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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-writing-credits-work).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 193 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you and I both this week were working on rewrites. How did yours turn out?

**Craig:** So far so good. I made it to the end. And —

**John:** That’s always a good place to end?

**Craig:** Well, but, you know, I’m fond of saying that “The End” are the two biggest lies that we can tell ourselves as screenwriters. So, all I’ve really done is reach the end. So, now, Lindsay Doran has the whole draft. I will be spending next week with her going through everything. And then off it goes to Scott Frank and to Working Title and to Universal. So, you know, high hopes. High hopes. How about you?

**John:** Yeah, I was doing the paper edit this week. And so, I like to print out the script and sort of go through it page by page, really read it, you know, do all of that sort of noticing of typos and mistakes, and then things I could cut, things I could change. And then as I’m going through it, and then figuring out like these are the new scenes, this is what’s swapping out there. I will sort of write on the left-hand page the new stuff that goes in there. So I’m just now typing in those changes. But I feel good about it.

**Craig:** Well, listen, man. I would like [laughs] for our movies to be out at the same time. They’re both family movies, I believe.

**John:** Oh, the same weekend.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re both family movies. So I think we should go head to head. It’ll be the ultimate Three Page Challenge. It would be a two-hour challenge.

**John:** That would be fantastic. It would be a two-hour challenge. Speaking of hours, did you buy yourself an Apple Watch this morning? We’re recording this on Friday. Did you buy an Apple Watch?

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] So I don’t —

**John:** Me too. I wasn’t planning to, but I did.

**Craig:** No, I was actually planning on not doing it. So I was planning on buying the Apple Watch. Then I checked some reviews and things. And The New York Times was very favorable. There was a pretty good in-depth review that someone else wrote that didn’t seem quite as favorable. And then I remembered that I don’t care about reviews. So then I just thought, “Oh, you know what, I guess maybe I’ll wait. I’ll wait, I’ll check it out. I’ll hear from my friends.” And then, suddenly, there I was at midnight tapping away like a monkey hitting a bar that —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Spits out cocaine-wrapped bacon. It should be bacon-wrapped cocaine.

**John:** Yeah, I guess so. Because it’s really hard — you could dust bacon with cocaine.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** But you can’t wrap it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m hitting the bar like a monkey —

**John:** Or like a tempura sort of thing. Like a cocaine in a tempura batter.

**Craig:** Yeah, like cocaine battered bacon. So there I am. And so, I did it. Now, which version did you get?

**John:** I got the cheapest one I could get or almost the cheapest. I got the larger size. I didn’t get the little teeny tiny one. But I got the larger one with the sport band, space gray throughout. So it was like $399.

**Craig:** Is that the Watch Sport? Is that that version or —

**John:** I think it’s Watch Sport, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I went for a standard watch. So not the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, the [laughs] absurd collector’s item. It just —

**John:** You went for steel rather than aluminum.

**Craig:** There you go. So I went for the standard watch, the larger size with the Milanese Loop.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, that should be a nice watch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** So mine is just to see what the watch is like. I haven’t worn a watch in 20 years, but this might be a watch I’ll wear. We’ll see.

**Craig:** I know. That’s the thing. I haven’t worn a watch either in 20 years. But, you know, I remember when I put my wedding ring on, I was like, “What the — what is this? I don’t wear jewelry. What am I, a gypsy? Now I’m wearing jewelry?” And —

**John:** And now it’s bizarre not to have my wedding ring on.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I was the same way.

**Craig:** It’s just, it fits, right? So it’s just there and you feel it all the time. And I know that the watch will be that way, too. The real question is, from the summaries that I was reading, the great blessing and curse of the Apple Watch is that it uses this Taptic Engine to notify you when things are happening. So, little taps on your wrists of different kinds. Like here’s a tap for email, here’s a tap for text, here’s a tap… — well, sometimes, you’re just getting a lot of texts and you don’t want to and it’s annoying. So, it’s about adjusting how you get notifications. I don’t want my phone tapping me on the wrist every time some Facebook thing happens or something, you know, so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’ll be a lot of customization.

**John:** A lot to learn.

**Craig:** Yeah, but it’s fun. And you and I are pretty hardcore dorks. So, it’ll be exciting.

**John:** Absolutely. One day, you’ll be able to like sit down in your fancy car and the car will recognize you that you’re in the car and will just start.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of already does that.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah, my car does that [laughs] because —

**John:** Well, I mean, you have to have the key fob in your pocket to do that, correct?

**Craig:** Yes, I do have to have the key fob in my pocket.

**John:** And soon, it’ll be just your watch.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the nice thing about the Tesla is you don’t have to actually turn the car on. There’s no on button. You sit, you close the door, you put it in gear. You’re off. And there’s no gears, actually. You put it in mode.

**John:** Mode.

**Craig:** Mode.

**John:** All right, this podcast, this episode is in the education mode. Because this podcast, we’re going to be talking about screen credits. We’re going to be talking about how writing credits work. So this is going to be one of those really long in-depth episodes. I don’t really want to say long. I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to be long, but it’s certainly going to be in-depth. We talked about screen credits way back in episode 20. That was back when we had like five people listening to the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s way back in the archives. And I’m sure everything we said in there was accurate. But my goal with this episode, and I think together we can do this, is that I want to have so much knowledge imparted that if you listen to this whole episode, you will understand more about screen credits than 90% of working screenwriters.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Do you think we can do that?

**Craig:** I know we can do that. We are going to basically deliver the definitive walkthrough of credits, which I hope is not only listened to by members of the Writers Guild or prospective members of the Writers Guild, but also people who write about credits. Because, frankly, they often get a ton of stuff wrong.

So, we can really walk you through the whole shebang here, which is complicated but interesting in its own way so that whether you’re a fan of movies, or you’re a writer, or you write about movies, you will understand exactly what this credit arbitration thing is. How it actually works from top to bottom. You will be an expert when we’re done with you.

**John:** I hope so. And it was reports in the news this last week that sort of prompted this discussion. Because this last week in Deadline Hollywood Daily, there were articles about the arbitration process over the new Jurassic Park, Jurassic World is the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the final decision came down. And the final credits for Jurassic World when it opens in theaters will read Screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and, A-N-D, Colin Trevorrow & Derek Connolly. Story by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, based on characters created by Michael Crichton.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** At the end of this episode, we will understand what that means and sort of how they got to this place. We will also understand why writers are sometimes frustrated and confused, and sort of unhappy about the writing credit determination process.

This is what Trevorrow said about this whole process. “I have spoken with Rick and Amanda several times over the past few days,” Trevorrow told Deadline. “Though we may not agree on specifics of the ruling, we share a disdain for the arbitration process and the ugliness that it often breeds. Our conversations ended in a spirit I’d like to think the Guild would support — that a credit should be equally shared. Jurassic World is a special film, and I’d rather acknowledge these writers as co-designers of this adventure than bitter enemies who must be avoided at parties. That kind of animosity isn’t in the spirit of our craft, or our organization. Though I remain a proud member of the WGA, I encourage my fellow members to work together to find alternate ways to evaluate our contributions.”

So that is Colin Trevorrow, one of the writers and the director of Jurassic World talking about it. And I think by the end of our podcast, we’ll have a better understanding of what he was going into and sort of what the reality is of getting your name up on that screen really involves.

**Craig:** Well, let’s begin by taking a close look at something he said here which isn’t quite specific enough. And in doing so, I’m going to kick a little bit of a hornet’s nest. Because the WGA or the Guild does not determine credits the way people —

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Use those, huh? In fact, the WGA West or WGA East determines credits. So we have two unions, West and East. Now, a lot of people will immediately say why? And the answer is, don’t know, it was that way back in the ’40s when long distance was, you know, super expensive. It makes no sense now. That’s a whole other episode.

**John:** Wouldn’t the whole history, though, be that television was largely based out of New York and features were largely based out of Los Angeles and overtime that sort of changed. But that was — originally, they were very different beasts. Is that accurate in any sort of historical context?

**Craig:** No, kind of not really.

**John:** Yeah, I’m probably wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean a little bit, but no. I mean, it doesn’t matter. The truth is, it’s one of those things we live with now and in an age where we’re constantly revising the world around us to be better this has resisted revision for political reasons essentially. But it is important to understand here that in this case, the credit determination process was messy, from what I can see. It did contain a very strange inaccuracy. There was a second review of it. And it was conducted by the Writers Guild East.

Now, let’s talk about who determines credits and why it matters. So, the Writers Guild West or the Writers Guild East determines credits. Here’s the way the rules work. If a majority of participating writers on a project are West members, the West handles it. If a majority of the members on a project are East members, the East handles it. If there’s exactly the same number, tie goes to the West. The West handles it.

Well, aren’t the two unions governed by the same collective bargaining agreement? And aren’t they governed by the same Screen Credits Manual and guidelines? Absolutely. So what’s the big difference? Well, the Writers Guild West has well over 7,000 members. And more importantly, it has probably 50 or 60 attorneys working at the Guild. The credits department of The Writers Guild West handles the vast majority of arbitrations and most of the principals in that department, principal staff members, are attorneys. And they are very, very good at what they do.

Now, I’m not a Writers Guild East member, but I can tell you this. I believe, last I heard, a few years ago, they had one lawyer on their staff. Their staff is something like 20 to 30 people. They really don’t like when I say things like this. They get very, very fussy about it. And generally speaking, this is my opinion, if I could choose which guild would be managing my credit arbitration, I would really, really want the West to do it.

In this case, a very strange decision came down initially where there wasn’t a story credit. There almost had to be a story credit. It was by the rules. I couldn’t begin to explain what they did or how it worked out that way.

But important for you guys to know out there, the West handles most credit arbitrations, but there are cases where the East does. So, be aware of that. In this case, I don’t know who the participating writers were beyond the credited writers, but I believe Colin is an East Coast guy. I don’t know Rick and Amanda.

**John:** I believe Derek is as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s an East Coast team. If there were no other participating writers and except for Rick and Amanda, then I presume they must be East Coast because this was an East jurisdiction. So, that’s right off the bat. There’s a funky little thing.

**John:** Yes. So let’s talk about why determining credit matters and sort of why we have this system at all. So if we didn’t have the Writers Guild West or the Writers Guild East determining credits, how would we figure out who got screenplay credit?

**Craig:** Well, we don’t have to ask. We know, because in our inception as a union, we did not have credit protection. And so credits were determined by the companies. And in fact, that system still exists today for feature films that are not covered by the Writers Guild, most notably animated films. So when you go to see a Pixar movie, there are credits up there for writing. And those credits are at the sole determination of Pixar. And if they think you deserve it, you get it. And if they don’t, you don’t. If they love you, probably that would be good. If they do not love you, probably that would be bad.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Similarly, if you have an arrangement in your contract where you are set to receive a bonus should you get screen credit, it would obviously be in the company’s interest to not give you screen credit if it would cost them a lot of money. And, of course, there are issues of abuse where they could theoretically put, particularly in the case of writer-directors and writer-producers who just say, “Look, I want this credit for myself and we’re all chummy here. You know, just give it to me.” So that’s the major thing we’re avoiding.

And then there’s also the secondary thing that’s actually written into our collective bargaining agreement that says that the WGA is in the business of protecting the dignity of the credit. We want our credit to mean something. It is a special credit. It is not like other credits on a movie, other crew credits. It is both a credit that says I wrote this movie and it’s a credit that indicates proper authorship of a movie. Even though we don’t have copyright, there’s an implication of authorship there. So our credits mean something and we want to protect their dignity.

**John:** Absolutely. So, while we’ve often talked about on the show how filmmaking is an incredibly collaborative process. So, at every level, everyone involved in the film is helping to make that film possible. People who are writing the film, people who are directing the film have an interest in defining some authorship, defining that their work is the principal creative driving force behind this film existing.

And it’s one of the reasons why, you know, you might see 15 different companies listed in the visual effects in a very visual effects intensive movie. But you should hopefully only see one writing credit that reflects who the individual or the team that was principally responsible for this movie. Even if more than one writer wrote it, there’s been a determination of who is most responsible for this film. And that is the process that goes through arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right. And our credit isn’t manipulable the way that a lot of crew credits are where you could say, “Well, here’s 100 people that worked on visual effects. But these people are artists, these people are supervisors, these people are producers. The person is the, you know, the ultimate, the visual effects master.” Writing is writing. And so we don’t have junior writers, senior writers or stuff like that. We just have writers. Did you author this movie or not?

Directors are shielded from this to almost exclusive extent because the job of directing a film is singular. We don’t direct. I mean, by the way, it used to be that they would have three or four directors on movies, but we’re talking about back to the ’20s and ’30s. In modern filmmaking, one director makes the film. You cannot successfully replace that director once, twice, three, or four times on any regular basis.

So you will not really, I mean, there are occasional times where directors are replaced. And there are director credit arbitrations. They’re exceedingly rare. But because of the nature of what we do comes before production, it’s obviously quite common.

**John:** So the crucial sort of third piece of that creative triumvirate is the producer. And producer credits have, as we talked about on the show before, proliferated. And so one of the things you will start to see increasingly in films these days is a credit after the person’s name saying PGA, Producers Guild of America.

And the Producers Guild attempted to do something like what the Writers Guild already had for writers’ credits. It’s basically to identify who are the producers who were principally involved with the actual creation of the film. And so that if there are 12 producers listed, the ones who have that PGA credit are the true principal producers behind it. And that same sense of authorship. They are the ones who deserve some creative ownership, some creative recognition for what they did for the film.

**Craig:** Right. They recognize that if you have 14 people that say producer, then the credit producer means absolutely nothing. The PGA is not an actual guild. It’s not a labor union. It’s a club. But they do a good job of their primary goal, which is protecting the dignity of that credit.

So the PGA comes up with their own rules as they wish. We can’t do that. Because we are a labor union, the Writers Guild derives all of its authority and jurisdiction from its collective bargaining agreement with the companies. And so while most writers in the union will never look beyond our Screen Credits Manual, which is the manual the union publishes for its writers and arbiters to list all the guidelines. In fact, all that stuff derives from our collective bargaining agreement. It’s in an area called Theatrical Schedule A, which sounds sexy. It is. It’s —

**John:** It’s such good reading.

**Craig:** 50 Shades of Schedule A.

**John:** I just love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty hot. So if you’re ever feeling randy.

**John:** Well, the fact that it comes from this collective bargaining agreement would explain why it actually feels so lawyerly when you go through it. So most writers will encounter these restrictions, these regulations, these, you know, they’re not even guidelines. They really are rules in something that’s called the Screen Credits Manual.

And that is when you are seeking credit on a film or if you are involved in arbitration either as an arbiter or someone seeking credit, you get the Screen Credits Manual. And it really lays out in very clear language exactly what the requirements are for different kinds of credits.

This is important for lots of reasons because this is how we’re going to determine the credit. And if we didn’t use those rules properly, writers would be up in arms. And writers would be not just disappointed, the way that Colin Trevorrow was disappointed, but might sue or might take actions that would potentially break the whole system.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s unfortunate because there are things in the Credits Manual that are clear. There are other things that are as clear as mud. And it is. It all derives back to its origin as a legal document and a legal document that is the product of negotiation with companies and lawyers on both sides.

So a lot of times, writers will look at this stuff and think, “My guild is ridiculous. They’ve printed this impossible to understand booklet. And they’re so legalistic and they’re treating me like, you know, I’m in court, and they’re the judge. And it’s very off-putting and it’s very disconnecting.” But it’s not the Guild’s fault. They have no choice.

This was the devil’s bargain. We get to do final jurisdiction over credits but we get to do it within the framework of a large document drawn up by a lot of lawyers.

**John:** If it were nicer and squishier, it wouldn’t hold up in court.

**Craig:** It would not.

**John:** And then we would be in a real bad situation.

**Craig:** It would not hold up in court. And ,in fact, a number of writers have sued the Writers Guild because they felt that they were unhappy with the outcome of going through the credits process for one reason or another. And in the Writer Guild history — Writers Guild’s history — they have never lost. They have never lost one of these credit cases.

And they have never lost in no small part because the credit staff at the Writers Guild West, at the very least, is full of lawyers who specialize in this area of law. WGA credits [laughs], that’s their area. And they follow those rules. It can, at times, be distressing when your own guild seems to be applying rules to you with no sense of mercy or fairness or rationality. But that is the job they’re tasked with, unfortunately.

**John:** So before we get into the process of determining the credits, let’s make it clear what we’re talking about and what we’re not talking about. So you and I both have a lot of experience with screen credits for feature films. And that’s mostly what you and I have done. I’ve done some TV, we’ve done some other things, I’ve served as an arbiter in some TV situations.

But mostly what we’re talking about here is theatrical films. And that’s really our sort of bread and butter. That’s where we have the most experience with. And you’ve also served on the screen credits subcommittee for the WGA. You’ve had like a lot more intense first-person experience with how these rules are made, is that right?

**Craig:** That’s right. I am the co-chair. There are three of us along with — I’m the co-chair along with Robert King who currently is a television guy because he and his wife, Michelle, have created and run The Good Wife. But prior to that, he was a feature guy.

And it’s a joint committee for West and East. So our East co-chair is Stephen Schiff who wrote a number of fine films as well, a sequel to Wall Street being one of them, Deep End of the Ocean I think. Maybe the other —

**John:** Yeah, that sounds right.

**Craig:** Great guy. Awesome guy. Very, very smart. So we have this joint committee. And over the years we have been tasked to take a look at our rules, consider revisions, put those revisions to the membership to vote on. And happily, they have approved all of our proposals. And I think we have done a very good job of fixing some things that needed fixing.

I also, because of the fact that I serve on that committee, I get calls all the time. People call me all the time with their problems, complaints, questions and suggestions.

**John:** Yeah. I will confirm that behind the scenes Craig is a go-to person for questions about is this how things are supposed to work. And if things are working improperly, Craig is the person who can help steer people towards better answers.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The other thing I want to make clear that we’re not talking about is we’re not talking about copyright. So if you think back to the Gravity lawsuit, if you think back to other copyright claims, this is not copyright. This is… — copyright on feature films, the kinds of things we’re talking about, it’s the people who made the movie are going to own copyright. They are the people who are considered the authors of the film for copyright purposes.

So this is determining whose name shows up as written by or screenplay by or story by. We’ll get into specifically what those mean. It’s important for those writers because sometimes it is a form of compensation. It can influence what they are paid for the day the movie comes out, but it’s also a huge impact on what the residuals will be down the road.

So even though this is not copyright, it’s incredibly important, both creatively and professionally but also financially.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re right. So we work on a work-for-hire basis. The screen credit is the as if version of your name on your book. And residuals are the as if version of getting royalties on your book. So we don’t have the legal copyright. But that’s so much of what credits are about are essentially compensating us for that and allowing us to have attribution which would be one of the moral rights that go along with copyright.

**John:** Great. Let’s walk our way through the process. And so let’s imagine a theoretical film that has gone into production, it is finishing production, maybe they’ve wrapped, or maybe they’re about to wrap. Let’s talk through the process and what the stages are of figuring out who should get credit on a given movie.

So Craig, start us out. What’s the first thing that’s going to happen?

**Craig:** Well, interestingly enough, the first thing that happens is the studio says, “This is what we think.” It begins with the studio. They get a chance to propose what they think the credits ought to be. They are restricted really only in one sense. They cannot propose credits that are essentially illegal or impossible.

For instance, there can be no more than three writers listed as credited for screenplay with a writing team counting as one writer. There can be no more than two writers credited for story by, again with writing teams counted as one writer. So they can’t propose something with three story bys and five screenplay bys.

So they report to the Writers Guild and they say, “Here it is.” And it’s a fixed form that is defined down to the letter in the collective bargaining agreement called the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits Theatrical.

Now, while this is going on, the companies do have a little bit of flexibility. You may, out there, have noticed that you went to go see a movie, and in the lobby saw a poster with some names on it for credit. And then months later, when the movie came out, the names were different.

Aha. Well, the companies are allowed to use their tentative writing credits for promotional purposes when they need to do things in advance. One of the rules that we have is that if they credit a director on something, they have to credit the writer. So if they put a poster out there and say, “From Jim Blue,” they need to also say, “Written by Alice White.” Well, they may not know the final credits, they’re allowed to use their temporary credits.

Once the credits are fixed and placed by the Guild, then those are the only ones they can use. So it’s all kicked off by the studio.

**John:** A tiny sidebar here. As we talk about those posters, those sort of teaser posters, it’s worth noting that the rules stipulate that the director’s name has to be equal to the writer’s name. So it has to be the same size, the same color.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The director’s name cannot be highlighted in a way that the writer’s name is not highlighted.

If you know this rule and you start looking at posters, you will notice some really interesting trends. So the teaser poster for Big Fish says “From the visionary mind of Director Tim Burton”. And so Tim Burton is big there and it’s in the blue sky and brown letters. And then it says, you know, “Based on a novel by Daniel Wallace, Screenplay by John August”. And our names are also in that same type size and they’re also in brown.

But our names are like on top of like some dirt. [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s actually much harder to see our names. But technically they met every stipulation that we are the same font, the same size, same color.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes, they will do things like that. Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing. When the promotional stuff for the second Hangover came out, they made a big deal about Todd Phillips’ name because he was so, he directed the first one, it’s his franchise. So his name was really big. So then suddenly my name and Scot Armstrong’s name were really big. And people were like, “Dude, who do you think you are?” [laughs] And I was just like, “It’s a rule. I didn’t ask for it. It’s a rule.”

So here’s what you get. The Writers Guild will receive this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits Theatrical and then send copies to the participating writers or their current agents if the participants so elect. And the sheet will list all of the participating writers that were involved, the title of the movie, the executive producer, producer and director, other production executives and their titles if they were participating writers.

And then here’s what we think the credit should be, here’s what a source material credit will be, like based on a novel by. And that’s basically the deal. And it kind of ends with this will become final unless a protest is communicated by this time. So that’s what the company thinks.

**John:** Let’s define what production executive means because that trips a lot of people up.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** So production executive does not necessarily mean a studio employee. It means somebody who was involved in the production of this movie with a different title or a different sort of controlling interest. Producer is often one, but so is a director. There may have been cases where an editor or somebody else has a —

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** That was production executive. No? Is it only producer and director?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s defined and it’s basically defined as anybody that has a producing credit or anybody that has — and it’s an onscreen producing credit. Or anybody that has a directing credit. And it is strange that they call it a production executive because in the real modern world production executives are basically studio executives who never write on movies. Well, extremely rare, rare exception.

But it’s quite common for there to be writer-producers and writer-directors. And so their presence in this process will — well, you’ll see why it matters. But, yeah, the way that they define these things is, yeah. You got to be a director or producer.

**John:** So let’s say you are one of the writers of this theoretical movie and you receive a Notice of Tentative Writing Credits. So hopefully, it went to your agent, your lawyer, hopefully, it went to you. And you see this and you say, “Well, I don’t think that’s actually the appropriate credit for this film. I believe I deserve, for example, screenplay credit.” Or, “Something about this does not strike me as being right.” Or perhaps there was a writer whose name was left off the list of participating writers. This would be a time for me to say, “Something here is not correct.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, first of all, let’s hope that you actually get the damn thing. So that’s been an issue.

**John:** It has been.

**Craig:** They should be just emailing these things directly to us. I think now they can do that, but they still need to send copies to your agents or your managers. You need to make sure if you’re working on a movie that the Guild has your current representative information. Must have it.

I have spoken to writers who have suffered because they didn’t get the statement in time. And it is a disaster. So make sure, if you’re working on a movie, the Guild has your proper information. But, yeah, basically, you’re looking at this. And if you agree, great.

And by the way, if everybody agrees, guess what? Done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** If one person, one single person says, “I don’t like this,” all bets are off and now you go to arbitration. So like I said, any participating writer can ask for a protest. We should probably define who exactly is a participating writer. Aha.

**John:** So a participating writer is anybody who wrote on the movie, was paid to write on the movie, correct? Because if they were just, let’s say, somebody’s niece wrote one scene and they weren’t paid for it, they shouldn’t have been writing the movie anyway, but they would not be considered a participating writer, is that correct?

**Craig:** I don’t think — well, probably, because she’s not a professional. But if you are a professional writer and you do write literary material, in the absence of a contract, I think what happens is the Writers Guild will go back and say, “Okay, they’re a participating writer. But they must — ” you have to go pay them. You have to get a contract put together for them.

But the way it’s defined in our collective bargaining agreement, it says, “Contributed literary material or employed under a WGA contract” which means, by the way, somebody could be employed and not actually write anything, and then suddenly they’re a participating writer. But it’s an exceedingly rare circumstance.

Typically, all the participating writers are people that were paid under a contract to write on the movie. Sometimes, though, there is an argument about that and we’ll get to that in a second. But let’s say nobody protests but one of the participating writers happens to also be the director. Automatic arbitration.

**John:** Yeah. If one of the participating writers was a producer or director, it automatically kicks into arbitration.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And talk to me about the rationale behind why that is, that rule exists.

**Craig:** Well, the notion is that if you are a lowly writer — let’s say you’re just starting out, you’re 26 years old and the producer is a legend. And the producer comes to you at the end of the process and says, “By the way, you know what, I want credit on this movie.” “Uh, well, you didn’t write anything.” “Yeah, I want credit. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to put my name on there for credit and don’t arbitrate. Because if you arbitrate, I’m going to have to destroy you. I’m going to ruin you. Everywhere I go, I’m going to ruin your name.”

Well, that’s potentially quite horrible. And I wish I could say that there aren’t people that behave like that in Hollywood. But I think we all know that there are.

So the Guild’s solution quite elegantly is to say, “If anybody is in a producer or director position that is participating in this process, there is going to be an arbitration. Nobody has to make a choice. There’s no ability for anyone to say don’t do it. It’s happening no matter what.” So you will remove the potential for undue pressure —

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** From people with authority.

**John:** So going into these situations, if you are writing on a movie that has, you know, a writer-director or you wrote something and a writer-director came on board and re-wrote your script and it’s now going into production, you should know that will automatically trigger an arbitration.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so the situation with Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow was hired on to direct this movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He ended up re-writing the movie. That was always going to be an arbitration.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There was no way that could have avoided arbitration.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. So that was a necessary arbitration. An arbitration will occur if any of the writers protest. An arbitration will not occur if all the writers agree.

And by the way, the writers don’t have to agree necessarily with the studio. If none of the writers are directors or producers, they can agree amongst themselves. They can come up with their own agreement. It happens quite rarely but it is possible.

**John:** It’s happened to me probably on three or four different movies. So, you know, I try to always have open discussions with any writers involved in the movies I’ve worked on, to talk through those issues before we get to arbitration.

And in some cases, we have decided like, “Oh, this would be a fair way to split the credit.” And that’s great and we all agree and we sign off on that and that’s done.

In other cases, we’ve had that conversation and disagreed but it was actually incredibly collegial. And we explained very clearly where we were coming from, what we thought the credits should be, we disagreed, and we went to arbitration. But there were no bad, hurt feelings. It was actually a pretty happy process.

So I would just encourage people to try that discussion if it makes sense.

**Craig:** Now, in the cases where you guys agreed on things, did you still have to write statements for an arbitration because it was an automatic arbitration or —

**John:** In those cases, it was not an automatic arbitration. I do recall writing a letter saying, “I believe these credits should be this credit.” And we basically all sent that in at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that would have been an automatic. So sometimes, in the case of an automatic arbitration where everybody really does agree, they can all send in one joint statement. And we’ll get to participating writer statements.

But before we can get to that, first, we can’t get to an arbitration if there is a disagreement about who is supposed to be in the arbitration.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So what happens if somebody says, “I should be a writer and I’m not listed,” or somebody says, “That guy didn’t write anything. He shouldn’t be listed,” or if someone says, “Well, wait a second. She’s listed as the third writer but she was really the second writer,” or somebody says, “Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, that guy is submitting that material? That material wasn’t before me,” all sorts of issues.

So there is a procedure in place called a pre-arbitration. It’s also at times known as a participating writer investigation when that is the focus of what it’s doing. And these are the things that a Writers Guild member, hopefully a seasoned, well-informed Writers Guild member under the careful watch of the staff makes a decision about what material should or should not be included in the arbitration, who is or is not a participating writer, is the project really an original or is it an adaptation of source material, what is the chronology of the material. All of these fussy, fussy questions will get hashed out before it even goes to arbitration.

**John:** Now, this is a unique situation and it doesn’t happen all the time. But this is really an investigation. And so they may actually call you in to say, “Can you talk us through what actually happened here? Can you explain what this is? Where did this come into existence?”

And so I’ve been in some of these situations where I have had to literally go in and talk in front of some people and they would ask me some questions. I wasn’t there opposite the other writer who was seeking credit, but there were things that needed to be figured out. And so I’ve had to physically go in and do these kind of things.

**Craig:** They were somewhat rare when you and I started. They are growing increasingly more common, because the way that studios develop movies now has gotten loosier and goosier.

It’s actually quite common for studios to purchase spec screenplays and repurpose them as sequels to things. And there are quite a number of notable examples. For instance, Ocean’s Twelve started as an original screenplay written by George Nolfi and was then repurposed.

Well, what do you do about that? Is that still an original or is it an adaptation? There are all sorts of things that need to be figured.

Sometimes, studios will purchase a screenplay from another company. They’ll buy a company. That company has screenplays but they weren’t Writers Guild screenplays. What happens to those? By the way, answer, those become source material not subject to Writers Guild credits.

But there’s all this stuff that needs to be figured out. And as companies get stranger and weirder about how they suck up material from the culture and spit it back out in the form of movies, these pre-arbitrations will become increasingly common.

**John:** So there’s a lot to figure out. Especially, studios now are doing these kind of bake-off competitions where they’ll hire two writers at the same time to work on different drafts of things —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which to me just feels like a disaster waiting to happen. And yet the studios are banking like, “Well, one of those drafts we’ll shoot, or if there’s things we like in both of them, we’ll piece it together.” And God bless them, but that makes it very, very complicated. And this pre-arbitration hearing could become a very important part of the process of figuring out who deserves credit, when stuff happened, which characters originated in which draft.

**Craig:** Absolutely, absolutely. And to be clear, as we go through this section, as we walk you through this section, the Writers Guild has a duty of fair representation. That’s a fact of law. They have to represent all participating writers equally, even when one of them is the director or one of them is a producer, or one of them is new, or one of them wrote a spec, or one of them is a re-write, it doesn’t matter.

At times, writers will feel like they’re siding with one person or another. And that’s only because they are [laughs], because somebody has to be right, you know. This is where, unfortunately, people get really emotional and upset about this because nobody wants to lose. And when you think you’re getting jobbed, it’s a terrible feeling. But, alas, it’s a dirty job, someone’s got to do it.

**John:** So, Craig, as we come out of the pre-arbitration hearing, as we come out of the participating writer investigation, what information should be agreed upon? It’s basically these are the writers who participated in this draft, this is the order in which the scripts sort of come in. And at that point, do we start to impanel real arbiters?

**Craig:** Yeah. So now we know that we have a number of participating writers. There are no more participating writers than these and no fewer. These are they. We have a chronology for the work that they’ve done.

And each one of them gets a letter because everything’s done anonymously. We’ll get into the why of that. And we have material assigned for each one of them. So we know what material has been allowed and what material is no longer there.

And now, we reach out to three writers who will become the arbitration panel. Before the guild can select them, all the participating writers receive a list of all the screenwriters in the guild that are eligible to be arbiters. And the participating writers can red-pen through people they don’t want.

Why would you want to strike people’s names? You may have had a bad experience with some of them, some of them you may not like, some of them you —

**John:** Some of them you may know that they are just a dummy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You may just realize like, “You are not a clever person and I would not want to trust your opinion.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, keep in mind, you as the participating writer, you should be anonymous. They shouldn’t know which was your draft. So they shouldn’t be able to hold any personal bias against you. But in the Internet era, it’s very hard to have no idea of what a movie is or who might have been involved with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So there’s lots of reasons why you might want to, you know, not select certain people.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s virtually impossible at this point to presume anonymity.

The way the process is set up, the writers obviously are familiar with each other. But the writers will not know the identities of the arbiters. And that’s easy —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they’re not going to see them or address them.

The arbiters receive materials and all the participating writers are identified by letters. So there’s writer A, B, C, D and E. They don’t know the names of the people who have written them. But if they go on IMDb and there’s only writer A and writer B, they’re probably going to be able to figure it out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The great hope is that they don’t do it. And certainly if they indicate at any point that they have, then they’re bounced. The double blind anonymity — arbiters don’t know each other, arbiters don’t know the participants, participants don’t know the arbiters, maybe triple blind, that has essentially been the cornerstone of the Writers Guild’s defense of itself.

Essentially, they’re saying, “We have fulfilled our duty of fair representation because the process excluded the possibility of some people being favored over others for any reason other than the material itself.”

**John:** So let’s talk about the requirements of an arbiter, because you and I both served as arbiters on screen credits decisions.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So to be an arbiter, you’re supposed to have been a member for five years, you should have had a minimum of three on-screen credits. So you should know what it is you’re talking about. You should have been through this system before. You should know what, you know, a movie looks like when it’s written down on a page. And you hopefully sort of have some exposure with what this whole process is.

Now I get the call to be an arbiter probably five times a year.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I say yes maybe twice a year based on sort of like how busy I am. It’s a tremendous responsibility. And I will credit the guild as being very upfront about how much work it’s going to be and how many drafts there are to read, how complicated it is, how many writers there are on board. They will tell you the name of the project just so you would know, like, oh, I can’t do that because I know exactly who wrote. I know too much of the history of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or like that was the thing I wanted — I was up for that job but I didn’t get it. Like, there would be really obvious situations where you should not be involved with it. But my instinct is to always say yes if I can say yes, because I know how incredibly important it is that smart and dedicated guild people take these arbitrations seriously.

**Craig:** No question. And so the struggle is always when they call and they say, “Well, there are seven participating writers, so seven drafts, plus a novel.” Oh, and you know you have a deadline and it’s just, you know — I try not to automatically say no to those. I have done a couple of those monsters. Generally, when they call me, I tend to get problem cases. [laughs] I’ve noticed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They haven’t indicated this but I tend to get complicated ones. I tend to get big ones. And I often get comedies. So I don’t know if they’re doing that on purpose or not. It’s just the way it kind of comes.

Not everybody can be an arbiter. There’s three rules that govern this. One is, okay, you can be an arbiter if you’ve been a current member for five years, or you can be an arbiter if you have a minimum of three on-screen credits. So if you’ve gotten that in fewer than five years, Mazel tov.

And then the other issue is that of the three arbiters, two of them have to be what they call experienced arbiters. Meaning that two of the three have served on at least two other arbitration committees which you start —

**John:** Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Wow.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there’s an interesting bottleneck there of experience. So in every arbitration, they can only put in one rookie. So every time — so once they put in one rookie, they’re like, “Okay, they can be a rookie one more time and then we get to use them as experienced.” But you can see how the pool of available arbiters is fairly compressed.

The Writers Guild struggles endlessly to find arbiters willing to do the work and willing to do it in the short amount of time we get. And the amount of time, that window has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk over time because post-production has taken longer and longer and longer and longer, there’s additional writing going on.

And then of course the studios are turning around. The release is incredibly quickly. And they’re saying, “My God, we need the credits because we got to do the — literally put the credits on the movie. We’ve got four days.” It can get really bad.

**John:** Yeah. And in television, just imagine everything is about 15 times faster.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So as tight as the schedules can be in features, television is nuts.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the great boon for televisions is that in television the credits are often decided before the arbiters even get them, because in television when you work on staff everyone’s going to get a credit. It’s not the, you know, I would say that movies are like basically one episode television series. So, yeah, the credit is super important. [laughs] It matters. And if you don’t get it, you’re never getting it.

**John:** Yeah. So these arbiters and impaneled. They are receiving the scripts that are labeled writer A through writer F. Sometimes there will be multiple drafts given by a writer if the writer thinks it’s really important to show the progress from this thing or that thing or an idea that was taken out of a draft but then appears later on in a different writer’s script. There may be a reason why she wants to show that.

But the arbiter gets this big stack of scripts. The arbiter also gets a statement from each writer. And those statements can be long and detailed. Those statements can be short. But in that statement, the writer is laying out a case for why they believe the credit should read a certain way and hopefully making a good case based exclusively on the Screen Credits Manual why they believe that the credit should read a certain way.

**Craig:** This statement is essentially your only day in court as a participating writer.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s your one chance to express to the people deciding your fate why you feel the way you do. And so naturally this document becomes loaded with all sorts of emotion. And that’s unfortunate because this would be the last time you’d want to do that. This is when you want to be as rationale as possible. Since you and I are both arbiters, I assume you like I have read some terrible, terrible statements from writers.

**John:** Absolutely. And you read these statements which are basically just explaining the hardship that they faced and sort of what the struggle was to make the movie and how unfair things were. And it doesn’t matter because that doesn’t help me reach my decision in which my decision is based on the words on the page.

So the great statements that I really enjoy are the ones that very clearly explain why the writer is seeking the credit that she’s seeking and can provide some roadmap for how she gets to that decision. Will I get to the same decision? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I at least one want to be able to see what the writer is thinking as I’m going through this.

In some cases that statement may help elucidate something that I might have missed otherwise. And so as I’m writing my own statement I try to provide just that same kind of this is the roadmap that gets me to this decision, maybe you will want to follow the same map. And thank you so much for your service. I think any statement that doesn’t acknowledge the incredible amount of time that the arbiter is putting into this is a foolish statement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would argue that the most foolish statement is the one where the writer has paid somebody to write it for them. This is a scourge and I’m sorry to say it exists. And if you are in the Writers Guild and you’ve heard of people doing this and they’ve had success, yes, much the same way that Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc works in homeopathic medicine and so forth. It’s a disastrous idea and an enormous waste of money.

There are people out there who charge thousands of thousands of dollars to write a professional statement for you as you, analyzing all the material, making their case. These statements tend to be quite long which arbiters don’t like. But more importantly they’re the same. They’re the same. You’re getting ripped off.

So what will happen is for instance I did an arbitration recently. And when it was done and the decision had been rendered I then called the staff and said, “So I don’t know if you’re able to tell me but this particular statement smelled like a professional statement to me. It didn’t impact my decision one way or another. But it just smelled like it.”

And they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we see that statement [laughs] with like various versions of it.” I mean basically these people — you know how it works. You know the way the world works, right?

**John:** Absolutely. I will say that as friends go into an arbitration situation they will invariably email me saying like, “Hey, can you share one of your statements with me?” And I will usually do that but I always caution them that each statement needs to individually, you know, reflect the needs of that project. And so I’ve written long ones for things that really, truly were complicated where I came on and off the projects several times. And like without some sort of map it could be very easy to forget sort of what happened along the way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I’ve also written like the two-page statement. I’ve written the half a page statement that basically says, “This is how I think it should end up. I thank you for your service. God speed.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It really depends on the situation. So I would never urge people to write the long statement to spend, you know, six days writing a long statement because people will go crazy writing it.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, look a bad statement from you is always better than any professional statement. The arbiter will understand whether they realize the statement is a “professional” or not, they can feel a personal touch on a personal statement.

So I’m going to give my advice to people on general advice when they’re writing these statements what I think makes a good one. And then I guess by elimination what makes a bad one. Generally shorter is better. If you can keep it under four pages, you will be loved, you will be loved by your arbiter.

Avoid math. A lot of the guidelines refer to percentages. You will get screenplay credit if you hit 33% of a screenplay or 50% of a screenplay. Well, we actually don’t do math on our end. We’re kind of just 50% to I think a lot of us is half or more and 33% is a good amount, you know, I mean. So we’re not counting words or lines so don’t do it for us.

Don’t be a jerk. No matter how you feel about who rewrote you or who you rewrote, be polite and be professional about it. Don’t treat the arbiters like they can’t read. This is my biggest complaint about participating writer statements. They will go and on about some obvious point. And while I’m reading their statement I’m thinking, “Can’t I just read the screenplay? I’ll read it and I’ll know that. I don’t need your chart.” You know what I mean? Like I know how to read, I can do — yes there are certain things that it’s great that you track for me. But other things like a whole page about how this one thing is really just like this thing. It’s a scene, I’ll read it.

Context in small doses is helpful. It’s helpful although not determinative for to me to understand how you came on the job, what your task was, how you approach the writer’s material before you, how you may have been replaced. It doesn’t change necessarily what I’m reading but it can place it in some sort of meaningful context. It doesn’t matter that you’ve spent 12 months on it as opposed to another guy spending a week. But I think it’s at least interesting for the arbiter to understand some of that sort of thing.

And lastly just to remind people, they try this all the time and the guild has to bounce it back to them. You can’t send in recommendation letters, so the producer can’t send a letter saying, “Yeah, we’re backing this guy.” And other than that you’re free to write anything you want in your statement with one exception. You can’t breach anonymity. You can’t identify yourself and you can’t identify any of the other participating writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** And as the arbiter you get all these scripts, you get these letters. I tend to — I go both ways. In some cases I’ve read all the letters first. In some cases I’ve read all the scripts first. Both ways make sense. If you read the letters first, you have a sense of what the individual writer thinks is important about that draft. But if you read all the scripts first, a lot of times I’ll end up with like, you know, well, this is what sort of makes sense to me and then you’ll sort of see which writers are completely insane and which writers are like, “Oh, I can see how they got to this place.”

**Craig:** Right. And that’s part of the shock of doing the job of being an arbiter is that you will read the scripts and then you’ll look back again at the statements. And someone who’s truly contributed nearly nothing to the final screenplay will have written a seven-page passionate creed about how they really wrote it all. And it’s scary but I understand it.

It’s not — that is not a schizophrenic delusion. That’s just part of being a writer. They’re inner world is rich and fulfilling and everybody else is just a bunch of words on paper. And so this is why sometimes I think people are shocked.

There are ways to process the work if you have a bunch of scripts. You can choose to read the final script first, that’s the shooting script and then go backwards or can start from the beginning. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is you read all of it.

And while you’re doing that you’re in touch with somebody who’s called a screen credit’s consultant. That’s not a staff member. That is another Writers Guild member. Often they are emeritus. They’ve been doing it for awhile, they may be retired, they may live somewhere else.

And their job really is to just — they’re not reading the material. They’re just there to advice you on the applicable rules. Because there’s all sorts of rules depending on what kind of project it is. So they’re there if you have any questions about things. And they’re also there to collect your decisions. Because once all three arbiters have rendered their decision, if it’s unanimous, that’s it. It’s done.

**John:** You’re done. Yeah. You’re almost done. Each of those arbiters is going to be asked to write up their decision. But it is done. There’s not going to be any further discussion.

**Craig:** Correct, as long as that decision is in fact a legal one. And so staff is — the screen credit’s consultant will then convey to staff, “Okay, awesome. All three of them on their own came up with the same decision.” Staff goes, “Yes, that is a legal decision.” And then off we go.

**John:** It’s a permissible decision. It meets the requirements of what a screen credit can be.

**Craig:** Permissible, perfect word. There may be a case where all three arbiters have three different versions of the credits. So the screen credit consultant will sort of kind of horse trade a little bit and say, “Well, how firm are you on that? Would you be at all? Could you entertain the idea of adjusting your decision to be more like this person or this person?”

What they’re trying to do is see if they can avoid a stalemate. A stalemate is kind of a disaster. It’s incredibly hard as I mentioned to get three people to do this. If all three of them disagree, they got to basically toss them and start again with three new arbiters which they don’t want to do.

**John:** No one wants to do that.

**Craig:** Nobody wants to do that. But on the other hand, they don’t want to force writers into making decision they don’t want to make. So they’re very gentle about this. They just say, “Okay, well, could you or would you consider this?” And if they say, “Absolutely not.” “Fine, no problem. We’ll do another panel.”

If there are two writers, two arbiters that agree and one that doesn’t then what we do is we have teleconference. All three arbiters get on the phone along with staff monitoring. The arbiters are identified to each other only as arbiter 1, 2 and 3. And they talk it out.

And the reason they talk it out is to see if they can actually achieve unanimity because two to one is sufficient. Two to one means, yeah, that’s the decision. But if you can be unanimous it frankly sits better with everybody. So it’s worth taking a look to see if you can get to unanimity.

And there have been times where, you know, the person standing there in the one slot has pointed out to the other two, “Hey, you know, you actually probably agree with me more than you agree with each other.” And so interesting things can happen there. But it’s a chance for arbiters to agree more closely than maybe they would have before.

**John:** And so the arbiter teleconference is a relative innovation or something that’s happened new. It’s the last six or seven years?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How long has that been around?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s about probably coming up on five years. This is something that we cooked up in our committee and brought to the membership and they approved. And it’s been extraordinarily successful.

**John:** And it really is. Thank you Craig for doing it. Because it actually does make the process much better. Because there’ve been times, twice in this last few years, I’ve been in one of these teleconference situations and it’s great to hear what the other writer, arbiters are thinking and sort of why they reached their decision.

Sometimes I’ve been able to sort of persuade people over to my side. Sometimes we’ve ended up in the two-to-one, but I’ve at least understood why we got to this two-to-one. It wasn’t just like who could possibly think that that, you know, it should be shared story credit. Like it seems impossible to me. It helps you really understand why they got to that decision. So I think it’s a really good process.

**Craig:** It also comes with another benefit. The staff is on the phone listening. And it’s their opportunity to hear the arbiters talk and defend their own positions. And if they’re hearing that one of them is a dummy or is nuts, or is ideological in a prejudiced way then they know not to ask that person to arbitrate again. So it’s another nice side effect of that.

**John:** Yeah. Because otherwise they would have the written decision but that’s not necessarily clear about what the thinking was behind it. The written decision that each individual arbiter makes is very carefully constructed to be sort of unassailable. That like you’ve reached this decision based on exactly these points and nothing more is said.

You’re not talking about the nature of the project. You’re not talking about the history of things. You’re talking about how you reached your decision. And at times the Writers Guild staff will ask you to adjust something in your statement just so it’s absolutely clear that you understood what you were doing.

**Craig:** That’s right. The statement is your — I think that is the evidence of your good work as an arbiter. In your statement, you know, certainly this is how I do it. I cite the rules, I go carefully through story and screenplay. I go carefully through why I felt some writer deserved something or some writer did not.

Some no nos. You cannot refer to anything that one of the participating writers put in their statement because other participating writers can view your decision statement. And we need to keep those statements completely walled off.

I think as an arbiter you need to really make a clear judgment because participating writers can ask to see your statement. They don’t always have to but they can ask if they are contemplating a Policy Review Board.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** Uh-oh. Policy Review Board, what’s that Craig? I’ll tell you people. A PRB, a Policy Review Board, is essentially an appeals. Well, wait a second, how would the guild ever manage to that because everybody that loses will want to appeal, right? Isn’t that what’s destroying our nation’s court system as we speak?

Yeah. Well, here’s the deal. The Policy Review Board is an appeals process. Three different writers are now on that Policy Review Board. They are the new judges. But here’s the deal, they can’t read any of the scripts. They’re not there to decide if the arbiters had good opinions or good judgment or good taste. All they’re there to do is determine if any procedural errors were made or misapplication of rules. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. So unlike a court of law where an appeals court can examine the facts of the case, can examine sort of testimony and other things. In this case the appeals process is only about like did they follow the rules. And that’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. So, you know, if an arbiter writes something in their statement that’s seems fishy or strange and a participating writer asks for a PRB. Well, what will happen is the people at the PRB will call the arbiter and say, “Explain this. What did you mean by this?” And if they say something that’s wrong, the PRB will throw out the decision. It happens very, very, very rarely. Have you ever gotten called by a PRB as an arbiter?

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** I got called once.

**John:** You got once.

**Craig:** I’ve had PRBs before, you know, where they just go, “No.” One time I got called. It was a very, very complicated arbitration with so many bizzarities in it. I know it’s not a word but I don’t care. And but they did call and they just said, “We’re picking up this one line from your statement and we’d like you to explain it more.” And I did.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I [laughs] very clearly remember I explained it. And then I heard one of them go, “Yeah, I knew that’s — it’s obvious that’s what he was going to…” It was like, “Duh.” But they had to do it, you know. And then the PRB was the, you know, the appeal was denied.

**John:** So in most cases a Policy Review Board will not happen. It did not happen in the Jurassic World decision. In most cases, the arbiter’s decision will come in, the arbiters will file their statements and then what is the document that the Writers Guild East or West will produce that says, “These are the credits.”

**Craig:** Well, they will send — first they will call. If you’re in an arbitration, the staff member assigned to your case will call you and say, “The arbitration has reached a decision. And the screen credits will be as follows.” And then you go, “Yay” or “Huh,” or “Nah.”

And then they send a letter to the studios and to you that confirms the precise wording with a bunch of legalese about how it has to be presented and so forth. And those are the credits, period, the end, forever.

The IMDb has a deal with the WGA. Once the WGA credits are confirmed, it’s also piped over to IMDb. And those become the official IMDb credits. And then we have working rules as writers that govern us. Once the credits become final, we have to abide by them, we can’t contradict them in public and the studios must abide by them as well.

**John:** Yeah. So, what are some take homes we should have from this whole discussion of screen credits? So, one thing we need to really sort focus in on the end is we’re determining written by credit. And written by credit is of course two different credits combined. There’s screenplay by credit, there’s story by credit. If a writer receives both of those things and there’s no other people who will get a portion of those things, they collapse and become written by credit. Those are the two basic areas that an arbitration will be determining. But every once in a while, there will be weird, fluky kind of things that will show up on screen. Adaptation by for example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What are the other —

**Craig:** There are screen story by.

**John:** Screen story by.

**Craig:** Which is common. Adaptation by is extraordinarily uncommon and it also isn’t what it sounds like. It’s probably why it’s extraordinarily uncommon. Generally speaking, the credits that you’ll see are story by, screen story by, screenplay by, written by. Those are the various versions and various combinations.

**John:** Those are the permissible credits.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And in permissible credits, a writing team may share one of those slots or share one those credits. That’s why you see the ampersands. So, in the case of Jurassic World, you see two writing teams, you see they’re joined by ampersands then the word and, A-N-D, combining the two of them to indicate that there were two writing teams involved in a film.

So now as you look at any poster, you will be able to determine which people who are credited as writers were working as a team and which people are working solo. In some cases, you will find weird situations where a person was writing solo and then they joined a team and so they have multiple credits in strange ways. But generally, the ampersand is the indication that those people were a team from the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these things I would imagine most — most Writers Guild members probably know, surprisingly — surprising number of them don’t. The arcane stuff almost no writers know which is always shocking to me because that’s the stuff that’s you’re subject to. You kind of need to know. So, you know, an appeal to — oh, do you want to play stump the ump? Want to play stump the ump? Let’s stump the ump. All right, John.

**John:** Great, do it.

**Craig:** Okay. John August, we have a case of a remake, a 1978 film written by some guy, he’s dead now. And they come to you. You write a draft of this remake and then they go to a second guy and he writes a draft. Then there’s a third guy who comes along and says he actually wrote a treatment before the two of you. Who is A, B and C?

**John:** I will ask you a question first.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Was the movie originally produced under the Writers Guild contract?

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** If it was, then writer A is the person who wrote the first movie.

**Craig:** The dead guy is writer A. What did he win? What did he win?

**John:** I hope something.

**Craig:** Nothing. You know what you won?

**John:** I get nothing.

**Craig:** You won my goddamn respect, sir. [laughs]

**John:** I would say that the treatment — if the treatment guy can prove that he wrote that treatment beforehand, that treatment guy became writer B, is that correct?

**Craig:** The treatment guy became writer B, yes. And then the treatment guy is basically vying for a shared story credit with the dead guy, I believe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If there’s going to be, you know, if he can show that he significantly changed the story. So, yeah, there are cases for instance, the remake of The Omen, sole screenplay went to the writer of the first Omen because they felt that the remake just didn’t change it enough. So anyway, see, these are the things you know. You’re smart.

I’m saying to our fellow writers out there, be smart like John August. Take a look at the book before you go into the movie. If you’re working on a project and you’re not the first writer, read the book. If you’re going into the project and you’re the first writer, and then somebody comes to replace you, read the book because it’s common. Right? Know what’s going on.

And similarly, if you do know what’s going on and you’re a smart writer, please do arbitrations. Serve as an arbiter. Let the guild know, if they haven’t called you, that you are volunteering, that you want to be an arbiter. But please, only do it if you’re smart and you’re rational and you know the rules.

**John:** The other take home I would like to urge our writers to keep in mind is if you’re going into a situation where there are preexisting materials, know that it could get bumpy down the road and I see so many people who they’re so excited to sign onto this movie and they’re going to get going and they were the person who wrote it in production and they’re like, “But what’s happening now? I was the person who wrote the movie, how could there be all this hubbub and Sturm und Drang?

Well, you weren’t the original writer. And those original writers, they feel the exact same thing you do. Like, “Well, I was the person who created that movie. You were just the person who delivered it over the finish line.” Very likely there’s going to be some issues down the road. And so as long as you go into it knowing that those could happen, that’s great. It doesn’t mean you need to change a single word of what you put on the page. You can’t — that’s never going to serve you well to try to change more things on the page. Just know that it could happen down the road so it does not blindside you. And you don’t feel like it’s some vast conspiracy against you. It’s the situation, it’s going to happen whenever there are multiple writers on a movie and the movie’s been in development for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean this is — this is our court system guys. You’re a fool to walk in a court not knowing how court works. And you’re a fool to walk into credit arbitration not understanding how credit arbitration works. It is an awkward, ungainly, overly legalistic, rigid, and occasionally infuriating system, but it’s probably the best system that we can offer ourselves at this stage of the game.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So learn it.

**John:** Whenever I read an article that’s like the Jurassic World decision, it’s always the filmmaker who feels incredibly frustrated by how this all happened. And they are wishing and pining for a better system, a more fair system, a more just system. The frustration is, I don’t know what that system would be and no one has ever been able to articulate what that more fair system would be.

There have been overtures towards, “Well, what if we had professional arbiters so you knew the quality of the people who were going to be doing the arbitration?” Certainly that’s an idea. There’s been a discussion of, “Well, maybe credits should reflect all of the writers who worked on a film to acknowledge that there were other writers before this.” That’s certainly a possibility as well. For each one of these suggestions, there are many negatives that come along with it too. Any proposed change to the system is going to have a whole host of problems as well. So this is where we’re at. And Craig is on the committee trying to make this work as well as it can work.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this thing that happens where people perceive a problem in some system. Their local schools, the way their town is governed, the Writers Guild. And they see something and they go, “Isn’t it obvious what to do? Just do this. Everyone would agree on this.”

Now, actually, finding things that everybody agrees on is extraordinarily difficult. And when it comes to credits, nearly impossible. Simple common sense changes that we made took months and months of diplomacy and discussion and negotiation. And people should also be aware, there are some things that we can’t change on our own. We have to renegotiate those with the companies if we want to change any term that’s in the collective bargaining agreement. Well, we have to ask them for it. And you know what they say? “No.” [laughs]

**John:** They’ll say no. They’ll just say no to spite us.

**Craig:** They will say no to spite —

**John:** Because the negotiation committee —

**Craig:** Absolutely, they — if you said to them, “Well, we want the right to give you guys some nice warm tea,” they’ll say, “No.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “No.”

**John:** Absolutely. It would be struck the very first day.

**Craig:** That’s right. You ask for it, you want it? No. Then the answer is no. It’s a —

**John:** Yeah. It’s absolutely no.

Craig. Yes. So, people have to understand, this may be the best we can do. Maybe it will get a little bit better. But it’s pretty much it is what it is. Again, just my personal bias, it’s not up to you. But I’d root for getting the Writers Guild West to run my arbitration.

**John:** Yeah. I’d also just, again, urge any smart writer who’s eligible to serve on an arbitration, serve on an arbitration. And Craig, I have a question for you. If a person has never been asked to serve on arbitration but they are otherwise eligible, can they reach out to the guild saying like, “Hey, I would love to do that?” Will they actually take an incoming call?

**Craig:** Yes. Absolutely. You just call up the credits department and they will check your eligibility and they will note your interest and they will put you in the hopper. They’re careful. They don’t want kooks, you know, and unfortunately, a lot of our members are nuts.

**John:** But if you are WGA member and you are — this podcast has encouraged you to try to do this. And you believe you’re eligible and you believe you could do a good job, call them and tell them that John and Craig urged you to do it because we really do want smart folks doing it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Only for smart. So, you really got to look in the mirror here people, really look in the mirror.

**John:** Yeah. We do. Maybe they’ll be emailing us to look through like previous people’s comments and things they sent in to make sure like, have they asked really stupid questions on the show?

**Craig:** Yeah. How many times in the last month did somebody call you stupid? More than two? Don’t call them.

**John:** Yeah, don’t call them.

**Craig:** Don’t call them.

**John:** I believe it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is also WGA-related because it’s just sticking with the theme. The WGA redid the residuals site. Basically, if you’re a member and you sign in to check your residuals, it’s much better than it used to be. And I’m not quite sure when they updated the whole system. But you can finally sort things by individual movies, by studios, by total amounts of checks. And so I spent, you know, a good hour on it this week looking through stuff, making sure that everything had actually gotten paid out right.

And it’s really fascinating to see what percentage of really my income comes from it. Like, when you actually see your residuals totaled up you realize how incredibly grateful we should be that the residual system exists and that we are paid for our work in the time after we’ve, you know, delivered it.

Not surprisingly, the single film that’s paid me the most residuals is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was, you know, successful out in the theatre but also of course sells really well on home video. The least successful by far is my film, The Nines, which has, you know, made almost nothing in residuals. And yet, it still gets tallied up. And I’m just incredibly grateful to the people who built this new system and who keep the system up-to-date to make sure that we are paid accurately and quickly for our residuals.

**Craig:** Huh, I wonder which one — I guess we should — do you want to guess which ones of mine are the most? And I’m looking at it right now.

**John:** I’m going to say Hangover II is your most rewarding residual.

**Craig:** Okay. All right. I’m looking career view by project.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Had you seen this new whole thing?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Yeah. They sent me a beta of it. I just never actually thought to ask questions. So, no, you’re not right.

**John:** Oh, what is your most successful project?

**Craig:** Well, because here’s the thing. Remember, on Hangover II, I was splitting three ways.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forgot.

**Craig:** So, for me, it’s Identify Thief. Although I guess the total, if you’re looking at the total pie, Hangover II would probably be the biggest total pie. And then the lowest, well, poor RocketMan, it’s my first movie, RocketMan. You know, and it’s interesting, RocketMan came out actually — it was like pre-DVD era. So it wasn’t even out on DVD for a long time. It missed the boom. [laughs]

**John:** It missed the boom.

**Craig:** It missed the boom.

**John:** Just ranking through mine, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which obviously a successful movie, I’m also solo credit so I get 100% of that pie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, I share with the Wibberleys, and so that also did well, but I’m sharing it with the Wibberleys. Big Fish is a solo credit but it is not anywhere near the success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Then we can down to Charlie’s Angels, Go, and the rest. Including my TV show, D.C. which only aired three episodes in the U.S., it aired all seven episodes overseas. And so I will tell you that I made a total of $23,000 in residuals on a horrible, disastrous fail of a TV show.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** So residuals do matter folks.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you are a writer in WGA and you want to look up your residuals, I would say that the menu system to find this page is not the most straightforward. So we’ll have a link for this in the show notes. But if you’re on the WGA site, wga.org, it’s in residuals and then residuals look up is the page that we’re looking at now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty cool.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah. What? [laughs]

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Huh? Hmm? What? Huh? No.

**John:** Your One Cool Thing can be my One Cool Thing. Bruce Joel Rubin, we did a whole episode about Ghost.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I’m going to host a WGA screening of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder on, what’s the date? April 25th?

**Craig:** It’s April 25th. Yeah, right there.

**John:** Yeah, you’re looking at the same thing.

**Craig:** I’m looking at the same thing you are. Yeah.

**John:** On April 25th, I will be hosting a screening and a Q&A with Bruce Joel Rubin. We’ll be looking at two of his films, Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder. So if you’re a WGA member, you can RSVP for that now because it may very well sell out. If it doesn’t sell out, there’s a chance that they’ll open it to the public, which would be great too. So, if it looks like it’s going to be available for other people to come to, I’ll let you guys know on the podcast or on Twitter. But it should be really great and Bruce is really wonderful and smart. And especially after our discussion of Ghost, I’m looking forward to sitting down with him and really talking through everything terrific he did in that movie.

**Craig:** Great. Awesome.

**John:** It’s time for our boilerplate. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth who has written some of our great outros. Thank you for that. If you have an outro you’d like to send in, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions. We love to answer questions, so please send those through.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on iTunes and we just love it when you give us ratings.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if give us some stars, that would be awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just search for Scriptnotes. You and also search for Scriptnotes to find the Scriptnotes app which lets you download all the back episodes back to episode 1 or even episode 20 where we first talked through screen credits. So you can see what we did then and what we did now. We also have an Android app. You can search to the Android app store for that as well. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we will be back next week to talk through more stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, we got a —

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

**Craig:** We got a good one next week.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be really good.

**Craig:** We got a good one.

**John:** If next week’s works out the way I hope it works out —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s going to — it could easily be in the top ten.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, Ep 20: How credit arbitration works](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-credit-arbitration-works)
* [Jurassic World Script Credits Resolved; Helmer Colin Trevorrow Speaks On Arbitration Process](http://deadline.com/2015/04/jurassic-world-script-credits-resolved-colin-trevorrow-speaks-on-arbitration-process-1201406086/) on Deadline
* [WGAw Screen Credits Manual](http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=167)
* [Big Fish poster](http://netdna.webdesignerdepot.com/uploads/2013/04/BigFish.jpg)
* [WGAw Credits Department contact information](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=809)
* [WGAw residuals look up](https://my.wgaw.org/home/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2fresiduals.aspx)
* [RSVP here for the April 25 WGAw screenings of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, featuring a Q+A with Bruce Joel Rubin moderated by John August](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=229)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-perfect-reader).

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

**Craig Mazin:** [laughs] My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 173 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we are going to be talking about the perfect reader, loan-out companies, and how to record a podcast. But, Craig, all of our listeners want to know first and foremost, how was your heritage turkey?

**Craig:** I got to say home run.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. Glad to hear it.

**Craig:** Home run. So changed up a couple of things this year for those of you playing the home turkey game. I got a heritage turkey from a company called Mary’s Turkeys, about a 17-pounder because I had a lot of people. I brined it — I always brine but this time, instead of brining it in a bucket or a cooler, I went with a brining bag.

**John:** Ah, those are the dry briners —

**Craig:** No, no, I’m a wet brine guy. I believe in the wet brine. But that’s a whole north/south, east/west civil war but I’ll —

**John:** Yeah, which is the right barbecue sauce, too, while we’re at it.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t even get in the middle of that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But, no, I’m a wet briner. But the nice thing about the brining bag is that you put the turkey in this big — it’s basically an enormous super heavy-duty Ziploc bag. So it goes over the turkey, you fill it up with the brine, and the nice thing is you can put it in your fridge. Because, otherwise, you got to put it outside in the garage with a bunch of dry ice in a cooler. It’s a big pain in the butt.

And the other thing I did this time was I added some brown sugar into the brine. By and large, you know, people throw in, like, what I call potpourri into their brine. You know, like lemons and sprigs and things. That stuff, all those oil-based things, like, from citrus, that’s not going to dissolve in the water and it’s not going to go into the turkey. You’re wasting your time. Anyway, it came out fantastic.

**John:** That’s great. And how long was your bird in the oven?

**Craig:** This is also the simplest oven-cooking of all time.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** I went with no basting. I did an olive oil rub.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Put it in at 325 degrees.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** 3.5 hours later, it was done to perfection.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Did not do anything.

**John:** So this year, I did what I’ve been doing the last couple of years which is the high-heat method.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So you think yours is simple. This is how simple mine was. A little olive oil rub into a 475-degree oven.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** For two hours. Done. And so not only do you not have to do anything other than sort of clean and dry the bird —

**Craig:** It’s faster.

**John:** Yes. And you don’t even truss it. You sort of deliberately untruss it. So you have to stick forks in to sort of hold the legs out away from the bird so the heat can get everywhere.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And it worked really well.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did fail to mention that I trussed. I’m a trusser.

**John:** You’re a trusser?

**Craig:** Yeah, my method is —

**John:** Well, that’s really your bondage thing coming through there.

**Craig:** Yeah, Fifty Shades of Grey’d that thing.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes, the turkey will see me now. I did the slow-and-low method. But the truth is that if you put it in, you know, as long as you don’t have to do stuff with it, it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** It doesn’t matter. Time is irrelevant as long as —

**Craig:** Time is irrelevant. But I have to also, well, I’ll save my One Cool Thing because I did a — I made a lot of different things. I made a pumpkin pie. I made an apple galette, I made acorn squash, I made garlicky green beans with roasted pine nuts. I made a ton of things. But one thing I made, oh, pumpkin scones, which were spectacular.

**John:** Oh, good. Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’ll save my favorite thing for my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. How about you? So did you have a great Thanksgiving?

**John:** We had a great Thanksgiving. We had some friends come over. We had a good simple outdoor Los Angeles Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** I know. My sister is in town with her husband and kids and, you know, it’s freezing in New York and they’re swimming today, so they’re super happy.

**John:** Yeah, life is good.

**Craig:** Life is good.

**John:** So life is also good on December 11th. That is the live Scriptnotes show in Hollywood. So as we record this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, there are still some tickets left. I don’t know if they’re still really out there, because you, Craig, are bringing in a whole entourage. So I know that you requested, like, 20 tickets for you and your posse so —

**Craig:** I believe I’ve requested four tickets.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s too much. That’s way too much.

**John:** Way too much. You’re disrupting everything.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our other guests are going to be, so it’s me and Craig, Aline, Jane Espenson, B.J. Novak, Derek Haas, actress/singer/funny person Rachel Bloom, all those people will have entourages as well. So we’re not sure how many tickets are going to be left but if you would like to come, you should come. So go to wgfoundation.org, click Events and you will have the option to purchase the tickets. Come join us on December 11th at 8:00 pm.

**Craig:** Let me do a little hard sell on this, by the way.

**John:** All right, sure.

**Craig:** For those people that listen to the podcast but haven’t been to one of these things, they’re great. It’s just a more relaxed, fun atmosphere. There’s something about it just being all together in a room is fun. You also get to meet other people that listen to the show and people have made friends at these things. You know, it’s like a little community.

**John:** Yes, and we’ve had some babies created out of —

**Craig:** We must have had some podcast babies. I probably made a few podcast babies. I mean, don’t tell anybody. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Don’t tell Melissa. Does Melissa listen to your show?

**Craig:** Hey, Melissa, I made, like, 14 podcast babies. [laughs]

**John:** That’s absolutely not true and is the worst.

**Craig:** Not at all true. No.

**John:** Not at all true.

**Craig:** I don’t do that.

**John:** But the shows are genuinely fun and while we’ll, of course, ultimately have this show up for listening, it’s not going to be same thing as being there because we will cut it down and we will cut out, the audience Q&A will probably get cut out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s why you kind of want to come.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a great Q&A. I’ll probably do 40 minutes on She-Hulk again [laughs], so that should be terrific.

**John:** Oh, don’t, no, don’t.

**Craig:** Oh, I shouldn’t do that? I shouldn’t?

**John:** No, no more She-Hulk. I think we’ve banned that discussion ever happening again. What I will say what’s interesting is because for my Kickstarter I had a video of me talking about it, some people wrote in and said, like, “Wow, you look nothing like I thought you would look like.” And that is a strange thing about listening to podcasts is that —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have, just human nature. You form an image of, like, who you think goes with that voice, and apparently, I don’t look like my voice at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t look like my voice. Neither of us look like our voices.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I remember as a kid, you know, it’s funny, podcasts have kind of brought back an experience that you and I had when we were kids. And then I felt like it sort of went away because radio started to go away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I was a kid, I remember wondering like what does Howard Stern look like? And what does Robin Quivers look like? What do any of these people look like? And then that sort of went away because — and now, it’s back.

**John:** I remember being in Los Angeles, well, as I first moved here and listened to KROQ, and there was Kevin & Bean in the morning. And I had this image of who I thought Kevin and Bean were.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I saw them at some live event and like, wow, that’s not even remotely what I thought that would be. It’s jarring.

**Craig:** They looked pretty much like I thought they would look like.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. I used to listen to Kevin & Bean every morning. Kevin & Bean, and you know, people don’t know, like, that’s where Adam Carolla came out of, that’s where Jimmy Kimmel came out of.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a great show but, you know, it’s radio. What are you going to do?

**John:** Yeah. I remember when Go was being launched, I mean, that was an incredibly important platform for us to get our actors and I think Doug Liman may have even been on that. And like Doug Liman on the radio, it’s just, “Why would you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs] I know.

**John:** But we were promoting our show. But, like, Breckin Meyer, Jay Mohr on that kind of show killed it.

**Craig:** Right, absolutely. Yeah, I know. It was a big deal back in the ’90s, yo.

**John:** Yo. Another thing we talked about on the previous show was Franz Kafka and we had a reader, Kevin, from Tokyo wrote in with a long response to that and I thought it was great so I thought I would read this aloud. “It was a pleasant surprise to hear Franz Kafka come up on the podcast. I spent many years studying his work and life, visiting the places he lived and wrote, archives, holding his manuscripts and so on. I’m writing to let you know that Craig’s literature professor lied to him.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, liar.

**John:** “The mention that Kafka’s works were only published after his death and against his wishes is a persistent myth. The truth is, Kafka oversaw the publication and translation of many of his short stories and novellas, including Metamorphosis. He fretted over details and illustrations, cover designs, and tracked the sales records of his books.

“It is true they asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished manuscripts in fragments which he considered incomplete. One justification Brod later gave for ignoring this was that after making the request, Kafka continued to actually publish his work. He was working on correcting his proofs for the collection that contains The Hunger Artist when he died. I certainly do not mean to criticize you since Craig brought up Kafka as a springboard for talking about writers’ feelings about their work. Your podcast is not about Germanic literature and the whole thing started by Craig’s professor lying to him.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “I guess the professor wanted to leave out the facts to make a juicy story like the entertainment journalists who were the target of your umbrage. Thank you for your entertainment inspiration. Kevin in Tokyo.”

**Craig:** Well, thank you, Kevin in Tokyo. You know, this does happen. Sometimes these myths persist. And look, we are trusting Kevin because Kevin sounds informed. He could be lying to me also, [laughs], right? I mean, we now know that I am susceptible to these kinds of lies. But in this case, I think Print the Legend, that’s my theory.

**John:** I think it is a Print the Legend situation. So I was doing just a little bit of cursory research and it does seem that Kevin has other people in his corner backing him up. There’s a book by James Hawes and there’s a review I read by Joanna Kavenna in The Guardian, and I’ll read a little quote from her because I thought it actually really summed up sort of what we’re talking about. “Hawes strongly believes the myth surrounding Kafka has clouded the perception of his writing to the extent that his translators believe he should sound like some ghostly, plodding sub-Sartre rather than someone whose, ‘black-comic tales of what happens to modern people who can’t give up on the Old Ways’ could hardly be more timely.”

And I think that’s actually a really fascinating aspect of the Print the Legend because when you print the legend, it’s going to influence all the choices you make about that person’s work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in the case of Kafka, you are translating these things and so if your image of the person you’re translating is, like, “Oh, he’s dark and it’s all about, you know, gloom,” then you’re going to make choices that support that thesis rather than try and define, you know, the funny or the satirical aspects of what it is that he’s writing.

**Craig:** That’s true. And I suspect that this is all accurate because I know that I didn’t study Kafka anywhere near the extent to which Kevin has, obviously, but I did do a lot of Nietzsche studying in college and there are a ton of myths surrounding Nietzsche as well, that he had syphilis, which is not at all the case, that he was an anti-Semite, which is not at all the case. There’s just a lot. It happens, you know, and all these guys lived well before the time of over-examination. No more myths can possibly exist, it seems to me. Unfortunately, we repose mythology now.

**John:** Yeah, it’s very possible we are. I can think back to Columbus, for example, if you want to talk about a person who is sort of built around a myth. And so you and I grew up celebrating Columbus Day and, like this was the day of discovery and there’s all this imagery about sort of who Columbus was and now as we sort of discover more things about, like, “Oh, you know what? Maybe Columbus wasn’t such an awesome guy.” We have to sort of look at all this text we’ve read as a kid and say, like, “Wait, huh? Is this really the right thing to be talking about with Columbus?”

Or Thanksgiving, for example, Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday. I would not want to change anything about the modern celebration of Thanksgiving. But if you look at sort of what is the legend behind it, it probably wasn’t anything like what we want it to have been.

**Craig:** Oh, no question. America itself, essentially, is the product of, I mean, the American dream, the American stories, all mythological. I see mistakes cropping up all the time. In fact, I was listening to, somebody had put on Facebook this bit that David Cross does in an audio book where he’s rebutting Larry the Cable Guy who was complaining about him. And at one point, Larry the Cable Guy is complaining that America’s on the verge of banning Christianity which David Cross correctly finds absurd and says, “You know, this is a country where, you know, George Washington was christened.” Actually, most of those guys weren’t Christian.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the Founding Fathers were Deists. They weren’t even Christians.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s just a lot of bad info circulating out there. And now, I’m circulating it as well. So good. Tune in next week for more disinformation.

**John:** Well, speaking of David Cross, David Cross’ frequent collaborator, Bob Odenkirk, is associated with our next —

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

**John:** A follow up. So on the last episode, we were talking about Simon Cowell and the aspect of, like, criticism and how criticism itself becomes a form of entertainment. And I said, like, “Oh, well, somebody should make a show where they just like criticize a stick of gum and it should be all about that.” And Jonathan Bell, a reader, wrote in, a listener wrote in and pointed us to this great Bob Odenkirk sketch which is on Funny or Die, which is all about — it’s called American Contestant.

And it’s a spoof of American Idol but it’s really just about the judges criticizing this woman who thinks she’s on a singing competition. It’s, like, “No, no, this isn’t about the singing.” It’s, like, “Well, I really want to go to Hollywood.” “We want to see that you want to go to Hollywood but, you know, you have to prove it.” And it just becomes about the nature of criticism and how criticism becomes a popular culture. So of course, I did have a good idea but about six years ago, Bob Odenkirk did a funny series of sketches about it.

**Craig:** Once again, trumped by Odenkirk.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not going to be the last time, I suspect.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Did you see the new Star Wars teaser?

**John:** I did. So we we’re recording this on Friday. So as we’re recording this it is a big deal because this new teaser came out so —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, how erect were your nipples when you saw it?

**Craig:** Like I could’ve cut glass with those things.

**John:** Yeah. I’ll pause for a second. When did cutting glass with nipples become a thing? Because it is a common phrase. How did it happen?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know how it happened out there. I cut glass with my nipples all the time. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Indeed.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Basically, whenever you need to do a jewel heist, you have to get really, really excited so you can actually cut through the security glass and steal the jewel.

**Craig:** I have to sort of rotate my torso in a planar, circular fashion. Yeah. No, I do it all the time. I loved it. But rather than talk about the teaser trailer, I just want to tie in to what you were saying that it just seems like these things come out and then there’s just this horde of people just waiting to say, “Meh,” and “I don’t like it.”

**John:** I have to say, as we’re recording this on Friday, I have not heard a single “meh.” I’ve heard a lot of sort of like, “Holy cow, that was much better than I was expecting it to be.”

**Craig:** Well, look, it is exactly as good as I was expecting it to be but then again, as we know, I’m a positive movie-goer. I expect every teaser trailer to be awesome. I truly do. And then, you know, I start from a place of hope and then, you know, we’ll see what happens. But yeah, there was just a bunch, but you know what, sometimes when I’m on the Internet and this is a weird thing for somebody who does a podcast to say, I just want to — I wish there were a button like a shush button, and I could just shush the Internet, just shush. Everybody shush.

**John:** You can. You can close the window.

**Craig:** No, no, no, no, I want other people to shush. [laughs] I want everyone to be quiet, even on their own.

**John:** So on a previous episode of Scriptnotes, we talked about this list that a guy put out saying, like, you know, a list of reminders, sort of an open letter to J.J. Abrams and a list of reminders about Star Wars. And it is interesting that, J.J. Abrams is not a stupid person and it seems like he did a lot of the things on the list not because that list existed but because, like, they’re the right kind of ideas.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the universe does definitely feel old. It doesn’t feel new and shiny. And, like, the helmets look battered and damaged. It definitely looks like it takes a place on a frontier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It looks, you know, like there’s mysterious things happening.

**Craig:** Well, it also looks like it is part of the universe of the first three movies. It has the palette of the first three movies, those wonderful Ralph McQuarrie illustrations. It looks like those. The colors are like those. Obviously, we know from advanced publicity that he’s been erring towards the side of practical objects that are maybe enhanced by CGI as opposed to pure CGI creations. It just looks like a Star Wars movie whereas the other ones just didn’t, you know, so —

**John:** Very shiny.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were shiny. So, I’m super excited. I do believe that this movie will be the biggest. I believe it will be the biggest movie. I think —

**John:** It could be the biggest movie of all time.

**Craig:** I think it will be. I think it’s going to outdo Avatar.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re probably right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Hooray for everybody involved.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Last bit of follow-up. On the last episode, I asked if there were listeners who had insights about retail that could help me out as I’m trying to figure out Writer Emergency Pack and in 2015 we’re going to try to put it out in the world, both retails like physical retail and online retail. And about half a dozen people wrote in with like really, really good helpful suggestions. And so I just want to thank everyone who’s written in and if other people have thoughts about that.

And it’s a good segue to our first topic which is, I recognized this last week that we’re actually going to have to put Writer Emergency Pack in a whole separate company because right now I’ve been running it through my own loan-out company and it should not, for accounting reasons, it should just not be part of the loan-out company. So I thought we’d start by talking about loan-out companies.

**Craig:** The loan-out company, which is a quirk of the entertainment business. It really is, you know. It’s not something that anybody really should know about unless they are considering becoming a writer, an actor, a director. That is to say an individual who sells their own art that isn’t — and they’re not objects but rather us, our expression, our individual expression. So what happens is if you achieve a certain amount of success and you want it to be success that you expect to be repeated, not just a one-time deal, then everybody, every tax person, your agent, all of the people around you, your lawyer will say, “You need to form a loan-out company.” What is that?

It is a corporation. Typically, it’s an S-corp. Some people do a C-corp. And you become a company. So for the sake of argument, you’re the Joe Smith Company. The Joe Smith Company is controlled entirely by Joe Smith. Joe Smith owns all the stock. Joe Smith is the sole officer of the company. When you are hired to do things, let’s stick with writing because we are Scriptnotes, the studio makes a deal with the Joe Smith Company, not with you. The studio pays the Joe Smith Company. The Joe Smith Company, in turn, warrants that it is there to provide the services of Joe Smith. And then, of course, you set up something where the Joe Smith Company then pays Joe Smith.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** What’s the deal with all these hoops? What does it come down to? No shock, taxes.

**John:** Mostly taxes. So let me back up and make sure that a few terms are clear along the way. So when we say success, it’s not, like, “Hey, you got an Academy Award nomination.” Success means that you are earning a certain amount each year.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And so when I first became a corporation, that threshold was about $200,000. They said, like, if you’re making more than $200,000 a year, then you should incorporate so that you could have a loan-out and things would just become much simpler. That bar may actually be a little bit lower now just for —

**Craig:** That’s what I read, yeah. Now, I think maybe even $100,000. But back when we were starting, yeah, $200,000 was the number that I heard as well. So every actor you see in movies, pretty much every working writer, every director, everybody has a loan-out company.

**John:** So some of the advantages for this are taxes. And so it’s a way of, Sony is paying through a loan-out corporation. Your loan-out company has that money. Your loan-out company can take write-offs against that money for things like your agent and things like your manager and things like your lawyer. Some of the things are going to being paid as a corporation, so they’re not being charged to you individually. That’s very useful.

In almost all cases, the overall balance of your company will be zeroed out of a year. So they’re ultimately going to pay you but it’s a way of delaying paying you as an individual writer for a little bit longer, and that can be very, very useful. It can also be useful because if you have legitimate research that you need to do, trips you need to do to study something for something you’re writing, if you have an assistant like Stuart Friedel, that person can be paid out of your corporation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s generally much better to pay things from a corporate perspective than to pay as an individual.

**Craig:** Yeah. As an individual, taking business deductions is arduous. It is often a red flag. A real simple thing, for instance, I have an office in Pasadena. That’s where I am right now. If you’re an individual and you have a home office, the IRS is, like, “Do you really? Because that’s something that a lot of cheaters say they have but don’t really have. Is it really just your bedroom?” But if you have an office-office and it’s a corporation, it’s an office. They don’t have a problem with that. They expect that.
So you’re right. And there’s something called the alternative minimum tax where as an individual they’re like, “You can deduct a bunch of stuff but then where if you deduct too much, we’re just going to add on a new tax because we don’t really believe you.” That gets circumvented when you’re talking about the — having a corporation.

The other huge tax benefit to having a loan-out is that you can then access different levels and expanded levels of tax-deferred savings. I’m talking about retirement plans. So you can save, you know, as an individual, you have your IRA where, I don’t know, they let you put in $2,000 a year. As a loan-out, you can put in six figures. You can put in a lot of money in tax-deferreds for retirement. You will pay taxes on it one day but it gets to grow without you having to pay the taxes upfront and it’s better.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think we should stress for writers is that if you were a screenwriter, you’re going to be a member of the WGA. And so there will be a WGA pension. The WGA pension, while good for most industries, it’s probably not going to be sufficient for you to be carrying on for the rest of your life. And so socking away money as a screenwriter during your most productive years is really quite important. And to be able to do that in a tax-deferred way through a corporation is fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a must-do.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a must-do. I mean, it’s not just silly, it’s actually dangerous not to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Well, an interesting that’s happened to me is like I’ve had some employees long enough that they have actually become vested in the corporation and therefore, like, they have retirement plans with me, which is just weird but also kind of great. So assistants who’ve been with for, like, five years —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where now they have a pension, which is wonderful.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s terrific. You have all sorts of options and flexibilities when you are a loan-out corp. Some people will say that the other benefit is that, you know, you’re shielded a little bit from some legal issues. Not really.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The truth is that if you do something wrong as an individual, you can’t really hide behind that loan-out corp. That’s so easy. They call it piercing the veil. It’s so easy to say, “No, it’s really just you.” The other thing is that when we sign contracts with studios, one of the things we sign is a certificate of authorship that says, “We’re going to write this.” The individual is going to write this. That’s what the loan-out company is promising. And as an individual, we are warranting that we’re not ripping anyone off. We’re not infringing. We’re not making any, you know, bad mistakes.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about this from a newer writer’s perspective. And people might be listening and saying like, “I’m an aspiring screenwriter. Do I need to form a loan-out corporation?” The answer is unequivocally no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So it’s one of those things like getting an agent, getting a lawyer, getting all that stuff, it’s all stuff that happens down the road. And when it has to happen, it just has to happen. Actually, here’s the best parallel. It’s the kind of thing like joining the WGA. You don’t need to join the WGA until you need to join the WGA. Like, at the minute you sign to write a script for a studio that’s a signatory or you sell a script to a signatory, then congratulations. You have to join the WGA and you are now a WGA member. The same kind of thing holds true for incorporating is that at the minute you need to incorporate, your agents, your lawyer, your manager will tell you, “Oh, about that time. You got to incorporate.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there will be a whole process to do it because literally thousands of people have done it before you.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s a fee involved to incorporate in the State of California. You know, it’s tempting to think, “God, what I should do is incorporate in Nevada because they don’t have taxes there the way that we have taxes here.” Yeah, it don’t work that way. You got to —

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Incorporate where you live, in the state you live. But they will tell you — it’s good information though to have in your pocket for those of you, especially if you’ve just sold your first thing, if you’re on the verge, this is something you should start talking about with your attorney because it’s a huge benefit to you. You will actually save a lot of money. By the way, do you, question.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you use a business manager?

**John:** I do use a business manager. So I will get into that. But first I want to back up one step and say that the first thing I sold, Go, was the first, actually, that wasn’t my biggest sale. I sold two things which I was paid as an individual, neither of which got produced. And those were just paid to John August. And I sold Go and that was just paid to John August. It was after Go that I incorporated. So I still get checks sometimes for just John August money. It’s not my loan-out money.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it’s fine. It’s just a little bit weird that there’s some stuff that falls outside that veil and falls outside that —

**Craig:** I’m in the exact same boat. My first two movies, RocketMan and Senseless, were both —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t have a loan-out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the residuals go to me personally for those. But everything else, they go to the corporation.

**John:** So actually back to your question about a business manager, yes, I do have a business manager, Carrie, and I love her to death. And so she is responsible for keeping track of the corporate money and keeping track of sort of the individual John August money. So I get quarterly statements. She files, you know, the estimated taxes, the quarterly taxes that have get through and make sure that all of the stuff happens.

And again it goes back to the heart surgery thing. She does this for a lot of other writers, a lot of writers that you and I both know. And because she’s seen all the stuff before, it’s just gets done, and it gets done right. But you do not if I can remember correctly.

**Craig:** I don’t, no. Because I kind of like this sort of stuff. I mean, some people have different arrangements. Some business managers do everything for people. They pay their bills. You know, they talk to, “Oh, I need to switch my, the guy that does my exterminating.” Okay, we’ll handle it. So I don’t do any of that. I pay all of my bills. I like Quicken, you know, I’m a Quicken guy. I do have a tax guy that I work with and I have financial investment managers that obviously I don’t , you know, I don’t know what stocks or anything like that. I don’t do that sort of thing.

But the other stuff I handle, you know, it’s not that bad. It’s pretty simple. And, you know, with computers now, it gets even simpler than it used to be.

**John:** So the conversation I had to have this last week with my business manager and with my accountant, and ultimately with my lawyer is that my company, my loan-out company, has been doing all the stuff we do for apps and it’s worked out just fine. So I have employees and we do stuff. The challenge is the company works, the corporation loan-out, works as a cash-based business. That’s fine when you don’t have inventory. But once you start having inventory —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Things get a lot more complicated. So the only inventory we’ve had to date, has been literally like our 150 episodes Scriptnotes drives and our t-shirts and those just sell out and then they’re done and nothing sits around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But these will sit around and there will be orders coming in and orders going out and there’ll be this whole timeline thing, and first in, first out. And it’s just going to be very complicated and wrong to try to bend this company to deal with that kind of situation. So it will end up being, I think, a whole separate company that will end up being the distributor of Writer Emergency Pack and other things we hope to make.

**Craig:** As well as it should, yeah, because when you have — I remember talking with my late father-in-law about this. He was a Burger King franchisee. So he owned a couple of Burger Kings and you would have to do the same thing with your new company if they get in to profit and loss statements.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just a whole other world. See, the loan-out company exists and can exist because it’s so simple.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, we don’t have stock, we don’t have inventory. We don’t even have profit and loss because our overhead is such a joke, you know. I mean, let’s put it this way. If your overhead is so great that it’s eating up all of your money, I mean the idea is whatever your overhead is as a writer, that plus the money you pay yourself should equal all of the money you’ve earned.

**John:** Exactly. The goal is to zero out everything, every —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Every year, every financial year. And as a writer, that’s really simple to do. As someone who has inventory, that’s just not going to be possible.

**Craig:** Right. Because if you don’t, then ultimately you end up paying taxes twice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because the corporation is making money, it has to be taxed. And then it’s going to send it to you, and then that’s going to be taxed again. Anyway, this is something that you, I know it’s all wonky, money, annoying stuff. But if you want to be a screenwriter, you kind of got to know about it.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you need to think about it at the time that you need to think about it. And so awareness of it before it happens is great. And then when the time comes that you need to do it, you do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my questions are mostly the writers I know from loan-out companies are feature writer people but it happens in television too.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And at a certain point you’re getting paid enough money, and you’re being paid as both a writer and producer, and that’s going to be enough money that that will happen. But I wonder, are professional athletes a loan-out company?

**Craig:** I believe they are. Yeah, I can imagine —

**John:** And musicians are probably the same. Like Taylor Swift, I’m sure is.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** She is a multibillion and whatever. But I think any time that you’re being paid a lot of money as an individual —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s when you want to be paid as a loan-out.

**Craig:** And particularly when you are essentially an individual actor not performance actor but an individual person doing something. So, you know, it’s the difference between now becoming an employee of a company temporarily as opposed to a corporation that’s being contracted and providing a service to somebody. It’s just a better thing. By the way, a little bit of advice for those of you out there who are successful enough to incorporate and have your loan-out company. Don’t name it something stupid.

**John:** Because that name will stick with you for the rest of your life.

**Craig:** And it’s super hard to change it. So —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When I started out, I was working at Disney. And when I had to set up my loan-out, I remember that my business card from Disney, it said The Walt Disney Company. I thought, “Oh, if it’s good enough for Walt Disney, it’s probably good enough for me. I think The Craig Mazin Company is probably, that sounds like a good name.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Did you pick something silly?

**John:** I picked something good, it’s Quote-Unquote Films Inc.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, that’s totally fine, it’s respectable.

**John:** But unfortunately, it doesn’t actually make sense with things that aren’t films, so —

**Craig:** True.

**John:** You know, the new company name will be something different that it makes more sense for that. And if you want a good advice on picking a good name, I would go to the recent South Park episode, I think it’s Go Fund Yourself where they actually picked names for their startup venture. And it’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Those guys are the best.

**John:** So our second topic is the Perfect Reader. So this is the third installment of our Perfect series. We have no idea how many installments there’ll be. Craig, how many installments will there be? Thousands?

**Craig:** Thousands, yeah.

**John:** So we previously talked about the perfect studio executive. We talked about the perfect agent. Today, we want to talk about the perfect reader. And by reader, we really kind of mean two different things. We mean a reader who is a professional gatekeeper, somebody who is the difference between your script moving on some place and not moving on some place.

We’re also talking about the sort of casual reader which is the friend or acquaintance or compatriot who you’ve given your scripts to and that person is reading your script and they’re both looking at your script and judging it and hopefully giving you some feedback on your script. But there are very different goals behind it.

So we just want to talk about what it’s like to be a great reader.

**Craig:** Well, why don’t we start with the friend version?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And then we’ll get to the professional version. So I do this all the time. Just in the last month, I’ve read a script by Scott Silver. I read stuff by Koppelman and Levien. And the first thing that I think that the perfect reader has to do is make sure they understand what the person giving them wants.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And you don’t always get it right, you know. Sometimes you get it wrong. But it’s important for me to know, okay, has anyone read this before? Are you looking for a wide open what do you think? Or is this something that is already set up and you’re having questions about A, B, or C?

Is this targeted? Do you want to know what I think about what I would call like inside the scenes or do you want to think about the total thing? And you try and get a sense of that so that you don’t, so that you don’t go too far or just bore them with stuff that’s irrelevant or that they can’t do anything about.

**John:** I sent a script to a friend and her first response back was, “Do you want me to tell you that it’s really good or do you want notes?” And it was such an honest response. And I sort of split the difference saying like mostly I want you tell me that it’s really good. But if there’s anything that sticks out that says like, uh-uh, that part doesn’t work, please let me know. And it was such a wonderfully, upfront way of addressing sort of what I was looking at —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For the experience.

**Craig:** That’s the other thing is that sometimes people send you something and that’s what they want. They want validation with some little bon mot of easily done work.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Sometimes people really do want shotgun to the face. In general, when I read things, what I say to people is, look, my default position is what I would want which is shotgun to the face. But if you’re not looking for shotgun to the face, let me know, and I’ll adjust.

And again, you know you don’t — everybody’s different. Like not every reader is right for every writer. You know, so like Scott Silver and I, we have a good, like I really like reading his stuff and I feel like I have a good, and the same thing with Brian and David. And Scott Frank and I read each other’s stuff. And so you find people that you’re like, okay, yeah, this is actually working, this is a good deal.

Then other people maybe you’re like I don’t think I helped them or whatever. But when you’re doing this for somebody else, the most important thing, I think, the perfect reader does is not think how would I rewrite this, which is a mistake I think a lot of writers make. And it’s natural because most of the time when you’re a professional writer and you’re reading someone else’s script it’s because the studio has given it to you and said, “Would you rewrite this please?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So your natural instinct is to go, all right, I’m going to read this now and imagine what would I do. That’s not helpful for your friend. What’s helpful for your friend is, I’m just going to read this and then I’m going to say to you here’s where I got confused. Here’s where I wasn’t sure what to think. Here’s where I thought what you wrote didn’t feel good. You know, it’s all about just pure audience style reaction. And then ideally you offer some solutions. They don’t have to be hard and fast solutions or overspecific because you want the writer to feel like they’re going to write their work.

But it’s not enough to say, “You know, this scene felt a little bit too much like that other scene.” It’s better to say, “You know, this scene, when these two people talk like this, these two other people are talking the same way in this other scene. So what if instead they did something like this or this or this, just so I didn’t feel that repetition because I like what’s happening in the scene. I just feel maybe, it felt repetitive to me.” That kind of thing.

**John:** So it’s a different experience when you know the person whose script you’re reading and when the person is a stranger. And so I love reading scripts from friends who are tremendously talented writers. A lot of times I’m reading scripts for things like Sundance, The Sundance Institute. And so I’m reading their scripts and but the first thing I always think about is, “What movie are they trying to make?” And I’ll never sort of — it’s dangerous — you should never ask that question first because that just sets you off on a path of like talking about things rather than talking about the movie itself.

But again, I don’t want to think about, “What movie would I want to make?” I’m saying like, “What movie did they seem to be trying to make on the page?” And when I think in the sense of what movie is it that they’re trying to make, then I can really look at it from perspective of like, “Are these scenes helping them tell the story that they seem to be wanting to tell?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which scenes best encapsulate this vision of what they have and which scenes stick out because they’re not actually getting to where I think they want to be going. And that way, I can sort of start the conversation with them, saying like, “Here’s what I think is so awesome and amazing. Here’s where I think this movie is. Tell me if I’m wrong, tell me if this is the right thing you’re aiming for. And if so, then let’s talk about how well these things are working and why these things might not be helping support that vision of what you have for your movie.”

In general, if you can talk about your reactions in terms of this future thing, the movie rather than this thing that’s sitting there in front of them that they’ve been slaving over, they’re going to be much more free to extrapolate and expand and move away from decisions they have made because it took them so long to write that moment.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I think what you’re zeroing in on is that when we are reading things for our friends, we have to read them like we’re producing the movie rather than that we’re rewriting the movie, you know. And a good producer is there to say, “I’m going to tell you how I felt not as a writer because I’m not a writer. I’m an audience member. I watched this movie in my head. Here’s what I thought of the movie. Here’s where I thought it worked, here’s where I thought it didn’t work. Here’s what I think, like you said, the movie is or wants to be. Here’s something that I loved and wish there was more of.”

It’s just an honest expression of your reaction. And it is not at all clouded by anything other than a pure audience member rooting for the movie as opposed to, “Oh, I don’t like this sort of thing,” or, “I don’t write like that,” or “Why would you? Your character, you know, is always like the way you do action.” No one needs that, you know. And particularly when it’s a fellow professional, one of the nice things about reading scripts from fellow professionals is that I never worry that there’s a subtext of, “I’m evaluating you as a writer.” Because I’m not. We’re all good writers, we all are professionals. I’m just evaluating the movie.

**John:** So let’s talk about the other kind of writer, the other kind of reader, I should say. This is the kind of reader who is working for a production company, for a studio, for a producer, a director. Is reading through a bunch of material and has to render a decision about like, “This is a script that I think is worth this next person reading or I think we can pass on this right now.” And I used to have this job. I think you used to do some reading as well.

One of my first jobs in Hollywood was as a reader at TriStar. And so I would have to read — I was reading 14 scripts a week and writing up coverage on them. And that’s a very different kind of reading because while you’re still flipping the pages and sort of taking notes and looking at what’s working and what’s not working, ultimately your audience is not the writer who wrote that script, but it’s some other decision maker. And so what your job is is to encapsulate, well, this is what is actually here and this is what’s working about what’s here. This is what’s not working about what’s here.

And there’s a third thing which I think is also really important which is a thing you don’t do when you’re talking to an individual writer is you’re saying, “Here’s the good writing and here’s the bad writing. Here’s strengths I see in this writer and here are the weaknesses I see in this writer.” It’s a very different experience because you’re not trying to think about being supportive, you’re just trying to be kind of blunt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And honest about sort of an assessment of what this is in front of you.

**Craig:** And these people not only read, I mean we’re all familiar with the notion of new writers who are sending their work in and it’s getting coverage somewhere, and they’re hoping that it gets passed to somebody, and that’s true. But frankly, for you and for me, this also occurs where studios, internally, have work that they’ve commissioned to be covered by their own readers. They want that as well.

So we all live in the world of these people. And by and large, I think they do a good job. I’ve read some, lots of coverage, some of my works, some of other people’s work. And what I think is the best kind of gatekeeper reader is not so concerned with jamming the movie into a box. They’re not a production executive, they’re not trying to figure out what would be good in our slate or would this make a lot of money or any business concerns. They just concern themselves with the script and with the craft of the script and whether or not the script is true to itself and is well written. So they avoid some of that stuff.

I find that the good ones tend to leave out what feel like personal axes. If you don’t like violence, if you think that violence is distasteful, don’t cover bloody R-rated action movie scripts. They’re not for you and that’s just not an appropriate, you know, reason to ding a script. So you leave out your personal ax grinding.

I remember Todd Phillips showed me coverage that was done of a script that he and Scot Armstrong wrote many years ago and it was really, I really like the script and so did the reader. But then the reader — there was one joke. It was a 9-11 joke and it was, I think it was — the script was covered like on 9-12. And the reader was just outraged and wrote an entire paragraph about how this joke was the worst thing ever. And I just thought that’s a bad reader because that’s not relevant.

The joke will be cut — if it doesn’t work, guess what, it gets cut. We don’t even shoot it at all. That’s not why you’re there, to argue about a line in the movie, you know. So that’s less than ideal. But, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So quite earlier in my career, when I think I first had an agent, I was working at a production company and I had readers who worked for me. And so there was a slow week and there really wasn’t quite enough to cover. So I’ve slipped this reader, who I thought was a really good reader, my own script under a different cover page. Just to see like, oh, let’s see what he thinks about this. And he slammed it. He just really ripped it to shreds. And it was so fascinating. Both to see what he wrote, but also to sort of internally look at my own reaction and sort of like how I was gauging my own work that other people really liked because this one reader has sort of slammed on it and it sort of gets to the nature of all criticism. But I will tell you that that never actually kind of stops.

And there’s one project that I have that is dormant at a studio. And I’m pretty sure one of the reasons why it’s dormant is because someone snuck out the coverage, the internal coverage at the studio. And it’s really negative coverage on this project that they paid me a lot of money to write.

And it’s just so fascinating that after, you know, being employed to write this thing and having people like it and, you know, getting directors on board, this one piece of coverage apparently does, I’ve heard from other people, continues to hurt it.

**Craig:** When you say snuck out, you mean put it online?

**John:** No, no, no. Like somebody at — I think my agency or someone else’s agent said like, “You know, the coverage there is really bad.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. And this can, this is a real problem because you would think, “Well, look, all of these people are paid a lot of money to decide what movies to make. They’re the president of a studio or the senior vice president or whatever.” And then there’s a guy that they pay, I don’t know what readers got paid, but not a million dollars a year. And this person takes a dump on the script and they all go, “Well, it got bad coverage.” And that becomes kind of the path of least resistance to sort of yield to that.

**John:** Yeah. I think it has been a bit of a momentum killer on this particular project. Now is that insurmountable? Hardly. We can totally get past that and getting one director or one piece of talent on it will completely change everything. If Cowboy Ninja Viking gets bad covered someplace and then it gets, you know, Chris Pratt attached, well who cares about that coverage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it is a piece of momentum, you know, early on in the process.

**Craig:** It’s true. And frankly, you know, I was — happily Cowboy Ninja Viking got very good internal coverage. If it hadn’t, the problem is there’s just suddenly less of an impetus to get the script out to agents, and managers, and big actors because internally they kind of lose a little bit of their love for it and that’s a weird thing. But it’s a true thing, and I have to say that those people, we don’t know them. They’re very powerful.

There’s one reader at Universal, in particular. I don’t know him, I don’t even know his name. I just know the legend of him that he’s kind of their guy. And he’s a very powerful person. And, you know, in a way I’m glad he’s there because he’s like that silent, unseen person that is in the back of my head when I’m writing. I’m just thinking, you know, you can’t really get away with stuff because one day that guy is going to read it. And that guy isn’t thinking about marketing. He’s not thinking about the schedule or, “Oh, we need a movie that fits into this particular box because we don’t have anything like that.”

He’s just going to read the script and say is this good or bad and I like that. Actually, if you’re writing a script that’s off the beaten path a little bit, then that reader actually could be your best friend which, let me just say is another thing that I think the perfect gatekeeper reader does. They don’t shy away from different or ambitious. They kind of like it.

**John:** Well, I’m going to disagree with you on a bit of this because I worry about mythologizing this terrifying reader as the person who is going to stop you from being able to make your movie. I know I just said that it was a momentum killer on this one project. But I don’t want to sort of ascribe too much power or fear among this one person because if your studio executive loves the project and it gets bad coverage, yeah, you’re going to be fine. So it’s not the one sole gatekeeper. It’s the person who’s writing their opinion down and therefore it matters.

I will say as the person who was reading at TriStar, so you know, I looked through my coverage when I left and I had just covered like 110 scripts. And I had given two really enthusiastic recommends on two things. And in both cases I was called to the matt for having wasted people’s time.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** With these enthusiastic recommends. And that was incredibly frustrating. One of them was a really good Billie Holiday biopic and they were just like, “Well, who would want to see a Billie Holiday biopic?” And I was like, “You know what, I bet you can make a really good one now and I bet it could be really kind of great.” But I got called to the matt for wasting people’s time.

**Craig:** Really? See, to me that’s outrageous. Because I mean, and this is why I — look, I wasn’t a studio reader and I would have been fired immediately because I would have said, “That’s not my job. My job isn’t to tell you who would go see this or why you should make it. My job is —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** “To tell you is this good or not? How about this, you didn’t waste your time. You’re not going to make a Billie Holiday pic but look how good this writer is. Do you have something else you want to make that this person could write? You know, she’s really good, read her stuff.” That’s just dumb.

**John:** The other one I remember recommending was a script called Full Honeymoon. It was by a writing team. And it wasn’t perfect but it was a very good solid romantic comedy. And you could sort of see where it was going but it was a very good version of that. And the ability to say like this is a really good version of this kind of movie. So, while you may not make this movie, these are writers you should probably consider hiring for other stuff. And I remember being called to the floor for that too. So I have tremendous sympathy for readers as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do, too.

**John:** And many screenwriters are going to be readers along the way. And my recommendation is reading is really a great way to learn about scripts and learn about sort of what things never work on the page. But you have to get out of being a reader before you just get that hole burned in your brain. Because it’s impossible to read 15 scripts a week and actually write your own.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I totally agree. I think that any overconsumption of something is bad for you. Overconsuming movies the way that critics do because they have to is bad for them. It skews their appreciation of movies because they’re not intended to be consumed that way. And the same thing is true for scripts.

If you’re writing, I mean, I know, I don’t know about you. But when I’m writing something, sometimes someone will say, “Hey, do you want to read this script? It’s kind of in a similar vein.” I’ll say, “Absolutely not.” That’s the last thing I want to do is read anything that’s in the same tone because I just know the way I am. It’s going to bother me, it’s going to affect my choices. I want to be able to choose freely and not worry like, “Oh, but they kind of did a thing that was sort of like that. Or I didn’t like the way they did that, maybe I should do something else.” I could see where it would become a little toxic.

**John:** Yeah. And I have a hunch, though, as we do with Perfect series we’re going to come back to the same characteristics for every perfect person. But I think they’re going to come down to honesty, clarity, kindness/forthrightness, the ability to sort of to speak the truth but speak it in a way that understands what the audience for it actually is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And as we talked about a studio executive, those are the characteristics to look for. As you look at an agent, those are the same characteristics. And the same is true for a reader, be it a professional reader who is, you know, deciding which movies the bosses should read or it’s a friend reading a script. You want those people to take their jobs seriously and be able to communicate effectively what it is that they’re seeing.

**Craig:** I agree. And I guess I would throw on there another unifying quality to all these perfect professionals is a lack of cynicism. That they approach their tasks with a rooting interest and a desire to see success occur as opposed to the opposite which I think does affect quite a few people.

**John:** I agree. So our last topic for the today is Dan Benjamin who runs the 5by5 podcast network has been doing podcasting really from this whole new area of podcasting. You could trace a lot of the stuff back to him and sort of the shows that he created on his network. And so when we started to do our show, I remember looking for like what equipment should we use. It was one of his blog posts that became the go-to for sort of which microphone should we use, how should we do this. And so this last week he updated his blog posts with some new recommendations and so I want to point to that because it’s really, really good.

So if you’re thinking about doing a podcast, this is probably the first place you should look in terms of hardware and software recommendations. So it’s Dan Benjamin. The URL is podcastmethod.co and it’s just a really terrific expert’s opinion on sort of how stuff should work.

**Craig:** Are we still doing it right?

**John:** We’re doing it right. And so it’s interesting because we are using a lot of the stuff that he is recommending. And so let’s talk about our microphones. So we used to use these accent microphones. So you still use the Audio-Technica 2020?

**Craig:** I don’t. I now use the Apogee —

**John:** Ah-huh.

**Craig:** Something, something.

**John:** All right. And so you are using a condenser microphone. And a condenser microphone classically records voices really well but also records the surrounding environment, which in your case, your office is pretty well padded, so there’s not a lot of —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Bouncing around happening.

**Craig:** Right, yeah.

**John:** So other than the sirens, it’s all good.

**Craig:** If there were no sirens, it would be perfect.

**John:** And so I used to use the Audio-Technica 2020. I just switched three episodes ago to the Heil PR-40 which is a dynamic microphone. And that is because my office is really bouncy and noisy and so my side of the audio I always felt was a little bit too live and a little too present and echoey. And so after some negotiation and discussion, we switched to this microphone. And I think I’m happier. So I’m going to give you an example of what’s so different about my microphone.

So here, I’m talking into the microphone. And if I move a little bit off to the side, my voice really completely fades away.

**Craig:** That’s right. Whereas if I do that same test, I’m over here, I’m over here, I’m over here, it’s probably the same.

**John:** It’s about the same.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that is one of the useful differences. And because I’m working in a busy office, honestly the guys downstairs can have a conversation, you wouldn’t hear it up here. So it’s really useful this dynamic microphone. If I’m directly talking into it, it’s awesome, otherwise you can’t hear me at all.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad that our setup is still pretty good for what we do. But, you know, it’s not about the setup, man. It’s about the content, bro.

**John:** It’s all about the content. I would much rather hear a poorly recorded podcast that has interesting things being discussed than a terrifically recorded podcast that’s boring.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we are recording this on Skype. So you and I are very rarely in the same room together. So we are on a Skype call. You’re recording your end locally on your own device, I’m recording my end locally on my own device. Just QuickTime, hit record. Recently we started using Call Recorder, so we actually are recording the Skype call as well. So when Matthew Chilelli edits the podcast together, if he needs to, he can grab this Skype recording of the whole thing together and use that if anything goes wrong on one of our sides.

We cut the show, I believe Matthew’s he’s cutting it on Logic these days, but we still end up going back to GarageBand because GarageBand let’s it put in chapter markers. And I want to step up for chapter markers for a second because so many podcasts don’t do it. I think they’re so useful.

So in our podcast, in most podcast players, you can hit the jump forward button, it’ll jump to the next topic. And so Stuart puts in those little chapter marks, so if you really don’t care about loan-out companies, you can skip over that whole segment.

**Craig:** But who doesn’t care about loan-out companies?

**John:** Everyone should care.

**Craig:** You know what we should do? On the chapter marks for this, under loan-out companies it should just say sex tips.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everyone will check that out.

**John:** So GarageBand is also where you put in all your metadata, so information about the show itself. And that’s what shows up when you are in your podcast app and you want to see what the episode is about, it’s all there.

**Craig:** You know who loves sex tips?

**John:** Who?

**Craig:** Sexy Craig.

**John:** I walked right into that.

**Craig:** Hey, dude, how was your Thanksgiving, man? Did you stuff that turkey? Did you stuff it?

**John:** So it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** My One Cool Thing is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. It is a great Iranian vampire western. Did I say Iranian?

**Craig:** You said Iranian and I thought maybe you meant Randian like Ayn Rand had written a vampire Western.

**John:** No. Iranian, Iranian, both of those would be better choices than what I just said.

**Craig:** Iranian. Yeah, Iranian.

**John:** Iranian vampire western. It’s by Ana Lily Amirpour. It’s just great. It is black and white. I saw it at Sundance. It is terrific. It is, you know, set in Iran. It is a vampire movie. It is a western. It is sort of period, it’s black and white. It’s just terrific. And so I highly recommend people go to see it. It’s in five theaters in the Los Angeles area, including the Sunset 5. And so if you have a chance to see it in a real theater, I would definitely go and see it in a real theater. If not, come see it when it comes out on video. It’s just great.

She’s really talented. And I don’t think all the details about her next movie are released yet. I am fascinated to see what she’s able to do with it because it’s really ambitious and could be really, really cool.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But this movie that she made is a great example of picking things that, you know, you can do and letting your limitations be empowering. And so she didn’t shoot this film in Iran, but she was able to find places in Southern California that looked like Iran. And by shooting it in black and white, she can create this really unique and special world that supports, you know, just cool things we’ve never seen in a vampire movie before. So I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** All right. That’s good enough for me. I’m there. I’ll go check that out.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is something that you need to file away for next year.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s a recipe.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’ve ever cited the best recipe as my One Cool Thing. It should be. The best recipe is the big Omnibus Cookbook put out by Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen where they take lots and lots and lots of recipes of things and they basically do every version they could find, get a hold on and then say to you, “This is the best one and here’s why.” And they’re very scientific about it. They love to talk about molecules and things. It’s great.

However, sometimes the best recipe is not the best recipe because one size does not fit all, you know. However, I did make the best recipe stuffing, specifically the bacon, caramelized onion, sage, and apple stuffing.

**John:** Well, that sounds great.

**Craig:** It was spectacular. Rave reviews from everybody. Best stuffing I’ve ever made. Best stuffing they ever had. If you’re looking for a good stuffing, and I’m not a stuff inside the turkey guy. I don’t do that.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s just —

**John:** Dangerous.

**Craig:** It’s dangerous, it’s going to dry your turkey out because your turkey takes too long to cook, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the point is it’s not easy to make, it’s annoying to make, it’s spectacular. It’s really, really good. That is the stuffing recipe.

**John:** And Cook’s Illustrated could probably point out the reason why it’s so successful is you’ve combined, you know, smoky, salty, sweet —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Carby.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it is stuffing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Whatever you quality you want to say sage has, it’s —

**Craig:** Savory. You’ve got the tartness of the apples, a little sour from the apple because you’re using Granny Smith’s. It really does hit every part of your tongue. And texturally, it’s super crunchy because you start with a baguette that you slice up and leave out overnight. Then you chop that up into cubes and leave that out overnight and then it burns really super hard, which is great because then as it cooks, it sucks up some of the liquid so it’s still crunchy but soft. It’s just perfect.

**John:** So I have two stuffing related bits of follow-up. First off, Ike Barinholtz who is a talented writer and actor on The Mindy Project, he Instagrammed today, “Oh, this is my breakfast.” And so he basically took leftover stuffing and then cracked an egg on top of it and baked it with some cheese on top. Is that not a genius idea?

**Craig:** I mean, generally the day after Thanksgiving is when you’re trying to unclog your arteries, but yeah. [laughs] That sounds awesome.

**John:** And so my only stuffing modification this year, because I had a very classic, you know, celery, onions stuffing — cranberries. And just, you know, we had fresh cranberries. And so I microwaved them a bit so they softened up, added some sugar so they weren’t incredibly tart, and mixed those into stuffing. Delicious.

**Craig:** Well, spectacular.

**John:** Spectacular.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** If you would like to know more about the things we talked about on the show, join us at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you’ll find show notes for this episode and all of our other previous episodes. You’ll also find transcripts for our previous episodes. We’re one of the few shows that does transcripts, so please look those up if you’re curious.

If you would like to find us on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. You can also search iTunes to find the Scriptnotes app for your iOS device or also on the Android Store and the Amazon Android Store. And that’s where you can find episodes of our premium show. Premium subscription is $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** $1.99. A bargain.

**Craig:** So easy.

**John:** Let’s you get to all the back episodes and bonus episodes that we put up as well. If you would like to come to our live show on December 11th, go wgfoundation.org and join us for that. If you would like to reach Craig Mazin, find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. Longer questions, go to ask@johnaugust.com.

And our outro this week is provided by Betty Spinks.

**Craig:** Yeah, Betty.

**John:** Thank you for running that in. Yay, Betty. I think Betty Spinks is a pseudonym for somebody but —

**Craig:** Okay, all right.

**John:** Thank you, Betty Spinks. If you have an outro for our show, something that uses the [hums theme] in a clever way, please write it and please send us a link to that so we will know to find it and use it as the outro to our show. And that is our episode this week. Craig, thank you for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, talk to soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Mary’s Heritage Turkeys](http://www.marysturkeys.com/)
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-show/) for the Scriptnotes Holiday Show
* [American Contestant with Bob Odenkirk](http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/da114dc7e4/american-contestant-delicia)
* [Dan Benjamin’s podcast guide](http://podcastmethod.co/), and [Marco Arment’s](http://www.marco.org/2014/11/29/easy-listening)
* [A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night](http://www.analilyamirpour.com/#!untitled/c13ay) by Ana Lily Amirpour
* [Bread Stuffing with Bacon, Apples, Sage, and Caramelized Onions](http://heatherhomemade.com/2011/11/bread-stuffing-bacon-apples-sage-caramelized-onions/) from [The New Best Recipe](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0936184744/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-tentpoles-of-2019).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 167 Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, huge news on my side. I am finally buying a new computer.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god. So, are you going to get the 5k iMac?

**John:** I’m going to get the 5k iMac.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And so I’ve been looking at the same monitor for the last eight years.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Had this monitor for eight years, which is a very long time. And I’ve had different computers that have been driving it, but I’ve always been really far behind because I I’ve always thought like, oh well, there’s going to be the computer that’s just right for it.

So, usually I get castoffs from Ryan Nelson who is a designer who needs a much better computer because he’s doing stuff that needs a good computer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But finally I’ll have a good computer.

**Craig:** So, have you been like on a MacBook and a Cinema Display?

**John:** Yeah, I’ve been on an old MacBook Pro and then a Cinema Display. I have a 30-inch Cinema Display which there is just the one year they made that.

**Craig:** That’s big. Yeah, it’s huge.

**John:** It’s huge, but it’s nice. It’s not especially sharp anymore.

**Craig:** Right. Plus I don’t think it was Thunderbolt and all that stuff.

**John:** No, none of that.

**Craig:** I assume that you updated to Yosemite.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** As did I. And I’m so far very pleased. But the one thing I noticed is that, so I have the most recent MacBook Pro, and a fairly recent 27-inch Cinema Display, so it is Thunderbolt and all the rest. But it’s not Retina or —

**John:** And you notice it.

**Craig:** Okay, I do notice it. It’s a huge difference.

**John:** Yeah. So the fonts in Yosemite are Helvetica Neue and it looks really good on Retina and looks really not so great on things that aren’t Retina. So, I said that I updated to Yosemite, but I’ve only been using Yosemite in the betas on my 11-inch MacBook Air. And that has a sharp enough screen that it looks pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, not so much here. Which is okay, because I split my time between — usually when I’m on the Cinema Display it’s because I’m writing and Fade In looks very nice on it, although I have noticed that when I export to PDF, and I don’t know if it’s just a function of the way Courier Prime is or all fonts are, but now when I export in PDF on the Cinema Display the printed Courier Prime just doesn’t look very good. It’s like jaggy.

**John:** Well that’s not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It should look great. And so —

**Craig:** I know. It’s Yosemite.

**John:** It’s that constant challenge. Trying to balance the representation of what the computer knows the thing looks like to itself and how it’s portraying it on the screen are very difficult things. And that’s why these 5k displays have very custom circuitry to hopefully make things look as good as they possibly can.

**Craig:** Well, the bummer for me is I don’t want to get an iMac. I like being completely mobile. So, what I guess I’m waiting for now and I presume is inevitable is a 5k Cinema Display.

**John:** Yes. And those will happen. The challenge is that the actual bandwidth required to get from your computer to that display is huge. And so even Thunderbolt 2 by itself won’t be able to power that.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It will have to be a Thunderbolt 3, which doesn’t exist. So, it could be a little while to wait. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** But is 5k equivalent to Retina, or better than Retina?

**John:** They’re calling that Retina. Retina is really just I think a term of art for anything that has dots so small that you could not possibly see them.

**Craig:** Right. And so I don’t even know what the Retina resolution is, but —

**John:** It’s sharper than what you’ve got.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s sharper than what I’ve got on the Cinema Display. But everything looks fantastic on the MacBook Pro screen, which is Retina Display. And by and large I think design wise this is pretty great. I love it.

**John:** Yeah. The MacBooks are fantastic, but I love having a big screen, so I’m looking forward to having this and having a nice sharp display.

**Craig:** Well, congrats.

**John:** Thank you very much. It is my Tesla. So, I’m excited to finally get it.

**Craig:** You know, I am getting the —

**John:** Yes, everyone on the podcast knows that you’re getting the new Tesla. Because you have to be able to accelerate to, what was it, zero to 60 in three seconds or something?

**Craig:** 3.2 seconds.

**John:** That’s just absurd.

**Craig:** That’s super car speed. It’s got 691 horsepower. And I just like the idea that I have that many horses. I’m like a horse magnet.

**John:** I love that we talk about things in horsepower.

**Craig:** Well, of course we do.

**John:** Of course we do.

**Craig:** Everything should be in terms of horsepower. Like computers we shouldn’t talk about gigahertz or processing or clock speed. We should just talk about how many clerks the computer is duplicating. Like, the clerks from Brazil with the little visors.

**John:** That’s what you need.

**Craig:** Like my current MacBook Pro is four billion clerks.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good. Today on the podcast we are going to be talking about superhero scheduling and the 31 superhero movies that slated for this next decade, which is absurd. Not even decade, like seven years.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We’re going to talk about this great article about copyright. We are going to talk about developing a pitch. And we’re going to look at three —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, god, you’re going to make me never use the word developer again, Craig.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers. Developers.

**John:** Let’s look at synonyms. So, figuring out a pitch. Perfecting it. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Rowing.

**John:** If our listeners have suggestions for words they can use other than develop, so that Craig never does that again —

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers.

**John:** And we’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges from our listeners.

**Craig:** Do you ever listen, this is going to shock you, but I did listen to a podcast once.

**John:** Oh my gosh. I’m standing up, but still I’m sitting down.

**Craig:** I think it’s called Comedy Bang Bang. It’s the Auckerman, Scott Auckerman, is that right? And they have this ongoing thing, like years ago whenever they started it, whenever somebody would say my — they had a whole thing about how Borat goes “My wife” and now it’s their thing. Whenever somebody is on their show and they happen to mention the phrase “My wife,” one or more of them will just quietly go, “My wife.” And somebody made a super cut of all the times it happened and it’s one of those things like The Simpsons rake gag that just gets funnier and funnier because it never stops.

And I think maybe developers is our “My wife.”

**John:** “My wife.” Either that or it’s “Uh-huh.” My tacit thing. It’s interesting, this last week I was at Singleton and we were talking about podcasts. A lot of people there make podcasts. And we were talking about some people have these long monologues. And it’s that choice of whether you say the Uh-huhs or you just leave it out and just let the person monologue for like five minutes.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I’ve always done the Uh-huhs because it just makes it clear that I’m actually paying attention and listening.

**Craig:** Have you ever spoken with somebody that does this, they’ll keep saying, “Right, right, right, right,” as you talk?

**John:** So many development executives do that.

**Craig:** Right, right, right. Right.

**John:** Right. I’m checking in with you, yup, I’m with you, I’m with you.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Right. Yeah, and they don’t know they’re doing it. I can tell they don’t know they’re doing it. It’s the weird — and it’s the most annoying thing.

**John:** It’s almost the Tom Cruise like constant eye contact thing, where it’s just like, oh, you’re freaking me out. You’re just too present in this situation.

**Craig:** You’re too present. Exactly. I need you to ignore me just a little bit.

**John:** Just back off just a little bit and then I’m good.

**Craig:** Let your mind wander.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Follow up. This week, and really our next episode, is the Austin Film Festival. So, there’s two things which Scriptnotes listeners may want to participate in. First off, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge, and these entries will all be the second rounders from the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Competition.

Craig will not be there, but I will be there with Franklin Leonard of the Black List, and Ilyse McKimmie from Sundance Labs. So, they will be up on stage with me. And I picked them because I think they’re going to be great, because they’re reading a lot of scripts and they’re sort of gatekeepers to their respective domains. And I want to talk with them about sort of what they see as they start reading scripts and what their experience is like. And so I think that will be a fun time.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. And, you know, now that you mention it, and I’m so sorry I’m missing it, but for the next time we do something like this together with the Three Page Challenge, we should really think about getting, routinely getting an executive or producer up there, because it is so useful to hear that perspective from them.

**John:** It should be fun, so I’m looking forward to that. That will be Friday at 9am if you’re coming to the Austin Film Festival. It’s an early session.

**Craig:** Early, yes. People will be hung over for that.

**John:** They will be. I will not be.

**Craig:** Yeah you will.

**John:** And then we’re doing Scriptnotes Live on Saturday at 12:30pm. Susannah Grant will be my co-host.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** And our theme is all about writer-directors. And weirdly like everyone on stage I think will be a writer-director. So, I’ve written-directed, so has Susannah. We’ll have Richard Kelly. We’ll have Peter Gould from Breaking Bad.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** And Cary Fukunaga, just announced.

**Craig:** I mean, how did you? You’re just rubbing my face in it now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can you please tell Mr. Cary Fukunaga how much of a fan I am?

**John:** He’s a genius. And I actually met him at the Sundance Labs, with Ilyse McKimmie, many years ago when he was doing Sin Nombre. And I didn’t work with him there, but he was clearly one of those, oh, you’re a super talented person. And I’m so happy when my predictions prove correct.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And Peter Gould really is, sometimes TV directors don’t get their due. And he certainly deserves because obviously he was a writer on what I believe is the greatest television show in history, but also a director of that show as well. And you can’t go wrong with Richard Kelly. Please, for those of you at Austin, go see this, if only to look into the unfathomable bottomless cruel eyes of Richard Kelly. Stare into the abyss of Richard Kelly and tell me if it does not stare back into you.

**John:** Indeed. There will also be special guests that I’m not allowed to announce, but I think you will enjoy some of these other people who are going to come to the show. So, please come to that. That’s 12:30 on Saturday at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s a must do. I don’t care what else is going on. If you’re going to Austin and you’re going to be there, and I’m so sorry I won’t be there this time. This time only. I’ll be back next year. But Saturday at 12:30. If you don’t go to this, you’re just dumb.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** So, a little protocol. If you see me at the Austin Film Festival, it is totally fine to say, “Oh, hello, hi.” But know that I may be running from one place to another, so if I am brief with you it’s only generally because I’m trying to move from one facility to another facility and things are sort of spread all out.

But if you do see me, and you see me in a moment where I have some time, I will have on my person this thing called Writer Emergency which is a website you can go to. It’s this thing we’ve been working on for four years. And I actually have a physical thing I can show you. So, if you would like to see it, I will show you this small pack of suggestions that I will be carrying with me. Because we’re sort of beta testing them, so I need to show it to actual writers.

So, if you see me at Austin, I will have it on my person.

**Craig:** I was quite sure that you were going to say if you see me, feel free to talk to me, but do not touch.

**John:** Yeah. Do not touch. Do not touch me. Just maintain a safe distance.

**Craig:** Do not touch John August.

**John:** If you’re wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, I will probably notice that. So, that’s a thing you might do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My trainer today was wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt. It was the first time I’d seen one in the wild, and I’ve got to say it looked really good. Now, as we’re recording this, Craig, you just said that you have not actually physically gotten yours because you live out in the hinterlands, but everyone else, if by the end of this next week you have not gotten your thing, something is wrong and it’s probably Stuart’s fault. So, you should probably email orders@johnaugust.com and let Stuart figure this out.

**Craig:** Now I’m hoping I don’t get it because I want Stuart to suffer.

**John:** I think we did a really good job shipping everything out. We’ve gotten much better at it. But as we were shipping them out we realized, wow, there is one Highland t-shirt, like one person ordered a small Highland t-shirt, and we were out of small Highland t-shirts. And we realized like after we’d already gone to the post office we put someone who had ordered XXL and we sent them a small.

**Craig:** Ooh, no!

**John:** So, fortunately our wonderful listeners, he emailed us and so we were able to get that t-shirt back and give it to the right person.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good. Good. Good. Because, wearing a too-big t-shirt is perfectly, but a too-small t-shirt.

**John:** That would just not be good. No.

**Craig:** It’s no good. It’s no good. It shows all the soft squishy parts.

**John:** Yeah. Unless you’re wearing Spanx, which is something we learned about from Aline.

**Craig:** Man Spanx.

**John:** Man Spanx. People who may need Man Spanx are all of the actors who are going to be in all the superhero movies that have now been set for the next seven years.

**Craig:** Are you starring in Transition Man? [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I’m Transition Man. That I locked down. But this last week just got crazy. So, I want to just take a minute and talk through all of the superhero movies that are currently on the slate, and then we can talk about the reality here and sort of what’s going to happen.

So, I’m pulling from a list that was at News-a-Rama, but I think these are all sort of officially announced things. For 2015, here are the superhero movies:

May 1 is Avengers: Age of Ultron.

July 17 is Ant-Man.

August 7, the new Fantastic Four that Simon Kinberg is producing. And Simon was a great guest this last week at the WGA.

So, that’s three for 2015.

For 2016 we have Deadpool on February 12.

We have Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, on March 25.

May 6 we have Captain America 3, which is reportedly Civil War, which is kind of going to be great.

May 27, X-Men: Apocalypse, also Simon Kinberg.

July 8 is an Untitled Marvel film unofficially widely believed to be Doctor Strange.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** August 5 is Suicide Squad, which is a Warner’s project and DC project.

November 11, Sinister Six, from Sony, which I think is Drew Goddard if I’m correct. I hope I’m not wrong.

So, that was, I’m counting up here as we do this, that was seven movies for 2016. Seven superhero movies.

**Craig:** Seven superhero movies in 2016.

**John:** But, 2017, not to be outdone.

**Craig:** Surely there won’t be anymore.

**John:** Oh, there are a few more.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** March 3 of 2017, the Untitled Wolverine sequel.

May 5 is an Untitled Marvel Film.

June 23 is the Wonder Woman movie.

July 14 is the Fantastic Four 2.

July 28 is Guardians —

**Craig:** Wait, they already know they’re doing a 2?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They don’t even care if number one does well. They’re like, screw it, we’re doing 2. I love it.

John. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on July 28.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** November 3, another Untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** They should just keep that title. It’s good.

**John:** Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. Just say like the Marvel Movie.

**Craig:** It’s just Marvel. Just show up.

**John:** Marvel. Show up.

November 17, Justice League, Part 1.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Which I think is potentially the expansion upon whatever happens in the Batman vs. Superman.

There are two unspecified in 2017. One is a Sony female Spider-Man spin-off. And also a Sony Venom: Carnage Spider-Man spin-off.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I’m going to quickly count this. 10. I’m counting ten for 2017.

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. More.

**John:** Ten superhero movies, not too much.

**Craig:** More.

**John:** Yeah. Then, 2018: March 23 of 2018, The Flash.

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This can’t — 2018, they’re just guessing.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to get better than this. Just wait.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, The Flash, March 23.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** May 4 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 6 is an untitled Marvel film.

July 13 is an untitled Fox Mystery Marvel film.

**Craig:** Uh…all right.

**John:** So, I think, I’m talking that to be —

**Craig:** Like an X-Men sort of thing?

**John:** Yeah, something that is in the canon of the stuff that Fox owns would be part of it.

**Craig:** Right. Which will be the X-Men vs. Fantastic Four.

**John:** Oh, that would be great.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah, they have to.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** July 27 is Aquaman.

**Craig:** Oh, finally.

**John:** Jason Momoa.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, I thought it was what’s his face? [laughs] I thought it was the guy from Entourage. Okay.

**John:** No. [laughs] Yeah, it’s James Cameron finally got around to making the Aquaman film.

**Craig:** Finally got around to making, okay.

**John:** November 2, an untitled Marvel film. I think they’re cheating. I think you’ve got to pick some titles. But, all right.

Unspecified date for the Amazing Spider-Man 3.

**Craig:** Oh good. Is that a reboot of the last Amazing Spider-Man? Oh, no, there’s only been two. Okay.

**John:** So, I take all the Sony things with like a huge grain of salt, because who knows what they’re actually going to do because the Spider-Man franchise is in transition. But do I believe that they will make some movies? I certainly do.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, back to a little bit of reason, there’s only seven movies, superhero movies, slated for 2018 right now.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** This is 2014 though still we’re in right now?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Okay. 2019, this is why I wanted to do the list. April 5: Shazam. So, I’m so excited that they’re going to do Shazam in 2019 because back in 2007 when I wrote the Shazam movie, I remember having to scramble because Warners was like on my ass about delivering because they wanted to get in production and do budgets. So, I’m just really glad that I sort of canceled a vacation back in 2007, so 12 years later —

**Craig:** Well, they had to get ready for 2019.

**John:** So, this is supposed to have the Rock, Dwayne Johnson, as Black Adam, which is perfect casting and was also perfect casting 12 years ago when we started this process.

**Craig:** Now, let me ask you something. Is this still your script?

**John:** It’s still my chain of existence. It’s still the continuous development on the same project.

**Craig:** But they’re not, in other words, they haven’t just been sitting with your script for 12 years? [laughs]

**John:** No, I think other people have clearly come on and done this. And this was Pete Segal when I was doing this, who is clearly not going to be directing this now. But it is just bizarre.

**Craig:** That’s insane. Wow.

**John:** May 3 is another untitled Marvel film.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** June 14, Justice League, Part 2.

**Craig:** Yeah, because, you know.

**John:** Because.

**Craig:** Because.

**John:** 2020 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh, good, 2020. Are we even alive?

**John:** It’s really a strong prediction of like what will the world be like in 2020. That is six years from now.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know that phones will be implanted in our ears.

**John:** So, April 3 is Cyborg.

**Craig:** Oh good, Cyborg. Everyone has been begging for that.

**John:** Yeah. And then June 19 is Green Lantern.

**Craig:** Worked well the first time, let’s do it again. [laughs]

**John:** It did! You know what? I think part of the lesson of Green Lantern is that you just jam a movie into existence, it’s going to work.

**Craig:** So, listen.

**John:** 31 movies! 31 movies stretching in to 2020.

**Craig:** First of all, this list is highly suspect once you get past 2017. What happens is the real estate during the prime movie months of essentially March through July, really March through June is truly the big months now, because summer has sort of shifted up, it’s so treacherous to release a big movie because you’re always worried that you’re going to go up against two other huge movies. So, people start squatting on these dates. A lot of this is just nonsense. It’s nonsense posturing, and squatting, and some of these movies will move.

So, for instance, when Marvel says, look, on May 4, which is a huge weekend, in 2018 we’re putting a movie out. What they’re really saying is everybody be worried about us, but maybe they will, maybe they won’t. You never know.

A couple of things come to mind when I hear this crazy long list. One, you know, movie studios are businesses and they’re giving people what they want. People keep going to these movies, so why not? And a lot of them are good.

But, two, and this is really the big one, this is the Marvelization of Hollywood and I’m not sure that other people really are doing it right. Marvel is doing it right. And Marvel has a massive catalog. Massive. The Marvel universe has always been famous for having thousands of characters that are all interrelated in this huge soap opera universe. It’s very Game of Thrones in that way.

So much so that they can even, for instance, Nicole Perlman as we had on our show, picks an obscure comic out of a pile and lo and behold it’s now Guardians of the Galaxy and it’s a franchise.

DC never really had that depth. You can see them trying, because they’re colliding Batman and Superman the way that Avengers collided Iron Man with Hulk and so on and so forth. So, they’re trying, and I get that. And they should, frankly, Marvel should roll out things Dr. Strange and so on. I’m sure they’ll do very well.

Where we start to get to the Justice League I begin to worry because I’m not sure that DC really does have the depth there character wise, interesting character wise. Frankly, even Marvel was struggling a little bit. I mean, no offense to Jeremy Renner or Joss Whedon, who did as good as they could do with Hawkeye, but he’s just — he shoots arrows. [laughs] It’s not really, I mean Olympians do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s starting to get a little thin out there. Certainly by the time we get to Aquaman, your eyes should be rolling a little bit. Shazam, I don’t, I remember —

**John:** Shazam I think, I mean, I will defend Shazam because I wrote Shazam. Shazam is actually a great idea for a movie, because it’s big with super powers.

**Craig:** Right. The little boy can say Shazam and he becomes awesome.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it has the potential for both big superhero movie and sort of comedy. It has the ability to sort of — that wish fulfillment comedy aspect of it. But this is going to end in tears.

**Craig:** I mean, the problem is you and I remember Shazam because there was a television show when we were kids. It was, do you remember, it was paired with Isis.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not the beheading ISIS, but the —

**John:** It was the Shazam/Isis Power Hour. And I remember as a person who was excited to see Isis, there were only like three episodes of Isis, so it was almost always Shazam.

**Craig:** I know. And I loved Isis, too. My sister and I were —

**John:** It’s the power of the pyramid. Come on.

**Craig:** It’s the power of the pyramid. And I thought she was hot. I really liked Shazam and Isis. I liked Isis more. But I don’t think Shazam is particularly — and look, it doesn’t have the cool factor that Guardians of the Galaxy had because the whole idea was that they were kind of bad ass misfits, which is always fun. So, I’m just wondering if that property is going to appeal to a 17-year-old male.

**John:** I should step back and make clear that I don’t that Shazam is actually the problem. I think Shazam independent of all this stuff could be a huge success because I think it could actually do that crossover kind of — you can take seven year olds to it and make it feel like a good family movie, but I think the overall — you were worried about that thinness of the character slates. I just think the real problem here is the thickness.

I think you are painting, there’s just too many superheroes trying to jockey for attention. And people will get sick of it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they haven’t yet. They haven’t yet. So, and some of these things we know will do great. I mean, we know that Batman vs. Superman will be a huge movie. I would like to see that. That sounds like fun.

Captain America is sort of on its, perfectly well on its own steam. It’s a good series. I like that they’re calling it maybe Civil War because hopefully the villain this time will be dysentery.

**John:** You know that the actual premise is essentially Captain America vs. Tony Stark.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought it was going to be more just like, oh, gang green set in and we’re running short on black powder.

**John:** Oh, see that would be really good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A little north, a little south.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, oh, we need to amputate. Here, drink this bathtub hooch while I saw your leg off. [laughs] That I would go see.

**John:** Now, Craig, indulge me in a thought experiment because let’s take, let’s step aside and like not look at this as superhero movies, but let’s just say there’s some other genre that was tremendously successful. And so let’s say westerns are the tremendous success, but westerns are really, really expensive.

My worry is that by sinking all of our time and energy into making these incredibly expensive westerns, we are going to be screwed when westerns stop working. Also, we’re limited in our ability to make other kinds of movies, or other kinds of big movies because we’re spending all of our capital making these giant westerns.

**Craig:** I will give you a rosier point of view on it. Most of this stuff is a guaranteed hit. Yes, at some point the bubble will burst, but when the bubble bursts and the sixth Spider-Man movie fails to turn a profit, that’s okay. It will be absorbed by the five that came before it. And the same for all of the Marvel films and all of the — I mean, good, another Wolverine. Thank god, right?

So, the truth is these are the safest bets Hollywood has. And, yes, they cost a lot, but they also know that they’re going to generate enormous profits because they have so far. And they have to the extent that when it finally ends they’ll be okay anyway.

And, I would argue that the profits that these movies generate are essentially what is funding every other movie they make, whether those movies are big or small. These are the things that allow them to take a little tiny bit of risk here and there. It’s not like what they used to take, but without these, I’m not sure they would be in the movie business at all. That’s the scary part.

**John:** So, they’re not actually as guaranteed though. If you look at the ones that have not worked, there are some notable things you can single out. Green Lantern did not work. This last Spider-Man did not work to the degree that they needed it to work in order for it to propel the franchise forward. So, you can’t say that they’re a lock. And, you know, I’m so glad that Guardians of the Galaxy turned out so well, but as you look at that movie, a 20% worse version of Guardians of the Galaxy would have been a disaster. It was one of those things that had to be executed perfectly.

**Craig:** That’s true. And I’m not saying that they bat a thousand. I guess what I’m saying is that if Green Lantern fails, that’s a failed movie. If Green Lantern succeeds, it’s five hits. And so, for instance, Fantastic Four, the first Fantastic Four movie just didn’t really click.

So, what are they doing? They go back to the drawing board and they’re like, no, no, no, we can make this work and we’re going to put Kinberg on it. It’s going to be a different kind of vibe. And my guess is it will work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re learning how to make these better. And there are two twin pillars of superhero success. No, three. Three triple pillars of superhero success.

There’s what Bryan Singer actually deserves a ton of credit, I think —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** For kicking this thing off with X-Men. And to me those were the first superhero movies that got out of pure cheese mode and really went great. Obviously you’ve got to give Nolan a ton of credit.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Nolan, however, they’ve tried to Nolan other movies. Doesn’t work as well because Batman is perfect for Nolan. Batman is unique. Really no one else is like him tonally. And then you’ve got to look at what Whedon in collaboration with Kevin Feige at Marvel has done. Right?

So, they’re all learning from each other.

**John:** I would say Whedon is fantastic, but I would say the arc of Iron Man into The Avengers is already sort of well, you know, you make The Avengers because you actually already made Iron Man.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Kevin Feige deserves — Kevin Feige may be the greatest movie business genius in the last, well frankly since I’ve been working in the business.

**John:** I would give the Pixar folks a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Pixar folks are creative geniuses who are business successful because they’re so brilliant creatively. Kevin Feige doesn’t write and he doesn’t direct.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** He’s like, you know, you have to go all the way back to like, I don’t know, Thalberg, and guys like that to find these really powerful, very smart guys that actually made like a good creator-like impact on the movie business. He may be our generation’s, I don’t know, whatever you want to call it, Zanuck or Thalberg. One of those guys.

**John:** Yeah. Okay.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not a huge superhero movie fan the way that a lot of other people are, but I pick and choose ones I like. Business wise I think this actually generates money for them to make other kinds of movies. They do make other kinds of movies. Without them I worry that movie studios just start to stop down to more of a Disney-like existence of two or three movies a year.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at the range of studios here and sort of who’s not making them and who might be able to prosper by just doing something else. So, Sony is trying to do things in the Spider-Man universe. And so female Spider-Man, Venom, that kind of stuff. Sinister Six is theirs.

You have Fox with X-Men and Fantastic Four, which love them, grateful for that.

Over at Warners you have this whole DC universe that they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** At Disney you have the whole Marvel universe of things they’re trying to do. That leaves Universal without a superhero —

**Craig:** Well, but they’re trying. And you know what they’re trying with.

**John:** With the Monsters.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s not the same.

**John:** And maybe that will work that it’s not the same.

**Craig:** Because it’s not the same. And I know that Chris Morgan and Alex Kurtzman are shepherding that. And that’s obviously something that they are well aware they don’t have. And it’s interesting that all the studios essentially are saying how can we Marvelize stuff. How can we Marvelize — let’s just look through our catalog. Find intellectual property with multiple characters in it and then Avengerize it. They’re all doing it right now.

**John:** And then Paramount. So, Paramount has Star Trek. I’m trying to think what else they have that is I that vein?

**Craig:** Well, they had Iron Man but they’ve lost it. Is that the idea?

**John:** Or Dare Devil, right?

**Craig:** Dare Devil I thought was —

**John:** Oh, Iron Man was always Marvel, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** No, Iron Man was Paramount.

**John:** It was Paramount, but I think maybe they still have some distribution rights on it, but it’s back now in Disney’s hand I think.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, they had it and it’s gone. I think Paramount doesn’t have any. They have Transformers. Well, Transformers are kind of theirs.

**John:** Yeah, that’s at DreamWorks/Paramount, right? Or is it Amblin/Paramount? It’s all confusing.

So, yeah, the challenge is, and maybe the opportunity is if you are not in that business, maybe you stay out of that business and find ways to thrive in some other —

**Craig:** Yeah, like you know Lions Gate’s superhero franchise?

**John:** Twilight.

**Craig:** Tyler Perry.

**John:** Oh, that’s true. But they also had Twilight. They also had —

**Craig:** Well, Twilight and Hunger Games are there, but they’re limited. They’re like Harry Potter. They end because the books end. I mean, obviously you can see now that Harry Potter is not ending.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** When you talk about like a character that can renew over and over and you can just making new episodes with that character, Tyler Perry, Madea. Madea is their superhero.

**John:** Madea is the superhero. Speaking of Tyler Perry, did you end up finally seeing Gone Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** No. But I’m gonna.

**John:** You’re gonna. You’re gonna sometime. Because then we’ll have a special podcast just about that.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yay. Anything more on superheroes before we move on to the next topic?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Next topic. Copyright. And so copyright is fundamental to the things that we do. There was a good article this last week by Louis Menand — who knows how he chooses to pronounce his name — but it was in The New Yorker. It was an article called Copywrong. And there will be a link to it in the show notes.

And I thought it was an interesting assessment of where we’re at now and really how we got to this place. And his thesis is that, I’m just taking a thesis from other folks, but is that copyright was established with this idea that you want things to be protected for a short time, but ultimately fall into public usage so that everyone can benefit from them. And that has been changed and altered in a way that is sort of the opposite of that. And so it’s holding stuff to the individual, to the creator of things for such a long time that things never fall into the public use.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, it is an interesting article. I mean, the root of copyright ultimately was to encourage works for the public benefit. The idea being if you could give creators some exclusive right to their work for some period of time, it would be enough of an incentive for them to then do those things so that they could eventually move into the public domain for everyone’s use, a bit like the way that drug companies are allowed to own their drugs for awhile and then it becomes a generic.

What’s happened since then is a collision of two different forces, both of which I don’t think the initial copyright theorists could have foreseen. One was the rise of corporate intellectual property. And the other is the information revolution and the prevalence of cheap, easy, quick piracy.

So, on the one side we have companies that have used their influence over the legislature to extend copyright far beyond what it was initially intended to be, sometimes out of pure greed, a lot of times out of a kind of cultural panic that Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain and that doesn’t seem right. But really ultimately it’s about protecting the pockets of the people who pay for and distribute intellectual property.

And for us, of course, that interest is aligned with ours in a purely selfish way because that’s what puts money in our pockets.

**John:** Yeah, I want to step back to that idea of the public benefit because it is in the public benefit for people to write things, to create things because that is moving culture forward, it is dissemination of ideas. And so the idea behind public benefit in those initial years is really valid, because you want people to be incentivized to make things and share things and publish things so that it can enrich sort of everyone.

And so it’s in people’s public benefit for those creators to be able to charge for things and be paid. That makes sense.

The question becomes how many years after that is it more than public benefit for people to be able to use and share and reuse and do new things with that material. And originally it was like 17 years and it’s now up to 95 years because of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. And the issue that’s come up, and Howard Rodman from the WGA has actually sent a survey around asking us about things, like have you ever encountered dead books. And by dead books it’s meaning like books that you would love to adapt or love to do something with, but it’s impossible to figure out who actually owns this. Sometimes things are copyrighted, but there’s no actual way to find out who it is.

**Craig:** They’re called orphans.

**John:** You can’t publish it. They’re orphans. And that is a situation that has come about almost uniquely because of these extensions of the copyright term is that normally these things should have easily clearly fallen into public domain and yet they are not.

**Craig:** In fact, the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild have worked together to petition Congress to assign the copyright to orphaned movies to the writers and directors of those movies, which is not the same thing as saying put it in the public domain, but rather, no, no, we should have — keep the copyright, but we should get it. Copyright can last a very long time, particularly when it’s framed as a certain amount of time after the death of the author.

For instance, the movie that I’m writing right now is inspired by the general genre of Agatha Christie’s works. I mean, it’s based on a different book entirely, but the idea is that it’s an Agatha Christie style whodunit. There are only two Agatha Christie books in the public domain, the very first two books she wrote. And they date back to the ’20s, I believe. So, you could see how long copyright lasts.

Now, on the other side of the equation, you have this fact that the vast majority of intellectual property that is downloaded over the internet is pirated. The vast majority.

**John:** Okay. The only thing I’ll push back on that is that pirated in terms of this is a completed work of art and you are downloading the whole thing and using it. The challenge is like when you’re using a snippet of it, something that should be fair use, something that should be I am using this in order to make a statement on it, or to do something with it that is useful new work, it becomes very difficult to know whether that is a legal use or an illegal use.

And companies are, especially now in the age of corporate copyright, companies are extraordinarily aggressive at stomping down on anything they perceive could be an infringement on their copyright. So, it creates this chilling effect that new work is not happening because you are terrified that someone is going to come after you.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll push back on that a little bit. Fair use is really about use. It’s about the duplication or sampling of the republication of. But it’s not about the purchasing of. So, I can make a fair use argument that I’m allowed to put a clip from The Dark Knight on my website.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But what I can’t make is a fair use argument that I’m allowed to download The Dark Knight for free. We know that, for instance, there are — I mean, god knows, millions of pirated copies of Game of Thrones globally. So, what we have now is a weird storm like collision of a cold front and a hot front of this hyper-extended legal copyright and this hyper-truncation effective copyright.

And we are trapped in between right now. And so the people that follow the laws are being unfairly injured, I think. The people who are creating property are being unfairly injured, I think. Everybody is suffering right now. And I’m not sure what the answer is other than to say this: as somebody that creates intellectual property in conjunction with corporations, I must be on behalf of myself and my family ever mindful of the other sides, I guess I would call it hypocrisy when companies — the distribution companies or the provider companies like Google or Amazon bang the drum of copy fight and intellectual property freedom when really they don’t care about that at all and, in fact, defend their own intellectual property brutally. They just want to make money.

**John:** What this article points out though which I’ve also noticed is that you have tremendous legal teams with vested interest in maintaining the current copyright laws and extending them even further. You don’t have — to the degree you have Silicon Valley who wants to sort of make things free, whatever — but they’re not organized in a way to push for lower, like to rein back the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, to bring it back from 95 years to something much more reasonable.

There is no business model for that and therefore you don’t see the organized fight of lobbying and trying to get some of these copyright laws written a little bit more sanely.

**Craig:** Well, I think the sad thing is that they don’t have to because they know it doesn’t matter. I can go on YouTube right now and watch, you know, big chunks of all sorts of the movies that I’ve written that have just posted on there. Google owns YouTube. They’re distributing the content. They know they’re breaking the law. They don’t care.

**John:** But, Craig, I’m talking about the things that you and I do. So, exactly the situations where I would love to adapt this book, but I cannot adapt this book because it is still under copyright because of craziness. And so things that should have fallen in to popular culture that I should be able to use and adapt and work with are not available. And I think, and we’re talking, also I would say you and I will make the distinction between fair use and sort of piracy, but if you are a Disney company, you will come after both with the same hammer because you have one hammer and it’s an incredibly effective hammer.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, in the end the people that suffer are the wrong people. There’s no reason that you and I, if I wanted to work a little more freely with a novel that was written in 1931, it sucks that I can’t. It also sucks that my residuals are impacted by the fact that people can just go on YouTube, a Google Corporation company, and just watch that stuff illegally uploaded for free.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, once again, John, you and I are getting screwed.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. I wanted to debate it. I don’t think we’re going to find any meaningful answers. What I would love to see though is — I would love to see the Elon Musk of copyright law who is going in and saying, okay, this is crazy, this cannot continue along these same lines. We have to both protect copyright from piracy, from real piracy during that initial period of profitability on a new work, but then recognize that copyright is designed to protect new work and not to give you a century of profits.

**Craig:** Yeah, well…

**John:** I don’t know that we’re going to find that person.

**Craig:** I’ve got news for you. If we can find the Elon Musk of legislation, there are other things I would like him to work on first.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** We are in dire straits. Dire.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s not zoom out too much. Yes, things are bad.

So, next topic.

**Craig:** Next topic!

**John:** Next topic. So, I’m going to set this up and you will tell me like this is just the classically bad situation. I got sent this thing to look at. It was an adaptation and they’re like, “Can we just get on the phone with your really quick and just sort of talk through it. I know you don’t have a lot of time.” And so I got this thing on like a Wednesday and I’m looking through it and I’m like, oh, it’s sort of sparking and I can sort of see what the movie might be here. And it’s like is there any way we can get on a conference call, like four of us on a conference call, like me and four other people on a conference call on a Friday afternoon at 4pm.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Would you say that’s a good idea or a bad idea?

**Craig:** Well, considering that the Sabbath is right around the corner, John, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.

**John:** I think in general you don’t want to have a first pitch or kind of meeting on something to be on a conference call with four people you don’t know, especially Friday at 4pm.

**Craig:** You don’t want to be on a conference call. You don’t want to be with four people you don’t know. And Friday at 4pm, everybody is essentially done.

**John:** They are done and they are dead. And so classically a bad idea, but I was traveling, I was going to be traveling so I was like, uh, it’s the only time I can do it. So, I did it. And, remarkably, it went really, really well.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** Which is great. Which is very exciting. And I think maybe partly because expectations are so low at that point, that I could just do it. I think, also, the fact that you and I do this podcast every week, I’ve gotten much better at just sort of like talking on my feet.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I talked through it. So, anyway, that went great. And so now I actually have to go in and pitch the real thing. Because on that first phone call I could just pitch like this is what I’m thinking. I think it’s more like this, I think it’s like this, I think this is the world, this is the universe. And that was sort of kind of easy.

I could sort of do the elevator pitch of it really, really well. So, now I have to go through and figure out the whole pitch of it. And that’s a very different skill set.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And so I just want to talk a little bit about sort of moving from that “here’s the idea” to “here’s the expectation of what you are going to be delivering when you go in and talk through a pitch.” And I know you just did that pretty recently, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I thought we could give some helpful tips for people.

**Craig:** Well, there’s different kinds of pitches. So, the first thing you’ve got to figure out is what’s the kind I’m doing. For most people starting out, they do need to deliver a fairly detailed pitch. The purpose of which is to convince the other person that you know what you’re talking about.

There are times when people don’t really need you to give them the whole movie. They just need the big points. They need the big data for what’s going to kind of happen in the movie plot wise, act breaks, and twists and reveals, and the general idea. Every now and then you get to kind of just talk conceptually, which is always the best thing. But, you know, for instance, in your case you kind of did the conceptual and now it’s like, okay great, at least give us the big data.

So, when I think about putting these things together, I try and — I keep in mind who I’m pitching to.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s not a movie audience. It’s not my friends. The people that are listening to this are going to make decisions based on marketing, they’re going to make a decision based on how they feel in the moment and they’re going to make a decision based on how they can conceptualize this movie in the context of other movies that have made money.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I do try and pitch the concept with an emphasis on the characters which I think plays better in a pitch than “And then, and then, and then,” which gets really boring. I try and pitch with an emphasis on the big moments that I know in their minds they’re already putting in a trailer. And I also try and pitch with any context, so I can say in many ways it’s like this movie except that it’s not because of this.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s classically that thing you hear in sort of the elevator pitch is like, “It’s like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but in Space.” Or, you know, it’s this but it’s that. It’s not exactly this, but it’s these other two things combined.

And this thing I pitched, there are movies that I can sort of do that two things handoff with. And it’s very glib but it’s helpful because it provides a frame. It’s like the kinds of things that would happen in these kinds of movies —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Is useful. And then you end up distinguishing but these are the things that sort of make it unique and different. These are the unique elements that are going to be helpful for marketing, but also sort of make this movie a movie worth making. Like why you’re going to have the kind of response you want from this.

And so for me with this pitch, weirdly I’m going to be pitching quality because it’s a genre that you don’t necessarily associate with quality that often and sort of detailed character work. Hopefully it’s the kind of movie where the expectations about sort of what characters are supposed to be doing in it are incredibly low, but then so to push beyond that will be useful. It’s the kind of movie where the characters hopefully don’t recognize what genre of movie in they are in.

**Craig:** I think that’s always a good idea. I think that when you’re pitching something, you are in that wonderful moment where you are on your first date and you and your date partner can fantasize freely about the life you live.

Later on down the line when you wake up in a doublewide, and you’ve both gained weight, and you’re out of work, you can confront reality. When you’re pitching, it should be ambitious. It doesn’t have to be ambitious — budgetarily it should be creatively ambitious. It should be audacious. You should be willing to say I want this to be great. Because everybody wants it to be great. Nobody wants to, “Well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to deliver pretty much just what you’d kind of ho-hum about.”

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s that moment to not be cynical at all. Like, I’m going with really the expectation of like, you know what, I think we can make something really, really, really cool here that will be surprising. And the same way like Guardians, again, was surprising in that it was doing things like, wow, I didn’t necessarily anticipate you were going to do that. And this movie succeeded so well in large part because you did these things. That’s a crucial thing.

I often describe the great pitch is really as if you just saw a fantastic movie and you’re trying to convince your best friend that they have to see that movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s that level of excitement that you’re trying to communicate.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s why it’s also good when you’re doing “It’s like this thing” to say something that’s surprising. When you hear something like, “Well, it’s like Raiders in space,” people go, okay. So, it’s Raiders except that they’re in space.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if you say something like, “It’s a romantic comedy and it’s Raiders,” you go, well wait, how does that work? “Let me tell you.”

But I can already feel people leaning forward. It’s like, well, how does that work? You want to tweak curiosity. I mean, I always think that the Matrix must have been the best, I mean, I don’t know if they pitched it or spec’d it, but what a great pitch. Like, “Imagine this kind of Blade Runner-y, sci-fi world with this incredible martial arts. Yeah, it’s that, and also it’s not real. It’s Philip Dick. It’s this. It’s that. Now, let me explain how that’s going to fit together.”

And if you can pull off how it fits together, well, that’s what movies are. It’s basically — you know, we always say you put your character in an impossible situation and then you get them out of it. Put your pitch in an impossible situation and then get yourself out of it and you will be rewarded, I think.

**John:** Yeah. So, anyway, that’s going to be happening in these next couple of weeks, so.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I will let people know what the outcome of that was. But it was one of those sort of fun situations I think people don’t — writers of all levels will find themselves in a lot, where you had the sort of initial, you know, oh, that’s a really good idea, come and pitch me the full thing, and stepping from that whole like, oh, I think this is potentially really interesting to here is the whole movie I’m going to try to right is a challenging transition sometimes, because you start to recognize like, oh, that’s actually going to be a lot of work. And so it’s going to be a lot of work for me these next two weeks, but I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** It will. But I will say to you that I’ve never, even when they say we would love to hear the movie, they don’t really want to hear the whole movie. So, like everybody at some point starts to — they love listening to the first act. They love hearing how the second act works. And by the time you’re done with that, they just want to know, oh, so like what happens in the end?

**John:** Yeah. And this is an adaptation. So, there is already expectation about like these are some of the kinds of things that are going to happen, so it’s really I can tell them about like this is how I’m going to do this thing. And that is great because it’s both they have the expectation like, oh, he’s going to need to be able to do this thing. Oh, that’s how he’s going to do it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They just need to be able to say to the person that runs their life, “No, this guy has got it,” you know, “she knows what she’s doing,” which is why frankly if I had a choice between knowing every single scene of the movie or being able to deliver three moments that they would think, oh my god, those are great trailer moments, I go with those three trailer moments.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Always.

**Craig:** Because that’s what they’ll end up pitching.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all it’s going to take.

**John:** Yes. Craig, are we going to do these Three Page Challenges, or are we going to save them for another week?

**Craig:** I see we’ve blabbed a lot today.

**John:** We blabbed a lot this week.

**Craig:** So much blabbing.

**John:** So, should we save these for another week?

**Craig:** I think we should save these for another week.

**John:** I do. Because I don’t want to rush through these because they were interesting things to talk about and I don’t want to sort of slam through them. So, I’m going to save my notes in these and we will get to them another week. So, we apologize to — fortunately we never even mentioned the names of the people, so they will never know that they could have possibly been a part of it.

**Craig:** But they will be. They will be.

**John:** They will be.

**Craig:** Do we need to do any questions and answers? Or should we just —

**John:** I think we’re good. Let’s do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great. Oh, should I do mine?

**John:** I can do mine. So, my One Cool Thing is this app that a friend of mine who was at Singleton who I didn’t know was going to be there, but she was there, and she recommended this thing that her daughter loves to play on the iPad. And I checked it out and it really is just great. It’s called Dragonbox. And it is a game for iOS, both on your iPhone and your iPad. And it looks like a simple pattern matching game, where you’re trying to clear these levels by moving these tiles around.

And there’s sort of the board is divided into two halves and so anything you do on one half of the board you have to d the same on the other half. And so it becomes a sort of logic puzzle.

What’s so ingenious about it is it’s actually algebra. And they’ve sort of abstracted it all away. So, you think you’re just moving these colored tiles around, but as you go through levels you sort of realize like, oh, this is actually algebra, the same way you have to balance both sides of the equation.

Then eventually they start to introduce some tiles that sort of look like numbers. And you go through and it’s like, oh, wow, you’re actually doing algebra and you’re actually solving for X but the X is just a Dragonbox.

So, I played through, you know, almost all the levels now and they keep introducing concepts that I would say like, well, they’re never going to be able to deal with things in parenthesis or distribution of stuff. And they have these ingenious metaphors for what that’s like. So, parenthesis are like these bubbles and so it’s everything inside a bubble. And then you can break the bubble and pull the stuff apart, but you have to do it a special way.

It’s really quite ingenious. So, everything up through single variable algebra is actually presented in it, but I think you can actually — a kid could get through all of it and not really know they’re doing algebra, which I think is smart.

**Craig:** I think that’s awesome.

**John:** So, it starts, you know, there’s a version for like five year olds that’s obviously very, very basic. And then there’s the version I’m doing now, my daughter is nine, and she can totally do this. So, Dragonbox.

**Craig:** My daughter is nine. I’m going to start her on it today.

**John:** And weirdly I’ve been playing it like while watching stuff on TV. And it’s kind of fun.

**Craig:** I just sit down and do proper algebra when I’m watching TV.

**John:** Well, that’s always a good choice.

**Craig:** I will say that one thing that’s kind of funny, were you a good math student?

**John:** Yeah, I was good. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was good. I was always honors.

**Craig:** I loved math. I just loved it. But it’s been so long. And my son who is 13, he’s now in algebra and occasionally something will come up and I’ll just think, oh, I’ve just got to — like the other day he was working on some simple trigonometry, tan, cosign, etc.

**John:** You will never use that again in your life, unless you’re a scientific.

**Craig:** But here’s what’s so cool. So, I’m like, okay, he needs some help on his homework. I haven’t done that in forever. Give me two minutes. And I sat there and I just flipped through and I’m like, oh, okay, okay. And what doing that now as an adult teaches you is that we’re so much smarter now than we were when we were kids because we know how to read things and understand them.

It’s not fair. Literally I relearned that stuff in two minutes. I was like, oh…

**John:** Reading the actual stuff in the book, you were able to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because we’re used to reading things in books. Like when we were kids we were forced to and it’s just like, oh my god, a book, and I better wait for them to tell me how to do it. Now you can just do it. You can teach yourself anything. We’re geniuses now.

**John:** We are geniuses. All of us.

**Craig:** Compared to when we were 13.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, speaking of geniuses, Transition Man, Lockheed. So, okay, I love fusion. I love nuclear fusion.

**John:** I was hoping you were going to talk about this. So, we’ll see if it’s real. I’m worried it’s not.

**Craig:** Well, a lot of people are worried it’s not. So, fusion reactors are the dream, unlike fission reactors which are all the nuclear reactors that work today, fission reactors work by basically neutrons colliding in to each other and smashing atoms apart, which releases an enormous amount of energy, but has some inherent dangers, see Chernobyl and Fukushima.

**John:** And they always leave horrible stuff at the end.

**Craig:** And they do leave horrible stuff at the end that lasts, that remains horrible, for basically longer than we’ll probably be here on the planet. There’s problems with it.

On the other hand, nuclear power doesn’t release a single bit of carbon into the atmosphere. Has zero impact on global warming and climate change.

**John:** To be fair, you actually have to get the ore somewhere. So, you’re doing some carbon by getting the —

**Craig:** It’s so minimal.

**John:** But much less.

**Craig:** It’s much less. So, it’s vastly preferable to burning coal. So, fusion reaction is entirely different. Fusion reaction is when two light atoms collide together and form — they fuse together to form one big one and in doing so release a lot of energy. What’s interesting about that is that the fuel itself ultimately comes from seawater. So, you don’t need to go mining around.

The fusion reaction has to take place under such specific containment that if there was any kind of failure of the containment the reaction would stop immediately. So, there’s no melting down. There’s no release of dangerous radiation. I think the worst case scenario would be minor radiation within the fence line of the property of the fission reactor.

And also the byproducts in the end while somewhat radioactive, maybe are dissipated within 100 years or so. So, at least they’re not going to be there forever.

Problem with fusion reacting is that it takes an enormous amount of pressure to smash these atoms together and up to date it’s been very hard to get more energy out then it takes to actually smash them together.

**John:** So, we’ve been able to make bombs out of it, but not make a sustainable fusion reaction.

**Craig:** Correct. Sustainable fusion reaction, it’s hard to run at a surplus of energy, which is the whole point. You certainly don’t want to run it at a deficit. They’ve had these large things called tokamak reactors, tokamak fusion reactors, the ITER which was a prior Cool Thing of mine which is the French version they’re working on.

But Lockheed all of a sudden comes out and goes, whoa, whoa, we actually figured out a way to make this really small fusion reactor and because it’s so small it’s going to be way more efficient and we think in ten years we’re going to have a perfectly well-functioning fusion reactor running on seawater that would be the size of a truck that could power a town or something.

**John:** Yeah. So, if — let’s just stipulate — if this could actually happen, that would be incredible. It would be incredible for the future of energy, for the future of American industry, for the future of — it would be incredible.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be the single greatest industrial impact on human civilization. Period. The end. Because what we would do is eliminate the notion of energy resources. The one thing that we are not running short on on the planet is ocean water and frankly even then the reaction is very efficient.

So, essentially what we would do is we would say, globally, no globally, we have a safe pollution-free, endlessly renewable source of energy that we can put everywhere.

So, oil, done. All of it. Just oil, natural gas, coal, all of it, done.

**John:** There are some things, okay, so to be fair there are some things which fusion power is not great for. It’s not great for flying planes.

**Craig:** I disagree.

**John:** All right. How do you make a nuclear jet? A fusion jet?

**Craig:** Oh, if the Lockheed engine is correct, it would be no bigger than the big gas-powered engines on planes. You would have, absolutely. In fact, planes would be the first thing that would probably go, would be a fusion-powered plane.

Look, we already have fission-powered submarines. They’re dangerous. We have them.

If you have a small fusion reactor, yeah, for sure. You would basically tank up your plane with seawater and off you’d go.

**John:** Well, I mean, Craig, I know that you are looking forward to charging your Tesla off of this. I don’t blame you.

**Craig:** For sure. Now, here’s the downside. They may just be full of crap.

**John:** There’s an incredibly high likelihood that they are.

**Craig:** Right. So, let’s look at the balance sheet of the full of crapness. On the plus side in their favor, it’s Lockheed. It’s not like Ponds and Fleishman going, “Cold fusion,” which was nonsense. This is Lockheed. They’re pretty big and they’ve been around for awhile. And they don’t tend to just make stuff up and lie.

On the downside, there are a lot of scientists saying we don’t even think that’s theoretically possible. And the more concerning thing is that Lockheed is asking for private investment in this project. And as one scientist pointed out, that would sort of be like if the White House wanted a military project, them going to like a small town Savings & Loan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** Why isn’t Lockheed just funding it themselves? They have billions of dollars? So —

**John:** Yeah. If they started a Kickstarter for it then Craig would be really, really furious.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I would lose my mind.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** My mind! But anyway, I hope that it does change the world forever, and ever, and ever.

**John:** I like to have hope. Hope is a nice thing.

**Craig:** I sure do like hoping about these things.

**John:** Well, I hope I will see many of our listeners at the Austin Film Festival next week. That will be our episode for next week. Assuming nothing goes wrong with the audio that will be our episode for next week.

If you would like to tweet something at Craig, maybe wishing him a very happy attendance at his wedding —

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s not my wedding. I mean, I’m already married.

**John:** At the wedding he’s going to.

**Craig:** At the wedding I’m attending. It’s going to be a great wedding.

**John:** He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We actually have this new Twitter account set up for a thing we’re working on here called @writeremergency. If you tweet Help to @writeremergency, we will tweet back to you. And we have interns standing by who will write back to you with hopefully helpful suggestions.

**Craig:** [laughs] No.

**John:** [laughs] No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You should give up. Give up on your dreams. That’s what they’ll say.

**Craig:** Quit now. Quit now. You’ll never make it.

**John:** Never. Never.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you have longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also, johnaugust.com is also where you’ll find show notes for the things we talk about. You can sign up for the premium feed. We are so, so close to getting 1,000 subscribers on our premium feed at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** If we hit that, we’re going to do the dirty show, and man, we have some really good ideas for special guests for the dirty show. That will only be available for the premium subscribers. So, that’s yet another good reason to do the subscription.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. Thank you, again, to the iTunes Store for highlighting us as one of the best podcasts. That was terrific. And that’s also because people who subscribed left a comment and the iTunes people notice that. So, that’s lovely when you do that.

That is, I think, it for the show.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Oh, sorry, it’s produced by Stuart Friedel, who is actually not here today, but he does produce the show, so thank you, Stuart. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who does a masterful job making us sound coherent. And that’s our show. So, thank you. And join us next week.

**Craig:** Have fun in Austin.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* The new [iMac with 5k Retina display](http://www.apple.com/imac-with-retina/)
* [OSX Yosemite](https://www.apple.com/osx/)
* [Retina displays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display) on Wikipedia
* [Comedy Bang Bang](http://www.comedybangbang.com/)
* John’s schedule at [the 2014 Austin Film Festival](http://austinfilmfestival2014.sched.org/speaker/john_august.1sssegfs?iframe=no&w=i:0;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.VDMKbCldVjc)
* Help is on the way at [writeremergency.com](http://www.writeremergency.com/)
* If there is a problem with your shirt order, [reach out to Stuart](mailto:orders@johnaugust.com)
* The [31 scheduled superhero films](http://www.newsarama.com/21815-the-new-full-comic-book-superhero-movie-schedule.html)
* [Copywrong](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat) by Louis Menand, from the New Yorker
* [Dragonbox](http://www.dragonboxapp.com/) secretly teaches algebra to your children
* [Does Lockheed Martin really have a breakthrough fusion machine?](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531836/does-lockheed-martin-really-have-a-breakthrough-fusion-machine/)
* [Tweet “help” to @writeremergency](https://twitter.com/writeremergency) for assistance
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jackie Ann ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))