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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/to-chase-or-to-spec).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 147 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is the last episode of Scriptnotes we’re recording…

…before the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple will release all the brand new stuff on Monday but this is before Monday, so we don’t know what that stuff will be.

**Craig:** When you say they’re going to release all the brand new stuff, is this when they’re going to announce the next iPhone and such?

**John:** Well, they’re going to announce the new operating system, so for Macintosh and for iOS. And so it’s where all, you see, it’s sort of the future. And so our listeners who are listening to this on Tuesday or sometime after Tuesday, they are living in a future in which all these things are known. But we are living in a place of uncertainty. It’s like — it’s a quantum flux — flux is really the word but there’s — the decisions have not yet been made about what the future’s going to hold but they are made in the future that they’re living in.

**Craig:** You know what happened is the power of movies just happened there, because you saw Back to the Future.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And in your mind, flux capacitor is permanently lodged. It’s neurologically lodged right next to time travel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I mean quantum and quantum flux, I think they sort of feel like they belong together but I’m not sure they really do in a scientific way. But I do know that I envy the people in the future who know what the future’s going to be and, yet, I don’t want my time to move any faster.

**Craig:** It’s getting a little sad.

**John:** No, no, it’s getting exciting because exciting things are brewing. So, you know, it’s exciting for me as a developer because we are always so excited to see what the next things are going to be and what the next shiny bits of goodness are going to be. And so the very first Mac app we ever created was called Bronson Watermarker. I don’t know if you remember Bronson Watermarker.

**Craig:** I do, I do.

**John:** So Bronson’s really useful for watermarking scripts or any PDF that you need to send out. And it does a good job with that. But it looked just so awful and it actually sort of caused me pain every time I looked at it, so we decided a couple of weeks ago like you know what, we’re just going to dust it off and make a new version. The challenge is you would have to figure out like, well, do you make it look like the apps look right now or how you think the apps are going to look like after they announce all the shiny new goodness.

So we just kind of took a guess about where we thought the apps were going to look like. And so we just released it today, the new version today. And we think we got it right, but the people who are listening to this podcast will know whether we got it right or didn’t get it right because we made choices that could be completely wrong.

**Craig:** Let me get this straight. You guys a couple of weeks ago decided to significantly update your software.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And even though you only have 40 people working for you, [laughs], you managed to do it in two weeks?

**John:** We did manage to do it in a very, very —

**Craig:** That is right. You have 40 people working for you, right?

**John:** No, we actually — that’s not quite correct. If you count me, and you count Stuart who you can sort of only kind of half count because he’s really, you know —

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s Stuart. Stuart’s wonderful but he’s not a programmer.

**Craig:** No, he’s not a full human being, right.

**John:** Stuart’s a wonderful human being with many other qualities, but coding and design are not his forte.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s really a team of like two and a half, counting me as a half person that could do it in two weeks.

**Craig:** Two and a half — but that’s — what?

**John:** No, I know it does seem impossible. Granted, it is a simpler app then, you know, a mega-giant screenwriting app. But it does a lot of stuff and so it does sort of the watermarking stuff it always did, and does it better. But we also added in password protection, so we now create encrypted PDFs with passwords that are going to be individually generated and it’s stronger. A couple of weeks — not couple weeks — probably months ago we talked about the Tarantino script that leaked.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there are all these people who were saying like, “Oh, if they just like watermarked it, it would have been safe and protected.” It’s like, yeah, stuff can always get out.

**Craig:** Ish. Yeah.

**John:** Ish. It would have been a little bit more protected. I think a watermark is useful for saying like, “Hey, you know what? Don’t copy this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like a socially engineered protection. You don’t want to be blamed.

**John:** So for this new build we did a couple of things that are sort of also social engineering and a little bit more hidden engineering. So password protection is really obvious. So like if you’re sending someone a password protected PDF and separately sending them like this is the password to unlock it, you’re really sending a message like, hey, you know what, we really don’t want this going any place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We also had this thing called finger printing which is it creates a bunch of invisible watermarks on the file itself, so you don’t necessarily know that it’s invisibly watermarked but if that file gets out some place, other people can see that, ah, this was who the file actually came from.

**Craig:** That’s cool. You know, when you say developers, you know what I think of because I mean —

**John:** Who do you think of?

**Craig:** I’m not in the business, but whenever I hear the word developers, I think of —

**John:** Silicon Valley?

**Craig:** No. No, I mean, I love Silicon Valley. No, I think of Steve Ballmer.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers

**John:** Steve Ballmer is so excited.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! And you could hear — you could hear his heart, whatever is inside of his heart, congealing, and his cardiac arteries are struggling and he’s just — it seems like he’s killing himself by talking that much.

**John:** You know what? I think for Halloween you could go as Steve Ballmer and I could go as Tim Cook and we would be like the CEOs.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers! And the other thing that’s so great about Steve Ballmer is he’s got this really high voice. So, you know, because, I don’t know, when I think of the man that runs Microsoft, they go, “Developers, develop…”

You know, and he looks like a — he’s like a linebacker, you know. But he has this really high… — It’s funny, both he and Bill Gates have very I guess you’d call them tenory voices, you know.

**John:** Maybe that’s the quality of being a great Microsoft CEO is that you have to have that voice. The new guy, Satya, I’ve never actually heard him speak. I’ve seen photos of him. I have no idea what his speaking voice is.

**Craig:** I do. You ready for it?

**John:** Tell me.

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

**John:** It’s going to be a great voice.

So last bit on Bronson, so we put that out in the world today, so it’s out and through next Sunday… — So if you are listening to this on Tuesday, through Sunday it’s half off, so it’s $15 rather than $30. And we cut the price on all of our apps just to celebrate that, so Highland is half off. Even Weekend Read, if you want to unlock the full library, Weekend Read is only $4.99 through Sunday, so enjoy that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a show today to talk about. We’re going to talk about whether to chase projects or whether you should spec scripts. And this was a listener question that we thought was great and applicable to many of our listeners and sort of at many stages of your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to talk about Edgar Wright’s style of comedy and a video that says that more directors should take lessons from Edgar Wright.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And we will talk about Shawshank Redemption which is 20 years old and was not a success in its time and it has done really, really well for itself in the 20 years that have passed since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s do it.

**Craig:** All right. If you would —

**John:** First, we have a bit of follow up because several episodes ago we did The Angeles Crest Fiasco where you and me and Kelly Marcel played Fiasco. And we played a specific scenario in Fiasco called Hollywood Wives and I know that we mentioned the guy’s name who created it but somehow it got dropped out of the edit. So Hollywood Wives was created by a guy named Jobe Bittman and he did a great job, so.

**Craig:** Thank you, Jobe. Yeah, we did for sure because I remember when we were there we had a very brief sidebar about how to pronounce Jobe because it could be Hobe or Hobé or Jobé, but we ended up on Jobe which I hope is correct.

**John:** Yeah, we hope it’s all correct.

**Craig:** Yeah. So thank you, Jobe, and we do apologize for the initial omission.

**John:** Our question today comes from Jason. And we actually know Jason because I talked to him at the live Scriptnotes we did. So I remember who he was and in the email he singled out like, “I’m the guy you talked to.” It’s like, I remember that guy.

Here’s what he writes. “I’m a writer with an agent trying to get my first assignment. I’ve been on almost 50 general meetings. And the advice from productions and execs seems to be the same: spend time to write more specs because they usually find buyers and chasing assignments never works out. But my agents and managers think the chase is good and puts me in rooms with people who remember me. But so far, I’ve lost a bunch and aside from the feeling of defeat, I’m actually more upset about the amount of time I spend coming up with fixes or building worlds for projects that don’t choose me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “The last one was over a month back and forth to the pitch and the same idea three times. And in between I was tweaking my pitch and world base stuff, each person’s notes to have it ready for the next meeting. Now I’m faced with a conundrum of the summer. I’m house-sitting for the next three months with no rent to pay and a small stipend, so I quit my job just to write fulltime. I can get my job back if I need it back.

“I have the whole summer before me and I want to write a spec but several assignments have been put in front of me and my team wants me to go and try to snag them. I don’t want to waste this golden opportunity for writing, but come September I would like to not have to go back to my day job. If you were starting out in a similar situation would you go all in on yourself or chase some ideas that aren’t bad but you’d have to beat out seven to 10 writers possibly to get the gig?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What I love so much about this question is like it so encapsulates the experience of being a starting writer presently in Hollywood. And honestly, kind of at every stage in your career you kind of face the same questions, whether you should try to land that job or you should just write your own thing.

**Craig:** Right. And of course, things have changed somewhat over time. There was a time when chasing down jobs as a strategy, putting aside whether it was creatively fulfilling for you as a human being but just as an economic strategy of somebody trying to pay bills, it wasn’t a bad strategy. They were making a lot of movies and they would have to hire a lot of people. They were making a lot of movies and their ratio of movies developed to movies made was greater. So overall, it just seemed like there was a — there were many, many more jobs in features.

Today, no longer the case. They really, as an industry you can see them moving towards this theoretical one-to-one development ratio where they only pay for scripts for projects that they want to make and they make many, many fewer movies.

So it’s absolutely true that when you’re chasing those movies, you are in fact competing with many, many other writers. Many of those other writers are more experienced. Many of those other writers will be more comforting as hires to the people who are spending all the money. And most disturbingly, because of that pressure, because there’s so much more leverage on the employer side now, they will make you jump through endless hoops. It becomes Kafkaesque really quickly.

And it does require a lot of work. I mean, listen, they, on their side, think that screenwriting is, you know, when you start typing Fade In and putting things in a format. And we, on our side, know that so much of the work, perhaps the most important work is what happens before that. But that’s the stuff that they’re sort of expecting from you speculatively just to see if maybe they’ll hire you, maybe.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing we should stress is that a change from when you and I first started to what we see happening now is it’s not just that like we’re going to develop, you know, these movies — the ones we’re going to produce. It’s like a lot of them won’t, they’ll never hire anybody, o they’ll never actually proceed. And so I think so many more movies like never actually pick any of the writers. Like seven people will go in on a pitch, they’ll pick the best of the pitches to go up to the highest level and then they’ll say, “Nah.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “We don’t really want to do that.” And so then all seven of those writers have wasted a month trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. People lose jobs to no one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That we, the writer we prefer is no writer. And, you know, what’s going on also is that just as we have pressure on us now because of the way that the world has changed in terms of film production, so too is there great pressure on the executives. They now are almost acting entrepreneurially because they need to justify their jobs. So what’s happening is back in the day when you and I started, some executive picks up the phone and says, “I have this thing and we love it internally and we want to make it and we want to hear from a writer.” You would at least know it was real. Not anymore.

Now they call sometimes and like, “There’s something and I love it and I know that, you know, whoever the boss on high is is really into it and I want to bring this pitch.” They’re actually trying to make something happen which may not happen with anyone.

**John:** It may not happen with anyone. So Jason is talking about the very first wrung, when you’re trying to land that first job. But from my personal experience, I can talk about two projects in the last six months that a similar kind of thing has happened. So both of them I think I obliquely referred to in an earlier podcast where we talked about like well what should I do next.

And one of them was an adaptation of a book. And it was a YA book that was a hot sale, a studio bought it, they were looking for a take and so I went in and I met with them and I pitched a take to the producer. And I met him and pitched the take to the studio boss and that went really well. And so as we started to make a deal things just slowed down and things slowed down. And sometimes it’s like, well, maybe I’m just too expensive for this property and this book and this whole world and that can happen.

But really what had overall happened is like the book came out and it wasn’t a huge bestseller. It wasn’t The Hunger Games. It was more just like a mid tier. And so suddenly they were looking at the book and it’s just like this book, this plot, this story. And while there was something promising there, it wasn’t — it had no extra juice to it. And basically, I think they hired nobody. And that’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** They just kill it. Practically speaking, it does seem to me where we’re both going with this is that this — Jason should in fact spend his summer writing something original.

**John:** I think he should.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And probably in retrospect, should I have spent that time writing something original? It’s very easy to say that hindsight. The other example I wanted to give was I think I’d also kind of obliquely referred to this in the podcast was there was a property that was based on a piece of IP that was very linked to a studio. So no one else could do it.

And the real question was like, is there a movie here? And that’s a really dangerous thing because when you go in on a property that is exclusively at one place either because they own the book or because it’s already part of the studio general package, you’re really competing against nothing. You’re competing against the alternate choice of just like let’s just do nothing.

And so this is the process over like many, many months of like this meeting and that meeting and this meeting and that meeting, going up through the ranks to see whether everyone sort of agreed like this is a way to approach the movie. And so when I pitched it they all said like, “That’s a really good pitch. I totally get what that movie is, it’s not what we see ourselves doing with this property.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was a lot of time wasted.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s going to happen. So from a beginning writer’s perspective, Jason’s representatives are saying, you know what, it’s good for you to be in those rooms, it’s good for you to have exposure to those executives, to know who they are, know who you like, know, you know, sort of all that stuff. To some degree, that’s true. But after, you know, 50 projects, you’re wasting a lot of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s come at this from a couple of angles. The first angle is from the agency side. Why are his representatives advising him this way? Because it’s what makes sense for them. As an agent, the amount of work that is required to put your client in a room with somebody and who’s willing to meet with a certain tier of writer is de minimis. And you are also aware that those jobs are jobs. I mean, listen, maybe it turns out that they’re not really jobs, whatever. But the point is they’re there. Someone’s going to get hired. That’s at least your theory, maybe it’ll be my guy.

And while he goes through, even if he’s not hired on this particular one, they’ll know him, they’ll like him, he’ll impress them and they will think of him. And in this way, it’s a very simple way for them to have their client do the work for them. All they have to do is pick up a phone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On the flip side, specs are a lot of work for agents. You write a spec, you give it to your agents and you say, “I want to sell this.” The first thing that has to happen is they need to agree, right? And they don’t — not all of them, but many of them frankly don’t really have very strong or reliable opinions anyway. So if they’re going to go out with a spec, they feel like, well, first I have to find other people that like this. Can I find an actor that goes along with it? Can I find a director that goes along with it? So that’s work. And it also requires them to go out on a limb which they hate.

**John:** They do. It’s requiring them to take a risk saying that I like this thing, I believe in this thing and then if they aren’t people to sell it you’re going to blame them to some degree for not selling it versus you not getting the job, yeah, you didn’t get the job.

**Craig:** Everybody will blame them even if they never — even if it’s stillborn. You hand them a script and they say, okay, and you — and well, we should go to the studio and give them a movie here. Let’s give them a director, an actor, and a script. Fine, well, this is the actor I want for sure. And they work up the courage to go to that agent down the hallway and he says, “Why would you give me this crap? I hate you. You’ve lost credibility with me.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s all — that’s how they see the world. It’s just a lot of risk. Doing nothing, no risk; doing something, lots of risks. Specs require them to do a lot of somethings. And so this is not — I don’t mean to imply that they are being aggressively manipulative and self-serving. I think they’re just simply being human.

**John:** They’re being rational to some degree. They’re taking the path that is least likely to end up in tears for them.

**Craig:** They’re being rational.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, yeah, what they are doing is they’re following a risk minimization strategy. The problem is that risk minimization strategies aren’t very useful for new writers. In fact, the opposite is useful. Risk maximization strategies seem to be what works for a new writer because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They’ve got to make big rolls of the dice. Because if you really want to get to the kind of land of milk and honey where somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, would you be interested in getting paid a lot of money to work on this thing,” and all you’ll have to do is basically say, yes, I would be interested in that because here’s what I would do with it. And after that 20 minutes, they go, “Great, here’s $2 million.”

You’re never getting there unless you can establish a beachhead as a writer with an original voice who can take a script from start to finish, guide the readers through it well and write something that could be a movie.

**John:** Write something that actually was a movie. I think that’s a crucial thing too is that you could have written the most brilliant screenplays that mankind has ever known, but if they’ve not been produced as movies and turned out as really, really good movies, you’re not going to get to that mythical land of milk and honey that Craig just described where they pick up the phone and just sort of offer you the job.

**Craig:** I don’t like milk or honey, by the way.

**John:** Really? Both of those things?

**Craig:** I don’t like — well, I’m Jewish —

**John:** You don’t like any substance that like comes out of a creature.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s excreted from insects or mammals. I mean I don’t — I’m Jewish and Jewish people are notoriously poor at processing milk. I’m definitely in that subset of Jewish people. I’m not — I don’t do well with milk. And honey, I don’t know, it’s like — it’s too much. It’s just too much.

**John:** It can be overwhelming at times, yeah.

**Craig:** You know, like if somebody said, “Congratulations, you made it to the land of milk and honey,” I’d be like, “Oh…”

**John:** Oh, but come on, you get a good buttery buttermilk biscuit and a little honey on top of it, that’s a delicious thing.

**Craig:** You are so Goyishe it’s unbelievable.

**John:** Or if you ended up at Casa Bonita in Denver and you had the sopapillas and you poured the honey in there, come on, it’d be great. You raise your little flag again and again for more sopapillas.

**Craig:** Yucky.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t like it.

**John:** You don’t like it.

**Craig:** No. I just want — can I just have dry toast? I just want dry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, that’s — I think that Jason should spend his summer writing something original. You’re not going to lose out on some wonderful opportunity by taking a break for two months from the water tour of Los Angeles. Go ahead. Take the two months. Write something wonderful because I’ll tell you, when you do resume your water bottle tour of Los Angeles, you’re going to have something to talk about because they love to hear, “Oh, you have a script? Oh, well now there’s an action item. We can do something. We can read a thing.”

**John:** You can read a thing. Here’s the other reasons I wanted to talk through Jason’s decision process. So the reason why you take those general meetings is to meet people but I think it’s also very good practice of figuring out like how would I write all these different kinds of movies. And so that sort of quick scramble of like, you know, figuring out like how to do this movie or that movie or this movie or that movie, I did a lot of that.

And that was incredibly helpful for me thinking about story overall. So someone would said like, “Hey, would you want to do a Highlander movie?” And so I’m like, well, how would I do a Highlander movie? And so it’s a project I never got but it was really valuable learning experience.

Here’s why you only do so many of them. It’s because you could spend six months doing that and never have actually written something new. And suddenly then you’re not actually a writer, you’re a person who pitches things. And that’s not what you came out to Hollywood to do. Writing something give you something new, it gives you leverage with your agent to some degree. They’re going to try to sell this.

But also if you’re not really all that happy with your agent, that new script is a great way to transition to another agent or to another manager. That’s what I did as I left my first off agent and came over to my current agent was I had written a new script. I really doubted that the first guy could sell it and so I wanted to pick a new agent who I thought was going to be the right person to sell the script and this was a great entrée to introduce myself as, you know, a writer who can write this kind of script. That was Go, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listen, there’s no question that the screenplays are the commodity, not the people. And you need to have some work that they can review. And if it’s not a prior job, it needs to be a screenplay. Fresh material keeps you fresh. I think you’re making a great point that the practice that you get from very quickly breaking down something and coming up with a story is excellent experience for the new writer.

Like you, I did that deal. You know, I can remember my former writing partner and I spending a couple of weeks coming up with a whole scene-by-scene story to rewrite a project that was a modern day Noah’s Ark.

It was like a comedy where — you know, and god, there was probably a thousand of those, you know. And it just doesn’t work, you know, it just doesn’t happen. But you do learn from those. There is a point, however, where you have to stop batting practice and actually go out onto the field and face live pitching. And that’s the deal. Write your spec . I mean, I started with an original, with something that was original and you started with something that was original. Most people start with something that’s original. I don’t know of anybody that didn’t. I mean, I don’t know how that would happen in any other way.

So in a weird way, if you haven’t sold anything original yet, that’s what you got to do first. The Black List is not a substitute for selling a screenplay.

**John:** So to clarify, I did actually get hired to write something before I had sold something. So I wrote a script that got me an agent and I was able to actually land a paid job without ever having —

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Sold something before that. But I would say that’s unusual and it was one of the things where I think I just ultimately got lucky. I was the right person to hire for that job and it was also in a day when it was like a five-step deal and they paid me through all five steps which is just crazy now, but that’s how it used to be back in the day.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, and also to be fair, I didn’t actually — the first thing that my writing partner and I sold was original but it was a pitch. So we hadn’t actually sold a script ourselves either. But my point being we sold something, you know.

**John:** You sold something, yeah.

**Craig:** One way or another, it seems to me that Jason could certainly do much worse than spending a couple of months this summer writing some fresh interesting material so that when his current agent or his new agent calls and says, “Listen, we’ve got a Black List writer, he’s got his new thing, you got to jump on this.” It’s a selling tool. And sometimes we as writers have to, in a weird way, excite our agents. It doesn’t seem like we should have to do that, but sometimes we do.

**John:** Sometimes you do. Great.

Let’s move on to our next thing which was this video that Tony Zhou did about Edgar Wright and Edgar Wright’s directing choices for comedy and Zhou’s call to action for comedy directors to take lessons from Edgar Wright and use some of his filmmaking techniques in their own movies. Basically, really it was, you know, it was a celebration of Edgar Wright but in some ways at the same time kind of a condemnation of what he perceives as kind of laziness or lack of filmmaking finesse among comedy directors. And I have a feeling this provoked a little umbrage out of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** It provoked quite a bit of umbrage. And it bummed me out more than anything but I think the umbrage was certainly there but the stronger note in the bouquet of my reaction was sadness because this — it was so unnecessary to have been done this way. I think that Edgar Wright is extraordinarily good at what he does. And I loved how much passion this fan had for the work and how carefully he had studied it and how careful he had placed it in the context of other movies that he really liked. And particularly zeroing in on something that Edgar Wright is known for which is, I guess I would call it a visual bravura in the storytelling that he does.

And his movies are comedies. They aren’t traditional comedies. Frankly, even all parts of Edgar Wright’s movies are distinct. They are not genre films. He’s one of those guys that’s sort of his own genre which you will find here and there across many different kinds of movies. And so I love that and I thought how wonderful. And then it all succumbed to that thing, that disease of needing to justify and define that which we love by placing it in the context of that which we do not love.

And in doing so, I think, frankly, the creator of the video was just wrong. He was just wrong on so many levels.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about Edgar Wright’s style and sort of what makes it so successful for an Edgar Wright film. And is that some of the eight things that Tony Zhou highlights are things entering frames in funny ways, people leaving the frame in funny ways. There and back again where a character walks over something and then walks back to where he was after having encountered something. Matching scene transitions. The perfectly timed sound effect. Action synchronized to music. Super dramatic lighting cues. And then sort of two gimmes of like falling fences and fake guns, or really like repetitions of visual gags.

What I noticed in all of the things he’s clarifying is that they’re all very planned, very meticulously chosen beats that aren’t just sort of discovered. They were very much like you can sort of feel the storyboards in them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And all of Edgar Wright’s movies really exist in a kind constructed universe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Sort of like how I feel about Wes Anderson movies. And Wes Anderson movies kind of used to drive me crazy and then just — I crossed over into a place of just loving them. But they’re not natural, normal worlds. And I was frustrated that he was — Tony Zhou was comparing the Edgar Wright movies to movies that aren’t supposed to take place in a special artificial, unnatural world. They’re supposed to take place in a really real world. And real worlds don’t necessarily have this kind of visual flair for really good reasons.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think Tony understands how the music works. I mean, listen, there’s nothing particularly visually arresting or again, I’ll use that word bravura in Groundhog Day, which we went into at length on the podcast a few weeks ago. But Groundhog Day is brilliant. Most of the filming in Groundhog Day is consistent with Harold Ramis’s oeuvre and that is shot extraordinarily traditionally with extraordinarily traditional coverage and a naturalistic camera that isn’t structuring reality-bending moments because tonally that’s not the kind of story he’s telling.

Why would we beat that up? Similarly, he makes strange straw dummy comparisons. At one point, he goes after Todd Phillips. And, you know, granted, I’ve worked with Todd Phillips, I’ve made movies with him, so naturally I’m a little biased here. But I thought that was really off base because Todd actually is and has been visually arresting at times when he chooses to in his movies, when he feels it’s tonally appropriate. In The Hangover there’s that great car crash moment where that’s been aped by many other directors since, by the way I’ve seen, where they’re talking in a car and we see headlights in the distance and they keep coming and all it’s one take and the car crashes, it t-bones them, all in one shot.

And it’s really creative and not at all the way you normally would shoot something like that. There are many other examples I could cite, but it seems like he just ignored those and instead just cherry-picked a moment where people were just talking, which by the way, works great. He picks a moment in Old School that sets up a joke that works really well. And then he also does something else that I don’t understand. He compares some things that Edgar Wright does to other visual jokes that he does like and appreciate but they’re very different kinds of moments.

For instance, one of my favorite visual jokes he cites in this compilation which is the soldier running in Holy Grail

**John:** The Holy Grail. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is great. And it’s a wonderful visual trick and it worked and it’s hysterical. But then he shows this bit with the pouring of the beers and the pouring of the water which he’s citing as visual comedy. And frankly, I just don’t think that that’s funny.

**John:** I don’t think that’s funny either.

**Craig:** I think it’s really interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s visually engaging and fascinating, but I don’t think it’s funny. Similarly, the transition of a policeman going from one town to another, which I have to say, kind of was cribbed from Guy Ritchie who did it I think in Snatch with Dennis Farina. But regardless, that’s a really cool moment. That’s not funny. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. I just don’t think this guy gets the — how the music of this all works.

**John:** It’s also your relationship with your audience. And if you’re in an Edgar Wright film, and again, none of this is like criticisms of Edgar Wright’s films. They’re very specifically and very planned.

**Craig:** They’re awesome. They’re great.

**John:** They’re great. And they’re very well planned for being in that universe. And they establish an expectation that you’re going to have these kind of quick cuts at times. You’re going to have this again visual bravura that’s not part of your universe.

If you try to apply that same kind of speed and time and tempo to something like The Heat, you’re not going to have a good outcome.

**Craig:** It will break it. It will just break it.

**John:** It will break it because you have to believe that those two women are existing in a moment together and that this is the fatigue. And the most alarming thing in the frame has to be Melissa McCarthy’s actions, not how you’re cutting.

**Craig:** Well look, I engage with the characters in Edgar Wright’s movies. I believe that they’re real. But I also understand that the entire thing is pushed in an interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s part of his style. It’s part of his deal. That’s why I don’t need every movie to be a Tarantino film. I don’t need every comedy to be an Edgar Wright movie. I’m happy that Edgar Wright makes Edgar Wright movies. I just found that there was this bizarre chauvinism that other movies were lesser because they weren’t doing this.

And I have to say, maybe I’m totally off base, but if Edgar Wright were with us right now I have to presume he would agree, because I’ve always found that the people who make comedies and who have been bloodied in the war of making comedies are so much more charitable and understanding of their fellow filmmakers then is often the case with some of the more — some of the more attentive viewers out there.

**John:** Yeah. So a few things I do want to give him credit for which is I think it’s reasonable to have a call to action, really, a call to awareness for all filmmakers, comedy and otherwise, to certainly think about making some of these choices, and think about like, can you service a joke better by moving the camera in certain ways.

Can you service a joke better by holding in a shot and not trying to, you know —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Revert to standard coverage. These are all really laudable things. And I think if this video had been framed around the idea of like, look at some of the great things that Edgar Wright does, let’s point some of these things out —

**Craig:** I would be so much happier, yeah.

**John:** Other filmmakers can learn from this thing rather than sort of, you know, crapping on other people who don’t —

**Craig:** Calling people out… — Yeah, like, I love Bridesmaids. I understand that Bridesmaids isn’t visually arresting. I understand that it absolutely broke zero ground visually or cinematically if you want to use the term. But I also loved it. It made me laugh and I cared about the people in it. And I have to think that some of these things would have broken that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now where I think Edgar Wright has terrific lessons for all comedy filmmakers is in his complete rejection of the very overdone visual tropes to move people around. There is, no question, there is a certain malaise in a lot of comedy filmmaking where everybody goes, “Nobody is here for that stuff. Let’s just get to the parts that are funny.” And he’s right about that.

One thing that’s interesting is that in studio comedy making, and I’ve often come up against this distressingly: the budgeting process is such that it becomes very hard actually to do the kind of things that Edgar Wright does. His movies are not inexpensive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we were making Identity Thief, at one point there is a car chase and, you know, we were down to like how can we make a car chase when they’ll only give us two cars?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Suddenly, you run into these budget issues where believe me, you have all these interesting ideas for how to make these transitions and then they say, “Nope, it’s the second unit and they’re going to be doing the thing with the car goes from left to right and we’ll just play music.” And you get jammed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Part of the situation in studio comedies is that they will budget the movie. They’ll just say, look, here’s what we’re going to give you for this comedy. Most of the money will go to comic stars who deservedly get a bunch of money. So then what you have left is enough money to make a kind of a dingy looking movie. [laughs]

I see this happening all the time where, you know, Hot Fuzz, that’s not an inexpensive movie. I think it was into the $40 million in terms of budget. And because of the way he works with his collaborators, I suspect that they — it wasn’t a case where they have to pay, you know, each actor $5 or $6 million, but rather everyone is kind of working together and sharing in the pool, but I’m just guessing.

Similarly, Scott Pilgrim was $70 or $80, possibly $100 million.

**John:** It was a pricy movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, Bridesmaids I’m guessing was about $25 million.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So when you look at the shots that he is doing, for instance, the montage of Simon Pegg moving from one city to another, that’s many, many multiple shots and it’s set-ups, and it’s time, and it’s money.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I would love comedies to get that money.

**John:** But they’re not getting that money right now. The last thing I’ll say is that he does highlight a little bit like, you know, oh, Pixar will still do these things. And yes, animated films will do sometimes much more visually sophisticated things because they have that time and it’s honestly generally no more expensive to build that as a really fascinating shot because you’re building everything from scratch anyway.

So those visual gags are very natural there because you’re not trying to — again, it’s completely constructed reality. So within that constructed reality, the choices you’re making for angles and shots and how you’re telling your joke, you can do whatever you want and you have so much time to think of what those shots are.

So if you don’t like what that one was, throw it out and put a new thing in there and you’ve got that time.

**Craig:** And I’ll just say in conclusion, I could go through a bunch of movies that this guy is implying are visually inept or mediocre and find moments that comedically are entirely about how the shot was composed and how the editing was composed.

I learned a lot, you know, David Zucker made wonderful comedies and none of them were visually stunning, on purpose by the way. And yet, there was an enormous attention to detail when he made those movies.

One thing, one wonderful lesson that he taught me early on was, in physical comedy, if you can see the result of an action within the same continuous cut as the cause of it, it will be funnier. There was a lot of attention to these things. And camera placement and how to shoot things was a constant discussion.

But it was not visually shocking or bravura or in your face or innovative. It was rather just quietly constructed. And I think that’s okay. I guess what I want to say to the guy making this is you should love Edgar Wright movies. They’re wonderful. Please don’t beat up other movies because they’re not doing that. That’s just unnecessary. And frankly, it’s just misguided.

**John:** I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about these concepts in relation to actually writing the words on the page, because a lot of what he’s describing here you would never see manifest on the page. It becomes very annoying to read about sort of like, you know, a spoon enters frame from off-screen.

Sometimes you can do that and sometimes it works. But it’s very hard to picture what that’s going to be. So like trying to sell a visual joke on the page can be really, really tough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes you can do it, though. And techniques for like the there and back again. It can be very hard to describe like in a continuous shot the guy goes, you know, says something, goes to the window, look out the window, comes back. But sometimes the way to do that is to sort stay in the dialogue block and like put all that action in parenthetical, which is sort of cheating. But sometimes it’s worth cheating so people can actually follow what it is that’s funny that you’re doing there.

**Craig:** Well there’s — I don’t know how those guys go through their process. But if I had to guess, there’s a certain kind of casual, visual experience that I suspect is either figured out in the storyboarding process or on the day when they’re staging the scene in the morning and figuring how they’re going to do it. And they find these moments like, you know what, let’s follow with him and then let’s follow back.

But then there are other things that must be scripted. Simon Pegg’s traveling montage has to be scripted because it has to be shot. The pouring of the beers in the water must be scripted. There’s no way that they just decided on the day to do that. Or if they got it into storyboards, it probably then had to be written into the script so that you understood, okay, we’re going to need some macro shots and we have to shoot through the bottom of the glass. There’s a whole — there’s 10 meetings about that shot, so that it comes off, you know.

**John:** In the script I wouldn’t be surprised if it says, you know, in uppercase “SERIES OF SHOTS,” And either bullets them out or like in that action block talks about what happens in there and that they did have to have three production meetings to talk through what was going to be in that, what the steins looked like. And is going to be shot as a primary unit or is that something that is secondary unit? Are you going to pre-shoot that, is it all, is it happening weeks after you’ve wrapped your thing to get those extra shots? That is how it’s going to go.

So you don’t know what that’s going to look like. To the idea of storyboarding stuff, The Coen Brothers are very — who often have very visually sophisticated movies. Apparently, when you show up on the day of shooting, they’ve present your sides and they show like the storyboards, like they’ve storyboarded everything so you know like this is where — this is what the shots are going to be for the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So everyone can actually really have a plan for this is how it is. So you look at a movie like Raising Arizona that they do, the visual guides in there were really planned. They knew they were going to be using those wide lenses and how stuff was going to be going through the frame. But you wouldn’t necessarily see that in the script.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, if they’re presenting the storyboards to the actors on the day, it means that they haven’t seen those things because they do have the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those things are — I mean you can’t — basically, you shouldn’t put anything in a script that as you’re doing it makes you think, oh, I’m just ruining it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one’s going to think that this is any good if I spell it all out in the script. I have to again give Edgar Wright a lot of credit for having the patience and the faith to carry through on these plans because, you know, what happens is you do end up in your seventh meeting about how to shoot the glasses and the close-ups and everyone’s asking these questions. And inevitably people start to think, why am I doing this? This is an enormous —

**John:** Do you really need this? It’s not that special.

**Craig:** I’ll give you an example from something I did with Todd Phillips which I thought was very visually interesting. In the second Hangover movie, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, has a flashback where he remembers some of the incidents of the night before but in a kind of a dreamy state. But in Alan’s point of view he remembers himself and his friends as 12-year-old boys because that’s how he sees the world.

**John:** Which I love that moment in the movie. And I remember commenting, I think even on the podcast, like that must have been so hard to shoot —

**Craig:** It was so hard.

**John:** And convince people to shoot that.

**Craig:** It was so hard because on paper, it takes up a half a page and all you say is, “Alan and Stu and Phil as 12-year-olds.” But then you realize, oh my god, we’ve got to cast 12 year olds to be like them. We’ve got to put them in these clothes, and then we have to shoot a second movie, because all the stuff where these guys have been, we’ve got to then redo, so we have a riot scene where Ed Helms is freaking out and there’s this enormous riot and police and mall to have cocktails, then we have to shoot it again with children.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have to do it over and over and over. But, you know, it kind of came together but many, many times Todd and I looked and each other and thought why would we have ever done this. Just like, you know, very famously Parker and Stone decided early on that they were going to make Team America with marionettes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And about, you know, a month in of misery they just thought, we have killed ourselves on this, killed ourselves. But, you know —

**John:** They already committed.

**Craig:** They already committed. And frankly, in the end it’s not the audience’s problem. If you can provide them with something that is visually fascinating, it doesn’t matter how long it took, it doesn’t matter how meetings you went through. It’s really cool.

So I think — look, I think he’s great and I think that what he does is spectacular. I would be shocked if Edgar Wright were ever to stop and think, boy, I wish all comedies look like my comedies. I just think he would say, oh my god, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would I want that? I like my comedies looking like my comedies.

**John:** You want to be distinctive. That’s absolutely true. And same with Tarantino and same with Wes Anderson. I mean, the fact that you can parody a Tarantino film or you can parody a Wes Anderson film means that they’re doing something very special. They have a unique voice and unique eye and celebrate that rather than sort of, you know, crapping on everybody else.

**Craig:** Yeah and at least acknowledge that while there are lazy tropey moves in comedies that I would love to see eliminated, budgetary concerns aside, there are also incredible classic, great, great comedies that invent not one new bit of cinematic language.

**John:** Yeah, it is true…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last topic today is The Shawshank Redemption which is rated on IMDb as the best movie ever made. But a lot of people could agree with that. There’s an article that Russell Adams wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption and I had to remember sort of like what it was up against, but it came out the same year Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump.

So in its time, Shawshank Redemption wasn’t a big success. It only made $16 million in the box office. It got seven Oscar nominations, but no Oscars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now it’s kind of a classic. So this article is specifically talking about how, you know, the residual value of a well regarded movie and literally the residuals that happen. So, you know, minor actors in there are still getting residuals and they’re still getting like a tremendous amount of residuals because that thing airs all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie aired 151 hours of air time for Shawshank Redemption just in 2013.

**Craig:** Did I ever tell you the story of sitting in a car with Bob Weinstein and he was talking about the movie business and he said to me, “Hey, Mazin, you want to know how to make money in the movie business?”

**John:** And you said, no sir. I don’t want to know. I want to make art.

**Craig:** I said, let me out of this car. I said, yeah, sure, how do you make money in the movie business? He said, “It’s really simple, man. Have a library of movies and don’t make movies.” And he’s right, I mean —

**John:** He is right.

**Craig:** That’s, the library costs nothing to maintain and generates profit forever whereas making movies – oh, here they come, here come the alarms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Bob Weinstein.

**John:** It was your terrible impersonation.

**Craig:** Oh man, it’s actually dead on.

So yeah, a library sits there and unlike most warehouse products, it costs nothing to keep and yet it generates money forever. And a movie like Shawshank Redemption which crosses into that I’m going to say a land of potato chips and ice cream, a movie like that doesn’t just generate a lot of money, it generates a massive amount of money forever and increases the value of other movies, because if you want to show Shawshank Redemption, you can’t get it unless you also agree to take a bunch of other movies that maybe aren’t, you know, quite as exciting to the audience.

**John:** And that’s something I don’t think people appreciate is that when you see a movie on television, you think like, oh, okay, so ABC bought the rights to that movie so they could show it. And yes, they bought the rights to that, but they had to buy a package.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so what the studio did is they package together this one movie that everybody really wanted along with a bunch of movies that you really didn’t want. And they would only sell them as the package. And the frustration as a filmmaker is the studio wants to divide that money equally between those films just because and pretend that it’s not like the one movie is actually the one that’s worth doing, so they’ll spread it on all the different movies that they’re selling. And that is incredibly frustrating.

And sometimes it’s the subject of lawsuits. And I don’t know that it ever actually went to trial, but the first Charlie’s Angels was a big success. And we ended up selling it to I think ABC, selling rights to ABC, but it was packaged with these other movies.

And I remember producers being not especially happy about the way that it was packaged and the way the money sort of being divided it up because obviously we were the movie that was the goldmine there.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, what they do is they divide it up. They’re not looking to screw over any individual writer, director or actor. What they’re trying to do is avoid any movie showing a profit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, so they’re just sliding this stuff around so that, you know, the waterline never hits a certain thing. But when we talk about this thing, and this is all under the heading of distribution.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the answer to the question, why are there the same five big movie studios that were around for decades and decades and decades? Why if we live in a world now where Tesla can show up and actually be a viable new car company, why can’t there be a viable new movie studio? And the answer is distribution. Distribution impacts everything.

That is why these studios have a strangle hold on films and television, because to get a movie into a theater, all those screens is an art of negotiation where you are trading on a very desirable title. And thus, getting in maybe ones that are more speculative because theater owners lose money when nobody’s in the theater to see the movie.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** They don’t want bad movies. They want the good movies. Well, you’re not getting the next say, you know, they’re making new Harry Potter movies. Warner Brothers is making —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’re not getting one of those unless you take a bunch of these things, too. And it works that way for television and pay cable and all the rest. I have a question for you.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Of all your movies, can you tell from your residuals which one has had the most after theatrical success?

**John:** Yes, that was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by like a landslide. And just because it sold a tremendous amount of DVDs right at that moment where like they were still selling a bunch of DVDs.

**Craig:** They were still big.

**John:** Yeah. And Go does fine and Big Fish certainly generates a fair amount. But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was definitely the winner.

How about you? I mean you’ve got The Hangover movies. Those have to be the number ones.

**Craig:** They’re not. They’ve both done very well in video but by far, Identity Thief.

**John:** That’s not because it’s the sole credit — ?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I kind of did the math. I kind of did the math. Identity Thief has just been after market-wise, after theatrical I think the most popular movie I’ve ever done.

**John:** Well, that’s great.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** That’s wonderful. And again, this is a good lesson in why residuals matter so much. So the short version of what residuals are for people who are sort of new to this discussion is writers as part of this sort of grand charade we do legally about the work we do and copyright all this stuff, we don’t have royalties on movies, we have what’s called residuals.

And as movies are displayed on things after theatrical, so after they’ve left the movie theaters and after they’ve left airplanes, but as they sell on iTunes, as they go through Netflix streaming, as they show up on broadcast TV, we get a certain percentage of what that money is that comes back to the distributor or the studio to the film. We get that percentage. And that percentage can add up and be a very meaningful part of a writer’s career.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup, it’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so is Shawshank Redemption which I don’t think I’ve actually seen since it came out, so it’s one of those things where it’s always on. If you flip the channels, it’s always on somewhere. Yet, it’s a great movie and it was Frank Darabont’s sort of first big success. He bought the rights to it for $5,000.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? And I love that Stephen King didn’t cash the check.

**John:** Ooh, Stephen King.

**Craig:** Shawshank Redemption is a fantastic movie. It’s one of those movies, I’ve never met anybody that didn’t like it.

**John:** No, how could you not like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s just a terrific movie. It’s also a movie that while very cinematic in moments, plays wonderfully on TV. It’s like The Godfather. I very happily have seen The Godfather a number of times in the theater, which is obviously it’s not something that happens frequently because, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when I see The Godfather on TV, I’m like, yeah, this works on TV, too. It actually works everywhere. I can watch this in my shower.

**John:** Yeah, I think maybe the reason why it does, both of those films would work well on TV is because they’re sagas and they definitely kind of feel like there’s act breaks in them. You feel like, there’s moments like, okay, this is a moment where we can go away and we go to commercial and come back and regain the energy. And like it’s not going to be shattered.

**Craig:** The only thing that bugs me about Godfather is that sometimes when people are going from one place to another, Coppola will just show a car driving by.

**John:** That’s so incredibly lazy. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** Like when Michael Corleone goes to Vegas, there’s a plane landing and we hear a waa, waa, waa, waa. That’s not cool.

**John:** That’s not cool at all. But, you know, what is cool? One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for that. So my One Cool Thing is also on the topic of filmmaking. It’s this thing called A Guerilla Filmmakers Guide to After Effects. And it’s this course — I think it’s like $99, with a whole bunch of videos that you get access to, about how to use After Effects to develop visual effects for Indie projects.

It’s really well done. The sample video they have up there is Gareth Edwards who did Godzilla and Monsters and is now doing the new Gary Whitta Star Wars movie.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** Gary Whitta.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** It’s Gareth Edwards talking through doing the visual effects for this Attila the Hun movie he made and he did all the visual effects himself. And you’re literally seen his screen, you’re seeing After Effects and he’s narrating as he’s, you know, like a 40-minute lesson on sort of how he’s dealing with the timeline, the spreadsheet he’s built for himself for the work, how he’s composing these things.

And it’s just the little lesson I watched, it was basically he had to put I guess Constantinople on a hill, and so he had two shots that where handheld shots, a wide shot and the closer shot and like Constantinople had to be over there.

And so he’s doing motion tracking and figuring out like to get this city to land right in the distance. And it was just really, really cool. And so I think if you are a person who is looking to make films or honestly just kind would want to learn more of about how that stuff works, I thought it was just fascinating and really well done. So there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a updated app for the New York Times crossword puzzle. I am a —

**John:** Now, you hate crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** [laughs] How dare you. I am an avid crossword puzzler. I’ve gotten my times down to a place where I promised my friend and New York Times crossword creator, David Kwong, that I will compete this fall in the crossword tournament here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** I’m not going to even come close to winning. I mean the scary thing is like the guys who have really, really good times, I just — I don’t even know how they fill the grid in that quickly. But they’re actually — I think they could beat me if I were just writing answers in that I had, you know.

**John:** You had the keys beside and you’re like filling it in.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I’m getting pretty good. Like I can now routinely do a Saturday, you know, around 20 minutes which —

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Which is respectable. I mean, in the crossword puzzle world, maybe not so much. But I’m obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. And they have a new app that actually is very nice. It’s very clean. The apps powering crossword puzzles have always been a little clunky and oldish. And the New York Times stepped it up. I mean, for instance, you couldn’t sync your puzzle across devices until today. And now you can.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s an app for iPad and for iPhone?

**Craig:** It is, yes. It is in iOS app that syncs between your iOS devices and also syncs with the desktop New York Times crossword site so that you can pick it up and do it wherever and it’ll keep track of your time and your answers. It is a subscription. I want to say it’s $30 for the year.

**John:** If you like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course it’s worth it. I mean, my god. Even, let me just say, even if you don’t like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it because you should start liking crossword puzzles, because if you’re a writer, it keeps your mind sharp. It’s words. It’s good for you. It’s just good brain stuff. I’ve got Missy Mazin working on crossword puzzles now. I’m very excited about that. You know that my wife used to be Missy.

**John:** I had no idea. But it makes sense, her name is Melissa, so yeah.

**Craig:** Right, so she was Missy and then after we started dating, like maybe a year before we got married, she’s like, you know what, I don’t want to be Missy anymore. I want to be Melissa now. It’s too juvenile. I want to be Melissa. And I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to actually change what I call my girlfriend. And I did. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to bring Missy back.

**John:** Missy Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s just adorable.

**John:** Missy Mazin has pigtails though. She’s the not the woman I perceive.

**Craig:** She’s never had pigtails.

**John:** I just perceive her as being a Melissa. That happens.

**Craig:** All right. Well, let’s see what, maybe — let’s see if I can get this to catch on.

**John:** That is our show this week. So if you would like to learn more about the things we talked about on the show, there are show notes for every episode. They’re at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We are on iTunes. You may be listening to us through iTunes. If you are listening to us on the website, we would really love it if you’d actually subscribe in iTunes because that’s how more people find us and then we move up the charts. And, honestly, we’re a little competitive that way.

If you’re on iTunes anyway and want to listen —

**Craig:** You’re a little competitive.[laughs] I don’t. Let me just be clear to everybody out there. I actually don’t, I never look at the charts. Where are we on the charts?

**John:** We’re pretty good.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah, we are good in that film and TV category. But we can be better. We’ve been better at other times.

**Craig:** Oh really.

**John:** That’s sort of why I’m bringing it up. And so it’s not that we have fewer listeners. We actually have a lot more listeners. Those stats are really, really good. It’s that when people don’t interact with us on iTunes, we drop. And so it’s people adding us on iTunes is what moves you up the charts.

**Craig:** All right, well then everybody you’ve got to add us on iTunes.

**John:** Just add us on iTunes. It’ll take three clicks.

**Craig:** I suddenly got competitive.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. You were the person who wants like to be below 20 minutes on a Saturday crossword puzzle. This matters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

**John:** It matters so much. [laughs]

**Craig:** I get it. I get it now.

**John:** And if you’re there and you want to leave us a comment, we love comments, that’s all really nice and good. We also have a Scriptnotes app for your iPhone and for your Android device. With that app you can access all our back episodes back to episode one is you want to. Subscriptions for the back episode are $1.99 a month. Pennies, for you. Less than — a year of that would less than a year of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** But not necessarily more valuable. Not to run us down. But boy, those crosswords are good.

**John:** Those crosswords are good. We have transcripts for every episode. So about got five days after an episode airs, we have transcripts for it. So if you need to go back and refer to something we said, you can always look for that, so just look for the original episode and there’s always a link to the transcript for that. It’s also how I Google to see what the hell we said. It’s been incredibly useful part of that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Mathew Chilelli who this week also did the outro and it’s lovely. It uses a brand new woodwind sample library which is great.

**Craig:** Ooh, woodwinds.

**John:** And last reminder, if you would like Bronson Watermarker or Highland or Weekend Read, they’re all half off this week. So go for it. This is your week of bargains.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!

**John:** Nicely done, Craig. Have a great week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WWDC14](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/)
* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/) is available now! (And is half-off thru June 8th)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [Weekend Read Unlimited](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) are also half off thru June 8th
* [Steve Ballmer on developers (developers, developers…)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE)
* [Tony Zhou on Edgar Wright’s visual style](https://vimeo.com/96558506)
* [Russell Adams on The Shawshank Redemption](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304536104579560021265554240?mod=trending_now_1) from The Wall Street Journal
* IMDb’s [Top 250](http://www.imdb.com/chart/top)
* [A Guerilla Filmmaker’s Guide to After Effects](http://www.fxphd.com/store/fast-forward-a-guerrilla-filmmakers-guide-to-after-effects/)
* [The New York Times Crossword](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-new-york-times-crossword/id307569751?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 141 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Not bad, not bad. Turned in a script last week; went really, really well, so that’s good. I get two weeks off now before I start my next thing.

**John:** And what are you going to do with your two weeks?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. Job number one for these two weeks is to kind of flush my system out. Like I don’t know about you but as I’m writing something I tend to eat worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, right afterwards there’s a nice two-week period where I really try and flush my system out. Now, I don’t do any of these crazy — what do they call them, cleanses?

**John:** Yeah, apple juice, lemon peel, little cayenne pepper.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here’s the story with those. They don’t clean anything. There is absolutely no good science behind that stuff whatsoever. Your liver is super good at cleaning your blood. You don’t need a cleanse to clean anything. You know me. Anytime I see the word toxin or energy, I get all itchy, but I’m just eating much less and I’m doing a lot of reading. So eating less, reading, and catching up on some video games.

**John:** That’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Craig, Have you staring playing Hearthstone on the iPad? Do you know what that is?

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is. No.

**John:** So it’s a card game that’s sort of like the Magic: The Gathering, but it’s all the Blizzard universe kind of things and it’s totally addictive. And so I recommend you fall into a deep K-hole and play Hearthstone.

**Craig:** All right. Well, right now, I’m catching up on my console games so I’m playing — I’m just finishing up the Arkham Origins DLC Cold, Cold Heart. And I have already started playing the South Park Game which is awesome.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Love, I mean, the actual game play, eh. The game play actually stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what’s great about it is in addition to all the normal South Park fun stuff, they’re very smartly making fun of some video games that I’m very well familiar with. There’s at one point you’re wandering in an alien ship and you keep finding these little audio logs and as you play them the person who’s recorded the audio logs keeps commenting on how he doesn’t even understand why he’s making audio logs.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And he’s found other people’s audio logs and he keeps listening to their audio logs thinking that he’ll learn something important and he never ever does and he just keeps…but yet he still listens to the audio logs. [laughs] It was a great tweak at BioShock.

**John:** What’s so fascinating about that trope of audio logs is that very rarely do you actually see a character over the course of the narrative recording an audio log and yet there are all these audio logs. So when exactly do they record these?

**Craig:** Right. Like, why are they recording them? I mean, the first audio log was, [laughs], he’s on the ship and he’s just saying, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. The aliens are coming there about to break the door and why am I wasting time recording this, I don’t know.” [laughs] It’s pretty great and then why do they leave them around? Yeah, no, audio logs are absurd. But they also did a really nice job of parodying, in a kind of a very straight way, nearly copying the music from Elder Scrolls.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Those are smart guys, those South Park folks.

**Craig:** They are.

**John:** Today, on the podcast, we are going to talk about Game of Thrones. We’re going to talk about some Bryan Singer situation. And we’re going to talk about the numbers of women employed by the WGA —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And minorities and older people. We’re going talk about this situation where the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries is now writing Vampire Diaries fan fiction which seems absurd but it’s actually because of work-for-hire law and it’s just really an odd time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to answer a question about craft. We’re going to go through our old One Cool Things. So we have a lot today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big show.

**Craig:** Big show, big show.

**John:** First though, follow up. So we have our live show coming up on May 15th. The cocktail party hosted by Aline Brosh McKenna is all sold out, but there are still some tickets left for the show itself.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So if you’d like to come see —

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I think there are.

**Craig:** I can’t believe it.

**John:** Well, we’re recording on a Thursday. So by the time this podcast airs, we don’t know if there are still tickets but there might still be tickets. But the special news for people who have tickets is we have an extra guest who wasn’t even a part of the original package. Susannah Grant is going to be joining us for the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And she’s amazing. So she’s the screenwriter of Erin Brockovich, Charlotte’s Web. She’s the director of Catch and Release. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she will be up there on stage helping us figure how these three pages could be even better.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I can’t believe that these tickets haven’t sold out. First of all, let me just reiterate, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that makes no sense. I’m glad that people bought the cocktail party things.

**John:** Yeah. The expensive ones.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we promise to talk to you guys and not each other at the cocktail party. [laughs] We promise. But, yeah, these other tickets, how much do they cost?

**John:** 20 bucks.

**Craig:** 20 bucks to see David Goyer. 20 bucks to see McFeely and Markus. 20 bucks to see Susannah Grant. I mean, forget us. I mean, how much is those people.

**John:** They’re pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s just 20 bucks, yeah.

**John:** It’s just 20 bucks and like you pay $20 for any one of those people, but no, you get them all together as package.

**Craig:** You get them all together as a package and the money goes to the Writers Guild Foundation which is a charitable non-profit organization that supports screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting all day long.

**John:** That’s what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, they help veterans. They help young people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, for the Three Page Challenge, how are we going to do it? So last week on the podcast I said there would be a special way that people will submit for it. That is up and running as of today. So here is how you submit to it. You go to the same URL you’ve always gone to, johnaugust.com/threepage. When you get there, you’ll see that there’s now a form. And with that form, you will click some boxes and enter your name and information. You’ll click a box that says Attach File and you will attach your script there. It could be Fountain or a PDF. And you will click Submit.

And when you click Submit, it will magically get whisked into the system and the database from which we will call our entrants for just this live Three Page Challenge, the one that we’re actually going to do on May 15th. If the system works well, it’ll become the real system for Three Page Challenges from now forward.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But we’re just trying it out for this one-time deal.

**Craig:** And if your script is picked, pages are picked, do we let them know ahead of time?

**John:** We will let people know that they’re in the final contention for that. Essentially, if you are going to be submitting under the auspices of this live Three Page Challenge, we’re asking, like, are you going to be there?

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so we’re only going to be looking at the ones of people who say they’re going to be there. What’s special about this one event is all of our listeners will get to read those three pages as well. So not only the final ones are picked, the listeners are going to help choose which one is going to be discussed live.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So for one week starting today, Tuesday through next Tuesday, so starting on Tuesday April 29th through Tuesday May 6th, for that one week you can submit your scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That next Wednesday, for one week, you can vote on which one of those entrants you really want to see up there on stage. So you can read them both on the site. There’ll be links at johnaugust.com so you can read those samples. And I don’t know if there’s going to be 10 or 20 or 50 but there’s going to be some there.

We’ll also, if we can, put them on Weekend Read, so if you’re on your iPhone, you can read through them on there as well.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Technology!

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** While I was talking about Weekend Read, there’s a new update for Weekend Read, so people should update their app if they have it. There’s also an update for Highland. So if you’re on your app store, click on those.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

Let’s get to our business at hand. So I love Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I’m just a huge fan of not just the show I watch but just the fact that it can exist because it’s so incredibly complicated to make and they do such an amazingly good job. And I watched this last Sunday’s episodes which was really two Sundays ago for people who are listening to the show and the minute I saw this scene I said, “Well, there’s going to be a conversation about this one specific scene.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I [laughs]…so I was little taken aback by the fact that there was a conversation about it and we’re talking about the scene where —

**John:** We should say, I guess we should say there’s a mild spoiler here but it’s actually not.

**Craig:** No, you know what —

**John:** On the order of spoilers for Game of Thrones this is incredibly minor. This isn’t like a death of a major character.

**Craig:** And it’s two week later, so forget it, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like keep up or don’t. So Joffrey is dead of course and he’s lying in state so to speak in the Sept…Septum? Septom? Sept?

**John:** I think they call it a Sept.

**Craig:** Yeah, the septum is the thing in your nose.

**John:** And I think is it called Sept because there are seven gods? Is that why it’s called a Sept?

**Craig:** Maybe. Maybe so. I don’t know, but that’s where they are.

So he’s lying there and Cersei, his mom, is there and Jaime Lannister comes in. That’s Cersei’s brother and, of course, Cersei and Jaime incestuous lovers and Joffrey their incestuous son. Everybody else is cleared out of the room and basically Jaime comes on to Cersei and she says no and then he rapes her right there next to the body of their dead incest kid. And I thought, “All right!” you know, like, “Here we go again, Game of Thrones getting sick,” but people really got upset.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they got upset for a bunch of reasons. And I wanted to talk a little bit about it because it kind of ties into I think this interesting phenomenon. It’s a very human thing of what I call narrative directionality.

So some people got upset because they didn’t like the idea that Jaime Lannister raped his sister. Just forget the fact that he was a good guy now as opposed to before. They didn’t like that he raped his sister and I just thought, well, but you were okay with him up to this point when he pushed a kid out a window callously and didn’t even seem to care —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** When he was going to kill Ned Stark for no good reason. I mean, this is a bad guy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, and the fact that he had sex with his sister and had an incest baby and then lied about it and knew that his sister was aborting the babies that she’s having with her actual husband. I mean, this is a terrible person by any definition of behavior.

But people really got upset about the rape part. And, you know, my feeling was that what was underlying this was that they were, and in the book it’s not rape. It’s sort of — it turns into like a weird consensual kinky sex bit.

And so they were saying, “Well, in the book it’s not rape but in the show they chose to make it rape so it’s that choice and that’s super bad.” But, you know, again, it’s like, well, forget that there was a choice between the book and the show. The book had Daenerys Targaryen raped repeatedly by her husband that she was forced to marry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then she started to like it and then she fell in love with him. Nobody had a problem with that either apparently.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this, they have a problem with it. And I think their problem is this: Jaime Lannister’s character was starting to go through this process where he was seeing things differently and behaving differently in a way that people thought he’s getting better and this fits into a very clean narrative direction. A bad person starts to change their evil ways. And what that moment did was reverse that directionality and say, no, actually, he’s still the same guy that did all that stuff. And people got really angry I think because the narrative turned left on them like that. And for me, I actually kind of think that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a lot to sort of unpack here. First off, you described it as being rape. And so when I first saw the scene, I’m like, oh, one of the first points of controversy will be was it rape or was it like bad consensual sex. And I think it’s better just to call it rape and just like discuss it as a rape and not just that they’re two really screwed up people and therefore that’s sort of the nature of their relationship.

**Craig:** Oh, no, it was definitely rape.

**John:** Yeah, and it was rape because of specific choices of what she was saying and her trying to push him away and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s call it rape and like not even sort of open that.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** But I would say the first day after the episode aired, that was a lot of the discussion like was it rape, was it not rape. Let’s just call it rape.

About directionality, I want to stick up a little bit for the sense of people’s ownership of the Jaime Lannister character and the arc they believed him to be on. And that’s understandable why you are starting to identify him as being a heroic character rather than a villainous character. And that’s natural. I think it’s okay to feel a little betrayed by him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And by proxy, this shows creators, because they had given you good reason to believe that he had made a change for the better. He was a crippled man who had learned the errors of his ways, who wanted to do better by his sister/lover and everyone else around him seemed to be doing the right kinds of things. So for him to change course in that moment felt wrong.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s not wrong though. I guess —

**John:** No, I’m saying, it felt wrong —

**Craig:** It felt wrong.

**John:** I can understand why it felt wrong to the viewer.

**Craig:** I am with you on the point that I think we’re supposed to feel betrayed and disappointed by him. What I was confused by was the extension of that to Dan and Dave because I thought, frankly, what this show does better than most every other show I’ve seen is repeatedly confound and thwart our desire to see a natural narrative path occur from wherever a character is in a given point in the show. I mean, starting with the beheading of Ned Stark and going onward from there, I mean, there’s a great moment in that episode I believe where The Hound says to Arya, you know, essentially I see the world for what is, how many Starks need to be beheaded before you start.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And it kind of, like to me, that was the theme of the show like, hey, this is the way — we don’t — this isn’t the kind of show where somebody who casually murders children and then quips about it as they’re falling to their, what should have been their death, that person doesn’t have some mid-life, good golly, I’m going to be a sweetheart kind of changeup. No, he’s a bad person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And bad people have moments, but, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you that the moments between Arya and The Hound and sort of their — to the beats of their storyline in that episode were basically you were a fool for thinking that I changed. I didn’t change. I’m going to steal this guy’s money and keep moving on, because that’s who I am.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** And, you know, he wasn’t wearing like the scorpion jacket but it was essentially that sort of scorpion quality of like, you know, this is what I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that trope of like, I am genuinely irredeemable.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I think what’s different about Jaime Lannister is like you have a handsome guy who looks like he should be a knight hero and he’s sort of dressed like a knight hero. So it feels like a greater betrayal that he is doing it. Whereas The Hound, well, he’s ugly, so of course he’s going to ultimately be evil and do that thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I just think that if the people that are complaining about what happened there go and watch the first episode and look at the way that Jaime Lannister delivers his line, “The things I do for love,” after he pushes that kid out the window.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you can’t reconcile — that’s an adult. That is a grown man who is clearly got a sociopathic streak a mile wide. The fact that he’s been humbled and the fact that he can have a friend and that he maybe sees things differently vis-à-vis himself and his family, that’s doesn’t change the fact that he’s just an — he’s an awful person.

**John:** Yes. So what we’re really talking here I think is ambiguity, is that it’s frustrating sometimes as a viewer just to see this thing and say like, “No, but I want this person to be good or bad. I want this person to easily be placed in one box and I want this situation to be clear to me.”

And what Game of Thrones is saying is like, no, we are never going to make it clear and easy for you to say, this is a good person you should be rooting for. This is a bad person you should be rooting against. We’re always going to make it difficult for you.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think in this sense what they’re doing with things like this is very important. Because what happens in the way we experience narrative is we accept that there are certain rules in place to give narrative a structure. And then, every now and then somebody comes along and breaks it on purpose. Sometimes people break it because they’re just bad and they don’t know what they’re doing and everybody rejects it.

But sometimes people break it and they’re yelled at and it’s not understood or appreciated. But then, now the line about how flexible a character can be presented in narrative changes. Because it starts to make it freer for everybody else to say, “You know what? I actually think this person can do this and I think it becomes narratively interesting because there’s a context for it. Now, we’ve seen it before.”

So the first time, what is it, Rites of Spring was played people rioted because it was atonal. [laughs] But now that just seems bizarre to us. But I think that these things are important. When they are done with expertise and they’re done — and listen, this is not to say, just so that everyone is really clear, in no way am I defending what this character did. I mean, that was terrible, you know, but again he’s a murderer and a sociopath. So it didn’t shock me maybe the way it shocked other people but I’m not — I was a little surprised at how many people, because it was rape suddenly got super upset but didn’t get upset about the rape of Daenerys and didn’t get upset about the fact that Jaime Lannister tried to kill a kid.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But the rape here was the thing that really got them going.

**John:** If I’m being honest, my not loving the scene was largely because I didn’t necessarily believe that it was happening right beside the body of Joffrey. And that to me just felt a little soap opera-ish in ways that the show usually isn’t. And so, it wasn’t that this rape happened, that it happened in that moment right there. I just didn’t fully believe it. And that’s just my own personal response to how that situation was created. But I think that’s actually not the important thing to discuss. I think what we’ve been talking about of the nature of what he did is really the meat of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do think that that location was directly taken from the book, so they —

**John:** Yeah. That’s true.

**Craig:** It’s interesting to see how they drift from and stick to the book. But in any case, so I guess I’m sticking up for the showrunners on that one.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s switch to our next uncomfortable and ambiguous situation, which is that on April 16th a guy named Michael Egan filed a lawsuit against Director Bryan Singer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Describing abuse he said began when he was 15 years old. So we’re recording on this on a Thursday. I’m sure there’s been a thousand developments since we recorded this. So it probably doesn’t behoove us to get into too many details about the nature of this one allegation. But more to talk about sort of like what it is like to have this lawsuit happening now when Bryan Singer’s movie X-Men: Days of Future Past is supposed to be coming out. The nature of power in Hollywood gets questioned. The nature of relationships in Hollywood gets questioned. And sort of the big bag of hurt that this kind of accusation unleashes.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is not a good thing. I mean, we’re — part of the problem, this is a little different than some of the allegations that you’ll see sometimes because people do claim all sorts of stuff. I mean, you and I talked about how every movie gets accused of stealing some, you know, another idea or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this is — even when you’re talking about situations of assault and sexual assault which is always a very messy and tricky thing, sometimes these things don’t pan out. In this case, it’s a little disturbing to me that part of the deal here is that Singer apparently was associated somehow with this guy Marc Rector-Collins who has already, I think, been to prison for this sort of thing before or had been indicted or convicted or something. So there are some shady players involved here and this one I think is not going go away anytime soon.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t a crystal ball to tell you what’s going to happen. I can only look back at the past. And so, I can sort of share my own personal experience with the edges of this and sort of what’s been discussed because this one allegation came out.

So I don’t think I’ve ever met Bryan Singer in person. But I did encounter him for the very first time when I was an assistant. I was answering phones for producers and he called to invite my boss to a party and I don’t remember whether my boss was going to go or not. But he also, just on the phone, Bryan Singer invited me and I think just correctly surmising that I was a 20-something year old gay guy who might want to come to party at his house.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I didn’t go and that’s great and fine. But, in the years past and the decades since then, I would be at parties and Bryan Singer would show up with this posse of really good-looking guys who were about 20 and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This allegation of this guy was like he’s 15 and like I don’t remember seeing anybody that young, but it was sort of a thing and like everyone knew that like Bryan Singer would show up at a party with this group of guys. They’d swarm for like 30 minutes and then they go onto the next party. And that was just the thing that happened.

So a lot of the real meat of the story is more about like this posse of guys and sort of with that lifestyle was versus the nature of what actually happened in this one case. And I want to make sure that whatever the criminal or civil — whatever happens with this one thing is judged based on that one thing and that it doesn’t become this sort of indictment of this swarm of 20 year olds around him.

**Craig:** Well, sure. Yeah, I mean, it’s not illegal to have sex with 20 year olds. It’s illegal to have sex with, whatever, 17 year olds, I don’t know. [laughs] I should probably, I should look into that.

**John:** Yeah, well, there’s a complete age consent issue and there’s also the ability to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are two incredibly important things that anytime you’re talking about sexual abuse, rape, or anything like that you have to keep in mind were the people participating in the situation able to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Based on age or based on everything else.

**Craig:** And in this case, there are allegations that some of the people were not of age to give consent at all and other people were under the influence of drugs and were coerced either by drugs that they weren’t even — they didn’t even realized they were ingesting — or by threats of violence in some cases I believe. This is not the first time that Bryan Singer’s name has been mentioned in connection with something like this.

He got in to a bit of hot water over a situation when he was making the movie Apt Pupil as I recall. There were some underage kids in a locker room scene and, [sighs], you know, look, I’m not a big believer in where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we can’t, we don’t know. All I know is this: there’s enough stuff around this one to make me nervous that — if I were Bryan Singer I would be very nervous right now.

And here is the other issue is that it’s spreading now to these other people and, you know, people can take a swing at somebody. When you start taking swings at five people, six people, seven people, my guess is you’ve got something behind those punches because otherwise you’re just going to, you know, what lawyer is necessarily going to start going that nuts, you know?

**John:** Well, yes and no. I do, and again, this is probably pretty early days of this so we don’t know sort of how many people they’re going to start pointing fingers at. The issue is, to me, basically you ask why now and sort of why did this person — why is this person coming out and saying, making these accusations about things that happened many years ago? Is it because Bryan Singer is suddenly a much bigger name because he has a big movie coming out and that it’s more lucrative to make these accusations now when there’s a much better reason to make them all go away? That’s going to be the natural question that sort of comes up out of sort of why this thing happens right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m really confused by that too.

**John:** I don’t —

**Craig:** Because, I mean, Bryan Singer has had big movies out between the time of the allegation, you know, when he said these incidences occurred and now. I don’t know why now, and frankly waited past the statute of limitations. The whole thing is odd —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But disconcerting. I will say this: I have never encountered any kind of weird sexual situation in Hollywood because I’m a married guy, right. I mean, I’m — so there’s just, there was never any — and I’m me. [laughs] Nobody wants me at their orgy, okay.

But I do know that this sort of thing does happen. This sort of thing happens between men and women. It happens between men and men. It happens between women and women. And there are a lot of bad people in our business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who have appetites in which they indulge and they feel entitled. And there are waves of young, impressionable, naive, desperate people who are here in this town looking for mommies and daddies and looking for fame and fortune.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this tale is as old as Hollywood. I can’t speak to whether or not any of the people that have been accused are guilty or innocent. But I can say there are guilty people out there and I would love to see things get cleaned up because sexual abuse in Hollywood is pervasive I believe and it is just awful. It is awful that it exist and frankly it’s awful that we all kind of walk around knowing it exists but never being able to do anything about it.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s talk though about like how would you actually implement these changes? Is it — do you basically start figuring out who the bad people are and stop hiring them?

**Craig:** Well —

**John:** Because, I mean, you and I off mic could make a list of like these are terrible people, and maybe do you stop hiring them because you are worried about the kind of PR disaster that this clearly has the potential to be. Well, even when we talked about like Orson Scott Card many, many episodes ago, we talked about that weird thing like you never want somebody involved as a creator to become like this negative anchor on your movie and that’s what we’re talking about here.

**Craig:** Well, I think that it’s — the tricky part is you don’t want to black list people and you don’t want to go on witch hunts, because suddenly, you know, let’s say this all turns into something very, very real and Bryan Singer ends up in prison. Now you’ve got, you know, what are you going to have a witch hunt of every gay director in his 30s? I mean, you got to be careful about this. But on the other hand, I actually think the only thing that can stop this is for these people to be exposed and stand trial and if they’re guilty go to prison because they’re doing criminal things.

Listen, you could be a sleaze. If you want to be a legal sleaze all day long, I don’t have to like it but, you know, it’s not —

**John:** But, Craig, a lot of, I mean, with this bad behavior we’re talking about though, maybe we should distinguish these kinds of bad behavior. There’s actually, genuinely criminal things where you’re doing things with underage people or people who cannot give consent because of drugs or coercion or whatever else.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what about sort of the 18-year-old actress from Iowa who gets sent out for an audition with a skeezy producer/director or whatever and feels kind of coerced into —

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Coerced is the wrong word.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But we got to make sure that, I mean, there’s — I mean, again, there’s uncomfortable ambiguity here about like what is just like recognizing a bad situation and how do you deal with sort of skeevy producers and directors even if they’re not actually breaking the law, do you still hire them?

**Craig:** Well, it’s —

**John:** Interesting, even if they’re not found guilty , there’s till that PR disaster. That’s really what I’m talking about. It’s like —

**Craig:** No, I hear you. I mean, look, if you think that somebody is a ticking time bomb for activity that will impact your business negatively regardless of its legality, yeah, I would say, you probably should think twice before hiring them. Even if you’re just amoral. From a business point of view you should think twice about hiring them for sure. In terms of where the line gets drawn on the behavior, I think that our criminal justice system is fairly conservative in this regard. There’s a, you know, innocent before proven guilty. There’s got to be evidence. You get a lawyer. There is a trial. So if it’s not illegal, then it’s not illegal, then you just have to make a decision about whether it’s distasteful and embarrassing and detracting to your business. And you also have to be careful that you’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That you’re not simply acting on rumors. This business, in particular when it comes to gay men, less of gay women but gay men, this business since the beginning has just had this enormous percentage of closeted gay man who had to live kind of completely in secret in this way. And there is a culture of secrecy about it. And cultures of secrecy which are born out of necessity serve as a shield for then bad people who do bad things. Now, granted straight people have done probably I would say a larger proportion of the bad things. [laughs]

**John:** I would say a greatly larger proportion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the stereotype of the skeevy producer or director and the, you know, the girl just off the bus from Iowa, it exists for a reason because we see it happening all the time.

**Craig:** Right. That’s every day.

**John:** And maybe because it’s so commonly out there, we can sort of recognize the warning signs of it a little bit more easily. I am, I think I am generally in a macro sense most worried about the witch hunt aspect of it because even if it’s not a publicly-declared witch hunt , it’s that slow — it’s that reticence to hire anybody. You wonder like could there by some problem here. And the person who comes to mind is Lana Wachowski, because back when Lana Wachowski was Larry Wachowski —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, that was a big transition. And there’s a lot of reasons why you could worry that that was going to be a time bomb situation. It ended up not being a time bomb situation and things kind of turned out just fine. But I’m worried that you could create a culture in which you feel very nervous about hiring The Wachowskis because of this Bryan Singer situation or some other potential law suit out there.

**Craig:** You know, my point of view is that Hollywood is a fairly progressive place. One of the more progressive industries in the world. And when it comes to somebody, something like, someone who’s transgender, now at least in 2014, so who is transgender and who’s transitioning between genders, I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all for anybody.

I think, frankly, that people sort of line up to be first in line to say I support this person because we don’t look at it here, at least In Hollywood, we don’t look at that as anything wrong at all. I think where most reasonable people agree is that sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape and statutory rape, that these things are criminal and that they are not connected to gender issues.

I mean, listen, poor Lee Tamahori, remember his story

**John:** I don’t remember it well, but I recognize the name.

**Craig:** Lee Tamahori is a director and he was arrested for basically soliciting, I think, in drag on Santa Monica. And, you know, this was I think like 2000 — I want to say it was like 2005. And it was really embarrassing for him. And it clearly impacted his career in a way that Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant’s careers were not impacted, I should point out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think were that to happen now, I think it would be a different situation. I agree with you. Look, the last thing we want is a witch hunt. But also the last thing we want is to allow… — Listen, there was a culture going on. We know this because the guys that ran that Digital Entertainment Network, this guy Mark Collins, director, and a couple of these other guys, they fled the country and then got extradited and there were criminal charges. And one of them, I’m sure of it, I seem to recall was convicted.

There were bad things going on. And there are bad things going on. And so we have to balance witch hunter-y against, but I… — Listen, man, I have a daughter, you know? If I heard that somebody I knew professionally had sexually assaulted a woman, so we’re talking now heterosexual sexual assault, I mean, they’re out of my life, for sure.

Now, I also know as you do the odds of us not knowing somebody like that without knowing is zero, right? I mean, we have worked with somebody that we don’t know has done this. Has to be, right?

**John:** We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it. And I hope that all of the Jaime Lannisters get a light shone on them, because this is the worst, you know. It’s a terrible crime. And if Bryan Singer is not a Jaime Lannister, I hope he is exonerated. And if he is, I hope he goes to prison. I mean, you know, other people will make the X-Men movies. We’ll survive.

**John:** Yeah.

All right, next topic. Also on April 14th, or I guess two days before the Bryan Singer, the WGA released a report. I think it’s every two years they do this report. How often do they do the report?

**Craig:** I think they do it every year.

**John:** All right. This report was on sort of a representation of women and minorities and older people among writers in Hollywood. We’re going to put a link up to the executive summary, but some of the statistics were about female writers accounted for 15% of feature film work in 2012, the latest figure tracked in the survey, down from 17% in 2009. So, it dropped two points since 2009.

Minority writers remain stuck at 5% of film jobs, unchanged from 2009. But the survey shows minority writer earnings declined over the same period, even as paydays for white male writers increased. So, it was not a bundle of good news.

There was actually some good news in the TV side where women’s numbers had increased somewhat.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, looking through this, so if we’re looking for good news and there is not much here to celebrate. So, sort of good news, I guess, is that things didn’t really get that much worse. I mean, statistically speaking the percentage for instance of women working in film went like this from 2008 to 2012: 16, 17, 17, 16, 15. That 15 may just be an outlier. It may be up to 17 again next year.

And the numbers were very steady across the board for television: 28, 28, 27, 28, 27. And total overall employment is actually like one tick higher than it was in 2008. And it’s basically 24% to 25%. So, did it get much worse, no. I guess can we say that it’s good news that the bad situation stayed roughly the same bad? No, that’s not so great.

The one other bit of sort of good news is that there’s not much of a significant gender earnings gap in television. There is a slight gap, which obviously we don’t want to see again. Well, you know, it’s significant. In 2012 median television earnings $112,000 and for white males it was $121,000. That’s a difference of $9,000. That is significant, but it’s not — you don’t look at that and your heart doesn’t sink to the floor.

And what’s also interesting is that as male earnings went up, white male earnings went up, the female earnings went up as well. So, the lines kind of followed each other.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those things where if you actually look at it on the chart you’re like, oh, that’s not so bad at all. But then when you actually look at it like the actual numbers, it’s like, oh, women are still getting significantly less.

**Craig:** No, there is a clear problem there.

**John:** Really, the gap remained the same, it’s just that the numbers overall were the same.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess my theme of the good news is a bad situation stayed roughly as bad as it’s been. Yeah, I mean, for film the gap has narrowed somewhat significantly since 2008. The gap is much wider in film than it is in television which doesn’t surprise me because the income disparity in general in film is much wider than it is in television in terms of writing.

**John:** My takeaway from looking at this overall report, particularly in features, I felt like one of the realities is like there were fewer feature jobs. Overall the whole pot of future jobs, there were fewer of them. And that women and minorities probably seemed to take the biggest hit of those fewer jobs.

And so they took a disproportionately large hit I guess I should say. And also when there is more competition for fewer jobs, it becomes harder to push quotes up. And so if you are one of them women who got the job, or minority who got that writing job, it becomes harder to push your quote up higher because there’s a thousand other people who could do that same thing.

Another thing I thought was interesting was this statistic that since 2008 writers aged 41 to 50 have replaced younger writers age 31 to 40 as the age group who enjoyed the largest share of film employment. So, it went from younger writers claimed 37% of all employment to just 33% of all employment. That got flipped in 2010. So, writers age 41 to 50 were 39% of film employment. Writers age 31 to 40 dropped five percentage points to 32%.

So, it’s basically good news for John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, it’s good news for John August and Craig Mazin, two white men working in film in their forties. I will say that the bad news for the studios here, if they’re concerned at all, and this is a point that I’ve made to them when we’ve gone out with the guild to talk about the professional status of screenwriters is that they’re not doing a very good job of training the next generation of screenwriters.

First of all, there’s this myth that twenty-somethings, everybody wants twenty-somethings. Nobody apparently wants twenty-somethings. You want to talk about a group that’s discriminated against? Twenty-somethings.

So, traditionally — and frankly if you look at these numbers, I really have to question the guild’s commitment to this notion that age 40+ is now a protected class, when frankly 40 to 60, that’s the largest earning class in the guild. And that the class that is hammered and needs promotion is the under-30 group. They are —

**John:** Well, Craig, let’s talk about how many people could really fit in that cohort though of the under-30. Because let’s really realistically 25 is about as young as a writer you’re going to get, so there’s really only five years of that.

**Craig:** Well, if you double the percentages —

**John:** It’s still really low.

**Craig:** It’s still much lower than 51 to 60. And I think what we’re going to see is this trend that you pointed out here of the flip between the 30s and the 40s, that’s like guys like you and me going from our 30s to our 40s, which is exactly what happened in 2011.

Because I don’t think the studios are doing as good of a job as they used to bringing people up, bringing them through, and bringing them along. I think, frankly, you’re looking at a bunch of people that are just dropping out in their 20s and 30s because there is not a living to be made as a feature screenwriter.

**John:** Well, I would also argue that a lot of those people who would be the 25-year-old feature writer are now 25-year-old TV writers, because that’s where the jobs are. And so perhaps the feature jobs —

**Craig:** Not according to their chair. It suggests similarly terrible numbers.

**John:** Let’s see. I’m looking at my television one.

**Craig:** Well, for the 30s they’re solid, but still your 40 to 50, that’s the highest numbers.

**John:** That’s the bulk. Right.

**Craig:** And the under 31s is, again, dismal. I mean, that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I have to say like of all the — and let’s add onto that number, because that’s the one that really jumped out at me. That a lot of the efforts that have been made to bring woman and minorities into professional writing positions have been made in the last five to 10 years. Which means a lot of the efforts are going to be for newer writers who are in their 20s, so you’ve got this triple problem where suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’re a woman and you’re a minority, or you’re a minority, and you’re in this like jammed up class that’s just getting hammered out there.

Why? I guess — let’s take a step back, John. What do you think is going on here? Do you think that there is an explanation other than just flat out sexism, racism, ageism?

**John:** Oh, I think you can’t ever have just one explanation behind things, but I think there are fewer candidates than they want for some of those things.

So, let’s take, oh, I’ll talk about my experience dealing with a producer of a big TV show. And we were talking about hiring directors, but hiring writers is really the same situation. And she said that they actively really tried to hire female directors for the show and the first season they were able to get two on. And they brought one back the second time because she was great.

And that one female director was so good they could never get her back again. And they tried other people — they had a hard time finding candidates that they thought were actually good enough to do this.

That’s on the buyer side. But, you can also — there’s also the challenge of you have to want to become a screenwriter, or a television writer. And in some ways there is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you’re a young woman who doesn’t believe that she can make it as a TV writer, or as a feature writer, you may never try to make it as a feature writer or a TV writer. And that can take the numbers down, too.

We saw it to some degree even in the Three Page Challenges, looking at sort of what percentage of people who submitted to Three Page Challenge were men or women. And it was surprisingly there was a huge disparity of men to women writing in for that.

**Craig:** Right. And I think you see that also in the Nicholl Fellowship that I think they get roughly about 30% submissions from women, which is obviously out of whack.

I mean, look, it may be that that number is depressed because women are negatively influenced by the fact that they are a minority in success, or it may be a depressed number because there just may be less interest. We don’t know.

Look, if you’re a woman and you’re interested in screenwriting, that’s not a very satisfying answer, but of course you might be one of the 30%.

**John:** Yes. Well, because the minute I say what I just said, there’s a natural response to it, it’s like, but no, I’m one of those women who wants to be this thing and you saying that I don’t want this thing is negative. I’m like, I’m actually saying exactly the opposite.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m saying that in some ways in my conversations with people who are trying to make hiring decisions, they are often saying that we are really looking for women or minorities for these things and we’re having a hard time finding them. And so be that there need to better programs to get people trained to do those things, better mentorship of writers to writers, specifically women writers to women writers to try to make sure all those connections are actually happening, I’m saying that, yes, there is a problem. I’m just saying that the problem isn’t necessarily that these people aren’t willing to hire somebody; they just may not be able to find a person they feel is qualified to hire.

**Craig:** I agree. There is no real clear path to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to back up if I can to page ten of that report, because if you actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m looking at that now. The employment rate by age group. Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s really interesting. So, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m puzzled, because so here it’s saying, all right, employment rate by age group is the highest in the twenty-somethings, where in 2012 it’s arguing that 80% of the twenty-somethings got employment versus a lower percentage. But, how do they figure that out exactly? How do they — ?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Employment rate is defined as a percentage of current guild members who are actually employed. Okay, well that’s a very misleading thing. Because I would imagine that the current guild membership is probably skewed more heavily in the older ages, which means that the percentage of people employed would be lower because there are fewer guild members in the 20s. This is a bad graph.

**John:** Okay, I can see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean?

**John:** It’s because the guild has so many —

**Craig:** Current members between 30 and 60, right. So, if there are very few current guild members in their 20s, so yeah, if there’s like, you know, 40 of them that get work —

**John:** So, if you are a guild member in your 20s you’re likely a working guild member in your 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re actually actively working. I guess that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a bad graph. I think the graph that matters is the share. Because if you look at share of film employment, there’s no reason frankly… — Like I grant you, forget 20 to 25, but if you look at 25 to 30, there’s no reason that 25 to 30 year olds should be employed at such a lower rate than 30 to 35 year olds even, you know?

That’s a little odd to me.

**John:** I’m trying to read through to understand what share film employment actually means. Does it mean out of 100 jobs how many were occupied by people of a certain age? Or total amount of dollars earned in film? And it’s really unclear from this.

**Craig:** I would imagine it has to do with how many jobs, like how many workers worked. You know, like how many jobs out of the available jobs went to twenty-somethings. How many jobs out of the available jobs, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m guessing.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** That’s the problem with these statistics. They get a little crazy.

**John:** Yeah. But what’s so fascinating about those two charts is if you look at them you can draw completely opposite conclusions about where the real problem is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you were saying the real problem is that we’re not doing enough to help the younger people. The other chart makes it seem like the younger people are doing just great. It’s the older people who are —

**Craig:** Yeah, that other chart sucks. [laughs] I will tell you there is a chart that, I mean, you want to look at the only chart that matters? How about money? Let’s just look at money, because that’s the only thing that matters in terms of like what’s actually happening for people. Average earnings by age group.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Under 31s are way — I mean, you want to talk about a disparity. Like we’re here talking like, man, there is a 10% gap between men and women. Absolutely. There is a 100% gap between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in television. And there is similarly a very large gap as well in film. The 40-somethings like you and me, their median earnings in film in 2012 were about $90,000 and for twenty-somethings they were more like $50,000.

**John:** 50.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely shocking. And I will point out to you, and this is why sometimes the guild makes me nuts. They will never mention this because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Their narrative is… — And do you know why it doesn’t fit their narrative? Because there are so few twenty-somethings and because the grouchiest people, forgive me for being stereotypical, [laughs], but the old people are grouchier.

Like me and you, right? We’re part of the old people now. And they’re grouchy.

**John:** I do find it fascinating — we’re looking at figure 13 in the chart if you’re following with us. And so there’s, I don’t know if you call it an S-curve or what you want to call it, but essentially earnings peak in that 41 to 50-year-old, and they go down 61 to 70 they’re at the lowest point back down to where the twenty-somethings are.

But then it actually rises again. And if you’re 71 to 80, because I think basically if you’re 71 years old and you’re still getting hired, you’re getting a big paycheck.

**Craig:** You’re the best. Like basically you —

**John:** You’re Alvin Sargent.

**Craig:** You are exactly right. Yeah. And frankly there are so few screenwriters in that cohort that Alvin Sargent has a huge impact on this graph. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. One Alvin Sargent. He’s the entire dot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, but this is to me, when you look at these graphs the thought that the Writers Guild actually considers white men in their 40s to be a protected class somehow is insane. And frankly speaks to who runs the guild, which would be men in their 40s and 50s.

I look at this report and I mean I recognize women and minorities, we got a long way to go there. A long way to go. But I’m also looking at twenty-somethings because I feel like the bottom is just not there anymore.

**John:** Well, also the women and minorities who we need to get started in the film industry are largely those people in the 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, you help that whole cohort up, you’re going to help people.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Craig, how often should we do this kind of report? How often should the guild do it?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my feeling because this report is expensive and it uses our dues, my feeling is I think if we did it once every four years or once every five years we would be fine. And by that I mean even collect the data, because it doesn’t change. The data simply doesn’t change in any significant way. Look at figure 8. This is median earnings for employed women, minority, and white male writers. And it’s just the same crap. From 2002 to 2012 it’s the same.

And my issue with the guild is that they shell out cash to do these reports to make themselves feel better. Frankly, they could do it once every ten years. Hell, at this point you could probably do it once every 20 years, because all they do is they put this out there and go, “Isn’t this terrible?”

But, hey, how about, I don’t know, like doing something about it. Like creating a program. Why doesn’t the guild take the money they’ve thrown to these reports and just start doing specific training or sponsoring positions or, I don’t know, something. Try something else other than just putting the same damn graph out every year going, “Oh, dear, no.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to take the counterpoint that I think you need to do it more often than that because it just becomes too easy to forget about all together. So, the good thing about this report coming out is it creates a moment of conversation about the problem itself.

And so I totally hear you in terms of the spending a tremendous amount of money on it, so perhaps a better way to do smaller, much cheaper reports that don’t try to be as comprehensive or cost so much, but that remind us of the actual nature of the problem.

**Craig:** Well, I’m with you on that. Look, if this report were followed by action, and then that action was subject to a follow up report to test for efficacy, I would be all for it. And I feel like sometimes the guild hates to try things because they think that they’ll fail. I don’t mind failure. That’s part of the scientific process. And this is a scientific problem. Sociology is a science.

So, try something. See if it works. If it does, keep doing it. Do it more. If it doesn’t, try a new thing. But you have to try something. You can’t simply just collect data for the rest of your life and bemoan the fate of everything. I mean, geez, if I were a black kid, I’m 22 years old, I want to be a screenwriter and I’m looking at these reports going back all these years I’d think, well, so I can pretty much assume the next 10 years will be the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

**John:** Yeah. There’s no reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. This trend is pretty steady. It’s bad.

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

All right, our next topic. This is based on a Wall Street Journal article that we’ll have a link to in the show notes. But it’s about The Vampire Diaries and the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries. So, this is a little snippet from it:

Lisa Jane Smith started writing her first book, “The Night of the Solstice,” when she was in high school, and was around 20 when MacMillan published the novel in 1987. The book, a middle-grade fantasy novel, was a commercial failure that sold around 5,000 copies. But it captured the attention of an editor at Alloy, who asked Ms. Smith if she’d be interested in writing a new young-adult series, concocted as “Interview with the Vampire” for teens.

So, basically she wrote this book about a high school girl who is torn between vampire brothers. She wrote it as a trilogy in nine months for a small advance of a few thousand dollars. What she apparently didn’t realize is that she was writing it as a work-for-hire and that became a huge issue because down the road as The Vampire Diaries, actually many years later as The Vampire Diaries became a TV series, they decided to have someone else start writing the books for The Vampire Diaries and shut her out.

The strange twist that happened recently is, so Alloy made some sort of deal with Kindle for Kindle World, which is their fan fiction thing, so that writers who wish to write fan fiction for The Vampire Diaries can and they can sell their fan fiction through the Kindle World store. So, Lisa Jane Smith, or LJ Smith, started writing paid fan fiction for the series that she herself created, which is just bizarre.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just a weird — I think it’s just a fascinating case study in like what it is like to be a writer now and sort of just the importance of understanding what rights you control or don’t control as a writer.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, look, on the one hand this is actually a wonderful story because the way technology has advanced it’s actually given an opportunity to a writer that would simply not have existed. She just would have suffered the indignity of this had her career been shifted back twenty years. When you are hired under work-for-hire, what it means is you’re being commissioned to do a work by somebody else.

And this, by the way, only exists in the United States. As you are commissioned to do that work, you are considered an employee. You do not own the copyright on the work. The copyright is controlled and owned by the commissioner. You and I when we write screenplays for studios, it’s work-for-hire. So, we don’t own our copyrights. We are typically compensated quite well and we also get the benefit of the union because we’re employees, so there are certain terms that are collectively bargained and residuals that approximate royalties and things like that.

But in the book business, I would imagine it gets pretty bad.

**John:** It could.

**Craig:** Because I don’t believe there is a union, like a true federally-chartered labor union that organizes writers who are writing novels on a work-for-hire basis. I don’t know what she got paid. She might have been paid very little. I’m kind of shocked that she didn’t know the nature of the contract. Some lawyer must have understood it and explained it.

But the other fascinating part of this is that these companies realize that there’s money to be made in allowing fan fiction to occur. So, fan fiction exists sort of on an underground basis and these companies realized, well, if these people are going to do it, you know the deal with fan fiction is if you want to actually take it to the next level, like for instance E.L. James did when she wrote Fifty Shades of Grey, at some point if you want to sell the stuff you have to change the names and you’ve got to change certain details so you’re not infringing on the copyright of in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it turns out that Twilight is some weird touchstone for S&M. I don’t understand why, but it is. [laughs] Like a Mormon lady wrote this thing that everybody else looks at and goes S&M. Whatever.

So, things have to be changed. But these companies that own these properties, and they have to own them. See, that’s the key. If an individual author wants to do this, like let’s say Stephanie Meyer did say I want people to be able to write Twilight FanFic, she can individually license that right to Amazon and then get money for it and then people can go ahead and use the real names and the real places.

But in the case of something like The Vampire Diaries, because the company was commissioning these works as a work-for-hire, it’s their — they can do that. And now it’s open the door for the actual writer to write these things again. And the fans of her work are really passionate and they’re very excited about reading what they consider to be the real sequels to those books, and not the ones written by the other authors.

**John:** And Alloy Entertainment still gets paid for it.

**Craig:** They get paid.

**John:** I think because of the deal with Kindle Worlds, like they still — they actually own the copyright on it, which is also crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s interesting to me that the deal with Kindle World is that the company or the copyright holder, which may be an individual author, licenses the right to Kindle World for their user, for Kindle World users to write fan fiction, approved fan fiction, with the character names and all the rest. But, then if the FanFic writers want to do that, they have to sign away their copyrights back to the company?

**John:** Yeah. There’s something crazy like that. So, Alloy is still making money off of that, which is crazy.

**Craig:** Wow. And so what’s now, I really get it, because now what’s going on is these companies are going, “Well, why should E.L. James make $40 billion? We should be making the $40 billion.”

**John:** So, Craig, I have a question for you. Let’s bring it back to us. So, let’s say you write a spec script and it becomes a movie, it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. You write Raiders of the Lost Ark and it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. And people want to start writing fan fiction for it and put it in this kind of situation. Do you think that you have that as one of your separated rights? Or is that something that they own as part of their separated rights?

**Craig:** It is not one of our separated rights. Yeah, no.

**John:** So, they can license that and be making money off of people writing fan fiction.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We have, our separated rights are quite limited. And the closest thing we have to something like this is the right to a novelization. Under certain circumstances we have a right to publish our screenplay, under certain circumstances. But, no, they can absolutely… — Listen, they can remake your movie and they can have somebody else right a sequel to your movie, no problem. And I can easily see a situation where they went ahead and licensed this stuff to Kindle World, said go ahead, write your own sequels to this stuff and you can use Indiana Jones’ name and we’ll own it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, which I think frankly if they don’t do it I’ll be shocked. I’m sure the studios are looking at this now and thinking, “Why shouldn’t we do that?”

And to everybody out there, don’t do it! [laughs] Okay? Don’t write anything that is a work-for-hire ever unless you’re getting paid a lot of money and it’s under a collective bargaining agreement. Just don’t do it. I mean, works of fiction —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, works of fiction. Just don’t do it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think it’s going to be fascinating because it’s going to happen. And it will be really curious to see what the first incarnations of that are. And I also think there are some interesting challenges to put, because we do have the ability to write the novelization. And to what degree can you stretch the ability to write the novelization to mean to write essentially literary derivative works of that original creation.

Actually, I’ll run through — I was going to do a Go coloring book, and so I engaged with my lawyer to figure out like can I do that? And basically like is it an illustrated screenplay? And we ended up not doing it, but it was a really kind of fascinating test case like whether I still owned those rights as part of my separated rights.

**Craig:** If they can argue that it is something like a graphic novel or a comic book, then the answer is no because that falls under the heading of merchandising. And so a coloring book I think they would easily argue is merchandising and, no. [laughs]

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** We have a very — our separated rights you can —

**John:** And who would determine that? Is it their list of arbiters, or how would they figure that out?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean essentially if there were a real challenge. I mean, first of all the guild’s lawyers would have to agree with you. Because the injured party would be the guild. And so the guild’s lawyers have to agree with you. And I’ve found that quite often they don’t agree with writers. You want them to sort of naturally want to advocate and push the boundaries. The legal department at the guild, one of my big gripes is that they are far more concerned about their case load and winning cases than they are about taking chances and pushing the ball down the field.

I understand they’re always concerned about setting a negative precedent, which I understand.

**John:** Exactly. They just don’t want to lose because losing can cost them more.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s go to a question. We have a question from Henry Fosdike who says, “Chatting with other writers, we find that we all have those words we just can’t seem to break away from. He nods is my curse, for about 40 or 50 times in the first draft. Other friends struggle with synonyms for walk, pace, trudge, trundle, or to explain a character turning on the spot. He spins, turns, twirls. I’d be intrigued to hear which words crop up in your drafts a lot.”

**Craig:** Oh, good question.

**John:** I would say my first instinct is to sort of go back to the Hemingway of it all, and like Hemingway famously didn’t want to use anything other than He Said for dialogue. You don’t try to put synonyms for that. Just like basically use the generic word that sort of gets rid of it.

But, I do find myself sometimes a little bit frustrated by, particularly when you have to write a lot of action. You start to recognize that walks, heads to, spots, notices. I started using “clocks” too much, like just to recognize something. And it’s like I stopped using clocks.

How about you?

**Craig:** Well, my philosophy about this is that it is far less important for us as screenwriters to dwell on this than it is for novelists because our work is not meant to be read by the consumer or the audience. It’s meant to instruct our dramatic intention of people making a movie.

So, there are certain words that I give myself full license to use because I understand they have a function like seize, crosses to. I like crosses to as opposed to walks to. Nods is really just about somebody shares a look with. I do a lot of that. Smiles. I’ll do smiles, really just to say that somebody is kind of listening and paying attention and absorbing it in a certain way as opposed to another way.

There are a bunch of things I do like that, but they’re really all there just to give a — to let the director and the cast know, oh, there’s a moment here where the actor is going to respond or react. And that’s all it is. Just holding a place there so that you don’t think that you’re not supposed to respond or react, that the writer is saying now cut to this person. It’s almost like an editorial thing, you know.

I don’t have any sort of, I mean like clocks, maybe I’ll throw that in once in a script or something if it’s really appropriate. But I try and keep it to very bland, vanilla kinds of things like that because I want them really to be editorial input and not purple prose. There’s not much sense in evocative action descriptions because, you know, no one is going to hear them.

**John:** Well, let’s throw this back to listeners. If you have a phrase you’re sick of seeing a thousand times in scripts or that you find yourself using too much and you’re trying to avoid, just tweet that to us because we would love to see what those are.

**Craig:** I will give you one that I’ve worked on a lot. Chris McQuarrie has this theory that every time you use an exclamation point it’s a failure, in dialogue. So, I’ve really been trying to cut back on any use of an exclamation point ever.

**John:** Yeah. And all your double exclamation points, even those?

**Craig:** I actually never — occasionally there is the —

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever used a double exclamation point.

**Craig:** How about an interrobang?

**John:** I have used, not the true interrobang, but I have used an exclamation point/question mark probably three times in my career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nine times out of 10 you actually can get rid of the exclamation point. And basically texters have ruined exclamation points. 13-year-old kids have ruined exclamation points for all of us.

**John:** Well, they have. Also I find in emails sometimes now you can’t just say thanks, period, because it sounds negative.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, it sounds like you’re a dick.

**John:** “Thanks.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like it’s sardonic. Like you’re eye-rolling in a thanks. Yeah, everything has to be, “Thanks!”

**John:** “Thanks!” Yeah. A little up talk.

**Craig:** Right. A little up talk.

**John:** Let’s go to our Old One Cool Things. So, if you want to follow along with us, every week on the podcast at least I have a One Cool Thing. Craig sometimes has a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so last week we started going through our list of old ones to talk through which ones are actually still cool, which ones we barely remember even mentioning before. So, if you want to follow along with us, we are at johnaugust.com/onecoolthings, all one word. And I think we were at number 61 last time.

**Craig:** Yeah. We got to 61. Oh, I don’t think you got to 61. Maybe you did.

**John:** So, my 61 was What If? which is still a great blog to follow. There’s going to be a book coming out, so we’ll link to the book, too. Basically it’s scientific explanations, answers to questions like what would happen if a baseball thrown at the speed of light hit the earth. And it really talks through the physics of that and has great illustrations.

**Craig:** Excellent. Let’s see, number 62, mine was Red Cross donations to Hurricane Sandy relief, which I think they probably capped those off now.

**John:** I think so. Mine was Letterpress for iOS which is still a great game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t play it as much now, but for awhile there it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, it was 3s before there was 3s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Mine for 63 was Reach Gum Care Soft Woven Mint Floss which is still the best floss in the world.

**Craig:** I didn’t have one that week, probably because I was stunned by that one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then, let’s see, we didn’t have one for 64. 65, mine was brining which I swear by still to this day and you should all do it.

**John:** Ticket to Ride is still a great board game, but the iPad version is incredibly solid. The multi-player for like local people in a room is also terrific.

**Craig:** The next week I had the only one and that was Don Rhymer’s cancer blog, Let’s Radiate Don. Sadly Don did pass away last year, but I think about him all the time. My office is still next to the one that he occupied. And he will remain cool for all of time.

**John:** I agree. The week after that I had Soulver which was a calculator kind of thing for iOS and for the Mac. I do use this occasionally, but I don’t use it as much as I sort of thought I would use it.

**Craig:** Mine was Scanadu which I think is still possibly vaporware that’s like an all-purposes medical device that would attach to your phone and tell you if your kid had a fever, or an ear infection, or something. I think they’re still working on that.

**John:** I had Karateka for iOS which was the game version that we made of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka. I also had Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Both are still really great. So, full disclosure, I actually tried to make the movie version of Mr. Penumbra and we couldn’t actually get it to all happen. But I got to talk to Mr. Sloan over a couple weeks about that and it’s still a great book and I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Excellent. Mine was Seth Rudetsky’s Seth TV. And Seth TV, he is the best. He is the best. And I got to meet him. And I was on his show. And bravo, he is the greatest.

**John:** Bravo!

**Craig:** Bravo! And you should definitely if you care about music at all, you should take a look particularly at the things he does called Seth Deconstructs. They’re fantastic. They are sort of the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

**John:** I had a thing about Coffeescript which is my favorite scripting language, like for quick and dirty programming stuff. It’s still the thing I go to most whenever I need to actually write some code.

**Craig:** And mine was Poutine, the national food of Quebec, which continues to be incredibly delicious.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Starred changes, which is basically I don’t think people necessarily understand this, at least they didn’t understand it in Broadway, is the idea of putting asterisks in the margin to show what is different from this draft to the next draft. I think it’s genuinely useful. It’s a thing we are working to try to get into the Fountain spec.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Ah, you loved your car so much.

**Craig:** So, you saw in the news I was on the PCH there naked in my Tesla Model S. Anything that happens with the Tesla Model S I get 4,000 tweets. People, you got to understand something: I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t make the Tesla. I’m not driving every Tesla. Everyone is like, oh yeah. There are I think 60,000 Teslas on the road and I’m merely one of them. But I do love it so.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Pat Moran from The Credits. I really don’t remember this all that well, but I’m pretty sure Pat Moran was talking about sort of what a casting director does. I love casting directors.

**Craig:** Well, the next week I had the Easton-Bell pitcher’s helmet. They are still working on this. And there have been more incidents in Major League Baseball, of pitchers getting hit. No one in the head. There’s been a couple in the face that this would not have helped, but the whole idea of this helmet is to prevent brain injury. So, they’re working on it. I’m hoping it gets out there.

**John:** Let’s do five more. Mine was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which was a best-selling books, so it’s like I’m not the first person to tell you that it’s really, really good. But it’s really, really good. And I was so excited this last week to see the trailer for David Fincher’s movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck who is perfect casting for that. I’m really curious to see how that movie is going to play.

**Craig:** Excellent. My next week was a canker sore drug that helped mice lose weight without diet or exercise. I have been just drinking that stuff. And, [laughs], I don’t know if it works or not. But it’ll take them years to test it.

**John:** Mine was Dungeon World, the role-playing game, and we played it. We played it a bunch.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** It’s good. It’s a good lightweight system. Lots of really smart things.

**Craig:** We haven’t finished that game.

**John:** Yeah. We do. You basically got to the part with the gnomes and then Malcolm Spellman had to leave because of his dog. But there’s still stuff.

The week before that I had Apple TV. Apple TV remains great. I’m really curious what the next iteration of that will be.

**Craig:** As am I. I had — really, I had? No, this is backwards. I was going to say, I had Homeland on Amazon Instant and Blu-ray? I’ve never watched that show. My wife watches it.

No, I had Waking Mars for iOS. You know what? Very beautiful game. I actually never ended up playing much of it. I got a bit bored.

**John:** Mine was Homeland, which I still just love, although I’ve only seen the first two seasons, so I need to get to the third season here pretty soon. But it’s one of those great shows to catch up on and see that it really was as good as everyone was saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is a movie that people should see in theaters if they have a chance to see it in theaters because I dug it. I saw it with Kelly Marcel. It’s called Under the Skin. It is written by Walter Campbell, based on a book by Michel Faber, directed by Jonathan Glazer who did Sexy Beast.

The IMDb description of it says “an alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland,” which is kind of true but actually not really what the movie feels like at all. And so I went into it thinking it’s going to be like Species but like classier. And it sort of is. And yet what ends up becoming to me is sort of amazing meditation on sort of life beyond good and evil. Because she’s not actually — she’s not evil in any classic sense. It’s just she’s just a predator. She’s like a lioness who’s just out there. Even though she looks, Scarlett Johansson looks like a beautiful Scarlett Johansson human being, she isn’t at all. And her performance is fantastic. The way the movie sort of limits to her perspective is great.

I dug it. And there’s moments in it that are Kubrickian in just the most remarkable sense. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I’ve heard it’s awesome. I’ve got to go see that. I might go —

**John:** Oh, and it has a great soundtrack as well. So, beyond that you’ll probably want to get the soundtrack because I’ve been playing it nonstop.

**Craig:** I’m going to go see some movies this week I think. I’ve got to say that. I still haven’t seen The Grand Budapest.

**John:** Oh, you have to see that.

**Craig:** I know. I know! That’s why I said —

**John:** And I was the guy who didn’t like Wes Anderson and now I’m fully —

**Craig:** I’ve always liked Wes Anderson, so I’m really stupid for not seeing it.

My One Cool Thing this week is CarboLite. CarboLite is a fake frozen yogurt that has eight calories an ounce. I have no idea. I assume it’s manufactured in some Gotham City chemical factory. It’s manufacture in an ACE Chemical Plant where the Joker —

**John:** Smilex?

**Craig:** Yeah. It fell into a vat of Smilex. My wife and I call it Plastic Cream because we’re pretty sure that that’s what it is. It’s — I can’t understand how they make it. Sometimes it’s disgusting, and sometimes it’s quite tasty. Either way, it’s like eating yogurt except that there’s nothing there. It’s the weirdest thing. And it’s not sold in too many places, but if you can find it give it a try. They have lots of different flavors, but basically the flavors come down to this: brown and white. [laughs] And they’ll tell you that this week’s brown is Chocolate Pudding. And next week’s brown is Nutella. And this week’s white is Vanilla. And next week’s is Angel Food Cake.

Yeah, it’s brown and white.

**John:** So, is this something you get in the supermarket or something you get at like a Yogurt Land?

**Craig:** It’s at a yogurt store. And it’s never at Yogurt Land because they don’t have it. So, it’s usually at some sort of independent yogurt store. There is a place in La Cañada called Penguins that does it. There’s a place in, you know the Ventura and Laurel Canyon shopping center with the Daily Grill? That place underneath it does it.

It really is like eating the future. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** God only knows what’s in it. God only knows.

**John:** We’ll see if we can find a link to it, but it reminds me of this SNL sketch, That’s Not Yogurt, and these guys are eating this delicious white thing. It’s like, “Wow, this yogurt is really tasty.” And the announcer keeps going, “That’s not yogurt.” No, well what is it? Really, I’m concerned. I want to know.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way you could possibly be allergic to anything in CarboLite because I believe it’s all completely inert. [laughs] It is a horror show, but I kind of love it.

**John:** When you see Under the Skin, there is this viscous goop in it, and maybe that’s what CarboLite actually is.

**Craig:** I mean, just the name alone. CarboLite. Isn’t that what they — oh, that’s Carbonite. They froze Han Solo in Carbonite and then when they melt Carbonite it turns into CarboLite.

**John:** I was mortified because on the new page for Highland’s release we talked about how your scripts are no longer frozen in Carbonate, and I let that slide. But, no, it’s Carbonite.

**Craig:** It’s Carbonite.

**John:** And someone wrote in to say, “Uh, uh, uh,” and we got it fixed.

**Craig:** Carbonate is right out. Wrong.

**John:** Wrong. It’s like silicon and silicone. It’s not the same thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally different.

**John:** That’s our show this week. You can find links to the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes, which is also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes. If you want to listen to the back episodes you can do it through scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the back episodes listed there. The subscription for $1.99 a month, you get free access to all of those and occasional bonus episodes.

You can also get them through the apps. We have one for iPhone, for iOS, and Android. So, check your app store.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Adrian Tanner. If you would like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Wow. This was a good show.

**John:** And that’s it. It’s a good show. It’s long, but we got a lot done.

**Craig:** You know what? Listen, man, we’re given them more for their money.

**John:** That’s really what it is. Your zero dollars got you about 90 minutes of show this week.

**Craig:** Oh, god. Well spent people.

**John:** Well done. All right. See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [HearthStone](http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/)
* IGN on [Cold, Cold Heart](http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/25/batman-arkham-origins-cold-cold-heart-dlc-review) Arkham Origins DLC
* [South Park: The Stick of Truth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IOAHPK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* If you are attending the show, [submit your Three Page Challenge here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) and [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Game of Thrones season 4, episode 3](http://www.hbogo.com/#series/browse&assetID=GOROSTGP42365?seriesID=GOROSTGP31734?assetType=SEASON?browseMode=browseGrid/) on HBO Go
* LA Times on the [Bryan Singer lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-xmen-director-bryan-singer-accused-of-1999-sexual-assault-20140417,0,5240173.story#axzz30Dlb8J5C)
* The [2014 (and past) WGAw Writers Report Executive Summary](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922)
* [Alvin Sargent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Sargent) on Wikipedia
* [Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358), from The Wall Street Journal
* [Interrobang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang) on Wikipedia
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Preorder xkcd’s [What If? book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Under the Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* CarboLite [nutrition facts on MyFitnessPal](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/carbolite-frozen-yogurt-467427) and Yelp on [where to find it in Los Angeles](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=carbolite&find_loc=Los+Angeles%2C+CA)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

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

Craig, you’re at home, your son was using up all the bandwidth. We’ve had some challenges but I think we’re doing better now.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically I just yelled at him and now everything is fine.

**John:** That’s great, great parenting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last weekend I had a parenting challenge and we actually did something new where I asked five questions on a piece of paper and had her sort of fill out like what she thought was like the right amount of screen time, what she thought would be the right consequences of these kind of actions, and drew up a little agreement. And so far so good. Better.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or if it’s just an individual thing. With my son, I find that what seems to work best is a kind of a military precision with him. So generally speaking to help guide him we don’t discuss the why he’s doing things or why it’s wrong or what it’s supposed to be. Instead it’s just very like, here’s the rules, this and this and this. And he says, got it. [laughs] Then he just does it.

But we do have this interesting thing we do where sometimes at night he’ll write up a little something where he expresses his feelings. It’s easier for him to just write it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he gives it to me and he goes to bed because he doesn’t want to talk about it. And then I read it and then I write back a response. It’s very parental and nice. And then I slip it under his door and when he wakes up in the morning he reads it. And in a very kind of father-son way that works really well for us. We are allowed to be kind of vulnerable and sweet with each other that way.

**John:** Yeah. I do the exact same thing with my daughter, so it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** So our parenting advice for the episode would be to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have a show chock full of other stuff today, so let’s get to it.

We’re going to talk about the Writers Guild and producers who have reached a new agreement. And so we will have Chris Keyser on to talk about that.

We are going to talk about screenplay formats and not just our sort of new format but sort of how we got to the current screenplay format and some of the alternatives that have already been out there and sort of what they look like and their pros and cons of that.

And then I also want to talk about the process of assembling a first draft, because I just today shipped in a brand new first draft of something and it was a completely different way than I had ever written before. So I want to talk about that process.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But before we get to Chris Keyser I have a little bit of follow up. James in London emailed us two episodes ago about Courier Prime and how the underlining wasn’t right. Do you remember that?

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

**John:** And I was like, well, you’re wrong because I underline things in script a lot. And I think the underlining in Courier Prime is really good. The underlining does actually, like the Gs carve out in the underlining, which I think is a good thing.

He emailed us back to say, “I have since looked further into the matter and I feel I owe you an apology. The difference in underlining is due to changes in Final Draft 9 and not the fonts. I have attached a couple of screenshots showing the difference.”

**Craig:** Oh! Ha, that’s weird because they did spend three years on that.

**John:** So I will describe for our listeners sort of what the difference is. Like the underline is weirdly, bizarrely thin in the Final Draft 9 version. I don’t have an answer for why it is that way. But actually it’s a Final Draft 9 thing and he was not being crazy, we were not being crazy. It was a Final Draft thing.

**Craig:** How many times they —

**John:** Final Draft.

**Craig:** Do we say, oh it’s just a Final Draft thing?

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So on Wednesday this past week the Writers Guild and the studios reached a tentative agreement for another three years of contract, which is great news. Press releases don’t work very well on radio, so we’re so excited to have Chris Keyser, the President of the Writers Guild of America, on the show today to talk us through what is new in the deal.

Chris, welcome to the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Chris Keyser:** Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. Thanks, Craig.

I haven’t seen you in over a day, John.

**John:** It’s been a very long day without you.

So I was on the negotiating committee, so I got to see Chris in action sitting at the table right next to me as we were negotiating this deal and this contract. And you went off and shot a whole pilot in the meantime too, so.

**Chris:** I did. And now I’m editing it. So I’ve stepped out of the editing room and — but I’m glad to talk to you guys.

**John:** Good, fantastic. So what should writers know about this deal and sort of what has happened over the course of this negotiation?

**Chris:** There are actually a lot of things that I think this negotiation accomplished. Most people I think will look at it in that it’s two separate things. One is a whole bunch of stuff that we got that came off of what people will think of as the DGA pattern, a pattern that in fact we had a lot to do with because there were conversations that went on for a long time between the WGA and the DGA about all the stuff that had been negotiated. And then separately the new provisions on options and exclusivity which are the first time for those issues to be discussed in the MBA. And actually I think potentially a big step forward.

So we should probably talk about one and then the other. And I’m happy to do whichever thing you want to do first.

**John:** Let’s do the basics, because a lot of stuff going into this negotiation was about talk of really rollbacks.

So I think far in the distance as this negotiation was approaching, there’s a sense like, okay, it’s just going to be a very standard negotiation. We’re going to end up doing a lot of the same things the DGA deal did. It should not be complicated.

And then the first proposals we got from the studios were actually not what we expected.

**Chris:** No, they actually contained about $60 million in rollbacks which seemed outrageous during the time of unprecedented profitability for the companies. Nevertheless, that’s where we began. And so that’s coming off of an initial list of rollbacks and then a decision on the part of the studios, the companies not to come in for any early conversations but just to arrive on the first day with those rollbacks on the table.

We began on our end with a letter, as you probably all remember from the co-chairs of our committee, from Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray, essentially informing our members of what those rollbacks were. And I think that was a really important moment in the course of the negotiations. It put the companies on notice that we were not taking this lightly. I think it energized the membership in a way.

And we went into the room with interestingly I think a little bit of momentum. I don’t know whether it was a strategic mistake on the part of the companies. You’d have to ask them how they felt about it in the long run. But I think though it looked like it was a potentially dangerous moment and it could have been. There were many days sitting in the negotiation room when we were still at risk of some of those rollbacks actually trying — being imposed on us if we could not get out of them. But instead, what it turned out to do was to kind of invigorate us on our side and put us on the offensive almost from day one.

So first off, all of those rollbacks were off the table and those rollbacks included some major — would have — major concessions first of all in pension and health — mostly in health. Also some rollbacks on the screen side of the business that would have decreased the salary of screenwriters by raising the low budget minimum. So that was actually a very dangerous moment for us at the very beginning.

But all of that stuff actually went away. And by the way, those were the highlighted rollbacks. But the truth was as we got into the deal there were also a bunch of hidden potential rollbacks that we actually were able to avoid as we went and negotiated a number of the different specifics.

**John:** One of the things I found most interesting as I was sitting there learning about this stuff is that when we say the DGA deal, I sort of assumed that all the unions had kind of agreed on what the levels were for things. Like on the future side, what we describe as being a low budget or medium budget or high budget, I assumed those would be common across all of the guilds. And they’re not at all.

And so when the studios try to say like, oh we want to have the low budget and the medium budget things be similar to the DGA things, that can be really, really bad for our side because we may have much better definitions for what those terms mean than the DGA does.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think it — and you’re talking specifically about the rates for basic cable where the budget breaks for basic cable are different between the WGA and the DGA deal. So what ended up happening was we were looking at getting what’s called an outsized increase in the script minimums for hour-long dramatic basic cable series. And the question was, were we going to do it on our old budget breaks or would we be asked to adopt the DGA budget breaks. If we did that, we would have lost much of the gains that came with those minimums because the shows would not actually fit over those budget breaks.

But we held firm. So what ended up happening is it doesn’t look like a remarkable gain because in fact what we got — I mean, in terms of the budget breaks because the budget breaks are exactly the same as they’ve always been in the WGA deal. We do have, in fact, one of the gains we made was a 5, 5 and 5% bump in script minimums for basic cable dramatic series without a change in the budget breaks.

So that’s a good result of the negotiation that will not be clear in the materials that were put out for the negotiation.

So the DGA made a deal off of its contract and we made a deal off of our contract. And our point of view was you can’t change our minimums. That’s a rollback. And they didn’t get a rollback. We shouldn’t get a rollback either. So we didn’t. We both ended up with gains over what was existing in our current contract.

**Craig:** I want to take a step back for a second, Chris, because we’re going to go through all the points of what this deal means for us. But for the sake of context for people listening, there’s kind of a meta victory baked in to all of this. And that is a victory of prudence. I don’t know how else to put it.

The companies came to us with this jerky first offer. And there are so many ways to take the bait there. And quite expertly you and David Young and the negotiating committee and Billy Ray and Chip, you all chose the path of no bait. We’re not taking the bait at all. We’re not going to antagonize. We’re not going to throw a tantrum. We’re going to very calmly tell our membership. But basically, we’re not going to take the bait.

And they blinked. And I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s no fun victory in any of this. You never get to punch this guy in the nose and see him go down and then just dance around him. It’s always some quiet unseen victory. Those are the only victories worth having in these things.

**Chris:** Right.

**Craig:** So you guys did a really good job right off the bat of not taking the bait. And I think that the prudence paid off in a huge way. There is this saying that some used to promulgate years ago that the guild never won anything good without a strike. I would submit this negotiation as the perfect rebuttal to that. We got a lot here.

**Chris:** When the companies put out those rollbacks on the table and we came in with that firm undeniable response, I think they rightly believed that we could go back to our membership and take a strike vote. And that we would get a strike vote. That’s what the truth in the room that we were not going to put up with, in a period of unprecedented economic success for those companies, rollbacks in our P&H or for our most vulnerable members at this point, our screenwriters. That continued into the conversation about options and exclusivity throughout all of which I think they rightly assumed that they were sitting on a tinderbox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** We didn’t explode anything but we made it very clear what was at risk if we didn’t get some deal on this.

**Craig:** It’s a great example of walking softly and carrying a big stick because, yeah sure, I’m sure they were probing with the theory that we were all just battle-weary still from 2007. And why not see if we can get away with something crazy. And so they do what they do and you guys had the perfect response.

I was really happy to see the term — we used to traditionally always get these 3% bumps in minimums. And for people that write in features, minimums are sort of irrelevant because it’s sort of an overscale business and most of us — most people who work in screenplays get more than scale. But even if you do get scale, 3% isn’t going to change your life.

But in television it’s the basis for residuals. It’s a really important term. And we would always get 3% and then suddenly it became 2%. And now I’m happy to see that it’s coming back for 2.5% and now 3% — back to 3% again.

**Chris:** Yeah. David Young calls it breaking the 2s and it was a very high priority for us. I’ll just quote him again, something — a quote that the negotiating committee heard over and over again. I think anyone who went to any of the outreach meetings, I think he quotes Einstein — whether it’s actually an accurate quote or not, who cares: that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** So 3% every single year, year after year actually makes an enormous difference in income for writers both from their minimums they get paid but also in residuals. But in addition to that, I think that we believe that it drives eventually overscale income that as those minimums rise and at some point double over the course of a decade because of it, so too does above scale income rising. We all know that one of the pressures right now is on downward pressure on above scale income, not just for screenwriters but also for television writers.

And it’s a tough thing for us to take on because it’s not actually within WGA’s purview. But we do effect it indirectly by guarding our 3% bumps in minimums. And I —

**Craig:** Right.

**Chris:** And I agree with you. It was an important gain in this year’s negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** An unusual thing about this negotiation is generally the parties sit down, they negotiate for a long period of time and hopefully by the end of this negotiation they reach a conclusion, a deal. And this time, it didn’t happen. So we got through a bunch of it and then we announced to the members that we were taking a break and that we were coming back to focus on one specific issue which was options and exclusivity.

So can you talk us through what options and exclusivity really mean, who is affected by it, and sort of why it became an issue this round?

**Chris:** Yes. It’s a little bit of a long story and that would actually happen in the negotiations as well.

Options and exclusivity became an issue because of traditional television schedule, the 22-episode television schedule or more — 22 episodes or more television schedule which had writers writing on the same schedule essentially from the beginning of June until sometime in March or April. And then taking something around a two-month break before they were either hired again when their show came back or not or had the chance to go after a different job the exact time as everyone else.

It has begun to be replaced by a new system of short orders which meant that increasingly television writers were finding themselves working for eight or 10 or 12 episodes on a series much less time and for much less pay. And then waiting under both either exclusivity or an exclusivity and an option deal with their studios, and I’ll describe what that means for a moment, unable to get work sometimes for six, nine, 10 months in a row because you — as people know who write cable programs, you may be in a room, write all the episodes. It may be some time before all the shooting is done and then some even more months until that series airs. And then who knows how long until the studio and the network decide they’re going to pick up the show again and put you back to work.

So what ended up happening was writers had small amount of pay over a small period of time attached to which they had a very long period where they were effectively unable to get other work.

Why were they unable to get other work? One of two reasons. One, because some people had exclusivity agreements which meant that they were actually not permitted even when they were not writing to go write for anyone else. The studio that had them under contract essentially had a lock on them.

But even if they didn’t have an exclusivity deal, they had an option on them in first position for when the series came back which meant that anyone who wanted — and it’s not that they weren’t free to go look for other employment in television — could only look for employment in television in second position. So I’d go to another show and say, “Hey, I’ve got some number of months off. I’d love to be on staff on your show.” And that other show would say, “Yeah, but we don’t know when your first show is going to come back on the air and they’re going to take you out of our writers’ room potentially somewhere in the middle. And we can’t afford that. At the very least, why would we hire you as opposed to somebody else who’s free and clear?”

So effectively, what was going on is that people were working for short periods of time and being held under an option to that same studio for long periods of time without pay. At some point, that becomes an untenable financial situation for people. They can’t actually make ends meet. And what’s more and the argument that we made is it’s fundamentally unfair.

**John:** So I have friends who were in exactly that situation where they were sort of in limbo because the TV show they’d been writing on had shot. It was waiting to find out whether they were going to get another season of the TV show. And during that time, they were stuck. They couldn’t write on any other shows. They weren’t even supposed to go out and do feature work during that time, which seemed crazy. And you don’t know how long that’s going to be.

So to literally be taken out of the market for such a long period of time is so damaging to writers, especially young writers, people who are just first-time staff writers. They suddenly can’t work anywhere else.

And so these are the kind of writers who end up having to go get other jobs because like literally like Starbucks kind of jobs because they cannot work in the actual industry for which they’re supposed to be employed. It was incredibly frustrating to me. But I think it’s also frustrating for television. I think it’s bad for television.

**Chris:** That’s right. I mean, it’s difficult in a couple of ways. First of all, I think you were alluding to this: Imagine somebody who beforehand was writing 22 episodes a year, that kind of experience. And now, they’re — maybe they get eight episodes in a full year and maybe the next year they don’t get that because their show doesn’t get picked up. And so you end up with people instead of who have hundreds of episodes under their belt by the time they want to run a show or move up the ladder and become co-APs or whatever it is, they now have episodes that measure in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because that’s all they can add up to if you’re only doing a short order every season at best.

And so it’s very bad for that reason. The other reason why it’s bad is because — and we actually felt that the studios would respond to this and maybe they did even if they didn’t say so out loud — is that a marketplace where all the writers are tied up not working is bad for every television show that doesn’t have the dibs on that writer.

So if you, John, have a new show and you want to staff, you may well find out that there are five or six writers who are not currently writing but they’re not available to you.

The second argument really is that for every show, every studio that isn’t holding a given writer under contract, they’re at a huge disadvantage by this tight labor market because, for example, I said like say you, John, you have a new show that gets on the air and you’re looking to hire a writing staff. And in fact, there are many writers who are not currently working but they’re not available because they’re all sitting doing nothing because they’re under option to people who aren’t using them currently. How much better it would be if the labor market were freed up and that people who had shows and needed writing were able to hire those people? And those people would then be able to choose which show to work on.

In the long run, that benefits everybody. The companies certainly never expressed the feeling like this would in the long run be down to their benefit. But I actually feel like it’ll be beneficial to everyone to have a labor market in which people can work whenever they’re available.

**John:** I strongly agree.

Chris, can you talk us through what is new and different in this options and exclusivity agreement, because I think there’s some confusion as if, you know, we didn’t actually give up anything that was already in the contract. None of this was ever covered by WGA contract. This is sort of brand new territory for the MBA.

**Chris:** That’s right. This is the first time ever that options and exclusivity have been covered in the MBA. And like everything in the MBA, these are minimums which is to say that they only set a floor from which we can negotiate even better deals for ourselves and our individual contracts. There is nothing in the MBA that gives the companies the right to have an option over you or to exclusivity. They need to negotiate for that. The options and exclusivity provisions that are in the new MBA restrict the company’s ability to negotiate for options and exclusivity in the following way.

If you are a writer who earns after January 1st 2015 under $200,000 a year or after January 2016 under $210,000 a year, the companies are not permitted to negotiate options and exclusivity clauses with you. Instead, your treatment is governed by the MBA. And this is what it says. First of all, there’s no exclusivity anymore for any of those writers. So when you are not actually working, you are free to work for any other company. You want to go out and write — you get a chance to do a rewrite on a movie during your hiatus, you are free to do that and they cannot say to you, “No, we get a first look at your services.”

Second thing is about options. So the companies have a 90-day period after when payment is due for your writing services during which they still have a hold on you. This is roughly the same as the kind of hold that they might have had at the end of the 22 episodes, 22-episode order.

But beginning on the 91st day, you have the right to go out and look for any job you want. The requirement is that when you get a bona fide offer, you bring it back to the studio and they have two choices. Within three days, if your show has already been picked up, only if your show has been picked up, they may exercise your option and put you on that show and you need to begin being paid to write within 14 days. Or if your show has not been picked up, they leave you free to go. And you are then permitted to go and get another job in first position. And the company with which, the studio with which you originally work then retains second position.

So in other words, once your job is over, once that second job is over, if your original show gets picked up, they can come back to you and say, “Okay, we want to put you on that show under the terms of the deal that you negotiated.” Effectively, you are free to go get work in essentially any situation after those 90 days are done.

**Craig:** Unless they pay you a holding fee.

**Chris:** That’s right. So that’s the other thing. The other thing they can do is they can, after that 90 days, they can pay you to extend your option. And that holding fee is one-third of WGA minimum for either Article 13 or Article 14 writers plus pension and health. That’s fundamental for us because what we said was the right, which is not just the right of writers but of all human beings, is to actually be able to apply their trade, to go out and make money for the thing that they do. We don’t work for free nor do we forgo employment for free.

So beyond the reasonable period at the end of a season, of a show, there’s no reason why a writer should say you may hold me without either compensating me or, like I said, I wouldn’t put it that way, you can’t hold me without compensating me. And if you do not compensate me, you must let me go. The argument we made in the room over and over again, it was made very powerfully by a lot of members of the committee, was that anything less than that is a form of servitude. And that we would not live as indentured servants of the companies.

**Craig:** Well, one thing that I think is revolutionary about this — beyond the fact that it’s addressing an area that had not yet been addressed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement — is the idea, is the philosophy behind the idea that this applies to people who earn less than X. And in this case, X is $200,000 per contract year. Unless I’m incorrect, my memory of the MBA is that the only other place that there was anything like this was in relation to pseudonyms that we have a right guaranteed by the MBA to use a pseudonym unless we make more than I think it’s $200,000 or $250,000 on a project.

But what’s so brilliant about this is that one thing that we’ve always struggled with and what the companies throw in our face all the time is that this is a mature contract. And it is a mature contract. It’s — I mean, this is the product of — we’re coming up on 70 years now of negotiated settlements and it is a mature contract where we are literally arguing over whether we should get raises of 2.5% or 3% and so on and so forth. And we all know that certain residual formulae are set in stone. But this is shining a light. And I think this is the future of our guild and our negotiations with the companies.

And that is to say let us agree that certain areas here are mature, but let us now carve out exceptions and protections for new writers who are being paid what I call close to scale because those are the writers who are suffering the most from these kinds of practices. It’s harder to argue as some did.

When I was on the board people were still fighting the DVD battle and they were saying, “Well, we’re losing millions of dollars.” And I was listening to millionaires telling me that they were losing millions of dollars. And it was true.

But what was also true is that they were millionaires. And I really like the idea that we’re forgoing this need for a universal benefit for all union members and saying we’re okay to settle for getting the goods for the people who need it the most. To me, that’s what a union is for. And I think this is a big deal. I just think philosophically from an approach point of view, there’s a lot more to be mined from this tactic than there is from saying everybody deserves it or nobody gets it.

**John:** Well, I think it’s also — it’s looking structurally what are the biggest problems facing actual working writers. And you can’t be a working writer if you’re not allowed to work. And that’s I think a great place for the guild to come in and take a look at it.

But I would stress, though, it’s not necessarily just the people who are making below $200,000 or $210,000 in the second year of this that are going to be affected because I think the people who are above that level, their agents, their representatives are going to go back and say, “Hey, I know we’re above this cap but we want those same protections that the people below the cap have.” And some of those people will get it and some of those people won’t get it. But I think it sets a standard or a pattern for how you talk about options and exclusivity for even people who are making —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Significantly above that level.

**Craig:** Sure. I agree. Yeah.

**Chris:** I think one of the problems that we’ve had is, look, it’s obvious, is that individual agents negotiating for individual clients have been unable to exert the leverage to avoid onerous options and exclusivity clauses in contracts. The philosophy of this is that there are some writers who are beginning, who make less for whom the job of negotiating this individually through their agents is an impossibility. Much like negotiating a minimum salary for those people would be an impossibility. They’d be under pressure to — downward pressure to accept less and less and less.

But having set a floor below which the companies cannot go, we hope to provide an opportunity for the agents of better paid writers to make an argument that said, “If you’re paying my staff writer and my story editor and not holding them under option, you’re not going to tell my co-producer and my producer that he or she needs to be under an onerous option.” We put the power back in the hands of the agents where that also belongs.

**Craig:** Chris, you and I have had a discussion about the free rewrite problem, whatever name we want to give it, that’s really what it is. And one thing that I’ve expressed to you before and I’m kind of hoping that maybe this is a little bit of an illuminated path to it is the idea of carving out a protection in the MBA for writers that are earning close to scale, particularly when it comes to one step deals.

I’d love to see a term where we were okay with going in there and saying, “We’re negotiating for a two-step deal guarantee. But not for everybody, just if you’re making this or under.” And I think there’s nice precedent now for that kind of work to be done.

**Chris:** Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s where we have to go after we hang up. It’s high on the list.

**Craig:** Great, good.

**John:** So Chris, talk to us about when the things in this deal go into effect because it’s not all at once.

**Chris:** No. In general, the terms of the deal go into effect May 2nd of this year. That’s when the new three-year term begins. Options and exclusivity are effective January 1st 2015. That’s because it actually is a very large change in the way business affairs has to do business. So it gives them, the companies, a bunch of months to actually get their houses in order. And actually for us to begin to educate writers and agents about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** It makes sense too because the term is based on a contractual year income and that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a little strange to look back at income that was accrued under a contract that didn’t have that provision.

**Chris:** That’s right, that’s right.

**John:** So before any of this goes into effect though we have to ratify this contract. So what is the process for that? What do writers need to do or WGA members need to do?

**Chris:** Well, they can either vote online or in the old-fashioned ways. And all of the packet of materials will be going out — I apologize, I don’t know exactly what day but in the next day or two. The contract has been recommended by both the guild — the Board of Directors of the West and the Council of the East and by the negotiating committee. So all that’s left is for the members to vote and I hope to ratify the contract.

And so you’ll get the material in the next few days. And I believe the voting deadline is the end of — it’s like the 29th of April. Don’t hold me to that. It could be just a day or — it can’t be a day or two later because it needs to be ratified or we need to turn it down by the date on which the contract expires which is May 1st. So voting needs to happen.

And I — look, it’s the same argument that we make all the time. I think a good turnout and I hope a good turnout that votes in favor of this contract continues what I think the negotiation began to suggest to the companies which is that we are, after all these years, and an argument I think that I’ve made and you’ve made, John and Craig, we’re actually much more unified than the companies might have perceived that we were or the world continues to claim that we are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And one — another piece of evidence of that and that means people voting.

**Craig:** I think for me, by far the most important factor and the most beneficial thing for us when dealing with them is our leadership and how they view our leadership. And again, I have to say they took our leadership this time around, which includes the two of you, seriously because our leadership behaved in a serious manner. Not in a loud manner but in a very serious manner. And if they feel they’re dealing with serious people, in their minds they know if serious people turn to the membership and say, “Hey, everyone, this is bad,” everyone will believe them and become instantly energized.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to be marching around with pitchforks until such time as a reasonable man asks us to.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think —

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Chris:** I think that — yes. Look, I mean it’s self-serving for me but I will agree with — one of the things that we are susceptible to and I think a fallacious argument is that ignoring the fact that science gives consent in fact and that the assumption that when our members are not active, they are inactive because they don’t care, I think many of them are inactive from time to time because they have many other things going on.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** They have their lives that are complicated both in a work sense and every way else. And if they feel as if things are going in the right direction, then they’re less likely to actually feel the need to actively engage. I don’t take that always as being a negative. Sometimes I think that’s a quiet sign of competence.

**John:** Chris Keyser, I would like to thank you personally for your quiet confidence during this whole negotiation. It was great to see this. And I really thought the team was terrific, including David Young who I had not really encountered before but just did a terrific job negotiating that contract. So my personal thanks to you for a really great negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I’ll back that up. I would say, Chris, and this is self-serving for me because I’ve supported you strongly from the start but I think you’re going to go down as one of our great presidents. I really do. I think that you have accomplished not only an extraordinary amount of good during your time, which is of course not yet over, but you have set an example and kind of put forth proof of an argument of a way to do this that is better than the way it has been done. And that is extraordinarily valuable for us as a union going forward.

**John:** Well, Chris, we’ll let you get back to you cutting your pilot and thank you so much for joining us on here to talk about the deal and congratulations. And everybody, remember to vote.

**Chris:** Okay, thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

**Chris:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So Craig, we we’ve talking a lot about our potential new screenplay format and I thought today we could spend a few minutes talking about sort of how the screenplay format came to be and sort of what some of the other alternatives that have existed out there are. And it’s a little bit of a history lesson but also alternate history lesson of the way things could have gone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to start with — actually, a guy wrote in — emailed us. His name is Stokely Dallison and he wrote, “I suspect you may have forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter. In my view, it’s a wonderful comfort to adopt the same format as thousands of scripts that have come before. Every script the same font, the same spacing, the same three holes with two brass brads. It feels good to be part of something relatively old. It feels good to know that my script, however inadequate it might be, looks the same as all the great scripts that have come before.”

And I thought that was actually a really charming thought —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because I remember writing that first script and it’s like it just seems so weirdly magic that I — oh everything — it’s got to look just like a real script and the esoterica of the screenplay format is both something that sort of keeps people away, but once you sort of get inside it’s like, oh, I know how to do this. There’s something about that format and it does feel sort of special. And so whatever we do, we have to acknowledge that there is something special about it.

What’s interesting though is what we take as being the screenplay format is actually fairly recent. And there are other ways it could have gone and there are other ways — you’ve seen movies that were written in completely different ways.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so there’s not one magic way for it to work.

**Craig:** No. Well, I have to say that, first I hear — I can’t tell you how many times I will hear somebody say, “Well, you’ve probably forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter.” No, I haven’t. No. [laughs] I don’t think there is a screenwriter alive who still doesn’t feel like a new screenwriter on some level. And certainly we don’t forget what it’s like. I do want to just put that out there. Never think that we’ve forgotten magically the pain of becoming a screenwriter or starting out.

There is something that’s comforting about being able to write in a format that makes your screenplay look professional. But unfortunately that’s not really important. And I would argue that a lot of new screenwriters will obsess over those things in order to avoid the other things that are unique to their screenplay like, you know, the content.

**John:** So let’s take a little history trip and figure out how the screenplay came to be. Because when the first movies were made, the first screenplays were really just a list of shots. And if you think about it, these are silent films. So literally you are just making a shot list and just like a train comes, close on a man’s face. And that’s sort of what the original screenplays were like, were just a list of these shots.

And it was almost — it was basically a set of instructions for like what the order of the shots were going to be. And if there was going to be a title card, there wasn’t really dialogue, so it could just be a title card or like one of those intercut cards that show like some line that someone is supposedly saying. But that’s as much as there would be.

It’s Thomas Ince who is often credited with sort of being the father of the modern screenplay because he’s also the father of the modern studio. He was the one who said — he bought a bunch of land in California and he’s like we’re going to make a bunch of movies. And in order to make a bunch of movies, he wanted to make sure that he could basically hand a blueprint to anyone, any of his directors, and say like this is what it’s supposed to be. Shoot exactly what I’m giving you.

And so our idea of a screenplay being the blueprint for a movie is really credited to him. And so a bit of trivia, if you actually are down in Culver City, there’s a street of Ince. There’s the Ince Gate —

**Craig:** Ince, yeah.

**John:** To the Culver Studios or one of the studios down there. You will actually see the word Ince down there.

**Craig:** Wasn’t he the guy that got murdered on a boat or something?

**John:** I’m sure there’s a fascinating story. Like all of old Hollywood is great and wonderful. And so —

**Craig:** Right. Everybody was constantly being murdered.

**John:** Well, this was the frontier. This is like a brand new town. It was all —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was all made up from scratch. So he’s the guy who sort of I think is generally credited with being the guy who said this is a plan for making the movie. It’s typed out this way. It’s basically those shots.

Now I still, remember, he was essentially making silent films. And as we started adding dialogue in, that’s where the scripts became a little bit more like a play because you actually have to have people talking to each other.

So scripts going back to even like Casablanca, they written in what’s called a continuity style, which is sort of like a shooting script. It’s basically a sequence of shots. And even when there’s dialogue, it’s really about the shots. And it’s as if you’re sort of directing on the page. It’s like — it feels like a director’s plan for what it is that you’re shooting.

This evolved over time to what is called the master scene format. And I don’t even — I mean, I’ve been writing scripts for a long time but I didn’t know that the way we were writing our scripts is called the master scene. Have you seen that terminology?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard it before, but I did see it in the example that they used for an early master scene format screenplay. It’s The Apartment by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. And they wrote that in 1959. And that does look very much like the screenplay format we use, if not exactly like the screenplay format we use today, which by the way I have to say, so on like one hand you’re right that it’s not like the movie business was founded on this format that we currently use. On the other hand, we have been using it for at least 55, 60 years, which implies that maybe it’s time for, you know, a change.

**John:** Or that we got it exactly right and nothing needs to change at all.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s talk about The Apartment, because actually I was really struck by it. And there’s going to be links in the show notes to sort of all the scripts we’re talking about. So The Apartment, it really looks like a modern screenplay. Like if someone dropped it on your desk, it’s like, well, this is a screenplay.

But it’s considerably different from the continuity style of script. It’s literary. It’s kind of designed to be read. It’s not designed just as for a director to know what shots there are. It’s designed for a person to be able to see what a scene feels like just on the page. There’s a lot description about sort of — there is screen description. It’s really talking through what the characters are doing, what things feel like, what things looks like. And in a weird way, I think this is a good point that this site that we’re going to send you to makes, is that it actually gives the director more leeway.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so rather than calling out every shot, it’s describing sort of what the scene is like, and sometimes the suggestions were sort of like how it’s shot. But really, it’s going to be a director to figure out what those shots are in there to tell the story. So even though the writer gets to have a more free rein and more words to describe the scene, the director actually gets a little bit more leeway for figuring out how to shoot that scene. It’s a significant evolution.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can see in the Master Screen format — that’s what they’re calling it Master Screen format?

**John:** Master Scene format.

**Craig:** Master Scene format that everybody is starting to approach filmmaking in a more artistically free way. It is being unyoked from the factory. Early Hollywood was a factory. They would just burn film and lights and people would stand in spots and they would make movies in a matter of days. I mean, it was just — they would just churn them out.

And so it was really an ADs’ business if you think about it, you know. I mean, that what we currently think of as a first AD, they are the people on the set who are scheduling, figuring out how many pages you’re shooting in the day, marshaling the crew, making sure that the props people and the this and the that and everything is in place.

ADs were kind of the early directors, in some regards were like that.

**John:** They were.

**Craig:** And then as you see the influence of European cinema and also the increasing freedom, the artistic freedom of Hollywood, which I think was just naturally building on itself, getting bored with the kinds of stories they were telling and trying to find new ways to tell them, started to — and also probably because of the influx of playwrights into the process because of the demand. You can see now that the format is allowing both the writer and the director the freedom to tell a story in a creative way.

**John:** Yes. So if you look at the Master Scene format, which is really what we think about the modern screenplay format, it’s very tempting to read the dialogue and skip over everything else because the dialogue tends to be the meat of what is happening in modern screenplays.

You can get the gist of what’s going on by reading the dialogue. And so the dialogue is centered. And your eye kind of goes — falls to the center of the page. And all the scene description and the transitions and the scene headers stay towards the edges. But that’s not the only way that it can happen. And one of our listeners, Matt Markwalder, sent through a bunch of examples of Kubrick scripts which are wildly different and actually sort of do the opposite.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think and probably in direct response to how people read scripts, he decided to do a completely different thing. So in Clockwork Orange, first off, everything is double spaced. And dialogue has wider margins and action is sort of put over to the right. And so the action is deliberately sort of minimized and sort of put over to the side, but in a way that you tend to sort of read it. It’s like the line length is really, really short and your eye goes to it. Whereas dialogue tends to be bigger, wider blocks of things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So an example, I’m skipping to page 28 of A Clockwork Orange. Scene 22. INT. CAT LADY HOUSE. That feels kind of normal. “The cat lady enters and dials a number.” That sentence is centered in two lines in the middle of the page. So it’s like it looks in sort of the area where you would normally expect to see dialogue, that’s where that line is. And the cat lady has this long speech that’s double spaced and goes all the way to the margins of the page. Is just a really interesting way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, and then he changes it up because then when you get to Full Metal Jacket, it reads like a novel. He’s just in — he’s burying dialogue and action description into flowing paragraphs, not really breaking them out or formatting them any differently than each other.

It’s almost as if Kubrick decided I’m just going to format my screenplay the way I feel the movie is. I’m going to let the formatting reflect the tone and the vibe of what I’m going for which is awesome. And I suspect that when the entrepreneurial screenplay market really took off, the need for screenplays to be uniformly formatted became really important because now it was a commodity. And you had to formalize it. But I regret that. And I would love to see people have the freedom to write their screenplays however they choose to get across the vibe of the story they want to tell. I think that’s very powerful. And I think you and I are going to do it.

**John:** [laughs] So in Full Metal Jacket, for those who aren’t looking at this on the screen right now, the dialogue is actually in quotation marks. It just looks like a page of normal text really. It’s a very —

**Craig:** It’s like a book.

**John:** A completely different way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I also want to take a look at some of the other types of scripts that are out there that aren’t screenplay formats or at least normal screenplay formats. The most obvious one which is similar but different is the three-camera comedy, or the multi-cam comedy. So everything you see there has a laugh track to it on television tends to be that. So I’m looking at the page from The Millers.

**Craig:** The Millers, the show, the TV show, yeah.

**John:** So in multi-cam, action is basically on the same lines, has the same margins as we sort of expect in a screenplay format, but it’s all upper case. And it’s usually minimized. They don’t try to write as much in there as you would otherwise. Everything is double spaced. The whole page is double spaced. Character names, where they expect to be. But the dialogue blocks are a little bit wider. Parentheticals fall within the dialogue block themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s really different. One of the things I do sort of enjoy about multi-cam and you can see sort of why they do it is partly because you’re scheduling things sort of on the fly so quickly. Skipping to page 37 of the script I’m reading at. INT. NATHAN’S HOUSE. KITCHEN LATER, D3, D3, indicating day three. And this is a thing you’ll commonly see in TV shows indicating what day or what night it is. But underneath that line, in a parenthesis is, “(Nathan, Debbie, the Sarge),” and what it’s showing is like who is in this scene.

**Craig:** Who’s in the scene, yeah.

**John:** And that’s a really useful bit of really kind of metadata that is useful to have especially as you’re trying to schedule this thing. Who needs to be there, what characters even if they’re not speaking in the scene need to be there in the background.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is useful information. And obviously a sitcom’s script is formatted in part to serve the need of a churning production that is weekly and involves live theater essentially for most of them. But I have to say just aesthetically I find it ugly.

**John:** I find it ugly, too, but that’s what I’m used to. It’s what your — it’s what you grew up with. And I’m sure to people who are used to multi-cam, they don’t find it ugly at all.

**Craig:** I guess I would say that what I find ugly about it is that it is the most formalized, that even screenplays allow you a little more leeway about how you approach things. But it’s so rigid in that sitcom format. And, you know, my instinct now is to see how we can allow screenwriters to express a movie on the page in a way that is more idiosyncratic to the story they’re telling and how they want to tell it and their dramatic intention.

So I’m probably just reacting to that because it’s very rigid.

**John:** It’s very rigid. So actually it’s interesting because in stage plays there actually is a wide range of sort of how those stage plays look. And so something I found in Big Fish is that I was looking at other books for musicals and it’s like, oh, there isn’t really — there’s much less consensus about how those things are supposed to look.

Typically, in plays you will find action will always be put entirely in giant parentheticals, which I find maddening and really not attractive to look at. But it’s a common way to do it in stage plays. Dialogue can be sort of where we expect it now, but blocks tend to be a little bit wider. Are lyrics all the way to left, are they inset differently? Are they all upper case? That all changes.

But of course there’s another way you can do plays, which is just to have — which is more like sort of the reading plays that you and I are used to where a character name is, you know, upper case, bolded maybe even with a colon after it. And their dialogue just goes after it. Since plays are mostly people talking, that could be an efficient way to show that on the page. And it may make more sense to really let the page be dominated by the dialogue because the action is going to tend to be much more minimal than it would be under the screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, the key thing — the thing that’s going to unleash us all is this getting away from pagination. The more I think about it, I just know we’re right. I just know it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what those fundamental units are, because the fundamental unit could be a scene. It can be a sequence. It could some sort of other unit. But there needs to be some area of story by which you can say like, these are the outer perimeters of what this moment is because if you look at the Kubrick scripts, it’s very difficult to tell sort of where we are at in those things. And sometimes I wouldn’t even know like are we in the same location? Have we moved to a different place in time? That’s challenging to figure out in some of these Kubrick scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not an anarchist about this sort of thing. I do think that, you know, if you are — granted if you’re directing your own material, the only person that truly needs to understand it is you and you’ll explain it to everybody else around you. But for those who are writing screenplays for other people to read, I think sequences — sequences. I think letting the dramatic action delineate where the pieces begin and end is the way to do it, not location.

**John:** So the Coen brothers’ scripts, I don’t know if you’ve actually read any of them on the page. They tend to get rid of scene headers altogether. They tend to be, you can see that we’re in the new place or new time. But they’re not using the classic sort of nomenclature for sort of what those are. That may ultimately be the way to look at this is that as you’re moving from place to place you’re showing us where we’re at, but it’s not formalized in those scene header ways. So we don’t think of those scene headers as being — we don’t give them more importance than they deserve. And right now, I think they get way too —

**Craig:** They’re so important. Yeah.

**John:** I think they get elevated too high.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, you pick up a screenplay, if you were from another planet and you came here and you picked up a screenplay you would think that the most important part of storytelling is whether you’re inside or outside.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the dumbest thing. And half the time now the way we shoot movies, it doesn’t — you’ll say, you know, EXT. OUTSIDE OF INTERGALACTIC FEDERATION BUILDING. That means you’re inside on a stage. There’s no inside or outside. I mean half that stuff doesn’t even matter anymore. How do you write exterior/interior on a script for Avatar? Explain that. I mean what’s the point?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I totally agree. I think the slug line thing is the weirdest thing. It forces us into categories of time. A lot of time I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say morning, afternoon, dusk, noon, or just day. What does day mean? I don’t even know what day is. What’s day?

**John:** Yeah, and how specific are you allowed to be about what time of day you’re at? Do you need to clarify if you move to a different day. Like I just like The Millers script indicated it was day three, like that is a useful bit of information yet does that need to be reflected on the page right at that moment? Perhaps not. And maybe there’s a different way that you can indicate that, so that it’s part of the metadata for that sequence, but doesn’t have to be written down the road.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Because I’ve had this conversation with a number of ADs on a number of movies where they will sit down with me and say, “Walk me through the days of the week or the month on this? Let’s actually…” And in fact, I remember on Identify Thief, Seth and Jason and I sat down one day and really dialed in the days of the week, so we knew that this thing actually made sense and that it wasn’t taking either two days or 12 days. Because we didn’t, you know, if you have four nights in a row and then say you had a three-day road trip, it just doesn’t quite work.

So at some point, you do that. And if you want to — if we have a format that uses technology and allows us to flexibly include a file that they can pull up as they wish, that just shows a day, night, time passage summary.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That would be really cool. But I don’t need to look at it while I’m reading the script.

**John:** Exactly. So that’s a useful bit, just like costume changes. It’s one of the first things when you have a costume designer comes on to a movie is really doing that day/night breakdown to make sure like, are they still in the same outfit as they would be in the previous scene? And sometimes I will get involved with that because I need to sort of clarify like no, no, this is a different day. Like they could have changed clothes, they would have changed clothes between this time. Or no, they have to be wearing the same thing because they literary came right from there to there and it’s going to bizarre if they’re suddenly wearing new clothes.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact you’re zeroing in on something that’s really interesting about the current screenplay format, is that it overemphasizes some things, and ignores other things entirely. And what ends up happening is we go — right before you shoot a movie, right before you begin principal photography, the entire production gathers together all the heads of the department and most of their keys under them, and the director and the producers and hopefully the screenwriter is there as well. They should be. And everybody goes page by page and they ask questions.

And a lot of those questions will shock the hell out of the screenwriter because they’ll think, oh, I thought that would be obvious, but it’s technically not in the script, so yes, they don’t realize that they’re coming home in the same outfit that they went to work in, you know. But if we could help guide those things because the format allowed us to flexibly do so, that would be really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So I think that it becomes a matter of you write your script, you write what is going to be a thing. Let’s not focus on sort of what it looks like. But you’re going to write your thing and you’re going to figure, you’ll write your script, Hollywood script/screenplay. Don’t worry — we won’t worry about margins or sort of other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then you figure out what are the sequences? What are the units of story that are important? And within those units of story then we can sort of have those, you know, if this were the web, each of those units of story would be essentially a page and there could be extra metadata associated with that page. So you could have all the information that is about who is in the scene, day or night, where this falls in the timeline of the actual story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the situations where we’re in multiple locations, you can address those facts that you’re in multiple locations over the course of the sequence. So those intercut phone calls which are always a challenge, that can all be part of that because it’s — there’s a fundamental story unit that’s together.

**Craig:** What a waste of space when you have two people talking. You have interiors and exteriors, blah, blah, blah, intercut, nonsense words you don’t — it’s like, duh. You just write, you know, he calls her up. She’s sitting in her apartment. They have a discussion, on the phone. Everybody knows how phone discussions work, but somehow screenplay formats are like slogging like Frankenstein through the mud. It’s like we all know how to write our name, but if you need to program in Basic, you go 10, print name, 20, go to 10. You know, it’s just it’s so clumsy and unnecessary and we need to be free of it, John, free, free.

**John:** So the other thing I will say is, you’ve written some animation and I’ve done a lot of animation, is you recognize that they ultimately number things as sequences. And it will be a bunch of what we would consider scenes. They will consider one whole sequence. Almost more like what we think was as reel, they will think of as a sequence. And it’s a much, ultimately a much smarter way to address it because they’re not worried about sort of like this location, that location, whatever. It’s about this unit of story. And that’s probably a smarter way for us to format.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. I mean, you start writing. Let’s say you’re writing in our new format. And when you reach the end of your first sequence, you indicate it’s time for a new sequence to begin. You might naturally say, well, how will I know when that sequence is over? You’ll know. You’ll know. [laughs] Because you’ll just know. It’s so obvious. And it will just be similarly obvious when the next — it’s like, oh god, we got to do it, John.

**John:** We got to do it. So this is actually a great segue for our last topic of the day, which is I just delivered like literary two hours ago delivered the script that I owed and so I turned it in.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** But this is the first time I went hardcore on a way that I’ve kind of been working, but I went much more hardcore on it this time, which is that I wrote each bit separately. So I didn’t sit down with one file and write from the beginning to the end. I only wrote separate scenes or sequences, whatever you want to call it. And I just wrote the pieces.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I skipped all over the, you know, the story of this episode and wrote the pieces I wanted to write, I had a really good outline and I assembled it all at the end. And so I want to talk through sort of how I did it this way. And, you know, I think it’s actually useful for what we’re doing in terms of like what a format could do that could help us down the road.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So for this time, I used WorkFlowy which was a One Cool Thing from before which is an outline or it’s an online outliner that I really just love. And so even right now, I’m looking at WorkFlowy because I keep show notes for the podcast in it. But I just made a pilot and I wrote the, you know, these scenes that were in it. Basically these are the events that happened. And I rearranged them and so it was equivalent of my index cards. But I would sort of have a list of basically these are the scenes, these are the things that are happening over the course of it.

And then as I had more details I could fill in underneath those scenes. I sometimes would start writing dialogue. I’d write the important stuff that needed to happen in those things. And when I chose to write one of the scenes, I would just open up a brand new file in Highland and just type it. And I’d write it and when I was done, I would save it, I would scratch that off the list and keep moving on to the next one.

What’s so good about this is, well, once I start on a first draft I’ll go someplace and barricade myself and write drafts by hand. And I’ll do that so that I can’t go back and edit. This was sort of the same idea, is that I would write something and then I would not go back to it and futz with it. I would go on and write the next thing. And I would write the next thing. And I wouldn’t go back through and sort of start at page one and keep building forward. I actually got a lot more done I think because I wasn’t going back and tweaking all those things I’d written before.

**Craig:** You know me, I’m a big go-backer, tweaker, you know, but that’s just my flow. I like that feeling. It just makes me — I’m happy, you know, and whatever makes you happy and whatever gets you through the process. What I very much am addicted to, I don’t know, it’s probably the wrong phrase, but I’m committed to is the notion of thoroughly outlining the movie before I start because I feel like if you do it and I do think in terms of sequences when I’m outlining as supposed to locations which is an indication that we should be writing in terms of sequences and not locations.

It helps you place all of these things within the context of character and theme and all the rest of that stuff as opposed to just, there’s a car chase. Yeah, but what happens in the car chase that makes it relevant to the character beyond, you know, chase man and get him, you know, that sort of thing.

So I like outlining a lot. But there — look, there are writers who don’t and still get there on their own and do it well. I just think that when you’re putting a first draft together, you are entitled to do whatever you need to do to get there. That’s basically my feeling. You get to use anything that supports you through the very difficult process of making something out of absolutely nothing.

And just as long as you can accept that this is — there is no end to your first draft. There is simply ceasing and then returning to it. Do what you need to do.

**John:** So in this case, I ended up with a folder full of essentially 40 — 30 to 40 scenes. And classically what I would then have to do is I’d have to open up a new document and open up each one of those individually and sort of copy and paste them into one big thing and sort of get them all arranged properly.

So being the person that I am, I asked Nima to write me a new little app called Assembler.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** And because that’s what I do.

**Craig:** It’s what you do.

**John:** So Assembler is a thing which we might end up releasing or we might not. It looks ugly right now, but it did the job. Essentially, what Assembler does is it takes a folder full of little files, little text files because that’s all Fountain is little text files. And you choose a folder, it pops up, and you can just drag the order that you want the files to be assembled in. You hit a button and it assembles them and opens up in Highland. And so I had simply an assembly.

And I think that assembly is a really good way to think about that sort of pre first draft. It’s like it’s all the basic scenes, but they’re not necessarily nipped and tucked in the right way. So it’s — it wasn’t my first draft certainly, but it resembled what the script was going to be. All the scenes were there. And then I can sort of go through and then really do that detail work of making sure that this scene is really leaning into the next scene and tumbling into the next scene in ways that was useful and meaningful. Even as I was writing, I knew what had come before, I knew what was coming after. But I want to make sure I was making great word choices that were going to send me into the first line of the next scene. All that stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was a great way. So I went from that first assembly to this first draft in, you know, four days and felt good about it because I knew all the bits were there and so I could really focus on making everything that’s best and not sort of like struggling to get those last little bits done.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I think what I’m doing is an analog version of what you’re doing. I’m just doing it with index cards.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** That I’m basically breaking down my pieces into index cards. And the index cards typically are sequences. And that’s how I’m sort or organizing things. And what I’m doing — when I’m doing those index cards, is there’s a depth sort of textually there’s a depth because there’s a little summary on the card. And then what I like to do it is I like to have another card next to it that’s the what does this mean? Why is this in the movie? Why did this deserve to be in the movie card?

And then underneath that, the woman that sits with me and helps me, you know, takes all the notes and puts this all together for me, she’s also then writing down a whole bunch of notes related or thoughts, bits of dialogue, concepts, purposes, points, characters, et cetera that are related to those index cards.

So by the time I’m writing my draft I have this interesting assembly of headers and what’s and why’s and then details for these sequences in a non-digital, semi-digital format. And then I just start to write. It’s funny, even though we have — they look so different, there’s something very similar about the process.

**John:** I would agree. As she’s assembling this stuff, or as you’re sort of putting these things together, is that ever one file or it is just still a bunch of cards?

**Craig:** Well, we have one file that she kind of master, she sort of has this master file. And then a lot of times as I’m heading into a section, I’ll say, well, all right, let’s — now, we are on page 60. And I know that I’m about to head into this sequence where, I don’t know, the soldier is going to fly into the temple with his parachute and do a thing.

So let’s talk about it again. Let’s just run through what was there before, but now let’s rediscuss it in light of what has led up to it now through the writing. And so she’ll take that portion out of the master document and build a new thing that’s just like, okay, here’s what you’re doing for the next few days.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** And then I’ll add more detail and layers into that. That keeps in mind what’s come before it recently. And then I’ll use that. Like it will sort of sit next to me.

Sometimes I don’t even look at it because just the fact that I’ve talked it through, now I know it. And I know what to write, you know?

**John:** There’s a story that John Gatins told before, so I apologize to listeners if I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I think it’s such a great illustration of the trap you can fall into when you just kind of start writing, is that there was a guy who was hired to paint the stripe down the middle of a road. And so the first day he had his little bucket and his paint and he painted a mile and he came back and his boss was like, “That was really good, you painted like a whole mile. That was terrific.”

And the next day, the boss comes back to see his work, he’s like, “Oh, you painted another half mile. Okay, well, that’s great. Still pretty good. That’s better than most people.” And the next day, he came back and he’d only painted a quarter of a mile. And so the supervisor said like, “What’s going on? Like why did you slow down so much?” And he’s like, “Well, I have to keep walking back to get to the paint.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that can actually be what the situation you find yourself with a script, is that if you’re starting at page one every time and just like, write, sort of rewriting it to get up to the next page, and then rewriting it to get up to the next page, every day you sit back you’re going to have spent a lot of your creative energy rewriting those first couple of pages and you’re going to probably make less and less progress through your script. So yes, I bet those first pages are going to be incredibly tight because you went through them a bunch of times. But you’re not actually moving the ball forward.

So, you know, what I’m describing in terms of not letting myself, but just doing separate sequences and not letting myself assemble the whole thing is to keep myself from doing that, because it’s just a bad habit I’ve noticed.

So before I would write pages by hand and fax them through to my assistant who would type up the pages and stick them in the folder. And I would do that until I got to where I felt like I was probably halfway through the script and then start assembling and then start doing it. This was just the most hardcore version of that where I wouldn’t let myself assemble it at all until I knew I actually had all the scenes written that I thought I needed and could put them together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do see it differently than you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My feeling is that, I guess I stick to my loose, rigid, you know, I have loose, rigid scheduling and I have loose, rigid rewriting. And that is to say there’s this much time to write it and I’m going to use that time. How I use it? That’s my prerogative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I allow myself the — I’m okay with spending 40% of my time on the first 30 pages if I feel that that’s what’s going to help me efficiently write the last 70 pages. As long as I am productive I feel like I’m allowed to be productive in any direction I want to be.

Where I agree with you is the idea that you’re going to fastidiously whittle every word. Well, you can do that but just be aware that it would be really helpful if you were an awesome genius. And it would really helpful if you didn’t need money or to kind of work a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you wanted to just write one astonishing script every five years, I’m okay with that, you know. I mean, look, Rian Johnson is not prolific.

**John:** No, he’s not.

**Craig:** But, you know, but when the script comes out and he makes the movie, it’s really good. So that’s cool, too. As long as you are, I guess the way I would — I would just hand it to the writer and say you know if you’re being productive or not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Listen to yourself. And if you’re just rewriting to avoid writing then stop.

**John:** I agree. As we close this out I will say this is the first time I ever used Highland from start to finish on something. It was the first time working on a long script on Highland. And it was really good and illuminating in the sense that I recognized the pros and cons of Highland. So the new build that’s going to be coming out probably by the time or shortly after this episode airs actually reflects a lot of the stuff that were sort of happening while I was writing this much longer script because as something would break or something would annoy me, I could yell down to Nima and have him fix things.

And so one of the things, a situation which happens in all apps, but was particularly frustrating to me in Highland this time is you’re deep into the script, you’re on page 40 into the script or something and you need to refer back to something that happened earlier on. So how do you go back there and then find your place, find your way back to where you were at?

So assuming you’re in the middle sort of page 40, but you need to find something earlier on, how do you get back to where you were on page 40?

**Craig:** Well, I’m the worst because I’m a scroller.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I, you know, I have — most major programs have some sort of outliner available to you, but I just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll because I can kind of like see as the pages are flying by roughly. I know where to land. So it’s not efficient, but I’m a scroller.

**John:** So the thing which we put in this next build which I really love and found myself using a lot was called Markers. And so it’s really something I took from Final Cut Pro which is the video editing software. And a marker is something you can just drop and then you can find it again. And so you hit Control M and it puts a marker wherever you are. And then you can go wherever else you want to go in the document and the Control option then will take you back there.

So you can drop as many markers as you need. It’s like a little shortcut to get back to that place you’re at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you end up scrolling back and like did a little something, you know, on page 20, but you need to get back to where that thing is, Control option M it will take you back to where you were before.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. And I would love to sort of see the ability, you know, we talk about our new format and obviously we’re not talking about an application to read that format, but rather we would hope that applications like Highland and others would take advantage of what the format would offer.

And I would love to see sort of tabbed sequences. That would be great. You know, so when I’m working, I could just go up and go, okay, I’m going to go back to the car chase. I’m going to go back to the beginning, I’m going to back to the middle, wherever it is.

**John:** So Final Draft 9 has an aspect of that. It’s not great. But you can add sort of the information that gets you there. Slugline already does have a really good version of that. So in Slugline you drop little hashtags and those become your sections. And so you can do things for individual scenes. And it shows you an outline view that you can hop to anything in the script at any point. So it may be worth taking another look at that because it’s really — that is really good. It’s a kind of thing that they did great.

**Craig:** Is it — yeah, I mean, like you know, for instance Fade In has the outline that’s sort of running along the right side of the screen. So I can just jump, you know, from that. But there’s something about — I like what you’re saying about Slugline where it’s I can basically say, they’re chapter headings and they’re like little — it’s almost like a little Rolodex-y kind of thing along the top of the screen —

**John:** That’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**John:** It’s on the left side of the screen, but it’s the same idea.

**Craig:** Oh, I like it on the top

**John:** So you can either have it show all your section headings or if you have notes, it will show you the notes and you can jump to wherever those notes are.

**Craig:** All right. Good.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week. Mine is a book. It is called The Way to Go by Kate Ascher. And it’s a book that I think you will love, Craig. I think, you know, most screenwriters will love because screenwriters are curious.

And so what Kate Ascher did in this book and she’s done two other books that are sort of similar to it, is she looked at how planes and trains and cars work. And it’s like a big illustrated book, almost like kind of like one of those kids books where they talk through like, you know, how engines work. But this is like really sophisticated details. So it gets into like lots of details about like the modern air transportation system and sort of like how cargo containers are constructed and how things fit together, how locks work, how the Panama Canal works. And so it’s this great, incredibly well-illustrated book that sort of shows how stuff works for transportation. So I think it’s something you will enjoy.

**Craig:** There were those — I think it was David McCullough was the guy that did the books where he broke out the buildings for you.

**John:** It’s very much in that style.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love that stuff. All right, and it’s called The Way to Go?

**John:** The Way to Go.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a character. It’s a little random, but I watched Pitch Perfect last night. I hadn’t seen it before. I really, really liked it a lot. But my favorite character in the movie is the character of Lilly. Have you seen Pitch Perfect?

**John:** I saw Pitch Perfect. And I love Pitch Perfect.

**Craig:** Do you remember, Lilly?

**John:** Is Lilly Rebel Wilson?

**Craig:** No. Although Rebel Wilson was hysterical.

**John:** Oh, is Lilly the one who wouldn’t sing and then finally sings at the very end?

**Craig:** Lilly is the one that’s super-duper quiet and really, really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m just obsessed with this character. So her name is Lilly. And the actress is Hana Mae Lee. And Kay Cannon is a very nice lady and a very good writer. I just love her name because it’s Cake And really. It’s like Kofi Annan is like Cake and On.

Anyway, so Hana Mae Lee portrays Lilly. And she is just the strangest thing. She barely speaks. She has this tiny little whisper. That’s why I did my little name that way. And in the movie does one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen any character do in any film including Lynch films. I mean it was the weirdest.

So Aubrey, this character Aubrey is the very controlling head of the group. And she’s so tightly wound that she has this problem where when she gets really upset and really emotional, she pukes, which is funny. And at one point in the movie, she gets super-duper angry at everybody and she just pukes like a ton. And it’s gross. And you’re like, okay, it’s just like one of those scenes in a comedy where somebody pukes and it’s like, ahh.

[laughs] And then at some point, they start fighting and Lilly trips and falls and lands in the puke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then lies back in the puke and calmly begins making like a snow angel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was so shocking to me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I just — I just stared at it. And I watched it like three times because I couldn’t believe they did it, and I’m not even sure why they did it. And nobody in the movie really comments on the fact that she did that. But she did it.

And so anyway, I love her. And I just want to read a few lines because she doesn’t say much. She just says these individual tiny little lines. One of which is, “I ate my twin in the womb.”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** And one of which is, “Hi, my name is Lilly Onakuramara. I was born with gills like fish.” And then she says — they’re discussing the fact that Aubrey had puked the year prior, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to have what happened last year happen again.” And Lilly says, “What happened last year and do you guys want to see a dead body?” [laughs]

It’s so weird. She’s such a strange subversive character in the middle of this very mainstream comedy. So my One Cool Thing this week is Lilly.

**John:** That is awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. And that’s our show. So you can find links to the things we talked about at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you can also find transcripts to all the back episodes. You can also find the actual audio for episodes online both through the app, we have an app for Android and for iOS devices so you can listen to them there. And you can also subscribe and get to all the back episodes, back to episode one where we barely knew what we were doing.

**Craig:** Barely. Now we slightly more than barely know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yeah, we still have Skype issue sometimes. You can also buy the first 100 episodes on a few of our last remaining USB drives. That’s at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. It’s great. It’s sort of this ’80s awesome kind of tribute thing. So thank you, Blake, for that. If you’d like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for how you can do that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s our show.

**Craig:** That was a big, huge, long, great show.

**John:** It’s a huge episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, huge.

**John:** And cutting back and forth in time and so it’s —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** This has been almost 90 minutes of —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** No, it’s been 100 minutes of our taping this show.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, we need to charge people for this one. That’s it.

**John:** That’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah, see you next time.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* WGA President Chris Keyser on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Keyser)
* Deadline’s January article on [Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray’s letter to WGA members](http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/writers-guild-producers-pension-health-contribution-cuts-new-contract/)
* [Thomas Ince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Ince) on Wikipedia
* [Sample pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/four-alternate-formats-final.pdf) from alternatively formatted screenplays
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script formatting](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [The Way to Go](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594204683/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Kate Ascher
* Lilly Onakuramara on [the Pitch Perfect wiki](http://pitch-perfect.wikia.com/wiki/Lilly_Onakuramara), and [a YouTube compilation of some of her best moments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdG6v7gkxm4)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))