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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Aline:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Jennifer:** I was not.

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

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

**Aline:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Aline:** That was amazing.

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

**Aline:** That was amazing.

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

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

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**Aline:** You knew that?

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** It’s fundamental.

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

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

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

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

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

**Jennifer:** Right.

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

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

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

**Aline:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That can be great.

**Jennifer:** It can be.

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

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

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Crucial.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

And then —

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

**Aline:** It’s so great.

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

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

**Jennifer:** In a huge way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** They’ll come back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Let’s keep going.

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

**Aline:** Works completely.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Exactly.

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

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

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

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

**Aline:** It’s a trope.

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

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

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

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

**Jennifer:** Overcome it.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [hums]

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

**John:** That’s a crucial moment.

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

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

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

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

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

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

**Jennifer:** Throughout the, yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Jennifer:** The end of the first act is, yes, when she goes after Elsa, and right before Let it Go. And Let it Go is kind of this in between, because really the second act starts with Anna, as it should, but yet we have this song. But the end, that last moment where she sacrifices herself for her sister, I remember, Ed Catmull when I started on the film he said, “You can do whatever you need to do the film, anything you want, but you’re earning that moment.” And we still didn’t know how we were getting to it. At that point it was some big battle scene between snowmen. It was such a weird route to get to that moment.

But he said you can do whatever you want, but you have to earn that moment. And he’s like, “And if you do, it will be fantastic. And if you don’t, the movie will suck.” And that’s the only, he’s like, “Bye,” and it’s so him to say that, but I mention that because part of the reason the first act was so hard was because we were telling a much more complex story than really we felt like we could fit in this 90-minute film.

So, everything in the first act was over-analyzed, over-scrutinized. And it’s the maximum it can be without being more. And that meant things like who was in charge — we don’t have time for that. It’s not important to the story so we have to get it out. So, there are a lot of little things like that.

**John:** And that’s a case where I think Disney princess logic actually really helps you a lot, because you don’t have the expectation that anyone actually has to run the kingdom.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And the funny thing to me. I’m like, she’s 21. Why not 18? Well, because I want Anna to be 18. You know, it’s like those little things that we just had to do to say what matters to the story versus being logical, but it’s hard because you’ve got 15 people who part of their jobs in the story room is to beat on the logic of your ideas. So, that was fun.

**John:** That was fun. But, for the first time in forever the gates are going to be opening up. There’s new people coming here. It’s the first time we actually see a bunch of people. It’s a busy city and you sort of see what the universe is like.

You establish Elsa’s fear. She’s trying to hold the scepter without it turning to ice. She’s worried she’s going to freak out. but then Anna meets the cute boy and they fall in love and they have a very literal meet-cute with a horse and a boat and all this stuff.

At what point did Hans become a villain? And, I mean —

**Jennifer:** [laughs] Hans is a villain from the minute he hits her with the horse, in my mind.

**Aline:** Really?

**Jennifer:** But I am slightly a sociopath, I think. He’s just calculating from that moment. Go ahead.

**John:** But I assumed in the second viewing — first off, I was really surprised at the ultimate reveal that he’s a villainess character. But I thought like I must have misremembered. And so then I watched it the second time through and it’s like you gave us nothing.

**Jennifer:** No, I know. I know.

**Aline:** But you know what? That is another example of “cake and eat it too,” because the truth is some of those prince/princess romances are creepy. It’s creepy how generic those men are. And it’s creepy how fast the princesses fall for them. And it’s creepy that nobody questions it.

**Jennifer:** We buy it. Right. Exactly.

**Aline:** And it is amazing how in those movies often that’s the thing that makes you kind of roll your eyes is like this sort of instant connection. And there is something kind of, you know, if you met those guys there would be something a little too perfect and creepy about them. And so it has that thing where it does exactly what you want the genre to do, but it actually unveils this kind of seamy side to those guys.

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s interesting was it was a big — there was a lot of debate about that, not when to give it away. And John Lasseter particularly really didn’t want to. He loved it so much not to that he would push to the extreme sometimes where my sociopathic mind would break down because I’d be like, no, no, no, he wouldn’t do that because he’s calculating.

So, I had to literally walk through every scene, what’s going on in his head for real, and at least I could — like when he says, the first time when he finds out she’s princess and drops to his knees. Before that she’s just a girl. But the key moment is when she says, “It’s just me.” And he goes, “Just you?”

And that’s like inside he’s going, “Ooh, you don’t think very highly of yourself, do you? Well, I’m gonna…”

**Aline:** Terrific. Great news for a narcissist.

**Jennifer:** It’s all very sick and twisted deep down.

**John:** But clearly he’s a very talented sociopath.

**Jennifer:** He’s very talented. He’s charming. He mirrors everyone. And actually the original story had a lot to do with mirrors. And in many iterations of the story we talk about mirrors and we bring them up. And so I held on a little to that, what Hans is is a mirror as a lot of charming, but hallow or sociopathic.

**Aline:** And she’s also so lonely.

**Jennifer:** She’s lonely.

**Aline:** That it’s like she’s falling in love with her reflection in the pond, yeah.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, exactly. And he mirrors her and he’s goofy with her. He’s a little bit more bold and aggressive with the Duke, because the Duke is a jerk, so he’s a jerk back. And with Elsa he’s a hero.

**Aline:** I really like it because their love song is so quick and so declaratory that I was thinking, “God, I mean, I’m buying this. I’m buying this because I’m enjoying this, but man this is awfully fast.” And then I thought, well, this is just a trope of the genre, so it’s okay. So, I’m thrilled that it turned out to be, because that really is —

**Jennifer:** It’s another song that we had to have and I was going nuts, because to me there was one too many songs in the beginning and I — if you talk about like can’t find your way out, I couldn’t my way out of it. I just couldn’t find a way that we didn’t need everything we had. So…

**John:** Because really For the First Time in Forever and Love is an Open Door, they’re the same kind of song overall.

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re basically sort of like what it feels like to be me. But there’s the fun cute two-hander. We haven’t seen that kind of thing. Their chemistry was really terrific. You’re establishing sort of what it is. And you’re buying that this girl might say yes at the end of this song. That’s the crucial thing is she’s going to say yes to a proposal.

**Jennifer:** Right. She’s so lonely.

**John:** Because like, yeah, it’s a great idea. This is a fantastic idea. And the luxury you have is that not 20 minutes later someone is going to hang a lantern on like, “Wait, this is a stupid idea. How can you possibly do that?” which they never say in a Disney movie which is so remarkable.

**Jennifer:** Right.

**John:** So, Love is an Open Door, the proposal happens, they tell Elsa, “Oh, we’re going to get married.” “That’s a stupid idea.” She freaks out. Big catastrophic snow icy thing. Her powers are revealed and she runs off.

This is the moment where, I don’t know, I guess Hunchback of Notre Dame has the same quality where like he seems like the villain, the community believes that he is the villain. What was the discussion around this point?

**Jennifer:** It was another scene — the scene where Elsa flees, we call it, there was a lot of debate of that scene and then the one after where Anna goes after her about what needed to be and how much of a monster should she feel like, how aggressive should people be.

And really we ended up giving a lot of it just to the Duke as a representation. And this is where we talk about the villain and not having a villain.

**Aline:** He’s villain-ish.

**Jennifer:** It’s having these antagonistic forces and to us like the real villain is fear. And so what we did is take all the characters and as antagonistic characters they hang off of fear. So, he goes to the ultimate fear, she’s a monster, points fingers. And Elsa lives in fear —

**Aline:** A fear of her own self.

**Jennifer:** Fears herself. And then there’s someone like Hans who exploits it. I mean, he exploits love, too. So, every character plays off of — I should say fear and love. And Kristoff is the honest goods. Anna is fearless, actually, and all her faith is in love but she has to learn what that is.

So, it was our way of creating the constant villainess forces. But we felt like just having the — people could be frightened, but just having the chatter of “Get her!” or something, it just was, it was too complex. And it was too like why are they going right there? Why do they hate her? And just giving it to the Duke just gave Elsa the signal to go.

And from there I don’t think she sees herself as —

**Aline:** Well she doesn’t know what she’s done, which is really interesting.

**Jennifer:** That’s why. Because she doesn’t know what she’s done.

**Aline:** Does not realize what she’s done for a good portion of that. She thinks she’s just going off to hide.

**Jennifer:** [Crosstalk] I think if Anna — if it were much more of an extreme reaction Anna wouldn’t have just thought, “I’ll just go and bring her back.” It would have been too complicated. So, I – just like, just keep it about this moment as the girls being divided and being separated from each other.

**Aline:** It’s gorgeous visually. It’s amazing.

**Jennifer:** Oh, thank you. I will say our head of story, Paul Briggs, came up with one of my favorite things in the movie which is the run across the water.

**John:** It’s beautiful.

**Aline:** Amazing.

**Jennifer:** And turning into ice. And that moment. And that was the second sequence to go into production from the first act was that one because when we had that we were like —

**Aline:** Home run.

**Jennifer:** We were like that has to be it. [laughs] It can’t be anything else.

**Aline:** The sound of the ball hitting the bat heading for the bleachers.

**John:** Let’s talk about Let it Go, because it’s clearly a crucial thing. Without that moment you don’t understand who Elsa is or sort of what her journey is. And what point in the process did Let it Go come to be?

**Jennifer:** Let it Go came in about 15 months from finishing. It was the first song that landed in the film and was in the film. And it was an amazing moment. I remember, you know, we had spent a lot of time talking about Elsa and we were still going on the villain journey, which was killing me to try to figure out how to make that work and then redeem her. And have a love story. I was dying. [laughs]

And we just said, “Let’s talk about who she is. What would it feel like?” And Bobby and Kristen said they were walking in Prospect Park and they just started talking about what would it feel like. Forget villain. Just what it would feel like.

And this concept of letting out who she is that she’s kept to herself for so long and she’s alone and free, but then the sadness of the fact that the last moment is she’s alone. It’s not a perfect thing, but it’s powerful. And they came in with the demo of Let it Go and it’s exactly word-by-word the exact song.

**Aline:** Wow. You’re kidding.

**Jennifer:** Exactly. And we — half of us were crying. And then I just went, “I have to rewrite the whole movie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Jennifer:** I really, it was — I was just like I’m going to go lie down for a couple minutes. But it was the best thing. We knew we had the movie.

**Aline:** It captures such a moment for girls and women which is sort of the — really is the song where you go in your room and you close the door and you sing to yourself in the mirror, you know, “I’m going to be who I’m going to be. I don’t care about anybody else.” I mean, it really, really captures such a great I think particularly female moment.

I have a question about it which is in the sort of thing where she transforms herself she becomes so sexy.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Aline:** And what I had sort of admired up until then was how kind of sporty they were, especially Anna, how sporty she was. And then all of a sudden she was sort of pageanty and she has the slit and everything. Tell me about that.

**Jennifer:** Well, I can tell you. What’s interesting, that actually we did a lot of push and pull. There were two things we were feeling. One is that freedom moment where you strut and you just go for it. And I was fine with that and that was great. There was a lot of pull of, I will say from the guys, of loving her as the — every man in the studio, and some of the women, were in love with Elsa.

We used to joke like just put Anna in a closet. Just push her. There was one shot where someone was like, “Can you push Anna further back, further back?” And I was like, “Just take her off, just get her out of the stick. Just go stick her outside.” Because Elsa was — everyone was seduced by her. And so there was this tug of war I think, a bit, of letting people have a little — people who wanted to have that a little and not be afraid of it, but not make it a sexual statement. It’s more a moment of, for me, it was like you strut and you say nobody is looking, this is what I’m going to — I’m not going to be afraid of my sexuality. I’m not going to be afraid of who I am. I’m not going to be afraid of anything about myself.

**Aline:** But her sexuality is definitely part of it. It’s text.

**Jennifer:** And it’s definitely become, I think what we have found is the reaction to it has been bigger than what we had thought it was. But, that’s okay. It’s a moment that was — so many people worked on it that it was, yeah.

**Aline:** It’s the way she’s walking and the way it’s lit, it feel different. The depiction of the women’s bodies feels different in that moment.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** Even before or after that.

**Jennifer:** It’s so funny because also it was animated — half of it was animated by a woman, half was animated by a man. And my favorite thing about it though is the actual model for doing it was John Lasseter. Not a woman. Because we got him — he was so moved by Let it Go. He knew every line and what he thought it meant. And he was a huge help in talking through how we translate that emotional journey, not just with Idina’s voice, but with the animation. And for him he got up and he’s like, “Let’s, all that uptight, bottled up down and her hair goes, and she transforms, and she struts,” and he’s doing it. He’s acting it out.

And so it was really, he was the inspiration which his ironic —

**Aline:** To picture him in that dress.

**Jennifer:** Well, I have a lovely caricature by John Musker of John in that dress.

**John:** Ha!

**Aline:** Oh, you do?

**Jennifer:** Someday maybe I can share.

**Aline:** Oh my god, that’s great.

**John:** Well, what’s fascinating is it’s a sexual outfit, but she’s not actually a sexual character.

**Jennifer:** No, she’s not.

**John:** She doesn’t even talk to a boy other than Hans for a brief second. So, it’s not that she’s trying to seduce a man. There’s man around for her to seduce.

**Jennifer:** But I do think it was a moment that we weren’t hiding from the sexual aspect of it, but it wasn’t the statement, but people have seen it that way so I think we have to own that. Like saying, yeah, it was there.

**Aline:** Also, it’s the story of your older sister is coming into this time in her life and you kind of need to be separated from her because she’s going through things that you don’t understand and that your parents are sort of like that’s none of your business, honey, don’t look at that.

**Jennifer:** That’s true.

**Aline:** And then all of a sudden she’s coming to this flowering and the younger sister doesn’t understand it and there is this divide that happens. I mean, a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl —

**Jennifer:** It’s huge.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** And, you know, I didn’t want to shy away from — the thing is the original material is actually a lot about sex. And it’s about the sexual awakening.

**John:** Because all Hans Christian Andersen stuff is about sex.

**Jennifer:** I know. It’s true. It’s true. And we weren’t going there. I mean, that’s not the story we were telling, but at the same time I think my whole thing with this film was wanting sincerity. So, even though like I say we take tropes and then we spin them upside down, even in the tropes of sincerity —

**Aline:** You’re not spoofing.

**Jennifer:** Not spoofing. And that in every one of these things there is that mix. And I wanted these girls to feel real. I mean, even Anna’s sort of romantic relationships, it’s like the one with Kristoff, I like at the end that she kisses him first and he asks permission. And it feels a lot more real. But she’s not — I mean, she’s out in public. She kisses him on the dock. Like it’s a little — she’s pushing it. I don’t think there would be one second where she wouldn’t say, “We shouldn’t kiss here,” because that’s not Anna.

**John:** That’s not Anna.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** And I think we didn’t want to make these girls uptight, but at the same time I wasn’t certainly trying to make a sexual statement. But it just wasn’t trying to avoid, I guess you could say. But you could tell in the studio there was — the boys loved he I will say. Let’s just say that.

**John:** Let’s talk about Kristoff because we’re just about to meet him.

So, we sort of get into our Romancing the Stone aspect of the journey which is that she hooks up with a guy who can take her up the mountain to find her sister. And so this is Kristoff. He has his reindeer, Sven. Reindeers are Better than People. Does Sven ever talk?

**Jennifer:** Sven does not talk. Kristoff is talking for him.

**Aline:** I loved that.

**Jennifer:** That came…we wanted…because here’s the theory, and this I think came from Chris Buck is you only need one special talking thing per movie, meaning like if it’s all the animals the animals it’s all the animals. But you’ve got a snowman who’s magical and he talks. And it’s like — and then Sven talked, too. That’s where you say you put too magic on top of —

**John:** Hat on a hat.

**Jennifer:** Hat on a hat. But we were saying how do we — we knew we wanted to have him pantomime and things. And you don’t want to not do that in animation. You want to exploit it. It’s so much fun to do. It’s like if you didn’t the animators would just be like, “Why am I even here?” You know? [laughs]

But were just talking one day about confessing how a lot of us talk for our pets. And I’m like, I talk for my cats. And Chris has different voices for his three dogs. And that’s the kind of thing a lonely guy who lived in the woods with his reindeer would do. So, that’s where that came from. And it was just something we hadn’t seen, you know, which is always the hard thing, I think, where you haven’t seen.

**John:** Absolutely. And this is also where we meet our second male character. We met our snowman…

**Jennifer:** Olaf.

**John:** Olaf. I forgot his name. Olaf is his name.

**Jennifer:** That’s okay.

**John:** And Olaf is great.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**John:** Olaf is so just odd and cheerful and his song is not necessary in any way, but just delightful. So, his song, In Summer, is one of my favorite things.

**Aline:** Oh my god. I really had one of those, you know, when you’re watching a movie where I’m like I’m really loving this, this can’t get any better. And then it goes into that. It was just…

**John:** It was like a clean South Park moment.

**Aline:** Yeah! I mean, it was unbelievable.

**John:** We have a character who is so deluded about how the world works, and yet is just completely chipper and cheerful.

**Aline:** Oh my god, and I have boys, a 10-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy, and they just like, wow, when that happened. And just the spirit of him and the comedic strength of him. I just watched them just go like, wow.

**Jennifer:** That’s amazing.

**Aline:** Really magically interesting to them.

**John:** On a second viewing I did look like, well, what if you took Olaf out of the whole thing. And there are ways you could write it, there is a way you could write him out of the movie completely. But yet he provided that extra sort of — that just extra little something that was so important. Because things would get so dark without him to just be happy, and bright, and smiling.

**Jennifer:** The thing about Olaf is he was by far, for me, the hardest character to deal with. And I say that because when I came on, when I went to see a screening, people are going to hate me, when I saw the screening — I wasn’t on the project yet — every time he appeared I wrote, “Kill the f-ing snowman.” I just wrote kill him. I hate him. I hate him.

And part of it was, you know, we didn’t have Josh yet. And that’s a huge thing, obviously. And it wasn’t the scratch artist, he was great, but it was that he was — he wanted to be a shoulder because Elsa had these guards. He was half-good and half-bad. He was acerbic. He was a little, I don’t know, he just was kind of mean at times. And I didn’t know why he existed and I didn’t like him.

**Aline:** He does a funny thing that I don’t think I’ve seen. This is not even a trope that I haven’t seen. He’s sort of doing Mystery Science Theater on the movie from inside the movie, and I can’t think — can you think of anything else like that where he’s sort of doing a running commentary on everything that’s happening?

**Jennifer:** And so what happened with him is we really had to start over and we said sort of how does a snowman think? You go that, like snow is pure, so we started thinking innocence. And that’s what led us to him being sort of a representation of the girls when they were little. That they create this, “Hi, I’m Olaf and I like…” They create the snowman together when they’re the happiest.

**Aline:** He’s that spirit.

**Jennifer:** He’s that spirit. And so when she creates him magically, not realizing he’d come to life, he had to be a kid. And there was a while where we almost had, we were looking at younger, like is it a teenage boy, is it a young boy? But, I think we found just, no, when they built him they built this snow Man, so he’s encompassing what that fantasy play was for them.

**Aline:** But it’s another great fun thing of the genre which is, well, guys, we’ve got to have a sidekick, a comedic sidekick. We’ve just got to do it.

**Jennifer:** And he definitely started as that, totally.

**Aline:** And so give that and given that that is such trammeled ground, you know, every animated movie seems to do that in a different way, I could see that you were looking for ways to use him in ways that he hadn’t been used before, because he doesn’t really deliver a lot of the sort of homilies that you think are going to come from that character.

He doesn’t have that.

**John:** He has no deep well of wisdom that’s —

**Aline:** Which normally that character would. Just to me it’s sort of like an alt comic that wanders into the movie and does this commentary. And it’s funny because I think it makes the movie safer for boys, for sure.

**Jennifer:** Absolutely.

**Aline:** Which is why he’s so prominent in the marketing.

**Jennifer:** We wanted to get to him a lot sooner and have more of him. Obviously for those kinds of reasons. But, again, whenever, and I’m sure you guys find this, too. Whenever you try to force something on, it’s obvious for every second of it that you’re doing that. And he just didn’t belong until he showed up. And he belonged to me, him showing up was the moment for Anna of hope again. It’s that moment of like you’ve just survived this wolf chase. What are you doing? I hope you know what you’re doing.

And they walk ahead and there is everything of why she’s doing it. It’s her sister. I mean, that childhood innocence.

**Aline:** But they also parent the snowman.

**Jennifer:** And they parent, yeah.

**Aline:** So, it’s a big part of their romance.

**John:** It’s a way of bringing them together.

**Jennifer:** Totally. And to me it shows — that’s where you start to see there’s more to this guy. And he is not perfect. He doesn’t try to flirt. He doesn’t try to be anything but what he is, but the more you get to know him then you realize, like they say finally in the Troll song, he’s the honest goods. And I think Olaf helps with that.

So, for me he very much earned his place, and yet I was terrified because he is a character that I think — and Josh thinks this, too, we’ve talked about this a lot. He works when he plays off of other people. That’s just what he is. Because that’s his whole reason for being. He brings joy to other people. He exists because of this relationship. And then when you take him alone he just doesn’t have that same — you don’t feel the same thing. And so it took us a long time because wanted to say, “Let’s put Olaf and make him a host of this, and do this.”

And for us, both Josh and I were like, “We’re feeling wrong about it.” And the minute we add one of the other characters, it’s a joy. And so I love that we figured that out, because it was like we kept trying to say why where for so long did he not work for us and then all of a sudden he did. And it was like he just fits with this group and he is somebody who brings — it’s like he brings joy to other people. He’s not in and of himself some sort of iconic character.

**John:** So, one of the most surprising things that happens next is Anna gets to Elsa, which you sort of think of the quest of the movie, well eventually they’re going to get there and it will all be resolved by then. But at the midpoint of the movie —

**Jennifer:** That’s a good point, yeah.

**John:** They actually get there and they have the conservation and The First Time in Forever and then like things seem like they’re going to be okay.

**Aline:** God, another great tip for writers which is you can just go and do it.

**John:** Don’t delay it. Actually just start it. And it surprises you because you’re not expecting, you know, you establish a journey. So, like, oh, the journey is to get there. And like, oh, but we’re here. And so what else can happen? Well, she can shot in the heart with it and Elsa can refuse to change and shut them out and build an abominable snowman and sort of become more monstrous herself.

She doesn’t attack them literally, but she builds something that does attack them and sort of sends them down, back down a mountain.

**Jennifer:** Well, I think it shows you the part — for me it was like showing you the part of her that is still damaged. And like a lot of us, get damaged by moments in childhood. You know, being free felt wonderful, but she has right in the present “I could kill, I could hurt, and you have to go.” And then that fear takes over so much that obviously it hurts her and then it literally chases her out, in a way, if you look at it that way.

And that’s where you understand that, oh, we’re nowhere near resolving this relationship or, and wait a minute, things are — it’s the side of her powers that say there’s a great danger to them. And we had just done the beauty and we had seen her dangerous as a little child, but it’s still whimsical and accidental, but to see the fact that her emotions could create this spinning storm that hurts Anna you start to go, oh god, what more can she do?

And it is where I feel like her powers become villainess, but she doesn’t. But in having it — what’s interesting is the heart moment, where her heart is struck, was originally in the first act, and it was deliberate. And it was when she was evil and it’s when the girls were divided in a different way. But the whole second act was about Anna trying to get to Hans and to kiss him and then Elsa trying to stop her. And that was the whole second act.

**John:** That would have been a terrible movie. I’m glad you didn’t make that movie. That would not have worked.

**Jennifer:** [laughs] Well, the issue — the biggest thing I’ll say is it was an action-adventure film and that’s not — you can’t make a musical with that.

**John:** No.

**Jennifer:** And so it had to change, but we loved the concept of Frozen Heart, symbolically, and when we moved it to the midpoint is when we were like, oh, we can keep it because we wanted it at some point.

**John:** It’s the right idea, just that wouldn’t have worked —

**Jennifer:** It couldn’t sustain a whole film. That’s what we found.

**John:** So, leaving here we go back to see the trolls again. We see Kristoff’s adopted family and that’s when we realize that this early moment we saw where the boy was looking at the stuff, they actually stayed with those trolls and the trolls are real to him and all that stuff.

We talked about sort of the alt comic who walked into the movie, this is another great moment with Olaf, you know, whispering out the side of his mouth, “We need to get out of here. I’ll stall. You run.”

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s good is that was another John Lasseter moment though. Literally to the point where — because we were saying the joke is — there’s no joke because we know that the trolls are going to wake up. We’ve seen them wake up. And there was a time where pitched sort of you never saw them wake up so when you go there you didn’t know. But it just was like — the beginning is so complicated and it raised too many other questions.

But we said watching Olaf misunderstand we can have a lot of fun. And John Lasseter is the one who literally acted out the side of his mouth. And I caught him in the hallway because nobody was getting it. I’m like, “Could you just do it?” And I videotaped him doing it. And the animator had that and watched that. So, we will all watch it and we see John in that moment. [laughs]

**John:** What I like about this moment, this is the moment when I first watched the film when I realized like, wait, do I want her to end up with Hans, or do I want her to end up with Kristoff? And that’s a strange thing to happen in a princess movie, because a princess movie there should be like one prince that she should be with. It should always be the prince. But there’s this other guy and they’re trying to push these two together.

**Aline:** Again, that’s a trope which is the you meet the perfect guy and then you meet the kind of weather-beaten, not as handsome guy, you meet Jon Cryer — with Andrew McCarthy and then you meet Jon Cryer.

**Jennifer:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yes, but when those happen I should have already disliked the perfect guy. I should have already seen his flaws. I should have seen why he’s not perfect. And yet every time that we’re going back to see him —

**Aline:** But Pretty in Pink is a good example because initially she ended up with Duckie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** I knew it!

**Aline:** They changed that. They changed it. And so he was actually — whatever villainous stuff they had with Andrew McCarthy they must have pulled out. But he’s the same thing. It’s that slightly bland, handsome-y guy.

**Jennifer:** Well, what’s interesting about it for us is it wasn’t just about withholding Hans’ reveal. We knew where we were headed, which was her trying to get to Kristoff. But if you feel it too early then you’re just waiting for her to kiss Hans and it doesn’t work. Like you’re just waiting for it, and you’re not invested in it. But so it had to be this slow build where you really don’t feel — in my mind I never quite felt that moment until when she looks back at him and he looks at her through the door, right before Hans.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** And the goal was to — it’s coming, but is it?

**Aline:** You don’t feel like you’re ahead of them like let’s just get together already. Yeah.

**John:** But by establishing the expectation in people’s mind that like, oh, she thinks she’s going to have to kiss Hans, but she should really have to kiss Kristoff, you’re not thinking of any other options.

**Aline:** That’s the great thing. You think that’s the twist.

**Jennifer:** You’re not thinking about the…that’s the key. And we needed to feel that —

**Aline:** Double twist.

**Jennifer:** What you need to feel is her feeling something but not quite understanding it so that she doesn’t then seem like, “Well he doesn’t love me, I’ll like him.” What it is is there’s an awakening and you’re sensing it, but it’s not 100%. Because the minute it is it deflated. And that’s what made, to me, the Fjord moment we were headed for so hard. It wasn’t literally until we screened it in June — that was our last screening — so the last change. And Ed hadn’t seen it, because we had done an internal screening but he wasn’t there.

And then we screened it in Arizona for two audiences and he was there. And it was still only half animated, but the story was there. And he came out and he just said, “You did it.” And I went, boom, I mean, not literally, but emotionally I collapsed because — and it was because it was so nuanced. Anything we tried, it’s like you tip it and then it would suck, and then you tip it and it would suck. And it was just like can we build it?

**Aline:** How do you keep your sense of what’s working and what’s not working after you’ve been exposed to the same material so much over time, over time, over time? How do you do that?

**Jennifer:** God. I guess, I don’t know. How do you? I feel like it’s just trust. Because there are things, like for me Olaf was so challenging that I never could get that out of my head as to — never say is this working. I only knew what it needed to be. And I had to have faith and people were reacting right to it. But, I think that — and that’s always a danger in animation because we joke it’s the “Shiny New Toy Syndrome.” You get tired of a sequence and you want to change it because you’ve seen it so many times. But I think it’s a trust of —

**Aline:** Yup.

**Jennifer:** And it’s also a desperation of like —

**Aline:** Also true in comedy. You get sick of your own jokes. And then you start to look for other stuff. And they’re still —

**Jennifer:** And I’m still learning comedy. I mean, for me, I was a dramatic screenwriter. Everything that I’ve done is an independent, my options, nothing was a comedy. And Phil Johnston only worked in comedy, but we worked together all the time.

We met every week in school and then after school even, once we graduated, and we gave notes on each other’s material and we worked on each other’s stuff. So, there was this understanding of each other’s sensibility. But Ralph was the first comedy I worked on and then to have Frozen just me, without him, I was terrified.

And I still, you know, I still can’t — I cringe, I’m freaked out, and so I think comedy is the most insanely hard. It’s the craziest thing to have to do. It’s torturously hard. For me, anyway. I don’t know, maybe not for you.

**Aline:** No, it is. It’s very hard. But I think it is hard when you work on material over, and over, and over again, you have moments of being like, well, I don’t know. I have no idea.

And I’ve definitely had moments on stuff that was good where I tried to cut it, or get rid of it.

**Jennifer:** Oh, I did that a lot.

**Aline:** I saw an early cut of one of my movies and I went back and said, “Well this has to go, and that, and that, and that, and we’re cutting this and that and that.” It’s like I wanted it to be a 13-minute movie because there were only a few things that I liked. And I really admire, there are people who can read a script over again and watch a movie over again with fresh eyes and that’s very hard to do. It’s something you have to train yourself to do. Sort of like wipe out all your associations with something and try and feel it again. It’s tough. It’s tough.

**Jennifer:** I had a hard time. And it was always Olaf for me. He was the hardest. And I think possibly because he is a true comedic character and I’m not comfortable. I can do it, but it’s hell.

**Aline:** So, he improvised “I have no skull and no bones?”

**Jennifer:** No, that I did. I will say I did write that. [laughs]

**Aline:** Okay that, because I had read somewhere that that was improvised. That — if you wrote that — that is A+, A+.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That seems like it’s improvised. That is an A+…

**Jennifer:** How I could always get around, it’s a cheat I felt like, was because I love and I personally love — state the obvious humor that’s — and when you say it’s like he’s constantly, it’s like he’s doing this running commentary. I just personally like it. In Wreck-It Ralph I did a bit with Felix and with this character Gene.

**Aline:** That’s a joke that’s so good that I laughed through the whole scene. That scene ended and then the other scene started and I was still laughing about that line. When I watched it the second time I realized how much stuff I had missed just because I was so — it’s one of those things where you’re just really in the movie. You’re like so in the movie to be able to make that comment in that moment and to nail that character and have him say that in that moment.

That’s an amazingly funny joke.

**Jennifer:** Thank you. I’ll take that because there would be so many that — and there are a couple that I still would want to pull out and I see them and they fall flat every time. No one laughs. And I knew it and I wished I had pushed. But, what are you going to do?

**John:** Now, a strange thing happens in your musical at about this point. There’s no more songs. No more characters sing their songs. And it’s I guess common in movies where there’s fewer songs. You establish everything and then the action just resolves. But it is a strange thing where like no one sings —

**Jennifer:** It’s surprisingly — oh, go ahead.

**John:** I saw a cut where someone had built a version of Do You Want to Build a Snowman at the very end, like a reprise of it. Did you talk about adding more songs through the end?

**Jennifer:** What’s interesting, we worked with Chris Montan who is the president of music at Disney. He has been there for all the musicals over the years. Lion King. The most major ones, iconic ones as well. And Bobby and Kristen had never done a film before. They had done Winnie the Pooh, but that’s not a full-on musical. And that’s actually traditionally what happens. There are no more songs after the end of the second act.

**John:** Okay.

**Jennifer:** And, I think for me the reason it’s so much more obvious in Frozen is because it’s so song-heavy in the beginning. It’s got one more, maybe two more songs than even the traditional musical does. So, it kind of exposes itself a little more. But the reprise, now, we had a reprise. It was not Do You Want to Build a Snowman. There was a different song that got cut called Life’s Too Short. And that had been the song at the midpoint that became a reprise.

And there was a reprise of that where the two girls are — Elsa is in prison and Anna is in her room alone and they’re singing. But what’s incredible, and this is why — and I love that watching that moment the fans created, but the reason it wouldn’t work for the film where we did it, and I know they put it in a different spot actually.

**John:** They put it with Elsa singing it, yeah.

**Jennifer:** The reason it didn’t work where we put it is it gave away the ending. The minute you retied the girls together the movie was over. So, then —

**Aline:** You need to keep that tension open.

**Jennifer:** You had to keep it. And as soon as she thought about regret for her sister I knew the solution of the film was going to be her sister. And that was — if the solution of the film is buried in the Fixer Upper song when she says, “People make bad choices when they’re mad, or scared, or stressed, but throw a little love their way, you’ll bring out their best.”

Well, that’s the answer to the film. The solution to the problem, but it’s hidden. And it had to stay hidden. But also the issue of had Elsa sung at that moment a lot of us felt it would start mocking itself.

**John:** It would get syrupy.

**Jennifer:** We couldn’t do it. But to do it the way the fans have, I think we can enjoy it because you can always add after the fact and have fun. But, yeah, we did — at least we did talk about it, but it was that fear of —

**Aline:** That is true also with a lot of comedies, the first two thirds or three quarters have a lot of jokes, and then the resolution is a drama.

**Jennifer:** Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s also, too, you’re so invested in the story, that’s when you feel the stop of a song. You go, “Halt.” [hums] It’s like, no, you can’t do that.

**John:** Stop singing!

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And Bobby and Kristen were very conscious of that and we would always do that.

**Aline:** But they also as a tribute to the fact that the stakes were really working so that you’re not really noticing, that you’re so immersed then in what’s going to happen and how it’s all going to work out that you’re sort of okay with being past that, because you’re trying to puzzle out how is this puzzle.

The two things that I think are really great about this movie. One is that you’re sort of emotionally invested, but you’re also thinking, I mean, maybe just writers are thinking, but I’m thinking, “How is she going to get out of this?” There are so many moving parts to resolve in that ending. And so I didn’t really feel the absence of the song because I was so immersed in seeing how is this going to work out. And the emotional/dramatic resolution of a love story, you know, I’ve said this a lot: there are so many love stories in the world that are not girls and boys, that are not a man and a woman. And I think we’re getting better about that.

But, I think people are just always so excited and grateful that there’s something that just isn’t just about idealized romantic love.

**Jennifer:** Idealized. Yeah.

**Aline:** And this is what — almost everybody has a great love story in their family. And those sibling emotions, those sibling relationships are so deep. And almost everybody has that.

**Jennifer:** What was so weird for us with the — not weird, but it was a nice surprise was that with the — everyone we worked with, none of us can remember who said it. We were all in the room together. We all remember being together, and we keep saying you said, no you said it, said the “what if they were sisters?” And I remember that moment so distinctively because that was like when the film mattered all of a sudden to me.

I could not see this movie before it at all. I actually was very —

**Aline:** They were not sisters at all?

**Jennifer:** No, they weren’t sisters until about maybe one screening before I came on is when they tried the sisters. But the first screening I saw they weren’t related in any way. And part of why —

**Aline:** What were they?

**Jennifer:** Part of why Idina was not cast yet is it was more of — Elsa was more of like a Bette Midler kind of character. She was that more iconic older Snow Queen. And they were not related or connected in any way. And it was making them sisters was the first breakthrough I think.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Jennifer:** But what I loved was everyone suddenly could feel it. They could feel the film. Even if you don’t have a sibling, but just understanding that kind of — what you go through with your family is something you don’t go through with anyone, or rarely go through for anyone else.

**Aline:** Right.

**Jennifer:** But you get it. And part of because what happens as a child, you know, to you, that bond as a child even if it disappears you never let it go.

**Aline:** Right. But going back to that sort of subtext that I kind of see with the flowering with the older sister’s adolescence, you do feel when your older sibling goes through that. You feel like you’ve lost them. And as the younger sibling you just feel like, “I’m still here. I still want to be your friend. I know that I’m not wearing the right jeans and I’m not at the cool parties, but I’m still…”

So, I think that people really connect to that feeling of I want to do something. And I have two kids and the younger brother — the funny thing in our family, we are all younger siblings, except for my older son. My husband, and I, and my younger son are all younger siblings. So, that feeling of “let me prove myself to you, let me prove that I can be something and that I can do something.” And Elsa has been dealing with all of these issues on her own. And then the person that she doesn’t want to turn to — she doesn’t want to burden her, but yet becomes her savior. It’s just so incredibly moving.

**Jennifer:** And I’m the younger sister, too. I have an older sister. And she was a big inspiration for Elsa for me, because I think there was a lot of the shutting out. And like you said, it’s not that contrived. It happens even if it’s not for a big reason. It really does happen. And I remember a moment, too. We didn’t become close until I was in my twenties. And it was almost like one day, and I had gone through something very tragic and lost someone, and it was like she looked at me as a human being, an adult, and I became real again to her.

It’s like I’d lost her, and then all of a sudden we kind of arrived at the same place together. And then from that moment on she was like my champion. She was always there for me. And it was — that scene, having to like lose each other and then rediscover each other as adults, that was a big part of my life.

**Aline:** So relatable. So relatable.

**Jennifer:** And I think a lot of people…

**Aline:** So relatable. Really so relatable.

**John:** So, I want to focus on one last moment in the movie which was this reveal that Hans actually is up to no good. How nervous were you the first time you saw that with an audience with kids in it?

**Jennifer:** Oh, I thought they were going to hate me and Chris and hate us. It was a hard thing. Definitely.

**John:** Because it’s such a grown up moment. It’s that thing that I’ve never seen before in a kid’s movie where a character you assume is good completely pulls the rug out from underneath you. And that’s — it’s shocking.

**Jennifer:** What was interesting, I mean, we’ve gotten a couple — there have been a few Op-Eds of people saying how dare we teach as children not to trust anyone and saying good guys are bad. And I’m like, you know, I can’t — part of me is like, okay, I respect that people have that concern.

But for me what I think people always under — they underestimate children. And what we found is when we screen, it happened on Wreck-It Ralph as well and it was eye-opening for me, because you do a screening and it’s a family audience with real little kids and then you do older audiences to see how they react. And for both Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen the kids are like this is the theme. This is what they want. Well, he really loves her, but she doesn’t love him. Well, you know, she didn’t know him. Why would she marry?

And Frozen it’s like it’s about fear versus love. And, you know, well, she just met him and married him. Of course you don’t know him. He could turn out to be horrible. You got to get to know someone.

It’s like they go right to it.

**Aline:** Yes, she’s made that mistake. And the funny is anytime you’ve ever dated anyone who turned out to be a creep, it’s not like in the beginning it was awesome.

**Jennifer:** It wasn’t like he was like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

**Aline:** Right. No, in the beginning he’s actually — the creepy ones almost seem the most charming and the most prince-like. You’ve taught girls an important lesson.

**John:** To me the important lesson is that if you’re unhappy in your life and you’re feeling shut down and no one understands you —

**Aline:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** You’re going to fall for the first guy who seems like he understands you.

**Aline:** Boy, that’s it.

**Jennifer:** Yes.

**John:** And everything is going to seem wonderful and perfect, but it doesn’t mean that he’s actually a good guy.

**Aline:** That’s exactly right. She’s latched onto something for those wrong reasons.

**Jennifer:** And we all do. And I think — I have to say, I mean, I grew up on Disney. I was a Disney kid. Like, I wanted to be an animator. I was an escapist, so Disney was perfect. I could escape right into that.

But, as much as I love them — now I work for Disney — it would have been nice to have the one that says, “Don’t do that.” And for me, I mean, maybe I would have learned it a lot earlier in life and not at 40. [laughs]

**Aline:** I actually have to, when I look at those things, I actually have to force myself to look at the prince as something other than a man or a love story, because some of those movies which are so wonderful, they just are selling romantic love, so over-selling it to a point that you don’t really want to say that to girls.

**Jennifer:** No. I agree. I mean, I have a ten-year-old daughter.

**Aline:** That’s an aspect of the love you’re going to experience in your life, but there’s going to be —

**Jennifer:** I wish someone had said, “Your best friend is probably the one who’s right for you as the guy,” instead of saying, “It’s the hot guy who looks at you those ways.”

**Aline:** Well, you did say that.

**Jennifer:** The saxophone.

**Aline:** You said that to the tune of $765 million so far. And I do think, I mean, one of the reasons I was so elated when the movie was over is it’s just so rare to see a movie that tells a story about women’s lives and girl’s lives that has this other emphasis to it and doesn’t say — you know, she ends up kissing a boy. It’s not, because sometimes you have the other thing which is it’s a very empowering movie about women but they weirdly kind of end up alone and an addict somehow.

And other people go off and have boyfriends, but the Tom-boy heroine doesn’t.

**Jennifer:** Exactly. Well it’s the point of like not wanting to preach or make statements, but letting it evoke itself. And that’s the key I felt like with Frozen because anytime we — and even with Elsa like teetering on is she sexual, is she not, it’s like anytime we — if we had not given her any, too, there might have been that statement of like, “She has no sexuality. That’s a statement you’re making.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** It’s like we’re not making that statement. These are real to us. And it’s like these are real characters.

**Aline:** But that’s a great thing what you said. Another great thing for young writers to hear which is what you tried to go with was sincerity and reality.

**Jennifer:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And saying what is emotionally sincere here. And that is your guide. Not sort of thinking about it from the outside.

**Jennifer:** You can’t. And I used to say this thing, and we talk about in the room when you’re trying to sort of sift through all the notes, or fight for things. The key to me was always like you’re controlling her. Like don’t control Elsa. Don’t control Anna. Because the minute you do, the audience is gone.

Because I always feel that way. I can tell when I’m being manipulated in that the character’s motivations don’t — I don’t buy her. I don’t believe her. Or I feel like she’s turned for the sake of someone else, not for herself. And that’s the hardest thing to do, I think when you are doing something so collaboratively. And it’s to protect — your favorite moment is actually when you hear them go, someone else in the room go, “Elsa wouldn’t do that.” And you’re like, ooh, thank god! We’re here.

**John:** Jennifer, because you’re here I can actually ask you a question that was on my mind from the very start. On the podcast we’ve talked about the Bechdel test which is —

**Jennifer:** Oh yeah.

**John:** The classic statement of the Bechdel test is is there more than one female character with a name. Do these two or more characters talk to each other over the course of the film? And do they talk about something that is not a man?

**Jennifer:** Yes.

Aline : The question here, does it pass the male Bechdel. Yeah.

**John:** Your movie actually barely passes the reverse Bechdel test, which is one of the first things I can actually say.

**Jennifer:** Really.

**John:** Within your film actually as I looked through it the second time, it’s very rare to find, it’s almost impossible to find a scene that has two men with names who talk to each other.

**Aline:** Well, Snowman is a man. Olaf is a man.

**John:** Oh, I guess we count Olaf as a man.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Jennifer:** I guess if you count him.

**Aline:** Yeah, but otherwise.

**Jennifer:** Then it passes, but, yeah.

**John:** There’s a little moment at the very end of the story where they are throwing Hans and the [Briggs] and they talk about —

**Jennifer:** Yes. They talk about the brothers.

**John:** The brothers. But that’s the only time other than… — If Olaf really counts…

**Jennifer:** Do they have to be alone onscreen, because I’m like maybe the bargaining with Oaken, but Anna is there, so I don’t know if that counts.

**Aline:** She can be there. They just have to —

**John:** Or they’re talking about like going off to get Elsa, or something like that, so they’re really talking about a girl.

**Jennifer:** No, right, that’s true.

**Aline:** That’s thrilling.

**John:** So, it almost passes the reverse Bechdel test which is just fascinating. Or it fails —

**Aline:** Fails.

**John:** It fails the —

**Jennifer:** The thing I will say is that completely just happened to be that way. I have to say that even I didn’t remember. I know I’m like, I just assumed we were going to pass because we had two female leads, but I hadn’t thought about it through the whole thing until I was like, oh god, did we pass? But I never thought of the reversal.

I was happy that we were doing a film like this where it is two female leads. And there was a point where there was that concern of like is there anything in it for the boys, but people just really got around the girls and the story.

**Aline:** We also have to talk about the big snow monster.

**Jennifer:** Marshmallow. That’s his name is Marshmallow.

**Aline:** Which the kids enjoyed also. It gives you some of that.

**Jennifer:** What’s interesting about him, and this talks about sometimes you’re asked to do these weird, almost impossible things. Is there was a test done with the Snowman chasing them, and it was just a test to learn the animation. We were so late in production, I mean, this movie was so tight. There was a time where they said, “Do you think you can make that scene work? So actually use the scene, because we might not have time to animate.”

And I was like, oh god, and it was that scene.

**Aline:** Amazing. Oh my god.

**Jennifer:** So, I wrote it in and I found a way —

**Aline:** It’s like you’re juggling six balls and someone gives you a banana.

**Jennifer:** Yeah. And we had to reverse into how Marshmallow would fit and why Elsa would make him.

**Aline:** Wow.

**Jennifer:** And Olaf was a bit of an anchor with that. She’s like, if I can make that, I can make this. And if you won’t leave, I will make you leave. And so he’s kind of — we had to make him a bouncer, but then it had to be Anna who pissed him off or it would make Elsa too mean.

So, there’s all this stuff, but the funny thing was at the end of the day we had to actually go back and reanimate because we had changed Anna’s character so much that it was driving me insane. Because the first, the test version which went out at some point, and I was like, “No!” is Anna is at the edge of the cliff going, “Oooh,” you know, scared, holding her hands together. “He’s coming! Hurry. Hurry. No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.”

And that was the —

**John:** That’s a different character.

**Jennifer:** An Anna version way back. And I was like it doesn’t fit in the film. If she’s fearless she can’t do it. So, we had to reanimate it anyway. [laughs] And they did it, though. But by that point luckily we had done much better in production than we thought we were going to do. We had scheduled a lot of redo’s that —

**Aline:** That you didn’t need.

**Jennifer:** That we didn’t have to do. So, that allowed us to do it. But I remember begging for that moment I guess.

**John:** It all turned out pretty well.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**Aline:** I think we can agree.

**John:** This was an amazing conversation.

**Jennifer:** This was so fun, thank you.

**John:** This is our longest episode over.

**Jennifer:** Oh my god. See, I told you I can talk. I just —

**John:** Well, between you and Aline, we got a conversation covered. But thank you so much for coming and talking. And, Aline, thank you for being our amazing guest host.

**Aline:** I’m thrilled.

**Jennifer:** Thank you for having me. This is so much fun.

**Aline:** I hope it’s creepy that John and I have probably seen the movie twenty-five times combined. [laughs]

**John:** We have kids. That will be our excuses, that we have kids.

**Jennifer:** Thank you.

**John:** So, like all of our episodes, if you want to know about things we talked about, Frozen, oh, and thank you for putting the script for Frozen up online. That is so terrific and I’m so glad that people do that these days.

**Jennifer:** I love that, too. I love getting to read them myself, all the scripts.

**John:** So, we will have links to stuff about Frozen and the script to Frozen up on johnaugust.com.

If you are listening to us on a device that supports podcasts, like your iPhone, you can find us on iTunes. We are there. Just search for Scriptnotes. And we will be back next week with a normal episode featuring Craig Mazin.

**Aline:** I’m going to get Craig out of the closet now.

**John:** All right. I heard him stirring there a little bit. So, we’ll let him out.

**Aline:** The drugs are wearing off.

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

**Jennifer:** Thank you so much.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Jennifer Lee on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1601644/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lee_(filmmaker))
* [Frozen](http://movies.disney.com/frozen)
* The [Frozen final shooting draft](http://waltdisneystudiosawards.com/downloads/frozen-screenplay.pdf)
* Let it Go [in 25 languages](http://video.disney.com/watch/let-it-go-in-25-languages-4f06e85c30ce6b18db34b461)
* Our episodes on [Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark) and [Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/the-little-mermaid)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/not-safe-for-children).

**Disclaimer:** The following podcast contains explicit language. So, if you’re driving in the car and your kids are in the backseat, it may be a good time to switch over to NPR.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 113, the Not Safe for Children edition of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Fuck yeah!

**John:** Yeah. So, we should have prefaced this by saying our Three Page Challenges this week involve so many F-words that there was just no way we could edit this out and have it make any sense. So, while our podcast would usually try to avoid things that you don’t want to be playing in the car while your kids are in the car, this will be not one of those episodes.

**Craig:** Correct. Yes.

**John:** There will be four-letter words a-flying.

**Craig:** Sorry kids, but you got to fuck off now. [laughs]

This is so nice. I wish that every one could be like this. But it’s good that we show some restraint.

**John:** It’s actually very hard for me to swear now. It was a weird thing that happened like literally right as my daughter was born I just stopped swearing.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** And I just completely stopped. So, I can totally write it, but it’s really hard for me to say those words now. I just — I became very prudish in a way about all those things.

**Craig:** I am super good about not cursing around my kids. My son is now 12, so I’ve allowed certain words in. Occasionally when I need to impress a point upon him I will use “shit,” as in “Enough with this shit,” but I don’t F-bomb around the kids.

But the rest of my life…geez Louise, man.

**John:** A helpful tip that people taught me quite early on and I did use it a few times early on when I slipped is if you end up saying fuck by accident, you immediately say duck, truck, muck, luck. You say a bunch of words that rhyme with it and then you’re kid can’t remember which was the word that actually was the bad word.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And that actually did work for awhile. So, I still think my daughter doesn’t quite understand what the bad words are because she’s said like, “A kid in school said the S-word.” And I’m like, really? “He said stupid.”

Oh, yeah, that S-word. It’s a bad word.

**Craig:** Watch how quickly that shit goes away. [laughs] Actually I remember when my son, he was around eight when he started to become fascinated with bad words. And we were on a walk together and I said, “Listen, Jack, you can say anything, if it’s just you and me, you can say any word you want. I don’t care. I’m cool with any word. It’s all about context.”

And he said, “Well, there’s one word that I saw and I want to say it but I’m nervous.” And I’m like, “Go ahead, just say it.”

He goes, “I’ll whisper it in your ear.” I said okay. And he said, “Ash-hole.” And I’m like, “No, you pronounced it…You’re stupid.”

**John:** I was probably in second and or third grade and my mom and dad would watch football. And I don’ t know if that’s Sunday evening or Monday Night Football, anyway, they were watching some evening football game. And I was watching sort of halfway from the kitchen and whenever there would be like a great play my mom would say, “Hot damn!” And whenever something would go horribly wrong she’d go, “Shit!”

And so I saw like some big play happen, and so I go, “Hot shit!”

**Craig:** [laughs] Ah! I still see you today at your current age watching football and just bizarrely blurting out, “Hot shit!”

**John:** It might happen. I can follow football. I actually do understand how football works. I don’t find it tremendously enjoyable, but I will watch a football game.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be totally honest with you and all the people who listen. You know I’m an enormous baseball fan, huge baseball dork.

**John:** Do you enjoy watching the game?

**Craig:** Love watching baseball, whether it’s on TV or at the stadium, and I know enough of the rules where I could responsibly umpire youth baseball if I needed to. I don’t love football. I just don’t. I’m cool, I’ll watch a game, it’s exciting, but I don’t have the football gene that just about everybody else seems to have.

I certainly don’t have the soccer gene. That’s like, uhh, what the hell is that about?

**John:** It’s like a lot of running.

**Craig:** It’s just running.

**John:** So, one of the reasons why today’s episode can have a lot of vulgar language in it is we actually have a list presented to us by Diablo Cody who is a woman who writes a lot of great dialogue that is sometimes vulgar. So, we want to talk about that, but we also have three Three Page Challenges that even the titles are vulgar.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fun. I’m excited.

**John:** Let’s get started.

For whatever reason this has become the month of, “Hey, you’re a screenwriter! Make a list!”

**Craig:** Yeah, what’s going on?

**John:** I don’t know what this is. Honestly, so I did a thing for Vulture, which has hosted a lot of these lists — vulture.com. When Frankenweenie was coming out they asked me to do a diary of like the things I was following. So, I think it’s one of those things where like PR people will interface with Vulture and say like, “Hey, we’ve got a screenwriter,” and Vulture says, “Make us a list.”

**Craig:** Right. Make us a list.

**John:** And you give them a list.

**Craig:** But I feel like there was, whatever the first list was, was it Gilroy’s list?

**John:** That was the one that sort of broke this off. I think so.

**Craig:** Then I just think everybody else goes, “Oh, now we need a list from a screenwriter. Get me a screenwriter to do the list because it got a lot of clicks.”

**John:** Yes. Well, that’s the thing about screenwriters is we can write things. And sometimes they’re amusing or helpful. And as opposed to if you wanted to ask a director to make a list, or an actor.

**Craig:** Right. I just feel like all these sites basically copy each other.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh, lists. But this was a decent list I have to say. She did a good job.

**John:** This was her list and this is why I think it was useful. Diablo Cody, “Seven Things No One Tells You About Being a Top Screenwriter.” And this is a useful thing to think about, because we often talk about sort of like breaking in as a screenwriter or sort of what that experience is of going from a screenwriter that no one has ever heard of, to being someone that might be employed.

Well, Diablo Cody is that rare situation where she’s actually a screenwriter people have heard of.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because of Juno and because, I think, of her —

**Craig:** Her background. Her name.

**John:** Her background. She had a great story. I mean, she was an interesting person to put on a talk show and have talk about her movie. And that was an amazing thing. I think she broke a lot of ground for not just women screenwriters, but screenwriters overall. It’s like, “Oh, people write movies.” So, that was a thing we can definitely credit to Diablo Cody.

She also had to deal with the backlash against that for having a cool name and being known with a certain kind of dialogue and all that stuff. But, I’ve always liked Diablo, I’ve always liked her movies, and I like this list.

**Craig:** She’s a cool person.

**John:** She’s just kind of really cool.

**Craig:** She is. And you know me — I default to hating everyone. And I’m constantly walking around full of anger. She’s actually really cool. I’m not good friends with her or anything, but I met her a couple of times and we emailed and such and I just thought that she was a very thoughtful, smart person and smart and thoughtful take me so far, honestly.

**John:** I had an awkward conversation with Diablo Cody at Dana Fox’s, one of Dana Fox’s birthday parties. Dana Fox is a mutual friend. And I had just seen Young Adult that day and so I wanted to — I saw Diablo across the other side of this pool and it’s like I want to go tell Diablo Cody that I really liked her movie, that I just saw it. But I didn’t realize that she actually had some challenging interactions with the whole making of the movie, the way that you can be happy that a movie exists, but also be sort of frustrated by things.

**Craig:** Uh-uh.

**John:** And so as I tried to tell her that I saw and really liked her movie, she wasn’t in the right space to hear it. So, I ended up sort of feeling like an asshole for bringing up this thing which she didn’t want to have brought up.

**Craig:** You felt like an ash-hole?

**John:** I felt like an ash-hole. But let’s take a look at what Diablo wrote in Vulture. The first point is, “You will be held accountable for your words. Writers drink, and therefore we often exhibit poor judgment. In 2007, when Juno came out, people were wearing rhinestone-embellished trucker caps and I was making bad decisions, too. I said a lot of stupid things in interviews because I figured no one was paying attention — who cares about screenwriters, generally?”

Oh, this brings up a topic from last week…

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** …in which I mentioned a screenwriter whose decisions to portray himself on a blog were not maybe the best ones.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** But we’re not even going to say his name because he asked us to never mention his name again. And you know what? I will respect that wish.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s too busy mentioning his own name. He doesn’t have time for other people mentioning his name. [laughs] So funny.

**John:** Diablo says, “But my big mouth got me into trouble countless times. As a ‘visible’ writer, you have to learn to conduct yourself like an actor.” That’s really good advice. “Say what you’ve been coached to say. Don’t talk shit about anyone. Behind closed doors, I’m still a drunk train wreck, but in interviews, I try to channel Sandra Bullock or someone else the public finds charming.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good advice. Essentially like be a better version of yourself. And when I have to do press, and I had to do a lot of press for Big Fish these last couple weeks, I am just sort of a better version of myself. I’m the version of myself that communicates the ideas that I want to see portrayed in print and not any of the other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. What it comes down to is what your priority is when you’re talking about your work with members of the press, is your priority you or is your priority the project? And for adults, the priority is always the project. It doesn’t matter what I’ve experienced or what I think about anybody. When I talk — I became very aware of it when we were doing press for the Hangover Part II because there was just an enormous amount of press interest. And there had also been a bunch of controversy.

The Mel Gibson thing in particular was a big controversy. And I was very aware when I was talking to the press that it wasn’t innocent. That they were looking for something that also anything I said, if I should happened to say something about some actor or something, it was going to be a story. And I don’t want — the point is it’s not about anything other than the project.

Here’s the point of press — sell tickets. That’s it.

**John:** Yes. Done.

**Craig:** Bingo. Period. That’s that. If you’re talking to the press and you honestly think that they care about you, or your life, or any of that baloney, well maybe they do, but that’s not why you’re there talking to them.

So, I think that this is good advice. There is that wonderful scene from Bull Durham where you kind of get the rules of how to talk about your team and how to talk about a game. And you just stay positive and upbeat without being boring. It’s not hard.

**John:** Very true. Her second point, “You will be a big deal for about ten seconds. Since I ‘broke through’ (ugh) six years ago, countless younger, funnier, smarter writers have flocked to Hollywood and TOOK MY JERB.”

**Craig:** Jerb!

**John:** Jerb! “That’s the nature of this business. Just ask any of the actresses who were on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue in the nineties. Believe me, they all want to murder Emma Stone right now. You will be replaced. Keep your head down and work as much as you can.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Boy, that’s a really…

**John:** That’s a nice specific example.

**Craig:** Well, and it is because I actually had a conversation with an actress a few months ago and that was exactly what she said. She just went on about Emma Stone. I’m like, “You’ve got to calm down.” I mean, listen, you know, it’s like: shit happens.

It’s funny. You’ve had your ten seconds. I remember when Go came out. I remember your name and I remember you having just notoriety. I’ve never had ten seconds. I’m like that guy, [laughs], you know, I’m the overnight success that takes 17 years, you know. So, I’ve been kind of lucky. I’ve ducked that whole thing.

**John:** Yeah. And specifically if you’re known for being a unique iconoclastic writer with a voice, that’s great, and that will still be your voice. The challenge is there will be the next iconoclastic writer with a voice and that spotlight will shift over to them. And that doesn’t mean that what you were doing is wrong, but that will be — the spotlight will go over to that next person.

And in some ways because you’re known has having a specific, distinctive voice, the next time you do something with that specific, distinctive voice, they’re going to be judging you based on that. And some people are going to have their hackles up for that, which certainly happened with Young Adult, or I’m sorry, actually with Jennifer’s Body right after that. Everyone went in looking for, “Oh, it’s the Diablo Cody movie and it’s going to have this feel to it.” And when it did, but it didn’t, that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And, granted, maybe we’re speaking to a very narrow audience at this point of writers who are either on the verge of being big deals or writers who will one day be big deals, but the truth is there is no such thing.

When she says, “You will be a big deal for about ten seconds,” what she really means is you will be dubbed a big deal for about ten seconds.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But we ourselves aren’t big deals.

**John:** Uh-uh.

**Craig:** Our writing is a big deal. Let the writing, let the work be your diplomat and your ambassador. You don’t have to talk. It’s not that important. You know?

**John:** Well, I think it would actually be great, because most screenwriters won’t have the Diablo Cody experience where they have this giant spotlight on them, it’s worth generalizing sort of overall if you’re actor, or if you’re actress, if you are a musician — whatever you are it is to recognize that if you find yourself in that moment of spotlight is to recognize that you are in a spotlight but that spotlight will not always be there. And that’s going to be okay. But just don’t —

**Craig:** Don’t make it about the spotlight. That’s for sure.

**John:** No. Let that spotlight be the thing that lets you do the next thing that you really want to do rather than just, “Oh my god, I’m in a spotlight.”

**Craig:** Frankly, you should be paranoid and suspicious about any spotlights. That’s my position. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like people looking at me.

**John:** Number three. “You can make money doing things nobody knows about.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Which is true.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** We’ve talked about this on the show. A lot of the actual profession of screenwriting is not the things that have your name on them. It’s helping out on other projects that need a writer to do a certain amount of heavy lifting on it. And that’s — most of the money I’ve made probably is on projects that either didn’t get made or if they did get made don’t have my name on them because I was just there doing a little bit of work.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And that’s a thing that’s different than any actor. No actor is sort of —

**Craig:** That’s right!

**John:** Well, animated movies, I guess, you sort of don’t have your whole face and personality in those movies.

**Craig:** Yeah, but they promote you though.

**John:** They promote it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, for us there is a lot of that. And you should actually find a way to enjoy your anonymous contribution to things. I recently did some work on a movie that did very well, but nowhere near what would be required for credit. I didn’t ask for credit, or try for it I guess I should say. And I saw a couple of tweets or things where people are like, “This is a funny movie. It’s so much better than that crap that Craig Mazin writes.” [laughs]

I’m like, well, I worked on that too. [laughs]. You know, but you can’t say anything about it! So, you’re like, okay.

**John:** Yeah. A disagreement I had with Aline Brosh McKenna, which I mean, next time she’s on the show we can talk about it more, is the question to what degree do you acknowledge working on another movie.

**Craig:** I’m on Aline’s side on this debate.

**John:** I know you’re on Aline’s side. And we won’t get into the deepest part of that discussion, because I think it’s a better three-way discussion, but just to acknowledge the reality that like other people have worked on movies that have my name on them and I’ve worked on other people’s movies that have their name on them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s no shame or terribleness in that. That’s actually just the nature of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s good that Diablo acknowledges this, too. Number four, “You have to say no to people constantly.” Well, that’s a great position to be in is to be able to say no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that is also one of the frustrating things I encountered is that sometimes there will be a project that is really tantalizing, but the opportunity cost of doing that project is something else that I would much rather do. And so a person you might want to be in business with and do work with, but you’re going to have to say no. And sometimes you hurt people’s feelings by saying no.

**Craig:** No question. And this is where you start to feel the existential dread of choosing because it’s so hard. And we’ve all made mistakes. We’ve chosen, or not chosen, the wrong things.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** We have all heard the terrible cautionary tales of people that turned down a thing that became the thing that made $100 million for that person. And they went and shot themselves in a room somewhere. And, of course, as she says, “My 20-year-old self would hit the roof if she knew I turned something down.”

And my middle class Staten Island inner child freaks out every time he says no. I’m so scared. But I have to say no. I have to. And it is a — that’s a skill that takes a lot of time and a lot of balls.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I passed on something that became a very big franchise and I passed on it dismissively, like, “Oh, I don’t want it. That’s not a movie I want to make. I don’t want to do anything like that.” And it became really big. And I did have that moment of sort of, “Oh, I made a huge disastrous choice.” But then actually as I talked to the people who worked it, it was kind of a nightmare. So, I don’t know that I necessarily would have wanted to be involved with it.

If I put myself in the middle of that nightmare situation and how hard it was to get that movie made as a writer, I don’t know that I would be feeling that it was a good outcome. So, maybe I was lucky.

**Craig:** In the end you can’t hang yourself on the noose of your choices. You choose what you choose. We’re not perfect. We’re going to make mistakes. But, it’s more likely in a weird way that you’re going to make a mistake saying yes to something just because it’s in front of you than you will by saying no to something.

**John:** Yeah. You take a project because it’s a dangling paycheck. And you don’t realize that it’s going to eat up three years of your life and be misery.

**Craig:** I’ve been there. [laughs]

**John:** Ooh! I’ve been there. I’ve been there for sure.

The classic sort of fortune cookie advice here is: only a fool trips on what is behind him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you keep regretting the things you didn’t do, well, that’s not going to be helpful.

**Craig:** It’s not going be helpful. You’re absolutely right. And the truth is, you know, people, when we start these things we are starting them with so much optimism and passion and perhaps a huge dollop of self-delusion. Everybody looks at it after the fact and says, “Well, obviously this person took this job to get paid. Why else would you take it?” Well, because when I took it it was going to be good. Yeah.

**John:** It was pretty and great. There were different directors. And different actors.

**Craig:** Right. Stuff happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I grant you it looks bad now…

**John:** Yeah, and if we were allowed to write that full history of like the day after something is released, we could write the real history of what happened, that would be great.

**Craig:** That would be pretty awesome.

**John:** It would be great, but you would burn every bridge doing it.

**Craig:** It would be done. Yeah.

**John:** Her fifth point is that, “Meetings get way better. I have friends who are lesser-known writers, and they get very nervous before a pitch because they feel like they’re in service of the people that they are pitching to. Whereas sometimes when I go in and pitch, it’s like being an honored guest. They actually seem interested in what I have to say. People don’t look out the window. Also, you get to park right in front of the studio instead of having to go way off to P6.”

**Craig:** [laughs] That is…

**John:** Again, so specific and so very true. When they make — at Sony they make you park in the garage and hike all the way in. Or for me, like if I have a meeting at Thalberg but they make me park across the lot in that weird complex…

**Craig:** Oh yeah, no, that’s not cool.

**John:** That’s not cool at all.

**Craig:** You know that you screwed up.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re not in that parking lot…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Meetings do get so much better. And we’ve talked on the show about how when you first start out it’s like the water bottle tour of Los Angeles and you just go and have general meetings.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then you go and you have pitches. And some of them are great and a lot of them are just terrible. And it’s honestly kind of not what you’re doing, it’s how interested they are in you as a person. How excited they are to have you in the room. And, god, when they really want you there it just changes everything.

**Craig:** No question. And once you get to a certain level as a screenwriter and you’re earning a certain amount of money, you’re not having meetings haphazardly with people. If they’re sitting down and meeting with you it means somebody somewhere made a decision to spend some money. And it’s business already. It’s already a different kind of meeting. That’s all true and it is a helpful thing.

Unfortunately I’m not sure that it’s, [laughs], I just don’t know if there’s any advice inherent to it other than just keep going and just know that one day it might — I don’t even, when she says meetings get way better, I think she should have rephrased to, “Meetings might get way better.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or they may never get way better and you might not get way better, or you might not get more interesting to them. But.

**John:** Well, I think all of this is under the umbrella of, “Hey, you’re now suddenly a hot screenwriter.”

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That’s under that umbrella. Yes, if you’re a hot screenwriter, meetings do get much, much better.

**Craig:** I will say that when I noticed the syndrome of meetings getting better, I made a conscious decision to not let that change anything about the way I approach the meetings. In other words, don’t skate. Because I talk to these executives and producers all the time and one of their big gripes is that they make huge commitments to big shot screenwriters and they feel like sometimes those big shot screenwriters are kind of taking that money and acting like, “Oh god, this is payback for all the times that I had to sweat and bleed and I got underpaid.”

And my attitude is I do the same job no matter what. I don’t care whether you’re kissing my ass or I’m kissing your ass. I have a job to do. I’m going to prepare. And I’m going to have something to say. Nothing has changed about the way I approach the meeting.

**John:** The only thing I would say that has changed about the way I approach the meeting is when they are steering me on a path that is full of rocks, and danger, and badness, I am much more upfront about explaining in a tactful way why that’s not going to work, because I don’t have to tap dance for you in a way.

**Craig:** Yes. That is true.

**John:** But respectful. Respectful.

**Craig:** Well, respectful. And I think also that they’re more inclined to listen to you because maybe you’re right. [laughs] Whereas when you start out you couldn’t possibly be right.

**John:** You could not possibly be right. You have no idea. And you’re lucky to be in the room.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** Her sixth point, which is, again, so true. “Everyone you know will suddenly aspire to be a screenwriter.” And that I definitely found was true. And, granted, this is Los Angeles where everyone basically is a screenwriter, whether they’ve written something or not something, everyone is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. But it’s particularly true when you’ve had some measure of success and they can point to and it’s like, “Well, why do you get that success and why don’t I get that success,” in a way that doesn’t hold true for a director, for example, because a director could point to like “this is the work I did” and not everyone thinks they could be a director.

**Craig:** I have to be honest. I haven’t noticed this at all.

**John:** You haven’t?

**Craig:** Maybe because a lot of my friends were writers anyway and a lot of my friends are writers, so they do the job. But I didn’t notice that other people that I knew suddenly… — Maybe I’m just so uninspiring. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Like everybody saw me do it and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to be like that idiot.”

**John:** Yeah. I think looking at it from Diablo’s point of view, here is a woman who was not known as a screenwriter who suddenly was a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This was really her first project. So, suddenly all these other people sort of like would, you know, her orthodontist would say, “Oh, I wrote a script.” And I guess because I always was a screenwriter and was always sort of a public screenwriter with johnaugust.com, I sort of always saw that more. So, I was always around those people who aspired to be screenwriters.

But I definitely find that even in normal life, like meeting people’s extending families, suddenly that Uncle Tom says, “I’ve got a script I wrote and what do you think the odds are of this?” I’m like I have no idea what the odds are here in Missouri.

**Craig:** I’ve never been so much more thankful for my family now than I was yesterday. I mean, nobody has bothered me about that. I mean, they’ll do the usual — there’s a script and I have a great idea for a script. That everybody does. But no one has come up to me and said, “I’ve written a script.” I would just…oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy. Her seventh point I have no experience with. “The guy who refused to date you in college comes asking for a job.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** No, that didn’t happen.

**Craig:** Ah, no. We don’t have jobs. I don’t know who these guys are. What jobs would we have to offer?

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. I guess if you were like a TV — well, actually, she did run a TV show.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. The Tara show, right.

**John:** That Tara show. And that is an absolutely true thing. When you shift from being a person who is employed to a person who is an employer, that is…ugh.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, look —

**John:** That’s one of those uncomfortable things about being a TV showrunner.

**Craig:** It is. Even as a guy that just does movies, I get frequent emails from crew that I’ve worked with just sort of check-in emails, like what’s going on. Because everybody is looking for work, I get it. But I’ve never had, well, first of all, no one refused to date me in college. Well, yeah, they might have refused. Just saying no, absolutely no, is that a refusal?

**John:** Well, basically no one who refused to date Craig in college is still alive.

**Craig:** Correct. [laughs] Well, they’re alive in my mind and they’re alive in a certain sense.

**John:** They’re alive in the hearts of the people who miss them. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** But, no, they’re all dead.

**Craig:** Yeah! Big time. Well, they fucked up.

**John:** Exactly. They had a choice and Ted Cruz is running for President.

**Craig:** Oh, goddamn it! So, you know, we haven’t talked about Ted, have we on the show?

**John:** I think we did talk about Ted Cruz.

**Craig:** Oh okay. I just want to be clear just so people understand —

**John:** That Craig is the reason why the government is shut down.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much.

**John:** If you had been a better friend to Ted Cruz back in Princeton.

**Craig:** Well, no, I made the mistake in the other direction. I wasn’t awful enough. I should have killed him. Hopefully this doesn’t trigger a Secret Service issue here.

**John:** So, let’s clarify that. In no way are you trying to threaten the life of a US senator?

**Craig:** In no way. I’m simply saying that maybe I should have 25 years ago. [laughs] That’s all. You know, in a kind of time travel way. I currently am an incredible peaceful individual who does not wish or inflict violence on anyone. And, you know, I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99% of why I hate him is just his personality.

If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only 1% less.

**John:** Wow. That’s a strong indictment of a man’s character.

**Craig:** He’s an awful, awful, awful person. He’s awful. Anyway…

**John:** Resolved. I’m wondering if you’re going to email Stuart in about 15 minutes to ask him —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No?

**Craig:** No, because look, everybody knows he’s an awful person now. Everybody.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** And I think I’ve been clear, again, [laughs], for the record, for the government, because I respect and love my United States government. I am not interested in committing violence or inspiring anyone to commit violence against anyone for any reason. Don’t be violent people.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Vote this dude out of office. How about that, Texas?

**John:** Perfect. What a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s also a good idea is for us to take a look at some of our Three Page Challenges. So, we have three of them this week. And I love doing Three Page Challenges, and we love doing them so much that we’re actually going to be doing some of them during the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, maybe before we get into that, let’s go through our Austin schedule because people may not know all the different things we are doing at Austin.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Do you know your session?

**Craig:** I…oh…I know…

**John:** I’ll look it up while I talk to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know of at least two of them. I know I’m doing the live podcast with you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I know I’m doing something that I would love to see people show up for because it’s pretty cool. I’ve done this class at USC a couple of times and it always goes over well. It’s basically a lecture on a different way of approaching structuring a screenplay and structuring it around character and theme and finding your plot as a function of those things rather than the other way around. And I use Pixar a lot as a kind of touchstone.

If you do show up to this, bring a pad and a pen because I’m going to be talking fast and saying a lot, but it’s very specific and it’s very craft-oriented, and it’s very practical. So, hopefully I’ll see people at that.

**John:** Great. So, here is my schedule for the Austin Film Festival. I arrive at Austin October 24. My first session is early in the morning at 8:45 on Friday the 25th. I have a session called “The Unreliable Narrator,” which should be good.

**Craig:** That is good.

**John:** Talking about screenplays that have unreliable narrators. At 11:30 on that Friday I will be doing “Deconstructing Alien,” which is going to be great.

**Craig:** Oh cool.

**John:** Because I originally thought of signing up for “Deconstructing Aliens,” which is my favorite movie of all time, that I know inside out, but I also love Alien, so I’m delighted to go through a conversation on how Alien works.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** At 1pm you and I are together for a Three Page Challenge. And so this will be a live session with a Three Page Challenge. We will have two of the finalists at the Austin Film Festival presenting their first three pages. And one of our listeners will also be joining us for their three pages.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, just like at the Writers Guild Foundation session we will be talking through what we found, but we will be bringing up the writer to talk with the writer, or writers, about what they did and what they think they might do next.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We love those sessions. If people are interested in reading the samples for that, I think rather than having a handout this time there will be some sort of URL at johnaugust.com that you will be able to just read it on your phone, or your iPad, or whatever else you want to read it in the session or before the session.

**Craig:** And have we talked about our special guest that we’re going to be talking with?

**John:** Yes. But that’s the next day.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s the next day. Okay.

**John:** Our special guest at the live, the big live Scriptnotes is going to be Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And it’s on Saturday.

**Craig:** That’s going to be great. And also I believe that I am hosting the Writers Guild “Welcome to Austin” party Thursday night.

**John:** Holy cow! Yeah, I did that last year.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you tried to silence the crowd for me and it was not possible.

**Craig:** No, so we’ll see. Maybe I’ll have you try and silence the crowd for me this time. Nobody wants to hear. I mean, the funny this is the Writers Guild puts on these events and they always say, “Can you just say some kind of union-y thing at some point so people know.” And like, of course, absolutely. But you realize everyone here is drunk and they don’t care?

**John:** Yeah. You should just stand up on the bar and shot, “Union! Union! Union!” That’s basically, just Sally Field it.

**Craig:** I’m going to Norma Rae the shit out of this. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] My final session, god, they have me for five session at Austin.

**Craig:** Come on! Too much.

**John:** Too much.

My last session is with Daniel Wallace, the novelist of Big Fish, and we will be talking about book, to screen, to musical.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And that journey in Big Fish.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, that’s going to be my fun weekend in Austin. So, please join Craig and me for especially that if you’re in Austin or would like to come to Austin. I think there are still tickets available for those sessions.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great event and there is just a ton of amazing screenwriters there. People that do the job, talking about the job, it’s remarkable.

**John:** Yes. And Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** And Rian Johnson!

**John:** Great screenwriters…and Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** And Rian Johnson, exactly.

**John:** Who will be our special guest for the live episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** He’s adorable, by the way. I don’t know if you people know. Rian is just the cutest little Swedish thing.

**John:** Yeah. He’s essentially a giant baby.

**Craig:** He’s a giant baby. There was a time when Derek Haas and I and Rian, I think, the three of us just did an email chain where kept finding pictures on the internet of people that like look Rian Johnson. And it was amazing. You know, like Oliver from The Brady Bunch, all the way to the weird lead dwarf in Freaks. I mean, his face — he is the man of a thousand faces. It’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. Let us go to our Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The first one let’s talk a look at is by David Liberman. And his script is called Batshit.

**Craig:** Batshit! You want to do this one?

**John:** I’ll happily do Batshit. So, we start with a quote over black. It says, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” It’s by William Congreve from 1697.

We fade in. We start at a Midwestern University. We’ll ultimately learn this is Ohio. There are cars in a parking lot outside of a college gymnasium. It’s Greek Week Sock Hop. We’re in Ohio. It’s 1957.

The music comes to a stop. Flames rise along one side of the walls. College students race out of the building. And the one that we’re following most is Jimmy, who gets into his ’53 Plymouth Cranbook convertible and shrieks, or gets out of the parking lot.

We hear this “SHREEE! The shriek of a bat!” He’s shaking with fear. He’s burning rubber trying to get out of this college campus. He’s on the main road. He’s heading into town. And he’s saying, he’s screaming, not really clear to whom, “I said I was sorry baby. I had no idea she was your sorority sister. It’s just that Betty and I are in love. Why can’t you be happy for us, instead of being so damn selfish?!”

But we still hear these “Shree! Shree!” and these sort of bat sounds. And as we get to a residential street he stops the car and suddenly, “Whoosh!” He screams like a girl as he’s lifted out of the driver’s seat by some force we can’t see. And he’s hauled into the night sky. A biting sound. A crunch. And then Jimmy’s body splats down. And that is the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Craig Mazin, you start.

**Craig:** Well, so, I mean, this could go a hundred different ways I suppose, although in my mind it was kind of like a quasi-spoofish Little Shop of Horrors-y kind of thing about a bat — woman who is really jealous and some new guy is going to meet her and have to deal with, you know, my girlfriend is batshit, so to speak.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, I had no real issues with, I mean, the quote at the beginning is one tone and what we see next is a completely different tone. Sometimes you’ll see this where they’ll do a super serious quote and then the next quote will be something like, “That bitch is nuts,” or something like that to kind of say this is the tone. Remember, these first pages are teaching us how to watch the movie. So, I was a little confused by that.

The chase is fine. I like the way we’re using sound to imply that something unseen is chasing him. My biggest issue ultimately is that this is playing a little bit like one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that goes on too long. We get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We get that there is a girl and that he cheated on her. And so the dialogue here just isn’t that funny. You know, it’s a bit sitcom-y. It’s a bit soft. So, it got a little broad and the joke of, “Oh, geez, oh god, I’m saying the wrong thing. Please stop chasing me,” it just wasn’t that funny. But I like that it committed, that the scene committed to her picking him up and eating him and killing him.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, the tone of kind of spoof horror here is nicely laid out. I would just maybe either shorten or sharpen up this dialogue. Give Jimmy a little bit more of a character other than just babbling sitcom guy.

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s very much a classic kind of horror or horror-comedy cold open where you establish a character, you establish a monster, and that character is going to get killed. And that’s great and fine. And from page three I felt like we could go almost anywhere. We could stay in the same time period, or we could jump forward to present day and she’s still around. There’s a lot of different ways we could go.

But it’s a classic cold open that doesn’t necessarily have to do much with the rest of the film.

I really agree with you about juxtaposing another quote to give us a better sense of tone, because “Hell hath no fury,” great, but if the second quote was like, “Bitch is a gold-digger…”

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** Or something like that. Like something else that just completely sets where we’re at would really help us out here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I also agree with you in terms this felt long, but to me it felt long not just because the dialogue wasn’t maybe as sharp as it could be, but because I didn’t see Jimmy making any rational choices. He’s just driving away in a convertible. And if he really does see that there’s this woman following him, this bat-woman following him, which he seems to understand that she’s behind him, or she’s around, he’s not making a choice that could possibly save him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you want to give him some hope or some chance. So, while I was delighted to see him killed, I just wanted to see him make some rational choice that could possibly save him, like you know, driving into the car wash and like the sound is gone. And then he drives out and the thing gets him, something to sort of maybe defend himself or establish the logic to some degree in this world.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And there’s a problem with this first line. “Oh geez! What did I do?” He knows what he did. He’s about to tell us what he did. I mean, there’s another way of imagining this where this guy is driving away and he’s looking backwards and he’s scared. And there’s a distant sound, but he plays it serious and he’s not talking at all. And he’s trying to get away from something and pulls his car in behind and thinks he’s safe. And then suddenly there’s that noise and a shadow. And he says, “I said I was sorry, baby! I had no idea she was your sorority sister.”

And then he’s yanked up in the air and eaten. So, the reveal and the button to the scene prior to him being eaten is, oh, he knows this bat and he cheated on her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, something to give that idea a little more push

**John:** Let’s look at the opening image here which is that Sock Hop and then it’s burning and it’s on fire. That doesn’t match very well with the action that’s going to be happening after this point. Like, I don’t think of a bat setting fire to things. And so to me if it is about his infidelity it should be either leaving the girl’s house or some other thing that sort of establishes that he just had sex with some girl and that’s what this thing is coming after him for.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Tat feels like a more direct tie in for where I think this is going in terms of this is a vengeful woman because of this. Burning down a whole gymnasium isn’t specific enough to sort of what the sin was.

**Craig:** Yeah. It feels more Carrie than Vampire Lady, or Bat Lady. Agreed.

**John:** And Carrie is a great thing to bring up, because Carrie classically is that gym fire. So, if you’re going to reference it in a way you’ve got to acknowledge it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or do something different.

Let’s talk about the first line of setup for this Midwestern university. “Chevys, Fords, Buicks and an assortment of other cars litter a parking lot in front of a college-sized gymnasium.” Well, that was frustrating to me because you’re just giving us a bunch of brands and saying they litter the parking lot. Uh, a college size gymnasium. But you already said a Midwestern university. I just feel like, you know, I don’t know that that’s helping us out there very much.

**Craig:** You could just go to a banner above the entrance reads Greek Week Sock Hop.

**John:** Exactly. And so then rock ‘n roll music from inside the walls. And then establish the parking lot. If we’re going to start with this image, start with a banner then give us the campus, give us the parking lot. And then give us people running out. So, midway through this first page, “COLLEGE STUDENTS scurry out of the burning gymnasium, screaming and crying. Mass hysteria!”

Eh.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Within minutes, the entire gymnasium is engulfed in flames.” Within minutes?

**Craig:** [laughs] Set your watches, folks!

**John:** Indeed. We have three minutes here. We’re going to just sort of watch things start to burn. Oh, it’s burning a little bit more. Now, it’s burning a little bit more.

**Craig:** Actually would be awesome if, you know, like this very commercial movie just took this weird art moment to just watch a building burn for three minutes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That might be good.

That whole sentence should just go away.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It’s hurting us here.

**Craig:** Yes. Agreed.

**John:** Bottom of page one. “The engine roars to life.” I would capitalize that roar. Just that sense of sound effect.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** “…which intern powers on the radio.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s the weirdest typo. I mean, I was going to say something but I’m like, I don’t know. It’s the weirdest typo in the world. I don’t even know how it happened.

**John:** No, “which in turn powers on the radio.” First off, “powers on” isn’t the right choice. But it’s written here “intern,” like intern, like Apu the intern.

**Craig:** Right. So, how do you think, I mean, there’s a whole Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the making of this movie where that typo, the story of that typo…

**John:** My thought is that in typing this sentence he just didn’t put a space between “in” and “turn.”

**Craig:** And then he spelled checked.

**John:** And spell checked. Or it auto corrected to —

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Yeah. That’s my hunch. But that’s why you need to human proof these things.

**Craig:** Guys, it’s just three pages. I mean, if you can’t read through three pages and pick out one of those…

**John:** On page two, “The Plymouth burns rubber. It kicks up a cloud of dust as it turns onto a…” You can’t burn rubber and click up a cloud of dust. That stopped me because I don’t think you can actually do that. If you’re burning rubber than you’re on pavement. Kicking up a cloud of dust, you’re on a dirt road.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s correct. And we have some extra spacing here. I mean, I don’t know, maybe he’s using Main Road and Plymouth Cranbook as slug lines.

**John:** But Plymouth Cranbook is a terrible slug line.

**Craig:** It’s really bad. Yeah.

**John:** Because I think like, wait, is that a city? Is that a place?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** Doesn’t Plymouth Cranbook sound like some quaint little village in the Northeast?

**Craig:** Yeah. It does. And I was confused by the corn gag. I’m not real sure how that works where, you know, again, you just have to think like, okay, so on the day there’s going to be some grip somewhere trying to throw corn into the car while… — It just doesn’t work that.

**John:** Yeah. I get what he was trying to go for. Basically, if you’re driving through a corn field really, really fast, like it’s going to —

**Craig:** Scatters.

**John:** Everywhere, scatter, and including some that are going to hit him in the head. Like hitting him in the head is more fun than just landing in the car.

**Craig:** I don’t know how corn hits you in the head if you’re in a car.

**John:** No, he’s in a convertible.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then the hood. I don’t know. I guess maybe the corn hits him in the head. It’s fine. All that was fine. I just think that basically what ended up happening was we kind of were in a slightly boring car chase between a guy and somebody that he was talking to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think ultimately the point that you made earlier is the most important one. And that is he’s not making any choices here that are interesting.

**John:** Yeah. One last idea about visualizing this is right now we’re staying in his POV this whole time. At a certain point it’s probably going to be useful to cut to her POV and just be bearing down upon the car.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea. A little bat vision. Yeah.

**John:** That would probably help. But I would say that I’m intrigued by the idea of this and I definitely would want to read the next couple pages to see what’s going to happen next. That’s the nice thing about a cold open is you can sort of go anywhere after this and I’m curious what would happen next.

**Craig:** Me too. I think it could be a fun John Waters-y kind of deal.

**John:** Cool. You get to pick the next one.

**Craig:** Oh, let’s do, I’m going to go with, well, it could Bass Reeves, Lawman Outlaw, or it could be Bass (pronounced Base) Reeves, Lawman Outlaw.

**John:** Oh, I didn’t’ think about it that way.

**Craig:** Which way did you read it?

**John:** I read it Bass.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s go with Bass. I mean, that’s probably closer to true. Bass Reeves, Lawman Outlaw, written by Billie Jean VK. Based on the true story of Bass Reeves. So, he’s got a real name. Hopefully I’m not mispronouncing it.

So, we open, we’re exterior, Indian Territory Trail. And a couple of men are on horses. One is Bass Reeves, 34, described as a tall Negro wearing a wide brimmed hat. And then his partner, James Mershon, 30 and white. And they’re talking about their hats and about keeping from getting wet. And then it starts to rain on them. They start riding their horses off to escape the rain and they ride towards a clearing with trees and suddenly somebody is shooting at them. Pierces Bass’s hat brim. Whizzes by Mershon, the partner.

Mershon loses sight of both guys. He’s now on the grand. He’s inside the trees. And then, boom, boom, shots are firing from a mysterious shadowy figure. He keeps ducking and firing back. Uh, he actually comes really close to this guy. The two of them are sort of like face to face and right when Mershon is about to be killed, boom, his shadow man attacker falls to the ground dead. And Bass has shot him dead. Picks up his hat. And Bass says to Mershon, “You waste too many bullets.”

And Mershon says, “You need a new hat.”

**John:** Yes.

Craig, I think this is our first western. I don’t recall another western.

**Craig:** No, no, we did. Remember the western where there was the supernatural element in the house that we liked?

**John:** Oh, yeah. Oh god, that was really good. Yeah, I forgot about that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was a good one.

**John:** I guess because there wasn’t a gun fight in it, so I didn’t —

**Craig:** Right. This is probably the first real like western-y western.

**John:** Yeah. And as a western-y western, I was pretty good with these pages.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** A lot here that people could learn from it and look at. So, page two and page three, nearly every line is just a single line of action. And it largely works. There were times I got a little fatigued with the single lines and would have loved, you know, a few more things together. But it really is nicely done. The blams are separate lines by themselves to give you a sense of what that is. And I got a good sense of being in a heavy rainstorm.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where you can’t really see what’s happening. And there are things firing at you. And I got a very good sense of Mershon’s perspective. And that’s the crucial thing about writing action is that it needs to show what it feels like to be a character in that moment. And I thought Billie Jean did a really nice job getting that across, what it felt like to be in that moment.

**Craig:** I agree. These were really well done pages. I thought it was a smart choice to describe Bass Reeves as a tall Negro. Because actually in my normal — and a lot of people will do this — as they read they kind of skim past these slug lines. I saw Indian Territory Trail and I’m immediately looking at hooves and getting into the imagery which is good imagery, by the way. It’s well written imagery.

But when she calls out “tall Negro” I’m like, okay, we’re in a different time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was smart of her to kind of reinforce it that way. The kind of casual clipped dialogue between these two men tells us a lot about their relationship without telling us anything. You know, they are comfortable with each other. Bass seems to be a little more confident. And he seems to be a little more alpha.

And Mershon refers to him as a “Posseman,” so that’s a little bit of a hint of a mystery. Is Bass escorting this guy as a prisoner or what? We don’t know.

The action is done well. Billie Jean takes her time to spread it out, give us nice, short, punchy things. I saw everything she wanted me to see. Maybe a little too orchestrated in terms of the cat and mouse game between the shadow man and Mershon, but by and large good stuff in there.

Here are my two suggestions. The first is that there’s a little bit of a mixture that is distracting from the beginning between first names and last names. Bass is the first name of Bass Reeves, our hero, I presume. Mershon is the last name of James Mershon, his companion. Generally speaking I try and stick to one or the other, at least in the beginning, unless there is some reason to focus in on a last name as opposed to a first name.

And then the other thing that I wanted to mention were these last two lines of dialogue. They bummed me out a little bit because they were quippy. And I see, this is my new hobby horse is quipping. I see quippiness all the time. Quipping may be the lowest form of comedy underneath puns. [laughs]

The problem with quipping is it undermines all the work you’ve done to make these people real, to make their fear real, to make us fearful for them and concerned for them. To make us think that when this man shoots another person that it matters to him in any way at all.

When we get into this quippiness we fall back into a ninety style, eh, whatevs, it’s a movie, you know? I think it’s old fashioned and I would argue against it in most cases.

**John:** I agree with you. And in a setup of a movie that doesn’t seem like it’s going to have a lot of dialogue, that moment about the hole being shot in the hat might be better with like poking a finger through the hole, sort of showing the other guy like, ah, yeah, like basically let an action show that you’re going to need a new hat rather than saying it out loud.

**Craig:** Right. Or maybe he just takes his hat off, looks at the hole, and you know, tosses hat away. It’s done. Whatever it is, this guy’s got such a cool sense to him. I’ve learned so much about Bass and he’s cool. I just didn’t want to get into quippiness.

**John:** Great. Going back to page one, a few things on the page which I thought could have been better. Right now the Fade In is over on the right hand side. You can do that, but a lot of times Fade In on the first page is over on the left. And a lot of times you just don’t bother fading in, because it’s a sort of assumed fade in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The second real paragraph. “Her head bowed against the steadily falling rain, a cloud of warm breath bursts from a sleek brown mare. ”

**Craig:** Yeah. Yoda started writing there. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. So, the noun — the subject of this sentence is at the very end, so I’m like what’s going on in this sentence. A sleek brown mare? And so then I had to go back and reread the whole sentence.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s move that subject up higher.

So, here’s the real problem I have with the setup here. You say that there’s a steadily falling rain, so then when they start talking about like, “Looks like it might rain,” I’m like, wait, it is raining? I was so confused.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** And so just get rid of that “Looks like it might rain.”

**Craig:** It’s funny, I wasn’t confused because I just skimmed that and didn’t even see it. So, I got lucky.

**John:** You got lucky.

**Craig:** I got lucky.

**John:** You got lucky that Craig didn’t read carefully.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s right.

**John:** And then on page two, a “copse of trees.” Totally valid and yet it’s just a weird — because it’s not a common thing to say, to say copse of trees twice in a row isn’t especially helpful. Also, copse feels like you’re trying to be fancy. “And dashes to the trees, or nearby trees.” Nearby may be a better word than “copse.”

**Craig:** I’m okay with copse only because I don’t mind when writers flex a little vocabulary as long as it’s not annoying me. It just didn’t annoy me. I was okay with that.

**John:** My last thing, bottom line of page three. “Both men look at the falling rain, a smirk on their face.”

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** They only have one face?

**Craig:** Yeah, well, and they shouldn’t be smirking anyway. Someone just died. They almost died. No smirking.

**John:** Yeah. So, we’ve already talked about rewriting that last moment of this scene would probably be a great thing. And so they probably won’t share a smirk.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. But, again, delighted to read some really nice pages here from Billie Jean.

**Craig:** Yeah, Billie Jean can do this. She can do this.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** And we got through that without making a single “Billie Jean is not my lover…”

**John:** Yeah, well, I did. You didn’t.

**Craig:** She’s not my lover.

**John:** No, for sure.

**Craig:** You know what she is? She’s a girl who say’s I am the one.

**John:** She’s a talented writer.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s a girl that says I’m the one.

**John:** Who the Fuck is Eli Davis?

**Craig:** Who the Fuck is Eli Davis?

**John:** Is the third script that we’re looking at today. It’s by Derek Assaff & Aviv Rubinstien.

**Craig:** Uh-uh, Aviv Rubin-Stien, exactly.

**John:** I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** Do you see what he did? He switched it up on you.

**John:** He did.

**Craig:** So strange, by the way. I’ve never seen that before.

**John:** But he spelled it that way twice. It wasn’t a mistake.

**Craig:** Clearly not.

**John:** He does know his own name.

**Craig:** He knows his name.

**John:** I will summarize this the best I can.

We fade in in a dorm room where Jackie DiGennaro, 19, smiles from ear to ear. And she is, in the voiceover from Eli Davis says, “Jackie DiGennaro. She was the one.” And the super title says: Jackie DiGennaro — The One.

We find she’s actually in a sex swing and a big hunky college senior is having sex with her. And the voiceover says, “But that’s not me,” and the title says, “Not Eli Davis.”

And then a second football player is having sex with her. And then a college professor takes off his suit and tie and starts having sex with her.

And then we realize as we keep pulling back that we’re actually on a porn set. So, a director and a cameramen, so this is “Wyld Entertainment Presents — Freshman Pooniversity 5.” The voice over continues, “I would have given anything to trade places with any one of them at that moment. Not, like, as a career choice, but, you know what? I should start earlier.”

We go back a couple years before where we see Eli Davis and Jackie, a younger version of Jackie, who are high school sweethearts. And they’re in the hall. They kiss in the hallway. They’ve never been happier. In Eli’s bedroom they don’t have sex, they’re sort of heavy petting, but they’re not actually having sex. They’re saving themselves for post-college time.

She goes off to college. We see a suburban street. The RV of the family pulls away. She’s going off to college. We’re going back to watching this porn and seeing that Jackie is in this porn. This high school girl is in porn. And our final scene of these three pages is an airplane in the present day. This is Eli Davis, now at 30, who sits beside Ibrahima Akenfinwa, a Senegalese woman I assume.

**Craig:** Guess so.

**John:** Eli says, “She called me about a month into freshman year and broke things off. Said she met someone, I don’t know. I was crushed. The imagination runs wild after something like that.” And it is our belief that this voiceover has been directed at this person.

And that is where we are at at the end of page three.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** All right, Craig Mazin, start talking.

**Craig:** Hey! Hey! Oh boy. Well, look, it’s not, the problems here are not problems of technical or writing problems. The problems here I think are problems of just not — of being weird, and not funny. They’re trying to be funny. I mean, this is a comedy, I presume.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The biggest issue is we’ve got this — we see the schmo-y guy who has been left behind by this girl. And oh my god, she’s now doing porn. By the way, the presentation of porn of itself is very old fashioned and out of date. This is not the way porn goes anymore.

But that aside, that’s a pretty crazy thing that this girl that he was a high school sweetheart with who wouldn’t let him have sex with her because she was such a good girl is now just an over-the-top porno star. And then what we seem to find out is in fact he’s just made that all up. And that, in fact, like he says, because at one point the porn thing devolves into clear fantasy where a unicorn enters and then Mahatma Gandhi is there. And he takes off his robes and Eli Davis says, “Okay, to be fair, I don’t really know if this happened, but I have my suspicions.”

What have we been watching?

**John:** Yeah. So, I misunderstood this, in fact. So, in my summary I clearly didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand that whole unicorn moment on page three, so I just assumed that it was like the porn got really, really weird, but that it actually did happen and that he was continuing this narration into the airplane traveling sequence.

I think I’m wrong. I think you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think what he’s suggesting is she broke it off with me and in my mind she ended up being this horrifying porno whore and now what happened and I’m crushed.

And here’s my problem. This is all just force-feeding me plot. I don’t know anything about this guy at all. I don’t care about him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why he’s talking to this person next to him. And even if I find out why he’s talking to this person next to him, it seems like such a crazy structured story to tell somebody that they turns out to be bullshit anyway.

I don’t know humans that do this kind of thing, where they make up this lurid tale to describe what happened to somebody after they dump you. [laughs] There are little touches that are just overly broad and clumsy, like when he says, “We knew going to different schools would be difficult, but we planned to talk every day.” The RV pulls away. A “College Bound” sign hangs on the back. I mean…

**John:** Does not exist.

**Craig:** Come on, man! [laughs] What’s going on here?

So, I guess my point to you guys is this. You may have a terrific idea here. And this script may turn into something very funny. And this character may turn into something great. These three pages unfortunately are just cramming a jokey scenario. It’s like you fell in love with this idea that he would imagine her being a porno star, even though she’s not, and you fell so in love with that idea you forgot all the stuff that we care about in the darkened theater which is who is this guy, who is that girl, why does he care, why does he remember her, what really happened. You know?

**John:** So, I want to play what-ifs. And so what if we had essentially the same first page and so we’re talking about like this girl and you see she’s actually in this whole porno thing but then as we sort of pull out you realize that he’s actually showing this to some other girl that he’s like trying to hook up with but he’s like talking about his ex-girlfriend who like made this porno. That’s a really fascinating moment to me is like who is this guy who’s so fucked up that this girl he’s trying to get with, instead he’s showing her this porno that his ex-girlfriend did.

That’s an interesting sort of character reveal moment, rather than just like let’s set up the plot of the whole movie.

**Craig:** If she had, in fact, become a porno star.

**John:** Yeah, so I’m assuming that she actually had, in fact, become that. There’s a fascinating thing to be saying like why he’s showing this other girl this film. If his girlfriend really did become a porn star, that is an interesting way to sort of get to that who is he talking to earlier on. Because my note on page three that I wrote to myself is who is he talking to. And I assumed he was actually really talking to this woman on the plane, but it doesn’t actually make sense.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He’s saying like, “She was the one. Unfortunately that wasn’t me.” He’s clearly talking in a movie sense because there’s super titles with people.

**Craig:** The voiceover is presented as the kind of voiceover that is for the audience. That is a disembodied voiceover meant for our consumption. But then we turn around and it appears, I think you’re correct, that he’s, in fact, been telling this story and probably to this person next to him who I assume can only look at him and think, “You’re mentally ill.”

First of all, why? Everybody has been dumped. And this is an important thing about comedy. Comedy tends to work when the things that are sad funny that happening are things that we have some personal ability to touch. We don’t have to have had those specific things happen to us, but we have an emotional echo to it so we can touch it and go, yes, I get it and I understand why this is so miserable for this person.

I never had a situation like the one in Meet the Parents. When I met my now wife’s parents they were awesome. But, I know what it’s like. I have touched moments like that.

No one, everyone’s been dumped, and no one has done this. No one has decided in their head that after this girl dumped me and then went away somewhere she became a depraved whore. That’s just gross. I don’t like that.

**John:** It makes you not like the guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because it seems weird. I mean, look, I got dumped once and in my mind the opposite happened. This girl met like a guy that was way better than me and had an awesome life. That’s where my mind went, which I think is something that’s relatable. But this is just weird. I don’t know what to say.

I think that you guys — I will say this in your favor, gentlemen. You have the rhythm down. You’re clearly trying to be cinematic. These pages were easy to read.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

**Craig:** So, it’s about the content. It’s not about your ability to write. It’s about your ability to present a character that we’re interested in.

**John:** Two very specific little things that could be helpful. First line of action description. “The face of Jackie DiGennaro smiles from ear to ear.” Well, no, she smiles from ear to ear. Her face doesn’t smile from ear to ear.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** “She’s pretty in a mid-90s bridge and tunnel sort of way.” Bridge and tunnel is just too easy. And so if you’re going to say mid-90s, if you’re really going to establish that we’re in the mid-90s you’ve got to give us more specifics and you should probably tell us that it’s the mid-90s, because that got confusing, too, because we’re going to jump forward in time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, even in that slug line of the past, be specific about where we’re at.

On page two, “One of these hands belongs to Jackie, a few years younger, and lifetimes more innocent. The other belongs to ELI DAVIS (16), the kid in high school everyone loves but no one knows.” I cannot parse that. I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Well, first of all you shouldn’t have to parse it. You know my feeling about these things. That’s just not fair. Even if you understood what “everyone loves but no one knows” means, and you can’t, because it makes no sense, we still wouldn’t be able to see that from a boy walking with a girl in a hallway. Not portray-able.

**John:** Yeah. So, I want to say to Derek and Aviv is some things that they’re doing very, very right. First off, Who the Fuck is Eli Davis is a great title. And it’s the kind of title that sells a spec script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It breaks as a clutter buster spec script title. Well done, guys. I also think they are better writers than these three pages indicate.

**Craig:** I agree. I know what you mean.

**John:** I felt like these people do really know what the form is. This wasn’t the best example of what they can do, but I think they can do really well. And seven years ago, if Diablo Cody wrote her version of this script, I think that would be a noticed thing, to sort of go full back to Diablo Cody. This strikes me as the kind of thing that she could have written and written a great version of. And maybe they can write a great version of it, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that they just need to maybe think — put being cute and clever second, and put being real and interesting first.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Because the thing about cute and clever is, if you’re cute and clever you’ll find the moments that are natural to be cute and clever. I mean, it was funny, they’re doing this kind of, you know, the Horrible Bosses gag of “Total douchebag” or whatever, the super gag. And then the professor walks in. “No idea who that guy is.” Super: “????” That’s cute. And that’s clever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And if I were interested in what he was saying and what was going on and not repelled by it, and also not let down by the revelation of it, then I would be much more inclined to laugh at the little cute and clever moments. Just don’t let that override the job at hand.

**John:** And honestly if you were to do that exact same scene, but the first things he said were about how wonderful this girl is, then we would be a little bit more on his side. And the joke would actually be funnier if we talk about how incredibly — this very specific lovely thing that she did for him once. Like how she baked him cookies at a very special time, or whatever, and then that’s playing against this great scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Funny.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m convinced from these pages that she’s not a porn star, so we’re not in the angel in the centerfold genre, so to speak, but that’s why…

**John:** And you totally might be right.

**Craig:** …I’m just so puzzled by why — that choice. These first pages are so important. I mean, so, I’m puzzled by the choices that were made.

**John:** Yes.

Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. Woo-hoo!

**Craig:** Woo-hoo! Yeah!

**John:** Mine goes very well with this topic of voices and profanity. And so mine is a book by Samantha Irby called Meaty. And Samantha Irby, she runs a blog called Bitch Has Got to Eat, which I think I mentioned on the blog before. And so I randomly followed a link to her blog and just loved it. And so I tweeted her how much I loved her blog. And she’s like, “That’s awesome. I have a book coming out.”

So six months ago I got an advanced copy of this book and I actually blurbed it. If you actually pick up a physical copy of it, I’m like a blurb on the back saying how awesome it is.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Because I think it’s awesome. But, the book is now out. And so it’s out in physical form and in Kindle form. And I’ll read you one little quote from it that I liked so much. This is Samantha Irby’s voice, not my voice.

She says, “I like farmer’s market white people, the ones who are always dressed like they just finished climbing K2, when all they’ve done all day is eat samples at Whole Foods. The ones who try to convince me that $15 jar of organically-grown, locally-sourced, environmentally sustainable white peach marmalade is worth a fucking purchase.

“I’m black, though. Fuck earth. Black people don’t really believe in recycling, or for that matter, artisanal jam. If you see me put my Coke can in the recycling bin, it’s because, one, someone left that shit within arm’s reach of my desk, and two, a white person is watching me.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I guess I’m black, too. I am 100 percent with her on that. I am so there with her on all those points.

**John:** Yes. So, Samantha Irby, and a point I tweeted when I first read it and I still really believe in reading this book is when you see a person who has a clear voice, you hear their voice through their words, it’s just so engaging. You want to go with them on a journey.

And so most of her book is sort of David Sedaris like and sort of like observational quippy things, or sort of like what the Lena Dunham character in Girls would be writing. But then you get to, there’s like two or three chapters in it that are just sort of nicely tucked in there which are like her childhood which is one of the bleakest, saddest things you’re going to encounter. It’s like Glass Castle kind of sad. And just terrifically well done there, too.

So, I highly recommend Samantha Irby’s book, Meaty.

**Craig:** it sounds great. Sounds terrific. And, yeah, she sounds like somebody who is able to combine honesty with not boring people.

**John:** Yes. Always a good combination.

**Craig:** Some people have a problem with that. [laughs] Not her.

Great. Well, my One Cool Thing, it’s basically de rigueur. I have to do this, because if I don’t I’m going to get buried under a tweet-a-lanche.

Everybody knows I’m a big fan of the Nest thermostats and Nest is coming out now with a carbon monoxide and smoke detector. And it’s really interesting because when I heard about it I’m like, oh, of course. And then I thought about it and I’m like, well wait, no, not of course. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. One thing is a thermostat. The other one is a safety device for your home. But then I thought, but no, of course. Because aside from the form factor being roughly similar — they’re hockey pucks that still on your wall or ceiling — one thing that the people at Nest seem to have a real talent for is finding stuff in our house that we forgot was there that we hate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And making it better. And I didn’t realize how much I hated those goddamn things until they pointed out how much I hate them. And they zeroed in on exactly why. Never once in my life, thank god, has a smoke detector or carbon monoxide alert thing gone off for just cause. Never once. They’ve gone off about a thousand times because my wife is burning something, or I’m burning something. And, of course, they’ve gone off chirping in the middle of the night because they always run low on batteries at 3am. Always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you can’t — at first you’re like, “Where the fuck is that noise coming from?” And you have to hunt around and you realize and then you’ve got to climb a ladder. It’s a horror show. First World problems. So, Nest has come up with this brilliant solution, so like all their devices they are internet connected, but they’re smart. If the alarm goes off because of a false alarm, which is probably I’m going to guess 99 percent of all alarms, you just wave your hand. You wave your hand at it like, “Fuck off.” And a voice will say, “Oh, okay. Sorry.”

It talks! And it’s like, “I’m so sorry.” And it shuts up, which is amazing. The other thing it does is you can monitor battery usage via the phone. It can alert you well before the chirping thing happens that, hey, you’re going to need to replace a battery, which is great. And they also have versions — I guess the second wave of these devices will be versions that tie into home security systems. So, I have to wait because I have a home security system that does hook up to all my alarms, the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. So, I’m going to wait for that second version to come by.

The other thing I will point out is that if you look at Nest’s site, they’re really good at teaching you how to install your own devices. They make it super easy. They’re just very smart, clever people. And I almost don’t want to — I don’t want to think about what the next thing is that they’re going to fix for me, because I think it’s fun.

I wonder what other thing in my house that I’ve forgotten about that I fucking hate that they’re going to fix. So, great work, Nest People You’re cool.

**John:** I agree.

And this has been our podcast for the week. So, if you have a question for me, or for Craig, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we will attempt to answer them as they come in.

One gentleman wrote in five times in the week with the same question, which was excessive. And the strangest thing is I went shopping at Banana Republic at Century City and he was there. And he recognized me and said, “I wrote in five times this week.” I’m like, oh, hi Alan.

So, maybe don’t write in five times in a week.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. That’s scary.

**John:** I know that you have questions, but, yeah. But, we do like your questions, so if you have a question for us we will try to answer it on the air at some point. If you have a shorter thing, Twitter is great for that. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on iTunes and you’re probably listening to us through some device that connects to iTunes. If you are there, click on Subscribe, and also leave us a comment if you feel like it and let us know what you think of the show.

I think that’s it, Craig.

**Craig:** I think that’s it.

**John:** Awesome.

**Craig:** Good show.

**John:** Fun show. And next week we will back, but we will not be swearing. So, next week you can play us in the car and it will be all be fine.

**Craig:** Squeaky clean.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** All right. See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Diablo Cody’s [7 Things No One Tells You About Being a Top Screenwriter](http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/diablo-cody-7-lessons-of-being-a-screenwriter.html), from Vulture
* Join us for Scriptnotes Live at the [2013 Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Three Pages by [David Liberman](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DavidLiberman.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Billie Jean VK](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BillieJeanVK.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Aviv Rubinstien & Derek Assaff](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AvivRubinstienDerekAssaff.pdf)
* [Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0988480425/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide monitor](http://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/life-with-nest-protect/), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FN4EWAM/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Alan Dague-Greene

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/disaster-porn-and-spelling-things-out).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 103 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, three things I want to talk about today.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** First off something you suggested which was this interview that Damon Lindelof did about big movie stakes and story gravity which I thought was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to talk about this idea of spelling things out in dialogue, which is a thing that you sort of face at every stage in your career. And so let’s talk about what that actually means when someone tells you that they want to spell stuff out.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And, finally, I want to talk about — as we talk about movies, why do we never read stories about what went right? We sort of only read stories about what went wrong. And sort of what that is and maybe how would fix it.

**Craig:** In my bones I believe this is going to be an excellent podcast.

**John:** I hope so, too. I’m a little better prepared for this podcast than I am for some, so I’m eager to get into this.

**Craig:** I am equally as unprepared for this as I am for all.

**John:** Yes, but sometimes you just wing it, and winging it is sort of the Craig Mazin way.

**Craig:** I’m more of a jazz podcast kind of guy. Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** [laughs] Your variations on a basic theme.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** First, sticking with our basic themes, there is always some housekeeping and sometimes some follow up. Some housekeeping: we’ve sold quite a few of those 100 episode Scriptnotes USB flash drive thingies. So, basically if you have an interest in previous episodes of the show and you like maybe caught up with us in the eighties and would like all those first episodes, you can now buy them all on one little USB drive that you can stick in your computer and listen to — 100 hours of me and Craig talking through the things that I’ve carefully thought through and Craig has improvised.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a lot of haphazard, off-the-cuff theories and opinions.

**John:** We are taking orders for these little drives. They cost $20 apiece. We’re taking orders through this Friday. And then we’ll ship them two weeks later. So, if you would like one of these buy one now because I’m not sure we’re going to make any extra ones, so it’s good for you to buy them if you would like to buy them.

**Craig:** You’re like when Disney puts out the animated movie and says, “And this is it. For the last time ever…”

**John:** Yes. It’s your only chance to buy Pocahontas…

**Craig:** Ever!

**John:** …on DVD. That would maybe be okay. Or Song of the South which they never even actually release.

**Craig:** Song of the South, just as a side note, is watchable on YouTube.

**John:** How nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, the entire thing. And, you know, just as a side note again, I watched it because, you know, it’s a big part of Disney history.

**John:** Yeah, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I was sort of curious to see if Disney was being a little fuss budgety about just pretending it didn’t exist anymore. And the answer is, no, it’s incredibly racist. [laughs] It’s so much worse than I could have imagined.

**John:** Okay, while we’re side-barring here, speaking about incredibly racist, have you seen Pinocchio, not Pinocchio, blah, Peter Pan? Have you seen Disney’s Peter Pan recently?

**Craig:** Recently, no, but I have yes.

**John:** “And it makes the red man red.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I know, it’s bad.

**John:** It’s bad.

**Craig:** It’s bad.

**John:** And that movie is out there in the world.

**Craig:** It is. Yeah, but the thing is it’s animated and there are humans in this movie, [laughs], that are being forced to portray… — It’s just bad.

**John:** It’s the Aunt Jemima problem.

**Craig:** It’s super bad. It’s no good.

**John:** So, let us return from our sidebar. Do you think our sidebar was on the left hand column or the right column?

**Craig:** I instinctively imagine sidebars on the right, but I’m Jewish and we tend to do right to left.

**John:** Okay. Let’s slide back left then and a common question about these little USB flash drives were selling — are the Three Page Challenge PDFs on them? Yes, they are.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, again, if a nuclear apocalypse happens and we’re all wiped out, or maybe zombies — it could be anything that actually wipes out all of humanity and our ability to access the internet, if you had one of these little drives and some sort of computer that was capable of reading them, like a laptop that you’re powering through some sort of pedal bicycle in a kind of Gilligan’s Island scenario, you would still be able to listen to all of them and be able to follow along on the Three Page Challenge which is I think really important as we’re rebuilding civilization that you have access to not just our words of advice but the words on the page that you can see why we were giving the notes we were giving about these Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** I don’t know where it would fall on the hierarchy of goals, but certainly it would be probably between procuring food and medicine.

**John:** Yeah, I mean the shelter — the hierarchy needs is shelter, shelter and safety, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually, I think food and water first.

**John:** Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** Then shelter. Then podcast. And then belonging.

**John:** Yeah. A sense of community. A sense of place.

**Craig:** Yeah, Maslow put our podcast somewhere in the hierarchy. I just can’t remember specifically where.

**John:** Yeah, it’s tough. We’ll ask her onto the show at some point to talk about it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Maslow is a she, isn’t it?

**Craig:** I believe it’s a he.

**John:** I could be wrong. Oh, I’m thinking of stages of grief. That’s a she.

**Craig:** That is a she. That’s what’s her face? That’s Kübler-Ross.

**John:** Absolutely. So, if we could only introduce Kübler-Ross to Maslow and have them combine things, put them together in a merger scenario would be fantastic.

**Craig:** They could discuss their hierarchies and steps all day long.

**John:** Very good. Another bit of follow up. At the same time we are selling these little USB drives, we’re selling off the very few remaining Scriptnotes t-shirts we have left. They’re almost all gone. Almost all of the normal sizes are gone. But if you are small person you’re going to find yourself in luck because as we’re recording this podcast the smaller sizes are what we have a lot of. And like one or two stray extra large extra-larges, or extra extra-larges.

That’s confusing. I’m not saying extra-extra-large. We have one or two extra —

**Craig:** Additional, you mean? You have one or two additional extra-larges.

**John:** Additional would have been the right word to choose for that because otherwise it was confusing. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Thank you. A very good writer there.

**Craig:** There. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That one example, Craig. You have been tremendous help on this podcast.

**Craig:** At last.

**John:** Several people have written in saying you should sell other stuff, you should sell mouse pads, you should sell hats. Uh, no we shouldn’t.

**Craig:** Slow down folks.

**John:** I have learned a tremendous amount about the shipping of physical goods through this exercise, and I like to learn new things. And so I feel if at any point we decide to sell more t-shirts, or now we’re selling these USB drives, we’re better at it than we were four weeks ago. But it’s certainly not our goal. Our goal is to make movies and to some degree apps. It is not to sell t-shirts. T-shirts are just a fun little side thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, no mugs. No mugs for you.

**John:** No mugs for us. We have a bit of follow up. Last episode we talked about Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund investor who is telling Sony you have to split off Sony Entertainment and Sony Entertainment is going underwater because of these two big tanked movies. And George Clooney yelled at him and there was all that brouhaha.

A bit of follow up, a listener in Japan name Stevie — Stevie in Japan wrote: “Although George Clooney brings up valid points, Loeb’s actual aim of suggesting spinning off Sony Entertainment from the parent is to maximize the advantages of Sony Entertainment. It’s not that Sony Entertainment is unsuccessful, it’s that the parent company is unsuccessful. He describes Sony Entertainment as a hidden gem and that the Sony parent is relying on it for much of its profit. The other very successful arm is Sony Financial, I think. He suggests a breakup because the parent company is limiting the scope of what Sony Entertainment can do and has made it impossible for Sony Entertainment to be an alternative to the iStores or iTunes, and Netflix.”

**Craig:** Uh…no. [laughs] That’s not what he said.

**John:** Well, basically this is sort of the Japanese perspective. Let me get to the second paragraph. “Of course, Loeb could be playing Gordon Gekko and everyone. He supposes that Sony is undervalued and its breakup values much higher than the listed value. But his comments about the fundamental differences in the business culture between the parent and Sony Entertainment have gotten a lot of press here in Japan.”

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So, Stevie is telling us how it is being portrayed in Japan where Sony is, of course, a very big and important company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s been a big subject in Japan ever since Sony bought Columbia and wrote of $3-point-something billion as part of its overinvestment.

**John:** My recollection is Sony bought it from Coca-Cola. Didn’t they own Columbia at that point?

**Craig:** No, I think…I read that book Hit and Run. I don’t remember who… — I think they were just their own company, I think.

**John:** Maybe. Anyway. Since we recorded the previous podcast the Sony board unanimously rejected Loeb’s idea of doing the spinoff and sort of wrote a very detailed letter to Mr. Loeb saying, “Thank you but no thank you for your suggestion.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then Loeb gave this interview with Variety, which coincidentally he owns a piece of.

**Craig:** Eh!

**John:** And so this is what Loeb wrote. “‘Notwithstanding the fact that the media likes to create a stir, I admire Mr. Clooney’s passion for Sony and his loyalty to Sony and his friends there,’ said Loeb, suggesting that he and Clooney share ‘a common goal’ and that ‘a more disciplined company with better allocation of capital means less mess money spent on bureaucracy and more investment in motion picture.'”

“We are all aligned for intelligent investment and creative content. I believe our interests are aligned in a way he probably doesn’t realize.”

Eh.

**Craig:** Yeah. Congrats on spinning your stupid statement that was either stupid or transparently manipulative. Either way, yeah, you know, we’re not necessarily financial geniuses here in Hollywood but we’re really good at words. And, no, you need a rewrite.

**John:** So, I think it fundamentally comes down to the question of is he really looking to improve Sony Pictures or is he doing what financial people do which is look at, “Can I make money by breaking this thing apart? Can I make money by gluing it back together?”

And there’s a long tradition of that in all corporations, but especially I think Hollywood corporations. You look at what’s happened with MGM and the travails of MGM over the years, essentially it’s been bought and sold, sometimes by the same people, multiple times within a decade. And so they’ll split off the library because it’s worth more separately. “Oh, no, let’s glue it back together because it’s worth more together.”

That’s just what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah, they will do that with companies that are vulnerable to that sort of thing. But you don’t see it at the big, long-standing stable companies that seem very allergic to the idea of fragmenting any part. If anything they want to consolidate everything. So, when you and I entered the business studios didn’t own networks. And now every network is owned by a studio. The consolidation is the name of the day.

This guy, I think what it really comes down to is he doesn’t really care about movies. He cares about whatever is going to lead his stock to be worth more and so he’s attempting to insert himself into a creative discussion about what movies will make more money because he thinks he knows the answer. And Clooney’s response, which was correct, is you don’t know the answer. And if you just shut up and let us do the movies that we do, you’ll be fine. You’ll be better off than if we listen to you. But unfortunately the people that make decisions have to listen to you, so would you please shut up?

**John:** Yes. I think that is a good summary of what Mr. Clooney said.

Speaking of Sony specifically, Sony is a hardware manufacturer that also owns a content business. And there would seem to be natural synergies there, but I don’t know that we’ve actually seen evidence of tremendously great synergies there. Not in music, not in movies. It’s one of those things like, well, this should work better together, and so far it really hasn’t worked better together.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only company that seems to truly capitalize on synergy — a terrible word that was invented a decade ago — is Disney. And Disney capitalizes on it because they’re the only entertainment company that actually has a brand, a significant meaningful brand to the consumer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I understand when they take a property that they have at a theme park and they convert it into a motion picture and then convert it back into a television show and merchandise and a cruise experience, this all makes sense because Disney means something to the consumer. But Universal doesn’t mean anything to the consumer, and certainly Sony doesn’t.

**John:** And hardware has not been a Disney strength, either. People don’t remember that Disney actually tried to make phones and they also made like an ESPN phone. And those did not work well.

**Craig:** Right. Precisely. Yeah, because it’s not really — the Disney brand is connected to an experience. A family experience where parents and children can share an experience together in a safe way that doesn’t totally bore the parents to death and delights children.

**John:** Yes. And Sony is not that yet.

**Craig:** No, and never will be, because Sony — even when the marketplace was such that content needed to be played on devices, you know, in a way that they don’t, because even your laptop now can play this content. You don’t need a device. But everybody had Walkman and remember the Watchman. But the problem is that those devices rely on content, not Sony content, all content.

So, for device manufacturers, in fact, the broadness of application is the key, not synergy. Anti-synergy. Standards basically.

**John:** Standards help. All right, let’s go to today’s new business. First off was this article that you had said, “Ooh, we should talk about,” and I agree that we should talk about. So, there’s an article by Scott Brown, which was in both Vulture and in New York Magazine, the article headline was “Star Script Doctor Damon Lindelof Explains the New Rules of Blockbuster Screenwriting.”

And, Craig, why don’t you give me the highlights of this because this was your impetus.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, this is, I guess, one in a series of 14 billion articles that have come out in the last three weeks about Hollywood falling apart, even though it’s not. But it was unique because Damon who actually writes a lot of these movies is pointing out something that for a change is true and relevant.

What he’s saying is the problem with the bigness of movies isn’t what people think. What everyone else has been saying is the problem is financial, that the movies cost too much, and so if they if they don’t succeed they crater the studio and then the studio can’t make little movies, or they can’t make this kind of movie, or they’re going to drive the audience away.

And his point is none of that is in fact relevant or even true. His point is that the problem with the bigness factor is that it’s necessarily infecting, irrevocably infecting the way the stories for those movies must be written.

**John:** Here’s a quote from what he says in the article. “Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world. And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world — you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it and, again, I make no excuses, I’m just saying you kind of have to start there.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** So, basically by saying like we are going to make a big giant tent pole movie, by its nature we’ve come to expect that the stakes in a big giant tent pole movie have to be sort of save the world stakes. And so to try to do anything that is not that gets met with huge resistance and fear quite early on in the development process. And through successive iteration will scale bigger, and bigger, and bigger until sometimes these movies are kind of absurd.

**Craig:** And when we say that the audience is feeling fatigued because they’ve seen a succession of movies this summer that have destroyed cities or chunks of the planet. The problem isn’t that “Hollywood has run out of ideas,” which you often hear. The problem is that the concepts of the movie require it. And I don’t think people understand this. When you’re a screenwriter you have to write within certain parameters.

Forget budget. I’m talking about creative parameters. If you had me a concept and say, “The concept is five of the world’s most powerful superheroes ban together and form a team to fight a threat,” creatively that threat must be enormous. One of the people on my little team is literally a god, and the other one is so strong that he can throw tanks. So, obviously the threat needs to be formidable or there’s no drama.

Well, what’s formidable? Somebody that’s even more powerful than they. And, well, what would that person do, rob a bank? No. The threat therefore must be concomitant with the hero’s and the heroism. And that’s what’s going on here. So, you know, for me when I read this I just though, first of all, I thought it was important that Damon did it. I was really glad that he did it because he is part of the machine of these kinds of movies in a very important way. But also in a smart way I think Damon kind of issued his own memo to Hollywood on behalf of all of us who are writing movies saying, “How about we become aware that this is a thing creatively so that we don’t just keep doing it blindly? At least if you’re going to make me do it, you acknowledge that you’re doing it.”

**John:** Yeah. Well, what’s happened is that there’s an escalation which is sort of natural where, you know, you were talking about the assemblage of super heroes. And Damon actually calls this out and says, “The Avengers aren’t going to save Guam. They’re going to have to save the world.” And so they can’t have a small challenge. They have to have a huge challenge because you’ve made these things so bad.

It’s also a challenge of sequels in that you feel this pressure to have to top yourself over what you did last time. So, whatever the big set piece was in this last movie, it has to be bigger than that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, in the most recent Star Trek movie, the first Star Trek movie actually had more planets being blown up than the current one, but he says, “Did we have to have a gigantic Starship crash into San Francisco? I’ll never know. But it felt like it did.” And that was the issue of audiences approach these kind of big tent pole movies with a set of expectations. And one of those expectations for better or worse has been that big stuff needs to blow up. Big things have to be destroyed.

**Craig:** And that is leading us to an almost pornographic celebration of big stuff from a creative point of view, because the movies begin to stack up against each other. And there is a fear that you’re simply going to disappoint people if you blow up a smaller city than a big city. If I had just watched New York explode, it just seems like a little bit of a dramatic letdown to watch Portland explode. But, the truth is, I think, that we are collectively as an audience quite a long way from that day when we sat down in a theater, saw Jurassic Park, and went, “Oh my god!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Look, there are dinosaurs!” Right? We don’t have that anymore because we’ve seen it a lot now. We have become comfortable with the spectacle of impossibility. So, admittedly when I saw Pacific Rim on one level I thought, “Wow,” and on the level I thought, “Eh.”

You know? Okay, so, I get it. Yup, that is quite an accomplishment to show huge robots fighting enormous monsters, but on the other level, not enough.

**John:** I want to step back and look at some of our earlier blockbusters and figure out sort of if we can track where this pattern came from. I’ll start with Star Wars because Star Wars I think about as this classic hero story, this boy rises up and sort of has to learn who he really is and that destiny and he would restore balance in the force. But it does end up with blowing up the Death Star. And it does have that expectation of like that really big thing has to blow up and our hero has to do it. And if we don’t see the destruction of something giant at the end of that movie it wouldn’t be as rewarding.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** I go to Indiana Jones and the end of Indiana Jones you have Indy and Marion, they’re tied there. So, he wants to save the girl, but it’s also you’ve got the Nazis and you know if the Nazis get this thing it’s going to be really, really bad.

**Craig:** But you don’t see anything other than about 14 Nazis dying.

**John:** Yeah, on a soundstage.

**Craig:** Right. On a soundstage. And even with the Death Star exploding, what you didn’t see, I mean, the sort of shocking moment of Star Wars is when they blow up Alderaan, you know, when they blow up a planet. But even that in a way what you didn’t get was what you get now where you’re on the ground and you see people vaporized and the buildings flittering —

To me, the moment I always think of is Terminator 2. To me Terminator 2 is the movie that sort of said, “Hey everyone, I’m so far beyond you. Look what I’m doing. And I’m going to blow up Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb. And I’m going to have this guy be liquid metal. And I’m going to do all this stuff. And I’m going to visually blow your minds.”

**John:** Yeah. But you also brought up Jurassic Park. And what I think is interesting about Jurassic Park is the dinosaurs don’t leave the island. And the goal of the heroes in Jurassic Park is not to stop the dinosaurs from taking over the world. It’s to survive.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those stakes are very small and relatable and wonderful. And that’s a hugely successful movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, by creating a world in which there never was the expectation that they had to stop the dinosaurs from taking over the world, you’re able to keep those stakes really intense for the characters you actually know and care about and not have to destroy the pier. But then, of course, in Jurassic Park 2 you do destroy the pier.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I mean, look, what happens is as size escalates there is a certain antiseptic nature to the whole thing. Because on some level we understand none of it is real which is the death of drama.

I remember watching the Star Wars prequel, the first prequel, and the movie concludes with a fight between CGI creatures and CGI robots. And I just couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t possibly feel anything. But, I think sometimes of the ending of the first X-Men movie. And that was very smartly done because even though in a sense the world was at stake because there was one of those silly movie gatherings of luminaries, and there was a beam that was going to turn them all into mutants and therefore the world would sort of head towards mutant-ville, it was all focused through the pain of a little girl and this unloved man who had formed a bond with her.

So, the managed to be both big and small. And I think if you can be big and small it’s okay. But if it just is about size, you got a problem.

**John:** Damon is also an interesting person to be talking about this issue with because of course he and Drew Goddard and Chris McQuarrie came onboard World War Z. And the third act of World War Z was originally huge. It was this giant battle in Red Square.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it was apparently not what the movie wanted to be. And Damon in the article says that had he come in to write the first draft of it and had been the writer who got it into production he would have written that version.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** He would have written the version that was big at the end because you write big things for the end. What they discovered is that you stopped caring about Brad Pitt’s character in it and that what you really wanted was to see Brad Pitt succeed in a small, and relatable, and human way. So, all of the stuff in the end of that movie from the plane flight on, all the stuff at the CDC lab is small. And it’s contained and it’s very thriller personal stakes. And that it movie ended up working for, god bless it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked it. And I particularly enjoyed the ending because I felt that once I had gotten through the sequence in Israel which was enormous that the movie itself was a little microcosm of what’s gone on this summer. Well, we just had this insane scene in the middle of the movie, I guess we’ll have to end really insane. At that point it’s so insane you just lose connection with it.

So they went the opposite way when they reconceived the ending and it worked great. And Damon is right; if you, or I, or anybody had come in, our instinct of course is you’re making a movie called World War Z. The climax needs to be WORLD WAR Z, not Laboratory Z.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it turns out Laboratory Z was a little more human and more relatable and there is a good lesson contained in there.

**John:** Yeah. You would never have set out to write the movie with that ending because a lot of the stuff should not work — I’m going to go back and say I don’t think the ending is fantastic. I think the ending is good for what the movie needs to do. But, the idea that you would end up in a lab with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and that’s going to be the end of your movie is not the idea you would set out to write. You would never set out to write that script that way.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** You would have found some way to make it more relatable to characters we’ve actually seen longer. But, it was a good, salvaged shot.

**Craig:** Well, if somebody had come to you and said, “Listen, I’ve been to the future and I know that you can — the audience can only withstand one massive sequence in this move. Go ahead and write it now. You would save that for the ending probably.

**John:** You would.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s move onto our second topic today which is the idea of spelling things out. So, this was sort of generated by a question that came in through the mailbag, but also based on a meeting I had this week with a studio about this book property to adapt. And it was an interesting difference between this is a book and there are certain things that are on the page in the book that work really well and certain things that felt a little forced because you’re just reading the same words again and again. There are like terms given to certain groups that made me feel like, “Oh no, I’m reading a very obvious parable about something.”

And so in doing it for the movie version I wouldn’t have to be so literal about that, which was going to be really useful. But an issue that we as screenwriters face on every script throughout our careers is how much information do we have to have characters say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or speak aloud so the audience will be able to follow along with what’s going on in the story. So, a lot of times we call this exposition, or if we have a character who is doing it too much we call him a plot-bot. But it can also be more subtle. So, I want to give you some examples of some more subtle things that happen.

You need to get out a specific thing about a character’s background. So, if you need to know that a character is a nuclear physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. Sometimes you find yourself having to get that spoken so a character actually hears that. Sometimes you need world background — why there’s a giant wall of ice in the north. Or, sometimes you need to make it clear to the audience what the limit of the character’s knowledge is, like, “I never actually saw my father die,” so you know what the boundaries are of what this character really does know and what you as the audience know that the character doesn’t know.

So, I want to talk about spelling things out and, Craig, how we make decisions about what needs to come out of a character’s mouth and what we could just let the audience figure out for themselves.

**Craig:** Well, part of the game is to figure a way to give the audience all the clues they need to solve the mystery. And every little one of these expository moments can be viewed as a mystery. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometime a guy a walks in and he flashes a badge and says, “Lieutenant Smithers, LAPD.” That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But sometimes you want somebody to convey information naturally because the two people in the scene know each other and probably know this information already. It’s just that we in the audience don’t. That’s where we start to feel that weird tension. And that’s where we find the clumsy exposition where people start sentences with, “As you know…” And we hate that.

So, the game is let’s seed in little clues that the audience can kind of put together either sub-textually or even if it’s just a visual thing that’s happening and have fun with that so we can do it in a way that is satisfying for them. They feel engaged. However, as a producer said to me just a couple weeks ago, sometimes you have to spell it out more in the script because people are reading it. And if they miss it because they’re not watching the movie and experiencing the puzzle the way it’s intended then they’re not going to enjoy the script as much. Good point.

**John:** Yeah. An example being like do we understand that the character has registered that thing we just saw in the movie? And so sometimes, visually watching the thing, oh, we clocked that he saw that and knows what’s going on. Sometimes in a script you will actually have to have him say or acknowledge that he saw something so that we know that he saw it and that can be frustrating.

An earlier point you made though I think is worth sort of underlining is that we have conflicting goals. We don’t want the audience to miss something important, yet at the same time every scene needs to be about what the actual characters in the scene want to do and are trying to do. And so if you try to wedge something in there that isn’t what the characters would naturally be talking about, that’s going to feel forced. And so finding that balance is really tough.

So, what you say about like a character introducing his name and showing his badge, well I believe that actually could happen in the real world so that I would totally accept and buy that. But no character wants to suddenly reveal that he was fired from his job for gambling. That’s just not a natural thing that’s going to come out. Unless you very specifically construct a scene so that he has to get that information out, which may work fine. But if the whole purpose of that scene is to get that piece of information out, then that character probably isn’t moving the story ahead in the way that the character would want to move the story ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these moments, even when you’re scripting them, you can turn them to your advantage by essentially crafting them as little pieces of surprise. So, I’m thinking of The Ring. There is a moment where you suddenly are surprised by the fact that this man we’ve been watching and this boy who have had these weird encounters that have been mute and silent are father and son.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if it’s a surprise you’re actually allowed to be kind of overt about it because you’re fooling the audience and then pleasing them with this sense of suspense followed by surprise. But even within a scene, a man and a woman are in an office, they’re talking, and you know that it’s important to your story that they’re married, but you certainly don’t want to have somebody walk in and say, “Hi sweetheart, how are you? You’re my wife. Now let’s discuss business.”

So, there’s two lawyers arguing over something and they finish arguing and then they get up and then she kisses him on the mouth and says, “Pick up dog food on the way home.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just find ways to do that, but, you know, there are moments. I will say that my tendency always is to provide as little as possible and I never get the note, “You’ve spelled it out too much.” I often get the note, “You should spell out it more.” And my response to that note is always, “But did you know?” Because a lot of times producers or just people reading a script will presume that they’re the only smart one. And that’s not in fact the case.

**John:** Some other techniques which I’m not going to say are good or bad for getting this information out, but you will see them used and used effectively can help you. Have a character who is a proxy for the audience who knows as little as the audience knows.

And so Jurassic Park is a good example of this. We have to explain how dinosaur cloning works. And so David Koepp writes this terrific sequence in which the characters are shown this little movie that explains how dinosaurs are cloned. It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s good, and it tells us everything we need to know.

The only reason that works is because we have characters who are coming into the environment with the same amount of information that we have. And so the new person into the world is often a conduit for getting all this information out. You’ll see this in TV pilots where it’s someone’s first day on the job and they’re being shown around and this is how it all works.

It’s kind of a clichéd scene, so if you can find a new way to spin it, you’re going to be better off. But it is a way of letting us sort of in to what this environment is and what the situation is.

It doesn’t have to be like a person who is brand new into the world. It might be like the “Hey, how are you,” first time they’re ever meeting, but a person who is not normally part of that world. So, someone else who is, you know, the sister who has come into this thing. I’m thinking about like Homeland where Carrie’s sister is a way of getting out information about how the agency actually really works because she’s not actually part of the agency normally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finding those sort of proxy characters for the audience can be a useful tool for doing it. But it’s tough and, you know, as you’re constructing your scenes, as you’re looking at the big outline either on the whiteboard or on the cards, you have to always be mindful of what will the audience know at this point. What is the audience expecting to happen next? And is there a way that you can use the audience’s expectation to sort of fill in those gaps?

If the audience expects that like, “Oh, I think they might be married,” then you have to give them a little thing to sort of prove that they’re married. And you don’t have to have this whole long explanation.

**Craig:** That’s right. And similarly if you feel like the fact that they’re married is something that the audience is too easily onto, then go the other way and then surprise. Always be surprising. In a way your relationship with the audience is a little bit like a judo match. They bring a certain weight of expectation to the experience of watching a movie. And your job is to use that weight against them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** They like being thrown to the mat, basically.

**John:** Well, what I would say about expectation is that audiences are always going to have an expectation. They’re going to have expectations about genre. They’re going to have expectations about characters. Expectation about the kind of movie this is that they’re watching. And most of the time you want to meet their expectations, or hopefully exceed their expectations. But make them feel smart. Make them feel like, “Oh, I got it. I’m with it, I got it. I think it’s going to happen. Oh, and it happened. Oh, and it happened, that’s great.”

And then if they’re with you that way then you can pull the rug out from under them every once and awhile and surprise them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you surprise them every scene they’re going to stop trusting you. So, you have to sort of balance those two things of making the audience feel really smart and also making the audience feel rewarded for closely watching.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** So, how do we, I don’t know, how do we advise people to talk about exposition then? What kinds of things do you think you have to have a character say? Can you think of any examples of things that characters need to speak aloud?

**Craig:** You mean exposition that sort of requires that sort of thing?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so. I think ultimately there’s a visual way to do anything, or a conversational way. Two other people can comment on another person. There are moments, though, where you want them to say it out loud.

**John:** Yes. And an example I think of is when they articulate what the plan is for how they’re going to do something. You love to actually hear what the plan is so that if everything goes right you know what to look for. So, they’re laying out the roadmap ahead. And usually that’s a reasonable thing to do because the characters would need to do that. They would actually need to articulate what the plan is supposed to be.

You have to find the right moment to do it, because if they’re in the middle of it and then they’re suddenly talking through all this stuff that they should have talked about five minutes ago, that’s frustrating. But if going into something you see what the plan is supposed to be, that’s generally helpful and I believe that when I see it in a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even then, though, if you watch Ocean’s Eleven you’ll see that Ted Griffin gives you only pieces of the plan. So, he actually again is kind of judo-ing the audience. He’s spelling it out overtly to make you feel like you just heard what the plan is. But you haven’t.

**John:** Well, what he’s done is he’s giving you little markers to show these are components of the plan. And then when you, you know, “We’re going to need a very limber guy” It’s like, well why do you need a very limber guy? We’re not going to tell you now, but now we know like, okay, we should look for that really limber Asian guy.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then when we see him again, “Oh, okay, that was part of the plan.”

**Craig:** But he also leaves out huge chunks like — spoiler alert — we’re going to build a fake version of the vault and we’re going to film ourselves robbing the fake vault on a soundstage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then we are going to play SWAT team guys who come in and he’s literally going to call us and we’re going to rob the bank after he thinks he’s been robbed when he hasn’t been robbed. That’s just simply not articulated in the plan.

**John:** Because if it were fully articulated all the suspense of–

**Craig:** Movie over. [laughs]

**John:** Movie over, yeah. Like, you know, will it go? According to that, the plan was too detailed.

**Craig:** And that’s why I think even when you’re spelling out a plan, don’t spell out everything. Just give us what we need to know but don’t be afraid to cheat a little bit. I mean, stylistically that’s the beauty of editing. You don’t know that the camera was there for the entire conversation. Obviously it wasn’t.

**John:** Let’s move onto our final topic of the day. This is about what went right. And so this actually is based on an email interview I did with Scott Brown who is the same guy who wrote the Damon Lindelof article. So, he was interviewing me to talk about sort of the summer’s movies and sort of what went wrong. And so I sort of challenged him back to say, yeah, okay, I get why you’re writing this article, sort of. But I also never see the articles about what went right.

And so it feels like it’s become the air duct of entertainment journalism is we just keep writing the same story. We keep writing the same story of like, you know, movies cost too much, ticket prices are too high, everything used to be better back when, and Hollywood is doomed. We keep writing that same story. And the story we always write though is what went wrong and we never actually write the stories about what went right.

And, honestly, a small exception to that is World War Z which is one of the few stories you’ll read in the popular entertainment press about like this presumed disaster sort of righted itself. But I think the only reason we’re reading about it is because it was supposed to be a disaster.

**Craig:** And we’re reading about it because they wrote about it and they were wrong. The amazing thing is they create this thing that simply is unrelated to the movie itself. They didn’t see the movie. They’re just creating this thing — oh, there’s trouble, we hear there’s trouble, there’s supposedly trouble, it’s a disaster because we believe it’s a disaster and now we’re saying it’s a disaster so it’s a disaster. And we just read other people saying it’s a disaster, so let’s repeat that it’s a disaster.

And then a news story comes along. Wow! How about that? It’s not a disaster. That’s an interesting story. No, it’s actually not. All you needed to do was not write the first story and then you wouldn’t have to write the second story. You’re now writing stories to answer your own stories. It’s gross.

And similarly this pattern of, well, what went wrong? Uh, I don’t know, the same thing that always goes wrong: some of the movies don’t work. I mean, hasn’t this happened every summer since the beginning of movies?

**John:** Well, I think we’re treating failure as an exception rater than failure as sort of like the normal state of things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s the wild successes that are the exceptions. It’s the things didn’t go as well as we’d sort of hoped they would go is the norm actually. And when they go just a little bit wrong, they still make money. When they go really wrong, then they lose money. But failure is kind of the normal state for what this is. And we don’t ever want to acknowledge that.

So, I think back to the R-rated comedies of the summer. And the R-rated comedies of the summer did really well.

**Craig:** And continue to.

**John:** Hangover 3 did great. The Heat did great. We’re the Millers is doing really well. And I don’t think we’re going to see stories about how amazing these movies did because that’s not a doomsday scenario. There’s nothing —

**Craig:** It’s boring, yeah. It’s boring. People, you know, give them dirty laundry. So, let’s just refer to the book of Don Henley here. That’s what interests people. If it bleeds it leads. And in the entertainment journalism version of that is if it fails it sells. I had to do like a southern accent to make the run.

**John:** Or you can make sails like a sail boat.

**Craig:** Right. If it fails it sails. Exactly. So, you know, and of course underlying all of it is the fact that the chattering classes have a contempt for Hollywood and popular fare anyway. They have a contempt for movie studios. They love movie stars who speak their mind in concordance with the chattering class topics.

But, they hate Hollywood studios and they hate big Hollywood movies and they hate popcorn movies. And so this is fun for them. They delight in it. They get angry when a lot of these movies do well, frankly. They get confused. They’re still wondering why people showed up for the second Pirates movie, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that’s what sort of fuels a lot of it is a general sense of resentment and bad faith combined with a delight in the thought that Hollywood would collapse under its own weight and return to what they believe the ’70s were, the worship of the ’70s, or as I like to put it, the worship of 2% of the movies that were made in the ’70s.

**John:** Yes, it’s that golden age fallacy of all the movies when I was young were amazing because I only remember the good movies when I was young. And you didn’t see the other 97% which were not.

**Craig:** Endless crap. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Specifically this summer there is a lot of talk about, oh, the sequels aren’t working or it’s all sequels and there’s this whole problem. And yet Fast & the Furious did tremendously well.

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** And I don’t see anybody talking about that now.

**Craig:** Or Iron Man 3.

**John:** Or Iron Man 3. Another huge hit.

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** You don’t see people talking about that now. They’re only talking about like these last couple of movies that didn’t work or like there are no movie stars left. Well, okay, fine, but maybe that’s because you’re sort of only talking about the movie stars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even if you go back to Damon Lindelof and World War Z or –there are a few writers whose names are actually sort of mentioned in relation to their movie, so Joss Whedon is, J.J. Abrams is, Sorkin, Lindelof. I think the only reason you see their names mentioned is because we already knew who they were. We already knew who Damon Lindelof was because of Lost. And that’s the reason why you see his name brought up so often in relation to World War Z and not Drew Goddard or Chris McQuarrie who are just not the profile of Damon Lindelof.

**Craig:** Well, and also Damon chose to talk to Vanity Fair when they did their big article and Chris and Drew didn’t. And so that was part of it, too. And also Damon is kind of an interesting public figure. He’s made a public figure of himself because he likes engaging the media on his movies, for better or for worse. And so they feel like now that’s somebody they can — they’re very simple. I mean, the media’s understanding of how Hollywood works is a child’s understanding of how it works.

**John:** Yeah. But here’s where I’m trying to get to with the point of these sort of star writers is that I really think that’s a carryover from television, is that I think ten years ago we started to notice who TV showrunners were. We started to notice who Aaron Sorkin was, who Shonda Rhimes was, you know, Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams — showrunners.

And so we started to see their names in popular entertainment press. And now that some of those people have moved into movies, if we see that they’re associated with a movie, we assume that they are the showrunner of that movie. And so therefore we want to talk to that person as if they are the showrunner of the movie. And as we talked about before with Screenwriters Plus, sometimes they kind of are a little bit more of a showrunner. They’re doing more than just writing the movie. They’re producing in a meaningful way.

But we associate them strongly with a movie because we actually already knew who they were. You look at Fast & the Furious 6, Chris Morgan wrote that. You never see anything written about Chris Morgan writing that. Look at The Heat, Katie Dippold, I’ve seen nothing about her and that was one of the biggest movies of the year. And that is singularly her movie.

We see writing about these writers because they were already famous. It’s the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because they already are famous, anything they touch that does really well or doesn’t do well, they’re going to get more press about it.

**Craig:** And ultimately the attention is irrelevant. The attention that we get and the attention that directors get is dwarfed by the attention the actors get. I don’t — I know the media is into it, but, you know, I mean, Brad Pitt and Melissa McCarthy are names on the tips of everyone’s tongue, not necessarily Damon Lindelof or, I don’t know.

**John:** Here’s where I disagree when you say it doesn’t matter. I think it does matter for the perception of what a screenwriter does and what a screenwriter’s responsibilities are. Because I’ve long maintained and even — I don’t think statistically I can prove this, but you will see that every great movie just happened and every bad movie had a bad script. And every bad movie had a bad writer kind of behind it.

And I think that’s become sort of the narrative. Like if a movie doesn’t do well, it’s because of the script. And if a movie does great, you never hear about the script. You only hear about how good that actor was in it, as if they sort of made up all their lines themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, That’s true. And I don’t know — I guess all I can say is that for me it’s — there’s nothing wrong with, even toiling in obscurity and success and being called out in failure, if along with that the people that make decisions about how movies are made don’t care. That’s the big one. And I don’t know if they do. I don’t think studios really care that Damon gets — that they blame Prometheus on Damon Lindelof. They don’t appear to care at all.

**John:** They don’t care at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I come back to that showrunner idea, and I think maybe the closest we really have in the feature world for showrunners has been the writer-director. And you look at the people who have been making interesting movies the last couple years, I look at Rian Johnson who is that guy. He’s the writer-director. You look at Chris Nolan, who even if he doesn’t write everything himself, is very intensely involved in the very genesis of the idea. That’s who — I feel like that’s who we need to spotlight if we’re going to get people to pay attention to the good contributions of writing to movies.

**Craig:** In the end I think that you have more faith in the media righting their ship and doing a good job of reporting on this stuff than I do. I just think they’re dopes. Of course, the feeling is mutual. [laughs] So, there you go.

**John:** There you go.

I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo!

**John:** Woo! I can go first or second. Your choice.

**Craig:** You know me, I remain passive.

**John:** All right. I will go first. So, my One Cool Thing this week is kind of self-serving but it’s also hopefully generous for our listeners.

So, I am in New York for 11 weeks to get Big Fish, the Broadway version of Big Fish up on the stage and out into the world, which is very exciting. It’s been a very long nine years to get to this point.

So, back in April we did our run in Chicago which was exhausting and fun, but one of the most things about it was I had a bunch of listeners come to see the show. So, I had a couple hundred people who came over the four week run, which was great.

And part of the reason we were able to get those people there is because I asked the producers to give me a promo code so they could get discounts.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I went back to the producers and said like, hey, for Broadway can we do this? And they said, “Eh, maybe, maybe, sure, sure.”

So, I said for Chicago I could only get the discount on the balcony seats and that theater was huge and those balcony seats were a very long way from the stage. So, I asked could we get like for all the seats in the house and they said, “Okay, sure, we can do that.” And not only for Ticketmaster but actually at the box office.

So, now if you would like to come see Big Fish during its first month of previews, you can do so for quite a lot less. Big Fish starts previews on September 5, 9/5. And so for the orchestra seats and for the first part of the balcony, the mezzanine, it’s half-off basically.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So, $74 versus $150.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** If you want a little bit further back in the balcony, it’s about a third off the price. So, it’s $52 for those seats.

**Craig:** That doesn’t make any sense. If you’re giving them good seats for $75, don’t save the $23 or whatever.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re probably better off getting the 74. I think you kind of want to be on the floor. Although, so now having actually been in the Neil Simon Theater. It’s so much different than our Chicago theater. Our Chicago theater was huge.

**Craig:** Broadway theaters are small.

**John:** They are small. And so by seats the Neil Simon Theater is about a third smaller than the Oriental Theater is. But by actual volume it feels like half the size because it’s just crammed so much tighter together.

**Craig:** Yeah, everything — but I like being level with the show. It’s that looking down on the show that bugs me.

**John:** Yes. So, I will say that the first row of balcony in New York is probably better than the best seats were in Chicago, which is kind of amazing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, you won’t get a bad seat in this house because it’s nice and small. If you want to come see the show, get tickets because they will at some point not be available. September 5 is first performance. You can go to Ticketmaster Big Fish Broadway if you want to do it online. If you want to come by the theater box office, that is at the Neil Simon Theater on 52nd. The promo code, I believe, is SCRIPT. I will correct this in the podcast if it is not SCRIPT. But that should be the one that gets you your discount.

So, we officially open October 5, or October 6, which is a month after our previews. At that point all the ticket prices go up like ten bucks, but for that first week you can still come and see us. So, please come.

**Craig:** I was spending some time yesterday with Aline and she and I — we’re figuring out how to get out there to see.

**John:** Very nice. I would love to have there.

**Craig:** The previews are — I mean, are you still tweaking, or is this really just about tech previews?

**John:** Previews are still tweaking. The luxury of having four weeks in Chicago is we could do a lot of tweaking. And so the show is I think honestly a lot better. And better in ways that I would never have been able to anticipate if we had gone straight to Broadway. Because there are things you recognize. It’s like as if someone said to you, Craig, like, “Hey, we just had a test screening for The Hangover. Do you want to go back and reshoot? Anything you want to reshoot? Anything you want to do, go for it.”

**Craig:** Yeah, ooh.

**John:** By god, you would love that chance. And so that’s what we’ve had the chance to do. So, we did some tweaking while we were in Chicago, stuff we could do on stage during our limited afternoon rehearsals. But over the summer there were bigger things we wanted to change around and move. We have new songs. We have new ways that stuff works. And that’s great.

**Craig:** But I’m not going to see a greatly different show in previews than I would once it has its official — ?

**John:** No. It will be the same show. It’ll be nicely put together and worth every penny.

**Craig:** Great. Plus I get to sit next to the creator of the show, the author of the book.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s pretty cool.

**John:** And next to Aline Brosh McKenna which is honestly sometimes more rewarding.

**Craig:** Always rewarding.

**John:** What I will say, whether you’re coming with the special promo code or jut some other time coming to see the show before opening, send an email to Stuart and let him know that you’re coming. Because if I have a chance to find I will find you. The lobby is so much smaller in this theater than the old one, but I will somehow track you down.

**Craig:** I love New York. It’s tiny. I mean, it’s a big city and it’s a tiny city. Great. I’m looking forward to it. I’m really excited for this. And I’ve just got a good feeling, you know? I’ve got a good feeling.

I don’t look at reviews, as you know. I just have a good feeling about the show. I feel like you’ve done it the right way. You have a great, great partner in Lippa. He’s so talented. And I like that you guys didn’t just like jump from a really tiny — sometimes shows go from — I saw a show recently that went from La Jolla to Broadway. It just seemed a little kooky.

I like that you were in Chicago. I mean, you’ve got a great cast. It just feels like everything is right.

**John:** I think everything is right. And one of the things I’m sort of trying to emotionally prepare myself for is like everything can be right and we could run for ten weeks, or ten years.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And some of that is just out of my hands.

What is strange — and this is my last sort of plug for the show — with a movie, like if you don’t see a movie, well you can catch it on DVD. If you don’t see this show while it’s on stage in Broadway, you may never sort of get the chance to see it, or at least not see it with the A-level team and cast because this is sort of the one chance. And we hope to be running for fifteen years like wicked. But realistically that’s probably not going to happen. So, come see the show as soon as you can.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. Well, I’m very excited. And I’m hoping that I can time it so that I can see the show with Seth Rudetsky, my best friend Seth Rudetsky, but I suspect that Seth sees every show like in the first week.

**John:** Yeah, he probably sees opening week.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll make him go see it again with me. How about that?

**John:** Yeah, do it.

**Craig:** Okay. Terrific.

So, my One Cool Thing is a person. I had a really interesting day yesterday. The producer Lindsay Doran had this fascinating gathering of people at a home in Hermosa Beach. And the whole day was really just a discussion of creativity and it was led in part by this brilliant man named Marty Seligman who basically there are chapters about him in psych textbooks.

He famously coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the nature of depression. And his new thing lately is creativity and questioning whether or not we can teach creativity, enhance creativity in people. It’s an interesting line of inquiry. And so we had this day where we all just talked. And there were very cool people there. Aline was there. Lord and Miller, the guys who did the terrific 21 Jump Street and also Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Really cool guys. Jen Celotta who is a former showrunner of The Office. Just neat people like that.

But the person that made me the happiest was a guy I didn’t even know. His name is David Kwong and he’s a very unassuming guy, just sort of sitting there. I didn’t know who he was. And he got up to talk about what he did. And he’s a magician. And I thought, okay, that’s cool. I like magicians. They’re impressive. And he was super impressive. I mean, his tricks were remarkable. He did a bunch of close-up magic for us, it was great.

That aside, I’ve seen awesome magicians before. It’s great, but it doesn’t change my world. No, what made me fall in love with this man was that he is a huge crossword puzzle guy. And in fact he has written a number of crossword puzzles for the New York Times. And I don’t know if you know this but I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.

**John:** I can believe that. It’s not surprising to me. I didn’t know it, but it’s not surprising.

**Craig:** Every day. I am a crossword puzzle connoisseur. I only do the New York Times crossword puzzles. And I love them. And, in fact, he mentioned — he started to describe a Sunday puzzle he did and I stopped him. I’m like, “I did it. I know exactly what you’re talking about. It was great.” It was an amazing Sunday —

So, the Sunday Times crossword puzzles have themes and a lot of times, there’s always some sort of gimmick. And sometimes they’re simple gimmicks like word play gimmicks. And sometimes they’re more involved. And he created one that was so brilliant. The theme was basically, it referred to Mad Magazine. And in the end you did a fold in.

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** And I like the Mad Magazine fold-ins to create answers to certain starred clues. It was really smart. I was just very inventive and I love that. So, I got super excited. However, what’s so cool and we’re going to put a link to it is that he does a particular trick that isn’t even a trick. Well, it’s a trick, but god, it’s so amazing.

In part of his show what he does is first he does a deal where he fans the deck and he has somebody pick a card. He doesn’t see it. They show it to the audience. They put it back in the deck and he puts the deck away. He moves onto a bunch of other stuff.

Then, he does this bit where he creates a crossword puzzle right in front of you using words that the audience is suggesting, which is already remarkable. To create a crossword puzzle is a very complicated thing.

Well, he starts with this 15×15 grid and he follows the rules of American crosswords which is that all words must be three letters or more. It has to be rotationally symmetric in terms of where the black boxes go. There can’t be too many black boxes. They can’t be clumped together in any particular way. So, all these rules.

And the thought of just creating on the fly a crossword puzzle from random things people are shouting out is amazing. He does it and then when he’s done, as if that weren’t impressive enough, he has embedded the card —

**John:** The card, yeah.

**Craig:** Running diagonally through the puzzle. And it’s just mind-blowing. And the truth is, the only trick part is that he knows what card that person picked. The other stuff isn’t a trick. It’s just a fascinating Rain Man like ability to manipulate words in a way that is just awesome to me. Awesome.

So, his name is David Kwong. He does magic shows around… — I believe he does a standing once a month appointment at the Soho Club here in Los Angeles. Brilliant guy. Super nice guy. Check out this video of what he does. It’s astonishing.

**John:** That sounds great. Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

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

**John:** And I’ll talk to you again next week.

**Craig:** Awesome. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* Scriptnotes First 100 Episodes flash drives [are available until Friday, 8/16](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* Daniel Loeb’s [Variety interview](http://variety.com/2013/film/news/exclusive-interview-daniel-loeb-vows-to-end-sony-spinoff-quest-at-least-for-now-1200572856/)
* Vulture: [Star Script Doctor Damon Lindelof Explains the New Rules of Blockbuster Screenwriting](http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/script-doctor-damon-lindelof-on-blockbuster-screenwriting.html)
* Use discount code SCRIPT for a deal on select [Big Fish on Broadway tickets](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/) (And be sure to [tweet](https://twitter.com/stuartfriedel) or [email](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) Stuart and let him know when you’ll be there)
* David Kwong’s [crossword puzzle magic](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1VPUZDr-fY) will blow your mind
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Bryan Duke

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/50-random-questions).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mera naam hai Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 90 of Scriptnotes, a podcast this week not so much about screenwriting, but things that could be interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I have to tell you that I just spoke Hindi and you didn’t even — you didn’t care.

**John:** Yeah. I just accept that you’re going to do weird things every week, so I just…

**Craig:** I spoke Hindi, per a listener’s request.

**John:** That’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah! I feel good about it.

**John:** You should feel good about it.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m sorry. I should acknowledge when you jump out of your comfort zone.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because it doesn’t happen very frequently.

**John:** I should tell listeners that I offered to let you actually do the intro today, and you said, “No, no, no.” And now I know the reason why you didn’t want to do the whole intro is because you’d already practiced how you were going to do your Hindi for just your one thing. And that’s why you didn’t want to do the whole “Welcome to Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** Allow me to embarrass myself. I didn’t even think that through.

**John:** Okay. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I really just think, you’re right, I mean, in retrospect that’s a good point. But more than anything I’m just becoming Rain Man-ish, and I don’t like change.

**John:** Yes. So, last night I hosted this thing at The Academy and it was tremendously fun. And we had like a thousand people there, which was great and nuts, and so I want to thank everyone for coming.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** People came up afterwards. But, it struck me — I knew I would need to start off the evening, and I just wanted to get through the first three sentences without messing up. And so I was going to start like, “Hello and good evening on behalf — my name is John August — on behalf of The Academy it is my pleasure to welcome you.”

But because I always start the podcast as, “Hello and welcome,” it was so hard to break myself of that. And so before I was going up on stage I was just in a loop going, “Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening.” But I got through it!

**Craig:** You got through it, buddy. I’m super proud of you.

**John:** Oh, thank you so much. And it made me think about our live episodes of Scriptnotes coming up this summer and how excited I am about those.

The one for the Writers Guild Foundation is a lock. And that is definitely going to happen. The second one in July, dates could be shifting a little bit, but there’s going to be something in July to celebrate our hundredth anniversary. So, I look forward to seeing more of our people in person then.

**Craig:** Yes, our people.

**John:** Our people.

**Craig:** Come to us, our people.

**John:** Craig, you had two items for the agenda before we get to all of these great questions that listeners have submitted. So, let’s talk through the agenda items first.

**Craig:** Yeah, real quick, because we have so much to talk about today. So many questions to answer. Two topics. One, Zach Braff redux. And, two, what’s going on with E! and the Fashion Police strike.

So, real quick on Zach Braff. There was kind of a weird thing that happened over the last couple of days where The Hollywood Reporter basically said, “Hey look, this other film financier came in and gave him a whole big bunch of money, like another $8 million or whatever.” So, he is, according to that article, he is funding his movie with traditional funding and all of you people that gave him $2 million, why? Why would you have done that?

Turns out that’s not exactly the case. Really what’s going on is that it’s gap financing. And Zach Braff had always said in his Kickstarter, “Look, I’m going to fund this movie through Kickstarter and foreign presales.” And foreign presales kind of work in such a way that you sell the movie to people before you make it based on who’s in it. And they say, “Okay, we’ll buy it for this.”

But you need to make the movie now. That’s money is not showing up for awhile. So, these gap financiers come in and say, “We’ll loan you that money, because we have the collateral of all these people who have agreed to pay you the money.” And so that’s kind of how that works.

However, I should just add, I don’t think people really understood how foreign financing presales work and, frankly, the truth is even though he told you this from the start, he was really saying, “Look, I’m going to finance this movie half traditionally for people that get something for what they give, and half not traditionally — you get nothing for what you give.” So, I’m not surprised that people are confused. This is going to come up and up again.

**John:** I didn’t follow it all that closely, but it seemed like there was backlash. And there was backlash-backlash, and it just becomes this big cycle of whatever. It’s very common — what you’re talking about with gap financing — is actually very, very common. It’s how a lot of indies get made. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. It just gets swirled into all of this crowd sourced excitement and enthusiasm and it just becomes weird.

So, I can understand everyone’s perspective on why they’re frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. Normally this isn’t an issue because films are financed by financiers who are in it for profit and not for joy and pro-social activity. Now, we’ve kind of — it’s a strange thing to fund an enterprise with both charity and traditional profit investment.

**John:** Now, while I know almost nothing about the Zach Braff situation, I know even less about this E! Fashion Police thing, so catch me up to speed on that.

**Craig:** So, Fashion Police, I don’t know if you ever watch it.

**John:** No. I don’t. I never actually turn on E! — like for years I haven’t seen E!. So, tell me about it. It’s a Joan Rivers show?

**Craig:** It’s a Joan Rivers show. So, it’s a panel show, Joan Rivers, and Kelly Osbourne, and a very thin woman, and a very funny fashion guy, they critique red carpet fashion. And it’s just a super gay catty show and it’s really, really funny. My wife watches it religiously, so I kind of absorb it. You know, she has her thing of Fashion Police and then The Soup. And it’s actually really, really funny. I mean, Joan Rivers is still super, duper funny.

But, the problem is that the writers of that show just haven’t been paid very well. And they essentially want to be unionized. They want it to be a WGA show. A lot of them are WGA writers, which kind of drives me crazy a little bit, because if you’re a WGA writer you’re not allowed to write on shows that are not WGA shows if there is a contract that exists to cover that show, or that could cover it. You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s one of our rules. And it kind of makes me nuts, but I guess it’s so widespread you can’t do anything about it. Long story short, they walked off and basically said, “Look, we want a union deal.”

And E! said, “Um, yeah, listen, um, all you have to is vote. If you just have an official union election governed by the NLRB then we’ll let you be WGA.”

And I just wanted to tell people following along at home, if you’ve read that, that’s basically baloney. The deal is the writers have already expressed that they want t be union. The great majority of them want to be union. E! has the ability to just say, “Oh, okay, you all want to be union, or a great majority of you want to be union. Poof. Let’s just start negotiating a union deal.”

The reason they’re insisting on an official NLRB election process is because that drags it out, it gives them a lot more control over the process. They have the potential to try and fire some people, even though that’s illegal they do it all the time. They also have the ability to put a lot of pressure on the writers to not vote. They get a chance to make their case very strongly. It’s essentially a union-busty kind of thing.

But the fact is all they have to do, when they’re like, “Just vote.” They don’t need to vote. Everybody that understands how unions work knows what they’re doing, so anyway, what I’m really saying is, hey, E!, come on. They want to be Writers Guild. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a funny show. I’m sure you guys make a lot of money on it. Please, just come on.

**John:** Yeah. In previous situations we’ve talked about reality shows and it’s a question of like is that really writing, what are they really doing, and there was a whole controversy when the WGA was trying to cover these shows. There was a real question of is that the kind of thing that should really be covered.

But here, this is writing…

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** You’re writing material that’s being performed on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a comedy variety show. So, come on, E!. Enough with the, “Oh, we need an election.” Gee, golly, if only they would just vote.” Yeah, come on, please. Too smart for you.

Okay. So, those were my follow ups.

**John:** Hooray. My only bit of news that I will launch before we go into our big questions is Highland Version 1.0.2 is in the Mac App Store right now, so if people are using Highland they can download the new version. The new version has a really cool way of making things uppercase. You can hit shift-return and it makes that line uppercase, which is incredibly useful in Fountain.

And it has lyrics, because I needed people to sing. So, this is completely scratching my own itch. I needed lyrics, and now there are lyrics.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** But our podcast today, I’m so excited, is all about things other than screenwriting. That will be the last screenwriting thing we’ll mention today, because for now on it’s just John and Craig talking about stuff we are probably not really qualified to talk about, but we’re going to talk about anyway. We’re going to answer these questions.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, people wrote in. We had 90 questions or something. We had a tremendous amount of questions. We culled the list down a little bit. People wrote in at ask@johnaugust.com. They sent us Twitter questions. They went on our Facebook page and asked questions. So, let’s hit it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Maybe we’ll alternate, so I’ll start with the first question which is from a guy named Jason. “If I someday have the opportunity to be uploaded into a robot body, should I do it?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I say yes also. And, obviously, the topic of mortality and sort of what it means to be alive are valid questions. They’re good philosophical questions. They’re good questions for a movie. But, if I had the opportunity to like not die, and be a robot, I’m okay with that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You definitely want to do this, because you are just your brain. I’m assuming when you say “uploaded into” you mean your brain as exists uploaded in.

I’ve often wondered what happens if — I guess it doesn’t matter — you upload your brain, you make a copy of your brain into a robot. Now, you and your robot friend are kind of in that moment the same, but now it’s just that your robot friend who is you just diverges from that point because of their different experiences.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, it would be fun to know that person.

**John:** It’s like the software has forked and it’s gone in different directions. It comes down to the question of software and hardware. And is the person the hardware, is the person the software? I am a software person. I think the person is the code that’s running. And if that code can run without your physical body, I’m cool with that.

**Craig:** Totally. Now, the key for me is if you upload me into robot body, I kind of actually want you to kill my other self. [laughs] Because there can only be one.

Next question. Do we say who wrote in, or no?

**John:** Yes, we’ll say the person, but not the last name. But you can say Vancouver.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sarah in Vancouver. “This year I decided to stop coloring my hair and let my natural dusky silver grow in. Seeing as you’re both the same vintage as me, and the kind of men I’d be attracted to…”

**John:** Mmm.

**Craig:** Oh, hmmm…”I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the attractiveness and sex appeal of women with gray hair. I seem to be the only one excited about being natural again. People either find it amusing or disturbing. Am I alone out here? What should I do?”

**John:** Yeah. She didn’t include a photo, so we don’t know whether she’s a woman who looks amazing with gray or silver hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Look, I think natural can be awesome. And I think if you like being natural the way your hair is, that’s great. The most important thing about being attractive is being confident. And if being natural gives you confidence there, that’s terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. I basically agree. I mean, definitely what happens is your physical appearance is the thing that kind of starts the ball rolling with men, but those of us who are into women, a lot of it then is what happens after. So much of it is what happens after. What happens when you open your mouth and you start talking? Are you interesting? Are you fascinating? Are you funny? Are you cool?

It’s a fact that biologically men are programmed to be attracted to youth. It just comes down to the whole spread your genetic material around pregnancy, animal behavior theory of sex and sexual attraction. So, it will probably stop a few guys in their tracks. It may make it a little more difficult for some guys.

But, you know, whatever. Who cares? If you’re cool and you’re awesome, I don’t really think it’s going to stop anyone.

**John:** I would agree. Next question comes from Ben in San Angelo, Texas. “If you had to start from scratch, let’s say your current mind got zapped to your teenage body, would you do it all over again?”

**Craig:** Interesting theme that keeps emerging. Well, yeah, I would do it all over again because I love my life, and I love all of it, even the parts that are terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I thought about this a lot. And if I could go back and sort of do junior high and high school, all that stuff over again, I would because there was stuff I definitely enjoyed, but there is stuff I know I would enjoy differently knowing what I know now.

**Craig:** Oh, wait, you know what you know now?

**John:** Yeah. That’s the trick of the question — do you get to take your current experience with you back to the past?

**Craig:** Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I just want to basically do everything that’s happened already again. I want to rewatch the episode.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know that I want to do everything that’s happened again. I mean, I’ve had…

**Craig:** So, you don’t want to meet Mike? You’re going to meet some other guy. You might not have a kid. You get run over, [laughs], by a cart.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a Sliding Doors quality of like if you got to live your life again would stuff necessarily turn out better for having the information. Maybe not.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. Cool.

**Craig:** So, finally a difference there. Justin from Arlington, Virginia with a great question. “Croissant, English muffin, or biscuit?”

**John:** I think they’re all excellent choices. I can enjoy any one of those things. I find that a great biscuit at the right moment with a little butter, a little honey, there’s maybe nothing better.

**Craig:** I find biscuits to be big handfuls of glue and croissants are too greasy for me. I’m an English muffin guy.

**John:** English muffin for a hamburger, by the way, a fantastic choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do it all the time. Whole wheat English muffin. Hard to beat.

**John:** Ed writes, this is a question for you, “What E-cigarette brand do you recommend? Any cons to e-cigging?”

**Craig:** Interesting that this question comes up because I quit smoking those things.

**John:** I’m so glad, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, you don’t have to be that glad. It’s not that big of a deal, although I have to say it’s — ugh, quitting nicotine is the worst. What it does to your brain? Ugh, anyway. It’s been a weird week. You can imagine.

So, look, what I recommend is just not starting, but if you’re smoking regular cigarettes, definitely. And you don’t want to deal with cold turkey. Definitely switching over to e-cigarettes is good. I recommend just generically using the Boge Cartomizer. That’s B-O-G-E.

And you can get standard — there are these standard batteries. I can’t remember the model number, but they’re sort of skinny black batteries with either blue or red tips at the end. If you go to — there’s a cool website called Cignot. Cignot.com. They sell all that stuff.

And then in terms of the liquid, I recommend Johnson Creek because they are made here and it is actually looked over by people that seem to care as opposed to, I don’t know, a Chinese factory somewhere just dumping spare melamine and liquid lead into a vat. [laughs]

Yeah, the cons of e-cigging: incredibly addictive and when you quit those it will suck.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Did I tell you that we were at Disneyland, and so we were on the Silly Symphony which is those swings that spin around? There’s never a line because it’s never actually all that fun.

**Craig:** I know those, yeah.

**John:** But my kid likes it. So, there’s this woman in front of me and she had something glowing in her hand. I’m like, oh my god, she has an eCig and she’s like using her eCig while she’s on that swing.

**Craig:** Cool lady. I mean, she just doesn’t care. [crosstalk] Yeah, I like it.

Here’s a question for you, [laughs], from…

**John:** I think it’s really a question for you.

**Craig:** I know, it’s really a question for both of us, I think. It’s from our friend TS and he wants to know, “Should I seduce a married man?”

I’m pretty sure we have the same answer.

**John:** I would say probably not.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** Yeah, here’s the question — are you wrong to go into, not knowing what somebody’s marital situation is. You know, somebody could be married but they could be separated, or they could have an open relationship. There could be reasons why you’re not a terrible person for going into that situation. You’re not a morally terrible person.

Are you going to be emotionally hurt trying to seduce a married man? Yeah, very likely. So, I think you’re better off sticking with people who are actually available.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the word “seduce” that’s the problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, “sleep with,” if the guy is living a closeted life and he’s into you, whatever. But “seduce” is sort of, that’s a tougher one.

**John:** Yeah. Should you seduce anyone? Well, yeah, I guess you can seduce a single person.

**Craig:** Yeah, no of course. Yeah, sure. But seducing married people is kind of — don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of crappy.

**Craig:** That’s not nice.

**John:** Clint asks, “I’m considering replacing my lawn with Buffalo grass. If memory serves, John August made the change a while back. How is that working out? Is it worth the expense and effort? Anything you’d do differently?”

So, yes, and I’m actually looking at the Buffalo grass that is growing in our backyard right at this moment. And it was pretty good.

So, the deal with Buffalo grass is unlike normal grass where you can put out a seed or you can roll out the big long strips of it, Buffalo grass actually has much, much deeper roots, and so you have to plant little plugs. It’s sort of like you are getting a hair transplant and they’re putting those little plugs into the dirt.

And that’s a hassle and it just took a tremendous amount of work. And the crows came after the plugs and pulled them out, so we had to scare away the crows and redo it. But, once it grew in it’s been really, really solid. And you kind of don’t have to water it much at all. And it looks pretty good. So, I would do it again.

We used UC Verde Buffalo Grass. It was the type that they figured it… It was the UC System that studied all the kinds of Buffalo grass and this is the one that actually works well on lawns.

It’s been really solid. And if you have dogs or cats or whatever, they won’t burn holes in the lawn they way they can with normal grass. So, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Nice. That would be — maybe I should think about that.

So, Patrick here in Los Angeles writes, “What’s your favorite weeknight meal to cook for your families?”

**John:** Do you cook, Craig?

**Craig:** I do. I love cooking. But when I cook it’s either like a big, adventuresome cooking thing, or I tend to do little smaller things like on-the-spot breakfasts or lunches. So, I don’t have a routine weeknight meal that I cook. But my daughter does love my famous grilled cheese sandwich. I like making a nice grilled cheese with a little tomato soup. But when I cook I go crazy and I just go nuts.

I like making desserts.

**John:** Yeah. So, I am by nature more of a baker rather than a cook. So, for a long time I would make like a lot of desserts. And I’d bake cakes, and cookies, and all that kind of stuff. And now I don’t do that very much anymore because we don’t eat that kind of stuff anymore.

My husband does most of the daily cooking, but when I do do cooking, turkey meatloaf is sort of a good staple for us. We have a really good turkey meatloaf that we like. Mini turkey meatloaf — that’s the crucial thing. When you make that giant meatloaf, only the little outside of it gets browned. But if you make little small meatloafs, then it all gets good and brown.

**Craig:** Like in little ramekins?

**John:** No, you actually do it on a baking sheet, flat on a baking sheet.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. You just make like little mounds on it.

**John:** Little mounds. And the key I have learned is to sort of mound them up like a shark fin, because they will sort of soften down a bit as it bakes, but it will end up with a nice shape if it’s sort of pointy at the start. And every little bit gets a little more ketchup. So, that plus roasted cauliflower and maybe some spinach or something else, that’s a really good weeknight meal.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m still kind of into making desserts. I like making pies from scratch, crusts from scratch.

**John:** I like pie crust, too.

**Craig:** Chocolate mousse. I like chocolate mousse. I like making complicated things. I feel like I like the chemistry a little.

**John:** And people are always intimidated by like a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Turkey is one of the easiest things you could possibly ever make.

**Craig:** Brine.

**John:** Well, yes, we’ve talked about the brine. But essentially, you know what you do? You clean the bird and you stick it in a hot oven. People make too much of a deal of it.

**Craig:** Brine it, stick it, don’t put stuffing in it like a dope.

All right, so what do we have next?

**John:** Billie Jean asks, “What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done in front of an idol, or a celebrity, or a mentor?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I can remember mine. It’s so stupid. So, it was — I’m going to say it was 1993. And I was sitting with a friend. We were by Johnny Rockets at the Beverly Connection. And we look over, it’s like around 10pm actually. And we look over and there’s Jerry Seinfeld talking with a friend.

Oh my god. Jerry Seinfeld. You know, it’s 1993; Jerry Seinfeld is the king of the world. And I’m like, “I got to go, I got to go say hi to Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve got to shake his hand or do something.” And he’s like, well, do it.

So, as we’re leaving, I start walking, I’m parallel to Jerry Seinfeld. I’m too scared. I’m now a step past him and I’m like, no, no, no, I can’t not do it. So then I just whirl around and I go, “Mr. Seinfeld, it’s really nice to meet you.”

And he was like, “What?” Because he really thought that I was going to stab him. Because that’s the motion I made. It was the motion of a guy walking past somebody and then suddenly flinging themselves into their personal space and then saying, “It’s really nice to meet you.” But he hasn’t met me. There’s just a man suddenly in his face. It was terrible.

**John:** That’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** It was so stupid.

**John:** Mine is not embarrassing as much as just like really, really awkward, and especially awkward because there’s a photo of it that my husband insists on keeping because it’s just so awkward.

So, this is at the opening of the USC Film School. They had this big gala event where they had celebrities and famous people there. And so I was downstairs touring the post-production area and Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are there. And so I know Katie Holmes but I hadn’t seen her in years. And so, they’re like, oh, say hi to Tom and Katie. Like, oh great.

So, we’re in this really narrow space, and so I’m shaking hands with Katie. And it’s like, “Hey, how are you?” Trying to talk about her kid, because we have a kid about the same age. And I meet Tom Cruise. And Tom Cruise, anyone who has met Tom Cruise, he sort of like locks eyes on you. And it’s just this weird sort of like tractor beam thing that Tom Cruise does.

And so there’s this photo of us having this really awkward meeting in this narrow hallway from this angle, and I look bizarre in it. I look like I’m some sort of Martian who is talking to people from Venus. And it was incredibly awkward because of just…and then of course the whole Tom and Katie of it all, because this is right when, you know, their sort of sudden relationship and what all that was.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does sound weird.

**John:** That’s an odd thing.

**Craig:** That is odd.

**John:** One thing I should say about meeting a celebrity is it’s also that always awkward thing of like, you know, “Hi, I’m this person,” and they’ll say their name back. It’s like, well, of course you’re that person because you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, when they say like, “Hi, I’m Tom,” it’s like, yeah, I know you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? There’s like a weird contract that you have with famous people that they’re going to tell you their name and you’re going to go, “Hi, I’m Craig,” like, I did not know that. This is a normal meeting. You’re not famous.

**John:** What I found, like even last night at The Academy thing, when someone is coming up, and there was a little bit of a receiving line kind of quality that happens, the next person that comes up, I’ll just say, “Hi, I’m John,” because it just starts the conversation. So, it’s natural that we do it.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s why these people do these things. I find it easier to deal with celebrities and famous people now because I think once you hit 40 you start to realize you’re older than a lot of them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know? I’m older than Bradley Cooper. It’s kind of weird.

**John:** It is weird.

**Craig:** But I am, because I don’t know, he seems like a man. He is a man.

Here’s a question from JD. “You’re both in love and in some states both married.” I think you’re just married. “Do you think it’s important to have more common interests than not with a significant other? Or, are opposite interests okay as long your personalities and respect for one another’s wants and needs remain constant?”

**John:** I would say that shared interests are very, very useful so that you have something to talk about. And I think it’s going to be hard to get very far in a relationship if you don’t have some good overlap in things that you are interested in other than sort of like kind of generally digging the person. But you don’t need to have that 100 percent match. And there should be things that one person loves and obsesses over and the other person couldn’t care less about, as long as they don’t openly mock. That’s good and fine.

But you want to be able to go places and do things and have some reason to be able to go out to certain events at nighttime. If one person hates the theater, that’s fine. You’ll always find other people to go to the theater with. But, if that person hates theater, and movies, and concerts, and everything else, and you like those things, then it’s not going to work out well.

**Craig:** I tend to shade a little bit more to saying opposite interests are actually a great thing. And what keeps us together as bonded pairs is our intangible love and assistance for each other. And the things that are going around outside of us are so much less important. And, frankly, it’s nice to be able to get away from my wife and do things I like doing that she doesn’t care about and vice versa.

It’s so hard to find someone, I mean, of course, if really there is no common interests it is unlikely that the two people will fall in love anyway. But, I think that sometimes people make too much of “we both like doing the same thing.” Uh, yeah. It’s that we do something for each other that we like.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, the ideal spouse is somebody who is always on your side, is like always on your team. And that’s a really crucial thing. It doesn’t mean you have to have 100 percent alignment on everything.

I’m always amazed though by the mixed marriages where people have radically different beliefs and somehow they make it work. And that I just don’t know how they do it.

**Craig:** I get it. Because, the truth is for those people they’re getting something from the other person that’s so much more valuable than agreement on a topic. You know, there are things that go to our survival, our sense of safety and security and feeling loved.

You know what? Look at children and their parents. So many children have different political views than their parents. The still love their parents. The parents still love the kids, you know?

**John:** Well, that’s a central theme of Big Fish, though, is that throughout your entire life you get to pick your relationships, you get to pick the people who are going to be your friends, you get to pick the people you are going to marry, but parents are just sort of assigned to you. It’s just like a big lottery and you end up with these people. And you’re supposed to have this amazing relationship with these people.

But, you didn’t pick them. They didn’t pick you. And somehow you’re supposed to get along on everything. I think sometimes we put unrealistic expectations on what that relationship is supposed to be, “Because he’s your father, how could you not love him?”

“Well, I didn’t pick him.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t have to get me started on that topic.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that one.

**John:** Kristen in Seattle writes, “I would like to know if you guys like cats. And if you know why of all the animals in the animal kingdom cats purr?”

**Craig:** Well, a two part question. No, I don’t like cats. I find them annoying. I love dogs. Actually, I once talked to a veterinarian about this whole purring thing, and the truth is they don’t really know. I mean, there’s like some cockamamie theory that purring helps healing because there’s like some vibration thing that happens. I don’t believe that.

I think it’s probably just something they do.

**John:** Yeah. Because I think big cats purr, too. So, it’s not something that we kind of bred into cats. I think it’s a natural thing that cats do. But, it’s like there’s lot of other animals that do weird things, just they’re not around us all the time so we don’t notice it.

I like cats. And I did not grow up with cats. And I’ve always been very allergic to cats. But I learned to love cats because my friend, Elizabeth, had cats. And so I would talk to her on the phone, this is sort of pre-internet, so we would just talk to each other on the phone for like an hour a night. And so I would hear all about her cats. And so I knew all these details about her cats.

And then in our house here we don’t have cats because I’m allergic to cats, but in Los Angeles people should understand that there are cats everywhere. Los Angeles is just full of cats. And so there are some feral cats, but also some house cats that sort of just wander through our yard. And they’re really cool. And like one of them is actually Patricia Arquette’s cat wanders through our yard.

**Craig:** Is her name Patricia Arcat?

**John:** Wouldn’t that be amazing? I never even thought of that. That’s why you’re the comedy writer.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was a really good joke, man. [laughs]

**John:** That’s a great joke. You could get fifty bucks for that on Fashion Police.

**Craig:** At least.

**John:** [laughs] Rollie is just the best cat in the world. So, we eat lunch outside — Stuart, Ryan, and I eat lunch outside — and Rollie will just come over and hang out. Just the best cat in the world. But I like cats that are sort of like dogs, and that’s why I like Rollie so much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, cats don’t do it for me.

**John:** Cats are great.

Next up is Victor from Pittsburgh.

**Craig:** Victor, yeah. Are you reading this one? I’m reading this one?

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Okay, this guy is moving, and Victor is “moving into an apartment that for the first time is all [his] own, a real home to call [his] own.” I guess he’s been living in dorms and things like that. “It’s a blank slate coming with no furniture. As the hip artsy fellows that you are, I’m sure your lovely LA homes are decked out with only the finest in furniture and decor. What do you suggest for a first time home renter? Goodwill, IKEA, or anything else? Standing desk? Specific recommendations? First time apartment stories worth sharing?”

**John:** I think IKEA gets a bad rap. I think some stuff from IKEA is absolutely fine. And, I mean, that’s the motto for IKEA: For now it’s fine. That should just be their tag line. I give it to them for free.

Because there’s decent stuff you can get that will work okay in your apartment for a while. So, IKEA or CB2 or sort of the lower rent brands for sort of the big furniture companies, they’re absolutely fine. I would say you’re not going to have a lot of stuff, so sort of embrace a nice minimalism that looks good.

The best thing you can do for your apartment to look nice is to clean it and to not let it be a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree. Don’t get cluttery with it. Apartments are small. In general, small spaces look best when they are minimally appointed, because they can’t handle a lot of clutter, they can’t handle a lot of different heights, and shapes, and things. Low, sleek, simple, small. I totally agree on IKEA as far as, you know, look, your job at this point is to succeed and move on save your money. Don’t spend money on furniture now, that’s crazy.

So, yeah, sure, go to IKEA. Get disposable Swedish furniture. Enjoy putting it together yourself. There are some nice tasteful things that they have there. And just do it.

There are people that really get into, “Ooh, look at my cool vintage sofa that I found at Goodwill, that’s full of bed bugs or smells.” Eh, you know, you’re going to have to move it, you know? You’re not living in this apartment the rest of your life. Think about that, too.

**John:** One of my favorite pieces of apartment furniture was something I found in the dumpster of the apartment building. It was this big green dresser. And it had these really handles on it, so I took them off and I put like cool handles on it. And that was my dresser for six years.

And that stuff is fine and good, too. Yeah, don’t worry about it too much.

**Craig:** Do not.

**John:** Steve asks, “How much can you guys bench press?”

**Craig:** Hmm, good question. Well, I haven’t been to the gym lately, and you know, my maximum bench press, I was never that strong. I think like one time, like one up and down, I think maybe like — I don’t know — probably I could do 200 pounds or something like that.

**John:** I did 205 for eight.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Yeah, so I was checking with my trainer today, because I asked him. And he said, “Oh, that’s what you can do.” So, that’s great. I actually probably couldn’t do that right now because I’ve been in Chicago and I haven’t had a trainer for awhile, but that’s what I could theoretically do.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was more, I like dumbbells. So, I like to do multiples with like two-50s. You know, not 250s, but two individual 50-pounds dumbbells and do like twelve reps or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, I do find that dumbbells, I don’t have that fear of dying, because there’s not going to be that bar that’s going to crush me.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** That’s the thing about bench pressing is that fear of like you’re actually going to be trapped underneath this forever. At least I could also like drop free weights.

**Craig:** And dumbbells are harder because you have to individually steer and balance, you know, whereas the bar of a bench press bar helps kind of stabilize.

Kyle from Salt Lake City says, “If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?”

**John:** I would choose flight, the two-handed arms pointed out at the sky flight.

**Craig:** I would go with invisibility. Super useful.

**John:** Yeah, that one is really useful.

**Craig:** Super useful. Flying, though, would be great though.

**John:** Yeah. Lawrence from New York City asks, for me, I guess, “Are you spoken to in a different manor because you are gay/straight??? Do they expect more or less of you because of your sexuality??? Do they believe you should be better at melodrama and weepy stuff, and sports films or action??? How does sexuality affect your career??? Does it???” All of these questions end with three question marks, which…stop doing that.

Lawrence, stop asking questions with three question marks.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Lawrence’s basic question is has being gay impacted my career at all in Hollywood. I don’t think it’s had a huge impact. I think, yes, I don’t get considered for sports movies as much. That’s not a huge tragedy in my life. But John Logan who’s gay, he wrote Any Given Sunday.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think that’s because you’re gay.

**John:** No. I think it’s because I don’t give a rat’s ass about sports.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I write action movies and people call me in for that. I don’t think that it ever comes up that much. I will say that when I was writing the first TV show I did, D.C., it was the only situation in my whole Hollywood time where I walked into a room and I felt like “faggot” had just been said, because it was this weird energy that had happened.

And I’m not sure who it was, or what was going on, but it was really, really uncomfortable. But that’s kind of been it.

And so a lot of times I will, they’ll ask me like, “Hey, do you want to become a bigger part of the Writers Guild Gay Writers Group?” I’m just like I don’t know that I need it. I don’t know that we need it. I don’t know that it’s actually a hue problem. It hasn’t been a huge problem for me, so I don’t relate to it.

**Craig:** Now there are so many gay producers, so many gay executives. It’s just, I don’t know. Yeah.

**John:** I think it would be much harder to be homophobic in this town than to be gay.

**Craig:** Openly homophobic? Oh, yeah, good luck. [laughs] I don’t think that can work. No.

**John:** It’s not going to go well.

**Craig:** I don’t think that would work. And, frankly, you’re just in the wrong business. I mean, if you don’t enjoy gay people and you don’t enjoy the expression of gay culture and gay humor and gay aesthetic, you’re just in the wrong business.

Earling writes, “Can either of you actually sing? Which musical production do you wish you could have had the chance to experience in person? And which musical to film do you think has resulted in the greatest or poorest film adaptation?”

**John:** Great. So, we’ve established that Craig can sing, because Craig sang on an earlier podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Earling.

**John:** Yeah, go back and do your research.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can sing well enough to get the point of a song across. And so I’ve gotten to be a better singer through Big Fish. So, I can sing a little bit. I can’t sing the way that the actors can sing in Big Fish, but I can sing well enough that I’m not scared to sing.

Which musical production do you wish you could have seen in person? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** I mean, I’ve never actually seen any production of Funny Girl, but Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl was probably awesome.

**Craig:** It probably was awesome. Yeah. I’d probably go with Fiddler on the Roof. The original Fiddler on the Roof. I just love that show. And I just think that would have been amazing to see that. Every song is just so great.

And what do you think about this musical to film, up and down?

**John:** I loved Chicago. And I love Chicago as a stage play, but I love it as a movie, too. And I think it was just a really, really smart version that captured the stuff I loved about the stage version and made it a movie.

**Craig:** It did. That’s a very good choice. I would probably go with West Side Story only because it may be the best musical ever and it also happens to be a great, great film, too. So, that’s a very high risk/high reward kind of thing to go from something that’s truly brilliant, take it to film, and not blow it.

Poorest, you know, I hate doing this, but The Producers, because The Producers was a great movie, and then they surprised everybody by doing a terrific musical of it. But the movie of the musical of the movie just didn’t work.

**John:** I have not seen it.

**Craig:** It just didn’t work. And I love everybody in it. And, yeah, it didn’t work. Plus, they cut out the best song, King of All Broadway.

Anyway, those are our answers.

**John:** Cool.

CC from Calabasas asks, “I love to hear about your solar panels and your electric cars. What are some other fun high end toys or home improvements that you recommend?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s one thing that I’ve signed up for, you know, when they make a big splashy thing, “Look, we have this new product coming but it’s not ready yet,” so you put your email on it and they tell you when it’s ready. And it’s called Kevo and it’s basically a lockset for your door that fits right in the regular deadbolt that locks that thing, but it’s controlled by your phone.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And I think it’s as simple as like a Bluetooth thing. So, you walk up to your door and it unlocks.

**John:** That would be great.

I like our Nest Thermostats. They’ve been really useful for us.

**Craig:** Love those.

**John:** I love that I can on my iPhone app see like, is the air conditioner running? I will turn it on. Or, I can turn it on like when I’m at the restaurant saying like let’s get it cooled down before I get home. That’s been awesome and great.

My husband has also been really good about sort of switching out all of our light bulbs to LEDs and energy efficient lights. So, throughout the whole house we’re all that way, and that’s part of the reason why we’re able to generate so much power and sell so much power back to the City of Los Angeles. We actually use very little power now which has been terrific.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Next question, John Ligget asks, “Hey, I think you should talk about food on your podcast and your favorite restaurants.”

Favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. I love Mozza. I love — both Osteria Mozza and the Pizzeria Mozza are fantastic. What are your favorite restaurants in Los Angeles?

**Craig:** You know, I’m not like a favorite restaurant guy. I guess if I had to say one, I really love Sasabune.

**John:** Okay. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Sushi place on the west side. And Sushi Nozawa and Sugarfish. I like really, really good sushi. But I’ll go to any restaurant. I’m pretty easygoing about restaurants. I’m not really a foodie. I love interesting food. I love the food that foodies eat, I just don’t love obsessing about food, and the trucks, and, oh, this new spot, and this guy used to own this place, and opens that place. And when people start having that discussion my eyes roll back in my head and I lose consciousness.

**John:** Yeah. I like to go to dinner with friends, but I’d much rather go to a mediocre restaurant with good friends than a great restaurant with people I don’t like.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Next up.

**Craig:** All right, next up we’ve got Hanu Carl. [laughs] Hanu Carl — so cute, in the Valley, question mark, exclamation point, exclamation point. “Kwanzaa or Diwali? Which of the non-Christmas holidays is cooler? Feel free to address history, music, fashion, and food.” My answer is none of them. The only cool holiday around Christmastime is Christmas. Sorry.

**John:** I’m 100 percent Diwali. I love Diwali. I love kind of everything Indian and I love Indian food. Come on, Diwali for me.

**Craig:** I love Indian food, too. I love everything Indian. I’m a big fan of the culture. I don’t need to celebrate Diwali though, or Kwanzaa. Frankly, I don’t even celebrate Christmas. Here’s the truth: I’m the Grinch and I don’t like celebrations. But I do love Indian food.

**John:** You’ll love the hundredth episode of Scriptnotes celebration, though. That’s a celebration you’ll endorse?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a holiday, you know?

**John:** I heard they’re actually going to shut down the town, though. I mean, everyone is going to take the day off and it’s going to be big deal.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Carmen in Missouri asks, “What are your thoughts on bacon? What are your thoughts on bacon in desserts?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Bacon is very good, it’s very tasty. I don’t care for the ridiculous internet obsession with bacon. You know, this is the worst of the internet. Take something that’s perfectly good but a little downscale and then turn it into like a meta, quasi-ironic worship thing. Yeah, it’s bacon, whatever. Isn’t there other stuff to talk about?

I do think that bacon in desserts is perfectly fine in the sense that savory plus sweet can be a nice thing. But, the whole bacon thing, it drives me nuts.

**John:** I’m glad to hear you say, because it drives me nuts, too.

**Craig:** What is that, John?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s the obsession over things that you don’t need to worry about being obsessed with. So, I don’t eat normal bacon, because I don’t eat beef, or pork, or mammals. So, I eat turkey bacon. And so I obviously like suspect because I eat turkey bacon which is not really a thing and I should be shunned for eating turkey bacon.

But I like turkey bacon just fine.

**Craig:** Turkey bacon is good. I like turkey bacon.

**John:** It’s delicious. And so whatever you want to do with bacon, great, go for it. But don’t push it at me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And like stop inventing fake obsessions, the point of which is that obsessions are silly but yet cool. All right, hipsters, go ahead with your bacon.

Ooh, Fabrizio from Italy. “If your podcasts weren’t about screenwriting or anything related to filmmaking, what would it be about?” Huh? What?

**John:** Mine would be yet another tech podcast, another sort of Mac Geekery podcast. And so I guest on some of those podcasts at times and I enjoy talking about that stuff, but really we don’t need another one, so I shouldn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think I would talk about anything else. I’m just simply not qualified. I’m barely qualified to talk about this. Let’s put it that way.

**John:** Chris Han in East LA writes, “What lessons do you have for nerds for a successful marriage?”

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know. Because they’re nerds?

**John:** Or for anybody.

**Craig:** You know, okay, here’s my big lessons — these are not shocking. Be faithful to your spouse. Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of time on your own. Don’t be afraid if they spend a little bit of time on their own. Don’t be contemptuous of your spouse. And, you know, avoid things like violence. I mean, it’s not really — I’ll tell you the number one, the number one thing. Honestly, everybody’s going to give you a bunch of platitudes. Number one thing: Be faithful. Be faithful. There you go.

**John:** I think all your points are very good. The other thing I would say is to always understand that your spouse is his or her own person and to always keep in mind what do they want or what do they need to do. And to figure out how you can be supportive to what they want or what they need to do, because their needs and wants may not immediately line up with what your needs and wants are. But you need to be aware of what they are so you can together both get to places you want to get to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, part of that is respect, but that’s also understanding that it’s not just about the two of you. It’s also about you as individuals.

**Craig:** Correct.

Oh, look at this, Robert…

**John:** Robert James Cross asks…

**Craig:** Robert is, yeah, he’s going for this question we’ve kind of trotted all over, kind of gone over this a little bit. “Where’s the best place for sushi or pizza in Los Angeles?”

**John:** Yeah, so when I was in Chicago we had the conversation about Chicago pizza and New York pizza. Honestly, the pizza I love the most is Los Angeles pizza. It is at Pizzeria Mozza. I think it’s just the best pizza you’re going to find.

**Craig:** That pizza is not what I call pizza, but that’s sort of what I call Italian fancy pizza. And that is excellent Italian fancy pizza. No question.

For traditional pizza, the kind of pizza that comes from New York, there are a couple places in and around there. There’s a Joe’s, I think, in Santa Monica now which is a transplant from New York. And there’s actually a little booth in The Americana on Brand in Glendale that sells pretty good pizza.

Sushi wise, like I said, Sasabune. Big fan of that. Nozawa. Sugarfish.

**John:** So, I go to Nobu and I like Nobu quite a lot. I’ve been to Nobus in many different countries, but the Nobu in Los Angeles is lovely, as is Matsuhisa.

But my favorite sushi, actually Sushi Azami which closed, but the owner Niki has opened up another restaurant on the west side which is amazing, but it’s always omakase, and it’s like a three-hour thing to eat dinner there. It’s completely worth it, it’s just that you have to plan for three-hours to do it. So, I’ll have a link to her restaurant.

**Craig:** That’s interesting that it’s three hours long, because Sasabune is the same thing, it’s omakase, but it doesn’t take that long.

**John:** Yeah. I was with Josh Friedman and we drank a lot of wine, so maybe that’s why it took three hours.

**Craig:** Maybe you thought it was three hours, it was 20 minutes.

**John:** Ha. We actually had to walk around the block just a few time just to, you know, settle your stomach and feel like you could actually move in a car again.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon,” oh, this is a question from Jessup, I love Jessup, from Vacaville. “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon. Because of carryon restrictions you only get to bring one book, one snack, one beverage. What are they?”

**Craig:** I don’t care.

**John:** I have answers for all of this. My book would be Pride & Prejudice, because I just love Pride & Prejudice. I could just read it again and again. One snack would be almond butter. And it would specifically be Whole Foods Almond Butter, the one that you can actually get from the grinder. Like fresh ground almond butter is one of the best substances on earth. And one beverage, I suppose if I’m going to go…well, it’s a question, do you go for the alcohol? You’re flying to the moon…

**Craig:** You’re going to the moon. This is what I don’t understand about this question. You’re going to the moon and you’re reading? My eyes are glued. I’m like, I want to just watch the trip entirely. I don’t care what my snack is. I’m going to the moon!

**John:** Yeah, the moon.

**Craig:** You know what I’ll have, moon snack. Whatever moon plane gives me. I feel so simple.

**John:** I will say one of the things I miss most about Chicago is a chain called Protein Bar. And Protein Bar is this sort of healthy fast food that is all over Chicago, and I haven’t seen here, and I really which were here. But they have these amazing smoothies. And they have like a peanut butter/chocolate chip smoothie that’s actually kind of healthy that’s really great. So that would be my beverage.

**Craig:** That sounds good.

Josh from San Luis Obispo. “If you had the option to either own a real life light saber, or an actual working hover board from Back to the Future, which would you choose and why?”

**John:** I’m full on light saber. I would love to have a light saber.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. That’s not even a good question.

**John:** It’s not a good question at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s not a fair question.

**John:** It’s a light saber. How can you not pick light saber?

**Craig:** Yeah, working hover board? Who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Oh, look at me, I’m on my hover board. Whoop-de-do.” All right. Or, you can just go get a Segway and also look like a dork.

Or, you can have a light saber. Come on, Josh. [laughs] I’m getting angry.

**John:** Mark Thorson writes, “Now that even Rush Limbaugh has admitted the gay marriage issue is lost, what’s the next milestone for gay rights? The only thing I can think of is the first gay president. Is anything more important that happens earlier?”

Uh, yeah, I think marriage is happening really quickly, and I’m delighted that it’s happening so quickly, and delighted that just last week we picked up another giant state. And whatever the Supreme Court decision is, it will be incredibly useful. And I’m excited to be able to get off of planes and be married in more states. That’s a wonderful thing.

I talk to the people who run these organizations and one of the things I say when I talk to these people is it’s fantastic that gay and lesbian couples can have the rights they need, I think the next frontier is going to be to make sure that people who don’t fit into nice categories, transgendered people, get the same rights that everyone else does. And I think that’s one of the things where, you know, we talk about gay people as minorities. Those people are super minorities. And making sure that they have full and inclusive rights to things that every American should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, ultimately the most meaningful milestone beyond this one is that there’s no longer a topic because it’s just nobody cares and everything is equal and fine and it’s just not an issue.

I think that employment rights are probably where I would look if I were running one of these organizations, because there are going to be states soon, I think, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of federal gay marriage — there are going to be states where it is legally possible for two men to get married but also legally possible for both of them to be fired from their jobs because they’re gay. That’s bizarre.

**John:** Yeah. That is bizarre.

**Craig:** So, I mean, it’s bizarre right now, obviously. So, that’s where I would probably — that’s where I would load up my ammo.

Let’s see, we have Brian from Tampa, “Morally speaking, what’s the worst thing you’ve done to get out of some type of obligation?”

**John:** I will say personally I feel good that I’ve never used my kid as an excuse. I’ve never pretended that it was like my kid that was why I couldn’t do something. But I have, I feel like I’m coming down with something, I have done that. And I feel terrible when I do it. And sometimes I get sort of the symptomatic cold that I imagined from doing that. But, I’ve feigned some illness to get out of a meeting or to reschedule something.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure I’ve done that, too. I mean, it’s hard to quarrel with somebody who’s telling you that they just threw up. Even if you think they’re lying, even if you think there’s a 90 percent chance they’re lying, that means there’s a 10 percent chance that you’re forcing somebody to show up in your office and they might throw up.

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to do that.

**Craig:** Near you. Yeah.

**John:** Malibu Jack asks, “If the universe is infinite, how can it be expanding? And if space is mostly empty, how can it be warped by gravity?”

**Craig:** I can’t answer the first question, because I don’t know. The second question I think misunderstands gravity and space time. But, I’m not smart enough to explain why. I just know that in my head I’m looking at that diagram in A Brief History of Time and Thinking. No, that’s not a good question.

**John:** I think it’s a reasonable question, but it’s not a good question in the sense that we are not — as human beings we’re not well set up to deal with things at a giant, giant, giant scale, or at a really tiny scale. We’re used to being able to deal with things at a scale that we can see.

Our whole mind is set up for like there’s that bison over there. I will throw this rock and hit this bison. And so our minds work really well for that scale of thing. And so scale of things we can see and scale of things we can do.

And so we have this tendency to try to use our understanding of that kind of world and apply it to much bigger things, and it actually just doesn’t hold up very well. And so we say the universe is expanding, but it’s infinite. Well, that makes sense at the giant levels that we’re talking about. And, you know, say, “Well what is this expanding into?” It’s like, well, that’s actually not meaningful in a way that you sort of want it to make sense. This is because we think in very physical, relatable terms that aren’t actually accurate to how the big universe works or how the tiny universe works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or, spice.

**John:** The spice. The spice explains it all.

**Craig:** The worm. The spice. What is the connection?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s my favorite line from a movie ever. “The connection is that the worm is the spice.”

**John:** The worm is the spice.

**Craig:** And then he just kept asking the question. “It’s got to have something…the worm and the spice. What is it?” [laughs] “They’re the same. They’re the same thing.”

**John:** Let’s skip this next question because another one down the list asks the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Ferdinand from Constantinople asks, “If Craig and John did a life swap, who would be better at being the other?”

**Craig:** I think I’m good at impressions, so I think I could actually convince some people that I was you.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’d actually do a pretty good job with my life. And my life is not that difficult. I think I would have a harder time being you because I don’t care anything about baseball and I would not be able to coach your son’s baseball team.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are lot of dads that also can’t coach their kid’s baseball teams. And, you know, you would just watch.

**John:** But I could love your woman. There’s no question.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’d like to see you try!

**John:** [laughs] Gary from Orlando, Florida asks, “Craig, how’s the Tesla been so far?”

**Craig:** Awesome! Greatest car in the world. And it was terrific to see that Consumer Reports, which is very fussy, super nerdy guys — one thing I like about Consumer Reports, when they review cars they don’t get a car from the factory. They have somebody go and buy a car anonymously. So, it’s actually just a random car and they put it through ridiculous paces. And it got a 99 out of 100. Only one other car in history has every gotten that. It was a Lexus from 10 years ago.

And they said essentially, “This may be the best car we’ve ever tested.”

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s an awesome car. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

**John:** Hooray. And for the record, I still love my Leaf. It’s been a great car, too.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Doug Jay asks, “What are your thoughts on automobile safety ratings? Would a bad safety rating be a deal breaker for you?”

**Craig:** It would for me. Absolutely.

**John:** It would for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, this guy mentions that the Camry rated poor in the IHS Small Offset Crash Test. Well, it turns out that most crashes are offset. I mean, very few people just slam into each other headlight to headlight. And if a car structurally is doing very poorly in a test like that, well, yeah, of course it’s a deal breaker. What, like a Camry is so awesome that I need to overlook the fact that it could possibly be a death trap? It’s a Camry.

**John:** I honestly feel the same way about motorcycles. Because, you know what, no motorcycle survives a crash well.

**Craig:** That’s right. No, motorcycles are just dumb. And, listen, if you ride a motorcycle, I get it, and that’s cool. I understand. My wife has this whole theory — you deserve to die. It’s the whole “you deserve to die theory.” That she just can’t muster sympathy for people who die doing things that are kind of safe but just generally not safe. Like it’s kind of safe to go skydiving. But not really. So, if you die skydiving, screw you. [laughs] That’s basically her theory. So, I don’t do a lot of — I used to go diving in the ocean. Don’t do that as much anymore. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Bryce from LA wonders, “What were both of your drinking habits before you made it and while you were rising the echelons of the industry? Perhaps to a lesser degree, what are they now? And would you mind speaking to Hollywood’s atmosphere of rejection in conjunction with the drunken writer stereotype?”

**John:** Yeah, so I think, you know, we have this stereotype that like writers are drunks who, you know, are functioning alcoholics and that kind of thing. And there are some. I don’t think there’s very many. And you won’t meet a lot of drunks and you won’t meet a lot of drug addicts who are actually working in the industry. That’s been my experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, people go through their phases, like everybody else. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, at all. I’ve had a problem with nicotine, food, wanking. I don’t have any problems with drinking. I am that guy who can have one or two glasses and then just drop, in fact, prefers to stop.

You know, it’s funny — I often think, sometimes my wife will buy like a cake. And the cake will sit there for four days in the fridge. And I’ll think, “How is she buying the cake and not eating it?” Like if I buy a cake it’s to eat it. Do you know what I mean? So, she’ll just buy a cake and just leave it there. And then I think, but wait a second, that’s the way I am with alcohol. Like I’ll buy a bottle of wine or a fancy bottle of scotch or something. I won’t open it for a year. I don’t care. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky, too. So, I will have a glass of wine or two, and that’s been fine, and great, and good. And I was never much of a drinker-drinker. So, you go through your periods of your 20s, and those are going to be those times when you’re out drinking with friends and you’re going out to much and drinking too much with people. But you sort of grow out of it, and I just grew out of it. And I was happy and lucky.

So, there is some sort of going out with the gang to do stuff, or that sort of social drinking, that happens. But it’s not awful. I would also say that my husband when he went to get his MBA, that crew would drink so much. And they would drink all the time that it was really surprising and kind of crazy to me that they were able to sustain a graduate school program.

**Craig:** You know, I live in La Cañada, this little town, and it’s not a Hollywood town. It’s very kind of finance and law and accounting and so forth. Good god people drink in my town. I mean, I go to these parties, [laughs], and people get wasted. And they’re adults. I don’t get it.

**John:** I want to fall back on a piece of advice I gave on the blog a long time ago, but I would say if you’re out drinking, my basic rule is alternate with water. So, if you don’t want to get drunk, you don’t want to be problematically drinking, you have a drink, great. Have a full equal glass of water before you get your next drink, and that will slow you down. It doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be — it doesn’t mean you’re safe to drive, but it means that you’re not going to make a horrible decision if you were to stick to that plan.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Josh asks a series of questions that we’re going to get to really quickly. “How much weight, if any, do you give to conspiracy theories about the new world order, water fluoridation, 9/11, JFK assassination, etc?”

**Craig:** I give negative weight to those.

**John:** I give negative weight. And anyone who believes them, I have a hard time taking seriously.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like you. I think you’re an idiot.

**John:** “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I think you die, you die.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “How have your feelings about money changed throughout your life?”

**Craig:** They haven’t.

**John:** I would say they really haven’t. I’ve always been like hold on to as much money as it makes sense to hold onto.

**Craig:** Save.

**John:** Save.

**Craig:** Save. Yeah. Don’t spend a lot. Don’t need to.

**John:** “Do you believe we are alone in the universe?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, there have to be other civilizations. Here’s the thing — I don’t think the Earth is actually all that special. I think we’re going to find that there’s actually a lot of earth-like planets and it’s going — other planets will have life that has existed or will exist. Will we be able to talk to those other civilizations? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not any time soon. [laughs] No, that’s narcissism to believe that we happen to live in the time…

**John:** The best of all possible worlds.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. No, no, they’re out there, but they’re way out there.

**John:** Yeah. “What’s the secret to a close and comfortable shave?”

**Craig:** Get yourself in the shower, get a nice hot shower going. Get your face nice and steamed out. And then shave with the grain, not against the grain. And then after you’re done shaving with the grain, which changes depending on what part of your face your shaving, then go against the grain.

**John:** Yeah. Shave in the shower. That’s where you should do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** David in Wellington, New Zealand asks, “I’m ready to propose for marriage next month.” I love that he says “propose for marriage.” That’s not how we would say it in the US.

**Craig:** Yeah. Propose for…

**John:** “Can you give some creative ideas on how to ask the big question. Cheers. Please no Hobbit jokes.”

**Craig:** Well, Gimli, oh no, he was a dwarf, sorry. No, no Hobbit jokes whatsoever. I like people from New Zealand. They’re very cool people. They’re good people.

I can only tell you how I did it. I had kind of a cool idea. And that was I like cold places. So, I surprised my then girlfriend by flying us to Alaska. And, by the way, I wasn’t rich. I had no money, but it just seemed funny. I saved my money and then I flew us to Alaska. And I went all the way out to the middle of Alaska in Fairbanks, and it was around the beginning of April. And I had sort of timed it because I knew that the Northern Lights were super, duper active around that time.

And so we went outside at night under the Northern Lights and I proposed to her.

**John:** That’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Nice. But she kind of had the idea that you were going to propose if you were…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** So, I didn’t have the proper proposal because essentially we always talked like, oh, whenever marriage becomes possible let’s get married. He’s like, so of course. And so suddenly the California Supreme Court decision came down saying that yes they have to have marriage. And so suddenly it just could happen.

So, I was in Arrowhead writing on something. And so Mike called. He’s like, “Oh, it went through. Great. So, let’s get married.” And like we literally picked a date. But neither one of us asked the other person. It just happened.

**Craig:** Right. You guys actually kind of got saved. I mean, the truth is that men don’t really care about any of this stuff. We just want to jump to the conclusion. Women care.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, even if this hadn’t been shortchanged by legal maneuvering, my guess is that you probably would have been like, “Marriage? Yeah, cool.”

**John:** Yeah.

Bin Le asks, “When can we hear Stuart’s voice on the podcast?”

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, we could just keep him like Maris, Niles’s wife on Frasier. [laughs] Just sort of a presence.

**John:** Yeah. So people last night, Stuart was there, and people would ask, “Is Stuart…?” And I was like, yeah, I pointed, “That’s Stuart. He’s a real person. He’s not Snuffleupagus. He’s a real live little boy.”

**Craig:** And you pointed to an empty space in the room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And everyone slowly backed away from you.

**John:** Indeed. It’s like in Fight Club the whole time through. I’ve actually been Stuart the whole time through.

**Craig:** Hercules Rockefeller the Third, certainly his real name, asks, “How can someone stop falling for the wrong woman and/or man?” Answer, you can’t.

**John:** You can’t. The heart wants what it wants.

**Craig:** That’s why they call it falling. If you can stop falling, that would be great. But, eh, I don’t think so.

**John:** But, going back to an earlier topic, you know, maybe don’t fall for married people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good choice. And so look for what your type is and find your type in a type that is actually available. Because maybe your type is unavailable people because you don’t actually want that commitment of a relationship. And then you need to have some therapy and deal with your issues.

**Craig:** Yeah. Deal with your issues, Hercules.

Who’s next, Hector?

**John:** Hector from Canada writes, “Serious question here, perhaps life’s most serious question. How do you cope with mortality? Does the inevitable prospect of death borrow you? If not, why not? If so, how do you cope, or do you?”

**Craig:** It bother me now, but I know that when I am — assuming that I don’t die an untimely death — I’ve talked to enough elderly people to know that you, your mind starts to prepare you for death as you get older. And you get to a point, frankly, where you’re not afraid of it at all. It’s just a natural thing. It’s almost like, well, this is what all my friends are doing. Might as well do it, too. It’s cool. It’s okay.

You don’t get scared anymore. I asked my grandmother. She was 94. And she said, “No, somewhere around like 82 or 83 you totally stop caring.”

**John:** Maybe so. I’m afraid of death, but not in a weird way. Not so much the fear of like well I will stop existing, because I don’t believe in an afterlife necessarily, but just having a family and a young kid, that’s what I think about, sort of most afraid of sort of mortality wise. And you want your kid to be able to get to a place in life where they are stable and they don’t need you as much.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, the truth is, they always kind of need you. And as I face sort of my own parent’s mortality, that’s, you know, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is, but the truth is, let’s say you’re 85. You’re daughter will be 40-something I assume, or something like that, right? She’s an adult. She’s your age now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’ll be fine. She’ll have her own kids, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

Clint Williams asks…

**Craig:** Good question. Yeah, Clint Williams.

**John:** “Adoption of the designated hitter by the National League? Idle chatter? Good for the game? Umbrage?”

**Craig:** I think it’s idle chatter. I don’t think it’s good for the game. I don’t have any umbrage about it. I’m a Yankee fan, so I grew up in the American League. So, the designate hitter isn’t a matter of religious objection to me. But, you know, we’ve changed so much about baseball in the last ten years. You know the wild card, and the expansion of playoffs, and teams bouncing around from national, to interleague play. All this stuff. Yeah, leave it. Leave it the way it is. No DH in the National League. No DH.

**John:** I barely understood a word you said.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You’ll understand this. John from Albany, New York, says, “Should I buy my 16-year-old son condoms now that he has a steady girlfriend? And at what age did you lose your virginity? Full disclosure: I was 16. So, that’s why I ask question number one above.”

**John:** So, number one question, yes, you should buy your 16-year-old son condoms. And you should have those frank conversations. People freak out way too much about having the conversations about sex and they shouldn’t. Just have the conversations. It’s awkward at the start, but then it’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s better that you have the conversations. And don’t be intrusive but just make sure they know that it’s an option there and it’s there and you want them to be around.

**Craig:** Yeah, he could also buy his own condoms. That’s what I did. [laughs] I mean, he doesn’t have to have daddy go buy him condoms. There’s no condom law, is there?

**John:** Yeah, there’s no condom law. But, I think it’s a good first gesture to buy condoms for your son.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And at what age, and certainly you should not just let him go condom-less. At what age did you lose your virginity, John?

**John:** If we were going to define virginity in a sense of the activity that I was engaged in if I was engaging with a woman could have led to a baby…so, like, it’s a question of virginity. Like, what’s fooling around and what’s more than fooling around?

**Craig:** I would say penetrative sex is virginity.

**John:** Penetrative sex — 23.

**Craig:** I was 16. I was a man-whore, obviously. [laughs]

Kevin Williamson, for real.

**John:** The real Kevin Williamson?

**Craig:** The real Kevin Williamson, creator of Scream and so many other wonderful television shows, Dawson’s Creek and so forth, his simple question, “Zoloft or Lexapro?”

**John:** I’m on neither anti-depressant, but I think they’re both good choices for people who need an anti-depressant.

**Craig:** Neither am I. I’m not on anti-depressants. And I suspect that they don’t work as well as people think. But, you know what does work? Kevin Williamson.

**John:** Yeah. He works hard.

**Craig:** Best guy ever.

**John:** Nima, the actual Nima, wrote in to ask, “I want Bride & Prejudice,” which is apparently a movie. “iTunes has it in SD to buy and HD to rent. Should I buy SD or wait for HD?”

So, I would say you should never wait. I think waiting for almost anything that’s going to cost $3 or $4 or $5 is never a good idea, because the world could end tomorrow. So, if you want to watch this movie, do whatever it takes to watch this movie now and don’t wait another second.

**Craig:** Yeah. Totally. Just rent it. Yeah, of course. I mean, how many times really are you going to watch this thing? Also, I should say that we do better on residuals when you rent things.

**John:** Yeah. Rent it.

**Craig:** Matthew Kingshot wants to know, “Where does the podcast’s opening musical riff come from?”

**John:** So, that actually is something I wrote and it is from The Remnants, which was a web pilot that I did during the strike, so 2008. And I needed some opening little jingle, so I wrote that opening little jingle. And I liked it and I needed something for the podcast, and so I put it there.

So, if you go back to really early episodes of the podcast, I would use sort of super hero or cartoon music for the thing, and I just got really tired of looking for new stuff every week.

**Craig:** Finding new ones, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so I went to [hums opening]. And that’s what it is.

**Craig:** [hums opening] What’s next? We’ve got David Wells. David Wells, great picture.

**John:** Yes. He writes, “What surprised you about being a father?”

**Craig:** I think the — when I had my son and I became a parent I was surprised by the amount of innate violence that had been in my bloodstream and I didn’t realize it was there. I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been in a fistfight. I don’t believe in hitting. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t spank them or do any of that stuff. I’m not a violent person.

But, I remember somebody accidentally waking my baby up and I wanted to kill them. Not like, ha-ha, I want to kill them; I mean, I actually wanted to kill them. It’s powerful stuff.

**John:** I would say that I was not prepared for sort of how, I would say sort of like your violence — how primal it feels when you have a newborn kid who you are protecting. And how you are — it’s like this beautiful jailor who has like locked you to care of them. And how day becomes night, night becomes day, and you’re just in this weird dreamed fugue state of taking care of the newborn.

And eventually you sort of pass through that thing. But, because of that intensity you feel this tremendous connection to this kid. So, like any scratch on the kid becomes an affront to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is intense. Indeed intense.

**John:** Jeff Orrig writes, “How would Craig redesign Kickstarter?”

**Craig:** You know, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t redesign Kickstarter. I would just simply say to the people who are participating on Kickstarter to Kickstarter Emptor, you know. Oh, I’m sorry, Caveat Kickstarter. I got it totally backwards.

Just really think critically before you toss your money out there. Kickstarter can be a good thing. Kickstarter appeals to your most pro-social noble instincts. That doesn’t mean that the people appealing to you are pro-social or noble themselves. So, just be skeptical, be cautious, and if somebody is asking you for money that you think ought to just be asking a traditional investment community for money, don’t give them money. There’s other things you can do with your cash. That’s all.

**John:** Sounds fair.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see, we got Mike Bowman in LA saying, “We often hear about the crazy things athletes and actors do with their money or fame once they have it, what was the craziest thing you did once you became a working screenwriter simply because you had the money or recognition to do it?”

**John:** So, this wasn’t right when I first became successful, but I really liked the movie Lost in Translation a lot. And so we got the idea, my husband and some friends and I, like let’s just go to Tokyo for 48 hours. And so we did. And it was kind of amazing. So, we flew to Tokyo. We stayed at the Park Hyatt, the same hotel they used in there. I swam in that same pool they shot. And we had like a Lost in Translation weekend. And it was kind of amazing.

And we sang at karaoke bars. And we went to the Imperial Palace, which happened to be open that day. And it was kind of great. So, it was a lot of money to blow, but it was also a really great time and a great experience.

**Craig:** I haven’t done really crazy things with money. I mean…

**John:** Tesla.

**Craig:** Well, is that really crazy? I mean, it’s a car and people have cars and people have expensive cars. I don’t know if that’s that crazy. You know, it’s okay. Does that count? Okay, Tesla.

**John:** I think it counts.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s it. Cool.

**John:** Hawke from Berlin, Germany writes…

**Craig:** [How-ka].

**John:** [Ho-ka], sorry, I should have put the E in there. “I always feel guilty for the Holocaust. I am 30-years-old and I had nothing to do with the war, or the Holocaust, or anything. Even my father was born in 1947 when the war was already over, but I want to apologize as soon as I meet a Jewish person. Do you think that a person should carry the weight of the most horrible crime ever, or let it die after my grandfather left this world?”

**Craig:** Hawke, you are adorable. No, Hawke, you should stop. That’s ridiculous. You don’t — first of all, don’t apologize as soon as you meet a Jewish person. As a Jewish person, that would probably be the only thing you could do to me that would make me feel kind of awkward and weird.

You didn’t do anything! And your dad didn’t do anything. And, frankly, people who were alive during the war, a lot of them didn’t do anything. A lot of them did, but a lot of them didn’t. And a lot of them were just kids, you know.

And the truth is that it was a terrible thing that happened but I don’t believe collective guilt. I don’t believe in sins of the fathers. And, no, you should just stop. You should just stop and breathe easy and be a good person. And you’ll be fine.

**John:** Yeah. Sins of the father just drives me crazy in that sense of like things carry over past a generation. You didn’t choose to be born to that person, so why should you inherit any of their guilt for things? That’s nuts.

And so we have the equivalent in America, it would be slavery. And so slavery was a terrible thing that we can look at, learn from. We can recognize, are there aspects of what happened there that are still happening in society now. But we can focus on what is the present tense and not focus on that thing that happened back then, or of feeling culpable as a modern day human being for what that was then.

We can acknowledge what happened and try to avoid that sort of situation happening again. But, we shouldn’t feel guilt about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not about you, basically. You know what I mean? It’s not. You don’t have to feel this personal connection to that because you’re not personally connected to it. And that’s just a fact.

Let’s see, Tim says, “Describes your home entertainment setup and talk your tech in general perfected platform/gamers. Outside of movies, what’s the first thing you read or seek information about each day?”

**John:** That was too much. Let’s just talk about home entertainment center.

**Craig:** Home entertainment center. Done. What do you got?

**John:** Our main TV, our DVR is just the standard Time Warner, no, I’m sorry, it’s the DirecTV box, which is actually just fine. It’s the DirecTV DVR.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I have.

**John:** It’s just fine. And I was for a long time holding onto my TiVo but then I got this thing. And you know what? It’s just fine. So, we use that and then we use a Mac Mini that we use as both our DVD player and to watch things off Hulu or Netflix or anything else with that. So, we just switch between the two. It’s fine, it’s painless, it’s easy.

Our old house had a projector and all that stuff, and we never used it because it was a giant hassle. Some people love the projector stuff, but I honestly believe in a TV that you can turn on, you can watch, and it sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have TVs and we have the DVRs for DirecTV. And then we have a couple of nice setups with surround sound, which I like. Surround sound things are — one particular super cool surround soundy thing which I like a lot. But, yeah, you know, nothing crazy.

**John:** I think people will spend way too much time and money tweaking and adapting their situations which they shouldn’t.

**Craig:** Well, and that entire industry is based on a fastidiousness that simply doesn’t apply. It just doesn’t apply. It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Treat asks, “So, how do you and Craig feel about marijuana? Have you ever smoked before writing? Do you know other screenwriters who do this, or on an occasional or regular basis?”

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t care about marijuana. I had my get high a lot in senior year of high school phase, and then I smoked a little bit in college but not that much. The truth is I don’t smoke marijuana. I don’t get high ever really anymore just because I kind of don’t want to. Again, it’s sort of the alcohol thing, frankly.

And the other issue with marijuana is the dosage concept, because I know exactly how much alcohol is in a glass of wine, or in three fingers of scotch. I just don’t know if I’m smoking marijuana, what is it, how much — how intense is it? There are so many different kinds.

No, I wouldn’t smoke before writing. I just think that that’s crazy. I don’t drink before writing, either. I just think that would be dumb.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t smoke pot. I smoked pot in college some, and a little bit since then. But, the problem with pot for me is I’m really stupid the next day. It just lingers with me for a while in a way that’s not helpful or useful. So, I think it should be legalized. I think we should tax and regulate it and treat it much the same way we treat alcohol, but it’s not a useful thing to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Next question.

**Craig:** Oh, Hugo von Giggle-Bottom.

**John:** Ha. Hugo von Giggle-Bottom writes, “I’m interested in your opinions on baldness, John more than Craig, because you are winning the race to hairlessness. Do you care? Does it affect your confidence?” And related questions.

So, here’s my hair situation. I started to lose my hair in my early 20s. And at a certain point, my friend Tom Hoffman says, “You know, if you ever want to just shave all your hair off, I’ll totally do that.”

And I was like, “You know, we should do that, and we should do it as a public event.”

So, I was at my friend Jen’s house and it was sort of like a white trash party and we were watching Miss America. And it was like, yeah, shave my head. And so we shaved it. And I don’t regret it at all. I never looked back.

The weirdest thing about shaving your head though for the first time is I would catch my reflection in a mirror or even just like walking by a window it was like, “Ah, who is that?” I did not recognize myself for a while. But, then, god, my life is just so much easier not having to think about hair.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would totally shave my head, I guess, but my wife doesn’t want me to. She just likes a very close-cropped balding look. The one thing I won’t do is anything to delay the balding. I don’t put any medicine in there. I don’t put any of that stuff. I don’t take the pills.

I know guys that are injecting stuff directly into their scalp. I don’t do anything. I don’t care. This Dr. von Giggle-Bottom, who is German nobility, apparently, says he’s been struggling with hair loss for years and “I just can’t seem to get comfortable with being a bald guy.”

Dude, you’re not a bald guy. You’re a guy. No one cares.

**John:** No one cares.

**Craig:** No one cares. Honestly. It’s just hair. It’s hair.

Let’s see, Jessie asks, “Did Craig ever get to read the rest of the script for that three-page challenge he likes so much? Did he like it?”

I did. And I did. It turned out that it was actually a short. It was about 10 pages, so I got super lucky. Because, you know, you ask to read something, you’re like, oh boy.

It was a very fun read. And when I read it I thought it felt very — it felt like a script for something animated which didn’t come through necessarily when we read it as just three pages. And it was a little reminiscent of Paper Man, the Oscar award-winning animated short. So, I’m actually hooking up the writer with somebody at Pixar who is going to read the script as a writing sample.

**John:** Great. That’s a perfect choice for that.

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

**John:** Matthew from California writes, “I have a hard time waking up in the mornings, no matter what I do, no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten, I cannot seem to rise when my alarm says it’s time to start the day. Part of me thinks it’s a habit ingrained to me after a long period of depression, but regardless of its origins it’s really messing with my ability to get stuff done. Any advice?”

I would say that you are not a morning person and you should somehow rearrange your life so that you don’t have to be a morning person. I think it’s honestly kind of maybe okay that you’re not a morning person. Just take night shifts or something.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s possible. There are a couple things that you generally ask in a situation like this. What is your caffeine intake? Try stopping all caffeine after noon. Don’t smoke. Exercise a little bit more. And then just try for three or four days to wake up when your alarm says wake up, let’s say 8 o’clock. So, don’t get crazy and say, “I’m waking up at 6:30.” 8 o’clock. Give that a shot. Do that for three or four days in a row and see if you don’t start to get super tired around midnight.

And then you may be able to adjust, if it’s important to you.

**John:** I will say the 11 weeks I was gone in New York and Chicago, that whole time I did not have to set my alarm once, and I could just wake up when I woke up, and I was so much happier for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Jonathan writes, “Two questions because I’m a greedy bastard. What was the clichéd love at first sight when dating? Or was there a clichéd love at first sight meeting? And since you guys are fairly popular, what would you say is the proper etiquette for people to come up and say hi?”

**Craig:** You walk past them two steps and then turn around, thrust yourself at them.

**John:** And say, “So good to meet you Jerry Seinfeld.”

**Craig:** “So good to meet you.” And then walk away.

**John:** So, let’s handle the second question first. It’s fine to say hi if we’re not clearly engaged in some other conversation or place. It’s situational, but I was at a restaurant and the server recognized who I was and could say, “Oh, I’m a big fan of your podcast.” That’s lovely. That’s great. If I’m in the middle of doing something, or if I’m sort of like doing stuff with my kid, that’s the only time it gets kind of weird, because I’m busy doing other stuff here and there isn’t a great time for me to talk with you.

But, our fans are super cool, so I’m never scared about that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a good rule of thumb to not approach any famous people or people that you don’t know when they’re with their children for the aforementioned reason that parents get — they’re like bears with cubs. They just get weird about that. I mean, the people that have said things to me that I’ve met about the podcast have been very nice.

And, look, the truth is there’s not a great reward. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of meeting me. I just go, “Oh, that’s nice, good to hear.” And then I just move on. But, yeah, just don’t trust yourself into my personal space, because that’s the sort of thing an idiot does to Jerry Seinfeld.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

For me and my wife it was not love at first sight. It wasn’t not love at first sight. It was interest at first sight. I don’t know if there is a love at first sight. I’m suspicious of that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s lust at first sight. And so we weren’t love at first sight, either. We were like, this is good. This is great. And then three dates became four dates, became ten dates, became, you know, everything else. So, I think sometimes we’re guilty in movies of creating this situation of love at first sight and it becomes the expectation about how love is supposed to work. And that’s not how love usually works.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. It is not.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** So many books just are lies. The world is a huge blanket woven from threads of lies. We just cover ourselves in it.

**John:** Craig, that was actually our last question.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s so anticlimactic, but that was love at first sight, so that’s a good way to end a podcast.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Why not? So, I have no One Cool Thing, because I thought that was about 90 Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh my god, yeah, no, we can’t keep talking. That would be ridiculous.

**John:** But thank you everyone who sent in these questions. I’m looking at the list now. There were 106 questions. We answered maybe like 50 of them. That was a lot of questions.

**Craig:** We answered a lot of questions. I think we answered them well. We didn’t fight.

**John:** No, we didn’t really fight. We didn’t even disagree. I would say our answers lined up much more than I would have guessed they would.

**Craig:** Well, because, here’s the truth — the two of us are right.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** We’re right. And I wish people would just stop fighting it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just let us be right.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Standard boiler plate language here: If you like the show, find us on iTunes, give us a rating, tell people that you like the show. And if you have questions about screenwriting, which is mostly what we talk about here, you can send them to ask@johnaugust.com. And you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you very much and we will talk to you guys next week.

**Craig:** [hums opening] See you later.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

LINKS:

* The Writers Guild Foundation presents [The Screenwriter’s Craft: Finding Your Voice](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/the-screenwriters-craft-finding-your-voice/) featuring Scriptnotes Live
* [Zach Braff’s response](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1/posts/482298) to [The Hollywood Reporter’s article](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-zach-braffs-kickstarter-film-523352) on his film’s gap financer
* The Hollywood Reporter on [E!’s Fashion Police writers strike](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fashion-police-writers-strike-begins-441421)
* [Highland v 1.0.2](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) brings shift + return caps, lyrics and various minor bug fixes
* Try [Cignot.com](http://www.cignot.com/Default.asp) for all your eCig needs
* Thumbs up for [UC Verde Buffalo Grass](http://ucverdebuffalograss.com/)
* [Kevo](http://www.kwikset.com/Kevo/default.aspx) is on its way
* The [Nest Thermostat](http://nest.com/) is fantastic
* For LA pizza, check out [Pizzeria Mozza](http://www.pizzeriamozza.com/), [Joe’s Pizza](http://www.joespizza.com/Tel_310_395-9222.html) in Santa Monica or the pizza kiosk at [The Americana](http://www.americanaatbrand.com/)
* And for LA sushi, we like [Nobu](http://www.noburestaurants.com/) and [Matsuhisa](http://www.nobumatsuhisa.com/), [Sugarfish](http://sugarfishsushi.com/) and the former [Nozawa](http://sushinozawa.com/), [Sasabune](http://www.trustmesushi.com) and [Chef Niki Nakayama](http://www.n-naka.com/about/chef/)’s n/naka
* If you’re in Chicago (or Washington D.C.), try [Protein Bar](http://www.theproteinbar.com/)
* Craig still loves his [Tesla](http://www.teslamotors.com/) and John still loves his [Leaf](http://www.nissanusa.com/electric-cars/leaf/)
* [Alternate with water](http://johnaugust.com/2009/alternate-with-water) when you’re drinking
* OUTRO: George Michael’s [Father Figure](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_EGdiS2PEE) covered by Cantaloop