Search Results for: residuals

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/campaign-statements-and-residual-statements).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 217 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about the results of the WGA election and what that means for screenwriters, and we promise, promise, promise to answer several questions that keep falling off the end of the episodes. We keep running out of time. And today we will not run out of time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, Craig, last time I spoke with you on this podcast, you were starting to feel sick and I want to know how you are feeling right now.

**Craig:** So much better. And somehow this time I managed to duck this thing that always happens where I’ll get a virus, you know, standard cold, and then it will go into my chest and then turn into bronchitis. It just didn’t happen this time.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, well, look, I don’t like taking antibiotics. Nobody does. So, yeah, I’m feeling much better. On top of the world, almost. Exuberant to the point of mania.

**John:** Uh-oh. So this is a rebound kind of thing that’s happening and we should all be really worried.

**Craig:** You should be particularly worried because tonight I’m going to be DMing our latest session of Dungeons & Dragons.

**John:** Yes. So we are going to be exploring the horde of the dragon queen. And when Craig is feeling too good, it is bad for us because that means he may go for the total party kill.

**Craig:** Total. Party. Kill. TPK. TPK.

**John:** So it’s interesting that you’re feeling better, and this small sidebar on the antibiotic discussion, because I have the cold also. You had a worst cold than I did, but it did go into my chest. And so I have the thing where I am coughing up every once and awhile. So I went to see my general physician and he said, okay, I will give you a prescription for the Z-Pack, but I do not want you to take it unless it persists for quite a long time. Because he does not want me, even though it may actually help the situation, he feels like it is bad overall societally for people to be taking antibiotics for such things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I try and hold off every time. And so this time, for instance, I didn’t call. I just waited and it worked out. When it happens to me and it goes into my chest, it just gets worse and worse and worse. I get that achy feeling. And then I start coughing up nasty gray stuff. And it’s just over at that point. I’ve lost.

And I have to say, luckily for me, the Z-Pack works every time brilliantly. But, yes, we are all rolling the dice, aren’t we?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Playing the fool’s game.

**John:** Yes, you could be the patient zero that starts the next epidemic of antibacterial resistant strains.

**Craig:** Yeah. I didn’t want to be somewhat uncomfortable, so you’re all dead.

**John:** All right, let’s get to some follow-up. Question from Skye in Manitoba who writes, “I have a question regarding your recent discussion on the PG-13 rating system and the use of language in certain films. Your discussion focused mainly on two specifically frequently used swear words, the S-word, and the F-word.” And so I’ve cleaned this up for broadcast here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** “Suppose that I was writing a script and I did not use the above words, but I might want to use another word that references male or female genitalia in a non-sexual context, calling someone a dick or a C-word. Is the limit you mentioned on the podcast, that is one non-sexual F-word in a PG-13 script, applicable in this context? Also does the same rule apply to swear words from other countries? Like if a North American film featured the British word Bugger or the French word Zut?”

**Craig:** Zut alors.

**John:** And I don’t know how bad those words are, so maybe we’re getting an explicit rating in other countries.

**Craig:** Possibly. I don’t think Zut is particularly bad. Bugger, in England is still kind of mild, although it’s specifically connected to anal sex. It’s buggery. Sodomy is very similar. But people say Bugger It all the time there.

I think that probably calling someone a Dick in a PG-13 movie is absolutely fine. The C-word, See You Next Tuesday, pretty loaded here in the United States. So, I’m guessing that would not work. In England, it’s right up there with bugger I guess. It’s just things that people toss out. So, yeah, it is a little bit contextual. For the MPAA here in the United States, all they’re doing is rating movies for release in the United States. So, it doesn’t matter what other countries think of particular words because other countries have their own ratings boards and their own way of rating films.

But, here in the United States, I would imagine See You Next Tuesday is going to get you booted to R.

**John:** Yeah. I included Skye’s question because I think overall it’s important to remember that it’s not just a simple like you get one use of these certain words. There is an overall context of how much you’re using explicit language. And so you might get away with one S-word and a Dick, but if you had — in aggregate there could be too much that pushes you over the limit. So, you do have to be aware that they’re watching the whole film, and so it’s not just a checklist of how many times you said a specific word. There’s overall situations where you might get dinged because of general coarseness of language. And so we aired that episode, a couple of screenwriter friends wrote in to say that they’ve had situations where they didn’t even use those words, but overall things were considered aggressive enough that they had to change some language.

**Craig:** They keep an eye on what they call a cumulative effect of things. You know, in terms of casual language, I think the good old S-word — you can pretty much go to town with that one and stay within PG-13. They’re pretty okay with that. And, frankly, how many times can you actually say that word anyway?

Yes, but you’re right. They aren’t really doing math. Nor are they really adhering to super hard and fast rules. In fact, any rule they have, they also have a rule that they can break their rule. So, you know, it’s a roll of the dice either way.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some new stuff. Election results. So this last week, right after we recorded the podcast, election results were announced. And, Craig, how did you feel about the results of the election?

**Craig:** Very happy, bordering on elated.

**John:** See, that’s I think why you’re feeling better. It’s not because the virus passed. It’s because you got a happy email in your inbox from the WGA.

**Craig:** I think I’m feeling better not because of the good things that happened to people, but because of the bad things that happened to people, because I’m an awful person.

**John:** There’s reason for pure joy and a little schadenfreude in the results —

**Craig:** A little schadenfreude, yes.

**John:** In the results of the election. So, the headlines are Howard Rodman was elected WGA president. You and I both think that Howard will do a superb job leading the organization. And then we were very curious about how the board of directors would be composed. And the two people that we were both stumping pretty hard for, Zak Penn, and Andrea Berloff, both were elected.

**Craig:** They were. They were elected and they were also elected convincingly. So, one thing that happens is they publish the vote totals. And while the vote totals in and of themselves aren’t determinative of anything, everybody has the same authority on the board, when you are elected to the board everyone has a sense of who kind of made it by the skin of their teeth and who was swept in with some force. And if you’re swept in with some force, people kind of — they take you a little more seriously.

So, our winners, the top vote getter not surprisingly Billy Ray. And he was an essential for all of us. Then Meredith Stiehm, Andrea Berloff, Mara Brock Akil, Luvh Rakhe —

**John:** I thought it was Rakhe [pronounces it Rock], but I’m not even sure.

**Craig:** Luvh Rakhe. Sorry Luvh. Zak Penn. Carleton Eastlake. Ari Rubin, and Patric Verrone. So, here’s what’s fascinating, to me.

First of all, if you look at Writers Guild politics as basically moderates over here and wackadoodles over here, not to editorialize.

**John:** [laughs] Not a bit.

**Craig:** This was a huge victory for the moderates. And the moderates, by the way, that changes from time to time. I mean, look, Howard Rodman, who is somebody that you and I both backed, was once one of the wackadoodles. And then, I think, got a pretty good eyeful of the way things actually worked and not surprisingly as a rational person started to adjust.

So, voting for Howard was essentially a vote for continuity from what Chris Keyser had been doing for the last four years and what Billy Ray has been doing for the last four years. And so that was great to see.

In terms of the vice-president, David Goodman was elected. I think David and Carl Gottlieb were kind of similar, so I don’t think that was indicative of much. Aaron Mendelsohn is our secretary-treasurer because he ran unopposed, which I hate, but fine. We dealt with that topic last time.

Now, on the board issue stuff, what’s fascinating to me is this — not only — so Carleton Eastlake is associated with Patric Verrone. And Carleton got the seventh lowest vote total. He was also an incumbent. Now, as tradition goes, incumbents always get reelected and always get reelected convincingly, except this time. Carleton slides all the way down to seventh place.

Patric Verrone, the former president, two-term president of the Writers Guild, and leader of the glorious strike, didn’t even get in the top eight. He becomes a board member because Aaron Mendelsohn is now secretary-treasurer and vacates his seat. So Patric only serves for one year, the remaining part of Aaron’s term. That’s shocking.

**John:** And so I’ve heard several different theories about sort of what’s really going on. One of the theories I heard is that the overall percentage of members voting was up from previous elections. We had 27% of members voting, which sounds really low, but apparently for union elections is actually pretty high.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s a theory that the sort of Patric Verrone camp, the people who were sort of all riding on — it wasn’t officially a ticket, but it sort of felt like a ticket, that there might be kind of a ceiling to sort of how many votes those people got because Patric got sort of the same number of votes he usually gets. But more people voted and more people voted for these other folks.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that Patric has indicated his maximum support, which at this point is very soft. And to continue the theme of softness, Dan Wilcox and Alfredo Barrios, who were both incumbents running for reelection and aligned very strongly with Patric, didn’t even make it into the top nine.

And when I say they didn’t make it into the top nine, what’s shocking to me is they didn’t just lose to a bunch of people, they lost to some people that had run before and lost themselves. For instance, Luvh Rakhe, he had run, I think twice before and lost.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, this is pretty remarkable to me. And I think it signifies fairly strongly the end of an era. Joan Meyerson, who was Patric’s strong endorsement for president, lost by a ton. I think it was a two-to-one vote.

So, I’m incredibly encouraged by this. I thought that Dan Wilcox was a terrible board member. I’m glad to see him go. This is a much better board. And, by the way, it’s a more diverse board. We have more women. We have more people of color. We have — and the best news of all, John — three, I believe, three feature writers? Maybe four?

**John:** Which is remarkable. And that’s part of the reason why we were so vocal in urging people to vote for Andrea and Zak Penn to make sure that we have feature screenwriters represented on the board.

**Craig:** It’s huge. It’s a great result for us. And I think that — I’m happy to say that in terms of 2017, because we have a new contract coming up, we aren’t in a position where we’re definitely striking. We would have been with Joan Meyerson and a stronger Patric, and Dan, and Alfredo. Oh, no question.

Now, we actually have a chance of negotiating a deal as we have in the last two years. So, very encouraging.

**John:** So, the election is done, but the issues remain. And Jonathan Stokes, a listener and a friend, wrote an email saying, “Hey, could you and Craig talk though some of the issues I see brought up in all of these campaign statements and talk through what they actually really mean?”

So, when Craig and I were on Franklin’s podcast, we sort of talked through some of these things. But I wanted to just give some bullet points of like these are the things that you’re going to hear a lot over the next two years, and some quick impressions on sort of why they’re important, and what the choices are that we have ahead of us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Jonathan brings up agency packaging fees being abusive to writers. So, packaging fees are ways in which the agencies actually collect money from a package being set up either at a TV network or in some cases a feature film, where rather than commissioning from the client, from the person who they represent, they commission from the studio. And there’s reasons why that can be really bad for the writer, but it’s also really complicated.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of it for features. I’ve only heard of it for television.

**John:** You know, I say that it can’t happen for features in that I’ve seen it, but it’s really a historical thing. I remember there being packages set up with a big spec script that went out with certain people attached and there were ways to do it. But, yes, it is really a television concept.

**Craig:** As a feature writer, this is the one I’m fuzzy on.

**John:** Yeah. Paper-teaming of writers, and this is a thing that’s come up a lot. Paper-teaming, for people who don’t know, is where a show is putting together its writing staff and they decide, you know what, I really like Pam and I really like Chuck. They’re both really good writers. And they’re both really good new writers. I would love to hire both of them, but I can’t. I only have one spot. So, hey Pam and Chuck, why don’t we say that you’re a team and we will put you together as a team and you will get one salary to share, because hey, you’re a team.

And that is a thing that happens far too often in Hollywood today as we’re making TV shows. So that’s called paper-teaming. And something needs to be done because it is a really abusive practice that happens to some of the most vulnerable writers out there.

**Craig:** Yes. We have to kill that. And I’m very concerned that it’s not something we can kill through negotiation. My great worry is that the way to kill it is through showrunners standing up and saying we’re not going to do this.

**John:** Craig, I have a theory, and I’m pretty sure my theory is impossible and unworkable. So I’m going to speak it aloud and then you’re going to tell me why it couldn’t work and then I’ll just move on.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** So my theory for how to end paper-teaming of writers in television is you are only allowed to hire a team if they are a bona fide team. And how we’re going to track bona fide teams is that they have previously been paid together as a team. Or, they have registered with the guild as a team. And if you attempt to hire a team of writers that is not a bona fide writer under those two conditions, sorry, you cannot do it. And by you cannot do it means you cannot actually hire those writers.

**Craig:** When you say register with the guild as a team, is that something that any two writers can do? Or, does the guild need to see the same history of teaming?

**John:** I believe that it should be something that any two writers are able to do.

**Craig:** Okay, great. So I have Pam and Chuck. I want to hire them both. I can’t. I want them to be a paper team. So I call them up and say I’ll hire you, but only as a team. Go call the guild and register as a team.

**John:** Great. And so there would have to be a criteria, a limit on that basically saying you have to have been registered as a team for three months, six months. You’d have to create a system where you couldn’t just force people to do it. You couldn’t shotgun people into doing it at the last minute.

**Craig:** Okay, new problem.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Pam and Chuck are both writers. They’ve been trying separately to get TV gigs and they’ve had some success, but not much. Then they meet a guy — and they sit down together and they’re like, you know what, we should write together. It would be fun. And so they call up a friend of theirs and say, you know what, we’re thinking about working together as a team. Are you looking for a writer on your show? Yes, I am.

Oh, I can’t give you the job. Why? Because you didn’t register with the guild six months ago.

**John:** I think in that situation Pam and Chuck are SOL. And that is their own fault.

**Craig:** It’s their own fault for meeting — they met too late?

**John:** It’s too late. Essentially, like, you guys haven’t worked together. You have no track record of working together.

**Craig:** But you’re taking their choice away. I mean, in other words, you’re saying to writers you’re not allowed to choose to work together and get the benefits from it unless you chose six months before the benefit could occur.

**John:** So, I would say that union representation is always about taking away choices. So, union representation means that we do not allow you to choose to work for certain employers. It means we do not allow you to accept less than certain amounts of money.

So, yes, it is limiting your choice, but it would be limiting your choice in a way that would protect you from abuses.

**Craig:** Right. Okay, so I guess the only objection left then, because look, generally it seems like a decent idea. The only objection left is that the companies will say no.

**John:** Well, actually can the companies say no? My theory is that when the company says we’re going to hire this writer and pay them half of their salary, the union can say, no, you’re not allowed to hire that writer for half their salary.

**Craig:** Of course they could. I’m looking at the MBA. Now I’m talking like a company nerd. I’m looking at the MBA and it says that I can hire a team of writers for this amount of money. They say that they’re a team and so I’m hiring them. And you don’t define what a team is. The MBA doesn’t say you define what a team is at all. In fact —

**John:** Oh, that’s so fascinating.

**Craig:** We have a definition of what the team is in the MBA. And it doesn’t involve you, or your certification, or anything. [laughs]

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** There’s the roadblock that Craig, going back to the MBA, and finding the way. And I should have anticipated that because during the last round of contract negotiations, one of the things that the studios floated was the idea that a team could be three people. And we said, uh-uh-uh —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, they’re going to try now to paper-team three people together.

**John:** Good times.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t you paper-team them all together, you jerks?

**John:** All right. I still think there may be some way to do what I am suggesting. And this is really modeled on how the DGA prevents there being two directors on a movie. And everyone hates it, but it’s a way to sort of make it so that it’s one director.

**Craig:** Well, that’s in their agreement, though.

**John:** Yeah, it’s in their agreement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Part of the problem is that there is a tradition, a very healthy, longstanding tradition of teams in writing. And so the companies very craftily have found this week spot. I tend to believe that the Writers Guild is horrendous at solving things through legislation. And that this needs to be solved politically with the showrunners. Because here’s what happens. The showrunners have a certain amount of money to hire writers. And they want more people in the room.

So, they’re told here’s a way you can do it. And they have to have the wherewithal and the strength to say, no, I’m just going to hire one writer per writer position, or hire a legitimate team, because we all know. We don’t need — it’s I know it when I see it. I know a real partnership when I see it.

So, it comes down to — I think it comes down to the showrunners to great extent.

**John:** I think you are probably right. I’m just holding out hope that some part of my idea is workable. I didn’t think I would actually be able to solve it just in spit-balling it here on a live podcast.

Next up on the bullet points, free unpaid pre-writes and producer drafts. This is a thing that happens both in features and television, but features is obviously where I have the most experience with you’re writing a bunch of stuff to get the job, which is crazy. And you’re not being paid for that stuff.

**Craig:** What’s so distressing is that I got involved in Guild politics back in 2003. I ran for the board in 2004. And this topic was super-hot back then. Nothing has changed. We are now — it’s 12 years later. And the reason nothing has changed is because the guild is essentially powerless here. I hate to say it.

There was an arbitration. The guild challenged the companies on — particularly this producer draft issue — and per the MBA it was adjudicated by an arbiter and the arbiter said, no, the deal is this, a writer can end it at any point, development. I write a draft. Oh, you know what, can you fix this? Can you do that? Write another draft. Write another draft. Write another draft. And then we’ll turn it in. And what the arbiter said was the writer can write a billion drafts if they want. Any time they want to get paid, they just turn the draft in to the person indicated in their contract. And that’s a fact.

When people say that this is a guild problem or a union problem, it’s not. I’ve finally come to this place. It is an agent problem. And it’s a writer problem. And, yes, it’s a studio problem in the sense that they’re behaving poorly. But let’s just assume that that’s not going to change. Agents and their clients, but particularly agents, need to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to make the point that you would usually make at this juncture, as we’ve talked about this a thousand times, is that it is a studio problem to the degree to which they are sometimes getting material in pre-writing that they have not legally obtained. And that will come back to haunt them in a lawsuit. That will be a big copyright problem in the future.

**Craig:** It already has, I think, bitten them a number of times. It’s something that I’ve brought up specifically in our meetings with the studio heads, you know. Sometimes I’ll go, and you’ll go. And they all seem very nervous about that. But they’re not the ones making these demands. It’s the lower ranks who are doing it. And they’re not going to stop because everyone is selfish. So, you have a junior executive who is trying to get ahead. And what they want is a writer that’s going to deliver and then they could say, look, I found this person. I found her. She delivered. Promote me.

That executive doesn’t give a sweet damn about IP or rules or blah, blah, blah. They’re all knifing each other in the back to get ahead. There are so few positions and so many people that want to do this job. So, they’re just going to cheat. And writers end up suffering. And if the agencies can’t get their act together on this, then it won’t stop.

**John:** It is surprising to me that I think we have such large powerful agencies and yet they don’t seem to have very much control over making things better for their clients. The general sort of observation that is not — will have no effect, but just an observation.

Related issue, one-step deals. So, one-step deals is where you’re being paid a certain fixed amount for writing this draft and there is no guarantee that you will have subsequent drafts. Why this becomes an issue with free rewrites is that there is a natural inclination to keep writing, and keep writing, and keep writing because you will not get to those optional steps unless they are happy with you. And one-step deals really goes hand-in-hand with free rewrites.

**Craig:** It does. There’s another dark side to one-step deals and that is that it deprives newer writers of the experience and education that you get going through a proper development process where — and this is something I remember I said to a studio head. I said how are writers supposed to learn how to work for you when you don’t let them. You give them a contract that gives them one step, and all they do is work with the producer. That’s it. And the producer grinds them into a jelly and then you get a script. And then they’re done. And they never worked with you.

They didn’t get your notes. They didn’t go through your process. When I started, I was only working with the studio and I got two drafts, so I was able to try things. I wasn’t also living in such a crazed state because I only had one guaranteed step that I was constantly looking for the next job, so my eye was never really on what I was doing, but always on what I could be doing. There’s so many things that are wrong with one-step deals. Perhaps the worst is that when you have writers that are earning closer to the lower end, they effectively — we are effectively destroying our scale, our minimum payments, because they’re writing five drafts for the price of one minimum, right?

So, one thing that I’ve been talking about for a while, and maybe we can float this one to the companies, is a negotiated term that says if you’re going to pay a writer less than two times scale for a draft, then you have to make a two-step deal with them. If you pay them two times, a minimum of two times scale, then you can do a one-step deal. At the very least, then, we’re protecting the lower end scale writers. Those are the sort of terms where I feel like I could say to the company, look, I’m not asking you to shove more money into Richie Rich’s pockets. This doesn’t impact me. I’m trying to protect the farm team for us all.

**John:** I think there is some good reason to have hope for traction in that idea, because I’m thinking about you and I are sort of at the upper tier of what people are paid for things. And I get frustrated when I am approached with a one-step deal, but at the same time my one-step is a big chunk of money, and those second steps and third steps are big chunks of money, too. So, I can understand the apprehension. Like, we’re not even sure if we want to make this movie and we’re not sure we want to be on the hook for so much money. I kind of get that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It is so abusive to those younger writers and the people who are just starting out. My very first deal was for How to Eat Fried Worms over at Imagine. And it was a standard one-step plus two optional rewrites, plus two polishes. And I burned through all five steps on that project. And I learned so much, because I had to do five really big drafts.

And along the way, honestly, there were some like let me show the producer, let me show the development executive. There were some interim things that were there, but it was never a big deal to move on to my next step because those steps were there and there was an expectation that we’re going to go through those steps.

And that was great.

**Craig:** You were also extended the opportunity to begin a career. Why would anyone who is really smart want to do this if the idea is, so, we’re going to work you for a year and you’re going to get paid $110,000? Well, if you’re a Princeton graduate and you have a lot of earning potential and you’re really smart and what you want to do is be a screenwriter and write feature films, that’s not going to do it, because it’s not $110,000. It’s $100,000. Now it’s $90,000 when you get rid of your agents, your managers, and all the rest. Now it’s really $60,000. And that’s it. For your year, that’s $60,000.

Well, this guy could probably start out at law firm and make 80 or 90. And then you might not even get past that one gig ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really frustrating to me.

**John:** So let’s assume you do get a movie made, new media residuals will be a factor that you will keep discussing through the end of time. We used to call these new media residuals, but now they just should be thought of as residuals.

**Craig:** Residuals.

**John:** Yeah. They’re the bulk of probably what you’re going to be getting in the future. So, residuals, again, for people who are just joining us for the first time, residuals function kind of like royalties if you’re used to royalties in a book publishing world. They are payments given to screenwriters, to actors, to directors, for the sale on home video, or rental on home video, of things that are originally shown theatrically, or that were shown on television. It’s for those reuse. And so it’s a payment that the studios are required to give you for reuse.

Those rates are set and negotiated in the contract. They are a huge part of every contract negotiation. And at all times, writers believe that those rates should be higher. At all times, studios believe those rates should be lower. And we will squabble over ever period and comma in the definition of what those residuals are.

**Craig:** Well, we can squabble all we want. They’re not going to change, at least they’re not going to be changed by us. The directors will negotiate first. If any changes occur to those residuals formula it will be through that negotiation. You know, we can try, but history has taught us that once the formula is set, it’s set. There are a couple little squidgy areas where maybe things are evolving a bit, you know, like ad-supported streaming and things like that with the imputed values and so forth.

But, in terms of features, yeah, the deal is it’s home video rate for stuff before 2008 and it’s the 1.8% of, what is it, 25%, or 50%? I can’t remember. Anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Portions of portions.

**Craig:** 20%. It’s 1.8% of 20%. And then for sales it’s a full 1.2 of 100%. And that’s it. That’s not changing.

**John:** As we’ve said on the podcast before, if you want to give a screenwriter the most amount of money for watching a movie, it is to rent it on iTunes. Because that is actually the formula that gives us the biggest residual payment.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. Next bullet point in Jonathan Stokes’ email is bakeoffs. Bakeoffs are really a form of often pre-writing. It’s when you are bringing in a bunch of screenwriters to say, hey, we have the idea to do a movie about haunted paperclips. What do you think — come in and pitch us your haunted paperclip movie. And they bring in a bunch of screenwriters, all to tackle one idea. And then they hopefully pick one of those ideas in order to try to develop that into a movie.

Bakeoffs could involve writing. They could not involve writing. But they involve a tremendous amount of a feature writer’s time and they’re generally a bad thing. They’re generally a very frustrating waste of time for almost everybody involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

**John:** Yeah, there really is very little we can do about it, other than just saying no. And so that is, again, a situation where I feel like agencies have to take a stronger hand. If you see that 10 of your clients are going in to pitch on this movie, there’s something wrong, and you need to intervene and stop that.

Next bullet point, the possible erosion of studio pension contributions. I don’t know anything about this.

**Craig:** I don’t either. Just so people understand how this works, when we get paid under a guild deal, the studios kick in a certain percentage on top of what we get paid. So, let’s say I get paid $100. They have to add another, I think at this point now it’s like another $8 on top of that into the health fund, and another $8 into the pension. And that’s tracked. And those contributions are tracked on my behalf. And then eventually I qualify for healthcare on a year-to-year basis. And then when I hit retirement age, I get my pension.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And over time, despite the hysterical nature of the way political campaigns are run in our union, when we get to these negotiations, what it basically comes down to is we’re going to give you a certain amount of money. And the way we look at it is that money is in terms of healthcare and pension and residuals.

And healthcare and pension have been seriously impacted by the market crisis and by healthcare costs. And so a lot of times we’ve come in with a fairly weak hand and basically said, look, just keep our pension and health healthy. And we have.

There’s something else looming, however. And it’s a direct result of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and that is this impending tax on so-called Cadillac plans. We have a very good healthcare plan. And it may get severely impacted by the law. And this is one of those interesting areas where the unions sort of turned on their democratic bedfellows because this wasn’t going to work out well for them, or at least some of the unions.

So I don’t know where that is right now. But we will always, I think, no matter what people — because it’s funny. Most writers, they think like, yeah, we’re going to go into negotiations and we’re going to fight for better jobs and more dignity. And I wish that that were true, but mostly what we’re fighting for is to make sure that you can still go to the doctor and get paid for and that there’s something waiting for you when you’re old and you retire.

**John:** Yep. These are crucial things. Getting older and retiring, just this last week I was having a conversation with a writer and I had to confess that I fundamentally did not understand how retirement worked for WGA screenwriters. Well, I kind of assumed I would never retire, because I can’t ever imagine stopping. And she informed me that like there really is a reason why starting at 55 you might consider taking retirement. And you would essentially retire for a month and then unretire and start working again. Because that would allow you to start collecting your pension.

And that was enlightening but also horrifying, because I can’t imagine retiring even for that month. It just feels crazy to me.

**Craig:** I have been looking at my pension statements. And on the one hand, I’ve fantasized about this day when I could just lounge around and collect checks. But, yeah, you know, the closer you get to it, the weirder it feels. I mean, you know, look, we’re all still children inside our heads. And retired people are the elderly who either mutter in a booth at McDonalds, or are sweeping up at McDonalds just to keep busy.

And I don’t think of myself that way. But, you know, you and I, we’re basically the same age. We’re mid-forties.

**John:** Yeah, we are.

**Craig:** And it’s bearing down on us like a freight train, buddy.

**John:** Yeah, it’s crazy to me that it would be even a possibility. So, the other thing I should stress is that the WGA pension is probably an important part of retirement for most WGA members, but that nothing precludes you from setting up your own retirement accounts. And you should.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** You should fundamentally do that. So, anyone whose entire retirement savings is based on the WGA pension would have to live a more frugal life, I guess, in order to make it through the end of their ages.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look, most people have nothing except for Social Security. Then, for those of us who are vested in the Writers Guild pension plan, we have that on top of Social Security. And then, hopefully, you’ve also made your own independent investments in IRAs and 401(k)s and all that other stuff. You know, that’s why I keep thinking like, ah, maybe it will be awesome, you know? Because there’s a whole bunch of money I have that I can’t even touch.

**John:** Right. I do feel like at some point we need to have, I don’t know if it makes sense on the podcast, or just some sort of WGA session where once people start making like significant money where we just sit you down and say like, okay, here’s the reality of what you need to start doing. Like at about the point where people need to incorporate, there just needs to be a little sit down and say like, okay, here’s how not to be an idiot about your money. Because I do find there’s this wall that people hit where it’s like suddenly, oh my god.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And writers — and this is where writers also turn everything over to business managers, which makes me nuts, because now you’re paying somebody 5% of your income to do something that we could probably explain to you in four minutes. Let’s put all those people out of business. I love this idea.

We’ll do a podcast that’s basically just for rich people. It’s exciting.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll do the high class problems podcast.

**Craig:** High class problems.

**John:** The last three bullet points here. Late payments becoming epidemic. Late payments is, again, sort of — to me it’s like the Student Council election where like we’ve got to do something about apathy. It’s like it’s one of those things that’s an evergreen topic. Checks have always come late. And it seems like they come later every year, but I think it also just seems like they come later every year. I’ve advocated for a long time publicly shaming studios that are the worst about late payments, but that’s an enforcement thing. It’s not a contract thing. That is a spending the resources at the guild to go after those late payments.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could shame them. What does that mean? When you get offered a job to write something there you’re not going to take it? [laughs] You’re going to take it.

**John:** Yeah, I say publicly shaming in terms of having the guild actually collect statistics and — the guild knows exactly who is late.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They know.

**John:** And actually just taking out the ad in Variety saying this is who’s late.

**Craig:** They’ve been threatening that for a while. I think late payment is annoying, but it’s better than non-payment. I mean, in other words, people are getting paid. I don’t know why it happens. This is the thing. Like when I talk to, again, when we talk to studio heads, they’re mystified. They don’t understand it. And then what happens is somebody from a department in a different building will say, well, it’s all this paperwork. And we need somebody to fill the form out. And then you need to call the right person. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you realize that there’s this massive machinery to issue checks there, which makes sense, because it can’t just be a simple as somebody picking up a phone and going, “Hey, can you pay this person $700,000?” “Uh, okay.” No, that doesn’t work.

So, it’s just this massive machinery of red tape.

**John:** I always assumed that the like, “Oh, the check is in processing right now,” was just — was that a thing they said. But then years ago I was dating a guy who worked at Universal and I was writing for Universal. And he’s like, “Oh, your paycheck just crossed my boss’s desk.” And it was just crazy. Like literally his boss had to like either sign herself or approve this check.

And so he saw this check that was about to come to me, which was crazy.

**Craig:** “It’s in process.” And then it has to be put into another thing. And then it has to be sent out, and mailed. Blah, blah, blah. And it gets mailed to your agency. And then they take out their — you know, it’s — I don’t like it. But on the list of problems that we have, we’ve got bigger ones.

**John:** Diversity. There’s a problem we could solve.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Let’s spend maybe 30 seconds on diversity here. Matt Damon had a really good answer apparently on to the diversity question on Project Greenlight. I haven’t seen it yet, but he was able to solve it there.

**Craig:** D’oh. Diversity. I know, let’s do more surveys and gather more statistics to show that it’s also bad, again, exactly as it was the year before.

**John:** This feels like one of those situations where, again, you know, in television it’s showrunners taking the lead and making sure that they are finding and hiring the best, most diverse staffs they can. When it comes time for features where it’s studios hiring people, the studios need to hire diverse writers. It’s frustrating, but I don’t think it’s going to be thing that’s going to be solved through contract negotiation.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. And there’s this other thing that I worry about sometimes. Rachel Prior who works for Edgar Wright’s production company, Big Talk, she’s a development executive in the UK. And she’s very prolific on Twitter. A very smart person. She’s an outspoken feminist and she talks a lot about gender topics in our business and the employment of women in our business. And she did say something very interesting recently.

She said, “Look, I want to make sure that when we talk about the tragedies that are occurring statistically,” and we’re just focusing on women for the moment here in terms of hiring of women as writers, directors, producers, studio employees, “that by concentrating on the deficits, which are severe and real, that we aren’t actually discouraging women from wanting to come to this business.”

**John:** That’s a great point.

**Craig:** Sort of like I don’t want a black kid to sit at home and go, “Well, apparently the statistics are that no black people are writing movies, so why would I try?” And I think that we have to do both at the same time. We have to call out the deficits and the failures. We also have to promote the successes.

We must promote the successes, because that’s — nobody is going to come to our business to say, “Well, I know what I’ll do, I’ll fix the negative statistics.” No, people just want to succeed for themselves. So let’s get those positive role models out there. And also some positive stories. It’s not all bad.

**John:** Yep. It’s not all bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not all bad.

**John:** All right. One of those diverse writers who might be coming to work in Hollywood is Pam in Seattle. And so this is question that we’ve kicked it back for three weeks now. So, we’re finally going to answer Pam in Seattle’s question.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, Craig, tell us what Pam in Seattle wrote.

**Craig:** Pam says, “I’ve written a script which is being well received by the many people I have reading it. I’m revising said script again and again to make it as good as I possibly can. I’m working on the second script, so I have an answer when someone asks me, ‘What else are you working on?’ And eventually I’ll be heading to LA to, well, do something. So far my list is, one, go to LA. Two, sell script.”

I love that.

“If I were to come to LA for a visit, how might I best use my time? I do have a few connections. An actor friend. A showrunner acquaintance. A producer acquaintance. But that’s about it. I don’t want to waste my time or anyone else’s. But I sort of very much don’t know what I’m doing or what I should be trying to do.”

John, some advice for Pam?

**John:** Well, I think Pam is super smart and already kind of funny even in her question. She seems to understand what she doesn’t know, which is great, is that she doesn’t kind of know where to begin. She’s going to want to talk to her actor friend, her showrunner acquaintance, and her producer acquaintance. She’s going to want to sit down with them and get any bit of advice or feedback she can from those folks. But then she’s also going to just kind of soak in to LA and to the situation and figure out where she can meet people who are doing the kinds of things she wants to do.

So if she’s coming to LA for a weekend, there’s not a lot she’s going to be able to do. If she’s coming here for a week, she should have coffee with all those people. She should ask those people, hey, is there anyone else you think I should meet. And if she’s here for a month, then she should try to — an internship may not be possible, but she should try to shadow somebody. She should try to use any alumni connections. Anything she can do to sort of get exposure to people who are actually making film and television.

**Craig:** All excellent advice. I agree, by the way, Pam does seem smart and does seem funny and very realistic. Now, Pam, you have to be a little careful because I’m realistic like you, very pragmatic person. Sometimes those of us who are realistic and pragmatic are so afraid of being delusional that we end up being a little timid.

So, what I would say to you is this — you shouldn’t want to waste your time. Don’t worry about wasting other people’s time. Go ahead, waste their time. You’ve got to push yourself in there. This is not an easy business to polite yourself into. You’ve got to get your elbows and get in there, muscle in. Now, you say you have a showrunner acquaintance. I’d start there. I mean, that’s a big deal. A showrunner is not only somebody that’s very highly placed in the business, they’re also somebody who employs writers. So, whoever this person is, that’s a great starting point.

And really, again, elbow yourself in. Make sure that you get that meeting in with them. It’s more important that than your actor friend. Producer, also, a good idea.

Don’t worry so much about wasting other people’s time. You have to kind of show up with this attitude. I actually deserve to be in this business. I know I haven’t earned my way in yet, but when I do, I will be good.

**John:** So, let’s say that she has her script and she’s gotten feedback from her friends who have brought it back there. If she puts it in competitions and she does well in competitions, if it’s on the Black List site and people like it on the Black List site, she may start to make some contacts of people who said like, “Oh, if you’re ever in Los Angeles…” Those are the people you should actually sit down and meet with when you come to Los Angeles. And you should arrange your trip so that you can get as many of those squeezed in there as you possibly can.

When we had Ryan Knighton on the show, several episodes ago, he talked about like he lives in Vancouver but he comes down here and he books himself solid with meetings for those times that he’s down there. And you’re not Ryan Knighton yet, but you might be. And so you should start booking up all those meetings and those coffees until you have way too much caffeine in you, but that’s great and fine. Take advantage of all of those things.

And some of those people will be jerkoffs and will not be useful to you at all, but you’ll start to learn to anticipate who the jerkoffs are. And that’s education. That’s learning, too.

**Craig:** Yep. Excellent. And don’t be afraid to let people know that you’re ready to move down here permanently. Because they’ll be a little suspicious about the out-of-towner. So many people out of town are like, “Well, I’m just going to play it safe. And once I get a job, then I’ll move.” And that’s never going to work. So, let them know, this is the advanced scout for an inevitable move.

**John:** Great. Adam wrote in to ask, “Let’s say you are a new writer in LA with no agent, no manager, et cetera, and a producer finds your script on the Black List or someplace and options it. What are the next steps you should take? Example, should you ask the producer for a recommendation for an agent? How about getting an entertainment lawyer? Should you contact the WGA? Is there anything you need to make sure you do before signing anything? Maybe you guys could walk us through the step by step from option to production?”

So, that may be too long, but what should he be doing for let’s say a producer is interested in his script?

**Craig:** It seems like all the questions he asked the answer is yes. So, I mean, look, first of all, congrats. Okay, but now you have to be really smart. Somebody is saying that they’re going to pay you some money or make a professional agreement with you on a piece of paper that is legally binding, so smarten up.

Number one, yes, you should ask the producer for a recommendation for an agent. And you should trust that that agent will be independent, even though they come to you through that producer. And you should say, “Look, I can’t really get into an agreement without representation, so help me.”

You absolutely need an entertainment lawyer to evaluate the contract, make changes and adjustments. The lawyer will work on commission, for 5%, and so you don’t have to worry about paying them out-of-pocket. They get paid when you get paid.

Should you contact the WGA? Probably not necessary unless the deal isn’t a WGA deal, at which point you may want to contact the WGA to find out how you can — maybe there’s a way to get it. But again, that’s something your lawyer should be able to do. When you actually sell something that qualifies you for membership in the WGA, they’ll call you. They’re going to find you.

**John:** So how you get into the WGA essentially is once you’re hired to write for a company that is a WGA signatory that has a deal with the WGA, any writer they hire has to be WGA, and therefore if you’re not WGA you have to join the WGA. And that’s good. That’s happy. And that’s a good outcome.

But I completely agree with Craig. And the way I got my first agent was through a producer who was interested in my script. So, it was Michael Shipley who then became a journalist and is now a producer again. He read a script I wrote. And he got the script because Al Gough, who was a classmate of mine, who went on to create Smallville. Al had read the script. He gave it to his intern boss, Michael Shipley. And Michael Shipley liked my script.

And I asked Michael Shipley politely but really sort of hopefully, “Hey, could you help me find an agent.” And Michael Shipley said, yes, I think I know two agents who would be good for you. And one of them I liked, and I met with him, and I signed with him. So that is a very common way to get your agent because an agent fields a bunch of calls, but if a producer says, “Hey, I read something really good. You may want to read this writer,” that is going to go higher up in the pile of stuff for that agent.

**Craig:** All correct. I do want to just adjust one thing you said for people listening so that they don’t get misled.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Meer employment isn’t enough to qualify you for — and compel you for — membership in the WGA. I believe it is in the East, curiously enough, but we don’t talk about them. In the WGA West, there’s actually a system where you earn a certain number of — I think they’re called credits, but they’re not like on screen credits. Credits towards compulsory membership.

So, some jobs don’t get you all the way. For instance, if the very first thing you’re hired to do under a WGA contract is rewrite a screenplay, that’s half the way to compulsory membership. However, if you sell an original pitch or an original screenplay, that’s the full boat, and you’re automatically in.

**John:** Yeah. I should have clarified that, too. My first job did get me all the way in on the one first thing, but you’ll find that most companies have two ways they can hire you. They have the company that is the signatory, and a company that is not the signatory. And they will always try to find a way to hire you through the non-signatory when you’re a new writer. And then you have to remind them, no, no, I am WGA. And therefore you have to do it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. In terms of finding a reputable attorney, I don’t have any great recommendations other than if you look — this sounds really cheesy and obvious — but if you look through the headlines of like people who sold scripts and they say they were represented by this agent and by this attorney so and so forth, that might be the kind of attorney you want. Some person who has been representing writers who have sold stuff recently. And you may just find a contact through there.

If you’re calling into that lawyer’s office and you say like, “This producer is trying to option my script and I need an attorney,” they might take you. And you might get the junior person there, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. And similarly, if you’ve gotten a new agent through your producer, the agent will also certainly be able to recommend a lawyer that they share clients with.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not uncommon for baby writers who sign at an agency to use the agency’s in-house lawyer to do some of their initial contracts.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea. I think you’re generally better off having somebody outside.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** You’re making so little money, that that 5% might seem really painful, but I think you’re better off having someone else out there. Because for nothing else, they have other contacts, they have more exposure and experience, and they may see things that other people won’t see.

**Craig:** Well, also, remember, when you have outside counsel, the negotiation for your fee is now being looked at by an agent and the lawyer. So, when I’m making a deal, my agent and my lawyer are both on the phone with business affairs and they’re kind of, you know, it’s not like one can get away with soft pedaling it or being easy or being outrageous, because the other one is there to kind of keep a check on them.

**John:** All right. Our final question comes from Lucas Stroughton who asked on Twitter, “Could you please explain on the podcast the difference between backend and residuals? Thanks in advance.”

**Craig:** Sure. So, residuals are fees that we get for the reuse of material on which we have credits. And the residuals are set in our collective bargaining agreement through our union. And basically they take the place of royalties which is what people get when they own copyright. So, remember, we don’t own the copyright in the material we create for the studios. They do. They employ us as work-for-hire.

So we get residuals as a kind of replacement form of royalties. So let’s just talk about movies. Every time our movie is rented on video, or shown on free TV, or shown on pay TV, a certain amount of money is sent to the studio because it’s been reused. And then the studio sends us a small portion. That’s what residuals are.

**John:** Let me clarify a little bit more residuals. Residuals are a thing that’s negotiated by the Writers Guild of America on behalf of all writers. So, I am not individually negotiating a contract with Sony saying like I want to be paid this amount of residuals on this project. No, no, that’s just a WGA thing that is a blanket for all WGA members, just one set rate for what you’re going to get paid on a movie, which is very different from backend, which Craig is about to explain.

**Craig:** Right. I should mention technically you could negotiate better residual terms for yourself.

**John:** But has anyone done that?

**Craig:** I heard once, just a rumor, I heard that —

**John:** It’s going to be Ted Elliott, right?

**Craig:** No. [laughs] I heard that Tom Cruise tried once, and failed, because the precedent is so strong.

Now, backend is really profit participation in the primary release of the product, along with the secondary release. So, residuals is all about the secondary market, reuse, so we don’t get residuals from the ticket sales of a movie. That’s considered the primary exhibition of the movie. Backend is about sharing in the total amount of money that comes in to the studio, whether it’s from the primary exhibition or secondary exhibition. Doesn’t matter.

And there all sorts of different kinds of back-ends. Very typical one is called cash break where the studio says, okay, once we recoup all of our costs and go into profit, like real profit, not the fake baloney profit, then we start paying you a percentage of money. Usually they also have to recoup what they paid you, by the way, as an expense before they start paying you your little piece of the backend.

Then there is the notorious first dollar gross, where you’re actually getting a piece of every — of the gross, not the profit, but the gross money coming in, again, after they recoup what they paid you. Screenwriters generally do not get backend. Screenwriters generally get paid a lot up front, hopefully, or something up front, and then, of course, we get our residuals as determined by our screen credit. And of the amount of residuals they dole out to writers, 75% is reserved for the writers who have screenplay credit and 25% is reserved for the writers who have story or screen story credit. And if there’s no screen story or story credit, then it all goes to the screenplay credit.

**John:** And so when we say backend for writers, there are cases where like a showrunner, a show creator in television will have a backend, will have a meaningful backend, which is really a slice of the pie. And that is incredibly lucrative. There are cases where big actors will have a piece of the backend on either a TV show or a feature.

But for most screenwriters, you’re really looking at residuals as being the ongoing revenue stream you get for having written a movie. And in some ways that makes sense, because as a screenwriter we don’t know which projects are actually going to get made. And you don’t necessarily want to take a deferment on your initial salary in order to hopefully see something down the road. That’s not a great choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Interestingly I’ll say that the writers in television that do get backend, or writers in features that get backend are usually getting it as a producer. But not as a writer specifically.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. All right, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, you have the coolest thing of all, so you should start with yours.

**Craig:** I do have the coolest One Cool Thing this week. So my One Cool Thing this week is Melissa Mazin, my wife, my wife of almost 20 years by the way.

**John:** Nuts.

**Craig:** I know. Next June will be our 20th wedding anniversary. How about that?

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** It is good stuff. And I’m mentioning her because she is going to be accompanying me to the Austin Screenwriting Conference this year. So, it’s kind of like I’m smashing two cool things together. Really it’s just a way of saying to people, hey, come to the Austin Screenwriting Conference if you haven’t bought your tickets yet. I’m going to be there. John’s going to be there. We’re going to be doing a live Scriptnotes. We’re going to be doing a live Three Page Challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on thematic structure.

My wife is going to be there. What else do you need?

**John:** I’m curious whether Melissa’s presence will make you wilder or less wild during the weekend?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with less wild. [laughs] I think that’s probably for the best. Don’t you?

**John:** I think it may be for the best.

**Craig:** I mean, every time I go there, I end up exhausted and hoarse and it will be good. Because really what I want to do is just go to my room and sleep.

**John:** Sleeping is nice.

**Craig:** Sleepy.

**John:** Later this evening I will be playing Dungeons & Dragons with Craig Mazin and I will be bringing with me my small little figurine which I painted. And so my One Cool Thing is actually miniature figurines. Because I remember growing up playing D&D and I would have lead figures. They called them lead figures. I don’t think they really were lead, but they were heavy metal figures.

**Craig:** Yeah, like pewter or something.

**John:** Pewter. And I would attempt to paint them and do a terrible job and they would always look mangled. And so for this round of D&D I decided, you know what, I’m going to get a better little miniature figure. And so for Gilly, my little gnome monk who I’m playing with, little Gilly, I was able to find like a great little figurine and it’s because of the Internet and it’s because of better technology.

So, this company I’m using is called Reaper and they make these great little plastic figures that are obviously lighter than the lead, but have tremendous detail. And also because of the Internet, there’s a tremendous number of tutorials about how to paint. And so I learned that I had been doing everything wrong in terms of painting a figurine.

And so I spent. God, probably two hours painting this tiny figurine, but I’m really proud of it. And so if you are at all curious about painting stuff, or you’re looking for some new hobby in which to spend some time and learn something new, I really enjoyed painting this figurine. So I will put some links in the show notes for both Reaper, but also some tutorials that I found really useful for painting a figurine, because it was actually a good therapeutic process.

I listened to some podcasts as I was doing my dry brushing and my flooding with paint. It was cool.

**Craig:** Did you say slutting?

**John:** No. I was doing some dry brushing and some flooding. It’s where you actually get the details out by making your paint far, far, far too wet. And then it sort of floods into all the crevices. And that gives the detail.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig likes that.

**John:** I could tell Sexy Craig would probably like that, yeah.

**Craig:** Just get all wet and flood into the crevices.

**John:** That’s good stuff. Our show as always is produced by Stuart Friedel. Stuart is downstairs right at this very moment folding t-shirts, because the t-shirts just came back from the printer, so they should be going out probably the end of this week, so hooray.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Thank you, again, to everyone who ordered a t-shirt. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week is actually another piece of found art. So Luke Yoquinto found the Scriptnotes thing embedded, or actually in the very intro, to the Steve Winwood song, “While You See a Chance.”

So, as you start to listen to this you’ll hear like, oh, wait, there’s the Scriptnotes theme. So, it’s just a thing that’s out there.

I should also as a final bit of celebration I want to congratulate the world for getting the rights to Happy Birthday back.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a song that was under copyright and there was a huge copyright fight and it finally appears that we can now sing Happy Birthday without paying anybody any money.

**Craig:** We don’t have to sing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow in movies anymore.

**John:** And what will all those restaurant chains that had to sing their own little custom themes do?

**Craig:** Happy, happy, happy, birthday, birthday, birthday, birthday. Yeah.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Geez. You know who else likes painting figurines?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Patric Verrone.

**John:** Yeah, he does like painting figurines. I think he’d be really good at that.

**Craig:** He paints Supreme Court justices. It’s not like painting figurines wasn’t already dorky. He figured out how to make it extra dorky. And for that, I got to salute him.

**John:** I have nothing but praise for that.

**Craig:** That is actually — I give that one the high five.

**John:** All right. Craig, I will see you tonight. Everyone else, we will see you next week.

**Craig:** See you later.

**John:** Thanks for joining us.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGAw 2015 election results](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=5938)
* John and Craig [on The Black List Table Reads podcast with Franklin Leonard](http://blacklist.wolfpop.com/audio/39626/john-august-and-craig-mazin)
* Melissa Mazin will be at the [Austin Film Festival 2015 Screenwriting Conference](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/)
* [Reaper Miniatures](https://www.reapermini.com/), and [Miniature Painting 101](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0292071C3B38CAC) on YouTube
* [All the ‘Happy Birthday’ song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html) from the LA Times
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) sent in by Luke Yoquinto ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/ndas-and-other-acronyms).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 213 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, this last week I got to give a presentation, like a proper presentation with like Keynote slides and all that stuff. Have you done one of those recently?

**Craig:** With Keynote slides? No, because I’m not a sales rep for the southwestern medical appliance industry.

**John:** Yeah. I very rarely get to do those. And so whenever I have to crack open Keynote, it’s basically, you know, half an hour of reminding myself how Keynote works. And then I have a lot of fun with it. But it’s a ways to sort of get started in the whole designing of a proper presentation.

But I had a really fun time. And one of the slides I put up was about Clueless which is, of course, my favorite or my second favorite movie of all times. And in the Q&A afterwards, someone asked a question about Clueless. And it brought up an interesting point which I hadn’t thought of, is what if Cher in Clueless didn’t have voiceover? And how would you perceive that character if you didn’t have the ability to go inside of her head?

**Craig:** It is an interesting question. Some movies are just begging for it, you know. You need it. And we’ve talked about how musicals require you to sing what’s happening in somebody’s head. And it’s weird. It seems like the teen genre often feels like I need to know what’s going on in their heads because so much of what they’re saying and doing, the joke is, “This is not how I actually feel,” which is a very teenage kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I think Mean Girls has a lot of VO, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. It’s one of those things where I feel like in Clueless, she would seem like a sociopath if you didn’t actually have that inside, if you just like had all the shots of her walking around thinking, like, “Wait, what is she thinking? I don’t understand what’s going on inside of her head.” And that ability to have voiceover is like the ability to have a song. You get to know what is driving her at those moments.

And in a weird way, it allows her to keep many more simultaneous wants because you would not be able to keep track of what it was she was trying to do at the moment if you didn’t have that voiceover to sort of talk you through what was happening.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly useful tool. It’s so flexible. I was actually talking the other day with a director. He’s currently in post-production on a movie he did. And I won’t say who it is or what the movie is because I don’t want any spoilers.

But the movie has a lot of VO kind of in the Goodfellas style. And he said, “I’m so tempted to never make a movie without VO again because in terms of editorial, it’s the most freeing thing ever.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You need to cut a scene because it’s not quite working but there’s that one piece of information there, we got VO [laughs]. It’s throughout the whole movie, not a problem.

**John:** Well, let’s try to distinguish that kind of Goodfellas VO from the Clueless VO. So the Goodfellas VO, I want to say it’s like the ellipses kind of, like basically it allows you to skip over a bunch of things because it is telling the overall narrative. Is that correct? Is that what you were trying to describe in a Goodfellas VO?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Goodfellas VO is more of a — one of the characters actually narrating the story as if they’ve already seen the movie —

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Or they’re telling the story of their lives. In the case of Mean Girls or Clueless, a lot of times, the VO is an interrupter. It’s like a commentary. Like somebody who’s doing color commentary on their own life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the color commentary version allows you to also do the skip ahead stuff if you need to.

**John:** Yeah. I would say that the Clueless and Mean Girls VO is very much a present tense VO. It’s describing what’s going on inside as they’re experiencing the scene in front of them. And so they’re having revelations at the moment and you’re seeing the revelation on their face while you’re hearing the voiceover, versus the Goodfellas which is like it’s telling the story as if this has already happened and this is the through-flow of a narrative.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great way of thinking about it. It’s like in sports, there’s the person who’s commenting on the game as it’s happening. And then there’s the person who does the post-game wrap-up. And, yeah, Goodfellas is more of a post-game wrap-up and Clueless is more of the color commentary as the game is being played.

**John:** And our experience has been, and I’m sure that I speak for both of us, you have to plan for that in advance. And if you try to put that color commentary or that narrative commentary voiceover on after the fact, it will probably not work.

**Craig:** It won’t work because first of all, you need space. I mean, you need to be able to shoot in such a way. Like if you know that there’s going to be VO sort of sneaking in, you need to know that as you’re shooting.

**John:** Yeah. I have not shot any movies where it’s been so crucial. Like Big Fish has a lot of voiceover but in a weird way, there was always time to sort of get that voiceover in. But classically, you will have somebody read that stuff on the set just to make sure you’re allowing enough space. So be it the assistant director or somebody else will read what that voiceover is just to make sure that everyone understands what it is that’s going to fit in that space.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the case of Big Fish, rarely is the character responding to the kinds of things that are being said in the voiceover. But you still want to make sure you have enough handles on those shots to be able to get that voiceover in there.

**Craig:** Yeah, especially if the voiceover is part of a joke.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then somebody really does need to read it because the person on screen needs to react or at least acknowledge with their eyes that this is what they’re thinking. So you do need to prepare. The post facto VO is usually a desperate rescue mission.

**John:** Yes. And that’s why it gets such a bad rap.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about non-disclosure agreements which came up because this thing I had to give a presentation on, I had to sign an NDA, so I can’t talk about what I talked about. But we can talk about non-disclosure agreements.

We’re going to answer a bunch of listener questions, including questions about international writers, acronyms in dialogue, and what someone means when they say, “This would make a good writing sample.” Is that a good thing or a bad thing? So those are our new topics but we have so much follow-up.

First off and maybe most importantly, we finally have T-shirts.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Yay. So there are four Scriptnotes T-shirts and they are available right now in store.johnaugust.com. They’re all preorders. And so when we say preorder, that means you will purchase a T-shirt and we will print the T-shirt and we will send it to you. But if you purchase the T-shirt today, it will still be three weeks before it gets to you.

So the four T-shirts that are available, first is a classic Scriptnotes T-shirt that has —

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** The typewriter logo. And we had to find a new color we had never done before, so we picked vintage purple. Is that a fair description?

**Craig:** Okay. Is it? [laughs] I would call it purple.

**John:** Purple. Yeah, everything has to have some modifier to the actual color —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It’s the J.Crew rule where everything has to be a heather something.

**Craig:** I see. So this could be like a courgette purple.

**John:** Yeah, a courgette. I mean, an eggplant really is the other sort of good choice for it. But this is the classic typewriter. And so if you have the other collection of Scriptnotes T-shirts, there was a black one with a typewriter, there’s the tour shirt which has sort of a modified typewriter. There was the original orange and there was the blue T-shirt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So this is the new hotness. Our second T-shirt is developed by one of our own listeners. Taino Soba came up with this design. It’s called Three-Act Structure and it is a blueprint of a script.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. It was very minimalist. It was clean. I like that it implied that you could assemble a screenplay like a piece of IKEA furniture.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have to say, having assembled quite a bit of IKEA furniture in my life, writing screenplays may be slightly easier.

**John:** Yes. It might be a little bit more straightforward. You have choices with a screenplay that you really don’t have with IKEA furniture. There are sites, and we’ll try to put a link to it, of like IKEA furniture assembled in ways that are not the way they’re supposed to be assembled. And sometimes they’re brilliant.

It’s sort of like the way you can take a cake mix and modify it in ways and it creates something fantastic. There’s ways you can do that with IKEA furniture.

**Craig:** You’ve built a lot of IKEA furniture, right?

**John:** Oh, so much in my life.

**Craig:** A question for you. Have you ever, in your life, successfully built a piece of IKEA furniture without making one mistake that required you to unscrew something?

**John:** Never once in my life.

**Craig:** No, no one has.

**John:** I’ve always had to backtrack a little bit.

**Craig:** Everyone has because their instructions are horrendous.

**John:** Yes. Well, their instructions are designed so that they don’t have to put a lot of words and therefore translate them a lot. But sometimes the pictures cannot actually accurately explain what’s going on.

The one piece of advice that I have for anybody who has to assemble IKEA furniture — actually, when we finish this podcast, we are going to be assembling a new IKEA table that we got as a work table for downstairs.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Buy yourself, you know, a cordless drill or a cordless drill driver and get yourself the Allen wrench bit because that will make assembling IKEA furniture about 17 times as fast. If you don’t have to turn that little Allen wrench manually, your life will be so much better.

**Craig:** Let me go one step further.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Not only should you have the power drill and a wide variety of bits, by the way, get yourself as many Phillips head, flatheads, hexes, all of them, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Torx. But also, they make an extender. So it’s like a long bit with another receiver at the end so that in those tight to reach spots, you’re not defeated.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you get that thing and now you’re golden.

**John:** So is that extender, is it a hard thing or is it flexible?

**Craig:** No, no, it’s hard. It’s a hard piece of metal. So it’s got a male on one end and a female on the other. The male goes into your drill end. And it’s magnetized at the receiver end.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** So the bit just slips in and it goes click. And now you can reach everything.

**John:** But I foresee there would be a benefit to the flexible version of that. So it’s kind of like a sigmoidoscopy. It can sort of sneak into those places which would be otherwise hard to reach, that otherwise you would have to use that stupid little Allen wrench tool to get in there.

**Craig:** John, I want you to think through what you’ve said there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I want you to imagine [laughs] the flexible thing turning in the drill. And now tell me what’s wrong with this.

**John:** You’re saying that the whole thing would whip around and —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That they’re not —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I bet someone solved this problem. There’s a way in which the —

**Craig:** What you’ve created is essentially an edge trimmer. There’s a piece of fishing line that’s —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s what you’ve done. Now, there are universal joint ends that can actually spin and turn in a hard right degree. You can get at a certain angle with the universal joint. But I’ve never seen one made and it would be structurally shaky at best because it wouldn’t really — universal joints are best when both ends are hard fixed to something.

I would love to see you build this —

**John:** I believe we —

**Craig:** [laughs] And attempt this because it will be hysterical.

**John:** We live in an age of carbon fiber and nanotechnology. There’s a way that they’re going to be able to do this.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Basically, so the things inside is spinning even though the outside is solid.

**Craig:** But once you… [sighs].

**John:** No, I agree with you that the anchor on the outside is going to have to not spin. But I think there’s a way to do that.

**Craig:** But even inside. I mean, if it’s spinning rotationally in one plane —

**John:** I fully comprehend the challenge.

**Craig:** You see what’s happening? [laughs]

**John:** I do fully. So whenever the cable is inside —

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

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I want you to build it. I actually want you to do it and then I want you to turn it on and get hurt and your furniture is everywhere. [laughs] But I —

**John:** I don’t know if this is a Kickstarter or a suicide pact but —

**Craig:** It feels good, man.

**John:** It feels really, really good.

**Craig:** Feels good.

**John:** So that is our structure T-shirt. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And our third T-shirt actually comes in two different colors. This is the Camp Scriptnotes shirt from way back when we were at camp in 1981. And this just really a chance to relive, god, those memories from so long ago and sort of where this all started.

And so I want to thank Dustin Bocks who designed this recreation of the original Camp Scriptnotes logo. God, I just look at it and the feeling of nostalgia I have. And I mean, so many of our listeners were there at the very beginning.

**Craig:** In so many ways, this podcast is a sad attempt to recapture the glory of a past summer.

**John:** Yeah. That summer of bug juice and mosquito bites and, you know, those crazy moments where Nora Ephron could talk us off the high rope scores. We’ll never quite be able to get back to those highlights. But, I don’t know, something about wearing the T-shirt from that camp will, I don’t know, at least recreate the experience. And people who weren’t around for that time, it’s a chance to sort of experience a little bit of what that was like.

**Craig:** Did you ever work at a summer camp, John?

**John:** I did work at a summer camp. So I was at the Ben Delatour Scout Ranch in Colorado. So that’s where I went to scout camp every summer. And so I was never a counselor there, but I ended up doing a lot of special weeks up there for troop leadership training. I did Order of the Arrow stuff. And so I was essentially an employee because I was back behind the scenes a lot of the times.

**Craig:** I worked at Ivy League Day Camp.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** This was a terrible misnomer. There’s nothing Ivy League about this day camp. I basically worked as a short order cook in the whatever you call it, the snack shop, you know, that thing.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** And I learned a lot. I learned a lot that summer, just about life and stuff.

**John:** You were living there and working there?

**Craig:** No, I wasn’t living there.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** It was near my house. I was 16 years old, I went there. Here are the following things I learned that summer. I learned how to cook hamburgers on a grill. I learned how to make certain sandwiches. I learned how to have sex. I learned about drugs. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I learned about Vietnam from —

**John:** Yeah, of course.

**Craig:** From the, this guy had the best name ever, the caretaker. And always, whenever you hear caretaker, you immediately think it’s Jack Nicholson, it’s The Shining. All caretakers are troubled people, I believe, which is why their name is so ironic.

This guy was a Vietnam vet and his name was Bill Cruel. Bill Cruel. But he wasn’t cruel.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** He was cool. He had a tattoo that said “Bill”.

**John:** Did he smoke?

**Craig:** Yeah, man. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he would teach me all sorts of stuff about Vietnam and that was a hell of a summer.

**John:** That’s great. So you were a townie essentially?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Townies have the most fun.

**Craig:** No, no. I mean, listen, man, townies do have the most fun. Well first of all, everybody was a townie there. I know I said Ivy League Day Camp, so you think this must be a destination. No. It was not a destination. It was terrible. But, you know, everybody probably has that summer in their life when the world kind of explodes on them. And that was mine. It was awesome.

**John:** Amazing. Well, this is our last podcast for the summer. Labor Day is fast approaching.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

**John:** So it feels appropriate that we’re celebrating the end of summer as we talk through summer camp T-shirts and all these opportunities for new gear to wear as we head into the fall.

So all the T-shirts we have up for sale, they are preorders that have to be in by September 17th. That’s a Thursday. So we will remind you on the next two podcasts. But you should probably not wait because inevitably what will happen is on Friday the 18th, we’ll get a bunch of emails saying, “Hey, hey, hey, I really wanted a T-shirt and I forgot the deadline.” And we’re going to say sorry because once we put the order in, the order is in. So September 17th is the deadline. And I want to thank Taino Soba again for his work on the Three-Act Structure shirt.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you.

**John:** It’s also the end of summer, so therefore, it’s the end of our Featured Fridays in Weekend Read. So Weekend Read is the app I make for iOS for reading screenplays on your phone. Every Friday this summer we’ve been putting up scripts for people to read. We had a bunch of Aline scripts up there. We’ve had different themes. We’ve had pilots. We’ve had Black List scripts. This past weekend we had Dodgeball up there and a bunch of other sports-themed movies.

**Craig:** Oh, Dodgeball.

**John:** So this next week will be our last week. If you have a suggestion for what this final theme should be, there’s still some time for us to scrounge up some scripts and put them in there. So we’re wrapping up Featured Fridays because it’s about time for awards seasons stuff and we have to get ready for the awards season scripts to be in there.

But thank you to everybody who wrote in with their suggestions for Featured Friday stuff and said they like the app. And if you would like to see something in this app for the last week of Featured Friday, please let us know.

I should also say, if you are a person who has a script that is going to be one of those awards season contenders, it might be good to email us or just tweet at me so we can get your script in there and get it in there formatted properly.

Or if you are person who works for these studios who puts out those for your consideration scripts, most of the time we can just link to the one that’s on the website and everything is swell and fantastic. But every once in a while, you guys will put up something that is just like crazy and impossible to format and like one email between us would make things so much happier and easier. If you’re a person like an Andrea Berloff who has a script that’s going to be in consideration for those Awards, email us and let us know.

**Craig:** I don’t think that the Huntsman is going to be out in time for awards season. I’m just — I don’t get it.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I mean it just feels like a slam dunk, again, by the way, another slam dunk script.

**John:** Yeah, you’re really just being hurt by timing. I mean I think that is really the reason why you don’t see more Craig Mazin —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Awards is timing.

**Craig:** For whatever reason, my films, my oeuvre, doesn’t come out in the November-December months.

**John:** Well, if we decide to do a Featured Friday again in the future, Craig, can we have the Huntsman as one of those scripts?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That would be nice.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** More follow up. Nick writes, “In a recent episode about last looks, John mentioned going through his script to replace two spaces with one space. I was always led to believe that two spaces is standard. Is one space the standard in screenwriting or is it more of an accepted shortcut to trim some length?”

**Craig:** One space, one space, one space.

**John:** It’s now one space. And honestly, it should be one space in everything. So I used to use two spaces. And typewriters used to love two spaces. Everything is now one space. And actually, if you look on the Internet, everything you see on the Internet now is one space because html actually compresses two spaces down to one space. Just go with one space. It will look weird for a day or two and then you’ll get over it and just be one space.

**Craig:** Just be one space, man. We’re all in one space, bro.

**John:** It really is. It’s a shared experience. And once you accept that we’re in a shared experience, life is happier.

**Craig:** There’s no you and me, man. There’s just one space.

**John:** Yeah. In that one space, there are many different countries. And a lot of our questions and comments this week are from China. First off is Cindy in Beijing who writes, “I’m a loyal listener to your podcast Scriptnotes. And I’m also a screenwriter/creative associate working for a film production company in Beijing, China. I listened to your latest podcast, The International Episode, and I would like to share some thoughts with you. Most of the Chinese market discussion you and Craig had was accurate.”

**Craig:** That’s all I needed to know. That’s it. We’re good. We’re good.

**John:** We’re good. Done. End of question.

**Craig:** Thanks. Thanks, Cindy.

**John:** “Just a few facts I’d like to clear/discuss with you. Yes, Monster Hunt made history as the highest grossing Chinese film. One reason is that its production value is much better than most other local films. However, another major factor is, ‘Domestic film protection month in China.’ It’s usually around June to July when the summer vacation starts. During this production month, only Chinese movies will be shown in the theaters making audiences choices during these couple of months very limited. It helps lots of Chinese films to perform well in the box office. Imagine Monster Hunt hits theaters with Mission Impossible 5, Terminator 5 at the same time. It will never do this well. However, it also shows how big and how much potential the Chinese market has.”

**Craig:** Well, we did touch on this, actually, I think, although, I didn’t realize that there was a specific domestic film protection month which turns out to be the biggest movie going month of the year, big shock.

This is part of the issue that we’re dealing with. On the one hand, China, we call China this enormous market. On the other hand, it’s not a market yet. It’s a sort of market. It’s a market when the Chinese government decides it’s a market.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I don’t know about you, but when I go to the market, it’s open all year long. It doesn’t close so that certain protected goods and services can be offered to certain protected audiences. This is a thing. And China has actually been quite successful and smart about this for themselves. Obviously, this doesn’t have a lot of advantage for us. So it will be interesting to see how long this goes like this.

Now, what confuses things is as Chinese finance continues to proliferate in our market, the question then becomes, well, what is a Chinese movie? In the end, I always feel like money wins out. And if very moneyed Chinese interests say, “Hey, I invested a ton — ” I mean, for instance, take Mission Impossible 5.

**John:** I was going to say.

**Craig:** It is heavily backed by Chinese money and yet the Chinese government won’t allow it to be shown during primetime. At some point, that will get figured out.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** Should I read this next bit of follow up?

**John:** Great. This is from my friend, Mike Sue. So why don’t you —

**Craig:** Oh, it’s from your friend, Mike Sue. All right. Well, here’s what Mike says. He says, “I just listened to the International Episode and it reminded me of how they turned South Park into a hit show back in my homeland, Taiwan.

“The Simpsons had launched there first, but largely landed flat. For South Park, the translators actually watched the episodes on mute five or six times first and crafted their own storylines to match the show. So instead of Kyle being a Jew,” okay, “he was a… — ” this is amazing, “he was a Taiwan aborigine. They throw in Taiwan pop culture references and jokes about Taiwanese politics all while preserving the irreverent and over the top voice of South Park and it caught on like wildfire. For you guys as creators, I’d be curious whether this level of complete rewrites still follows in Craig’s ignorance is bliss camp or whether it gives you guys the willies and in this case, trading off the creative license for commercial success?” Well, what do you think about that?

**John:** In general, I would say, you know, if I’m not aware of it, I sort of don’t care about it. Where this would become very frustrating is like let’s say, these people in translating this show I’ve made makes some wild, crazy, controversial change that has things in an uproar and suddenly I’m the person dealing with the firestorm over this thing that I didn’t write and I didn’t sign off on is a huge change they’ve made to something.

So if they’re saying, you know, something incredibly inflammatory or racist and it’s perceived that I wrote this thing, that’s the only thing that gives me pause about this.

**Craig:** That racism wasn’t the racism I wrote, I wrote different racism.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I think it’s both, honestly, Mike. I think that it is ignorance is bliss and it gives me the willies. But, you know, this is one of those things where as Americans, we can only be so focused on the way the work is presented around the world because we have to ultimately serve the English-speaking audience, that’s who we are. We are ourselves English-speaking audience.

Other people will always be there to help us, make sure that things aren’t completely lost in translation. But in those cases where they are, yeah, I think this one’s probably ignorance is bliss and willies.

**John:** And one of the aspects of ignorance is that something I may have written in my movie or on my TV show, which plays completely one way in the American market and like in a not offensive way in the American market or like not so offensive that it’s actually sort of, you know, a cause for riot, could be completely offensive to another culture in a way that I don’t intend at all. So having somebody look at it and intervene in some cases may be the good thing because something that I did not intend at all could come about — which could mean a very literal translation of what I wrote.

**Craig:** Makes sense to me.

**John:** All right. Our first new topic is NDAs because this thing I did this week, I had to sign an NDA. And I don’t end up signing a lot of NDAs. I mean you and I both had to sign an NDA for this thing we went to see a couple of weeks ago, but I would say, I sign maybe four or five a year.

But I’ve been signing probably more of them each year related to film stuff than I ever have before. So while we can’t talk about specific things we signed NDAs for, I wanted to talk about NDAs in general and whether you’ve been encountering them, Craig.

**Craig:** I have, rarely. I’m always surprised when they’re not there. I mean I know that for some of the stuff I did with Todd Philips, we had NDAs. I didn’t sign any NDAs, but I was writing the damn thing. I mean other people had to sign NDAs. I’m surprised, honestly, that they aren’t more widespread.

It may be that they’re just not as enforceable as people hoped them to be. Perhaps, we just don’t have that culture. I mean I don’t know exactly how that actually works in the real world. You know, I mean it’s one thing — I mean we all sign things when we download software and none of us read it. It is the, I guess — what do they call it, a contract of adhesion?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would — I mean if I were running a company, I’d make everybody sign an NDA every four minutes.

**John:** Yeah. So these terms get conflated and again, this is not a legal show, so we can’t suss out exactly what the boundaries and definitions are, but there’s non-disclosure agreements and there’s non-compete agreements. And non-compete agreements you hear a lot about because it basically says like you can’t work for any of our competitors after a certain period of time. Those things I’ve seen challenged a lot in state law and sometimes in federal law about being, you know, restraint of trade, restraint of ability to like move from one job to another job. And I’m not seeing those things yet.

But what I am seeing our NDAs, particularly if I go in on an animation project, I’m quite frequently having to sign some documents saying like, “You’re going to see some stuff, we’re going to talk about some stuff and you can’t talk about what we’re talking about.” I was thinking about why animation has that more often than live action.

And I think it’s because animation works a little bit more like software development. You have these small teams of people who are working in private on a very long time scale to do one specific project. And they need kind of the freedom to mess up and make mistakes and completely, you know, change course in what they’re doing. And without that, if information about what they were working on got out, it could be completely the wrong information very early on. It could make it seem like the movie is about this thing when actually they just end of scrapping that main character and sub out a whole different thing.

Whereas, a live action movie, by the time you are shooting your movie, that’s kind of the movie you’re making.

**Craig:** That’s possible. I wonder also if this is something that was driven by Pixar. I mean Silicon Valley is NDA obsessed. Pixar is in Silicon Valley basically. It started as a software company. Maybe, it just became a cultural thing once the biggest started doing it, everybody started doing it.

**John:** What I have heard, anecdotally, and this is again, I put up a question on Twitter and people wrote back saying, “I work in visual effects and we’re signing NDAs all the time.” And so again, you know, visual effects kind of comes from that software background and maybe that culture is just more naturally going to happen there. These visual effects companies may be doing previews on a movie and so like they’re sort of making the prototype of the movie and so therefore, that’s a very — it’s coming at a very delicate stage.

Or they’re working on the final version of a movie and they want to make sure that not only does no frames of that movie leak out, but also no information about what actually happens, no spoilers leak out about what actually happens in the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you’re making Star Wars, well, of course, I bet everybody on there has a thousand NDAs —
**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re like little laser dots sort of tracking through. And if you see one on your forehead, you know it’s over.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean actually the apparatus to secure ties development is not in and of itself inexpensive. So on huge movies like Star Wars where there’s an enormous desire for information and also an enormous budget, they’re going to be extraordinarily secure. On a small movie where no one’s paying attention, maybe it’s not as important to spend all the money. Even if the script for it should somehow leak online, it’s not a problem because there’s not a voracious demand that’s going to ruin the mass market experience.

**John:** The other thing I have encountered is that certain people who are very high profile where there’s actually monetization and value in people finding out secrets about them, if you are entering their house, if you are working for them, if you are their gardener, you’ll probably be signing an NDA or some other sort of confidentially agreement.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ve encountered this with like people who just like they’re remodeling their house and anyone who walks in the house has to sign this agreement. And whether that’s enforceable or not, I don’t know, but I think it’s meant to be just a, by the way, don’t be a jerk, this is what’s going on here.

**Craig:** You didn’t see any cocaine.

**John:** Not a bit. I’ve never seen any cocaine.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** In certain celebrity’s house.

**Craig:** Yeah, she was 18, right?

**John:** Right. Yes. Let’s get to our questions. Justin in Beijing writes, “How does the WGA deal with their writers working overseas? Let’s say a Chinese company wants to hire Craig to write a script.” Craig, congratulations.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** “Does the WGA get grumpy because that company is not a signatory? Is Craig on his own for salary, credit residuals and everything else?” There’s a second part, but let’s answer this first part first. So Craig, congratulations on your job, the Chinese company wants to hire you.

**Craig:** Yay, yay. The deal is that the WGA is a labor union. All the power and authority that the labor union has is backed up by federal labor law here in the United States. What that means is that the WGA has absolutely no jurisdiction or authority anywhere else other than in the United States.

So what the WGA can do to me is say, “If you are working on a work area we cover like writing a feature film and you are in the United States working on it, then you have to do it through us, through a WGA contract.” What they can’t do is say, “Oh, are you working in China?” No, they literally can do nothing. Are they grumpy about that? A little bit. They only get grumpy if they feel like people are gaming the system.

Like for instance right now I’m writing a movie for Working Title. Working Title is a British company. Well, if Working Title said, “Oh, and by the way, would you mind just hopping on a plane and writing this in an apartment in London and then going home because this way we can get around the WGA?” That makes them grumpy. And people have tried that, but by and by, no.

So legitimate companies like Working Title would never do that. But if you are working overseas in China, no, you’re not signatory and I am in fact on my own for salary, credit, residuals [laughs], if I get them, and everything else.

**John:** So I’ve heard discussion with actors and with I think they call it like SAG Global Rule One or something where screen actors were feeling like they’re being pressured to sign international contracts so that they wouldn’t enforceable by SAG. But I didn’t really dig into it enough to understand what the beef is. Is that something that we need to be thinking about as writers as well?

**Craig:** Not really. There’s a ton of production going on all over the world. Most writing takes place domestically. So, you know, if Todd and I write a movie and we’re going to go make it in Thailand, we’re still writing it in Los Angeles. And even then, because we’re usually one budget item and people want a certain actor in a certain way — I’m sorry, a certain writer in a certain way and it’s one writer that they’re getting, even if we were writing overseas, very often the company will say, “Oh, you know, look, yes, they are going to be writing in London.”

Let’s say Star Wars, for instance. You know, oh, you’re going to be in London doing a lot of writing but it’s fine. You’re being hired by the American company, it’s a WGA deal. With casts, really what the — was it Global Rule One?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s about everybody else. It’s not about the big movie stars. It’s about the, you know, 10 other people that are being hired and told, “Okay, and you got to get down to Mexico and shoot there and also, we’re not doing it SAG,” because casts can be enormous.

SAG has a ton of problems that are unique to their situation. For us, by and large, this isn’t a big deal. Frankly, we have a bigger problem with the fact that we don’t have feature animation covered in this country. Much bigger problem than this particular issue. But Justin asked the reverse question.

**John:** So what happens if Sony wants to hire a Chinese writer to adapt a project? Do they hire them directly or through a local company? And if they do, would the WGA become involved for things like credit?

**Craig:** That depends. If Sony wants to hire a Chinese writer and they’re okay with the Chinese writer working in China, they can go ahead and hire that writer through one of their non-union subsidiaries. It’s not like Disney or Universal is a WGA signatory. They have these kind of sub-companies that are WGA signatories, precisely so that they can hire writers who are and are not WGA dependent.

Now, practically speaking, if the movie is going to be a Chinese production, this is no big deal. They hire a Chinese writer. She’s in China. She works on the movie there. They shoot the movie there. If they need to rewrite her, they bring in another writer and he rewrites her and he is Chinese, and it’s all there and it’s all non-WGA.

**John:** And so they figure out credit however they want to figure out credit.

**Craig:** However they want to figure it out. But let’s say they just happen to love this Chinese writer because she’s written some amazing stuff and they want her to work on some big movie starring Angelina Jolie. So she’s in China and she’s going to do this first draft. And Sony thinks they’re smart and goes, “Oh, we’ll do it non-union.”

Well, the problem is that eventually Angelina comes along and says, “You know, I really want John August to do that Angelina polish he’s so famous for.” Well, they can’t hire you through the non-union company. So now the project is WGA again. So I suspect that the way the companies work these things is if they think they’re going to want to hire WGA writers for it, they just start it as a WGA gig.

**John:** Yeah. So in this situation described where I come in to rewrite the Angelina Jolie movie, and by the way, I’m happy to, that original writer’s script, you know, for credit purposes, it could get complicated because it could be — is that it would be like based on a screenplay by the Chinese writer or is it just she gets pulled into the WGA and she just becomes the first writer on the project? What would happen?

**Craig:** In the case where somebody starts non-union and then they turn to you and turn it into a union gig, her script becomes source material. She does in fact get a based on a screenplay by credit. That doesn’t come with residuals or separated rights and she won’t be considered a participating writer for the purposes of the WGA credit arbitration.

So it’s a raw deal. And it causes problems along the way. I mean, again, I do think that the companies spend less time trying to game this system than we think. I think they look ahead and they say, “Well, if we are going to end up doing this the normal way, let’s just start it the normal way.”

**John:** Yeah, save some headaches.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right, next question. Chad writes, “I have a question about money. How do you get paid for a story credit? How much for an uncredited rewrite?” I like to mix in a question that is just sort of like, you know, completely basic. And so this is one of those completely basic questions that Chad wrote in.

**Craig:** It’s so basic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, Chad, first, story credit, screenplay credit, those aren’t salaried items. So we get paid to write. True, we also often negotiate bonuses should we get credit, but the credit is ultimately determined by the WGA. So we get paid a bunch of money, hopefully it’s a lot. And then the WGA decides who gets credit and who doesn’t, which means depending on what your bonuses are like, you might get paid a big bonus for getting story credit. You might get paid nothing for getting your story credit. So just be aware of that.

When you say how much for an uncredited rewrite? Well, that’s essentially what your salary is, right? So the salary is for the writing. The basic structure is we get paid a certain amount of guaranteed money to write. Then there are optional payments that they can make if they choose to keep us for another step of writing. And then after that, there’s bonuses that we may or may not get depending on how we negotiate because they’re not guaranteed by the union. And those bonuses are for sole screenplay credit or typically, they’re for sole screenplay credit or shared screenplay credit. They are almost never for story credit.

**John:** Yeah. Just to underline what Craig said is we get paid to write. And so the time that we are being paid to write, we don’t know if we’re going to be credited on this movie or not. So there’s no difference in salary between a credited rewrite and uncredited rewrite because the time we’re writing the scripts, we’re just getting paid either a flat fee for doing a draft or we’re getting paid a weekly fee for the work we’re doing on the script that week.

And so that weekly fee can vary hugely, as could the fee you’re getting for a draft. That fee you’re getting for a draft is going to be no smaller than the Guild minimums, so, you know, a fair amount of money. But it’s not any different based on whether it’s supposed to be a credited rewrite or an uncredited rewrite. That’s not a thing that exists at the point that you’re being hired.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You want to take the next one?

**Craig:** Sure. Derek writes, “Following up on your one-handed movie heroes episode, I teach literature to high school students. One of my favorite things about literature of all types is its ability to reflect truth and life experience. Movies have always been my favorite form of literature and I had never considered before your conversation that film characters have motivations that are less complex than real life human beings. I find that notion disappointing, even troubling. Does that mean that film characters tend to be less complex than characters in books?”

**John:** So this was the topic that I brought up. And I would push back and say that I don’t know that movie characters are less complex. But I will say that it’s harder to expose that complexity in a movie than it would be in a book.

It’s that because we only have experience of a character through what we can see and what we can hear, it’s harder to do the deep forensic work inside a character to expose to the audience what is going on inside his or her head. To the degree there’s less complexity, there is less opportunity to explore that complexity because of the nature of the medium.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that I would say that all characters, characters in books, characters in any kind of drama whatsoever are ultimately less complicated than real life human beings because they are purposeful. Most people, in a snapshot of their day, aren’t purposeful. Most people, sadly, when you look at their entire lives, are not purposeful. They existed, did things, moved in erratic, non-productive circles like Eddies in time and then died.

And you could remove them from existence and probably things wouldn’t be that much different. The point of dramatic characters is that you cannot remove them because they are part of a narrative that is purposeful. It’s interesting, I think that Derek is intending the world complex to be complimentary.

But in drama sometimes, actual complexity is boring. What’s more interesting is resolvable complexity or a dialectical complexity where somebody is occupying two interesting sides of a debate. We call that complex. Sometimes I see a movie and it does appear that the movie is trying to simulate the everyday numbing, pointless complexity of real life. And those movies make me sleepy.

**John:** Yeah. I think he is trying to create antonyms between complex and simple. And I would say that the better antonym is complex and focused. And I would say characters in literature are focused, and characters in movies are even more focused generally than characters in books.

In all literature, you are editing down the experience of a lived life to focus on the things that are important to your story. And so literature is, by its definition, going to be less chaotic and complex than real life but that’s sort of the point. You want to be able to expose certain things through editing away the stuff that is not part of the story you’re telling.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that’s a very good way of putting it.

**John:** John in Roswell, New Mexico writes, “In dialogue, if a character pronounces an acronym as its own word rather than a string of individually spoken letters, how would you do that on the page without it being confusing in any way for the reader? To give an example of this, there’s a military institute in my town. The acronym of its full name is NMMI. In conversation, people routinely refer to it as NIMMY, turn the acronym into its own word. How would you do that in dialogue?”

**Craig:** Well, a couple of ways. Ideally, you’re going to introduce the NMMI establishment before someone says the word. So in action description, you say EXT.NMMI.DAY, this military institute blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The locals pronounce it NIMMY. And you just tag that in your actions so that from then on, you can write NMMI or just NIMMY, whichever you prefer.

My guess is I probably want the dialogue to say N-I-M-M-Y, NIMMY, just so people don’t have to constantly be like, “Oh, right, that thing where I’m supposed to pronounce it this way but it’s spelled this way.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If that does not occur, then I think probably what I would do is on the first mention, I would have somebody say, “Oh, yeah, he’s been working at NIMMY for five years. I would write that as N-M-M-I for five years. And then if they continue on, I’d put this parenthetically or then I’d add afterwards “The locals pronounce N-M-M-I NIMMY” in quotes and then everybody after would be N-I-M-M-Y.

**John:** Yeah. I would probably do something similar to that. I would also consider changing the name because I always think about it from the audience’s perspective. And it’s like, “Are they going to get confused about what it is we’re talking about?” And NIMMY sounds kind of silly. And so, you know, unless I could see the sign and someone says, “NIMMY,” then I would get what it is. But I might honestly just pick a different name for what that is just to sort of get past that confusion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What Craig is talking about also with the spelling things out is part of the reason why we tend to always spell out numbers in dialogue because sometimes there are multiple ways someone could say that number and they probably want exactly one way. So if you have the number 212, well, do you mean 212 like a phone number or do you mean two hundred and twelve or two-twelve? Just spell out the words so you can get the actual line of dialogue that you want.

**Craig:** Yeah. This brings to mind another way that you can solve this problem is by having someone casually say NIMMY, N-I-M-M-Y, and then someone say, “What’s NIMMY? Oh, NMMI. It’s the military institute.” I hate that personally, but.

**John:** Yeah, but you see that in procedural shows a lot.

**Craig:** By the way, I generally don’t like this sort of thing. I find it cutesy. I find it like I’m sure the people in your town do call it NIMMY but it feels like false cruelness somehow. I don’t know, it just seems weird. Like if you’re going to have a military institute, have the military institute. You know, call it the institute. I don’t know. I don’t like NIMMY.

**John:** Yeah. But Craig also pronounces all the words in SCUBA because he doesn’t like that abbreviation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Lowell in New Hampshire writes [laughs] — come on, I get a little credit for pulling that — “I have gotten advice recently that my spec would serve as a great writing sample. But I am not sure what that means. That is to say, what do I do next? Also somewhat related, I heard once that it’s a good idea to write a spec for a TV show that’s off the air as a writing sample.” He likes i.e., “That is, you want a staff job on the new sci-fi you heard something about and so you write a spec on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If that’s true, it’s not clear to me what you might do with it.”

**John:** All right, let’s clear up some things really quickly here. If someone says something would make a great writing sample, that can be a backhanded compliment, kind of saying like, “No one’s ever going to make this as a movie but maybe it’s a writing sample.” But it could also mean like, “Yeah, that’s a good writing sample. It shows good writing.”

So don’t necessarily take that as an insult that someone says it’s a great writing example. It just means that if someone were to read this and might say like, “Oh, this guy could write. I’d be curious to see in writing something that I would actually want to make.”

In terms of specking a TV show, you are listening to some old advice. And so most of the TV showrunners I’ve talked to recently, they do not want to read an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation unless it was some brilliant meta-conceit of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that would get them fascinated. So, like if you wrote an episode of Bonanza where they encounter a UFO, that might actually be kind of great and fascinating, but they’re probably not looking for a show that’s off the air.

And honestly, back when people were still reading spec episodes of existing shows, they were looking for the shows that were the new hot show. And so, you’d be writing a spec episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. You wouldn’t be writing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Most TV showrunners I have talked to would rather read original scripts, though. They want to see what you can do that’s your own thing, rather than aping someone else’s voice.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question, whatsoever. It’s part of the evolution of television. It’s less of a factory now. There are fewer shows and they exercise more care, I think. So they do want original voices. Also, the reduction of feature films means a lot of former feature writers are now in television. I think a lot of television showrunners started reading feature scripts and going, “Wow. This person is a really good writer.” And then getting rewarded for it when they put them on the show. So —

So yeah, this thing of writing some show that’s either — some other show that’s on the air or god forbid you write a Star Trek: The Next Generation is — that’s like going outside in I don’t know whatever the fashion of the ’20s was. No, that’s probably hip now. Whatever the fashion of 15 years ago is like, what’s the worst? Anyway, you get the point.

**John:** We get the point. Trudy writes, “How do you do research? Is there a process for this? And do studios allow for research time when they hire a writer? Are writers compensated for that time? I’m really just curious about the process of writing a screenplay where a lot of due diligence is required to make something that is representative and accurate.”

**Craig:** Good question. I am currently working on a pilot for HBO that is very research intensive because it’s based on a thing that happened. And do I have a process for this? Yes. It’s the research process. So, remember research methods and how to research things in high school and college? It’s that. It’s research. You start looking things up. I mean, it’s easier now than ever before but you, hopefully, are getting your combination of primary sources, which are people describing things that they personally experienced, secondary sources where people are talking to people who primarily experienced it. You’re getting various view points and perspectives. And you’re getting your facts straight. And you’re being as accurate as you can. It’s just research. Are we compensated for that time? Not specifically. No. We’re paid to write. That’s our job. If we need to research stuff to write, that’s on us. That’s part of our writing process and it’s folded into the cost of us writing for them.

There are times, however, where if necessary, the studio may be willing to fund a research trip.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s something that you have to convince them is necessary. When they hear research trips, sometimes they get excited and sometimes they think, boondoggle. Or if you’re writing your movie about — what was that movie? Couples Retreat, where the couples all went to Bora Bora for marriage therapy. Well, if that’s your research trip, smells a little boondoggly. But if you need to research, I don’t know, the slums of East Berlin, sure. I can see that, yeah.

**John:** So two examples of research trips from my experience. So first was a project I was writing for Paramount a zillion years ago. And it was set in New York City and it’s set like at the Dalton private school and sort or that kind of world. And I really — I’d never been to New York. And so, I needed to go there and do some basic research. And Paramount said, no. It’s like it’s New York, just write New York. And so, Gale Anne Hurd who was my producer, she used her personal miles to fly me to New York. I ended up staying at Doug Liman’s apartment. And it was a great research trip. And so that was the case where the producer stepped up and got me on that trip.

More recently, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is set in a very specific place and I needed to go to that place and do some research there. And I just flew myself there and I put myself up. And there was never going to be a question that I was going to try bill the studio for that because partly they’re paying me enough money, but also, it was a kind of arbitrary choice I was making for why I wanted to have it here. So I needed to defend that choice.

What I do in those research trips I find is you are looking for the geography. You’re looking for specific details, but also, I was looking for people. And so —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I was looking to try to meet those people, hear the vocabulary they were using and getting a lot of great contacts so I could have people who I can text at like, you know, seven at night and say like what would be the word for this thing? And they can text me back with what that is. That is really the value of research. And that’s the kind of thing that if I had — I had Stuart do it, it wouldn’t —

**Craig:** It would be terrible.

**John:** It would be terrible if Stuart did it.

**Craig:** Once again, if you had Stuart do it, it would be a disaster.

**John:** Because the thing is, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m just listening and like, ah.

**Craig:** I thought it was just because Stuart is doing it.

**John:** No, no. I mean, I — even like a really good Stuart, it wouldn’t work the same way.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t even know what that would be like.

**John:** [laughs] Yes, we could imagine, though. We’re screenwriters. You can imagine anything.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Patrick in San Dimas writes — I love Stuart. “I heard Craig warn a Three-Page Challenger that he was pitched a Time Bandit movie and he was unsure if he was going to do it. At this stage of your career, do you both get pitched specs scripts or ideas by different studios to write? Or are these things your agents have found for you?”

**John:** Great. So, we need to take the word spec script out of there because that actually doesn’t make sense there. So —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** A spec script is something that Craig and I would write independently. But we are pitched ideas by studios, by producers. They say like, “Hey, we want to make a movie based on this thing or about this idea.” And sometimes they’ll approach me directly if I have a relationship, but more likely they will call my agent David Kramer and David Kramer will call and say like, “Hey, they want to do this thing.” And I’ll think like, “Do I want to do that thing?” And about half of the time, I’ll say, “No, that’s just not a world I’m interested in.” Or I’ll say like, “I don’t know what that is, but I’ll look it up.” And then, I will pass on it a few days later.

But sometimes, it’s a really great idea. And then I go in for the meeting and that becomes a thing. So that was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I was like, “Yeah. You know what, I kind of know what that is, let me look into it.” And then I hop on the phone and that happens.

So I would say at this point of my career, a significant majority of the stuff I end up being paid to write is that kind of thing, where someone has pitched me, this is either a project we own, it’s a book we want to adapt or it’s this — a story world we want someone to approach.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s basically the way it goes. I mean, I — seems like it’s half and half for me, in terms of whether somebody has something that they give to my agent or they just call — I don’t know. I must be the most accessible guy because people are calling me all the time. Or sending me emails all the time saying, “What about this? What about this?” And I always think like, you know, it would be better if everything did go through an agent because one of the benefits of an agent is that you don’t have to have that awkward conversation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know. I mean, look, sometimes, somebody pitches you something and you just know within four seconds, you just don’t want do it. Or you can’t do it. And you find yourself, you know, I don’t like saying no at all.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s a part of me that wants to do everything anyway. And just because, why not? Let’s see, you know. But you can’t.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But yes, at this stage of our careers, we get pitched stuff all the time to rewrite or to write. And it’s very flattering. And it is — it’s funny. It just sort of happens at some point, you know. You spend of a lot of time, many years, waiting for it to happen in the way you imagined it happening. And then it happens. And soon enough, it will un-happen and then you quit.

**John:** Yes, exactly, when they stop calling you about that, you know, would you want to make remake of this? And you’re like, “Well, of course not.” And then like, “Wait. Why aren’t you calling me about that anymore?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that’s one of those fascinating things. When we get off the air, I’m going to ask you whether you got a call about a remake of a specific TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And I will judge my worth and your worth, based on which of us got the call first.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay. Sounds good. I’m excited. What do we have next?

**John:** Kathel in Dublin writes —

**Craig:** Kathel.

**John:** “I am wondering whether to set my next screenplay in the 1970s or modern day. It’s a buddy/fish out of water comedy. And while the time period won’t change the concept or story, it will impact how I write some scenes.”

**Craig:** Will it? Will setting it in the modern day or the 1970s impact [laughs] how you write some scenes? Will it? Huh? This is a very strange question.

**John:** I think it’s actually really easy question to answer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it is an easy question, which is — you better — you need to set it in the 1970s or in modern day. It belongs somewhere. It wants to be in a time. It has to be specific. You just can’t go, “No, it could be 70s.” I just feel like, well, why answer your question, I’m wondering whether to set my next screenplay in the 1970s, or ’80s, or ’90s or modern day, or ’40s, or ’50s or the middle ages. Why the 70s?

**John:** What I find so fascinating is like my idea is so unformed that I’m emailing you but I don’t even kind of know the basic nature of this idea. Because it can’t be. The same idea really couldn’t be in both places. Like if the email had come in saying like, “I have this whole approach, which I’m really excited about, like the 1970s of it all. And yet, I’m worried that it’s going to be so locked down in ’70s. I could also do it in this way, which obviously changes a lot of things. I’m really torn. Or if the question was how much more difficult am I making my life by setting this in the ’70s versus the modern day? That email, I kind of get, but to have it be so unformed is fascinating to me, so —

**Craig:** it’s bizarre. Look, the time period is one of the fundamental elements of your story. For instance, John and I recently watched Diary of a Teenage Girl, last podcast episode.

**John:** We did a podcast about it. Yes, yes.

**Craig:** We interviewed Mari Heller, the great Mari Heller. Now, that needed to be in the ’70s. I felt it. Because I didn’t think — I don’t think I would have believed a lot of what happened there had it happened now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It felt like it needed to be a product of a time that was both sexually adventurous and also sexually naïve. It needed both. It needed to be before AIDS for instance.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it needed to be before the kind of morality panic of the ’80s. You need to have this movie now or in the ’70s? Need to. You just don’t know which, because I don’t think you’ve thought this through well enough.

**John:** So if the question from Kathel in Dublin had been, “Given your druthers, should a movie be set in the 1970s or modern day?” I would say, in general, modern day. Because I think the things you are making your life more difficult about by setting it in the 1970s are substantial. And sometimes, a movie really wants to be set in ’70s. But if it doesn’t really want to be set in the ’70s, then set it in modern day.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that modern day is the default.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you need to want it to be period for a reason. All right.

**John:** Pick good defaults.

**Craig:** Pick good defaults. Harris from Brooklyn writes — hey, Brooklyn, what’s up? “I have made two short films so far that I’ve written and directed. I’m interested in doing both of those things, writing and directing. The thing is, I don’t know if I should focus on writing my full length screenplay or write and actually make my short films.”

**John:** So Harris in Brooklyn, you’ve already made two short films. That’s good. We encourage people to write things and direct things, so they actually understand what the process of writing and directing things consists of. If you have not yet written a feature length screenplay, you should probably write a feature length screenplay just so you know what that is and what that whole experience and process is. Because you could make 17 short films, after film number eight, I don’t think that’s going to help you write a full feature length screenplay or get a movie made. That’s just my first instinct.

**Craig:** It’s sort of an unanswerable question. I don’t know if you should focus on writing your full length screenplay or continuing to write and make your short films because I don’t know what your — I don’t know what you’re good at.

**John:** Does this guy want to be a music video director? Then he should make more short films. Does he want to be feature screenwriter? He should probably write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you want to make feature films, you better start getting into feature films, sure. But, you know, you — I’m sure are aware, Harris, that it’s one thing to write a short film script and then go shoot it because it’s manageable. It’s another to go shoot a feature length screenplay. You have experience now, so it is possible for you to write a feature length screenplay that is shootable. I would write so that you can make it, because ultimately, there is no better currency than a film. It’s better currency than a script.

**John:** I agree. Our last question comes from Jay. “I’m always fascinated with going to Wikipedia and finding out what the budget for a movie was against how much it grossed. But then I heard somewhere, maybe on your podcast, that movies have to gross at least double the budget of their movie to break even. But what exactly does that mean? In terms of screenwriters, producers, et cetera, do they get piece of the backend? Or is that just the studio behind the film? I’m basically curious of the entire process of how everyone involved [laughs] in the movie makes money?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So I just figured it would be a good last question to throw in here.

**Craig:** So first, there was an enormous explosion in space. And stars were formed. Then, it’s the — okay. So there’s a lot here. We can’t answer it all at once. I think we’ve actually answered a lot of this before. But let me just go through it quickly.

You’re fascinated with going to Wikipedia and finding out what the budget for a movie was against how much it grossed. Well, maybe, be a little less fascinated with that. It’s just so — who cares? Okay. But —

**John:** You don’t know that the budget that Wikipedia lists is at all accurate.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s not. I guarantee you, it’s not. No budget ever is accurate. I believe that. No budget that is ever published anywhere is accurate. The budget that they show us, that when we’re making the movie, I don’t believe is accurate. [laughs] So all those numbers are baloney, okay? So just know that.

Two, against how much it grossed. Theatrically or grossed theatrically, plus DVD, plus rentals, plus Internet. What does gross even mean? Okay? So there’s that.

You heard somewhere, maybe on our podcast, the movies have to gross at least double the budget of the movie to break even. There’s a rule of thumb. That if you can gross double your budget theatrically, then eventually you’ll be okay. Why double? Because the movie costs money, but then the advertising of a movie costs almost as much — sometimes more money than the movie costs. A lot of times, more money than the movies costs. Then, they have to distribute the movie which costs money as well.

And remember, advertising isn’t just in the United States, it’s everywhere all over the world. And then, all the overhead that goes into play as well, all the salaries of the many, many people that work at the studio in marketing, in distribution and development, all the rest.

And there’s things like taxes, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And of course, the money that was reported as the theatrical gross, that doesn’t all go to the studio. The theaters take a big cut of that as well. Now, you ask, in terms of screenwriters, producers, do they get a piece of backend or is that just the studio behind the film? Screenwriters do not get backend. If a screenwriter is working as a producer or director on the film, then optionally, they may be able to get a real backend. But screenwriters just doing the screenwriting job, no, they don’t get real backend.

Producers almost exclusively get backend, meaning they don’t get paid much for developing the project. They often have fees for making the movie. And then those fees are applied against a backend, so it’s recoupable against a backend. And then if it goes over that amount, then they get more.

So, yes, big movie stars, big producers, big directors can get a piece of the backend. Their salaries are applied against it.

**John:** We can stop there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s good.

**John:** That’s good. It’s a good introduction to this. But I will say there are previous episodes, we’ll try to put links to some of those previous episodes, where we talk about sort of how money works in the business. But it’s a topic for a book, not a topic for the last question of the show.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, I see something called Dead Synchronicity. What’s that?

**Craig:** Dead Synchronicity is a game that is out for Mac, PC and iOS and possibly, possibly Android, although who cares about Android? And I liked it. I liked it a lot. I played it. I thought it was really, really good. It’s an interesting game. It comes from a company in Spain. I think three Spanish brothers actually are the principals of the company.

And it’s not revolutionary game play. It’s basically a point and click puzzle adventure. I love these point and click adventures where the game structure basically is find things and figure out where to use them. Very old school way of doing things.

What made this game interesting for me was that it was incredibly dark. It’s got a lot of sci-fi mumbo jumbo. The sci-fi story, in and of itself, is bordering on incoherent. It promises a sequel, which I’ll play. But what blew my mind about the game was one moment [laughs], one moment in particular, where I thought, “I can’t believe the balls on these guys — ”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “For putting this in a game.” It is gross, and disturbing, and awesome. And there were a lot of gross, disturbing, and awesome things in it. But there was one moment where I went, “Wow, this is getting sick.” And you just don’t see that very often juxtaposed with the point and click graphic adventure. So I really enjoyed it. It is dark and disturbing, so trigger warning.

**John:** Okay. My One Cool Thing is Mr. Robot, which is a show on USA. It’s a summer series that I heard people talking about and then I didn’t start watching and it’s like, “You know what, I’ll start watching it.” It is fantastic. And so I would strongly recommend that really everybody listening to this podcast at least watch the pilot episode because I thought it was just terrifically written by the guy Sam Esmail who I’ve never encountered before.

The pilot is terrifically directed. This guy, creator of the show, also directed the second episode. It was just terrifically done as well. The conceit of the show is you have a guy who is a computer security technology expert who is definitely on one of Craig’s spectrums.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** He is an incredibly dark central character to try to follow and yet he’s fascinating. And so at the top of the show, we were talking about Clueless and how Cher might seem like a sociopath if you didn’t have her voiceover. Same situation with this guy. He has voiceover and yet the conceit behind his voiceover is he’s talking to a person he knows is an imaginary person, and that is you.

And so he will address you directly through his voiceover. And it ends up becoming incredibly important and helpful to the show. It’s all entirely from his point of view and to the degree to which things within the world have bent to sort of his point of view. And so the villainess corporation has a giant E. He calls it Evil Corp and then from that point forward, every time you see it and everyone who refers to it calls it Evil Corp, which I think is just great.

It’s such a great example of how a strong central character can drive not just the plot but really the world of a show. So I strongly recommend Mr. Robot on USA.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Okay. You will find links to most of the things we talked about on the show today at the show page at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes or /podcast, both will get you there. Also, while on johnaugust.com, you should go visit the store, store.johnaugust.com where you can see the four Scriptnotes T-shirts and pick your favorite. Pick a couple if you want to.

Again, these are all preorders. You only have about two-and-a-half weeks to order these shirts. Then we will print them, we will package them up, we will send them to your house. They will be on your body in time for the Austin Film Festival if nothing goes horribly wrong. And I don’t think anything will go horribly wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week comes from Duncan Pflaster. If you have an outro for our show, you can write in to us at ask@johnaugust.com with a link to your outro. That same address is a great place to write questions like the ones we answered today. And so ask@johnaugust.com. Little short things are great on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. And that is our show this week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes shirts are available for pre-order in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Dewalt hex bit set](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000628SO2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and a [magnetic bit extensions set](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V3TQP2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* This is the last week of the summer for [Featured Fridays](http://johnaugust.com/2015/weekend-read-featured-fridays) on [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* Scriptnotes, 130: [Period space](http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space)
* [South Park popularity is soaring in Taiwan](http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-12-28/features/0012280062_1_taiwan-south-park-four-musketeers) from The Baltimore Sun
* [Non-disclosure agreements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [handling numbers in dialogue](http://screenwriting.io/how-should-you-handle-numbers-or-confusing-jargon-in-dialogue/)
* Screenwriting.io on [spec scripts](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-%E2%80%9Cspec-script%E2%80%9D/)
* Scriptnotes, 11: [How movie money works](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-movie-money-works)
* [Dead Synchronicity](http://www.deadsynchronicity.com/en/home/)
* [Mr. Robot](http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot) on USA
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Duncan Pflaster ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-descriptive-audio-works).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has some explicit language. So if you’re traveling in a car with children, you may not want to listen to this episode in the car where your kids could hear it. Thanks.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

Today on the show, we are going to be looking at narrative audio description and how that all works. We’re going to look at the WGA financial numbers and see what that means for screenwriters and for television writers. And we are going to answer a bunch of listener questions.

But first, last week on the show, we talked about Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s nothing more revelatory about what your audience thinks of you than what designs they send at you.

**Craig:** I can’t.

**John:** Looking through the initial batch of ideas —

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t want to know. How bad is it?

**John:** Well, there’s a lot of Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** Oh well, as well there should be.

**John:** There’s a lot of typed pages. And typed pages like seemed a good idea for a podcast about screenwriting, but I don’t know that anybody really wants to read your shirt closely. So we’ll see if that’s the winning idea.

**Craig:** People don’t want to read screenplays either. [laughs] So I don’t want to read shirts.

**John:** [laughs] And there are a few references to Stuart. So I put a link to that in the Workflowy so you can see one of the Stuart shirts because Stuart is really the unvoiced third voice of the Scriptnotes podcast.

But if you have an idea for a Scriptnotes t-shirt that you would desperately want to see, you can go visit johnaugust.com/shirt and there are full instructions about sort of what we’re looking for and what we’re not looking for and sort of best practices and guidelines. Deadline is August 11th, so you have a few more weeks to figure out your ideal Scriptnotes t-shirt design.

**Craig:** Great. I can’t wait to see at least one or two of the Sexy Craig drawings. I mean you’re going to send them to me, right?

**John:** Yes, I will send to you the ones that are especially not safe for work.

**Craig:** You know who is not at all interested in Sexy Craig t-shirts?

**John:** Who’s that?

**Craig:** Sexy Craig. You don’t have to —

**John:** Does Sexy Craig not wear t-shirts?

**Craig:** No, he doesn’t have time for t-shirts.

**John:** All right, he’s too busy smoking and hanging out.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not what he’s doing, John. He’s busy though. Oh, he’s busy.

**John:** He’s probably busy playing Capitals. So your One Cool Thing last week was this game Capitals for iOS.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s Nerdy Craig.

**John:** That’s Nerdy Craig. Nerdy Craig has beaten me probably four times I think in Capitals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Right now we’re in the middle of an endless game that will, I mean —

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s, here’s what basically was happening is —

**John:** Through the next century, we’ll be playing this game.

**Craig:** I am denying John. He is going to win this game. It’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’m doing that — it’s like Masada. I’m basically now at the top of the hill [laughs] and at the very last moment, I’ll kill myself. But I’m going to make him lose — yeah, it’s 300. I’m the 300 Spartans. You’re Xerxes.

**John:** So I would say after a week of playing this game, my observation and my biggest criticism is that it falls into like a consistent kind of game design trap of once you’re ahead, it’s very hard to not stay ahead and sort of conversely, once you fall behind, it’s very unlikely that you’re ever going to win the game. So classically Risk is that kind of game. Monopoly, if you play the endless version of Monopoly, it’s sort of this game.

And I’m frustrated by Capitals for that reason, is that basically once you get into a position like we are in in this game, it’s just going to be a long, long stalemate.

**Craig:** Well, okay, but here’s the thing, what if I win?

**John:** If you win, then you’ve proven to be the exception to the rule and therefore, you know, you’re the underdog story perhaps.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And maybe there’s a narrative arc that you could find from your sudden victory in Capitals, but I have a feeling it’s just going to be a long slog because both of us are going to be play incredibly defensively in order to make this game go on forever.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. What I’m hoping for is that I get a random splash of letters that lets me break through.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And if I can do that —

**John:** You’re waiting for the miracle. You’re waiting for the sudden eclipse that sort of terrifies the soldiers and they flee and therefore you’re able to charge across the board and somehow capture my little castle dude.

**Craig:** You ask me for a miracle, I give you the FBI.

**John:** Very nice. Our second bit of follow up is also about capitals. This is a letter from Michael W. who writes, “It really hit me hard when Craig said that he was in favor of capitalizing whatever you want in a screenplay when in reference to the Aliens screenplay. This is without a doubt my biggest pet peeve in screenwriting. I don’t understand why it happens so often.

“Surely, you want the capitalization to really stand out and mean something. Whenever I see capitalization used more than once per page, especially if there seems to be no real pattern to what gets a cap, it just comes across as obnoxious and irritating, almost like a person who thinks that shouting random words in their sentences is a great way to get people to listen to them.

“I’m a big fan of caps when used sparingly. But when it feels like the text is in caps, to me, it just feels like a cheap gimmick that gets really old quickly and makes me want to pay less interest. So why the love of random caps, Craig? Why?”

**Craig:** Well, obviously, when I’m writing for the studio that Michael W. owns, I really pull back on those caps because I’m very concerned with what makes — what feels like a cheap gimmick to Michael W. and what gets old really quickly and makes Michael W. want to pay less interest. [laughs]

Normally, however, I’m not working for the studio that Michael W. owns. I work for the other studios and they don’t seem to mind. And so this here, this right here, we have an example, John, of someone who has externalized that their internal taste to the world. They have determined that because they loathe something, surely it is wrong and the rest of the world also loathes it. No.

Here’s my biggest pet hate [laughs] in opinionating. People who have a strong opinion and think it matters. I understand you don’t like it. If I were writing this letter, I would’ve written this letter, “I’m really surprised that you like that. For some reason, I hate it. It just strikes me wrong. But I get that other people seem to like it. So my question is, have you ever run across anybody in your professional life who’s pushed back on that or not?” That would be a good question.

**John:** It would be a great question.

**Craig:** It would be a really good question because then it would be relevant to other people instead of externalizing your individual [laughs] opinion to the world, you would be trying to find a consensus in pragmatic use for our podcast time together, Michael W., but you have failed to do that. So my response to you is —

**John:** I would love to answer the rephrased question that Craig just asked. And that I do feel like there are times in which one writer’s personal style can be to the detriment of his or her work being taken the best possible way.

And I think there is generally a band of which, you know, a certain amount of capitalization is fine up to that point and more than that, people will just sort of tune you out. And I think, you know, there are individual writer voices. Individual writer of voices are wonderful things as we write movies for Hollywood studios.

There is a — I find a fairly wide band of sort of what you can do in those pages in order to make it come across well to an average reader.

One thing I think we talked about on the show before is, Craig, have you gone in and done a rewrite and the writer before you had a very different page style than you did and you had to either adapt to their page style or go through and change the whole script, you know, the scene description to match your style.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just ends up frequently that on rewrites I am starting — often at times I’m starting from scratch. But there have been times, a really weird instance on The Huntsman where someone had come in to just do a week while I was off doing another thing. And then I had to come back to finish. And the stuff that they had done in the week, now we are in production, right?

So I’m looking at some of the things and I’m like, okay, that’s fine, but I just — I don’t like the way he does his dashes and his dot-dots. And there’s like a weird extra space between two words, it’s just a mistake. But if I fix it, it’s a changed page.

**John:** You’re not going to do that.

**Craig:** I didn’t do it. But God, I wanted to. It was driving me crazy. But yeah, I think that if you are working on something, I have done something where I needed to sort of fit in. I don’t try and fit into their style. I have to do what I’m doing. People are paying me to do whatever I can do.

So to me, where I need to fit in stylistically is with the characters’ voices. That’s the area where people will notice. But people in the audience will not notice that I describe things somewhat differently. My job now behind the scenes is to get everybody on the same page in terms of what the intention is.

You know, I don’t care if my three pages in the middle of your script look a little different in terms of how things are described. I just need to know that in terms of the choices that are made and the words the people say and the tone of the material on screen that it is seamless.

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s a good working rule is to try to make sure that you’re consistently carrying the torch of what an audience actually experiences. And if the scene description is not a cohesive experience throughout the entire script, that’s maybe not the most crucial thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There have been times where I have come in and I’m literally just going to be there for two days, I’m just working on one specific little thing. And if the other writer has a much more bombastic style, I will adapt to their bombastic style just so that the scene won’t feel weird.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Especially if you’re doing a lot of action sequences. And there’s some project in which the Wibberleys and I were both working on it sort of separately, but they were really the primary force there. And they are much bigger all caps, underlines, you know, some bold face in there. And I’ll happily do that when that is the case.

It also reminds me of TV shows tend to have house styles for how their scripts read and look so that it feels the same episode after episode no matter who wrote the episode. And so classically both the Damon Lindelof shows and the J.J. Abrams shows, they use a lot of fucking in the scene description. And so a giant fucking explosion will happen.

We just posted in Weekend Read the pilot script for Once Upon a Time by Kitsis and Horowitz. And they are from that camp. And so they use fucking all the time in their things and like this script had like seven fuckings in it just for like a 60-minute pilot.

And when we posted it, Adam Horowitz was like mortified. He’s like, “Oh, I can send you the cleaned up version that we use for when we’re having people sign scripts and stuff like that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Doesn’t have all the F-bombs in it.” It’s like, no, it’s really how they write their scripts. It’s like they need the F-words in there to sell the scale of what those moments are like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both styles are fine.

**Craig:** I will do that at times. I don’t do that often. But maybe once or twice in the screenplay where I know it’s not meant to be rated R, I’ll still in description, you know, I might have somebody say, you know, she stares at him, “What the fuck?” You know, what the fuck is an incredibly evocative phrase. It puts a face on a character in your mind. You immediately know so much about what they’re thinking and how they’re supposed to look. It’s just really terse. You know, it’s a good way to quickly state something without any confusion in the reader.

I mean when it comes to this capitalization stuff, I’ve read screenplays from all sorts of people and while there are always little things that are like, “Oh, I wouldn’t, you know, I don’t do my thing like this. And I don’t do mine like that,” I’ve never read a script where I thought, “What’s with so — there’s so many capitalized words. My God, half the page is capitalized. I’ve never seen anyone even come close to that.”

Michael W. doesn’t want more than one per page which seems just like the most arbitrary and frankly dumb thing I’ve ever heard, like why? Why is two a problem? What does that even mean? This is a bad question. It’s not a question.

**John:** That’s not a question. It’s just like a statement or opinion, phrased as a question.

**Craig:** No, no. Yeah, he basically just wanted to do like his own version of an umbrage rant and then end it with, so why the love of random caps to make it officially a question. But look, Michael, I got to tell you, this isn’t how you do umbrage. You need a whole class [laughs] on umbrage because I’m not believing it. I don’t believe it. You’re not feeling it, man.

**John:** So what is the guidelines for umbrage? I think you need to firmly state your opinion and then like categorically break down the reasons why you have this opinion, sort of restate your opinion more strongly, and express moral outrage that somebody could have an opinion that is opposite than yours. Is that a schema? Is that a sort of way of thinking about an umbrage rant?

**Craig:** It’s not bad. Like it’s your understanding of it, which is really [laughs] interesting. But to me, it has to start with a kernel of something that you hold very true and near and dear to you. And then you have to see that other people are just denying it. They’re denying it. And they’re doing so in a way that is causing themselves and other people problems.

The umbrage isn’t about I have an opinion and the rest of the world needs to agree with me. I see things all the time, like, “I don’t like that.” But who gives a crap if I don’t like it? “I don’t like this sandwich.” That’s not umbrage material. “You capitalize too much.” That’s not umbrage material.

Umbrage material is more like, you’ve decided that the best way to go about something is to do A, B and C, and I’m telling you you’re hurting yourself and others. That’s umbrage material. I’m getting angry now thinking about my hypothetical example that only has A, B and C in it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s an emotional place. You have to understand, it’s an emotional [laughs] place I can occupy. You know, like some actors can just cry on the spot?

**John:** Oh yeah, I’m a good crier actually.

**Craig:** There you go. I can’t do that, but I can become furious in a second.

**John:** That’s nice. And is it that you’re imagining the hypotheticals or you’re imagining the conversations or you’re imagining the other side of the argument? Is that how you’re getting to that furious place?

**Craig:** I’m literally just placing myself in the emotional space of watching somebody do something that is hurting themselves or other people. And I have a thing in my brain, I don’t believe you have, John, [laughs], it’s just another area in my brain that begins to pulsate and send out signals and it’s that — you see people don’t understand. The umbrage is not about this kind of snotty, hypercritical view of the world. I’m the opposite of — I’m hypocritical of art and personal expressions. I don’t care, like I — people were sending around, “Oh my God, you got to see this. This guy goes on this amazing rant about Pixels and totally takes it down.”

Well, I’m not going to watch that because I don’t give a shit. Oh my God, a guy worked himself up into a fake frenzy over a fucking movie? A movie for fucking 13-year-olds and that’s what you’re going to do, adult man? [laughs] You’re going to go out and you’re going to go crazy about that?” Something’s gone wrong with you and I don’t care. It’s not for you. What drives me crazy is the other stuff. It’s when I watch my union say, “We’ve got a great idea.” And I go, “No, you’re going to hurt people with that.” That’s what makes me crazy.

**John:** I want to briefly defend the Pixels rants because I was, like you, convinced like, “Oh come on, what are you complaining about?” Like this is the Pixels movie. And then Stuart watched it, so I actually watched it and I actually found there were moments of artistry within his anger that was not really manufactured, but actually a true expression of loss and sadness. That’s why I found that one to be interesting, but I agree with you the general sense of angry nerd ranting, there’s a column in Wired called Angry Nerd which is just that manufactured umbrage.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is just completely fake. It’s as fake as —

**Craig:** It’s fake.

**John:** A listicle in BuzzFeed.

**Craig:** And I’m sorry. If you legitimately have honest, sad, torn up feelings over fucking Pixels, then you need meds. You need meds. Meds. Meds. [laughs] Now, I’m getting angry. Getting angry about that.

**John:** Our next bit follow up. In last week’s episode, we talked about audio description for films and TV shows designed for the vision impaired or the blind and we really knew almost nothing about it. And our question was whether the people who are writing this description are using a script or if they’re just watching the filmed product and writing the description based on that. And so the minute the podcast went up, we had a bunch of emails from people who actually did this for a living and they were incredibly helpful, so I did a follow-up blog post which I’ll put into the show notes about that.

The short version of it is it’s really based on what shows up on screen and they’re very carefully tailoring the things they say and to fit them in small pauses to really give you the best experience of what this would be like if you were actually being able to watch the finished product. It’s an incredibly difficult job obviously because you are trying to, you know, with very limited time and resources create the experience of watching a thing when you only have audio. As screenwriters, we’re doing everything that we can to describe a movie with what people see and what we hear. Here, we have to take away all those visions and that’s an interesting challenge.

So I wanted to actually play examples because it was really strange to talk about something without being able to hear it. So here are two examples from Daredevil. So Daredevil is a TV show on Netflix. It was actually controversial when it first launched because the audio descriptions weren’t ready and so then they added them later on and they’re really good. So first I want to play you a scene from the pilot and this is just what you would see on screen, so just the audio that would actually match with the video that you would see.

(Daredevil scene begins)

[Girls screaming]

**Turk Barrett:** Hey, hey. Man, shut up. I’m getting $1,000 a head for y’all. So, you be quiet, I’ll let you have a bucket. You don’t — .

[Girls screaming]

**Man:** [Speaking Foreign Language]

**Turk Barrett:** Scream all you want. Come on, let me hear you scream. Scream louder. Nobody gives a shit down here. [laughs]

(Daredevil scene ends)

**John:** Okay. So, Craig, I think that we can safely assume that you’ve not seen the pilot for Daredevil because you watch no television.

**Craig:** Right, it’s on television, so you had a 99.9% chance.

**John:** All right, so let’s — just based on what you heard there, what do you think is happening in that scene?

**Craig:** Okay. There’s a bad guy. He’s black, I’m guessing from his voice. He’s got hostages. One of them has asked for a bucket, [laughs] I’m not sure why. And he says he’ll give them a bucket, and then he’s tasing them. It sounds like he’s tasing them to torture them, and then he’s laughing ha-ha-ha. Then I think we switched perspective to Daredevil because I feel like I’m hearing his echo location sound effect, and I assume then he comes in, just starts beating the crap out of everybody. And yeah, that’s what I think happens.

**John:** And that’s actually pretty close. But now, let’s take a listen to that descriptive audio that goes with that, and it will paint a little bit more a full picture of what’s happening here.

**Craig:** Okay.

(Daredevil scene begins)

[Girls screaming]

**Narrator:** Two thugs drag three young women to a storage container on the docks. A man in a leather coat appears around the opening door.

**Turk Barrett:** Hey, hey. Man, shut up. I’m getting a $1,000 a head for y’all. So, you be quiet, I’ll let you have a bucket. You don’t —

**Narrator:** He holds up a cattle prod.

[Tasing sound]

**Narrator:** Then jams it into one woman’s belly while an overweight man in a lawn chair watches at the edge of the dock.

[Girls screaming] [Tasing]

**Man:** [Speaking foreign language]

**Narrator:** The injured woman and the others are shoved into the container.

**Turk Barrett:** Scream all you want. Come on, let me hear you scream. Scream louder. Nobody gives a shit down here. [Laughs]

**Narrator:** A man with a crude mask covering his head and eyes crouches behind the thug. The thug turns as the man leaps knocking him down. The cattle prod rolls on the filthy wet dock. The man stands, it’s Matt. He listens as the thugs rush in. One thug goes down instantly. The terrorized girls watch.

Matt fights the other thug. He batters the man in a storm of punches knocking him against the container door, then flipping him over onto the dock. The other creep charges getting in some hard punches before Matt knees him in the gut and headbutts him. As they fight, the leader comes too, woozily reaching into his back waist band.

Matt, crouched, swing kicks the thug, then snaps his leg at the knee. He hears the leader cock the gun. The leader turns and shoots. The masked man flings himself into a roll and grabs the cattle prod.

**John:** So, what did you think?

**Craig:** I mean, I kind of love it. It’s interesting. It’s a huge job, first of all. That’s what that I was thinking when I was listening was somebody has to write all that because that’s not the way we would write the screenplay. For starters, we won’t know all those things when we’re writing the screenplay. We won’t know exactly how the fight was going to go down. That gets structured by the stunt guys, and then sort of shown to everybody, and then done on the day, and then edited.

So, you can’t have the screenplay be as accurate as somebody describing what they’re seeing, meaning somebody is writing the description. And that’s a big job. Deciding what to say and what to not say is a big job. You picked an interesting one here because there’s not a lot of dialogue, you know, so you could see how he’s sort of getting out of the way when there is, and giving us some basic context. I like that everything — didn’t seem like they were skipping anything. So, you know, an overweight man in a lawn chair on the other side of the dock is watching. That’s information I didn’t have without the descriptive audio, and —

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s crucial because like, I mean even the person who’s writing up the description for this episode doesn’t know if that man is actually going to come back and become important later on. So, you got to put him in there.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you’d also don’t know, even as the screenwriter, you don’t know exactly when you’re going to cut to that guy. I mean you might have an indication when you’re going to cut, but then in the editing room things happen, so again it’s all done after the fact as far as I could tell. It reminds me a little bit of like a book on tape because you immediately start painting your own visual picture in your head. I can see the shipping container. I liked that it was the wet filthy ground instead of just the ground. You know, so I liked that they were adding things that helped the mind paint that image. It was cool.

**John:** It was cool. And I thought it was actually really well performed like that the narrator they use for this does a great job. So the Daredevil pilot was written by Drew Goddard who’s amazingly talented. I’m trying to find the credit of the guy who or the people who wrote up the descriptive audio for it because I thought they did a great job too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I agree with you that it’s not — you know, when it got into the fight sequence, I wondered if they might have looked at what the text was from the fight as written on the page because like some of those flurry of blows, that kind of stuff, that felt scene description-y. I can see that being part of the fight scene description, but it’s never going to be so directly matching what the fight choreography was going to be. So, you know, I thought it was really well done.

**Craig:** Yeah, like maybe they take what’s in the script and then remove bits that have been edited out and kind of add things in that were done on the day. You know, so they use the script as a basis and then kind of go from there.

**John:** So, what Daredevil makes clear is that writing this descriptive audio is not easy. And I wanted to talk to somebody who did this for a living. So, yesterday I got on Skype with Alice Sanders in London. Alice, thank you so much for being with us.

**Alice Sanders:** My pleasure.

**John:** So, can you tell us some of the movies you’ve worked on?

**Alice:** Oh, I’ve worked on so many films. One of my favorites to describe was Up, the Pixar film. I’ve worked on Inception, and Bridesmaids. I tend to get given a lot of comedy films or films for kids. I did Nanny McPhee because apparently I have a light-hearted comedy voice. So you tend to write the films that you also voice, but that’s not always the case.

**John:** So, at what point does a film come to you for descriptive audio?

**Alice:** Well, normally when it’s completely finished, although again, that is not always the case. We have had films that have not had all their special effects and stuff finished, which obviously makes it very difficult to describe properly because we need to see everything in order to describe it for visually impaired people.

**John:** So, which company do you actually work for? Is it one place that does all of it for movies or is it different companies contract out?

**Alice:** No. Well, I work for Deluxe, but obviously I work in London. And I know that Deluxe in L.A. also does movies, but their movie audio description will be different to the British one.

**John:** So, for each market — so, the U.K. English versus the American English would have different descriptive audio?

**Alice:** Absolutely. The actual writing will tend to be very similar, although obviously there’ll be a few words that are different like, you know, lift and elevator and all those kind of things. But also the American one will have an American voice and the British one will have a British voice.

**John:** So, let’s take the movie Up. So, this movie comes to you for descriptive audio, what is the first thing you do?

**Alice:** The first thing I do is open the clip and start watching it. I don’t watch the film before I start describing it, but I don’t describe it in real time because that would be impossibly difficult. So, what you do is you pause the film. I mean you can stop, and rewind and fast forward, you know, wherever you like.

And then what you start to do is you time in what I would call a box, which is a single description. And obviously you do it between dialogue, so the shortest description would tend to be a second, you wouldn’t go under that. But you can have anything up to, you know, well even minutes and minutes of silence in a film, although you would tend to break that up into descriptions rather than record kind of five minutes straight of audio description.

**John:** So, when you do this process, are you typing up a document or is this in specialized software?

**Alice:** It’s in specialized software, which is also used for subtitling. On the program, we can time in a box to the exact frame of the film. So, I could have a box that was like one second. I could have a box that was like 38 seconds and four frames.

**John:** And so, once you have this box described, you’re writing up the description for what the narrator is ultimately going to say in that space?

**Alice:** Exactly. So, once you’ve timed in the box, then you write the description. And so, the description will include anything that’s going on visually really. If you have a short space, then what you’re trying to get in is the relevant piece of information for a visually impaired person to understand what is happening in the film conceptually like plot-wise.

**John:** Now, are there any cases where you have to sort of move a piece of information from one time period to another time period because there wasn’t a space there to get that crucial detail in there? The Daredevil thing we just listened to, there was like a man sitting in a chair by the river. And it felt like it wasn’t especially important that you establish that now, as long you establish it in the scene. So do you ever slide where you describe something?

**Alice:** As much as possible, you try to get it in at the moment that it’s happening because you almost always describe in present tense or present tense continuous. But occasionally, of course, that happens. So there’ll be dialogue over a very important action. And then you can do something in past tense.

**John:** Describing in the present tense, screenplays are also written in the present tense. Do you ever look at the original screenplay for the movie as you’re doing the descriptions?

**Alice:** Yes. If we have the script, that’s really, really helpful because, first of all, it will give you all the characters’ names. Because what you’re doing when you’re audio describing as well is, this sounds like a silly thing to say, but we’re trying to understand what’s going on as quickly as possible, which I guess you’re doing as a viewer of a movie.

But as an audio describer, you sort of have to be one step ahead. So you get very good at quickly understanding like a plot or a character and stuff like that. But having a script means that you have all the character names so that you can correctly identify characters easily. If you have a, what’s it called, like a spotting script, you’ll have visual directions as well, which of course are really, really useful to us because it’s not always really obvious where you are all the time.

**John:** What was the most difficult movie you had to describe?

**Alice:** The most [laughs] difficult film I have ever described, without a doubt, is David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

**John:** And why was it difficult?

**Alice:** Have you seen Inland Empire?

**John:** I have seen it. It feels like you would have a very hard time explaining what was on the screen.

**Alice:** So there were so many reasons that it was hard. I’m a massive Lynch fan, but it is a deeply weird movie even for Lynch. So you have these scenes where there are sort of like human-like figures but with bunny heads kind of interspersed into the other plot. I call it a plot. I mean, it’s certainly not a linear or obvious story.

The other thing that was really, really hard was that there’s two characters that are actors who also play a role that has a different name. So, essentially, they’re playing two characters. And at a certain point in the movie, you can no longer be certain whether they’re the actor or the role. You know, they switch between the two characters sort of fluidly and you don’t really know.

And so it’s the only time ever, really, in an audio description that I’ve broken the fourth wall because I just didn’t know anymore. So I just was like, “Listen, guys, it might be this character or this character. I mean, I’ll choose a name but, you know, from here on in, you can decide for yourself because I don’t know anymore.”

**John:** Well, it sounds like the descriptive audio is trying to make something that is potentially ambiguous and make it less ambiguous. So someone who’s listening to just the soundtrack might not really know what’s going on. And so your job is to make it more clear what’s going on.

And in the case of Inland Empire, you just can’t do that because you, yourself as a viewer, have no clear sense of what is supposed to be happening and what the audience is supposed to be feeling.

**Alice:** Absolutely.

**John:** Do you ever use wes or like do you use the second person plural? In screenwriting, we often will fall back to ‘we see’, ‘we hear’, ‘we do this’, or is it just simple present tense scene description?

**Alice:** We tend to avoid that [laughs] because I think sometimes it can take you out of the moment almost. We tend to also avoid using any kind of technical language about shots or, you know, camera angles or anything like that. We may very, very rarely use those if it’s extremely relevant. Like, for example, in a kind of 3D thing, if something leaps out at you. Or if maybe somebody turns to the camera and sort of like addresses the camera directly, we might say that because that’s quite an unusual thing to happen in a film. But, yeah, we tend to just present tense, very simple.

**John:** Great. Alice, how does somebody get your job?

**Alice:** [laughs] Well, I just did a writing test and a voice test to get my job. Obviously, you have to be quite a good writer, she says bidding herself up. You have to be very concise a lot of the time because you’ll have so little time and you really have to get across those salient points for a visually impaired person to be able to understand the film.

You also have to sound fairly decent on a microphone. And I think sometimes having a nice voice isn’t always enough. I think it took me a while, actually, to sound natural on a microphone. At first, I think I was quite nervous. But audio descriptions should sort of fit in with the film. It shouldn’t jolt you out of the film. So you should be able to kind of weave in and out quite naturally, which is actually also more difficult than it sounds I think.

**John:** When you’re writing this description, how often are you going to be the person who’s doing the narration versus another person?

**Alice:** They tend to try and give you films that you will voice because it’s much easier to — because what you do when you record is, again, the software will queue you up to every description but only sort of a second or two seconds before each run. So if you’re reading your own work, it is of course much easier because you sort of have an idea of what’s coming up. You know, you don’t know it off by heart but you know what you’ve written.

Whereas if you’re sight-reading someone else’s work, that’s quite difficult. So they do try to give you the writing if you’re going to record. But it doesn’t always work out like that.

**John:** Are there cases where a movie will have a lot of women characters in it and they therefore would want to have a man be the other voice so no one gets confused or people just can sort that out?

**Alice:** Well, no, absolutely. And the film companies will often choose the voice of the film. So they might get sent a few samples. And, yeah, they definitely sometimes choose, you know, a man because it’s mainly women and therefore to sort of, yeah, differentiate. But, again, like I said, I sort of get chosen for a lot of lighthearted things because apparently I sound lighthearted even though I’m a very serious person. And normally, you’ll probably get a man doing an action film and a woman doing a rom-com and that kind of thing.

**John:** That’s great. Alice, thank you so much for talking us through this. I understand this so much better than I did five minutes ago.

**Alice:** [laughs] That’s good, great.

**John:** Great. Alice, thank you.

**Alice:** You’re welcome.

**John:** And that is descriptive audio. So, thank you to everybody who wrote in with suggestions and especially for people who put me in contact with Alice to talk about what it was like to write descriptive audio, a thing I knew nothing about and a week later, I know so much more.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a big job.

**John:** Big job.

**Craig:** You know, there’s this other hidden job that I would love for you and I — you know what, I just had an idea, John. John, every now and then, I have an idea. So you write a movie, the movie gets made. And then as we all know, the movie play overseas. What we forget is that all across the world, in many, many, many countries, there are people whose job is to dub the movie. Most American movies play overseas dubbed, I believe. I mean, you can probably find some subtitled versions, too.

But the people who dub in the other languages, that’s a fascinating gig because they have to essentially do this really quickly. Sometimes, you know, with the way things are released, they maybe have two weeks to dub an entire movie. And then translation is a real art. You know, especially in comedy, you have a line, it’s a joke but it’s based on wordplay, how do you translate that? How does it make sense?

I’d love to get somebody on who does that for a living, to talk to them about how they go through the way the screenplay is showing through the movie and how they turn that into another language.

**John:** So, luckily, I know several people who do this for a living.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. These are French friends who do it. And your instinct is right in that in many markets, movies are dubbed. In many markets, movies are subtitled. But often, the people who would do subtitling are not the same people who do dubbing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a completely complicated, crazy world in which they work. But, yes, I can get them on the air and they would be fantastic. One of them, Mannu, actually did a blog post for me, talking through what his process was. So I’ll put a link to Mannu’s post in the show notes.

**Craig:** Well, great.

**John:** But we’ll get either him or my friend, Fred, on to talk about that job because it is really crazy. And so my husband, Mike, who speaks French, sometimes Mannu will email Mike saying like, “What does this joke even mean?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Like, essentially, he’s looking at an American movie, he’s like, “I’m trying to understand what this is actually supposed to be.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Mike will give him some sense of what it could be and so then Mannu has to find the French equivalent.

**Craig:** What if Mike just had no sense of humor?

**John:** That would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. So he would just guess at what it meant. It’s so confusing for the world over.

**John:** Yeah. Well, I think what’s also interesting, the difference between people who are doing dubbing and subtitling versus descriptive audio is that the dubbers and subtitlers are almost invariably, they are native speakers of the language they are converting into. So they speak English but they’re converting it into French or Arabic or some other language.

People who are doing descriptive audio necessarily need to be sighted so they can see what’s actually happening there but they also need to be able to experience the movie as a blind person would experience it. So the people who wrote in with their experiences about how they did it, some of them would talk about like watching something with the picture turned off just to see like what was there and what you could get with no visual information.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. Right, like you think to yourself, “Okay, I almost need to see it.” I mean, I assume with practice, that’s no longer necessary. But to watch it first without the picture and then see what emerged from you, well, that difference is what you’re filling in. Very cool.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** All right, onto this week’s show with some questions from listeners. Rick Silcox asks, “As a follow-up to the discussion about getting ideas from the media such as FIFA, can you talk about your processes for vetting your ideas? How much will you develop an idea in your head before you decide to start writing it or drop the idea? Once you’ve started writing, what will make you give up on the idea? Do you ever truly give up on a notion or do you keep it in mind in case some new revelation comes along?”

So, Craig, what is your vetting process for an idea?

**Craig:** Well, I would say there is the left brain vetting and the right brain vetting. The left brain needs to feel like there is a through line that can be followed where the end is a commentary on the beginning, that the process and journey of the movie will be interesting, and there will be places for characters to evolve and change, and that the premise of the movie is fertile ground for stuff to happen.

And that’s all good. But then there’s the right brain vetting which is, “Do I love this or is this just something I could do? Am I excited? Is this getting me going? Do I want to write this?” You know, early on in your career, you have to kind of shut your right brain down a little bit because you’re starving and you need to pay your rent. And so you’re like, “Well, I don’t love this but I could do it. So I will left brain my way through this. And maybe as I do it, I will come to love it. I will grow to love it.”

But, yeah, ideally, you want to have both. So I do drop ideas. I have ideas sometimes that people are like, “Yeah, we’d buy that.” And I think, “Great, let me just get to the place where I feel like I would be able to write it for sure.” And sometimes I don’t. And then I say, “Well, I’m not going to do it,” you know, because it doesn’t seem like something that would delight me.

And there’s only so many things you can write. We’re all on a clock. I’ve wasted a lot of time writing a lot of stuff I didn’t want to write. That’s the God’s honest truth. So I try now more than ever to only write things I do want to write.

**John:** Yeah. I completely understand that sense of lost time writing things that seemed like a good idea to write. It’s like your left brain convinces you like, “Oh, you should totally write that.” And I knew I could write that but it really wasn’t the thing I should have written. And there were some years that have been lost to sort of writing the wrong thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And some of those movies got made, some of those movies didn’t get made. Most of those movies didn’t get made. And on some level, it was I think in part because I didn’t fundamentally love them.

**Craig:** Honestly, it’s worse when they do get made. God’s honest truth, that’s the worst because then you’re sitting there like, “Why did no one stop this thing?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] One of my crucial questions for myself is, would I pay to see this movie? And if I wouldn’t pay to see this movie, then I have no business writing it. And that’s just a very simple gut check for me.

There was a project that got offered in my direction. I won’t say it was fully offered to me but like they said, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this thing?” And it was very tantalizing because it was very high profile kind of thing. And yet, as I had the phone call conversations with it and sort of went through it, I couldn’t fundamentally see myself being happy writing this movie three years from now.

And you have to approach any project like that as, you know, a multiyear commitment. And I just didn’t see myself necessarily wanting to spend all those years on this project to the exclusion of other projects. I mean, everything you say yes to is something else you’re saying no to. And the opportunity cost of this one was just higher than I was willing to spend.

That’s part of the reason why I think some writers in our position end up rewriting a bunch of other little things because the opportunity cost seems so much smaller to just spend a couple of weeks on something. It’s when you’ve done a couple of weeks on a bunch of things, you realize like, “Oh, wow, I could have written a whole other script in the time that I’ve been tinkering with these other people’s movies.”

**Craig:** I know. Yeah. I mean, people always wonder, “Why don’t they write original things anymore?” Well, because when you get the little jobs and they say, “Here, come on board for two weeks or three weeks,” in a weird way, there’s no pressure. People are saying, “Help us.” And you can definitely help in two or three weeks, always, you know.

I mean, if you’re decent, you’re hopefully not one of those people that’s going to make it go backwards but let’s say you don’t, you know what to do, you feel comfortable with it and you can make it go forward, it’s only two or three weeks of your life. That’s no big deal. And, you know, they pay you pretty well for those things. And you don’t have a sense of loss over it.

If someone says, “Oh, we just don’t like the thing you did on this part of it,” okay, I’ll change that. I mean, I get it. I’m here to visit for two or three weeks. You don’t feel the pain.

A lot of times, those jobs are like, they’re all ups and no downs. The only down is that, you know, you’re servicing something for two or three weeks and that’s not necessarily the kind of thing that you can do all the time. I mean, ultimately, Hollywood will ask you to do that stuff all the time, until one day, they go, “This guy is just one of those guys that just keeps taking from our plate. [laughs] What is he going to give?”

So you have to do both. And it’s tricky. These days, a lot of what I think about with my ideas is who would be the right person to collaborate on with this, whether it’s a director or a producer or an actor. And if I can think of the right person, then that also gets me excited because a lot of the work that I’ve done that I’ve been happiest with has been the product of good relationships.

**John:** That makes a lot of sense. Part of my vetting process is, “Can I write a trailer for it?” which seems really strange but like I have to have a sense of like I know what this movie would feel like on a screen. I know what somebody would see that would make them want to come spend, you know, $15 to see this on the big screen.

And so writing the trailer early on is sort of a crucial first step for me. Something I said in the 100th episode of Scriptnotes was I write the movie that has the best ending. And so if I don’t have a sense of where this movie is going to end up, I won’t start writing it.

And the last thing which has been really helpful for me is describing it to Kelly Marcel because for whatever reason, if Kelly Marcel is enthusiastic about something I’m thinking about writing, I suddenly want to write it because I want to keep Kelly happy.

**Craig:** She’s an amazing cheerleader that way. I’ve pitched many things over time to her and she’s just naturally very supportive about that stuff. Although, have you gotten like the anti-Marcel, like has she ever kind of just gotten heavy-lidded and like, “No?”

**John:** [laughs] You know, it was so funny because when you started to describe the anti-Marcel, I saw like a sadness in her eyes and I knew exactly what you were going for. Yes, I have seen that sort of like, you know, “Oh, yeah, I just felt my heart sink a little bit.” But those can be useful, too.

**Craig:** And then she went, “Um, John, um, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Yeah.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But that’s useful, too.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, you said a couple of things that I definitely do. I definitely think of the trailer. Specifically, I think of trailer moments because like I’ll go, all right, my left brain is good enough to know to not start writing something that you couldn’t make a trailer out of. But I’m looking for those moments where the trailer exceeds expectations and basically turns things on its head a little bit for people and they go, “Wait, what?” you know.

So that’s always useful. And the ending is everything. So, like you, I’m obsessed with the ending. And in fact, this thing I’m working on right now, you know, for months I’ve been thinking there’s something wrong with this beginning because I know what the ending is supposed to be but this beginning will never earn me that ending. And I kind of just had a meltdown about it two days ago and then went, “Oh, wait, wait, wait, I know what to do with this beginning.” And it’s the smallest thing and it will make me earn my ending and I’m happy now.

But until that happens, how do you proceed, you know? I need to know. The beginning and the ending is the movie. That’s the point of a movie.

**John:** Yeah. All right, next question. Will in San Diego writes, “I’m just starting to write my first screenplay. I wish to include the use of a specific song in my piece. Can I put the song in the screenplay and just change it later if necessary?”

Simple answer. What’s the simple answer, Craig?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, you may. You may cite the use of a specific song in your screenplay that is completely fine and fair use and no one will look askance. Does that mean that that song will necessarily be in the movie? No. But does it help the reader get a sense of what that section of the screenplay feels like? Sure, it could help.

Don’t make your screenplay be like a playlist because that is annoying. To me, my pet peeve is like capitalization, like that’s the thing where it’s like, “Come on, I’m reading a screenplay not a playlist.” But if the use of that song helps, go for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that what can strike a reader as amateurish is when you’ve got multiple scenes showing, say, a car driving down the road and we hear China Grove from The Doobie Brothers. You know, like, well, yes, we could hear a typical driving rock song there or another driving rock song. Don’t give me generic choices. If you’re going to do it, it has to be very purposeful.

Now, interesting, you got to find this weird middle space. It can’t be generic. It has to be purposeful. But it can’t be something that — at least I would recommend strongly that it’s not something that indicates to a buyer we absolutely must get this song because it’s now a plot point, you know.

Like in Cowboy Ninja Viking, there was this moment where the camera was sort of floating through this abandoned mental hospital. There is an abandoned hospital on — I’m not going to say where it is because I don’t want to give away my secret location. But this very cool, like from 1910, 1920 abandoned mental hospital.

And I wanted something that wasn’t like just creepy score. I didn’t want it to feel horror movie. I wanted it to feel like kind of odd and I wanted to comment on thematically what was going on with the main character who is about to enter this place.

And I’m a big Pink Floyd fan and there’s this great Pink Floyd song called If. And it’s, you know, as far as Floyd goes, it’s fairly obscure. Not a lot of people know it but it has these really beautiful lyrics and this really beautiful feeling to it, so I included that. I even included the lyrics because I felt like I’m writing a visual montage and I’m suggesting that this is sort of the tone that we would go for so that you understand how it feels.

And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean it has to be that song, but it’s not a generic song.

**John:** Yeah. In my script for Dark Shadows, there’s a section in which Barnabas Collins kills all the members of this terrible cult. And it is scored to Sunshine of Your Love which was just a lovely sort of counterpoint to the horrific violence of the scene. And it was a charming sequence which I wish would have shot.

And that’s the case where they probably would have used that song. But they didn’t have to use that song. But it gave you a good feel for what that section was supposed to feel like. It gave you a sense of what the texture of that section was.

**Craig:** There’s a great Sunshine of Your Love section of Goodfellas, I believe.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** [makes guitar sound]

**John:** [makes guitar sound] You know what, I said Sunshine of Your Love, I meant Age of Aquarius.

**Craig:** Totally different song.

**John:** This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It’s a different song.

**Craig:** That is a completely different song.

**John:** But happy in that sort of happy in the ’70s way.

**Craig:** Yeah, because Sunshine of Your Love actually is kind of creepy. But, yeah, Age of Aquarius is a little more upbeat and “harmony and understanding”.

**John:** Yeah, so when you’re decapitating people with a sword, it’s a fun choice.

**Craig:** Yup, that is a fun choice.

**John:** Brad in Maryland writes, “I’ve been working on a buddy road trip comedy between a fictional character and a celebrity from a ’90s sitcom. The celebrity character is a completely outrageous, obviously fictional portrayal. The only thing he shares with the real person is his name and a love interest from the ’90s. I don’t intend for this to be made. It’s merely a writing sample. And if it generates buzz on The Black List, that’s a plus. Am I vulnerable to a libel lawsuit if I continue down this road? I know libel needs to be false and defamatory statements of fact. But do celebrities get special treatment because of their brand?”

Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I think celebrities do get special treatment in favor of you. They’re public figures. So, essentially, they are more open to lampooning and spoofing and parodying than people that aren’t public figures. You should be fine. I mean, the basic test is, would anybody reasonably assume that what you’re suggesting in the screenplay is true and that this person has done those things?

The fact that it’s already a fictional screenplay, I mean, you can write [laughs] a fictional screenplay on the cover if you want. But, you know, the other issue is damages. Generally speaking, if somebody, let’s see, it’s a celebrity from a ’90s sitcom. I’ll go with television’s Matthew Perry.

So, Matthew, you’ve written a buddy road trip comedy about, you know, a guy who meets Matthew Perry in a bar and they go on the road. Matthew Perry finds out about this and he goes, “Oh, my god, the script is suggesting that I’m blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah and I’m not. And that’s defamatory.” And he runs to his lawyer and his lawyer says, “Well, yeah, but what are the damages at this point? You’re going to sue this Brad in Maryland, you know?”

And Brad, I mean, unless you’re a DuPont — oh, no, those are Delaware, aren’t they? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’m just going to assume, Brad, you’re just an average American guy who has a certain amount of assets that would not be significant to the star of a ’90s sitcom, so he’s not going to want to sue you. What he would want to do is wait and sue the movie [laughs] or the studio. And so their legal department will make their process through.

I don’t think that you would be vulnerable to a libel lawsuit. I, not an attorney, do not think that you would be vulnerable. So if you want to cover that base for sure, always best to talk to a lawyer.

**John:** Brad, I think you have precedent on your side, too. If you look at Being John Malkovich, John Malkovich was not involved in that project until it was going to become a movie. So his name was in the title and it was not yet involving him.

Another example is Harold & Kumar. I could be wrong but I think Neil Patrick Harris was always scripted in to be that role in Harold & Kumar. And he is obviously a fictional version of himself and he decided to do it. I think it’s not a bad idea, honestly, to take — a good execution of what you’re describing could be a great writing example that people enjoy reading. And the ability to sort of, you know, tweak a known celebrity’s persona could be fine.

So, basically don’t worry about it. Forge ahead, I say.

**Craig:** I’m with that, yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take this last one?

**Craig:** Sure. Anthony, Anthony writes, “The New York Times just published a feature about the lawlessness of the High Seas, basically crimes that can happen onboard cargo ships on Trans-Atlantic voyages. Note, the article isn’t about pirating, as portrayed in Captain Phillips. It’s a world I probably wouldn’t have known about if not for this one specific article. In doing some more additional research, there isn’t much documentation of it elsewhere online.

It’s not a commonly known or reported world and the events that take place in a completely fictionalized story would likely resemble events referenced in the article because the article talks broadly about the types of crimes that take place onboard these ships. Because this article is essentially the only source of that information, couldn’t The New York Times, theoretically speaking, say that I infringed their copyright or not obtained the rights to the article when they feel I should have?”

**John:** I thought this was a really good question because it talks about that sort of murky grey line between what are just facts that are available for everyone to use and what is specific implementation of details that are protectable by copyright. And I thought this fell in a really nice zone where he couldn’t find anything that wasn’t in this article that talks about the things he wants to talk about. And so if he wants to make a movie about this specific thing, he would be well-served, I think, having the rights to this article.

Now, let’s say he liked a lot of the ideas in it but like, “But I want to set this in space,” well, just go for it. But because, to me, this felt like he wants to use some very specific details that he could only find in this article, he should strongly consider getting this article. Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** It is, I would say, de rigueur for studios to pick up articles like this. In fact, somebody probably already has. And therein lies your problem, Anthony. They’ll buy the rights to these articles. When they buy the rights to the articles, I always feel like most of the time what they’re really buying is the right to the whole body of work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the article isn’t going to cover everything. So, all of their research, all of their sources, the ability to talk to their contacts, the contact information, it just becomes a lot easier.

Here’s a simple truth. Facts are in the public domain. So The New York Times does not own the facts in that story that they’ve reported. You may use any of those facts because they’re facts. People, so for instance, there’s a captain of one of the boats. Well, if elements of his life are suddenly appearing in your movie, that’s an issue most likely because he’s not a public figure. So you would have to get life rights.

A lot of times, what happens with articles is that agencies will represent both the article writer, the journalist, and the key person that the story is about or if there is a key person, the life rights, so that it’s all bundled together into one package so that you’re free and clear to make the movie you need to make.

In this case, I would think that you shouldn’t worry about The New York Times. You should worry about the people that The New York Times is quoting. That’s just my gut feeling. And that you should fictionalize your characters so that they’re not overlapping with real people’s lives. That becomes a problem. The facts that there are boats and these crimes take place, those facts are free and clear to all human beings.

**John:** I think you made some really crucial distinction in that in most cases, it’s not a screenwriter who goes out and gets the rights to a New York Times’ article, it’s a producer. It’s a producer or it’s a studio who says, we think there is a story idea here and we’re going to try to lock this down so that we can make a movie about this. And they want something they can protect and defend so that they can then hire on a writer to write them that movie.

And so a lot of movies you wouldn’t think are based on articles are based on things like this. So way back to like the John Travolta movie, Perfect, I think it’s based on like a Rolling Stone article about aerobics instructors. There’s —

**Craig:** Saturday Night Fever. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So there are weird examples of movies you wouldn’t think would have to be based on anything, which are based on non-fiction articles. So there is a precedent for it. Could you have made a movie like Saturday Night Fever without an underlying article? Of course, you could have. But somebody wanted to make a movie in that space and they bought that article and therefore the movie became based upon that article.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I would say in a very general sense, if you as an individual writer want to do something set in a specific world and there’s, you know, there’s limited research, but there’s one article you find. I would not set your hopes on getting the rights to that one article because you are then bound to that article and you’re bound to the underlying article rights of that article. And it just becomes complicated. The degree to which writer can control his or her complete destiny and not have any chain of title issues behind your property, you’re going be happier and better.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree.

**John:** Cool. Last final topic for this week’s show is the WGA financial report which just came out. And Craig took a look through it. I’ve just cracked it open. But Craig, can you give us any highlights from this financial report?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. It’s not good news for those of us who work in movies, I’ll tell you that much. Total earnings for writers were basically flat from the year prior, technically down 0.2%, I think that’s essentially a flat line.

And the number of writers reporting earnings, so how many of us worked, down 1% from last year overall. If you’re interested in knowing, the number of writers reporting earnings in 2014, 4,899. So just under 5,000 professional writers in the Writers Guild West. Very small amount.

**John:** Very small amount.

**Craig:** That’s it. Yeah.

**John:** If you want to read along with us, we’ll have a link for this in the show notes. You can see a PDF of the annual report. So the WGA is required to publish this every year to show what its members are actually earning, what’s coming in for both film and for television and in residuals.

And so the television picture is I think as we could anecdotally guess is not that bad. It was actually — there’s pretty good employment in television. If you are a writer who wanted to work in Hollywood, television would seem to be the place to go. So what’s the best numbers to look at? What’s the best chart here? Earnings and employment in screen.

**Craig:** Well, first we’ll say that television in terms of number of writers reporting in was sort of flat. It was up 1% and earning is up 2.3%, which is not bad. It beats the bank account these days.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But of interest is you’ve got 4,900 writers reporting earnings in Writers Guild West. Of that 4,900, a full 3,900 of them, so essentially, you know, three-quarters, right, or more are in TV. So that’s a lot. Now, there are some that write in TV and movies, so there’s some overlap. But the great bulk of people working and voting in the Writers Guild West are TV writers.

Now, if everything is flat, then hopefully it stayed at least flat or better in screen — oh, here comes the — here, it just get worse and worse. And by the way, as far as I can tell, no plan. Not plan to stop it. And I’m not sure that there is a plan that will stop it.

Earnings and employment in screen, the number of writers — so to contrast, in 2009, there were 3,166 working writers in television. 2014, 3,888. So that’s an increase of about 700 and a little bit. In screen, we’ve dropped about 300, from 1,836 in 2009 to 1,556 in 2014. But what is even worse is that that has been a steady trend down and down and down. For instance, this year, down almost 6% in terms of working screenwriters from the prior year. And I’m talking about 2014 to 2013.

And then of course, what are we making? And not surprisingly, fewer writers means less money. It’s not like they’re spending the same amount of money and just giving fewer writers more of it. The pie is shrinking. And it has been shrinking steadily year after year after year in a kind of grinding freefall. The total earnings reported in 2009 for screen were $432 million. In 2014, we’re down to $313 million. That’s about 70% of what it was in 2009. And it dropped 5.5% from 2013 to 2014. I have no reason to think it’s not going to get worse. It just, it’s bad. It’s bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And part of the problem for guys like you and me is that we are now kind of entering a minority phase in our union. We are both a numeric minority and we are a financial minority. And our interests will, as this — it’s a real catch 22, the less you make and the fewer of you there are, the less power you have to use, you know, to kind of exercise you and your muscle to help yourselves. So I’m not sure what to do.

**John:** I don’t know what to do either. If there’s any, you know, silver lining to all of this is that the gains in television have made up for some of the losses in screen, on the big screen. And so therefore, some of these writers who are not making a living on writing for features are making a writing living in television and maybe they’re happy in television, so maybe it’s not a bad thing.

But if you’re a writer, whose goal is to really work on the big screen, it’s increasingly less likely you’re going to have a great career doing that.

The last bit to look at here is total residuals, which seemed fairly flat to me. Theatrical residuals were down 0.15% from 13 to 15. Television residuals were up 4.8%. That’s not the worst thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean the residuals are — because the residuals are based on the library, they will shield you from certain realities for a while. But there will be an echo. What’s happening now in feature film employment will echo forward. And we will see the commensurate drop in residuals down the line. It’s inevitable because they’re just not making as many movies.

**John:** Exactly. So fewer movies being made, fewer movies getting residuals. And then we don’t know what the structural changes to people not buying DVDs anymore, people streaming. We don’t know the full extent to which that’s going implement how much money is coming in on those checks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We did see a kind of an interesting bump in theatrical reuse, miscellaneous theatrical reuse. I don’t know what that means. I’m kind of curious about that because they breakdown theatricals residuals — the big number is in television.

So we make movies and then they replay them on TV all over the world for free essentially, but supported by ads of course. Then there’s home video, which we all know. It’s been, I mean, decimated from — it’s dropped from 2009 to 2014, that’s down 36%, horrendous.

Pay TV continues a nice climb. So that’s your HBOs and so forth. DVD script fee is nonsense, it doesn’t matter. It’s $5,000 every time you write a movie. New media reuse is up, not surprisingly, 1,421% [laughs] over the last five years. But in doing so, only now is starting to hit numbers that are significant. So for instance, pay TV generates $53 million in residuals in 2014 for screenwriters, new media reuse, $11.5 million. But still, better.

Then there’s this thing, this miscellaneous theatrical reuse. The numbers aren’t big. I’m just kind of —

**John:** I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** I don’t know what it is either. I wonder what that is. Anyway, they’re small numbers, who cares? Point being, total theatrical residuals, down 1.5%. Total television residuals, up nearly 5%. And I got to say, anything that goes up 5% right now when a typical savings account is giving you 0.7%, is really good. And down 1.5% is really bad. And that’s going to — that number, I’m afraid, is going to get worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah, I’m looking through why the numbers are up for television residuals. And the big gains seem to be in obviously new media reuse, so that’s the new services that we have for doing stuff. And great, as we talked about on the show before, writers get more money in residuals if they rent a movie on iTunes than they would have if they were to stream a movie on Netflix and honestly probably more money than it would on a DVD sale, at least DVD sale at most common prices. So we’ll see. There’s some reason for optimism there.

It is time to wrap up our show. So let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this weird sculpture website that I went to and actually bought something off it. It’s a place called Bathsheba. And Craig, click on the link because I think you’ll actually really dig these things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** They’re basically these things you can buy that are sort of paper weight size generally and they’re all 3D printed, but they’re 3D printed in metal. And there are these impossible shapes that look like, I don’t know, things we’d find in Star Trek. They are just kind of great.

So there are knots that seem impossible. The thing I’m holding is sort of — it’s four-sided, it sort of feels like a four-sided die, but it’s actually all one piece, but it’s sharp and spiky. It feels like you could throw it as cling on weapon. I just really dug it.

So I found this site through Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which is another great site. I’ll put a link in the show notes, which has just like random stuff you can buy. So Bathsheba Sculptures is my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That one that you have, I think it’s called Rajina.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like a spiky kind of —

**Craig:** It could be Rajina.

**John:** Rajina, the queen.

**Craig:** Nothing there — a Rajina is not a spiky pipe. Okay. Here we go. One Cool Thing for me. Oh, so here’s like an interesting one. It’s like a One Cool Thing that’s trumped an old One Cool Thing. So it’s an app called MacID. So we talked about Knock before. That was one of our One Cool Things. And the idea of Knock was you’ve got your computer locked down with a simple login password. And instead of having to type in your password every time, you can just — your phone will know, the app on the phone syncs up Bluetooth-wise with your computer. It knows that it needs that. And it says, hey, knock on the back of me. And you knock on the back of your phone and it fills the password in for you and it’s great.

And that was great for a bit and then it just stopped working for me.

**John:** It’s not working for me too.

**Craig:** Okay. It’s just a mess. I don’t know what happened with it. But it ain’t working. Even worse, the whole point of it which was knocking on stuff basically became obliterated once they introduced the touch ID functionality. And even Knock was like no more knocking, just use touch. It just doesn’t work at least for me and for you [laughs] for 1,000% of us, it doesn’t work.

So MacID, same thing. I mean in terms of what it’s supposed to do and it does it. And it works.

**John:** It’s great.

**Craig:** So get it.

**John:** But I haven’t tried it yet. I’m excited to try it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Now, Craig, my question for you is, you and I both have Apple watches. Shouldn’t our computers just that we are in front of them because we have our Apple watches on? Shouldn’t that be identify enough?

**Craig:** It should and it — well, it is. But the point is you may not want to unlock your computer just because you’re walking by it. So actually MacID works really well with your watch. So when I sit down — maybe the first time after a couple of hours, it takes like a second or two and then my wrist buzzes and I look down and I tap my thing and unlocked.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** But then after that, you know, it’s really quick and like, boop, boop, and it fills in your passwords. I’m very happy with it.

**John:** Great. That is our show this week. Reminder, that if you have an idea for a Scriptnotes t-shirt, we would love to see it. So go to johnaugust.com/shirts and there’s some instructions there for how you can tell the world about your Scriptnotes -t-shirt idea. August 11th is the deadline for that.

If you would like to know more about some of the things we talked about, there are show notes at johnaugust.com. Just search johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and you’ll see all of the back episodes including transcripts.

Thank you Stuart Friedel for getting those transcripts together. He’s our producer. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. I would like to thank Alice for coming on the show to talk to us about describers and what they do. And Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

Links:

* [Submit your Fall 2015 Scriptnotes shirt design](http://johnaugust.com/shirt) by August 11
* [Capitals](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/capitals-free-word-battle/id968456900?mt=8) for iOS
* [MovieBob Reviews: Pixels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFD2293oGvA) (NSFW)
* [Subtitling for screenwriters](http://johnaugust.com/2013/subtitling-for-screenwriters) on johnaugust.com
* [Can you reference specific, proper-noun products/songs/locations/etc. in your screenplay?](http://screenwriting.io/can-you-reference-specific-proper-noun-productssongslocationsetc-in-your-screenplay/) on screenwriting.io
* [2015 WGAw Annual Report to Writers](http://wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=230)
* [Bathsheba Sculptures](https://www.bathsheba.com/)
* Kevin Kelly’s [Cool Tools](http://kk.org/cooltools/)
* [MacID](http://macid.co/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))