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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))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 131 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are ya?

**Craig:** You know, I’m — do you ever get this thing, John, I’ll bet you you don’t. I bet you you don’t. But every now and again, and sometimes for stretches of days at a time, I’ll get that butterflies in the stomach anxiety thing.

**John:** For no good reason?

**Craig:** For no good reason. And I just sit and I wake up in the morning and there it is. And it kind of lingers all day. It’s really uncomfortable and I feel anxious and I don’t know why. I believe this is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry to hear it.

**Craig:** Do you ever get that?

**John:** I do get that sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, you do?

**John:** And, in fact, I will talk about a little section of my life. These last two weeks have been really busy with the contract negotiations. And then we were supposed to take a trip this weekend. And then the next week was going to be chaotic for different reasons. And I finally just had to say I cannot possibly take a trip this weekend. It just was going to be impossible.

So, we ended up staying home and it’s a lovely weekend in Los Angeles and it’s so much better and more fun.

But, yes, I sympathize with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I don’t know, is it technically some sort of like fight or flight instinct that has no basis? Do you know what it is?

**Craig:** It seems like it. I mean, every now and then I get that. It’s the feeling that you get when, I don’t know, you’re nervous or scared, except that there’s nothing to be nervous or scared about. So, you just get that fluttery — and I guess physiologically what’s going on is that adrenaline tends to divert blood flow and oxygen from your gut to your muscles and that what you’re feeling is the result of that. But it’s unpleasant and I’m not really sure what’s going on. And I just want it to stop.

And the problem with anxiety is that you — then what happens is you feel okay but then you get a little twinge of it again and then you suddenly worry, oh god, it’s happening, and then that’s why it’s happening. You know, it perpetuates itself.

**John:** Yeah. With me it’s usually I have convinced myself that I’m having a heart attack.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a panic attack. That’s a whole other…

**John:** Well, that’s true. That’s a whole extra discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never had that. But people who get checked into emergency rooms all the time, with every symptom of a heart attack except cardiac damage.

**John:** Yeah. Well that’s me twice. I’ve twice had to go to the emergency room with all those symptoms.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they said like, “Yeah, it was good that you came in. But, no, you’re not having a heart attack.”

**Craig:** Right. You’re just panicking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The two of us are so panicky!

**John:** We’re so panicky.

Well, this week let’s talk about some psychological issues. Specifically I want to talk about procrastination and pageorexia based on partly a great article you sent through that we’ll talk about.

But we have a lot of other sort of follow up and bits and news and things. I want to talk about sort of all the changes in the industry with the Aereo lawsuit and the Comcast merger. So, let’s just get to it, okay?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, as long as I don’t freak out.

**John:** All right. Don’t freak out. I’m here to keep you company.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

First off, we can freak out just a little bit because we have a live show coming up. We have a live crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. And I’m so excited because we’ve talked about doing this for a long time. The Nerdist Writers Podcast is potentially the other great screenwriting podcast or writing podcast you should be listening to and we’re going to have a joint show. We’re going to have a joint live show — they do all their shows live — April [13th] at 5pm. It’s at Meltdown Comics. And tickets are available right now. So, you can go get them.

We have a link in our show notes, but if you’re listening to this on Tuesday I would really recommend you get tickets now because they’re $15. They will sell out. And then you’ll be sad that you weren’t there in the audience for us.

**Craig:** Once again you and are the Jon Bon Jovi of live screenwriting podcasting events. So, yeah, you got to get these tickets.

**John:** I guess we are the Jon Bon Jovi. I don’t even know what the Jon Bon Jovi means though.

**Craig:** Well, Jon Bon Jovi keeps selling out — he sells out everything. You, Jon Bon Jovi is a huge — people love Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** See, I’m learning things on this podcast even right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I should say that this podcast, like all the stuff we do, we’re not making any money off of this. The proceeds from this benefit 826LA, the non-profit organization that sponsors writing programs in Los Angeles. So, it’s another good cause to support.

**Craig:** I mean, you’re familiar with Jon Bon Jovi in general?

**John:** Oh, in general I am. But I’m familiar with him as being a thing from the past.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for us to be like the current things, that makes me feel really weird like, oh my god, we’re like some ’80s relic. And I don’t feel like a relic whatsoever. I feel vital and young.

**Craig:** So does Jon Bon Jovi.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** [sings] Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

**John:** We also have some follow up. Last week on the podcast we talked about —

**Craig:** Just the best.

**John:** [laughs] I said, “Oh, there used to be this place called The Office where people would go and write.” And I spoke of it in the past tense and that was completely incorrect because it still exists. And so they sent a nice tweet, which I retweeted, saying like, “We still exist, we’re out there.” And I recommend people check it out.

There’s another place called Writer’s Junction which does the same function. So, I did mean for those to rhyme. But, if you are looking for a place to go that is not actually a coffee shop but is more like an office that you can go to and write, those are two options for you there.

Also, last week, Craig said The New Girl instead of New Girl for the TV show on Fox.

**Craig:** Sorry!

**John:** And I get it. I mean, it’s so easy to say The New Girl. But, it’s actually called New Girl.

**Craig:** And, by the way, my current television obsession — I shared this with millions of people — is True Detective. And about, I don’t know, 80% of the time I’ll say True Detectives with an S at the end.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s two of them.

**Craig:** There’s two of them and I’m basically a yokel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t get this stuff right.

**John:** You’re the Cletus of the show. You’re the Cletus and Jon Bon Jovi of the show.

**Craig:** Cletus. Cletus is the greatest character.

**John:** He’s so good. Because clearly he was meant to be just a one-time throwaway and they just loved him so much that they brought him back.

**Craig:** Did you ever see the one where Marge is trying to find a designer dress at a discount price because she has to go to this fancy party?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they offer her, [laughs], they tell her that they don’t have anything right now, but in her price range there is a shipment expected of partially burnt Sears sportswear coming in. And she’s not interested. And Cletus walks up and he goes, “What time and how burnt?” [laughs]

Perfect line. Ah! He’s slightly discriminating.

**John:** [laughs] He is. Yeah, so it’s a character that you couldn’t get away with — if he had like a race associated with him you couldn’t possibly do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But because he’s just white trash it’s still safe.

**Craig:** Oh, 100 percent. I talk about this with Malcolm Spellman all the time. We try and track what races are now safe to do. Like what racism is okay. I mean, poor white trash racism, thumbs up. Huge thumbs up. Irish people. Yeah. Green light. Green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Asians, I think, are successful now enough where it’s starting to get to be a green light. Bad news for Asians.

**John:** Yeah. But then you’re generalizing a whole giant category of people rather than being specific.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, but that’s the point of racism. [laughs]

**John:** That’s the point of racism. It should not be precise enough in your description.

**Craig:** That’s it. The whole point is it’s a very clumsy, ham-fisted way of getting a laugh, a cheap laugh out of an entire billions of people. But, yeah. I think that they are successful enough, powerful enough that it’s happening. It’s happening.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I feel it.

**John:** Craig, so we recorded — the last show came out on Tuesday and Tuesday afternoon we put out this new app and I sort of didn’t want to talk about it ahead of time, I just wanted it to be a surprise upon the world, but it wasn’t actually a surprise to you because you’d seen the build of this app quite early on. This is called Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s an app for reading screenplays on your iPhone. And can you summarize what your reaction to the app was when you saw it?

**Craig:** [laughs] Look, you don’t have to set a trap for me. I’m perfectly happy to just jump into your spikes and poison. I have no idea.

**John:** And told-you-sos?

**Craig:** And, by the way still — and told-you-sos. I still have no idea why anyone would want to read a screenplay on their phone. On their iPad, sure, I get it. On their phone, it’s just tiny, and I frankly don’t want anyone reading my screenplays on their phone.

So, you sent it and I’m like, “Why would anybody?” It’s perfectly — you did exactly what you set out to do and you did it well, but why would anybody want this. Well, apparently, I’m just, once again, totally marginalized by existence. Everybody wants it. I think it’s your biggest seller, right?

**John:** Which has really been remarkable. So, Weekend Read is a reader for your iPhone. It basically takes a screenplay and melts it down so you can make it look good on an iPhone, so basically you can take a PDF of a screenplay, sort of like what Highland does, it melts it down and just gives you the text so you can change the size and make it actually readable on your iPhone.

You and I both — well, you said you’ve never ever had to read a script on your iPhone, but I’ve had to. And you basically end up squinting and pinching and it’s terrible. That’s why you would never want to read a script on your iPhone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now you suddenly can. So, we launched the app on Tuesday and within like four hours we’d sold — we’d shipped more copies of Weekend Read than we did of FDX Reader, our first app, which has been out for two years. So, that was remarkable.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It seems to be quite popular among people. I just feel like many listeners of the show probably do read screenplays and many of them probably do have iPhones, so if you would like to try it out it’s free in the App Store right now. So, you just download it.

**Craig:** Look, congratulations. That’s spectacular. One thing that occurred to me when you were talking about how successful the launch had been is that you had — the app is a great name.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** It’s a really good name, you know. And it’s one of those names that manages to both say what the thing is but also sound interesting. It sounds like an actual name and not just a description.

**John:** Yes. So Weekend Reading in Hollywood lingo is classically the scripts that a development executive would read over the weekend. And so essentially a bunch of stuff will come in over the week and then they will sort of assign out the weekend read which is basically everyone on the team is supposed to read these scripts over the weekend. And so it felt like a very natural thing to call a script reader Weekend Read.

**Craig:** And now they’re going to read them on their phones. “Oh, good for you!” That’s my Christian Bale yelling at Shane Hurlbut. “Good for you!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** It’ll be nice.

**Craig:** Have you ever heard that?

**John:** Oh, yeah, that great audio of Christian Bale ranting at people?

**Craig:** That’s my favorite part. “Good for you!” [laughs]

**John:** Good for all of us. What Kelly Marcel pointed out, which I think will be interesting to see if it actually kicks in, is that a lot of times actors going out for auditions get sides. And those sides are just a PDF. And so it’s fantastic for them just like, well, it’s now on their phone and that’s kind of all they need. So, we’ll see if that works as well.

**Craig:** Oh, good, now the actors will just be reading their parts. “Good for you! Oh, good for you!” We got to throw a little clip of that in at the end of this.

**John:** It’s going to become a meme.

**Craig:** Did we ever talk about which side of that you come down on?

**John:** Both of them came out horribly in it I would say.

**Craig:** Interesting. I disagree.

**John:** You think Christian Bale came out — ?

**Craig:** I back Bale 100 percent on that one.

**John:** Okay. Here is my perception of what actually happened, being the person who was in Shane Hurlbut, the DP’s perspective. For people who don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, this was on the set of Terminator Salvation which was — Christian Bale played John Connor in a Terminator version. And he had a complete flip out on the set against the DP who was Shane Hurlbut I think is his name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recorded because people were already wearing mics. So, Christian Bale initially came off really badly in this and sort of had to do some penance to dig himself out of this hole.

My gut feeling is that Christian Bale was incredibly frustrated by the situation and he couldn’t flip out on the director, McG, and so he flipped out on the nearest person who he actually could kind of flip out on, which was probably Shane Hurlbut. That’s my perception.

**Craig:** My perception is that Shane Hurlbut was doing something that I’ve never seen any DP do which is go and tweak lights in the middle of a take. And I guess the deal was it’s coverage, so the camera is aiming at Christian Bale over someone else’s shoulders. Which means all the lights are behind the camera pointing out at Christian Bale.

And you try and clear the eye line for actors so they’re not being distracted. They can perform in the moment. And then while he’s talking here comes this guy that just starts wandering in behind the person he’s talking to and starts moving stuff around.

And I guess he had asked him a bunch of times, “Please don’t do that,” and then the guy just kept doing it and he flipped out. “Good for you!” I’m sorry. This is the weirdest tangent. Like a weird old tangent.

**John:** It’s a fine tangent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to the meat of today’s podcast.

So, you had sent this great article by Megan McArdle which is from The Atlantic on procrastination. And I loved a little piece of it, but it’s worth reading the whole thing because I thought it was a really smart piece and it’s actually part of I guess a bigger book about sort of the importance of failure.

But, tell me why you sent it and sort of what you got out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first I got excited because I thought that the child star of Annie had written this, but that’s Andrea McArdle. Megan McArdle — boy, I’m in the craziest mood today.

**John:** That’s all right.

**Craig:** I promise you I’m totally sober.

Megan McArdle wrote about procrastination which in and of itself is nearly impossible to do, because it’s been written about 1,000 times, but what I liked about this was that she zeroed in on why writers — I mean, this is the title — Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators. And she has a theory.

Look, I’m not sure if her theory is correct. But at least it’s a theory of why it seems to be so much harder for writers than for other people. And essentially her theory is that writers were likely the kids who found writing easy. That is to say writing relative to their peers. So, you’re in English class, you’re doing creative writing, you’re discussing a book, you’re doing a book report — you have to write anything. And everybody pats you on the back because being able to write instinctively and write cohesively and interestingly turns out to be fairly rare. I mean, just walk around. Go into any business and read what people are writing. It’s just hard for most people.

It’s a little bit like singing. Most people can’t sing, but a lot of people can. And people who can sing it comes easily to them, that’s great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And her point is that this unfortunately starts to — this creates a bad lesson for this kid, because they associate writing with something that is innate and fixed. That is to say this isn’t something I’m going to develop, it’s something that I was given. You have a gift as they say.

It turns out, of course, in the real world, no. You do have to develop your skills. Just because you have natural ability or a “gift” doesn’t mean that you are now ready for primetime or that there are other people that aren’t doing a lot better than you are. You have much to learn, much to learn. And you always will. You always will.

So, what happens for a lot of writers is that procrastination becomes the psychological extension of the fear that they don’t have anything more than what they have.

**John:** Yeah. I described it on the blog as the best scene is the scene you haven’t written yet. Or like you can’t fail at a scene you haven’t written yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s every chance — every time you sit down at the typewriter it’s a chance that you’re going to write something terrible. And so therefore maybe I just won’t sit down at the keyboard and I will do something else instead.

What I think is interesting about writing is you compare this to really kind of anything, like athletics, and so let’s say you’re a kid who is like really naturally athletic and great. And so you are very good at basketball or whatever. At a certain point it’s going to become objectively clear whether you are great at basketball or you were just good compared to your peers. Because you can actually see how good somebody is at basketball.

Writing is actually so much more amorphous. It’s really hard to say who’s a good writer, who’s not a good writer, who is a fantastic writer, who’s an okay writer. But weirdly the writer, him or herself, at a certain point develops a sense of like what is good and what’s bad. And they can recognize sometimes when they’re not writing their best. And there’s always that fear like, well, I might write something just awful. And everyone may — this is, again, the imposter syndrome — everyone may realize that I’m actually not that good of a writer at all.

And so by procrastinating, by putting off that writing you are delaying, you’re protecting yourself. It’s really self-preservation through procrastination.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because if you’re one of these people that falls into this category that there’s — Ms. McArdle sites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who is doing some research on this, and so professor Dweck has this idea that there are people who have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset people, basically when they do something they look at it as an indication of essentially what my ability is. Period. The end. That’s it. if you have a fixed mindset and you sit down, and you start writing, and either you don’t like what you wrote, or other people don’t like what you wrote, this is going to shatter some fixed part of your identity. People might as well be looking at you and saying you have an ugly face, you know, you’re far too tall, and I don’t like your eyes. You can’t change it.

Whereas the other kinds of writers, the growth mindset writers, don’t look at their writing ability as some sort of fixed capacity tank. Do you feel like you have both of these or just one, or — ?

**John:** I think I do have both of them. But I think I definitely am guilty of sometimes picking the easier — that sounds wrong — but in her article she talks about self-sabotage. I’ve definitely witnessed myself self-sabotaging by creating a situation where it was impossible for me to sort of succeed. And so therefore I have an excuse for why that thing wasn’t the best thing I could possibly do.

So it’s like, well, it’s the best I could do in that circumstance. Well, I put myself in that circumstance so therefore is it really my best work?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or, not doing that thing that is so incredibly risky because I wasn’t sure if I could write it.

I would say over the last ten years though I’ve been much more aggressive about picking the thing that I’m both sure I can write and also not sure I can write. The thing that’s sort of outside of my comfort zone.

And even I guess sometimes at the start of my career, definitely going from Go to Big Fish, which are not sort of natural progressions, I really tried to push myself to do both of those things.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s very —

**John:** Are you a growth or a fixed? I perceive you — I’ll diagnose you first, but I think I’ll be wrong. I perceive you as a person who is fixed in the sense that you perceive yourself as a comedy writer and yet you very much also want to stretch beyond those boundaries of just a pure comedy writer.

**Craig:** I, yeah, well the thing is the genre that you pick is probably — it’s probably a symptom of your desire to stay safe and to succeed.

I don’t feel that I’m a fixed person. I do feel like I am always trying to get better and challenge myself, which indicates that I don’t have a philosophical belief that I’m just capped at a certain level. But certainly like you, I’ve made choices to protect myself and like you, lately and particularly lately, I’ve been making choices that do the opposite, that essentially put me out there in an area — I think you said it perfectly. I can do this and I can’t do this. That’s a good place to be. That means you’re not trying to fly, but you’re definitely taking careful steps somewhere. And that’s a good thing.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say beyond just my pure writing stuff, I think in public speaking and sort of my moderating of panels and my doing stuff at the Academy has been also an expansion beyond what I’m comfortable and safe doing, because it’s just so much easier for me to stay at home and just write on blog. And to go out and have to be in front of a big crowd of people was not natural for me. And yet I’ve gotten much more comfortable about doing it.

I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’ll summarize it here because it actually fits really well with this sort of fixed versus growth mindset. I was on set and I was watching Spielberg direct this scene. And I was looking at sort of how he was doing stuff and how stuff was going. And I had this momentary flash where I realized like, oh, he’s just working really hard.

You associate these great directors as being these visionary talents who are born with these gifts. And while clearly he has gifts, he’s also just worked really hard. And I could see him — he’s Steven Spielberg, but he’s figuring out all these shots and he’s telling all these people what to do. And he’s really good at doing that, but he’s also just really focusing on it and he’s really working.

And it was one of those moments that was both sort of sobering in the sense that, oh, it’s not magic. But it was also like, oh, it’s not magic. Like I can work really hard, too. And that was actually greatly encouraging for me to see like, you know, it’s really, really hard work but I know I can work really, really hard.

And I think it gets back to Megan McArdle’s point is that oftentimes the people who succeed are the ones who just kind of aren’t afraid of failing. The ones who sort of can benefit from failure or benefit from struggles and learn how to sort of struggle.

**Craig:** That’s right. It puts you in a tough spot because most people on the planet don’t do jobs where failure is likely. They don’t. I’m not sure — most jobs are fairly safe things. This one isn’t one.

**John:** You can’t fail at a spreadsheet.

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I mean, you can, but it’s a different kind of failure. It’s not a failure of you. You can make mistakes but it’s not a failure of the expression of your point of view, your taste. Our brothers and sisters in the film review community, how do you fail? How do you fail?

If you can give Her a terrible review and still be at work the next week, how do you — there’s not failing there. But what we do, there’s failure every day. In fact, it’s built in. When we are hired, the contract is built around the notion that we’re going to keep failing. That’s why there is more than one draft even if it’s just optional. The entire editorial process is built around that. The reason you shoot more than you’re going to keep in the movies, because directors make mistakes all the time.

Why do actors get more than one take? Failure. Failure. Failure. The whole thing is a parade of it. And you have to make your peace with it, or it will absolutely destroy you.

**John:** It occurs to me that this kind of procrastination that a writer faces sitting down at the keyboard is really just a form of stage fright. It’s that fear that I’m going to get there at the keyboard and I’m not going to be good. And everyone is going to see that I’m not good and it’s going to be awful.

And so therefore I just won’t sit down at the keyboard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the difference with stage fright is that eventually you have to get on. They’re going to call your name and you’re going to have to get up on stage and you’re going to have to start singing. And that’s, I think, ultimately what you have to face is a writer is that I have to sit there and I have to type this thing. And even if it’s terrible, I have to get through it because that’s my job. That’s what I’m here to do.

So, let’s just talk a little bit about sort of how you get past those humps and sort of what you find.

**Craig:** Well, I try and remember, and this is something that McArdle points out. I try and remember that there is no percentage for me to compare what I’m about to do or what I’m doing with finished products, which I think is the demon that plagues us constantly. I’m going to sit down. What should I write? Well, if I write this, that’s been done before. If I write this, somebody else already did that better. If I write this is it too much like that?

Constantly comparing the process, the messy process of cooking, to already completed perfect meals. You have to get ultimately to the place where it’s done. And, of course, we’re all trained to watch and appreciate the best of all those completions. So, I try and remind myself that there is nothing permanent about what I’m about to write. I can always hit delete.

It’s not like I’m expending resources, you know, rare resources to generate three or four pages, only to throw them out. I’m not building a wall, you know, where it’s going to cost me money to build it again. So, I give myself a break in that regard.

**John:** I think what you’re saying is exactly right in terms of recognizing that the finished product is not what you’re working on right now. You’re working on the process and in McArdle’s piece she points out that we always read, when we read like the great authors, we’re reading their final drafts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re not reading everything they did along the way. We’re not seeing all their mistakes. We’re not seeing everything they threw out. We’re seeing the finished product. And it would actually be very helpful, I think, sometimes if we saw all the drafts that led up to it so we could see this.

Shakespeare actually weirdly, we do get to see all the different versions of things, and that’s kind of useful. You can sort of see how things grew and how things changed.

When I find myself procrastinating I, you know, the classic rule is you sort of set a timer. And it’s like for the next 20 minutes I’m going to write and I’m not going to do anything else. I’m just going to write. Jane Espenson calls this a Writing Sprint, which is basically no matter what, the next 20 minutes, the next 40 minutes, I’m going to write and I’m not going to stop writing until the timer goes off. That’s a great trick.

Freedom for Mac, the utility that we’ve talked about before on the show, which basically turns off your internet connection for a period of time, also really helpful. So, if you’re sitting there and you can’t get on the internet you’re more likely to be able to focus on the work you’re doing.

Anything else for you?

**Craig:** Yeah. The other little trick I do is to think about the scene that I’m supposed to be writing and then say, okay, maybe I’m scared to start writing this because I just don’t love it yet. There’s nothing in it that’s getting me super excited. And so I just try and think about it in different ways. Or just let myself think.

If it takes all day I’ll just think all day. If I have to take a walk, or you know me, a long shower is always great. But, when you find that thing that suddenly gets you excited then it’s a lot easier to sit down because it doesn’t feel quite so grindy.

And, by the way, interestingly enough, a lot of the times those things that got us motivated, they come out. It was something that we just needed to do it to not feel bad about moving our fingers over the keys. And there are days when you can take a walk and you feel like you can walk from one end of the earth to the other. And there are days when taking five steps just feels tough.

You have to actually honor that and not punish yourself for having one of those days. It’s totally normal.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

I want to sidestep to another sort of psychological thing which I actually witnessed this week in the negotiating room.

So, basically during the negotiations there is a lot of time where we as the screenwriters are just sitting there waiting for the next thing to happen. And so people are writing, which is great. So, you’re shoulder to shoulder with all these writers writing, which is fantastic.

But one writer who was sitting close to me was struggling to — his script was 116 pages and he really wanted to get down to 114, or 112. And he called it Pageorexia, which I thought was just the best term. And this wasn’t like a newbie writer. This was like a guy with multiple awards and nominated this year for awards. And I just thought it was hilarious that this is this guy who is getting paid a tremendous amount of money to do whatever he wants to do. And he still sweats all of these little details to try to get it down one more page.

He described it as, “Well, if they love it at 116 they’ll love it even more at 114,” which is such a classic anorexia kind of comment. It’s like he’s looking in the mirror and he’s not seeing what the script truly is.

**Craig:** Right. He’s got script dysmorphia.

**John:** Yes. But I would argue that in some ways that’s related to the procrastination thing that we’re talking about. It’s a perfectionism as a way of fearing failure. Rather than fear stopping him from writing, fear was getting him gripped into this sort of OCD must make everything perfect.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are constantly deluding ourselves that we have control over the response to our screenplay when we don’t. We write what we write. And we then give it to entirely different sentient organisms with completely different tastes, experiences, moods. And either they like it or they don’t. But that stuff is about trying to control that which we cannot control.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It does not — they will not like a 114 page script more than that script at 116, ever. [laughs] It’s never going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. What it’s doing is it’s crossing the line between like sort of professionalism, which is basically like making that look as good as it can. And perfectionism, or sort of needless perfectionism where you’re just moving commas around so that it breaks a little bit differently.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is a very smart man. So, I can tell him, and he knows that the 114 page script and the 116 page script will shoot exactly the same. You’re not changing the movie whatsoever. You’re just changing the words around on the page.

And yet sometimes we get obsessed about the words on 8.5 x 11 paper, not remembering like, oh that’s right, it’s actually just a plan for making a movie.

I heard a story, which may be apocryphal but it sounds absolutely true, because I feel I like I may have seen this in one of his scripts, that James Cameron when he got to — this is back in the time where you actually would type scripts or they were sort of printed out of things, so they weren’t PDFs. So, he would number it from 70 to 79 and when he got to 80 he would start it again at 70 to 79 again, so he could squeeze an extra 10 pages in. And no one would sort of notice that like it was doubled up there. Isn’t that a great idea?

**Craig:** [laughs] I totally believe it. I mean, the “it’s too long” is the traditional problem of the screenwriter. I’ve really never had a problem of a script that was much too long. The current script that I am doing is more of an action movie, and so I’ve given myself more length than a typical comedy. And it’s in at 119. And that’s 119 with proper margins and double spaces before the slug lines. And I feel good about that.

I called up Scott Frank in a little bit of a panic —

**John:** Scott Frank will tell you to turn in a 180 page script. Scott Frank writes long…

**Craig:** Scott laughed at me and then slapped me around and said, “No one gives a damn. I’ve never turned in a first draft that was shorter than…” Yeah. Exactly. “If it’s under 150 it’s a hallelujah for me.”

The one thing that I do spend time on, and I know Scott does — a lot of writers do — is page breaks at important moments.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do look and see, okay, look, if there’s a big reveal or a moment, I don’t want that to be split up by a page break. If there’s an interesting speech. In fact, I don’t want any dialogue split over page breaks. I hate it. So, I try and — I mess around with stuff like that. But, you know, that’s when the script is done. And that’s just a fun hour or two.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s segue to our next topic which is a bunch of stuff happened this last week and it’s going to be happening in the next few months which could make everything quite a bit different in the next couple of years. So, I just want to give a little sense of what’s gone on and forecast — a very murky forecast — of what could happen in the weeks ahead.

So, this last week it was announced that Comcast is buying Time Warner Cable, which will create the largest cable company in the universe, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was the number one cable company, Comcast, buying the number two cable company, Time Warner. It raises just a lot of questions about sort of how powerful can one company be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also, happening soon we have Aereo, the company that’s being sued by the broadcast networks. Aereo essentially retransmits over the air broadcast via the internet. And it’s a whole question about sort of what is possible there. What’s going to be legal there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then we also have, you know, this is the new season of House of Cards starting. A real question about Netflix and Amazon and now companies are making things that are like television but are not classically television. And how are we going to write for those and how are we going to get paid for those? And that’s a big thing.

**Craig:** It’s a mess out there. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess out there. And they’re actually all kind of related because — so, let’s go back to the Aereo lawsuit.

So, essentially Aereo’s lawsuit is — the broadcast networks are suing this company, Aereo, which provides television, a local channel television, but what they do which is very clever, they have these tiny little antennas and essentially as a subscriber you are renting this tiny little antenna which is often hooked to a tiny little hard drive which allows you to record the over-the-air broadcast in your market and so that you can look at it on your iPhone, your iPad, your computer.

It’s a way of getting your broadcast television to your computer or your other device. And it has this sort of geofencing on it and stuff so you’re not supposed to be able to get it outside of your region. Classically that would be called retransmission.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when cable companies come into a market, or cable companies are in a market, they have to pay the broadcast channels for the right to retransmit their shows.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they have to pay, the classically New York, CBS, and I guess it was Comcast had the fight over basically how much Comcast would have to pay CBS in order to rebroadcast.

**Craig:** It happens all the time. Yeah.

**John:** And so if you lose a channel, like basically for awhile CBS wasn’t on Comcast, and that was because they were fighting over the price. And the broadcasters make about $4 billion a year in those retransmission fees. So, if Aereo were to succeed the broadcasters would feel like, well, we’re going to lose all that money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand how this is legal at all. Anyone that watches a baseball game has heard, or any sports event, “This telecast cannot be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the expressed given permission, blah, blah, blah.”

Yeah, how do they do this? It doesn’t seem…

**John:** I’ll tell you exactly how they get away with it. It’s because of Comcast itself. So, Comcast won an earlier Supreme Court decision with their basically personal DVRs. So, what Comcast was letting it do, and I remember blogging about this a zillion years ago and actually coming down on kind of maybe the wrong side of it. But, so Comcast, the DVR decision, was essentially Comcast wanted to say like, “Okay, so we have this cable subscriber. And rather than having a DVR in their house, they can have their DVR at the cable company.”

**Craig:** Right. A cloud-based DVR. Right.

**John:** Exactly the same thing. But it’s one DVR per household, so it really is an individual’s DVR. And so the retransmission is public retransmission, not private retransmission. So, that is the very fine line that Aereo is trying to go for. And apparently the reason why they introduced service in New York City is because it was already in the second court, the second district court when it had that ruling for Comcast that was beneficial. So, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens.

This case, and now I think it’s supposed to be heard by the Supreme Court in April, so we’ll have a ruling there.

The question is, from a writer’s perspective, and an industry’s perspective, what happens if the Supreme Court says you can do this sort of private rebroadcasting? Well, I think if you’re a cable provider you’re going to say like, well, I’m not going to pay this local channel all this money for this. I’m going to do this thing with the antennas and it will be cheaper for me just to do this thing with the antennas.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m always fascinated by these businesses that operate like fatal viruses. There’s the classic question in epidemiology. Why didn’t say small pox just kill everyone? What stopped it? And the answer what stops it is it’s too good at killing people. And it just kills at its hosts in an area too quickly and can’t transmit itself.

I’m fascinated by these companies that their business model is to feast on the corpse of the thing that’s giving them life until there’s nothing left.

**John:** Well, here’s the thing though. I think from what Aereo would argue back, and I’ll just play devil’s advocate for Aereo here, is that it’s essentially the same thing as what the Cablevision decision was. The subscriber is still getting exactly the broadcast that they would have gotten with their own rabbit ears.

And so they’re still getting all of the commercials. They’re still getting — Nielsen still measures those people. So, technically it’s not that they’re stripping out commercials. It’s not that they’re taking the content away. They’re just giving it to them in the way that they want. And so Les Moonves of CBS said, “Well, if this lawsuit happens maybe we’ll just become a cable channel.”

Well, maybe they’ll just become a cable channel. Or maybe they’ll just start offering on CBS.com all of your shows for a subscription.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which then raised the question of like, well, does that mean that five years from now, CBS, NBC, everything we associate as being broadcast television could ultimately become a subscription service?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it could. I mean, the fact that anything is broadcast over the air anymore is, obviously, it’s archaic. But it is so much part and parcel with the way that networks work. And there are still a bunch of places in the country where people use antennas and pick signals out off the air.

**John:** Yeah. And complicating these things even more, when we switched over to the digital channels — there’s piggyback digital channels. There are basically secondary channels that can go along with this. And so you’ve seen like My Network TV in certain markets or there’s another thing with like Axion or something, that’s considered a piggyback. It’s a secondary digital channel. And the rules for how we treat those are still kind of amorphous. Are they broadcast? Are they not broadcast? Do they fall under those rules? Do they fall under some sort of digital distribution rules?

That’s all strange and complicated.

**Craig:** Mess. It’s a mess.

**John:** It’s a mess.

So, but let’s talk about Comcast because what’s so weird about Comcast is if the merger happens, it’s already the nation’s largest internet service provider. It’s the nation’s largest video provider. It’s one of the biggest home phone providers. It controls a movie studio, because Comcast owns NBC Universal, so it controls a movie studio, a broadcast network, and a whole bunch of cable channels. That’s a big company.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where do you stand on big companies?

**Craig:** Well, my feeling is that as a professional writer who makes a living from these big companies, that I want them to survive but only to a point. I want them to survive with robust competition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem. I know the Writers Guild immediately freaks out every time this happens. They absolutely lose their minds over vertical integration and multi-national corporations consolidating the business. My feeling is, good, I’m okay with that. As long as there’s not one or two of them, you know.

We currently have Sony and we have Comcast Universal. And we have Warner Bros. which will exist with its networks and its movie studios and its television production regardless of the cable situation. We have Disney and we have Fox and we have Viacom. There’s big companies out there all fighting with each other. Those companies have the resources to not only make large scale entertainment but they also have the resources to pay us and to negotiate pretty good — pretty good deals with our union, as you’re in the middle of right now.

I think the Writers Guild, this is an area where I’ve never understood the Writers Guild’s full blown paranoia. Paranoia, yes. Hysteria, no. They’re constantly looking at Amazon and Google as some sort of rescuers. I keep screaming to everybody they’re the opposite. They’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Non-union shops that are used to bullying everybody out of everything.

I mean, we have five major movie studios, right? Five?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How many major search engines are there on the planet? One. That’s the way Google works.

How many major e-tailers compete with Amazon? I’m going to go with none.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I have no problem with these companies doing what they need to do to survive as long as I have options. Frankly, in my house I don’t get my internet from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my phones from Time Warner or Comcast. I don’t get my television from Time Warner or Comcast. You know what I get from Comcast?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** I get paid because I’m working for Universal. [laughs] That’s what I get. I get paid.

**John:** Ha-ha! You get checks.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m still living — I get checks. So, I’m still living in a world where these companies have vital, large scale competition and I support their — I back their survival as long as there’s enough of them to keep each other honest. How about you?

**John:** All right. I’m concerned about this merger because it’s literally like, it’s just like number one and two, it’s like 75% of cable in the country would be controlled by this one giant company which doesn’t feel like a lot. And cable is also one of those weird things.

So, broadcasters are subject to these regulations because the broadcast spectrum is there are limited resources, therefore we have a lot of controls over sort of what you can do there and how many players you can have because it’s a limited resource.

But cable is actually a limited resource in the sense that every community had to make deals with the companies who are bringing in this wire. And basically because, so you’re not ripping up the streets a thousand times, they’re sort of near-monopolies in a lot of these markets.

And I do worry that because they are the fastest pipe into the house and it’s essentially only end up having one or now maybe two choices, a duopoly situation where AT&T is the other way you can get the stuff. It could just become really problematic.

And I’ve sympathized on both sides of the net neutrality debate, but I think it becomes a little bit more pressing when you have this giant company that controls the access to households, to so many households, and is making its own content and can therefore in the world of no net neutrality prioritize its content over anyone else’s content. And that is challenging to me.

**Craig:** In my mind, I don’t see that the company would do that. I don’t think that Comcast/Time Warner would — their merged cable system — if they were to tier stuff would say, hey, it’s going to cost you more to watch these other channels. It’s going to cost you less to watch the ones that we control.

**John:** But that’s exactly what they’ve done in cable. Cable is tiered. I mean, it already is tiered right now. You can get these channels with this. You can get this, a higher tier, you get these channels.

**Craig:** But in the way its tiered, they don’t — in other words, Time Warner never gave you a break on HBO. They charge you more for HBO because it’s worth more. My point being that they never — they know the consumers — the demand from consumers is what drives the market price. And if they try and use monopoly pressure. Well, first of all, they’re going to run into anti-trust problems if they start bundling, because that’s basically bundling. You’re not allowed to do it.

But also they’re just going to run into marketplace problems because people are not going to want that. Where I kind of see benefit for professional writers on these non-net neutrality side is if these companies said things like, “Well, we’re going to start charging a premium for super fast delivery of movies. All movies. Not Universal movies. All movies.” And then we would get better residuals. So, that — I could see that as a benefit for writers. But, I don’t, I mean, look, I personally suspect that cable has got another 10 or 15 years left. Physical cable. Because I think ultimately —

**John:** Before there is some sort of pervasive Wi-Fi?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So, I mean, this merger I don’t think is a cause for us to twist our underwear up.

**John:** All right. We’ll see.

We have some questions. Let’s go to some questions. So, Mark in Portland asks, “If pagination isn’t that important,” I think he’s talking about last week’s episode where I ranted on pagination. “If pagination isn’t that important, why use Courier or Courier Prime font?”

I would say that use Courier because Courier is what is expected in screenplays. It’s not that it’s better, or that it’s perfect, or that will exactly match the one page per minute guideline. It’s just what we’re expecting in a screenplay. And anything that’s not that will be met with an “Uh-huh? That’s not what a screenplay should look like.”

**Craig:** Yup. It’s basically tradition. Simple as that. It’s the tradition that comes from an old school way of thinking about stuff as being a page a minute and all that. And really it was way to try and — all of these things were really ways to foil writers who were trying to cheat either by not writing enough, or by jamming too much into a space. The studios got wise to all of our tricks.

It’s an easy way for them to go, “Oh, okay, well at least we’ve eliminated one variable. They can’t use the super tiny font. They can’t write everything in Times 12, you know.” But, yeah, it’s tradition.

**John:** I think we use Courier and Courier Prime, even though we have better fonts now, or different fonts that you could use, simply for the same reason why when you’re turning in those papers in college or in high school they wanted you to use a certain font so you wouldn’t cheat.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s style sheets. I mean, Warner Bros. I think still includes all that stuff in the contracts. Margins and all that.

**John:** Scotty Shumaker writes, “I’m a 22 year old recent college graduate working as a night shift janitor at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.”

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** “I came here to find some adventure and pay off student loans. Because I work alone in a deserted science lab for 60 hours a week I’m able to pass the tedious hours mopping and scrubbing urinals by listening to you guys. I have probably listened to over 100 hours of Scriptnotes in the past few months as well as all seven Harry Potter books, all three Lord of the Rings, and about 100 episodes of a podcast called Inside Acting. I just wanted to say thank you and let you know that your wisdom and umbrage has made its way down to the seventh continent.”

**Craig:** That is amazing. I mean, first of all, there’s something — doesn’t that sound like the first five pages of a movie? You’re the guy —

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s a great setup.

**Craig:** You’re there at the science base on the south pole, but you’re not a scientist. You’re a janitor. You’re just the janitor.

**John:** You’re the janitor.

**Craig:** And you’re just scrubbing stuff. And then one day you come out of the bathrooms and everyone is dead.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And there’s something — yeah, I mean, it’s great. Anyway, my former college roommate, Eric Leech, I believe worked down at that very station. He’s an astrophysicist. And I think he was there for a year. It’s dangerous down there. When they have their winter, and our summer, you get like 15 seconds or 30 seconds to walk around before they make you come back in. It’s brutal.

**John:** It’s bad.

So, Craig, I’m hoping that over our many, many episodes of the podcast I’ll get to know all of your college roommates who have all gone on to become famous people.

**Craig:** Well, Eric and I share a common opinion of the junior senator from Texas.

**John:** A third roommate.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz. Yeah.

**John:** A question from Khrob in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Khrob?

**John:** Khrob. K-H-R-O-B .

**Craig:** Oh, Khrob.

**John:** Khrob. “Where’s the line for things in your script that are very clearly referencing the specifics of another project? If the Tae Bo movie had a shot — ” So, last week we talked about the Tae Bo movie, or the theoretical Tae Bo movie. I guess it was a real Tae Bo movie.

**Craig:** It was an actual Tae Bo movie.

**John:** “If the Tae Bo movie had a shot of the protagonist clearly doing Daniel-san’s Crane Kick practice, but was otherwise its own film, at what point would that cross from reference to homage to plagiarism? If a show like Futurama or The Simpsons builds a whole episode around a known property, the Futurama episode of Titanic, for example, do they pay for that or are they allowed to use specifics given their status as satirical shows?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, you can reference any movie you want.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. It’s fine to reference the movie. And I would say like that whole thing about doing the shot, the Crane Kick position, that’s obviously a reference, we get the reference, you’re not stealing anything.

But I will tell you in a very real sense it does happen sometimes where people get uncomfortable, even not a legal standpoint, but sort of like, “I’m not sure we’re in a parody spot here. I just feels like too much the same movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It does happen. That’s a conversation that happens all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, if you’re trying to parody something, parody is generally protected under the copyright law and fair use. But, let’s say you’re just making a reference so that the reader understands the kind of thing you’re going for, you know, you say something like, “The two of them begin fighting in the elevator. It’s like From Russia with Love,” but you know, something, something.

**John:** Over peanut butter.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just so that people understand what you’re going for. That’s okay. I mean, don’t do it lot. You know, it starts to get a little weird. But it’s fine if you feel like it’s going to help convey your intention. You’re not copying something, but you’re saying it’s a little bit like this, but imagine that in this new circumstance. Just, you know, underline the film title and keep going.

**John:** Keep going.

Hope writes, “I’ve heard you and Craig mention several times on the podcast that now more than ever people should try to shoot their own small projects, like a short film. This helps them learn about filmmaking, see their words on a screen, and has a slim but real possibility of getting them attention either online or at festivals.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would this advice still apply if you have no intention of becoming a writer-director? Is an award-winning short that you wrote a useful calling card as an aspiring screenwriter? Have there been any screenwriters, not counting writer-directors, who have gotten their first success in the industry through a short?”

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sure.

**John:** I’m sure there are. But I would say my general advice about like shooting your own stuff is not just as the calling card for yourself, while it can be really great as the calling card, it’s just so you actually understand what it is like to make something as a finished product rather than just a screenplay. And so that’s why — I think that’s why we talk about the importance of going out and actually shooting some stuff, just so you have a sense of what that is, because that is incredibly useful.

But if you wrote a really great short film, and even if you didn’t direct it, I think that is good for you. I think it is great exposure.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, the whole point of making your own thing is to be a better writer. And if you say, “Well, I actually don’t want to direct, I just want to write,” which is completely noble and that’s pretty much what I do, then just do it anyway because it will make you a better writer for the person that is going to be directing it.

**John:** Yeah. A question from Oscar. “A script of mine was optioned by a producer over a year ago. It was a one-year free option. Nothing came of it, even though the producer pushed it and still wants to try to get it made. I don’t want to pull the rug out from under him, but several other producers have asked me to send them the script if nothing was done with it at the end of the option period. How do I handle this? What are my ethical options?

“I realize that legally I can do with my script whatever I wish because the option has expired, and wasn’t formally renewed. But I’d like to do what is right by the initial producer.”

So, what’s your advice for Oscar in this situation?

**Craig:** In this situation I don’t think the ethics are — there’s no shadowy ethics here. the ethics are that you made a business arrangement and the term of the business arrangement is up and it is now your choice. And you are able to ethically, guilt-free, do whatever you want with it.

The only question I think you need to ask is do you want to give this producer more time? Do you think that this producer actually can get it done, that their passion sets them apart from these other people? And that if they have another three or four months something terrific is going to happen and that’s the person you want producing the movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I would say — it’s not clear entirely whether this producer has had the option and no one else has been reading your script, because you need other people to read your script. I mean, you want people to read your script. And so no matter what, make sure it gets out in the world so people can see it.

If these other producers are asking about it because they have some plan for how they’re going to do it, I think honestly at this point you listen to their plans and if they sound like interesting plans you let them pursue it.

Now, it could come to a situation where they start to get some stuff moving and this initial producer gets upset and just the whole awkward terrible conversations, but those are awkward, terrible conversations that are happening because there’s movement and because there’s things that are going on with your script. So, that’s only a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s an interesting — I was talking about this the other day with a fellow writer. There is an interesting psychological phenomenon in our business as it relates to the relationship between writers and executives or producers. We writers are expected to be rejected constantly. And either rejected off the bat or hired and then replaced and fired.

We are meant to expect this and to absorb it politely and without fuss. They are not at all expected to handle rejection politely or without fuss. And very often are nasty about it. And I think you just have to remind yourself they — while the day that they’re complaining to you that you somehow have rejected them, they rejected five people before they got on the phone with you.

**John:** Yup. It’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Part of life. Circle of life. Lions and gazelles.

**John:** And as a circle of the podcast, because it’s now time for One Cool Things.

Craig, do you want to start, or should I?

**Craig:** Oh, you should totally start.

**John:** Okay. I actually have two Cool Things, so I’m going to give both of them here.

First one is The Fog Horn, which I thought we had talked about on the podcast, but maybe we haven’t. Many episodes ago, god, 90 episodes ago we probably talked about Popcorn Fiction which is Derek Haas’s short fiction website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Fog Horn is an app. It’s a thing that you can find in the iPhone App Store, the iOS App Store, which is sort of like Popcorn Fiction, but it’s just short stories that every month they put out a new batch of short stories. It’s one of those sort of online magazines. And some of the short stories are terrific, so I would recommend you check out The Fog Horn online. It is a very good experience both as an app and some really good writing in there.

My second Cool Thing was something that, we’re recording this on Saturday, so this happened Friday, was Ellen Page’s coming out speech. So, Ellen Page, star of Juno, came out this week. And if you just saw the headline, like Ellen Page comes out. It’s like, oh, fine, good for her. But I actually — I really strongly recommend you watch the video. We’ll include a link to it if you haven’t watched it yet. Because it’s really just terrifically well written and terrifically well presented in terms of why she feels — why she hasn’t come out publicly before now, why she thinks it’s important to come out.

And last week we talked about sort of a hero sort of needs to be in charge of his or her own story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really very much about that. It’s basically until you can claim your own sort of self-identity you can’t actually control anything else in your life. And so it’s a really smartly done thing and I just sort of — I want to vote for her for something, because it was just an incredibly well presented, incredibly articulate and heartfelt description of both what was keeping her from being public. It was basically the lie of omission. And why she was excited to not be lying anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I strongly recommend you check that out.

**Craig:** It’s great. Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins —

**John:** We love Chris Nee so much.

**Craig:** We love Chris Nee. And Chris made a really good point that one of the great things about the way that she came out in this video was that it was about a minute of “I’m gay” and really seven minutes of her acknowledging that all the people in the room didn’t need her to come out. They were already doing great work. They were already doing great stuff.

She said at some point, “So you guys are doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, you’re doing this, and the truth is you didn’t need me to tell you any of it. That’s the weird part of this.”

And I love that she didn’t — it’s so easy for celebrities to turn everything into me, me, me, and frankly coming out of the closet is a me, me, me, and somehow she made it into a you, you, you, which was awesome.

**John:** It was really smart. So, the context of this was HRC’s Time to Thrive conference which is this sort of youth and teachers conference they were doing. And it was exactly what you described. It was five minutes of you, you, you, this is the nature of the struggle, and it’s because of what you’re doing that I’m able to come out. And so it was just a thank you.

And it was just perfectly done. Perfectly delivered.

**Craig:** It was. Well, you know, my One Cool Thing is also a person and it’s, I’m sad, I’m sad John because we found out this week that this coming baseball season will be Derek Jeter’s final season.

**John:** I can’t tell you how incredibly heartbroken I am to hear this.

**Craig:** Well, you should be, and I’ll tell you why.

**John:** I did know that Derek Jeter was a baseball player, so I get some points for that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Allow me to extend what his value is. Are you a Simon & Garfunkel fan?

**John:** I’m aware of who they are. That’s the best…

**Craig:** They are not baseball players. The famous folk singing songwriting duo of Simon & Garfunkel.

So, in their song Mrs. Robinson there is a lyric that says, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”

And apparently this drove Joe DiMaggio nuts because he was a notorious grump. But Joe DiMaggio is in that song because he exemplified a kind of purity of a time. He was a class act playing America’s game. He was remarkably talented. And he just managed to do it all right. And we love that in our heroes. I mean, he had his stumbles and his falls, and he had his injuries and his mishaps, but he was classy. He was the Yankee Clipper.

And baseball has had lots of heroes and lots of great guys and lots of goats. God knows, so many goats. And in a time when America’s pastime has just been about the most tarnished it has been since the Black Sox scandal of the early part of the century, Derek Jeter has exemplified what it means to just be a classy, great baseball player. He’s done it right the whole time. He’s enormously respected.

And more importantly, now I feel old because Derek Jeter isn’t going to be out there anymore manning shortstop for the New York Yankees. This is going to be a tough season. He’s a shoe-in first ballot Hall of Famer. Never one iota of concern that he was on steroids. He wasn’t that kind of player. But, he has hit some magic benchmarks, well over 3,000 hits and a career average of slightly over 300 which I know is something that you always look for.

**John:** It’s really my first criteria, career average.

**Craig:** It’s sad because one of the greats is riding off into the sunset. One of the truly great, great players of a great, great game celebrated by a great, great country. So, Derek Jeter, today and for many months to come you will be my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Now. Craig, is it possible we’ve pinpointed the source of your anxiety. Was it his retirement that is causing your anxiety?

**Craig:** No. No. I’m not quite that, [laughs], I don’t like Derek Jeter at all, actually.

**John:** Not that much. You appreciate it more from a distance. And that’s our show. So, if you would like to know more about the things we talked about today, the show notes are always at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can see the things we’ve talked about. You can see some sort of article that Stuart will find about Derek Jeter. You will also find Ellen Page’s coming out stuff. Many of the articles we talked about today on the show.

If you are on iTunes looking through the App Store you can find the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to our most recent episodes, but actually our entire back catalog as well. You’ll also find Weekend Read there while you’re there.

If you have iTunes open and you want to leave us a comment or a rating, that’s awesome as well. You can subscribe to us there in iTunes.

And so, Nerdmelt, so we should say the live show at Nerdmelt, the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Podcast. Tickets are available now, so don’t wait too long for that because that will sell out. There will also be other live shows coming later on in the spring, but we’ll have those details when they come.

**Craig:** “Good for you! Good for you!”

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

**Craig:** You too, man.

Links:

* [Generalized anxiety disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_anxiety_disorder) on Wikipedia
* Get your tickets now for the [Nerdist/Scriptnotes Live Crossover episode](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/tickets2/index.php?event_id=791/) on April 13th at Nerdmelt, with proceeds benefiting [826LA](https://826la.org/)
* [The Office](http://www.theofficeonline.com/intro.htm) and [the writers junction](http://www.writersjunction.com/) are both open
* Weekend Read in the [App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/wr-podcast)
* Christian Bale [gets upset on set](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0auwpvAU2YA) (very NSFW language)
* Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)
* [Freedom for Mac](http://macfreedom.com)
* Comcast/Time Warner deal will [face antitrust hurdles](http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* [McMurdo Research Station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station) in Antarctica
* [The Fog Horn](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fog-horn/id778971478?mt=8)
* Ellen Page’s [coming out speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hlCEIUATzg) at HRC’s Time to Thrive conference
* Wallace Matthews on [Derek Jeter announcing 2014 will be his final season](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/68961/for-once-jeter-can-savor-the-moment), and Jeter’s career on [Baseball-Reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/j/jeterde01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kim Atle

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 125 of Scriptnotes, the Ego episode of a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s episode we’re going to talk about Beyoncé’s surprise album and what it might portend for filmmakers and the future of home video.

We’re going to talk about a post that Craig found on egoless programming and how that could benefit screenwriters.

Finally, we’re going to talk about a lawsuit filed about The Expendables and what that could mean for the future of WGA credit arbitrations.

But, first and most importantly, Craig, how was Austria?

**Craig:** It was great. I had a great time. It’s why I’m a little sleepy because I’m still jetlagged. Jetlag is one of those things that everybody just goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, jetlag. It’s annoying like airplane food is annoying. And security is annoying.” But it’s so much worse than that. [laughs] Nobody really wants to admit that it’s actually a traumatic illness that your body goes through, not once, but twice.

**John:** See, I think it affects different people different ways. I actually really enjoy the coming-back-from-Europe jetlag because it just means I go to bed really early and it’s really nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. And that has been the case. But I can still tell that my body is a bit screwed up and I tend to wake up at 3am for 45 minutes and then I go back to bed. It’s just not — I’m not quite there yet. But no question, much easier that way than actually showing up. You’re so messed up when you get there.

But Austria was wonderful. I had a great time. Vienna is a remarkable city. It’s a beautiful city. I learned a lot.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** You know, it’s nice going to a place where you leave knowing more than you — I mean, this is how ignorant I was. Did you know that Marie Antoinette was Austrian? She was Viennese.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You did?

**John:** Because I saw the Sophia Coppola movie.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go. That’s how you knew.

**John:** Yeah. So, I saw it in the tent where they stripped her down and then she put on her new clothes to leave Austria behind.

**Craig:** Exactly. And then I was reading more about Marie Antoinette. She got a really raw deal. But, regardless, I learned a lot and I saw a ton of stuff. And I had a wonderful lunch with some of our podcast listeners and it was great.

**John:** So we have Austrian podcast listeners?

**Craig:** We do. Yeah. We have, let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, six, I believe six.

**John:** Wow. That’s kind of great.

**Craig:** Well, six that agreed to show up at lunch. But we had a great time. And it’s a beautiful city. My kids had a great time. My wife had a great time. We all — it was a lovely vacation. I plan on not leaving — even the Pasadena area at this point seems like too far to travel for me, so I’m not going anywhere for awhile.

**John:** Very good. Well, it’s good to have you back. And actually a lot happened while we were gone, or at least while we were not recording our shows, because our last two episodes have been the live shows. We did our live show and then we did the questions from our live show, so it’s been awhile since we’ve done this thing where just you and I are talking about the issues of the day.

**Craig:** It’s nice, isn’t it?

**John:** It’s kind of nice. It’s nice, and relaxing, and quiet. We’ve got the lawn mowers dealt with before this, so I think we’re good.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, one of the things that happened was right before the holidays, actually December 12, so right before we going to go record, Beyoncé released this album. And we’re not a show that talks about music very much, but in general anything that happens in the music industry is something that’s going to happen in the film and television industry just a couple of years ahead of time.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** That’s what we’ve largely learned is that all the changes that sort of shook through the music industry with piracy and artists and all that stuff eventually happened in film and television land. So, I watched the Beyoncé surprise album and wondered what could that mean for us.

And two things I want to talk about. First off, Beyoncé was able to surprise the world with this album because she sort of made it in secret and she shot these videos in secret and she could just, surprise, here’s this album. It came out on like a midnight.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to ask whether you think a filmmaker, certain kinds of filmmakers could do that, where they would just surprise the world with a movie that they don’t even pre-announce. There’s no advanced publicity for it. And what that could look like.

**Craig:** It’s possible. It would have to be a very small movie.

**John:** Maybe. Maybe. Or it would be have to be a very reclusive filmmaker.

**Craig:** Look, let’s say you’re making a normal size movie. You have to pull permits just to shoot outside. You know what I mean? I mean, there’s a specific kind of movie I think you might be able to get away with, but it would be very hard to show up somewhere with famous people and start shooting if it were a normal movie.

**John:** Yeah. Although I genuinely think there are ways to do that. You look at J.J. Abrams with Cloverfield. Everyone thought they were making a different movie than they were actually making. And so they called — they had some sort of code name for the movie. It was like Cheese Party or something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And everyone thought they were making some goofy little comedy for Paramount and it turned out they were making Cloverfield. So, I wonder if there is, I’m not even going to wonder. I’m wondering when the first filmmaker will just suddenly drop a movie on iTunes with no advanced notice. Or just literally drop it in theaters, basically taking the slot of another movie that was supposed to be there and suddenly this movie exists out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think this is going to happen.

**John:** No one thought that Beyoncé could suddenly release an album.

**Craig:** No, you know what? That to me is — the only impediment to doing what Beyoncé did, or I suppose the only two impediments are, one, a level of fame that is so extraordinary that anything you do is news.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And, two, balls.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Just absolute balls. And she has both, obviously the second one figuratively. But you can sit in a… — And I think also the music industry has been plagued by pre-release leaks and pre-release piracy that is connected to the promotion and hype surrounding an upcoming album. So, it was smart that she was able to do it this way.

The videos are things that you can shoot inside soundstages. And the music obviously can be done inside of a small studio. It doesn’t require large movements. And most importantly the publicity campaign for an album is designed to get people on the day the album is released to press a button and get the album.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t press a button and get a theatrical movie experience.

**John:** Well you can if you’re willing to give up theatrical. If you’re willing to give up theatrical, or if you’re able to slot yourself into someone else’s place. That’s sort of hard to believe that someone is going to actually like be able to take 2,000 screens and then give them up for you so you can —

**Craig:** You can’t. You can’t because the theaters are different. They’re owned by different companies. It’s so complicated. And I’m not even sure what the upside is, frankly, because the upside of what Beyoncé did was to say, “Surprise everybody. Here’s an album. And on any day of any week if I put an album out you’re going to want it. Isn’t this cool that I just did this without even telling you I was going to do it?”

And that’s great, but that’s not the case for any movie. I mean, the only movie that I think you could get away with something like this would be if suddenly J.J. went, “Surprise, Star Wars is in theaters today!” But why? [laughs] What’s the point?

**John:** Well, let’s talk about the J.J.s or the David Finchers or somebody, because if you don’t need to have a big screen theatrical experience, if you’re willing to say, like, well this movie is now suddenly on iTunes and you didn’t know it existed and right now you can download it and watch it right now, there are certain filmmakers for which that would be an incredibly compelling way to do it if they could charge $15 for the download of that. There is good money to be made there.

So, if David Fincher — Or really you can think about it with television at this point, too. If David Fincher came out with a four-hour series on something that was kind of great and he just made it and released it out there, that’s possible.

Or, your concern seems to be about that you need to be outdoors and people are going to notice that you’re doing this thing. Well, yeah, but people are outdoors filming a lot. Or sometimes they don’t even make movies outdoors. Gravity is shot entirely inside.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure.

**John:** So, it’s possible.

**Craig:** Yeah, that is possible. I’m just not sure why you’d want to do it that way. I mean, to say, “Surprise! I made a movie,” is great but I can’t think — the only movies I can think of that would be so immediately compelling as to get people to want them right on that surprise day would be movies that don’t need this trick.

**John:** Well, a surprise prequel. A surprise sequel by a filmmaker who is really interesting. So, essentially the David Bowie of filmmaking who doesn’t make things very often would be interesting. And I think the advantage, you said what is the advantage. The advantage is that promotion is incredibly expensive. As we’ve talked about on the show, you can spend $25 million, $40 million promoting an upcoming release. If you don’t have to spend any of that money and just the surprise of it all takes care of a lot of that, that’s pretty compelling.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but you know that’s —

**John:** It’s a gamble.

**Craig:** It’s a gamble. The only time you’re not gambling is when say you’re releasing an album that didn’t cost $50 million to make but cost maybe, I don’t know, $5 million to make. And the album is from the biggest pop star in the world.

**John:** Yeah. So, I’m not going to convince you that someone is going to do that, but I think some filmmaker will do it and it will be really interesting. It will be sort of the bigger version of Shane Carruth what he did with Upstream Color which was basically, “Surprise, I finally made a movie,” and released it sort of almost day and date with the theatrical debut at Sundance.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But here’s I think the more interesting thing about Beyoncé and the thing that we should think about in terms of the industry is what happens when you release this thing through iTunes and then suddenly your physical retailers, your Targets and your Amazons, say, “Well screw you. We don’t want to ship your CD anymore.” And that’s going to be a really interesting case with movies.

If we are debuting more of our features on iTunes, at a certain point these retailers are going to say, “Well, no, we’re not going to sell your movie in our store.” And that’s going to be an interesting development. I think it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Well, for theatrical movies I believe that the moviegoing experience, the theater-going experience is going to continue.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And so I don’t think that that’s relevant in any significant way for feature films. For television shows —

**John:** Well, Craig, let’s talk about it. There’s always been this sense that theatrical movies are releases in the theaters and then they’re released on home video.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that home video has traditionally been the same time that the physical DVD comes out there is a download through iTunes. And every time we try to change that day and date people get really, really angry.

**Craig:** Well the theaters get angry.

**John:** No, no. Theaters get angry. But I think, let’s take the theaters out of it for a second. Let’s say you have The Avengers and it goes spectacularly well in the theaters and everyone is delighted. So, let’s say that Marvel decides, you know what, we are going to put it on iTunes a week before we ship the physical disc.

**Craig:** Well, look, the physical discs are going to die. That’s inevitable. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows. That’s going to happen. So, you mean, right now the studios are still making money off of the plastic. They will continue to protect the people who push the plastic for as long as they can. But they realize they’re groping along a curve and they’re not quite sure where they are in the curve. But they are as convinced as anybody that the plastic is going to go away inevitably.

**John:** So, my question though is does the plastic go away partially because some studio says, “Okay, we’re going to do the digital version first,” and the retailers say, “Well screw you. If you do that we won’t carry your physical disc at all,” which is exactly what they did with Beyoncé.

**Craig:** I think that when that day comes it will not be what causes the death of plastic. It will be the death rattle of plastic. In other words the studios aren’t going to — they’re not going to do anything to hurt their revenue base until they are quite sure that there is more money to be made doing it the other way.

So, that will be — that’s like one of those jungle fights that happened in a South Pacific island in 1946 because soldiers there didn’t realize the war had ended.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How’s that for an analogy?

**John:** That’s a good analogy. We should get Aline Brosh McKenna here. She would mix some squirrels in with it, but I think she would appreciate that analogy.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So, to summarize your positions, you believe that we will not see a filmmaker surprise us with a feature film on iTunes with no publicity within the next year.

**Craig:** Not a major one, no. I mean, I think that, look, there are movies that are small that frankly anyone could say, “Surprise!” because they don’t really have much of a budget to promote it anyway. And I don’t think there’s any need for Shane Carruth to promote his movies. He has a very small avid fan base. His own website, I think, would suffice. However, if you have a company that is investing tens of millions of dollars into a feature film, no, I don’t think — no one is going to be going, “Surprise.”

**John:** I predict that there will be one. And it will be — if it’s not J.J. Abrams it will be someone like J.J. Abrams. And I also strongly suspect that within the week after Beyoncé did her album there was a conversation happening at Bad Robot about how do we do something like this.

**Craig:** Why? I don’t know. Why do you think that J.J. is so obsessed with this?

**John:** Because J.J. and I think a lot of other filmmakers are obsessed with secrecy, obsessed with surprise, obsessed with the ability to go directly to their fans and not have to do all of the in between steps. I think it’s possible and compelling.

I also think George Lucas could easily, you know, before they sort of shipped off the Star Wars empire, George Lucas could have easily done this, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Just like a surprise prequel thing.

**Craig:** That I agree with. In other words that’s such a compelling movie for so many people all over the world that the publicity that surrounds a new Star Trek movie is pointless, really. Everyone is going to see the next Star Wars movie. So, I agree with you on that point, but while I understand the love that filmmakers — all filmmakers I think have a love of surprise. And all filmmakers hate the exchange that occurs in marketing the movie where you need to show what you need to show to get them to show up, but you don’t want to show them things you don’t want them to see because you want them to enjoy the movie.

That tension is there for everybody, but the difficulty, I mean, look, the day that J.J. I think can do this is the day that he’s financing his own film. I guess that’s how I would put it. That would be a prerequisite for this, I think.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s why the Lucas model of it all makes sense. And so if it’s not him, then he has to have access to such a huge quantity of money, a Megan Ellison or somebody who can just do that to make that possible.

**Craig:** Well, somebody who could do that and then also not really care — have no problem just throwing —

**John:** Rolling the dice.

**Craig:** Crazy roll of the dice. Because the truth is it’s not like, look, what Beyoncé did in no small part was just for funsies because promotion wouldn’t have hurt the sales of her albums, the album, one little bit. It was just more like — it was swagger. It was great swagger.

**John:** It was swagger.

**Craig:** But it wasn’t businesswise I don’t think she made more money. I mean, you could argue that people tweeting each other “Oh my god, did you see what Beyoncé did?” created a huge amount of expectation for free and that’s true. And it was a roll of the dice. But in the end I can’t — I mean, look, the album is doing really well. Her last album did really, really well. The next one will do really, really well. So, from a business point of view I’m not sure that there’s a huge upside.

**John:** All right So, segueing from that topic of ego and swagger, let’s go to this article that you tweeted or emailed to me this week which I thought was really good. So, it’s this article from 2006 that you found.

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually I didn’t find it. Kevin Bisch, screenwriter Kevin Bisch sent it to me. And it is, yeah, it’s officially old. It’s now seven plus years old, I guess, or seven-ish years old. And it’s not about screenwriting at all. It’s about coding. It’s from a blog called codinghorror.com. And this piece was written by a guy named Jeff Atwood. And what he’s citing is actually the Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming.

So, why are we talking about this on our screenwriting podcast? Well, Kevin when he sent it to me he said replace coding with screenwriting and all this stuff applies to us. So, I’m going to quickly read through these and stop me if you have comments.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Number one, understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production.

**John:** I would agree with that. I think you have to agree with that. And I think any kind of writing which you’re going into not anticipating it being perfect from the start you will never finish it. You will never actually begin.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in the context of egolessness, the idea being you’re not perfect so you need to sort of negotiate between your pride and your belief in what you’ve done with your sense of humility and your understanding of your own imperfection.

**John:** Yeah. A second corollary thing that goes into this idea is to fail fast, fail often. Is that sense of like to go, write at to it and so you can actually — to get to a far enough place that you can actually see what the mistakes are and sort of not go so slowly that those mistakes are extra costly because of all the time you have put into it.

**Craig:** Do you do this thing, I do this thing where after a movie is done I look back to the first draft and I try and see if any line of dialogue survived intact. [laughs] You know, not changed in any way.

**John:** I haven’t done that. That would be fascinating to do.

**Craig:** There’s not many. There’s not many. It’s wild. The process is thorough.

Okay, number two, you are not your code, or in our case you are not your screenplay. Remember that the entire point of a review is to find problems, and problems will be found. Don’t take it personally when one is uncovered.

**John:** We’ve talked about this before on our “how to take notes” episode which is to listen and hear what they’re saying about the script and to not take it personally that you are a terrible writer for this perceived problem in a story, but to listen — to be the person who is there to help make this script better, not the person whose entire self-esteem is wrapped up into this one bit of writing.

**Craig:** And it’s hard for us, I think perhaps harder for us than it is for coders because it is us. I mean, the truth is we’re being artists here. And we’re pouring ourselves into something. No matter what genre it is, we’re pouring ourselves and it is an expression of many voices inside of us. So, it is us. When we’re writing we have to essentially say we are our script.

And then when we email it off we have to shut that off and say, “No, now we’re not our script.” And then we’ll come back to it and we’ll be it again and we’ll have to keep going back and forth in a strange way.

**John:** What is actually harder I think about our job than a coder’s job is that a coder to some degree can say that problem is solved. Clearly like it does what it needs to do and it does it in a way that lets the entire program run.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When we solve a problem in a script, yes, it might get us past a little thing but it may not serve the greater purpose the way it needs to serve. Because there’s no one scene you can write and you can say is the perfect scene. Whereas programs, or at least the sub routines in programs, can be optimized to a degree where you can say like there’s nothing more to do there.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. There’s an objective success there and it’s much harder for us to find that.

You know, I’m looking at reviews for some of the movies I’ve seen recently that I loved and naturally there are — some nut hates it, you know. There’s no objective victory available.

Okay, number three, no matter how much “karate” you know, someone else will always know more. Such an individual can teach you some new moves if you ask. Seek and accept input from others, especially when you think it’s not needed.

I like that last part in particular.

**John:** Yeah. That last bit of advice is very hard for me to take because I tend to not seek other people’s input and opinion unless I really feel stuck.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I think we’re all with you. That is completely natural. I’m trying lately, sort of independent of this, I’m trying now to be a little, I could say brave, or I could say masochistic, [laughs], I’m not sure which one. I’m trying to be a little bit more of one of those. And handing over work that I am actually very happy about, because I feel that my emotional opinion isn’t necessarily related to the reality of whether or not it could be better.

And what if I hand something over that I just think is gorgeous and wonderful and someone says it is gorgeous and wonderful, but what about this or this? And you think, oh, that would make it gorgeouser and wonderfuler. So, I’m trying to… — But, obviously, when you’re not feeling good about it, which is a lot of the time, seeking out the wisdom of people with better karate is a positive thing.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Okay, next, don’t — this is an interesting one and it will feed into our Millennium discussion — don’t rewrite code without consultation. There’s a fine line between “fixing code” and “rewriting code.” Know the difference, and pursue stylistic changes within the framework of a code review, not as a lone enforcer.

This is a bit messier for us, isn’t it?

**John:** It is. Because obviously as the writer of a film, the writer of a screenplay, you are ultimately responsible for everything that’s there. And what Jeff Atwood is talking about here is that your writing of code has to fit into the broader framework of the whole thing that’s trying to be done. And so basically saying like don’t fiddle with this little work because it could potentially break everything else.

And usually, as a feature screenwriter at least, we are dealing with the script either entirely by ourselves or it’s so clear that we’re working on this bit while this thing is being filmed. So, it’s tougher. And consultation with whom? Ultimately there won’t be other writers on a film, usually.

**Craig:** That’s right. The one thing that you and I both do is we give a call to, if we’re being brought on we call the prior writer or I guess the most significant prior writer. I think the translation for this for what we do is know what you’re being asked to do. And don’t cross the line unnecessarily.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There was a movie I worked on this year that I did some work on, uncredited work on, and there is a movie that will be coming out this year that I also did some uncredited work on. And I know the people who had written the movie and I knew that they were — it was their movie. I didn’t ask for credit or anything like that, and I also understood the parameters of my job which was not to rewrite but was to fix a few things here and there as best I could.

And I didn’t let that fixing spill over into other stuff. Believe me, if somebody had said, I think any screenwriter, if any screenwriter was asked, well, given free rein and your fee what would you do here, almost every screenwriter would change gobs and gobs of stuff, because it’s their individual expression. But knowing how to work within the lines of somebody else’s work respectfully when that’s the job, I think it’s a great thing to keep in mind.

**John:** You’re describing basically recognizing the scope of your involvement in the project. And there have been things where I’ve been brought in to do a very specific little thing and because I know that my natural voice wouldn’t fit this script I will deliberately write in the voice, or at least the style of the existing script, the previous writer.

And so there will be cases where I will do slug lines the way they do slug lines, or basically do action the way they would do action just so it will read consistently, so it won’t feel like the gears are not kind of clicking together.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But there are other cases where I really am being brought in on a page one and then I really will sort of go through the whole script and make it all feel like my voice because its ultimately going to be my version of the script.

**Craig:** No question. When you’re asked to come in and do a page one, or if sometimes I’m asked to come in, sometimes they will think that what’s required is a fix. And all you have to offer is to start over again. And I’m not demanding about it. I just say if what you want is to fix this within this I’m not the guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would, however, this is a separate coherent story I think I could do from scratch if you’re interested. And sometimes they are. And when that happens then I just start from scratch. But I’m with you. If I’m working within the framework of somebody else’s screenplay, I don’t, yeah, I don’t sit and the first thing go, “Okay, I like bolding slug lines, so I’m going to start bolding all these slug lines.” I don’t do that. And don’t change the names. You know.

**John:** All that stuff.

**Craig:** All that stuff.

**John:** There’s a project that both the Wibberleys and I worked on that neither of us were the original writers. But they were the writers who came right before me. And so I looked at sort of how they did these sequences and there was stuff that I thought I could do better. I thought I could do better for what this movie wanted to be in its current incarnation. And so as I went through them I was — I used their style. And sometimes it’s as small as like do you end a hanging line on a dot-dot-dot, or a dash-dash?

And if I recall correctly they’re dash-dash people. And so I was like, you know what, I will dash-dash it. And it felt right for this one project.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. There’s never really a debate on set between the director and the cast about, you know —

**John:** “But it says dash-dash.”

**Craig:** I mean, for me dash-dash is an abrupt thing and dot-dot-dot is a trailing. But, okay, next one.

Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. Nontechnical people who deal with developers/screenwriters on a regular basis almost universally hold the opinion that we are prima donnas at best and crybabies at worst. Don’t reinforce this stereotype with anger and impatience.

**John:** Again, this is something that we talked about on previous shows, just expressed a little bit differently, which is how do you take a note and very gracefully understand it and reply to it in a way that is respectful, that makes sure the person is being heard and also can continue the conversation and doesn’t sort of abruptly say, “No, that’s a stupid idea. That won’t work.”

**Craig:** Yeah. One thing that I sometimes think about is that I am in the meeting for myself and the screenplay. I’m also in the meeting for the next screenwriter that walks in and the next one. And every screenwriter this person hires or talks to. That there is a way to get what you want, defend your work, fight for what’s right, and not be an ass.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And I like this, the “don’t reinforce this stereotype with anger and impatience.” I think that’s great advice for us a collective.

Next, the only constant in the world is change. Be open to it and accept it with a smile. Look at each change to your requirements, platform, or tool as a new challenge, not as some serious inconvenience to be fought.

And we are dealing with change in our business all the time, it seems.

**John:** And I think change on a given project will happen a lot. You’ll have suddenly an actor will be replaced. And that role which was a female role is now a male role. Or we were supposed to be shooting this in Topeka, but now we’re in Atlanta. That happens all the time to real movies that are really going to happen. And you have to accept that and sort of roll with it. Because if you try to fight it and say like, no, that’s impossible, well you’re not going to actually be able to proceed with the project.

**Craig:** Correct. They will find another writer who will be correct in saying, no, that’s very possible. The other thing that we deal with is change on a macro level across genres. Genres change. The kinds of movies that we write change. Trends change. And people’s taste change. And you have to be aware of it. You have to see it and keep your eyes open. I know writers who wrote a kind of movie that was in style and they’re still writing that kind of movie and that’s not the style anymore.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** And it’s not about chasing things as much as just keeping up with the times. I mean, nobody walks around saying “radical,” [laughs], you know, so why should we write as if it were 1992?

Next, the only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position. Knowledge engenders authority, and authority engenders respect — so if you want respect in an egoless environment, cultivate knowledge.

And this for me is really one for our employers and maybe less for us.

**John:** I would agree. This is the one I had the hardest time applying to screenwriting. You can say, in a general sense you can say a good idea is a good idea no matter where it comes from. That partly that idea. But really that’s not knowledge, though. That’s just an idea. So, I guess I would say that you could take this to mean recognize that — oh god, I can’t even phrase this better.

I’m stumped on this one.

**Craig:** Yeah, to me it doesn’t really apply to us because the truth is if we write a screenplay that is the expression of the knowledge available. And I do believe most of the time that the screenwriter is the person in the room with the best understanding of the story. And that should impart authority. It often doesn’t. And there are times when we are talking to people who by position but not knowledge have a very arrogant way of essentially saying, no, no, I’m thinking of one person in particular that I’ve done some things with the best, who has a brother. And, you know, he would say things like, “No, that’s not funny.”

Well, but you’re not funny. You just own a company. That doesn’t make you funny. It just makes you a guy that is in charge. Being in charge doesn’t mean that you know what you’re talking about.

**John:** Agreed. And I think that you’ve hit on what you can actually take from this lesson is that just because that person has the power or is the person who has the authority to sort of make decisions doesn’t mean they actually are correct.

The egoless aspect of this though is to understand that that person is not necessarily correct and yet at the same time always be thinking of how do you move forward and to make this project the best it can possibly be given that this person with authority is making incorrect decisions.

**Craig:** That’s right. Essentially once you become aware that somebody saying confidently and with corporate given authority promotes an opinion, once you’re aware that that doesn’t necessarily connect to it being correct, now it’s about conniving to get what you want.

**John:** Well, conniving and also conspiring in general. Usually the only way you’re going to be able to get past an impossible gatekeeper is to rally enough support from other folks who actually need to help make the project.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so if you have an impossible studio head then you need to enlist the reasonable studio head, or the producer, or director, or as many people as you can to get this thing to happen or find another way to make it happen, make them not realize that it happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. One thing that has occurred to me many times in my career is that if somebody is being a palpable jerk in a room, you’re not the only person who notices, nor are you the only person who is suffering. So, you have allies that are being created simply by the fact that this guy is a jerk. It may be your turn in the barrel, but jerks are jerks.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, everybody else has gotten it at some point or another and perhaps you could make a friend.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right, let’s see, we’ve got three more.

Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat. Understand that sometimes your ideas will be overruled. Even if you do turn out to be right, don’t take revenge or say, “I told you so” — told ya — more than a few times at most, and don’t make your dearly departed idea a martyr or rallying cry.

What do you think about that?

**John:** Absolutely true. And so often, yes, I think it’s a screenwriter’s job to stick up for what he or she believes is the best possible solution, but you also have to recognize that there may be a range of solutions that are all quite good and that you will not always win on those. And so if the solution that is picked is not your preferred solution, if you can live with the other solution write the best version of that you can and don’t try to, you know, don’t try to tank it so that you can sort of say, look, I told you it wouldn’t work.

No, you need to make that work. You need to make that work and make it work really well. That is your responsibility. That is what you’re brought in to do is to write really good words.

**Craig:** You know, there are times when we know we’re right. And it is beyond frustrating. It is sickening to be in a situation where everyone is talking about how to build a building and you’re saying that there needs to be a poured concrete foundation with reinforced steel in it and everybody else is saying, “No, no, no, I think just…”

**John:** Some bricks.

**Craig:** “Just some bricks. Some bricks that are loosely mortared.” And you can feel your body starting to tense. And the frustration of people around you denying what is patently, obviously correct can make you insane.

The one thing that you can’t do in a sense is just put the bricks, and the mortar, and the foundation. You have to find a way by hook or by crook to make the foundation right or go. But what you can’t do is you can’t throw yourself into doing something — there’s no way to write something that you know is absolutely totally wrong.

I will say that there is — people will eventually, I think, they eventually come and they see when it’s that obvious. Other people will start saying it. And eventually you’ll get your proper foundation. The advice here that I love is to not take revenge or say, “I told you so,” and don’t make your dearly departed idea a martyr or rallying cry, because what is more satisfying, to throw a tantrum and then get your way, or to get your way without throwing a tantrum and then have the people that were the problem come to you quietly later and say you were right?

**John:** They will never come to you and say you were right. I’ve never in my life had somebody come back to me and say like, “Oh, you know what? You were totally right.”

**Craig:** I’ve had it.

**John:** You’ve had it?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s never like — they’re not crying about it or anything. I mean, look, we’ve all been there. Haven’t you ever gone to somebody and said, “You know what? You were right.”

**John:** Oh, I totally have. In terms of my screenwriting life and where things would go to the rail, rarely has that happened. To some degree on the second Charlie’s Angels. I think I’ve talk about this on the podcast before is at the very start of the process for making the second Charlie’s Angels I made a list of like, “Hey, let’s not do these things list,” which is basically like all the stupid things sequels do. And so it was like a 20 point list of like let’s not do these things. Let’s not have Cameron dancing in every scene. Let’s not sort of overdo stuff.

And it was a detailed list. I made everyone on the project sign it. [laughs] And it became the checklist of all the things we did.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And the movie suffered for doing all those things. It was trying to deny fate. But I want to step back for a second because you started talking about like bricks and foundations and things and I wanted to differentiate between those fundamentally bad choices which you described as sort of this feeling in your gut like, oh, this is going to end poorly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there are much smaller things which happen all the time which is I think these things should be in this order rather than that order. And sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong, but I guess the question is sometimes you’re wrong and it doesn’t really matter that much. And so when it doesn’t matter that much you have to let it go.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree with you there. Some hills not worth dying on. No question. The one hill that is always worth dying on is the beating heart of what matters to you in the movie. Defending at its core what the movie is, what you want it to be, and defending what makes you passionate about writing the material. No question.

Look, the silliest thing a screenwriter can do, I think, is get into a fight before or during production over scene ordering, because once you get into the editing room there is no scene ordering anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, there are things that you just don’t argue about. Certainly locations and things like that, if the director is absolutely in love with the location make it work. Make it work. Because that’s going to be the location. That’s reality now. You know?

**John:** And when you’re in post you will actually be able to see the scenes two different ways to two orders of things and see what makes more sense. You may still be overruled, but hopefully it won’t matter that much.

**Craig:** Right. And, frankly, the directors I’ve worked with, and maybe I’m just lucky in this regard, have always been — they’ve always been reasonable. I mean, they’ve made enough movies to know that they’re not always right, so they’ll say, “Look, this is my feeling. I believe in this way. I get that you think it’s that way. Let’s try this one for the first test screening. We’re going to have another test screening. We’ll try it your way.”

Well, everything will get its shot, so everybody relax. That’s like a good example of why fight. No need to fight. Let’s just see it play.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Next, don’t be “the guy in the room.” Don’t be the guy coding in the dark office emerging only to buy cola. The guy in the room is out of touch, out of sight, and out of control and has no place in an open, collaborative environment.

Well, I don’t know, there are some wonderful guys in the room in our business, aren’t there?

**John:** There really are. I think what’s useful for screenwriters, and we’ve talked about this before, is that so much of a screenwriter’s job is solitary and it is literally being like that one guy sitting at the desk, one woman sitting at a desk, writing a script and pouring everything you have into this one imaginary world that you’ve created on the page.

The challenge is you also have to be the person who can talk to other people and interact with them so that this thing you’ve created on paper can be an actual movie that is shot. And that’s a tough thing to learn is that balance between being sociable and being public and being agreeable and friends of folks, and being that recluse who is really good at getting things written.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there are writers who can very successfully be the guys in the room, or the women in the room who never emerge. They are very solitary. They are not particularly social. They’re not really fit for, I don’t know, being on set and dealing with the hundreds of people moving in and out.

Those writers can write beautiful scripts and they may very well write beautiful movies. Their work will always be in danger because they aren’t equipped to care-take it through a very social process.

**John:** Agreed. Ultimately an incredibly collaborative process.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, it’s a challenge.

**Craig:** Finally, critique code instead of people — be kind to the coder, not to the code. As much as possible, make all of your comments positive and oriented to improving the code. Relate comments to local standards, program specs, I don’t know what that means. But the point here is, and we see this all the time in the wasteland of internet “film criticism” that things get personal instead of about the subject matter itself.

And I’ve seen it happen many, many times in meetings. I never do it, but I’ve watched producers and studio executives suddenly get very personal with each other when it has nothing to do with the work.

**John:** I agree. General advice, never slam the writer. If you’re reading someone else’s screenplay, whether that person is in front of you or a thousand miles away, don’t slam the writer. If there is something that’s not working in the script, talk about what’s not working in the script. But don’t throw it all at the writer’s feet there.

**Craig:** I agree. And you hear it sometimes from people. They’ll say things like, “Well, I just think that this person stinks.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, somebody may stink until they write something great. There are people, I mean, Charlie Kaufman used to write episodes of Alf, I think. And, you know, I thought Alf stank. A lot of people liked Alf. I thought it stank. Charlie Kaufman was writing Alf.

Did Charlie Kaufman stink? No. No he didn’t. There are lots of examples of this. And every good screenwriter has written something that somebody thinks stinks. I can’t think of a writer that has written nothing that I think stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? I mean, at some point, because it’s me — you can’t make me happy all the time.

**John:** We’ve learn that through 125 episodes of the show.

**Craig:** [laughs] But you can make me happy a lot of the time.

**John:** Ooh, I try.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so anyway those were — I just thought it was fascinating how a completely different business shared so many of the same interesting problems that we have and some good tips here from Jerry Weinberg via Jeff Atwood via Kevin Bisch via us. Hat tip all of us.

**John:** Absolutely. Good advice is good advice.

And I think we’ll also have some good advice for the people involved in the lawsuit about The Expendables, which is our next topic.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this happened just before Christmas. It was December 24 is when the story came out that Nu Image and Millennium, which I guess are sort of a joint venture, are suing the Writers Guild of America West and screenwriter David Callaham, arguing that the 2009 guild arbitration gave Callaham undeserved credit on The Expendables and its sequels.

And so in the links to the show notes you’ll see there’s the PDF of the lawsuit you can read, there is other supporting material about it. It was really fascinating and I think we should probably before we dig into it too deeply just give us the refresher course on what credit decisions mean so we know what happened back in 2009 and so why this is happening now and sort of what it means now.

**Craig:** Well, the way credits work very fundamentally is that the Writers Guild and the companies have all agreed via our collective bargaining agreement, the writers’ union collective bargaining agreement, that the companies will propose screenplay credit that conforms vaguely to the rules that the guild has put forward. They can’t put forward proposed credits that don’t fit, for instance.

And then if any of the participating writers in the project disagree, or if any of the participating writers had another job like producer or director, then the guild has an arbitration. The guild arbitration is unilateral. By agreement between the company and the union the guild appoints three people. They read the material. They render a decision. That decision is essentially final. The review process is also internal to the guild and typically doesn’t yield any changes.

And those become the final credits, period, the end, that’s it.

**John:** And when we’re talking about the credits on a feature film we are talking about Story by, Screenplay by, and if a writer is credited with both of those things those are often conflated down to Written by.

**Craig:** Right. And there’s also Screen Story by, which is the adaptation version of Story by. And a very, very rarely used credit known as Adaptation by. That is the unicorn of credits. You never see it.

**John:** So, the Writers Guild determines credits for feature films. And pretty much all the feature films you’re going to see in theaters are going to have a Writers Guild credit determination because those were released by the majors, and the majors have all agreed by contract in order to be able to hire Writers Guild writers they have to agree to Writers Guild credit determinations.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** All Writers Guild members have agreed that this is how credits will be determined. We’ve talked about on the show before it’s not a perfect system by far. You’ve been involved personally, Craig, on talks of reforms or changes to it and maybe some of those will happen. But what’s so fascinating about this lawsuit is when you hear people with problems about their credits its usually the credit writer or the person who believes they deserve credit and didn’t get credit. They’re the ones who kicking up a lot of dirt and dust about the credit process. This is interesting because it’s a company doing it which was the first I remember this having happened.

**Craig:** I’d never heard of such a thing. And I have bad news for Millennium, [laughs], there have been a number of court cases where Writers Guild members or former Writers Guild members have sued the union because they felt that they were unfairly deprived of credit. And no one has ever one. No one has ever beaten city hall on this one because the rules are pretty clear.

And the rules are not that you get credit that you can agree with. The rules are this is the credit. And as long as we follow the rules that’s that and you are powerless to change it. And it can be extraordinarily frustrating and traumatic and emotionally distressing for writers and there have been really bad decisions. And you can imagine how that feels to be disappeared off of a movie that you’ve written half of. And it’s happened. Or more than half of.

And still no victories.

**John:** Still no victories.

So, let’s talk about this case at least as well as we understand it. So, this all stems from Stallone is trying to write this movie called The Expendables. He reads a script that Callaham has written called The Barrows or something and if I get any of this stuff wrong read the real court case, because I could be misrepresenting some of these details. Callaham has written this script called The Barrows. Stallone reads it. Ultimately Stallone decides that he’s going to be basing some of it on the script The Barrows. The script is purchased and at a certain time as it goes in for credit arbitrations, because Stallone is that production executive of features, he’s a director or producer on the project, it has to go to WG arbitration.

In that WG arbitration Callaham is rewarded sole story credit and shared screenplay credit.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** That should basically be it. That’s usually the last you ever hear about this, except there have been two sequels to that movie. And it’s because of those two sequels that this is continuing to come up. And because of some emails that surfaced from Callaham to it’s not clear whom in which Callaham basically says this movie is terrible and he’ll be surprised if he gets certain kinds of credit.

**Craig:** Screenplay credit. Yeah, so look, here’s what this is really about. We’ve talked about separated rights before and there are certain rights that go along with getting story credit. Screenplay credit gets you a bigger share of the portion of residuals, but story credit is what confers separating rights. And that includes certain things that go along with sequels to original screenplays.

For example, the contractual credit Based on characters created by. So, for instance, in The Hangover Part II and III in the credits it says Based on characters created by Lucas and Moore because they had sole story credit, importantly, on the first Hangover.

And there are also payments that go along with this sort of thing. And that’s, I think, there may be some payments per his contract if he gets story credit. I think that’s what they’re annoyed about. They may just be doing this because they’re frustrated with this guy and they hate having to put his name on there and Stallone wants sole credit on this and he can’t believe that he’s still putting the name of a guy on who didn’t even like the movie and had nothing to really do with it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But what’s interesting is that they’re suing over the screenplay, that’s what they’re complaining about, the screenplay credit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And all this stuff is attached to story credit anyway, which I think would be contractually required for him because it’s an original screenplay and he was writer A essentially.

Look, this lawsuit is never going to work.

**John:** No, this lawsuit is declared nuts in a lot of different ways.

**Craig:** It’s nuts in a lot of ways.

**John:** Let’s talk about the decision process here because I think I question some of the decisions behind this lawsuit existing. First off, it’s one thing to sue a screenwriter because that screenwriter, he is not going to have your legal resources. At a certain point he’s going to say, “Whatever. I’ll do whatever. We’ll settle it. Fine. It’s gone.” An individual screenwriter is not going to have the legal fire power that Nu Image and Millennium will.

If you’re going to sue the Writers Guild of America, they’re going to fight back. It’s completely within their interest to defend their credit process. They will defend it to the death. So, now you’ve angered the Writers Guild. That’s not a good choice.

**Craig:** Well, you’re going to lose. You’re not just going to lose. You’re going to lose early. And that’s why when I looked at the details here all I could think was that this is a stunt, not a publicity stunt, but a stunt to make someone happy. I mean, someone is — and maybe it’s Stallone, I don’t know — is so infuriated by this credit that they think is unfair that they are being placated by a corporation. [laughs] They’re basically saying you sue these people or I’m not going to work on this movie or I’m not going to deal with it. Somehow someone has thrown a huge tantrum because I think any self-respecting corporate attorney has to be holding his nose while he’s filing this lawsuit. He knows this thing is a loser. I mean, never going to work. Never going to work.

**John:** So, it seems like they want to get Callaham’s name off of the sequels, for example, but as we discussed because it’s story credit and they’re not even arguing that Callaham shouldn’t have had story credit on the first movie, his name is going to part of those sequels regardless.

**Craig:** Seems to me that’s the way it is.

**John:** That feels like separated rights to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Based on —

**John:** Based on characters created by.

**Craig:** Yeah. And given the details we have, and again, we’re not lawyers and we don’t know all the details, but just going by what we see here that does seem in fact to be the case. And more importantly it is completely relevant what this writer thinks.

I don’t care if this writer puts up posters or does a Shia LaBeouf skywriting exercise to explain to the world that he also thinks he doesn’t deserve that credit. It doesn’t matter. It’s not his credit to give or take away.

**John:** That’s the crucial thing that people are not acknowledging.

**Craig:** They don’t get it. Right. The credit is not something that the writer possesses. The credit is a form of compensation essentially that is proposed by the companies and then finalized by the union. That’s it. It belongs to the union, not to the writer.

**John:** So, in the lawsuit they are accusing Callaham of fraud. And wrongful and fraudulent conduct is actually the quote. And what they’re saying essentially that in his statements arguing for sole credit, or sole screenplay credit, which is what he apparently filed for, but I don’t know that we actually know that publicly.

**Craig:** I don’t know how we could.

**John:** Actually we couldn’t because that’s supposed to be a private matter.

**Craig:** Confidential.

**John:** But they’re saying that because in his statements seeking credit on the movie he believed he got sole screenplay credit and in these emails that have come out which are around the same time he feels like he shouldn’t have credit. And so they’re saying that it’s fraud.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, but I don’t even understand how they could see his statements. I mean, those statements that we write to the arbitration committee are highly protected by the Guild. They are considered confidential documents. Forget the public seeing them, the other writers involved in the arbitration aren’t allowed to see them.

That is an expression entirely between you, the arbiters, and the staff. And it’s also anonymous.

**John:** Yes. And let’s talk about what an arbitration statement actually consists of, because you and I have both written plenty of them and we’ve both read plenty of them as we’ve served as arbiters. And what you’re talking about is really ultimately not about how much — the amount of time you worked on something. You’re not talking about whether you like the project. You’re talking about do you believe that there is enough stuff in this thing that is your work, that shows that the final product reflects your work.

That’s ultimately what it’s about. It’s about the drafts. It’s not about what you think about it or how you feel about it. It’s about is there a percentage basis of what is reflected in the final script that is my work. And that’s ultimately all it is.

So, whether he loves the movie or hates the movie is ultimately irrelevant. And whether he emailed somebody saying that he hated it, partially maybe to protect his own reputation is irrelevant as well.

**Craig:** It’s all irrelevant. Frankly, even if he believed everything that he believed on one day and believed the opposite the next day because he’s schizophrenic or fickle, who knows. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. And I’m so puzzled by this. Why would, I mean, this is the easiest thing I suppose for the guild to argue — why is it that they think this writer was lying to the guild? Why don’t they think that maybe he was just lying to them when he sent them an email saying he didn’t think he deserved credit. Who cares what he thought on that day. It doesn’t matter. It’s not his decision to make.

I might as well write a letter to my doctor saying whether or not I feel I deserve to get tonsillitis.

**John:** Yeah. It ultimately does not affect —

**Craig:** It has nothing to do with that. I’m not in charge of that. Yeah.

**John:** [sighs]

**Craig:** Exactly, man!

**John:** Yeah. It’s a big sigh.

**Craig:** This is how I feel all the time. [laughs] You realize that? This is my life.

**John:** So, my frustration with the lawsuit, actually, there are some lessons to learn from this. I guess probably general good legal advice is don’t email people things that could come back to haunt you later on. In general I’m mindful of the things I will write in an email, that should anyone ask for those emails I don’t have to present those emails. I will have phone conversations with people about things rather than emailing people things. I will generally try to say nice things about people.

Those are good advice for any screenwriter in any situation. It might have made this situation a little bit better. But this is mostly on Millennium. I think it’s just a silly lawsuit that has the bad effect of casting doubt on credit and writers and sort of the merits of the system.

**Craig:** Kind of. I mean, it’s Millennium. And, listen, I’m sure there are good people that work over there, but these are the same guys that got in trouble for having an audition where writers had to actually write spec material in order to get employment which is a clear violation of the MBA. It’s not like we’re talking about Warner Bros. turning around and suing the guild over something like this.

You know, the big boys don’t mess around in this stuff. This is bush league. This lawsuit is bush league. I don’t believe it. I don’t even think they believe it.

**John:** Do you think the lawsuit is just going to go away.

**Craig:** I think what will happen is it’ll just get settled out and by settled out means they’ll lose and withdraw it. I just think they’re going to drop it.

**John:** Yeah. I’d be surprised if it goes to trial. They want a trial. They claim to want a trial.

**Craig:** Oh, it’ll never, I mean, I hope it does go to trial.

**John:** Be fascinating.

**Craig:** It would be great. It would be great to watch them get their butts kicked out. I don’t see a world in which —

**John:** It would be fascinating if it went to trial and because of the trial ended up delaying the release of Expendables 3.

**Craig:** Stranger things have happened.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I can’t see a world where they win this. I just don’t know how they do.

**John:** I don’t see how they do it either.

Craig, we have not done One Cool Things for two weeks in a row, so I really hope we can get back into this with a roar.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Let’s roar into it. Who do you want to go first?

**John:** I’ll go first. So, this Christmas Santa brought my daughter the Lego Mindstorms kit —

**Craig:** Ooh, yeah.

**John:** Which is really great. So, it’s a robotics kit that’s based on Lego. Mindstorms is actually pretty expensive and so you have to kind of really commit to like we’re going to build some robots here. But I do really love it, so that’s fantastic and there will be a link for that.

But we also got her this little thing at the school book fair which was called the Crazy Action Contraptions Lego kit, which is a little flip book which comes with just the Legos you need to build the projects in this kit.

And it’s actually terrific. And it’s smaller, and it’s cheaper, and it’s like ten bucks. And it was really impressive in the sense of like one of the projects is this little car that has like a windup rubber band thing. And it actually zooms really quick. And it was an impressive use of like gears. Because it’s so basic elementary gears and physics I think it’s much more exciting for a kid, especially a kid with an eight-year-old attention span.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Something that she can put together in 20 minutes rather than a three-hour project like most of the robots kits.

**Craig:** Man, I wish I were a kid.

**John:** So, two different Lego robots.

**Craig:** You know, I assume you played with Legos like I did when you were a kid?

**John:** Absolutely. But Legos when I — it was just basically you had the 2 by 4 blocks essentially what a Lego was.

**Craig:** You had 2 by 4s, you had 2 by 2s. They were all yellow. [laughs] It’s just the worst. I would make bricks, like larger bricks out of smaller bricks. I mean, I wasn’t particularly graphically inclined.

**John:** The only thing I will say I did learn from those very fundamental bricks was that I would build houses and you recognize you can’t just stack up the 2 by 4s and like make the walls out of that, because those walls will fall in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to actually brook lay the proper way for structural strength. So, I do credit that to Legos.

**Craig:** Yeah. My Lego houses were built with all of the care of, I don’t know, like a Turkish shopping mall. And the slightest tremor and thousands perish. Everything is cooler now. Everything is cooler now and that’s just a fact.

**John:** Yeah. They fundamentally understood something about axles and how — basically once they figured out how to cut holes through Lego pieces so you could put axles through them it changed everything. And that didn’t really exist in the original Lego kits I had.

In order to attach wheels in those original Lego kits there were special bricks that had like little holes where the wheels snapped in, but it wasn’t really effective. You couldn’t build anything special or meaningful out of these. These are incredibly impressive.

**Craig:** Do you know even though I’m not — I’m a dork, but I don’t do a lot of stereotypical dorky things. One dorky thing I do do occasionally is build some enormous Lego thing. And a few years ago I built the big huge Millennium Falcon Lego thing. It’s like 6,000 pieces or something like that.

**John:** Those are great. I’ve seen those.

**Craig:** It took weeks and I’m so proud of it. [laughs] Sometimes I just look at it. Yeah, I built it.

**John:** You built that yourself. Did you glue it together or is it just held together with friction?

**Craig:** No, no, it’s held together with Lego magic. But, I wish that there were something I could spray on it and maybe somebody could point us to something where I could fix it, because I can’t transport it anywhere and it’s actually quite heavy as you might imagine. So, but it would have taken a year to glue everything together. And, of course, sooner or later you’re going to make a mistake.

**John:** Doom.

**Craig:** At least twice I made not just a mistake but a deep mistake and I had to go back and undo a bunch of stuff, you know. Because sometimes it’s like, ooh, that was a black piece, not a dark gray piece. I’m screwed. You know? So there’s that stuff. So, if somebody knows of something you can sort of spray over a Lego project to fix it together, I’d love to hear about it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like someone should develop some sort of heater thing that like heat it to just enough that the pieces fuse but don’t actually melt the whole thing down.

[sirens blare in background]

Hold for siren.

**Craig:** Why even bother at this point? Let’s just let them go. I miss that. You know, I mean, in Austria it’s just [makes European siren noise]. I wonder why we have [makes USA siren noise]. We have this kind of flowing up and down the scale thing and they have this [makes European siren noise]. What is that? Why?

**John:** I think it’s just a different historical basis.

**Craig:** One must be —

**John:** One could argue that, well, one must be stronger or more powerful for certain cities.

**Craig:** I think one must be more effective for the human attention. I’m kind of curious who’s doing it right.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Well, another thing that somebody can write about.

**John:** Well, in general I would say that perhaps the European siren played here would be especially effective because you would be like, “What is that?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Is it a European having a heart attack?

**John:** It could possibly be. I’ve also noticed, and you may have noticed this in Austria, I definitely notice in Paris whenever I go there is a color of green that exists for emergency vests and emergency vehicles that does not exist in America whatsoever.

**Craig:** I know what you mean.

**John:** And so the people who are sweeping the streets are wearing this sort of, it’s both bright and dark green that you can’t, I don’t know what it is, but it’s fascinating. Every place where we would use orange they use a green. And it’s arguably better. It’s just different and it’s really striking.

**Craig:** It’s Euro. That’s for sure.

**John:** It’s certainly Euro.

**Craig:** It’s very Euro.

My One Cool Thing, this is a first for me, because it seems so easy but it’s important to me, it’s a movie. We have all of our screeners from the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild and the Academy and blah, blah, blah.

**John:** And the Academy.

**Craig:** And so on and so forth. I don’t get those. You get those. I assume that those hand delivered by butlers.

**John:** Oh, no, it’s pigeons now. Specially trained pigeons.

**Craig:** Trained Oscar pigeons.

And so I’m watching these movies and enjoying them. And so far I’ve actually enjoyed, it’s weird, I haven’t seen a movie yet of my screeners that I don’t like.

**John:** Because of positive moviegoing, Craig.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s it. I’m just really trying to be a positive moviegoing guy. But I’ve actually — none of them have lost me. I will say, okay, so Wolf of Wall Street I really liked. American Hustle I really liked. I liked Walter Mitty a lot. I really appreciated Inside Llewyn Davis. I can’t say I love it, because I kind of don’t understand what happened, but I kind of do, but I kind of don’t. And it’s not quite the puzzle box that Barton Fink is for me that I truly love, because Barton Fink is about writing anyway. I don’t know.

Anyway, so I can’t say I didn’t like it, and I was a very positive moviegoer about it. But yesterday I saw, or a couple days ago I saw Her.

**John:** Yeah. I saw it last night.

**Craig:** I think this movie, honestly, aside from being my favorite movie of the year, that doesn’t even matter. Who cares? That’s a calendar demarcation. I think it’s a classic. I think this is an important movie. I think this movie is going to live on and it’s going to be talked about for a long time. I think it’s amazing.

I thought that Spike Jonze and his cast and his crew did a profoundly brilliant job with this movie. I loved it. And I want everyone to see it.

**John:** I strongly endorse your endorsement. I’m very careful to never say like best movies of the year or anything like that because, I don’t know, it just feels gross to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. It’s stupid anyway. Who cares, the best movie?

**John:** Who cares?

**Craig:** Yeah, whatever.

**John:** But I think it’s superlative for the reasons you describe, in that it not only is the storytelling terrific, the production design is unbelievably good. Because it’s set in a near-future Los Angeles and just the details they chose are so incredibly smart.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** You look at it and it’s like, well, of course that’s what it’s going to look like in ten years or however much in the future it’s supposed to be. And to a degree that I feel like it probably will look like that just because it will look like that because everyone saw the movie Her, because it’s just so right.

**Craig:** It’s so right. And what I also loved, I mean, look, I could talk about this movie for an hour. One of the things that I thought was so brilliant just about the vision of the near future is how many things they were restrained on. People still open their mailboxes with metal keys because that’s how we’re going to open our mailboxes for a long time. So, they were so smart about that. They just didn’t get stupid with fake sci-fi stuff.

Everything just felt really natural and, frankly, inevitable like you’re saying. It never caught your eye. It never seemed outrageous. But every choice, just when I started to ask myself a question like, well, if he has this operating system and it’s not like a beta or anything, it’s available to everybody, so it’s not like Google Glass. And he’s falling in love with his operating system, surely other people are falling in love with their operating systems. So, why aren’t we hearing about them?

And just as you start to feel that it just comes up and then people are. That’s, in fact, exactly what’s happening. And then when he tells somebody, “Oh, you should bring your girlfriend.”

“Okay, I will. She’s an OS.”

“Oh cool, yeah, bring her anyway.”

No one seems to care. [laughs] Everyone is cool with it. It’s brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Yeah. What you describe is the awareness of what the audience is experimenting right at every moment. It’s such an incredibly important thing to do and it’s such an incredibly hard thing to do as a screenwriter is to recognize what is the next question that people are going to ask and how do I answer it for them in a way that is especially rewarding. How do I reward them for asking the questions?

**Craig:** It’s so true.

**John:** It’s so well done.

**Craig:** I mean, think about this. To do a movie like this, to be Spike Jonze, a guy I’ve never met, so this isn’t my friend. I don’t know him. All I can say is he must be an extraordinary person. He is an extraordinary person. He’s special and different. He’s special and different and he wrote and directed this movie. And yet while he is special, and different, and extraordinary he understands what not special, not extraordinary people will be feeling as they watch his special thing.

And he takes care of you in doing it and surprises you and delights you. And everything makes sense. It’s beautiful. Scarlett Johansson is just, I mean, what an incredible, incredible job she did.

**John:** She’s great.

**Craig:** Again, I don’t know her. I’ve never met her or worked with her. The day I meet her I’m just going to thank her for that. That was just amazing. The writing is outstanding. And it has to be, of course. A character not on screen. [laughs] How important does the writing become? I just loved it. I just think it’s wonderful and an important movie and a terrific movie. And so, of course, John, you know what I did.

**John:** What did you do?

**Craig:** I went and read a bad review of it.

**John:** Oh, good, just to take the edge off?

**Craig:** To gloat.

**John:** Oh, to gloat.

**Craig:** To gloat over how stupid the film “critic” at the Village Voice is. Enjoy your shame for the rest of your career, for blowing it that badly. That is the equivalent of running the wrong way around the bases, okay? That is like driving east on the westbound side of the highway, you dummy.

**John:** Craig, that is actually a very smart technique, because you can’t do that with anything you’ve been involved with because you have a personal stake in it. But when you know something is brilliant and you see that terrible review, you’re reminded like, “Ooh, you know what? People are idiots.”

**Craig:** I get more angry because when they do it to me I get sad and also they’re kind of, you know, there’s —

**John:** Yeah, we know, Craig.

**Craig:** I know. And there’s also, you know, inside of me there’s a person that hates me more than they ever could hate me. So, that guy is like, “See, I told you.”

But in this case, this is like — I feel like this movie is my friend, you know? And they’re hurting my friend. And how dare you, you dummy. Where’d you get your film criticism degree, stupid?

**John:** It’s terrible.

**Craig:** Ooh, and so anyway, beautiful movie. Boy, I hope it was the Village Voice. [laughs] I better go fact check that.

**John:** Whatever publication that was.

**Craig:** Yeah, I better go fact check that.

**John:** While you’re doing your fact checking I’ll go through our normal end of show boilerplate.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, if you are listening to this device, what, I can’t even speak properly. If you are listening to this podcast —

**Craig:** You always say that. You always say, “I can’t ever speak properly.” You say that every podcast, so I feel like — just accept it. You can’t speak. Don’t even point it out. We know.

**John:** It’s true. Everyone knows I can’t speak properly.

**Craig:** We know. We know! We still love you.

**John:** In fact, in iTunes you can read reviews of this podcast and one of the few negative reviews will be “John August can’t speak clearly.” And it’s kind of true. I do the best I can.

**Craig:** Is that real? I mean, somebody took the time to complain about you?

**John:** Craig, it was my mom.

**Craig:** Oh, well, listen, she’s — all the money she spent on speech therapy and you still can’t get it right.

**John:** I can’t do it right.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, if you are somebody other than my mom who would like to read us a review on iTunes, [laughs], go ahead. And we would love that because it helps other people find the show.

If you are using an iPhone or Android device you can also get to our podcast through the Scriptnotes app which is available on the App Store for iPhone and for the Google Play Store. And probably also the Amazon Store, but I don’t really know how Android devices work. But you could also find us there. And that’s useful. That’s also where you can find all the back episodes of our show, so that’s a possibility for you, too.

If you have a question for me or for Craig that’s short, Twitter is your friend. So, you can write to me, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions can go to ask@johnaugust.com.

And johnaugust.com is also where you’ll find all of the back episodes. You’ll find links to things we talked about on this show and other shows. Just look for the episode name.

And, Craig, did you find Village Voice?

**Craig:** Oh my god, was I supposed to be doing that right now?

**John:** Well, that was the goal that you would actually be doing this while I was talking.

**Craig:** I was listening to you. I was just falling in love with your voice again. Hold on, we’re doing it live. I’m looking it up right now.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Village Voice review. It’s hard because Her is a tough word to look up, so I’m going to go Spike Jonze.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Okay. Oh, god. Her review, Spike Jonze…Village Voice…I can’t find it now. [laughs]

**John:** Well, just go to Rotten Tomatoes.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, of course. See, I forgot about that website. I love Rotten Tomatoes. They’re great.

**John:** They’re fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re just so great.

**John:** How they like your movies.

**Craig:** They love ’em! Okay, so here we go. Her. And then I can just go to Rotten. Oh, here are nine people who thought it was rotten. You’re all dummies. Yup, Stephanie Zacharek, perhaps pronounced Zacharek is a top critic according to Rotten Tomatoes. And she does write for the Village Voice. And unfortunately she, like James Verniere of the Boston Herald, and Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle. And Cole Smithey of the hard to work for, very, very selective colesmithey.com are all big dummies.

Sorry. You’re just wrong. This was a terrific movie. Is an important, great movie. And you’re just all dummies. Yeah.

**John:** And on that note, I think we should wrap up our show.

**Craig:** All right. Sounds good. This is going to be a great year.

**John:** I think this is going to be a great year. By the way, I think it will be a great year. And I think it will be an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly busy year for reasons I’ll talk to you about off the show.

**Craig:** Ooh, terrific. Okay. Can’t wait.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [BEYONCÉ by Beyoncé](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/beyonce/id780330041) on iTunes
* [The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/the-ten-commandments-of-egoless-programming.html)
* The Hollywood Reporter on [The Expendables lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/expendables-writers-guild-tribunal-evolves-667599)
* Lego [Mindstorms](http://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms/?domainredir=mindstorms.lego.com) and [Crazy Action Contraptions](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591747694/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [European green](http://carsihaveseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_0175.jpg)
* [her](http://www.herthemovie.com/#/home) is in theaters now
* A bad her review in [The Village Voice](http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-12-18/film/her-movie-review/) and the [very few other bad reviews](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/her/reviews/?sort=rotten) on Rotten Tomatoes
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/lets-talk-about-coverage).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 120, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, are you high right now?

**Craig:** No, I’m not at all high right now. Not right now.

**John:** And that’s something we’ll be talking about on today’s episode is writers who get high a lot, or somehow use some other substance in order to allow themselves to write.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the pros and cons of doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today we will also talk about the upcoming WGA negotiations. There may have been a template set by the DGA negotiations, so we will talk about that. But first, we wanted to talk about this infographic that probably everyone on Twitter sent to us this last week.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s got to be some service, someone would make millions, if they could create a service that let people know don’t send this to someone because the rest of the world has already sent it to them.

**John:** Well, let’s think about that. because it wouldn’t be that hard for Twitter to actually build that in. So, essentially if you were trying to @-message somebody this link, when you send it to them Twitter could come back saying they already got that. Are you sure you want to pester them again?

**Craig:** That is a great idea. Twitter, please! Just because you and I have a very specific kind of podcast. Probably more specific than 99% of the podcasts out there. And what that means is when something hits our specific topic, everyone sends it. Everyone.

**John:** I like that Craig knows that our podcast is more specific than every other podcast…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Considering he listens to exactly one podcast, this podcast.

**Craig:** I’m using the process of — I’m using induction.

**John:** [laughs] Induction.

**Craig:** Induction. I’m inducing this. Because how could you be more specific than what we talk about?

**John:** Oh, there are whole podcasts about grandfather clocks.

**Craig:** What?! That’s crazy. [laughs]

**John:** Well, if you think back to the prototype for our show, something like Car Talk, where they’re just two brothers talking about cars. And that’s a very — seems like a very specific topic. Granted, it’s more general than screenwriting, although we’re talking about screenwriting in movies overall, so movies are not more specific than cars, are they?

**Craig:** Well, screenwriting is. But you’re right. I’ll notch it back. We’re not more specific than 99% of podcasts. We’re more specific than 9% of podcasts.

**John:** We are fairly specific. And so the bigger point being that people do send us things like this infographic a lot. Probably because they like the show. They think this graphic is interesting. And we would probably want to talk about it on the show. And you know what? Let’s do it right now.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** So, this was an infographic that was put up on Reddit but a guy named profound_whatever. I think that’s his handle. If his actual name was profound_whatever…

**Craig:** Coolest guy.

**John:** He’d be kind of cool. Also, you wonder about his parents. It just tells you a lot about who the parents could be if they named their child profound_whatever. This person wrote, “I’ve covered 300 spec scripts for five different companies and assembled findings into a snazzy infographic,” which is linked. And it’s a huge infographic.

So, before we get into this I thought we could talk about what coverage is, because for people who are new to our podcast or to screenwriting, they may not be familiar with coverage.

So, Craig, describe coverage for us.

**Craig:** Great question. In fact, there was somebody on Twitter recently who was asking this very question and they seemed a little, they just seemed a little at sea about the notion of it.

Coverage is simply the process by which people who are interested in whether or not they should pursue a script ask somebody else to do the work for them. And the work meaning reading the script, summarizing the plot of the script, offering opinion about the quality of the script — relative quality of the script — and then giving it some sort of grade.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It sounds a bit awful to say that people whose job is to evaluate screenplays don’t do the reading, they essentially farm out the reading of these scripts. But they have to. They just don’t have a choice. There are so many more screenplays than decision makers. And so the decision makers need some sort of filtering system. And that’s how Hollywood has evolved. There have been readers forever. And they get paid, you know, sometimes they get paid okay. Sometimes they don’t get paid much at all. It’s a classic job for somebody that’s starting out.

You yourself did it.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** And you kind of — you just hope that you get good coverage. And everyone has it. Agencies have readers, and studios have readers, and producers have readers. They’re everywhere.

**John:** Great. So, let’s define some terms. A reader is somebody who works for a producer, a studio, an agency, and someone plops a script down in front of this person and says, “Please read this and write coverage on it.” Coverage is both the process of covering a script, basically like to write out this report on a script, and it’s also the report itself. So, it’s the object and it’s the process.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, coverage can best be thought of as sort of like a book report about a script. And so it has a summary page and it sort of lists the very basic things about it like who wrote it, how many pages long it is, so the quantifiable data. Some grades in different categories, like characterization, or setting, or different things.

**Craig:** Plot.

**John:** Plot. Which would be scaled from like poor to excellent. And then usually three possibilities: “consider” or “recommend” are sort of interchangeable terms; “pass with reservations” or “consider with reservations,” sort of like that maybe grade; and then “pass,” which would just be no — you should not consider making this as a film or pursuing this any further.

**Craig:** Right. Recommend, consider, and pass are like green light, yellow light, red light.

**John:** Exactly. So, this person wrote coverage on 300 different scripts. When I was reading at TriStar, by the time I left TriStar, I had read 110 scripts and books and written coverage on them. And it’s very common to sort of keep at least your title pages of this in like some sort of database. And so it’s actually easy-ish to generate some kind of report and that’s what this guy apparently did.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, out of 300 total scripts, he recommended eight.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** 89 scripts received a consider. And 203 scripts received a pass. I found the 89 considers really, really high. Did that strike you as high, too?

**Craig:** No, because consider is — you have to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. I’m not sure who he was reading for, but you usually know for whom you’re reading. You will find screenplays sometimes that either have a high quality to them, but you don’t think are something that your employer, the person asking you for coverage, is looking to make.

And sometimes you have the opposite problem where, okay, well this is exactly the kind of move they want to make, it’s just not very well written. So, you kind of have to give it to them and let them know, at least, because it may be something that they want to be rewritten, or maybe a writer that they love that they want to put on something else.

So, that didn’t shock me.

**John:** That’s actually — those are very good points. And consider may also be, depending on the studio or what the venue is that you’re reading for, consider might be consider this is a writing sample. Basically like I don’t think this movie is something you’re going to want to make, but this writer is good, so therefore you should take a look at it.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the number that should give everybody a little pause is eight scripts out of 300. So, we’re talking about roughly, what, 2.5% success rate there.

**John:** I will tell you that when I was a reader for TriStar, I recommended — by the time I was done with 110 scripts I had recommended four.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I can tell you on each of the four scripts I recommended I got called to the mat for recommending them. They’d say like, “Why are you wasting our time recommending this script?” And so it’s one of those things where as a reader a lot of times you’re more rewarded for not recommending something, which is a sad thing but a true thing that people should keep in mind.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the thing is when you recommend something you’re saying, “You are going to spend three hours on your weekend reading this.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if they hate it, you wasted their precious time.

**John:** Exactly. You took time away from them and their families and their second wife.

**Craig:** [laughs] Second wives!

**John:** Let’s take a look at page count, because I thought you would be very excited by this page count graph. Basically he’s charted from the very shortest script to the very longest script.

**Craig:** I was excited, yeah.

**John:** The average script length was 107 pages. But Craig recognized a very familiar pattern from his psychology days.

**Craig:** The pattern of like the double hump.

**John:** The double hump. At first glance it is a bell curve, but then as you dig in a little deeper, there’s sort of two places where it also pumps up.

**Craig:** Yes. This is not a clean bell curve by any stretch. And the average script length here, I think, is less interesting probably — he’s using the mean. I’m kind of more interested in mode or median perhaps. But, yes, there’s this cluster of, I mean, it’s really small on my screen on this particular — oh, there we go.

So, there’s this cluster that occurs kind of around 95 to 100 pages. There’s a cluster that occur around 106 to 112. Then there’s a cluster that’s 117 to 122. A weird little spike, like in the mid 120s. But I was interested, and I was actually pleased to see this, there’s kind of no real average here. When you look at it you realize that there’s pretty remarkable diversity of page length in the range of 95 to 126 pages.

**John:** Yeah. The highest number of scripts he read had 106 pages rather than 107 pages. Also, I recognize now on the very right end of the chart, it goes up to 147, but it doesn’t fill in all the little steps in between. So, it’s misleading out there on the edges of the chart.

**Craig:** Yeah, he didn’t do the little squiggle to show that the graph was breaking numerically, which makes sense, because the 147 would have just skewed the graph and made it look stupid.

I mean, let’s give — what’s his name, proper_whatever?

**John:** profound_whatever.

**Craig:** profound_whatever has done a quite beautiful job graphically here. I just wanted to give him or her credit for their visual sense. I like the color choices and the fonts and everything.

**John:** Here’s what I would say, a useful thing to take from this. Anywhere between, you know, I’d say 98 pages and 120 pages, you’re going to be in a pretty safe zone. Most of the scripts you’re going to read are going to be in that zone. And so if you’re outside of that zone, you should really think twice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you still see, I mean one of the more popular page counts in his infographic is 95 pages, which surprised me that there were that many. You know, I’ve never turned in a script that was fewer than 100 pages. I don’t think I’ve ever turned in a script that was more than 120. I’ve always landed somewhere in that 20 page zone depending on what the story called for.

But, I could see, okay, if it was a great 95 pages, no one is going to throw tantrum. If it’s a great 128 pages, no one is going to throw a tantrum. But, you will start to stress people out as you drift away from. I mean, however many standard deviations away from whatever they say — I would just say 110 is a nice number to call middle zone.

**John:** Let’s take a look at heroes and villains. Here he’s charting whether the hero and the villain were male, female, and how it all works. So, by far the bulk of scripts were a male hero and a male villain. That’s not surprising to me at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Male hero/indistinct villain is the second highest number. An indistinct villain is a forest fire, zombies, himself/herself, a haunted house, the Nazis, society, etc.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that man versus something that’s not another man.

Female villain, there’s only 16 scripts. Male versus female villain, 16 scripts. Female villains altogether only accounted for 33 of the —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s a not very high number.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Female heroes were 33 out of these scripts. Sorry, total of 50 if you count the male and female villains. Not that huge a number.

**Craig:** No, this may be a function of the fact that more men are writing these screenplays than women. It may be a function of society or god knows what. You know, I always hesitate to draw conclusions from these things. But one thing is clear. This is a very statistically significant finding.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the 300 scripts is actually a pretty decent population upon which to draw statistical analysis. That stories about men opposing men are wildly more popular than any other kind of story.

**John:** Nearly half of the scripts that he covered was a man versus a man.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the writers. So, of these 300 scripts —

**Craig:** Oh, well there you go. [laughs]

**John:** 270 were male writers.

**Craig:** There we go! That probably has is a big part of it. Yeah.

**John:** 22 were female writers. Eight were a male/female duo. Solo writers accounted for more than two-thirds, 223. Writer duos or trios accounted for the rest of them. Only four trios.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I know very few writing trios. So, if you have three names on a script, that’s usually someone has come in to rewrite it. It’s not that you were a writing team of three people. Do you know any writing teams of three people?

**Craig:** I do. The most famous and longest lasting writing trio probably in Hollywood is Berg, Schaffer, Mandel.

**John:** You’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** But they are an anomaly. No question.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the miscellaneous section. Heroes/villains with macho action movie names, 25.

**Craig:** “Stacker Pentecost.”

**John:** Scripts based on a true story. 18 of those.

Pun titles…

**Craig:** [sighs]

**John:** Yeah. Oh, he didn’t count how many were like a bad word in a title, because that’s always like one of those icebreaker things where you have filthy words in the title.

**Craig:** Where is that?

**John:** It’s not there.

**Craig:** Oh, he didn’t count that.

**John:** It feels like there would be more of those than pun titles.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that’s a thing that people do. They throw some word you could never actually use in the movie title —

**Craig:** But so many pun titles. I mean, Last Vegas is out in theaters right now. People love pun titles. I don’t know why.

**John:** They do. Found footage scripts, 11. Zombie scripts, 10. Attempts at the next Sherlock Holmes, like historical revision.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Manic pixie dream girls, only four.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice to see.

**John:** But three uses of the scorpion and the frog analogy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s everyone’s favorite analogy.

**John:** It’s the best little analogy.

**Craig:** And look, I like that he puts here, “We get it, some people are born bad.” I know, but you know, like what if it’s in a good script?

**John:** I would take exception to that. I don’t think you can use that anymore. I think it can be a fantastic script, it would only hurt a fantastic script to actually call it out. Even Drive, with his scorpion jacket, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I get it.”

**Craig:** Well, what if it’s in the script in action and it’s not meant to be seen or heard? Like what if somebody says something like, “Jim shoots Dan. Dan looks at him. Of course, the scorpion and the frog,” but not like dialogue. Is that okay?

**John:** Yeah. It wouldn’t bug me nearly as much. I think it’s still absolutely a valid idea that a character cannot change his basic nature. That’s an absolutely valid idea, thematically resonate now, for the next 100 years.

**Craig:** But you can’t say it.

**John:** You can’t say it aloud.

**Craig:** I totally agree with that. That would be ridiculous at this point.

**John:** So, of the 300 scripts that he covered, he or she, I’m just assuming it’s a he, but that’s not necessarily true, 49 were horror/slasher.

**Craig:** That’s so crazy to me that there’s that many.

**John:** So many.

**Craig:** And you know, interestingly, so that was the most popular genre. And perhaps specs lend themselves to horror/slasher genre. Or perhaps a sort of cottage industry of amateurs love horror. But, horror movies are actually not that — they don’t get made a lot actually.

**John:** See, I think people will see that those scripts are selling. And we’re making at least ten of those a year. So, I think if you’re a first-time writer who is trying to sell a script, it might be the thing you write though.

**Craig:** Sure. But, I mean, look at this —

**John:** It’s not a bad —

**Craig:** There’s comedy, I mean, every month there’s two comedies, no matter what, without fail. And there are only 31 out of 300. 10% of the scripts were comedies.

**John:** That seems crazy to me.

**Craig:** It just seems crazy, right? Whereas almost 50 were horror movies. That was very, I mean, listen, great. Less competition. Please, more horror movies.

**John:** But here’s a thing I’ll say. If you are a funny person why are you not writing a comedy script? Well, maybe you’re writing a comedy TV half-hour. Maybe that’s where they’re actually spending their time. But if you’re a funny person, you have so much less competition on the spec level for those reads.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, maybe there just aren’t that many funny people.

**John:** Now, it could be a reporting bias. Like maybe this guy is known as like not having a sense of humor whatsoever, so he doesn’t get sent those scripts. That’s possible. When I was at TriStar I got sent certain scripts and not other kinds of scripts and I will never know why, but that’s possible.

**Craig:** Oh, all right.

**John:** The other genres are less represented. Drama, only 23. Drama that’s not a thriller or crime and gangster. So, that is sort of an eccentric way of breaking that up. Coming of age is broken out separately, so you never quite know what that —

**Craig:** Right. I mean, 13 science fiction post-apocalyptic. 12 mysteries. I liked “extraordinary romance,” 12 scripts. I’m not sure what that means. I guess, does that mean like — ?

**John:** I think it’s Twilight.

**Craig:** Oh, that means almost like supernatural romance?

**John:** Supernatural romance.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, I thought extraordinary romance meant like, wow, they really love each other. As opposed to those other movies where they kind of love each other.

**John:** I will point out that later on in this chart which I didn’t recognize, action-adventure comedy is listed separately as a category as six scripts, so there’s some of your comedy people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Black comedy is listed as four. But black comedy is really it’s own thing. Like black comedy is not joke-joke funny-funny usually.

**Craig:** Yeah, black comedy is truly its own thing.

**John:** And there’s seven scripts listed as family, and family is a little bit more likely to be comedy.

**Craig:** You never know. It could be, or it could be sort of mopey.

**John:** Time period, story set in the past, 55 scripts. Story set in the future, 12 scripts. The vast majority of stories were set in the present. That makes sense. As it should be, unless there’s a reason to be somewhere else.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** The endings. Good triumphed over evil in 229 of the scripts. Evil triumphed over good in 32 of the scripts. And there were a lot of horror/slasher movies —

**Craig:** Right, setting up the sequel.

**John:** Yes. Open-ended or even-handed. A little of both but not enough of either. 39 scripts.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I was thinking of my own movies applying to this and it’s like, well, good triumphs over evil. Well, like Go didn’t really have evil to some degree. I guess it’s a happy ending because no one that you cared about died, so —

**Craig:** Yeah, maybe yours would have been “even-handed.”

**John:** Yes. All right. Settings. How many scripts were set in each of these different locations. Totals will not add up due to scripts with multiple locations.

So, he has a very nice little map here that shows the locations where a lot of things are set. Obviously things tended to be set more on the edges of the country. So, west coast, east coast, some Texas, some New Orleans, very little in — well, there were four scripts in Denver, Colorado, which has been a weird thing I’ve noticed recently. Because both of your last two movies had a Denver connection, didn’t they? Or, no, your movie and Rawson’s movie? Identity Thief did, but also Rawson’s movie had.

**Craig:** The reason why is because studios, particularly when you’re dealing with the, we’ll call it mid-budget studio comedy that’s around $30 million or so, which is where We’re the Millers and Identity Thief both landed, they almost inevitably shoot in Atlanta. And you can’t make every movie actually set in Atlanta. Denver, as it turns out, is a kind of — for the rest of America, it’s considered a generic city. Nobody really knows what it looks like. You can kind of get away with it.

And so I have a — that’s why they did Denver, at least for us, and I suspect it was the same for Rawson because he was shooting in Atlanta, also.

**John:** So, considering that so many movies are shooting in Atlanta right now, not one script was set in Atlanta.

**Craig:** I know. Which is really interesting.

**John:** I would say the south overall is hugely underrepresented in this sample. So, Houston, there’s only two. New Orleans, there’s five. Miami, you really can’t count Miami as the south. Nowhere else in the south.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is odd. When I look at, for instance the original setting for Identity Thief was a road trip from Boston to Portland. So, in this case I would have been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three scripts, which I assume were Harvard stories, and Portland, Oregon, two scripts. But, when you look at the way people basically write, New York — 43 New York. 32 in LA. 12 in Chicago. And then everybody else is just running behind.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** People love writing movies in New York and LA.

**John:** They do.

This next category, the undisclosed locations, some of our south is made up here. So, there were 11 scripts set in the deep American south. But, not specifically one southern place or another southern place, which as someone who has made Big Fish, I will tell you that you’re going to find great differences between Alabama, and Kentucky, and Tennessee.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it strikes me it might be a lack of specificity to use our commonly used term here.

**Craig:** Or to be fair to these writers, he may have not — when it says “Undisclosed — the deep American South,” there may have been some indication that it was in a state or something like that. But he’s done these by city, so.

**John:** Yeah. We also don’t know — he presumably didn’t go into this planning to do exactly this infographic chart. And so usually in coverage you would not necessarily list every little detail that could help build this kind of chart.

**Craig:** Right. I didn’t like seeing though that 46 scripts were in some anonymous small town and then 40 were in some anonymous big city. That’s unacceptable. And I have read many, many scripts where you are in “a town.” What town? How town? [laughs] Please, give me more than “town.”

**John:** A town in Montana and a town in Arizona are going to be very different towns.

**Craig:** I mean, this is not a stage play. You know what I mean?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You can get away with Our Town on stage, but not on film.

**John:** So, this next section is recurring problems. And this is where it’s really his judgment, and so you should take it with a grain of salt. Like this is his opinion. But, the reader is basically giving his opinion in writing this coverage report anyway.

Usually coverage will have a title page which will list all the sort of quantifiable facts. And also give you the pass/recommend/consider. The second page or couple pages of the coverage will be a synopsis which will basically — just like a book report, like summarizing what actually happens in the plot. The last page of coverage is usually comments, which his basically this is what I actually genuinely think of the script. And this is really the meat of it. And this is where you’re pulling these recurring problems. So, these are the problems that he found in scripts and we’ll go from the most common to the least common problem.

The story begins too late in the script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. You see that a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I don’t know what to — this is a little hard for me because I’m not sure how to evaluate this exactly. Maybe I disagree with him, and you and I have talked about how —

**John:** Because you like long first acts.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you — we both like long first acts. This guy may just be like, “Start,” you know.

**John:** Well, here’s what I will say based on what he’s putting in his little sub heading here. If it’s not even clear what kind of movie it is until like midway through the script, then you really have a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, even in these long first acts we’re talking about, they’re setting you up for, like, this is what the world of the movie is. This is what we’re going to follow and see. So, even if the fuse hasn’t been lit so quickly, we know that there’s a bomb.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We know sort of what the world is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have a feeling that if we were to talk to the person that did this, he or she would be able to look us in the eye and say, “No, no, no, trust me. This story began way too late.” And so I’m going to say, okay, yeah, I get that.

**John:** Scenes are void of meaningful conflict.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yeah. We know this. So, far too often you have scenes where characters are either doing the next thing the story needs them to do, and they’re just doing it, or they’re telling another character something that happened that we already saw happen. Like, you have to look at like what is the conflict within every scene. And if there’s more than one character in the scene, there’s probably some conflict. Hell, if there’s one character in the scene, there’s got to be something that she needs to do that is a source of why there’s an engine in this scene.

**Craig:** You will also see this a lot in screenplays written by people who are attempting to dramatize their own lives, or things that have happened to them that they think are interesting or funny, but they’re not. All they read like is lunch with three people jabbering.

**John:** Yup.

The script has a by-the-numbers execution, 53 scripts. Yeah, so if you can predict exactly what’s going happen the next ten scenes from now, that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The story is too thin. That’s a little bit generic. But he says 20 pages of story spread over 100 script, stuffed with tone but light on plot. Well, yeah, with bad execution, certainly.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** There’s lots of movies I love that are actually kind of light on story, but that’s part of their charm that there’s not that much that happens. The French film with the old couple and she has the stroke.

**Craig:** Amour.

**John:** Amour. Great. That has 20 pages of plot over a two-hour movie. But you would not want more in there.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, there are movies where the joy is the journey. And I have a feeling, again, that perfidious_whatever…

**John:** profound_whatever.

**Craig:** profound_whatever would say to us, “Uh-huh, no, totally. Trust me. None of these were Amour. None of these came close to that. I, in fact, wanted to kill myself with a pillow after reading a number of them.”

**John:** The villains are cartoonish/evil for the sake of evil. Yeah, that’s really tough. We talked about villains in a previous episode. You have to have — every villain is a hero. You have to look at the whole story from the villain’s point of view. And it has to actually really make sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They can’t just be doing it “just because.”

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, there are times when you write a villain and part of their charm is that they are kind of — they’re kind of monologue-y and a little pretentious because that’s who they are. I mean, he writes, “The best villains are those who think they’re the hero of their own story, i.e.,” I think he means e.g., “the Joker, Hans Landa, Anton Chigurh.” Well, the Joker and Hans Landa, in particular, are incredibly snarky, and smirking, and sinister, and have affected dialogue, and pretentious monologues.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, you can’t have it both ways, Whatever. You got to pick one. So, I think the answer is if you’re going to go for a villain like that, make them interesting. And make them actual human beings who are understandable.

**John:** Also, let’s look at, you know, so many of the things he covered were horror/slasher things, which is going to be much more likely to have this as a problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve come to accept in certain kinds of genre, slasher movies, that the villain is just a psychopathic villain. And there’s something really terrifying about that, but that is sort of evil for the sake of evil.

**Craig:** And he’s calling out hit men, serial killers, and gangsters. And those three areas are rife with awfulness. No question. The too-cool-for-school hit man. The Hannibal Lector rip-off serial killer. And then gangsters. There’s just, you know, we’ve been doing gangsters since they figured out how to shine light through celluloid.

**John:** Yeah. Character logic is muddy. Yeah. Often lack of character consistency or a logically unsound villain plot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Every character actually needs a reason. Why is he doing this?

**Craig:** Yes. Your characters don’t behave like human beings.

**John:** That’s where I describe where we should be able to freeze the movie and point at every character in the scene and say, “What are they trying to do? What is their goal? What’s happening here?’

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you can’t answer that question you need to stop and actually rewrite your scene.

**Craig:** And do they pass the human test. Would a human react this way to this?

**John:** Absolutely.

The female part is underwritten.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** A common complaint.

The narrative falls into a repetitive pattern.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Yup. The conflict is inconsequential/flash in the pan.

**Craig:** Right, low stakes.

**John:** And sometimes it’s really just that you can feel the conflict is just being spread on. it’s not inherent to the actual situation. It’s just like people are shouting at each other just because you need them shouting at each other.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there’s a problem and it just gets done. There are no obstacles. It’s not interesting. You don’t feel like anybody had to struggle or sweat. There is no significance to what the heroes are tasked to do.

**John:** The protagonist is a standard issue hero. So, basically based on the genre or the kind of movie it is, it’s exactly the kind of hero you have in this kind of movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a fair criticism. If it feel generic because it just sort of comes with the territory, that’s not going to be a helpful thing for you.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** The script favors style over substance. Well, yeah. I don’t know, there’s scripts I really enjoy reading that are written very stylishly and have a lot of flourish to them. That can be great. But if it’s not great, it’s not going to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m not quite sure I understood the little sub-header here. “The rule of cool for action movies. The rule of funny for comedies. The rule of scary for horror. No depth, just breath and flash.” What are these rules? That they should be those things?

**John:** Yeah. The rule of cool I kind of get, which I think is going back to that sort of Shane Black action style is what I think they’re trying to get to.

**Craig:** Hmm, okay.

**John:** But I don’t know what the rule of funny is. What’s the rule of funny?

**Craig:** That it’s supposed to be funny? I don’t know what this meant. [laughs] I got confused by that one.

**John:** The ending is completely anticlimactic.

**Craig:** Ooh, that’s bad.

**John:** That’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Think of your ending before you start writing, folks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Characters are all stereotypes. Sure, that’s not going to work well.

Arbitrary complexity. “Cluttered and complex aren’t synonyms.” Well —

**Craig:** I know what that means. Sometimes I read scripts and I think the person who wrote this, you know, like Richard Kelly was talking about scope creep. And sometimes you read a script and you think this script has all the invention that only an autistic writer could have put in there, but then also a level of complexity that is bordering on autistic as well. I’m being asked to work too hard to enjoy it.

And now that obviously changes depending on who’s reading it and who’s watching it. And, listen, people went to go see Primer and were like, a lot of people thought it was amazing and some people were like, “Oh, my head.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, most of these rules I think all have to fall under the biggest rule of all which is unless it’s good. [laughs]

**John:** Unless it’s good, yeah.

**Craig:** And then it’s Primer and it’s cool.

**John:** The script goes off the rail in the third act. Yes. That happens probably most of the time where you start to read it and it’s like, wow, that’s not just where I wanted to end up with this story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes writers who have not planned their story in such a way that the ending has relevance for the beginning and vice versa, they just replace — they substitute noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, everyone is going to run around, stuff is going to blow up, I’m going to flash lasers in your eyes, and then roll credits.

**John:** I honestly believe that most of the problems with scripts’ third acts is because it’s the last thing you wrote. You were just desperate to get it done. And you just didn’t write it with the care that you could have. So, yes, some of it may be plotting. You may not have actually had good ideas for how you were going to wrap stuff up. But, honestly, just the words on the page are much worse than they were in the first 15 pages because you haven’t rewritten it as much as you’ve rewritten those first 15 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was sort of the last in, last out. And you kind of were rushing and you were tired.

**John:** Yeah.

Script’s questions were left unanswered. Sure.

The story is a string of unrelated vignettes. Well, that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s bad.

**John:** The plot unravels through convenience or contrivance.

**Craig:** Yes. You get one coincidence per movie.

**John:** Agreed. And so Peter Parker can be bitten by a radioactive spider, but that needs to be it. You can’t have a lot more coincidences there. You can have the one that’s sort of without this coincidence the plot wouldn’t have happened. That’s great. That’s starting you off. That’s like why you’re watching this movie, with this character today. But it can’t be happening again and again throughout the course of your story.

**Craig:** I would actually say that Peter Parker getting bitten by the spider isn’t a coincidence. That’s a random act. The coincidence that they got in that movie was that Peter Parker’s best friend is the son of a guy who is going to become a super villain. That’s convenient. That is a coincidence. And I think you get one of those kinds of things.

Then, you know, if it happens again and again, like I just happen to be here, and I happen to be going through here, then people start getting really angry because our feeling as an audience is you’re not doing the work that’s required to entertain us. You’re just cheating.

**John:** Well, we start to disbelieve the world.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we know that the real world is not that coincidental. Things don’t happen that way so often.

I would say you can sometimes get an extra coincidence if it’s something that helps the villain. And so if it’s the kind of thing where it’s like out of the blue the villain gets something that actually sort of really helps his side, that’s kind of great, too.

**Craig:** Right. Agreed.

**John:** Luck. Yeah, if it feels like just luck that helps them get there.

**Craig:** If luck hurts your character I think it’s okay. [laughs] It just can’t help them.

**John:** How are you making things worse for your characters? One of those fundamental questions you should be asking with every scene.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The script is tonally confused. Okay.

**Craig:** Sure. See it all the time.

**John:** The script is stoic to a fault. Let’s see what he says by that. “Nothing rattles the characters or the script. Characters don’t react to moments of drama. The script can’t deliver emotional/dramatic beats successfully. Dramatic beats fall flat, even when characters are dying.”

**Craig:** See this all the time. That’s a great one.

**John:** That’s actually a really good observation. It’s not something I’ve ever singled out, but I think it is a real problem where it’s another way of saying the character is not responding in a way to these events as real human beings would.

**Craig:** That’s why when I say to somebody, “How would a human being respond?” We had that Three Page Challenge a few weeks ago, the really good well written three pages, but there was a moment where somebody after murdering somebody kind of quips. And that was a stoic moment that shouldn’t have been there. It was too stoic for what had just occurred.

**John:** That was the western.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly.

**John:** The protagonist is not as strong as need to be. Ooh, that’s a bad sentence.

**Craig:** The protagonist is not as strong as need be.

**John:** As need be, oh yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s still not a good sentence. The protagonist is not strong enough is the proper way to write that. We’re now doing coverage of the coverage of the coverage.

**John:** [laughs] It got very meta here for a second.

The premise is a transparent excuse for action. Well, yes, but that’s not all together bad. There’s a whole genre of movies that are a transparent cause for action. And it’s really the same way we have musicals which are just an excuse for musical production numbers. There can be something lovely and delightful about that in the right kind of movie.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So, yes.

Character back stories are irrelevant or useless.

**Craig:** Well, irrelevant and useless is bad in all circumstances. [laughs]

**John:** So, a thing is where it’s just like the obligatory “here’s my character backstory” but it doesn’t actually matter at all, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Yes. That would be bad.

**John:** Supernatural element is too undefined.

**Craig:** Uh….well. I don’t know. I mean, sometimes I kind of like it when the supernatural element is appropriately undefined because it’s supernatural, you know. Like when it’s like a very clear, well drawn ghost that explains what his problem is. That’s the one way of doing things. But the idea of some cloud, some evil, some presence, some thing actually matches a child’s understanding of what the dark is, so I kind of like that.

**John:** I do like that, too. I go back to The Ring, and it’s never really quite clear what’s going on with The Ring, but you are freaked out. And I love that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Totally.

**John:** The plot is dragged down by disruptive lulls.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Breaks in story where nothing happens. Momentum is lost. Well, momentum is lost is really the key thing here. How are you going from one scene to the next scene and really propelling your story forward? And if you have this little chunk where nothing is happening, that’s going to hurt you.

**Craig:** That’s got to go.

**John:** The ending is a case of deus ex machina. Oh, am I pronouncing that right?

**Craig:** Machina.

**John:** Machina. It’s a hard “Ch.”

**Craig:** Deus ex machina. Yes. People have been complaining about this since Aristotle. No question.

**John:** The gods come in an rescue you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Or something like the gods.

**Craig:** And, by the way, they’re not even right about — Lord of the Flies doesn’t have a deus ex machina because there is no rescuing. They are lost and broken permanently. Forever. [laughs] But, so I don’t even think of that — to me a deus ex machina is, well, we’ve seen them. We know. We know it when we see it.

**John:** Characters are indistinguishable from each other. We’ve talked about this a lot.

**Craig:** Yes we have.

**John:** Simple things, like your character’s names, will help you out a lot, but every character needs to be more than a name. They need to have defining characteristics so that one character’s dialogue couldn’t be said by another character.

**Craig:** Correct. If you give somebody an accent, nobody else gets that accent. If you give somebody a clipped way of speaking, nobody else speaks that way. Everybody must speak very, very differently.

**John:** Yeah. The story is one big shrug.

**Craig:** Well that would be bad.

**John:** That would be bad. I think that’s actually a fair comment. When you get to the end and you’re just like, “Yeah, okay.”

**Craig:** Right like, “Well, that was perfectly well done. I wouldn’t watch it. I don’t feel anything from it. It ticked off all the boxes. It just doesn’t ultimately deserve to be seen.”

**John:** Yeah.

Let’s power through the rest of these. Cheesy dialogue. Potboiler script. I don’t even know what potboiler means.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** Oh, the airport novel of scripts. Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I guess, but it also just means not well done.

**Craig:** Sometimes those are cool, yeah.

**John:** Drama conflict is told but not shown. Yes, show don’t tell. Great setting isn’t utilized. Well, that’s an interesting complaint. Yes. A great setting is worth making the most out of. Emotional element is exaggerated. Well, okay, but maybe sometimes that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Dialogue is stilted and unnecessarily verbose. Sure.

**Craig:** Hurts the flow. Okay. [laughs] I don’t know, unless you’re watching a Tarantino movie, and then it’s amazing. I don’t know.

**John:** Then it’s fantastic. Emotional element is neglected. Well, so, this reader has some perfect little zone of emotion where it’s not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks zone is not achieved.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, and we’re getting angry at this guy. Screw you, man! [laughs]

**John:** The script is a writer ego trip —

**Craig:** Well, this one actually did piss me off: includes excessive camera directions, soundtrack choices, actor suggestions, credit sequences. How dare you writer that has invented an entire world, and narrative, and characters, and place, and theme, and purpose, how dare you have an idea of where the camera should be looking, or what music should be playing, or who should be playing the person. Or what could even go in the credits. How dare you! That’s the job of the director.

No, dude, that’s old school. Listen, when you say excessive, all I hear is “too much for me” and I don’t know what that is. Now, finally, at this point in the podcast I’m getting a bit shirty. All right, listen, here’s the situation. I don’t believe there are any scripts that have excessive camera direction or any of this other stuff, unless it’s so excessive that it’s stopping you from reading the script. But in and of itself, this notion that writers aren’t allowed to touch this stuff needs to die.

**John:** I’m going to stick up for this guy halfway. So, I think “writer ego trip” is a terrible headline for what he’s talking about here. But things like actor suggestions is — actor suggestions don’t belong in a script. That’s breaking the script to say like, “It’s a Will Smith character.” No, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Not in the script.

**John:** But everything else, not in the script. So, he’s talking about a script. So, if that’s in the script, that’s crazy.

**Craig:** Okay, that one, fine.

**John:** And too many music choices. I think you can get away with like one music choice in your thing. More than that and it’s like you’re reading liner notes. Stop doing that.

But camera direction we’ve talked about on the show. When you do camera direction correctly it feels like you are helping — you’re creating the experience of being an audience member watching it. And that can be fantastic.

Credit sequences are fine. They’re good. I think they’re a useful thing to script if they help tell your story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, don’t stop.

**Craig:** And let me just stick up for soundtrack choices for a second. No, you don’t put in soundtrack choices if it’s just background music while a car is driving. But, if you’re building a sequence that is married to music, and there’s a song that you feel will impart what your intention is for this section, then yes, I’m okay with it. And if you need to do it four times, do it four times.

If the music specifically important to what your trying to say, if in fact you’re using the music to say something you would otherwise have to say with words, then it’s okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway, I got a bit shirty. Okay.

**John:** The script makes a reference but not a joke. A pop culture reference still needs a punch line.

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** Uh…I don’t really quite get that. I mean, I’m sure that he was noting situations where that was annoying, but as a general rule I can’t say that I agree with that general rule.

**Craig:** It’s about the characters. I mean, there are characters that speak that way. If the idea is that you’re trying to make people laugh just by citing it, then no, I agree, that’s annoying.

**John:** But I could imagine things where you’re making like a cosmopolitan joke, sort of like very Sex and the City, and so like if someone now orders a cosmo thinking that it’s really cool, I can see you having them do that and that be a pop culture reference, but making the joke about it would just be a hat on a hat. So, in some ways I think there’s times where you make the reference and you don’t try to make a joke out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or you don’t acknowledge the joke.

**Craig:** Exactly. The point is it’s just a reference which gets made.

**John:** Last one is the message overshadows the story. Well, yeah. I can think of movies that are…yeah, earnest, where you are left with a message but you don’t really care about the plot.

**Craig:** Yeah. Some people like those. I mean, if you’re making a message movie and there’s, I don’t know, I don’t write movies like that so I can’t judge.

I did want to say, have you ever seen that thing from Essanay Studios?

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** So Essanay was an old movie studio. I think it was an old movie studio from the silent film days. And someone found this thing on the internet that has been passed around. It is authentic. And it is a rejection slip from Essanay studios for your screenplay. And so we’ve just gone through all of these things written by some man or woman in 2013. Now let me read you, very quickly, this.

So, they list 17 things and they put a check mark next to the ones that apply.

**John:** That’s so wonderful.

**Craig:** So, Essanay: Your manuscript is returned for the reason checked below.
1. Overstocked
2. No strong dramatic situations.
3. Weak plot.
4. Not our style of story.
5. Idea has been done before.
6. Would not pass the censor board.
7. Too difficult to produce.
8. Too conventional.
9. Not interesting.
10. Not humorous.
11. Not original.
12. Not enough action.
13. No adaptations desired.
14. Improbable.
15. No costume plays or story with foreign settings desired. Illegible.

And last but not least:

16. Robbery, kidnapping, murder, suicide, harrowing death-bed, and all scenes of an unpleasant nature should be eliminated.

Yours very truly, Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, Chicago, Illinois.

**John:** That’s pretty fantastic. So, Craig, when I was in grade school, maybe early junior high I, well, it probably was junior high, I wrote a short story which I hoped to have published in Dragon Magazine.

**Craig:** Hmmm.

**John:** Dragon Magazine being the official monthly magazine of Dungeons & Dragons.

**Craig:** I remember it well.

**John:** And so they published some short fiction. Not every month, but every couple months they published some short fiction. So, I wrote this short story which was sort of hopefully, appropriately sort of sorcery-ish. And so I sent it in and I was so hopeful. And I got back that kind of letter. It was a one-page thing with like a checkmark.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** If I remember properly, though, I think it was just like, “Does not meet our needs at this time.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it was at least a useful thing on that since it was like, well, they liked it, it just didn’t meet their needs at this time.

**Craig:** [laughs] I like that you thought that. You were like, “Hey, dad, great news. They loved it. It doesn’t meet their needs at this time, but that’s sort of like saying it will meet their needs at another time.”

**John:** And what’s amazing is I think they actually did send it back to me, because that was a time where I was sending them a physical object and they sent me the physical object back because they did that at that time. Just the idea of somebody mailing something back to you at this point is crazy.

**Craig:** I know. I know. Well, just the idea of departments of people that are getting these things. Although, you know, it still happens. You ask anybody that works somewhere where things are submitted and packages still show up. There are people out there sending cassette tapes out.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s a wild world.

**John:** Even at the Austin Film Festival, some young musician was like, “I want you to hear my demo thing,” so gave me like a CD. I’m like I have nothing to play this in. A CD? I haven’t touched a CD in a long time.

**Craig:** Did you make a cool CD-shaped USB drive? Is that was this is? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Because that would be really useful. Ooh, you say you actually printed a URL on a business card. That would be vastly more useful to me.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I’m not going to listen to this.

**John:** Or like this is my Sound Cloud account. Oh, I know what that is.

**Craig:** Somebody should go make CD-shaped of things that aren’t CDs. I like it.

**John:** [laughs] Done.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Our next topic is this WGA negotiation that’s coming up. So, essentially this past week the DGA make their deal, or they — so, I don’t want to overstate what they did. The DGA goes into negotiations with the AMPTP which were the people who run all the major studios. And generally the DGA goes in and is the first group to talk with them about the things they would like for the next three-year contract.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they came back with some decisions and now the membership will vote on the deal that they have reached.

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually historically they haven’t been the first ones to go in. Historically they’ve gone in very early, but the way that the union contracts were staggered the Writers Guild often went first. Sometimes the actors went first. One of the biggest losses that came out of our strike with the companies in 2007/2008 was that we fell out of cycle and the DGA officially did become the first to negotiate.

Technically we are still — we still expire before they do, but it’s so close that, you know, the DGA will literally go in eight or nine months early. So, they are now in the driver’s seat firmly which is where they’ve always wanted to be and that’s where the companies want them to be. The companies know that the DGA is the most likely union to make a deal. They don’t strike.

**John:** So, next up will be the Writers Guild and the actors will have to go in and negotiate their deals. And the whole idea of being on one of these committees that negotiates these deals is horrifying to me, because why would any sane person ever want to be involved in these negotiations. But, of course, this year I actually am on the negotiating committee, so I was asked to be on this.

It’s weird. I can’t talk in any official capacity about these negotiations, but what I can do is listen to Craig Mazin describe what happened in this last deal and what the things are that we in the negotiating committee might be having our ears open to as we go into this next round of negotiations.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, the deal is that when a union arrives at one of these agreements, what they’re basically arriving at is a memorandum of basic deal points. It’s a little bit like when you and I get hired to do something. There’s something called a deal memo. And the deal memo basically says this is how many drafts we’re hiring you to do guaranteed and this is what we’re paying you for each draft.

Then there’s this long form contract that the lawyers have to write up that goes into all the nitty gritty like how much do I get paid a week if I have to travel with the production to Paris and so forth. That will still happen. The DGA still has to do that long form. But the deal memo is the important part.

We’re still kind of picking out the details from this, but here are sort of the big ones. They got some wage increases for one-hour programs on basic cable, what they call “out of pattern.” Basic cable is a big, big issue for the writers because we know that the explosion of employment on basic cable dwarfs what is currently available on network, which is where our bread and butter was back in the day of three channels or four channels.

We have a ton of people that are working in cable. And, frankly, cable is a little bit of the wild west. Some of the cable shows aren’t even union at all, which I don’t understand. I don’t understand how we let WGA writers work on those shows. That’s another topic. But they got some sort of little increase. We’re not exactly sure what.

They are continuing to work on new media in small ways. They’re coming up with residuals for things like shows on Netflix, or shows that run on Amazon. So, they’re starting to get into that business.

**John:** We should clarify, this is original programming for Netflix or for Amazon.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, things like House of Cards or any of those, or Betas, or any of those things.

**Craig:** Correct. And this is one of those areas where no one seems to know how much money there really is. And they’re trying to figure out how to create a formula that doesn’t turn around and bite you in the butt later. The Writers Guild has, in the past, vehemently argued for formulas that then turned around later were not great for us. So, we have to basically get the details on what’s been done there.

Similarly, they’re covering things in ad-supported streaming and cable video on-demand stuff. Set top box streaming. And these things were uncovered before.

**John:** Yeah, can you explain cable set top box streaming in a way that might make sense? Because I think that’s video on-demand. That’s what I think of as video on-demand. Isn’t it? Or is it a special case of video on-demand?

**Craig:** I think it may be that it is that, that it is basically, but it’s not pay-per-view, it’s different. It’s streaming through, you know what I mean?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** So if you’re streaming directly from maybe, I don’t know.

**John:** Here’s what, so once I get into this negation I’ll —

**Craig:** You’ll find out. You’ll tell us.

**John:** I’ll find out what these terms really mean. Here’s what I think it might mean. And there are some movies which are free to watch through cable. Like they’re basically video on-demand, but they’re free.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re ad-supported. That’s what it is.

**John:** Yeah, they’re either ad-supported or it’s part of a subscription. Basically you get that as part of a subscription. So, those things are free to watch because they’re buying a block of movies that you can watch when you want to watch. So, you’re not paying individually for each movie. My guess is that is the kind of thing which needs to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right. That we get some residuals based on the ad revenue. And they also, a lot of this stuff, the company is building these free windows where they’re allowed to show things without paying residuals for a little bit just to get people’s interest up and then — and apparently the window for free streaming there was reduced.

To me, the big, I guess this is the big one. The big one really is that traditionally there would be a 3% increase in our scale pay rate. Most screenwriters aren’t dealing with scale. And the 3% increase there isn’t that much anyway. The reason that was always important is because television residuals are in fact tied to minimums, to scale. So, when we would get a 3% increase over the life of the contract, that meant that residuals in perpetuity we’re going to paying out at a higher rate for television.

In the last negotiation the companies successfully worked that number back down to two. And it looks like the directors have gotten them to now over the course of three years work it back up to three again. It’s sort of like, okay, everybody recognized that the marketplace went crazy but that crisis is over and we need to get back to three again.

So, it looks like that happened. I’ll tell you that all this stuff is done. In other words, when the companies come to the Writers Guild, the terms that they negotiate with the directors will be the terms that you guys get and they will not be altered in any important way. There are some areas where things are unique and can be massaged. And for this next negotiation a lot of that has to do with the relative state of health of the pension and health funds at the different unions.

The actors have a whole bunch of issues over there. And we all have our own issues. The writers traditionally have had very strong health and pension funds. I don’t know how Obamacare is going to affect us. I have suspicion that it’s going to. And so I think part of the negotiation is going to be about protecting health and pension from perhaps an increase in taxation or penalties or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. I think not knowing any specifics about our pension plan and negotiations, the general discussion I’ve heard about Obamacare is that the Writers Guild health plan is considered like one of those luxury plans.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** It covers a whole bunch of things. And because it covers a whole bunch of things it may have different tax ramifications.

**Craig:** There’s no question. And the thing is what you start to find when you go through a negotiation process is that the companies really look at these contracts bottom line as a number. And it all gets divided up in various different ways. But when they say, okay, well we gave the directors this amount. We’re going to give you this amount. And it’s going to come in terms of an increase in residuals and this and that. And also you can move things around for health and pension.

So, I think this is going to be a fairly boring negotiation. I think it’s basically been negotiated with little areas here and there that we can fiddle with. But this is life in the world of the directors going first and I think we are going to have to get used to it.

**John:** Let’s go to our third topic for our show this week which is something you suggested which is something you suggested which is, I think was a conversation you had with a fellow writer?

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I met with a writer, he was a younger writer and he just wanted to get some advice. And obviously no names here. Terrific, terrific person. But he mentioned to me that — he was describing the various struggles that he faced as he was learning his craft and practicing his craft. And a lot of them were very familiar: finding the right amount of time, and self doubt, maybe partnerships that didn’t work out.

And then he brought up this other thing which was getting high. And, you know, you and I, we’re the old guys now. People just get high a lot. [laughs] They get high a lot.

**John:** You’re saying the younger generation gets high a lot, or our generation gets high a lot?

**Craig:** I think twenty-somethings just get way higher than we ever did. They just —

**John:** That may be true.

**Craig:** They just get high all the time. Our generation obviously got high and still gets high. And drinks. And drank and still drinks. But weed in and of itself, when we were in our twenties you could get arrested, you know? [laughs] Like I had to hide it. You really can’t now. There’s not a — and I actually like that. I believe that marijuana should be legalized.

However, I also believe that if you want to be — and this is what I told this person — stop getting high. If you want to write a screenplay, stop it. You want to get high Friday night through Sunday afternoon? Go for it. But this is a job that to me at least requires an enormous amount of sobriety. Even the famous writers who were notoriously drunk —

There was an interesting article recently. A lot of them found that they were most productive when they were writing through hangovers. It was in the aftermath of the drinking and the abuse. But, it’s romantic to think that you can get high and write the best stuff of your life.

I don’t think it works at all.

**John:** Well, in a general sense let’s talk about writers and drugs, because I think it’s actually a fascinating topic. The writers who get high because getting high reduces their inhibitions and makes the words flow or whatever, that was never me, and it’s not the experience I’ve noticed from any of my writer colleagues who sort of of my cohort. So, it’s entirely possible that this next generation that’s rising up to replace us, they are tremendously successful at writing while high and I’m just completely missing it. That same way that like I kind of didn’t understand why anyone would have a manager, then Justin Marks explaining why writers have managers.

So, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. But I kind of don’t think I’m wrong. Because my experience of being around people who get high a lot is that either you can do two things. You can use it as a crutch. Basically like, well, I can’t write because I’m not high, and I’m always high when I write. That’s tremendously challenging when you’re in any situation where you can’t get high. Where you’re actually in a room working on something and that becomes your thing. It’s like having this weird thing where you can only write when the sun is streaming through the window one certain way and any other way it won’t work. That’s bad. That’s not going to be useful to you.

The other thing I would say is that most of the people I know who get high a lot, their ambition just sort of dissipates a bit. And without ambition, I don’t think you’re going to be able to generate the quantity and quality of work it’s going to take to really make a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** I agree. I think that it’s important for me to point out that my experience of my cohorts is exactly the same as yours. I don’t know one single successful writer who has maintained a career who continues to abuse drugs or alcohol. I know some that have, and gotten over it, but I don’t know any that continue to do it as a matter of practice and can still function through it. I also think that the problem with writing while you’re high is that you’re not writing. The whole point of getting high is to alter your consciousness, which is fun.

It’s totally fun. Drinking is fun. And getting high is fun. I get it. But it’s about expanding your consciousness, and letting go of who you are for awhile, and when you come back from it, perhaps you can come back with something that you’ve learned about yourself. But then you’re not writing. There’s a you and it’s the sober you. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I would agree with you. Writing is really hard. And so I think some of the instinct behind using something like pot or people who are using Provigil or Ritalin or other sort of stimulant things, helps them sort of focus in on what they’re doing, it’s an attempt to make something that’s inherently hard feel easier. But in making it feel easier, it’s unlikely that you’re going to find great success in that solution.

If you’re on one of these, if you take Ritalin or whatever, you may pile through more pages. The odds that they’re going to be awesome pages are very, very small.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** And I would also say the same with pot. You may write a few good sentences, but it’s unlikely you’re going to get the work done that needs to get done.

**Craig:** No, screenwriting is rigorous. It requires enormous attention. To me, writing while altered is right up there with directing while altered. Or driving. And I’m taking away even the aspect of how dangerous that would be for other people, yourself physically. I mean to say your just not very good at it.

It’s something that requires focus, and attention, and intention, and thought. And the whole point of getting high is to make some of that stuff go away. You know, beyond caffeine and, you know, cigarette, you know, if you feel like hurting your lungs.

But, yeah, just no. Don’t. I think culturally speaking I was a little taken aback, not in a judgmental way, but more in a, huh, I think this is probably going on more than you and I realize.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** So, advice here is stop. I don’t think it’s going to help you.

**John:** Yeah. And so I want to phrase it as this is not a moral judgment about sort of whatever substances you want to consume. Just in my experience looking at sort of historical record of people I know who have succeeded and got stuff done, none of the people I know who have succeeded and really gotten a lot of stuff done have been using stuff frequently to do it.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Beyond the exact examples that you list, which are caffeine, which is getting you up and getting your focused through that next bit. And some people do smoke. But not that many people smoke now. Even Craig Mazin doesn’t smoke now.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s an occasional, you know. The guy that needs to smoke a cigar every day while you’re writing. Great. Worked for Mark Twain. And really caffeine and nicotine or sort of two peas in a pod. But, you know, totally agree with you. This is not judgmental. I believe all drugs should be legal. I’m very libertarian about that. And I don’t care what you do when you you’re not writing. But, I do want you to be writing, not high or drunk you.

**John:** Yeah. That’s very important. And I will also say that I’m not discounting the fact that some people have special challenges and their brains are not working right, and so this is really talking about an otherwise healthy person who is trying to write a screenplay.

If you are a person who is sort of not overall healthy in life and needs some other antidepressant or whatever else, go do that and take care of yourself first. So, that’s not like a blanket statement against all drugs or any medication that could help a person.

But specifically taking something in order to get yourself to start writing is not my advice to you.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Craig, I have a One Cool Thing. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Great. You go first.

**Craig:** This flows out of this last discussion. When I was thinking about it I realized that it would probably be a good idea if people who were out there who maybe were struggling with this as writers, is there something for writers who are struggling with substance abuse. And I found this. I can’t necessarily vouch for it, because I don’t have a substance abuse problem. And so I don’t have any personal experience. But there is an organization called Writers in Treatment. And they even have scholarships and things. And they’re an independent California non-profit company that basically was started by writers, for writers, here in Los Angeles, to help people recover from alcohol, or drug, or substance abuse, or self-harming probably, or any of these other things that writers get stuck in.

So, I don’t know if you are somebody out there who is struggling and you feel like, well, I would like to recover but I’d like to do it with people that are doing the same thing I’m doing. Then there are some resources for you. This is one. But like I said, I can’t vouch for them. Look around.

I guess the point is they’re out there.

**John:** Agreed. So, we’ll have a link to that.

My One Cool Thing is called Screenflow. And this last week I’ve been recording some different screencasts on Fountain and Highland and why I like to write in Fountain mostly. And Screenflow is the app I use to record my screen for doing those screencasts. And it’s actually just a terrific application.

In the way that we’re all probably used to taking screenshots of things so we can show like what’s going on on our screen, this is recording the video of your screen and the app is very smart at being able to let you zoom in on parts of the screen. And it very much works like Final Cut Pro in the sense that you’re able to cut between different scenes to get your point across. But it’s a terrifically well designed app that has been a pleasure to use. I’ve probably spent 25 hours in it this last week. And it’s great. So, I highly recommend Screenflow. It’s on the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, Craig, if people wanted to tweet to you or to me, I am @johnaugust. You are @clmazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you want to subscribe to us, go to iTunes and click subscribe for Scriptnotes. Just search for us and click subscribe. If you are there you can leave us a comment. We like those comments.

Next week we should really read those comments. We should go through those because it’s been awhile since we’ve responded. That’s great when people leave comments.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I think that’s it. Oh, if you have questions about stuff that we talked about today at johnaugust.com/podcast you will see a list of all the episodes we’ve done and links to the things we talked about on the show.

**Craig:** This was a packed podcast. Dense. The dense fruitcake of a podcast.

**John:** It was a long episode. It started with that dense infographic and I think it really sort of took its tone from there.

**Craig:** We’re saving lives, John. We’re saving lives. [laughs]

**John:** Perhaps.

**Craig:** I want to believe that we’re saving lives.

**John:** I do want to believe. Craig, thank you so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

LINKS:

* profound_whatever’s [post on r/screenwriting](http://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1r5y6l/ive_covered_300_spec_scripts_for_5_different/) and its [accompanying infographic](http://i.imgur.com/T22gGBO.png)
* Deus ex machina [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina)
* [Directors Guild of America Board OKs New Contract, Triggering Member Vote](http://variety.com/2013/film/news/directors-guild-of-america-board-oks-new-contract-triggering-member-vote-1200874949/) from Variety
* [WGA Announces Contract Negotiating Committee](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wga-announces-contract-negotiating-committee-655750) from The Hollywood Reporter
* [Writers in Treatment](http://www.writersintreatment.org/)
* [Screenflow](http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/) for Mac, and John’s video and post on [why he likes writing in Fountain](http://johnaugust.com/2013/why-i-like-writing-in-fountain)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli