then once we got into the church and we got into the dialogue, the writer suddenly showed up. And it was alive. And it was fun. And I like the tone of it. You know, here’s this, and again, too over-written, you know, “Father Sweeney is avuncular.” Don’t use words like avuncular in screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what avuncular means. I’m a smart person, but I would have to look that up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Father Sweeney seems like a nice lovely old priest, and this is guy is asking to be baptized, and then immediately Father Sweeney just like falls apart into a stream of F-bombs, which is fun, you know. Like, okay, this is actually an interesting person. They start to do this thing. We hear something outside, which our character obviously knows is not the wind, even though he says it is.

Then this woman comes in. I would recommend, by the way, not saying Mrs. Wilkins, because — so this woman walks in and the distracted priest sees her and says, “Mrs. Wilkins,” which is such a fake screenplay name. And, frankly, if he’s — if this is a small town and he’s a priest he might just call her Alma or something. You know, just so you don’t feel like you’re getting detached and into overly broad stuff.

She goes, she engages in this monstrous thing. And the character of Cooper who is getting baptized just turns to the priest and says, “Maybe you can speed things up a little.” So, there’s like a good — you got the tone. It was snappy and it was fun.

Then unfortunately we get a little broad here because we’re meeting what I presume to be the main character at his job, his business, which is called Yappy Snaps. And it’s a photography, it’s a pet photography studio, which I find to be overly broad. Maybe too broad for something like this when you have monsters, and villains — supernatural villains I should say — and people who react to them kind of in a quirky way. Maybe everything else should sort of be grounded. I don’t know; that’s just generally my feeling. A little picky thing.

“Slumped behind the desk in reception is NATALIE, an overweight goth who has made the very smallest possible concession to what is considered acceptable corporate attire.” Putting aside the fact that that’s a huge mouthful, what is the very smallest possible concession? [laughs] I mean, if you’re going to overwrite, be specific…

**John:** How do you visualize that?

**Craig:** Don’t make me guess what that is, because that’s all I can see is what I can see. And you’re right: Meeting a character who isn’t doing anything is a little — I understand the author wants to get across that this is a fairly passive person who is unhappy with his boring life, but then maybe engage in something that is a little more active to show that.

**John:** Yeah. Sort of starting at the end, with the Yappy Snaps, I don’t know that I even really necessarily need the exterior to get us there, but if we’re going to have that, fine. Once we go inside the studio, I would pan passed our photos of the dogs first, and then get to our guy. Because right now we’re meeting our guy who’s just polishing a lens, and then we’re like looking around at all of the stuff on the walls.

Probably better to sort of set the scene, meet the guy, and then have him do something, rather than just sort of sit there while we look at the scenery around him.

**Craig:** Exactly. You could also open with him, just looking at him setting up the lights and taking a picture, “Good, good,” and then he crosses over and we reveal that he’s got a little dog with a hat on or something. You know. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, some more nitpicking stuff. The first sentence here, “…sits some way off the road,” it’s “some ways off the road.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s a lot of sort of not careful proofreading here which was a frustration to me.

**Craig:** Oh yeah…

**John:** “…and smashes through the gate.” Things like smash, we tend to capitalize. Most screenwriters will tend to capitalize those things because those are big action words, and you like those big action words to let you know that something big is important. Because your reader will read that word even if they don’t kind of read the rest of the sentence. So, it’s a sound effect but it’s also a big thing that happens.

The writer is capitalizing half the character’s name, which just isn’t common.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it’s John Cooper. Capitalize both JOHN and COOPER. Even if you’re going to call him Cooper for the rest of the time, just capitalize John Cooper. It’s weird to sort of only do half of it.

And at the end of this third paragraph, after the semi-colon he capitalizes the next word which is strange.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “A large amount of dried blood stains the cracked driver’s side window.” A large amount of dried blood sort of stops me. A large amount? It makes me think, like, well what is a large amount of dried blood? I’ve never really stopped to think about that. So, dried blood is all you need. You don’t need a large amount of it.

**Craig:** I agree. There’s a bunch of things, like for instance he hyphenates station wagon, which shouldn’t be hyphenated, but doesn’t hyphenate rust-speckled, which should be hyphenated. So, there are things like that. I’m not one of these people that freaks out about adverbs. There are writers who say, “Never use adverbs; they’re the devil’s work.” An occasional adverb is fine. But we are buried in them here. And adverbs do tend to slow you down, especially for screenwriting.

**John:** Now, you and I have both talked about the passive voice before, and defended the passive voice. And there are times where the passive voice is really helpful. I saw two cases where exactly the opposite is true here. In the second scene, “Finally a light is switched on and the door lurches open.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** No. You don’t need, “is switched on.” “A light switches on. The door lurches open.” Break those into smaller sentences for starters. But the passive is not helping you there.

Page two. “The heavy oak doors are flung open as if made of plywood.” Are flung open? “The heavy oak doors fling open.” “The heavy oak doors blow open as if made of plywood.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Again, being passive is not helping you here.

**Craig:** I totally agree. It’s a shame, because there’s interesting things going on. This is a great bit of advice for this writer, Mark. Don’t worry so much about crafting pretty sentences with your action. Just paint the picture for me in an exciting, fun, crisp way.

You know how Dana Carvey, Dana Carvey’s impression of George Bush, Sr. in large part rested on dropping the subjects from a lot of things, which I find also useful when you have a lot going on. You know, “Mrs. Wilkins throws her head back violently. Eyes bloodshot. Skin flaking. Produces an ungodly scream.” You know, just shorten, tighten, punchier to match what you want the scene to be. And these scenes should be tight, punchy, suspenseful, surprising, startling. So, if that’s the tone of the scene, that should be the tone of your description.

**John:** Yeah, this feels like quick cuts and Dutch angles. And let your sentences indicate that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Let us go onto our next piece. Who do you want to do next? We can do any one of these. Why don’t you do one that you have the synopsis for?

**Craig:** Tell me which one I’m doing the synopsis for? [laughs]

**John:** Either Margarita Night or Photo Op.

**Craig:** Photo Op. And who wrote that one?

**John:** Photo Op must be Nick Scott.

**Craig:** Nick Scott is Photo Op, yes. Yes. Okay, so in Photo Op we begin in an unnamed city somewhere in the Middle East. A photographer, a photojournalist is running down the street. We hear a rumbling behind him. He stops, turns, and then a huge crowd of protesters surges forward chanting in Arabic. He’s taking pictures. His cell phone rings. He ducks out of the way of this sea of humanity and he begins a phone conversation with his editor and boss, Vincent.

And Vincent is basically unimpressed it seems with the pictures that our hero, Caleb, is taking. He’s more interested in the fact that an actress is heading towards where they are. Oh, it’s Northern Algeria we find out. And they have a brief argument about what that means, but he has to go take pictures of this actress.

He runs back into the crowd to take photos and a bomb goes off and there is mayhem.

**John:** And a lot of gore.

**Craig:** A lot of gore. A lot of gore and mayhem. Yes.

What did you think?

**John:** Um, [sighs].

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** I wanted to love this a lot more than I did. So, first I want to talk about the description of our hero because it got to be so Ken-dolly that I… — I’ll read it aloud to people who don’t have it in front of them.

“CALEB MILLER (30s) races around the corner, hauls ass down the middle of the street. Stubborn, experienced, driven by determination. A beard covers his chiseled jaw.” And then later, “A backpack hugs his strong frame.” I just kept feeling like, I didn’t — I just got this visual description of him that made me sort of not relate. It felt very stock to me. I felt like I was looking at a Gerard Butler character, which is not a good first thing for me to be encountering. No offense to Gerard Butler.

I also got a little bit frustrated by, I understand the instinct to, like, “We’re going to pull this editor’s phone call up into the action so it’s like part of it,” but it’s not really part of it. It’s sort of halfway part of it. Like he’s ducked into an alley to have this conversation that I don’t really believe or buy while there’s all this mayhem happening all around him. And then we get back into the bombs and the explosion.

I don’t know where all this is going. I suspect that he is going to meet this actress and they’re going to have some sort of relationship.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** But I don’t care about that right at this very moment. If you’re showing me a crowd of people and humanity, my instinct would be to stick with that and get to this phone call in the aftermath of that and not try to interrupt this action with a phone call that is not successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, Nick Scott, here’s the bad news for you: I completely agree with John in every way. I mean, first of all, I didn’t like, I understood what you were going for with the setup which is this individual running down an empty street. It says, “The street is devoid of life, almost silent if not for a low RUMBLE in the distance.” Then this hero comes running up, stops, turns, and then waits, and then here comes this huge crowd.

That just seems fake to me. And I understand that you were trying to be interesting, frankly far more interesting is to just open, boom, in the middle of it. It’s absolute chaos. There’s this huge protest. And then suddenly we reveal someone is in the middle of it taking photos that doesn’t look like everybody else. And then he’s in the action, because here he almost seems like Superman. How the heck did he get out in front of this crowd? [laughs] Why, frankly?

I mean, the point is to sort of be in the action and take these photos, so it just started a bit fake. Certainly tonally though the first page until Vincent calls is very serious, very dramatic. Nick takes time to sort of call out a few people in the crowd to sort of paint the picture, which I liked, because we’ve talked about that before, so it’s not just an anonymous crowd.

But the conversation with Vincent suddenly becomes very light and kind of ’90s comedy, where the two of them are having almost screwball-esque banter about the value of his work.

**John:** Let’s read a little bit of this. So, I’ll be Vincent.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “Anything happen?”

**Craig:** “Not yet, but it’s gonna. Still no cops!”

**John:** “You’ll get the same old shots and file the same old story.”

**Craig:** “I knew you loved my work! Why the fuck are you calling?”

**John:** “Because I pay your bills and you pay mine. Got an assignment.”

**Craig:** “I’m working one.”

**John:** “Then where are my shots of the village? Or my interview with the militants?

**Craig:** “They’re coming.”

**John:** So, it’s that whole same old story — you love my work. I just don’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy it either.

**John:** I don’t buy that he’s taking this call and having this conversation right now when his job is happening right outside there.

**Craig:** I mean, if Vincent is his editor he sent him to Northern Algeria to take photos of a protest. He’s obviously interested in some of it, but on the other hand so disinterested that he’s going to just talk to this guy — first of all, it’s the middle of the night wherever he is. [laughs] But he’s just going to talk to this guy while the actual event is going on.

Here’s a thought, Caleb: Don’t answer your phone! [laughs] You’re in the middle of a near riot with all this stuff going on in an incredibly dangerous part of the world. You’ll talk to your boss later.

I totally agree with you. This scene should be very real. It ends in a very dramatic startling, depressing way that sets a tone for something that’s incredibly real and disturbing. You want to let that happen, see the emotional aftermath of it. I mean, this is the kind of scene where after this is done you find Caleb now at the bar where the ex-pats, or the foreign journalists are, having a drink in the relative safety of their bubble, and he gets a phone call from an editor who is saying, “I’m really sorry, are you okay? Yes. Listen, this is weird, but there’s this woman coming.”

And now we understand in the context of what I just saw how disturbing that kind of frivolity would be for him. But to do it before it? Just the whole thing is just all backwards and messed up.

**John:** I would agree. And another logic problem that just occurs to me on the second read is right now it is set up that we hear this rumble coming and then he comes in. Like, what could this rumble be? Oh, it’s the crowd of protesters. But the protesters have an Arabic chant, so they would have been chanting before this. So, it’s not there’s a herd of elephants coming. We know it’s a chanting crowd. So, they wouldn’t start chanting right when they came around the corner.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like a false reveal.

**Craig:** It is. And tonally I am concerned about where this goes, because I agree with you. Once we say that there is this broad, strong, large-framed, square-jawed, daring man who is about to encounter a famous celebrity, we know what’s going to happen, to some extent. And that’s fine. But I’m just worried how that’s going to fit into the tone of severed hands, crying children, blood and bodies.

I’m worried about this one.

**John:** I’m worried about the tone, too.

**Craig:** But I think frankly there is, for Nick, I think you just have to kind of be a little less clever and cute here and just tell the story in a more engaging way.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** How about I will do Kelli Bowlden now?

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** All right. So, we open with a voice over by Ali who is talking about how the world is overrun with beautiful people with perfect bodies. The voice over continues as we see women around Los Angeles and at the gym where Liz is working out. In an editing room Wendy is eating and watching a bouncing babe on a monitor. At Spirelli Surgery, Mrs. Stern, a woman in her late 40s, is in for a consultation. We finally arrive at Ali who is in her 20s, cute, classy, curvy, who works at a casting agency.

She talks on the phone with her male friend, Alex, who works as the receptionist over at Spirelli Surgery. And that’s what we got in three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know what? I liked it. And this is an example where I don’t get worried about voice over if the voice over is over things that are sort of interesting. And I thought that there was an interesting — we bounced around in an interesting way and the voice over was making an interesting point. And the point, essentially, is about how women are faced with these impossible examples, exemplars, of perfection — physical perfection — and the lengths that they go to for physical perfection.

When we landed on Ali, I sort of went, “oh,” because the thing is when we finally find her she’s eating a chocolate bar, and she’s eating it messily, and she’s dipping it into a jar of Nutella. And I thought, “You know, the tone of the beginning was sort of promising something that was pretty smart. The introduction of Ali feels really broad.”

And I’m not, frankly, a huge… — To me, sort of average girl bemoans hot women while she eats peanut butter and chocolate together, or hazelnut spread and chocolate together, is sort of the distal side of the bro comedy coin. It’s very cliché. So, I was kind of excited in the beginning. I got kind of bummed out there. Then I’m guessing the gay friend shows up, and now I’m really twitching a little bit. You know, if Alex isn’t gay then I’d be happy. But I’m sensing gay friend. [laughs] I don’t know if you were.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’m just worried that we’re going to sort of head into cliché forest here.

**John:** Yeah. I did not enjoy this as much as you did I would say. So, we’re assuming this is a comedy, correct?

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. Was it remotely funny?

**Craig:** No, well, and it was trying to be with the Nutella and the chocolate, and that’s when I started getting worried.

**John:** Yeah. So, here’s the thing: This kind of a voice over…we’ll start by talking about the voice. So, voice over would need to do two things. First off there’s the content of the voice over, and I thought the content was a little bit obvious. She’s making the same point again and again. Like, “They’re everywhere. Staring at us with those ridiculously bright eyes. Judging us for being mere humans with non-airbrushed skin and unevenly lit, naturally colored hair.” Kind of awkward.

“Okay, sure, some women have the discipline to look good. Some just have the metabolism, which is really unfair, and some women have the funds to fake it.” So, it’s a kind of a Sex and the City kind of voice over, but not particularly clever. And my bigger concern with the voice over is that there’s not a voice to it. There’s not a specificity to who this young woman is who’s talking.

It feels like something you could read in any kind of magazine. I didn’t know anything about the character of Ali by the time I met her hearing this voice over.

Compare that to one of my favorite movies of all time which is Clueless. And Clueless has scenes that are kind of like this where it’s just a shot of like, you know, a bunch of high school kids walking, and there’s nothing funny about the shot, but her analysis of what’s happening in that shot is so funny that it’s an amazing thing. Like, you know, “I don’t want to betray my generation, but I don’t get how high school boys dress. It’s like they just pick up, find clothes off the floor and stick them together.” It’s a better written version of what I just said, but it’s very specific to her character.

And there wasn’t anything specific to Ali’s character that we got out of this voice over. And because it was just a boom, boom, boom of scenes, nothing actually could happen. Like it was three pages just to get to two people talking on the phone.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, basically I agree with you. If the kind of intro — which I agree was a little sort of flat and we’ve heard it before — had arrived at a perspective or a point that was interesting to me, then it would have been okay. But where it landed was I’m a chubby girl who dips chocolate bars into Nutella spread while sort of bitchily mocking the hyper thin models that are in the waiting office at this casting thing, which the male receptionist at the plastic surgery place gives me a call and has sort of a very — I’ve seen and heard it before — bitchy chit-chat about their clients.

So, it just didn’t — it sort of had potential. I just feel like we know where this is kind of going to have to go. I mean, so…

**John:** Let’s take a look at sort of the words on the page. So, on page one a couple things stick out for me. First off, often in scripts you won’t actually put the number on the first page, so that one can go away on the first page.

Right now it’s starting “OVER BLACK: ALI (V.O.) They’re everywhere.”

Then we “FADE IN: EXT. LOS ANGELES — DAY.” I think you get rid of either “OVER BLACK” or “FADE IN.” Because it’s too much. If you’re not giving us an image we know that it’s over black basically.

We fade in on Los Angeles — Los Angeles is such a generic thing to have as your first slug line. Like where we are in Los Angeles? What are we looking at? Because that first sentence description there is, “Perfect women have infested the world. Half shirts show off taut bellies and proportionately impossible breasts.” But what are we actually looking at? Are we looking at pictures of women or actual women? If they’re actual women, capitalize that so I know that we’re looking at, you know, essentially extras.

But, I didn’t even know what I was looking at, so it took me awhile to get even started there. And ultimately in the same paragraph we’re looking at billboards, and benches, and posters, so that lack of specific imagery was hurting me.

When we get to the next scene we’re at a gym, I’m just pointing out, “LIZ, 20s, 2 sizes skinnier than she should be, steps off.” She’s the number 2 rather than the word two. General sort of journalism kind of rules still apply here. Numbers that are less than 11, so up to ten, type them out. Other numbers you can use the numerals as long as it’s not in dialogue, but it feels really weird to have that 2 sitting there.

**Craig:** Particularly right next to the number of her age.

**John:** Yeah. On page two she’s trying to do a cut here but it doesn’t really work for me. It’s like we’re in the doctor’s office and “Dr. Spirelli nods, he can do that. A fabricated image of a BEAUTIFUL WOMAN smiles from a BEAUTY MAGAZINE cover.” Ultimately “A blob of CHOCOLATE drops onto the Beautiful Woman’s face.”

**Craig:** That did not work.

**John:** And that’s the cut to take us to the next place, but I got really confused, like, why are we eating chocolate in the doctor’s office?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It just didn’t really work as a transition that we have right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can’t do that.

**John:** I really…

**Craig:** Yup. [laughs] Yeah, you can’t do that. If you want a blob of chocolate dropping onto a beautiful woman’s face then he can do that “INT. CASTING OFFICE — DAY. A fabricated image of a beautiful woman smiles from a beauty magazine cover.”

You’ve got to put the chocolate dropping where the chocolate is dropping.

**John:** Or if it is truly a montage, and you’re sort of playing it like more of a montage, then we’re going to be able to do that, but you’re going to have those transitions — it can’t be the first time we’re doing that kind of transition, because otherwise we’re going to assume that that magazine is in that office there. And that it’s in Dr. Spirelli’s surgery office.

**Craig:** Right. And this would be tough to kind of montage out because there’s sort of like…

**John:** Anything that makes a reader read twice is bad.

**Craig:** No, it wouldn’t actually, you could do it.

**John:** How would you do it?

**Craig:** You could do sort of like, you know, “MONTAGE — VARIOUS.” And then big capital action line — “GYM” and then description “EDITING SUITE,” description, “SURGERY,” description, “OFFICE,” description. But , yeah, it just didn’t — that chocolate thing, absolutely, I was so confused by what was going on there.

**John:** Yeah, so “A blob of CHOCOLATE drops onto the Beautiful Woman’s face. We are actually at the casting office.” Even that might make it clear to the reader. The reader is not going to have to stop and go back and try to figure out again what happened there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to point out one nice thing on page two. “She’s more than a montage away from being comfortable wearing a bikini in public.”

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** That’s kind of nice. I like acknowledging sort of the genre, being a montage away from something.

**Craig:** It made me smile. And it was also a good way of — I understand her weight actually from that.

**John:** Yeah. On page three there’s an intercut here, which is nothing fancy, but I like that she actually knew how to do it. We’re intercutting between the two people having a phone conversation and the graceful way is just INTERCUT. So, you don’t actually necessarily need to spell out where you’re intercutting between. You just have the word “intercut” and we will get it as long as we’ve had two locations close to each other and you recognize that people are talking on the phone; “intercut” can be your very best friend.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is one of those areas where there were fewer issues with the specifics and more just that this felt very sort of episode of 90210-ish to me.

**John:** I would agree. The only other suggestion I have for her is Ali and Alex, two characters with such similar names, is going to get annoying and frustrating at about three more pages. Because when you’re just like looking at someone’s dialogue, if you’re going to have to remember, “Oh which one is the boy, which one is the girl?” I would go for a different name.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know even know how she can — Kelli, you know, you wrote an entire script where you couldn’t just type A and then have the character. You couldn’t even type AL and have character.

**John:** Yeah. Smart Type couldn’t even help you.

**Craig:** We’re trying to help you . [laughs] Also, if Alex does turn out to be quirky gay friend, I just feel, again, just be careful of cliché-ville. Because, again, it just feels like we’ve been done that road.

**John:** I would agree.

Let’s do the last of our Three Page Challenges today, which is Margarita Night by Steve Marcarelli & Billy Lalor.

**Craig:** Yes. Otherwise known as Hangover for Moms. [laughs] So, we begin with some 40 year-old women who are in the middle of a debauched night out. They’re at a bar. They’re getting loaded. They’re doing bad karaoke. Smashing windows with lawn jockeys. They’ve lost their pants. It gets uglier and uglier. And then in the morning one of the women, our hero, we suppose, Mel — Melody, goes by Mel — wakes up and she’s woken up by her eight year-old son, Robbie, who is exhorting her to take him early for cello lessons before school.

He is super duper responsible. She is super duper hung over and seemingly witless and does not know even how to make — or tries to make him breakfast, he already made it himself. He made her the coffee. And they go to drive and her car is gone. And she doesn’t know where it is.

The last little bit we see, we’re now actually at a radio station where an overweight, morning time, drive time disc jockey begins chit chat with his sidekick, The Roach, about women being trouble.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well…?

**John:** Yeah. [crosstalk] So, there were specific, I know, the writer had a voice and specific jokes. And not everything worked and there’s a lot to improve here, but I felt like I recognized the intention of what these pages were, where this was going. Some of it was a little too familiar, but there were some jokes that I really liked.

One thing I didn’t like: there’s literally an alarm clock slapping moment. No more slapping alarm clocks in movies. Stop that.

**Craig:** Moratorium.

**John:** Never needed. So, on the first page, right now, “An alarm clock GOES OFF and the sounds of a crass talk radio show fill the room. Mel MOANS. She SLAPS at the clock.” Robbie, “Mom.” We have Robbie’s description. “Mom, are you driving me to school?”

The first line of the scene should be, “Are you driving me to school,” because he’s already there, and that’s the question, “Are you driving me to school?”

I really liked on page two, “Where are my keys?” Robbie says, “They were in the front door.” I liked that that was just nice and specific. I like that.

The coffee beat gets a little bit cliché, like the kid is a little too perfect for this. He’s too sitcomy, overachieving kid because his mom is a wreck and a mess. But I liked the build on the joke of they get out and like the car is not even there. It’s well handled. I dug it.

**Craig:** Well, not so much for me. I think that the opening bit was nice and taut. There’s essentially a third of a page that shows a night going out of control, and it would be fun to see. And then when she wakes up in the morning, and the alarm goes off, we understand: she’s hung over. It was all fine.

Where it started to go off — and look, I’m going to talk in a larger way about this idea — but where it went off for me was this kid. Because here’s the deal: we’ve got two pages of an impossible eight year-old. And I’m going to guess that our authors Steve and Billy do not have children, because eight year-olds cannot talk like this, cannot act like this, cannot function like this.

A slightly older kid, a ten year-old, I think, or an 11 year-old, maybe. Maybe you got a shot. Eight year-old simply can’t do that. They’re in second grade and third grade. They’re not capable of this. And I also felt like the writers have missed an opportunity to imply that this is not the first time this has happened, and it’s clearly not on her side of the conversation it’s not the first time.

And in a way on his side, too, it doesn’t — he’s not shocked by this behavior. So, he’s seen it before, so in a way…

**John:** If he made coffee for her, no.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be a surprise. I think maybe he just hands it to her might be more interesting. And sort of like this is the usual deal. You know, if I were rewriting this I would make it that the kid was waking her up and sort of saying, “Here’s your coffee. I basically have done everything. Please just drive me,” because we’ve been through this before.

So, I think shorter. It treaded water and it wasn’t like, I don’t know, I wasn’t laughing during that scene, so it felt like it should just be shorter and more interesting.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And then the car is gone, which is definitely, you know, so we’re kind of drifting towards Hangover area, or I guess closer to like Bad Mom, or Bad Teacher, Bad Mom, Bad Santa, Bad Something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s really my issue is that I feel like this is a copycat. And it’s a copycat idea. I’m going to read a script called Bad Mom basically. And it’s actually called Margarita Night, which is closer to like Hangover, or there’s a lot of those out there.

I think that these guys have a pretty good grip on the rhythm and flow of how something of this should work, and I like that they’re taking a few chances. Frankly I’d be bigger and more outrageous. I think if you’re going to be outrageous, be outrageous. It felt a little mild, frankly, and a little PG as I read the first three pages.

And I’m not here to say to promote being gross, or sexual, or stupid just for its own sake, but rather just be realer. If this deserves a movie, I want to see a wreck, and I want to really see a wreck. But, I’m just concerned that this is just following the leader and not really blazing its own trail; that it’s kind of behind the curve a little bit.

And I had no idea what’s happening in this little final bit, but that’s fine, that doesn’t matter. I guess my final comment is this: For a movie like this, I want to laugh, and I’m not laughing. I’m sort of smiling, nodding, and going, uh-huh. Eh, that part was not a good reaction.

**John:** I get that. My hope for this, and the reason why I’m optimistic about it is I feel like there’s a movie that is 9 to 5 pushed into the Bridesmaids world. And I think there’s an opportunity for this to be that kind of movie.

I mean, if you think back to 9 to 5, we got those home life moments, and they were really good, but they were tighter than this. They were tighter and they were shorter.

As this is set up there is Ally and Mel, so it’s not a one-hander, it’s supposed to be a two-hander. We’ll see from both these women’s perspectives. I know we might be intercutting this morning. We might be seeing a little bit more of what’s happening there. I have hope in here.

And it was — I laughed at the keys in the door. I laughed at the car being gone. Well, that’s not actually fair; I didn’t quite laugh at the car being gone, but I was happy that the car was gone.

**Craig:** I liked that, too. I would also say, when you do this kind of Bad Blank genre, which has become a little mini genre, that you need to kind of embrace it in a big way, because she’s now endangering the welfare of an eight year-old child. And so, man, just make me laugh when she does it. In a weird way, be more outrageous. Be more screwed up. This kid should hold her hair while she pukes. [laughs] Do something that makes me really go, wow. Part of the humor is that this is their lives, that it’s not just — I’m not just waking up with one weird thing where they kid is like, “What’s going on? Where’s the car? Why were the keys in the door? I made you coffee.” But I’m not…

I want this to be part of the deal. And part of that also is changing the age of that kid. Eight years-old is just not going to work for this character.

**John:** I would agree with you.

Craig, that’s four of these.

**Craig:** I like this. We blew through them there. And you know what? All of them had something to recommend.

**John:** I would agree. So, Stuart, thank you for picking these four out of the 511 for us to take a look at today.

Now, Craig, it’s come to that time. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Uh, did I already do the fat-free peanut butter?

**John:** You already did the fat-free peanut butter. You know what? I should just remind you when I send you the email as we schedule the time for this, I should just put a little reminder in there. I should have a macro that just says, “Oh, and Craig, don’t forget your One Cool Thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah. God. What’s yours? Maybe I’ll agree with it.

**John:** When you were a kid did you forget your permission slip a lot in school?

**Craig:** Constantly. I constantly forgot my permission slip. Constantly.

**John:** That’s what this is. So, next time we’ll just pin a little note to you to remind you to do your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I thought your One Cool Thing was going to be, like, a permission slip app.

**John:** Oh, that would be great. Wouldn’t that be nice?

**Craig:** So, really, there’s no salvation for me. I’ve forgotten my permission slip again. All right, go ahead. What’s your One Cool Thing?

**John:** That’s fine. So, the fact that you didn’t do one this week makes mine like sort of extra sort of good little Girl Scout, which I feel sort of is my function in this podcast just to be like the one who does everything ahead of time.

And I’m also the person who is like lecturing people to get their flu shots. So, this is probably even more in that nagging territory. But, for most of my life I was not a flosser. I did not floss my teeth. And that’s just shameful but I just hated to floss my teeth and it was not fun, and I didn’t want to do it. And so I brushed carefully but I wouldn’t floss my teeth.

And so then every time I would go into the hygienist for stuff they’d say, “Oh, do you floss?” So I’d either lie and say, “Yes, I floss,” in the sense that I flossed right before I came here, which was the first time I flossed in maybe three months. Or I would be honest and say that I didn’t and then they would give me a little lecture and a little lesson on how to floss. Well, I know how to do it, I just choose not to do it.

The truth I’ve discovered over the last three years is that it’s actually not about technique or anything else, it’s just that all the flosses I was trying were terrible. And most dental flosses are just terrible. But there’s one that’s actually really good. And I feel like if you actually use this floss people would actually want to floss their teeth because it’s actually delightful.

So, the best floss that exists in my opinion is Reach Gum Care with Fluoride, Soft Woven Mint Floss. It is available at nearly any grocery store or drug store. It’s made by Johnson & Johnson. It comes in a white package. It has pink and black printing on it. And it’s terrific.

So, what’s different about this floss, it is not waxed. It is not thin. It is sort of two bits of string twisted together like a very light yarn. And it slides between your teeth nicely. It tastes really good. It actually gets all that gunk out between your teeth. And it is a delight to use.

So, my recommendation is dental floss.

**Craig:** Do you know I’ve never had a cavity?

**John:** That’s fantastic, Craig. You must have like good genetics, really strong teeth.

**Craig:** No question. Because in fact one of the side effects of never having a cavity is that I’m terrible about flossing. Frankly, I’m terrible about going to the dentist. I just sort of — it becomes one of those things. It’s like super thin people who are just born thin and stay thin just kind of eat what they want and they don’t really care. You know, they just have cake sometimes.

I have never even come close to having a cavity. I don’t have gum disease. I don’t have any. I just genetically got blessed.

**John:** That’s fantastic. That’s great.

**Craig:** So, I don’t need your floss, man!

**John:** I was going to point out that brushing your teeth is for cavities, gum disease is, the thing with flossing generally is that if you don’t floss people’s gums tend to puff up and then recede, and then there’s problems. And then you have to do horribly painful stuff to fix things. So, congratulations on your lucky mouth genes.

**Craig:** There actually is some benefit to your gums from brushing. I had a dentist once tell me that the most important thing brushing does is actually massage your gums. Because when you massage your gums you help them sort of naturally get some of that puffy infected stuff out. And have you ever done that rubber tip thing?

**John:** Oh yeah. The massage set?

**Craig:** She said if I were on a desert island and I had a choice between taking a rubber tip or a toothbrush with me, I would take the rubber tip.

**John:** I have definitely noticed on watching many seasons of Survivor is that they get really bored out there. But what they’ll tend to always do is like take little pieces of bamboo and pick out their teeth, because it does just make you feel much better and cleaner.

When you’ve got grit on your teeth it’s just never a happy experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are certain foods like seaweed salad and beef jerky.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Will always get wedged in between my molars, and I go crazy. And that’s the only time I floss, really, and I hate to say it.

**John:** What about corn on the cob? Corn on the cob you have to.

**Craig:** I don’t like corn on the cob. I don’t like corn.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? I don’t like it. And it’s a shame because it’s a weed that grows everywhere. But I don’t like it.

**John:** It’s a major American specialty. If it weren’t for the Native Americans we would not have corn on the cob.

**Craig:** How many people do you think we’ve lost just talking about floss and corn? Just out of curiosity, like 100,000?

**John:** Hmm. I don’t know. There should be some good metrics for that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Let’s see if we can get down to zero!

**John:** That would be fantastic. I will say, so, changing topics only slightly here. So, as you know this last week we’ve been studying sort of the metrics of the podcast and sort of how many people are downloading it. And thank you so many people for subscribing to the podcast, and downloading it, and listening to it.

But, podcast metrics are actually very, very frustrating. Because if you are listening to this podcast, you’re listening to it one of several ways. You might be listening to it on the website, and it’s loading up and you’re listening to it just there on the page.

You might be listening to it on your iPhone through the podcast app or through a much better app called Instacast which I’d recommend. I’ll put a link to that as well. But if you’re listening through the podcast app you might be listening in two different ways. You might have downloaded it to your actual iPhone, which basically one big file comes to your iPhone. Or, you might be listening to it sort of live off the server, and you’re like scrubbing your little finger through and listening to stuff.

And where that has thrown us off this last week is something like our numbers got just crazy and Ryan had to spend a lot of time going through and figuring out what it was. It’s like, it’s literally people dragging their fingers through on the little slider in the podcast app crazily jacks up your numbers in ways that are really misleading.

And so the numbers and the log is reported with such a granularity that like literally every time a person does that it shows up as a new person. And so we have to filter those out because otherwise a person who like skips through to eight different places in the podcast counts as eight different people.

**Craig:** Okay, so then here’s the question: How many people do you think, your best accurate guess? How many people are actually listening to this?

**John:** Next week I think we’ll know. So, we’re going back through old logs and figuring out sort of when it started, and then sort of figuring out how we could filter it out. And so we’re actually switching to a different stats package, because our files are hosted on Amazon right now, on Amazon S3, which has extensive logs that are challenging to parse.

So, we are sorting that through. I think next week I’ll have an answer for you.

**Craig:** Hopefully I won’t have to un-sing my song.

**John:** I think we’re over your 100,000 mark.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** But, here’s the thing: we’re not near that crazy number that I whispered into your ear.

**Craig:** That was crazy.

**John:** So, that’s better and good for us all.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We were concerned about the exponential growth of the podcast. Essentially that we would take over the earth with the podcast. And, rest assured, we’re not.

**Craig:** [laughs] It was getting a little logarithmic.

**John:** Yeah. We had a little bit of a hockey stick curve, whatever you call that thing where…

**Craig:** Not that. Well, great. Maybe we should have Nate Silver look at it.

**John:** He’s not busy anymore, so we’ll just have him come in there and do it. Nate Silver who, god bless him, I really like that a math nerd sort of won the election. Every time I see him, though, I just want to wash his hair. His hair looks so dirty to me.

**Craig:** From what I hear, Nate Silver might not mind you washing his hair.

**John:** I’ve heard that, too. I have not heard any confirmation however.

**Craig:** I think it’s great. And I, of course I sit here thinking can you imagine the amount of money that has suddenly in the last week been offered to Nate Silver to just, “You know, could you please stop blogging this stuff for free on the New York Times and instead just let us pay you millions of dollars to do this for us?” I mean, this guy must have had so many offers just in the last week.

I mean, he was disturbingly accurate, and I wasn’t surprised because I believe in math, and I believe in statistics. But, boy, boy, man, he was right on.

**John:** Yeah. Which I like to see. Yeah. A hero or villain.

**Craig:** Yeah. Finally. Now we can say who the hero of the election is. [laughs] Excellent.

**John:** So, our standard wrap-ups on the show. If you have questions or comments about things we’ve talked about I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is…

**Craig:** @clmazin at Twitter.

**John:** All the notes for this podcast will be up at johnaugust.com/podcast. If you like the show, give us a little rating in iTunes because that helps other people find the show. And thank you so much.

**Craig:** Enjoy your corn and floss.

**John:** All right. Thanks man. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.