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

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

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

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

**Abby Kohn:** Hi.

**John:** …and Marc Silverstein…

**March Silverstein:** Hello.

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

**Abby:** Thanks.

**Marc:** Thanks for having us.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** No. Production.

**Abby:** Production.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Gravitated towards each other?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Abby:** During, yeah.

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

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

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

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We are not.

**Marc:** We are separately married.

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

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

**Marc:** Seven years.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** But, this survived.

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

**Abby:** It did.

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

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

**Craig:** I’m that guy?

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It will.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** And just revising?

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Like so much of the rhythm…

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** It’s gotten less and less.

**Abby:** It’s less than two pages.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

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

**Abby:** Sort of.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes. We’ve done it.

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

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

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

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

**Marc:** We went to the wedding…

**Abby:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

**Marc:** No.

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

**Marc:** Yeah, he did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Which was a thesis.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** It got everything.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Marc:** First Look.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** The day after.

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

**John:** Holy cow.

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

**John:** Pre-email.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly.

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

**Abby:** Right.

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

**Craig:** What’s the next one?

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** It’s totally cool.

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

**Craig:** You love it.

**Abby:** Because I love it.

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

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

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

**John:** Party Girl, yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Terrible.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Absolutely.

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

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

**Craig:** Good romantic.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Naturally.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** You can’t avoid it.

**Craig:** You can’t avoid your fate.

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

**Craig:** That’s what you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great point.

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

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** A no-hander.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**Abby:** And we’d be excited about.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes!

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** That’s it. Pathetic.

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

**Marc:** Right.

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

**Marc:** You can’t blame the woman.

**Craig:** But that’s not good drama.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** No.

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

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** 100%.

**Abby:** I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Right.

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

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

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Great.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** Completely.

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah, 100%.

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

**Abby/Marc:** Right.

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

**Abby:** Right, right.

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

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

**Marc:** 100%.

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** We have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No, no, that’s fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh, can we get eyes on wipes?”

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

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

**John:** What was the show?

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

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

**Craig:** That’s a great idea.

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** It was really fun…

**Abby:** It was really fun.

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

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

**Marc:** We built a campus.

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** “No, listen…”

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

**Craig:** Noooo!

**Abby:** My character…

**Marc:** Oh no!

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

**Craig:** Awesome!

**Abby:** Hate it.

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

**Marc:** I was like, “I knew it!”

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

**Marc:** “‘I’m right.’ I was.”

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

**Marc:** Their dots are dropping.

Craig; That’s right.

**John:** If in real life…

**Marc:** A fight dial. Can we test…

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

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

**Marc:** “We’ve done this before.”

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

**Abby:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Trailblazers.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** God, that’s a hard choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** “You’re making this.”

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

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

**Marc:** Which is weird.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s kind of crazy.

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

**Abby:** [laughs] Totally.

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

**Marc:** We talked about it.

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** We do.

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

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

**Abby:** But not for kids.

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

**Abby:** Like a comedy of…

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

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

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

**Abby:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly. Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Oh, years later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** So, it was at DreamWorks…

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

**Marc:** …it was never going to go.

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

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

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

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

**Abby/Marc:** DreamWorks.

**Craig:** DreamWorks, yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Rewriting other movies.

**Abby:** Rewriting other movies.

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

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

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

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

I’ll say, “Um, this movie.”

“Oh, when’s that coming out?”

“Next May.”

“And then?”

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Abby:** “We can ride that. ”

**Marc:** Yeah. Exactly.

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Marc:** Nothing else.

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Oh wow.

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

**Abby:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Wow.

**John:** So, we’re always on Skype.

**Abby:** We’re part of history.

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s the best part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** In moments.

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

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

**Abby:** Oh yeah.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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

**Marc:** Sure.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 58 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, you may be familiar with the sort of classic technique in dramatic writing where you create tension by letting the audience know something that the characters on screen don’t know.

So, an example: you’d have like a spy who places a bomb underneath the table, and then when the hero is eating dinner at that table, some of that dinner is filled with tension, because you as the audience know there’s a bomb under the table and the hero does not know there’s a bomb under the table.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A good, classic technique. And that’s sort of what I’m feeling right now, because the audience, our listeners, have information that I don’t have.

**Craig:** Right. About Halloweenie.

**John:** Yes. It’s called Frankenweenie, but thank you so much.

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] I’ve been calling it Halloweenie lately. I just like that; I don’t know why.

**John:** I like it, too. So, we’re recording this on a Friday, a Friday afternoon, which is the day that Frankenweenie comes out. But most of our audience will be listening to this on Tuesday at the earliest.

— Maybe we should have, like, people could pay money to hear it early. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, like a Scriptnotes Premium?

**John:** Premium. Yeah, like — we would charge extra money rather than nothing.

**Craig:** Double nothing.

**John:** Double nothing. Yes, exactly. You could pay zero dollars rather than free.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, anyway, our audience is hearing this on Tuesday. So, they are knowing how well the movie did. So, we got great reviews, and that’s all great, but in terms of how we did at the box office, they have information that I don’t have.

They are living in one of three possible futures: the future where we did outstandingly well, the future where we did fine, and the future in which we didn’t do as well as we might have hoped.

And I would love to know which future our audience is living in, but I really have no good sense of that, because the tracking on the movie has been just bizarre. And so, like, the people who you usually go to ask, “How much do you think the movie will make?” they have said like, “Oh, it will make between $10 million and $30 million this weekend.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very, very difficult to track children’s movies. I mean, first of all congratulations; the reviews were outstanding, so it’s always good to see.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The way tracking works is they call people up at home and they say, “What race are you? What gender are you? How old are you? Here are a bunch of movies. First of all, what are movies you’ve heard of — we’re not going to say any names.” That’s called unaided awareness. “Now, here’s a bunch of movies, have you heard of those?” That’s called aided awareness.

Then, “Which of these movies would you definitely recommend to friends,” or, I’m sorry, “which of these movies are you definitely interested in seeing?” And then, “Can you tell us which of these movies would be your first choice to see?” And then, “Which of the movies that are actually available for you to see — which one of these would be your first choice to see?”

The problem with kids’ movies is that kids’ movie-viewing is driven by moms, mostly, and kids. And a lot of times moms aren’t aware of what their kids want to see until it’s Saturday at noon, so very difficult to get a sense ahead of time what kids’ movies are going to do. They often surprise people. Typically they surprise you in a good way. Sometimes they Oogielove all over you, and then you’re just crying.

**John:** I don’t think anyone was surprised by Oogielove. That was not a surprise to anyone. But, like, the surprise last weekend was the Hotel Transylvania which did much better than people were expecting. And so the second weekend of whatever that movie will be, even if it drops a tremendous amount of money, will be a lot of money. So, people will go see that movie because it’s out there in theaters as well.

Anyway, it shouldn’t really matter that much. I’m delighted the movie did so well. It’s not going to help me or hurt sort of how much it does, but you want people to come see the movie. You want it to be successful.

So, I’ve been trying not to… — I know that the reviews are good because I sort of the scan the page of Rotten Tomatoes. This time I’m trying not to actually read the reviews because I find I can just sort of get sucked into a K-hole of reading all the reviews, which is just not helpful or productive to anyone.

But, my new time suck has been going on Twitter and just doing a Twitter search for Frankenweenie.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** And so you see all the people who are just seeing the movie right then. And so at midnight on the east coast, or two in the morning on the east coast before I went to bed, I could see all the people who were just coming out of Frankenweenie and crying and talking about how much they liked it, which was really nice.

**Craig:** That is terrific. I totally know where you’re coming from. I used to be obsessed with reviews, and obsessed with this, and obsessed with that. But Twitter has not only supplanted the importance of all that in my mind, I think frankly it’s just eliminating the actual practical value of critics. I’m not talking about their theoretical value, or their intellectual value, or cultural value, just their practical value of “Should I go see a movie or not? Let me check a particular critic. Let me check Metacritic. Let me check Rotten Tomatoes.”

It seems entirely driven by Twitter. So, even when the Identity Thief teaser hit, I went and searched and was getting — just kind of rolling through the reactions. And people are super honest, which is great. And it was a good reaction, so it’s always good to see.

But, you should be — eyes glued to Twitter, all weekend. But, you also know — I don’t know if people know this — but I mean, I guess most people by now know by Saturday morning or even frankly by tonight you’ll have a pretty decent idea of what the movie is going to do.

**John:** Absolutely. By tonight we’ll know whether sort of grownups, how many grownups went to see it. And based off of that they can do their little metrics and figure out with this kind of movie what they could expect for a Saturday, which would be a much bigger day for families, and Sunday, which is also a big day for a family movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, exactly. So, they just sort of compare it to a similar film and use the same multiplier and you should… — But, I would be shocked if it were on the low end of that. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were on the high end. So, good luck.

**John:** Yeah. Fingers crossed. But, I thought we might escape from this stress by reverting to a simpler time in the podcast today and really think back to what it was like when we were writing our very first scripts. Because before you have a movie that you have to worry about NRG tracking, you have this first screenplay that you’re trying to write. And so I thought today would be a walk down the hallways of history back to the time when we were not screenwriters yet, and we had not finished a script, and we were just getting started.

And so I don’t think I know — what was the first screenplay you ever read?

**Craig:** Screenplay I ever read? It was probably, oh, that’s a really good question.

**John:** As a related question, when were you aware that there was such a thing as screenwriting?

**Craig:** Pretty early on.

**John:** You grew up in a neighborhood with writers.

**Craig:** I knew in high school that there were screenwriters. I don’t know if I knew in middle school.

**John:** So, what do you think was the first time you started thinking about the script behind a movie? Because to me, I’ll give you my example first, is my brother and I had rented War of the Roses on VHS. And so we watched it and I was like, “I love this movie.” And then we rewound it and my brother went upstairs and I, like, I started just playing the movie again and started writing down everything people said.

And, I realized, “Oh, you know what? Someone must have written the things they’re saying. Like, there’s a whole plan for this.” Which sounds incredibly naïve, but I guess I just didn’t really realize that movies were sort of like plays. I’d read plays, but I didn’t realize that movies must have worked the same way. And so, just on a sheet of legal paper I was like trying to figure out what scenes were and what — I was trying to reverse engineer War of the Roses.

**Craig:** Huh. I actually remember before ever reading anything, I actually remember writing a script in — I wrote a script in eighth grade. So, I must have been aware of it. I didn’t write a script with proper FADE IN, and INT./EXT., or anything like that, but we were supposed to do a skit in our drama class and I wrote the whole thing.

**John:** Yeah, but that was a play, though. Because you’d experienced plays before. So was it more like a play, or was it really meant to be a script for filming something?

**Craig:** No, it was definitely more like a play, because we could not film anything.

— Hold on, I have to pee. If I don’t pee now it’s going to be a disaster.

**John:** Okay, go pee.

**Craig:** I can feel it. I’ll be right back.

**John:** So, Craig thinks we’re going to cut this part out of the podcast, but no; I’m actually going to just leave it in. So, this is a chance for us to talk about Craig while he’s not around.

Yup.

Just talking.

**Craig:** Uh! So much better.

**John:** Good. I talked a lot while you were gone. So, Stuart may leave that in, or may cut it out.

**Craig:** I think it’s great.

**John:** Yeah. Honesty in the podcast at this point.

**Craig:** I had to pee.

**John:** Yeah. We’re at episode 58. We’re not going to hide anything here.

**Craig:** No. Because if I try to pee in a bottle or something like that — I mean, if they can hear an electronic cigarette, they’re going to hear pee.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. You shouldn’t try to pee in a bottle.

So, you were saying that you wrote this little skit, or sketchy kind of thing. So you had a sense of what a play was like. But to me it was a weird change, because I had a read a lot of plays. I’d read Shakespeare and I read sort of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I just hadn’t associated that movies were written the same way.

So, the first script I was able to find — this is Boulder, Colorado; this is early ’90s — the only script I could find was Steven Soderbergh’s script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, because that was published in a book. It was his production diary and his script. And so I bought that, I read it, and then I read it like while the movie was playing. And I was like, “Oh my god, everything they’re saying is in there, and this is what a scene is. And this EXT must be exterior and INT must be interior,” which sounds so hopelessly naïve now, but this was a time before the internet was everywhere, and before you could sort of find that information.

I had maybe, like, Premiere Magazine as my only source of film information. And that was just a revelation. So, first off, thank you Steven Soderbergh for making that movie and publishing your script. But it actually was one of the reasons why on my own website I do publish as many of the scripts as I can, because I feel like I want people to be able to see what the scripts were like behind the movies.

**Craig:** I think probably the first screenplay-type material I ever read — I guess it was more teleplay material — was in 1991, the summer of 1991, I had gotten an internship through the Television Academy. And I came out to LA that summer between my junior and senior year, and I worked in the current programming department. And that was the first time I was exposed to teleplays. So, I was reading scripts for The Simpsons.

**John:** How lucky are you?

**Craig:** — And I was reading scripts for their other sitcoms and their not-sitcoms. And I distinctly remember being surprised at how dead it all seemed on the page. That was interesting to me. Learning how to fill that in, just from text to images in your mind. It’s weird; you almost have to learn how to read before you can learn how to write, because screenplays are such a strange animal. That was probably the beginning, yeah.

**John:** It was also a strange situation reading Simpsons scripts because the scripts for an established TV series tend to be much less detailed in terms of scene description, because you don’t have to introduce who Homer Simpson is. And so you were reading a very dry version of what a script would be.

What was the first script you tried to write?

**Craig:** Well, I started — the very first things I tried to write were television scripts. I thought I would break into sitcoms. So, the very first script I ever wrote was a spec script for Frasier I believe. And I did that with my partner at the time.

**John:** The very first thing I tried to write was, well, I sort of transcribed an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, literally, I recorded it and then I wrote it all down. And then I tried to sort of reverse engineer what the script was like. And, so, all the dialogue I used from the dialogue that I saw in the show, but I tried to make the scene description feel like what the actual scene description probably was for it. It was a good exercise. I would recommend it to any high school student who’s listening who wants to sort of figure it out.

So, I was obsessed with, like, “Oh, I’m going to write a spec episode of Star Trek and…” you know, because sometimes Star Trek at that era would take a spec episode and actually produce it. That was my first obsession. And then I decided I was going to adapt Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not at all ambitious.

**John:** No, not at all. And so I got through about two and a half pages of that, because it’s a simple little story of the American south when told with multiple narrators and many flashbacks. Easy.

**Craig:** Yeah. No problem.

**John:** No problems. But, when I finally came out to Los Angeles I had the opportunity to read a ton of screenplays and realize sort of all the things I didn’t know. And one of the great luxuries of the Stark Program that I was in is that we had at USC a great film library. So, you could check out all these scripts, you know, James Cameron’s Aliens, but like everything you could possibly ever want.

And Laura Ziskin, who taught our very first development class, she had her own library, so everybody could check out two scripts from her. I learned how to write up coverage. You could even go and compare two different drafts. So, you could see, like, an early draft of Hero and the shooting draft. You’d see sort of all the changes that happened along the way. And that was fascinating. And that got me over some of my fear of it. Because when you first encounter the screenplay form, it’s just alien. It’s not like any other kind of writing you’re going to experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So in addition to these great scripts we had to read at USC, I also started interning. And so I wan interning at a little production company called Prelude Pictures that was based at Paramount. So I would read scripts for them and write up coverage. And at first it was free, and then I got a different job where I got paid for it. But I was reading a bunch of honestly terrible screenplays. And that was really useful to me, too, because I was reading these great screenplays in class of these like produced movies, and I was reading these bad screenplays. And to be able to compare and contrast the two of those was fantastic.

And at the same time, I was starting to write my own screenplays. And it taught me a lot of what I didn’t want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, the thing about comedy — and I remember at the time, this is when I started thinking about writing comedy screenplays. It was 1994/1995, in that zone, and PG comedy was sort of ruling the day. Family comedy was ruling the day at the time; at least it seemed that way to me.

And I just sort of thought, “Well, you know, I’ll try my hand at that.” And so many of those scripts were bad. And, so, in a weird way I had the kind of opposite instruction. I was reading scripts that I thought were goofy but they were successful. And I kind of [laughs] wandered down a weird path there for awhile because I thought, “You know, in that kind middle class-ish, sort of 24-year old way I should probably just write what they’re buying, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t know any better.

**John:** Yeah. Very much the high concept PG comedy was the sweet spot at that time, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** So, I want to talk about some of the common characteristics I’ve noticed in people’s first screenplays. Over the years I’ve read a lot of people’s first scripts. And they’re often like, you know, friends of colleagues. Classically sort of like your gardener’s sister wrote a script and would you read it? And I try not to read those, but I do sometimes need to read them. Or, just other people who I think are smart overall, but they’re just new to the format.

So, some characteristics I’ve noticed of first screenplays, and in listing these hopefully people will recognize them and try to move past them. And you can add to these as you hear.

If I see a scene that’s three pages long, it’s probably a first script, or a very early script. Produced screenplays tend to have short scenes. They don’t tend to go on for a very long time. Three pages of, you know, a speech. If a speech goes on for more than a page, that’s unusual.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have a general rhythm where scenes should — the typical scene, not big ones, but typical scenes should fit in a day of work. And a day of work on a major motion picture film is 2.5 pages. And any time I get past 2.5 pages I start getting a little itchy.

**John:** Well, and the experience of watching a movie, if you actually were to pull out your stop watch and as you were clocking a movie, you would recognize that very few scenes are more than three minutes long. There will occasionally be some scenes that are more than three minutes long, but three minutes in one place and one time with two people talking feels like an eternity in most movies.

**Craig:** For sure. And I just want to point out that there’s a distinction between scenes and sequences. So, when you’re thinking about the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s one big sequence that begins with a shot of a mountain and ends with Indy flying away on a plane. But there are a lot of little scenes within it.

**John:** Yes.

Another characteristic of first screenplays: shot-gunning characters. So, if I see, if you introduce eight characters in the first page or two pages, that’s not going to be a happy outcome most likely. If you’re trying to overload us with a bunch of people all at once and tell us everything about them we’re not going to be able to keep them straight. More sophisticated screenplays tend to sort of understand the readers and recognize, “I’m going to highlight these people who are important and save other people for later on in the story.”

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Same token: when you over-describe a minor character. So, that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be Security Guard #2, but if you’re giving a lot of description to a minor character who’s never going to appear again, that’s not a good idea. Because we as the audience and the reader are going to think, “Well, this person must be really important so I’m going to ascribe a lot of mental energy to remembering this person,” when they’re never going to come back again.

**Craig:** Another good one.

**John:** Weird formatting is always a standout for me, because people tend to freak out about formatting, but if it is wrong it feels wrong.

When did you feel like you understood the formatting of scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I think I started basically by just mimicking the formatting that I saw in actual screenplays. I picked up a copy of Syd Field’s…it wasn’t the Syd Field book that people normally read. It was a book called Syd Field’s Workbook, or something like that. And it was very technical and really just about where-do-you-put-the-margins and interior and exterior. And so I just sort of copied that faithfully. So, I don’t think I ever went down a weird formatting hole.

**John:** What were you writing in originally?

**Craig:** Believe it or not, Final Draft.

**John:** Oh, you started on Final Draft?

**Craig:** I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing all the work of writing in Microsoft Word like that, and it was — I want to say it was 1993. And I was working at an ad agency and a guy who was working there was friends with this dude named Mark Madnick who had invented this really cool program called Final Draft. And it was on floppy disks. And I drove to Santa Monica and they had a little bungalow there. And I bought it right from them. I bought it from Mark Madnick. [laughs] I wrote him a check and he gave me two floppies for Final Draft 2.0.

**John:** That’s fantastic. How much was the check?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Was it like $200?

**Craig:** I mean, my guess would be something like $40. I’m just guessing.

**John:** All right. Because it’s now up to like $199.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was nowhere near that. I couldn’t have afforded it.

**John:** I started in Microsoft Word. And so in preparation for this podcast I was looking at early script and it is in like an ancient version of Microsoft Word. It’s very easy to sort of slam on Final Draft for some of the things that have gotten frustrating over the years, but if you try to write a screenplay in just Microsoft Word and do all the formatting yourself it is really maddening. Like when you have to do a page break, that becomes just a brutal, brutal exercise. So, it was a good innovation.

But my first, up through Go, I never had Final Draft. And so that was all Microsoft Word.

**Craig:** Awful.

**John:** Awful. Awful stuff

A common feature of many first scripts is what I call D&D descriptions: “There are,” “there is.” You’re talking about a room as if you were the dungeon master describing the room in which the player characters have come into. And so it’s very much like, you know, “15 feet to the left there is this,” as if characters need to figure out how to avoid traps on the floor. They’re not sort of painting the scene the way a screenwriter does.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another thing I sometimes see is a weird over-appreciation for one’s own dialogue. The characters get very florid and a little too over-literate as they speak. And you get these long — I think first time screenwriters love speeches. They all think that the movie is going to be chock full of those great monologue moments. And, if you have one monologue in a movie that’s a lot. Most movies have none.

**John:** I also notice first time screenwriters have a hard time getting a character into a scene. There is a lot of like walking through doors.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shoe leather.

**John:** Yeah, they’re shoe leather. Characters will say hello and goodbye and do all of this stuff that people do in the real world, but there’s ways you find how to do in screenplays where you don’t need those intros and outros and you can just, you know, get to the meat of the scene much quicker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** By the same token, a lot of times these movies will spend 20 pages setting stuff up, and you will have no sense of where this is going. And in most movies, quite early on you get a sense at least that you’re on a path to some place. You don’t need to know all the details, but if you’re just spinning your wheels, you have no idea what the next, what the characters are trying to do after 20 pages, there’s a real issue.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a thing I’ll see a lot in first scripts or relatively early scripts in someone’s path is an abundance of plot and almost no character at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the movie becomes about exciting sequences, and I couldn’t care less about any of the people involved.

**John:** Sometimes you will often see the flip, where it’s just exceedingly low ambition for a script, where it’s just a bunch of characters hanging out, talking about marital problems…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but not in a fascinating or interesting way. So it’s like: put a little more story in there, like actually have your characters do something rather than just sit around and kind of complain.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the whole idea is that the story should be matched to the character, and the character should be matched to the story in an interesting oppositional way. A lot of times you just get, like you said, people talking, or frankly what’s even worse to me, people acting but not actually being people.

**John:** Ideally you want to match the character to a story in a way that is answering both questions. Who is the most appropriate character for this story? And who is the sort of least appropriate character for this story? Who would this story impact the most? Who would this idea have the biggest impact on and thus, you know, that character would be a fascinating person to see in this world and in this universe. And too often they’re kind of matched too perfectly.

Like, “He’s a schlub who wants to impress his wife.” It’s like, eh, I don’t care.

Another, sort of like the walking through doors problem, is when one character tells another character something we as the audience already know.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I see that. “As you know, to review…” I was just going through these the other day with somebody. There’s “As you know, to review,” and then there’s one of my favorites: “Wait, wait, wait. Tell me that again?”

**John:** Oh my, yeah. So, those are all things, like, trying to summarize stuff. It’s easy to understand the instinct. The screenwriter needs the audience to know that the other characters are also aware of this fact or information, but the actual scene in which you’re doing it is terrible, and you will try to find a way to cut it out when you actually make the movie. So, don’t write this scene. And find some way that we’re running up and we’re getting ahead of that, because those things are deathly.

And weirdly I find I don’t encounter that nearly as much now as I used to. I think subconsciously I’m already avoiding those scenes way ahead of time. I’m doing the judo so that those scenes can never have to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, to me it’s just a sign that your story is all wrong anyway. I mean, if you find yourself in a spot where suddenly one character has to explain a bunch of stuff to another one, something is just in your story. If it’s important for one character to know it’s important for me to watch it happen or see it. So, figure out a way to illustrate it dramatically to me, whether it’s a flashback… There are always creative ways to get this information across.

**John:** Agreed. Although you say flashback; unnecessary flashbacks are also pretty much the pinnacle of first screenplay-ness. It’s just like, you know, “Here’s a big flashback to tell you about how bad my dad was.” It’s like, that’s not important.

**Craig:** Well, unnecessary flashback, unnecessary narration.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** These are the crutches we use when we’re not quite sure how to tell the story that we have, because maybe it’s not the right story to be telling.

**John:** Yup.

So, Craig, are you ready for this now?

**Craig:** Dude, I was born ready!

**John:** Ah! So the reason why we’re talking about this: it’s been so nice that so many of our listeners, more than 200 of our listeners have written in with their three page samples. And so Craig and I are actually going to give you three page samples from our very first screenplays.

**Craig:** Very, very first. And so, you know, I had such a… — When you suggested this I thought, “That’s a great idea/that’s a terrible idea.” [laughs] Because it’s so embarrassing and it’s so awful.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. It is. It is so awful. So, it was my idea, so I’ll start first just to rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, my sample is from my very first script. I wrote it while I was in grad school. And I’ll give some back story on when I wrote this. Between my first and second years of grad school I was interning at Universal. And I had a job for the head of physical production. And I was the intern below three assistants. Like, there was nothing that they actually needed me to do. It was very nice of them to give me a little job, but there was nothing for me to do. So, I would file a couple of papers a day.

So, I would come home from work and I had not used any brain cells, and so I would just write at night. And so I hand wrote at night, and then during my lunch break I would type up the pages. And actually wrote most of the screenplay during that summer at Universal.

The script I wrote is called Here and Now. It was originally called Now and Then, but then there was a movie with Demi Moore that was called Now and Then while I was writing this, so I had to change it to Here and Now. So, these are the three pages from Here and Now which you will find on the website, along with all the other three page samples.

A summary of what happens in these three pages: We open in a crowded parking lot of a shopping mall. It’s snowy, Christmastime. Two passing women talk about someone’s sudden death. We meat Karen Miller, a young woman. She’s in her car. She’s trying to back out. Another car slams into her. Her airbag blows. She’s not badly hurt, but as she looks into the window’s reflection she sees someone behind her, someone who is not actually there.

We cut to one year earlier, and we’re at the University of Colorado. We see some background action describing the student body. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a pretty good summary, and if you had written that summary I think you’d be in good shape. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha-ha. So…

**Craig:** Do you want me to go after you because you get to… — I mean, I want to go after myself, too. So, maybe you want to go after yourself first?

**John:** Yeah, I’ll go after myself first. So, a lot of the stuff I talked about in the criteria of like first scripts, you see some of that here. There’s a lot of over-description of things. And our protagonist, our Karen Miller, first off we say her name but we don’t’ actually give her any description whatsoever. So, there’s nothing to sort of signal that she’s actually who she is as a person. She’s just a young woman in a car. And so we don’t know anything special about her. She’s not driving this introductory scene. She’s not doing anything interesting. She’s just a passenger in the scene.

And she’s a passenger who gets hit in the scene. And that’s not a terrible opening, but it’s not a great opening. It’s setting up that there’s some mystery there. And it may be a bit of a misdirect in terms of sort of what the tone of this is going to be. It feels just sort of wintery and snowy. And then by the end we get to the University of Colorado a year earlier and it’s just, you know, a picture postcard. It’s just painting, “this is what a campus looks like.” And it’s like, “Oh, but that is probably what a campus looks like.” But we haven’t really gotten any story started and we’re three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look: the truth is I like your pages better, your first pages better, than I like my first pages. That’s the awful thing about comedy is when they’re not funny, that’s just — that’s the headline…

**John:** I wasn’t aiming for funny.

**Craig:** You don’t have that sort of objecting, “ugh.” However, there’s just nothing really happening here. I mean, she gets hit by another woman, and there’s a lot of description of what’s happening with the cars and the geography of the space and how she actually gets hit, although it’s really just a fender bender so the car crash itself isn’t that interesting.

There is one interesting thing buried in there, which is that she sees somebody that isn’t there. So, you sort of like made a real meal out of all these mundane things that frankly just aren’t that interesting and then kind of, like, da-da-da, passed the one thing that really is interesting. And so the scene has this lack of focus. And I always like to say — and this is a classic new writer thing: You are not directing my attention to where it’s supposed to be. You’re directing my attention to where it’s not.

So, there is a paragraph, or descriptions of what the engine sounds like as the car stops. [laughs] But, then, you know, very little thing — I mean, you underline “Someone is standing directly behind her.” There’s no one there. But then we’re back and then there’s just more discussion of the woman. And then, yeah, some of the description is awesome. I mean, I got to hand it you. “Brown mutant icicles hunched behind the wheels,” is spectacular.

**John:** But it’s novelistic. I mean, I think you can get away with some of it. And I think “brown mutant icicles” could last if there wasn’t so much other stuff around it.

I don’t like these five sentence blocks of scene description. They’re intimidating to read, and so people skip them.

**Craig:** Thank god I didn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Thank god you didn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. But we’re getting there.

**John:** On page two, midway, actually near the bottom of page two, I actually finally do give a description of Karen. So, “She’s really very pretty, a page torn from a J. Crew catalog, fresh-faced and a little delicate.” That’s actually not bad description. But that should have come when we first met Karen Miller, and not, you know, two pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also feel like we have this — we’re concentrating on what these two women that we will never see again — I presume, because they’re Woman 1 and Woman 2 — are saying, when really what I wanted desperately is a moment before Karen Miller gets in her car and starts to pull out and gets hit. I just want to be contextualized with my protagonist, not with weather and extras.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But, here’s what’s good. I want to sort of say, “Okay, but here’s the sign that the guy who wrote this would one day write Halloweenie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I just love saying Halloweenie.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine.

**Craig:** There is a specificity to the way you’re writing this. And, more importantly, it is visual. It’s not always interesting in terms of what you’re visualizing, but you’re being visual. And you’re also being very sparse with the dialogue. The dialogue felt real to me.

And, you know, these are things like pitch that you can’t teach. Either you can or can’t sing. Either you can or can’t feel rhythm. And so I see that there is somebody writing this who has an ear, and somebody who has a rhythm. And, you know, this was — can I say what year this was?

**John:** Oh yeah. This is 1994.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this was February of 1994. And that’s 18 years ago, actually. And you can see there is something going on here. There is an intelligence behind this. And there is a voice. And also little things, like for instance, just to show that you understand the language of cinema — as the sequence ends, Karen looks up at the Donna Karan woman, gives a half a laugh, smiles a little to herself, which I like the sense of mystery. “In the distance, CARILLON BELLS ring, continuing as we cut to:
TITLE OVER BLACK
One year earlier.”

And there are the Carillon bells. That’s how I pronounce it, right? Carol-on?

**John:** Yeah. Carillon bells.

**Craig:** And so you got already that there was a language where sound could sort of play oppositional to time stream. And these are things that are precise.

**John:** It was my very first pre-lap. And lord knows I pre-lap the hell out of things these days.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m not embarrassed by these three pages. It’s just that they’re not the way I would have written them right now.

So, reading these three pages, what kind of story do you think this is?

**Craig:** I would suspect it’s some kind of supernatural — what I got was a supernatural love story.

**John:** It is a love story, but it’s actually not supernatural. It is a weepy. And it was my first weepy. So, it’s actually good that it’s on a Frankenweenie release date. Because it was the first time that I made people cry. And that was actually the thing about this script is I could kind of consistently make people cry. And that got me an agent. It got me sort of started, because people weren’t used to actually reading a script and crying.

So, it’s a tiny romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, which is my hometown. Again, a very sort of first script thing where it’s like you write things that you know so well that they might not be interesting to other people. And it suffered from another first script problem, which is that I tried to cram everything I knew about everything into it. Because, like, “Well maybe I’ll never write another script, so I should shove everything I know about everything into it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of speeches.

Well, great. Thank you for looking at that. I’m not horrifically embarrassed. Let’s take a look at Craig’s script. The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** Yes. The Stunt Family. Just a year later, February of 1995. And the background on this is I was working at Disney in the marketing department. And my boss was Oren Aviv, who would later go on to actually run Disney and now is the head of marketing at Fox.

And Oren took a shine to me and suggested that I try my hand at writing a movie and then he could produce it. And he had an idea for a movie. And his idea was called The Stunt Family. And it was going to be a big, broad, physical comedy for kids about a family of stunt men who live their lives as if every day and every moment were a stunt. And they would go on a grand adventure and kind of use their fearlessness. But one of the family members, of course, just didn’t really feel like he fit in.

And so I wrote it with my then partner, Greg Erb, and it was the first screenplay I’d ever written. These were the first screen pages I’d ever written. And so, I mean…God.

**John:** [laughs] Well, for people who are just listening who aren’t on the page in front of them, do you want to give the summary?

**Craig:** Sure. So the summary is: We are on a backlot of Maxwell Studios, which is essentially like Universal Studios if any of you have visited Universal Studios where you take the tour of the actual backlot of the studio in the little tram. And they’ve kind of combined the actual working backlot with attractions. Like at Universal there’s a fake earthquake and then Jaws comes out of the lake and stuff like that.

And so you’re sort of on a tour with a tour guide who apparently is on his first day and isn’t very well prepared. And they pass by the stunt house and we start meeting members of the Stunt Family who are waking up to their morning routine. And their morning routine is sort of a very Addams Family combination of living in the middle of a working attraction. And it seems like they are living in a rather dangerous life, and yet they seem kind of curiously okay with it.

**John:** Yeah. And we get to the bottom of page three, we’ve met — have we met all the family by that point?

**Craig:** No. You meet sort of the [laughs], this is probably not a great idea. But you meet the protagonist on page 4 who is the one who doesn’t feel like he fits in.

**John:** Okay, cool. So, Craig, do you want to pull the Band-Aid first? I mean, how are you feeling?

**Craig:** Well, I feel pretty bad.

**John:** [laugh]

**Craig:** And this is when I talk to some of the people who send pages in who are writing comedy, and I say, “Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done these mistakes.” I really have. And you can see it here, even though this was 17 years ago, it hurts to read. First of all, you have these huge chunks of description. And even though they’re not particularly prosy, it’s just a ton of unimportant detail.

We have a run, a page and a half run of back and forth dialogue between the tour guide and some people on the tour that is really broad, poorly written, not at all funny, illogical. Just bad. Really forced and awful.

**John:** And I would assume, just as the movie starts, that Zeke is actually our hero because he’s the guy who’s given a name and give, you know, he seems to be the center of the story but he’s not.

**Craig:** No. You sure would think that. And he’s not. And nothing is grounded. Not even the name of the studio and their mascot is grounded. It’s Zeke’s first day and yet apparently they don’t train people there, so he’s overly stupid and doesn’t know what anything is and makes ridiculous mistakes in order to set up bad punch lines.

So, the first page and a half is an unmitigated disaster. It gets a little bit more interesting when we actually get inside the stunt house, because you do have this kind, I guess I would describe, as sort of Addams Family setting. And even though, again, way too much description, there’s some interesting things happening.

This old man wakes up, and as the clock goes from 7:59 to 8:00 his eyes open up and this huge rot iron spiky chandelier plummets from the ceiling, puncturing the bed, and he rolls out the way and looks at his wristwatch and says, “I’m getting slower.” So, that’s kind of interesting, like, okay, they’ve rigged the house like Cato and Inspector Clouseau. A kind of constant test for them.

And on the third page you can see that their house is actually — and this is of course unfilmable; I mean, this comedy would have cost $400 million to do — the house literally is besieged by a fake flash flood. The people inside kind of amusingly know how to work with it. They’re using the flood waters to clean dishes. More terrible lines. It’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I do like, at the start of page three, the idea of the bus tram tour and the inept tour guide is funny. And there’s reason why, like, Kenneth the page works on 30 Rock. There’s a way that can work; where things go a little bit wrong, he’s saying the wrong stuff.

So, I did like at the top of page three it’s like, “‘Rumor has it that Wilford and his family still live in the old house, but I sure hope not, because I smell SMOKE!’

A simulated FLASH FLOOD is unleashed.

‘I mean…water.'”

That’s a good joke. The scene description line didn’t really help us there. But it is a nice idea. You set the wrong expectation and suddenly a flood comes by. You get a joke for that, the unexpected.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t call that a joke. [laughs] I just think it’s awful. I mean, I hate it. And I think it’s really just juvenile and even more juvenile than for me. It’s really juvenile.

I mean, I don’t know. The only thing I look at this, I mean, I would have said had I read these pages, “This guy is never going to make it,” personally.

**John:** I see competence in there. I see, you know, I see you setting up sort of — trying to setup a world, trying to get into something. I see the instinct behind t”his is how we would set up a studio by giving a studio tour.” So, you had a sense of what the Universal thing would be. And once you get to Wilford’s room, and since you said Addams Family, I get that more now. I just didn’t get it on the page. But I can see where that would be.

But partly why I want to talk about first scripts is you kind of have to get one out of your system. You kind of have to get through it, just so you can get familiar with the format and just finish a document that’s 120 pages long, which is going to be the longest thing that most human beings will ever write. So, it’s just that process is an important part of getting started.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. I think doing this script, one of the things it drove home for me, if I can remember that accurately that far back, is that there was a lot — it was really important to take care of the fundamentals that weren’t related to comedy. To make sure that the story was well told and the characters were real and relatable and that the plot moved in an interesting way.

And even though the next script I wrote with Greg was also very ridiculous, and broad, and family-oriented, it was a movie. And they made it. And that was the second thing I ever wrote. So, I surely needed to do this.

**John:** Yeah. And I couldn’t have written Go as my first script. Go was too complicated. I needed to be confident with the format. Although I will say I wrote the first section of Go at about the same time I wrote Here and Now. The first section of Go was X, which was a short film which became the whole movie, but it’s really just that first act of Go. And if people are thinking about trying the format, writing something short might be a really good idea, because at least it will get you familiar with the format and you’re not juggling all of the complexities of how-do-you-tell-a-story-over-two-hours. You’re just trying to tell a story over a shorter period of time.

That’s a small bit of advice. But, eventually you do have to write a full lengthy script and there are going to be all of the challenges that come with writing a full length script. And it won’t be perfect, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

**Craig:** No. It will likely be absolute garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But people don’t remember the first time they wrote a school report. People don’t remember the first time they wrote a paragraph. This is such a bigger step that it’s hard to expect that it’s going to be great the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think I want to actually wrap it up today because this was actually sort of meaningful and touching. And we’ll save other Three Page Challenges for a future time.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I’m glad you find it meaningful and touching. I just find it awful and depressing.

**John:** Well, see, we’ve come full circle then. Because I started the podcast sort of stressed out because of Halloweenie, and now I feel actually kind of better about myself, because in a slightly Schadenfreude way my pages were better than yours. So…

**Craig:** Well, I mean, honestly, you could have wiped your butt with three pages and roughly assembled the fecal smears into Courier shape and they would have been better than that. I mean, that’s just the worst. When I look at that stuff and I just think, “Good lord, what was I thinking?”

**John:** Yeah. Clearly your co-writer is the problem.

**Craig:** No. I can’t really blame him at all. [laughs] I can’t.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** No. I mean, the one thing when we talked about doing this, I did think, “Well, you know, it might not be fair because I did write it with somebody, and maybe the better way of approaching this would be for me to submit the first three pages of the first thing I wrote on my own.”

**John:** That’s not fair at all.

**Craig:** But that was kind of a cheat, because frankly that was a really good script. And, even though it didn’t get made, it’s probably why it didn’t get made because it was good. And I really love those first three pages of that thing. And I thought, “Well, this is just cheating. I’ve got to actually go back and just pull up The Stunt Family, for the love of god.”

But, I was 24 and foolish. You apparently were 24 and wise.

**John:** Yeah. Wise beyond my years. I decided to write, like while everyone was writing the high concept comedy I was writing the weepy, which didn’t get made either, but it got me started. So, god bless those first scripts.

**Craig:** I guess that’s the way you’ve got to look at it. This one got me going, too.

**John:** Every once and awhile a producer will ask for, or a development executive, will call my agent and say, “Hey, do we have any of John’s old scripts? Can we read some of his early things?” Or they will ask for the script specifically. And I had to say no. I don’t want that out anymore because it’s just not me anymore. There’s a reason why it’s not part of my active file.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I would say that the one script I just brought up that was sort of the first one that I wrote on my own I would love to see made. I think it still is an interesting one that works. Scott Frank is prepping a movie right now to direct that he wrote called The Walk Among the Tombstones, which he adapted from a Larry Block novel. I think. And he actually wrote that in ’97, I think, or ’98. And sort of it’s always been there and he’s kind of dusted it off and polished it up and gotten it ready to go.

**John:** That can work. Often there are bad examples, but there are also good examples. Unforgiven was an old script that sat around for a long time and someone said, “Hey, let’s make that script.”

**Craig:** Well, actually, Clint Eastwood bought when — David Peoples wrote that script. Clint Eastwood bought it, I think it was in the late ’70s or early ’80s I want to say. And put it in a drawer on purpose because he knew he wasn’t old enough to play the part. So, he bought it and just aged it like wine until he was ready.

**John:** I’m sure David Peoples was delighted.

**Craig:** You know what? He should be, because it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But at the time, I mean, do you think for those 30 years David Peoples was like, “I’m so lucky that Clint Eastwood hasn’t made my movie.”

**Craig:** It wasn’t 30. It was like 12.

**John:** Everything feels like more time.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, Craig, our last piece of housekeeping. Scriptnotes Live in Austin, at the Austin Film Festival, is October 20 at 9am. So, people have written on Twitter to ask, “Hey, can I just get a ticket for that one event?” And I don’t think you can. I think it’s actually part of the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Austin Film Festival would be silly if they started to do things like that. I mean, the whole point is that they break even. And I don’t think it’s a profit organization, so they do need people to buy their passes to actually put on these things and support these events. So, no, you can’t just go see it. You have to buy a pass to the event. They are still available online. And there are a lot of other wonderful things to go see there.

**John:** Great writers there.

**Craig:** I mean, we will be, spectacular, no question. But…

**John:** And we have Aline Brosh McKenna is really our secret weapon.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I’m our secret weapon.

**John:** Well, yeah, you’re right. That too. And if you want to talk to our secret weapon, Craig Mazin, on Twitter, you are @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I am @johnaugust. That’s a good way if you have like small questions for us. If you have bigger questions, or if things you need to send in or ask us about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a whole form on the website, johnaugust.com, about how to write stuff in.

And, thank you very much for listening to our podcast. Subscribe in iTunes if you don’t.

**Craig:** Wait! I have a Cool Thing, finally, and you’re just blowing right through it.

**John:** Oh, I blew right past it. Tell us your Cool Thing, Craig.

**Craig:** I’ll be really fast. It’s an App. It’s a game. It’s called The Room. The Room. It is for the iPad. It’s spectacular. I like these puzzle games. I like games that are sort of Myst-like if you remember that one.

**John:** I love Myst.

**Craig:** This one is gorgeously done. It’s beautiful. It’s in the perfect space of not too hard, not too easy. A really good hint system if you need it. Incredibly simple. You don’t know who you are. You’re in an attic and there is a box in front of you. And you proceed to examine the box, and open the box up, and then open the box inside the box, and a house inside the box, inside the house. It is spectacular. It’s so well-done. Download it.

**John:** Hooray. If you’re doing yours, I’m going to do mine. Mine rhymes with yours. Mine is called Moom. And it is an app for the Macintosh. And what Moom does is a very simple thing. It resizes windows in a very specific grid-like way. And so if you’re trying to have multiple windows open, like I am right now while we’re recording this podcast, that little green dot in the title bar of every window, which is mostly kind of useless, now when you hover over that with Moom it pops up a little gird and you can sort of draw how big you want that window to be.

And it just stacks your windows really nicely. So, it’s very helpful on a big monitor, but it’s also really helpful on smaller monitors as well, when you need to have two windows side by side. So, Moom for the Macintosh. It’s in the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Room and Boom.

**John:** Moom.

**Craig:** Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Done. Podcast.

**Craig:** Podcast. Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Mic drop. Now.

**Craig:** Good luck, John, with Halloweenie and I’ll talk to you next week.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-happy-funtime-smile-hour).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is episode number 23, and this episode will not be depressing.

**Craig:** No. This is going to be uplifting, exciting, enlightening, life affirming.

**John:** Because you know what? That last podcast, we talked about some serious issues; we did some good, but I think, we also did a little harm, if I take another listen to it. It is kind of suicide inducing. It was depressing. It was realistic in a way that is not necessarily always helpful.

It was like Lars von Trier snuck in to the last 20 minutes of the podcast, and just said, “Do it. I will take over from here. There’s no hope.”

**Craig:** Well, but as you point out, this is the… That is the podcast that gets us an Oscar. We don’t get —

**John:** Oh!

**Craig:** — we don’t get nominations for this podcast, or the goofy ones. That one, though, that may be the one.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder how soon there will be like genuine podcast awards? I’m sure there is some sort of podcast award happening right now, because there is an award for everything. But, I feel like podcasting is an emerging form, that cultural signifier. It is something that will eventually become better acclaimed. And once it becomes better acclaimed, how will they award it?

**Craig:** You think that there is going to be like Poddies and things like that?

**John:** Yeah. Although, what are the equivalent radio awards? There must be radio awards; I’m trying to think about that.

**Craig:** There are, but nobody cares about them. There are radio awards, but they are — yeah, nobody cares.

**John:** Nobody cares.

My week is better than it was last week, for a couple of reasons. First off, I’m no longer on heavy allergy medication. That helps.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** I have a brand new to-do organizer thing, which I love. So, what are you using to keep track of, like, the stuff you have to actually get done? What is your system?

**Craig:** You know, you were the first person to ever even reveal to me that there was this thing out there of to-do systems. And you turned me on to that whole FTL, FTC, TBD —

**John:** GTD, yeah.

**Craig:** — GTD, yeah. It is like GTL from Jersey Shore. And I bought the book because, you know, I like to try things.

You are one of those guys, when you say, “You should try something,” I always think, “Yeah, it is worth a shot.” Like I tried the crazy Dana Fox upright typewriter for, like, two minutes. I’m like, “What is this? I can’t do this.” It’s in my garage. Oh, my kids play with it.

And that thing, the to-do thing, I tried. But the truth is: I actually don’t need a system. I just feel like I get stuff done. I don’t know, am I weird?

**John:** No. You are not weird. I mean, stuff will get done; it is a matter of sort of how stressful your life is while that stuff is getting done. That is what I found to be most useful about these systems. And I have gone back and forth between some, and have been incredibly religious and dogmatic about it sometimes; I have been much looser about it sometimes.

Where the systems tend to be best is when you have a bunch of little things you need to get done, and they just keep stacking up every day. You have piles of tasks, and it is a great way of plowing through the piles of tasks. So, for a lot of the stuff related to apps, like the stuff we are developing, and two new products we are pushing out the door in the next two weeks, there is a lot of stuff like that that I have to keep on top of that is really time sensitive. It’s great for that.

And just for getting stuff out of your head and into your systems so that you are not thinking about it and stressing out about it. Because most of what stresses you out isn’t really the work that you have to do, it is kind of remembering the work that you have to do. And so you end up spending a lot of brain cycles thinking about the stuff that you can’t forget about.

And if you just had it down on paper, or had it in some other system, you wouldn’t stress out about it so much. It’s good for that.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Of all the problems I have, and I have got a ton of them, that has just never been a problem for me. I remember the things I have to do.

And, by the way, I remember them down to tiny, little details. I have like a weird Rainman-y ability to know all of the things that need to be done. And sometimes, if it is a really tiny, little thing that I know I am going to forget, I just write it on a little slip of paper. But most of the time I don’t really need a system. And I don’t forget to do things.

On the other hand, I was late for this podcast. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. This has not been one of your finer days in terms of getting stuff together for this. But, that happens to everybody.

**Craig:** Hey, you know what? I will tell you what, man: someone called, and I couldn’t get off the phone. It was one of those. It was one of those conversations where I could not get off the phone. I wanted to get off the phone. It wouldn’t have been cool if I had gotten off the phone. It is one of those deals. Like, I have a friend, who we both know, a mutual friend. And he works in the same… he has an office in the same building.

**John:** We both know him. He might be your friend, but actually my mortal enemy.

**Craig:** He is no one’s mortal enemy. [laughs]

**John:** He is just the nicest guy ever, right? Yeah.

**Craig:** He really is. When you hear the story you will say, “Oh, no, that was ridiculous. He is no one’s mortal enemy.”

He and I have offices in the same building. And about two years ago, he stopped into my office, he knocked on the door, and he wanted to chat. And the thing was, I had a cold, and I was on a deadline, and I was miserable. And I just said, “Oh, I’m so sorry man, I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t. I’m just in the worst mood, and I have got to get this done. I have a cold; I’m so sorry. I have a cold.”

I felt like, you know, when you say you have a cold it really excuses a lot, because you are sick. And he was like, “Oh, no problem. No problem.” And he walks out, and then at the end of the day he sends me an email to tell me that he had just stopped by to tell me that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

That was, I mean, I was… “I have a cold. Don’t talk to me right now. I have a cold!” “Oh really? I have cancer.” Ugh. So, that is why there are times when you just, you know what? You should have the conversation. Just have the conversation. Be late for the podcast; it is probably for the best.

**John:** So someone else had to call you to tell you that they have cancer.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Okay. Good.

**Craig:** No. No. It wasn’t anything like that at all. In fact, it was frivolous, and I should have just gotten off the phone, but I couldn’t. Sorry.

**John:** I hate being on the phone. I hate phone calls now. I have come to resent every time the phone rings, because it is almost never ringing for a good purpose. It is always somebody who is, like, just going to steal some of my time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not, I mean, there are phone calls that are fun to do and the rest, but it is true that most of the things that actually happen in life that are good happen face to face. This phone stuff —

That is why I could never be an agent. They are on the phone all day. It never ends.

**John:** Yeah. It’s never good. So, we got on a tangent there. What I am so happy about with my new system, I switched over to OmniFocus, finally, because I used to use OmniFocus and there were some things I didn’t like about it, so I switched to Things. And then I didn’t like Things, so I kept going through various systems. I was on paper for a long time. I had a little Moleskine notebook.

OmniFocus has gotten really good, again, in the last year or whenever; since the last time I paid attention to it, it got really good. And one of the actual great things about it now is if you have an iPhone with Siri on it, you can say, “Siri, remember to call Craig Mazin.” And it will create that reminder, and it will go straight to OmniFocus, so it is just on your list.

So, like, while you are out walking the dog, that thought comes to you, you have a place to put it. And that is what I find, probably, most useful about any sort of system for getting things done is just to, like, when that stuff happens, to capture it, and get it out of your head so you can focus on other things.

**Craig:** I think maybe as you spoke about that, I started to realize why maybe the reason that I don’t do these things is because I find that I am a very impulsive person. When it comes to my mind to do something, I do it. Because, and I know that people behave in different ways; some people like to defer these things to the right time.

But, I’m that guy who is just like, “Oh, that’s right. I need to call somebody. I am calling them now.” And then I will leave a message. But I am an impulse doer. I’m an impulse purchaser/buyer. That’s my thing. So, maybe it is just a reflection of my personality.

**John:** I would say in general that is a good way to approach many things. You shouldn’t defer things if you can do it right now. And, so, a lot of times I will be in a meeting with somebody about a project, or about a movie, or a name will come up say, like, “I wonder if that person would be in our movie?” And I say, like, “Well, let me call them right now, and see if they will be in our movie.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a very good overall system. But there are times where you can’t do that, or it is 11 o’clock at night, so you are not going to be able to do that. Or, it is really a bigger idea that is going to have many steps along the way. Well what do you do with that bigger idea?

And as writers, you need to capture that little bit of dialogue, that little bit of, “Oh, here is an idea for how to do something.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I have found it incredibly beneficial just to write that down. I always have this notebook in the bathroom so that at three in the morning I can run in there, and write down that good bit of dialogue that I thought of. And it is the same kind of thing for the stuff that I need to get done.

**Craig:** Right. It is a horrifying feeling waking up, going to bed, and as you are falling asleep going, “Oh, that’s it. I got it. I know exactly how the scene should go.” And then you wake up in the morning, and you can’t remember. It is a horrifying feeling.

**John:** Never let yourself do that. Always go to the bathroom, write it down.

**Craig:** Go to the bathroom. Write it down.

**John:** Yeah. And the other good thing I will talk about, and then I will shut up about the system, is I have added a list for Brain Dead. So, basically, you have projects which are… Projects are anything that involve more than one step. So, this thing I am writing for Fox, that is a project. And I have all the little things in there related to that, that have to get done for it.

There is also Context. And contexts are the situations that you find yourself in. So, I have a context for work. I have a context for Ryan Nelson, who is a graphic designer who I work with, so next time that I see him I need to talk to him about these things.

I created a context called Brain Dead for when I have absolutely no energy or will to do anything. It is, like, 5 o’clock at night, I have really stupid little tasks that I can burn off there that are things that actually need to get done, but I shouldn’t try to do them when I have energy to do anything real. So, it is a good way to use that time where otherwise I would be spending it clicking through websites, or doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** Or playing Skyrim.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m suspicious of this —

But this is, what, you are German. This is why Germany does so well at everything they do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Other than large-scale dual-front world wars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Single-front wars they are awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Well, does anyone thrive on dual-front wars?

**Craig:** No one has managed to pull one off successfully except for the United States.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. We actually were able to. We did that. We pulled it off.

**John:** Yes. But, granted, my knowledge of military history is incredibly slight, but what I would say is that we came into that war so late, in a way, that we sort of got in on the tail end of that goodness, and on the European goodness, and then had to do the Asian — the Pacific War ourselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. We hit Pacific pretty hard right off the start. Definitely eased in to the European theater, no question. Yeah, because Pearl Harbor was 1941. We went right into it in the Pacific. And then D-Day was ’44, I believe. Yeah.

**John:** See, all these details are murky to me because they haven’t reached that period yet in Downton Abbey, so I don’t have the context for it.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is tragic. [laughs]

**John:** Now, one thing that you do have, you do find the time to do, which I cannot believe you find the time to do, is to respond in online forums to incredibly esoteric questions. And that is what I think we will spend the bulk of our time doing today.

**Craig:** What am I doing?! I’m so stupid.

**John:** What are you doing?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** So, I will set us up on this, because there is a forum, an online forum, called Done Deal Pro.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, tell me what it even really is? I don’t go on, so explain it.

**Craig:** The name alone makes me laugh, because Done Deal Pro implies that there are pros there, and that deals are done, and neither of those things occur. But it is not a bad place. I think if you are an aspiring screenwriter, it is donedealpro.com, and it has got all sorts of things you can pay for. I don’t pay for any of it, personally. Maybe there is use in some of those —

**John:** You are kind of opposed to paying for things like that.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know what they offer, so I can’t evaluate it, because I refuse to pay for it. [laughs] So I don’t know what it is.

But, there is a free forum. And the forum is, like every Internet forum, full of interesting people, and actually a few quite talented people, I think. I have read a couple of scripts that I was impressed with. And then cranks, and idiots. But by and large, I think the tendency there is for people who mean well, who are serious about being screenwriters, and who are trying quite hard, and quite seriously, to do it, and want to learn.

And Derek Haas sort of pulled me on this one.

**John:** Derek Haas, who does somehow find extra time in the day to do all of these things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When he is not like, you know, recording songs on YouTube and other things.

**Craig:** Right. And writing novels. Yeah. He pulled me in, and I got frustrated pretty early on because I felt like what was going on was a lot of people – who had no experience as a professional screenwriter – giving other people – who had no experience as professional screenwriters – the kind of advice that requires experience as a professional screenwriter.

So, it was just the blind leading the blind. There is a ton of bad advice in there. And I got kind of frustrated, and said, “You guys have got to stop doing that.” But then, unfortunately, what that means is then I have to start doing it. And I’m just, not like I am the Oracle of Delphi, but we did have after —

Because a lot of the questions are the sort of inane questions that professional screenwriters roll their eyes at like, “How do you format? And should you use is it okay to use voice-over?” And all these really just grindy questions. It is like, “I don’t know, is the script good?” That’s all anybody cares about. Is the script good?

But, there was finally a very, very, very interesting thread, I thought, and it is going on right now about the central dramatic argument.

**John:** And when you say it is going on right now, literally, there are new posts from today and yesterday. It is up to 43 web pages, so that is like 430 entries probably —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A long thread. And you are a good 30 or 40 of these entries.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m an idiot. [laughs]

**John:** This thread, and I haven’t read all of it, because I couldn’t possibly read all of this.

**Craig:** Put it on your Brain Dead list. [laughs]

**John:** We will link it in the show notes.

**Craig:** No. I think you should do it at 5 o’clock, when you are really tired. [laughs]

**John:** So there will be a link to this in the show notes. But it is the central question here. Someone asks, “What is the difference between theme and central dramatic argument?” And your response is?

**Craig:** Well, central dramatic argument is a phrase that I basically made up, although then one guy found like an example of it in a book from 1950 as if to say, “No you didn’t make it up.” Uh, this is the Internet, you know. God bless the Internet.

But the reason I made it up was because the word “theme” can be distorted when we talk about writing screenplays and theme. Some people can use the word theme the way we should probably use the world motif like brotherhood, or justice, or bravery. Those are motifs. But they are not actually useful when you are writing a movie.

What is useful when you are writing a movie is what Aristotle, going all the way back to Poetics, called “unity.” And that is, at its core, an argument, and what I call a central dramatic argument: an assertion that is the answer to a question, that you could agree or disagree with, but ultimately is at the… It is when people say, “What is this movie really about?” It’s about that.

**John:** Would you say that any argument could be rephrased as a question?

**Craig:** Any argument could be rephrased as a question. And in fact, to me, what is interesting about thinking about this when we write screenplays is that that question is the one… That question should have two answers. And ideally your hero is answering the question one way on page one, and the opposite way at the end of the movie.

That is sort of, when we talk about character arcs, and people say, “Well, your character has to change.” Well, okay. But why? And how? Is it a random change? Is it just that he got braver? Stronger? Smarter? No, it is that he is answering a question differently, a fundamental question about life differently. And, to me, at least.

And sometimes when you think about movies, like for instance last week, I think, we talked about Ferris Bueller, or two weeks ago, we talked about Ferris Bueller, and how Cameron is actually the protagonist of that movie. Because he is the one that answers the question differently at the end of the movie. Ferris Bueller doesn’t have a problem, other than that he doesn’t have a car.

**John:** The same with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie really has no fundamental problem.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He’s poor.

**Craig:** That’s right. Like you, yes, it is an interesting… Actually, it is interesting that you bring that up, because I always felt like in the original Willy Wonka movie, they are making Willy Wonka the protagonist. And his question is a very simple one, it seems: Is there someone worthy?

And maybe he starts by thinking there is no one worthy. And then in the end he changes his mind and says, “There is somebody worthy.” And you had a totally different argument.

**John:** I would also say in the original Willy Wonka movie, which I hadn’t seen until after we got started with the new one, but in the original Willy Wonka movie, I felt them desperately trying to make Charlie have hero/protagonist problems.

So that is why they had him stealing stuff, and making many choices that would seem to give him an arc, but he didn’t really need to have an arc.

**Craig:** Well, and I actually don’t even think that he does. I mean, in the Gene Wilder movie, I think that Gene Wilder starts essentially with a presumption that there is nobody pure enough to take on what he has created. He is a skeptic. He is a cynic. And at the end of the movie it is that little thing he says when he puts his hand over the Gobstopper, you know, that Charlie is behind. He says something to the effect of, you know, I can’t remember what he says, but it is quite lovely, and that is his new answer to the question.

And in your Willy Wonka it was really about, it was about a son and a father, and —

**John:** Yes. It’s letting someone in. So to me, Willy Wonka is a strange, sad shut-in who doesn’t want to let anybody in, but ultimately has to let somebody in.

**Craig:** Right. And then I would say that the central dramatic argument of your movie is you need to let people in. [laughs] So that is how I would phrase that, because what is nice about that is in the beginning of the movie, just flip that on its head, and that is where your character starts. I need to not let people in.

And, literally, by just keeping the same statement, even the fact that “I need to not let people in,” as opposed to, “I shouldn’t let people in,” or, “I don’t want to let people in. I need to.” Now, all of a sudden, I start to realize why this guy behaves the way he does, why he lives the way he does, why he acts the way he does because he needs to keep people out.

And so, I like to think about movies in terms of those questions that go from what they are in the beginning to the opposite of that at the end. And I like to let that inform how these characters should grow and change. It also helps you design the obstacles they face. It helps you design the antagonists. It helps you design their allies. You know now what their sore spot is.

**John:** Yeah. So, but let’s talk about the 43 pages of it all. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I mean, I accept that as a thesis, and I would say that we can… I can push back to a certain degree because I feel like many of my movies, and many of my successful movies — the movies that I enjoy that I think work really well — don’t lend themselves to easy expression of the central dramatic argument, and weren’t conceived with that central dramatic argument.

So, it is a question of, you can say like, “Well, this ultimately is the central dramatic argument of Go,” but that really wasn’t in my conception as I was creating it. So, it is a question of was that the author’s intent, or is that something that you are applying ex post facto to the final product.

But looking at the 43 pages of this, looking at how it changes over the course of these pages, some of it is talking about just semantics, like “what is theme.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And growing up, going through junior high, theme was always stated as something versus something. So, it was man versus society, or man versus the wild, and it was easy for most stories to find that theme. It wasn’t especially helpful.

Deeper in this thread, as I was skipping through it, the question was like, “Well is greed a theme? Is greed a central dramatic argument?” And, the pushback was, “No, that is not enough of one because it is not saying anything about greed. It is just a thing.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What is your philosophy on something like greed, or envy? You need more than that. Is that correct?

**Craig:** I would say so. I mean, I just don’t know how that helps me write anything. I mean, I understand that you are giving me an emotion, or a motivation. I like the fact that a character is motivated by greed, but in the end I want to know why.

To me, that is what it all comes down to. When we think about these characters, I mean you may say, “Look, I didn’t think of the ‘central dramatic argument’ in that stupid phrasey way,” because I know I sound like Robert McKee when I am saying stuff like that, and that is the last thing I want to do.

You may not have thought of that while you were writing that movie, but at the same token, I can’t imagine that you weren’t thinking about why what this guy’s problem was. What is his real issue? That has got to be there, I assume.

**John:** I would honestly say, “No.” I approach most of my movies from the perspective of, “What is this movie about, and what is this movie about to me?”

So, I look at, you know, Charlie’s Angels is one of the things that I got actually bumped up in this thread. I should say that I never actually go to DoneDealPro, I don’t really sort of, like, hang out there. But every couple of months I will just do a forum search for my name to see what people are talking about me.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** A specialized form of Googling yourself.

**Craig:** And what are they saying?

**John:** Mostly decent things. Mostly.

**Craig:** Mostly. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So in this forum, someone bumped up a post that is on my site, which I will also link to in the show notes, where I talk about writing from theme. And, so I bring up several of my projects, and discuss what I mean when I say writing from theme on those things.

And, so, Charlie’s Angels’ I said is, “Three princesses who have to save their father, the King.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now that is not, by your definition, a central dramatic argument. It is not a theme. But that is what that movie is to me. Without that, I don’t have a movie at all. I can only think of that movie in terms of this is what it feels like to me.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so once I know what the movie feels like to me, and who the people are within this kind of movie, then I can write it. But, I could have a really clear “this is what the thesis of the movie is” figured out, and still have no ability to write that movie unless I had that sort of core aspect, that core element.

**Craig:** I get it. I mean, look, I think you need all of that stuff. I don’t think you can write a movie if you don’t know what the basic attraction to it is, what the hook is, and the idea. The plot needs its own kind of archetype. You need to have a grasp of your story. And there are certain kinds of movies that are simpler in their execution. No. Let me take that back. Simpler in their construction.

You know, for instance, I wrote spoof movies. There is no central dramatic argument to those. They are a different kind of construction. If you are writing a fairy tale, or something that is larger than life, oftentimes you are right. It is really about —

If you are writing something with a little more drama to it; I mean, I don’t think of Charlie’s Angels as a drama.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s take Big Fish. It’s hard to get more, sort of, like, that is a movie that feels like it should have a central dramatic argument.

**Craig:** And does it?

**John:** I would argue no. It is very hard to find a central dramatic argument that you are going to state that way? There are certainly key touchstone things that cycle back through, you know; what is the difference between factual truth and emotional truth? So that is a key idea. So the stories that Edward Bloom is telling, are they literally true, or are they emotionally true?

**Craig:** Well, but —

**John:** What is the difference between inspiration and sort of idealization?

**Craig:** Who is the protagonist of Big Fish?

**John:** It is a dual protagonist structure. Edward Bloom is the protagonist of the overall arc of his life, and so he is a boy who starts with humble beginnings and grows to some measure of success through these bigger-than-life stories.

The present day protagonist is his son, Will, who has to figure out who his father really is, and discover the secret that his father has been keeping.

**Craig:** And who is —

**John:** So, Will functions as the antagonist to —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — the function as protagonist/antagonist through the present-day story.

**Craig:** And what is Will’s opinion of his father in the beginning of the movie?

**John:** His father is a liar.

**Craig:** And what is his opinion at the end?

**John:** His father… That he was asking the wrong questions. That his father was telling the emotional truth, even if it wasn’t the factual truth.

**Craig:** So, in my mind, even though you weren’t consciously doing this, there is a central dramatic argument there. And the central dramatic argument is that our parents are more complicated people than we understand them to be as children. And the concept that your father is a liar is a childlike understanding of your parent, because you view them as some sort of authority figure that has failed you because of their failings, their shortcomings.

And then you finally get to know them as a person, and you realize that they are far more complicated. And that is an argument. And that permeates the entire thing, not to mention necessitates what is so interesting about Big Fish, which is that this man is a liar.

See, to me, that is always there. And you may have not thought of it, but I think it is there.

**John:** I agree that is an element of it. But what I am saying is, that alone would not have driven, I don’t think drives the story. I don’t think it could drive the story.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** And it doesn’t drive this particular story.

**Craig:** I acknowledge that. I am not suggesting that these are the things that even drive a story. What I am suggesting is that they are valuable, at least for me, and it is fine if they are not for you; but for me, they are valuable when I am trying to figure out, particularly if it is not an adaptation, if you are really just like, “Okay, I’ve got a blank page here. What is my story to tell?” What should come next?

And that is why I always, to me… — And by the way, the only reason that I started thinking about this is because it is so evident in Pixar films. And I feel like Pixar films are so gorgeously structured. And it is so clear that this is part and parcel with what they do.

And so I started thinking about it for those reasons.

**John:** Great. Let me throw out a similar but contrasting way of looking at, I don’t even really want to call it theme, but let me describe what it is, and then we will find the right name for it. This is something that actually occurred to me when I was doing D.C., which was this terrible TV show I did for the WB network that I actually had a nervous breakdown during.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But that was the extreme version of, I think, something that happens on every project, with everything you are writing, is you are trying to figure out what fits in this movie, and what doesn’t fit in this movie. And you are basically making two boxes. And as stuff comes out you are like, “Is this the kind of thing that fits in this movie, or the kind of thing that doesn’t fit in this movie? Is it in the box, or is it outside the box?”

And the extreme version of it on D.C. was I had to write so much, and oversee so much, and I was flying on planes constantly. Basically, any song that played on the radio, within five seconds I had to decide, okay, does that fit into my world. Is that a song I need to hold onto? Yes? It goes in the box.

People would be talking and I would just be sort of recording the whole conversation and figuring out what out of that can I fit into the box. Does this fit into the box? So something that wouldn’t fit into my show, I would walk away because, like, this is not helping me write my show.

To some degree, I think that is what you are doing on every project is you are figuring out some heuristic for sorting what belongs in your movie, and what doesn’t belong in your movie. And, if theme or your central dramatic argument helps you figure out, like, is this the kind of moment that exists in my movie, or does it not exist in my movie?

And when you read bad screenplays, it is often because they are trying to wedge in things that just fundamentally don’t belong in those pages. Especially, I think, it is also a syndrome of first-time writing syndrome is that you don’t know how many things you are going to write in your life, so, like, “Well, I have always wanted to write this thing, so I am going to write this in this script, even if it doesn’t make sense in this script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely the case. Everybody who writes a screenplay has to have that weird horse sense about whether something fits, or doesn’t fit, the world that they have built.

But, what you are describing is almost like a passive filter in a way, like something emerges and I just decide, “Does that pass through or not?” And one of the benefits, I think, about to thinking about an argument underlying your story is that it helps you actively determine what ought to go in.

**John:** Yeah. So it is like writing a regular expression. I am going to get super nerdy here. Writing a regular expression which can sort of pattern match, and figure out, like okay, out of all of this possible stuff, what actually fits into our story?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I always think of these things as like when you look at a movie like Groundhog Day, for instance, which is appropriate because I believe we just had it.

**John:** And a new book about Groundhog Day just came out, which I linked to on the site.

**Craig:** Excellent. Groundhog Day is sort of the… To me it is the perfect execution of this kind of thing. And when we look at movies like this, whether there is a supernatural component or not. For instance, okay, Identity Theft, the movie that I have written for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, coming soon to a theater near you. Starts shooting soon. That’s my big plug.

That movie does not have any supernatural elements. A man’s identify is stolen. He has to get his life back together. In both of those situations, a man keeps waking up on the same day over-and-over. A man has his identity stolen, and needs to put his life back together. My argument as a writer is that as writers we are like, we are God, and we see Job, and we go, “Boink! We are going to make your life miserable. And the reason we are making your life miserable is, look, the side effect is we are going to entertain people. But the reason as God that we are making your life miserable in this specific way is because you need it. You need it. There is something wrong with you. You needed this to happen.”

That is why, and so then I say to people, “Okay, if you have a great concept for a movie, if you had a concept, ‘I imagine a man who tells these incredibly tall tales, and his son, who things he is a liar,’ I immediately think, ‘Wow, that is interesting.'” Now, who needs that to happen? Who needs that experience, to talk to that man, and have that guy be your dad? What is wrong with you? That is the way my mind works at least.

**John:** That is a reasonable way to approach it. And what you are describing with Identity Theft very much fits, I think, our expectation of going into these kind of comedies in particular is that the premise is straightforward, relatable, and everything that flows out of it should… Every important element of the movie should flow out of that premise.

So, the fact that his identity his stolen, or the idea of identity, or the idea of who it is to be you should be the central element of every sequence.

**Craig:** But, by the same token, it is a good thing for, I think it is a good thing if the internal problem is actually somewhat unrelated to the external problem. I think it is fun for an audience to match up a strange external adventure with a far more mundane internal problem. Finding Nemo is the best example. I mean, there is this enormous external problem: my son is lost in an ocean, and I have to find him. And internally there is this other, almost opposite, competing problem: I need to learn how to let my kid go.

And you can see how they both affect each other, but they are different, you know? And I love that.

**John:** And then Pixar made Cars 2.

**Craig:** Well, listen — [laughs]

**John:** You can’t hit it out of the park every time.

**Craig:** I mean, their batting average is still startling.

**John:** It’s pretty good.

**Craig:** And you have to forgive them for Cars 2, because I know some people talk about this, but maybe others don’t know. The most profitable Pixar movie by far is Cars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Cars. I know! Because, look: I am a huge Pixar fan. Is Cars near the top of my list? Nope. Is Cars 2 near the top of my list? No. But, they sold more crapola, more Cars stuff, and you know, if that funds another Nemo, I’m cool. I’m down.

**John:** Yeah. We’re cool. Yeah. We are not going to be negative this podcast.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** This is a positive podcast. How dare I bring up, you know, disappointing Pixar movies, when this is a podcast of celebration and joy, and not wrist slitting. And we are not going to talk about the sad realities of things. We are going to talk about the happy possibilities of things.

**Craig:** In fact, can you make the outro music the Ewok Celebration Song?

**John:** Well, it’s done.

**Craig:** Thank you! Jub Jub. Do-do-do-do. [singing]

**John:** You don’t have to even have to sing it yourself, Craig, because right now it is already playing underneath.

**Craig:** [singing along]

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** Thank you very much for a nice podcast.

**Craig:** Jub Jub who? [singing] See you later.