Search Results for: residuals

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/first-day-on-the-job).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. A small language warning. There are some big words, some bad words, in this episode. So this might be a good time to put in headphones if you’re in a place where it is not appropriate to hear the F-bombs.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Craig Mazin named Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 317 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we are debuting a brand new segment where we look at how different movies handle the same kind of scene. We’ll also be tackling listener questions about “therapy pieces” and writing for the international market.

But first we have some follow up. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** All right. So we have some follow up from Anonymous Animation Writer. It would be great if that was this person’s full name.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** And they didn’t actually work in animation, but I think they do. I don’t think it’s their name. Anonymous Animation Writer writes, “I just finished listening to episode 310 where you dove,” I think we dived, “into the recently passed WGA deal. I am a WGA member, but primarily I am a fairly successful animation writer.” Hats off to you.

“The reality is most animation isn’t WGA. We get no residuals. The pay rate is extremely low. And yet our material is played and replayed constantly. Kids, you know? And, our material is the primary driver for toy sales. Animation employs a huge swath of writers in Los Angeles, yet I feel as though we are the most neglected segment of the writing community. Can you address or have somebody from the guild address why all animation is not covered by the WGA?”

Yes. We. Can.

**John:** Yeah. It’s actually one of those rare cases where we can answer the question fairly definitively. So, animation is writing. It is completely the same kind of writing as writing for features or for television. Animation should be covered by the WGA, but it is not covered by the WGA because it never has been covered by the WGA.

Once upon a time when animated films were going to be made and when animated television programs were getting made, that writing was not covered by WGA. And it got covered by other unions, specifically a branch of IATSE covers it. So you, Anonymous Animation Writer, probably are working for a union. You’re represented by a union. It’s just not the WGA. And it sucks for you. And it’s going to be very difficult to get you covered by the WGA.

**Craig:** It will not be difficult. It will be impossible. So, here’s the deal with the law, Anonymous Animation Writer, and this bums us out as much as it bums you out. Well, I grant you you’re bummed out even more. You basically have two options for employment. You can either work non-union or you can work union. That’s just in general in life, right? It’s sort of binary. You’re working non-union, or you’re working union.

In closed shop states like California, if a union covers a work area, and there are companies that are signatory to that union, then you are covered by that union. Period. The end. There’s no other way for John or I to write a live action movie for, let’s say Warner Bros, unless it’s done under a WGA deal.

The union that has jurisdiction over animation is as John stated IATSE. And specifically it’s IATSE Local 839, the Animation Guild. Locals are subsidiaries of a larger parent union. But essentially it’s part of IATSE. Like most of the crew and stagecraft unions are.

The deal that 839 has with the companies is such that there are no residuals and, as you note, the pay rate is much lower than the WGA pay rate. The WGA can do nothing about this. Jurisdiction between unions is a matter of federal law. It’s like the jurisdiction police departments. You can’t have Philadelphia cops rolling on into New York and arresting people. It’s just the way the law works. You can’t overlap.

So, the choices in animation are if you’re working for a signatory company it has to be through Animation 839. Or, you may be working for a non-signatory company in which case it’s not union at all. Pixar, for instance, not union. I’m sure one of the other big ones is not union. And so really the choice that you face as you’re taking employment as an animation writer in Hollywood is whether you’re going to have a bad deal or a worse deal. And there is absolutely nothing the Writers Guild can do about it. Zero. Period. The end. And it is so frustrating for us, but it is just fact.

**John:** Yep. So, Craig, talk us through quickly there are certain primetime animated shows that are WGA. Why are they WGA?

**Craig:** Right. So, what we’ve been talking about is feature animation. Now, primetime animation was never clearly covered by any jurisdiction. So what happens is once a union makes a collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of employers to cover a work area, that’s theirs.

From what I understand, primetime animation was never seized, because there was never that much primetime animation. There was a ton of Saturday morning animation on television, of course, but primetime I don’t think there was particularly much. So when The Simpsons happened, then there was this opening. And for the first time in decades an animation football was up in the air. And The Simpsons writers very quickly organized to become a WGA shop. Because, specifically, there was no primetime deal for Fox. Fox, which made The Simpsons, had never signed, I believe, any collective bargaining agreement covering primetime animation.

So, open field. And they obviously — Fox I think, probably quite strongly, pushed them towards Animation 839. That was something that happened also with DreamWorks made a show called Father of the Pride, which they successfully got to push over to 839. But in this case, The Simpsons writers, probably because of the amount of leverage they had, were able to get a WGA deal. And once they did, all primetime animation made by Fox is a WGA deal. So Family guy, WGA deal. And what are the other ones? American Dad. And all those.

**John:** Bob’s Burgers.

**Craig:** There you go. So any primetime animated show made by Fox is WGA. Now, this does give a little bit of a glimmer of hope. For instance, I don’t think Pixar has ever signed any collective bargaining agreements. So, theoretically all of the writers that write Pixar movies could organize and demand to be covered by the WGA. And I wish they would. But easier said than done, because of the nature of feature films.

In television, you have to crank out episodes, particularly primetime network television. I mean, so that’s 26 right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If your writers stop working for 10 minutes, you’ve got a huge assembly line problem. Not the case in feature animation, where those movies take years and years and years and there’s one of them. So, if there’s a halt for six or eight months, or two years, well, they absorb it. Much, much trickier to do. So, hopefully that answers the question of why The Simpsons, for instance, is a WGA show and not say a primetime program that maybe Sony Television is making.

**John:** Absolutely. So basically the way to get all animation covered by the WGA is to build a time machine and go back and have the decisions made differently. But I think with that theoretical time machine we can also be looking forward. And we need to be looking forward to what are the things coming down the pike that are going to be sort of like this animation situation. And how do we make sure that the people who are writing for those screens are covered and that they are WGA writers who are making a WGA living down the road. I think that’s a thing we need to focus on. And take the lesson we’ve learned from animation to make sure that we’re not leaving stuff uncovered.

**Craig:** Yeah. The legend — I don’t know if this is accurate, but the legend that I have heard is that way, way back in the day feature animation writers went to the WGA, the nascent WGA in the ’40s and ’50s, and said, “Hey, we want you guys to cover us.” And the WGA said, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re real writers. You people are making cartoons. We don’t cover cartoons.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but man it sounds true.

**John:** It does sound true.

**Craig:** Sounds super-duper freaking true. So, if there’s anything to guard against moving forward, it’s any hint of snobbery or exclusion, because whatever you think — if you look down at, I don’t know, content that’s made for YouTube, well, that will be the thing that’s destroying you 40 years from now. We really can’t afford to turn up our noses at any kind of writing for any screen as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** I agree. Second piece of follow up comes from Tim in Asheville. He writes, “I wanted to let you know how thankful I am for your feedback on the Reconstruction of Huck Finn over Mark Twain’s Dead Body in Episode 263.” So that was a Three Page Challenge you and I did.

“That story has reached the quarter finals of Nicholl,” and I actually just checked, it made it to semi-finals. “And although you only gave feedback on the first three pages, your thoughts engendered a come-to-Jesus type rewrite. And let me tell you, Jesus was not having that draft. Thanks for your thoughts and your inspiration.”

**Craig:** I like catty Jesus here. I am not having this draft. Oh no. Oh no! That’s great to hear.

**John:** Yeah. So congrats to Tim in Asheville. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to all the people who were the finalists in Nicholls this year. It’s the only I think competition that Craig and I both feel good about saying, yes, if you do well in Nicholl that’s fantastic. That is a feather in your cap and people actually do pay attention.

**Craig:** They do.

**John:** Congratulations to those folks.

**Craig:** They’ve already released their finalists?

**John:** Yes. So the article I read showed like the 10 finalists, but out of those 10 apparently five get fellowships, so there’s still another culling that happens. I can’t say I honestly understand how it all works, except that I’m very happy for the people who get to be a part of those lists.

**Craig:** So do I. And I hope that at least one or two of them, I mean, this is how crazy our business is. You think, well, there’s thousands of scripts, I assume, sent to the Nicholl Fellowship each year, and then it comes down to 10 finalists. And then five of them get fellowships. And here I am saying I hope one of them becomes a professional screenwriter. But that’s kind of — that is kind of the mesh size of this filter. It’s tough.

**John:** It is tough. Indeed.

All right, let’s get to our brand new segment. So this was suggested by Megan McDonnell, she is our new producer. And her idea was to take a certain class of scenes, a certain kind of scene you see in a bunch of different movies, and take a look at how different movies play that kind of scene. And so we’re going to be comparing and contrasting scenes from four different movies that are all about the same thing.

And in this case it is about the first day on the job, which is sort of a stock scene. And actually very common, I think, in features because as we always talk about features are about characters going through a journey they can only go through once. And so the first day on a new job is a very classic moment that your characters are going to have in lots of different kinds of movies. Comedies. Dramas. Everything in between.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, for sure. It’s a fun scene to write. I mean, we look forward to scenes like this. Sometimes we know what we have to accomplish in a story. We know how people are going to get in, and we know what we need to have them thinking or doing on the way out. And then the nature of the scene itself seems a bit, well, foggy. And then you have to figure out how to make it work.

No one has to really get lost in a fog over this.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The first day of work we’re throwing characters at you. We’re throwing responsibilities at you. I know everyone knows how that feels. We’ve all been there before. So really it’s just about what is your unique perspective on this shared experience of the first day at work.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, let’s jump right in. So I put out a call on Twitter for people to send me their suggestions for great movies with great scenes about the first day on the job. And, of course, our listeners are fantastic and threw back a lot of suggestions. Probably the number one suggestion was one I hadn’t thought of which is The Hudsucker Proxy. So this is a screenplay by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Sam Raimi.

In the show notes for this episode you’ll find links to the full PDF, but also the individual scenes we’re taking a look at. So, Craig, why don’t you read the setup to this scene? This is scene 14 in Hudsucker Proxy.

**Craig:** Sure.

“SWINGING STEEL DOORS that read, ”MAILROOM.” They burst open as Norville, who wears a mail clerk’s leather apron, imprinted: HUDSUCKER MAILROOM/The Future is Now. The hellish mailroom is criss-crossed by pipes that emit HISSING jets of STEAM.

As he wheels a piled-high mail cart down the aisle, Norville is accompanied by an orientation AGENT who bellows at him over the clamor and roar of many men laboring in the bowels of a great corporation.

**John:** And now let’s take a listen to the scene.

**Scene:**

AGENT
You punch in at 8:30 every morning except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday unless it’s a Monday and then you punch in at eight o’clock You punch in at 7:45 whenever we work extended day and you punch out at the regular time unless you’ve worked through lunch!

NORVILLE
What’s exte–

AGENT
Punch in late and they dock ya!

People on either side bellow at Norville and stuff envelopes and packages under his elbows, into his pockets, under his chin, between his clenched teeth , etc.

FIRST SCREAMER
This goes to seven! Mr. Mutuszak! Urgent!

AGENT
Incoming articles, get a voucher! Outgoing articles, provide a voucher! Move any article without a voucher and they dock ya!

SECOND SCREAMER
Take this up to the secretarial pool on three!Right away!Don’t break it!

AGENT
Letter size a green voucher! Folder size a yellow voucher! Parcel size a maroon voucher!

THIRD SCREAMER
This one’s for Morgatross! Chop chop!

AGENT
Wrong color voucher and they dock ya!Six-seven-eight-seven-zero-four-niner-alpha-slash-six! That is your employee number!It will not be repeated!Without your employee number you cannot cash your paycheck!

FOURTH SCREAMER
This goes up to twenty-seven! If there’s no one there bring it down to eighteen! Have ‘em sign the waiver!DON’T COME BACK DOWN HERE WITHOUT A SIGNED WAIVER!!

AGENT
Inter-office mail is code37! INTRA-office mail is 37-dash-3! Outside mail is 3-dash37! Code it wrong and they dock ya!

FIFTH SCREAMER
I was supposed to have this on twenty-eight ten minutes ago! Cover for me!

AGENT
This has been your orientation! Is there anything you do not understand? Is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully- oriented–if there is something you do not understand in all of its particulars you must file a complaint with personnel! File a faulty complaint…and they dock ya!

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** It’s delightful. So this is a very classically kind of what we expect on that first day, where everything is being thrown at you. You are just barely trying to catch up with the action around you. And it’s important to set up the environment of this world they’re entering into. This is a sort of dystopian hellhole of corporate machinery. And from sound design to sort of the monologuing of the orientation agent, you get a feeling for all of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Classic bit of filmic storytelling to take the normal emotions that we have in shared universal experiences and then externalize them in these very broad, caricatured ways. Even though nobody has ever experienced a first day at work like this, you can argue that this is how it feels to us. Everything is confusing. Everything is scary. Everyone around you seems to be perfectly meshed together and frantic in a way you are not because you don’t understand what’s going on. And you are laden down with rules that you do not understand and consequences you do understand. So, you don’t know what you need to do to succeed. You just know what happens when you fail. Very, very first day.

**John:** Yeah. They will dock you. So, this is a great example of like this orientation agent is not a major character, so he’s just going there and he’s just establishing the rules of the world. He is basically — he’s just part of the setting really. This is not a significant character.

But I want to contrast that with the first scene from Devil Wears Prada, or at least the first day scene from Devil Wears Prada. This is a script by Aline Brosh McKenna based on the book by Lauren Weisberger. Here we see the same kind of orientation where you have somebody starting to lead somebody through the office, and yet this case it’s Emily Blunt leading Anne Hathaway through. And Emily Blunt is a major character. Emily Blunt is a character who we’re going to come back to again and again. And so you can see the scene is actually taking some time to establish her as a more important significant character who has a depth to her that this orientation agent doesn’t have.

Let’s take a look at the scene on paper first, and then we’ll take a listen to it. It starts in reception. “Andy is trying to arrange herself on the uncomfortable sofa when suddenly a taller, thinner, and amazingly more groomed version of the women in the room walks in. This is Emily, who looks the part of the sleek fashionista, but is propelled by a core of barely tamped anxiety. Andrea Barnes? Emily looks up, their eyes meet, as Emily takes in how different Andy looks from everyone else. Andy springs up and follows her down the hallway.”

Let’s take a listen to the rest of the scene.

**Scene:**

INT. RUNWAY RECEPTION AREA — DAY

Sleek, elegant, hard-edged chic. Behind the reception desk is an elegant logo that says RUNWAY. ANDY walks over.

ANDY
Hi, I have an appointment with Emily Charlton–

EMILY (O.S.)
Andrea Sachs?

(EMILY (and MIRANDA, later) pronounce ANDREA Ahn-DRAY-a. ANDY refers to herself as AN-dree-a.)

ANDY turns and sees a taller, thinner and, amazingly, more groomed CLACKER. This is EMILY. She looks the part of the sleek fashionista, but is propelled by a core of barely tamped down anxiety. She examines ANDY.

EMILY (CONT’D)
Human Resources certainly has a bizarre sense of humor.
(sigh, annoyed)
Follow me.

INT. RUNWAY HALLWAY — DAY

EMILY briskly walks ANDY down the hall.

EMILY
Okay, so… I was Miranda’s second assistant, but her first assistant recently got promoted so now I’m the first…

ANDY glimpses an office in front of them, seductively bright.

ANDY
And you’re replacing yourself.

EMILY
I’m trying. Miranda sacked the last two girls after only a few weeks. We need to find someone who can survive here. Do you understand?

ANDY
Yes. Of course. Who’s Miranda?

EMILY
(eyes widening)
You didn’t just ask me that. She’s the editor in chief of Runway. Not to mention a legend. Work a year for her and you can get a job at any magazine you want. A million girls would kill for this job.

ANDY
Sounds great. I’d love to be considered.

She smiles. EMILY tries to think how to break it to her.

EMILY
Andrea, Runway is a fashion magazine. An interest in fashion is crucial.

ANDY
What makes you think I’m not interested in fashion?

EMILY gives her a look. ANDY smiles, like she has no idea what EMILY could mean.

Suddenly, EMILY’S Blackberry goes off. She gasps.

EMILY
Oh my God. No. No, no, no.

ANDY
What’s wrong?

EXT. ELIAS-CLARKE — DAY

A black sedan pulls to a sudden stop outside the building.

INT. RUNWAY – BULLPEN – DAY

EMILY begins rapid-fire dialing four digit extensions.

EMILY
(all but screaming)
She’s on her way — tell everyone!

Just then a dapper man of about 40 walks briskly by.

NIGEL
I thought she was coming in at 9.

EMILY
Her driver text-messaged. Her facialist ruptured a disk. God, these people!

NIGEL turns and sees ANDY. Looks at EMILY. Who is that?

EMILY (CONT’D)
I can’t even talk about it.

No time to discuss. NIGEL calls down the hallway.

NIGEL
All right, everyone. Man your battle stations!

**John:** First off, it’s great to have Aline on the show, even if she’s not literally on the show, we get to hear her words and see her work. I think it’s a delightful scene. And so here we’ve already established Anne Hathaway’s character in the movie, but this is our first time meeting Emily Blunt’s character. And it’s a sophisticated thing that we’re seeing here. So, you get to see that Emily Blunt is trying to do her job, but she’s also very skeptical that this girl could even possibly be working here. We’re establishing the stakes of the world and we’re establishing that everyone else who has been hired for this job has been fired very, very quickly.

And then we end this scene with this moment of like, “Oh no, the boss is coming.” And then we get into this sort of montage of Miranda Priestly arriving at the office and everyone panicking and scurrying around to sort of prepare for her. So you’re establishing this big character entrance for a character who has not yet shown up in the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. In some ways, this is the opposite way of playing a first day moment than the one in Hudsucker Proxy. It doesn’t seem like it starts as the opposite, because in walks this young woman who seems to be perfect, as opposed to our protagonist. But then as they move through the building and begin to talk what starts to come out is that our hero, Anne Hathaway’s character, doesn’t even know who Miranda is. And is oddly sort of Zen. You know, “I’d like to be considered.” She just seems so much calmer and more centered than Emily Blunt’s character, who is already kind of twittery panicky.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when they hear that Miranda is coming early, you see Emily kind of fall apart. So, what this first day is setting up in a sense probably the arc of these two characters and what is going to happen ultimately with Anne Hathaway’s character, I think.

**John:** What’s also great in this scene is we’re used to the sort of bulldozer coming in and our protagonist being sort of run over by the bulldozer. Anne Hathaway’s character does stand up to her. “Well what makes you think I don’t like fashion?” Basically, she’s taking some agency. She’s actually willing to sort of hit the ball back over the net. And that becomes important in the next scene where she actually is interviewing with Miranda Priestly to make it clear like, you know, you are going to say that I’m not qualified to be here, but I really am. And you should take a chance on me. She’s actually going to stick up for herself in ways that are incredibly important for the character.

What I’d like to do now is actually compare it to her first actual day on the job. So, this is clip from later on in the film where she’s trying to get through her first real day after she’s been hired. And there’s a moment, which I think has become sort of one of the iconic moments in the film, where she is dismissive of sort of what it is they’re doing in general. She makes the mistake of laughing about how absurd it is. And let’s take a listen to what happens in that scene.

**Scene:**

ANDY lets out a little giggle. And it’s like she set off a grenade. Slowly everyone turns to her.

MIRANDA
Is something funny?

ANDY
No, no, no. It’s just…

And MIRANDA says nothing. ANDY twists in the wind.

ANDY (CONT’D)
It’s just that both of those belts look the same to me. I’m still learning about this stuff, so–

And the silence is deafening. Everyone looks to see what MIRANDA will do.

MIRANDA
This… stuff? Okay. I understand. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and select, say, that lumpy blue sweater because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what’s on your body. What you don’t know is that your sweater is not blue. It’s not even sky blue. It’s cerulean. You also don’t know that in 2002, De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, Yves St. Laurent showed a cerulean military jacket, Dolce did skirts with cerulean beads, and in our September issue we did the definitive layout on the color. Cerulean quickly appeared in eight other major collections, then the secondary and department store lines and then trickled down to some lovely Casual Corner, where you no doubt stumbled on it. That color is worth millions of dollars and many jobs. And here you are, thinking you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry. In truth, you are wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

She smiles at ANDY. Who quakes.

**John:** What I love about this clip is that it shows a crucial aspect of first day on the job which is failure. And that sense of the protagonist comes in with a head of steam. They think they’re sort of figuring it out. And then they meet a huge obstacle and a huge setback. And that setback is generally the antagonist. In this case, it’s Miranda. And it makes it really clear that as plucky and as smart as Anne Hathaway’s character is, she is out of her depths in sort of this situation and specifically opposite Miranda.

**Craig:** Yeah. Most movies that are workplace movies will involve a hero who is new to the job pushing up against an antagonist or villain who is established on the job. It could be a boss, as it often is. Or it could be a rival for a promotion. But no matter what, that villain, that antagonist, needs to have some formidable weight. This is a very common note that studios will give, and for good reason. It’s a good note — make your villains formidable.

So, we could easily begin to see Miranda Priestly as a nut. Just a tyrannical nut who should be laughed at. And, of course, a lot of fashion does seem, on its face, absurd. And it makes perfect sense for us to be with Anne Hathaway and thinking I see through everything here. I can see the matrix. This is all baloney and this lady is nuts.

And it’s really important for the movie and for the character for Anne Hathaway to hear, “No, you don’t see anything at all.” And it has to be done in such a way that in the audience, in the theater where we’re sitting we go, “Oh you know what, that’s a really good point. You’re right. It’s not just that you’re mean about it, or strident, you’ve convinced me. Right? And by doing so I now understand that the character I was identifying with and feeling really proud to kind of be in the saddle with doesn’t maybe know what she’s talking about. And doesn’t see all the things she thinks she sees. And now I feel that way, too.” This is the bedrock of making people care about characters in a movie.

So, it’s a terrific way to use a first day on the job scene to not only set up what it is that people do, but also set up the basis of a rivalry. And to take your hero, and as we always should, push them down. Push them down, because there is no satisfaction in their rise if we do not push them down.

**John:** I’m thinking about the archetypes of this relationship and you see this all the time in military movies where you have the drill sergeant. But you also see it in teacher movies. You think of Whiplash. And this is very much the same kind of dynamic in Whiplash where you have the upstart who thinks he knows what’s going on and then meets this incredible asshole of a teacher who really can show him up and sort of prove that he knows nothing.

And that’s a crucial dynamic. I think so often we think of the antagonist as being the villain in the story. And villains don’t always wear capes and sort of try to destroy cities. A lot of times it’s how they are challenging our heroes. And that’s what you’re seeing in Devil Wears Prada.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is really important for people to note, in a time when a lot of movies do seem to feature villains that only are interested in the most broad villainous desires like total power and total destruction, that the most satisfying cinematic villains are the ones who in some way at the end of a story are actually vaguely proud of the fact that the hero has risen up.

It took a long time, it took three movies for Darth Vader to get to that point. But he did. And we really liked it. It’ll take one movie for Miranda to get there at the end, but that’s exactly where it ends up with the two of them. You get the sense that Miranda is a combination of antagonist and mentor. And that’s a great combo.

**John:** That is a great combo. When it works, it’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** We always think of mentors as being like the kindly old wizard or the caring teacher, but oftentimes it is a confrontational role that is pushing them to the next place. So, it’s great to see it here.

Let’s take a look at another sort of mentor figure and sort of authority figure in Hidden Figures. So this is a screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Ted Melfi based on a book by Margo Shetterly.

So in this scene we see Taraji P. Henson. She’s going to work in the larger office with the engineers rather than just being the calculator off in the little back room. Let’s take a read through the scene and then what actually happens.

So we’re inside the Space Task Group office. “Katherine steps into a cyclone of activity and stress. ENGINEERS chalk equations on blackboards, slug coffee. AIDES and SUPPORT STAFF scurry, answer phones. This is the Space Task Group: the world’s most exclusive scientific club. At the back of the room, Harrison paces in his glass bubble, talking with Karl Zielinski. For the briefest moment, everyone seems to be looking at the black woman who just entered their world. But it’s just a passing moment, there’s far too much to do.”

And so we’re going to actually skip ahead a little bit in the scene to listen to when she first has her conversation with the character played by Kevin Costner.

**Scene:**

AL HARRISON
Ruth. What’s the status on my Computer?

RUTH
She’s right in front of you, Mr. Harrison.

Ruth motions to Katherine. Harrison gives her a once over. Not what he expected either.

AL HARRISON
Does she know how to handle Analytic Geometry?

RUTH
Absolutely. And she speaks.

KATHERINE
I do, sir.

AL HARRISON
Which one?

KATHERINE
Both, sir. Geometry and speaking.

Harrison waves a finger at Ruth.

AL HARRISON
Then give her the-

She knows exactly what he’s talking about. She always knows what he’s talking about. She snatches a bundle of worksheets off her desk, rushes them to Katherine.

AL HARRISON (CONT’D)
(to Katherine)
Do you think you can find me the Frenet frame for that data using the Gram- Schmidt–

Katherine glances at the data sheets.

KATHERINE
–Orthogonalization algorithm. Yes, sir. I prefer it over Euclidean coordinates.

That’s all Harrison needs to hear. She knows her stuff.

**Craig:** Right. So this is a fairly common way of doing these things. You have somebody that no one would expect to be really, really good at something because of their gender or their race or their age. And they are going to impress somebody. It’s not actually — I mean, it’s a really, really good movie. This is a fairly cliché way of doing these things.

But there is something pretty interesting in it, and that is — and you can pull out and sort of go, ah-ha. You know, sometimes when there are scenes that feel cliché, you realize that one thing isn’t. And it’s a little bit like those puzzles when we were kids, like find the things that are different, right? And those little differences are actually really illuminating. And I’m certain quite intentional. And the little difference here is Kevin Costner just says, “OK, all right. Do you do this? Do you do that?”

There’s no “I don’t think so, or is this some kind of joke?” That’s the difference. And you will see that little bit play out and grow in their relationship over the course of the movie. So there’s a little seed in what is a fairly stock kind of execution of something that is different and refreshing and kind of counter to the hyper formula of this kind of moment.

**John:** Absolutely. So this is a moment that happens midway through the story, I think, because we’ve actually established quite a bit of backstory with the women that we’re going to be following. And they’re sort of all going through first day experiences. They already worked at NASA. They worked as calculators in the sort of backroom doing the difficult calculations. And one by one they’re sort of being pulled into greater responsibilities, so Janelle Monáe’s character is going to work with the heat shield people. And Octavia Spencer is really managing these women and basically wants to be credited with being their manager and being paid as their manager.

So, Taraji P. Henson is of them the most lead character of them, and so she’s going to work in the biggest room with the biggest most important people. And I think we have a natural expectation that her relationship with Kevin Costner is going to be classically antagonistic where she has to impress him and change him.

He starts pretty far along the journey, and so it’s really more about his coming to see the world from her point of view. And basically recognize his own ignorance about sort of what was going on. So it wasn’t that he was this horrible racist. It’s that he had never even thought to question what she was allowed to do and what she wasn’t allowed to do and how frustrating that would be for her. And so it’s nothing like the Miranda Priestly sort of relationship. It’s not — he’s not even sort of teaching her how to grow into this bigger thing. It’s her just through her quiet competence pushing him and the rest of this group forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that is kind of the thing that jumps out of this exchange. Because it is, like I said, it’s a very — we’ve seen this before.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. So, that’s the thing that is the little payload. I think there’s a really good lesson there, actually, that when you are writing these scenes sometimes people are so panicked that they’re writing a stock scene. And I think it’s not something to panic over as long as you are putting some kind of twist or thing on it.

It’s when you don’t. It’s when you fail to surprise in any way whatsoever that the thing just starts to lie there and feel super derivative.

**John:** I think one of the other reasons why this didn’t pain me when I saw it in the theaters is that it’s part of a much longer scene. So we did some of the setup, but she’s just standing around this office for a long time while people are waiting and doing other things. She has this moment, and then the scene just keeps going on where she has to — where she’s finding her desk. And so it really places you into her perspective of what it’s like to be there.

One of the brilliant tricks that this movie does is that by fully grounding the experience in these women’s lives, you see everything from their point of view. And so when we go into these sort of white male enclaves, we are going into it as her. That is the foreign territory we’re heading into and we are completely identifying with her perspective on things.

And so letting her be sort of quietly competent in this moment and not have her big speech here, but save it for later on, you know, saves our powder and lets us sort of really stick in our perspective.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree completely.

**John:** Cool. Let’s take a look at one last first day, which was the second most highly recommended thing on Twitter when I put out the call for these scenes. This is Training Day by David Ayer.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And this whole movie is a first day on the job essentially. So, let’s take a look at a scene that happens in a coffee shop. So, we’ll read through the setup here.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a good one. All right.

”INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY

Old and tired, near Good Samaritan Hospital. Jake struts through the door, confidently looks around. JAKE’S POV: DETECTIVE SERGEANT ALONZO HARRIS, in black shirt, black leather jacket. And just enough platinum and diamonds to look like somebody. He reads the paper in a booth. The gun leather-tough LAPD vet is a hands-on, blue-collar cop who can kick your ass with a look. BACK TO SCENE Jake walks over. Slides in across. Alonzo’s eyes will never leave his newspaper.”

**John:** And let’s take a listen.

**Scene:**

JAKE
Good morning, sir.

A young waitress pours Jake coffee, offers a menu. Jake waves it away.

JAKE
I’m okay, ma’am. Thank you.

ALONZO
Have some chow before we hit the office. Go ahead. It’s my dollar.

JAKE
No, thank you, sir. I ate.

ALONZO
Fine. Don’t.

Alonzo turns the page. A long beat. Then:

JAKE
It’s nice here.

ALONZO
May I read my paper?

JAKE
I’m sorry, sir… I’ll get some food.

ALONZO
No. You won’t. You fucked that up. Please. I’m reading. Shut up.

Jake does — Jeeez, sorry. Pours a ton of sugar in his coffee.

TIME CUT TO:

INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY

The waitress pours refills. Alonzo reads. Jake fidgets.

JAKE
Sure wouldn’t mind not roasting in a hot black and white all summer.

Alonzo sighs, carefully folds his paper. Glares at Jake.

ALONZO
Tell me a story, Hoyt.

JAKE
My story?

ALONZO
Not your story. A story. You can’t keep your mouth shut long enough to let me finish my paper. So tell me a story.

JAKE
I don’t think I know any stories.

Alonzo waves the paper in Jake’s face.

ALONZO
This is a newspaper. And I know it’s ninety percent bullshit but it’s entertaining. That’s why I read it. Because it entertains me. If you won’t let me read my paper, then entertain me with your bullshit. Tell me a story.

**John:** This is a fantastic scene. I remember loving the scene when I first saw the movie. This is establishing the dynamic between these two characters. This is like the Miranda/Anne Hathaway relationship in that the nature of their relationship is going to be the entire movie. And this establishes it so well.

**Craig:** It does. And the story he goes on to tell also helps quite a bit. Indeed. We, I think, have all had an experience where we’ve met somebody that puts us on our heels permanently. Because not only are they aggressive and preternaturally in control of themselves it seems, but they are bizarrely unpredictable. They feel dangerous to us. And you try and catch up to them. You try and get into their good graces. You try and match them and their tone. You try and figure out exactly what wave length you’re supposed to operate on with this person until eventually you find out you can’t. That’s never going to happen.

And what’s interesting to me about this first day scene is that Denzel Washington’s character puts Ethan Hawke back on his heels really, really hard. Really, really aggressively. And Jake, Ethan Hawke’s character, goes ahead and does as he’s ordered. He starts to tell a story. And this guy keeps interrupting him, and he’s doing it in a way that is, again, dangerous. Until Jake finally starts telling the story kind of the right way.

You can see Ethan Hawke trying to tell it in a way that would entertain Alonzo, because that’s what Alonzo has demanded. Entertainment. And he does and Alonzo gets entertained. And Jake feels really good about it, you know? Until Alonzo smashes him down again. Verbally, of course, in this instance. You get everything you need to know in this first day on the job scene. This is not a scene where you are trying to catch up with somebody who is going to teach you lessons. This is not a scene where a large business is overwhelming to you. This is a scene where you’re meeting a dangerous person, and you’re trying your best and using all of your skills to make it work and none of them are working at all.

**John:** Absolutely. So, in contrast to all these other scenes, we’re not going into the classic workplace, except that the workplace of these two characters is going to be just them together in a car, in a place. We’re not going to be in sort of the bullpens. It’s not that kind of movie. And so the workplace of this movie is going to be wherever the two of them are. And so it’s a really good way of establishing what the dynamics are going to be there and telegraphing what to watch out for.

I think what’s so great about how Denzel Washington’s character is playing through this moment is he’s not boxing, it’s more like a kind of Aikido or a Judo where he’s just continually knocking Ethan Hawke’s character off balance. And so that he can’t sort of figure out what he should say or do next. And it his desperation to figure out what to do next that can sort of compromise him.

It’s just ingeniously set up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the rhythm that this establishes will repeat over and over and over. And you realize that the only way that this rhythm will ever break is if Jake breaks, essentially. And the movie itself, I mean, I love Training Day in part because, for a movie with a lot of action and a lot of plot, honestly — there’s a big kind of, well, you know, internal affairs-y sort of conspiracy going on and you’re meeting characters and people are getting double crossed and all the rest of it, but it is a movie about these conversations. It really is. And obviously those of us who have seen the movie, we all understand the metaphor here of what the training is exactly meant to be.

But this scene is a good example of when you and I talk about a little seed, you know, our first three pages. This is a great little seed. All of the stuff that is going to happen in this movie is essentially all packed into this one scene. So that’s another great way to make use of these first day on the job scenes is by giving them double duty. It’s first day on the job and it is the thematic and character DNA for the whole film.

**John:** Absolutely. Some other choices that were suggested for these scenes included Swimming with Sharks, The Sound of Music, Hot Fuzz, 9 to 5, Men in Black, Mr. Mom, Tootsie, Soapdish. There’s a whole wide range. And so in picking these four movies we didn’t necessarily pick the best scenes, but the ones that I thought could show us a good contrast between the kinds of things that happen in your first day on the job scenes.

So, this was fun. I enjoyed doing this as a new segment. If you have an idea for a future installment of This Kind of Scene, let us know and we’ll try to do this in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? We can do whatever we want.

**John:** Yes. But we like your suggestions.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I mean, well, you do. I just like doing whatever I want. Here’s the sad truth: I say that, and then I just do whatever you want. So really that’s what it comes down to. Do you want their suggestions? You get them. I do what you want. And here we are.

**John:** And this is how it all happens.

**Craig:** This is how it all happens, folks.

**John:** We have two listener questions we’re going to try to hit. So, first off, we have John who wrote in a question regarding how to write for an increasingly international market. Let’s take a listen.

John Listener: Do you think that the international audience has become significantly more important to the studios than the domestic audience? And if so, when you guys are working on studio projects how do you keep in mind the international audience? Do you try to limit dialogue, for example? Add more action? Add more CGI? Or do you not really worry about that?

How do you make your projects, you know, feel like they’re not pandering? Lately it seems like a couple films have been pandering to Chinese audiences, for example, and it sort of backfired. And the Chinese audiences rejected them knowing that they were being pandered to. So, how do you avoid situations like that?

What do you think we can expect, basically, going forward in movies and how can we train ourselves to be thinking about international audiences? Does it start at the concept phase? Should we come up with stories that are less regionalistic, for example? Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

**John:** So, Craig, what John’s referring to is there have been some movies that definitely steered things in a certain way so they could either capitalize on Chinese dollars or avoid angering Chinese audiences or Chinese censors. Basically, it could be very hard to get your movie to play in China if China doesn’t want your movie to play there. So, there have been movies that have been nipped and tucked in order to play in China. And movies that have included a scene of characters drinking a Chinese product because it was important.

But, I will say that as a person who writes some big studio movies, it’s never come up for me that I needed to be writing something specifically different for China. Have you felt this?

**Craig:** No. I haven’t. But I suspect that it was probably couched in something else. Sort of the way you give your dog a pill by shoving it in a piece of cheese. We do hear things from studios: casting suggestions, and maybe, oh, we need another action set piece, or something like this or that. The truth is that we are in a strange dance right now with the rest of the world when it comes to our business and how important the international audience is.

For some movies it’s kind of important. For some movies, it’s really, really important. In general, the studios get a much lower percentage of the returns from international box office. But international box office at times dwarfs domestic box office on a movie by movie basis.

I’m thinking for instance of a movie like Warcraft. Warcraft was made by Universal. It starred people speaking English. So it seemingly was intended for a domestic audience. But I suspect it was really largely intended for an international audience, because Warcraft is just so much bigger in Asia than it is here. It used to be pretty big here, but it’s huge still in Asia, and, not surprisingly, Warcraft made a massive amount of money overseas. Far more than it made here. Far more. People think of that movie as a huge bomb. It’s not.

There are, of course, movies that then — and I think John is absolutely right when he points this out — they pander. And that’s horrendous. And hopefully we stop doing that because I don’t think it’s productive. One thing I know for sure is you’re going to be very hard pressed to have a hero in your movie from Tibet. You’re going to be extremely hard pressed to have the villains in your movie be Chinese people. That’s not going to happen. Nor North Koreans. It’s hard for that, too, because again China is incredibly protective of that sort of thing. And they have a strict government control over what gets released and how long it is in theaters.

So, it has been very disruptive to our business, I think. The emergence of this massive new market, and also a lot of capital, has been disruptive. But creatively speaking, I also feel like domestic audiences are moving closer to where international audiences used to be. They just seem mostly interested in spectacle. I think that’s why we are awash in superhero movies and will remain so for some time. They are massive spectacle. And they cross all cultures.

**John:** I would agree with you. I think we would be making those kind of movies regardless, because those movies are incredibly successful in the US. And so you look at how our movies have become sort of bigger and flashier and sometimes dumber when they’re trying to be the giant blockbusters. But we’re also still making really good movies that are intended for a domestic audience that do really well. And so you look at Girls Trip, which was made by Universal, and was incredibly successful. Nowhere in their calculations did they say like, oh, we have to be able to release this movie in China. That just wasn’t sort of on the table for it. And so it’s still very possible to make an incredibly successful movie that is mostly playing in the US. And that’s good. We want to have a range of things being made.

Also, to date, the television that we’re making, some of it goes overseas, but some of it doesn’t go overseas. We’re still able to make television that is appealing to a very American sensibility that’s about sort of America right now. And I think that’s only going to continue.

So, I’m not too pessimistic that we’re going to lose the ability to have a culture of filmmaking that is sort of uniquely looking at American culture because we have that, it’s just sometimes not on the big screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. From a practical point of view, I don’t think there’s much sense in tailoring your writing for some imagined studio executive’s desires. Look, if in your heart what you really want to write is Pacific Rim, well, congrats. Good news. That is the kind of thing that studios probably will look at and go, OK, that feels like it could play really well internationally. And, yeah, that will give you a leg up.

But you have to want to write that. You have to feel that. You can’t calculate these things. If you do, you just end up with a calculated piece of crap. And believe me, we’ve got enough of it. We’ve got enough calculated pieces of crap coming from highly trained professionals. So we don’t need amateur calculated crap. What we need is stuff that feels authentic and passionate.

So, the truth is you kind of have to play the hand you’re dealt by your own passion and your own desire as a writer. And just know that there are still avenues for everybody. There are — good news — far more avenues now than there were five years ago for, for instance, grown up dramas. Because now they don’t necessarily need to exist theatrically. They can exist in a very real way on Netflix or on HBO. So, you’ve got to write what you want to write. Don’t try and game the system. You will lose.

**John:** I agree.

All right, our last question comes from Arvin who writes, “I’ve received notes back on several of my short scripts. One person keeps giving comments back that I am writing a ‘therapy piece’ and I’m putting my own issues into the script and not dramatizing the conflict. What is a therapy piece and how do I avoid writing one?”

**Craig:** Oh, well, I can guess. I mean, it’s not really a common term, meaning I’ve never heard it before.

**John:** I never heard it before either. But I understand what the friend is saying. And to me what the friend is saying is that if feels like you’re writing this to work through some issue that is not necessarily interesting to a reader or potential viewer of this product.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we have all seen scripts that feel like they’re navel-gazing. Somebody is writing a script because the events in their mind and the insights that they are having about circumstances particular to them are occupying their every waking minute. And now they’re putting it into a screenplay. It is a terrible miscalculation to do that because by and by those specific details of your life are remarkably boring to everybody.

There is a reason you have to pay therapists. It’s not just for their expertise. It’s also because nobody else wants to listen to that shit week after week after week. It would be exhausting. Literally exhausting.

We all have our problems. We are all carrying our baggage. And it is fine to be informed by that, or inspired by that, to write something that would be universal for everybody, that would be exciting for everyone.

If you are writing a screenplay to exercise your own personal demons and you’re not doing it couched in a larger story that would play to somebody who has no interest in your personal demons, then yeah, you’re kind of not doing it right. That said, Arvin, one person is saying that. I don’t know what other people are saying. And, you know, there are smaller movies that kind of do this somewhat successfully. I mean, you could argue that a lot of Woody Allen’s films are — I guess you’d call them therapy pieces in a way. But they are done with such wit and intelligence that we are entertained.

**John:** When people make intensely personal movies, that can be a really good thing, as long as that intensely personal thing speaks to a larger universal truth. It gives you an insight to the human condition that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. And so some of our great filmmakers make things that are intensely personal to them and yet we’re able to see through their lens a much broader perspective around us.

Speaking to the sense that this one person has read your script and it feels like you’re just working through your own stuff, you know, you’re not doing the other things well. And so you’re probably having characters speak the kinds of things you wish you could say, and in doing so you’re basically writing yourself into it, but not in a way that is entertaining for everyone else.

You look at Aaron Sorkin, I mean, you could say that most of what Aaron Sorkin writes sort of feels like therapy pieces. It sort of feels like you’re going through a therapy session with him. And yet he has such tremendous mastery of craft that you’re sort of delighted to go through those therapy sessions with him. So, it may just be picking stories that let you examine things that are interesting to you — internally interesting to you — but finding a way to externalize them in a way that they’re interesting to other people as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a term that has become very popularized. Mary Sue. Or Gary Sue. Depending on gender. And the idea there is a writer creates a character that is essentially a stand in for them. And this character is an idealized perfected them. So, whenever something goes wrong, it’s because this character is being unfairly wronged. And they are able to quickly fix the situation and come out on top. And it’s just basically sort of a teenage fantasy version of yourself. It’s an immature, childish expression of kind of an overpowered perfected you, which in and of itself implies a need for actual therapy, which I think is pretty universal and common to all human beings.

I’ll make a suggestion, Arvin. Check out, if you haven’t seen it already, 500 Days of Summer by Neustadter and Weber and directed by Marc Webb. Because it is a therapy piece I think. I think — I think it was based on a relationship that Scott Neustadter actually had. And it is very much that and yet manages to be extraordinarily entertaining and I think provides a kind of universal pep talk for us all.

So, we don’t feel like we’re watching one person getting back at someone or proving to themselves that they’re OK or that they were wronged. We watch someone go through something that we feel we’ve all felt. So, take a look at that and maybe you’ll get some good lessons from that.

**John:** I think that’s a great suggestion. And what’s crucial about 500 Days of Summer is that you see the suffering and you also see the mistakes that the protagonist is making. And so often in the Mary Sue stories or the Marty Stu stories, the character is flawless and therefore uninteresting.

**Craig:** Correct. That kind of is the hallmark — I like Marty Stu. I don’t know why Gary Sue. I saw Gary Sue and I did think like that’s weird, because Sue is still, like no one is named Gary Sue. So Marty Stu. I like that. That’s much better.

**John:** Our friend Julia Turner was talking about that on the Slate Culture Gabfest today and they were talking through fan fiction and the prevalence of the Mary Sue and the Marty Stu character in fan fiction.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely out there.

**John:** It’s out there. All right, it is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, I am so fascinated by what you put on the outline that I want you to talk me through it.

**Craig:** Well, this is the most — it’s just bizarre. So, George Plimpton, you know, George Plimpton knows — I don’t even know why George Plimpton is famous. I’ve got to be honest with you. I never quite got it. He was — I think he wrote some books about sports and —

**John:** But he was mostly a talk show guest is what I think of him.

**Craig:** Yeah. He was famous for being famous and for having that incredibly patrician American accent. And then he was also famous, I think, for people of my generation because he was the guy that advertised I think in television or something like that. But anyway George Plimpton was also quite rich apparently. And he purchased a 3,700-year-old tablet from the ancient civilization of Babylon. You know, and they had this cuneiform, we all learned that in school, their manner of writing which was these little wedge shapes in clay. And then eventually the tablet was gifted to some academics.

So, a guy named Dr. Daniel Mansfield, along with his team at the University of New South Wales in Australia, took a close look at this tablet. Everybody knew that it was basically mathematical in nature. What they figured out, in fact, is that it was a tool — it was essentially like a times table, except it was a trigonometric table to calculate right triangles at different sizes.

And what’s fascinating about it is it is actually a more advanced trigonometric system than the one the Greeks figured out 1,500 years later which we are still using today. So, our system of trigonometry is limited to our number system, which is basically base 10, you know. 1, 10, 100, 1,000.

But the Babylonians were using base 60, like time. So they divided things up into time. Which meant that they could have many more perfect divisions of things as they calculated them and they wouldn’t end up in these weird repeating fractions. Like if you want to take a third of 60, it’s 20. No problem. It’s exact.

You want to take a third of 10, it’s 3.33333 forever. Not as exact. So, really fascinating stuff. And we’ll throw a link here in the show notes. It actually will make sense to you when you read it. It’s not a particularly — you don’t need a math degree to understand this. All you need to know is there is a clay tablet from 3,700 years ago that may change the way we do trigonometry today. And that is awesome.

**John:** That’s very cool. My thing will not change the world, but it was a great observation. So this is a piece by Hana Michels writing for The Cut called Sword Guys are a Thing and I’ve had Sex with All of Them. And she talks through Sword Guys.

And Sword Guys are guys who own swords. And she really finds this sort of subculture of men who buy swords. Asian swords or other swords. And prop swords. Some are cos players, but many of them aren’t. And there’s just a very unique kind of man she’s describing as the man who owns a sword.

And she likens it to cat ladies, in the sense of like we have an idea of what a cat lady is and all the stereotypes about them, and you can kind of do the same things with any man who owns a sword. And so her piece I just thought was delightful, so I would recommend them.

It very much feels like the kind of observation you could see in a movie and say like, oh, wow, I totally get it because that guy has a sword hanging above his fireplace. It’s just very true.

**Craig:** I read this and I thought it was terrific but I didn’t think it was real. It seems not real. This is real?

**John:** Oh, this is real.

**Craig:** Are you sure?

**John:** I am going to bet $5.

**Craig:** Ok, because here’s the thing. Sword guys are real. There’s no question about that. I have sex with all of the sword guys feels made up to me. That’s not a thing. I just don’t believe that.

**John:** Well, I think I have sex with all the sword guys is the exaggeration of what it is like to be in a part of that piece of culture. Basically she’s saying I am the kind of girl who ends up having sex with the sword guys.

**Craig:** OK. I can see that. I don’t know. At some point while I was reading it I thought this is a master work of comic fiction. But if it’s real than I just am a bit confused, to be honest with you. Then I’m confused because the article seems to be both acknowledging and embracing what is — it seems to be painting this as a sort of pathetic pursuit and then also really appreciating it. I’m confused.

**John:** Yeah. So, you know, I think it would be delightful if I was confused and took this piece of fiction as a real fact. But I’m pretty sure that this is more on the order of a Modern Love kind of column in the Times where it’s like this is kind of a real thing. And so it’s a well-told version of the real situation.

**Craig:** I mean, she is a comedian.

**John:** She’s a comedian. Yeah. So like all comedians, there’s going to be exaggeration and things twisted around to make the joke better. But it feels real to me.

**Craig:** You know, she also wrote something called My Imaginary Boyfriend, Josh. I don’t know man. This can’t be real. Well, we’ll find out.

**John:** We’ll find out.

All right, that is our show for this week. So, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. 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 shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes. You can search for Scriptnotes on Apple Podcasts and add us and subscribe and leave us a review. That is so nice and helpful when you do that. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. Go there. You can download the PDFs of the full screenplays for all these things, but also the individual scenes that we talked through.

That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. So Megan gets them about four or five days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We also have a USB drive with the first 300 episodes available at store.johnaugust.com. Craig, thanks for a fun new segment.

**Craig:** John, thank you as always for being a podcast innovator.

**John:** Ah, we do our best. And I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Academy Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl)
* The Hudsucker Proxy [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hudsucker_Proxy) and [the full script](http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Hudsucker_Proxy.pdf).
* [Our scene in The Hudsucker Proxy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv33SsGHYHo), and [in the script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/HUDSUCKER_PROXY_Orientation.pdf)
* The Devil Wears Prada on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_Wears_Prada_(film)), and [the full script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DEVIL_WEARS_PRADA_Full_Script.pdf).
* [Our first scene in The Devil Wears Prada](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=t4isatjZ0BM), and [in the script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DEVIL_WEARS_Andy_Interview.pdf)
* [Our second scene in The Devil Wears Prada](https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_9506656686&feature=iv-UoUErzCSSctn&src_vid=b2f2Kqt_KcE&v=Ja2fgquYTCg), and [in the script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DEVIL_WEARS_Miranda_Monologue.pdf)
* Hidden Figures on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures), and [the full script](https://s3.foxmovies.com/foxmovies/production/films/123/assets/hidden_figures_screenplay.pdf-5183735384.pdf).
* [Our scene from Hidden Figures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syZeizyYNUs&app=desktop), and [in the script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/HIDDEN_FIGURES_New_Computer.pdf).
* Training Day on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Day), and [the full script](http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Training_Day.pdf).
* [Our scene from Training Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3myRRZkErs), and [in the script](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/TRAINING_DAY_Coffee_Shop.pdf).
* [Sword Guys Are a Thing and I’ve Had Sex With All of Them](https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/sword-guys-are-a-thing-and-ive-had-sex-with-all-of-them.html) by Hana Michels for The Cut
* [3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Stone Tablet Gets Translated, Changes History](http://www.distractify.com/omg/2017/08/28/13BnNP/babylonian-stone-tablet) by Collin Gosell for Distractify
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_317.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/well-it-worked-in-the-80s).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 313 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, are you at all afraid of the number 13?

**Craig:** No, not even in the slightest. No Triskaidekaphobia for me.

**John:** Not even a tiny little percentage of it for me. And I was thinking about this. I don’t have very many superstitious quirks really at all. The only thing I think I do on a regular basis is if I’m driving and I go underneath a red light or an orange light that’s about to turn red, I will scratch the roof of the car. And that’s a thing I started doing in college. And it’s a little OCD, but it’s also just kind of comforting to me. Do you have any of those?

**Craig:** No. I have drummed them all out of my life because they’re stupid. Every now and then what I will do is I’ll create momentary tests of fate. So, for instance, if there’s something where it’s going to be close, but I feel like I can do it, like for instance, oh, I let — like the door to my office is on a hinge, a springe hinge, right? So, it’s going to close. I open it and it’s closing behind me and then I think, oh, I forgot something in there. I turn around and then very quickly in my mind I think if I can get to the door before it closes then everything is going to go great today. And then I do it.

**John:** It’s the Raiders of the Lost Ark sort of escape from underneath the — yes.

**Craig:** But it’s an absurd thing to do.

**John:** Yeah. I do notice that even among our friends when we’re playing D&D, there are certain ones of us who will like, OK, that dice is no longer lucky, so we’re going to swap out which die were rolling for 20-sider. Which is, of course, crazy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not entirely crazy inasmuch as the dice that we’re using, we have lots of them, and they’re old. And in time a die can go out of true. And then — so you might think, well, there’s some — but we aren’t rolling those dice anywhere near enough times to make that determination. So, you’re right, essentially it is irrational. But also part and parcel of D&D. I feel like when you’re playing D&D you are accepting that you are in an irrational world with magic and stuff, so you might as well just, you know, extend that and keep it going.

**John:** Absolutely. Bring the fantasy into the real world.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Correct. Today on the show, we’ll be trying out a new segment where we look at four films from the past and discuss how we could make them today. Plus, Craig, we have more listener questions.

**Craig:** Well, I’m excited to do all of those things.

**John:** Hooray. But I know you’re especially excited about a future episode in which we’re going to be talking about Unforgiven. This was your idea. And so I want to warn listeners in advance that Unforgiven is coming, so if you have a chance to see the film or read the screenplay, or do both, this would be a good week to do it. Craig, what do you want to set up for our listeners about Unforgiven?

**Craig:** Unforgiven is coming and we’ve all got it coming, kid. So, this is our — what are we up to now? Our fourth deep dive? Four? We don’t do these very often, but Unforgiven is a fantastic, brilliant, brilliant script by David Webb Peoples. The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood, of course. Starring Clint Eastwood. And Gene Hackman. And Morgan Freeman.

And it is a wonderful movie to dissect in my opinion as a screenwriter to talk about the choices that were made all throughout. It is one of the best examples of a thematically cohesive film. Richard Harris also in the movie. And it is beautifully structured without feeling too short or too long. It has pretty much everything that I would ever hope for and it does it within a genre. And so it is one of the most literate — it’s certainly the most literate Western I think that has ever been made. And a gorgeous movie to dissect.

So, if you have not seen Unforgiven, or it’s been a while, of course it is available to you on all the normal avenues. And I suggest you take a look, because next week we’re going to be going in.

**John:** So if you’re looking for a screenplay to read, I’ve been doing some cursory Googling and there are quite a few Unforgivens floating out there. They all seem to be about the same. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about which draft you’re reading or sort of what’s in it. If somebody has a link to what they think is the definitive Unforgiven, send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. We’ll try to link to that in the show notes for next week’s episode.

What’s interesting as I was sort of Googling things is that more recent movies, because it becomes so commonplace for the Academy nominated films to send out their screenplays as PDFs, it’s a much more acceptable — like this is the definitive draft for people to read of the movie. Back in that day, it wasn’t the same way. So, there can be many different versions floating out there. But they all seem to be hitting the same scenes. They’re a pretty good representation of what people’s intention was as they were set to make this movie.

The legend of Unforgiven is that it was a — they shot a white script. Basically that Clint Eastwood took the script and filmed it. There was no rewriting. There was no changes of the script before they shot it. We’ll try to investigate that, too, to see whether there were any things that did change over the course of production.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve read — first of all, if you’re looking for scripts, avoid the transcripts. All that is is just somebody writing down what they hear on screen. But there are a bunch. I did see one that was — it said Shooting Draft. And it did seem like there may have been a few revisions, although I didn’t really see much in the way of asterisks. The movie is remarkably faithful to the script. There are few places here and there where there is a touch of wandering. It is typically when Clint Eastwood’s character of William Money is talking. He occasionally made slight adjustments. But they are very slight.

And in one case I thought a brilliant two-word adjustment that I just loved. But by and large, they shot it. They shot it just as it was written. And, oh no, I don’t want to upset anyone but, boy, he puts a lot of camera direction in his script, David Webb Peoples. I know we’re not supposed to do that, but, um, oh dear. Oh dear. Where are my pearls? I must clutch something.

**John:** So, that is coming in an upcoming episode, but also coming soon is the Austin Film Festival. So at the end of October, this October 26 through 29, Craig and I will be in Austin, Texas for the umpteenth annual Austin Film Festival. We’re there every year. There’s always a live Scriptnotes. There is one this year. It’ll be a nighttime thing. I think it’s the Friday night that we’re doing the Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There will be a party afterwards, so you should go to both of those things. There’s going to be a live Three Page Challenge, like there have been on previous seasons. So, what we usually do is there’s going to be a special webpage you’re going to go to submit saying like this is for the live Three Page Challenge at Austin, because we only want to have entries there for people who are going to be in the room with us. And so we can bring you up on stage to talk about what we read and what your intention was.

It’s a really cool exercise for us to be able to see like, OK, we just read this thing, but what did you actually mean. So often when we do the Three Page Challenge, we’re just sort of talking into the void. And to talk to the writer, that’s very exciting. So, next week or the week after there will be a special link for how you submit to the Three Page Challenge live at Austin.

**Craig:** Well, that’s going to be fun. It is our umpteenth. Always a good time. And this live show, it’s sort of a continuation of what we did last year, which was a bit of a departure, but it worked out pretty well. The general theory is we do it later in the evening, on Friday, when everyone is drunk. Everyone. And just creates a much better show as it turns out. It’s just much more fun and freewheeling. And we answer your questions. Don’t show up like — don’t be actually drunk. Don’t be actual drunk.

What I mean to say we’re all screenwriter drunk, which means we’ve all had a little more than 1.5 drinks. That’s what screenwriter drunk is.

**John:** All right. So you’re not required to drink for the live show.

**Craig:** No. God no.

**John:** So please don’t take that as an invitation to binge-drinking.

**Craig:** No barfing at our show.

**John:** Absolutely none. None of that.

**Craig:** We just can’t handle that.

**John:** One of my I would say frustrations of the live show we just did in Beverly Hills was that we did not have alcohol at that event, and the show was lovely, but I felt like a cocktail beforehand would have been just great.

**Craig:** Well I somehow got myself a glass of wine out of it.

**John:** There were two bottles of wine in the green room, so I did have like a glass of wine there. But I felt like the audience, there’s just a party vibe when everyone has access to alcohol.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I agree. Look, we’ve been really clear about this. And I think it should be our rider, like our backstage rider. Everybody who shows up with the exception of people who are on a program has to have had 1.5 drinks.

**John:** Well, I think there’s more exceptions there. I think the people who are under 21 should not have had drinks. Just the liability there, Craig, it’s a lot.

**Craig:** All right. Fine. And the dangerously old shouldn’t drink either. Yeah.

**John:** There’s a lot.

**Craig:** There’s a lot.

**John:** It’s a good thing that there’s somebody here looking out for us on a legal liability basis, because there’s so much money to lose here.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, they could literally get our nones of dollars.

**John:** Yeah. All our t-shirt money.

**Craig:** Aw, t-shirt money.

**John:** Good stuff. And people have been asking will there be new t-shirts. There will eventually be new t-shirts. I think before Christmas there will be new t-shirts because you have to look good.

One of the joys of coming back to Los Angeles is that I will just walk around and I will see people wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt and it makes me very happy.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. I see them all the time. It’s crazy.

**John:** But lovely. So, thank you for wearing your t-shirts with pride.

**Craig:** Can you imagine what it’s like to have had partnership in a business that creates a product and you see the product everywhere and you’ve never received a dime. Do you have any concept, John, of what that’s like?

**John:** I think it would be like having done a lot of work rewriting a film and then not having your name on it, and therefore not receiving any residuals. And I would know what that’s like.

**Craig:** Or doing a whole lot of work on a movie and then getting your name on it and another person’s name is on it and they didn’t do much at all.

**John:** Yeah. There’s that, too.

**Craig:** That’s the guy to be.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** All right. This is a new segment. So, you know, 313 episodes in, we keep trying new things. This segment was suggested by Annie Hayes who actually helped us out at an Austin Film Festival a couple years ago. And she was awesome. And so she came up with this idea for a segment and I think it’s a really good idea. So we’ll see.

She’s calling this Modernize This, which is the sense of how do you take an old movie and make it new. Or sort of take the idea for an old movie and how would you do that movie today. So, we’re not talking about remakes or sequels. So we’re not talking about Robocop or Ghostbusters or Escape from LA. But like how do you take an old movie and make a movie that does the same kind of things today? What would change and what would be the challenges and the opportunities of making that kind of movie today?

And I was thinking about this, I was flying back on a plane from Ohio and I watched the movie You Get Me, which was a Netflix original movie. And I dug it. I genuinely dug it. It is a teen thriller. It’s basically a teen fatal attraction. And it was gorgeously shot. I liked it.

I landed in Los Angeles and like turned off airplane mode and Googled, pulled up Rotten Tomatoes, and it was not well-reviewed. And I was frustrated by that because it felt like, you know what, maybe it’s just not possible to make a teen fatal attraction now that’s going to get good reviews, but I still dug the movie.

**Craig:** Hmm. It’s weird that you liked something but the critics didn’t. I think you should just stop liking it now, John.

**John:** I should probably stop liking it now. I should question my basic assumptions of what is good and what is wrong.

**Craig:** You’ve been told.

**John:** But quite often when you and I are in meetings, it will come up like, ìOh, we want to do something that’s like this.î Or we want this dynamic to be like it is in that movie. And so I thought let’s take a look at some of those movies that are always cited and how would you make that kind of movie today.

**Craig:** Well, let’s do it.

**John:** All right. Let’s start with the one I think that comes up more often than any other movie which is for me Romancing the Stone. So Romancing the Stone from 1984. It was written by Diane Thomas, directed by Robert Zemeckis. If you haven’t seen it, just see that. See that along with Unforgiven this week, because it’s just great.

So the basic plot is Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist. She heads off to Colombia because her sister has been kidnapped and she finds herself in this relationship with Michael Douglas who is kind of an Indiana Jones-y kind of adventurer, but he’s a scamp. He’s not a good guy, he’s not a bad guy, but like their relationship becomes the focus of the adventure of the story. And so often when I get something to — sent something to rewrite, they’re looking at the central dynamic between the man and the woman and they’ll say like, ìOh, like Romancing the Stone.î You’ve probably gotten a note like that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. So it’s a great shorthand for a woman who is not looking for love and does not like this rascally man. And a man who is an uncompromising gruff guy. Are thrown together in buddy cop style, essentially. I don’t like you and you don’t like me. And then they fall in love.

**John:** Yep. Guardians of the Galaxy uses this trope between the two mains, between Zoe Saldana’s character and Chris Pratt’s character. That is the central kind of dynamic. She comes in much tougher than the Kathleen Turner character comes in. But it’s that same kind of thing, where they hate each other, they’re fighting, but ultimately they are going to fall in love. You just know that it’s going to have to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. We simply cannot abide relationships where women and men don’t like each other. And then it’s only because they really just want to sleep together. You know, sometimes women and men do not like each other. Did you know that? [laughs]

**John:** It does happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Weirdly, a movie I was working on last year, there was the suggestion like, oh, could we change this friend character to a woman. And I said yes you can, and we can totally do that. I just want to make it clear to everybody that the audience will expect there to be a relationship between these two characters. And I can’t fix that. There’s going to be a basic assumption that if that character is a woman, given what that character has to do, there’s going to be an assumption that their sparring and their bickering is going to turn into romance.

So like I would have to rewrite that whole character. I can’t just simply change the gender because of the expectations of society.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s basically right. When we see men and women bickering and arguing we just presume it’s foreplay. It’s just elaborate foreplay. And maybe that’s part of the key to reimagining and modernizing something like Romancing the Stone. So many of the examples that we’re going to be dealing with, the problem that exists now with modernizing them is that they existed in the first place.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So they led to a lot of knock-offs. A lot of lesser-thans. And a lot of versions, not just of the plot, but the character dynamic as you’re describing has leaked into all sorts of movies across all sorts of genres. So maybe one way to reconsider Romancing the Stone is to come up with a relationship between a man and a woman that is not romantic at all, and never will be. Let’s just get rid of that. Let’s make it about earning respect or understanding another person, walking in their shoes. There are other ways to perfect a relationship which is, I guess when you get down to it, what movies are about. Two people perfecting a relationship.

**John:** So let’s look at ways you could stick a man and a woman together on screen and not have the expectation of romance. Well, if you establish from the beginning that they are brother and sister, then you take the sting of that off. So they’re an estranged brother and sister who have to come together to do this thing. We’re not going to expect them to hook up at the end unless it’s Game of Thrones.

If there’s such a disparity between the two characters that we don’t see them ever — doesn’t seem plausible that they would hook up romantically, like there’s an age difference. That they’re just vastly different types. You can sometimes do that. I mean, there’s still going to be — it’s going to be ageist. It’s going to be sort of body-shapeist, but there is — it breaks that expectation that that natural thing is going to happen.

**Craig:** You can get that dynamic even if you don’t push things too far in kind of an obvious direction. Even if you have a very good-looking 60-year-old man and a very good-looking 25-year-old woman, if the dynamic from the jump is parental and it’s about getting the lessons from this person before they die, or whatever it is, I mean, there are ways to push relationship into father-daughter in a way where you would never think, oh, oh now I don’t want them. That wouldn’t feel right. This feels so much more father-daughter or mother-son to me that I don’t want.

I mean, ultimately that’s the key. Your job is to just take away the emotional desire from the audience to have them get together. And by the way, one of them could be gay if they’re opposite sex and then you’ve solved that problem immediately.

**John:** You have solved the problem but I think there’s always going to be that question of like, oh, but is this going to be the exception? Is the going to be the she’s a lesbian who is going to crossover for this one guy, or vice versa? There could be something there. I think it’s — I definitely hear that instinct, but I do just wonder if some part of me is going to think like, oh, but I really wanted them to get together.

I remember when My Best Friend’s Wedding came out. There was a huge contingent of people like, oh no, she should have ended up with her best friend. But he was gay. It’s like, oh, but they were delightful together. There’s always going to be that sense of like the people who want Will and Grace to get married.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, yes. But I think that that — I think we live in a different time now. I think in particular if Kathleen Turner shows up and meets grumpy Michael Douglas and he’s rugged and tough and they’re quarreling and he’s gay, then once we have that revelation what we are now looking for is, OK, what is the new perfected state of this relationship? That’s the most important thing. You’ve got to substitute something. You can’t just take it away. There has to be something else. So that partly is a trick. I think of modernizing something like Romancing the Stone from the character point of view, because I agree with you, I just think that the romance of Romancing the Stone has been done too many times.

**John:** So, but I would say like let’s put a pin in sort of killing the romance and let’s look at sort of fundamentally the DNA is like this sparring couple ultimately does fall in love. So is there a way to sort of do Romancing the Stone that doesn’t fall into exactly the same traps? One of the easy and obvious things to try to do is to basically flop the genders, so that he is the romance novelist come down and she is the bad ass. She is the Lara Croft that is ultimately getting in here. And they despise each other for different reasons. It’s a little harder to imagine. Weirdly, I can picture the Lara Croft character more easily. Imagining that novelist coming in, I think it’s a different character coming in. I think he’s coming in with different sets of expectations and different biases.

But I think there’s a version of it that could work. And maybe you’re not going to the jungle. You’re going to some place more exotic, some place farther out. Make them culturally more different so that there’s wider space for them to travel to get together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that that would be interesting. And I think you’re right. We would need to send them farther flung than — further flung? Further flung?

**John:** It’s a distance. It’s both a distance and a journey, so it could either.

**Craig:** There you go. They need to be sent somewhere even more remote than they were — because, look, Romancing the Stone in and of itself was borrowing from Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was basically saying what if you did romantic Raiders of the Lost Ark. And we’ve seen a lot of those movies, too. And so you need to go somewhere stranger. I actually think a real cultural difference would be nice. I mean, in Romancing the Stone we’re in this remote jungle in Colombia and it’s just two white people. And the villain is a white guy. And so it’s just white people running around in Colombia. And I think that there is an interesting story to tell where you’re dealing with people who are native to their country, indigenous people, really deep into parts of the world that are maybe not quite as modern and yet are probably far more modern than we realize here where we live. And playing around with culture I think could be really interesting.

**John:** Agreed. All right, let’s move on to our next movie. This is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Again, this is all from the ’80s. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off if you haven’t seen it, again, add it to your list. It’s really remarkable. Written and directed by John Hughes. It tells the story of Ferris Bueller who takes a day off from school and the adventures he has over the course of that day. It’s a classic sort of breaking the patterns of normal reality and just having the lark, having the adventure.

So, I guess there’s a couple ways to approach this. First off, how possible is it to make a movie that stars essentially a 16, 17-year-old protagonist that can break out past sort of a teen audience? And weirdly I feel like teens aren’t going to see movies with teenagers anymore, too. But how do you make this kind of movie with this kind of protagonist open up and become a broadly accepted movie?

**Craig:** I don’t know how you can do this because it was singular. I mean, it was a singular piece of work. It was one man’s vision from top to bottom. It was done perfectly. And it was not particularly — I mean people think of it as being very ’80s because John Hughes was a master at the accoutrement of teen life in the ’80s, but Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out in 1986. Ferris Bueller was 16 years old in the movie. And I was 15 years old watching it. And I did not recognize that world at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It looked nothing at all like my world. I didn’t talk like that. I didn’t dress like that. Nobody in my school looked like that. And yet it felt real.

**John:** How a movie can be both feel true but also be kind of aspirational at the same time. No kid was actually kind of like that. And yet it captured the feeling of what suburban Chicago would feel like. Everyone speaks in a much more sophisticated way than they actually would in real life, which is sort of a movie convention. But the way that Ferris is able to address us directly to camera. It is a very singular unique voice. So I don’t think we can duplicate that exactly.

But I wonder in the DNA of that, the sense of like you know what, maybe just don’t go to work today. I think that is an idea that you could do today and actually make something really special out of. Like you know it doesn’t even have to be a teenage protagonist, but just like the person who is supposed to go into work and doesn’t take the exit ramp and just has the wild day. That feels like a movie that’s evergreen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so, but there’s something about it being a kid. You know, adults can take days off. Kids, you know, they’re prisoners in a sense. I would — the one thing about John Hughes was that he was a master at articulating a vision of upper class white Illinois America, teen America, always Illinois. So it was Midwest.

It would be interesting to go to a filmmaker now and say this is the basic premise. You have somebody who is smarter than everybody around them, who is popular for reasons we can barely even fathom, he can barely even fathom. He gets away with everything. He is going to rig himself the best day ever and he’s going to get away with it. And his friend is going to have to deal with the ramifications. But they’re black and it’s also Chicago but it’s South Side. Now, give us — and by the way, put it in the ’80s also. Don’t take it out of the ’80s and give us the other version of this. There’s a whole other world. And sometimes the most fascinating thing is when you’re not going across the globe and saying well what was it like for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in Yemen. No, what was it like for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off literally 45 minutes south of where Ferris Bueller’s Day Off happened?

But still it’s funny. Don’t fall into the trap of like it all ends in gunfire and gang violence. Make it funny. Make it amazing. You know, but build it around that character. I think could be a really interesting — I mean, they could even pass each other.

**John:** That’s what I was thinking. It would be fascinating if during the parade or something, during Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or like the car, you focus on the valets who took the car at one point. It’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s something — that’s what I would do. Somebody is going to do that right? I feel like somebody is going to just do what we just said.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And you know what, again, I don’t think we’re going to get any money, unless you’ve been getting money. [laughs]

**John:** You’ll never know. There’s no auditing of the show. Let’s go on to our next ’80s classic. This is Rain Man. So this is a story by Barrow Morrow, screenplay by Morrow and Ron Bass. Directed by Barry Levinson. So, again, if you haven’t seen it you need to see Rain Man. Tom Cruise plays a guy who has inherited a fortune but he’s also inherited his autistic brother played by Dustin Hoffman. And it is a cross-country trip because his brother will not fly.

Craig, how do you do a story like Rain Man today? Can you?

**Craig:** Um…I don’t think so.

**John:** So, what is the obstacles of making Rain Man today?

**Craig:** Well, when Rain Man came out it autism was still quite exotic. And it was only after really starting in the, I guess, late ’90s/early 2000s that diagnoses of spectrum disorder started to explode. And autism became kind of a national conversation. Our understanding of what autism was expanded from — even, you know, look, even Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal was a very kind of narrow slice of — I mean, profoundly autistic weren’t talking at all. But it expanded way beyond that to people that we deal with all the time in our lives and who are quite functional and move around and do in fact fly and probably are pilots. But I think probably the autism part just doesn’t feel right anymore.

The question of a brother having to finally become a brother to a brother who is somehow disadvantaged, disabled, is interesting. I think you could do a Rain Man today with a brother who has schizophrenia. I think that’s a very unexplored topic. And a very tragic one. That’s probably the direction I would go.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a smaller Sundance-y version of the story that is two brothers taking a trip across the country and one of them has a profound situation that impacts his ability to process the outside the world. And the other brother is just an asshole who has to become less of an asshole over the course of the trip.

I think if you’re trying to make the big studio version of this, you have to have the big studio version of this that can plug two giant actors in to those roles at the time. I think Rain Man wouldn’t be Rain Man if it weren’t for those giant stars in those parts. And so finding who those people would be is really crucial and planning for these are going to be sort of big showcase marquee roles to do it.

So, I think it’s possible. It’s not easy. And it also feels like the kind of movie, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, where a studio will make one of these movies a year. Basically we’re going to make this movie and try to get an Oscar for it. But we’re not going to try to make this movie if we don’t think this there’s going to be an Oscar looming for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. These were made all the time back in the day. They are rarely made now. Oftentimes when we see movies like this from a studio it’s because they’re distributing it. But some other entity made it. And I agree with you it has to be star-driven. It’s practically the definition of a star-driven movie. But it is doable.

**John:** My hunch is that this kind of movie would be based on a book today. So there would be a book that they bought that was a bestseller that was beloved and sort of as the book was taking off and attracting a lot of attention people were already sort of plugging in who those stars were going to be. That to me feels like the kind of way you’d make this movie today. I don’t think you’d make this movie without a book behind it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just agree. I agree. Well, although you know, look, if you wrote a great spec. If you wrote a great spec about a brother, or make it sisters, because we don’t see sisters very often in this capacity where one has to care for the other. I mean, we have but not frequently enough I don’t think.

Look, I don’t know how else to put it without sounding callous and exploitive. When we portray heartbreaking conditions, mental conditions or physical conditions on screen, we do it in part because of a certain exotic nature of them. And I know the word exotic makes people’s hair stand up because it sounds like we’re, I don’t know, making people into freaks. We’re not. It’s just a question of interest. I mean, it’s just simple interest. What interests us? What fascinates us? I mean, the movie Mask, which is a beautiful movie — not the Jim Carey one, but the Eric Stoltz/Cher one — that is about a very exotic condition. And it fascinates us. The Elephant Man fascinated us.

Well, the Elephant Man’s condition ultimately wasn’t as fatal as someone’s glioblastoma, which doesn’t fascinate us because it’s not physical. It doesn’t have these huge — you know what I mean? So it’s about exploring something and in a way educating. The truth is Rain Man actually did a lot of good, I think.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. I think it took conditions which had always been like not discussed and sort of put them out in the open. And while we didn’t have the best words for discussing them then, I feel like it allowed a conversation to begin. So that can be a good thing.

I agree with you that like swapping in a woman for the Charlie character could be useful. I can envision a Sandra Bullock/Oscar Isaac story that is this kind of thing. Or she may be too inherently likeable. But some A-list actress opposite an Oscar Isaac who would be magnificent in playing whatever condition or situation you want to put the other character in. There’s some version of that that could work.

**Craig:** I like that Oscar Isaac is listening to this and he goes, so, anything? Really? Any disease you can think of? Any condition, you just think of me?

**John:** I think Oscar Isaac is one of those unique actors who is just so good that like, oh yeah, you know what, he could totally do that. He could pull that off.

**Craig:** Oscar Isaac is so good. He’s so good. It’s actually exciting to see that actors are still good. That’s a weird thing to say, because we’ve lost so many movie stars, per se, you know, the star system has gone away. And when we grow up we think of Hollywood always in nostalgic terms about the great actors of old. And then we compare them to what we have now and every generation it always feels silly. Like, oh, well they had, you know, Cary Grant and we have Arnold Schwarzenegger. Well, now Arnold Schwarzenegger is the actor, you know, and then we look, but we have — the actors just continue to renew.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** They really do. I think more than great directors and more than great writers. I think there are probably more great directors, more great writers back then because there were more movies being made. But great actors, they just keep coming. It’s exciting.

**John:** Yeah. Easy to write roles for them.

All right, our final one to talk through is Coming to America which is a 1988 film. Story by Eddie Murphy. Screenplay by David Sheffield and Barry Blaustein. Yes, I know there’s controversy over the origins of Coming to America, but it was directed by John Landis. So it tells a story of this very spoiled African prince who comes to New York and has to learn sort of the common ways of America.

How do you get into a story like Coming to America today? So it doesn’t have to be a prince. It doesn’t have to even necessarily be Coming to America. But that central idea of a pampered person coming to a place and having to learn it from the ground up. What does that story feel like today?

**Craig:** It’s tough because what’s happened since 1988 is all of the very, very wealthy powerful people in places that are so different enough from America that the journey and arrival would be exciting have already been to America. They all come to America. They come to London. They buy large amounts of land and property in these places. So, it was a bit novel to imagine a very small perhaps Central African nation which had a son who had not been exposed at all to America, but I don’t know where I would go to find that person now.

You know, the truth is Coming to America does not age particularly well. There is, you know, at the heart of it a very clichéd story.

**John:** And I think you really need to look at for what are the tropes you’re going to be following into if you’re not very careful. So, in terms of a culture coming from money coming to America, you talk about sort of vast wealth from overseas coming here and buying stuff up. There’s a version of this where you have somebody who is incredibly wealthy from the Middle East or somewhere who comes to America and for whatever reason does not have access to his money and has to sort of see America from the ground up.

And there is something — there could be something delightful and charming about how those outside eyes can see what we are like and also be able to see how a Midwesterner perceives a person from the Middle East. Like there could be a story that is actually — I can imagine a story that’s good about that. I can also imagine so many pitfalls in sort of how you’re doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if this one is worth it. You know, we really should just run a studio.

**John:** Done. I mean, if anybody wants to throw us some VC money and just build us a studio that would be great. Because we have a friend who apparently just came into a lot of money to make movies, so maybe those same people who have given him some money could give us some money.

**Craig:** So, what I think though, John, is that we should get an actual studio. I mean, one of the studios.

**John:** Oh yeah, like Paramount.

**Craig:** They give these studios, ultimately, they have to give them to someone to run. Have to, right? And if you have one of those studios that’s maybe struggling, why wouldn’t they just give it to us?

**John:** That’s a valid question to ask.

**Craig:** We’re really good at this. We’ve written a lot of hit movies. We know that. You know? And we know people.

**John:** We have good relationships with a lot of writers. And we only have bad relationships with a few writers. And, you know what? Screw them. We don’t need them.

**Craig:** They’re not going to work there.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s just as simple as that.

**John:** Our blacklist is very, very short. But, I mean, we get along with a lot of directors. And the few that we don’t get along with, oh well. That’s OK.

**Craig:** Right. You can’t get along with everybody.

**John:** No. That’s not possible.

**Craig:** But generally speaking we know lots of people, lots of producers. And we have a good eye for material. And I feel like we would do a really good job.

**John:** Yeah. I think it would be challenging to be a development exec working for us.

**Craig:** Well, yes. And we would have to really just get the best. But you don’t need that many. See, that’s the other thing.

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** Let’s say you’re making five movies a year. How many? I mean, honestly do you even need any? I mean, if we found two that we loved, you know, because the truth is we wouldn’t be developing a lot of stuff we didn’t want to make.

**John:** Yeah. That’s classically what everybody says as they come into this job. It’s like, ìI only want to spend the money on the things I’m going to make. Or I only want to make the hits.î That’s the other thing they say a lot.

**Craig:** Only make the hits. Only make the hits.

**John:** That’s a great business plan is to only make the hits.

So, I don’t know that we made any hits today, but I kind of enjoyed that segment. So, again, in all these things we’re talking about, we’re not really describing like let’s take the original IP and make a remake it. So let’s not make a new Coming to America. But how do you make that kind of movie I think is a valid thing? And if we do this again, I really want to get into the sex thrillers that used to exist in the ’80s because they were great. And we just don’t make them anymore.

**Craig:** No. The Erotic Thriller. Yeah, the age of the erotic thriller.

**John:** I want a Jagged Edge. We don’t make a Jagged Edge anymore.

**Craig:** We just don’t. I think that somewhere a borderline producer is frantically trying to find a writer to do our Chicago South Side Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

**John:** Yep. That’s a situation where you would have to have some control over the original rights to do that, I think.

**Craig:** If you wanted to do the overlap, certainly. No question about that.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to some questions. First off we have a question from Jacob. Let’s take a listen.

Jacob: I’m a 22-year-old film student from Phoenix, Arizona. My question is about making the most of opportunities in the industry. I was lucky enough to snag two unpaid development internships in LA this fall. I really don’t want these months to fly by and have nothing come out of it. Both said job opportunities are possible afterwards, but of course no guarantee. I would just love any tips on what I could be doing during these internships to really stand out and be remembered. How could I ensure that the time spent with these companies will truly be fruitful and worthwhile?

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**John:** That’s a great question. We have great listeners.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** I remember being in exactly Jacob’s situation. I was 22 when I had my first internships here. And so I was reading for a company called Prelude Pictures which had a deal over at Paramount. And I think I did basically the right things. I asked sort of what they needed me to do. And that was to write some coverage. I asked for samples, like can you show me some good coverage, like coverage you really like? And I tried to do the best job I could on the coverage to give them the coverage that they would like.

What I always did as I turned in coverage, like I tried to see if they actually were reading it and if they could give me some feedback on what I was doing. And you should never feel needy but at the same time if it’s an unpaid internship, which I think has to have some college component at this point. I think studios are very wary about unpaid internships in general, but like make sure you’re getting something out of it and making sure that you get sort of what the company is trying to do and how you can be helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Some practical tips for you Jacob. Show up a little bit early every time. Leave at the very end. When you are asked to do something, do it and deliver it before you’re supposed to deliver it. Essentially, every step of the way exceed expectations. Every single step of the way. Exceed expectations. If they give you four tasks to do, and they say you have all week to do it, do it in two days and do it great. Do it great.

Forget about everything else. Forget about everything else. Just be a killer. And do a really good job.

It’s sad, but you’d think that everybody would kind of get the message here, that exceeding expectations is how you get noticed. They don’t. Good news, Jacob. That means you’ll be special. So, you just have to go above and beyond. In addition to that, be pleasant. Be humble. Listen. Ask people if they are ever willing to sit down with you at lunch and you can just ask them questions about themselves and how they got where they got and get advice from them. They love that. And they love people who ask.

So, in general, you will be this very lovely, very intellectually curious person who is a hard worker, who is always there, who does more than he’s asked to do and does it very, very well. That will get you noticed. And in the end that’s how you take advantage of these things. By getting noticed and becoming somebody that they would miss if you weren’t there. That’s how you get the job.

**John:** Completely agree. And what you might be looking for down the road after this internship when they say there could be job opportunities, what it really means is you might be an assistant. You might get a job answering phones and doing that kind of coverage for pay. And that is probably a good thing. So try to get to that point.

What Craig says about like see if you can sit down for lunch with people, like don’t go right ahead to the producer or whoever is running the company. Like have lunch with the assistants. Get to know them. Get to find out how their job works and so they will tell you about tracking boards and all the other stuff. Just learn. Just learn how all that works. Figure out how you could be a good assistant because one day that assistant is going to call in sick and they’ll say like, ìHey Jacob could you take over the phones for a few hours.î And you say, ìYes, sure, I can do that.î And you can prove like, you know what, you’re a competent person that they can trust.

On that last topic of trust, don’t talk about the stuff that you’re doing. Don’t talk about the internal stuff that you’re finding out there with strangers. Just make sure that they feel like they can trust you to not spill the beans on everything that’s happening in the company.

**Craig:** Yeah. One last bit of advice. At every workplace there is somebody who will resent anyone who does well. That is a person who has given up. Or who is scared of their own mediocrity. And it will be tempting to find yourself in conflict with that person or to let them get in your head. Don’t. Don’t.

**John:** Don’t.

**Craig:** They’ll be there. You’re going to get a job there after your not-paid-job. You’ll get a job. You’ll work your job, you’ll get promoted. You’ll get a better job. Then you’ll leave and then you’ll move on. And ten years later you’ll be doing something else, hopefully wonderful. They will still be there.

**John:** Yeah. Lastly, I would say there’s a time limit on these kind of internships. And if you’re doing this for more than three months, maybe you need to move on. Especially if you’re doing two different ones. At least pick the better of the two and maybe continue that one on a little longer, look for a different thing. Because you’re not there to be just free labor and hanging out. So, it should be a growth experience for you, too. And when you’ve stopped growing, move on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s the idea. Is that you get to that place where you say, OK, I should be paid at this point. And then you say to them, listen, I am going to have to move on if there isn’t a paid job here. Make sure that you have somewhere to move on to. And that will make them very scared. And that’s how you know, by the way. If they say, ìOh, well we’ve loved having you. Good luck,î well, then you didn’t really stand out.

**John:** Or there really wasn’t a job for you.

**Craig:** Or there really wasn’t a job. Exactly. But if there was, and they let you go, then OK, that’s information. And if there is a job and they get nervous and say, ìWait, wait, wait, we don’t want you to go,î then you know you’ve done it.

**John:** Yep. Last thing I will say is the topic of unpaid internships naturally brings up the question like well who can afford to have an unpaid internship? And I think there is a basic question of fairness at work. The people who can afford to have an unpaid internship have money from some other place. And so we can’t sort of dig into this now, but I just want to acknowledge that part of the reason why I’m down on unpaid internships is because they fundamentally favor people who could afford to take an unpaid internship.

**Craig:** It’s true. I never did one because I couldn’t afford it. The first internship I had was through the Television Academy and there was a stipend. That was the only way I was able to do it. They paid money. I mean, it wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to live. Yeah, I’m with you. I think everybody should get paid.

To the companies that have these unpaid internships, please don’t tell me you can’t afford to pay minimum wage. You can. Come on.

**John:** Yeah. So if it really is a deal that you’re cutting with the university, I get it. There could be reasons why it’s all an educational thing. But I agree with you. You can pay minimum wage. Pay minimum wage.

**Craig:** Yeah. Come on.

**John:** All right. Next question. Brandon writes, ìI’m writing a comedy script and was wondering if putting in a few alternate jokes, maybe in parentheses or italics or somehow otherwise noted, would be a boon or a detriment. Would the reader think, hey, this guy has got jokes, great? Or, boy, this is unprofessional amateur, bad? I haven’t seen it done in any of the comedy scripts I’ve read, even in the very early drafts. What if one of the jokes makes the reader laugh more than the other? It’s sometimes difficult to tell which joke is most funny.î

Craig, alternate jokes?

**Craig:** Alternate jokes in a standard screenplay format for someone who is not involved in the development of the movie are problematic because they don’t know how to read them. They’re not designed to be read in secession. They’re designed to be read as a matter of choice. Pick one. So, you’re stopping the read and now asking them to do math. You can, for instance, Fade In software allows to do an alternate system where you can click on something if you want to see alternates, and then a bunch come up.

So, if somebody has that they can do it that way. But by and large it’s something that’s not really great for people who are reading your screenplay because at some point it pulls them out. It just reminds them that there’s a writer there who is now doing some math.

What you can do at times is — and this is something that a lot of modern comedies have kind of gravitated to — frankly I think over-gravitated — is you can create a structure where someone can ramble off a whole bunch of those things. That’s fine. Those can work sometimes. People like those.

But, by and large I would say pick your best. Check with your friends. See what they think. No any one particular line or another is what is going to make or break your comedy script. It’s really about the characters and the situations. Some set pieces. Key set pieces that are really, really funny. Individual lines we tend to overemphasize because they’re so written. We think that they’re more important than they are.

**John:** So, I agree with Craig. I’ve never seen this sort of alternate line stuff done in a feature screenplay. Where I have seen this happen is in television comedies. And so I think I’m remembering this correctly that in an episode of New Girl, like a script for New Girl, I saw where a character would have their dialogue and there would be a slash-slash and there would be a different line, and then a slash-slash, and then a different line. Which is basically saying like these are alternate lines for this character to say here. And like on the day they would shoot those lines in quick succession and sort of see which one works the best. And it could be sometimes a springboard for other things they’re doing in different takes down the road.

That’s New Girl. That’s a show that thrives on that kind of rapid fire stuff.

I’ve also, and again, Aline is probably going to listen to this and say I’m misremembering how they do it, but I think when they’re going through a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend script they have it on the big projector and Aline is scrolling through and at each joke there will be a script note listed there that she could pop open and see like which line are they going to try to use for that thing.

And so the alternates are written in there and they make decisions before the script is finalized about which of those would be there. So, you know what Craig says about Fade In in terms of those little notes, or Final Draft. In Highland we have these double brackets which you can put anywhere and put any text in there you’d want to save, but not actually print in the script. So there’s always ways to do that. I would just say don’t put them in something you’re sending out to a person who is not directly involved in the production of this specific comedy that you’re trying to make.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Once you’re in production you can do whatever the hell you want. I mean, the script is now serving a production. If you have 12 different lines, throw them all in there because everybody gets the drill. But if you’re sending something fresh for somebody to read to see if they want to purchase it or option it or produce it, no. I wouldn’t do it.

**John:** Great. One last question. Raphael wrote in about dialogue. Let’s take a listen.

Raphael: So, I found a film that I now really, really love due to its stylistic choice of dialogue. So, I’ve watched the film again, but with the subtitles on because I wanted to see how the words could have possibly read on page as a script, as opposed to it being performed. And at times I felt that some of the lines would have read for lack of better words sort of cheesy and tacky and weak. But when it was performed by professional actors, you know, it sounded like music. It sounded beautiful.

So my question is how do you deal with dialogue that you’re not sure is working? I know that you guys are really busy and you don’t always have time to do table reads before shopping your script. But is that something that you suggest that I do?

And my second question is how do you differentiate bad acting versus bad dialogue in a scene? Thanks. Love you.

**John:** We love you, too, Raphael. All right. First off, we should say that if you turn on the subtitles for a movie, what you’re seeing is basically a transcription of what the actors are saying, which may not necessarily reflect what was scripted. And so always be mindful that what you’re seeing presented on the bottom of the screen may not really be what was printed in the script as they were shooting the scene. So, there can be some differences there that would make the line that they’re saying feel really weird on the page if it were written that way.

But, I think Raphael is describing something that like it’s a very stylistic kind of writing. It could be like what Rian Johnson did in Brick. They’re talking in a very stylized way. I feel like that’s going to work on the page the same way it’s going to work in the movie. And if you’re not creating an environment as you’re reading the script that signals to the reader like listen to it with this voice, you’re going to run into some troubles.

**Craig:** Yeah. Some great points here. The fact is that there is this weird gap, Raphael, between written dialogue and performed dialogue. We’ll see it every now and then poke up when we go into Unforgiven, although for the most part David Webb Peoples is so good that there was no gap. But at times the way we write things on paper read amazingly well, and then when the actors perform them just like that it’s not so great. And then the actors sometimes drift away and it sounds wonderful, but if we were to put what they drifted away into words it just doesn’t work at all, you know, on page.

There is a gap there. It’s inevitable because it’s something approximating something else. And so you just have to kind of deal with that. I do think that you absolutely should have actors read your script aloud. John is correct when he says that if you have a stylized manner to your dialogue, as long as it is consistent throughout your script what ends up happening is a cumulative effect. People just fall into the world of the way people are talking there.

If you sit and you read the script for Sin City, after three or four pages you get the drill and now you’re in it. And everybody is doing it. So, you understand that it is intentional and not just mistakenly clunky, for instance.

But, yeah, you should take the time. You should have actors read it. What’s the difference between bad actors and bad dialogue? You’ll know. You’ll just know. It’s one of those things. Bad acting is bad acting. It’s just bad. You know, I don’t know what else to say.

**John:** And sometimes you fall in this weird valley where it’s like it’s not quite the line, it’s not quite the acting, it’s just like it just doesn’t fundamentally work. And so let’s close off this segment and let’s play a clip from the first X-Men movie. And there’s a notoriously awful line that made it through to the very end which was Halle Berry asked the question about — asked the question of Toad. And this is a line, I think Joss Whedon wrote the line. You don’t do better than Joss Whedon. Halle Berry, an Oscar winner. She actually can tell a joke. But it just did not work at all in the movie. So, let’s close this up by taking a listen to a not great line from a great actor and a great writer.

Halle Berry: You know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning? Same thing that happens to everything else.

**Craig:** It’s not a good line. It’s just not.

**John:** Well let’s talk about — how could that line — I can envision a scenario in which that line works. And I think it would only work if you cut to Toad and he goes, ìHuh?î It has to be much quicker. Or like he’s really thinking about it like, huh. But no.

**Craig:** Well yeah. The editing did not help because it’s like it’s a riddle. How did the chicken cross the road? Wait. Wait. Wait. Show a different thing. Come back. Wait. Wait. To get to the other side. Wait. Wait. [laughs] The pacing is really bad. But also it doesn’t really make sense.

Do you know what happens when a toad is hit by lightning? The answer is he’s electrocuted. There’s no mystery to the solution here. There’s no interesting quirk to her response because, well, yeah. Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s right. It’s electrocuted. Is there something else that happens? Yeah.

**John:** I think if there’s something that this example illustrates though is that so much of what can be blamed on bad writing or bad acting ultimately is just editorial choices that did not help the writer or the actor. And that is an example of something. The proper editorial choice I think would be to cut out that line and just have her zap toad guy.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know. Exactly. I will say that pacing is the thing that ends up hurting comedy the most onscreen when directors are too languid with the pace of dialogue. Faster and faster. It’s hard to go too fast, frankly, when you — if you look at the speed with which the Marx Brothers did things. It is blinding.

We were constantly, you know, when I was making movies with David Zucker or making movies with Todd Phillips, we were constantly trying to get things to go faster. At the same time, you hate cutting because it’s more fun when it’s all in one. So, a lot of it is just getting the actors on their horse to go faster and faster.

One really cool thing that this movie that I’m working on with Mark Webb, there’s this animated component so you’re recording actors who are having a discussion and their voices will be then animated into creatures. And we can make them go faster. Just digitally. It’s awesome. Because at some point you can go too fast. I mean, some of the screwball stuff in the ’30s, which was notorious for its blinding speed, goes almost too fast. But it’s hard for actors to kind of feel things and be in the moment if they’re racing. But now you can kind of help them along a little bit and it becomes snappy and timing. Turns out that, I don’t know if you ever heard this, but timing is everything.

**John:** Timing is everything. And I want to clarify I’m not meaning to slam any given editor. I mean this as a call to be really nice and respectful for editors because they make us look so much better.

**Craig:** I love everybody that works on a movie. God’s honest truth. I’m trying to think if there’s anybody that works on a movie that I find annoying. No. Need them all.

**John:** Need them all.

**Craig:** Need them all.

**John:** Need them all. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Peter Aldhous which is BuzzFeed. And what they did is they were able to figure out spy planes flying over the US based on machine learning. Basically fed all this flight information data into the computers. They had it develop its own algorithms for figuring out where these planes were flying.

And through it they could figure out like, oh, you know what, a bunch of these planes are just flying in tight circles over certain parts of the country. And so they are along the US/Mexico border. They are searching for drug planes and other things. They are listening planes in other places. So, it was a great example to me of how machine learning can fundamentally change our ability to discern patterns in the world because no one person could actually look at this mess of data and figure out like, oh, there’s something going on here. But with these new tools and machine learning they were able to figure out like, oh, there’s actually all these very cool and very specific flights happening which must be for a specific purpose.

And so I’d urge you to check that out. I think it also raises interesting questions about the degree to which obscurity can be a benefit in terms of ability to monitor narcotic trafficking and other things like that. So, you know, if we have these tools and we’re putting them out there, other people have these tools as well. So, it raises interesting ethical and sort of governmental issues in how we’re collecting this data and how we’re using these tools.

**Craig:** Yes, the cat and mouse game continues. Cat and mouse game continues.

Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a book called The Maze of Games. This was recommended to me by a gentleman named Dave Shukan who is an intellectual property lawyer here in Los Angeles but also a puzzle master. And genius. And friend of the official magician of Scriptnotes, Dave Kwong. And The Maze of Games is awesome. So, big, big book. It’s a story but it’s kind of an interactive story. And you solve essentially a game of some kind on every other puzzle on every right-handed page. Sorry, every other page. Every right-handed page is a puzzle. And the puzzles are excellent and incredibly varied. Some of them are easy. Some of them are really challenging.

And you cannot really proceed through until you finish them all. And then there are meta puzzles. And apparently there is a meta-meta puzzle. So, I’m like about halfway through this thing and just having the time of my life. The story is written by a guy named Mike Selinker. And excellent illustrations by somebody named Pete Venters. And we’ll through a link on. It’s sold through Loan Shark Games and we’ll put a link on there. If you are interested, like I am, in solving the Maze of Games.

**John:** You know what? Mazin would be a great last name for you.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** There’s a meta quality to your very existence.

**Craig:** I am meta.

**John:** Our show this week is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jonathan Mann. And Craig will especially love this outro.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered today. So several of these people attached audio recordings of them asking their questions. That is terrific. So, do that if you’d like to.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Look for us on Apple Podcasts to subscribe and also leave us a review while you’re there. That is so helpful.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com which is also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can find all the back episodes, all 312 episodes that happened before this, plus the bonus episodes and stuff at Scriptnotes.net. Or on the USB drive we sell at store.johnaugust.com.

And a reminder because I keep forgetting to plus this, we have the Listeners’ Guide that talks through the first 300 episodes of the show and gives you good suggestions for which episodes you should not miss. So you can find that at johnaugust.com/guide.

**Craig:** How much does that cost? Does that cost a lot?

**John:** Everything is free. Well, that’s not true at all. That is free. The USB drives are, I think, $30. And the Scriptnotes.net is $2 a month.

**Craig:** And I get none of it. Great show, John. Still a great show.

**John:** Great show. All right. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too. See you next time.

Links:

* [Triskaidekaphobia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia) on Wikipedia
* Where to watch [Unforgiven](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/unforgiven) before next week’s deep dive
* [You Get Me](https://www.netflix.com/title/80155477) on Netflix
* [Romancing the Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romancing_the_Stone), [Ferris Bueller’s Day Off](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_Bueller%27s_Day_Off), [Rain Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_Man) and [Coming to America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_to_America) on Wikipedia
* [Watch Toad get struck by lightning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0yKSNq-oLg) on YouTube
* [BuzzFeed News Trained A Computer To Search For Hidden Spy Planes. This Is What We Found.](https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/hidden-spy-planes?utm_term=.dtAP3rMkDp#.hkG7aMKdQR)
* [The Maze of Games](http://www.lonesharkgames.com/maze/) by Mike Selinker
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jonathan Mann ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_313.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, with the WGA negotiations set to begin, we’ll be doing a deep dive looking at how the Writers Guild attempts to make a deal with the studios on behalf of film and TV writers. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about writing for producers versus writing for the audience. And last steps when finishing up a script. But first, and most importantly, Craig, I am so sorry I got you sick.

**Craig:** Yeah, you got me sick. I’m pretty sure that you put your virus into the microphone and it came out into my headphones. I don’t know any other explanation.

**John:** Yeah. It’s sort of magical. Basically because of the power of homeopathy, I put it out there in the world and it got all the way over to you. Like the atoms sort of vibrated all the way over there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I’m sorry you’re sick. So, on the last episode we were talking about do you try to push through, do you take care of yourself? What are you actually doing?

**Craig:** Well, what did I say last time? I said that I never learn. [laughs] Well, I still haven’t learned. It doesn’t even matter that I say I never learn. I still don’t learn. Yesterday, I wrote a little bit. Today I’m going to try again. I mean, I’m a little bit – I have some good news, by the way. So, I think I mentioned a couple of podcasts ago that Future Craig might have some good news.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And I’m not really going to talk about what it is yet, because I don’t know how that works. You know, I don’t want to jump any publicity guns. But in addition to the movies that I’m working on, I do have a miniseries at HBO that we’re going to be doing. We got our–

**John:** Well that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s happening. But, of course, all success with me brings a panic. So I’m a little panicked about getting the work I have to get done done. And doing it as best I can. So, the panic actually is probably what led in no small way to a depression of the immune system followed by a sickness. It’s no good. But I’m going to try today. I feel – it’s early sick days, so what I feel is that empty fatigue and vague queasiness.

**John:** Well, there’s also an anxiety of like is it going to stay this level, or is it going to get worse? And you really don’t know when you’re at this phase. Like, is this what it is? Is it going to pass by? Or is it going to become a full-on sickness? For me it became a full-on sickness. But I’ve had many situations where I’m sort of where you’re at. And it never really fully kicked in.

**Craig:** Well, I have taken 4,000 Oscillococcinum pills.

**John:** That should do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I have diabetes now. Because of the sugar. And also I think at this point I’ve probably worked my way all the way up to one-millionth of one molecule of useless duck liver. Feel good about it.

**John:** That’s good. Do it. Yes.

Let’s do some follow up. So, on our last episode we talked about Kellyanne Conway’s amazing skills at being able to get out of questions. There was another great explainer this past week by Carlos Maza for Vox. So it’s a video. I will put a link in the show notes. But it does a very good job sort of walking through sort of specifically how she’s getting out of some of the situations she’s trying to get into.

Of course, last week we talked about Kellyanne Conway and then like the day the episode came out she had a total fumble and could not get her way out of a seemingly pretty simple situation. So, no one is magic. No sports player does sports 100 percent all the time.

**Craig:** Oh, John, that was adorable. [laughs] No sports player does sports. You’re the best. By the way, I agree that this Carlos Maza thing is terrific. And something came out – he was interviewing an old classmate of his who is a national debate champion about the techniques that Kellyanne Conway uses. And he zeroed in on something that was sort of an addition to what we were saying. We were pointing out how she will – like the name of her game is to make her evasion as quick as she can, and then immediately go on the offense to make her point.

And he said the same thing, but what he picked on was something I hadn’t really thought about. In her little evasion section, she routinely will pick a key word from the question and she will then recontextualize that key word so that you feel like you have some weird sense that she’s responding to the question. And then she goes off on her tangent.

So if somebody says to her, “Why would the president say something that just patently isn’t true? We know that it’s not the fact that blah-blah-blah.” And she’ll say, “Well, what I know about facts is, or here’s what I know is true…” OK, that’s just a word that she’s linking to make it seem like she’s answering a question. And then she’s off and running in the other direction.

I wonder if part of the reason she’s starting to get trapped now is because people like this and articles like this are laying bare her tricks for everyone. At some point, once you know how they pull the rabbit out of the hat, or how the sports guy does his sports thing, it’s just not that impressive anymore.

**John:** We can check the transcript. I do think I brought that up last time when we were talking about Kellyanne Conway. But what’s so good about a video is that they can show you sort of the real time transcript of like here’s the word and here’s her repeating the word. Like that subtitle, that [unintelligible] at the bottom of the screen really does help you see sort of what she’s doing. And it’s a trick you can’t do endlessly. You start to recognize how it all fits together.

So, anyway, we recommend this video. A few episodes we talked about Sinbad starring in a movie called Shazam. That movie never existed. And there was a whole discussion about whether this is some sort of weird metaphysical thing that’s happening. Craig really focused on the neuroscience of it. And an actual neuroscientist really backed him up in this article that I thought was very well conceived, basically talking through a lot of what Craig described about it. The things that trigger in the brain for a memory are often sort of the same things that you’re thinking about in conjecture.

So, Craig, talk us through more of the science in this article.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I remember specifically we were learning about the concept of familiarity. And that there was essentially a cognitive algorithm in our minds that said, oh, this is a familiar thing. So that when we see something we’ve seen before, we know that we’ve seen it before. And that that sometimes could misfire and this leads to thinks like déjà vu. And really that’s kind of what’s going on if you think about it with these kinds of false memories of a movie. You’re having déjà vu in a sense.

There’s all sorts of deeper – far deeper – theories about this. And people should read the article, because it’s actually quite good. And really there’s a lot of conjecture here. But it really comes down to the concept of confabulation and the way that the brain is constantly filling in missing gaps of information.

We know this from most visual illusions, right, optical illusions are playing off of the brain’s constant work to fill in gaps in between bits of data. We do it all the time. And some of this of what’s going on, this confabulation, may be leading to things like this. So, people should read the article if they have a deeper concern about how are brains are really bad. Honestly, they’re just bad.

**John:** Well, they’re designed to do very specific things and those specific things are not remember who starred in a movie about a genie back in the ‘90s. That’s not a thing they were designed to do. So, the writer of this article, Caitlin Aamodt, one of the phrases she uses which I’m sure is a phrase used in neuroscience is neurons that fire together wire together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so often, you know, rehearsing even a fact that something isn’t true strengthens the idea that it is true because those neurons have to work together. So, it was a really well done article, so we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

My last bit of follow up is actually from 2011. So, on the blog I used to do this series called First Person where I talked about people’s experiences in Hollywood that were different than mine. And one of those people was Allison Schroeder. And I had not realized that this article even existed until one of our listeners pointed it out. So, Allison Schroeder, back in 2011 she was a new screenwriter. In 2017, she is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for Hidden Figures. So, in this article she wrote for me she talked about her experience coming up. And what’s great about it is it’s still completely relevant. She’s talking about the work she’s doing every day. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this, an article from six years ago by Allison Schroeder who is now an Oscar nominee.

**Craig:** How cool is that?

**John:** It’s really cool. I really liked Hidden Figures, too. So, kudos to her on this success but also the success of her career.

**Craig:** You know who loved Hidden Figures? My daughter.

**John:** Yeah, my daughter loved it, too.

**Craig:** She loved that movie. Loved it.

**John:** So we saw Hidden Figures as a screener here, because it hasn’t come out in Paris, and we went and did the Women’s March, and so after the Women’s March we got together with some of her friends who were also on the march with us, and we sat in the living room and watched Hidden Figures. It was a great American day.

**Craig:** That is a great American day.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our main topic today, which is the WGA negotiations. So, this actually comes from a listener, a listener question that came in this week. Listener Mike B wrote in to say, “Do you guys plan on doing something on the current rounds of pre-negotiation outreach meetings that have been taking place for WGA members? A lot of my knowledge of union business comes from discussions that have occurred on your podcast, and I’m sure that’s true for many other listeners. So I ask that you give some consideration to addressing the situation on your show. Your opinions would be appreciated.”

So, Craig, we should do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have a very complicated process. It’s not complicated because the Writers Guild makes it complicated. And it’s not complicated because the companies make it complicated. It’s complicated because the process is essentially governed by federal law. I think a lot of writers don’t quite understand just how intrusive all the laws are regarding management and labor. Labor unions, and the Writers Guild, you know, we’re kind of a special union of a sort, but in general the Writers Guild is no different than any other union in the sense that it has to be federally recognized, federally chartered, and then it has to follow federal labor laws.

In exchange for that, it gets stuff, like for instance the ability to say we represent anybody that’s going to write for the following signatory companies. It can collectively bargain. And the companies in return have to follow certain rules as well. Sometimes these rules help us. Sometimes they hurt us. But they definitely shape the way that we go about doing this. It may seem very formal and awkward to members, but it is essentially the only way we’re allowed to do it.

**John:** Great. So, before we do our deep dive, we should talk about sort of our background and experience with this, because I was on the Negotiating Committee for the last round of WGA negotiations, so that was back in 2014, and Craig you were on the board at a certain point. You’ve been around these negotiations a lot. So the things we’re talking about, like we’re not on the Negotiating Committee right now, but we just have sort of seen a lot of these processes before. So we’re going to talk in a very general sense, not about what’s going on right now, but to sort of what’s gone in the past and the frameworks for things.

I think we should start with kind of an explain it like I’m five aspect of this, because if you’re not a WGA member, some of this may be just completely weird and new to you. So, we should talk about some basic terminology, just so if you’re coming in completely cold to this, you sort of know what’s going on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, first off, the WGA is a labor union. It’s the same as a labor union for people who drive trucks, or for people who work in service industries. There are two different branches to the Writers Guild of America. There’s the WGA East, which is the writers east of the Mississippi. There’s the WGA West, which is west of the Mississippi. They’re sister unions. You can kind of ignore the differences for most things. And honestly for this negotiation you can ignore largely. You know, any negotiation that’s going to happen is going to affect both guilds at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even though there are two guilds, they by their constitutions have to negotiate this part collectively, because it covers screenwriting and television writing members in the east and the west. And because the west is much, much larger, for this negotiation, for all these negotiations throughout our history, the west essentially takes the lead on the negotiations. On the Negotiating Committee which is the, well, we’ll talk about what they do. There are a few members from the east, I think four, possibly two, not – not that many. And in the end both the Writers Guild Board of Directors and the Writers Guild East Council must vote to support bringing a contract to the membership. There are rules involving that that again favor the west. And then the combined memberships of east and west vote to approve a contact, or also to in different circumstances to reject a contact which I don’t think we’ve ever done, or to authorize a strike.

**John:** Yep. So we’re not the only Hollywood union, quite obviously. So there’s unions that represent directors, that represent actors, that represent gaffers, below the line people. Everybody – well, not everybody – but most of the people whose names you see going past in the credits are represented by some sort of union. Some of what writers do is a little bit different than other unions, of course. Writers write things that could be controlled by copyright. So, in the United States we have this elaborate process where if we’ve written something on spec we sort of then can pretend it wasn’t written on spec so that the copyright can be transferred to the person who is buying the script.

If you’re writing for a TV show, we have work for hire. So, it allows us to become employees of the signatory companies, which is very useful because it lets us do things like collectively bargain.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, the Guild has a bunch of sort of important functions for writers. So, it sets the minimums. By minimums we mean the minimum you can be paid for doing a certain kind of work. And it seems like, well, who wants to get the minimum, but trust me, the rest of the world wishes they could have minimums. When I was in Spain a couple weeks ago, talking to their Writers Guild, they’re not a real union like we are. And so they’re not even allowed to talk about minimum rates for the work that they’re doing. Not only can they not negotiate. They can’t even discuss on their website what a writer should charge.

So, you know, as a writer, you would have an agent and a lawyer who would negotiate hopefully money above those minimums, but those minimums are the floor, and that’s the base of which your salary grows.

**Craig:** Yeah. Minimums traditionally have been more important in the television area than in the feature writing area. For a long time most feature writers, and probably still true that many feature writers, are what we call over-scale writers. So sometimes you’ll hear the word scale. That really just refers to minimum. Essentially the scale of minimums. Technically it’s the schedule of minimums. In television, the minimums have always been important because unlike features where our residuals are calculated by how many copies of a movie are sold or rented, in television residuals are calculated with a couple of different kinds of formulas that are based on the minimums.

Although one of the issues that has been coming up lately is that the minimums have become more and more what they are actually paying television writers. So, minimums are an essential part of any union’s work. They are the floor underneath our feet. And if anything occurs to degrade those minimums, then at that point the union starts to lose its effectiveness.

**John:** Absolutely. So other functions the Guild has. The Guild collects residuals. So residuals are those things we talked about on previous episodes. They kind of feel like royalties. That’s the amount per DVD sold, amount per stream of your show that the writer gets for subsequent reuse of that material, that TV show, that movie after its initial airing. That’s incredibly crucial to the long-term career of writers.

The Guild supervisors the writer’s pension and health fund, which is crucial for the ability to get your health insurance, to have a pension at the end of the day. And, finally, a very unique thing that the Writers Guild does, it determines credit on who should get credit for that movie, who should get credit for that episode of TV. And so we’ve talked in previous episodes about arbitration which is how the Writers Guild determines whose name shows up as Written By or Screenplay By.

**Craig:** Yeah. For our international listeners, they may be shaking their heads saying, “Wow, a huge part of your union is getting you healthcare, which you should just have.” Because those of us who live fill-in-the-country-here just have healthcare, like they just have roads and water coming out of their faucet. But in the United States, as many of you know, that’s not what we have. Even with Obamacare, which may or may not survive in some form or another, that is kind of basic healthcare. And even that, you know, is ultimately paid for through taxation.

But for what we would consider to be more traditional health plans that have a wider and more beneficial coverage with more choice, it’s a private healthcare system. The way it works it writers earn money and the companies as part of our collective bargaining agreement and on a percentage above that and send it off for pension and health. I believe, this could be slightly off, I believe it’s something like 8.5% at this point. But I could be off on those numbers, so don’t hold me to them. But for each pension/health.

So, John, if you work on an assignment and you get paid $100,000, you get the $100,000, the companies then send $8,500 for health and $8,500 for pension. They send those directly to the plan, if those percentages are correct. Again, I may be off. They don’t do that forever. They will stop. I believe the cap is at 250. So they will pay that extra amount up to you earning $250,000, what they call the cap, at which point they stop. But that’s essentially how our pension and health fund are funded.

The pension plan, like most pension plans, really does work as this enormous pod of money. We have – our pension plan has well over a billion dollars in it. And the idea is that it grows over time through prudent investments and that we – a lot of the money that we make from it really is about earning interest and capital gains. And so it is that kind of pyramid effect. That’s the way pensions work. With health, it’s far more precarious, because it’s really money-in/money-out each year. They take in a certain amount of money. And not every writer qualifies for healthcare. You have to earn a certain amount. I believe currently in our union you need to make a minimum of something like $39,000 in earnings, writing covered earnings, in a year to qualify for the following year’s health.

**John:** And one factor that is sort of unique to writers is that sometimes writers are sharing a salary because they’re a writing team, so that can influence people’s eligibility for healthcare and other things as well. But that gets to be a little more esoteric. So the money that’s being paid in, well, who’s paying that? Those are our employers. And those are the studios essentially. They’re the signatories of the Guild.

In order to work as a WGA screenwriter, you have to work for one of these companies. And these are the companies who we negotiate with every three years to figure out the contract and what those rates are going to be. So the rates for residuals, how much money is going to health and pension, how we are going to schedule the minimums for the different kinds of work we do. And so together all these signatories are called AMPTP. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers. These aren’t producers in a normal sense. It’s a little confusing. But we just call them the AMPTP.

And those are the people we get together with every three years to figure out a new contract. And that process of figuring out the new contract, that’s what’s starting right now.

**Craig:** Right. So, the AMPTP is a strange organization. It’s essentially, I think it’s a trade organization. And it doesn’t actually represent all of the signatories. It largely represents the major ones. And then the major ones return back to all of their minor members and say, “This is the deal we made. You’re taking it.”

So, we ultimately really find ourselves negotiating with a group of people that largely represent Fox, Sony, Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, the networks. That’s roughly the big names.

**John:** Yep. So, I say that the process is starting now, but that’s actually not quite accurate, because the process of figuring out this contract starts years ahead of time. So, it really starts pretty shortly after the last contract was done. Our contracts run for three years, I should preface by saying.

So, the early discussions happen among writers. Generally kind of informal. But it’s private conversations, especially talking with showrunners, other sort of bigger writers to sort of get the temperature of the room to identify what the major concerns are. And to really see if there’s any changes in the landscape that the WGA needs to be focused on as they’re going into the negotiations.

So, I was on the Negotiating Committee for 2014. So some of the things we were hearing is that the change to shorter TV seasons was having a weird impact on writers. It really affected writers, especially for options and exclusivity, which is that if you are hired to be on a show, they will try to hold you under an option for a long period of time for that next season. Well, that wasn’t a big problem if you were on a 22-episode season. So basically you were working the full year. But if you’re working on a 10-episode or a 13-episode season, that was a long time you were being held under option. So that was a thing that was being singled out to us by writers in 2014.

On the feature side, we heard about sweepstakes pitching, where they were bringing a bunch of writers to pitch on a project that may not ever go anyplace. And paper teaming, where they would stick two different writers together who really were not a team, so they could hire them as one writing team for a television show. So those were some of the kinds of issues that were coming up during this early discussion phase of negotiations.

**Craig:** On the one hand, it would be very easy to negotiate a certain kind of union contract if everybody did the same kind of job in the same sort of place. You could just say, look, what it comes down to is we get paid $12 an hour to work on the line and we’d like to get paid $15 an hour to work on the line. Also, our lunch break is too short. Because we are essentially like freelance employees at the same time, these things come up all the time. And our business is changing so rapidly. We don’t have a factory that keeps doing the same thing. The delivery systems. The kinds of entertainment that we create. The length of the entertainment we create.

I mean, this – for instance, the miniseries that I’m talking about doing. That’s not really something that anybody was doing maybe 15 years ago. If you wanted to tell a story that required a five-hour series in five chunks, I don’t know. Nobody was doing that. That wasn’t a thing. Well, now they do it all the time.

**John:** Well, they used to do it sort of broadcast networks. Like Aline Brosh McKenna and I will one day do our Winds of War remake, which was a classic sort of miniseries. But I think what you’re describing though is sort of the prestige, The People vs. OJ Simpson, that kind of thing has not existed for a while. And it’s a new thing and it creates real challenges to figure out like what is the business model for writers for that kind of thing. It’s new territory.

**Craig:** It is new territory. I mean, there was a time when you and I were growing up where networks would make, television networks would make made-for-TV movies. And they would make television miniseries. But then there was a long stretch of time where both of those things went bye-bye completely. And then they start to come back because of new ways of delivering content to people. Similarly, for most of our lives, and for most people’s lives in the United States, television was dominated by the network model of 22 episodes a season. Whereas across the pond in the UK, their seasons were typically more like eight episode, or ten.

Well, we seem to now be moving towards that model because the network model of a season and that many episodes supported by advertising has essentially collapsed into something very, very different, which is a subscription based notion of watching. And we also have the emergence of major new content. I won’t say content creators, but content providers. Netflix and Amazon are two new outlets that are buying up an enormous amount of, well, you could call it TV if you want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But some of it’s movies. Some of it’s TV. Some of it’s miniseries. What it really is it’s entertainment that you watch on your television. And all of this is putting enormous pressure on whatever the old models were. And our bargaining and our contract, all of it, it is a mature contract, it is all steeped deeply in the tradition of the time in which it was first conceived which was post-World War II America.

**John:** I love looking through the minimum basic agreement, which is the big contract that sort of shows like how much you get paid for different things and how everything works, because they’ll have these formats for different kinds of shows. Like no one makes that anymore. Like, you know, if it’s a half-hour show involving horses it has to have this kind of, like this is scale for it. There are really strange things that you can’t imagine are used that often, but they’re still in there from when those things were done more frequently.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I would have to look it up, but the formula, I was talking about the TV residuals formula. And those residuals formula, there’s two kinds. And one of them I think is called the Hitchcock formula, because it’s based on old Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I think and one of them is Sanchez based on some television show that was maybe from the ‘70s. I mean, it is an old contract based in old, old stuff.

So, unsurprisingly, every single negotiation that we have been through since I would argue 2001 has been about trying to address these industry-breaking and contract-breaking developments that are occurring in our industry. I mean, 2001, that was really the first negotiation that earned us a residual rate for work that was rented over the Internet.

**John:** Yeah. Whole new things. So whenever there are changes you have to be really mindful of making sure that writers are being paid for those things, so that initial outreach is basically to identify those things.

The second stage is survey. So they basically survey the membership to ask, hey, what’s going on? Are you experiencing these things? Basically trying to get some quantifiable data to match up with the anecdotal data they’re getting from these early discussions. It’s mostly for planning. Basically trying to identify what are the big key issues here that writers are concerned about, that it’s not just like those three guys over there that have this problem, but it actually is a bigger issue for more writers.

So, those surveys happen. And then there’s sort of really internal meetings where they quietly sort of talk through what the priorities are, what the strategy should be, what do they think they want to do in this round of negotiations. That’s where the Writers Guild board, but also the Writers Guild Negotiating Committee, which is a separate group, figure out what their plan is for going into the negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is all done in a sort of vacuum. Until they start to talk to the membership at large, they are doing a strange dance internally. And it’s really the only way they can. They look at the landscape. They look at what they know. And they decide this is what we should do. And that is coupled with a creation of a message. This is why we should do what we should do. And this is why our membership should support us in our efforts to do what we should do.

**John:** It has an aspect of a campaign. Basically you’re testing some messages, you’re testing to see what is it that we think we want to try to do here. And, you know, in this pattern of demands and in these sort of initial outreach meetings to showrunners and to other members of writing staffs and to individual writers, they’re trying to get a sense of like does this accurately reflect your concerns as we do into this negotiation. And that’s the end of a long process, but it continues throughout the process of these outreach meetings.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the name of the game, really, for all of these things is to balance yourself where you feel like you have enough of a message where you can get the membership to support you fully. And fully means and if you come back to them and say they’re not giving you the things that we all agree we should get, we should walk? Right? So there’s the strike threat. You need that, but you also need to come up with a message that doesn’t feel like essentially you’re saying there’s no way out for us, we have no options here, all we can do is strike. You don’t want to come up with a message that feels out of touch with the membership, that either feels like it’s underserving the membership or vastly too aggressive. It’s a very tricky thing. And it makes negotiating on behalf of a union very difficult because unlike most negotiations in business, where both parties are working privately and then facing across each other at a table, or similarly in politics where people work somewhat privately and then sit across the table, for unions a lot of this discussion leading up to things is public.

It’s open because union members have a right to freedom of speech, even within their own union. It’s specified in something called the Landrum-Griffin Act. And as a union leader, you’re walking a careful line because you don’t want to give away too much. If you’re bluffing, you don’t want to necessarily bluff both the membership and the companies, but sometimes it’s hard to bluff the companies if you can’t bluff your membership. Very difficult line to walk. It’s a hard gig to do.

**John:** We should also then now think about the other side of the table here. So, the AMPTP, they’re coming into a round of negotiations thinking like what are we prepared to give. What are we prepared to ask for? What do we want out of this negotiation? And they’re having their own meetings where they’re figuring this out as well. They’re taking their temperature among their members. They’re listening to see what’s happening on the writers’ side. And they’re trying to come up with an approach which will be their initial offer for like this is what we think the contract should be. And sometimes that offer is designed to send a certain message about how the negotiation is going to go.

**Craig:** Yeah. The actual dance that is done is highly formal. And you will hear people on both sides repeatedly refer to it as Kabuki Theater. Both sides will begin the negotiations the way perhaps two animals start their courtship dance. It’s very ritualized. And not surprisingly, so much of the ritual is that the union is asking for so much and the companies are insisting they can’t afford anything. And then once the dance is done, things get down to it.

I was on the Negotiating Committee in 2004. That certainly was going on then. And it’s gone on every time since. What are you looking for are those larger signals and we can talk about 2007 was clearly a different situation. We were sending a very different signal then. And certainly the response from the companies was a very clear signal as well. But traditionally in negotiations there’s a dance. There’s some more dancing. And then the work happens, often very rapidly and in a much smaller room. A room inside a room inside a room.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let me get you inside the room for 2014. The actual process of negotiations happens over a period, it was about two weeks in 2014. We were at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, like actually the shopping mall. So the AMPTP has a headquarters there and when the negotiations start there’s a room off to the left which is where the Writers Guild Negotiating Committee is headquartered and we are there and we are talking through stuff. There’s a room where the AMPTP, bigwigs and lawyers, are headquartered and they are talking.

And every once and a while they will say, OK, we’re going to get together. We will go into their room. We will make our points about a specific issue on the table. They will ask some questions. We will then leave the room and it will go through this process several times. That’s the Kabuki part of the whole thing.

But what Craig is referring to is a lot of the actual discussions and like the changes that happen happen in other conversations that are not the whole group, but just between a few key members going off someplace else to discuss through one specific point or a different point. Sometimes they’ll be asking for clarification. There’ll be give and take. And then our leaders will report back to the Negotiating Committee and we will proceed to the next part.

I wrote a whole script while I was in that Negotiating Committee room.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because literally you’re in a room with a bunch of tables. You know, Susannah Grant is behind me and she’s typing away. I’m like, man, if she’s writing something, I got to get down to it. And so it’s a situation where it can be incredibly intense at moments. But then it can just be incredibly like lots of free time.

And so you can chew the fat with people, but you can also get work done. And I took it upon myself to get some work done. It was a really fascinating experience that I don’t necessarily want to repeat again really soon.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the truth is serving on the large Negotiating Committee, which I think is about 17 members, is thankless and the committee itself is required by our constitution. It is a formality. The truth is you could never negotiate anything with 17 people all in a big room asking questions and bickering amongst themselves because, of course, even within a group of 17 writers who are, let’s just stipulate that they’re all largely aligned. They won’t be completely aligned.

So, inevitably what happens is the larger Negotiating Committee is a group of writers who don’t get to do much and they don’t get to decide much. Really all they’re there to do is hear the reports back from the front lines, give their input, which matters or doesn’t, and then vote at the end.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say that part of our function of being there is that we tend to be sort of writers that they recognize, and so the reason why Susannah Grant was there, or I was there, or Shawn Ryan was there is like these are the people that they’re hiring all the time. So it was useful to have us on the other side of the table looking at them, just because we are – we can speak with some authority and occasionally like Shawn Ryan would speak about a specific issue that was related to his experience in television.

Me, I said nothing in that big room. The only thing I was there to do was in the writer’s side I could ask some questions about things that were going on that I felt weren’t clear.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that was my function. My function was to be a body there. And I took that as my charge.

**Craig:** Well, you’re exactly right. That they do choose – I mean, this is a committee that’s appointed by the board, and it’s carefully curated. And the point of having people like you there is we are advertising to the companies that we have our best and brightest. We have our most rational. We are not stocking this committee with writers that they maybe think represent a certain class of employees that they simply could do without. We’re advertising that you can’t do without us because look who’s here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in the end, there are sidebars. And by the way, this is the same thing on their side, too. They have so many people. They have individuals representing each of the companies and then they have their lawyers and then they have their labor specialists. All these people. In the end, there are sidebars. And the sidebars typically take place between Carol Lombardini, who is the Chief Negotiator for the AMPTP, and a couple of her chief lieutenants. And then on our side, David Young, who is our Executive Director, and typically then one, two, or in this case we have three co-chairs of the Negotiating Committee. And this year it’s Billy Ray, Chris Keyser, and Chip Johannessen.

**John:** Yep. So, at the end of this process, which is very intentionally kept under a cone of silence, like no one reports out what’s happening inside this room. And that, I think, has been well maintained and I think it’s a really smart idea. But at the end of this process hopefully you come to a tentative agreement, which is a compromise that neither side is entirely happy with, but they are saying like this is the best we think we can do. And you go to membership. Then the membership votes on it and hopefully approves the contract and then you’re done. For now. And then three years later you’re going to be going through the whole process again.

**Craig:** That’s right. And while you’re doing this, there is a certain formal process going on on the parts that are not in sidebar. That’s why sidebar is so important in negotiations. When both sides are presenting their formal requests to each other, and when anybody says anything in the big room, all of it is carefully written down. And those notes are considered essentially evidentiary going forward. If somebody – let’s say David Young in the big room said we are willing to sacrifice blah-blah-blah if we can get so and so. That’s written down.

And they will say, “You said you were willing to…” That’s a thing now, right? So everybody is very careful about how they say what they say in that big room. And in the sidebar all the horse trading goes on and on. Those large room notes are also important because sometimes there’s a dispute after the deal is allegedly determined about what a certain deal point actually meant. And so both sides have their copious notes to be able to present to some kind of independent arbiter in the case of a dispute, or, you know, I think it may even go to the labor department if there’s a dispute.

And, for instance, we had something exactly like that at the conclusion of the 2007/2008 strike. And unfortunately what we thought we had gotten we had not. So, those can happen.

**John:** So, let’s circle back to where we’re at right now which Mike B’s question. We’re talking about the outreach meeting. So that’s sort of step three in the process. We’re not really into the negotiation yet. We’re still figuring stuff out. So the outreach meeting that Mike B went to, or that, Craig, you went to an outreach meeting last night.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** These are chances for the guild leadership to talk with the members about what the plans are and also what the concerns are. And so that’s a good thing. So it’s good for Mike B to have gone. It’s good for Craig to go. If, you know, you’re another writer in the Writers Guild, it’s good for you to go just to sort of hear what is being discussed about the upcoming negotiation. So, Craig, I’m in Paris so I’m not hearing any of these discussions. But what I gleaned are sort of the important issues. The health fund is always going to be an issue because we have, again, we are in a system where we have this private health insurance and you have to keep it solvent, so that’s going to be crucial.

A lot of the concerns are TV concerns. Which seems weird in a way because this is clearly a boom time for television. There’s more TV shows. There’s more TV writers. There’s more TV income than before. But when you actual talk to individual writers, a lot of TV writers are struggling. And it has to do with this weird thing about how TV writers work is that they are writing TV shows and they are also producing TV shows. And they’re doing both jobs. But the Writers Guild portion of it, the WGA is responsible for the writing aspect of that. And writers are being paid minimums for that stuff. But those minimums that they’re being paid for, well that money is also being counted against their producing fees.

This may not be such a huge problem if you’re on a 22-episode season that’s lasting the whole year, but if you’re on one of these short shows, ten episodes, 13 episodes, sometimes you’re writing that episode months, and months, and months before you’re producing that episode. And you’re basically having to work as many weeks as if you were on a 22-episode season, but you’re only being paid for that short show. And that’s creating real issues for a lot of TV writers.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it seems like what’s really at stake here in this negotiation is an extension of the very issues that you and others were dealing with in our last negotiation, and dealt with somewhat successfully in 2014. And I think the great hope is that additional incremental gains can be made in this area. And this – these kinds of gains aren’t specifically about being paid more. Although, the guild will certainly ask for that, as well they should. And every cycle, I mean, so the DGA made their deal, and it’s a very typical deal where minimums are boosted either 2.5% or 3% on a year-to-year basis over the three years. But it seems like it’s more of an implementation and lifestyle problem where the companies are saying we’re going to pay you the minimums, but we are going to own you for a year and for a bunch of that year – and we’re going to spread that amount of money out over so much time of exclusivity that even if you’re not working for us, you’re not working for anyone else. So, effectively your payment, which would have once paid for four months say of your work is now going to pay for a year of your work. And while technically that’s not violating your minimums, it is essentially violating minimums.

Now, this as I pointed out in the meeting last night is a problem that screenwriters are far too familiar with. We’ve talked before about the pernicious abuse where – this is writers up and down, but really more the middle class and starting writers deal with this the most and in the most egregious way – you’ll be hired to write a screenplay and you will write a script and hand it to your producer. The producer will give you notes and say we can’t turn this in. You have to write it again. And you will maybe write seven or eight scripts. Seven or eight drafts of that script, just so you can send it in.

Meanwhile, if you’re being paid close to minimum, that’s a year of your life? A year and a half? For minimum. And so what does the minimum mean at that point? And so TV writers are now it seems dealing with this sort of stuff that feature writers have been dealing with forever. And so what happens as a result of this? Not only does this negatively impact individual writers, of course, but it also negatively impacts our pension and health fund because the fringes of pension/health are paid on what writers are paid. And if they are paid less frequently, P&H gets less money.

One thing that’s important to understand about pension and health is that it is not as simple as if you qualify, you get healthcare and the money that has been contributed on your behalf will cover your healthcare. It does not work that way. Not at all. The way our system works is we presume that a number of writers that qualify for healthcare are going to over-qualify. They’re going to earn much more, all the way up to that cap I described, the $250,000. Those are the people that are essentially subsidizing things for everybody else.

You may only take $39,000 to qualify for your healthcare, but on average the contributions that come out of that do not cover the typical writer’s year of health costs. So, the more writers we have moving towards the lower end of the scale, the harder and harder it is for pension and health to be solvent. And, of course, there’s also been this ongoing problem of how television writers are paid. On the screen side, it has been very frustrating for my entire career to watch as I pay 1.5% of dues on every dollar I make to the Guild and all of my money is pension and health contributable.

But on the writer’s side, we have showrunners who make millions and millions of dollars, the vast majority of which is paid out as producing fees. They don’t pay any dues on that money, because it’s not writing money. And none of it is what we’ll call fringe-able. None of it gets that P&H contribution. So, the Guild is trying to address these things. And, it is a real issue and they have all sorts of choices about how they’re going to try and get those things, but certainly it is a problem. Part of my function at the outreach meeting last night was to say, correct, hey also in screen we have issues, too. We have to be addressed.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. And let’s take a look at the other side of the table, too, because we’re not the only one coming in with an agenda. So what is the AMPTP looking for as they’re going into this negotiation? Well, overall they’d like to keep things in line. They’d like to keep the industry running. They’d like to be able to keep making TV shows and movies. That’s crucial for them. That’s how they make their money.

They’d like to keep things in line with the other deals they’ve already made. So they’ve already made a DGA deal. They’re going to have to make a SAG deal with screen actors after our deal, so they’d like to keep those things consistent. So, you know, their goal is going to be to not go above 2.5% or 3% on those kinds of things that are so similar between the different contracts.

But there are things like these options and exclusivities which are kind of uniquely ours, and so that’s a thing they’ll be looking at too because they want to be able to keep making the best TV shows that we’ve ever made. And in order to keep doing that they’re going to have to be able to make this system sustainable. So, I think they’re going to be looking for ways to be able to keep doing the kind of stuff that they’re doing and not, you know, hopefully decimate a class of writers. They’ll hope.

**Craig:** Right. Well, they have a vastly different approach, as one might expect, to these negotiations. It’s quite typical that writers, directors, and actors will begin negotiations by pointing out how much money the companies are making off of the work that we do. And the companies typically will say, “Oh no, no, no, you don’t understand. Our business is on the edge of disaster.”

In truth, neither point is particularly relevant. No, of course their business isn’t on the edge of disaster. You and I have punctured this myth a hundred times. We did it a couple of weeks ago.

On the other hand, they are corporations. They exist to maximize profits, so the idea that somehow if they’re very profitable this is a problem for them, I mean, they love that, right? Their whole point is we take in as much as we can and we send out as little as we can. I think the things that they are always thinking about in the back of their minds is what is the benefit of labor peace, what is the value of labor peace, what is the cost of labor peace? Because in the end they do get hit by a strike. And they do suffer some costs for that.

So, they are constantly worried about that. Maybe not worried as much as they should be, or as much as we would hope they would be. But they are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think they also in the back of their minds are concerned that they don’t create a situation whereby their ruthless pursuit of maximizing profit by minimizing labor costs doesn’t actually dilute and damage their labor pool to the point where they’re damaging their product.

**John:** Yeah. You look at sort of what’s been possible to happen in TV and in film over the last ten years and the profitability that it has been able to see, that comes from really talented people who are choosing to make this their livelihood. And if they can’t make a livelihood doing this, they go away. And then they’re sort of stuck.

Let’s talk about these concerns and sort of the fear and anxiety around it. Basically what should you tell your mom if she asks you about the WGA negotiations? And I think I would stress that this does feel different than 2014. Like 2014 I wasn’t hearing some of the same conversations. But then again 2014 was a really different year. And I think some of what I’m sensing is that we’re just in such a really strange place as a world right now. We have protests in the streets. We have talk of union busting and right to work laws that may be coming out of congress. And we have all this anxiety over healthcare which dovetails really closely to our own concerns about our health plan. So, I think it’s natural for us to feel some of this anxiety right now.

But I don’t think it’s useful to push that into real fear. Fear is useful for like ginning up action, but it can also lead to some sort of rushed and sort of bad decisions. And I think the reason why we wanted to talk this long explaining is that the process of negotiations isn’t rushed and hasty and sudden and spontaneous. It’s actually kind of planning. It’s a real process.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s normal I think for writers to be concerned about a strike. A strike is a scary thing. We don’t strike very often. We used to. The Writers Guild in the ‘70s and ‘80s struck constantly. And so it was a very unstable time and I think people probably did live in a constant state of some kind of fear. But since 1988, we’ve struck once. Came close in 2001. And that’s the balance that the Guild has to find. We never want the companies to feel like we are refusing to strike under any circumstances because ultimately that is the leverage we have.

On the other hand, I think the companies and at least a few people in the Guild understand that when we do strike, we are essentially pulling a pin on a grenade, hugging them close to us, and letting it explode. We get hurt, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s not something that we’re looking forward to. Essentially a strike – when a strike occurs, it is an indication of a failed negotiation. So I agree with you, the panic and fear are essentially useless. And I hope very much that our negotiators are able to go in there, particularly because they’re – look, there is a deal. We know that there is a DGA deal. Right? There is a certain package and a certain amount.

My basic philosophy is that I hope they get more. They should not bring us back less. It’s pretty simple.

**John:** So let’s move on to some other questions that are not about the Writers Guild specifically.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Why don’t you start with Conner in Ireland?

**Craig:** So Conner in Ireland asks, “What do you do after you’ve finished a first draft, but before you start sending it off? Are there any particular things you do to make sure a script is as good as you can make it? Do you have a checklist of things that a character should be doing or saying? Do you map out the plot in each scene and make sure the drama is coming in peaks and troughs? Or, do you just make sure everything is spelled and formatted correctly and just send it out and wait for notes?”

John, what’s your post-flight checklist?

**John:** So I feel like we did an episode about last looks at a certain point. But it’s an evergreen question. My personal way of going through this is when I’m done with a script Godwin is the first person to read it. He makes sure that it actually makes sense. He checks for mistakes. I leave out words all the time. I’m terrible that way.

He’ll read it. Then I’ll read the same draft and when I say read it, I’ll literally print it out because sometimes I can only catch the mistakes on paper. And I’ll really just try to get a feel for like did I actually accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish? Because sometimes there will be a long period of time between that scene I wrote on page 20 and what I just finished up on page 96. And really make sure that it’s feeling like the same thing the whole time through. That I’m not making really some stupid choices. Or like sometimes I’ll create a character in two places that it’s not really quite the same character. I’ll be doing that kind of sort of idiot check, but I’m not going through to make sure is this scene meeting the character goal of this thing – am I hitting these peaks and valleys? It’s none of that stuff. Hopefully I’ve done my work in the process of writing it that it’s not going to have that sort of fundamental issue.

But I won’t know that until I have somebody else read it. Somebody who is out there in the world.

Craig, what’s your process?

**Craig:** Very similar. And I agree with you. At this point it’s too late to start asking questions like is this any good? Some people have different ways of approaching how they write things. Some people are much more loosey-goosey. I am very much a planner. So, there won’t be problems like that. However, I’ll forget about Jack who I have here, because she reads things for me the way Godwin reads for you. Let’s just talk about people that are just by themselves. That’s probably most of you. Read it out loud. That’s the best advice I can give you. Read the whole damn thing out loud. You don’t have to read the action stuff. Read the dialogue out loud. And hear and listen. Things will crop up. Little things that are easily fixed. You may sense suddenly that you’re bored. You may sense that you used the same word too frequently. You may sense that something doesn’t quite make sense.

And you’ll make little changes. And then read through the script carefully. And look for those little things. But don’t panic over small, I mean, I don’t think I’ve – typically I will have one mistake in a script. And I really carefully proofread it and I have somebody else, I have Jack who is proofreading for me as well. There will always be one. It’s not the end of the world. It really isn’t. You just don’t, I mean listen, don’t send in a script full of mistakes. That’s a disaster. But just read it out loud. It’s remarkable how much that will do for you.

**John:** I agree. Some writer, and maybe you’ll remember who this was, their advice was to remove page 17. That in any script you can take page 17 out, and maybe I’ve got the page number wrong, but there’s some sort of classic advice, there’s something early in the script that you just don’t actually need. I think it can be a useful exercise as you’re going through that first draft to just like take a random page out and say like do I really need this. And recognize that your script, even though it’s as good as you can possibly make it at that moment, it’s a flexible document. It can change. It doesn’t have to be – you shouldn’t expect it to be perfect right now. It just has to be the best version of this first draft it can be.

**Craig:** Writing screenplays is a function of balancing a dozen competing interests that are all functioning in different ways. That’s why we need to do multiple drafts. You fall into a trap if you either expect perfection on your first draft or believe you have attained perfection on your first draft. You have not.

So part of sending screenplays off is also adjusting your own expectations and not thinking so much in a fantasy-like way that what I’m going to do is send this script off and in return applause, tears of joy, and so forth. That’s just not how it works. You always have another draft. And so at some point, send it, just to see what happens.

**John:** Yeah. All right, that segues very nicely to our second question from Tobias in Sweden who writes, “I read this article on no film school,” we’ll put a link in the show notes, “that argues that instead of writing a story for a reader, newbie screenwriters are often mistakenly writing a movie for a producer. Instead of telling a story, they’re explaining a movie. Can you give some guidance on too much or too little scene description?” Craig, what is your take on this article?

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, this is an article written by Tom Long who is a screenplay consultant. And I promise that is not why I am annoyed at this article. I’m annoyed at this article because it makes no damn sense. It feels like somebody came up with a vague gimmick for an article and then wrote around in circles. This is what he says. “This is why you shouldn’t think of your screenplay as a movie. For non-established spec writers, a screenplay is a written story that if loved by enough industry folk can then lead to being setup at a studio and hopefully produced in a movie.”

I don’t know–

**John:** I want to stop right there. That was the point where I wanted to bail on the article.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And so this sense that a script written by a newbie writer, a spec script, is a completely different thing than what you and I are doing is just not true. And that is a thing that has to be killed dead. A script is a script. A screenplay is a screenplay. It’s the same thing. And so the script that I write for Disney or that Karen writes for herself, they’re the same thing, and there’s no fundamental difference between those two things. The rules are not different for me or for Karen. It is the same process. It is the same words on the page. We’re all equal when it comes to those words on the page.

So, the idea that a spec script is a fundamentally different beast than the script that I’m turning into a studio is just wrong. And that’s where I fundamentally lost faith in this article. But I kept reading, so. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s funny. So did I. So he goes on to say, “Yes, writers should be envisioning their screenplay as a movie, which means writing visually, externalizing actions and conflicts, and applying form and function. However, the story has to be fully executed on the page first.” What? Yeah. That’s what a screenplay is. What is he – what?

**John:** Some of what he’s saying does match up to things we say all the time. You have to be thinking visually. You have to be thinking about what is it going to feel like to experience this as a movie. So, that’s why I’m often saying don’t think about writing a script. You’re trying to write a movie. The goal is to make a movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But when he’s getting to – especially as he gets to his examples, I don’t think are selling his point very well. And I don’t think he has a clear logic behind the point. So, people who are listening through to this, you need to click through the article to see the two samples here, because they’re sort of like our Three Page Challenge samples. The little sections of things.

**Craig:** In reverse. [laughs]

**John:** Well, yeah. He sort of shows the early version of a scene that had too little scene description. And then like a second version which has much fuller scene description. And I will be generous in saying like if this was the first scene in a movie, then yes, I could see why the second thing would much better set up who the character is and what’s going on, but the second one if it was on page 90 is just completely overwritten for what that moment is. And so I think it’s a useful exercise for people to compare these two scenes, because the second one is – you know, if it’s the initial scene in a movie, I can see why it’s written that way, but it’s not how you would write most scenes in your film.

**Craig:** Correct. If the scene is in the middle of a movie, and it has to be, because the slug line is EXT. THE GRAVE – SECONDS LATER. So I’m going to just go out on a limb here and say we’re not opening a movie this way. So he says this, “It’s a spec script he consulted on.” And he says, “When I sat down with the screenwriter I explained that the scene confused me on many levels and that I senses there was supposed to be much more here that wasn’t being articulated.”

And so then that writer rewrote the scene per their discussion. If this in fact is a scene from the middle of the movie, I vastly prefer the writer’s original version. And I vastly prefer it because I feel something from it. It actually felt emotional because it was delivering a movie scene to me.

And the second one, I got bored. My god are there a lot of words here. Way too many words. It’s just overwritten. It’s purple. And overdone. And it turns what should be this kind of lovely little moment into a – I don’t know – boring. Boring. And this blows my mind. Blows my mind.

**John:** Yeah. So going back to the initial question that was asked. I think the amount of scene description is the appropriate amount of scene description for what the scene actually is and where it’s functioning in your script. And so it’s absolutely true that earlier scenes in your script tend to be a little bit denser and fuller because you’re setting up the world, you’re setting up the tone, there’s a lot more stuff to them.

They get a little bit leaner in general as you sort of go through the script. That’s fine. That’s good. I say you got to be thinking about you’re writing a movie and you’re writing a movie that is, yes, a literary document that’s going to be carrying the feeling of the movie. So therefore you do have to do the work to pick exactly the right word in the scene description. But that doesn’t mean you have to write reams of scene description to get that point across.

**Craig:** Look, I don’t really know what he’s trying to say here. God’s honest truth. I don’t know what this title means: Avoiding a Screenwriting Trap: Tell a Story Instead of Explaining Your Movie. I don’t know what he means by “this is why you shouldn’t think of your screenplay as a movie.” I don’t know why he’s assigning certain kinds of writing to writing a screenplay as opposed to a movie. It’s all the same to me.

I think you and I have the same experience. I just feel like this is just a bad article that misunderstands how we do what we do. And I think the lessons in it are questionable. So, to sum up, don’t read this.

**John:** [laughs] I think you should read it just to know what we’re actually talking about.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But don’t take it to heart.

**Craig:** Don’t take it to heart. Fair enough. Don’t take it to heart. Exactly.

**John:** All right, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Greece. So this last week was French Ski Week, so I was on vacation. We went to Greece, sort of last minute decision. Like, you know what, let’s go to Athens and see ancient things. And for whatever reason, Greece was not high on my list and I think it was because I thought like, you know what, Greece is going to be a hassle. And I got this idea in my head like it’s Greece, it’s sort of hard to get there, you can’t take trains there. It obviously had economic crisis. I don’t speak Greek. It seemed like it was going to be a lot of hassle.

And I don’t know why. I was just so wrong. And so I would just encourage people to go see Greece because I really loved it. We spent some time in Athens. Saw the Acropolis. The Parthenon. All amazing. Then we went up to Delphi to see the ruins of the Oracle, the Temple of Apollo there, which was incredible, too.

People in Greece are really cool. Their economy is basically built on tourism, so they’re really good at it. I just really liked it. And so I’d encourage people if you’re headed over the European direction, go to Greece, because Greece was so much better than I was expecting. And really worth it, especially if you have any interest in sort of how civilization with democracy and really crucial aspects of our culture started. Greece is the center of it all.

**Craig:** Grease is the word.

**John:** It is the word. No, it’s spelled differently. Sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was hoping that you were going to be talking about the musical Grease, then I was hoping that you would talk about just the all-purpose lubricant. But I’m happy that you talked about the country because, you know what, they gave us Steve Zissis.

**John:** Nothing better than Steve Zissis.

**Craig:** Nothing better.

**John:** And the new little Zissis of the world. It’s all good.

**Craig:** Mini-Ziss.

**John:** Mini-Ziss.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is one creepy thing but one very cool thing. There is a series of games available for the iPad/iPhone. Again, maybe for Android, but we don’t give a damn about Android. And it’s called Fran Bow. Fran like the girl’s name, and Bow. B-O-W.

And the story is released in chapters. Each chapter is its own game. I think two bucks a game, two bucks a chapter. Fascinating game. Really cool. Very simple controls. You are investigating your world around you and you’re picking up items and manipulating them to solve puzzles. What makes this game fascinating, it is the darkest thing. You play this little girl. She is sweet and so innocent. And she constantly asks sweet and innocent questions of the world around her. Her parents have bloodily butchered. And by the way, this is not a game for children. This is 17 plus all the way.

And she has now been committed to a mental hospital for observation. And they give her pills. And one of the main game mechanics is when she takes one of these pills, the world transforms into this horror show. An absolute horror show. It is disturbing. It is visually gorgeous. The game play itself is the least important part of it. It really is just experiencing the remarkable creepiness of this game. I love it. Fran Bow. Check it out.

**John:** Well done. So, while you’re on your long flight to Greece, you can play Fran Bow. And you’ll see the glorious wonders of ancient world and the wonders of the iPad. Well done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Kristian Gotthelf.

**Craig:** Gotthelf.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send longer questions like the ones we answered today. On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Send us your short questions there. That’s always delightful.

We are on Facebook. I do occasionally check the Facebook page, so find us there. Like us. Liking us does something. I don’t know what.

Even more useful though is if you give us a nice review and some five stars on iTunes, because that helps people find the show through iTunes. We are on iTunes. We’re also on Google Play. We’re other places, too, but iTunes is sort of the main catalogue of things.

People often think that iTunes delivers podcasts the same way that people – like you download a song from items. You don’t download podcasts from iTunes. It’s just a catalog. It’s just a bunch of RSS feeds.

**Craig:** It’s a directory.

**John:** It’s like old Yahoo! That’s what it’s sort of like.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I remember when Yahoo! was just a vertical list of websites.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** That’s how old I am.

**John:** Yeah. My daughter has no sense of what the Internet used to be. I mean, she’s never lived in a time without the Internet, and so just like, well yes, everything was always there whenever you wanted it. We had a situation in Paris where our power went out in our apartment. And so I’m trying to find the fuse box and she comes in and she says, “The Wi-Fi is out, too.” I’m like, well of course the Wi-Fi is out. There’s no power. But it hadn’t occurred to her that like without power we don’t have Internet. And so like, oh no. The worst.

**Craig:** She thought it was more like, well, the power is out. And the water isn’t working.

**John:** [laughs] Oh my. So, if your Internet is restored and the Wi-Fi is back up–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** You can come visit at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the show notes for this week’s episode and all the back episodes. You’ll also find the transcripts for previous episodes. They go up about four days after an episode posts. And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. That’s right now the only place where you can find all those back episodes. There’s talk of future USB drives, but at the moment there are none of them, so that’s where you can find them. It’s $2 a month for all the back episodes, the special episodes.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** The Aline Brosh McKenna specials. Aline was gracious enough to live tweet our most recent episode, so maybe she’ll do that for this one, too. She won’t. She won’t do it.

**Craig:** You know what happened last night at this screenwriter outreach meeting?

**John:** Tell me all about it.

**Craig:** When I got up to speak, [laughs], a woman said, “Sexy Craig.”

**John:** [laughs] Oh no!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s so inappropriate.

**Craig:** No, it was amazing. So I think it’s been so long. I think next week – I’m not going to drop him on you now – but next week Sexy Craig is going to have something to say.

**John:** Ugh. So a reason enough to tune in or not tune in. Reason enough for me to bring in a guest host for next week to avoid or to have some Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** You can’t, man. Can’t avoid me. I’m with you.

**John:** Ugh. Everyone have a great week. We’ll see you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Kellyanne Conway’s interview tricks, explained](http://www.vox.com/videos/2017/2/13/14597968/kellyanne-conway-tricks)
* [On shared false memories](https://aeon.co/ideas/on-shared-false-memories-what-lies-behind-the-mandela-effect)
* [Allison Schroeder](http://johnaugust.com/2011/allison-schoeder-first-person)
* Avoid a Screenwriting Trap: [No Film School article](http://nofilmschool.com/2017/02/screenwriting-tell-a-story-instead-of-explaining-your-movie)
* [Greece](http://www.visitgreece.gr/)
* [Fran Bow](http://www.franbow.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Kristian Gotthelf ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_289.mp3).