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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-screenwriters-guide-to-the-end-of-the-world).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 160 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you and I are both writing scripts. We’re both in our first drafts. I just crossed page 60. Where are you at?

**Craig:** Oh, well, see, you’re lapping me because this is really where the difference in our processes is driven home.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you like to go kind of get a fast draft out and then you go back, whereas I am painstakingly whistling this thing. So I am currently on page 41, I believe but feeling —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Feeling very good about it, feeling very good.

**John:** Yeah, it’s important to have a good 40 pages.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, I’m —

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Happy with the 40.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about the end of the world, which is one of my favorite topics of all things to discuss. But before we get to that, we have some housekeeping to take care of.

First off, Craig and I were both on the nominating committee for the WGA board and we were the people who interviewed people who wanted to be on the WGA board and sort of asked them why they wanted to be on the board. And it was four nights of fun and hilarity.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, yes, high —

**John:** At the WGA headquarters.

**Craig:** High stakes fun and hilarity.

**John:** So on previous podcasts, you and I have endorsed candidates. We said like, well, these are some people who are running and these are people who we think are fantastic and you should vote for.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But this year we cannot do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Specifically because we are on a committee, we are not supposed to endorse anybody. So the only thing we can endorse is that you should absolutely vote for the candidates of your choice. If you are a WGA member, you have received a packet in the mail that has all the candidate statements along with statements from people who are endorsing those candidates. You will not see me or Craig’s name on any of those endorsements, but we definitely think you should vote for people because it’s an important election. It’s always kind of an important election. There’s always stuff to get done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You should read those candidate statements and really think about who you want to be representing you. And you actually have an opportunity, if you’re listening to this podcast on Tuesday, tomorrow, Wednesday, there is a Candidates’ Night at the WGA, so you can go and listen to them speak and ask them questions.

**Craig:** Yes. You can listen to them and point your finger at them and boo and cheer. It’s like a zoo. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah. You know, weirdly, like a lot of people bring fruit to it. I don’t know that’s a good idea but —

**Craig:** Rotten vegetables, yeah. Why did people throw rotten vegetables? First of all, the forethought like, okay, we’re going to go out to the theater tonight in 1920 and we paid, you know, paid money for this but we’re expecting that at least one or two of the acts will be so bad we’ll want to hit them with stuff. So who’s going to bring, but we’re poor and vegetables are kind of hard to come by in the Lower East Side, so whose got just rotting cabbage?

**John:** Well, I think rotting cabbage isn’t that hard to find. If there is cabbage that doesn’t get consumed or cabbage that you could pull out of the ground and the maggots have already gotten to it —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the kind of thing you bring to the theater.

**Craig:** Do maggots eat cabbage though?

**John:** No, they really don’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s some sort of like — there’s probably a cabbage worm.

**Craig:** Oh, like a fungus rot?

**John:** Yeah, that too, yeah.

**Craig:** So you just gather it up and then you’re like, “Oh yeah, where are you going? I’m going to the theater that’s why I have this bag of just stinking refuse.”

**John:** Yeah, because, you know, I’m broke and poor but I’m going to pay for a ticket to see —

**Craig:** Well, I still love the arts, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** I still love the arts.

**Craig:** But I —

**John:** I mean, you have to support the arts.

**Craig:** But I also hate the arts so much that if somebody just doesn’t make me happy, I’m going to [laughs] hit them with stuff.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It never really happened. I think that was just made up in the movies, right? I mean, nobody ever did that for real.

**John:** I’m sure people threw garbage at, like, candidates they didn’t like or like political figures they didn’t like.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** But I don’t know. I mean, The Gong Show was an extrapolation of that idea but —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Gong Show was just a unique cultural moment that never needs to be repeated.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t know. I mean we’re trying, right, because America’s Got Talent, they have their little “Eh” and there’s an X or something like that which is really just a gong..

**John:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** But The Gong Show was great because there was an enormous amount of power in any particular judge. Anyone hitting the gong, that’s it, right, you’re done.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** So if Jaye P. Morgan’s not into you, it’s over.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, the old game shows were different and in some ways better. I mean Kitty Carlisle could just postulate about sort of what someone’s profession was. I’m guessing it’s Kitty Carlisle. I’m sort of making that name up but, to tell the truth.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that was kind of a fascinating show because like who are these people, the people on Password, like we don’t have kind of that level of celebrity anymore.

**Craig:** No, I know. There was all this wonderful sort of, where a celebrity became a professional game show person.

**John:** Yeah, Paul Lynde.

**Craig:** Paul Lynde or Charles Nelson Reilly, I mean they were just kind of… — Or who’s the woman on Match Game who really was just famous for being on Match Game. I don’t even know what she was famous for.

**John:** Is she the one that Kristen Wiig is sort of impersonating or like —

**Craig:** No, no, she’s, you know, I wish that [TS Fall] were here. He would know.

**John:** TS would know something.

**Craig:** TS would know. Yeah, you know, the old game shows were great. I don’t know, these new things, they’re. I don’t know. I really, oh, you know, it’s funny, The Gong Show, Rex Reed was on The Gong Show a lot. That was before he became an enormous asshole.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. An enormous drunken asshole.

**John:** Yeah, it was certainly good training.

**Craig:** In my opinion, in my opinion. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I don’t really know if he is. That’s just my feeling.

**John:** Yes. It’s also possible that everything was just better back then because it was our youth and everything seemed better —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If we actually were to look and compare it on The Game Show Network, we’d say, oh you know what, it was actually kind of terrible. You know, another thing that was better in our youth was Scriptnotes t-shirts. And so we used to make Scriptnotes t-shirts and we sold them to people who liked them and it was nice. And so our first batch of Scriptnotes t-shirts were the Umbrage Orange and Rational Blue.

And we sold a whole bunch of them and people really liked them. And we also did a batch of black. But that was about eight months ago. And so my open question to you, Craig, but really to the audience is, should we make more t-shirts? And so if you would like to have more t-shirts, on johnaugust.com, the same place where you may be listening to this podcast, there’s just going to be a poll saying like, hey, should we make more t-shirts. And if we should make t-shirts, what color should they be because we’re happy to do them if people actually want them.

But we won’t do them if people don’t want them. So that is a question I am positing to the readers. You can also chime in on Twitter if you would like but we are considering making t-shirts in time for, possibly Austin, but more likely for the holiday season. So if you would like a t-shirt, that is something you can weigh in on.

**Craig:** Is Jaye P. Morgan still alive, do you think?

**John:** I think of JP Morgan being the banker. Is that a different person we’re talking about?

**Craig:** Well, it’s Jaye, J-A-Y-E P. Morgan.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** So she was a —

**John:** It’s a she?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, Jaye P. Morgan. Oh my god.

**John:** Well, I’m Googling this right now because this is —

**Craig:** Jaye P. Morgan.

**John:** Fascinating information.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, see, Jaye P. Morgan is still alive. She’s 82 years old. She lives apparently, oh no, she was born in your home state of Colorado.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she was like a singer and an entertainer. You know, back in the day, you could be an entertainer. That was your job.

**John:** Well, looking at the Google Images, she’s having a conversation with Kermit the Frog which seems like exactly the kind of thing an entertainer would do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So Jaye P. Morgan is still alive. If you guys out there say, yeah, we should go ahead and make some t-shirts, we’re sending a free t-shirt to Jaye P. Morgan.

**John:** Well, that was never even a question.

**Craig:** She made me so happy.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** She did.

**John:** Yeah, anybody who makes Craig happy rather than angry —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Deserves a t-shirt.

**Craig:** Deserves a t-shirt.

**John:** A place where people could wear their t-shirts if they wanted to is the Slate Culture Gabfest. We can actually announce what this thing is now. So on October 8th at 7:30 PM in Downtown Los Angeles, we are going to be joining our friends Julia Turner, Stephen Metcalf and Dana Stevens from Slate for the Slate Culture Gabfest.

And so it’s a fantastic podcast. It should be a fantastic night. Tickets are on sale now. So it’s actually their event. We are just going to be guests, which I’m so excited not to have to host something.

**Craig:** Yeah, we just show up and we’re brilliant, huh? Is that the idea?

**John:** Yeah, that’s the goal. So we’ve back and forthed about what our topics are going to be. I think it’s going to be fun. A chance to talk about what it’s like to be creators of content versus critics of content and consumers of content. So I’m excited to have this chance to be on stage with them.

**Craig:** Yeah. For those of you who might be thinking, ah, I’m on the fence, should I go or not, let me just underline for you: I’m going to be on stage with a film critic.

**John:** That’s true. Fireworks are promised. And the whole thing is sponsored by Acura, which is just kind of great and odd but wonderful.

**Craig:** Acura. Oh, that’s right —

**John:** Yeah, we never have sponsors on our show, [laughs] so it sort of feels — it feels fun to sort of say like, brought to you by Acura.

**Craig:** [laughs] We’re such namby pambies.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That the only time we’re ever sponsored by anybody, it’s a charity. We never make any money for any, like we’re so… — It’s funny because it’s not like you and I are particularly anti-corporate or anything like that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** We’ve just kept this whole thing very, very pure. And it’s so odd, yeah, that Slate, liberal Slate, will be sponsored by Acura this evening. The Japanese Daibutsu.

**John:** Julia actually emailed like she’s like, “I know you guys don’t like to take sponsorships, is it going to be a problem?” Like, eh, like it’s no problem.

**Craig:** It’s your show, so.

**John:** It’s your show. We’re happy to be there.

**Craig:** Oh, I said Japanese Daibutsu, I didn’t mean that. A Daibutsu apparently is a giant Buddha, [laughs] so I mean the other thing, like what’s the word for the Japanese business, word for corporation?

**John:** I have no idea.

**Craig:** I’m looking it up right now.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** It’s like Zen — it’s zaibatsu.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** Okay, that’s a totally, totally reasonable mistake. So I said Daibutsu and I meant zaibatsu.

**John:** Yes, but in Tokyo, that could get you shunned or killed.

**Craig:** I mean, no one’s going to kill — I think the whole point of Buddhism —

**John:** I guess, no, if you call the corporation a Buddha, they’re probably not going to kill you.

**Craig:** And Buddhists just don’t kill you. That’s why they’re the best.

**John:** Yeah, but the thing is that they’re not Buddhas. They’re zaibatsus, not Daibutsus, so.

**Craig:** Well, the zaibatsu people may also worship a Daibutsu. This is the best episode we’ve ever done. And I have to assure people, neither one of us is high right now.

**John:** No, god, no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’re recording this at 1:24 in the afternoon.

**Craig:** On a Friday.

**John:** Yes. So let’s go to our main topic because this is a thing that I’ve definitely noticed for a long time and you and I have gone through this topic before. And I would posit that there’s actually a thing I would call, a variable I’d call the Armageddon delay which is how long it takes a group of screenwriters gathered together to not talk about the end of the world.

**Craig:** Yup. I have witnessed

**John:** It’s this thing that just inevitably comes up.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** And so we’ve had long online conversations about, specifically the longest one I remember is what do you do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. And I blogged about this. Basically, what is your plan when the zombies attack. And you are way out there in La Cañada, so you have a completely different game plan than I do here in the center of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. So last week or a couple of weeks ago, I joined a writer named Will Staples.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** He wrote a few of the Call of Duty games. And —

**John:** Yeah. And he has the best name ever.

**Craig:** Will Staples.

**John:** Yeah. He’s heir to the Staples fortune, right?

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** No?

**Craig:** I don’t think so, yeah, or the Staples Center which is also the Staples fortune, nor the Staples Sisters. I think —

**John:** I just think it’s bizarre that there’s an office supply place called Staples that’s named for staples.

**Craig:** Well, it’s also just seems like a dumb name because I mean the whole point is like Amazon, look, we’re as big as the Amazon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Staples. It’s pretty much what you would think. We got Staples.

**John:** Another Los Angeles chain, a food place, a food service place is called Smart & Final. And it’s like, that’s weird. It’s like it just feels sort of like two adjectives. No, it was named after a man named Smart and a man named Final.

**Craig:** Are you kidding me?

**John:** No, it’s real. There’s a Smart and a Final. And they were grocery stores and they became this sort of warehousey thing over time.

**Craig:** And, you know, Ralphs is not Ralph’s.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The man’s name is Ralphs with an S. And then keeping with the whole Smart & Final thing, the Outerbridge Crossing, which is a bridge connecting Staten Island to New Jersey, it’s named after a man named Outerbridge.

**John:** Yeah. It just happens to be a bridge —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s named after Outerbridge.

**Craig:** How about that? Anywho —

**John:** Wouldn’t the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis say that, you know, that the word itself sort of creates the reality? You know, essentially having your name be Outerbridge means that you were destined to —

**Craig:** Design bridges?

**John:** Design bridges perhaps?

**Craig:** Perhaps. I mean it certainly doesn’t explain you or I, although our names are nonsense.

**John:** My name’s made up. My name’s made up, so.

**Craig:** Well, your name’s made up but your real name and my name are very similar actually.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And they’re just nonsense. They mean nothing.

**John:** No, mine does mean something. My original name is a kind of bird in German.

**Craig:** Yeah, but that’s German. We —

**John:** Yeah, we live in America.

**Craig:** We’re in America, man. We won the war, bro. Anyway —

**John:** Back to Will Staples.

**Craig:** So Will Staples puts together this group of writers. I was there, Alec Berg of Silicon Valley —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And Nicole Perlman.

**John:** Oh yeah, Guardians of the Galaxy.

**Craig:** Guardians of the Galaxy and we’ll be having her on the show soon. And we all went out to the Angeles gun range —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Which is out in like by the Hansen Dam. You don’t know where that is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But anyway, we were joined by some military folks. I cannot say of what type. And they’re active duty military folks. And we just —

**John:** They were not Nazis, they were —

**Craig:** No, they’re American military folks —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Of a certain stripe. And we were instructed on shooting all sorts of gun, sniper rifles and .50 caliber Barretts and Israeli machine guns. It was amazing. It was just an incredible day. But it struck home how my strategy, my surmised strategy, is absolutely the correct strategy for where I live. Get up into the Angeles Crest Forest, it’s just full of gun nuts. [laughs] Get around some gun nuts, hunker down, it’s mountainous territory.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You can see a lot. So, you know, in warfare, you want the high ground. So we get up high, load up on guns and ammo, look down and theoretically I think we should be okay.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a very reasonable — you know, you’re picking a defensive location. You are, you know, barricading but you’re barricading smartly. In the middle of the city, it’s tougher to say what is the right choice to do because certainly for an earthquake we’re well set up for, like we have our supplies and we can get out and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And lord knows we have solar panels, we can sort of do a lot of stuff here at our house for a good long time. But it’s not ideal for a zombie apocalypse because I live like in the heart of the city, so.

**Craig:** That’s right, John.

**John:** I think we’re going to have to just bail and just get out of the city.

**Craig:** And my feeling is always that if you live like where you live, your primary strategy should be an efficient painless suicide.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because you’re not going anywhere. I mean, you’re just not.

**John:** Yeah, our emergency kit definitely has the cyanide in it. So I want to talk about sort of why — I’ll just give a quick rundown of sort of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the end of the world because it’s just such a dominant theme in all of our recent literature really, movie literature, TV literature, written literature.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So 28 Days Later which is very much the scenario we’re describing, World War Z, The Road, Revolution which is just like all the power goes away, The Walking Dead, End of the World, Shaun of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Terminator which is basically the rise of evil robots.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Planet of the Apes which in this most recent version, is essentially —

**Craig:** Dead dirty apes.

**John:** An outbreak that kills everybody.

**Craig:** Apes.

**John:** Did you see the most recent Planet of the Apes?

**Craig:** What do you think, John?

**John:** You see nothing. You just see nothing. The Hunger Games in terms of, you know, in the movies, it’s not especially clear what has happened to the world that’s put in this place. I guess in the book it’s more clear sort of what happened but like there was I think an environmental catastrophe that sort of led to the world falling apart in that specific way. Outbreak, again, is an outbreak of a disease. The Day After Tomorrow, climate change again. Terra Nova by our friend Kelly Marcel —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is basically not… — Well, the world is ending but therefore we’re going back to a primitive time.

**Craig:** With the dinosaur she did not want.

**John:** Yes, yes, lots of quality dinosaurs.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Mad Max, you can’t get sort of more end of the world than Mad Max.

**Craig:** Yes, very, very end of the world.

**John:** And then there’s the things that are sort of in between. So like The Leftovers, which I’m enjoying the series, it’s not the end of the world but it’s just the world is bent in a way that is so irrevocable that it feels like everything has changed.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then to some degree you can also even look at like the space epics like Battlestar Galactica which is about the end of the world and the migration to a new place. So we do this a lot and I sort of want to talk about why we do it so much.

**Craig:** Well, there’s something I think inherent to the human condition. We are fascinated by our own mortality for obvious reasons. We also contain a certain amount of inherent self-loathing.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I think that’s part of the human drive to improve the world around it and to improve itself, right? Humanity is constantly trying to make humanity better, trying to make the world better. We occasionally screw up as we do it but we have that instinct. And that instinct I think is driven in part by the opposition of our self-loathing. I hate the way humans are now. Let’s fix things.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So we will dwell sometimes on the parts of our nature that is awful and come up with ways in which humanity has destroyed the world. Very frequently in the movies you’ve cited, humans have caused this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Even when the machines rise up to beat us, it’s because humans made Skynet and got lazy. And you can see this over and over that really it’s our fault. We did it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, of course, when it comes to the idea of zombies, we are externalizing time.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And particularly when the traditional zombies are slow-moving zombies, they’re just time. They’re just sands in the hourglass. We are all of us running from this very slow zombie called death and it starts shambling after us once we are born and it eventually catches up to us and bites us.

**John:** I think you’re hitting on some of the key themes that are going to be, you know, endemic to any discussion of the end of the world which is mortality, which is the sense of we all know that we’re innately going to die but we want to apply it to everyone at once. And so it’s mortality, but it’s also scale in the way that movies and TV shows and books, they take — generally, they take ordinary experiences and then they heighten them. They push them beyond sort of normal expectations. And so an individual person dies, well, that’s sad and tragic but what happens when everybody dies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, at a certain point, it stops becoming just, you know, exponentially more tragic and just becomes, wow, it’s completely new framework for how you have to think about sort of what’s there and what’s next.

I think you also hit on that sense of it’s self-loathing but we also have this inner question about like, well, what would I do if I didn’t have all these things.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** In sort of a stoicism that kicks in where I don’t need all these trappings around me. If I can get back to a primitive, more simpler time, I could be great. I could be a king in an earlier time.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And that I think is a fascination as well. It’s that question of, what would it be like if I were in a time back before we had all these things.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Even back to Twain’s like, you know, a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, that sense of like what it would be like to be transported back to a place that was simpler.

**Craig:** And this is particularly seductive for writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Writers typically don’t grow up as the head of the cheerleading squad or the quarterback. When writers sit down to imagine starting with a blank slate, they very often drift into a classic conflict between might makes right, and rationality and what we would call enlightened wisdom.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And of course, the screenwriter, the novelist, they [laughs] tend to represent the power of the mind and goodness as opposed to I’m going to hit you over the head and drag you away. If you want to look at the cleanest, simplest version of that, screenwriters are Piggy in Lord of the Flies and the people that used to beat up screenwriters are Jack [laughs] from Lord of the Flies.

**John:** Yeah. Even if you take a look at Lost, which is not the end of the world but it functions the same way where people are stripped away of all of their normal things, it’s a chance to take a look at those archetypes in very clean circumstances because in normal daily life, none of us are like a hero or a villain and we’re all like in line together at Starbucks. But when you take away all the trappings of society, you’re able to look at those stereotypes as archetypes and those drives much more cleanly because there’s not everything else surrounding them. So, you know, by stripping away everything else, you can sort of see what is there.

**Craig:** Yes. Yeah, you know, it’s a truism that so much of what we do during the day is an expression of how we survive. Our survival instinct. Almost never in a day are we making a decision that actually impacts our very survival, but the survival instinct is always there. Is your survival instinct to create a consensus and an alliance based on mutual respect? Is your survival instinct to lash out and defeat? [laughs] Is your survival instinct to lie and cheat? Is your survival instinct to be noble and heroic? That will come out so much more clearly when in fact every choice you make impacts your actual survival.

**John:** I think the key point is that in daily life, your decisions kind of don’t matter that much. Really they don’t. Like, you know, are you going to invest in this or in this? Are we going to have takeout or are we going to cook food at home? It just doesn’t matter, whereas in the scenarios that we’re describing, every little decision matters tremendously because your survival depends on it.

And so you look at, you know, Rick, Lee and the group in The Walking Dead, you know, literally the decision to do we go into town to try to get some more food or do we wait until, you know, some later point, all the decisions are life or death all the time. And in our daily life, we don’t really experience that. And I think there’s an attraction to feeling that danger. That’s the reason why we go to movies and to watch TV shows is that sense to escape our daily life and to imagine ourselves if those decisions we made were actually important, mattered.

**Craig:** Which, by the way, that’s why I’m not a huge fan of the zombie genre, the survive the apocalypse genre. When the genre creates a situation in which every decision is a matter of life and death, I get fatigued by it.

**John:** I do too.

**Craig:** You know. I like the stories where, I mean, like even a Mad Max, I mean he’s driving around, he’s pretty happy and then he runs into some trouble, you know.

I like situations where there’s some sort of stasis. I mean, a typical zombie movie just gives us the world, everything is fine, you fools you don’t know what’s coming, you fools. It’s very anti-human. Zombie movies hate humans by the way. That’s the point of zombie movies is that humans are stupid. But oh, these two or three are noble and so they will continue the humanity forth. It’s very confused. But everything’s fine and then everything goes to hell and then a few people make it out. But it’s all fatiguing to me. And I recognize other people love it but —

**John:** Well, I think part of the fatigue is the futility of it all is that in most zombie stories there is no perceived end to it, like it’s going to suck forever.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And therefore like, you know, you were joking about sort of like the suicide pills, but like in many ways, like that probably would be the most reasonable course of action because there’s no destination to get to that is actually going to be safe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that becomes an exhausting aspect of two characters who are living in it but also the people who are, by proxy, living in it through watching your story.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s nowhere safe and there’s also nowhere interesting.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I mean the world now, the best you can do is find some terrible, uninhabited island that zombies can’t get to where you’ll just sit there for a while. And then, by the way, you’ll die anyway one day. So it’s such a direct metaphor for mortality that it’s just kind of vaguely depressing. And I’ve already accepted that I’m going to die one day anyway, so, you know, meh.

**John:** Meh.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** So another kind of end of the world scenario tends to be climate change like some, the cataclysmic event has happened to the world, so either an asteroid has smashed into us, there has been an extinction level event that killed everybody but like they’re not walking around as the dead. And that I find more interesting in some ways because you’re adapting to a new reality but that new reality is not trying to kill you at every moment.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m totally with you. I’m fascinated by people’s responses to things. It’s interesting to watch characters respond in various ways to a disruption of stasis that can be overcome.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** One of my favorite books from childhood was — did you go through your Heinlein phase?

**John:** I didn’t really read the Heinleins. I read like short bits of things but I didn’t go through a big binge.

**Craig:** Well, so you didn’t soak in adolescent space fascism the way that I did. But he wrote this great book called Tunnel in the Sky. I loved this book. And I can’t believe no one’s done this yet. So producers listening to this, somebody go and get this book. Get the rights to this thing and make a series out of it. It would be an awesome series.

So the idea is that in the future, people have to go leave earth and colonize other places because earth is really crowded and that’s the way it goes. And there are special groups of people that go to new planets and kind of are the frontiers people to see like, okay, can we actually live here and if we can, then other people can show up. And so our young hero, he’s a senior basically in high school. All these kids are like really hardened teenagers and they’ve taken this super awesome survival class, right?

And what’s the final exam? They open a tunnel in the sky, a space portal, and they send you somewhere to a planet that no one has been to before or maybe they’ve scouted briefly and you have to survive.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** If you come back alive, you pass.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you die on the planet, you fail. And so they go there and of course something goes wrong. The tunnel doesn’t open back up in time and they’re marooned there and they must truly survive there. And what was so fascinating to me about the book was that they had to form some kind of society. And, you know, Heinlein was so like, you know, he was such a nut about that stuff.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it was really interesting to watch these people like create a constitution and it was very cool. Anyway, I like that sort of thing.

**John:** Well, I think, part of the reason why I like that type of fiction is that the villain is not this faceless thing that’s always going to be there. The villain or the antagonist is going to be someone else who’s in that same situation who wants different things, which is true in real life is that, you know, your antagonist just wants, it has cross purposes to you. And it could be the other group leader who is trying to get your stuff.

And you see that on The Walking Dead. We see like, you know, the real villains become like the mayor of that town or the sheriff or whatever his name was who is much more dangerous honestly than most of the zombies in the world. And yet, ultimately, you feel the fatigue of like, but there’s always going to be more zombies out there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so in the scenarios in which like everyone has died and you’re starting to create a new society, Stephen King’s The Stand is an example of that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You’re trying to create a new society and so you don’t have to worry about the dead people. You only have to worry about sort of what happens next. And so as I read The Stand, or reading the sort of unabridged The Stand, I was so excited to see these groups coming back together and trying to figure out how to build society from scratch, which is a good segue to this book I’m reading right now, which I’m loving, which is The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch. It’s by Lewis Dartnell. And it’s talking about exactly that topic which is if everything did go away, how would you start everything over again?

**Craig:** Well, you’d use Sugru.

**John:** The Sugru would be, obviously, the first thing you would go to because you need to have good grippy handles on all the tools, the hoes that you’re now using for agriculture.

**Craig:** You’ve got to have hoes in a new world.

**John:** You’ve got to have hoes in probably two — two dimensions of hoes.

**Craig:** When things go bad, the first thing I go looking for, hoes.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And the guy with the most hoes obviously is the most powerful.

**John:** Because his agriculture would be unstoppable.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because his soil will be so well tilled.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. He will have fertility.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Oh god, this is the worst.

**John:** Terrible.

**Craig:** This is either the best or the worst that I can remember.

**John:** Terrible metaphors stacked upon each other. So Craig —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think, before reading this book, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I always had this sort of vision in my head where I did get like transported back to year 0.

I’d be like, wow, you know, I would know so much and I would be able to therefore rocket, you know, science ahead, like people would benefit so much from everything I could tell them.

**Craig:** What year have you gone back to?

**John:** Let’s say I’d go back to year 0 or year 1.

**Craig:** Oh, they would stone you to death almost instantly.

**John:** Oh, they would stone me to death. But let’s say I’d go back to some place that likes me and —

**Craig:** No, you want to be somewhere in the, I would say, the 1600s, 1500s would be nice. Anything before that, if you start talking about atoms —

**John:** No, I don’t think even talking about atoms. I think you can talk about some sort of fundamental things. First off, you and I know, we know that there’s a new world. We know that there’s a —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We do know some fundamental things that could be very, very useful to people. But what’s challenging is we don’t know some fundamental things, like you and I don’t know fundamental things that are super crucial like, how to make steel?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** How to sort of make furnaces. I kind of know how to make electricity. But I don’t know how to make the wire and the magnets that we’re going to need to forge the electricity.

**Craig:** No, what you’re describing is the difference between creators and consumers. We’re consumers of technology.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re not creators of technology. So it’s literally of no use. It would be like if you went back in time and you were a very well-read person, you’re not going to be able to cheat Mark Twain by writing Huck Finn instead of him. You won’t be able to do it, you know. We will be, look, if I go back in time, I don’t care where I’m going. I’m just going to keep my head down, [laughs], try not to get burned at the stake, you know, I’m Jewish which is already an issue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I’m just going to like keep my head down. Certainly, if I were going , like if you sent me back to a time when I thought I could do some good, I would try to do good. I would.

**John:** Right. So just so we’re clear, zombies, you head for the hills.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To the past, you keep your head down low.

**Craig:** Keep head down low. Keep your head down. Remember, those people are not like us at all. Speak of the dumbest mob on the planet currently. Go to whatever country you feel has the dumbest, most ignorant people. Find them at their worst. That’s everybody back in the day. That is the entire world in the year 500.

**John:** The other challenge, I think, and I haven’t gotten so far in the book to know whether he actually addresses this, is clearly you need a critical mass of people in order to do any of the kinds of bigger projects that he’s talking about. So you can’t build a dam with just, you know, five people. You can’t make steel with five people.

But so much of what we’ve done historically has been on the backs of slaves. And so could you go back in time and, or yes, even go forward in time like let’s say everything falls apart. Could you rebuild civilization without slavery? And I would hope so.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** But certainly it would be challenging.

**Craig:** I think so. But how awkward for us if the answer is, no, you can’t. Like, oh man.

**John:** Yeah, that slavery is just like a key, crucial component at certain point.

**Craig:** You know, we’re really progressive people, but ooh.

**John:** Ooh, but, [laughs] I’m going to have to make you my slave. Sorry.

**Craig:** I’ve got to own humans now. Oh well, sigh.

**John:** Sigh.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think we could do it without slaves. I feel pretty good about that.

**John:** Yeah, so a zombie situation or any situation in the future without medicine. So what do you do without, not just even without the technical knowledge but without the actual medicines and what do you do without the technology to be able to look inside a person? And so this book goes through like how to create x-ray machines, but that’s —

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** No. Challenging.

**Craig:** No, no. Yeah. The way to kind of handcraft an x-ray machine probably involves the cancerous death of the crafter. I don’t know. [laughs] I mean if the zombies come and I’m up in the hills, you’re going to want some basics, you know. There are medical basics which should keep you alive for awhile. But there’s simply no way to avoid the fact that even if no zombie ever breaches your perimeter —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Life expectancy is going to plummet.

**John:** It is because mortality is not just, you know, that zombie biting you. Mortality is all the things that could kill you, but wouldn’t kill in normal society because there is disinfectant and there is a doctor and there is simple surgeries. So that impacted tooth could kill you.

**Craig:** Childbirth.

**John:** Childbirth, incredibly dangerous.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it.

**Craig:** No, there’s [laughs].

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’ve personally, I’ve watched it and I caused it to happen. But I —

**John:** Yes, and I’ve cut cords.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I wouldn’t want to do it in a non-medical setting.

**Craig:** No. No, I’m just befuddled. Again, I really do believe this. The same instinct that makes people want to write stories about how humans have destroyed the world, it’s the same thing that leads them to say, I think a home birth is better for my baby than a hospital birth. I don’t think the baby cares.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s like a weird thing where people want to turn away from the modern because they suspect it. They feel that it’s all tainted by something quote- unquote, “unnatural”. But there’s nothing unnatural about humans doing stuff. We’d been doing it forever.

**John:** So I think that keys in to sort of my final point here, which is that, all these dystopian scenarios that we’re laying out, I think underlying most of them is this utopian ideal that’s there. And what you describe in terms of like, oh, it would be so much better without modern medicine or if, you know, we’ll be able to have natural things, the people would just chew willow bark instead of taking drugs.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** There’s a utopian idea there. And I kind of applaud that utopian idea. But at the same, we need to recognize that that’s, you know, that’s not realistic. And you can’t get some of those few utopian ideals without all the stuff that feeds into making those possible. You can’t have perfect representational democracy and still get those power lines lit. Ideals are wonderful things, but the reality on the ground can be quite a different thing.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I think that one of the interesting things we see from culture and from stories about the end of the world and the recreation of a new world is that we tend to give more credence to dystopian visions. Because we feel like a self-critique is more valid, whereas utopian ideals seem sugary and silly and corny. But the truth is they’re both dumb. There will never be a perfect world nor is there going to be some horrendous awful world.

The world we have will continue to get better. I think things are better now than they’ve ever been before, as bad as they are. And I think things will get better. But there’s no utopia.

**John:** No. And there are dystopias in the modern world. But luckily, they’re pockets of dystopia that hopefully can be eradicated and they will show up somewhere else. So like, Somalia seems like a dystopia at times.

**Craig:** Liberia.

**John:** Liberia, yeah absolutely. And, you know —

**Craig:** If you go Liberia and Syria.

**John:** You look at some of the things that are happening in Iraq right now, there is huge pockets of terribleness, but that’s not the general state.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk about it from a writer’s point of view in terms of you are creating a story that is taking place in one of these worlds. And what of the crucial things because the world building you’re doing here is very important and there are useful short-hands and then there are some really dangerous short-hands. And, you know, we talked about expectation. And so if you’re doing a zombie story, you get a lot of zombie stuff for free. We sort of know basically how zombies work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you have to be clear about the things you’re changing. So it’s no longer a spoiler, but in The Walking Dead series you don’t have to be bit, you know this right, you don’t have to bit in The Walking Dead series to become a zombie. You just will become a zombie when you die. And so that’s an important rule change they had to make. But kind of everything else with zombies they got for free.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Or 28 Days Later, like they are fast zombies. They have to make that clear. But that’s an easy thing to make clear.

**Craig:** We can see it, they’re fast, yeah. Those basic monster rules, sure.

**John:** Basic monster rules. But yeah, I think you have to extend beyond those, then take a look at like what is the overall world in which your story is taking place. And that could eat a lot of pages as you’re trying to describe it. And so you have to be very, very smart about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** The initial images you’re showing will lead us to believe whether this is a Mad Max world or a Hunger Games world. And those aren’t the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or a world of your own making that’s just fresh and interesting. I mean, Snowpiercer, the entire world is a train.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there are movies, I mean Blade Runner obviously was a huge influence on anybody that was trying to write some sort of dystopian future. I thought that Rian Johnson did a great job in Looper of just casually setting up a world that wasn’t, I don’t think of it as dystopian.

**John:** It’s not dystopian, no.

**Craig:** It’s just it’s kind of just the world. It’s just —

**John:** Yeah, it’s messed up in a way that would be realistic for the world to get messed up in.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly, but not a dystopia per se. Yeah, you want to make sure if you’re going to write a world, a dystopian world, that you have some sort of point. And here is where I think a lot of dystopian movies go awry. They’re just too on the nose.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, humanity must work together and stop killing the planet. I mean we get it. We know. Yes. Absolutely. [laughs] But surely, there’s something else to say.

**John:** So you have to look for what is the, you know, your movie can’t just be about this world you created. This world you created has to support the story you’re trying to tell. And so I think an example of a movie that does it really well is The Matrix.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so The Matrix is this, obviously, it’s sort of two levels of dystopia. Like Neo is in this sort of messed up world to start with. But then you realize like, oh it’s actually much more worse than you think. And it’s Neo’s story. And so that’s the backdrop for this journey that he’s going on throughout the course of the story. And it’s exciting because it works. But if it had just been that cool world, who cares?

**Craig:** Exactly. And part of what I see sometimes is that the dystopia is a straw dummy set up for the screenwriter to knock down. Elysium, the concept of Elysium was that very rich people lived on this space station floating above the planet. And then all the have-nots lived on the planet where they suffered. Well, that’s just, it’s too simple. You know, so you want to get —

**John:** It’s way too simple.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you want to get angry at the 1%, it could have been like space 1%. It’s just too obvious. And the whole movie feels like a rigged job for people to basically tell rich folks, you stink, which often times they do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course, the people making the movie are all super rich. And the movie was made by a mega corporation. All of which just seemed very odd to me.

**John:** Yeah. But you compare that movie, it’s the same director to District 9, which actually had fascinating things to say.

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Yes, exactly.

**John:** And so District 9 could talk about immigration and squalor and —

**Craig:** Racism.

**John:** And racism. And it focused on a character who could move from one world into that other world and actually become a part of that world which Matt Damon’s character never did in Elysium.

**Craig:** Well yeah, and so part of what made District…9?

**John:** District 9, yeah.

**Craig:** District 9. I always want to say District 7, I don’t know why. But District 9, part of what made it so good was that it was getting into this really greasy stuff about what it means to be a policeman.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And to be a policeman in a bad neighborhood. And to feel like you are both a part of and at war with the community around you. You have this sympathy and then this repulsion and disgust. Some of those people, you’re there to help. Some of those people are there to hurt you. You start to hurt them. That stuff is good, greasy stuff to get into.

**John:** Yeah, because they’re deep human themes but also completely relatable to modern experience.

**Craig:** And there’s conflict to it, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can see how a human being becomes torn by the dilemmas of all this. But, you know, if you just get too on the nose with your conceit, then it’s just like, no! It’s a little bit, you know, I mean it goes back to The Time Machine, Eloi and the Ewoks, or whatever the other ones were. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, I want to step back for a second, when you say like you see the dilemma. Dilemma is another word for a choice. And the dilemma is you’re forcing your protagonist to make a choice between this way of doing things and a new way to doing things. And the choice that you want them to make is generally the one that’s going to cause them the most pain but is the one that’s going to lead to an outcome that’s rewarding.

Now I would also state that like the dystopia doesn’t have to be the thing itself. In some ways it can function like a MacGuffin. And so if you go back to Terminator, you know, Terminator is coming to kill Sarah Connor. So while we see these moments of dystopia before John Connor , wait, no.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** John Connor comes back, we see these moments of dystopia where like, you know, tanks are crushing human skulls. Most of the story is not that. Most of the story is this chase movie set in the real present day things against this incredibly dangerous killer robot.

So that dystopia is an incredibly important piece of set up and is a thing to avoid, but in order for the movie to resolve successfully she has to win and defeat this one thing. She doesn’t have to stop the apocalypse. That’s a part of what she’s doing. That’s the overall goal is just, you know, she learns to, she’s going to be carrying a baby who’s going to be this important leader. But she herself doesn’t have to stop Skynet within the course of this one thing. And it lets it be much more contained and let’s it be a story about human beings rather than this grand Skynet.

**Craig:** Yeah. And The Terminator is I think the best version of the zombie story anyway. You know, he can’t be reasoned with, he can’t be defeated. He will never stop no matter what. Very zombie-like, right? It just keeps on coming. You chop him in half, he keeps on coming. But he is defeatable.

And ultimately you can defeat it. And that’s why Terminator is I think a more interesting story ultimately than the general zombie story because we like stories where we triumph over death. At least, if I’m going to do a fantasy story, and all science fiction is fantasy. Terminator is fantasy and zombie movies are fantasy. If I’m going to do a fantasy story, I might as well — I’m an optimist, so I like fantasy stories about triumphing over death, even of course, in the end, though, everyone dies.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah, everyone does die.

**Craig:** You die, she dies, they all die.

**John:** To wrap this up, I would say that, you know, you and I are both fans of life with a purpose. And therefore, hopefully death with a purpose as well. And so if in crafting these stories, you’re able to make that character’s existence meaningful in the course of the movie’s world, that’s success.

**Craig:** A good purposeful death is a wonderful thing.

**John:** I agree. Craig, I think that’s the end of the world for us here in the end of our show. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah? [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to decide between two. I think I’m going to go with this one. Have I talked about this, I don’t know, I always feel like I’m app heavy. So I was thinking like, you choose, do you want a One Cool Thing that’s an app or One Cool Thing that’s something you can hold in your hand and put in your mouth?

**John:** I’m going to pick an app for myself, so why don’t you do the thing you put in your mouth?

**Craig:** Okay. So I was over at Chicago Fire/PDs creator’s home, Derek Haas.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** His wife put out all this —

**John:** His wife is the best.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

**John:** I love Kristi. She’s the best.

**Craig:** She is the best. So Kristi put out all these things because we had all the kids together and she put out these things. And it was boxed water. Have you seen this?

**John:** Yeah, I’ve seen boxed water.

**Craig:** Yeah, boxed water. Okay, well you live in fancy town. I live, you know, in Mormonville where we don’t have boxed water. And so I thought it was pretty genius. I hate bottled water. I hate the concept of bottled water. I hate the bottles. I don’t understand why we don’t just drink water out of the tap. I’m the one guy left in LA that drinks water out of his tap.

**John:** I only drink water out of the tap. Out of the tap or out of like the filtered pitcher.

**Craig:** Okay, exactly. So I don’t understand, I mean, understand occasionally if you’re serving people or things and you don’t want keep filling stuff up, maybe then. Or if you’re going somewhere I guess. But people, it makes me nuts. Anyway, at least with boxed water, you’re not just filling the trash with all these bottles. It’s much easier to recycle. And you can squish it down. And it’s not a petroleum product. I just don’t … — What is the story with bottled water? Why did that happen? Why?

**John:** I think bottled water serves a crucial need when you cannot count on the safety of your water supply. And so for those purposes, I think bottled water is a great thing. And I guess if your choice is between drinking a soda and drinking a bottled water, the bottle water is healthier for you to be consuming. But in general, I completely agree with you. And that’s why we don’t have any bottled water in the house. And I either drink directly out of the faucet, well, I drink it in a glass.

**Craig:** Right. I will do it out of the faucet.

**John:** Every once in a while, I will do the, you know, the two-hand scooping thing.

**Craig:** Oh really? No, I just do the sideways head, like [lapping noise], like a dog.

**John:** Like the dog lapping.

**Craig:** Where you’re mostly just drinking air, but it feels good. I mean when I was a kid, we used to just drink water out of the hose.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, you shouldn’t do that honestly because the plastics in a hose are not —

**Craig:** Oh, get out of here. Look at me, I’m as healthy as an ox.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. They actually make hoses, though, that are designed for drinking water that are safe.

**Craig:** I’ve just had it with this. You know what, now I want the world to end. Now I hate the world. Oh, your hose, we’ve got a special hose for your special body. I used to drink out of some nasty hose that was —

**John:** I used to drink out of puddles. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. And like our garden hose was smelted in the basement of some weird prison. And it was all coils and nasty chemicals and stuff and it was hot.

**John:** And we liked it.

**Craig:** It was delicious. And the end was like a rusty nozzle.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look at me, strong.

**John:** Strong.

**Craig:** Strong like an ox.

**John:** You could not be stronger.

**Craig:** Strong like ox.

**John:** My One Cool Thing, I don’t think I’ve talked about it in the show before. And I’m curious whether you use it. It’s Waze. Do you know Waze?

**Craig:** I use Inrix.

**John:** Okay, so same —

**Craig:** Inrix was one of my Cool Things many —

**John:** That was your One Cool Thing a while back.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I finally got converted to Waze because I kind of didn’t understand the point of it and then I took a meeting at Amazon which is on the West Side in Santa Monica in the afternoon. I’m like, oh, why did I do this? I’ll never be able to get home. So people who don’t live in Los Angeles, you should understand the east/west divide in Los Angeles isn’t a we hate them and they hate us. It’s that it’s actually physically impossible to move from the West LA to East LA at certain times of the day or vice versa.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It takes forever.

**Craig:** It’s also impossible to move North and South in various spots. It’s just impossible to move.

**John:** Yeah. It can be very, very challenging to move. So in my life, after about 4 PM, so like 4 PM to 8 PM, I will not try to sort of go out to Santa Monica or something like that. It’s just madness. But I took this meeting, I’m like, oh, crap. So it was only an hour, so I get out and it’s like, you know what, I’m going to try Waze.

And so the idea behind Waze is it’s like Google Maps or Maps on the iPhone where it’s telling you which way how to go expect that in real time it’s updating it based on how fast and slow these streets are moving, partially based on other people who are using Waze and calculating their speeds.

And so Waze will send you in these crazy ways, literally ways, to get you to your destination. But it actually works. And so I got home in like 35 minutes which is just impossible.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I took like the weirdest streets imaginable. So you just have to trust it, but it works.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, that’s the same thing with Inrix. I’ve been using it forever. And particularly for me because I live a bit a further afield than you do, it’s absolutely essential.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s nothing that feels better than getting into my car, putting in, you know, and I’ve saved all the various locations that I want, but I can always put new ones in, and I go, “Okay, what’s the fastest way to get home?” And they show me the way I would have gone home which is a disaster and their way which is like 20 minutes faster. Oh, it’s the nicest feeling.

**John:** Blessed be.

**Craig:** Yes, yeah.

**John:** Alright. Well, that’s our show this week. So if you would like to talk to me or Craig about the end of the world or our plans for it, you can reach Craig, @clmazin on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions and statements can be directed to ask@johnaugust.com. We are on iTunes and so you should subscribe to us there. And while you’re there, you can leave us a comment and let us know about the show and what you think. You can also subscribe to Slate’s podcast there if you feel like it because that would be a nice thing to do.

The show is produced by Stuart Friedel who’s out sick right now. So I’m hoping he’s feeling better. Oh, Stuart.

**Craig:** Oh no!

**John:** Yeah, basically everyone in the office is sick except for me. So I’m just, yeah, yeah. So if they all, if it becomes an extinction-level event, it’s just going to be me doing the podcast, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll have to do it myself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Matthew Chilelli edits the podcast. Thank you, Matthew for that. I think our outro this week is going to be the one from, it’s actually the jingle from Stride gum which is exactly the same melody as the Scriptnotes melody.

**Craig:** Stride gum?

**John:** Wait, no, it’s actually Orbit gum. But anyway, I’ll put that on as the outro. But we would love more outros from our listeners. So if you would like to do a riff on our [hums], you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com or put it up on SoundCloud with a #scriptnotes and we will do it.

**Craig:** I was listening to a bunch of those. They’re really good.

**John:** They’re really good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Matthew Chilelli who cuts our show has done a lot of the really great ones. But there is some competition there. There’s some really good people out there who’ve done amazing things.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I liked a lot of them. I’m always impressed that people even do it all but they can do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Can we do a, find like, I don’t know, Stuart is out. Maybe Matthew can dig up a little clip of Jaye P. Morgan for the very end there.

**John:** We’ll try to find a little clip of Jaye P. Morgan being her Morganist.

**Craig:** So pretty.

**John:** Pretty in that old way. The way that people used to —

**Craig:** That glamorous old way. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The way people used to be pretty. They’re not anymore, it’s true.

**John:** So our last reminders. People should vote for the WGA board. If you would like a t-shirt, you should let us know that you would like a t-shirt. And just go to johnaugust.com. There’s still a few leftover t-shirts from way back when in the store but this is really a question for what t-shirt should we make next if we want to make t-shirts. And you should buy tickets for the Slate Culture Gabfest because it will sell out and then you will not get to see us. So there’s a link to all these things we talked about on the show at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes.

If you would like to listen to all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, those are available at scriptnotes.net and you can also get them through the app which is for Android and for iOS.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** You too, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* 2014’s WGA Candidate Night is [September 3rd](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=5597)
* [Jaye P. Morgan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaye_P._Morgan) is still alive
* [Get tickets now](http://www.slate.com/live/la-culturefest.html) for October 8th’s live Slate Culture Gabfest with guests John and Craig
* [The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch](http://www.amazon.com/dp/159420523X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Lewis Dartnell
* [Boxed Water](http://www.boxedwaterisbetter.com/) is better
* [Waze](https://www.waze.com/) gets you there with real-time help
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by [Orbit](http://www.orbitgum.com/) ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/wet-hot-american-podcast).

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

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

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

Today, we are going to be talking about abortion, religion, politics and which way is the proper way to hang toilet paper on the roll. Is it over the top or against the wall like a heathen? Craig, where do you stand on the toilet paper issue?

**Craig:** Before we get into that, I have to express my doubt that anybody would want to pick up any of our opinions and put them on a blog somewhere or on Time.com. That’s the nice thing about our podcast — no one listens.

**John:** That’s the crucial thing about our podcast is that absolutely no one listens. So no one will hear us today as we talk about the origins of the three-act structure, the weird situation with Legends of Oz, and hear us answer some questions. But probably most tragically, no one will hear our special guest on the podcast this week. He is the writer and/or director of really great movies, including Role Models, Wanderlust, Wet Hot American Summer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Mr. David Wain, welcome to the show.

**David Wain:** Hello, guys. I’m so happy to be here. It’s a real thrill.

**John:** Hooray. So you’re going to join us as we talk about these things, but kind of most crucially, we also want to hear about this new movie you have coming out that stars Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd which is kind of amazing.

**David:** It is amazing that I get to work with people like that, I will say that, and a movie I’m super happy with. It’s called They Came Together. It’s kind of a rom-com spoof of sorts, also in the weird particular voice of me and Michael Showalter who we did Wet Hot American Summer together before.

**John:** Oh, I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about Wet Hot American Summer. I want to talk to you about Childrens Hospital.

**David:** Sure.

**John:** I basically just want to talk to you constantly about all the things you do, if it’s okay.

**David:** Oh my god. I mean, let’s go. Let’s rock it.

**John:** Let’s go.

First we have a tiny bit of follow up from a previous episode, the episode before the Superhero Spectacular. I had mentioned that Big Fish was going to be playing at Liberty University or I thought it was Liberty University. It turns out it is Liberty University. And so somebody, one of our listeners wrote in. Marcus Jay wrote in with a link to an Atlantic piece about being gay at Liberty University, which is actually fascinating. So we’re going to put that in the show notes.

It made me actually kind of feel better about doing Big Fish at Liberty University because it’s a big diverse world and sometimes bringing in new opinions to a place that is otherwise a little bit cut off can be really good and useful.

**Craig:** That was a really good piece. And not that Big Fish is what you would call a gay musical, it’s just that it’s a musical, therefore —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To some extent, it is gay. But, oh god, I’m doing it again. There is another blog piece — I love musicals. But I thought it was a really interesting piece because he basically said really it wasn’t a big deal. That’s what it kind of came down to. I mean, the institution is fundamentally against homosexuality and here is a gay man at that place and he’s like, hmm, yeah, feels fine.

**John:** My husband went to Notre Dame and really the situation seemed kind of similar, maybe like 10 years offset but, you know, traditionally, the Catholic Church says like, well, we don’t think that gay people should be around. Yet, if you actually talk to individual people who are at that university, that’s not sort of what it feels like on the ground.

**Craig:** The Catholic Church may be aware that there are gay people around.

**David:** It seems like the winds are changing no matter what.

**John:** I would agree. The winds are changing and you can —

**David:** And it’s hard to resist the winds when they keep blowing in the same direction for a long time.

**Craig:** The most shocking thing to me, I don’t know if you guys saw this, the guy who was the long time head of the Westboro Baptist Church, apparently they excommunicated him because near the end he was like, “Ah, you know, maybe gay people aren’t that bad.” Even that guy. I feel like that — yeah, the winds.

**John:** Well, it’s also fanaticism. I mean, when you believe in something so incredibly intensely, anyone who — countless part of your group who doesn’t believe as intently as you do is a heathen, is — has to be thrown out.

**Craig:** Purity of thought.

**John:** Purity of thought. Weirdly, I was joking when I said we would talk about religion and politics and all this stuff, but we just did.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is what we do now.

**David:** Can we do 20 minutes on abortion now?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Fantastic. Is there a way you can feed that into your discussion of They Came Together? So tell me about this movie because… — So I actually met you I think for the first time in person or I may have met you way back at Sundance when you were there with The Ten.

**David:** Yes, we did.

**John:** I had a movie called The Nines which is the same year as The Ten.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And that was not confusing at all.

**David:** [laughs]

**John:** But I think I first met you on the set of Childrens Hospital. I came to visit you and even then you had finished the movie and you were figuring out what you were going to do with the movie.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s coming out. So tell us about the origins of this movie and what people can look forward to.

**David:** It’s actually kind of an interesting story that might be of interest to screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting. It might be good for this podcast. But Michael Showalter and I made this movie, Wet Hot American Summer, that came out in 2001 and after it — we were living in New York. And after that, we came out to LA to kind of meet the studios and try to figure out something else to do.

And we met with Shady Acres, Tom Shadyac’s company at Universal, and pitched them this idea which was very simple, just, you know, doing a spoof movie of romantic comedies. No more or less than that. And they were like, yeah, let’s do it. And so we wrote this movie that was that but it wasn’t similar to the more successful ones that had come out around the time, all the Scary Movie and so on. It was just weirder. And it also, you know, it was kind of a mix between Wet Hot American Summer and those kind of movies.

So it didn’t go. The studio paid us to write it but then it never got made. But the Shady Acres group was interested in trying to get it done, so we tried to do it at a lower budget. We tried to do it independently. In fact, one company was down the road with us to make a $10 million version of it and at the last minute, like right before pre-production, the head of the company watched Wet Hot American Summer for the first time, said, “This is not funny…”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**David:** “You guys have no idea how to do comedy.” And he was about to pull the plug and we said, please, this is funny. So he did the first and only test screening that ever existed for Wet Hot American Summer.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** How’d that go?

**David:** Which was two years after it had come out.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god!

**David:** And it was a bunch of sort of older, you know, like 40s Latino and Asian women it looked like to me.

**Craig:** That’s your audience.

**David:** It really tanked, obviously.

**Craig:** Wait a second. I have to ask you. This sounds like Bob Weinstein to me. It just sounds so Bob Weinstein.

**David:** I’m not going to say who it was but it wasn’t Bob Weinstein.

**Craig:** Boy, it sounds like him.

**David:** It was an LA-based independent company that had recently come into a lot of money based on a couple of —

**Craig:** Hold on a sec. Just so to clarify how insane this is, we go… — For people that don’t know, when we make a movie, particularly comedy, before — while we’re in the editorial process, we show the movie to a test audience and they rate the movie excellent, very good, fair, poor, very good, whatever they want.

**David:** This is while we’re still making the movie.

**Craig:** While we’re making the movie. And the point is, the point is to see do they like it, can we make them like it more? And the studio uses it to decide should we really promote this or kind of promote this? Is this any good? That movie came out, it was, I mean, regardless of what it did at the box office, there was — there’s just a love for it. I mean, it kind of defines what it means to be a cult movie in that regard. I mean, people found it and they loved it. And even then, still this studio was saying let’s test it anyway. [laughs] That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**David:** Well, in — just to contextualize, it did do horribly. You know, it basically tanked at the box office and then it was before kind —

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**David:** It was years before… — And, you know, Wet Hot American Summer has more awareness today and more screenings and more people probably watching and talking about it than it ever did. It was just — it’s been a slow build and now it’s probably, you know, now it’s considered by many to be this touchstone classic comedy but it really wasn’t at the time.

That said, it was the same movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think it’s pretty damn funny. But —

**John:** So give us a timeframe here. So what years would this have been that you had —

**David:** This would be 2002. 2003 was around when we were pitching and trying —

**Craig:** Wow.

**David:** And 2004 I think maybe was when we were doing this other version, this other, and was going to shoot in Canada even though it’s like defined as the ultra New York romantic comedy and we were going to make a joke out of that and —

**John:** You should have shot in Montreal and like not changed the French signs.

**David:** Well, that was the idea actually, is we were going to have Canada everywhere you look and then, you know, pretend it was New York.

**Craig:** We tried to do that. Around the same time we were shooting, unfortunately hurting your chances, with Scary Movie 3 and we were shooting it in Vancouver and we really wanted to open the movie with one of like the Welcome to Vancouver sign but put up a subtitle, you know, New York 1930.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They wouldn’t let, yeah, Bob Weinstein didn’t think that was funny either. [laughs]

**David:** Well, what happened was, I mean in fact, people — the reason the studio didn’t make it and the reason no one else made it was because everyone said the audience for romantic comedies and the audience for spoof movies are two separate audiences and they will never meet. And so we’re like, all right, whatever. And so, meanwhile, they then made Date Movie and they made Romantic Movie which were literally the same premise.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Ours being, though, a totally different take on it I think.

**Craig:** We’re going to get the whole timeline from you. But just jumping in on this particular point, because I’ve spent some time in the spoof camp and —

**David:** Yes, I know.

**Craig:** See, I feel like that form of spoof is just dead, you know, like the kind that I was doing with David Zucker, it’s dead. And we could go into a whole discussion about why it’s dead and how I may have contributed to its death, but it’s dead. And I’ve been sitting around kind of waiting for a new model to come along and, you know, when I see the trailer for this, I think this might be it because it is… — Clearly, there are some classic elements of spoof in it, but there also seems to be a different kind of self-awareness and a different method of kind of satirizing a genre.

Can you talk a little bit about why your approach is different than what you’d call traditional spoof or even the current crop? Yeah.

**David:** Well, yeah, and I’m curious for you to see it. You know, having been in those trenches, I’m curious to see how you feel the differences are once you see it. But essentially for us, and this is not — wasn’t so much exactly by design as much as just following our own taste, it doesn’t make nearly as many or almost any specific references to specific movies or specific scenes. It’s much more about the genre and much more poking fun at really storytelling conventions as much as specific genre conventions.

And doing it in different ways that are sometimes weirder, more subtler, or more — and a lot of times, it’s just doing those kinds of pieces of banal dialogue that go into these things very sincerely and without even a particular twist on them. Just the notion of doing it in this context is the joke.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** You know, it’s not for everyone. And it’s, it was, you know, we did a lot of the similar kind of humor in Wet Hot American Summer which came out to some incredibly hostile reviews at first where people were like, this is so unfunny I don’t even know what to do, like I can’t believe… — I think reviewers were upset that they didn’t get it or somebody was getting something that they didn’t.

Meanwhile, what’s kind of amazing about this one is I think times have changed and Wet Hot American Summer is known by a lot of people. And we’ve been — I’ve gotten — the pre-release reviews of this movie has been far more positive than anything I’ve ever been involved in.

**Craig:** But you can’t possibly be shocked by that. You understand how these people work, right? I mean, you get the deal with reviewers and comedy. They’ve been told now, they have been informed that you’re cool and you’re good. You know what I mean? They follow, they follow. I mean, it drives me nuts.

**David:** I think you’re right. I know there’s an element of that. I also think that we did some things in this movie to make sure that people liked it more, which I can tell you about which are interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just go back for one second, just the nature of what this kind of spoof is versus another kind of spoof. It sounds like in order to appreciate the movie you have to understand not a reference from another movie but a reference to a trope. And so you have to see like they are doing this trope and they are commenting on this trope but not commenting on exactly that scene from When Harry Met Sally.

**David:** Exactly. But I don’t think you have to be super film literate in any conscious way to appreciate it. And I think that’s what we tried to pull off here is it’s not like a thinking man’s movie exactly. It’s much more just we’re doing this but we’re helping you understand the jokes just by the context, which I’ll explain how we did that. But I, and I think if this movie works for audiences, that’s why. And it seems to work so far.

**Craig:** That’s great. I mean, my favorite, you know, because there is even in what I would call traditional spoof there was always room for absurdist moments. And we tried, you know, we tried to do that. You know, again, we, not to keep saying the name Bob Weinstein, but we kept getting steered to a different direction. But —

**David:** One thing I’ll say about any kind of original comedy is it cannot be done by committee.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** Like you can’t have studio layers overseeing it. That will absolutely generally kill it unless somehow they’re all on the same comedic wavelength which would be incredible.

**Craig:** It’s…yeah. It’s a rough thing, but my favorite joke from the trailer is when they’re having the leaf fight which is a trope of just a goofy fight with leaves which we’ve seen before. And then they walk off happily and there’s a dead body under the leaves. And there’s that — that’s wonderful because that’s actually not even a commentary on the genre. That’s just a joke about, well, but there’s also — I’ve always felt that great spoof characters were absolutely idiotic. That they were almost bordering on sociopathic, that they would not even stop to notice a dead body because they’re just happy. I love that.

**David:** We definitely have, you know, especially the Paul Rudd main character in this film is, you know, as is kind of the deal with these bland everyman rom-com leading men, he’s borderline retarded. I mean he’s —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I would constantly have to explain this that these people are —

**David:** Innocent to the point of being like brain dead.

**Craig:** Well, they’re like soap opera characters in that regard. They’re designed to be thin and I actually, and not to wander off again from the narrative of how this came to be, but I’ll do it. I’m also interested in — you can get to this when you want — the challenge that there is when you say you do a movie like Role Models which is about actual human beings. I mean, it’s a comedy and it has set pieces and all the rest, but it’s about humans. And when you do a movie like this where you’re actually not writing human beings, I want you to get into a little bit of the challenge of that.

**David:** Well, it’s, for what it’s worth, my comfort level over my career has been the latter because I started out in sketch comedy and I’ve done so many things that are considered meta or whatever. You know, Childrens Hospital and these are utterly absurd and often purposely cookie cutter characters. And so for me, leaving my comfort zone was doing something like Role Models where I had to constantly curtail my instinct to like blow out the fourth wall or to, you know, make an overt comment about the scene structure or something within the scene.

And we actually did layer some of that stuff into Role Models in much more subtle ways knowing that we had to keep it real. But I think that little, tiny layer that we did was part of what made a lot of people like Role Models. Here, of course, you know, everything was absurd.

This movie, everything is a joke. And it’s, you know, I do think it wasn’t so deliberate in the making of it, but now stepping back from it, the model really is ultimately Airplane.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think what I find interesting about the spoof genre which I have now thought a lot about over the past couple of years making this movie is Airplane, for how iconic and classic and loved it is, hasn’t really been duplicated that much, you know.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** The successors have gone in different directions.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s true. Well, Airplane is also fascinating because it is in fact a spoof of one single movie. It’s just a movie that nobody saw called Zero Hour.

**David:** There is something amazing about that actually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And our movie is sort of in that vein too, like we’re really — some of the spoof targets we have we think of as these widespread, universal spoof targets, but then when we go to like talk about them with our collaborators and our crew, we realize it’s only like one movie that had this thing that we’re making fun of that nobody saw and we don’t care.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, no. Very cool.

**John:** So talk us through the movie got stuck and then how did you get it unstuck? How did it become a real movie that you shot?

**David:** What happened was, so after that went away, then we still kept it in mind over the years, but it never came together and I moved on to other things. And then I know that my wife, Zandy, was working on a web series with Michael Showalter, and they were just talking about this script that was something that kept gnawing at us. It’s something, you know, you write a lot of things, and they don’t get made, fine.

For some reason, we knew this should or we always thought it was funny. And so I pulled it out in bed one night with her and we started laughing so hard. The next thing you know, we decided to do a reading of it at the San Francisco Sketch Fest with a bunch of friends on a Sunday morning with an audience just to hear it out loud.

That went so well. Everyone went berserk. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler were part of that reading. And they came up afterwards and said let’s do this. And that was in January. They had only four weeks free overlapping in the entire year which was June. And so we scrambled and basically found financing for a very low budget through Lionsgate and got the movie to be shot in 23 days in June.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. 23 days.

**David:** No, it was, and you know, my first film, Wet Hot American Summer which to me seems like the lowest budget kind of imaginable was 29 days.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, because it was all in one spot, so it’s cheaper.

**David:** And all in one spot.

**Craig:** This one you’re moving around and wow, that’s tough.

**David:** This is like a big — this has the look and feel of a big, big budget New York romantic comedy. 23 days. So I had to call on 25 years of experience of how to get this done in the most clever, effective, outside-the-box way to achieve this feel. Because we couldn’t do the normal shortcuts when you have a low budget, are to shoot it all handheld, shoot it all with a certain look —

**Craig:** You can’t do that because you’re modeling movies that cost $50 million.

**David:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean that’s really challenging. Plus also, you know, people think of action movies as being more expensive or time consuming to produce. But anytime you’re introducing physical comedy into a scene, that’s like doing an action sequence. It’s complicated.

**David:** Exactly. And we had plenty of, you know, in a way a lot of what we counted on was we had more visual effects than you’d imagine because we didn’t have time to or ability to build or go to sets and locations. And so it was — we did a lot of little tricks to get it done.

But what the biggest one was just to move really fast, not get a lot of takes, not have time for a lot of improv, have the very best actors and know that they were going to deliver it and work hard on the script to make sure that it was all on the page and know that we didn’t have time to dick around on set.

**Craig:** Well, that’s actually a question, you know, people think of improv and comedy in the same thought and that makes sense. But for spoof I’ve always found that improv is kind of deadly because spoof is so structured and so formalist.

**David:** Exactly right. And we realized that this movie was not a good candidate for that more rambling improvised loose style that so many comedies today have. It just wouldn’t have made as much sense. And so the kind of written quality was part of it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**David:** Now, there was plenty of improv too, like when people had ideas or just when stuff came up, of course, we follow whatever is funny. But probably a lot less so than you might think.

**Craig:** Well yeah, because like for instance in Judd Apatow’s films, part of the fun is watching somebody like Paul Rudd express themselves spontaneously. But in a spoof movie, Paul Rudd’s character can’t be that fluent, he can’t be that articulate. It’s really rigid. You know, he’s dumb. I mean they’re all really profoundly stupid.

I mean when she, his mother — I love the physical bit where she throws the drink in his face, but there’s only a tiny little drop and he reacts.

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** That’s only something you can do if you are in fact a fictional character. I don’t know how else to put it.

**David:** Exactly. I mean every — another way we put it is the entire movie is in quotes.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly.

**David:** But, you know, also, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler are two of the greatest improvers alive, so we used that to the degree we could. But yes, and so what was interesting, here’s the interesting thing. So we shot this movie very quickly as I said. We cut it together over the rest of that summer and we had a two-hour cut which I thought was pretty tight where we, you know, cutting out everything that didn’t work and, you know, getting it down at the bone and I consider myself very brutal with the material and throw things out and whatever.

And we start screening it into the fall and it’s working okay, you know, particularly among people who are our friends and fans, they like it.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** Nobody’s going nuts for it. Then we do our, you know, we get to our official preview for a much more random audience in LA in a mall —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And it tanks.

**Craig:** They usually do. Spoof movies’ first screenings, worst things ever.

**David:** Yeah. Crickets. So at this point the studio kind of moves their attention onto other things. I actually moved my attention onto other things to some degree because I had to. I was going into another season of Childrens Hospital. This is when you came to our set.

**John:** That’s right.

**David:** And we were sitting there around for a while thinking about what do we do, how do we do this movie? They’re not going to give us another dime. So we have no money to spend. And I took on the editing myself essentially on a laptop and just started looking at it and thinking about it and working with Michael and talking about what to do.

And we realized that, you know, studying the tests and just studying the movie that too many people whether subconsciously or not, were actually taking it at face value. They did not realize it was in quotes enough to like it.

And so we carefully devised this storytelling device which is Paul and Amy sitting with another couple, Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper, at a table at a restaurant telling the story of their relationship, which is its own trope.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** But within that setup, we also blatantly and overtly spoon feed to the audience what this movie is.

**Craig:** Right, she almost looks at the camera and says, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Exactly. And so the whole setup is in almost these words saying to the audience, “This movie is a joke, don’t take it as not-a-joke. Just relax and laugh.”

**Craig:** Right, you’re basically teaching them, “We didn’t make a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** We made a comedy that makes fun of bad romantic comedies.

**David:** Or another way to put is we did it on purpose.

**Craig:** We did it on purpose.

**David:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes, this is intentional.

**David:** This intentionally bad romantic comedy. And so I’m telling you, better than I ever expected, it worked.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** The audience completely shifted and now in screenings you can’t hear the movie because they’re laughing from the very beginning to the very end, which is so gratifying. And also what this device did, which by the way we shot for almost nothing in one day, one three-camera setup, 34 different drops into the movie, it also allowed me to cut out every single thing that didn’t get a laugh.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing.

**David:** This device allowed us to skip over any part of the story — it didn’t matter — and then like I did this, and we realized how little the story matters in a movie like this. And whatever you did need to tell that wasn’t done in a funny scene, you can just say, and then I did this and I did this, and now here’s the next funny big thing that really does work.

So it allowed us to cut characters. It allowed us to — it really worked better than I ever imagined. And it didn’t cost us anything.

**Craig:** I love that story. You know, because these movies are designed to be stupid on some level, smart stupid, I don’t think people understand how much science goes into it. It’s just an enormous amount of science.

**David:** Well, I agree. And I think that the care and thought that goes into it over the course of years to then make something that looks thrown off and silly and fun is the key. And I think the ones that work really well, they’re not thrown off. There’s so much thought put into every frame.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re obsessed over it. I actually was talking to David Zucker the other day. And he, we’ve had this war for years about Top Secret because I love Top Secret. I think Top Secret is amazing. And he would always say, “You know, no.” He would say, “Top Secret is deeply flawed, we messed up, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, we should, the story, it’s too many stories jammed in and the ending is no good.” He just went on. But over the years he slowly started to let in the notion that maybe Top Secret is good.

And he said he went up, there was a screening in fact in San Francisco, and he went there and the audience loved it. And he said, “But, you know, I know how to fix it now.” And he said, “I want to reshoot. I think I could get the — I could fix the ending. And I’d just do it with body doubles and I can fix…” And he was deadly serious.

**David:** That’s so funny.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deadly serious.

**David:** For some reason, I’m glad to say, I have this thing with the movies I’ve done. Well, so far I’ve made five movies and they’ve all got many, many flaws and many mistakes, but somehow I feel like when they’re done, they’re done and they are what they are, and I wouldn’t want to change them, you know.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you don’t have the same level of autism that David Zucker has. I can already tell. You’re much more acclimated to humans.

**David:** But until it’s done, I’m going crazy and obsessing on every little thing. And I can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I keep having to open up and open up and open up. I guess once it’s like released in theaters and I just have — a switch turns and I’m like that is the thing and now it’s not mine anymore. It’s out in the world.

**John:** Because we’re a podcast that’s mostly about writers, some of what you’re saying seems kind of dispiriting, because like you went into this with a script that you loved and you shot a script that you loved and you were really happy with how it worked on the page.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** So to go through and basically restructure the entire story by this whole new device feels like, I don’t know, it could feel like a failure, but it’s honestly the way most movies work. Is that you’ve made these choices which were absolutely right for the page, but somehow how it all came together on the screen, it doesn’t work the way you anticipated.

With Go, I loved the way that Go opened in the script, but then when we shot it, it just didn’t make sense the same way. And people — it was exactly the same kind of problem where people weren’t quite sure what movie they were in. And so we shot a new intro and it really got people onboard.

**David:** I think moviemaking is far too complicated to know any — you can’t possibly know it all on the page. On the other hand, I do think that they should do more testing of some kind with a script before they start wasting film. But, you know, we did — we tried to know everything we could know before we got, but to me it’s not dispiriting. I think it’s an inspiring writing story because some of my screenwriting that I’m most proud of was figuring out how to fix this movie at the late stages and writing those, that framing device while editing it at the same time and having the benefit of knowing exactly the actual cut footage that I’m working around was a fascinating process.

And I’m so relieved to say that the movie that we now have, I am so proud of and so happy with. And I really had a lot of reservations about it until we figured that out.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no prize for getting it “right at the beginning.” That’s not the point of a screenplay.

**David:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and especially with this kind of comedy, which I really do feel is written in practically every genre there is at this point. And writing spoof was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s incredibly hard because you’re doing a normal comedy, you know, I don’t know, there’s a joke every page maybe or something. There’s like three jokes a page, mandatory. The characters, there’s never a point where a character can just be quiet or thoughtful. There’s no break. There’s no breath. The audience is well aware that you’re doing this.

It’s like you’re a pitcher and you’re saying, “Okay, here comes another fastball.”

**David:** You’re sitting there literally as an audience waiting for the next —

**Craig:** Waiting for the next joke.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** Arms crossed, you know. And I’m sure you’ve had this experience too where you show them the movie and you think, well, I know that this joke is killer. This one, oh boy, let’s see what happens there. And the joke you knew was a killer is deadly. And then they just go crazy, it’s something that is barely even a joke to you at all.

**David:** My five favorite jokes from the screenplay that were the things that made me excited to make the movie are all cut.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**David:** I mean that’s just “there you go.”

**Craig:** There you go. You have to be — you have to have an ego strength to do spoof that is just unparalleled.

**David:** And one of my things that I’m most proud of is the ability to recognize those things and say, “You know what, I loved it all the way until now, and now let’s cut, you know.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. Oh no, the audience is your boss in spoof in a way that is just disturbing. But necessary.

**David:** But I will say and having been through this on many movies, you’ve got to be very, very careful about audiences as well because an audience might be crickets on one screening and the same exact cut might have a huge uproarious response at that same joke. And so it’s just you’ve got to be also careful. And sometimes, I’ve left in things just because I know they’re funny to me and I will never my change my mind about it. And, you know, it’s just —

**John:** Or that funny joke is actually cueing up a laugh, a bigger laugh later on.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** So if you take that out —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** The organism is so complicated, it’s hard to — you can’t just blindly follow how loud the laugh is.

**Craig:** There are some jokes that aren’t meant for an audience to laugh at together. They’re meant for people to love five years later.

**David:** Exactly. And I’ll tell you when we did Wanderlust, it was, you know, a big studio situation and a very different kind of process where we did so many screenings. Sometimes we did — we did a couple times where we screened two versions of the movie side by side at the same time to two different audiences and then run numbers on that. And it got bewildering and confusing. So many different versions floating around, it was very hard to keep track of what the spine is of what we were doing.

**John:** One of the great things about doing Big Fish night after night after night on Broadway is we would have the audience there. And so we’re really doing exactly the same show. At a certain point the show was frozen. It was exactly the same show. And things would get laughs one night and not laughs the next night.

You start to realize there are certain key people in the house who if they started laughing would sort of make it safe for other people to laugh.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** And if you didn’t have those crucial key people in there it was tough. And you kind of wish you could seed the audience with designated laughers, just to sort of get stuff started.

**David:** It’s such a mysterious thing. And if you think about it, ultimately, what makes you have this involuntary physical response to something? You know?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s keep talking about this, but I also want to get to some of our real topics on the show today.

**David:** Yes.

**John:** The first of which is a listener sent in a link that was really kind of fascinating about not only film history but really the origin of the three-act structure. Basically this guy, David Bordwell, did a study looking at when did people first start talking about three-act structure. Basically looking through old memos, looking through old Hollywood stuff saying like is the idea of a three-act structure something that’s a pretty recent invention, like sort of a Syd Field thing, or has it always been there.

Did you guys get a chance to look at this blog post?

**David:** I did. I remember he wrote the textbook that I had my first film class at NYU.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Very nice. Talk to us about your film education. So, you went to NYU as a film major?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s weird is I remember watching The State and like in my head I was like in high school watching The State but that’s actually possible because we’re about the same age. You must have started incredibly young. Is that correct?

**David:** Well, yes. I went to film school at NYU from 1987 and I graduated in 1991. In ’88 when I was a sophomore is when The State was formed as a comedy troupe at the college. And when everyone was out of school in 1992, by that time we were already starting the process of getting our show on MTV.

**John:** Wow.

**David:** It was a very lucky set of events.

**John:** So, when you were at NYU you were studying filmmaking, you studied screenwriting, and you learned about a three-act structure, right?

**David:** I did. I took several dramatic writing classes as part of film school, but I don’t remember ever getting the kind of straight up Syd Field or Robert McKee like really here’s the formula kind of thing in film school. I also, frankly, was spending most of my time in film school doing The State.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, not learning but doing?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** The State was so great. And it’s so amazing that all of you guys have done so incredibly well since that time.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s been fascinating. It’s funny, John, I was sort of — I feel like I was watching The State in my old house in New Jersey, but I wasn’t. I was watching it here in Los Angeles. I don’t know why that is. What hypnosis have you — ?

**David:** It exists in a weird time period. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. But everybody from it, I mean, it is true. They’re all out there. They’re all — talk about an all-star cast.

**David:** They did one little sketch show at NYU my sophomore year. Most of them were freshman and I wasn’t in the group. And I saw it and I was like, holy mother of shit, these guys are incredible. And I tried to hook in and get into the group right then which I did, thank god. And, yeah, it’s just somehow these people came together and every single one has gone on to be fairly successful in the business.

**John:** Now, how did you move from doing sketch writing into a full on screenplay. So, was Wet Hot American Summer the first full-length thing you wrote?

**David:** It was the first full-length thing we basically finished. When The State started to fizzle in activity, Michael Showalter and I started writing a high school screenplay that was going to be a big high school epic. And that was around 1997. And we got a draft or two done, but we knew we had a lot more work to do. And we wanted to shoot something that summer, because we were anxious to do it. So, we decided to just write an outline and just get our friends together and go to some summer camp in Westchester and just shoot a summer camp movie because we knew it would be easy and we could shoot it all with the same clothes and it would be outside.

And just as we started writing it, it turned into just, well, A, no one — we couldn’t even get the financing for a hundred grand or whatever we wanted for that. And then it took us three years really to get the money. And during that time we kept developing it more and more and more into a real screenplay, so to speak.

**John:** And you cast some like terrible people who never did other stuff like Bradley Cooper.

**David:** Right. Well, yeah, both Bradley Cooper and Elizabeth Banks and many others just kind of walked in and auditioned for it. This was their first movie.

**John:** It’s a good time. So, as you’re writing this for a screenplay, sort of going back to this topic of like three-act structure and sort of how that gets sort of drilled into you, did you have a sense of this is the end of our first act and this is where things are changing? Because my recollection of Wet Hot American Summer is it’s just the arc of a summer and it’s not trying to do sort of big worst of the worst scenarios, but maybe it does.

**David:** Oh, it does. At least we definitely did have that in mind by then. It was — the way we wrote that was every character pretty much had their own storyline. And so it was an ensemble piece and there was, I think, ultimately maybe 10 to 12 storylines. And then each of those we did think of in a three-act structure. And I think we might have specifically been following the Robert McKee version of it at the time. I can’t remember exactly. But I do know that we thought about in those ways.

And like, okay, we made charts and we made graphs and we’re like here’s how this starts, here’s the inciting incident of this, here’s how this develops, here’s the climax. And then we meshed them all together into one day and then tried to come up with a climatic sequence at the end that climaxed each character’s story at around the same time.

**Craig:** Well, you guys in a weird way you were doing the Robert Altman model, which then you saw again in Magnolia. And it’s the disparate stories that interweave throughout, they kind of come together, separate again. And then there’s some kind of disaster, like an earthquake, or a plague of raining frogs, or Skylab falling that forces everybody to kind of experience the ending of their stories together.

**David:** It was totally deliberate because the movie that kind of changed my life that I saw when I was in college was Nashville.

**Craig:** Right. There you go.

**David:** And that was for sure a very conscious model. All those stories in Nashville are somewhat separate but they’re tied together by place and by time and then they all come together literally in this climatic time when this woman gets shot and kind of turns everything around.

And then also Dazed and Confused was such a favorite. And so those were kind of the structural tent poles that we looked at.

**Craig:** But tonally one thing that I thought was really interesting about Wet Hot American Summer was that you weren’t in the zone of say Meatballs which was more of a standard comedy where there was some serious stories and serious human beings or actual human beings, and then some broad characters. And you weren’t really doing what I would call a spoof in the traditional like Mel Brooks or Zucker and Zucker sense.

Every character was kind of nuts. You were already in that zone where you were kind of making your own thing where, you know, for David Zucker he always says, “There’s one person in the scene who’s crazy or stupid and one person who is sane and normal and they might switch during the scene or in a different scene.” But for you guys it was like everybody at once could be nuts, which I thought was great.

**David:** Thanks. For us it was a lot of just instinctual we’re doing this kind of a camp movie thing and we tried to source it as much in our own actual memories. It wasn’t really a spoof of camp movies because we didn’t think of that so much as a genre that we were so interested in getting. It was more of a spoof of what camp was like for us.

**John:** Well, that sense of where every character is kind of crazy in their own special way is something that really bled through to Childrens Hospital, because that’s my same sense of Childrens Hospital is like there’s not one normal person who’s like the voice of reason in that show. Everybody is nuts and everyone can sort of do whatever they need to do. It’s probably more heightened in Childrens Hospital than it was in Wet Hot American Summer.

**David:** We discovered that phenomenon in Wet Hot first which then has carried over into Childrens Hospital which is to say any given character can be malleable to serve the plot or comedic point to the point in a way that would just be absolute no-no in regular screenwriting.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. There’s a chaotic nature to the whole thing. I mean, that is informed by the way the cast did come out of sketch comedy. There is a chaos to it. There’s an anarchy.

And I can understand why critics or even theatrical audiences at first just couldn’t handle it.

**David:** And it’s fair. I mean, if you’re going to see certain kind of rules followed then you’re not going to like it. And I don’t even mean that flippantly. It’s definitely not for everyone.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not surprised that the movie kind of found this second life because I do feel like some comedies are designed for big rooms of people together and some comedies are simply, they’re too offbeat for that. And because the theatrical experience of comedy is one where it’s about commonality… — Everybody, or at least we would always say if 40% of them think this is funny that’s good enough. Then the people that aren’t laughing are forced to say, “Well, I guess other people think it’s funny.”

But when it’s challenging like this and kind of trying to redefine how the rules of it work, sometimes the best way for it to succeed is in the privacy of somebody’s home where they feel safe enough to kind of, you know, enjoy it for what it is and explore it.

**David:** And with a movie like ours, which I think that was the middle period for Wet Hot American Summer over the years where people discovered it, show it to a friend, pass it around. And now it’s come into this thing where there’s 7,000 people at Brooklyn Park watching it, all big fans, and that’s — everyone is having this communal experience now.

**John:** I watched your movie, I watched Wet Hot American Summer I remember out in Santa Monica at the Laemmle Santa Monica that doesn’t exist anymore. And I remember seeing it like opening weekend out there and loving it.

But I have a thought experiment though. You talked about what you did when they came together and you shot those new blocks, changed the setup of the movie, sort of what your expectation was. Was there a way that you could have setup Wet Hot American Summer that could have made it more accessible from the very beginning?

If you had a time machine and could go back and shoot something, do you think there’s a way to do that?

**David:** You know, probably there might have been, although part of what made Wet Hot, what I love about it is that it starts off in kind of a normal place and it just sort of slowly starts moving to the left. And not surprising that was not a formula for success. Many, many people have said to me over the years, “I saw your movie. I really didn’t like it. And then I saw it again and it became my favorite movie.”

**John:** Yeah. So, once you know what the movie is you like it, but while you’re watching it the first time —

**David:** It’s like a fine wine, I guess. You need to taste it and get the sense of it and then you can relax and like it.

**John:** So, David Wain, can you comment on this. So, I see stories that there is discussion of making a Wet Hot American TV show or something for Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah, the Netflix.

**John:** Is that something that’s interesting to you?

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** You can’t comment on that.

**Craig:** So, the answer to that is, no, that’s not interesting to me at all. I wish they wouldn’t do it. [laughs]

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** All right. That is fantastic. Let’s go to our next —

**Craig:** By the way, I will now speak for David for the rest of this. David, you just make little Morse code blinks at me. Yeah, you Morse code blink to me and I will tell them what you’re thinking.

**John:** Yeah, Morse code blinking is really effective on a Skype podcast I have found.

The next topic on our agenda is the Legends of Oz. And so I sent through this blog post about this which was so Legends of Oz was this sequel to the Oz movies, or sort of an extension of the Oz movies, an animated feature starring Lea Michele and a bunch of other people. And I knew about it before it came out only because a friend of ours was doing the posters for it. She didn’t work on the movie but she did work on the marketing of it. And so I knew that this movie existed.

The movie did not fare well at all and it was not a box office success. So, there’s this blog post which is going through and talking about the investors in the film. And I had assumed that this was, when she was first describing it it sort of felt like it was a made for video thing that turned out well enough that they were talking a gamble and releasing it theatrically. Turns out it was actually always meant to be theatrical. And they had raised this money with investors putting in $100,000, but individual people putting in $100,000 to make this potentially $100 million budget to make this film.

And the individual investors are really upset that this movie didn’t do better. They’re blaming Hollywood. They’re blaming some of the people involved in producing the film. So, I don’t know very much more about the actual Legends of Oz itself, but I think it was a good way to talk about the weird way we have to raise money to make movies.

And, David Wain, you’ve had to raise money a lot of times to make movies.

**David:** Well, I have to say that you sent me that story and I was fascinated by it just because it is such a weird story of that particular kind of — to me it was a complete Hollywood outsider guy who raised $70 million somehow $100,000 at a time thinking he could kind of hone in on the big budget animated movie market that is the Disney/Pixar world.

And I actually think it’s really interesting. And then there’s all this postulation, I was reading all the message boards, really why did it tank? And they were saying, “Oh, it’s a conspiracy. The critics were paid by the studios to trash it.” But to me that seems utterly ridiculous. However, it seems like it really was a marking thing because from what I can tell the movie is not good but many movies are not good. And many kids’ movies, particularly, are not good. It feels like it was fine. It was serviceable, or whatever.

And so it feels like what they didn’t do is put enough money or smarts into marketing it, or they could have been successful. I just think it’s interesting.

**Craig:** I mean, I read this stuff and the whole thing smells like a weird scam to me and not a scam that Hollywood perpetrated on small time investors but the people who were raising the money perpetrated on these small time investors. I mean, there’s a bit, so one of the investors referred to he put something on Facebook about the movie coming out on May 9th. “To all my friends that invested in this blockbuster, congrats. For those that had the $100K minimum handy but were too busy to take a look, you’re going to be so sorry.”

That’s the kind of stuff you read on like Penny Stock forums on the internet. It’s this — like, okay, we’re all in this together and we’re going to all get rich off of this thing. And so people who raise money for high risk investments will start to inspire this kind of religious fervor among all the people investing because either they’re all going to win together or they’re all going to fail together.

I mean, you almost see a little bit of that rhetoric, for instance when we all went on strike it was like everybody hold together, completely, or it’ll all fall apart. So, you’ve just got to be religious about it. And, you know, then when it doesn’t work, who are they going to blame?

And this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard: the idea that Hollywood doesn’t want serious new competition from individual investors so they’re going to pay critics to not like stuff. God, I wish that were true. I wish —

**John:** Hollywood loves money. Hollywood loves people coming with money.

**Craig:** It LOVES money. They’ll take money from anybody. Anyone.

**John:** The thing I would stress is the three of us on this podcast, but really anyone we know who works in the industry would never have invested in —

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** $100,000 of their own money in this project, because they would talk through what their plans were and we would have said like, “Uh-oh, that’s not going to work.” Or, the odds of that working are incredibly remote for this kind of system.

**David:** And no one who personally invests in movies ever invests in a single project.

**Craig:** Correct.

**David:** Especially if it’s a big budget like this, unless they’re just — the only ones who do are the ones who are saying I’m going to give somebody I know X amount of money just knowing that I’m tossing it in the toilet, just for fun or to do a favor for a friend or something, you know.

**Craig:** Look, here’s the biggest warning sign of all: someone is going to make a movie using the intellectual property behind The Wizard of Oz and the Frank Baum world and they’re asking you, an orthodontist, for $100,000. Something is really bad there. And in fact I don’t know if looking at a — I was just poking around doing a little research on all this, but apparently now some people are in fact talking about that there were deceptive practices in the raising of this money.

It just feels so scammy to me. I am just bummed out that people did that.

**David:** I read one thing by an animator who was like there’s no chance they spent even a quarter of this money on the movie. And so maybe it’s a Producers thing where you knew it was going to tank and now he’s keeping all the money.

**Craig:** Yikes.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t know what the actual reality is behind the situation. But what I kind of want to stress is that raising money for any movie is difficult regardless. I mean, if you’re going to a studio that’s actually fully funding something, that’s one situation. But when you’re trying to raise money for an independent film, this is a very big independent film, there’s always that weird boundary between being ambitious and being scammy. And trying to convince people like, “Well, this is the way we can make money back,” but at the same time having to be honest of like you’re probably never going to get your money back, because very few of these movies are really going to be so profitable that like the people who put in $100,000 are going to see a return on that, or even get their money out of it.

That’s the reality of this. And not even just shady Hollywood accounting. It’s just the nature of the business.

**David:** That’s just reality, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just reality. It’s such a speculative, high risk business. I mean, the reason that studios have lasted as long as they have is because they have massive libraries that generate profit with no costs required to generate that profit, so there’s this huge featherbed that they’re constantly landing in every time they whiff. And they whiff all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. They have to whiff. We’ve talked a lot about the theory behind the big, huge franchise bet is that if you get one hit and four flops you’ve actually gotten eight hits and four flops because that one hit is sequelized and then spun off into ancillary things. I mean, it doesn’t matter, if Lone Ranger doesn’t work it’s okay because Pirates did work. And there’s five Pirates movies, plus Pirates stuff, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To invest $100,000 in a single movie is a little bit like saying, “I’m going to have a Major League baseball career, but I only get one at bat, and it has to be a home run, or I get sent down.”

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** It’s not a good track record.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s another headline that came out this last week which was our friend Eric Heisserer wrote a script that Amy Adams is attached to star in that got sold at Cannes. And it was a really confusing headline that came out because it’s a $20 million sale but the headline didn’t sort of say like what actually sold. And what happened was — I emailed with Eric — and it was a foreign financing deal, so essentially that $20 million is money to help make the movie.

And so I get frustrated when these headlines go up, like $20 million deal for something, and it makes it sound like it’s a spec sale. It’s just the way movies sometimes get financed. And they used to get financed that way all the time where you sell off the foreign rights and you sell off the domestic rights and by selling off those rights you have enough money to make the movie. It’s much more common than sort of this Legends of Oz or Kickstarter way to make a movie. It’s a natural way that these things sometimes happen.

**Craig:** Kickstarter.

**John:** Mm, Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Don’t get me started. Don’t get me started.

**David:** [laughs] I heard the head of Kickstarter at Sundance London giving a big speech and Q&A and I was thinking about you, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] Thank you.

**John:** Yeah. I had coffee with him. He’s great. And I like that they exist. So, I was happy that at least Veronica Mars, the one thing we talked about on the show, did as well as it did.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** For that it made a lot of sense.

**Craig:** It did make sense for that, yes.

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not going to kick start Legends of Oz. Not $100 million.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what these people, I mean, the reason that Kickstarter annoys me is also the reason why it’s better than this. I mean, so there’s no chance of ever participating, truly participating, in the success of something as “investor” in Kickstarter because you’re not an investor in Kickstarter.

But on the other hand, the world of investment is full of people with bad intentions. And, look, I don’t know if — these are all allegations now about this guy and he may have done absolutely nothing wrong. This just may be a situation where a guy said, “Here’s something to invest in,” a lot of people just got their heads full of dreams. And really though, my god. I mean, I get it. It’s like, “They’re making a Wizard of Oz movie and it’s going to be like a Pixar movie? Sure.”

**David:** I mean, the fact is — the fact that the movie got made and came out makes it less of a scam than most.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right about that.

**John:** I would agree. Yeah. It would be very easy just to sort of never have it come out and blame it on something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Insurance loss.

We have some questions to answer, so maybe David Wain can help us out with our questions. The first one is from Hayward in North Carolina. He writes, “First, this is not a situation where I think someone stole my idea. There are no billion dollar lawsuits forthcoming.” Good.

“That said, what do you do if you’re halfway through a screenplay and you read an article on the internet discussing a movie coming out next year which sounds fairly similar to the one you’re working on? Not exactly the same, but the premise strikes you as being pretty close to the one you’re working on, especially when reduced to a log line where all the differences wouldn’t be as apparent.

“Do you scrap it and move onto something else? Or do you push yourself to finish it anyway with the hope of maybe using it as an example when seeking representation or writing assignment?”

So, David Wain, you had two other spoof dating movies, romantic comedies, come out in that time that you already had your thing written.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** How, I mean, talk to us.

**David:** Well, that definitely did, in fact, a friend of mine made that other movie called Not Another Teen Movie soon after. And, yeah, it did damper our aspirations. Seeing that happen, you know, you feel like, okay, there’s not going to be two of these. But I do think if you love a movie, if you love something you’re doing in a specific way, I would keep going with it knowing that maybe you might have to sit on it for a little while. Everything has a chance to come back. If that movie gets made and it’s not a success or it is a success, that could potentially work to your advantage either way if you time it right when to bring the thing back.

But I definitely, I mean, you know, yeah, there is… — I remember a friend of mine worked on this movie for quite a long time that he was writing as a spec and he was an established screenwriter, and then he read in Variety that somebody else was making basically the exact same movie and he said, screw it, and he moved onto something else.

**Craig:** You know, I always, what’s that — John, you’re really good at this, figuring out the names of fallacies. What’s the deal where you buy a car and then you think suddenly there are more of that car on the road?

**John:** Yeah, it’s like a validation fallacy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think we always are so much more attuned to what our idea is and the specificity of that idea. So, it’s natural for us to look at one thing or another and say, oh no, I’m done. But the truth is that’s not actually how the world works and, frankly, if Date Movie had come out last month and I were now seeing trailers for They Came Together I wouldn’t even really connect the too, because the way we judge stuff as we see it is so visual and so based on cast.

When we watch things, I think it’s the cast, and the look, and the vibe that jumps out at us much more rapidly and accessibly than maybe the log line or the idea, because we are trained, having watched movie after movie, to understand that ideas are repeated constantly. It’s the execution that attracts us to things. So, I would certainly counsel this questioner to stick with it and at worse, they’re right, they’ll end with a sample.

But, frankly, I suspect no one will care.

**David:** Also, the only caveat I would add is sometimes it depends, depending on the genre, how specifically is this other thing exactly yours. Is it in all ten plot points, or is it just the general idea? I’d be interested to hear that.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say that sometimes one other film is like a direct comparison, but if there’s like three other films kind of like it, well that’s a genre. So, suddenly, oh my god, there’s another vampire movie. Well, yeah, there’s lots of vampire movies. The fact that you’re writing a vampire movie doesn’t preclude that or a zombie movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even if you were writing, there was the zombie teen romance that came out a couple years ago. If you were doing that now I think it would be okay. Where it gets a little trickier if you were writing something that is very specific and really twist-based and another movie comes out with that same deal and that same twist. That can be an issue because —

**John:** That can be an issue.

**Craig:** Because people do feel like twists are, because they’re so surprised-based you really can’t get away with, “Oh, he was dead the whole time.” [laughs] It’s tough to pull that one off twice.

**John:** Yeah. We know there’s an upcoming Disney movie that actually had that twist problem. They had to sort of very carefully work around that situation. What I will say, personally from my own experience, you can’t get much closer to this problem than I was writing Monster Apocalypse and then Pacific Rim came out which was so remarkably similar to what I was writing. It was like we couldn’t make the movie.

What’s fascinating is now Godzilla has come out and also made a lot of money and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s suddenly now just a genre. They were — too easy to directly compare the two movies, Pacific Rim and Monster Apocalypse, but if we have more movies with giant monsters smashing down cities, well, that’s now a genre. And suddenly mine doesn’t look as similar to that movie that came out.

**David:** That’s so interesting, when something evolves from copying something to just a formula of a genre or a form of a genre.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know the word Kaiju now.

**John:** Yeah, which is awesome. Which is Japanese —

**Craig:** I guess. [laughs] I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Nate writes, “What is the difference between a green-lightable script that needs revision and a script that still needs revision and is not green-lightable yet?”

So, I’m going to rephrase this question: Why do some scripts get green lit even though they still say there’s work to be done on it, whereas other scripts that “need work” don’t get green lit. Do you have a sense of why that happens?

**David:** Because what’s written in the script is so not the factor that contributes to the green light most of the time.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Green-lightable is a tautology. It’s green-lightable when someone green lights it. All that means is that the people who are paying for a movie have decided, yeah, we want to pay for this. There’s a thousand reasons why they make that decision, some of which are good reasons.

**David:** And some of which might be that the executive is in a good mood that day.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** Really. It could be anything.

**Craig:** An actor shows up and wants to do it and they want to make a movie with that actor, so now we’re green lighting it. And fix it. Fix it before you shoot, you know.

**John:** Yeah. For some reason the train has started moving. And they’re going to keep going and they’re going to try to make this movie. And they will do the work that they want to do on the movie, work they could have done six months ago, a year ago, but suddenly now they’re starting to make a movie. And it may have nothing to do with the script at all.

**David:** I’m sure that both of you have been in situations where they’re like, “We love this project, we want to do it. Now we’re going to throw the script out and start over on that.” As if the script is just this minor afterthought in making a movie.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny — less now. It seems like in the last couple of years or three years there’s been this bizarre realization that maybe the screenplay counts and in a weird way I think it’s part of the result of the inflation of budgets and inflation of marketing costs. People say that the way that Hollywood makes movies everything costs too much and that’s bad. And on some levels it is bad. On another level they are way less cavalier about the screenplay than they used to be. When movies cost $20 million and video would make sure it was a profitable venture anyway, at that point they honestly would treat the screenplay like it didn’t matter.

**John:** I don’t know that that’s changed, Craig. I mean, you and I can both think of people working on movies where like they’re starting shooting soon and they are massively overhauling the script.

**Craig:** That is true. That is true. But, even then they’re massively overhauling the script because somebody whimsically decided to do it. They’re massively overhauling it because the script isn’t very good, or the script has a lot of problems.

I guess what I’m saying is there used to be a time when there would be a perfectly good script, everybody would be onboard with it. It was the product of years of development and careful consideration. And then a director would come along and say, “Eh, I want to do this and I want to do that.” And they’re like, “Fine. Do it. Because we don’t care.”

**John:** Okay. That’s maybe true. But, I mean, the frustrating thing for Nate’s question that we’re not really answering is that there’s really probably no difference in a script that’s green-lightable versus a script that’s not green-lightable.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The decision for green light is really rarely about the script itself. It’s really about sort of —

**David:** The elements around it. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we know this scientifically be true because there are scripts that do not receive the green light at one studio, get put into turnaround, are bought by another studio, and then made.

**David:** All the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. All the time.

**John:** Our last question comes from a different Nate. And he was actually at the live show. He was one of the people who was lined up to ask a question but wasn’t able to ask a question so he wrote in with his question.

“My question has to do with character motivation and stakes. Specifically let’s mandate that the character is ambitions and driven by a desire to succeed. Maybe he wants to be a famous movie star or the next Steve Jobs. Is the possibility of failure sufficient stakes, or does it need to be a more acute stake?”

Basically, what are stakes and what is enough stakes for something to be? Does it have to be a very specific thing that he’s trying to achieve or just an overall ambition or goal?

**Craig:** Well, I’m excited to hear what David Wain has to say about this one.

**David:** To me it has nothing to do — I mean, any screenplay can be about any stakes. It can be about something as tiny as like trying to get a piece of gum off your shoe, or saving the world, and it’s irrelevant. The point is that the stakes are important to the character and that you care as an audience about what the character cares about.

I think of Swingers and him making that phone call and how you’re just like on the edge of your seat freaking out and going no, no, no, just as you are when you’re watching Indiana Jones in exactly the same level of energy from an audience. So, it’s just about how you build and present those stakes. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think that it isn’t enough to simply say this person has some kind of external ambition, to build a business or to become a star, or change the world, and failure is the only relevant negative outcome.

Typically we’ll see in characters, when David says “what they care about,” the character does care about the external thing, but it’s also extensible to internal things. There’s something relatable for me in the audience to that person, where I can say, “Oh, I understand why that matters to you.” Because most people don’t want to build a business, that isn’t their ambition. So, what am I connecting to?

I’ve never done a day of karate in my life, but at the end of The Karate Kid when he says, “I have to go out there and win because I’ll never have balance otherwise, I’ll never have balance with myself, with my girlfriend, with the world,” then you go, “Okay, I understand. You’re trying to figure out a way to find your place in this world.” And that’s relatable.

That becomes so much more important than whether or not you punch the guy in the face. So, there does have to be some sort of common, human desire there so that if he fails we understand that he’s not just failing at a business. He’s failing himself in some big way.

**John:** Yeah. I think what Nate is confusing here a bit is goal, what is the character aiming for, and stakes being like what happens if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And really defining so for the audience what the consequences will be if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And so sometimes within a scene you might have a goal, like he’s got to disarm this thing or this bomb will blow up. That’s a very simple kind of stakes. But in the overall course of your movie the stakes might be if he doesn’t build this dam then his daughter will see that he’s a failure.

I mean, it could be something more, you know, like make it clear to the audience what will be the consequence of a failure so we can actually feel the potential loss or actually see the loss if he doesn’t succeed, because sometimes the stakes should be manifest and the character doesn’t win. That’s always a nice choice in movies as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ll say that movies tend to have movie stakes in the sense of like this is a story that can happen once and the nature of why we’re watching this story is because of this goal and these stakes. In a TV series, the stakes are a lot different because you’re hopefully experiencing this character’s journey over many, many episodes and things will grow and change. And their goals will change and the stakes will change based on what’s happened to them.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And it’s one of the things that people should consider when they’re asking themselves the question of what they ought to write. I mean, should I be writing movies, should I be writing TV shows? And one thing that is specific to movie storytelling is the idea that you are resolving somebody’s problem. That the stakes ultimately do come down to character and specifically what gets finished for this character, whereas in television you can’t finish. If you finish the character your show is done, so the stakes do tend to be far more external in TV, I think.

I mean, there are obviously shows, wonderful shows, where the characters grow and change. But they don’t resolve.

**David:** Unless it’s the new genre of TV that does seem to have more finite endings sometimes, which I love.

**Craig:** Well, when the series ends it’s over. But like in Breaking Bad you watch Walter White have a ton of moments where most of the stakes are external stakes, but obviously there’s a lot of internal stuff where he’s trying to maintain his family unit. He’s trying to balance these two lives. He’s making these very difficult decisions about the people he loves and about himself.

But there is no final resolution until the very end. And in movies we’re basically telling one long TV episode and it ends. And you do need that resolution. Even if it’s — I mean, sometimes my favorite moments of, I guess stakes, resolution are the ones that seem so out of whack with what we would expect. That’s why I love the end of Tin Cup. I just think it’s one of the greatest endings of all time because it seems like the stakes are standard to a sports movie — a once great golfer who is down on his luck goes in for a Rocky style comeback. And he’s doing it. And then he approaches this moment where he has to face a choice: should I play is smart or should I go for the perfect shot?

And he goes for the perfect shot. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And then he makes it. And the stakes of win the golf tournament, nope. You do not win a golf tournament, but you do hit a perfect shot. And it’s sort of like this is what I’m about. I thought that was, you know, that’s the kind of thing. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, I win or lose a golf tournament.”

**David:** Well that’s what Rocky was like, too.

**Craig:** Exactly. He loses as everybody seems to forget. [laugh]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, he loses. But in losing he finds himself. He finds honor. And so that’s another great example of why external stakes are always less compelling for me in movies than the internal ones.

**John:** This is the time on the podcast where we talk about One Cool Things. David, we should have warned you about this. Do you have a One Cool Thing to talk about?

**David:** I do. I do.

**John:** All right.

**David:** Am I going first?

**John:** You go first.

**David:** I just forgot the name of it. It’s this amazing iOS app that I just started using. You know, one of the things that I have now that I’m in California is all this time in the car. And I’ve always been trying to find a way to read screenplays while I’m driving, or read scripts while I’m driving.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh god. Get him off the road.

**David:** And this is my own thing. So, what I used to do was I would actually do a little tinkering in formatting. I would turn script into text and then I would turn the text into audio and then I would have to do a little text expander and find and replace to reformat it enough so that I can understand it well when it’s audio text. It was a pain in the ass.

Now there’s finally this app. And the app is called Voice Dream. And I guess it’s been around maybe a little while, but I just found out about it. And it really works beautifully. The voices are great. And you can just pull down something from your Read It Leader account, from Pocket, or whatever, or from your Dropbox, or from any number of other sources. It then brings it into that app so that you don’t have to start from, you know, when you’re just doing normal speak it on your iPhone you have to select the whole thing and then it loses your place if you get a notification and if you want to start it over from — it’s impossible for reading screenplays.

So, this one turns it into kind of an audio book.

**John:** That’s great.

**David:** And you can also double click on where you want to go and you can read a little bit regular and then you can pick up again with voice. It’s really, really great.

**John:** And does it work well with Fountain?

**David:** Yeah. It works great with Fountain.

**Craig:** How about that.

**John:** Great. Cool. I should have — I don’t know why we didn’t talk about this at all on the podcast, but David Wain is one of the premier champions of using Fountain to write scripts.

**David:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** And so he’s been on the betas of all of our apps, and Highland, and Weekend Read. So, thank you very much again for all the stuff you’ve done to help us move that format forward.

**David:** Well, I think the more people that use it the more it will get developed for and the more it will help my work. So, spreading the word is a selfish thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig?

**Craig:** I’ve always said that David Wain is very, very selfish. That’s his thing.

I have Two Cool Things this week. One very quickly, One Cool Thing, Ian Helfer, who has worked with David Wain a number of times. I went to 7th and 8th grade with Ian Helfer and he’s such a great guy. Do you guys work on anything together or what’s the story?

**David:** Yeah. He’s a great screenwriter. He hasn’t worked with me in any official capacity since Role Models. He came in and worked for a little bit. But, very good friend of mine and he works all the time with John Hamburg who we’re all buddies from back in college days and afterwards in New York. And, yeah, he’s one of my very good friends.

**Craig:** I love that guy.

So, my other One Cool Thing is a live stage reading that the Black List folks are doing. And it is of a script that made the official Black List of the best unproduced screenplays. And this one is a script written by Stephany Folsom and it’s called 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon.

And that script is about a White House public affairs assistant who basically convinces Kubrick to fake the moon landing in case something goes wrong. You know, that whole story that we didn’t really land on the moon, which some people, [laughs], basically you know I’m a pretty tolerant person. But if you don’t think we landed on the moon, I can’t talk to you. [laughs] I just can’t. I have to remove you from my life.

Regardless, this script is supposed to be pretty great. I haven’t read it, but they are doing a live stage reading of it. It will be at the LA Film Festival on June 14th, so they’ll actually have an interesting cast doing it and ticket info. So, look for information about that at the LA Film Fest website.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll also have a link to that in the show notes.

My One Cool Thing is this app for iOS, for the iPad, called Hopscotch. And it is a little programming app designed for kids, but really adults can use it, too. It’s very, very clever. I think on a previous episode I talked about Scratch which is this sort of programming environment that MIT developed for kids. This is like that, but actually a little bit more stripped down and I think a little bit more accessible for kids to get started with. You can build these little monsters and have them run around and interact with each other in ways that’s really, really smart.

The women who created the app are really big on sort of getting girls to code and it feels like a great way to sort of get your daughter to start interacting with code in a great way. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I really do believe that coding should, I don’t know if it will, but it should become an actual piece of core curriculum in primary education. There’s no reason that we expect as a matter of course American Children to learn geometry but we don’t expect them to learn how to code. It just makes no sense.

**David:** I think it will eventually happen, although it might take awhile. But it’s inevitable. It’s like it probably took a long time before they said everyone should learn how to type.

**Craig:** Do they do that? I mean, is typing mandatory now?

**John:** They teach typing now.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good.

**John:** They do. And they sort of gave up on cursive and they teach typing, which I think is a good tradeoff. I think the way that you will stealthily get people coding is Minecraft. I think you build some more logic into Minecraft where there’s switches and do this and this thing becomes a chain of events. I think you sneak that into Minecraft which every young person already plays and you will get a new generation of coders. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Well, I hope we do.

**John:** All right. That is our show this week. But before we wrap up, David Wain, we need you to plug hard your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And tell us when it’s coming out.

**David:** It’s They Came Together.

**John:** They Came Together. What day?

**David:** It is June 27th on Friday. It is in selected theaters and it’s also at the same time on VOD. And if —

**Craig:** Oh, you mean, you guys are doing day and date?

**John:** Are you guys at the Arclight in Los Angeles? Where are you?

**David:** Yeah. It’s day and date. So, you’ve got to go to the theater if you’re in one of those handful of cities that weekend, please. In LA it’s going to be Los Feliz, AMC City Walk, and Laemmle Playhouse.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Fantastic.

**David:** But also you can watch it on your TV that day if you choose. If you go to TheyCameTogether.com you’ll see a selection of some of the amazing reviews we’ve gotten, and a trailer, and clips, and poster. And Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, and a cast of incredible comedic talents including Jason Mantzoukas, Bill Hader, Christopher Meloni, Max Greenfield, Cobie Smulders, Michael Ian Black, Ellie Kemper, etc, etc.

**Craig:** Keep going. Keep going.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty awesome.

**John:** How about Childrens Hospital? Is there another Childrens Hospital coming?

**David:** Childrens Hospital is starting to shoot actually in two weeks, the sixth season, and also the other Adult Swim series that I do the lead voice on —

**John:** Newsreaders.

**David:** Well, there’s that. That’s also coming out in a few months, I believe. And then there’s also June 15th, just in three weeks, is Superjail! Is premiering on Adult Swim at 11:45pm.

**Craig:** You know, this is really our first podcast after all these shows where we actually did a late night talk show style guest with something to plug. It’s really..it’s fun.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we should honestly just do it. And I’m serious about this. I’m actually very serious.

**David:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We should never do this again except with David Wain. Like I honestly, like we should always have David on to plug his stuff.

**John:** Well, because you’re always kind of busy, so there’s always going to be something new to plug.

**David:** I can just come on at the end and plug.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** I just think we should always —

**David:** No matter who the guest is.

**Craig:** Like I don’t care if Tom Cruise wants to be on Scriptnotes. No. No. But David Wain can show up. He’s got — he’s just dropping by a block party. [laughs] And he just wants to mention that he’ll be there.

**David:** Come by. I’m baking cupcakes.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’ll be good. And that’s our show. So, you can find links to most of the things we talked about on the show today at the show page, johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for our episodes. You can also find the last 20 episodes on iTunes. If you’re there you can leave us a comment or a rating, that’s always lovely and nice.

If you want to go back to the old episodes, you can find them at Scriptnotes.net. You can go back to episode one and all the way up through to the present time. We offer subscriptions for $1.99 a month which gives you access to all those back episodes and occasional bonus episodes.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. Is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And if you have a question for us on the show, like the ones we answered, short questions are really good on Twitter. So, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. David Wain, what are you?

**David:** @davidwain.

**John:** Very nice. If you have a longer question, like the ones we answered today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And David Wain thank you so much for being an awesome guest.

**David:** I’m a big fan of this podcast and of both of you and I’m really happy to be here. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Have a great weekend.

**Craig:** Bye guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Wain](http://davidwain.com/), and on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906476/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidwain)
* [Being Gay at Jerry Falwell’s University](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/being-gay-at-jerry-falwells-university/274578/), from The Atlantic
* [They Came Together](http://www.theycametogether.com) is in theaters and On Demand June 27th
* [Wet Hot American Summer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005EYLFOW/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Caught in the acts](http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/05/18/caught-in-the-acts-2/), from David Bordwell’s website on cinema
* [Legends of Oz Investors Believe Hollywood Conspiracy Destroyed Film](http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/legends-of-oz-investors-who-each-paid-100000-believe-hollywood-conspiracy-destroyed-film-99641.html), from Cartoon Brew
* THR on [Amy Adams’ Story of Your Life selling to Paramount for $20 Million](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-amy-adams-story-your-704004)
* [Voice Dream](http://www.voicedream.com/), a text to speech app for iOS
* [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io/)
* [Ian Helfer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375043/) on IMDb
* Get tickets now for the [Black List Live! read of Stephany Folsom’s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon](http://filmguide.lafilmfest.com/tixSYS/2014/xslguide/eventnote.php?notepg=1&EventNumber=9107&utm_content=buffer89d0e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) on June 14th, part of the LA Film Fest
* [Hopscotch](https://www.gethopscotch.com/), a coding for kids app for iOS
* [Childrens Hospital](http://video.adultswim.com/childrens-hospital/), [Newsreaders](http://video.adultswim.com/newsreaders/index.html), and [Superjail!](http://video.adultswim.com/superjail/index.html) (which returns on June 14th) on adultswim.com
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Mike Timmerman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli