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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/parentheses-would-help).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin. How can I help?

**John:** This is Episode 552 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk narrative geography, professional development, and when it’s okay to take that pitch out somewhere else. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and give our honest opinions on what’s working and what’s not. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll teach you the one secret to social media everyone is too afraid to show you.

**Craig:** Oh god, it’s not the top 10 secrets?

**John:** No, there’s just one secret, it turns out. It’s a secret you already know, Craig. The secret was in you the whole time.

**Craig:** I can’t wait.

**John:** It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** I should say there’s not a general language warning for the whole episode, but I will probably swear when we get to that part. If you’re a Premium Member and your kids are in the car, John’s going to probably be saying some bad words.

**Craig:** Now you’ve unleashed me.

**John:** Craig, we’re going to start with some Follow-Up. This is so much in our pocket. It’s one of those questions that comes in that you and I are so well qualified to answer. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** @ryanbeardmusic from Twitter asked about the credits for the upcoming Elvis movie. He said, “Hi all, can you explain Baz’s multiple writing credits for Elvis, please? I presume it’s a WGA thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”

**John:** This tweet shows the credit block for Elvis. This is what it reads. It reads, “Story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Lurhmann & Craig Pearce and Baz Lurhmann & Jeremy Doner.” Baz Luhrmann’s name appears four times in just the writing credits for this movie. That’s a lot, but it happens. Craig, talk to me about why this happens.

**Craig:** We do answer this pretty frequently, but this is a particularly good one. I really like this one. The way to understand all this stuff is to understand that every writing team that works on a movie is considered an individual writer for the purposes of credit. Let’s say there’s a writing team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. We know they’re a writing team because of an A-N-D between them, there’s an ampersand. The ampersand tells you they’re a team. They count as one writer for the purposes of credit arbitration.

Now, when we do credit arbitration, and in this case there was an automatic arbitration, because Baz Luhrmann is also the director of the film, we don’t know who the writers are. We’re given scripts, and the scripts say Writer A, Writer B, Writer C, Writer D. I’ve done a couple that hit Writer H, which was exciting. What happens is we say, okay, we’ve gone through all the scripts, and here’s what I think it is. I think that the writing credit should be story by Writer A and Writer B.

**John:** With an A-N-D between those two.

**Craig:** That’s right. Writer A and Writer B, they’re two different writers. Then I think it should be screenplay by Writer C and Writer D and Writer B. Now, here’s where it gets fun. What if Screenwriter C is Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell? As it turns out in this case, that’s what happened. Baz Luhrmann wrote on this own for the purposes of story. Then he clearly did a draft in tandem as a team with a writer named Sam Bromell. He also did another draft as a team with a writer named Craig Pearce. This is an interesting one. Basically, the arbiters gave out as much credit as they could on this. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. They gave credit to Jeremy Doner. Then when it came to story, they gave it to Baz Lurhmann and they also gave it to Jeremy Doner. Wow.

**John:** It’s a lot. Here’s a thing that will help people understand this is, if you added some parentheses it would make a little bit more sense. If you put some parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell, if you put parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner, you’d understand those are three separate writing teams, and they were probably Writers B, C, and D, but they could’ve been writers B, F, and J. We don’t know how many writers were involved in this project.

**Craig:** Sure don’t.

**John:** That’s how it happened. By the distributive property, you want to be able to put Baz Luhrmann out and then put everyone else in parentheses, but you’re just not allowed to do these credits. As a person who’s been an arbiter on these things, I can tell you that Craig’s exactly right. We have no idea whether these people are writing teams or individual writers when we’re reading through these scripts. We’re giving credits to Writer A, Writer B, and then C, D, and E. We have no idea. That’s why you get credit blocks like this which look kind of strange. Same thing happened with Chloe Zhao on Eternals. It’s just a thing that happens.

**Craig:** It’s just a thing that happens. There is only one weird circumstance where we can collapse the credit down a bit. That is if there’s a writing team and then another writer, and the writer is one of the writing team, and there’s nobody else getting credit. If I worked on a script with John, it would be Craig & John. Then John goes off to do something else and I write another draft just by myself, and the arbiters say, oh, A and B both share credit. Written by Craig Mazin & John August and Craig Mazin looks bizarro. In that case they can smush it down to just written by Craig Mazin and John August. The apportionment of residuals would still be accurate to the technical credits.

**John:** All this was done by the books and is all good. I think a person could reasonably argue that there should be some way that these writers could agree to have the credits not have his name there so many different times, that there’d be some way the actual monies could be apportioned properly, but the credit block could look less screwy. Craig, under our existing rules, could these four writers decide that?

**Craig:** No. They can’t. There is an almost never used rule that says that writers can determine their own credits if they want to get together and do that, but not in the case of an automatic arbitration. Furthermore, the apportionment of screenplay credit among three writers can only be granted by arbitration.

**John:** Yes, in this case the screenplay is apportioned between three writers, in this case three writing teams, so only arbitration can do that. Megana, did that answer your questions?

**Megana:** I guess my question is can you talk about the development process of this, the process of Baz Luhrmann working with these three different writers? Are they hiring these people on to work as a part of a writing team to work with Baz Luhrmann?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** My question was whether the writing team is also under contention, like who did what to the draft?

**John:** We know people who’ve worked on… None of these writers. We don’t know these writers personally, but we know other folks who were involved at some point in this process. I think the call was, hey, do you want to go to Australia and work with Baz on this script. A writer would go and work with Baz for a couple weeks on this thing. It was a collaborative team writing thing where you were doing stuff together. There’s no real transparency into that process from the arbitration point of view. How much were they really a team? I don’t know. These writers were hired on to work on drafts with Baz Luhrmann.

**Megana:** Got it. That does clarify things.

**Craig:** That’s correct. There is really no… Other than a writer protesting to the guild and saying, “Listen, I was strong-armed into being part of the team. I didn’t want to be part of the team,” or somebody stuck their name on as if we were a team, but they really weren’t, unless that kind of protest happens, no, it’s just presumed that the writers who share the credit on the title page there for that draft are a bona fide team. It does seem like Baz Luhrmann probably wrote some kind of treatment at some point, some sort of story material by himself. Whether that came before or after Jeremy Doner, I do not know. Then it seems like he did indeed have at a minimum two writers that he did extensive work with as part of two different teams.

**John:** That’s my guess as well.

**Megana:** Got it. Thank you guys.

**John:** Megana, what else do we have?

**Megana:** Chris asks us, “What do you call the page before a script begins, where the writer puts either a quote or an explanatory message? I’m trying to figure out why writers do this, because my gut reaction is that it feels like cheating, but perhaps I’m missing a valuable tool I could use to better elucidate or thematically prep the reader for some of my writing. I don’t mean a character list like in The Nines script. I’m referring to something that is much more directly explanatory for the reader.”

**John:** Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page of a script?

**Craig:** I don’t. It’s just the stupid page with the stupid quote on it.

**John:** It feels like a dedication page. I’ve also called it an intermediary page. If there were a standardized name for it, I think it would be helpful, because it’s weird we don’t have a good standardized name for it.

**Craig:** You could call it quote page. It’s not something that you need to worry about, Chris, honestly. I don’t think it’s cheating. If somebody wants to do it, God bless them. Is it a valuable tool? No. There has never been a single screenplay that went toward the path of success as opposed toward the path of failure, simply because of the strength of its quote. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. You use it, you’re fine. If you don’t, you’re fine. It is not a valuable tool. It sounds like it’s not the kind of thing that you feel a great desire to do. The vast majority of screenplays do not do this.

**John:** The majority of the screenplays I’ve written do not have one of these pages. He mentions The Nines, which has a character explanatory page, which was really crucial for that, because otherwise you might not realize that the same actor’s playing these characters in different parts of the movie. Big Fish has one. It says, “This is a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion,” just a single sentence on that page. It was helpful for Big Fish, because it just set up the right tone for what is the story you’re about to read. For that, I thought it was great. It ties in very nicely to the next question from Corey here. Megana, if you want to ask.

**Megana:** Corey asks, “In Episode 550 you discussed a screenwriter placing a trigger warning page between the cover and Page 1, whether it was warranted. I’ve written a screenplay that has several characters with disabilities. I don’t outwardly identify as a person with a physical disability, and I’m concerned that it could deter producers into thinking my writing is ableist. My question is, should I be putting a disability inclusion/information page at the top of my screenplay? Since my script is a comedy, it involves both abled to disabled bullying and disabled to disabled bullying. Can an information page alleviate potential producer concerns or scare them off more quickly?”

**Craig:** That was a really good question. Wow, it’s funny, we’ve been doing this so long, John, that now we actually can get new questions, because the world changed. That’s how long we’ve been doing this.

**John:** It did change.

**Craig:** The world changed.

**John:** Craig, before your answer, what would your answer have been 10 years ago?

**Craig:** My answer 10 years ago would’ve been nobody cares. That is not the answer that I would give today. This is a good question to ask. It’s relevant, because I think that a lot of producers, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, have become very concerned about this issue. Depending on what the story is, they may feel a burning desire to know if the writer is part of the class they are portraying. There’s lots of ways they can find out. The easiest way is your agent. Your agent says, “By the way, I represent this disabled writer, and he or she has written this script.” If you don’t have representation, nobody’s doing that for you, then I think it actually is helpful to put some kind of thing in there to let them know that you are coming at this from the inside as opposed to from the outside.

**John:** I agree with you in principle. I’m trying to imagine what would actually be said on that page that would both set the reader up for a good experience reading the script and not feel weirdly pre-defensive. I think it’s a really challenging thing to phrase there for that one page, that one sentence you’re going to put there, that’s going to set the person up right.

**Craig:** It’s not an easy… You could simply say something… Let’s say Corey’s last name is Jones. “Corey Jones is a disabled writer from Virginia.” You could do something as simple as that that is the most barebones biographical thing. Then I think the readers would say, “I understand why you were saying this.” I don’t think anybody would go, “Who cares about your bio, Corey?” They would get it, I think.

**John:** I think another alternative would be to find some quote, a thing a real person said out there, who is a disabled writer, a disability activist, who said the most important thing is that we push hard and then take it back. There might be some quote from a disabled person who says you also have to be able to have fun. You can’t put people up on a pedestal. There might be something like that that can actually help frame the comedy that you’re about to get into, because otherwise the person might be uncomfortable with some of the bullying that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Every comedy, you risk that, regardless. You could. You just don’t want to start your comedy by saying, “Lighten up. It’s a comedy.”

**John:** Don’t do that. Not a thing to do. I can imagine other kind of comedies that are talking about marginalized communities where a similar kind of advanced statement could be really helpful in framing who you are and why it’s appropriate for you to be telling this story or the kind of story that you’re hoping to tell.

**Craig:** Megana, what would you do in a situation like this? Should there be something? What do you think? Also, how would you phrase it?

**Megana:** I think it’s becoming a lot more common just in my experience. I feel like I’m seeing whatever we want to call that interstitial page a lot more. I think that people are more open to reading that. I think the quote is nice. I think what John was saying about finding a quote that frames it, without being too explicit, sounds nice and warming you up to the story.

**John:** I’m curious what our listeners think about this issue, but also what to call that page, because Megana just said interstitial page, which is the term I was reaching for rather than intermediary page. What do we want to call this page? I feel like if we just picked a title to this page, within five years we could actually name this page, and it would no longer be a question out there in the world. Write in to Megana or just tweet at us and let us know what we should call this page between the title page and the first page of the script. Those are follow-up-y questions, but Megana, we have some new things in the inbox. What do you got for us?

**Megana:** Great. Fred asks, “What do established screenwriters do for professional development? I’m in a field where there are continuing education requirements to keep up on the latest developments and hone my skills, but I’m curious what you do.”

**John:** Craig, are you caught up on all your classes or your coursework? Is your documentation up to date?

**Craig:** Yes, I have been proceeding up the ladder of professional development, and I should have access to the executive bathroom shortly.

**John:** That’s good, because you got to keep your credentials going there, because you never know when you’re going to be called up on it.

**Craig:** I’m so un-credentialed.

**John:** We tease, and yet there are some things I think we are doing consciously or subconsciously that are the equivalent of professional development. There’s certain things like WGA Showrunner Training Program, well-known, well-respected. Hey, you are going to be running a show. Here’s a boot camp in how you run a show. That is important. It’s been going on for a decade. It’s been really helpful in people figuring out how to do that job, the management function at that job. Things do change and evolve over the course of our careers. What Craig was just saying about 10 years ago, he would’ve had different advice for this writer, than now when we recognize that the world around us has changed to some degree, and we have to adapt what we’re doing. Yet there’s not a systematized way of doing that, because we’re not continually employed by the same employer. Just know we have to do HR training and sexual harassment training if we are staff on a show sometimes. For feature writers, that’s not really a thing.

**Craig:** I did have to do that when we started our production here. I don’t really consider that professional development, per se. It’s a creative job. We really don’t have professional development beyond watching TV, seeing movies, reading books, talking to people that are different than we are, the things that creative people and writers have always had to do. Professional development, I think in a lot of fields, is essential. Then in other fields it seems like it’s just a bunch of busy work designed to make people jump through hoops so they can get paid more, when they should have just been paid more already. It’s a way for some people to say, “Oh, I took these seven classes, so I should get paid more than that person, who is way better at this job than I am, but I took the seven classes.” We don’t have these problems. We don’t have the benefits or the drawbacks of professional development. We just try and stay plugged into culture and hold on to some relevance, I think is probably a good way of putting it.

**John:** I would say, just to be perfectly honest, most of my professional development has come through Scriptnotes, because you and I having a structured weekly conversation about the profession that we’re in, between each other, but also with all the guests that we bring in, I learn a lot, especially when we bring in folks who are doing something different than what I’ve ever done. We bring on showrunners or folks who are working in late-night or other fields I’m not directly involved in. That’s professional development, because I’m learning how they’re doing their jobs, the questions they are asking themselves, the struggles that they are facing. If I were to run a TV show, I’d be much better prepped, just because I’ve been doing all of the work and listening to these very smart people talk about their jobs.

**Craig:** There’s your answer. All you have to do, Fred, is start a podcast and do it for 10 years. Then you too will be professionally developed.

**John:** Love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Rachel asks, “I’m working on a spec script that’s based in a city I know well. I know where each of my characters live and work, and when I have them meet, I’m automatically thinking in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, like which character would selfishly pick a place that’s close to their home but inconvenient for everyone else. At the same time, I’m aware that this isn’t generally how real-world locations are treated in actual movies. Any Before Sunset fan who’s visited Paris knows the disappointment of trying to trace Celine and Jesse’s walking route, only to discover that it dissipates after 10 paces because they teleported to some entirely different part of Paris mid-scene. Is my current approach misconceived? Am I sweating a set of considerations that don’t matter at all?”

**Craig:** A good question.

**John:** That’s a good question. I’m not saying you are totally misconceived, but I think you’re also, in your question, you’re answering your question. In the real world, people don’t think about that as much. In the actual making of films, we are going to cheat things to get from place to place. All that said, it does drive me crazy when people can do impossible things in LA in a movie. In movies that I’ve set in LA, things like Go, I am mindful of what part of town I’m sticking in and being sure it all tracks and makes sense within that part of town, both logistically but also just culturally and visually that it feels like you’re in the same part of the city that whole time. It’s not wrong for you to be thinking about where these people live, but you can get too anchored into some of your choices in the script that aren’t going to be relevant to the reader or to the viewer.

**Craig:** There was this note that used to get handed out a lot in the ’90s. Let’s say you were writing a movie that was set in Miami. The studio executives say, “I feel like you need to make Miami more of a character in the movie.” You would always think, oh, yes, yes, but what does that mean? Do you mean show places in Miami or have things that are… That’s what setting a movie in Miami is supposed to be. What do you mean? I think maybe all they meant is to provide some bits of authenticity and specificity. I think it’s probably a good thing that you’re thinking this way because it’s helping you think about your characters. If you think in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, that gets you closer to where that scene is going to take place.

Now, if you’re doing a movie that is very much about a city, then sure, you’re going to want to make sure that Fenway Park is where it actually is in Boston, because people will just point at you and say that you’re terrible. It’s okay to lay everything out as truly as you can, and then when production happens, you figure it out. If they say, “We can’t shoot there. We’ll have to shoot here,” you can either rewrite it or you can cheat it. If it’s helping you write and it’s helping you achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude, specificity, and authenticity, then yeah, as long as it’s not holding you up, march on.

**John:** The other thing I would ask you to do is keep in mind what your reader needs to know versus what you want to know, because you as the writer/creator have this vision in your head for how people got from this point to this point and the shoe leather that would take them from this moment to this moment. That may not be important to your reader at all. Always just try to go back through your script and think, okay, do they actually need to know this detail? Do they need to know this connecting bit, or are they just looking like, “We’re in this location and we’re in this location. We don’t need to know how we got there or how realistic it is.” Is it not informing the characters and their dialog and the choices within those scenes, it probably doesn’t belong in your script.

**Craig:** I want to answer another question, desperately.

**Megana:** Do you want to answer this one from Jack from Sydney, Australia?

**Craig:** I haven’t read it, but yes. I don’t know what you’re going to say. I haven’t opened the thing. I’m committing to answering this question no matter what it is.

**Megana:** Jack says, “I recently completed a feature, and after receiving some extremely warm notes from a coverage service, I decided to share details and the log line of the project online. It’s very high concept, and judging by the responses and feedback, it’s clear the idea alone has a great deal of appeal. Off the back of this, I’ve been contacted directly by development executives asking to read it, which all sounds very positive but also has me a little nervous. I know ideas on their own are a dime a dozen, so I’m very keen to get the entire script into people’s hands to digest and enjoy. As this is my first time with any sort of industry attention, I’m just not sure how to navigate this and whether to share it freely with whomever asks. I’m unrepped and still very early in my writing journey, so any advice on what to expect and how to manage this would be appreciated. Before sending, should I watermark my script somehow? Will I be expected to sign release forms? Are these for my protection or theirs? Is this all just the ramblings of a paranoid newbie?”

**Craig:** I’ve committed to answering this question, Jack.

**John:** Craig, do it.

**Craig:** I’m going to answer this question. Don’t worry. You are from Australia, Jack. I do not know how copyright functions in Australia, but I can assure you it offers you more protection than copyright does in the United States, because copyright protection in the United States is the worst, unless you’re a business. You have Droit Moral. You have moral rights of authors and so on and so forth. The point is, when you write something, you have established authorship. There is likely a copyright office in Australia. You should contact them, register your screenplay with them so that there is a legal paper trail. Then you should go ahead and give it to people. You can absolutely watermark it. I think most of the major screenwriting programs do it. John has a separate program called Bronson Watermarker that does it.

**John:** Oh my gosh, this is Craig Mazin hyping one of my products. Please make a note of this in the transcript. This is the first time this has happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I hyped it, but I’ve acknowledged it.

**John:** Acknowledgement is hype from Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** If your sales spike, I want money. Yes, you may be expected to sign release forms, but they have requested this, so it is now, instead of an unsolicited screenplay, it is a solicited screenplay. If it’s an unsolicited screenplay, it’s fairly common for them to ask you to sign something, because they really didn’t want to read it at all, and they don’t want to get sued over something they didn’t want to read. If they’re soliciting it, then in general you should be able to send it to them, watermark it with their name. They won’t be offended. It is for everyone’s protection. Live and love, man. Go for it. That’s what you wrote this stuff for is to show it to these people, right? Show it to them.

**John:** The moment has come which you’ve been hoping for which is that people like your stuff and want to read it. This is very exciting. Yes, so you can watermark it. It doesn’t have to be a big, obnoxious watermark either. Just a little reminder like, hey, this is for you and only for you. You have a trail because they’ve asked for it, and then you were emailing the thing. Down the road, if you do need to sue somebody, you could prove that they had access to it, that they read the thing. It’s fine. Don’t catastrophize this yet. The best possibility is that you’re going to make some connections. You’re going to hopefully find somebody who makes this movie or at least wants to meet you as a writer. These are only good things. I’d say take the excitement, work with the excitement, and keep pressing on. Also, in stressing out over this script, don’t stop writing your next one, because that’s even more exciting than this current one.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Megana, give us one last question before we get to these Three Page Challenges.

**Megana:** JJ from Pasadena says, “A couple of months ago, I had a general meeting with an exec from a company that controls a lot of magazine IP. After the meeting, the exec sent me a couple of articles they thought I might be interested in. One of the articles clicked with me, and I came up with a pitch for a show. I didn’t use any characters from the article or any other material except for the idea for a setting. Even then, my setting became completely fictional. I pitched my idea, and they passed. My question is, am I free to take this pitch to other places, without the article attached, of course? The characters I created, their relationships and backstories are wholly original works and have nothing to do with the article. My managers are saying it’s tricky, but my take is what’s the difference between what I did here and me reading the article on my own and using it for inspiration to create something original, which happens every day?”

**Craig:** Managers. I swear to God.

**John:** I’ll take the first crack at this, because I may have a different approach than Craig. We just talked through Jack’s situation where people have solicited his script, and so he doesn’t have to worry about this. In this case, the reciprocal is true, because this magazine can show like, oh we came out to you for this thing, and we didn’t want it. We didn’t want it, but you took this article that we’ve used, and it became a basis for your project. Is that likely? Not likely at all. The way to make it even less likely or ever become a thing is to really change whatever other details were from that article and just make it your own thing. If this thing was set at a bowling alley, could it be set at a roller rink instead? Is there a different place you could set it, it just gets rid of all traces of that article? Yes, what you did, JJ, was create a whole new story that was vaguely inspired by that thing. You can get rid of that thing that was underlying it and use what you’ve got there as its own pitch. Craig, what’s your take?

**Craig:** The tricky part is only the diplomacy between yourself and these other people, but they passed.

**John:** They passed.

**Craig:** Which to me, that’s the end of diplomatic negotiations. The fact is, I’m presuming this article is nonfiction. It may not be. If it’s fiction, that’s a different story. To me, I don’t think of articles as fiction. If you had said essay, that might be different. Fiction is copyrighted, and it is a unique expression and fixed form. You can’t infringe upon somebody’s copyright on that any more than they could infringe on something you wrote.

If it’s a nonfiction article about facts, and the facts have been published in a magazine or newspaper, those facts are free to everybody in the world. You cannot own facts, particularly after you have reported them. You have gone even further than you would need to go, because you’re not using any of the characters from the article, or if it’s nonfiction I would call those people people. Then you said your setting became completely fictional. I think you’re perfectly fine if it’s nonfiction. If it’s fiction, no. That’s dangerous. You would have to make it very, very different so that when the executive from the IP magazine company hears about what you’re doing and reads it, that he or she can say, “Oh my god, I’m suing you.”

**John:** Let’s talk for a moment about fiction versus nonfiction, because we’re not lawyers obviously, but let’s talk about it just in a general sense of why they feel different and why they work differently in terms of what we consider literary material. If something is a work of fiction that has characters in it, something that has story developments, you can see, okay, this is the movie within this space. These are characters that were created to tell this one story. It’s hard to get rid of all those things and create a whole separate story. It’s unlikely you’re going to do this. As opposed to most nonfiction works, which are like, okay, this is about underwater mining, and there’s just a general sense of how this all works and the people involved in this, but there’s nothing there that you couldn’t go out and just do your own research and come up with the same details and facts. You’re going to be able to do that with nonfiction. You’re not going to be able to do that in fiction. That’s part of the reason why they feel different and why you don’t see the same kind of problems happening with the nonfiction articles.

**Craig:** The nonfiction work is research. You’ve read it. It counts as research. It’s facts. Certainly you can write about real people. You can’t defame people. The reason that we are so obsessed, we meaning Hollywood, with buying the rights to nonfiction articles, is because it helps the company stake a claim to an area, so everybody else knows they’re making a movie about let’s just say-

**John:** FIFA Soccer scandal.

**Craig:** The FIFA Soccer scandal. So-and-so has bought the rights to this big article in Rolling Stone about the FIFA Soccer scandal. They’re going for it. Also, now, when they buy that article, they have access to the journalists’ notes and all the stuff that was behind the article, including the contact information for all the people they talked to so that you can keep going further. You can also use things that they didn’t publish in the article. Beyond that, facts are facts. It’s just research.

**John:** Facts are facts.

**Craig:** That’s why anyone can write a movie about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can take any fact you want from any nonfiction book or article, any of them.

**John:** Let’s discuss a practical matter though. Let’s do your Reagan assassination attempt thing. Let’s say there was a really good article and JJ was brought in to maybe pitch on this really good article about this Ronald Reagan assassination. It’s a very specific moment and beat. They say, no, actually, we’re not interested in that. If JJ then went out and started pitching this Ronald Reagan assassination movie to other places, those producers would be pissed. The ones who passed would be pissed. Would they legally have a claim to stop it? No, not really, they wouldn’t, because he could do his own research. That doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea for JJ to do, because it’s very clearly they brought him in, they passed, and he’s going off and doing that. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it. It just means he should be aware of that. I can understand some hesitation there. It doesn’t sound like JJ’s situation is anywhere near that specific.

**Craig:** No. It’s a bad idea unless somebody buys it, in which case it was a great idea.

**John:** Then it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** This is an area where having great representation helps a lot, because representation can launder these kinds of interactions. No, you wouldn’t want to be known for going around town shopping an idea like this. If you had a general meeting and you mentioned your awesome take on the attempt on Reagan’s life, and they got excited, when the other people call to complain, your agent’s going to say, “They wanted to make one too. They mentioned it to him. What do you want? You don’t own the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.” Then they just have to eat it. This is the danger of developing stuff that’s nonfiction. While I was developing Chernobyl, there was a competing Chernobyl project at Discovery, I think, which now amusingly is HBO, so that’s weird. You’re aware that it’s there. Let’s all see what happens. Nothing you can do.

**John:** Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. These are, as far as we know, not based on any fiction or nonfiction works. Instead, these are pages that our listeners have sent in. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can see the entry form, which you can send us a pdf of your three pages, generally the first three pages of a script. It can be a teleplay. It can be a screenplay. Every once in a while, Craig and I will read through these and give you our honest opinions. I say we read through these, but of course it’s really Megana Rao, and in this case Drew Marquardt, our intern, who is reading through all the entries in this last batch. If you want to read along with us, you can go to the show notes for this episode and click there. It will have the links to the pdfs of what was sent in to us, so you see. You could pause this episode and read through the pdf first, or just go back through it after you’ve listened to us describe them. We have three of them here. Megana, could you help us out with a summary of this first script?

**Megana:** The first one is Tag, You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson. In the dead of night, World War One trench fighter William leads a small group of soldiers to silently plant barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Caught by a German patrol, William is riddled by machine gun fire and bleeds out. We cut to present day, where Nia Jenkins, 50s, goes to take a sip of water but notices a drowned spider in her cup and flings it across the room. At the same time, a man in filthy clothes mutters to himself as he walks through the town center. He lunges at a group of students who fight back, and in the scuffle, pull off his hoodie to reveal he’s William, and he hasn’t aged a day.

**John:** Craig, one thing I want to say about these pages before we get into anything else is a lot happens in them. There’s actually a fair amount of story beats that happen in just the course of these three pages, which I just want to commend, because so often we’ll get through three pages and it’s like, okay, that set up some scenery, but not a bunch happened here. A bunch happened here, so good job on that. Before we get to these three pages though, the title page here reads Tag, Season 1, Episode 1, You’re It, but doesn’t have Suw’s name or contact information on it, nothing else. A cover page doesn’t do any good unless you actually have the cover page stuff on it. Just make sure you’re always putting that stuff on for a Three Page Challenge or for any script you’re sending out there into the world.

**Craig:** Particularly if your script is entitled Tag, because there is a thing in television that is the tag, and so they may think, wait, is this just the end of Episode 1. You might want to put that in all caps or something, just because… It’s a little interesting. Often, you will see pilot episodes. Season 1, Episode 1 is a bit… It’s very optimistic.

**John:** Say pilot.

**Craig:** I think pilot seems a little bit more true to what it is, unless Suw knows something that we don’t.

**John:** Craig, when we got into… We’re opening up in these trenches of World War One. What did you think of this first page? Let’s go through the World War One sequence.

**Craig:** There was a lot of really good stuff here. World War One trenches are pretty evocative things. I think that Suw did a pretty good job of placing us in that world. I needed a little bit of effort, which I didn’t want to expend, I generally don’t want to expend any effort early on, to get through a little bit of lack of information. It begins with, “Exterior, World War One trenches, night,” although it is WWI. I think if it’s World War One, you can go ahead and write it out at that point.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You can come back to the abbreviation later, but give us the first bit. Then it says “super: the Western front, 1916.” Other than my late father and men his age and history professors, a lot of people are not going to know what the Western front was. They’re not going to know where it was. I think we need to hear where we are, whether we’re in Germany or France. We need to know a town, an area, just so we can place ourselves.

I loved that William Fernsby, I liked he had “ferrety eyes and a shaven head.” He’s “up to his ankles in filthy water.” He’s got lice. He’s waiting for the soldier in front of him to move forward. It’s a nice way to move us into establishing that there are six men. It says “in the wiring party.” We don’t know what that is. Probably not a good idea to use that lingo when you just need to show me what you show me next, which is they’re gathering “supplies of six-foot pickets and rolls of barbed wire.” We proceeded through the No Man’s Land. Again, probably a good idea to give people a little bit of a concept of what No Man’s Land is, which was essentially this dead space in between opposing trenches.

This puzzled me. I’m curious, John, what you made of it. In the second scene, “William treads carefully, quietly, his nerves humming. The German trenches are only 150 meters away. There’s a noise.” Noise is in all caps. “The entire party freezes, nervously searching for its source. Communication is by hand signal and low whispers. Slowly, as they realize there’s no one there, they begin to move again.” Now, I know what happens next, but what-

**John:** Yeah, but at the time, what-

**Craig:** What is this noise? What is it? Do you know? I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know what that noise is. You have to be more specific here, because a noise could be anything. What do they think they hear? Do they hear movements? Do they hear someone approaching? What do they think are hearing?

**Craig:** Describe the ruckus. We need to know what they think it might be. Now, it seems to me that what Suw’s going for here is in the next scene, “William has moved away from the others.” That’s pretty vague. Why? What’s he doing? Why is he away from the others? “Out of nowhere appears a German soldier,” which is ironic, because that is how a German would say that. It’s backwards. A German soldier appears out of nowhere is better syntax, I think. “Part of a patrol.” You wouldn’t know that, because we don’t see them, because he’s alone.

**John:** Scratch that.

**Craig:** Don’t need it. Also, how out of nowhere? Do you mean apparated? Do you mean from the shadows?

**John:** From the darkness?

**Craig:** Yeah, because there’s clearly something supernatural going on. We need a little bit more clarity there. Also, it says, “The German soldier is on him immediately, but neither fire their weapons. Instead, they grapple hand-to-hand, silent except for huffs and puffs,” until the German soldier puts his wrist against William’s and then, “William screams in pain.” Why were they quiet earlier? Maybe that gets answered later. I don’t know. I like what happened next. Everybody died.

**John:** Everybody died. I was assuming they were quiet just because everyone has to be so super, super quiet. I think that could’ve been a little better set up. I think my only real frustration with this trench sequence is that throughout this whole thing I have got no sense of who William is individually. I wanted just one line. Just give one piece of business to William that is his alone, because otherwise it’s just the camera is favoring this one guy. I don’t know that’s going to be enough, because it is important that it is him, that we’re really going to see his face.

**Craig:** I agree. I did like that on the top of Page 2, the German soldier, which is spelled solider, a word that any spell check would capture, so please, for the love of God… “The German soldier leaps almost gleefully into the line of fire, his body jerking grotesquely.”

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Whoa, okay, that’s interesting. Then we find out that William is dead by, “William lies amongst the mess of bodies, eyes barely open, blood flowing freely from bullet wounds in his chest. Dawn breaks on the dead.” That’s great.

**John:** Dawn doesn’t break on the dead though, Craig. The sun suddenly comes up?

**Craig:** I still don’t know the difference between dawn and sunrise, to be honest with you. Every cinematographer laughs at me. Meaning there’s light on the horizon and there’s a lot of dead people. It was evocative.

**John:** It was evocative.

**Craig:** Then we ran into some trouble.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say is we want to get William off by himself. I think the wringing of the wire could be a good reason for him to be off by himself. Either he’s pulling ahead or he has to stay back with the reel as the others are pulling it forward. Just show us how he gets to be put by himself.

**Craig:** Agreed. No question, we need to explain that, because otherwise what’s happened is your screenplay has moved him somewhere he shouldn’t be so that something can happen. Audiences just don’t like that.

**John:** They don’t like that. That’s not all of our scenes. Next, we’re moving into Nia’s house, the bedroom. The room is “stylishly decorated, tidy but sparse … curtains drawn, dawn light seeping in around the edges.” I don’t know what tidy but sparse means.

**Craig:** Tidy and sparse. Sparse does not contradict tidy. It says “super: present day.” I’m not sure we would need that if you could just give us some details in the room that would tell us we’re no longer in 1916.

**John:** Now, we see this spider crawling around. I don’t need the spider crawling around at all. I basically just need… I love that she’s hot in bed and she’s the sort of person who sleeps hot and she grabs for the water and there’s a spider in it. That’s great. I think we spent too much time on this spider business.

**Craig:** Unless it becomes really important later, which is possible.

**John:** It could be.

**Craig:** We have some reverse syntax again. “Alone in the double bed lies a sleeping woman.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe Suw is a German speaker.

**John:** Could be.

**Craig:** “The menopause has reached Nia at last.” The menopause?

**John:** The menopause.

**Craig:** The menopause.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** I think it’s just menopause.

**John:** Menopause has reached-

**Craig:** She’s menopausal. Here’s my biggest issue. She wakes up. There’s a spider. She freaks out about the spider. She calls up for somebody named Tomos. There’s no one there. She’s upset. She then picks up the spider with some barbecue tongs and flushes it down the toilet. It says finally she can breathe again, except it says, “She can breath again. She sags.” Then that’s it. Then we’re off to a different scene. I’m like, why did I watch any of that?

**John:** I don’t know why we watched it.

**Craig:** I learned nothing. It didn’t drive me forward. Why? Here’s the deal. Suw, you get this big, exciting first sequence. Then you go somewhere else. I need something at the end of that sequence, doesn’t have to be crazy, to make me go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” I don’t get anything. I just get a lady flushing a spider.

**John:** I like the details. I like her with the tongs and all that stuff. I see it. It’s all great. I didn’t get any new information that’s making me extra intrigued. It just feels like a different movie, like okay, that movie happened, now we’re in this movie, and now we’re going to this third sequence, which is the college students. This fortunately does tie back into our opening. We see that William is part of this world. He seems to be the stereotype of the insane person rambling around that everyone’s trying to not look at, but mostly this worked for me. Then he’s on top of a student there. I would say my frustration at the end of this was, “With surprising speed and agility, the man lunges at the nearest student. There’s a scuffle as the others pull him off. His hoodie falls backwards, and we see his face.” The other student, who is that student? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Give us some detail here. Even if this character’s not going to survive this moment, we’ve got to know something.

**Craig:** Also, again, describe the ruckus. “There’s a scuffle as the other pull him off.” What does that mean, scuffle? Are people throwing punches? Do they grab him? Unless you were different, John, I had zero doubt that this was going to be William.

**John:** No. Of course it was going to be William.

**Craig:** His face is covered by a hoodie. I wonder who it is? You might, Suw, get away with not doing this ornate reveal and just a simpler reveal. We see a man from behind, stumbling “through the pedestrian precinct.” That’s an interesting choice of words. A car almost hits him. He turns, and now we see his face. It’s William, and he’s muttering to himself or whatever. This feels pretty involved. Generally speaking, “One notices the man but studiously ignores him,” I don’t know. The students, they’re nothing. They’re like props. Then we end with a reference to a character. We learn their name. We learn how the name is pronounced. We learn what their skin color is, what their eye color is, what their hair color is. We really probably don’t need all of that there. We’re going to learn it later. I would rather learn it when other people would learn it, because the audience isn’t going to learn it here. They’re not going to know his name here. I would probably dose that out a little bit later perhaps, because he’s supposed to be mysterious.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s give a little more detail on William at the start. Let’s consider whether we need to have this scene with the spider and Nia where it is, because I think it’s meant to be just a filler scene so that we don’t have these two things back-to-back. It’s not doing a job here. Let’s get to our William quicker. Even though I started this conversation by saying I was happy with how much happened in these three pages, and I still am, I think we could spend our time better in these three pages still.

**Craig:** If you do have what I think is a pretty interesting narrative conceit, which is Highlander but World War One, there’s other, more imaginative ways to show somebody being launched through time and still being alive and being as disturbed as the man who put this curse on him. I think this feels familiar. The executive feels familiar. I would really take a look at Page 3, and I would just ask myself… Let’s presume people get it, that there is actually… It’s not the most earth-shattering concept. Maybe put a little less pressure on the concept and think a little bit more about a more contemporary or challenging execution of it.

**John:** A thing we started doing recently with Three Page Challenges is that we asked them to submit a log line as well. Craig and I don’t know the log line until this very moment. I’m going to open up the triangle here. Here’s the log line for this thing which Suw sent through. “A curse transforms a single mum into an immortal heroine who must protect Earth from aliens, but is her 1,000-year-old champion really on her side or should she be protecting her enemies from him?” I did not see aliens coming.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** An involuntary immortal quality there, I get that.

**Craig:** You knew that Nia Jenkins was important because we saw the scene, so yes, but aliens, that’s the part I was like… That caught me by surprise.

**John:** I’m excited to see what Suw does with the rest of this script. I thought there was some promising stuff here.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Now let’s move on to our next thing. Megana, can you give us a summary of Halloween Party?

**Megana:** Great. Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu and Zachary Arthur and Kyle Copier. In a local newscast, a reporter delivers breaking news that three people have died and hundreds more were injured at a Halloween Party at Arizona State. They showed the mugshots of the two students identified as suspects, Carmichael and Allie. We then go back to two days earlier as Carmichael and Allie walk to class. Allie bemoans that they’ve yet to attend a single college party, but Carmichael defends this decision, saying he needs a spotless record in order to sit on the Supreme Court one day. Allie pushes back, insisting one party won’t destroy his life, but Carmichael asks her to wait until after his longtime crush, Maddie, leaves.

**John:** That’s where we’re at after three pages. Craig, first impressions of Halloween Party?

**Craig:** Lucas and Zachary and Kyle, this is going to sting just a touch. There’s a lot going wrong here. There’s a lot going wrong in a way that is very typical for screenplays. In that regard, this is, I think, useful and fixable. I want to go through them, because there are just a lot of screenwriting sins that pile up really fast and really consistently.

**John:** Agreed. There’s also some good things we can point out as well, but the sins are very obvious.

**Craig:** The sins are pretty obvious. Let’s start with sin number one. The reporter is not reporting the way any reporter reports. This is what the reporter tells us: Breaking news. Three people died and hundreds of people were injured “in a Halloween party gone wrong” near a college campus. Two people were taken into custody. They are the key suspects. What? How did the people die? It said investigation “into last night’s horrific events are ongoing.” What events? No one ever gets on the news and said, “Three people died.” How? Were they shot, chopped up, melted?

**John:** Poisoned?

**Craig:** We need something. Right off the bat, there’s just a clumsiness here. Reporter dialog is just something you need to get right.

**John:** Let’s talk about reporter dialog. This whole setup essentially is a Stuart Special, where it’s just like we’re seeing the aftereffects of this and the news footage of this thing, and then it jumps forward to three days earlier, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Stuart Special. This could be a good setup because it is surprising that these two people did this horrible thing, apparently. They want to see them in the time before. That can absolutely work, but we’re relying on this newscast to do a little too much. I also wonder about starting over black. There’s a limited amount of time which an audience is willing to just stare at a black screen and have someone talking. I think this was pushing beyond that. Think about what are you actually showing on screen. Are there multiple reports happening simultaneously in an I Am Legend kind of way? That could be a way to get into it. This is not going to work here. All that said, I love the character descriptions of both Carmichael and Allie. “Carmichael, 21, short Black chubby kid with a smile wide enough that it probably hurts his face, has a cul-de-sac haircut and lipstick all over his face.” I don’t know what a cul-de-sac haircut is, but I love that his smile “probably hurts his face.” I love it. Craig, Megana, what is a cul-de-sac haircut?

**Craig:** In the shape of a horseshoe?

**Megana:** I took it to mean just suburban and nerdy.

**Craig:** We’ll have to look that one up. While we’re doing research on this, I didn’t mind this description, but I did not like the description of Allie. The description of Allie was, “Allie, 22, tall skinny woman who’s far cooler than she has idea about.” To me, that’s just cool but doesn’t know it.

**John:** I like “glossy eyed and faded, she’s still on top of the world and doesn’t give a fuck about her black eye.” Great.

**Craig:** Hard to get across in a still photo. Also, who’s watching this? It’s on TV. We won’t know she’s a tall skinny woman because you’re showing us mugshots. How do we know she’s tall and skinny? Is there a specific height on the mugshot? They don’t really do that. That’s from the bad movies from the ’50s. There’s so many issues here. I thought, okay, let’s see where we end up two days earlier. We’re at campus. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the Stuart Special. We’ve seen this particular kind of Stuart Special a lot.

**John:** I do not believe that two days before Halloween, people are already wearing their Halloween costumes around campus. I just don’t believe it.

**Craig:** They’re not.

**John:** I did not believe the campus at that moment. They’re not. Here’s my frustration is, there’s no such place as “exterior, Arizona State University campus.”

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s not a place.

**Craig:** Not a place.

**John:** It’s not actually a location. You can be like, the main quad moving between the dorms and this place, but describe, give us a place, because I don’t know what the ASU campus looks like. I need to know something, and especially because you’re going to do a walk and talk, attempt to do a walk and talk for a very long time between two characters in a space. I have no idea where we are. By picking a more specific place, you could break it up. Give us some things to do and see and change up the scene. Right now, we are just trapped in this conversation that just keeps going. Aaron Sorkin could not make a good walk and talk that could carry us through these two pages of some void that we’re in.

**Craig:** Well-observed that we are in a place that doesn’t exist. Many, many years ago, all the way back when I had my blog, I wrote an article called You Can’t Just Walk into a Building. I think that’s what it was called. It’s common for screenwriters to say walks into a building and looks around. It’s like, what building? Building isn’t a thing. Someone has to go find the building. What is inside of the building? Is it just a building? Campus is not a place. Absolutely true that nowhere on the planet Earth are people in costumes two days before Halloween. There is no reason for Carmichael to be dressed in a Harry Potter outfit. Why?

**John:** I think it’s trying to ironically comment on JK Rowling’s trans controversy. I have no idea why he’s in a Harry Potter outfit. No idea.

**Craig:** It’s a brave attempt, but no. Then what proceeds is two pages of what I called ticker tape writing, just dialog, no interruption, no action lines, no one else shows up. I simply have these two people having a conversation that doesn’t appear to have a moment before. The conversation begins like this, “This weekend we’re doing it. I think we should try drugs.” Okay, but what were they saying before that?

**John:** They were together. They were already walking.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** This could be a first line if she runs up behind him and grabs him, startles him, and pins him down and says this is what we’re going to do. That is the beginning of a scene, that that moment started. It can’t start with them already walking and she says this.

**Craig:** If you just added the word no, then I would understand that she was responding to something, and so that we were inside of a…

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** You can’t just start as if these people were walking silently and then suddenly, scene. Then what happens is two people that know each other very well start telling each other things that they should already know. They just start announcing things that they should know. “We’re seniors at the number one party school in the nation and have literally never been to a single party.” Yeah, they know that. “I want to be on the Supreme Court.” Yes, I know. Then, “You act weird around Halloween,” which is bizarre, but also something that you would know. Then, “Imagine how many more copies of my book I’d sell.” Okay, so you’re a writer. You need to tell him that, even though he already knows. Then he has to tell her that there is a woman that he is in love with, that she already knows about. None of this would happen.

**John:** It would not happen.

**Craig:** None of it.

**John:** We often talk about how late could you come into a scene and still get the purpose of the scene. It’s a fun exercise with this, because you would come in so much later to this and actually get the information out that you want to get out, and give yourself space to do more interesting things in here. We won’t keep beating on this, but it’s like a jokoid. It has the quality of dialog, and dialog that people say in movies, but it’s just there’s too much, and it’s not actually moving us anywhere, not going to any place. There’s one sentence I actually have to talk about, because I think it would be actually an impossible sentence to diagram. I’m going to read Carmichael’s sentence from the top of Page 3. This is what Carmichael says. I’ll try to give a fair performance of it. Here it is. “I’m simply saying I have to go in there with a resume solid enough for Lindsey Graham to be comfortable nominating somebody with a skin color that’s darker than his mother’s.” Wow.

**Craig:** What I wrote next to that was awkward and written. By written, I mean instead of somebody talking, which is what dialog in a screenplay is for, it appears that somebody has taken some time to write some prose out. He does it again. Then his next dialog brick is, “This just kind of feels like one of those moments I bring up in my bestselling autobiography 50 years from now where I talk about how your decision to try drugs in this moment led you to a life hunting for Sasquatch and multiple felony-level prostitution charges.” No.

**John:** How many words was that?

**Craig:** So many words. The sentences are coming out in absurdly complete packages. I have a challenge for Lucas and Zachary and Kyle. The challenge is I want you to rewrite this scene. I want you to not worry about being funny. I don’t want you to write a single joke. I want you to write it in the most realistic way possible, as if these were actual human beings walking across an actual campus, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and having a discussion that two people that have known each other for years would actually have, in the way that they would have it. Just go as low concept as you can. Go mumblecore on this. You can always then pull it up. I think you guys need to get down to the really realistic ground on the ground before you can start getting into the comedic stuff, because it’s just not connected to reality right now.

**John:** I very much want to see that. I was going to propose the same thing. I want to see a cleaned-up version of this. I think it’s also challenging to have a team of three writing scenes. It can happen, but you don’t see it very much. It’s not common.

**Craig:** That’s true. Maybe that’s part of it is that it becomes committee-ized or something. All I can say, guys, is I think that I’m sure that you have a movie that all three of you love, that is in this genre. See if you can get that screenplay and just really dig into how it’s constructed. I think you will move forward by leaps and bounds. I really do believe so.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I am rooting for you guys.

**John:** Here’s the log line that they sent through. “When two best friends decide to impress their friend group from out of state, they mistakenly throw the greatest Halloween party of all time.”

**Craig:** That’s what I think probably you thought it would be about, certainly what I thought it would be about. There are lots of great movies about young adult parties going bad but good. Time-tested genre often works. I think you guys, just give yourself this little exercise, and then I think write back into it. It’s okay. Like I said, you didn’t invent any new mistakes, so don’t worry about that. I made these mistakes. John, you made these. Maybe you didn’t, but I did.

**John:** A hundred percent, I did. Also, I do wonder if some aspect of what happened to dialog at a certain point, and what we took to be as good dialog, like of the Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s very convoluted, and yet it all fits together, people heard that and internalized that and think that’s what dialog should sound like. It’s just not working in some of these situations.

**Craig:** Also, there’s a certain kind of person that can do it. If your characters are highly educated, articulate press secretaries for the president or future Mark Zuckerbergs who are on the spectrum and at Harvard, yeah, then they can talk like that, because some of those people talk like that. This is not to insult anybody at Arizona State University, but this is not the typical cadence of anybody. Neither Carmichael nor Allie are talking like actually people there. All of their lines are too formed. When Allie said, “Never fucked a woman,” she knows he hasn’t. What is that even about? Then you fuck him then. It was just so weirdly mean, and then he just kept going through it. That’s an example, guys, where I think you’re going for a laugh but you’re actually hurting the characters. That’s the other thing is never, never sacrifice character on the pyre of the laugh, because you probably won’t get the laugh, because people will be upset at the character, and you’ll hurt the character.

**John:** For sure.

**Megana:** Wait, also, do you want to know what a cul-de-sac haircut is?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to know. Please.

**Megana:** I think that what they are saying here is it’s a fade. There’s a little bit of hair on top, and then you have the cul-de-sac effect because it’s really trimmed down on the sides.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Megana:** The thing that comes up when you first search for this on Google is just male balding patterns. That makes more sense to me as a cul-de-sac.

**John:** A horseshoe, yeah. I doubt he has shaved his head to resemble male pattern baldness, although I’d want to know that character. I’d really want to know that character who would choose to do that.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Craig:** I would respect that.

**John:** Megana, can you talk us through our final Three Page Challenge?

**Megana:** Ronnie, an American at college in Scotland, comes home from a one-night stand to a voice mail from her dad, Ed. As she listens to the voice mail on speakerphone, she notices her pet goldfish floating in its tank. As she tries to resuscitate the fish, Ed informs her that her mother has died. Back home in Santa Barbara, Ronnie and her siblings stand on the beach as Ed pushes their mother’s urn out to sea, which the tide quickly brings back to shore. Her sister Elle swims the urn out and submerges it. When she returns to shore, their sister Sophia accuses Elle of stealing her earrings.

**John:** That’s where we’re at at the end of three pages.

**Craig:** What’d you think, John?

**John:** I liked quite a lot about these. I really liked quite a lot about these pages. There’s some interesting stuff here. Again, we’re on a college campus, and yet it feels a more specific college campus. I wasn’t trapped in nowhere for this as much. I have specific things about getting to voice mail. This is essentially the convention of someone listening to their voice mail when they get home or the answering machine that we used to have in the ’90s. I want to propose that maybe her phone is dead and she’s plugging it in when she gets into a room and that’s why she’s now getting this message from her father about her mother being dead. Yet I dug the tone. We were in a dramedy space. I was curious to see what was going to happen on Page 4, which is always my question for these kinds of samples is do I want to keep reading. What did you think?

**Craig:** I loved it. Do you think it’s Emme or is it Emme?

**John:** I think it’s Emme. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** If it’s E-M-M-E?

**John:** We’ll say Emme for this podcast. We’ll apologize if that’s not quite right.

**Craig:** Miss Harris. The start, here’s a description that does work for me, “Ronnie Thomas, 20, American, the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café, ties her sex-wrecked hair back and throws on sneakers.” Now I must admit, I’m not sure what the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café is, but sex-wrecked hair gets a check mark for me. I can see her. This was a very efficient way to show me something that I’ve seen a million times. Here’s the thing. It’s okay to do things that people have done a million times. Just don’t dwell on it like you’re the first person to do it. What I liked here about Miss Harris is that she writes this very efficiently, like you get it, you know the deal. As you point out, she’s running across the university campus. I would like to know where, but at least at the end, it’s super short and she’s heading for another dormitory building. At least I get a sense roughly of where she is. I like the stone spiral staircase.

I thought this was such an interesting way to convey information. We’ve talked about exposition a lot and how you get across ideas and how exposition is sometimes a wonderful opportunity to be creative. This is creative. He’s just yammering on her voiceover. She’s very upset about a goldfish. She starts doing little… I saw her doing little finger compressions, which I thought was really hysterical. Then her dad says, “Oh, and your mum is dead.” Then she starts screaming. Then her roommate says, “Well, that seems a bit dramatic, doesn’t it?” It was very good. It was a good way to… I’m so leaning forward and excited. I kept feeling that way when we got to the beach in Santa Barbara. How did you feel about that scene?

**John:** I think the beach mostly worked. We are there. The idea is that we’re going to put these ashes. We’ve seen the ashes at the beach thing a hundred times. Again, you weren’t scared of the stock scene. You’re doing the thing. You’re putting the urn in, and it just won’t sink. That comedy, it just keeps washing back up, feels great that the sister swims out with it and finally submerges it and dunks it. It feels right. Do I know quite what’s happening on the page after that? Nope, but in these three pages we’ve met our hero, we’ve taken her from Edinburgh where she’s going to school to Santa Barbara. It feels like that’s where we’re mostly going to stay. We don’t know. We’re curious. We want to know more about her. We basically like her so far. These are promising things.

**Craig:** They’re smart. This is a very funny bit. I thought this was really funny. I liked the idea that Ed is like, “This is ridiculous. This urn full of her ashes, it’s biodegradable, it’s supposed to just sink and release the ashes into the water.” Everyone starts laughing. Then Elle takes it and brings it out into the water and she dumps it in, and then there’s this bit about earrings. It had that kind of intelligence that you see in Fleabag, for instance, to me. You know in Fleabag, in the second season, when they’re at the funeral, and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god, you look really great.” It’s this incredibly awkward thing that happened. Her hair just was perfect that day. It’s so weird and specific. I could see her sister. I could see her other sister. I like that Elle was wearing a slightly too extravagant gown. It’s all just really well done. I loved how much white space there was on the page. I salute you, Emme or Emme or Emme Harris. Well done.

**John:** Here’s a suggestion for Page 1. As Ronnie’s speeding across campus, her friend in upper case “carrying books, stops as she passes.” Friend asks, “Are you coming to Lit?” Ronnie says, “Yes, just going to my room to grab my stuff. I’ll see you in a sec.” “They part ways. Ronnie heads for another dormitory building.” Who’s that friend? That friend male, female? That friend could be somebody specific. Just give us a gender. Give us something about that. Also, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s like a nothing conversation. There’s a moment to either acknowledge that this was a walk of shame coming back from this thing. I wanted something funny there and for them to just tell us that, okay, we’re in a comedy and get us primed for the next scene, which could land even better if we had some joke before that.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** That’s an excellent point.

**John:** As we wrap up here, let’s talk about the log line. “After the death of her estranged mother, a college student returns home to her sisters and dad in California for a memorial service that reveals more than one complicated relationship.” It’s a half-hour pilot, apparently.

**Craig:** Great. Great. I want to read it. Send it. I’ll read it. I’m excited. This is good. It was funny. I enjoyed it.

**John:** I want to thank all the people who sent in Three Page Challenges, especially these three that we talked about today. If you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and fill out the form there and attach your pdf. We do this probably every two or three months. If you’re a Premium Member, we’ll send out an email in the week before we’re going to do one so we can get that last call of entries for this. I want to thank Megana and Drew for going through all of these entries…

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** …and remind people that this is a voluntary thing, so we really applaud you for sending in scripts that we can all talk about. All right, Craig, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from, on Saturday night, we did a thing we had not done for a long time since the pandemic, which was having a game night. We were over at a friend’s house. We all played games together and gathered around a table. It was tremendously fun. I played a new game I never played before, which was the Blockbuster Party Game. I’ll link in the show notes to it.

This game comes in a case that looks like a Blockbuster tape, which is just such a wonderful bit of nostalgia. The game itself, you have movie titles on your cards. You’re trying to get your team to guess them. It has a Charades-y kind of quality, but it actually has some really smart game mechanics in terms of things you can do to compete against the other teams. There’s timers. It’s all smart, and just the right version of this kind of game. If you’re a person who loves movies, which you probably are, if you listen to this podcast, and want a party game for six people or more, I recommend you check out the Blockbuster home game. It was like eight bucks on Amazon, so not a big commitment, but a really surprisingly fun game.

**Craig:** This was a game from the ’90s, right?

**John:** No, this is a brand new game.

**Craig:** No, it’s not.

**John:** This is a brand new game that just-

**Craig:** You’re kidding.

**John:** It’s a brand new game that just happens to have the packaging and the feel of Blockbuster. They must’ve just found out whoever has the logo for Blockbuster. They got the rights to have the logo for Blockbuster. It’s a brand new game.

**Craig:** Oh my god, so this isn’t when Blockbuster’s at the height of their power. They had a little associated game. Maybe they’re like, “Who’s going to sue us? There’s no Blockbuster.”

**John:** I think Blockbuster’s one of those brands, it’s like Ataris. You don’t need the real company. You want the nostalgia for the thing.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** I quite enjoyed it. When you’re back in town, Craig, I’m going to have you and Melissa over for game night with a bunch of folks, and we’ll play this, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. It’s a smart choice they made in deciding this.

**Craig:** Deal.

**John:** I also insist that at some point you host Mafia again, because Craig may be a good screenwriter, he’s one of the best Mafia hosts you could possibly ever imagine.

**Craig:** I’m thinking about just doing that professionally from now on.

**John:** I think it’s a good choice. Craig, it’s less stressful. People would pay you good money. You could have billionaires pay you to be a host for Mafia parties.

**Craig:** I worry that for billionaires, when people die, they actually die, because they can murder, because laws don’t matter. My One Cool Thing this week is something that wandered my way via Twitter but I guess from TikTok. This is not a new thing, although it’s new to TikTok. It’s called the hanger reflex. Have you been following along with this one, John?

**John:** I have. We tested the hanger reflex around in our house after watching an episode of TV. We tried it. Craig, does it work for you? Does it work if you do it to yourself, or only if someone else does it to you?

**Craig:** I only tried it putting it on my… Let me tell you what it is. If you haven’t heard of the hanger reflex, you take a wire coat hanger and you spread it slightly and put it on your head and then let it go so it squeezes on your head. For many, many people, including myself, your head will naturally turn to either the right or the left. What I found was if I rotated it, it would turn one way or the other. It always turned towards the way the coat hanger was hooked.

**John:** The hook.

**Craig:** This is not one of these mass suggestion things. This in fact is an established reflex discussed in journals, medical journals, research journals. No one really knows why, although they think it has to do with shearing force, which is basically when one force is pushing one way and the other one is pushing the other way, but not directly at each other. It creates a natural desire to twist along with the shearing force. It’s really weird. I was not expecting it to work. It absolutely worked on me. Have you tried it, Megana? Have you hangered yourself?

**Megana:** I have not yet, because you have to have a wire hanger, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it will work with a thicker plastic hanger, as long as there’s actually space, as long as it will squeeze properly, but wire is the preferred one.

**Craig:** I think I’ll find a wire hanger and I’ll put it on your head. We’ll get this done. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. Anyway, check it out. If you just Google the hanger reflex, very easy to try at home. Fun for the whole family. You start to feel very, very stupid as you’re doing it. Some people are like, “Wait, this is a setup, right? You all just agreed to say that this does something, and then I’m going to be the idiot that puts this on my head, and you’re going to laugh at me.” No, it’s a thing. It’s actually real.

**Megana:** Have you tried to resist it when you’re doing it?

**Craig:** Yeah. You can.

**John:** It’s not overwhelming. It’s not like some ghost is turning your head.

**Craig:** No, it’s really more that if you don’t try and resist, you don’t try and help it, your head will just naturally want to turn. It’s really weird. You’ll see when I put it on your head.

**Megana:** Cool, I can’t wait.

**John:** That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with help this week from Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Our outro’s by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on secrets of social media. Craig and Megana, thanks so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The secret to social media was actually revealed this past week by Sara Schaefer, a writer and comedian who has actually been a guest on this podcast before. Let’s take a listen to Sara Schaefer’s secret to social media.

**Sara Schaefer:** I used to always share my opinion online. No matter the topic, I was ready to dive into the discourse, even when it had nothing to do with me. The result, me posting a lot of dumb shit. Before I knew it, I was posting dumb shit online every single day, until all that changed. Now I don’t post dumb shit at all. What’s my secret? Silence. Surprised? I was too. Turns out you don’t have to post anything at all. It’s not required. Sometimes you can just be quiet. My girl friends ask me, “But Cheryl, wouldn’t that be censoring yourself? Is this the end of a free society as we know it?” No, it’s actually something else. It’s called maturity. I wondered what would happen when I stopped blasting out every half-formed thought from my head like a diarrhea cannon, but now, thanks to silence, I’m posting half the amount I used to, and guess what, I still exist. Silence, I never knew. Did you?

**John:** Craig, do you think Sara has hit upon the formula for social media success?

**Craig:** She has, although I have to give credit to fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold for saying this exact thing a number of years ago. Somebody had tweeted something, and she showed it to me and then just wrote, “You don’t have to say anything.” It’s just an interesting thing. Sometimes you get fooled by social media into thinking that it must be used. It doesn’t have to be used at all.

You know what? The other day I was thinking about this very issue. We’ve been living with alcohol for thousands of years. They find residue of beer in prehistoric bowls. What if we hadn’t? What if no one had ever had alcohol until 10 years ago? Then the first alcohol was very rudimentary. It was pretty watered down. Now after 10 years, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s vodka, there’s gin. Someone just invented tequila. People are going crazy. No one knows what to do. They’re puking. They’re arguing if it’s a disease, is it not a disease, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing. We’re so ill equipped to handle something as powerful as alcohol, because it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s social media. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s alcohol. Sara Schaefer, what you’re really saying is you don’t have to drink it. You don’t have to drink it. You can watch other people drinking, and it’s fun.

**John:** One thing I think Sara hits on which is really important is that, “I didn’t say anything, and yet I still continued to exist,” because one of the things about social media, if you’re not posting it’s like you’re not really there. No one’s retweeting you. No one’s acknowledging you. If you don’t put out your opinion, do you even exist? You do continue to exist. You actually are a person who has opinions, even if you’re not sharing those opinions. More importantly, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You can just stay out of whole conversations. That’s a crucial skill which I wish people could pick up earlier.

**Craig:** I love staying out of conversations. It’s like crack cocaine for me now. I read something. In my mind I’m like, “I’ve got something to say.” Then I don’t say it, and I feel great. It’s such a joy.

**John:** What put us on the bonus topic today was the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, which I’ve never commented on. Obviously, I know Johnny Depp from work projects before. I don’t know Amber Heard at all. It angers me so much that this is a public trial that’s being shown to the world and also discussed by the world, when it’s none of our fucking business whatsoever. I just get so incredibly frustrated by that it’s just a moment of entertainment and enjoyment for the world to participate in and comment upon, when who the fuck cares? We shouldn’t be allowed to watch this thing.

**Craig:** I haven’t been following along with the trial of the century. You’re right. It’s none of my business. I can’t possibly learn anything or grow as a human being by following the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. There was this other thing that happened to me over the last couple of months. That was, and I think I shared this with you, getting a number of interview requests by real places like TV news outlets here and abroad to comment on the war in Ukraine, because I had written a television series about a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. They’re always very flattering when they come for you. I politely declined. The reason I politely declined is because I am not qualified to discuss the war in Ukraine. That’s not what I do. It seems like nobody out there cares. They’re just trying to throw more people at microphones. Everybody can shout their unearned opinion at each other. That’s why I like that we do this, because we actually have earned our opinions about screenwriting, so it’s nice. You see what I mean? Why would anyone ask a screenwriter to talk about a war in Ukraine? That’s crazy.

**John:** On the podcast we are sharing our expertise and our opinions on a topic that we know very well because it’s actually the thing that we do every day. Had they gone to an expert in Ukrainian military history or the tactical issues involved with Russian military or nuclear safety, fantastic. Those are great places to go to. The guy who wrote Chernobyl is not a valid news source for this thing.

**Craig:** No. I think everybody has been trained to believe that everyone is an expert on everything, and God knows they’ll tell you about it. The problem is, what do we do? I don’t know how to get out of this.

**John:** A choice is silence, as Sara Schaefer lays out. We don’t have to weigh in on things. We don’t have to weigh in on things that we are experts on or not experts on, that we do know of some information. We can stay out of it. There have been times where I’ve jumped in on something because it’s a funny moment. Great, but I’m trying to stay out of things that are just like, this is an enraging thing that’s happening in the world. If I’m not showing my rage, it sounds like I’m sitting on my hands. No, it’s just that I’m better off donating to abortion rights charities than screaming about it on Twitter, or I’ll go to a protest where actually my physical presence is important for me to be there, than just putting it out on the timeline, where everyone else is also venting. Megana, you are not as big of a social media user as I am. What is your decision process about what to amplify, what to keep back from? What’s your metric for doing that?

**Megana:** Sorry, this is something that I could talk about forever. I think I prefer to hold most of my opinions to myself and reserve the right to feel differently about things.

**John:** Wait, I want to stop you there. Reserve the right to feel differently, reserve the right to change your mind?

**Megana:** Yes, I reserve the right to change my mind, which social media and the internet does not respect or it’s not a thing that is really possible on the internet.

**Craig:** You monster.

**John:** You monstrous hypocrite. How could you possibly change your mind?

**Craig:** How dare you?

**Megana:** I agree. I also grew up with social media. Me and my friends all got MySpaces and Xangas when we were 12 years old. No 12-year-old has anything interesting to say. I think that around 2014 I was grossed out by the way it felt like everyone around me was behaving in a way that they could then curate to social media instead of just living. After that, I just stopped posting stuff. I’m still on social media. I’m still on Facebook because there are certain groups that I get information from and message boards. I wish that I didn’t have to be on Facebook, but I am, because of that. I’m on Twitter because of writing and work stuff. Then I’m on Instagram. I’m actually not really on Instagram that much. I wish that I didn’t have to be on any of these things, because I think that there is some value in them, but for me in my life it’s mostly a negative.

**John:** You’re distinguishing between you’re a consumer of these things but you’re not a producer of content for these things. That’s an absolutely valid choice. Basically, it is helpful for you sometimes to get this stuff coming in. There obviously can be toxic effects of that too. I guess back to Sara Schaefer’s point, you don’t feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening, passing by. You’re very judicious about what you put out there in the world. You got to go up and see Craig in Calgary, and Bo, and hang out with them. I got to see pictures of beautiful stuff up in Calgary, which is great. I was so happy to see you posting that kind of stuff. You could share that with people who would be interested in seeing those things, but you didn’t have to weigh in on bigger issues.

**Megana:** I think another thing with social media is that especially with the new Facebook algorithm and the metaverse overhaul or whatever, it favors extreme opinions. Most people don’t have extreme opinions. Most people think pretty similarly about things. When I’m on social media, I’m like, “Oh my god, this world is so polarized.” When you go outside and talk to people, you realize that’s not actually the case at all.

**John:** I will stand up for the fact that Oreo Thin cookies are the best version of Oreos, and the dark chocolate Oreo Thins are the best version of Oreo Thins. That’s the hot take that I will stand by.

**Craig:** Guess what? You’re a garbage person.

**John:** Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me what is the actual correct answer for what is the best store-bought cookie.

**Craig:** You may absolutely be right, but I feel that my job is to express outrage. Where is the outrage? I love when people on Twitter are like, “Where is the outrage?” I’m like, are you kidding me? What else is there here? “Where is the salt?” says man drowning in ocean. It just doesn’t make any sense.

**Megana:** One thing that was nice is John and I went to the Bans Off Our Body March in LA, what was it, two weeks ago?

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** The Supreme Court leak and the stuff about Roe v Wade is something that is incredibly frustrating and painful. I see so many hot takes on social media. First of all, found out about the march through social media. Being able to be in a physical space with people was so affirming. That’s all I wanted to say.

**John:** You just don’t know how many people there are on Twitter. You can see all these things scroll by in your timeline, but when you’re actually physically in a space with a bunch of people, you’re like, oh, these are all as upset and angry and scared as I am, and they’re all coming together to stand up for something, is meaningful. Shouting there was meaningful because we were all shouting together. Shouting at each other on Twitter is not doing any good.

**Megana:** There’s no room for anyone to “well, actually” you at that march.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Exactly, because you were experiencing real community. These places call themselves virtual communities, but that’s an oxymoron. You need to see people. You need to be with people. It’s why sporting events are still popular. Everyone has the best seat in the house to see any baseball game they want, any football game they want, and still, tens of thousands of people go every day in each individual city to see a team play because it’s community. It’s physical community. Fuck you, Meta. It’s not going to work. It’s just not.

**John:** Craig, what I hear you saying is that while you love Scriptnotes as this podcast, we need to go back to doing our live shows and we need to get all 40,000 of our listeners together in a stadium to listen together to a Scriptnotes recording.

**Craig:** That would be good if they would all agree to show up on the same day. It’s true, the pandemic, we worked around the lack of physical communion, but it’s just not the same. We were designed to live in space, in reality and space, and not in this disconnected fucking void. It is of course a system that is built on shouting, will encourage shouting. Sometimes people say, “Twitter just makes everybody mean.” I don’t think it’s Twitter that’s making people mean. I think it’s people being assholes make people mean. It’s the “well, actually” people. They have no control over themselves. They don’t know how to use this. They don’t know how to drink the alcohol, and so they’re ruining the party for everybody. All my metaphors collided, smashed together. I don’t care. It’s awful. Talk about a really hot, hot, hot take. Is there anything more Twitter than complaining about Twitter?

**John:** Nope. The circle is now complete.

**Craig:** The circle is complete.

**John:** Thank you guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Ryan’s Elvis Question on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ryanbeardmusic/status/1527078914304053249?s=20&t=mxVqjmJlJB_h7npBbI0w8Q)
* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [Tag – You’re It](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FTag-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=8f19a8a60a86d95ebd750d8d808c7e0f41086178fa494e7a66c4dbe1303ca6d8) by Suw Charman-Anderson, [Halloween Party](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FHalloween-Party-first-three.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=1e53d05e5ac4750e18d1cce9b4ec22f64a7ed94e761e27be5ad312169555a61e) by Lucas Abreu & Zachary Arthur & Kyle Copier, [Belly Up](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F05%2FBELLY-UP-three-page-challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=196cabefbb46451a9202a4b18c5fa5693fe28c48046c0a556434856eceb54b11) by Emme Harris
* [Blockbuster, the Party Game](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WMWNYNN?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_FAJ764ZAMGTXGQZ1V9AB)
* [The Hanger Reflex](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7788272/#:~:text=The%20hanger%20reflex%20is%20a,the%20cause%20of%20this%20phenomenon)
* [Sara Schaefer Silence Video](https://twitter.com/saraschaefer1/status/1527385667583365133?s=20&t=Xs601W2CeWgx8WrXLbPCXQ)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/552standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/telling-real-world-stories).

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

**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 580 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s a How Would This Be a Movie case study. I’ll be talking with screenwriter William Nicholson about his script for Thirteen Lives, following the attempted rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. We’ll get into issues of life rights, competing projects, narrative point of view, cultural sensitivity, and what happens when you and the director don’t agree about what kind of movie you’re trying to make. Craig, it’s a really good conversation. I was sorry to not have you there, but sometimes the one-on-one things are better when it’s just one on one.

**Craig:** What I’m hearing is that it was a really good conversation because I wasn’t there.

**John:** It was a good conversation. Also, I saw the movie. I think I was vaguely aware of the actual real-life rescue. You remember that one when it was happening, right?

**Craig:** Of course. I remember when it was happening. I remember Elon Musk doing what he seems to do on a daily basis now, which is say something incredibly stupid, so there was that.

**John:** There was that.

**Craig:** They got the kids out, which was great.

**John:** Yeah, which is great. I knew that the kids got out. We did talk a little bit about knowing the ending of the movie. Before we sit down and watch it, you know the kids get out. The specifics were actually a lot different than I realized or than I heard reported in the moment. It was really a question of point of view. Do you talk about it from the family’s point of view, from the kids inside the cave’s point of view? At what point do you reveal the kids inside the cave are alive? How do you reflect the balance of worldwide attention versus the actual very small, local story on the ground? It was a good conversation about the choices he made but the other choices that could’ve been made.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about our non-work goals and aspirations for 2023. We are canonically not a resolution show. We’re not going to promise to do a thing. I always like to think about stuff we’d like to do more of or less of.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s be thinking about that for a Bonus. We’re going to ask Megana too.

**Craig:** As long as we’re asking Megana, then we’ll be fine.

**Megana Rao:** I have to think of something.

**Craig:** Get going, Megana.

**John:** Some follow-up from last week. We had Rian Johnson on the show. We were answering a question about variable frame rates. I said that I was going to watch Avatar right after we record it, and I would be able to tell you what I thought of the variable frame rates. They mostly worked for me. The times that you go into really high frame rate stuff, it tends to be underwater. There’s a lot of underwater. The underwater stuff is amazing and beautiful in the movie. There are other moments where I did notice things were shifting, but it’s also hard to tell, because it’s a 3D movie, so everything’s a little bit weird anyway. I don’t know, if I was watching a 2D movie, I might not have had the same experience with the high frame rate stuff.

**Craig:** How are the glasses these days? Feeling good?

**John:** So much better.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** The glasses are pretty lightweight. This is my first time wearing them with a mask as well. A little trick for people is that if your glasses start to fog up, just pull your glasses a little bit further away, further down the bridge of your nose, and they won’t fog up so much.

**Craig:** That’s a good tip, or get Lasik.

**John:** I’m talking about the 3D glasses.

**Craig:** Oh, the 3D glasses. You have to wear the 3D glasses. I guess that makes sense. It would fog up. Maybe in a movie like Avatar, the fog might add a little something.

**John:** No, the fog will not add. James Cameron does not want you to have fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** He will come by and he will wipe off the fog on your glasses.

**Craig:** He does seem like somebody that would more likely just smack the mask off your face.

**John:** Interestingly, he was supposed to come to the Q and A after this, and all the chairs were filled and-

**Craig:** He got COVID.

**John:** He got COVID. He got COVID 20 minutes before. [inaudible 00:03:33] positive test 20 minutes before.

**Craig:** That’s very convenient COVID to get, by the way. There have been times where I’m like, “Come on, COVID.”

**John:** Craig is scratching a little line with a little thin Sharpie there like, “Oh, sorry, can’t go.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “I don’t want to do this thing. Oh, dammit.”

**John:** I really enjoyed the story in Avatar 2. It didn’t feel like three hours. I think what impressed me most is it’d been a long time since I’d seen a 3D movie, because I just didn’t really care about 3D. This was the first 3D movie I’ve seen that didn’t make me go blind at a certain point. There’s something that happens to me in 3D movies where my brain just stops being able to process what I’m seeing. In this, it didn’t happen. I felt like I could see everything [inaudible 00:04:14].

**Craig:** That’s good. There is a diminishing return. Watching 2D stuff, you begin to forget pretty quickly that it’s just a flat thing on a screen. Your mind turns it into 3D basically. Similarly, your mind turns 3D into whatever the 2D version of 3D is. It all just in my mind turns into the same experience, unless they’re doing the tricks, like something flying at your face. Otherwise, meh.

**John:** I think Cameron obviously couldn’t do whatever he wants to do, because it’s all virtually filmed and stuff, so that he could build shots after the fact to work properly to brain in 3D, which is helpful, because so much of the 3D we see these days was really shot to be 2D and then they do it in post.

**Craig:** They do a conversion.

**John:** It’s not the same. Let’s talk to smaller screens. The big news this past couple weeks has been how many shows got chopped off of HBO Max, and things that were already shot, things that were already on the system.

**Craig:** Gulp.

**John:** Old things, they’re gone.

**Craig:** My show’s still there. Yes!

**John:** Craig, are you checking Chernobyl every moment to see whether-

**Craig:** I am not checking Chernobyl every moment, but listen, who knows? I don’t understand it. I legitimately don’t understand it. We’ve talked about this before. It seems like there was some sort of tax benefit to merging companies and then offloading some assets or something like that.

**John:** That one was an example of that, where you could take a big write-off on it and just bury it. It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily going to bury all these things. Patrick Somerville, who came on to talk about Station Eleven, he said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He keeps checking to see if Station Eleven is there. He promises that he will project it on a rock in the Mojave Desert if he has to. These other shows, they’re off HBO Max for right now, but it looks like they’re going to try to put them on some sort of ad-supported system that’s maybe not HBO Max. That could be someplace else. I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s something we haven’t really gotten into a lot on the show. Megana, I think there’s a question we could frame this with.

**Megana:** Andy from Seattle asked, “Once a show gets sold from HBO Max to a free, ad-supported streaming television service, will writers and actors start getting residuals as the property starts making active money?”

**Craig:** They sure will.

**John:** They will. They’ll get some residuals. It’ll just be a different system for it.

**Craig:** Yes, but it will be a better system. We will make more money this way.

**John:** We’ll make more money depending on how it’s set up, because I can imagine two scenarios, which we’ll just set up. First off, HBO could sell it to a place like Pluto or one of the other existing services, in which case there’d be a license fee. That might be good.

**Craig:** There’s always that. That’s the only way we make money off of residuals. HBO made Chernobyl. Let’s say they put Chernobyl on CBS. The only money HBO gets is the licensing money. The ad money goes to CBS. We don’t get any of that. We just get the licensing money that goes to HBO. That’s the gross. Then the producer’s gross is 20% of that, because we lost many, many years ago. Then we get a percentage of the 20%.

What’s interesting is right now if you make something for a streamer, there is no licensing fee ancillary market. The residuals we get are these weird, imputed things that are not necessarily connected to anything real. You and I are old enough where we wrote movies, and then those movies ended up on TBS with ads in them. We would get pretty decent residual checks from the licensing of those movies to TBS. For writers and directors and actors, this could revitalize the dwindling residuals stream. Creatively, as we’ve discussed, it’s a little disconcerting that you can make a show and it just disappears from something like that. I think it’s gotten everybody a little wigged out, and for good reason. I’m curious. Is Station Eleven available on DVD?

**John:** Station Eleven does not have DVDs right now.

**Craig:** How does he have it?

**John:** I think he’s talking about whatever cut he has off of the non-linear editor. His actual tweet was, “If Station Eleven ever disappears, I promise to purchase one acre of land somewhere in the Mojave Desert and just play it on a loop projected on a rock forever.”

**Craig:** We’re going to have to download some of these things.

**John:** I’ll check into it. It’s entirely possible that DVDs were cut for that show. So many of these HBO Max shows have no DVDs. There’s no other physical way to see it. That creative fear is huge. Circling back to the issue of residuals, Chernobyl that’s on HBO Max, you’re still getting residuals, but those residuals right now are based on a declining fee per every year that it’s on the service and based on a certain fixed price. It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual success of the show. It’s just basically from the time it was made it just declines in value after that time. Chernobyl could in theory make more money being licensed someplace else and therefore create more residuals for you.

**Craig:** It would. It would. I don’t want people to watch it with ads in it, but yeah, it would. It’s really interesting, because what’s happening, this is again financially not necessarily bad news for artists, creatively potentially bad news, is that streamers are suddenly asking the question that all of the rest of us have been asking for a long time, which is, so wait, how do you make money? I know you sell a subscription, but okay, if they’re subscribing, why do you need to make anything more, or do you need to make this much more, or how much stuff do you need to have there, because where does money come from, because in the old days, if you could convert stuff to ad-supported or home video of any format, there was your reason to make more stuff. There’d be additional revenue streams. If all it is is streaming, that’s it. You’ve basically curtailed your own revenue stream as far as I can tell.

**John:** Your revenue stream is based on the monthly subscribers and the idea that having these vast libraries was going to keep them returning as monthly subscribers.

**Craig:** Sure, but that is the only revenue stream you’ll ever have, whereas in the old days studios would have ticket sales, airplane rentals, home video, and then eventually pay TV, licensing it to HBO and Showtime, and then eventually ad-supported television on TBS. Let’s just presume everything goes to TBS if it still exists.

**John:** A thing I’m always confused about when these announcements are first coming out is… Free ad-supported streaming television, or FAST is the abbreviation you’re going to see for that, it’s the same thing as AVOD, so advertising-based video on demand. The difference is that we usually talk about AVOD for things like The Office. If The Office was showing on NBC, and so you’re watching it there, but then a few weeks later it was showing on nbc.com, that was AVOD, and so where studios would show their own things on their own websites.

What’s different now is of course there are streamers that are doing that [inaudible 00:11:18] TV. There’s existing things like Pluto. There’s probably going to be new things presumably coming out of Warner’s that are going to be a service like that. I think figuring out what the appropriate licensing fee is for HBO Max to be selling it to their own service will be an issue.

**Craig:** That kind of self-dealing has been litigated many, many times before and will continue to be litigated now that it seems to be coming back. Making sweetheart deals with yourself is tricky. You need to sell it for what would be a legally supportable market price. You can’t completely jam people. It will be interesting. I feel like the wheel is turning back in time. We’re heading backwards in time. It’s funny.

Silicon Valley was so behind the explosion of streaming, if you consider Netflix. I consider Netflix to be Silicon Valley-esque. I guess the idea of just the new way of doing things, new media we called it. Meanwhile, what were those companies in Silicon Valley doing? Selling ads on everything. Google is an advertising company. YouTube, which Google owns, is an advertising company. Facebook is an advertising company and so on and so forth. Currently, the aforementioned Elon Musk is flipping out, trying to get more people to advertise on Twitter, because it’s an advertising company. They’ve always been ad-supported, and then somehow we got hoodwinked over here into being like, “No ads. No, we don’t need that. That’s old-school stuff.” I guess if you want to make money, ads.

**John:** Ads.

**Craig:** Ads.

**John:** The answer to the question is, what’s going to happen, hopefully this will be more residuals for the writers involved, but of course, those things actually have to be distributed someplace. I think it’s potentially good news assuming that they actually are putting those things someplace and not just burying them in a hole, which is I think the worry we had originally.

**Craig:** I could be wrong, but it seems like the things that are getting buried in holes are things that had very low viewership numbers. They’re pulling Westworld off of HBO Max. That’s going to land somewhere. That is be on another platform.

**John:** That was the marquee property of HBO two or three years ago.

**Craig:** There’s no question about that. It will be figured out one way or another. I think some of the things that got completely removed were probably… They had said in some article some of the… They mentioned one show. I can’t remember what it was. I think it was animated. Something like only 400 people watched it in a year or something. It was like, okay, I guess-

**John:** There were back-episodes. They had the whole catalog of Sesame Street. There were some episodes of that show that just no one had watched in-

**Craig:** No one had watched.

**John:** Yeah, because who wants to watch a 20-year-old random episode?

**Craig:** It makes me feel good sometimes to watch Sesame Street.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to our main centerpiece of this episode, which is the conversation I had with Bill Nicholson. This is part of a Writers Guild Foundation event. We’ve done a lot of events for the Writers Guild Foundation over the years. There’s going to be a link in the show notes to the video of this whole Zoom interview we did. William Nicholson, Bill Nicholson, is great. I’ve never had a chance to talk to him before. Credits include Everest, Unbroken, Mandela, Les Mis, Elizabeth, Gladiator, going back many, many, many years, starting out as a playwright. We really got to talk about the whole process of figuring out from someone coming to him with like, “Hey, would you want to do a movie about this cave rescue?” to all the changes and drama along the way, shooting this during the pandemic, and then shooting it for Amazon, which couldn’t release it the way they wanted to release it. A really good conversation and just a really great writer. Enjoy this. Craig and I will be back afterwards for our One Cool Things.

It is my absolute pleasure to be talking to you today, Bill, about Thirteen Lives but also I’d love to talk about screenwriting in general and your career and many other things. Where are we talking to you today from? I see it’s dark there.

**Bill Nicholson:** I’m in South England, in Sussex, in the converted garage where I do all my work in the lovely English countryside.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s start with Thirteen Lives, because I just watched it last night. I’m really curious how you came into the project, because I remember the story as it was happening in real time. It felt like, okay, obviously there’s going to be a movie coming out of this, but what was your entrance into this as a movie?

**Bill:** Like you, I remember it from when it actually happened. I wouldn’t say I followed every deet, but obviously, I did follow it. It was very moving, and then I forgot about it. Sometime later, as is the way of these things, a producer got in touch with me and said would I be interested in writing the screenplay. I was initially a little reluctant, because I thought maybe it was an oversimple story. Guys go down in a cave, get stuck. It’s all terrible. Then they get out and it’s okay. Of course, they sent me some research. They’d had a lot of research done on it. That amazed me and I realized what a rich tale it was. It moved me in a whole different way actually. I really like writing very emotionally valid and powerful pieces, so I said yes. The simple answer is I got asked.

**John:** That’s great to be asked. I’m not surprised you were asked. If you look at your credits and look at the movies you’ve written and going back to Gladiator and Shadowlands and those things, but more recently, Everest, Unbroken, other true stories, and finding the ways to tell these historical true stories in ways that are compelling. You seem like a very great fit for it. I guess my question is, when they came to approach you to write this, how much did they have? Off and on Scriptnotes podcasts, we get these questions about like, “Oh, what rights do I need to do to tell a true story?” People will see producers jockeying for rights, locking up this person’s life rights or this person’s life rights. As they came to you, what were they coming to you with? They had some original research, but what else?

**Bill:** You’re completely right. It was a writer’s nightmare. Lots of other projects were in the mix. There was another team that had the rights to the Australian doctor, Harry Harris. We did not have the rights to the Thai kids at all. The Thai government controlled that. The key rights, which are the British divers, those were the ones that my producer had obtained. That was the core of the project. The rest we had to… You know the process. We had to use material that was in the public domain. It’s worrying when you’re [inaudible 00:18:06]. It’s worrying on all sorts of levels. It’s worrying also because I’m dealing with real people’s real lives who are still there, especially the Thai people. I think we had a superb level of research, which fed me absolutely as much as possible. I just did my best to give a fair crack to all of those individuals.

**John:** You say you had research. How much of that was coming to you in written form versus your ability to talk to these divers? What was your ability to reach out and ask specific questions, or did you have to go through levels to get there? What was your connection to these characters?

**Bill:** With the two main divers, I went and visited them and talked to them and subsequently made very good relations with them, was able to check a lot of things with them as I went along. All the rest was [inaudible 00:18:58]. This was in COVID times. A superb researcher had amassed an enormous amount of material, mostly remotely, particularly on all the Thai details. I was supplied with that when I began, because the producer had also produced the documentary, which is called The Rescue. They’d done all the research for that. I was given all of that, and I was able to ask the researcher to ask the researcher to follow up whenever I wanted. I was very well supported.

**John:** One of the fundamental decisions you have to make as a writer is how you’re going to tell the story and when you’re going to start the story and what details are going to be at what point. How early in the process of the conversations with the producers about coming on to do this did you have an approach? Did you have a take for how you were going to tell the story?

**Bill:** Not immediately, but you’re completely right. People think if you have a true story, because you take down what happened. Of course, you sort of do, because you have an obligation to the truth. My job is finding the emotional through line and also the mini emotional stories within the overall one, because nobody is going to watch just to hear another fact. They watch because of what you make them feel about the characters, what the characters want, what the characters fear, and what then happens to them. It really is a kind of crafting of real events to create emotional drama. Of course, there is emotional drama once you’ve got kids threatening with death.

You’ve really got to do a lot more than that. I looked to the material. I drew up a timeline of my own, the peaks and the troughs. I looked at that very early on, because obviously, the producers, when they asked me to do it, they didn’t just say, “Go ahead and do it.” They say, “Tell us what you will do before any contract gets signed.” That’s fair enough.

I give them I suppose my pitch really. I said very early on the obvious thing which anybody tackling this story would say, which is, “We cannot afford to make this be a white savior story, so how are we going to deal with that? We’re going to look at all of the Thai stories. We’re going to look at what they did and the complexities of that and how much we can weave that in.”

I made the decision very early on that this was in a way not the story of the boys. This was partly because I did not have their rights, but it was also partly because they’re stuck. They’re in a cave. You have a choice. Are you going to keep cutting back to them inside the cave getting hungrier and hungrier or not? I said, “My way of doing this is we’re going to see them go in, and then we’re not going to see them again until they’re found.”

**John:** It’s 45 minutes into the film before we see them again. We see, oh, they are actually alive. This is a real open question. Obviously, as an audience who has some knowledge coming into it, we know that they’re alive in there, but everyone on the outside doesn’t. You set up a good expectation that maybe they are going in to find bodies ultimately. They don’t know where they are, how far.

**Bill:** It’s very interesting the way you can tell a story by being able to know the ending and still make it tense. I think it’s because as people watch, they accept that they’re within that moment. One of the reasons that I took the project on actually was because one of the things that really struck me, after the divers found the bodies, there was this ecstasy throughout this enormous camp, real cheers. The boys are there. The boys are alive. That was simultaneously experienced with the divers knowing that the boys are going to die, that there is no way to come out.

I find that sort of crunch very powerful. When I saw that, I go, “Actually, we have got a story here.” Of course, if you can communicate to the viewers sufficiently, this really is an insoluble problem, and then you proceed to find a crazy solution, which against all the odds works, and you have a story.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about decisions of classic characters and themes going through stuff. You have actors we recognize who are doing certain things. Also, what I was really impressed by with the movie, and you talk about making sure that the Thai people in their efforts are centered in this, for a lot of the start of the film and really throughout the film, we’re seeing the rest of the efforts from the Thai perspective. These are competent people who are doing their very best. It feels very documentary in a good way. It feels very matter of fact. You don’t see a lot of speechify. You don’t see people stopping to explain something about Thai culture and history and stuff. It’s very much focused on the moment.

Did you know from the start that you were going to have so many characters and that we as an audience might not even really know their names? I’m thinking about the engineer on top of the mountain who’s trying to divert the water. We recognize him, but we know very little about him. Do you know that from the start, that you’d have this wide array of characters?

**Bill:** Yes, in the sense that I had to place my heroic British divers in this much bigger context. I think the first thing that I thought when I looked into all this story was an enormous number of people volunteered. There was this great mass, like 5,000 people just gave their time or their equipment for nothing. I love that. It runs counter to the kind of story that we’re being told all the time, which is that we live in a competitive world where people will only get off their bottoms for money. I’ve wanted to celebrate that very much, which meant locating as many of these stories as possible.

There are very many stories. You simply don’t have the space. In that sense, you color code the characters so that people recognize them visually rather than knowing their names. You also give them each a little kind of trick so that you can spot how they’re likely to… You can only do that to a very small degree, because you’re juggling so many characters. You talk about it being documentary. Yes, it’s documentary in the sense that it did happen. We’re not grandstanding with it. We’re not trying to make out some sort of opportunity for people to make their own speeches.

I actually think the grand sentiments come over much more powerfully if you throw them away, if they’re not asserted, you ask the audience to find that for themselves. That’s a conscious decision, particularly with the main divers who really led me into this by their own characters. I was picking up from what they told me about themselves, which is, “We don’t do this for money. We’re amateurs. We’re not interested in publicity.” They’ve got a rather delightful… There were so many that got cut out.

When they were first asked to come, Rick, the Viggo Mortensen one, said, “How are we getting there?” John says to him, “They’re giving us business class flights.” Business class, I’ll fly anywhere. I love that. It’s very British, very undercutting heroism and grandiosity. I was working from the characters.

I also think it means that you can feed your actors with a role where they have very few words but a lot of emotional moments. Those emotional moments, they are going to act on. They’re going to be on their face. If you’ve correctly structured the emotional trajectory, the audience knows what they’re thinking and feeling, looking at their face. They don’t need words. That is what screenwriters do. It drives me nuts when people say… Somebody said to me, “Oh, you didn’t have much to do for the first 20 minutes, did you?” I say, “I wrote the damn thing. Every feat is written.”

**John:** Absolutely. What is the camera pointing at, what are we seeing, what are we living.

**Bill:** Exactly. Not just that. Ron and I talked a lot about structuring the dives, because too many dives are boring. Each dive has to have its own character, its own emotional little story. I literally listed them all with the emotions that accompanied them.

**John:** Let’s talk about the emotional trajectory of the Viggo Mortensen character, because he’s the one who I think… I would say your characters don’t protagonate a lot. They’re not going through this classic giant character’s arc where they come in as one thing and leave fully transformed. It’s small and it’s subtle but it’s there. Viggo Mortensen’s character’s probably the easiest one to see that. He’s initially reluctant to necessarily go on this dive, to even join on his trip. Then when he’s there, he’s skeptical a lot along the way. What were the beats you mapped out for yourself? Were they literally in an outlined form? How much were you thinking about how his character progressed over the course of the story? How did you chart that for yourself?

**Bill:** That’s kind of fairly simple really, because he starts out not wanting to go, doesn’t like kids, as he says. He gets there. He’s pissed off, because we then have all the beats about the local Thai divers don’t rate them, which is fun to have that. They’re old guys [inaudible 00:28:12] which gives him something to resent. Eventually, they do get allowed to dive, and it goes wrong. They pull out the pumping guy, and it all goes wrong. Then they’re stuck, and he wants to go home. I got that beat.

All the time, you’ve got John beside him, acting as the antagonist, his protagonist in a way, saying, “Yeah, but we’ve got to stay.” John, who knows, and I like this, John knows that Rick really wants to save the boys even though Rick says he doesn’t. That helps me a lot. I can write those little moments.

Of course, the big beat with Rick is that they find the kids, and he’s depressed. He goes down instead of out. Then you’ve got the interesting question of… This I had to argue out with both John and Rick, who had the idea to use anesthetics. I got it wrong the first time round, because it worked in my structure to have John suggest it. The real Rick said to me, because we’d shown them the script. This is no secret to them, of course. I always do that, by the way.

When I’m dealing with real, live people, I will say, “You can see anything I’m writing at any time.” Of course. It’s their life. I said to them originally, “You’re going to find this really peculiar, because I’m going to invent two characters, Rick and John. I have to.” They were really good about that. They got it. Then lots of stuff I just made it. They said, “That’s fine.” He did say, “That was my idea.” I restructured that beat.

Then you bring in the next group of divers. In the cut version, they come very abruptly. I wrote several scenes that introduced them, but it’s a long movie. Something has to go. You have the relationship with the incoming divers, which again reflects on Rick, because Jason is the one who thinks Rick’s a little bit [inaudible 00:30:19]. You then realize Rick is the leader. He has gone along with this idea. The failure will be his failure. We’re now emotionally engaged on his behalf, not just the boys’. That then takes you through the various beats of finding semi-failure along the way, until the moment when they’re sitting in a group and they’re just laughing. You can feel the release of the nervous tension and at the moments when he’s resisted contact with the families. I had so many moments I could track. There he is hugging families or being hugged I should say, because he doesn’t know how to do it.

It’s a gift really to just track all this. I did give him a little speech, which is not in the film, right at the end when they’re in their minibus and they’re going back to the airport. He’s saying, “You know what? This is something that should not have worked. This is like a one in a thousand chance that it worked, but it did work. You know what [inaudible 00:31:18] make a movie out of it, and everybody else think it’s easy.” I rather like that, but no, it didn’t come to pass.

**John:** The movie probably wanted to be over before they would’ve had a chance for that moment. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s in the movie and the dialog that’s not in the movie, because they both help in form. Let’s talk about the dialog that’s not in the movie, because there’s not a lot of talking. We have our characters mostly doing the work that they’re there to do.

There’s this misconception obviously that the screenwriter just writes the dialog and the director does everything else, but it sounds like if I’m reading the script, I get a very good sense of what those characters are, what’s going through those characters’ heads, even as they are silently observing, moving their way through the cave, stopping to get abreast.
I’m thinking back to Colin Farrell’s character half freaking out because his kid has woken up. There’s all those moments. Those were all scripted. I think it’s crucial that we remind people that those moments are in the script from the start.

**Bill:** That’s right. You’re right. If you were to see one of the drafts towards the end, you’d get a lot more dialog. It’s not so much more dialog, because there are several scenes, basically dialog scenes. This always happens to me. I guess I overwrite. I’m always writing dialog scenes which I think really help to get us sympathetic with the characters. They’re too long, and in the end the whole thing goes. The people along the way read them. Your point is correct. That feeds into their understanding. The director reads them.

I have no complaints about what is cut out. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve had the embarrassing experience of writing scenes that seem to me to be vital, having them cut out, and realizing they weren’t necessary. Each time, I think, “When am I going to learn? When am I going to write the 90-page script that they shoot instead of the 120-page script?” I don’t know why I don’t learn, but that’s the process. I’ve worked with some actors.

A million years ago, I wrote a film called First Knight with Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Sean Connery sat me down in his hotel room in London with a scene, and he said, “Look, I want to go through the scene with you. I’ll do my lines. You do the other person’s lines.” I did the other person’s lines. I would do the line, and Sean went, “Ah.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” Then I did the next line, “Mm.” He never spoke a word. It all made perfectly good sense. He said, “Would you mind if we just [inaudible 00:34:01].” Maybe you have to start with more and hone it down.

You are dependent on the actors, because once you start dispensing with the words, you’ve structured it so that the audience knows what the actor is likely to be feeling, but the actor has got to deliver that without the acting. In my opinion, acting has become so sophisticated now. Actors are so extraordinary, film actors. You can see what they’re thinking. I can think of moments like the little scene where Harry Harris is being asked to use his skills [inaudible 00:34:46]. He’s saying no, and the other two, Rick and John, are disagreeing on how to deal with him. There aren’t many words, but that little trio, you can see what each one is thinking right the way through. There’s a couple of shots at the end that are just faces saying nothing. That’s also very skilled directing, of course.

**John:** It is. There’s a moment in Worst Person in the World, a film from last year, where a woman makes a fundamental life decision, and we see it completely on her face. It was the screenwriting that got us from her leaving a party to standing at that place and being able to think. The natural instinct would be for her to say something to someone to make sure we understood that, and yet the power of a camera and a really talented face, we can see all that information. It’s a great lesson to learn.

Let’s circle back to you say you overwrite and you need to learn how to write the 90-page version of a thing. Also, it’s just recognizing that the process of making stories is always going to be too much. There’s going to be a process of discovery there, so giving yourself permission to overwrite there a bit and recognizing and hopefully having good collaborators who will see, “Yes, there may be too much here, but we need all this too-much-ness in order to find the movie that we’re also going to want to make.”

**Bill:** I would definitely agree with that, yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about your relationship with Ron Howard. At what point did he come into the process? Was he there from the start or only after you had a draft? What was his involvement in the film?

**Bill:** He was not there from the start. It was pretty much completely written. What happened was the producer, PJ, hired me. At that point, he had an arrangement with another director, a very good director. I worked on it with that director. I did I guess speed drafts. We kind of ran into a problem of how we saw the movie between me and the director. I have huge respect for the directors that I work with. I tried very hard to deliver the kind of tone that he was looking for, but it ran counter to my instincts. I argued it very strongly with him, but he was very clear what he wanted. There came a point when I said to PJ, “I have to leave the project. You must get another writer who’s in sync with your director.” They had a big think about it. The director had a big think about it. To his enormous credit, he said, “Look,” because PJ and Gabi Tana, the other producer kind of liked my take.

He said, “Look, I’ll withdraw. It’s not a problem.” He withdrew. I then proceeded with my version, which was, to put it very, very simply, more emotional. He was much more action and repression, which is a great way to go. I’m a very warmhearted person. We proceeded in my version. I did several drafts until both the producers were thinking, “This is good. We will shop it.” They then took it to their agents in LA. That is when it went to an agent, and that’s when Ron picked it up. Ron then came in, and I then worked with Ron for several more drafts.

**John:** We both had the experience of an existing draft and a director comes on board. It’s both a conversation with the director about what movie they see versus the movie that you wrote and what they need. You’re trying to explain what your intentions were with things. They’re trying to explain what they think they actually need from a movie. What guidance can you give to a writer listening to those conversations with the director? How do you approach that in a way that both sides benefit?

**Bill:** The first thing is you have to not be defensive as a writer. We writers have a very tough time, because we are not in control. That is the reality. If you want to be in control, be a writer-director, which I have also done. You are not in control. The director is going to have to make this damn movie. It’s no good, you demanding the director executes your vision. He’s going to execute his or her vision. Don’t be defensive. What you do is when the director says, “I think they need more of this or less of this,” what you’ve got to think is, why is he saying that? What’s happening here? Is there a valid point here? If there is, how can I enact it in a way that fits my vision? I’ve had some bad ones, but mostly they’ve been good. My experience has been that it improves when you do this.

I always tell people, and this applies to development as well, if you get notes, don’t obey the note. If the note says, “We think the dog should jump over the cliff,” don’t say, “Okay, I will write it.” Say to yourself, “Why did they say that? Haven’t I got a better way of giving them what they want?” because you will have, because you’ll understand the whole thing. They’re probably looking just at that beat. That’s the problem you have with some directors. Some directors aren’t good at overall structure. I’m talking now about really emotional storytelling. They’re good at a scene. They know that they can make a scene work. They can make that scene work when the guy comes in and we don’t even know what he’s seeing and he’s incredibly scared.

[inaudible 00:40:23] how that impacts down the road. What you have to do is say, “Okay, they want an emotional high point, which I have not delivered. I’ve got to find a way to deliver it, and then they’ll be happy at that point.” If you have a problem, I have had this with some extremely famous directors who have said, “I think there should be a scene like this here.” I’ve said to the team, “That will make no sense. That will wreck the whole flow.” They’ve said, “The boss has asked for it. You’ve got to do it.” I then do it. In my experience, always those the projects that don’t get made, because the director hasn’t understood what the story is, but the director is too powerful. There are too many directors, unfortunately, who never get anybody telling them boo. It’s just extraordinary to me.

I’ve said to the team, “Just tell him it doesn’t work.” They said, “You don’t do that. He’s our boss, literally our boss in every way.” [inaudible 00:41:25]. Mostly, you should be able to collaborate with the director in such a way that the director feels really safe with you as a writer, that the director can say, “I want more here and less here,” and you go, “Yes, fantastic, let’s do this. We’ll find the way together.” That is really exciting.

I have to say, with Ron, he was extremely respectful. I think he had taken on a highly developed script. It had been through many processes. His attack, it was a combination. It was very process-driven. He really wanted to understand how he was going to film the process and what impact that would have. A lot of his changes related to that. Other changes were he wanted more of a particular element. For example, he wanted more of the guy called the water guy, Thanet, who is up on the mountain diverting the water. Let me think. What else was there?

We did talk quite a lot. We played around quite a lot with changing some of my structure. We talked, and I was willing to, but in the end, we stuck with it. He will say that the last time we were on a giant Zoom together to talk about this at this stage, he said that the thing about the screenplay he received was that the structure was there already. He didn’t have to really mess with that too much. He’s a very nice guy.

**John:** He’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him on a couple projects. He’s lovely.

**Bill:** He’s just amazing. I just wanted him to be able to do what he needed to do. Then the other thing that happened was he started shooting it, and I was not present on the shoot. I was in Australia. He was on the phone to me or on the email to me quite a lot, saying basically for budget reasons, we can no longer do this scene or that scene, “Find a way to write the beat that happens there somewhere else in another way,” or, “Could you please add it in to the existing scene?” There was quite a lot of that, which I was of course completely willing to do. I think you need to be in that sense a kind of craftsman who is there. “We’re now sailing the ship and it’s leaking. Please could you plug that gap?”

**John:** Absolutely circling back to this, in the first time you’re talking with the director or really anyone else in the project, a friend always reminds me that as the screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. You see the whole thing there. You have everything that’s on the page, but you also have a whole movie in your head. Sometimes those initial conversations are really just aligning what movies is the director seeing in their head and trying to find the overlaps there and fix the things that aren’t overlapping quite right.

In those conversations, it varies director to director for me, but sometimes you are spending three days talking about the color of the paint on the walls, but that’s really the process for just trying to align your visions for what things really look like and what’s important to them or what’s important to you. You never know what it’s going to be as you start the process.

**Bill:** I don’t get into those sorts of conversations. I’m happy for him to paint the walls whatever color he wants really. What I want to know… I say I want to know. I don’t have any power over this person. It doesn’t get me anywhere. I would like to know that the director sees the same movie as me, but to be honest, I never know until it’s done, until it’s actually being shot, because people do the oddest things.

**John:** bill, you’ve made your living as a playwright and as a film writer and director. Do you have any experience running television shows or doing any of the series where the writer would be more in control, the writer would be telling the director what to do? Have you had that experience?

**Bill:** Not in the modern form. I’m doing a Netflix TV series right now, writing it. You’re right, it is very, very different in power terms. Back in the day, when I was working with BBC, I did I think four TV movies. The interesting thing about the BBC and television then is my name was the name that was in the newspapers, to the rage of the directors. It was William Nicholson’s latest. I really of course liked that.

I really disliked the filmed by thing, where directors act as if they’re created the whole thing. I’ve softened over the years. I used to be quite militant about this. I’ve done two movies myself as a director/writer. That has taught me to respect directors very, very highly. I do realize I need them. I just wish that the world out there understood what screenwriters do. I don’t know why this hasn’t got through. We need a movement like Cahiers du Cinema, which elevated the directors. We need a movement.

Maybe you’re right. Actually, it’s happening. It’s happening in TV. The people who create the great TV series are the writers. Our day is coming. That’s fantastic. You get astonishing things like Succession, which I don’t know who’s the hero of that, whether it’s Jesse Armstrong, Lucy Prebble, or whoever, I don’t quite know what’s going on, but somebody is doing something completely brilliant there. They’re also superbly directed, I have to say. Again, let’s all try not to quarrel over who gets the credit and be grateful if we can together do something good, because most things don’t quite work.

**John:** Circling back to Thirteen Lives, so much of the film is in Thai. It’s in a very specific Northern Thai dialect. I’m guessing you don’t speak it. At what point in the process did you need to think about how much of the film was going to be in Thai versus how much was going to be in English and what the balance was going to be. Did you need to interact with any of those language experts or did that process come later down?

**Bill:** It came much later. I knew all along that a large part would be in Thai. That was all part of respect for the people we were filming and not turning it into an outsider attack. I write it all in English, and it goes on the page in bold italics, meaning translate this please. The team making it under Ron then bring in Thai translators, but not just Thai translators, Thai filmmakers who are also Thai, who tell me about the culture. Back comes the message. You have this scene where this Thai Navy Seal speaks to his boss, his captain, in a quite strong way. They would never do that. That does not happen. We have total respect for authority people. You’ve just [inaudible 00:48:20] I change it. I just simply rewrote. That happened quite a bit.

I had a whole lot to do with the governor here, who had actually a very interesting story. I originally made him a rather ironic, wry guy, who was constantly saying, “They’ve set me up for the fall here.” There’s a little bit of it in the movie, but I had quite a lot more. I was told he would not speak of his superiors in this way. Even though he thinks it, even though it’s true, he just wouldn’t, so out it went.

**John:** Probably both choices about how that character would respond but also what the movie wants to do. The movie is so focused on the question of will we be able to get the boys out, anything that feels like it’s not to that point is going to be on the chopping block. It’s hard for it to last in the film. You made choices about how much we’re seeing or are aware of these characters’ personal lives before they get involved. Basically, the moment anybody shows up Thailand, we’re never seeing their homelands again.

Basically, we’re only going to stay near the caves here in Thailand. Talk to us about decisions to show Colin Ferrell’s home life and what you were trying to do there, the few glimpses we had outside of Thailand. Were there more scenes? What were your decisions about showing their life before they get to Thailand?

**Bill:** No, there were not more scenes. I knew that I wanted to just tell you enough about them to give you some anchor for how they were going to make their emotional journey and then just show you enough at the end to remind you where they’re come from and what it means. They’re two different stories, obviously. With Rick, Viggo Mortensen, he lives alone in this chaotic, machine-filled space. You would kind of sense that the guy’s asocial just from the images of him. Also, there was quite a bit of dialog there when he’s talking on the phone to John.

With John, with Colin Ferrell, all I needed to do was show that he’s divorced and he’s got a kid. Obviously, he’s going to identify the kids in the cave with his cave. I don’t need to say that. You just plant that, and that’s there.

In the early versions, there was another thread. They had a kind of office, the British Cave Rescue Council. There was a woman there who fed information back all the time. We did think whether to have her in England, but I really decided no, this is one of those stories where you need to maintain the pressure cooker, get them into the pressure cooker and keep them there. That was a very conscious decision, which is why I didn’t want to go into the home life of any of any of the Thai characters once the pressure had begun. I think it’s sort of like Aristotelian unities. It’s a unity of time and place, and they’re up against the clock, and just hold it there. Don’t play games. Don’t do cutting around with time. Give us a sense of the passage of time.

**John:** [inaudible 00:51:29] your theater background, it did feel like once you created the space of the camp outside the cave, that was your main set. That’s where everything has to happen within the space and within this place and time, which I guess helps answer the question of your decisions about which of the Thai parents we were going to follow, which ones we were going to identify and have some ongoing relationship with. You pick one mother, one father who we come back to more often and we [inaudible 00:51:55] which kid is —

**Bill:** And a boy. The boy, I made him up. That didn’t happen [crosstalk 00:52:00].

**John:** The smallest boy, yeah.

**Bill:** The smallest boy did happen.

**John:** That’s right, the boy [crosstalk 00:52:05].

**Bill:** The one who doesn’t go into the cave and who was out there. I wanted one boy who represented [inaudible 00:52:11]. That didn’t actually happen. They all went into the cave. The smallest boy, that was a real thing, because I had that in the research. Obviously, the mother is a competent mother, the father is a competent father, etc. All their names are changed.

**John:** Let’s talk about structure overall, because you have a time structure, which is very natural for day one, day two, and seeing the progression. With each day, there’s a change that has happened. Sometimes it’s the weather. The way that the weather is a huge villain in the course of the stories is really interesting. You also have the decision to overlay the map and show where things were and how far deep we are into things. Was that a decision that was made on a script level or does that come later on in the filmmaking process, the literal, how deep we are into the cave system structure.

**Bill:** That was not me. That was in the cutting room, in the final stages. That was Ron and his team doing that in the final stages, looking at it and saying, “It is really important that people know how far in we are.” In the longer version of the script, I’d incorporated that information in the dialog and things like that. That didn’t survive. I thought it was really good.

**John:** I think it’s a really smart choice.

**Bill:** It was really smart. In a kind of clever way, there was more information you could take in, but it didn’t matter. You got a visual sense. That was not me.

**John:** I think it’s another thing taken probably from some of the great documentaries of the last 10 years in that sense of as you see somebody climbing a peak in Yellowstone or a peak in Yosemite, seeing how far up they are, and it was just the right choice to give us that sense of-

**Bill:** It’s a very interesting challenge. How much does the audience realize? How much have they picked up? How much do they know? What do they need turning? On the whole, you’ve got to be ahead of your audience. If they’re left saying, “We’re underwater. I have no clue where I am,” which of course is the case. How could they? What we did was, and this was in the script, I characterize stages along the journey. I said, “This will be the stalactite one. This will be Chamber 3. This will be the T-Junction.” The T-Junction was what they called it and Pattaya Beach was what they called it. I gave a description of each stage so that when they built the sets, they would look a little bit different and would give us a bit of a sense that we’re not just always in a bath. We did think about that ahead of time.

**John:** You said you’ve written the script. You’re heading into production. Obviously, casting has happened. Was there a table reading? Was there any chance for everyone to get around tables to read this together? It doesn’t seem like it would have been necessary for this, but was there some sort of [inaudible 00:55:01]?

**Bill:** I simply don’t know, because it all happened in Australia, and I wasn’t there. They all had to fly out and go into quarantine for two weeks, and then they were in their bubble. I would say about this table read, which I’ve had on every film, I absolutely hate them.

**John:** Tell me why.

**John:** There’s a couple of reasons. For some reason, the person who reads the directions is the third AD, and he can’t read. That sounds like an illiterate monotone, which is awful, and I’m dying. I learned after a bit to say, “Let me read the directions, and I’ll put some [inaudible 00:55:37].” The second reason is the actors find it very, very difficult to know whether they’re performing or not. On the whole, they don’t want to perform. They don’t want to perform, because why would they? It’s a weird set of circumstances. The confident ones don’t want to perform because, “Why should I?” The un-confident ones think that they’ll perform and be found wanting. People will say, “Why did you cast him?” The whole thing is awful for everybody. I’ve come out of every reading thinking it is a disaster.

I wasn’t present at the readthrough of Gladiator. I was involved in the project. It was such a disaster that they practically pulled the whole thing. That’s when I came on board. I think they’re terrible, these readings. They do have a function, because I almost think you should get a whole team of completely different people to do the reading. The tech people, they need to know a little bit what this thing feels like. The actors, it’s hard.

**John:** I will make a mild case for the opposing view. I’ve had table readings that have gone as badly as Gladiator’s table read, where it’s just like, wow. Everything you’re saying about an actor choosing not to perform, the risk of performing, definitely been there, seen it. My argument for them is that it makes it clear that all the actors that have at least read the whole script once, because so often, actors, they’re reading, they’re focused on their part. It’s a chance to say, “Oh, you know what? This scene actually pertains to the scene before this scene.” It’s the whole thing feeling together chronologically for once, because movies are going to be shot out of sequence and it’s going to be hard to tell what things are where. For one moment, everyone was together.

The other thing, if anyone’s listening and this is helpful, I will tend to do, if there is going to be a table reading, I will make a special version of the script that is just for the reading, that greatly cuts down the scene description so it’s just getting you right into the dialog there, and it’s all clear. If we’re going to summarize things, everyone’s looking at the same page. I hear you there.

**Bill:** That is very smart. I think you’re quite right. The table reading should be treated as a kind of performance in its own right and thought about and almost directed. Each of the actors could be told, “Don’t worry about it. Just do it clearly. That’s all. You don’t need to emote if you don’t want to.” I have been at readings. When Shadowlands was done as a reading, it was amazingly successful, and it made everybody feel this is going to work. I just wish that happened every time.

**John:** My movie Go had a great table reading, and some other ones haven’t. Of course, in theater, the idea of a reading is actually super common, and those are ways you get financing and get to the next level. Everyone understands that it is a form of a performance there, but with movies it’s a special thing. Really, you have to ask yourself, who should be in the room for that? Is it just for the filmmakers and the actors? Do producers need to be in there? Do financiers need to be in there?

**Bill:** I really like your idea of having a special text for the reading, because that’s great, because you want to maintain the pace. I’ve sat there while somebody reads through a whole page of directions in a [crosstalk 00:58:53] tone where it needs to be tightened, performed, and move on so that we can get the feeling of it. I hadn’t thought of that. If it ever happens to me again… It’s quite a lot of work though, isn’t it, doing your own-

**John:** For you or for me, maybe it’s two hours of time to take and cut it down. If it saves a lot of drama down the road, I’ll do it.

**Bill:** Do you read directions yourself?

**John:** No. We’ll find somebody who’s actually a talented actor who’s not in the production to do it.

**Bill:** Good. Good.

**John:** My friend Dan Ethridge is fantastic at that, so I will draft him whenever possible.

**Bill:** You’ve thought about this much more than me. You’re smart.

**John:** During production, obviously this is happen in Australia. At most, you’re having a phone call or Zoom with Ron, so you’re not super involved in that. At any point doing post, do you come back in? Do you take a look?

**Bill:** Yes.

**John:** Was there anything for you to do?

**Bill:** Yeah. This is entirely at Ron’s discretion. He’s a nice guy, and he’s also a smart guy. It was cut in London. He said would I please come in, see the first assembly, talk about it. We talked together. I came in and saw the shorter version, and we talked about that a lot. I wouldn’t say that I did anything tremendously significant, but I was certainly there watching it and talking about it with him.

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** I was incredibly grateful for that. A lot of directors are frightened of writers, because they know the writer knows more than them what’s supposed to be there. They don’t want the writer on set. They don’t want the writer in the cutting room. They didn’t want the writer getting too much credit. Ron is not like that.

**John:** That’s terrific. This movie came out theatrically limited but then also on streaming. Did you have a chance to see this with an audience?

**Bill:** Not really. As you know, MGM, who financed it, got bought by Amazon after we finished the movie. It didn’t get the screen life that we would’ve liked. I’m old-fashioned. I like cinemas. I like theaters. They did put on a… This was in London. There was a premier in LA, which I didn’t go to. I was obviously invited, but I chose not to make the journey. There was a good screening in London. We were in France. We got the train back for that evening, and the train was delayed three hours in the Channel Tunnel, to my fury, so I actually missed about half.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Bill:** We got into the theater. I haven’t seen it much with an audience. Now it’s seen as a streaming event, and people see it separately. I’ve got this odd feeling. I don’t really know how people have responded to it.

**John:** I watched it again. I watched it last night at home, streaming it. My instinct though is that there’s going to be some big cheers when the first kid is brought on the stretcher up through the pulley system. That was a really emotional moment for me is seeing that the kids are getting out but also that everyone is there pushing the sled out together. I feel like that’s the moment where you’re going to get some cheers in the audience. I’m frustrated that you didn’t get a chance to hear those cheers, because I feel like it’s going to be a great sound. Bill, can you talk to us about what’s next? Are there any things that you’re working on that we can discuss?

**Bill:** I’m always a little bit shy, for the simple reason that I never know they’re actually going to get made.

**John:** Same.

**Bill:** That’s the life we lead. I’m doing a cinema movie. It’s with a very good director right now. It seems to be going a bit slowly. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. I’m waiting for my next instructions on that. I mentioned I’m doing a TV series for Netflix, which is about the crypto scam. It was a podcast actually called The Missing Crypto Queen-

**John:** Great.

**Bill:** … about a Bulgarian woman who created a crypto coin. It’s a wonderful story.

**John:** I think we actually maybe discussed that on our podcast in terms of How Would This Be a Movie. I’m excited that you’re doing that, because she’s a really flamboyant character if I remember correctly.

**Bill:** Exactly. It’s wonderful. It’s all about why do people believe what they believe, which is central to our current experience everywhere, politics everywhere. I’m just doing the first two episodes of that. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed. I’m also doing a small British movie about a guy, which is a true story again. You see, these are all true stories. I don’t like adapting novels. I don’t do it, because somebody else has [inaudible 01:03:41] the characters and invented the story.

Real life is a complete mess, so it needs people like me to come in and turn it into craft, something out of that. That’s what I like doing. I’m doing a small movie about a person who goes mad. The fun of it is, it’s kind of implying that madness is a choice, which actually serves a purpose. He thinks he’s a secret agent saving the planet. He ends up being sent to hospital and given heavy drugs and so on. You realize that being a secret agent saving the planet beats his real life. You kind of get why a guy would do that. Essentially, it’s dealing with the fact that all of us are prone to picking up clues around us and creating a narrative of our life that enables us to feel good about ourselves.

**John:** Absolutely. You are the story you’re telling about yourself.

**Bill:** Yeah. I’m doing that. There’s a couple of other longer-term projects. Those are three that are actually on my desk right now.

**John:** That’s amazing. Bill, an absolute pleasure talking with you and meeting you here. Congratulations on the film. I’m really excited to see these next projects as well. A delight. Thank you so much.

**Bill:** It’s a great pleasure for me as well, talking to somebody who gets these things, a fellow. I love it. Thank you so much.

**John:** Thank you.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Have a great night. Bye.

**Bill:** Bye-bye.

**John:** Craig, we are back in this moment. It is time for our One Cool Things. I have two TV shows to recommend to you and to our listenership. First is Andor, which everyone says it’s by far the best Star Wars series. It’s just phenomenal. It’s just really, really good. Craig, I was thinking about you as I was watching it, because there was this scene, I think in the maybe second or third episode, where the Empire, or what will become the Empire, is having this board meeting, just planning meeting. It’s in this big white room. It’s just so smartly done. It’s everything you always talk about how you admire the Empire for its efficiency and for its organization. I thought of you. If I could find the clip snippet of it, I want to send it to you, because you will just love that when you get a chance to watch it.

**Craig:** Obviously, I always root for the Empire. I’m just so confused after all these movies. How do they keep losing? It just doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone so scared of them? All they do is lose.

**John:** I’ll say that the whole premise of Andor is basically how does the revolution start, how does the rebellion start. It’s really smartly done. It’s no surprise. It’s coming from Tony Gilroy, who’s a great writer and is running this show. Just so, so smart. Everyone tells you to watch Andor. I’m just the 19,000th person to tell you to watch Andor, because really, it’s worth it.

The other thing is Fleishman is in Trouble, which I don’t hear people talking as much about. So good. As I recognize the names going past, Susannah Grant, who is of course fantastic, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote the book and she wrote almost all the episodes of the series. It’s so smartly done. The POV storytelling on it is really, really great. Fleishman is in Trouble, another great thing to watch. That is on Hulu in the United States.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is an article. It is in Wired. I don’t know if you’re going to need a subscription or not. Maybe Wired does a couple of free articles a month. This one is called Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira. It’s a really interesting story about this class of workers called digital nomads, who work entirely virtually, and so can work anywhere, but they’re alone. These are a lot of people who don’t have families, etc, so they’re stuck alone in their homes. They want to go places. They can go anywhere.

This Portuguese island basically on the southern coast of Madeira created what they call a digital nomad land. It’s basically like we built some homes and some work areas for you, communal work areas. You can come here, live here, and you’ll have a community, instead of being alone. Theoretically, this would also be great for the actual island itself and the people who live there, because it would help the economy. It doesn’t work exactly the way they were thinking, but it’s really interesting, because I never considered this is a new way of building a community. All of our legacy communities are built around decisions that were made god knows when, based on there’s a lake nearby or there’s a river or whatever.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** This is like, “Ah, it seems like a good spot to put a bunch of people with laptops,” so a new way of creating communities. Check out Welcome to Digital Nomadland by Susana Ferreira in Wired.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week and our show for this year. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Again.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Still.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Michael Lane. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segment. Reminder to use the promo code. What is the promo code, Craig?

**Craig:** Onion.

**John:** Promo code onion to save $10 on your annual subscription, but only through January 15th, so do that.

**Craig:** Onion. Onion. Onion.

**John:** Onion. Onion. Onion. Stick around after the credits, because we’ll be discussing our non-writing aspirations for 2023. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, I sprung this on you. We didn’t have time to prepare any sort of plans for 2023, but not work, because obviously you’re going to have a very busy work 2023. Maybe I’ll start with some of mine, and you can think of what some of yours are going to be for 2023. I’m excited to be DM’ing again. It looks like we’re going to finish up the campaign that you’ve been so generously hosting for the last three years.

**Craig:** It’s a long one.

**John:** It’s a long one.

**Megana:** Wow.

**John:** When you finish up, we’ve discussed in the group, I’m going to try to run a much, much shorter, not going to go three years, kind of campaign. I’m excited to get back into that and look at who our group is. We have a large group, but not everyone can come every time, so trying to plan for things that will work will if people are just gone, so their tokens aren’t just sitting there idly, that we can actually do things every week with the people that we have on hand.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about in 2023.

**Craig:** I’m excited about that. I can’t wait to just play again. I guess that’s not really an aspiration. It’s going to happen. It’s an inevitability.

**John:** It’s going to happen. We’re going to finish. We’re going to finish the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and then we’ll do something new.

**Craig:** Yes, we will. When it comes to non-writing aspirations, I don’t really have specific ones, or at least none that are tied to a new year. I have an ongoing project, which is to catastrophize less, take deep breaths, put anxiety in its proper perspective, and remind myself… Am I allowed to curse in this Bonus Segment?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Everything will be fucking okay. That’s great.

**John:** [crosstalk 01:11:27].

**Craig:** That’s what I’m working on. Megana, I feel like you and I are very similar in this regard.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Tell me, what do you do, or first of all, is that part of your non-writing aspiration for 2023? If it is, how do you go about it?

**Megana:** I think it is. I am also trying to stretch more in 2023 because I’m getting older.

**Craig:** That’s nice. Yeah, you are.

**Megana:** I am. I think that getting myself to a place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out,” and moving my body in some way is always incredibly helpful. That is a new tactic I’m taking for 2023.

**Craig:** I like it, stretching.

**Megana:** Instead of just panicking alone in my room.

**Craig:** Right, and tightening up in a little stress ball.

**John:** Stretching also one of the things that you can do while you’re doing something else. You can stretch while you’re watching TV. Increasingly, I will just not sit on the couch. I will sit on the floor and try to stretch while watching Andor or Fleishman is in Trouble, because I can still fully enjoy the show, but I’m also hopefully getting my hamstrings a little less messed up.

**Megana:** I have a standing desk, but if we’re being honest, I don’t stand at it very often.

**Craig:** You mean your sitting desk? That’s your sitting desk, Megana.

**Megana:** Now it’s going to be my stretching desk. It’s going to be my stretching and less panic desk.

**Craig:** I like that.

**Megana:** Do you have a standing desk?

**Craig:** I do. Like you, it’s really… Look. Here’s the deal. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do. I know what I might do. Part of everything is also just giving myself a break.

**Megana:** You deserve it.

**Craig:** I do a lot. You know what? I don’t want to use the standing desk. Screw it. I don’t want to.

**John:** If listeners are looking for things to help them think about their year and they want to try a book, a book that actually was genuinely useful for me was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which really talks about how the best way to change your habits and get rid of some bad habits and start some good habits is just make them unavoidable. It’s literally like putting your running shoes by the door so you’re going to be tripping over them if you don’t do it. It’s making sure you’re setting yourself up for success. If people are looking for a book or something to read over the holidays, to make them think better about what they want to do in the new year, how to get that achieved, that’d be a good bet, Atomic Habits.

**Craig:** If your New Year’s resolutions or aspirations are to read less and sit more, I just want you to know I’m your patron saint.

**John:** We’re going to support that. Craig, a thing I’m going to try to not do in 2023 is recreate Twitter. I’m not going to try to, because obviously, Twitter is going to… It’s not dead, but it’s not going to be the same thing it was. If it’s around six months from now, six years from now, it’s still not going to be as useful to me as it used to be. I’m not going to try to find the new Twitter. I just don’t think that’s going to be a goal. I’m going to find other ways to encounter the ideas in people that I used to encounter and stumble across on Twitter. I’m not quite sure what that’s going to be. I can still miss the things that were great about it. I’m not going to try to look for the next version of it.

**Craig:** Which is totally fine. I think you probably won’t have to try too hard. I think that there are people right now salivating and rubbing their hands together, going, “We sense a vacuum.” That said, Twitter never really made money. I don’t know if anybody necessarily… They’re not going to want to recreate Twitter either, but they’re going to make something. Something’s coming. You remember the fantastic opening credit sequence for Silicon Valley?

**John:** Oh yeah. Great. The constantly churning, 3D, top-down view of all these companies building up and exploding.

**Craig:** Exactly. They would change it over the seasons to reflect other implosions and new risings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know change is afoot. It just doesn’t stop. The churn doesn’t stop. Something new is going to come along that’s going to take over our lives soon enough.

**John:** What it has started doing more of as Twitter’s been declining is just going back to my RSS readers, the blogs I follow and stuff like that. That was actually really good technology. RSS is what’s actually powering podcasts like Scriptnotes to let new episodes come out there. People can use that for posts as well. I’m going to try to do a little bit more blogging on johnaugust.com. The thoughts that I used to try to cut down to 280 characters to fit on Twitter, I will expend a few minutes to make a longer blog post.

**Megana:** Nice.

**Craig:** Been a lot of that going on.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a very good 2022. I’m so excited to be doing more Scriptnotes with you in 2023.

**Craig:** Oh wait, we’re still doing this? Oh my god.

**Megana:** Wait, Craig, was that your answer for your resolution?

**John:** Catastrophize less?

**Megana:** Catastrophize less?

**Craig:** Yeah. What did you think it should be?

**Megana:** No, I think that that’s great. I also think that you deserve more vacation in 2023.

**Craig:** Aw, that’s very sweet. I don’t love vacations. I know I’m supposed to.

**John:** Maybe a different definition of vacation. It doesn’t have to be sitting on a beach someplace. It could just be like, Craig, for the next week you just get to play all of the video games.

**Craig:** I do love that.

**John:** I think we both wish a little more of that for you.

**Craig:** Thank you. You guys are very sweet. I wish you guys to have a wonderful and happy new year, no matter what it brings for us, which will be fascinating, no doubt.

**John:** It will be a fascinating year, I’m sure.

**Craig:** We will, as always, look back on this and go, “Aw, you guys didn’t know. You didn’t that the space weasels were coming.”

**John:** So naïve we were.

**Craig:** From the Planet Weasel. Yeah, they’re coming. We didn’t know. Until they do come, let’s have some fun.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [William Nicholson](https://www.williamnicholson.com/) on [IMdB](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0629933/)
* [Watch the conversation between John and William here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ22OXQEyos)
* [Thank you to the Writers Guild Foundation for organizing the event!](https://www.wgfoundation.org/blog/category/FYC)
* [Use Promo Code ONION for two months free in our annual Scriptnotes premium membership](https://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Welcome to Digital Nomadland](https://www.wired.com/story/digital-nomad-village-madeira-portugal/) by Kyle Jeffers for Wired
* [Fleischman Is In Trouble](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fleishman-is-in-trouble) on Hulu
* [Andor](https://www.disneyplus.com/series/star-wars-andor/3xsQKWG00GL5)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael Lane ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/580standard.mp3).