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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/franchises-and-final-draft).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 236 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, on the program, somebody buys Final Draft. But it’s not an aspiring screenwriter, rather a giant accounting software company. We’ll talk about what that means for Craig’s favorite application and the state of screenwriting software in general.

Also, today we’ll talk about franchises. We’ll do a ton of follow-up questions about previous discussions, including some “How Would This Be a Movie?” that are actually going to be movies. And we’ll answer listener questions, too, about reading your boss’ script and moving on from a draft.

**Craig:** That sounds like a lot.

**John:** It sounds like a lot. It wasn’t very much until we just added the last little thing.

**Craig:** I know —

**John:** Right before we started recording.

**Craig:** It’s way too ambitious. But you know what, I feel like we could do it.

**John:** I feel like we could do it because we’re an ambitious podcast that gets a lot of news attention. This last week we got written up in Vanity Fair because of our live show, our Hollywood Heart show with Jason Bateman and The Game of Thrones guys. There’s a whole article in Vanity Fair about that now.

**Craig:** I don’t know how Vanity Fair makes their money. I’m guessing ads on the internet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should get some of it. I mean, we did the work.

**John:** We did the work. There is reporting on something that we did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean —

**John:** Yeah. So Joanna Robinson just did a little write-up about The Game of Thrones guys talking about how the first pilot was terrible and how you said it was terrible and the things they did to fix it. And she noted that it’s not just booze and death threats that keep these two together, which really could be said for you and me as well. [laughs]

**Craig:** I’ve definitely been having a strange week in the news.

**John:** You have. Craig, you passed me in Twitter followers which is just — which is fine. Also just kind of bonkers because like I’ve been hovering above 50,000 for a long time. And if you look at the chart, you’ve rocketed it up in the last month.

**Craig:** I want people to notice. Play it, rewind if you can, and listen to John’s “Which is fine.” [laughs]

**John:** Which is fine.

So Craig, here’s a fascinating thing you’re going to find is — I don’t know if on Twitter you ever got ads before. Did you get ads in your timeline?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. You mean like a sponsored tweet or something?

**John:** Like a sponsored tweet or like you’d scroll past and there’d be an ad in there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So I don’t get them either. But apparently a lot of people do get them. And it’s because you and I crossed a certain threshold or because we have little verified checkmarks, we don’t get any of that stuff. So we live in a slightly different Twitter universe than other people do.

**Craig:** You mean it’s better?

**John:** It’s better. We sort of — we are in the express lane of Twitter, which is odd. But you are now in the center of Twitter firestorms because you keep poking the bear and the bow — the bear being your former college roommate.

**Craig:** He’s no bear.

**John:** No, he’s not a bear.

**Craig:** No. Bears are cool. [laughs] Yeah, I know I’m not going to stop.

**John:** You’re not going to stop?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And people will not stop emailing the ask account to say if I could get you to go on a national media appearance, and the answer is no. So you can stop writing in.

**Craig:** And I’m so sorry that that’s happening. For whatever it’s worth, I get bombarded constantly, every day, six or seven calls.

What’s kind of remarkable to me is news organizations will just have different people call and you start to realize that every organization is terrible in the world. So —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like, you know, so CNN will have somebody call. And then two days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then three days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then NBC calls, but then MSNBC calls. Nobody talks, and anyway, I’m not doing any of it, ever. So stop calling.

**John:** Which is good.

**Craig:** That ain’t going to work, but fine. [laughs]

**John:** So last night I had my own little media spotlight because I got to host Beyond Words 2016. So this is who I had up on stage with me. So I had Matt Charman who wrote Bridge of Spies. Drew Goddard from The Martian. I had Jon Herman and Andrea Berloff from Straight Outta Compton. John McNamara from Trumbo, Phyllis Nagy from Carol. We had Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short, Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy from Spotlight, and Aaron Sorkin from Steve Jobs.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That was a lot of people on stage. And if it sounds like that was too many people to have on stage, you are correct. That is more writers than you should ever have on stage for a Q&A.

But it ended up being really fun. And so we got a review. We got a write-up. Which I didn’t know they would ever write a review for a Q&A, but they did. So David Robb from Deadline wrote, “It was a high-spirited evening with lots of laughs and no controversy.”

**Craig:** That’s the way we like it.

**John:** That’s the way we roll.

So it was actually a really fun time. And everybody was great. No one had nearly enough time to speak. But I tried to structure it in a way that everybody got to speak pretty often so that it didn’t just go for like a half an hour without hearing from anybody. So it was a fun night.

If you were not able to attend but would like to hear it, you’re in luck because it’s going to be on the premium feed. So we’ll have that up maybe at the same time this episode goes up. So if you want to go over to scriptnotes.net, it’s $1.99 a month to get all the back episodes and premium episodes, and that will be one of them.

**Craig:** Spectacular. That must have been quite the task to wrangle — I mean, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11.

**John:** Yup. So me, plus 11 people.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You could barely fit all those chairs on the stage because we had the sort of couchey kind of things. We’ve done a lot of events at this theater. And so we went with the couch mold and — but it was a lot of people there.

And so I tried to structure questions that there would be some speed rounds where everybody would answer one thing and it would be really short. And then we try to go in-depth and talk about relationship with characters, relationship with setting up the worlds.

It was interesting. But what was so weird about that group of movies and that group of writers is like they were almost entirely movies about real people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so we could really focus on that.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And so except for Drew Goddard who ruined everything by writing The Martian.

**Craig:** Right. Drew ruined it.

**John:** But even Carol, as I went — as we sort of got into it, Carol is, you know, based on some real experiences. And Phyllis’ relationship with Patricia Highsmith and sort of the weird way that they met and first became friendly was a huge part of that. And the sense of responsibility writers have to their subjects, be it the author or be it the real-life people you’re portraying, that was a great thing to get into. And I don’t think — people weren’t answering the same questions they answered throughout the rest of the award circuit, which is fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the idea. I mean, when I did the session with Charles and Adam for The Big Short, I tried my best to come up with questions that I didn’t think they are constantly — I mean, because you can — it’s amazing. I don’t want to use the word lazy or anything, but man, these people, a lot of them don’t even try. They just ask the same question. They’re not embarrassed to ask the same questions over and over. I would be so embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. You got to talk about new things.

**Craig:** Yeah, give it a shot.

**John:** So one of the things we did talk about was what was one of your favorite scenes that is not in the movie. Or something you wrote that didn’t make it through to the end. And except for Aaron Sorkin everyone was delighted to sort of tell us those things. And I think those are often really revealing because those things that don’t make it up there were probably very important to you in the writing of the movie, but they weren’t necessarily important to the final version of the movie because, obviously, these movies all turned out great without those scenes being in them. So that was a good look at sort of the process and the emotional journey you go through as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I’m always struck by how you can take writers who are at the top of their game and take them at a point in their career when they’re in the middle of all this glory. And they’re all writing different kinds of things completely, and they all come from different places, and the problems are all the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re — it just — that’s actually very comforting, I think.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a shared experience of being the person trying to make this impossible movie happen. And all these movies were incredibly unlikely movies to exist. And so the fact that they all turned out and came out this year is a great testament.

I found it weird that three of these movies take place in the ’50s. And so I kept waiting for someone to cut together these movies into like one cohesive whole.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where like Carol is in Bridge of Spies and Trumbo is suddenly walking through. Because certain people could kind of be in both places. And of course you have Jeff Daniels who is both in Steve Jobs but he’s also in The Martian, and so he could, you know, be yelling at people for different reasons.

**Craig:** Bridge of Carol Trumbo.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe not the strongest.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But we can workshop it.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Let’s get a roundtable together.

**John:** Yeah, we can go out to one of the vendors and they can come back to us with some title treatments and some, you know, one-sheets. And we can really figure out what that’s like.

I will say, if you are an aspiring editor who likes to cut together mash-up of things, I would say, go for those three movies and cut them together and make something new out of it. Because they very much feel like they could exist in the same color-space-universe. So go for it.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m on the verge of a new character, by the way.

**John:** Uh-oh. Let’s work through this right now because I want to hear it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, we have Sexy Craig.

**John:** Yeah. And everyone knows how I feel about Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** This is — the new character is Cool Craig.

**John:** Oh, all right.

**Craig:** He’s like — Cool Craig is like this. He’s like, “Yeah, you know, it’s like, ah. Everybody’s just like all part of the same world, you know?”

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, like, I don’t know. I can’t even get worked up.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. It’s that sense of being like really connected but detached at the same time.

**Craig:** You know what, it’s not Cool Craig. It’s blasé Craig. [laughs] It’s actually — it’s the opposite of cool. But I’m going to work on blasé Craig.

**John:** I wonder if it’s maybe like a Whole Foods Craig. It’s really — yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that, Whole Foods Craig. That’s — it’s like a mixture of blasé and cool. Done.

**John:** Yeah. Done.

**Craig:** Okay. Whole Foods Craig.

**John:** This last week my daughter has been watching a fair amount of TV including Grease: Live, which I thought was fantastic. I don’t know if you saw Grease: Live.

**Craig:** Amazing. And I’m actually — the script I’m writing now is for the gentleman that produced that. And they were just — I mean, talk about going into a thing all muscle tight and, on my god, it’s going to rain, and what happens, and then poor, you know —

**John:** Vanessa Hudgens who lost her husband — who lost her dad.

**Craig:** Yeah. Her father died like six hours before. I mean, it’s just like, that’s ugh. But it was — I thought it was the best of all the versions of live productions they’ve done on network TV.

**John:** I thought it was spectacular. And look, I have some issues with the underlying material of Grease, but I thought they actually did a really smart job of just making that a huge, entertaining moment of television live in front of my eyes.

And it did definitely feel like they were like sprinting on tightropes. Like I just couldn’t believe that they were able to do this thing live in front of me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know — look, I know — I saw the tweets, you know — the point of Grease is change everything about you to get a man. You know, yeah. And also, it was made in the ’70s and so it’s like, whatever.

**John:** Yeah. It’s the ’70s version of the ’50s. And if we wanted to get our best lessons about how to live life out of stage musicals, I think we are really in trouble.

**Craig:** Well, also, it’s like, no one is coming to Grease for that. No one. You know why you’re going to Grease? For the romance and the songs. And it’s funny and they all get together at the end. They go together like ramramlam and dingidy dingidy bam.

You know what, man, it’s like, ugh. I just feel like, can’t you just like enjoy the music and not like overthink it? I don’t know, man. You know what? It’s like, whatever.

**John:** I think a Whole Foods Craig is going to work.

So before we got on to the Grease topic, my daughter has been watching a lot of things that involves sort of young adults flirting. And so she was just like, “Can you show me like how you flirt?” And so I was — we’ve been trying to demonstrate like really inept flirting, and it’s just delightful because she’s like, “No, no. You’re doing it wrong.” I’m like, “Ah, thank you, thank you. Somehow you were conceived. So I don’t know, I did something right.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I just think that I would pay anything to watch that. [laughs] To watch you teach flirting classes to your daughter. I just like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you turn towards the flirt recipient and you engage the flirting protocol, adjusting for input variables. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she said, “No, Daddy.”

**John:** She said it was the worst, that I was doing a terrible job. But what’s fascinating is that she was comparing against a template that has been enforced by like Disney Channel shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so her idea of like what cool is, is really sort of like this weird manufactured adult version of what kids should think is cool.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s just — it’s all so completely synthetic.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t match up to Zack and Cody at all.

**John:** Not a bit. Now they’re the best.

**Craig:** They’re just better than you.

**John:** They are better than me.

Let’s get to some follow-up. So hey, do you remember way back in Austin? We were sitting there in that church and we were taking through How Would This Be a Movie. We had Steve Zissis up on stage. Who else did we have up on stage?

**Craig:** I believe we had Nicole Perlman.

**John:** Oh, Nicole Perlman was there, yes.

And so we were talking about Zola. And so Zola was the young woman who was a waitress, and then she was also a stripper. And she did a little of sex work connecting. She wasn’t a sex worker, but she was helping facilitate sex work for a friend, an acquaintance.

**Craig:** The word you are looking for is pimping.

**John:** I think she was pimping and —

**Craig:** She was a big pimping.

**John:** She was pimping. And she had a very wild, very dangerous weekend, which she tweeted about. It was a long stream of tweets that became sort of this sensation. It was like, well, what is real here, what is not real here.

That became an article for Rolling Stone written by David Kushner. And it is now becoming a movie. So this last week it was announced that James Franco will direct from a script by Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it.

**Craig:** Now I’m really curious to see what angle they take on this, because we kind of went through all these permutations of how you could approach it. And so actually a very interesting example of how a story can open itself up to four or five different — totally different kinds of movies based on the same thing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated to see which one they choose.

**John:** I am, too. It seems a little bit strange that Franco is involved because like there’s an overlap between this and Spring Breakers, which seems — well, it could be good or it could be bad. I don’t know that he’s going to be playing a role in it. So it’s just — I’m curious to see what this will end up becoming.

**Craig:** I am, too. I am, too. I think that they will be smart to come at it from some angle that will be relevant beyond our general interest in the story, because it already seems like it’s 1,000 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And by the time the movie comes out it’ll seem like 20,000 years old. So there’s got to be more to it than just “Here’s what happened.”

**John:** Yup. We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Another bit of How Would This Be a Movie, this was from a later episode, we talked about sleep paralysis. And Matt, a listener writes in, “Jeffrey Reddick who is the creator and writer of Final Destination wrote and produced a feature called Dead Awake this past fall. It’s in post-production. The log line is a young woman must save herself and her friends from an ancient evil that stalks its victims through the real life phenomenon of sleep paralysis.”

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. It totally is exactly the movie I think we pitched would happen. And it apparently did happen and it is now in post. I was looking for a trailer. There’s no trailer up yet as we’re recording this, but it sounds like a movie that you will see in a theater, or on iTunes.

**Craig:** I think so. I think all these people should be paying us even though that guy did it before we ever said it.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re giving him some advanced promotion. So just like Vanity Fair should be paying us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Jeffrey Reddick, if would want us, slip us a few dollars, we’re not going to say no.

**Craig:** Or hey, if you don’t, it’s all right man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. Either way it’s great. I’m liking this Craig.

**Craig:** You just like it because it’s not Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**John:** I like — here’s the thing about this Craig. This Craig has no umbrage whatsoever.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This Craig, all umbrage has been completely pulled out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, we’re going to get to Final Draft soon enough. [laughs]

**John:** It’s like there was a Transporter accident. [laughs] And all the umbrage went to one Craig. And this is just the one that has nothing left in him. He’s just a sheep.

**Craig:** You know what, nobody would want the good Craig. They would just kill him. They would set phazers to kill.

**John:** You can’t do anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, you’re useless.

**John:** I have a bit of correction. In our discussion of dead scripts, one of us mentioned Armageddon and Deep Impact and a listener wrote in to point out that Deep Impact actually came out first. I always forget that but it is actually true.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** All right. I believe it.

**Craig:** Sure. Yup.

**John:** We talked about Matt and Matt was looking for a place to write. So David wrote in. Craig, tell us what David wrote.

**Craig:** He said, “For $19.99 a month, that’s $19.99 a month, I have a business lounge access to any Regus in the United States.” I think I’m pronouncing Regus correctly. “I’m in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and I use them all over Jacksonville. It works great for me. I’ve moved on but still keep it. I love it and wrote my first draft there of my most recent effort. Regus rents offices mostly to sole proprietors and small businesses. Those individual offices are extremely expensive but the business lounge accounts are a steal.”

**John:** That’s absolutely great and true. And I can imagine something that sort of like an airport lounge would be great and perfect for exactly those kinds of things. It’s like it’s a clean, well-lit place that maybe has some coffee and you just go there and you do your work. That makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So our mutual friend, Dana Fox, she does a lot of writing at the Soho House in Hollywood. So that is a fancy club at the top of a building on Sunset. And that’s another great place to sort of go for meetings and coffee. But I also know writers who just sit at a table and bang out a draft there. So it’s another good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of writers go there. Every now and then Todd Phillips and I would write there. But the problem with the Soho House, I mean — and this is frankly, that’s the Soho House is for rich people. And I think even then they make a decision about whether or not you’re Soho House people.

**John:** I have applied and have not gotten in, so if SoHo House wants to accept me, they could.

**Craig:** Well, they have a no-cyborg policy. It’s pretty strict. But —

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the problem with Soho House is that inevitably people that you know are going to walk by because it is that kind of Hollywood incestuous place. And then you’re not working, you’re talking now, you know.

I love — you know, it’s so funny like, the only person near me, truly near me is John Lee Hancock because his office is just two floors below mine in the same building. But the two of us are so similar. We never ever bother each other, ever, unless he wants to use my scanner.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, he’s doing pretty well. I bet he could afford his own scanner.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing. But look —

**John:** And the other thing is I honestly don’t even use my scanner that much. I just use the app on my phone. And it’s just, it’s so much easier.

**Craig:** I use the scanner if I have to like — at tax time, it’s pretty good.

**John:** Yeah, if you have a bunch of pages, it’s —

**Craig:** Yeah, a bunch of pages. But I should just start charging him, right?

**John:** You should, absolutely. Or if he got a lounge access account to —

**Craig:** To my scanner.

**John:** To Regus, I bet they have a scanner.

**Craig:** Probably.

**John:** They probably have a copier and a scanner. It’s probably one of those combo units, but it would be be fine.

**Craig:** Hey man, whether it’s a combo or not, you know, it’s like you pay and then what happens, happens.

**John:** 100%. Craig, you’re so right.

**Craig:** Here’s another question. This one is from Mario. And he asks, regarding our dead scripts discussion, “What if there were something, anything, in one of those dead scripts that you felt could work well in a different one, maybe even one you’re working on now?”

**John:** Yes. So that’s a great question. So has there been anything in one of those dead scripts that you’ve sort of taken and repurposed for something new?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I say basically no. There was one idea that I tried twice. And essentially, there’s a split screen action sequence, which I wrote in the first Charlie’s Angles and we ended up not shooting it. And so I ended up doing a similar kind of thing in another script that has never been shot.

So it’s a similar idea where at a certain point the wide screen goes split screen and you’re following two separate threads through both sides. So it’s really the same idea, but it’s so vastly different execution because the story is different. That it’s just the same. It’s only the very general same idea. There’s no beats that are the same.

I’ve never been able to like take a scene from one thing and move it to another. It just — that just never works. Everything is sort of bespoke and custom to that one movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. And occasionally I will hear writers say, “Well, you know, I wrote this scene in this other movie and I’m trying to put it into this one.” And I just think, “Why? Just, you know, write a new scene.”

When people do that, I feel like they’re clinging not to some kind of incredibly utilitarian piece of work that could fit into one movie or another. They’re clinging to some sort of feeling they had when they wrote that scene. Like, “I nailed it.” You know, “I got it.” Or that scene represented some kind of breakthrough for them and now they’re just basically clinging to it like, you know, some sort of shining example of their goodness and trying to put it into other things. It will never ever work, ever.

**John:** So if you’re a standup comic, you’re going to have your jokes. And you’re going to have your jokes that you go back to and the things that you know work because they’ve been tested. But it doesn’t really work the same for screenwriting because everything is very much, you know, the scene in front of you. So it’s very hard to move a joke from, you know, page 19 to page 64, much less from one movie to another movie. So it’s very hard to sort of take material from one script and move into a completely different movie.

**Craig:** I also feel like if you can, something is wrong with your current script. Because even jokes, unless it’s the broadest of movies, different characters say different kinds of jokes. They don’t — it just doesn’t work.

Not only have I never done it, I’ve never actually even considered doing it. It’s just those scripts are done and that’s that, and let’s just move ahead.

**John:** At some point, we’ll have Chris Morgan on, who writes The Fast and the Furious movies. And that’s a situation where I can imagine that there were stunt sequences which were considered and designed for one movie that for whatever reason they didn’t shoot, but that were actually really good ideas as sequences, which could be repurposed for another movie. I mean, obviously you would write everything in them, like the story stuff would change. But if the idea of, “What if we did these kind of trucks doing this kind of thing?” might be valid in a different The Fast and the Furious movie. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine being moved from one movie to another movie. But in most cases, it’s just not going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re talking about shifting a sequence from one movie to its own sequel, then I think it’s fair game because, you know, they’re the same characters. It’s the same tone. So, sure, I think that’s fine.

I don’t think we actually did that when we were working on the Hangover movies. But we — I remember at some point we talked about like, “Oh you know, we wanted to do that thing in 2. Maybe we should do it in 3.” And I don’t think we ended up doing it, but I get that.

But that’s not I think what Mario is getting at, which is, you know, because if the script is dead, you’re not working on the sequel. [laughs]

**John:** So if you’re copying a sequence from one script to another script, you might be using some screenwriting software, perhaps even Final Draft.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And that was in the news this week. So it was one of the things most tweeted at me this week, was this bit of news that production management specialist Cast & Crew Entertainment Services has bought screenwriting software leader Final Draft Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Cast & Crew said the deal, announced Tuesday, continues to accelerate its investment in technology supported by its majority shareholder, Silver Lake Partners. Cast & Crew which provides payroll and residuals processing and accounting systems and software, and production incentive consulting was acquired by Silver Lake Partners in mid-2015.

Marc Madnick, CEO and Chairman of Final Draft, said the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Together, “we will accelerate our development process and further solidify our industry leadership for many years to come.”

So in the show notes, you’ll see links to the Variety article but we’ll also put in the original press release which has sort of more details, kind of, about the deal.

**Craig:** This is awesome. [laughs]

So even the strange coincidence, I’m working on this project for HBO. It’s the first — it’s a miniseries, first television thing I’ve ever done. And it had taken me forever to finish this thing that I was doing and I finally turned it in. And then they paid me.

And I had forgotten actually that I was supposed to get paid because they didn’t pay for so long but I had taken so long. And these checks came and HBO — so all these companies go through payroll services. Usually, when I get paid, like for instance, I think Universal uses Entertainment Partners.

**John:** That’s where I get most of my stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s a company that handles payroll for the studios. I think they handle their own in-house payroll, so their own employees are paid through their own company. But outside vendors get paid through this service because when they pay writers, actors, and directors, it’s complicated. It’s not just paying you what they owe you. They also have to then keep track of how much they paid you, when you hit the certain cap, how much fringes they have to then send to the unions for pension and for health. And then there’s the whole residuals thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But this was the first time I got one from Cast & Crew. I didn’t even know what it was when it showed up. So Cast & Crew — so at least I know they handle the payments for HBO.

**John:** And I want to make clear that the check came through properly and Cast & Crew did a good job, at least, in terms of getting you paid.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, Cast & Crew did a brilliant job getting me paid.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** And they seemed like — this seems actually like a perfect match between a company that is the ultimate in bean counting and Cast & Crew. [laughs] So what in God’s name would these two companies have in common? It’s actually kind of a brilliant sale.

What is valuable about Final Draft? Well, let’s talk about what’s not valuable about it. The software stinks, in my humble opinion. It doesn’t work as well as a number of its competitors. It offers fewer features than a number of its competitors. It is refreshed far less often. It is way more expensive than any other option.

So why? Where’s the value in it?

The value, in a weird way, is in its format. Just because they were first, and because they were the leader for so, so long, their format, their file format is the industry standard file format. A little bit like the way VHS became the standard format for home recording even though, as many people will angrily say, Sony Betamax was a far superior format.

So FDX is the VHS format of screenwriting files. And you may say, “Well, you know, isn’t PDF — hasn’t that eliminated the value of FDX?” Almost entirely, but then there’s this little piece.

And the little piece is when you are in production and you are porting the script into breakdown software, breakdown software to schedule your movie, budget your movie, break it down for departments. All that stuff, which is very technical business, nuts and bolts, bean counting kind of stuff, the FDX file format pipes in, and that’s what is — their format kind of owns that space.

So this is actually a very smart marriage because I can easily see how a company that handles payroll can say, “Well, we can actually just take over this other nuts and bolts kind of thing. We’re really good in nuts and bolts. Let’s just buy the format that the nuts and bolts come in and we will do it.”

Now, what does this mean for the rest of us?

**John:** Well, before we get into what it means for the rest of us, I think you’re wrong sort of largely. And so I want to talk —

**Craig:** Hey man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, hey, man. So we can have differences of opinion.

So let’s talk through what they said about it and I think they believe maybe what you believe. Here’s the quote from Cast & Crew.

So, “With a clear strategic vision and the active input of our clients, we are leveraging technology to create compelling end-to-end solutions,” said Eric Belcher, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cast & Crew.

“We are delighted to partner with the best screenwriting software company in the business. We see powerful links between its exceptional product of family and the digital payroll and production solutions we are providing. It all starts with a script.”

Wow, so many buzz words crammed into such a small space.

All right. So I do think that they perceive that there’s going to be some way that Final Draft will be able to tie better into — I don’t even know that they really do production budgeting but I think they probably want to do production budgeting and go into all their other systems.

The thing is, Final Draft is client software. It’s a thing that you use on your computer. And that’s not the people who are really using their normal accounting software. It’s a really different customer. So I think that is a real problem.

And the FDX file format, Final Draft created it but they don’t really own it. It’s just XML. So Highland, my app, writes and reads to the FDX format just fine. And so do all of the other screenwriting software.

So even though Final Draft created that format, they don’t own that format. They have no special keys or mastery to that format. So if they really tried to sort of lock it down some, but they can’t because they picked an open format that anyone can read and pick through. So there’s no magic benefit you get from it.

What I do think you get from Final Draft, though, is I think you get the name Final Draft, which is honestly, for all of our frustration, is synonymous with screenwriting software. I think if you talk to somebody who doesn’t know anything about screenwriting but if you asked like, “What program do you use to write scripts?” They’ll say, “Oh, it’s probably Final Draft,” because that’s the one they’ve heard of.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. And actually, I don’t think we disagree, because you’re right. I mean, every good screenwriting solution offers an export to FDX because it’s academic to do. FDX isn’t a proprietary format, anybody could write through it. So you’re absolutely right about that.

I think that what they’re trying to do is go into companies where they are already providing the one part of the business service, paying people and saying, “We’d like to actually — we’ll give you a rate.” Like right now you’re paying this company to do this part of the bean counting. And you’re paying us to do this part. How about you pay us to do both parts and it will end up costing you a little bit less?

I suspect that’s what they’re going for. But here’s what I know for sure. When Marc Madnick, our friend, says the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers, he is lying through his teeth. There is absolutely no way that that’s true. None.

**John:** No. I don’t think that’s — I don’t think that’s accurate at all because to lie you have to be intentionally trying to deceive. I think he may genuinely believe that.

I don’t think that’s going to be the outcome. So I agree with you that the outcome will not be better for most people. But I — he sat across from us — I do take him at his word that I think he thinks it will be better for people.

**Craig:** I don’t think he thinks that at all.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Because he knows how he spends money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Final Draft basically is an advertising company. They have a product that they barely change and update. They have four people working on that part of it. Everybody else is in sales and promotion. And —

**John:** We should acknowledge that sales and promotion ended up becoming one of the sponsors of our live show from last week, much to our surprise.

**Craig:** Much to our surprise. Yeah, no, that’s what they’re good at. So that’s where the money will continue to go. And in fact, I think this partnership is about something that has nothing to do with the end user — the typical end user of Final Draft. This partnership has everything to do about cornering a certain part of the post-production marketplace or the — I’m sorry, the production marketplace here in Hollywood.

How in God’s name would the fact that they are now owned by a payroll company help a kid who’s 19 years old in New Jersey looking to write his first screenplay? It has nothing to do with him. And so therefore, that kid’s not going to be serviced any better. That’s ridiculous. It’s —

**John:** So I agree with you, Craig. I was just saying I don’t think — I don’t think we can necessarily say that Madnick is lying when he says it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re right. I’m — okay. Let me amend it. I can’t say for certain that he’s lying. I can say for certain that what he’s saying will not turn out to be true. Is that fair?

**John:** I think that’s absolutely fair to say.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So my question when this happened is sort of why or why now. And I have no great insight into the finances of Final Draft to know whether they are doing great and like this was a chance to sort of buy them at the peak or if they were in trouble. And I say that honestly because while I make another screening app, my app is nowhere near the Final Draft of the world.

So I don’t know whether this was, “Uh-oh, everything is going south. We better sell the company. Maybe someone will buy the company.” And that’s — whether this was saving Final Draft or whether this was an investment firm coming in to scoop up this brand name that was available. So I don’t know what the real reasons were for why this happened.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, you don’t sell your company when it’s on the upswing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because there is really no point unless it’s going to open up some new marketplace to you that you didn’t have access to, which is not the case here. So —

**John:** If you’re Marvel and you sell to Disney and you can do amazing new things.

**Craig:** Correct, because Disney opens up a marketplace. They just have this infrastructure that’s so much larger than yours and they have theme parks that you simply don’t have and don’t have the capital to construct, and an empire of hotels and floating hotels, right? So that’s not applicable here.

So in my mind, I’m thinking — I don’t if they were in trouble, but I would imagine that our repeated theory that, you know, they had kind of reached the end of the golden era of being the only person out there was becoming true.

**John:** Yeah. So the people who bought them is Cast & Crew, but Cast & Crew was itself bought just in the middle of 2015. So it’s this big company called Silver Lake Partners, basically an investment fund, so they own a stake in a lot of different things including William Morris, WME.

What’s odd is I looked on the Silver Lake Partners thing, and they don’t even announce that they bought it, so — that they bought Final Draft. So you know, whatever Cast & Crew paid for it, it wasn’t enough that it made it to the front page of Silver Lake Partners. It wasn’t a big enough deal to have mattered to that.

**Craig:** Well, it’s actually kind of fascinating to me when they said they bought Final Draft. What did they really buy? I mean, what they bought was the code. They bought intellectual property. They’re not buying — I mean, what are the assets there beyond that?

**John:** Well, they’re buying Marc Madnick. They’re buying the team. It’s however much you want to value that team. [laughs]

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because as we talked about, obviously there’s programmers and there’s a marketing team and there’s a support team. How much of those do you want to keep or need to keep? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m going to just predict that within five years Marc Madnick has moved on to another enterprise.

**John:** Maybe so. And maybe this is a good way for him to transition out of doing it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I don’t know whether he’s going to want to come on the show to talk to us about it, but he came on before.

So let’s talk about what this means for actual users. If you are a person who is using Final Draft right now, I guess I would preface this by saying, if you are using Final Draft and happy, well, good for you. I mean, I guess, if you like it, that’s fantastic. A lot of people don’t like it, but that’s — and then there’s many good other choices out there. And I think there are choices that weren’t available even three or four years ago. So it is better for this to be happening now than it would have been a couple of years ago.

**Craig:** Yeah, certainly. Ultimately, this won’t change anything for the typical end user. I can’t imagine that Silver Lake Partners and their subsidiary, Cast & Crew, is going to spend unnecessary cash on a product that seems to sell regardless of quality.

**John:** Yeah. I could think — my concern would be that oftentimes, especially on the Macintosh, and really — I’m going to fully reveal our Macintosh bias here because — Craig, do you know anybody who writes on a PC?

**Craig:** You know — yeah. I mean, I’ve never seen them do it but I’ve heard them say it.

**John:** Yeah. So most of the screenwriters I know are writing on Macs. And most of the TV writers I know and TV showrooms I know or writer’s rooms are writing on Macs. So that’s really my experience.

And my experience has been that when the Mac System Software gets updated, Final Draft breaks. Not always, but very often Final Draft breaks. My concern would be that if the people who now own Final Draft choose not to spend a lot of time and money on it, Final Draft could break and become irrevocably broken for even longer than it has been in the past.

**Craig:** Well, I would imagine that they — see, I actually think that maybe that’s the one thing that might get fixed because they are corporate and because they aren’t — when you — when something is just one part of your company then the costs involved aren’t so, you know, egregious. And you might think like — well, Marc Madnick, he was, “not in the business of going out of business,” which I think he translated into not in the business of doing his job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and putting out software that was robust and worked and was up-to-date. This company might actually go, “Okay. Look, we’re a real company here. We just got a memo from Apple saying that the following software has been deprecated for 18 years. Can we hire somebody to fix this now please?” I could see that possibly happening.

**John:** But here’s the thing, if Final Draft breaks on a Macintosh, they have to scramble to get it to work again. If this giant company — if this one little thing that’s not a huge priority for them breaks, then it’s not going to be a priority. And so that outside contractor they are bringing in to do this work, it’s unlikely to be awesome. It’s unlikely to sort of be — I mean, the good thing about Final Draft having exactly one product that sold is like all their eggs are in that basket and they’re going to protect that basket very carefully.

**Craig:** And they still had a bad basket.

**John:** They still had a bad basket.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s where they’re at.

So let’s talk about the state of screenwriting software just in general because it has been a little while since we’ve done that. And I’m going to break this into sort of two categories.

So there’s the screenwriting software you need if you’re doing production work, where you need to do locked pages, revision marks, AB pages. You need this if you’re going into production and there’s an AD and there’s a line producer, and you are submitting things for budgets and you are with Craig with his little cart and you are generating new pages because they’re shooting a scene in two minutes.

I think, honestly, the two choices you have at this point are Final Draft and Fade In for that level of stuff. Would you agree with me there?

**Craig:** Yes. Although I will add that WriterDuet is coming up strong.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, I think the problem for WriterDuet is that most of the time when you are somebody writing in production, the notion of writing on something that is cloud-based is — makes you a little nervous. But yes, I think largely speaking, correct. If you are doing big boy, big girl screenwriting, you’re going to want Final Draft or Fade In and, you know, for my money, Fade In is vastly superior.

**John:** So the other one that still exists which some people use, god bless them, is Movie Magic Screenwriter, which has not been updated for a while. But I know some actual TV shows that use that in the room and they still use that for production. So that’s sort of legacy software that still apparently works.

So those are your kind of choices. And you’re going to probably end up using one of those three things if you’re doing those lock-down pages. What I would encourage most of our listeners, though, to look for is you’re not going to be using that stuff very often. And so if you’re looking for an app to write in, you may choose to use a different app for writing.

So the app I make it’s called Highland. It is very simple and very straightforward. Slugline works very much the same way. And you know, the web-based things, WriterDuet, some of the other ones we talked about, that Amazon thing, Celtx, which I guess some people like, those are other choices.

But I write in Highland. Everything I’ve been writing has been in Highland. Justin Marks writes in Highland. There’s good choices that aren’t appropriate for final production work but are really good for the script you’re turning into the studio. So that’s my pitch for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely true. And more to the point, if you’re listening and you haven’t made a purchase yet, you need to understand that Final Draft, again, is so much more expensive than the rest of these solutions. It’s not even funny. They’re grotesquely more expensive.

I think the most expensive of the alternatives we just mentioned is Fade In which is $49, I think. Whereas you’re looking at nearly $200, I think, for Final Draft, for a new —

**John:** Yeah. Final Draft always seems to be on sale a lot. So I think Final Draft’s price has effectively dropped and is often at around like $99 when you want it to be at $99.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I think the reason I would say beyond just the expense is not just the dollars you’re spending but the amount of time you’re spending to learn an application that isn’t working the way you need it to work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I guess the best analogy for me would be like, “Hey, I want to go camping. I want to try camping.” And so you have a couple choices. You could go out and buy like the $2,000 tent and the sleeping bag that is rated down to 20 degrees below Fahrenheit, and the whisper-light stove and all this thing. And you could spend a lot of money and get a really complicated thing.

That would be great if you were scaling up Everest. But it’s not really the right choice for like, “Hey, we’re going to like to the lake and like go fishing.” And so I think there’s this temptation to buy the fanciest thing with the most bells and whistles and the most features —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Which is not necessarily going to serve you the best.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And that, to me, is really the experience with not just Final Draft but also Fade In, is that like you open up Fade In or Scrivener — I didn’t even mention Scrivener — there’s so much that you’re faced with that is, you know, it’s not about putting words on the page. It’s about sort of figuring how the app works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are professional tools and not everybody needs the professional tool.

**John:** I think there’s probably a fair number of screenwriters who are not screenwriters because they thought, “Well I need to use Final Draft or one of these big apps in order to write a screenplay.” And they’re like — they were trying to learn how to write screenplays and at the same time they were trying to figure out how to use this application. And these two things got conflated and that’s not necessarily the healthiest way to approach learning how to write.

**Craig:** I think WriterDuet has two modes. One is a monthly or something like that. But then one is free. And the free one actually is pretty fully-featured and a great way to kind of at least get your feet wet without spending a dime.

**John:** Yeah. And if you’re going to, you know, just get started with things, that’s a great place to go. My hesitation with the web-based stuff has always been that I’m worried that the service is going to go under. And as we talked about on the script episode, suddenly things are just gone because things magically disappear in the cloud.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s actually done a pretty good job the way he’s designed it where — from what I can tell, it’s doing both. It’s saving locally and it’s a little bit like a Dropbox kind of sync solution. So even if you don’t have access to the internet, you still have the file locally and you can still work on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s, you know, not —

**John:** Progress, at least.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s not bad. It’s just not quite — yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about Final Draft and make our wild prognostications about what happens one year from now and five years from now. Do you think we will have Final Draft a year from now?

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Five years from now?

**Craig:** Yes, but I don’t think — it will be different management. I don’t think Mark Madnick will be around in five years.

**John:** I would guess the same way. I think there will be something like Final Draft and there will be some changes that will come out, and I bet the website will improve. I bet there will be some things that happen.

Weirdly I did look though at the Cast & Crew website, and like there’s this really abstract like woman and a bird as the photo on the lead, like, ha, that doesn’t feel like accounting software at all. Five years from now, I think someone else will be running Final Draft or there won’t be Final Draft. That’s my prediction.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to — it’s all about the intransigence of the — what do they call it? The work flow, the — you know, the departments that are processing these files into schedules and budgets and all this, they are just so entrenched in like, “I use this software, beep-a-boop-a-bop.”

**John:** Yeah. But so here’s the thing is that there are maybe 100 people in all of Hollywood who needs to use that software versus thousands of screenwriters. So there’s no reason why thousands of screenwriters need to use that software —

**Craig:** I’m with you.

**John:** To send in that script to a budget because any application can create that.

**Craig:** You and I are — have been saying this forever and I’m still just puzzled. I’m just puzzled by why — you know a lot of times people say, “Well I’m working on a show and the showrunner uses Final Draft. So I guess we’re all using Final Draft, blah, blah, blah.” You know, it’s so annoying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So annoying.

**John:** It is annoying.

All right, let’s change topics. Let’s talk about franchises. This comes from Mark Rasmussen who asks, “I was at the WGA Beyond Words panel last night and made the observation that every single one of the nominated screenplays are either an adaptation, a based-on, or a biopic. And when you throw in all the sequels, prequels and remakes.”

And this actually is — ties very well into a blog post I did this last week which is called “It’s Franchises All The Way Down.” And this was a discussion we had over lunch where I was wondering aloud how many of the top 100 grossing movies were either sequels or the first film in a franchise. So they were either, you know, Star Wars 7 or they were Star Wars. They were like an original film that created a franchise. And so around the lunch table we were speculating like, out of the top 100 movies, maybe 30 of them are part of a franchise, maybe 50.” The answer is, Craig?

**Craig:** It appears to be 86.

**John:** Yes. So 86 of the top 100 movies are either the start of a franchise or they are in fact a franchise, which seems crazy. There’s only 14 movies in the top 100 that are just single movies, that that there’s no other — they’re not based on a previous movie, they’re not — they didn’t spawn a sequel, which seems crazy.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and no. I mean —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Look, if a movie does so well that it is on this kind of list or at least getting close to this kind of list of the 100 all-time top grossing movies, of course the studio is going to demand another one even if the original people say, “No, we don’t want to do it,” they’ll find somebody to do it. There’s just, you know, nobody wants to be the people that leave that money on the table. It’s actually kind of when you look at the ones that are single, you realize why.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at the ones that are single. So we’ll start with Titanic. You can’t sink the same boat twice. And so obviously there have been many parody videos of Titanic 2 like the boat comes back.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** 2012, Interstellar and Gravity are sort of the same boat. Like they’re not literally boats but the same idea like it’s the thing that happens exactly once. You’ve destroyed everything once and you sort of can’t go back and destroy it again.

**Craig:** Correct. So you have movies like The Lion King which because they were animated at a particular time where we weren’t doing computer animation but hand animation, they decided to make the sequels to those things for home video.

**John:** Yeah. And so for this exercise, we’re only counting the things that were theatrical sequels. So obviously the Lion King had a direct-to-video sequel but if the Lion King were to come out right now and be the same hit that it was, obviously you do the real sequels.

**Craig:** Oh, no question there would be a Lion King 2, no question.

**John:** So in the same boat with Lion King, we have Ratatouille, Up, Inside Out, and Big Hero 6. And there is discussion that Big Hero 6 is going to have a sequel. There’s nothing preventing them from doing Ratatouille, Up, or Inside Out as a sequel. Up would be kind of the hardest of them, but they’re all Pixar movies and Pixar is making other movies. So, to make the sequel to that they have to not make something else that could be a great franchise.

**Craig:** Correct. And we know the Pixar doesn’t shy away from sequels. They’ve gone through three Toy Stories, they’ve gone through three Cars movies I believe, and they are currently doing or I think their next movie is the Finding Nemo sequel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they don’t have a problem with sequels but you’re absolutely right, if their choice is to do an original or do a sequel, they’re going to do an original or a sequel, but they can’t do all of the sequels so…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yeah, like how do you make a sequel to Up, I mean, how old is Ed Asner? It would be crazy. Now, the one that’s fascinating is ET.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because ET, if it were made today would almost, I mean there’s a 100% chance of multiple sequels. But at the time, you had the biggest director in the world who had just made a bunch of the biggest movies in the world, make another biggest movie in the world and I think after that, he was like, “I don’t need to do a sequel, I’m going to make another biggest movie in the world.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it just didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t know if you remember but ET, it wasn’t long, maybe it was 10 years, they did a theatrical re-release and it made a ton of money again.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a great movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s one of the situations where, you know, yes, if we were to make that movie now, we would do the sequel and you still could make the sequel if you wanted to, I mean, those people are still alive and around. So I’m not going to say we’re never going to have a sequel to ET, we may not have it with Steven Spielberg, but I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible to make a sequel to ET even now.

**Craig:** They will not make a sequel to ET without Steven Spielberg.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It would just be dead on arrival I think.

**John:** We’ll see. They made a sequel to Star Wars without George Lucas.

**Craig:** Well, after George Lucas proved that it would be a great idea to make sequels without George Lucas. I mean that’s the thing. And, you know, you could say like Jurassic World is without Steven — but that was his — he produced it, it was with his blessing. It was many years later and Steven had also made two sequels.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this, no.

**John:** Yeah. So in the show notes, I’ll have links to the original post because there was talk of a sequel to ET, and Spielberg was going to do one at one point and then decided not to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Forrest Gump, there was a sequel written. They just decided not shoot it. Inception and The Sixth Sense, both of those movies are kind of twist movies and it would be very hard to sort of go back and do them again. Inception I think is the easier one. Inception is like, well, we’ll have another adventure sort of like another heist film.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Sixth Sense, you still have some of those people are around and alive. There’s still Haley Joel Osment. You could do a sequel to it even without Bruce Willis. There’s —

**Craig:** Sounds like a super bad idea.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Yeah, Inception I think actually could make a great sequel.

**John:** So DiCaprio has never done a sequel so do you do it without DiCaprio?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think you could absolutely do it without him because I don’t think that the brilliance of that movie — and I love Inception, I don’t think the brilliance of that movie comes down to Leo, although he, you know, delivered a fantastic performance. It comes down to the concept and the nature of the world it proposes. So I think you can absolutely do another one with an entirely different cast.

**John:** Yeah. So the question is, how crucial is Christopher Nolan to that thing? Could you make Inception without Christopher Nolan or would that already have a negative spin going into it?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t want to make it without him writing it with Jonathan or however he wrote that one. I mean it’s — the part that is unique and attractive is the part that came from his mind and that’s through the story. I think somebody else wonderful could shoot it. Yeah. But no, I think you need him.

**John:** Yeah. And the final movie of the top 100 is Hancock which was not a hit. It was not a bomb but it wasn’t kind of crying out for a sequel. I think if it had have been a bigger hit if there would have been a sequel.

**Craig:** Is this domestic?

**John:** This is all-time worldwide.

**Craig:** Worldwide? And Hancock, how much money did Hancock make?

**John:** Hancock made a tremendous amount of money. So it’s like 97 though on the list so it’s going to get knocked off by next year.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s crazy.

**John:** That’s crazy. That’s Will Smith for you.

**Craig:** I didn’t know.

**John:** So right now, a bunch of people in their car are screaming, “What about inflation?” And so in the same blog post, I do link through the same list of 100 that are inflation-adjusted. So of course Gone with the Wind is the top thing. When you look at the inflation-adjusted list, there are a lot more single movies in there but not as many as you would think. So it’s 49 of the top 100 are neither a sequel or the start of a franchise of the adjusted ones. So we’ve always been making sequels and they’ve always been making a lot of money. It’s just the trend has accelerated.

**Craig:** Oh, without a doubt. And so, you know, we can say I think with surety that we live in an era of sequel saturation unlike any other before it. And I had this discussion with — actually with Chris Morgan who writes the Fast and Furious sequels. So Chris and I have spent a lot of time on movies with numbers on them. And, you know, then we’re writing our own things and people are saying, “Great, and we’ll get around to that but we need you to write the sequel to this other thing.” And the frustration is, you just want to say, “Don’t you all realize that you got to have the first one to have the sequel? So when can we do the first one of something?”

**John:** Yup, and that is a thing that I’ve said so often in rooms and frustrated. It also weirdly gets thrown back at you. It’s because sometimes you’ll be pitching them an original idea and they really want to know, well, what — they’ll be thinking like, “What is the franchise here? Can I make four movies out of this?” because they’re not going to want to focus on that one movie. So it makes it especially hard to make. Honestly, most of the movies that we were showing or been talking about at the panel last night, like those movies were not sequelable movies. You’re not going to make The Martian 2 because you got him back and that is one of the frustrations is sometimes the best movies by their nature kind of can’t have a sequel.

**Craig:** Right. So the world is dividing — the studio world is dividing between movies that are made to win awards and movies that can be franchises. And then there’s this gone, lost practice of making movies for mass audiences that aren’t designed to be franchises and —

**John:** So we can’t make Fatal Attraction anymore because that’s a movie that can only happen once and it can’t be franchised.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that kind of stinks, you know. It’s the only genre I think that kind of gets a pass on it is comedy because even though they try and make comedy sequels a lot and they do, I mean, you know, you just saw Ride Along 2 but, you know, they wanted to do a sequel to Identity Thief and none of us wanted to do it. We just wanted to do other things, you know, but they didn’t freak out. They weren’t like, “What? You’re costing us a franchise.” They were like, “Okay, yeah, that would have made money but, okay, we understand.” Comedies can kind of come and go because comedies don’t turn into, with rare exception, don’t turn into these juggernauts that generate hundreds and hundreds of million dollars of profit every single time plus ancillary, god knows what, you know. When you’re talking about new things and you’re trying to get them to make a movie that they haven’t made before, they are asking how many more can we make?

**John:** Yup. And so part of the reason why they want those things to be adapted from other material is oftentimes that material has already lent itself to sequel. So there’s already a reason to believe that you’re going to be able to make sequels from this thing. The nature of the project, if it’s based on a toy, well, that’s a big toy line that has a whole bunch of different ways it can go or when they’re putting together a writer’s room for Transformers or for Terminator or for some other big property, it’s like, well they want to see like, “Could we make a bunch of movies out of this?” because while they would love to have one hit movie, they would also love to have five hit movies.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So take a movie like Jack Reacher. So we all know that it’s hard to make movies now that are what we would call adult movies, not porn adult movies, but movies about adults doing real adult things and it’s not explosions. It’s just that good old fashioned kind of thrillery movie, right. Normally, the discussion would go like this, “I want to make a movie based on this novel and we can get Tom Cruise. He’s awesome. What do you think?” “You know, we’re not really making in that space.” “Okay, well, what if I told you that there was like 50 of these books?” “Oh, really? Okay, yeah.”

**John:** Yeah, it helps.

**Craig:** Because here’s the deal, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does work, we’re going to make it over and over and over and over. And that’s where the real money comes.

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t have any great lessons to pull out of this other than to say that we kind of always made franchises, we both strongly believe that you can’t make a franchise until you make the first movie. So you have to make that first movie. You don’t always know what that movie is that’s going to spawn a franchise but everyone can sort of sense the thing that probably can’t be a franchise because of the nature of the movie. So it’s why it’s harder to make Gravity for example because there’s no possibility making a sequel from it, but sometimes you make really good movies that can only be made once.

**Craig:** I think sometimes people go to the movie theatre and they see some movie come out that is the first of its kind and they think, “Why did anyone make this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s because they were hoping that they could make 12 of them. That’s why.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Simple as that.

**John:** And sometimes — yeah, and sometimes people make the movie that can only be made once like Inception because that filmmaker has tremendous power and in order to make the next Dark Knight, he gets to make Inception and that’s awesome. So we need to sort of celebrate when that’s possible to happen.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. One last thing about my list, you’ll notice that I didn’t count Avatar or Frozen. The things that are very close to becoming sequels, I left off that list because I strongly believe that there will be Avatar sequels. I strongly believe there will be a Frozen sequel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m not counting those.

**Craig:** No, no, there absolutely will be. They’re working on it.

**John:** Jerry writes, “I’m a writer’s assistance to a produced writer-director in Seattle. My boss handed me a screenplay she wrote a while back. It is a ‘comedy’ but it ain’t funny. It’s very specific to a particular subculture and it feels dated. If and when she asks my thoughts, how do I give honest criticism without making her unhappy?”

**Craig:** Well, she’s going to ask your thoughts because she gave it to you. [laughs] Right. I assume that she gave it to you because she wanted — okay, Jerry. So you’ve got some choices here. So let’s talk Machiavellian. She’s your boss. I assume you like your job so one option is lie. Just say, “I read it. It’s so good. It’s really funny. I had a couple of thoughts that if you want, I was just going to mention to you just things to think about if you were still working on it but I like this, I like this, I like this. It’s just really good and really helpful to read.” Hmm, Machiavellian, good.

The other option is to say nothing but then you risk that day when she surprises you by saying, “Hey, did you ever read my script? Because you’re my employee,” right? And then the third option is to treat her the way you would treat any rational human being who has asked for your opinion about their work and that is to be — to provide dispassionate, honest criticism that is neither over the top nor a pulled punch in that is clear and shows that you’ve really thought about the material and provide some potential solutions or ways to solutions. But you really got to think about who you’re working for here because I don’t know.

**John:** Yup. The choice is almost always choice one.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s just be honest. And so, here’s what I say is, you know, it’s basically choice one which is to say like basically you love it, but I would say it’s easy to couch notes in terms of your reaction or something that makes it sound like it is you’re failing. So I often find — so I kind of fell off the ride here. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be feeling here, I didn’t quite know how these points were going to connect, and I think I was questioning this. So as long as you can talk about your subjective experience of reading it and not make it sound like it’s something that they did wrong, that can be a helpful way to sort of get your note out there without making it sound like you didn’t love it.

**Craig:** That’s a great, great way of putting it, John. I really — that’s perfect. You should do that, Jerry, what John just said.

**John:** So Jerry, do that. Our last question comes from Mark Rasmussen who asked a previous question. He asks, “How do you know when it’s time to step away or shelve a script that you feel is not working?”

**Craig:** I’m the wrong person to ask that question to because I don’t do that. First of all, I don’t think I ever have the luxury to do it. I mean, the truth is just because of the way my career started, you know, I started writing and then I was working and so with the exception of one screenplay, I’ve always had some sort of gun to my head and an expectation, a professional expectation that I’m to finish something.

**John:** I think Mark though might be asking more about the dead scripts because as we talked through those, there were a couple of things which you and I both said like I did a draft and it just wasn’t anything that was worth sort of going back to. So it may not be — I don’t think he’s saying like pull the ripcord midway through.

**Craig:** I see, I see. Okay. So after you finish, okay. You give it a little bit of time and then you kind of check your own emotions and feelings. It’s hard enough to write things when you don’t have passion and there isn’t the wind at your back. It’s nearly impossible to do it when you’re dreading it and the wind is in your face. So you just ask yourself, am I looking forward to writing this or not? And if you’re not, and you’re looking forward to writing something else, perhaps you should listen to that voice. It’s not a great voice to listen to mid-script because in mid-script, we will sometimes get the 7-year itch but after the script is done, if it hasn’t landed the way you were hoping with other people, then maybe yeah, listen to your little voice.

**John:** Craig, you’re absolutely right. And to me, what it is, is if I’m excited to do another pass because I’ve just spoken with somebody who had great thoughts and suddenly I’m engaged to do that next pass, then absolutely I should do that next pass. If I’m dreading going back into it because I’ve lost the thread, I just don’t know what it is to be doing with it, that’s a sign that I should probably be writing something else and set this thing aside. Maybe I’ll come back to it, likely I won’t, and that’s just the reality is that you’re going to be writing a lot of things in your life and that thing that you spent six months on may not be a movie and that’s okay, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like, man, just let it go, you know, and if it was meant to be, it would be.

**John:** Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. So I think you’re going to do the coolest One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I am so excited about this. I got a tweet about this and sometimes those pan out, sometimes they don’t. This time, it panned out like beyond. I cannot wait.

All right. So there is a game, I’m a little late to this, a few months late, called Pandemic Legacy. It is a board game and we’re going to provide a link in the show notes to someone’s review of it which really goes into why this game sounds so great. I haven’t played it yet, but the description of the game, I bought it. It’s on its way.

The description of the game makes me salivate. And as far as I can tell, on the one hand, it’s a very simple strategy game. It’s — the idea is there — you and — you’re playing two to four players and each player is a CDC scientist and you’re trying to stop outbreaks of viruses across the world. There’s a Risk-like map and, you know, as viruses spread, you’re taking actions and there are actions cards, you know. So it’s strategy and resource. Okay, it’s a regular game. Here’s where it gets crazy. Two things as far as I could tell. Crazy part number one, as you play the game, when you experience certain things, there are stickers, right, and you or your opponents can choose stickers that apply to your characters. And those stickers stay there permanently meaning the next time you play that game, the game is different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s — and in fact, you can even get to a place where like your game is done, right, which is amazing. So you’re permanently changing the game every time you play the game. Awesomeness number two, there are eight sealed things in the game box and on rare occasions, it will tell you open up the secret prize in box number three and you open it up and there’s something inside and the reviewer doesn’t tell you what but he gives the example of like let’s say it’s a little motor boat and you have no idea what good is this. And then later you realize, oh my god, there’s an airborne spore that’s only, you know, on land or it has infected our planes and you need a speedboat to get from place to place. So there’s these little things and those again, those are one shots that then change the game permanently.

And then the thing that really grabbed me and this kind of gives away like how bananas this thing is and why I must play it, one of the secret boxes says, “To be opened only if you have lost four games in a row,” and no one knows what’s in there. I mean you could open it and find out but I don’t want to know. So there’s like — it’s got spoilers, it’s got meta games, it’s got permanent changes. If you — certain victories give you permanent buffs, certain failures give you scars that last permanently, so we’re going to play it. You and I are definitely playing it for sure.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** We got to think of our other two players. They’ve got to be serious, they’ve got to be people — I think they’ve got to be people that can do left and right brain because a lot of this — the way he described it is it’s a bit of like a strategy board game combined with dungeons and dragons because you are playing characters and you’re making these really difficult choices about what to do and who to save and who to kill. So, I can’t wait.

**John:** I’m excited. So I have not played Pandemic Legacy but I will tell you that in the board game community, this idea of a board game that is permanently changed by playing it is sort of a thing and so some Kickstarters now will launch where they will send you two copies of the game. So basically you will have one clean copy and one to destroy.

**Craig:** In fact, Pandemic Legacy does this as well. They have a red box and a blue box. They are identical. This way you can say, “Alright, the red box is the one I’m playing with this group, the blue box is the one I’m playing with this group.” Also, they’re referring to this game as season one.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So they will carry on to some sequel game. I can’t wait. I’m so excited.

**John:** Very excited. My One Cool Thing is The Katering Show, With a K. It’s this Australian team. These two women, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. They are ostensibly doing a sort of YouTube cooking show where they’re talking about cooking gluten-free or cooking with ethical ingredients but it’s really sort of about their lives and everything falling apart around them. They are incredibly funny. It is just really well done. It’s available on YouTube in the US, probably everywhere in the world. It’s just terrific and I just love Australian comedy in general but this one was just delightful. So they’re short episodes and you’ll probably burn through all of them at once.

**Craig:** They are awesome. Years ago, I saw this one — their episode 3, We Quit Sugar, and so I’m going to watch the other ones, but I recommend that you start with that one because it’s spectacular.

**John:** So Craig, I’m watching this and I’m really questioning why no one’s figured a way to use them here because you see Rebel Wilson, you see other great Australian people who’d be able to crossover. I just feel like there’s a thing you could do with these guys that could bring them to a bigger audience.

**Craig:** Well, all right. So why don’t we see how powerful we are?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, you don’t know us and we don’t know you, we don’t know if you listen to the show, we don’t know if anybody you know listens to the show, but if some magic should happen, give us an email, drop us a line, and then let’s — who knows? Let’s see what happens. Yeah.

**John:** We will see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s our show this week. So our outro this week comes from Sam Tahhan. If you have an outro you would like to have us play on the podcast, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to that. That’s also the place where you would send your emails about questions or follow-up or things we got horribly wrong in this episode.

Our episode is produced by Stuart Friedel and it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. You could just search for Scriptnotes. If you search for Scriptnotes, you’ll also see our Scriptnotes app that let’s you get you to all of our back episodes including the live shows we talked about, the Beyond Words, and other interviews we’ve done with cool, famous people.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. He’s currently ahead of me in the Twitter count followers. I am @johnaugust. And you can find the links to all the things we talked about in the show notes. That’s at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** Hey, man, whatever.

**John:** Whatever, it’s fine.

Links:

* Vanity Fair on [the original Game of Thrones pilot](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/game-of-thrones-original-pilot-bad)
* [@clmazin’s followers growth over the past two months](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/clmazin_20160208followers.png)
* Deadline on the [2016 WGA Beyond Words panel](http://deadline.com/2016/02/wga-nominated-writers-panel-beyond-words-no-controversy-1201696981/), which you can [listen to now with a premium subscription at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-beyond-words-2016/)
* [Grease Live](http://www.fox.com/grease-live) on Fox
* [Scriptnotes, 222: Live from Austin 2015](http://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015), and [Variety’s article on the upcoming Zola movie](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/james-franco-direct-zola-stripper-saga-1201697548/) based on [this Rolling Stone article](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/zola-tells-all-the-real-story-behind-the-greatest-stripper-saga-ever-tweeted-20151117)
* [Scriptnotes, 233: Ocean’s 77](http://johnaugust.com/2016/oceans-77), and [Dead Awake](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3778010/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_2)
* [Regus](http://www.regus.com/)
* Variety on [the acquisition of Final Draft by Cast & Crew](http://variety.com/2016/artisans/news/screenwriting-software-final-draft-cast-and-crew-1201694791/), and [the official press release](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160202005654/en/Cast-Crew-Entertainment-Acquires-Final-Draft)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/), [Slugline](http://slugline.co/), [Writer Duet](https://writerduet.com/), [Movie Magic Screenwriter](http://www.write-bros.com/movie-magic-screenwriter.html), [Fade In](http://www.fadeinpro.com/), [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/), and [a host of other apps for writing in Fountain](http://fountain.io/apps)
* John’s blog post on [franchises all the way down](http://johnaugust.com/2016/its-franchises-all-the-way-down)
* Shut Up & Sit Down’s spoiler-free review of [Pandemic Legacy](http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/spoiler-free-review-pandemic-legacy/)
* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/), and the Craig-recommended [third episode](http://thekateringshow.com/episodes/3-we-quit-sugar/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Tahhan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/fun-with-numbers).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 232 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we will look at what the giant success of Star Wars means for screenwriters and the film industry. We will look at a startup that uses exclusive algorithms to predict which movies will be hits or flops. Ooh, get your waders because there’s going to be some umbrage muck there.

A WGA proposal that changes the number of years board members can serve. And in the craft corner, we’ll look at how you tell an audience what your characters’ names are. So a busy episode.

**Craig:** Indeed. Plus we have some questions and things.

**John:** We have a lot to go through. But this is our first normal episode in a while. Last week, we had Aline and Rawson on, and that was so much fun. But Craig, it’s honestly great to have you back.

**Craig:** Well, thank you, John. I’d like to think that everybody likes the original formula of Coke. You know, we are the original formula. This is it.

**John:** Well, it’s fascinating. It’s like the original formula of the Coke has been sort of supplanted by Mexican Coke. Classically, I mean, you should think that American Coke is Coke. But in Los Angeles restaurants, you order Mexican Coke because it’s made with sugar rather than being high fructose corn syrup.

**Craig:** Right. It’s made with cane sugar instead of — or, well, I don’t know, sugar. It’s funny, like, most sugar comes from beets, I guess.

**John:** Yeah. Sure.

**Craig:** But none of it’s really the original Coke because the original Coke had cocaine in it.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Yummy.

**John:** Somewhere on Twitter, a person linked to this photo of some product that was sold and the ingredients in it were amazing. It was like alcohol, cocaine and like morphine. And it was like an over the counter thing you could buy.

**Craig:** Cocaine wine.

**John:** Cocaine wine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh, more cocaine wine for Hellen Keller.

**Craig:** Oh, so good. [laughs]

**John:** All right. Let’s do some follow-up because there’s a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Alex writes in, “In Episode 7, another wonderful episode wherein you guys offered your thoughts and opinions on female health issues — ”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** “Craig ended up by promising, ‘Next week’s episode is entirely about vaginosis.'” Alex continues, “I’m not saying that things don’t come up from time to time to bump the planned schedule, but for the next 222 episodes or so, I’ve been waiting for this episode.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Before I continue spending my $2 per month, do you guys have an ETA on the vaginosis episode? And if the solution comes down to yogurt, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a great question. So I’m going to try to make this as quick as I can. This is the vaginosis episode, okay? And this should be family-friendly. It’s just science, folks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what is vaginosis? Vaginosis. Everyone’s like, what the hell is going on? Vaginosis is not a yeast infection. A lot of people think they’re the same thing. They’re not. Vaginosis is actually far more common than yeast infections. And it’s one of those good bacteria, bad bacteria things.

So you know, like there’s a whole thing now about good bacteria is really important for our health. We all know that’s sort of like in our gut bacteria is really important. Well, it’s also really important in the vagina because a particular kind of bacteria called lactobacillus keeps the pH balance in the vagina slightly acidic, and that helps kill bad microorganisms that come to the vagina.

Okay. I’m going to say vagina about 1,000 times, by the way.

Sometimes that balance gets out of whack. And a different kind of bacteria called gardnerella begins to proliferate, and that kills off the good bacteria, the lactobacillus.

Why does this happen? It just gets in there. You can think of ways it might get in there. I mean, the point is the vagina is an opening and stuff gets in openings. That’s just life.

Anyway, the point is, another — well, there’s another reason it happens. This is the worst thing. Sometimes women douche, and they should not. As far as everything I’ve read, that’s just like the worst thing. Because what it does is, perversely, the thing you’re doing to clean your vagina, is just cleaning away the bacteria that keeps your vagina clean, and then you can end up with this situation which is vaginosis.

And what are the symptoms? I’m not going to go into the symptoms. They’re unpleasant.

The point is this, she’s asking about yogurt. So people went, “Okay, well, if vaginosis is caused by things being out of whack and there’s not enough of the lactobacillus in there, how do I get more lactobacillus? I know, yogurt. Because it has lactobacillus.”

Sort of not really. Two different strains. And also, eating it isn’t really the same thing as putting it in your vagina which, by the way, people have tried to do. They’ve literally dipped tampons in yogurt and stuck it up in there.

And there’s like one study that says that might work. One study. But mostly, the studies say no, eating yogurt doesn’t really do anything. Even taking probiotics doesn’t really seem to help, because it’s just kind of the deal.

So this is a bummer, Alex. We’ve finally gotten to the vaginosis episode and what I’m telling you is I can’t even give you yogurt. I can give you nothing except, unfortunately, antibiotics. Which is not great because those come along with all other issues.

But it’s just one of those things. The vagina is an opening, things get in openings. Sometimes there’s infections. I’m sorry.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like one of those intractable problems that we often face as screenwriters where, you know, it’s just the way things are and you have to accept that it’s the way things are.

**Craig:** It’s just the way things are.

**John:** You could sometimes be vigilant for like things not to do. So you’ve given some useful advice on like not douching.

**Craig:** Yeah. So don’t douche. There’s no cause for it.

The worst of them actually not only wash away the good bacteria, but then they raise the pH of the vagina which then makes it even harder for the good bacteria to survive or come back. There’s just no reason for it. I know why it’s there, but don’t do it.

**John:** Lewis in the UK writes, “On your live show, you urged people currently using their parents’ Netflix accounts to get their own. This got me wondering what difference it would make to you, the screenwriter.

Assume I currently use my dad’s Netflix account and there are 1 billion people identical to me following my actions. What effect does it have on you if I and my clone army get my own account under the following conditions? One, neither of us watch your movie. Two, I watch your movie. Three, both I and my father watch your movie. Cheers, Lewis.”

**Craig:** Cheers, Lewis.

**John:** Yeah. So Lewis is asking what difference does it make whether I watch something on my dad’s Netflix account or my Netflix account. And the answer I think has to do with just overall numbers of subscribers to Netflix and that the more people Netflix have watching movies, the more money they have to spend to buy the rights to our movies.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there’s another thing, too. I think there’s residuals issues because Netflix pays the studios.

Now, we don’t really know how Netflix pays the studios, it’s a big bit of a mystery. But I suspect that it is somewhat metric. They’re not going to be paying Warner Bros. as much for a movie that made $2 million as they are for a movie that made $100 million that people are constantly clicking on and watching.

So Netflix has metrics for everything. The more people that are watching a particular movie, the more probably they’re going to send to the studio a portion to that movie. And then that becomes gross proceeds for the studio, which then impacts our residuals on our end.

If one person watches the same movie five times on Netflix, I don’t know if Netflix says it was watched five times. Maybe, but possibly not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if two individuals watch it each once, that may count as two viewings.

**John:** Yes. So in general, it comes down to we do not get paid — in sort of the iTunes model, we get paid a specific residual for you are renting that movie or you are purchasing that movie. And that is lovely and it’s much more straightforward.

When a services licensing a movie for a period of time at a certain rate, we don’t get a portion individually residuals for that one person who watched it. But the more people overall who are watching that movie on that service, the more likely that service is going to say, “You know what? We better have The Hangover Part 3 next month because a lot of people love to watch that movie.” And that’s the service you’re doing us by getting your own account and watching that yourself.

**Craig:** I mean, of course, there’s the — I mean, Lewis isn’t — he’s asking a very specific question about how it affects, but then there’s just the moral thing, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop leeching off your parents. [laughs] You know, like, it’s embarrassing.

**John:** Spoken as the father of a teenager, yes.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it’s embarrassing. Like, I mean, the last thing I would want to do is be leeching off my parents.

**John:** Yeah. It’s generational.

**Craig:** That’s just me.

**John:** Sean writes, “My script has been picked up by a couple of producers to be made next year and they’ve asked me to direct.” Congratulations, Sean.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** “They have chosen a venue and hired actors for a read-through. I’ve asked around and gotten some recommendations from others who have been in similar situations. Common advice was to watch those attending and read their body language, et cetera to find any spots that lag, spots that are engaged. My question is, what advice do you guys have about the questions I should ask those who attend the read-through so I can get the most out of it?” Craig?

**Craig:** Well, that’s interesting. I’m not sure that this whole body language — I mean, you really should just watch it like an audience member. I mean, you have to kind of take yourself out of the seat of being the director so to speak, because when you’re doing a live read-through, they’re just going to read it through. You can’t stop and start them. At that point, you really should trust yourself rather than — now, what you can do is you could have somebody set up a little camera to film the audience. Film, record the audience, that you can then review later to look for squirming. You can see like, for instance, if it’s a comedy, did we remember — was that a big laugh or not a big laugh? We can’t quite remember.

But mostly, I would say, just place yourself in your audience mindset and you experience it. And you take notes. And you monitor how you feel.

What do you think, John?

**John:** I agree. I think the value for the read-through is for you as the writer-director and for the actors. And if the audience and the producers and other trusted friends are watching this and they’re able to give you helpful things based on their observations, that’s great. But really, let the experience be about you and connecting with the actors.

The read-through is going to be one of the few times where all those actors are in the room performing the entire thing together. Movies aren’t like plays where the entire thing is staged each time. This is probably going to be the only situation in the entire process where the entire thing is performed. So just get a sense of what it feels like as a whole thing.

I would say, when you’re taking notes for yourself, look for lines that certain actors have trouble with. Look for moments that seem kind of clunky, or where the actors’ instincts about how to play something are not your instincts so you can go back and work through those before you show up on set and have to deal with those.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I would say let that experience of a read-through be a chance for everyone to sort of come together and sort of celebrate the work as a whole, because it’s never going to be whole again until you see these people at the premier.

**Craig:** Quite, quite true.

The other thing to look out for is judgments about particular actors in the role at the read-through. Some actors really are film actors. They come alive when it’s quiet and the camera is on them. And they act to a camera, and they’re brilliant at it. They’re not great stage actors. Sometimes they’re intimidated by being on stage. Sometimes they tank it on purpose. They just don’t want to be judged, so they get very small.

I’ve seen so many big movie stars do this at read-throughs where they just suddenly seem so small, almost like they’re afraid to be big because it’s embarrassing to them.

So, I wouldn’t make anyone a hero out of it, and I wouldn’t make anyone a goat out of it, because there’s an enormous difference. A little bit like when people say, you know, there’s that term daily laughs —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where, you know, it’s a big laugh in dailies or it’s a big laugh on the set. And then you put it in the movie and it’s like, “Nah, it doesn’t work.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Make note of the context. Sometimes the performances will not at all be what you’re getting when you’re there on the day.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Our last bit of follow-up harkens back to Episode 112, and we looked at this video that had gone viral that week called “Dear JJ Abrams” which offered four points of advice for what JJ Abrams should do now that he was setting off to direct the Star Wars movie. [laughs] So I thought we would revisit what those four points were —

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And see whether those were actually meaningful. As I recall, you were openly kind of skeptical and mocking of this guy who made this video. But here are his four points.

**Craig:** Because he was saying obvious things, I think. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, he was saying kind of obvious things. But here were his four points. Star Wars happens on the frontier. Is that true to Star Wars 7? Yes, it was.

**Craig:** Uh, yeah.

**John:** Very much. The future is old.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. Like the movie starts with the wreckage of previous battles and I think it is very old.

**Craig:** And also the equipment was just taken directly from the prior — from the original series. So the blasters looked old. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, they did. And there were lots of old people in it as well. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** The force is mysterious. I’d say, mixed bag here. Because there wasn’t a lot of talk about the force in this movie.

**Craig:** Well, I think it were — I mean, we all know what it is at this point.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I did like that the ball was moved a little bit forward on the force. You know, the whole staring, grunting duel between Kylo and Rey was something new. We hadn’t seen that before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was a little X-Men-y.

**John:** Yeah, it was a little X-Men-y. Kylo gets to make a blaster bolt hover in mid-air. That was cool.

**Craig:** That was awesome.

**John:** That was cool.

**Craig:** Loved that.

**John:** Finally, Star Wars isn’t cute. [laughs]

I would counter with BB-8. BB-8 is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in an entire movie. I want nothing but BB-8 in my entire universe.

**Craig:** It’s not true. Star Wars is cute. I mean, even Jawas were cute. BB-8 is cute. R2 is cute. C3PO is cute. The little woman with the big eyes was cute. Yeah. I mean, even that monster on, you know, that was rampaging at one point was kind of cute.

No. Sometimes Star Wars is cute. There’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** There’s nothing wrong with being cute.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, I still — I’m actually angrier about this baloney advice to — I love his advice to — I mean, I don’t know what I said. I’m guessing, if I could go back and listen to 112, that probably what I said was, “This is lame because all you’re doing is giving obvious advice that later you can take credit for.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Oh, he must have listened to me.” No, he didn’t. Stop it.

**John:** Yeah. No, he didn’t. Correlation is not causation. That’s going to come up later on.

**Craig:** It’s going to come up, yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back to Star Wars. So new topics here.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Star Wars is going to be the biggest movie of all time.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’re recording this about 10 days before this airs, the episode is going to air. So by the time this comes out, more of these records will probably have been broken. But on Box Office Mojo, which is probably the best place to look up sort of like how movies are doing over time, it’s fun that Star Wars knocks down sort of every record. So like fastest to 100, fastest to $200 million, fastest to $500 million.

The movie is also incredibly well-reviewed. And so I thought we might talk just for a minute about like what the impact of Star Wars will be on the film industry and for screenwriters in the coming years based on its gargantuan success.

**Craig:** Well, I did feel — I think I said on a prior episode that this would be — we would find out just how much money a movie could make. I mean, that’s kind of what’s happening here.

Very exciting for our friend, Rian Johnson, who’s making the next one, because I think that we will find out how much more a movie could make when he — I think his movie will become the biggest movie of all time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really exciting. Implications for the film industry? I don’t think there are any. This is a little controversial, but to me, this is a little bit like saying, “Well, what were the implications for Harry Potter?” Harry Potter was unique.

There were some other YA properties that came out, but they in themselves were — they had their own fan base and they had earned their way in. Like, say, The Hunger Games had earned its way in.

Star Wars is unique. I don’t know if anyone else can look at this and think, “Oh, well, let’s just do that.” You can’t.

**John:** Well, you can’t do that.

So in terms of it being unique, I think it carves out a space of like, you’re not going to make any kind of movies that are even like Star Wars for a while because Star Wars is Star Wars. And so I think if we were trying to make a big space opera, just put that on the back shelf for like 20 years because this is going to take up that entire universe. And anything you’re trying to make that is a big space opera is going to be compared to Star Wars here.

I think if you’re trying to make a giant Dune right now, it’s going to be compared to Star Wars in ways that aren’t entirely fair but would be natural.

**Craig:** Well Dune actually is not a bad idea. Hold on a second. [laughs] Hold on, because I agree with you.

I remember when Star Wars came out, it was succeeded by a series of terrible rip-offs and knock-offs, some of which I actually kind of liked because I was a kid and I liked that stuff. But Dune actually, this is probably a great time for Dune because —

**John:** You think so?

**Craig:** I do. Because I think people’s appetite has been whetted for the grand space opera. Game of Thrones is just Dune not in space, right? Dune is amazing.

Look, you’ve hit a little bit of a weird spot for me because I’m obsessed with Dune. I mean, I love the David Lynch movie. I’m obsessed with the David Lynch movie for so many reasons. But Dune’s incredible. And I do think it would be — this is a great time to do Dune.

Who has the rights to Dune?

**John:** They’ve been trying to make it for a long time. Pete Berg —

**Craig:** Paramount?

**John:** Yes. It was Pete Berg at Paramount. I think Favreau had a version at Paramount at some point.

**Craig:** That seems like a weird — I mean, you know, sometimes these weird matchups work. I wouldn’t have said Favreau for Dune. But regardless, I mean, maybe he could figure it out. It’s just, Dune is amazing.

This is not a bad time for Dune. Hold on. [laughs] I think you figured something out by saying no to it.

**John:** So here’s some implications I do think it will have, is that, sort of like the giant Marvel movies sort of just suck up all of the oxygen, and all the box office around them, whenever these Star Wars movies drop, it’s going to take — it’s like a huge meteor impact, and it’s going to be very hard to open a movie around those. And so that sense of like what weekends are left is going to be incredibly challenging.

So knowing when the next Star Wars comes out, knowing when future things down the road comes out, there are going to be fewer and fewer weekends in which you could safely program things. And so you’re going to have to look at sort of inadvertent counter programming, which is like, well there was no other place to put this movie, so we’re going to put this movie — this time I wouldn’t call it counter programming, but it’s really — we had no other place to release it.

**Craig:** We’re going to call it counter programming, yeah. [laughs]

That’s a very good point. That is the true impact on the film industry of Star Wars is that when the next Star Wars film comes out, no one can be on that weekend. They’re actually just going to give them the weekend. I mean, yeah, they might do — like Sisters was I guess their attempt at counter programming, but it’s interesting because —

**John:** It was a mixed bag.

**Craig:** It doesn’t really counter program. You can’t counter program Star Wars because Star Wars is for everyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every age, every gender, every race, everyone all over the world. Therefore, you can’t counter program it unless you’re literally just showing movies to animals. Like if animals could buy tickets, like pets, then you can make like — this is a decent movie. Okay, on Star Wars weekend, you should have a film of like bacon being made and you invite dogs. That would work. [laughs]

**John:** I think maybe in the sixth or seventh week, they probably will have like a bring-your-dog-to-Star-Wars day at some theaters because like you want to go see the movie with your best friend, and your best friend is your dog. [laugh]

**Craig:** That’s the saddest — that’s so sad. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** Oh my God, it’s the saddest thing ever.

No, you’re right. I didn’t even think about that. That’s another reason why I think Rian’s film will be the biggest movie of all time because it will have nothing. Nothing will be around it. You’re right, huge —

**John:** Well, nothing was really around it this weekend. I think this last time, people recognized that like, you know, they couldn’t compete. And that’s why so many, I think, the for your consideration movies got released earlier, like more towards Thanksgiving rather than on Christmas because I think they could see that it was going to be just a disaster to try to open against one of these things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean Hateful Eight, I had a hard time getting the screens it wanted. It was a challenging time for other movies.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it was a challenging time in the Galaxy. And you know, one kind of okay thing is at least, you know, there are two big seasons to release these A-bombs, you know. One is summer, which is getting longer and longer. And one is the Thanksgiving-Christmas time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if it were in the middle of summer, it would — they’re smart to not do that. This is the Harry Potter time, which is that, because, you know, summer becomes exhausting. It’s exhausting. I get so tired of the onslaught.

**John:** One of the nice things about Christmas holiday, because I know there was — they were originally trying to make this a summer movie. And when they pushed it back to Christmas, there was a concern like, “Oh, they cost themselves some box office.” But adults have a lot of time off over the holidays. And so adults can see movies twice over Christmas in ways they couldn’t during the summer. And that’s useful.

**Craig:** Great point. And I think Lord of the Rings was a Thanksgiving-Christmas.

**John:** Absolutely. And Titanic was. Avatar was. So there’s precedent for making a huge amount of money at this time of year.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure.

**John:** But let’s take a look at sort of the content of the movie. Some people slam it for, like, it gives the fans exactly what they want. And it’s like, well, yes, it gives the fans exactly what they want, which is basically it feels in some ways like a soft reboot. It sort of performs the Stations of the Cross of the original movie. But also, it gives the fans what they want in terms of like, they want the universe to sort of grow a little bit and sort of not all be like white men running around. And they made very smart choices for that.

So I think as we see these re-explorations of classic properties, the chance to go back through and address some of what’s new in 2015 and 2020 versus the original films could be great.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, it’s not going to be like this. I mean, this is — Star Wars is unique. I cannot bear to read one more think piece about Star Wars. It’s atrocious. It’s a movie. Go see the movie. Enjoy the movie or don’t. And then go home. Stop essaying every freaking thought you have and comparing it — no one cares.

The tidal wave of static that has erupted from the keyboards of the obsessives is overwhelming. I mean, it’s just a movie. I went to the movie and I enjoyed it. I could have a conversation about it with my friends. Sure. I’m not going to write some essay about it as if to say, “Guys, guys, guys, guys, I know a million people have written about this, but this is the one.”

**John:** This is the one.

**Craig:** This is it. This is correct. That’s the subtext of all those, which makes me nuts.

**John:** Perhaps the conversation that you do want to join in on though is on the January 25th special episode of Scriptnotes where we’ll have Lawrence Kasdan, the writer of Star Wars. And he’s going to talk to us about the movie.

**Craig:** Segue Man. Yes. He is going to talk to us about the movie and many other things.

Lawrence, Larry to those of us — Larry is fascinating for lots and lots of reasons. But what I really want — I mean, to be the guy that writes Empire and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Body Heat, and then 30 years later, co-write the biggest movie in history. Wow, it’s unbelievable.

**John:** Yes. It’s going to be great. So again, we’re recording this episode super early. So I don’t know if there are still tickets available. But if there are tickets, you can find those at hollywoodheart.org/upcoming. And that is where you can get tickets to our special show of Scriptnotes.

But I’m not sure yet if it’s going to be a normal episode of Scriptnotes in the sense that it will be in the feed. We have to figure that out with sort of the actual technical demands of where we’re recording. And also, this is sort of a special event. So I don’t want to promise that everyone can get this free on Tuesday and not truck down to see us in downtown Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yes. And Jason Bateman will be there, which is great.

**John:** Oh my gosh, Jason Bateman.

**Craig:** Yeah, and he’s terrific. And it’s for charity. It benefits children.

**John:** Yes. It’s a good thing. You know what does not benefit children? [laughs]

**Craig:** Segue Man. [laughs]

**John:** Segue Man. [laughs] It is a small Belgian company called Scriptbook.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** So the pit on Scriptbook is that they are using data science to figure out which movies are going to be hits or going to be flops. [laughs]

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** And so the CEO of the company, Nadira Azermai, raised money. They have a million dollars’ worth of financing. They are apparently in discussion with studios, not clear which studios, about their technology and their ability to predict which movies are hits or flops. So I just want to play one little clip from a promotional video they did so that you can get a sense of the company in her own words.

**Nadira Azermai:** I like data but — there is a big but, I also have a strong gut feeling. Sometimes you just want to back your gut feeling. And if I can back my gut feeling with really something that’s scientifically proven, then I have peace of mind.

**John:** Craig, I feel like this was forged in a lab just to anger you. This was like — this was a grain of sand introduced into your inner oyster belly.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. And here comes a pearl of absolute contempt and disgust.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Putting aside the stupidity of what Ms. Azermai just said, which is that she has created a number and database algorithm that is completely trumpable by her own gut feeling, this is not even new. That’s the thing, this snake oil baloney isn’t even new. She is the — I don’t know what, 12th of these things that have popped up that we’ve discussed. I mean, remember there was that one guy, Rocko, or whatever his name was.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There are so many of these guys. They’re all peddling the same thing. And what they’re peddling — okay, what they say they’re peddling, is an algorithm designed to analyze screenplays, and then out will come success. But what they’re really peddling is the oldest thing in the game — confidence. [laughs] They’re peddling confidence.

And so they’re saying, “You can be confident now. You can be certain. You can be relaxed. We’ve got it covered with our baloney. You don’t need to live in a scary world where you aren’t in control of outcomes.” I am so, so sorry to say that this business is scary and we are not in control of our outcomes. We can influence them as best as we can.

It’s a little bit like raising children, you just don’t know. And anyone who tells you they know is lying. These people are — and what numbers? What are they — what possibly can you pull out of a screenplay?

The whole point of it is that it’s exciting and has this weird mystical interconnection between movie and audience. The script itself is not the movie, so you can’t tell from the script. And these people are stealing other people’s money, and it’s making me crazy.

**John:** Right. Since there are so many factors to tackle this on, so let’s talk about the script, and sort of like, basically they’re talking about breaking down a script and finding the things that work and the things that don’t work.

Fundamentally, those are always going to be qualitative characteristics. Unless you’re talking about like the number of words per page, or the number of pages of the script, I mean, all of these things, they’re going to be qualitative. Things like, you know, what is the act break? Well, three smart people can disagree on what the act break is. Are there four jokes on this page or two jokes on this page? Well smart people can disagree.

So you’re relying on human fallibility to, or human opinion really, to determine which of these boxes get ticked in which ways.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That is an inherent issue that nothing in their materials made clear how they’re making those decisions about what the actual stuff in the screenplay is.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re not waving some kind of Geiger counter over this. It’s not what we call observable fact. It is intuitive judgments that they then assign facts to. Well, those aren’t facts. You can’t rate that. It’s ridiculous.

Furthermore, what they’re comparing the screenplays to are movies. Let’s be honest, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They look at a screenplay and they say, “Well, this screenplay has the following elements that have succeeded in these movies.” Screenplays aren’t movies. If you want to really do your data baloney nonsense, go to movies that have succeeded, then go back, find the screenplays. Not just one, all of them.

**John:** To be fair, I actually did look at the website, and they do do that.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** They’re trying to compare screenplays to screenplays.

**Craig:** Okay. So they go back to which screenplays? The final shooting script? It doesn’t work. Doesn’t count.

I assume that’s what they’re doing. That’s baloney. No. To be properly predictive, you have to go back to the first draft or to the pitch or to the spec.

**John:** I think it would be fair to go to the draft they put in production, whatever draft you green light.

**Craig:** Okay, fine. Then that, even that. But they don’t have access to that. They don’t. Because as you and I both know, things change constantly. And then of course there’s editing and all this other stuff. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** It doesn’t work. And on top — even if they had all the information, if they had every single word that was written, it still wouldn’t work. And here’s why. Because movies are not controllable. That’s the big secret.

Remember — did you see that movie, Nixon, the Oliver Stone movie?

**John:** Yeah, I did see it.

**Craig:** There’s this point where Nixon is, I think he’s at the Lincoln Memorial and he gets into a debate with these hippies who are yelling at him and saying basically the whole thing is his war machine and you’re not even in control of it. [laughs] And he gets into his limousine, he’s like, “She’s actually figured it out. The truth is, I’m not in control. None of us are. We’re just kind of holding on to this thing that’s galloping out of our control.” That’s a movie.

So you can run this all through your software. Here’s what the software doesn’t account for. Robert Downey, Jr doesn’t want to say those lines. That’s it. Software done.

**John:** So let’s check another vector of why this is so problematic. Let’s talk about Ryan Kavanaugh and Relativity.

So Relativity, it was a company that financed a bunch of movies. They ultimately started making their own movies. And the pitch behind Relativity was always, if you saw the articles about Ryan Kavanaugh, the charismatic CEO of it, was like we have our own software that makes it so we can’t lose money. And then they actually proceeded to lose a bunch of money.

So they’re not the first people to ever come up with this idea of like we can predict what’s going to work and what’s not going to work because we have software, except that it didn’t work.

**Craig:** It’s just, I’m tempted to call it arrogance, but I don’t think it’s arrogance. I actually think it’s just a crafted lie. It’s just very clever people who see an opening and an opportunity. And the opening and the opportunity is a bunch of scared executives who are desperately trying to figure out why things work and don’t and how to keep their jobs for God’s sake because they have children in private school and they have mortgages. And these people come along and throw them a life preserver. The problem is the life preserver is made of lead.

**John:** Yes. So I want to talk about what’s actually useful or meaningful about this kind of work, which is that, studios already — every studio in town already has a department. They have people whose job it is to find comps.

And so as they’re looking at like, do we make this movie or do we not make this movie, they have a whole department whose job it is to figure out how much can we anticipate making on this movie, in this market, and that market, and that market? And basically like, is this a smart investment for us or not a smart investment for us?

That’s kind of fine. And I don’t fault a studio for doing that because if the studio is saying like, “I don’t know how we’re going to possibly make money on this movie,” that’s a reasonable reason not to make that movie.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** The challenge is it can be so hard to find a comp for a certain kind of movie. So I was talking with Andrea Berloff for Straight Outta Compton, when Universal — I think it was actually Warner Bros. before Universal had it, they were trying to figure out like what comps to compare Straight Outta Compton to. And they’re like, “Well, is it Get on Up, the James Brown bio pic?” Well, of course it’s not that, but that’s the comps they had because there hadn’t been a movie like Straight Outta Compton.

And that’s the truth about most movies unless you’re making a low budget horror movie or a certain kind of mid-range comedy. It’s very hard to find a template that’s going to fit what this movie is you’re thinking about making.

**Craig:** And then the sick thing is that what they’ll try and do development-wise is force the movie toward a comp —

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Which is the stupidest thing of all. Now they’re literally making movies to feel comfortable in their data nonsense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some movies you just have to say, “This doesn’t have a comp.” That’s the point. That’s the point. “You know what? Let somebody else use our movie as the comp. We’ll be the new comp.”

Now, you could say Straight Outta Compton is a comp for other things. But until you have somebody say, “I’m just going to make this movie because I think it’s good and I think people are going to like it and enough with this comp baloney,” all that stuff really is, is them arguing to somebody that there is a science behind what they do. But this is a fact. I’m now giving you a fact. All of you, there is no science behind what they do. None. All of this, whether it’s from the outside people or from their own internal departments, all of it is designed to make it appear as if there is a science. There is not. That’s that.

**John:** So we’re going to ask Alex who wrote in about vaginosis. We’re going to ask Alex to put this in the follow-up file to make sure we do come back and look at Scriptbook in, I don’t know — do you give it a year, like two years, whether that still is a company that exists?

**Craig:** I mean they’ve all — we’ve given them all loads of time and they’ve done nothing. [laughs] Nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** No, nothing. I think Nadira — Nadira? My dear Nadira, if I were you, I would figure out a way to pocket as much of that million dollars as I can because no, this is not going to work.

**John:** I don’t think so either.

All right. My bit of umbrage this week is sort of related. It comes from an article by Todd Cunningham in The Wrap. Before I say the headline, I know that writers often don’t get to pick their own headlines and so we have to sort of discount any headline as being sensationalistic because it was probably editor that did it. But anyway, here’s the headline, “Box Office Shocker: Movie Reviews Matter in 2015.” That’s the headline.

So here’s the actual meat of the article. Cunningham says that 12 of the top 15 movies this year were well-reviewed by critics. And he says, “Not one of the year’s Box Office bombs had more positive reviews than bad.” This doesn’t seem shocking at all. So he says it’s a growing trend because critics liked 9 out of the top 15 movies in 2010 and 10 out of 15 movies in 2012. He doesn’t say anything about the other years.

So the obvious thing that I was screaming at my phone as I was reading this on Twitter was correlation is not causation. It’s like basically you’re saying like, “These two things happened at the same time.” And it’s like, “Well, yes, maybe people like good movies.” That should be the headline for the thing. “People Like Good Movies.” And so if a movie is good and if it succeeds at the Box Office, it’s because people like it. And if it succeeds critically, it’s because critics like good movies, too.

There’s nothing here. And it drives me so crazy that so many words were spent making it seem like, “Oh, you know, we have to really worry about what critics think because they have a huge impact on Box Office.”

**Craig:** We are swimming in a sea of stupid today, my friend. I mean, the stupid on this burns so bright, so hard. Here, let me rewrite the headline for you. “Film Criticism Shocker: Film Critics Now Copying Audiences.” [laughs] I mean, so yeah, film critics are people and audiences are people, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes film critics hate a particular movie and audiences seem to love it. I’m personally familiar with that syndrome. [laughs] Sometimes film critics love a movie and audiences are like, “Yuck.” Sometimes, there’s overlap. In this case, the weird cherry-picking here has led this guy to believe that there is a significant overlap all of a sudden. [laughs] That the overlap is meaningful, and the overlap is in one direction and not say film critics finally going, “You know what? Maybe we should adjust our tastes to what people generally like.” It’s nonsense. You can’t draw any conclusion from it, whatsoever. This is stupid. The stupid grows by leaps and bounds.

Here’s another fact, another fact for everyone out there. Anytime people start talking about movies and statistics, you should just start getting pre-angry because stupid is almost surely going to follow.

**John:** Yeah. And possible conclusions will be drawn out of that supposed data.

**Craig:** Crazy, just crazy.

**John:** So two of the examples he cites were Fantastic Four and Terminator Genesis, both of which tanked and both of which got bad reviews. The reality is everyone knew those movies were going to tank before they tanked. The tracking on those movies in the weeks leading up to them was low. People seemed to sense that these were not good movies and they were correct.

And so while I do think it’s true, and that you could probably study this, is that word spreads about bad movies faster because of Twitter and social media and Facebook and everything like that. That’s not critics. That’s just people being people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s a slightly faster version of what’s always happened. And it’s maybe harder to hide a bad movie for very long, which I think explains why movies can drop off so quickly and especially bad movies can drop off so quickly, but that’s not critics. It’s just reality.

**Craig:** It’s just reality. And first of all, we don’t even know if these movies are good or bad based on these things anyway. So a Box Office bomb doesn’t mean you’re a bad movie. There have been famous Box Office bombs that are amazing movies. Blade Runner was a Box Office bomb, was it not?

**John:** I think it was a disappointment at least.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, so that in and of itself doesn’t mean good or bad. But yeah, it seems to me like a company puts a trailer out for a movie, people watch the movie, they go on Twitter, they go bananas in their hatred of the trailer, and every film critic is on Twitter going, “Well, I’m pretty sure I’m going to hate this. Everybody else seems to hate it. I’m not blind and deaf, you know.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So here’s a new headline for Todd Cunningham’s article, “Movie Critics Reading Twitter.” [laughs]. Stupid.

**John:** Stupid.

**Craig:** So stupid.

**John:** Yeah, it’s not great.

**Craig:** Come on, Todd.

**John:** All right. Next topic. The WGA sent out a list of proposed constitutional changes to its membership.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There are three things in the constitutional changes. Craig and I have not discussed them whatsoever, so I don’t even know what Craig’s opinions of these things are.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Yeah. I will tell you that on the day this podcast comes out on Tuesday, January 19th, there’s an informational meeting. So if you’re a WGA member who wants to informationally meet about these things, it’s 7 pm at the 3rd and Fairfax main building in the conference room.

**Craig:** No one is going to go there.

**John:** No one is going to go to that.

**Craig:** That meeting is constitutionally required and nobody ever goes.

**John:** Obligatory. So let’s pretend we are at this meeting and we’re having this discussion. [laughs] There are three things that are being proposed, three amendments.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I will start from amendment three and work my way back to amendment one which I think is the reason — the only one we’re going to have disagreement on.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Amendment three, reducing the number of signatures that a candidate needs to be nominated by petition. So essentially, if you are going for the Board of Directors, it reduces how many signatures you have to get on your petition or your application, whatever you want to call that to be considered.

**Craig:** It used to be 25 signatures, now it’s 15. Obviously, those 10 signatures are going to really make a difference — I mean, come on, who cares? It doesn’t even matter. Like if you need 25 signatures in today’s day and age with social media and you can’t find 25 signatures, it means you can’t find one signature. It literally means your mom won’t even sign it. So 25, 15, 1, who cares? If you want to run for the Board and you’re a member in good standing, just go ahead and run.

**John:** Yeah, go ahead and run.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Amendment two, reducing from 16 to 12 the number of candidates the Board Nominating Committee is required to nominate. You and I have both served on the Board Nominating Committee so this is — basically, every time there are like eight seats open, we have to get 16 people to run for those seats and that can be challenging. So what is your feeling about reducing this number?

**Craig:** It’s a little bit of a mixed bag, but I get it. I mean, what ends up happening is the nominating committee will put forward 16 candidates, some of whom are legitimate and have a shot and are good, and some of whom are just either cannon fodder or we just need to fill out the spaces, you know?

The problem with reducing it is just that there is a sense that if you’re not nominated by the committee you’re not a real candidate. But I don’t think that that’s the way the directional arrow works. I think it’s more that it’s people who are legitimate then ultimately end up getting nominated by the committee, not vice-versa. People that you know have a lot of support, have stature, and are likely to get elected are then people that the NomCom will always nominate.

So I don’t see reducing the burden on the nominating committee so they’re not stuck, it’s not a bad thing. I don’t have a problem with that. I mean, if the nominating committee puts out — what is it? Instead of 16, what is it down to?

**John:** 12.

**Craig:** 12, and nobody else runs on petition, so you have 12 candidates for eight seats. I’m okay with that.

**John:** Yeah, I guess I’m okay with it too.

Having been the person who had to twist some arms to get people to run, I know, it’s this weird thing where like — you don’t actually say this, but like, “Would you please run? Because I promise you won’t get elected.” Which is the weirdest thing, but like sometimes you are throwing some people in there just like — just to fill stuff out. And when those people don’t get elected, they’re sort of relieved not to get elected. And that’s not really good for anyone either.

The only thing I would say that is good about when you have to find 16 people is like sometimes it makes you think past your obvious choices and like — I’ve had to go really deep and like, “What writers do I know who actually I think could maybe do this job? And I’ve reached out to people who I haven’t talked to in years to try to get them to run and they’ve thought seriously about running.” So that could be a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. I don’t think that this rule will change much, to be honest with you. I think that the — for instance, the nominating committee that you and I are both on, I feel like we actually nominated more people than we had to.

So a lot of people want to run. I think, you know, if somebody comes in and says, “Look, I got the 15 signatures, you want to nominate me?” “Yeah, sure.” The truth is the voting population, they have no clue who gets — it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** Nope, it doesn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, amendment one, increases from two to three years the length of the terms of the board members and officers and modifies the election cycle and term limits provisions accordingly.

**Craig:** Right. So this one, I’m not such a big fan of. Everybody serves for two years. On the Board, everybody serves for two years as an officer. Here is the value. The value is, well, A, fewer elections. The value is that once they begin this thing, it’s set up in such a way that there won’t be an election during a negotiation year so you’re not having elections conflicting with the, you know, membership votes on contract.

It provides more stability for staff. They don’t have to wonder like, “Who’s going to be president, you know, in two years?” They can wait maybe there’ll be a new president in three years. Because that’s a whole thing for them like —

**John:** Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** You know, whose in-charge of this place, and that’s fine.

Here’s what I don’t like personally. I don’t care that it’s annoying to have elections during contract season. Tough. I don’t like the idea that we’re going to get — look, here’s what it really comes down to. There are two types of union politicians for writers. There’s the kind that is dynamic and wants to change things and has great ideas and is positive and has skin on the game and is aware of what’s going on in the world. And then there is the kind that is just bored and looking for something to do and really likes sitting in a room making “decisions.”

There have been a ton of bad, bad Board members and some bad officers as well. And frankly, there’s more bad ones than good. I don’t know how else to put it. And the idea of extending the lifespan of some of those terrible ones just makes me, ugh, I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. To me, it comes down to the question of quality of candidates as well. And I think that sometimes you’re able to get really great people to serve for two years that wouldn’t be willing to try to serve for three years, and that’s just the reality. And so I would rather have to vote one-and-a-half times more often and get good people in there and get bad people out of there than to have people in there for three years.

**Craig:** I totally agree. I don’t mind reading the pamphlet once a year for eight Board candidates. I don’t mind reading the pamphlet once every two years for officers. It’s hard for me to go to a working screenwriter and say, “I need a three-year commitment from you.” Two years is hard enough, you know.

So where you’re going to end up is you’re going to end up with moving our system, I think, closer to what you see like, I don’t know, with the jury system where it’s a lot of retirees or people that don’t have quite as much going on. Because, you know, people who are busy just can’t commit to three years. They can’t.

How do you say to a writer/director or writer/producer or a writer that’s getting stuff made, “I need you for three years?” “Well, there’s, I don’t know, a 50 percent chance that I’m going to be on location for a chunk of time in the next three years, how can I agree?” It just doesn’t make sense. I don’t like it.

I’m not going to vote yes on that one. I got to talk to some people — I got to find out like what — I want to talk to Billy Ray about this and find out like why this is necessary. It just feels dumb to me.

**John:** I think Billy Ray is an example of a kind of person who you do want to keep around for longer. I mean, as long as you can have Billy Ray on the Board, you’d be delighted to have it. He’ll get termed out more quickly because of — if this doesn’t change.

**Craig:** Yeah, but here’s the thing, Billy, yes you’re right. But there’s so many more bads than goods. And the good ones —

**John:** Agree.

**Craig:** Can influence things regardless. Billy can be the chairman of the negotiating committee forever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He doesn’t have to be a Board member to do that. Well, he could be the co-chair or the effective chair. I mean, my point is there’s other ways. And frankly, we need new people anyway. We can’t just have Billy do it over and over and over again.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s talk about Negotiating Committee and sort of negotiations and trying to schedule in a way so that we don’t have an election during a possible negotiation. To me, it feels like negotiation isn’t really that time where we’re sitting in a room opposite the other people, it’s really that year leading up to it.

It becomes so long. You don’t really know sort of when the bulk of that work is going to be anyway and when the strategy and planning for that is going to happen. So I think, yes, you don’t want to change horses mid-stream, but like that’s — the stream is so wide now that you have to change horses at some point. And I don’t think it’s going to really matter whether it’s a two-year or a three-year thing.

**Craig:** No, I mean, the idea is that if you have — if I were Patric Verrone, I would love this idea, right? So I can be president for three years. I’m guaranteed to both run the lead up to negotiations and the negotiations and the aftermath of the negotiations and I cannot be interrupted.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So it puts way more power in the hands of the president. Way more power in the hands of the president. And frankly, less power in the hands of the Board as I see it, because it also puts more power in the hands of the executive director. Because if the executive director and the president are close, as is often the case, then the executive director — the one bit of leverage that the civil oversight has in our guild is that you can fire the executive director, which we have done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you got, you know, a friendly president, that’s three more years of job security. If that guy can run again, usually incumbents win, and now you’ve got six years of job security. It’s too much job security.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is. I don’t like it.

**John:** I don’t like it either.

All right. So that was our quick take on these things. Again, you could go to the meeting or you could also just read other people’s follow-up. There are arguments, of course, in favor of all these things. And so, you’ll get the packet and you’ll be able to look through why they did what they did, and why they’re proposing these things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. All right. Our last bit is some craft stuff which has been saved up for, god, many, many episodes. But I want to talk about character names, not basically how you pick character names but how you tell the audience what the names of the characters are. Because in a screenplay, obviously you’re reading it, obviously you know all the characters’ names because you’re reading their name above every bit of dialogue. But if you’re watching a movie, you don’t necessarily know what the characters’ names are. And sometimes, that’s fine.

I was thinking back through my own movies and in the middle section of Go, the characters that James Duval and Breckin Meyer played — Breckin plays a character named Tiny. James Duval’s character’s name is Singh. You wouldn’t really know it in the movie because no one ever calls them by name, and it’s fine. But in other cases, it really is very important that you know who the character is because people are referring to a character who is not even on screen.

So I want to talk through the ways you can introduce the names of characters to an audience who’s just seeing the movie and who’s not reading on the script.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** Cool. Easiest way to do it is simple introduction. There might be some reason why a character introduces himself to another character. So, in Go, Burke says, “Hey, I’m Burke.” And Ronna goes, “Ronna.” And therefore, you’ve established Burke’s name and you already knew what Ronna’s name was. But that’s the simple way to do it.

**Craig:** And these things do happen. They don’t happen frequently. In life, when people meet, usually somebody’s introducing you to somebody or — but you know, occasionally, people — you’ve probably had that experience where you’re talking with somebody on a plane or something. I mean, I don’t talk to people on planes, ever, but maybe you do. And after 10 minutes, one person finally goes, “By the way, John.” And the other person goes, “Oh. Craig.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That can happen. I mean, people do introduce each other.

I see in — a lot of times I’ll read screenplays where people are just introducing each other. They’re just shouting each other’s names out almost like they have Tourette’s. It’s crazy. So you just got to be careful that it doesn’t feel forced and stupid.

**John:** Yeah. It should only be a situation in which it would naturally would come up. And if it all feels forced to do it, I would say, don’t do it.

The next most natural way to do it or common way to do it is just the simple question and answer where someone asks another character what their name is and they reply. And therefore you’ve established the names.

So in the last Star Wars, the question is like, “Oh, what’s your name?” And he says, “FN2817.” “I’m going to call you, Finn.”

Okay. You’ve just established the character’s name, and it’s actually a plot point. Like, we don’t — this character didn’t have a name and he’s now been given a name. And for the rest of the movie and for the rest of the franchise, his name will be Finn because of this scene that happens in a tire fighter.

**Craig:** Yeah. Very cool. Giving somebody a name is a great way to learn somebody’s name, for sure. But it doesn’t come up often. I guess what’ll underlie a lot of these suggestions is just as we’re constantly looking for ways to vary exposition or make it gentle or elegant, we do the same thing with names. We’re always looking for these little tricks of ways to not just — not feel like the record needle is skipping.

**John:** Yep. Third way. Character A calls character B by name. And so it’s that thing where in talking with somebody, you use their name and that’s how a name comes out. And so that’s the “Damn it, McGonagall” way of establishing who somebody is in the scene by having another character say their name aloud.

**Craig:** This is the one that is the hardest to pull off well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because generally speaking, we don’t say the other person’s name when we’re talking to them. If I’m talking to you and I know you, we presume that we know each other’s names. It’s so rare for me to say, “You know, John.” “Oh, you know what I think, John?” [laughs] It just — it doesn’t — we don’t do it that much.

**John:** You do it more often if there are multiple people talking where you actually have to direct something to somebody, then you might use their name to pull their attention back. Or pull their attention if they’re doing something else. You might say, “John, look at this.”

**Craig:** Yes. And where I think that we probably the great majority of times we say somebody’s name is when we’re talking to a different person about them.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** This is, I think, the easiest way to introduce names is for somebody to look at somebody else and go, “What’s with John?” “What’s with her?” “Did you hear about John?” That sort of thing generally helps.

Of course, the other way of introducing characters’ names is to introduce it, well, we’re going to get to that. That’s the last one. I don’t want to give it away.

**John:** A version of what Craig just described is that sense of like you refer to somebody by name who you’ve not met yet. And then, generally, in the next scene, you meet that person. So you’ve established the expectation of going to — that you’ll meet this person and then you actually see the person.

So in Go, that’s the conversation about the skipping over to Simon to by the drugs. They say like, “Oh, I don’t need Simon, I’m going to Todd.” And the question, “Todd Gaines?” And in the next scene like, we’re at Todd Gaines’ apartment. And that sort of establishes like “Oh, his name is Todd Gaines.” And that’s useful and helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The final way is to literally show the name like to have it printed out someplace. So classically on a door, a mysterious slip of paper, there’s something with a name written down which will become important.

**Craig:** Yeah. You see this all the time. Look, here’s the truth of this — it’s funny. On the script that I’ve written for Lindsay Doran, after I don’t know how many drafts, she said, “You know, we never hear this character’s name.” I was like, “Oh. Well, I guess we’ll have to figure out a place to do it without seeming clunky.”

The truth is, a lot of times when I watch movies, I think, certain characters, I don’t need to know a name because they’re personality is kind of their name, you know, if they’re side characters. So I wouldn’t obsess over name stuff. But obviously, for your main characters, you just have to figure out how to work it in without seeming clunky.

**John:** Absolutely. And so while you’re working it in, particularly for your main characters, it’s important enough that you find a good way to do it naturally early on because, I think, if it’s a main character who I don’t know their name for like 20 minutes, I get really kind of frustrated. And something bubbles up that says like, “Hey, wait. I don’t even know who that character’s name is. I don’t have like a box to put my information about that character in.”

For minor characters, I agree. Sometimes it’s not even worth worrying about because any chance to like really force that out is going to feel weird. Ask yourself, you know, if the audience never knows that character’s name, will it impact their enjoyment of the movie?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If the truth is it doesn’t, then it just doesn’t.

**Craig:** Exactly. It just doesn’t matter. It’s like, you know, it’s funny. We always watch The Ref. Every Christmas, I watch The Ref with Melissa because we love it. And Christine Baranski, I can never remember her character’s name and it doesn’t matter. She’s crazy screamy aunt something. [laughs] Like, you know, that’s — she’s just great. And so it doesn’t matter what her name is. I just know that she’s the sister and she’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sister-in-law and she’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. All right. I think it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is called Ghost Streets of Los Angeles. It’s a blog post that looks at Google satellite imagery of streets in Los Angeles. And what you’ll notice if you sort of zoom in and zoom out, there — most of Los Angeles is on a pretty clear grid. But there’s sometimes, there’ll be weird buildings that are, I don’t know, strange diagonal and you can sort of follow that diagonal. Even though there’s not a street there, it feels like there’s this weird diagonal throughout Los Angeles in different places. And those are because there used to be streets there.

And so what this blog post is doing is it’s looking at some of these ghost streets that are no longer existing streets but used to be streets and how they’ve changed the property lines of different buildings. And so you can see sort of — you we can basically follow where there used to be streets that are no longer there.

**Craig:** That’s creepy.

**John:** It’s actually kind of cool.

**Craig:** It’s creepy.

**John:** Creepy. And it reminds me sort of in screenwriting, a lot of times, you’ll see a movie and you’re like, “Why is that thing there?” It’s because of like a much earlier draft. There’s a reason why that was there. And like the underlying causes are not there anymore, but you still see like the echo of a previous draft being in there still.

**Craig:** Right. A ghost scene.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Exactly. Okay. That’s interesting. Well, my One Cool Thing is One Sad Thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Vilmos Zsigmond, the great cinematographer, passed away on January 1, 2016. Which in a way is kind of — if you’re going to die, die on the first of a new year just so you get that extra year on your grave stone.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** So he was the cinematographer behind these incredible movies, most of which dominated the ’70s. He was very — I was thinking of his movies and his work as being very ’70s. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, Blow Out.

And you know, there’s that period of ’70s movies that we, you know, all cinephiles kind of adore. And I always think of him when I think of those because he was this uniting piece across all these incredible directors like Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg and Michael Cimino. And he had this — all of it’s wizardry to me.

I don’t understand cinematography. I mean, I understand what I see, I just don’t understand how they do it. So it’s kind of fun to watch them and not know what the hell they’re doing.

**John:** When you’re on the set and you see them like setting flags and cutting — I just have no idea what they’re actually doing. And like, they’ll spend like five minutes like tweaking things. I just don’t understand what they’re doing.

**Craig:** I have no idea. I don’t know what — I honestly don’t know what stops are. [laughs] I don’t know —

**John:** I know what stops are.

**Craig:** Okay. You know what stops are. I don’t. I mean, I know the difference between long lenses and wide lenses, but I don’t understand all the other stuff they’re doing back, all of it. I don’t get it.

But there was something about — so Zsigmond, he had this style that seems so real in the sense that movies, you know, can be very candy-coated. They can be very glossy. They can look like movies. They can have that shine to them. There was something about his cinematography where it always just looked like I was actually there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was drab in a beautiful way. It felt like naked eye to me. He was so good at that and it was so perfect for that time and those movies. I mean, McCabe and Mrs. Miller was, you know, didn’t want to be like those —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, old westerns or something. It wanted to look like that, like you were there. So a big fan of his. Sad to see him go. And so, adieu. Adios.

**John:** Adieu. Great. Craig, it was nice to have you back on the show.

**Craig:** Well, thank you.

**John:** It’s so good to — it’s good to be back in our normal environments here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mary Webb. If you have an outro you’d like us to play at the end of our episode, you can write in with the link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered at the top of the show.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you want to come to our live show on January 25th with Jason Bateman and Larry Kasdan, you can probably still get tickets at hollywoodheart.org/upcoming.

If you would like to leave us a comment in iTunes, we would much appreciate it. That helps people find the show. Just search for Scriptnotes in iTunes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Mexican Coke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Coke), [New Coke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke) and [the history of Coca-Cola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#History) on Wikipedia
* Bacterial vaginosis [at the Center for Disease Control](http://www.cdc.gov/std/bv/stdfact-bacterial-vaginosis.htm) and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_vaginosis)
* [Vaginal douching](http://www.webmd.com/women/guide/vaginal-douching-helpful-or-harmful) on WebMD
* [Scriptnotes, 112: Let me give you some advice](http://johnaugust.com/2013/let-me-give-you-some-advice) and [Dear J.J. Abrams](http://www.dearjjabrams.com/)
* [Star Wars: The Force Awakens](http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars7.htm) on Box Office Mojo
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* [ScriptBook](http://scriptbook.io/) and [The startup story of Scriptbook](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COOQU-8S_yM)
* [Box Office Shocker: Movie Reviews Matter in 2015](http://www.thewrap.com/box-office-shocker-movie-reviews-matter-in-2015/) from The Wrap
* [WGA Asks Members To Amend Guild’s Constitution](http://deadline.com/2015/12/wga-members-considering-guild-constitutional-amendments-1201673993/) on Deadline
* [Ghost Streets of Los Angeles](http://www.bldgblog.com/2015/12/ghost-streets-of-los-angeles/) on BLDGBLOG
* Vilmos Zsigmond on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilmos_Zsigmond), [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005936/) and [remembered in Variety](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/vilmos-zsigmond-dead-dies-cinematographer-1201670799/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mary Webb ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/writers-rooms-taxes-and-fat-hamlet).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 220 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to be talking about how and why studios are employing multiple writers to work on some of their biggest features, and what that means for those screenwriters involved.

We’re going to be looking at taxes that writers face in the City of Los Angeles. And we’ll be asking the question is Hamlet fat. And to what degree does the writer’s intent even matter.

Three very different topics.

**Craig:** No, they’re all related somehow. Segue Man will connect them.

**John:** I will try my very, very best. You will also get a chance to see me being Segue Man live and in person. I’m going to be doing a show with Drew Goddard for the Writers Guild Foundation. That’s Wednesday October 28 at 7:30pm. It’s at the Writers Guild headquarters. Not the big theater, but just the headquarters. So, small little room. There are still a few tickets left. It’s a $20 ticket. It’s a $15 ticket if you’re a WGA member or a student. And so there will be a link in the show notes for that. Drew Goddard, of course, wrote The Martian. He did Cabin in the Woods. He’s done a tremendous amount of TV. And he’s just a great, smart screenwriter. So I’m looking forward to that conversation.

If you’d like to see me talk with him, come join us on a Wednesday night in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** That sounds like it would be something well worth seeing. That room is called the Multipurpose Room.

**John:** Yeah. Doesn’t it sound just like Cafetorium in your elementary school?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because the Writers Guild is as close to a government institution as you can get without being a government institution. So they do things like have the multipurpose room. And the multipurpose room is in and of itself maybe the worst room in Los Angeles, because it’s this brutally bare box. And, yet, inside that room awesome things happen all the time. This will certainly be one of them. And it doesn’t have a ton of space.

What’s nice about the multipurpose room, worst room in Los Angeles, is because it’s small, you can hear everybody really, really well. Usually you guys will get microphones, so there’s no question about that. And when it comes time for Q&A, because it’s not some massive audience, almost everyone will get their question answered.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a nice thing about it. It’s also small enough that if I’m sitting in the little director’s chair, I can see everybody in the entire room. And so it just feels much more intimate than really even the things in Austin feel like, which is a segue.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Because just days later we will be in Austin for the Austin Film Festival. We’re going to be doing two live Scriptnotes shows there. We’re going to be doing a normal live Scriptnotes panel. We have Scott Neustadter, we have Andrea Berloff. We have a third guest which is yet to be confirmed. It can even be confirmed while we’re taping the show, because if he would just text you back we would know the answer to that.

If you are coming to Austin and to see us, you do need a badge or ticket or whatever else is required for the Austin Film Festival because these are Austin Film Festival events. So people have asked about that. It’s like, nope, it’s really part of the badge or ticket to come see these things. But there’s not a special ticket on top of that.

**Craig:** No. No. If you have a general entry, then you can go to any of the — I mean, almost any of the panels. There are a few special ones like where they serve food or something like that. Those are different. But I’m doing another panel on structure, on theme, and character, and structure, and some people have asked on Twitter if that’s going to be recorded, or it’s something we’re going to put on the show, and the answer is no. That you actually have to go to the Austin Screenwriting Conference/Film Festival thing to see this.

If you are going to Austin and you —

**John:** That’s because it’s a special performance piece that Craig can only do live.

**Craig:** I can only do it live.

**John:** He actually requires everyone to surrender their phones before they enter into the space so nothing can leave. You’re allowed to take notes, but only one piece of paper. So —

**Craig:** You know, I mean, here’s the thing. In all seriousness the reason that I don’t want to record it or anything is because I honestly believe it’s valuable. And I noticed that Jim Hart, the screenwriter Jim Hart, he’s doing a similar panel on the same topic. I don’t know what his insights are. But he’s got a whole like website thing now that’s — I think you can pay money for. It’s called the Hart Chart.

I would never do that because you know the way I am. I don’t like charts. And I don’t like —

**John:** Well you also don’t like making money.

**Craig:** I don’t.

**John:** You’re an anti-capitalist. You’re essentially the Bernie Sanders of this show.

**Craig:** I’m the Bernie Sanders of Screenwriting.

**John:** You are angry in a way that does feel like —

**Craig:** Right. And there’s umbrage. I’m Jewish. I’m angry.

**John:** Holy cow. I’ve just figured it all out.

**Craig:** I’m from Brooklyn. Yeah, no, I’m young Bernie Sanders. “I mean, what is going on?” So my whole thing is I want people — I consider it to be something special, not because I thought of it, but it’s special because it’s the result of 20 years of thinking about these things. And also because unlike all the other structure things out there which are really about this happens now, then this happens now, this is all about from the writer’s point of view. You have to create something. What is the order you go in? Idea. Character. Theme. How do they interact and how can use that to actually build something, rather than use some system to analyze movies that are already in existence.

So, if you are going to Austin, you should go to that. And obviously you want to go to the live Scriptnotes podcast. And you want to go to the Three Page Challenge. The good people, Erin Halligan, who runs the Austin Screenwriting Conference, was nice enough to rejigger the schedule slightly so that the live podcast is no longer competing with the Saving Mr. Banks panel.

**John:** Yeah. Which is very nice of her. And I should say the live podcast means that we will be live in Austin and there will be an audience there. That episode will come out Tuesday, just like a normal episode will.

**Craig:** Live on tape.

**John:** Exactly. But you’ll actually experience some special things if you’re there live in person because we will inevitably have to cut some things out of the show because of slander.

**Craig:** [laughs] There will inevitably be slander.

**John:** Particularly if that third guest makes it on to the show.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So, in the show notes at johnaugust.com you’ll see our whole schedule for Austin, the things that we’re going to be doing. I guess I’m also on a dual protagonist panel, just like I randomly got assigned to that. And that should be fun. I’m moderating that one.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** So, come see us if you’re in Austin and you want to hang out with us.

Next up on the Workflowy of things to follow up on is something you put there about an odd French ruling about plagiarism.

**Craig:** Yeah. This came through just today I believe. You know, we talk about these cases all the time where people say, “You stole my movie,” and nobody ever wins. Well, here’s a situation where someone won. But it’s unique. The person who was complaining was not some guy or some girl. It was the somewhat legendary filmmaker John Carpenter. And the person that he was going after was none other than Luc Besson.

So, here’s what happens. Luc Besson has a company that puts out movies. I guess the company is called Europa Corp. I presume it’s a French based company because Luc is French. And it seems like Europa Corp puts out like genre fare that’s not Luc Besson stuff. And they put out a movie called Lockout which was a science-fiction/action movie where Guy Pearce is a hero, an ex-con tasked with rescuing the president’s daughter from a prison in space.

Apparently not a success. Nonetheless, a bunch of people in reviewing the film noted that it was essentially kind of a rip-off of John Carpenter’s Escape from a City series, Escape from New York, Escape from LA. That the character of the ex-con having to go rescue a president or a president’s daughter was remarkably close to what Carpenter had done in those movies. And Carpenter sued.

Now, where this is fascinating is that a French court ruled in his favor and we’ll include a note in the show notes, so you can read the summary of their judgment, but essentially they said, yeah, a lot of these story points are really similar. And so, yeah, we’re going to go ahead and order Europa Corp to pay 20,000 Euros to John Carpenter, 10,000 Euros to the screenwriting team of John Carpenter and Nick Castle. And then 50,000 Euros to the rights owner of the movie, who I think in this case — I don’t know who the studio was. Which is fascinating.

So, the French court seems to be following a different standard than we follow here. What’s doubly fascinating is that the French court ruled on behalf of Americans against a French company. From the summary description I would say this: I don’t know enough of the details to argue in favor or against this ruling. All I can say is if courts in the United States spoke in similar ways, everybody would be suing everybody a lot.

**John:** I think you’re right. This definitely felt like the broad strokes of the idea were similar enough that you could say, oh yeah, they definitely feel like the same basic plot points are being hit in both things. Of course, one is in space and one is a broken down Los Angeles. But I can’t imagine this happening in the US and this being the outcome.

The other thing I was thinking about is like I don’t know how much it costs to sue somebody in French court, but that’s not a lot of money to be winning. It’s hard to say that was worth it, because I have a hard time believing that it didn’t cost that much money to even bring the lawsuit.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’re looking at a sum total of 80,000 Euros, which is something like $140,000. I’m guessing given whatever the exchange rate is now. And, no, that’s probably not that good compared to the fees, unless they also got legal fees paid for.

What’s interesting is that most of the stuff they’re talking about in their decision are things that we would probably call ideas. Also, I don’t know what kind of defense was mounted here. My guess is that in the United States there would be an effort to show that the John Carpenter movies had borrowed quite liberally from movies before in terms of the idea of ex-cons on missions to save people is not new to John Carpenter. I suppose —

**John:** The Dirty Dozen.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Dirty Dozen comes to mind immediately. And there are others. And what they didn’t say was that there were lines of dialogue. I mean, there are specific situations that feel, like for instance they said in both movies the hero manages undetected to get inside the place where the hostage is being held after a flight in a glider/space shuttle.

**John:** Those are very different things.

**Craig:** Yeah, what? It’s crazy. I mean, what? That’s not the same.

**John:** To me what’s most fascinating about this result is that so often when we’re talking about copyright infringement or sort of like, you know, what is acceptable borrowing, versus you’re ripping somebody off, it’s always like this one movie was produced and this other movie never happened. And so you’re comparing a potential, an idea for a movie that was never shot, and a finished film.

It’s so weird to have two finished films that both come out. You can like look at the finished products side by side and say like, oh, these are the things that one took from the other. I can’t think of other examples of that.

**Craig:** There is one fascinating case. I’m not sure we’ve ever talked about it on the show. It’s almost worth its own episode. And it’s not a copyright case. It’s a case of a movie being redone and both movies being issued. I don’t know of any other example like this other than The Exorcist IV. I think it was IV.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So it was originally done by Paul Schrader. Paul Schrader wrote a script, shot a movie. Finished the movie. The studio said we don’t like this. Let’s redo a bunch of it. Let’s fire Paul Schrader and let’s hire —

**John:** Renny Harlin, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** Thank you. Renny Harlin. Exactly. Let’s recast certain parts, not change the characters, just put different actors in. Let’s rewrite some of it, but let’s keep some of it, and shoot a bunch of stuff and release that as a different movie.

There are two of the same and yet different movies and it’s fascinating to compare them.

**John:** Those occasions are so unusual that like they become notable for that. And sort of the what if this happened, well, this is the one example of that happening.

The other thing if we’re going to talk about obscure legal cases, I don’t know all the background, but I’d be willing to do the research on it, is Whoopi Goldberg and I think it’s T. Rex, where she was like essentially forced to do this movie based on a contract, and she didn’t want to be in the movie, and they basically held her to her contract and required her to be in this movie, which is great. I just love that these bizarre things happen.

And so when you are forcing an actor to be in a movie they have no desire to be in, what the outcomes of that are.

**Craig:** I, in the back of my head, have this memory of that the cherry on top of the bizarro sundae of T. Rex was that the studio took out one of those For Your Consideration ads, but I could be wrong. But in the back of my mind I feel like there may have been a For Your Consideration Whoopi Goldberg in T. Rex. We’ll see if I’m crazy. That might be drugs.

**John:** I have some real-time follow up. The movie is actually called Theodore Rex, not T. Rex, and the artwork is about as amazing as you could possibly picture.

**Craig:** Is it Whoopi back to back with — ?

**John:** Side by side with her sort of puppet man T. Rex.

**Craig:** It was like The Dinosaurs show kind of like.

**John:** Very much like The Dinosaurs show. He’s wearing a hoodie. So, he may be starting a tech company. I’m not quite sure what the plot of the movie was. But she’s a cop, so.

**Craig:** Well, of course.

**John:** In an alternate futuristic society, a touch female detective is paired with a talking dinosaur to find the killer of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, leading them to a mad scientist bent on creating a new Armageddon.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s not a great idea for a movie.

**John:** No, but Armin Mueller-Stahl is also in it. So, there’s some good people. George Newbern. I wondered why there weren’t more George Newbern movies, and this might be one of the reasons.

**Craig:** I found the tag line.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** The world’s toughest cop is getting a brand new partner. He’s a real blast, from the past.

**John:** Come on. The movie writes itself.

**Craig:** It. Writes. Itself.

**John:** The other example I can think of, and I don’t think it was quite as acrimonious of a situation, there was an Ed Norton movie, a heist movie that he was sort of forced to be in, based on I think it was a Primal Fear contract that he’d done. So Primal Fear is how we first were introduced to Edward Norton. Such a great movie.

**Craig:** The best. I love that movie.

**John:** And my recollection of it is, and so I will probably get all the facts wrong, is that Paramount had a two-picture deal with him, basically when they cast him in Primal Fear. And they held him to it to be in this heist movie, which as I recall was actually a pretty good heist movie, and he was the villain in it. But he had no desire to be in the movie.

**Craig:** I’m so like all wrapped up in Theodore Rex right now. It was written and directed by a guy named Jonathan Betuel. It was the last thing he did. And when I look at stuff, so it’s an interesting career. He actually has a writing credit on The Last Starfighter.

**John:** Great movie.

**Craig:** Which is amazing. Everybody loves The Last Starfighter. And I’m just checking to see if he’s cowriter — no, he’s the sole writer of The Last Starfighter, which everybody loves. Then he wrote a movie called My Science Project, which he also directed. And that was in 1985.

Then he does a couple of episodes of TV. And then in 1995 he writes and directs Theodore Rex. And that’s it. You rarely see that. Usually, there’s some little dribs and drabs of something afterwards, or people kind of find a different angle in the business. I almost feel like he must have been like, you know what, that’s it. I’m done. You’re not getting rid of me. I’m walking away.

**John:** Mic drop.

**Craig:** It must have been a terrible, terrible experience for him, too.

**John:** Yeah. That’s another great potential episode that we’ll probably never actually do is the people who just walked away. And the people who made one or two great movies and just like, you know what, this is just not a thing I want to do and I’m going to go off and do a completely different thing.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, Bob Gale, right? This is my IMDb typing as I go. Bob Gale wrote Back to the Future. And there wasn’t much after that. And, by the way, it wasn’t like that was his first thing. He also wrote 1941, which was a Spielberg movie. He wrote Used Cars, which was maybe Zemeckis’s first movie. He wrote Back to the Future, and sequels. He also did an episode of Amazing Stories. Remember the Spielberg anthology series?

**John:** Yeah. Trespass in ’92, I see.

**Craig:** Yeah, Trespass actually is a cool movie. But not really, no, most of it like episodes of TV and most of his credits are like the contractual characters by credits that go with all the Back to the Future stuff. He just never — maybe because he was like, you know what, I just wrote the best movie. I’m good.

**John:** Done.

On the topic of writing and writing new and different things, this is the end of October and I’m strongly considering, well, November — there’s a lot of pressure in November. So, there’s the pressure to get a flu shot. I already got my flu shot.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** There’s the pressure to grow a mustache, to acknowledge men’s cancers.

**Craig:** Can you even do that?

**John:** I cannot even do — I can’t grow a mustache. You can grow a mustache, couldn’t you?

**Craig:** I could grow a mustache in like a minute.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m shaving right now. [laughs]

**John:** I’m incapable of growing a mustache. That’s the sound we hear, because it’s not the e-smoking anymore. It’s shaving.

**Craig:** No, it’s my hair growing.

**John:** Oh, okay. That’s good.

**Craig:** It’s my facial hair growing. I could totally grow a mustache. I just don’t want to because I don’t like it.

**John:** So the other things we do in November, of course, is figure out a new way to cook your Thanksgiving turkey. That’s really an end of November task. The other thing November is good for is writing a novel. So, there’s NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. And I’m strongly considering actually just doing it this year.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And there’s an idea I have that is not a movie idea, or at least it’s not an idea that wants to exist first as a movie. And so I’m thinking about actually doing it this year and hitting my word counts and writing a book.

**Craig:** That’s crazy.

**John:** It’s crazy. And honestly there’s real work that might knock that into the realm of impossibility, but I’m seriously thinking about it. So if I do decide to do the book, on the site I will let everybody know and I will certainly post my progress.

Do you remember a long time ago on the site I had this little thing that could fill in like progress on something? It was like a CSS thing. And you used to use that as well.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And maybe I’ll make the new version of that, so people can see how far I’ve gotten and which days I’ve hit my goals or not hit my goals.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I have this little secret novel that I’ve been writing at — even glaciers move quicker. Because, you know, I’m working on other stuff. And then when I do finally come around to it, I’m so conscious of the fact that people will read this. It’s not like, oh, and this becomes this. No, this is it. So, get it right, you know? I’m far too fastidious, I think.

**John:** So we’ll see if I end up doing this. Our friend, Derek Haas, is the only person I know who consistently writes both books, and movies, and TV. And, in fact, in November there’s a book launch party that we’ll both be at.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** To celebrate his most recent novel. And he’s able to hit those pages and he gets up at like five in the morning and writes his book. And I don’t know that I’ll ever have those work ethics, but I might try it for November.

**Craig:** Derek, we like to say, he’s that guy who sits down and goes, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to write a novel.” And then he just starts writing. There’s a beautiful, carefree nature to him. I wish I had it. Like I feel like those are the people when it’s time for bed, they get into bed and they go, great, good night. And they close their eyes and they’re immediately dreaming. I wish I were that.

**John:** Yeah. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

**Craig:** I’m not that.

**John:** I have a hard time picturing Craig Mazin’s schedule because you will be online at just bizarre hours. And then if I do though email you at eight in the morning, you’re right back there again.

**Craig:** Well, there are times when my schedule makes no sense to me, to my own body. I can’t predict the way my brain works. Right now I’m in the middle of a little bit of craziness. So, sometimes there is that adrenaline, and I make the mistake of thinking every time this adrenaline is awesome. I’m going to be like this forever.

**John:** You’re invincible.

**Craig:** I’m invincible! Uh, King Kong does have something on me. When I finish this little crazy thing, I will almost certainly fall asleep for a week, and also get depressed.

**John:** Yeah. Those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, last bit of follow up here. If you are listening to our show through not the official Scriptnotes app, but through any other app, you may notice that we actually have chapter breaks. And my favorite podcast client, which is called Overcast, now finally tracks those chapter breaks. So if you hate our follow up, and never want to hear our follow up again, you can skip forward right to the place where we start talking about our first topic, our second topic, our third topic. Also really good if you just want to zoom in on one thing we talk about.

So, if you’re using Overcast, I would check out the chapter marks because Stuart actually puts them in every week. And way back to the first episode we have chapter marks for every single episode. So, check those out if you haven’t and check out Overcast if you’ve not. It’s really a terrific app for iOS, for listening to podcasts. They also switched to a model now which it’s free, the whole app is free, and if you want to support them, just an in-app purchase, you can support them for a month or for 12 months. And it’s basically pay what you want. And it’s a great app. So I paid the most I could.

**Craig:** You are a lovely person. I just might download that. That sounds good.

**John:** It’s a good app.

**Craig:** And I guess in other podcast news, just because I know people really want to know, yes, Louis B. Mayer will be returning for a third episode of You Must Remember This by Karina Longworth.

**John:** I cannot wait.

**Craig:** Just keep that in mind, folks. Louis is coming pack, with a vengeance.

**John:** Yeah. I think you have some choice words as I recall what Louis Mayer needs to say down the road. So, good.

All right, let’s get to our topics for the week. First one is writer’s rooms. So this actually comes from a question that a listener sent in. This is Vic Digital, which I doubt is his real name, but he wrote in as Vic Digital.

**Craig:** I wish it were his real name. I wonder if it’s like Dig-i-tal.

**John:** That’s what it actually kind of looks like.

**Craig:** Vic Dig-i-tal.

**John:** Yeah. He writes, “Over the last few months I’ve been seeing lots of what look like non-standard processes for developing scripts, specifically genre scripts. You’ve got the situation with the Transformers movies, where Robert Kirkman, Akiva Goldsman, and a bunch of others got together to map out the next ten years of Transformers movies. You’ve got the Star Wars Story Council, or whatever it’s called, and all the stories that need to pass through that, be they movie, or TV, or novel/comic, or even sticker book.

“You have stuff like the next Wolverine movie where I know they’re seemingly working on it since the last movie came out, but you see comments from Hugh Jackman talking about how they’re working on the script and whoever has great ideas.

“I see this a lot with sequels to big movies where the existence of it is heavily dependent on the stars’ involvement. There are a few other recent examples that aren’t popping into my head at the moment where the stars were talking about the development of the script and his influence on it.

“Anyway, for each of these, what does the actual development writing process look like if you’re the writer who finally comes to work on it? Does it resemble a typical writing process? Or are you guys horrified to discover what these other writers might be forced to do? Are the writers just at the whim of all these other powerful forces? And is it a straight adaptation, more like a rewrite? How do stars get involved in the process?”

So, I want to take this as a jumping off point to talk about something we’ve all kind of noticed, this trends towards especially big tent pole movies, bringing in a bunch of writers at the start. Not necessarily writing together, but being in a room together to sort of break story together. And the way that we tend to — a lot of times you will see the actors involved in the process early on in the development, especially of sequels.

So we could take through his notes, but also I want to link to an article by Rebecca Ford from the Hollywood Reporter which gave some good examples of the kinds of situations that writers are encountering and the complications for the Writers Guild when what does it mean if you’re a writer employed on a project, but you’re not actually writing, so therefore there’s not going to be an expectation of credit.

**Craig:** What a mess. There are so many complications and problems with this. Let’s talk about the easy ones which are essentially the kind of legal contractual ones. The way our credits work, we do limit how many people can be credited on a movie so that you don’t end up with Written By and then 12 names. So, written by nobody really. Written by everybody. And also the Writers Guild I think has an investment in the notion that what we do is unique and it authorial, and therefore in its best form it is the expression of vision.

Sometimes the vision is a shared vision of one or two or three people, but we’re not in the business of sitting 60 people down in a room to cobble things together like Frankenstein.

So, when people do gather together and start breaking stories together, the issue is they’re not an MBA legal writing team. A writing team at maximum can be three people. So, they’re running into these issues down the line there. And to be clear, not everybody is doing this in a way that’s problematic. For instance, over at Universal where Chris Morgan and Alex Kurtzman are overseeing their Monsters Universe thing, they are seemingly doing it correctly.

They have each movie that they’re contemplating has a writer. They do gather everybody together so that they all can coordinate, so that the narratives have some intertextuality. And they don’t break each other’s movies, but individuals are writing individual movies. And that seems fair.

You have situations that are not new, but regrettable, where a studio will hire simultaneous writers to kind of compete against each other. I’m not a big fan of that for a billion reasons. But, in the end, again, individual writers are being hired and writing and their work can be evaluate individually for the purpose of some credit down the line.

**John:** Although it becomes increasingly challenging. So look at the two Warner Bros. examples. So, both Wonder Woman and Aquaman had multiple writers writing simultaneously. And so if ideas are showing up in both of those scripts simultaneously, how do you credit those things? If I were the person who had to do an arbitration on that, I would be at a loss.

**Craig:** It’s very difficult. The guild has encountered situations where they’re asking arbiters to figure out what to do with simultaneous screenplays. Traditionally, everything is chronological. So, you write first, you’re writer A. I write second, I’m writer B, and so on. They have had situations where they’ve had writer A1, A2, and A3. And chronology now is no longer an issue. And if there’s overlap, basically everybody gets credit for it. And who knows, because that’s only fair. It’s like, well, they all wrote the same damn thing and that’s in the movie, so each one of them is credited for it.

It’s a mess. What happens all the time is the desires of the marketplace are completely dismissive of our, we’ll call it ideology, our desires for what we think are ideal situations. So they think, yeah, screw it, this is great. If one writer is smart, maybe five writers will be five times as smart. We’ll put them all in a room together and they’ll figure out Transformers together. It’s just — putting the complications aside — from a creative point of view I don’t get it. If I were running a studio, I would not do that ever.

I think that is a recipe for down the middle, edges rubbed off, group think. I hate it. I hate it.

**John:** So, let’s talk about some other scenarios and the pros and cons of that. I wonder whether the James Cameron Avatar movies were a precursor to sort of what this is. So, the development of the Avatar sequels, Cameron oversaw essentially a writer’s room of very smart writers and they were talking through the whole world and all the movies kind of simultaneously. And then they were each assigned a movie to write. This feels like a situation that’s more analogous to what we think about as normal television, where you have a showrunner, who in this case is an incredibly powerful writer himself and director, James Cameron, and he is building out the universe of what he wants this thing to be and then assigning writers to do stuff.

That feels more like what we described with the Chris Morgan thing, where each of those writers is individually responsible, but they’re also responsible for making their thing fit with the other people’s scripts.

The Transformers thing feels much more challenging because it’s honestly — it’s kind of like the bake off situations we talked about on the show before, where you’re bringing in a bunch of writers to pitch on an idea and then you’re going to hire one of those people to do something. The difference being we always say like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they paid those writers for all the time they’re doing coming up with those ideas?” Well, in this case they are, but then they’re ultimately hiring one person to do it.

And I was talking with a writer just last week who was going in on one of these situations. It was a one-day writer’s discussion about a project and then at the end of the day they were — the next week they were going to pick one of the people who was in that room to rewrite the script.

**Craig:** That’s horrendous.

**John:** It does seem incredibly, I don’t know, it feels incredibly abusive. It feels — it just feels weird. And so a writer might go in on that because they want to have a relationship with that production company. They want a chance at doing that project. So, those writers were going in, they were getting paid, but they weren’t getting paid much, and they weren’t getting paid as writers. They were getting paid essentially as independent contractors for a day’s work.

**Craig:** My objection, I mean, look, there are circumstances about this where you’d say, well, this is great. Look, there are bake offs, everybody goes in, they pitch all their stuff, they don’t get paid. This is like that, but they get paid. So why is this bad?

It’s bad because they’re getting paid and then their stuff is being mulched into a slurry of a story that someone else is going to write. If you are being hired for your story, you write your story. We’re not supposed to go in there and be cogs. And the last thing in the world I would ever want, forget as a writer, as somebody on the other side of the table, would be to bring together a group of eight writers, sit them around a table, let them know — let them know — that they are now on a reality show where there’s going to be one person standing at the end. And then listen to them engage creatively how in god’s name would that not just be creative blood sport where the — it’s just terrible. It’s stupid. It’s counterproductive. I’ve said this before, I would much rather see a movie that has mistakes that are consistent with the right things than a movie that’s just 100 different people’s right choices that have nothing to do with each other. It’s bad, bad moviemaking. And I don’t like The Transformers movies, not because — I’m just not a fan of robots hitting each other. It’s not my thing.

But, why? Why do they feel the need? The Transformers seems like the last movie you need this for. Just have somebody who really cares and has passion for — and you know, oh, Marvel gets this. You know, Marvel gets it. That’s a very powerful company. Kevin Feige is a powerful guy. They have big meetings with lots of people who all have ideas. But then they turn to one filmmaker and they say make me your movie, please.

One. Not 100. You will never get, never in a million years would you get The Avengers if you sat 12 people in a room and had them all grasping for money. It’s sick.

I don’t know if I’m coming across quite clearly here. [laughs]

**John:** I think you’re being very internally consistent, because you’ve often praised sort of Kevin Feige and the Marvel model. And Kevin Feige is essentially the showrunner. And so even though he has incredibly strong kind of showrunner directors, you look at Joss Whedon for god’s sake, coming in and doing those things. Famously on Avengers 2, they didn’t agree on some things and Feige wins. I mean, he ultimately is the person steering the ship for the entire Marvel universe and that becomes an important thing.

I want to go back to the point about round tables. I don’t do very many round tables. I think you do a few more. But there’s I think only one case where we’ve both been in the same round table. And it was a useful round table on a script that was going to go into production. And afterwards, you ended up working on it. But that wasn’t an audition for you to sort of go in and do that. You were able to sort of help them get through one specific thing and were a godsend to them, but that wasn’t a job audition for you.

**Craig:** No. No. Typically when you have those things, they are — the idea of a round table is you’re not the writer of the movie. You’re not being hired to write the movie. We’re asking you to read this and give us your thoughts and opinions. So basically we’re paying you a little money to be development executives because either we’ve expressed our perspective and we found that we need some more perspective, or there are things that everyone suspects writers would just be better at figuring out.

There are times when after a round table has concluded, the director and the studio say, “You know, maybe instead of whoever just wrote this last draft, we should have one of the people in the room execute some of the things we really liked that came out of that room.

And almost always it’s execute something you said, you know, as opposed to execute something that everybody else said. But it’s rare, and there’s absolutely no expectation, in fact, that may have been the only time that happened to me. Most of the time, you’re going in and just, you know.

**John:** And most of the time I’m doing it as a favor to the writer, if the writer is still involved on the project, to the director if I have a relationship with the director, or to the people involved in making the movie because you’re trying to make the best movie possible here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Before we segue to the talk of actors and sort of how actors have control over things, and sometimes don’t have control over things, we should talk about what’s different with features and TV, because we had a whole episode about how features are different. In television, there are writer’s rooms. Almost all television is written with a writer’s room. And so even though an individual writer goes off and writes a given episode, the story is broken and figured out in a room generally.

The reason why the credits don’t become so complicated is you’re making 10 or 13 or 22 episodes of the show and the reality is you are kind of figuring out like who should get credit for a given script. And it’s kind of assigned. It can be controversial at times who gets assigned the credit, but I know friends who work on shows that are essentially written as a room and they just kind of go through the order and say like this episode was written by writer A and this episode was written by writer B, when in fact they all worked on every episode.

But they can do that because they’re making a whole bunch of episodes of this TV series, versus making one movie every three or four years.

**Craig:** No question. Every now and then somebody will say, “You know what would make the feature film credit rules a lot simpler, if you just used the TV model.” And I always just say that’s the stupidest possible suggestion. The TV model is predicated on the notion that everyone gets a credit. Everybody. Films are one episode TV series, so no, not everyone, in fact, almost no one will get credit, especially if a lot of people have written on it. It’s an entirely different situation. Credits for films are much higher stakes situations.

Residuals are calculated in a very different way and generally will produce more income for feature writers than they do for writers of episodic television, at least these days. It’s why when somebody says, “Well, we’re just doing what they do in TV,” I just want to say, well, you’re stupid. Because it’s not TV.

**John:** It’s not TV at all.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**John:** Let’s also talk about actors, because this point about I guess Hugh Jackman being interviewed about the Wolverine sequel, it’s not a new thing that actors, especially the star of a movie, particularly the star of a sequel of a movie has the ability to greatly influence the development process of that movie. And that’s not a new thing whatsoever.

I think what’s new is that Hugh Jackman is getting interviewed all the time, and so people will ask him questions about how the Wolverine movie is going, and he gets to answer. But I can tell very honestly having worked on the Charlie’s Angels movies, having worked on other big movies with big movie stars, they’re a part of it, and they’re going to be a part of it, and they always have been part of it. Because they are looking at what they’re going to do in the movie. They’re looking at their brand. They’re looking at what’s exciting for them.

And they’re not necessarily the best qualified people to be talking about story, but they’re going to be part of the process of figuring out how this movie is going to work and play. And part of the reason why A-list screenwriters get paid A-list screenwriter money is because they’re able to have those conversations with big movie stars and make the movie stars feel heard, but also get the movie to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are times when it’s very understandable. If you’re coming in and someone has been playing a character for five movies, it’s not possible that you understand that character better than they do. It’s just not possible. And you must listen to them. Not only have they lived that character five times, but they’ve also been through wars you haven’t been through, and seen things that didn’t work, and they have shot scenes that ended up being cut. They know stuff.

The best actors on — let’s put that example aside — and let’s talk about a typical movie. I think the best and smartest actors are the ones who are confident enough to express their opinions and then listen to opinions and trust their creative team to some extent. And it’s nerve-racking because if it fails they are the ones 50 feet tall being embarrassed. And I get that completely. Sometimes I feel like the movie business is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of what we’ll call good directors.

Good directors tend to make good movies because they’re good directors and also because all the other crap that everybody else is constantly dealing with, they deal with just a little bit less of it. It’s a lot harder to sit down with Martin Scorsese and say, “I don’t think you get it. I’m not doing what you want me to do.” Mostly I think actors in a very relieved kind of way can say to Martin Scorsese or to Woody Allen or to David O. Russell or these directors that keep coming up over and over in Oscar season. I’m here for you. Tell me what to do. I think you will make me shine.

**John:** And looking at it from — I’m sympathetic when I look at it from the actor’s point of view, because if they’re a star, they may have some control over — or they can control what movie they want to make, which movie they choose to make. They can hopefully influence the script to a degree, which they feel like they can deliver a performance that they’ll be happy with. During production, they’re there, they’re present in the moment, so they know what they’re doing. They can’t necessarily know how the scene is going to ultimately feel. But then they’re just — they’re done and they have no more control over anything after that point.

They can’t control the edit. They can’t control almost anything else about the movie. So, if they’re a little over-freaking out about the script at the start, it’s because that’s maybe the only opportunity they’re going to have to defend the things that they are important.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I sympathize tremendously. It can be frustrating when you’re dealing with an actor who is maybe less confident, who is focusing on the wrong things, and it happens from time to time. It’s a natural thing in Hollywood for people who do a particular job to start to look at other people doing that job and ask why are they getting a thing I don’t get. So directors look at another director and go, “Why does that guy have final cut? Why don’t I have final cut?”

Writers say, “Well wait a second, why don’t I have a bungalow and a production deal when they have a bungalow and a production deal?” And actors will say, “Well why does that A-list actor get to have the story conferences and do their own draft and all the rest of it, and I don’t? Maybe I should. Maybe I’m doing this wrong.”

It’s a toxic thing that goes on. I think sometimes everybody — writers, directors, actors — all start to push beyond their comfort zones because they feel they’re supposed to.

**John:** Absolutely. If you see the A-list movie star of your movie star is getting involved in these decisions you feel like, well wait, I should be speaking up my opinions on these things, too, and then it goes down the line. And when you have movies that have many stars in them, it can be incredibly challenging to balance all of those competing viewpoints. And thus Charlie’s Angels was a challenging movie to make because you have a lot of people with a lot of strong opinions.

**Craig:** As you go on in your career, if you can last, you begin to accrue the benefits of your time in the war, because studios want a producer that everybody looks up to as being authoritative. They want a writer that everybody feels confident in and relaxed by. They want a director that is a sure hand. And they want actors who know how to do all of it, not only the show up on time, know your lines, deliver a great performance that’s attuned for camera, but then play the game of selling the movie. Everybody is desperate for the pro who is going to put everybody else at ease, because the deal with our business is at any given point there’s somebody on the rise who’s fame and position is a little beyond their experience level.

And that’s when we start to get into trouble.

**John:** I agree. The last point I would like to make about these writer’s rooms is there is an analogous situation in feature animation. So you look at how Disney features are made, how Pixar features are made, and there’s a bunch of people looking at story all simultaneously. And some of those movies are fantastic and they really benefitted from a lot of story brains focusing on really every beat. And so while there may be one or two credited writers, there’s a lot of people who are in the trenches every day really figuring out story.

What I would point to as being a crucial difference between live action features and animated features is animated features are entirely iteration. And so you are going through the process multiple times. You’re making the movie every day. And so you are seeing — well we’ve tried this cut, now we’re going to try this cut. What if we changed this thing? You’re going through scratch reels. You’re going through storyboards. And because it’s a process of continuous iteration, you can invite all those voices in and really benefit from all the eyes and all of the brains you’re applying to it.

Making a feature is not that way. And the times we’ve tried to make features that way it has not gone especially well. Features are a thing you ultimately shoot once, and then you go through multiple edits, but that shooting happens once. And so you have to approach it with one blueprint, one plan for how you’re going to do it.

**Craig:** It is an inherently risky proposition and I think a lot of what we’re seeing now with these group rooms is a misguided attempt to mitigate the risk.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** In fact, it is the risk that gives you the opportunity for magic and great success. And when you mitigate, you are definitely lowering your chance of disaster and you’re also, I think, muting — seriously muting — your chance to make something that breaks through.

**John:** Cool. All right, our second topic is taxes. So, death and taxes are sort of the —

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Segue Man, we’re never supposed to talk about. But taxes are a thing that just this week I’ve encountered two people in my life who have been hit with these weird tax situations. And it’s an LA city tax. And so in general this is not like state or federal income. It’s a special thing that’s happening — people who have income that is either writer income, or other income that is not as an employee.

So, I’m going to put up a couple of different links for people to go through. First is an LA Weekly article that sort of talks about it and writers who like made $500 in freelance being hit with like a $30,000 tax bill.

**Craig:** Geez. God.

**John:** A Reddit thread that goes through it. And some information about AB63 which is often the notification you’re getting that you owe this money. So, the short version of this is that if you are a screenwriter working on a studio feature, that many is being paid to you, you are being paid as an employee. You’re relatively well protected from most of the figures of this tax, although there could be a home based business tax which will kick into, which is so complicated I don’t want to get into it.

But what my friends were being faced with was essentially they had some 1099 income for some freelance writing. So not feature writing, but writing for a magazine, or writing just a little thing, or doing coverage. And essentially if you do not file a specific piece of paperwork saying that you are a business and that your income will be below a certain thing, they can penalize you and charge you fees and fines for not having filed this paperwork.

And so I don’t have much more to — we could talk about sort of the frustrations of it, but I’m going to encourage people to follow through these links if you are in the City of Los Angeles and you are earning income and you are not paying a business tax on it, be mindful that you may be expected to pay a tax on it. And if you get a notification that you’re supposed to be paying a business tax on it, take it seriously because it’s not like jury summons where you just kind of ignore it. Apparently it gets much, much worse if you just ignore it.

**Craig:** I admit that I am aware of this problem but I don’t live in Los Angeles. And so I live in La Cańada, which is its own city, and my office is in Pasadena, which is not in Los Angeles. This is the weirdest thing, this tax. It erupted like ten years ago, as I recall.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a slightly different thing, so I think what you’re thinking about ten years ago was essentially the City of Los Angeles was coming after screenwriters saying like you are a home-based business and therefore you have to file home-based business tax. And I was trying to find if I had blogged about it, and I guess I hadn’t, but I was really up in arms about it because I was like that’s just crazy. So you’re essentially saying that if I made the exact same money but I was working on the Paramount lot, versus working a block off the Paramount lot, I wouldn’t have to pay the tax.

And they’re like, yes, it’s because you’re a home-based business. It’s like, no, I’m not. I’m a writer who is working at home. And they’re like, oh, that’s a home-based business. It became — so the Writers Guild got involved in that situation. And ultimately to cut the story short, I ended up having to pay taxes for a few back years because of that, because it was better to pay that than to keep arguing and fighting about it.

**Craig:** Could you have told them, oh, I don’t write in my house. I go to Starbucks and I do it.

**John:** That is what is fascinating. And so my belief is that my business manager actually — she does check where am I writing certain things. So if I’m writing a movie and I’m actually writing the movie in New York and being paid for writing this movie that is shooting in New York, I’m not paying that tax on the income I’m receiving in New York because that’s not LA-based income.

**Craig:** This is the part of government that makes me…argh.

**John:** I sort of suspected this would kick up Craig’s instincts on this topic.

**Craig:** All my libertarianism, my latent libertarianism starts to jump out.

**John:** What I find fascinating and frustrating is that weird murky definition of like are you an employee, or are you a business is such a strange question, especially in 2015, in the age of Uber, in the age of a freelance economy, that every person is a business and so therefore we’re going to start taxing every person like they’re a business when the difference between W2 income and 1099 income shouldn’t be that big a factor.

Right about this point, all of the international listeners have skipped forward with the chapter markers set up, because like I have no idea what these taxes mean. But essentially a person internationally should know that taxes in the US, there are federal income taxes, there are state income taxes, so the State of California, and some cities have income taxes. LA does not have a city income tax. And this feels like a weird way that LA is trying to do an income tax without having to call it an income tax. And yet it hits people really strangely because it hits both people who are making a good amount of money like feature screenwriters, but people who are not making very much money at all, it hits them kind of unfairly as well.

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** Stupid. I don’t know if have anything more to say other than just venting frustration and umbrage.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good. I like it when you — I mean, that is a pathetic excuse for umbrage, what you just did. I mean, your voice didn’t raise.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** There was no — your blood pressure didn’t rise. Your creepy 30 beats per minute heartrate —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Never went up.

**John:** I’m not Spock. This is not my pon farr moment.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This is just expressing frustration rather than — a great thing.

What I will say is that I don’t perceive the WGA becoming deeply involved in this because it tends to be targeting writers who are not writing under contract for a studio. So, therefore it’s not as much their issue. But I would say that most aspiring screenwriters are probably doing writing for other people, or are doing other jobs, even if it’s just teaching at a class, or teaching a class for somebody, they’ll have some of this income and just be mindful of what the possible ramifications of that are.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Done. Last, this will be so simple to figure out. Is Hamlet fat?

**Craig:** [laughs] I read this article. It’s really interesting. There is a throwaway line in Hamlet where he is referred to as fat. And obviously we — all of us who have seen the many, many multiple versions of Hamlet, if you say to somebody, “Tell me what Hamlet looks like?” you’re going to say, well, probably like Laurence Olivier, you know? He looks slender and he looks like he’s dithering about what to do. He might have tuberculosis as people often did.

But there is a moment where —

**John:** It’s during the sword fight at the end when Gertrude says —

**Craig:** Queen Gertrude says, “He’s fat and scant of breath.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, the question is, is Hamlet fat? Well, they go through this whole thing and it’s, well, which text are you looking at because there were multiple versions of Hamlet. And what does fat mean. How does Shakespeare normally use fat? And by the time they’re all done, they’re sort of like, yeah, he probably, I mean, he was a little fat.

**John:** Yeah. So the article we’re referring to is by Isaac Butler. It ran in Slate. And, listen, we’re not a podcast about Shakespeare. What I found fascinating about the question of is Hamlet fat is that sense that the author of a piece gets to decide ultimately who should portray that character and how that character should be portrayed.

And so you and I write features and television, but we write things that are going to shoot exactly once. And so ultimately an actor is cast in that role and if that actor does not meet what the text describes, we may need to make some changes because there’s reality. We know who that actor is and it has to make sense.

And so often some of the last work we are doing on a script is tailoring it to the person they put in that role. And we may have opinions about what that role should be and who that character should be played by, but ultimately a person is cast and it’s our responsibility to match what our eyes are telling us.

Compare that to a play, or to any musical, or anything that’s written from the past, if you’re staging a new version of that, it’s going to be a different actor every time. And you have to be mindful of the fact that the author’s original intention may not be what we’re seeing there. So, you’ll have dramaturgs argue about what this thing meant and what the author’s intent was, but ultimately you’re free to do whatever you want to do and feature directors can make radically different choices.

**Craig:** Nobody I think is subjected to more reinterpretation than Shakespeare because he is essentially the proto playwright for, well, probably some Greeks, but you know, for most people I would say he is the proto playwright. So, he’s constantly being reinterpreted. In fact, if you mount any production of Shakespeare that is really true to the text, it feels boring and almost like a wasted opportunity at this point.

What’s interesting is that the text says, “He’s fat,” and nobody who was interpreting Hamlet all along in the 20th century took that to heart. Because I think it’s hard for people to look at an overweight character as somehow this tortured soul like Hamlet, which of course is not true to life. If anything, the opposite is true. Overweight people suffer more, I think. And their internal life and their minds are as vibrant as anyone. So, it’s a bias. It’s just a flat out — just a bias.

**John:** But what’s fascinating, ever since I first heard this article discussed and then I actually read the article, as I think through my recollection of Hamlet and sort of like what Hamlet needs to do in the course of the play, sticking a heavy 27-year-old actor in that part in some ways makes a lot more sense to me, because the way that he is sort of stuck in his head, and the way that people are treating him, even Ophelia falling for him, it doesn’t feel like she’s falling for him because he’s hot. It’s his brain that’s actually attracting her. It’s essentially his doom that is sort of attractive to her.

So, I found it really kind of interesting to think through the whole story with those changes. And often that’s kind of a screenwriter’s job, isn’t it, is to imagine the world with one thing changed and what the ramifications are of that change. And so putting a few pounds on Hamlet does give you some different opportunities.

**Craig:** Without question. And as we progress through our evolution of narrative understanding, our interest in narrative cutting closer to what is real seems to be increasing. We want to see things that are true to the world around us, whether it’s actors that aren’t just white or aren’t just traditionally beautiful or aren’t just thin. And so I think it’s a good thing for us to start asking those questions all the time about everything.

It’s also good for the audience. I think it’s what they want. I mean, there will always, always be a desire for idealized perfection on screen. People will always want to see beautiful people doing very big romantic things on screen because ultimately we’re not that far off from where we were back in the days of the Greeks when gods would come down and start doing this stuff.

You know, we look at Brad Pitt on a screen. We’ve elevated him essentially to a demigod. Not spiritually speaking, but that’s kind of the place he’s occupying for us. Not surprisingly, he does really well when he’s playing Achilles, actually.

You know, so we’re getting better and our interests are getting a little more broad in that regard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I think it’s good. I like this sort of thing. I like the fact that people might have been wrong all along about Hamlet. I think it would be cool. And the article does cite that there have been some actors who aren’t traditional skinny that have played Hamlet.

**John:** Yeah. There’s the Paul Giamatti’s who have done it, which is great. I also look at — you look at Lena Dunham and if you took the text of Girls and didn’t have Lena Dunham in that place, and you cast a standard CW pretty actress in that part, it wouldn’t be the same show. And who she is and what she looks like is a fundamental aspect of what that is. And even when it’s not in the text, it’s informing the way the characters in the world treat her. And I think that becomes an important aspect of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Another thing I think about is the movie School of Rock, Jack Black is sort of iconically great in the central role in School of Rock. They’re making the Broadway version of that. And they cast Alex Brightman from Big Fish in that part. And so it’s that challenging thing where you say like, well, he’s not playing Jack Black. He’s Alex Brightman. He’s doing his own thing. And yet it was determined that they wanted him to be sort of Jack Black size. So he actually is heavier now so that he is more reminiscent of our perception of what Jack Black was like in that movie. And that’s an interesting thing. And I’ll be curious if down the road, that musical is going to be huge, but a year from now or when Alex leaves the show and another person comes in, will they always have the requirement that that actor has to be heavier? Or will we eventually get to the point where you realize that wasn’t important at all.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, you know, they kept changing through the actors on that, and it became less and less important over time that it be so iconically the same way that we saw it from the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ll run into that, I assume, at some point when they’re doing the umpteenth version of Book of Mormon that Elder Cunningham won’t necessarily have to be zaftig. It’s interesting. I don’t know necessarily why they felt that the lead in School of Rock the musical had to be heavy. I mean, it’s interesting. Maybe they did it to avoid the criticism that they didn’t have somebody — I mean, part of the problem with the world now is everybody is in fear. We live in fear of being accused of something. So, sometimes these decisions are made in weird ways that are a little calculated. That’s actually a really interesting thing that they asked him to gain weight for that.

**John:** I was thinking back to Big Fish when we did it with Norbert Leo Butz. And so I had the luxury of seeing a bunch of different actors play that role. So we had Hugh Jackman. We had other actors along the ways different people playing that role. And that was incredibly helpful as an author to see what is the character and what is what the actor is bringing to the character.

Ultimately, because Norbert Leo Butz was the Broadway version of it, that does sort of solidify in mind like, oh, that’s what that is supposed to be. And then after we’ve closed, and I’ve seen regional productions, and the Boston version I was there, just people are fundamentally different. And they bring different things to the role. And it’s been really fascinating to see the inherent aspects of the person come through and what that character is and sort of how does that change our perception of the character and the story based on who we cast in those parts.

Same thing happens like with the Will character and many productions are even much more multi-ethnic than the Broadway version. And if you break the essential belief system that these are all people who are biologically related, how does that change your perception of the story?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s been fun to see.

**Craig:** You can start to see why people panic so much when they’re casting a movie, because that’s your shot.

**John:** Yep. That’s such a great point, because in a movie you’re casting it exactly once. In everything — a play or musical, you are — every time is a different assembly of unique elements.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for some One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a brand new show called Computer Show by Adam Lisagor, the incredibly talented director and star of many great online videos and other things, commercials. Computer Show is set in 1983. It is very much like the Computer Chronicles on PBS, if you remember that. Except that it is these hosts are interviewing people who are running modern companies. So, they’ll interview the guy who created Reddit or other sort of VC entrepreneurs. And they are completely clueless about what they’re talking about.

And so it’s incredibly deadpan in a very great Adam Lisagor way. So I will include a link to several episodes of that. It’s just terrific and Adam is so smart.

**Craig:** That sounds like something I would like.

**John:** You would like it.

**Craig:** I would. My One Cool Thing, of course, is Tesla Autopilot.

**John:** I honestly don’t know what this is, so tell me all about it.

**Craig:** So the most recent generation of Tesla Model S automobiles came with all these sensors built in. And initially the only functionality was basically what you can get in a lot of modern cars. For instance, the adaptive cruise control. So if you set your cruise control in a lot of modern cars it will read ahead and slow down if it detects that it’s creeping up on a car. Stuff like that.

Or when you get too close to a curb it goes boop, boop, boop. Nothing special. But, just this week, Tesla released a major revision of its software which is unique to Tesla. Only they can really do this. It’s spectacular. It’s like you get a whole new car. And they turned on a whole bunch of functionality. And now the car has autopilot. I can get onto a freeway and I’m in my lane, I pull twice on the little cruise control stick, and it drives itself.

So, now it is adjusting its speed and also moving the steering wheel and following the lane.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** If I want to change a lane, I hit the lane change signal, and it goes, oh, you would like to go to the left lane. It checks, yep, good, moves into the left lane, and then stays in that lane. Now, it’s in beta, and they say keep your hands on the wheel just in case, but I tried it and it’s so creepy and good at what it does. And I know for sure that within — I’m going to say within 10 to 20 years, no one will be steering their car.

**John:** I concur with you that that will happen. And I’ll also be fascinated to see whether learning how to drive a non-super automatic car will be just like a, I don’t know, will it seem like a vintage thing, or will it still be a mark of distinction that you still know how to drive? I’ll be curious what the future is like for that.

My question about the autopilot in its current form, so it does not have your navigation information in, so it’s only if you’re already on the freeway, then you can hit this button and it will engage. And that you will disengage that when it comes time to exit the freeway, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly right. So if you press on the brake. So it’s braking for you and accelerating for you, but if you press on the brake, or move the steering wheel yourself, it goes, okay, you’re back in control now. It’s academic to look ahead and see that, yes, they will integrate the navigation into it. They’re going to integrate reading stop lights and stop signs into it. It’s just inevitable.

This is the first step toward it, but it’s inevitable.

**John:** It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. That is our show this week. So our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro, please send it to us. You can write in at ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli and produced by Stuart Friedel. A reminder that we have transcripts for every single episode of the show. So if you go to johnaugust.com and search for Scriptnotes, you can find every back episode.

If you would like to listen to the back episodes, you can find them at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $1.99 a month for a subscription there. It gives you access to the whole back catalog and the ability to use our apps to get back to those episodes. So that’s at Scriptnotes.net.

A reminder that I will be talking with Drew Goddard on October 28 at the WGA. So if you want to come to see that you should get tickets. There’s a link in the show notes. The show notes are always at johnaugust.com.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, write in to ask@johnaugust.com.

Next week will be a normal week, and then we’ll be in Austin. And the Austin episode should be up a normal time on Tuesday after that. Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get tickets now for the WGAF’s October 28th Writers on Writing event with Drew Goddard, moderated by John](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/writers-on-writing-with-drew-goddard/)
* [Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/2015-panels/)
* [John Carpenter Wins Plagiarism Case Against Luc Besson Over ‘Lockout’](http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/john-carpenter-wins-plagiarism-case-against-luc-besson-over-lockout-20151015)
* [Exorcist: The Beginning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcist:_The_Beginning) and [Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion:_Prequel_to_the_Exorcist) on Wikipedia
* [/Film and How Did This Get Made’s oral history of Theodore Rex](http://www.slashfilm.com/theodore-rex/)
* November is the month for [flu shots](http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2015-2016.htm), [Movember](https://us.movember.com/) and [NaNoWriMo](http://nanowrimo.org/)
* [Overcast](https://overcast.fm/) now has chapter support
* THR on [The Problems When Many Writers Work on ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Transformers’ and Other Film Franchises](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/problems-writers-work-star-wars-831582)
* AB63 Tax Program [FAQ](http://finance.lacity.org/content/AB63ProgramFAQ.htm), and on [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/3ogwef/freelance_tax_for_los_angeles_residents/), [LA Weekly](http://www.laweekly.com/news/did-you-just-get-a-500-freelance-assignment-the-city-might-bill-you-30-000-6040715) and [NBC 4](http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA-Freelancers-Get–Tax-Bill.html)
* [Is Hamlet Fat? A Slate investigation](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/theater/2015/09/is_hamlet_fat_the_evidence_in_shakespeare_for_a_corpulent_prince_of_denmark.html)
* [Computer Show](http://computer.show/) with Adam Lisagor
* [Tesla Autopilot First Ride: Almost as Good as a New York Driver](http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a27044/tesla-autopilot-first-ride-almost-as-good-as-a-new-york-driver/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))