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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/50-random-questions).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mera naam hai Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 90 of Scriptnotes, a podcast this week not so much about screenwriting, but things that could be interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I have to tell you that I just spoke Hindi and you didn’t even — you didn’t care.

**John:** Yeah. I just accept that you’re going to do weird things every week, so I just…

**Craig:** I spoke Hindi, per a listener’s request.

**John:** That’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah! I feel good about it.

**John:** You should feel good about it.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m sorry. I should acknowledge when you jump out of your comfort zone.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because it doesn’t happen very frequently.

**John:** I should tell listeners that I offered to let you actually do the intro today, and you said, “No, no, no.” And now I know the reason why you didn’t want to do the whole intro is because you’d already practiced how you were going to do your Hindi for just your one thing. And that’s why you didn’t want to do the whole “Welcome to Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** Allow me to embarrass myself. I didn’t even think that through.

**John:** Okay. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I really just think, you’re right, I mean, in retrospect that’s a good point. But more than anything I’m just becoming Rain Man-ish, and I don’t like change.

**John:** Yes. So, last night I hosted this thing at The Academy and it was tremendously fun. And we had like a thousand people there, which was great and nuts, and so I want to thank everyone for coming.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** People came up afterwards. But, it struck me — I knew I would need to start off the evening, and I just wanted to get through the first three sentences without messing up. And so I was going to start like, “Hello and good evening on behalf — my name is John August — on behalf of The Academy it is my pleasure to welcome you.”

But because I always start the podcast as, “Hello and welcome,” it was so hard to break myself of that. And so before I was going up on stage I was just in a loop going, “Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening. Hello and good evening.” But I got through it!

**Craig:** You got through it, buddy. I’m super proud of you.

**John:** Oh, thank you so much. And it made me think about our live episodes of Scriptnotes coming up this summer and how excited I am about those.

The one for the Writers Guild Foundation is a lock. And that is definitely going to happen. The second one in July, dates could be shifting a little bit, but there’s going to be something in July to celebrate our hundredth anniversary. So, I look forward to seeing more of our people in person then.

**Craig:** Yes, our people.

**John:** Our people.

**Craig:** Come to us, our people.

**John:** Craig, you had two items for the agenda before we get to all of these great questions that listeners have submitted. So, let’s talk through the agenda items first.

**Craig:** Yeah, real quick, because we have so much to talk about today. So many questions to answer. Two topics. One, Zach Braff redux. And, two, what’s going on with E! and the Fashion Police strike.

So, real quick on Zach Braff. There was kind of a weird thing that happened over the last couple of days where The Hollywood Reporter basically said, “Hey look, this other film financier came in and gave him a whole big bunch of money, like another $8 million or whatever.” So, he is, according to that article, he is funding his movie with traditional funding and all of you people that gave him $2 million, why? Why would you have done that?

Turns out that’s not exactly the case. Really what’s going on is that it’s gap financing. And Zach Braff had always said in his Kickstarter, “Look, I’m going to fund this movie through Kickstarter and foreign presales.” And foreign presales kind of work in such a way that you sell the movie to people before you make it based on who’s in it. And they say, “Okay, we’ll buy it for this.”

But you need to make the movie now. That’s money is not showing up for awhile. So, these gap financiers come in and say, “We’ll loan you that money, because we have the collateral of all these people who have agreed to pay you the money.” And so that’s kind of how that works.

However, I should just add, I don’t think people really understood how foreign financing presales work and, frankly, the truth is even though he told you this from the start, he was really saying, “Look, I’m going to finance this movie half traditionally for people that get something for what they give, and half not traditionally — you get nothing for what you give.” So, I’m not surprised that people are confused. This is going to come up and up again.

**John:** I didn’t follow it all that closely, but it seemed like there was backlash. And there was backlash-backlash, and it just becomes this big cycle of whatever. It’s very common — what you’re talking about with gap financing — is actually very, very common. It’s how a lot of indies get made. And so there’s nothing wrong with that. It just gets swirled into all of this crowd sourced excitement and enthusiasm and it just becomes weird.

So, I can understand everyone’s perspective on why they’re frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. Normally this isn’t an issue because films are financed by financiers who are in it for profit and not for joy and pro-social activity. Now, we’ve kind of — it’s a strange thing to fund an enterprise with both charity and traditional profit investment.

**John:** Now, while I know almost nothing about the Zach Braff situation, I know even less about this E! Fashion Police thing, so catch me up to speed on that.

**Craig:** So, Fashion Police, I don’t know if you ever watch it.

**John:** No. I don’t. I never actually turn on E! — like for years I haven’t seen E!. So, tell me about it. It’s a Joan Rivers show?

**Craig:** It’s a Joan Rivers show. So, it’s a panel show, Joan Rivers, and Kelly Osbourne, and a very thin woman, and a very funny fashion guy, they critique red carpet fashion. And it’s just a super gay catty show and it’s really, really funny. My wife watches it religiously, so I kind of absorb it. You know, she has her thing of Fashion Police and then The Soup. And it’s actually really, really funny. I mean, Joan Rivers is still super, duper funny.

But, the problem is that the writers of that show just haven’t been paid very well. And they essentially want to be unionized. They want it to be a WGA show. A lot of them are WGA writers, which kind of drives me crazy a little bit, because if you’re a WGA writer you’re not allowed to write on shows that are not WGA shows if there is a contract that exists to cover that show, or that could cover it. You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s one of our rules. And it kind of makes me nuts, but I guess it’s so widespread you can’t do anything about it. Long story short, they walked off and basically said, “Look, we want a union deal.”

And E! said, “Um, yeah, listen, um, all you have to is vote. If you just have an official union election governed by the NLRB then we’ll let you be WGA.”

And I just wanted to tell people following along at home, if you’ve read that, that’s basically baloney. The deal is the writers have already expressed that they want t be union. The great majority of them want to be union. E! has the ability to just say, “Oh, okay, you all want to be union, or a great majority of you want to be union. Poof. Let’s just start negotiating a union deal.”

The reason they’re insisting on an official NLRB election process is because that drags it out, it gives them a lot more control over the process. They have the potential to try and fire some people, even though that’s illegal they do it all the time. They also have the ability to put a lot of pressure on the writers to not vote. They get a chance to make their case very strongly. It’s essentially a union-busty kind of thing.

But the fact is all they have to do, when they’re like, “Just vote.” They don’t need to vote. Everybody that understands how unions work knows what they’re doing, so anyway, what I’m really saying is, hey, E!, come on. They want to be Writers Guild. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a funny show. I’m sure you guys make a lot of money on it. Please, just come on.

**John:** Yeah. In previous situations we’ve talked about reality shows and it’s a question of like is that really writing, what are they really doing, and there was a whole controversy when the WGA was trying to cover these shows. There was a real question of is that the kind of thing that should really be covered.

But here, this is writing…

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** You’re writing material that’s being performed on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a comedy variety show. So, come on, E!. Enough with the, “Oh, we need an election.” Gee, golly, if only they would just vote.” Yeah, come on, please. Too smart for you.

Okay. So, those were my follow ups.

**John:** Hooray. My only bit of news that I will launch before we go into our big questions is Highland Version 1.0.2 is in the Mac App Store right now, so if people are using Highland they can download the new version. The new version has a really cool way of making things uppercase. You can hit shift-return and it makes that line uppercase, which is incredibly useful in Fountain.

And it has lyrics, because I needed people to sing. So, this is completely scratching my own itch. I needed lyrics, and now there are lyrics.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** But our podcast today, I’m so excited, is all about things other than screenwriting. That will be the last screenwriting thing we’ll mention today, because for now on it’s just John and Craig talking about stuff we are probably not really qualified to talk about, but we’re going to talk about anyway. We’re going to answer these questions.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, people wrote in. We had 90 questions or something. We had a tremendous amount of questions. We culled the list down a little bit. People wrote in at ask@johnaugust.com. They sent us Twitter questions. They went on our Facebook page and asked questions. So, let’s hit it.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Maybe we’ll alternate, so I’ll start with the first question which is from a guy named Jason. “If I someday have the opportunity to be uploaded into a robot body, should I do it?”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I say yes also. And, obviously, the topic of mortality and sort of what it means to be alive are valid questions. They’re good philosophical questions. They’re good questions for a movie. But, if I had the opportunity to like not die, and be a robot, I’m okay with that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You definitely want to do this, because you are just your brain. I’m assuming when you say “uploaded into” you mean your brain as exists uploaded in.

I’ve often wondered what happens if — I guess it doesn’t matter — you upload your brain, you make a copy of your brain into a robot. Now, you and your robot friend are kind of in that moment the same, but now it’s just that your robot friend who is you just diverges from that point because of their different experiences.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, it would be fun to know that person.

**John:** It’s like the software has forked and it’s gone in different directions. It comes down to the question of software and hardware. And is the person the hardware, is the person the software? I am a software person. I think the person is the code that’s running. And if that code can run without your physical body, I’m cool with that.

**Craig:** Totally. Now, the key for me is if you upload me into robot body, I kind of actually want you to kill my other self. [laughs] Because there can only be one.

Next question. Do we say who wrote in, or no?

**John:** Yes, we’ll say the person, but not the last name. But you can say Vancouver.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sarah in Vancouver. “This year I decided to stop coloring my hair and let my natural dusky silver grow in. Seeing as you’re both the same vintage as me, and the kind of men I’d be attracted to…”

**John:** Mmm.

**Craig:** Oh, hmmm…”I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the attractiveness and sex appeal of women with gray hair. I seem to be the only one excited about being natural again. People either find it amusing or disturbing. Am I alone out here? What should I do?”

**John:** Yeah. She didn’t include a photo, so we don’t know whether she’s a woman who looks amazing with gray or silver hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Look, I think natural can be awesome. And I think if you like being natural the way your hair is, that’s great. The most important thing about being attractive is being confident. And if being natural gives you confidence there, that’s terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. I basically agree. I mean, definitely what happens is your physical appearance is the thing that kind of starts the ball rolling with men, but those of us who are into women, a lot of it then is what happens after. So much of it is what happens after. What happens when you open your mouth and you start talking? Are you interesting? Are you fascinating? Are you funny? Are you cool?

It’s a fact that biologically men are programmed to be attracted to youth. It just comes down to the whole spread your genetic material around pregnancy, animal behavior theory of sex and sexual attraction. So, it will probably stop a few guys in their tracks. It may make it a little more difficult for some guys.

But, you know, whatever. Who cares? If you’re cool and you’re awesome, I don’t really think it’s going to stop anyone.

**John:** I would agree. Next question comes from Ben in San Angelo, Texas. “If you had to start from scratch, let’s say your current mind got zapped to your teenage body, would you do it all over again?”

**Craig:** Interesting theme that keeps emerging. Well, yeah, I would do it all over again because I love my life, and I love all of it, even the parts that are terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I thought about this a lot. And if I could go back and sort of do junior high and high school, all that stuff over again, I would because there was stuff I definitely enjoyed, but there is stuff I know I would enjoy differently knowing what I know now.

**Craig:** Oh, wait, you know what you know now?

**John:** Yeah. That’s the trick of the question — do you get to take your current experience with you back to the past?

**Craig:** Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I just want to basically do everything that’s happened already again. I want to rewatch the episode.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know that I want to do everything that’s happened again. I mean, I’ve had…

**Craig:** So, you don’t want to meet Mike? You’re going to meet some other guy. You might not have a kid. You get run over, [laughs], by a cart.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a Sliding Doors quality of like if you got to live your life again would stuff necessarily turn out better for having the information. Maybe not.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. Cool.

**Craig:** So, finally a difference there. Justin from Arlington, Virginia with a great question. “Croissant, English muffin, or biscuit?”

**John:** I think they’re all excellent choices. I can enjoy any one of those things. I find that a great biscuit at the right moment with a little butter, a little honey, there’s maybe nothing better.

**Craig:** I find biscuits to be big handfuls of glue and croissants are too greasy for me. I’m an English muffin guy.

**John:** English muffin for a hamburger, by the way, a fantastic choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do it all the time. Whole wheat English muffin. Hard to beat.

**John:** Ed writes, this is a question for you, “What E-cigarette brand do you recommend? Any cons to e-cigging?”

**Craig:** Interesting that this question comes up because I quit smoking those things.

**John:** I’m so glad, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, you don’t have to be that glad. It’s not that big of a deal, although I have to say it’s — ugh, quitting nicotine is the worst. What it does to your brain? Ugh, anyway. It’s been a weird week. You can imagine.

So, look, what I recommend is just not starting, but if you’re smoking regular cigarettes, definitely. And you don’t want to deal with cold turkey. Definitely switching over to e-cigarettes is good. I recommend just generically using the Boge Cartomizer. That’s B-O-G-E.

And you can get standard — there are these standard batteries. I can’t remember the model number, but they’re sort of skinny black batteries with either blue or red tips at the end. If you go to — there’s a cool website called Cignot. Cignot.com. They sell all that stuff.

And then in terms of the liquid, I recommend Johnson Creek because they are made here and it is actually looked over by people that seem to care as opposed to, I don’t know, a Chinese factory somewhere just dumping spare melamine and liquid lead into a vat. [laughs]

Yeah, the cons of e-cigging: incredibly addictive and when you quit those it will suck.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Did I tell you that we were at Disneyland, and so we were on the Silly Symphony which is those swings that spin around? There’s never a line because it’s never actually all that fun.

**Craig:** I know those, yeah.

**John:** But my kid likes it. So, there’s this woman in front of me and she had something glowing in her hand. I’m like, oh my god, she has an eCig and she’s like using her eCig while she’s on that swing.

**Craig:** Cool lady. I mean, she just doesn’t care. [crosstalk] Yeah, I like it.

Here’s a question for you, [laughs], from…

**John:** I think it’s really a question for you.

**Craig:** I know, it’s really a question for both of us, I think. It’s from our friend TS and he wants to know, “Should I seduce a married man?”

I’m pretty sure we have the same answer.

**John:** I would say probably not.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** Yeah, here’s the question — are you wrong to go into, not knowing what somebody’s marital situation is. You know, somebody could be married but they could be separated, or they could have an open relationship. There could be reasons why you’re not a terrible person for going into that situation. You’re not a morally terrible person.

Are you going to be emotionally hurt trying to seduce a married man? Yeah, very likely. So, I think you’re better off sticking with people who are actually available.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the word “seduce” that’s the problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, “sleep with,” if the guy is living a closeted life and he’s into you, whatever. But “seduce” is sort of, that’s a tougher one.

**John:** Yeah. Should you seduce anyone? Well, yeah, I guess you can seduce a single person.

**Craig:** Yeah, no of course. Yeah, sure. But seducing married people is kind of — don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of crappy.

**Craig:** That’s not nice.

**John:** Clint asks, “I’m considering replacing my lawn with Buffalo grass. If memory serves, John August made the change a while back. How is that working out? Is it worth the expense and effort? Anything you’d do differently?”

So, yes, and I’m actually looking at the Buffalo grass that is growing in our backyard right at this moment. And it was pretty good.

So, the deal with Buffalo grass is unlike normal grass where you can put out a seed or you can roll out the big long strips of it, Buffalo grass actually has much, much deeper roots, and so you have to plant little plugs. It’s sort of like you are getting a hair transplant and they’re putting those little plugs into the dirt.

And that’s a hassle and it just took a tremendous amount of work. And the crows came after the plugs and pulled them out, so we had to scare away the crows and redo it. But, once it grew in it’s been really, really solid. And you kind of don’t have to water it much at all. And it looks pretty good. So, I would do it again.

We used UC Verde Buffalo Grass. It was the type that they figured it… It was the UC System that studied all the kinds of Buffalo grass and this is the one that actually works well on lawns.

It’s been really solid. And if you have dogs or cats or whatever, they won’t burn holes in the lawn they way they can with normal grass. So, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Nice. That would be — maybe I should think about that.

So, Patrick here in Los Angeles writes, “What’s your favorite weeknight meal to cook for your families?”

**John:** Do you cook, Craig?

**Craig:** I do. I love cooking. But when I cook it’s either like a big, adventuresome cooking thing, or I tend to do little smaller things like on-the-spot breakfasts or lunches. So, I don’t have a routine weeknight meal that I cook. But my daughter does love my famous grilled cheese sandwich. I like making a nice grilled cheese with a little tomato soup. But when I cook I go crazy and I just go nuts.

I like making desserts.

**John:** Yeah. So, I am by nature more of a baker rather than a cook. So, for a long time I would make like a lot of desserts. And I’d bake cakes, and cookies, and all that kind of stuff. And now I don’t do that very much anymore because we don’t eat that kind of stuff anymore.

My husband does most of the daily cooking, but when I do do cooking, turkey meatloaf is sort of a good staple for us. We have a really good turkey meatloaf that we like. Mini turkey meatloaf — that’s the crucial thing. When you make that giant meatloaf, only the little outside of it gets browned. But if you make little small meatloafs, then it all gets good and brown.

**Craig:** Like in little ramekins?

**John:** No, you actually do it on a baking sheet, flat on a baking sheet.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. You just make like little mounds on it.

**John:** Little mounds. And the key I have learned is to sort of mound them up like a shark fin, because they will sort of soften down a bit as it bakes, but it will end up with a nice shape if it’s sort of pointy at the start. And every little bit gets a little more ketchup. So, that plus roasted cauliflower and maybe some spinach or something else, that’s a really good weeknight meal.

**Craig:** That’s good. I’m still kind of into making desserts. I like making pies from scratch, crusts from scratch.

**John:** I like pie crust, too.

**Craig:** Chocolate mousse. I like chocolate mousse. I like making complicated things. I feel like I like the chemistry a little.

**John:** And people are always intimidated by like a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Turkey is one of the easiest things you could possibly ever make.

**Craig:** Brine.

**John:** Well, yes, we’ve talked about the brine. But essentially, you know what you do? You clean the bird and you stick it in a hot oven. People make too much of a deal of it.

**Craig:** Brine it, stick it, don’t put stuffing in it like a dope.

All right, so what do we have next?

**John:** Billie Jean asks, “What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done in front of an idol, or a celebrity, or a mentor?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I can remember mine. It’s so stupid. So, it was — I’m going to say it was 1993. And I was sitting with a friend. We were by Johnny Rockets at the Beverly Connection. And we look over, it’s like around 10pm actually. And we look over and there’s Jerry Seinfeld talking with a friend.

Oh my god. Jerry Seinfeld. You know, it’s 1993; Jerry Seinfeld is the king of the world. And I’m like, “I got to go, I got to go say hi to Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve got to shake his hand or do something.” And he’s like, well, do it.

So, as we’re leaving, I start walking, I’m parallel to Jerry Seinfeld. I’m too scared. I’m now a step past him and I’m like, no, no, no, I can’t not do it. So then I just whirl around and I go, “Mr. Seinfeld, it’s really nice to meet you.”

And he was like, “What?” Because he really thought that I was going to stab him. Because that’s the motion I made. It was the motion of a guy walking past somebody and then suddenly flinging themselves into their personal space and then saying, “It’s really nice to meet you.” But he hasn’t met me. There’s just a man suddenly in his face. It was terrible.

**John:** That’s pretty bad.

**Craig:** It was so stupid.

**John:** Mine is not embarrassing as much as just like really, really awkward, and especially awkward because there’s a photo of it that my husband insists on keeping because it’s just so awkward.

So, this is at the opening of the USC Film School. They had this big gala event where they had celebrities and famous people there. And so I was downstairs touring the post-production area and Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are there. And so I know Katie Holmes but I hadn’t seen her in years. And so, they’re like, oh, say hi to Tom and Katie. Like, oh great.

So, we’re in this really narrow space, and so I’m shaking hands with Katie. And it’s like, “Hey, how are you?” Trying to talk about her kid, because we have a kid about the same age. And I meet Tom Cruise. And Tom Cruise, anyone who has met Tom Cruise, he sort of like locks eyes on you. And it’s just this weird sort of like tractor beam thing that Tom Cruise does.

And so there’s this photo of us having this really awkward meeting in this narrow hallway from this angle, and I look bizarre in it. I look like I’m some sort of Martian who is talking to people from Venus. And it was incredibly awkward because of just…and then of course the whole Tom and Katie of it all, because this is right when, you know, their sort of sudden relationship and what all that was.

**Craig:** Yeah. That does sound weird.

**John:** That’s an odd thing.

**Craig:** That is odd.

**John:** One thing I should say about meeting a celebrity is it’s also that always awkward thing of like, you know, “Hi, I’m this person,” and they’ll say their name back. It’s like, well, of course you’re that person because you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, when they say like, “Hi, I’m Tom,” it’s like, yeah, I know you’re Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? There’s like a weird contract that you have with famous people that they’re going to tell you their name and you’re going to go, “Hi, I’m Craig,” like, I did not know that. This is a normal meeting. You’re not famous.

**John:** What I found, like even last night at The Academy thing, when someone is coming up, and there was a little bit of a receiving line kind of quality that happens, the next person that comes up, I’ll just say, “Hi, I’m John,” because it just starts the conversation. So, it’s natural that we do it.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s why these people do these things. I find it easier to deal with celebrities and famous people now because I think once you hit 40 you start to realize you’re older than a lot of them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know? I’m older than Bradley Cooper. It’s kind of weird.

**John:** It is weird.

**Craig:** But I am, because I don’t know, he seems like a man. He is a man.

Here’s a question from JD. “You’re both in love and in some states both married.” I think you’re just married. “Do you think it’s important to have more common interests than not with a significant other? Or, are opposite interests okay as long your personalities and respect for one another’s wants and needs remain constant?”

**John:** I would say that shared interests are very, very useful so that you have something to talk about. And I think it’s going to be hard to get very far in a relationship if you don’t have some good overlap in things that you are interested in other than sort of like kind of generally digging the person. But you don’t need to have that 100 percent match. And there should be things that one person loves and obsesses over and the other person couldn’t care less about, as long as they don’t openly mock. That’s good and fine.

But you want to be able to go places and do things and have some reason to be able to go out to certain events at nighttime. If one person hates the theater, that’s fine. You’ll always find other people to go to the theater with. But, if that person hates theater, and movies, and concerts, and everything else, and you like those things, then it’s not going to work out well.

**Craig:** I tend to shade a little bit more to saying opposite interests are actually a great thing. And what keeps us together as bonded pairs is our intangible love and assistance for each other. And the things that are going around outside of us are so much less important. And, frankly, it’s nice to be able to get away from my wife and do things I like doing that she doesn’t care about and vice versa.

It’s so hard to find someone, I mean, of course, if really there is no common interests it is unlikely that the two people will fall in love anyway. But, I think that sometimes people make too much of “we both like doing the same thing.” Uh, yeah. It’s that we do something for each other that we like.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, the ideal spouse is somebody who is always on your side, is like always on your team. And that’s a really crucial thing. It doesn’t mean you have to have 100 percent alignment on everything.

I’m always amazed though by the mixed marriages where people have radically different beliefs and somehow they make it work. And that I just don’t know how they do it.

**Craig:** I get it. Because, the truth is for those people they’re getting something from the other person that’s so much more valuable than agreement on a topic. You know, there are things that go to our survival, our sense of safety and security and feeling loved.

You know what? Look at children and their parents. So many children have different political views than their parents. The still love their parents. The parents still love the kids, you know?

**John:** Well, that’s a central theme of Big Fish, though, is that throughout your entire life you get to pick your relationships, you get to pick the people who are going to be your friends, you get to pick the people you are going to marry, but parents are just sort of assigned to you. It’s just like a big lottery and you end up with these people. And you’re supposed to have this amazing relationship with these people.

But, you didn’t pick them. They didn’t pick you. And somehow you’re supposed to get along on everything. I think sometimes we put unrealistic expectations on what that relationship is supposed to be, “Because he’s your father, how could you not love him?”

“Well, I didn’t pick him.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t have to get me started on that topic.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that one.

**John:** Kristen in Seattle writes, “I would like to know if you guys like cats. And if you know why of all the animals in the animal kingdom cats purr?”

**Craig:** Well, a two part question. No, I don’t like cats. I find them annoying. I love dogs. Actually, I once talked to a veterinarian about this whole purring thing, and the truth is they don’t really know. I mean, there’s like some cockamamie theory that purring helps healing because there’s like some vibration thing that happens. I don’t believe that.

I think it’s probably just something they do.

**John:** Yeah. Because I think big cats purr, too. So, it’s not something that we kind of bred into cats. I think it’s a natural thing that cats do. But, it’s like there’s lot of other animals that do weird things, just they’re not around us all the time so we don’t notice it.

I like cats. And I did not grow up with cats. And I’ve always been very allergic to cats. But I learned to love cats because my friend, Elizabeth, had cats. And so I would talk to her on the phone, this is sort of pre-internet, so we would just talk to each other on the phone for like an hour a night. And so I would hear all about her cats. And so I knew all these details about her cats.

And then in our house here we don’t have cats because I’m allergic to cats, but in Los Angeles people should understand that there are cats everywhere. Los Angeles is just full of cats. And so there are some feral cats, but also some house cats that sort of just wander through our yard. And they’re really cool. And like one of them is actually Patricia Arquette’s cat wanders through our yard.

**Craig:** Is her name Patricia Arcat?

**John:** Wouldn’t that be amazing? I never even thought of that. That’s why you’re the comedy writer.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was a really good joke, man. [laughs]

**John:** That’s a great joke. You could get fifty bucks for that on Fashion Police.

**Craig:** At least.

**John:** [laughs] Rollie is just the best cat in the world. So, we eat lunch outside — Stuart, Ryan, and I eat lunch outside — and Rollie will just come over and hang out. Just the best cat in the world. But I like cats that are sort of like dogs, and that’s why I like Rollie so much.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, cats don’t do it for me.

**John:** Cats are great.

Next up is Victor from Pittsburgh.

**Craig:** Victor, yeah. Are you reading this one? I’m reading this one?

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Okay, this guy is moving, and Victor is “moving into an apartment that for the first time is all [his] own, a real home to call [his] own.” I guess he’s been living in dorms and things like that. “It’s a blank slate coming with no furniture. As the hip artsy fellows that you are, I’m sure your lovely LA homes are decked out with only the finest in furniture and decor. What do you suggest for a first time home renter? Goodwill, IKEA, or anything else? Standing desk? Specific recommendations? First time apartment stories worth sharing?”

**John:** I think IKEA gets a bad rap. I think some stuff from IKEA is absolutely fine. And, I mean, that’s the motto for IKEA: For now it’s fine. That should just be their tag line. I give it to them for free.

Because there’s decent stuff you can get that will work okay in your apartment for a while. So, IKEA or CB2 or sort of the lower rent brands for sort of the big furniture companies, they’re absolutely fine. I would say you’re not going to have a lot of stuff, so sort of embrace a nice minimalism that looks good.

The best thing you can do for your apartment to look nice is to clean it and to not let it be a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree. Don’t get cluttery with it. Apartments are small. In general, small spaces look best when they are minimally appointed, because they can’t handle a lot of clutter, they can’t handle a lot of different heights, and shapes, and things. Low, sleek, simple, small. I totally agree on IKEA as far as, you know, look, your job at this point is to succeed and move on save your money. Don’t spend money on furniture now, that’s crazy.

So, yeah, sure, go to IKEA. Get disposable Swedish furniture. Enjoy putting it together yourself. There are some nice tasteful things that they have there. And just do it.

There are people that really get into, “Ooh, look at my cool vintage sofa that I found at Goodwill, that’s full of bed bugs or smells.” Eh, you know, you’re going to have to move it, you know? You’re not living in this apartment the rest of your life. Think about that, too.

**John:** One of my favorite pieces of apartment furniture was something I found in the dumpster of the apartment building. It was this big green dresser. And it had these really handles on it, so I took them off and I put like cool handles on it. And that was my dresser for six years.

And that stuff is fine and good, too. Yeah, don’t worry about it too much.

**Craig:** Do not.

**John:** Steve asks, “How much can you guys bench press?”

**Craig:** Hmm, good question. Well, I haven’t been to the gym lately, and you know, my maximum bench press, I was never that strong. I think like one time, like one up and down, I think maybe like — I don’t know — probably I could do 200 pounds or something like that.

**John:** I did 205 for eight.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Yeah, so I was checking with my trainer today, because I asked him. And he said, “Oh, that’s what you can do.” So, that’s great. I actually probably couldn’t do that right now because I’ve been in Chicago and I haven’t had a trainer for awhile, but that’s what I could theoretically do.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was more, I like dumbbells. So, I like to do multiples with like two-50s. You know, not 250s, but two individual 50-pounds dumbbells and do like twelve reps or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, I do find that dumbbells, I don’t have that fear of dying, because there’s not going to be that bar that’s going to crush me.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** That’s the thing about bench pressing is that fear of like you’re actually going to be trapped underneath this forever. At least I could also like drop free weights.

**Craig:** And dumbbells are harder because you have to individually steer and balance, you know, whereas the bar of a bench press bar helps kind of stabilize.

Kyle from Salt Lake City says, “If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?”

**John:** I would choose flight, the two-handed arms pointed out at the sky flight.

**Craig:** I would go with invisibility. Super useful.

**John:** Yeah, that one is really useful.

**Craig:** Super useful. Flying, though, would be great though.

**John:** Yeah. Lawrence from New York City asks, for me, I guess, “Are you spoken to in a different manor because you are gay/straight??? Do they expect more or less of you because of your sexuality??? Do they believe you should be better at melodrama and weepy stuff, and sports films or action??? How does sexuality affect your career??? Does it???” All of these questions end with three question marks, which…stop doing that.

Lawrence, stop asking questions with three question marks.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, Lawrence’s basic question is has being gay impacted my career at all in Hollywood. I don’t think it’s had a huge impact. I think, yes, I don’t get considered for sports movies as much. That’s not a huge tragedy in my life. But John Logan who’s gay, he wrote Any Given Sunday.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think that’s because you’re gay.

**John:** No. I think it’s because I don’t give a rat’s ass about sports.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I write action movies and people call me in for that. I don’t think that it ever comes up that much. I will say that when I was writing the first TV show I did, D.C., it was the only situation in my whole Hollywood time where I walked into a room and I felt like “faggot” had just been said, because it was this weird energy that had happened.

And I’m not sure who it was, or what was going on, but it was really, really uncomfortable. But that’s kind of been it.

And so a lot of times I will, they’ll ask me like, “Hey, do you want to become a bigger part of the Writers Guild Gay Writers Group?” I’m just like I don’t know that I need it. I don’t know that we need it. I don’t know that it’s actually a hue problem. It hasn’t been a huge problem for me, so I don’t relate to it.

**Craig:** Now there are so many gay producers, so many gay executives. It’s just, I don’t know. Yeah.

**John:** I think it would be much harder to be homophobic in this town than to be gay.

**Craig:** Openly homophobic? Oh, yeah, good luck. [laughs] I don’t think that can work. No.

**John:** It’s not going to go well.

**Craig:** I don’t think that would work. And, frankly, you’re just in the wrong business. I mean, if you don’t enjoy gay people and you don’t enjoy the expression of gay culture and gay humor and gay aesthetic, you’re just in the wrong business.

Earling writes, “Can either of you actually sing? Which musical production do you wish you could have had the chance to experience in person? And which musical to film do you think has resulted in the greatest or poorest film adaptation?”

**John:** Great. So, we’ve established that Craig can sing, because Craig sang on an earlier podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Earling.

**John:** Yeah, go back and do your research.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can sing well enough to get the point of a song across. And so I’ve gotten to be a better singer through Big Fish. So, I can sing a little bit. I can’t sing the way that the actors can sing in Big Fish, but I can sing well enough that I’m not scared to sing.

Which musical production do you wish you could have seen in person? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** I mean, I’ve never actually seen any production of Funny Girl, but Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl was probably awesome.

**Craig:** It probably was awesome. Yeah. I’d probably go with Fiddler on the Roof. The original Fiddler on the Roof. I just love that show. And I just think that would have been amazing to see that. Every song is just so great.

And what do you think about this musical to film, up and down?

**John:** I loved Chicago. And I love Chicago as a stage play, but I love it as a movie, too. And I think it was just a really, really smart version that captured the stuff I loved about the stage version and made it a movie.

**Craig:** It did. That’s a very good choice. I would probably go with West Side Story only because it may be the best musical ever and it also happens to be a great, great film, too. So, that’s a very high risk/high reward kind of thing to go from something that’s truly brilliant, take it to film, and not blow it.

Poorest, you know, I hate doing this, but The Producers, because The Producers was a great movie, and then they surprised everybody by doing a terrific musical of it. But the movie of the musical of the movie just didn’t work.

**John:** I have not seen it.

**Craig:** It just didn’t work. And I love everybody in it. And, yeah, it didn’t work. Plus, they cut out the best song, King of All Broadway.

Anyway, those are our answers.

**John:** Cool.

CC from Calabasas asks, “I love to hear about your solar panels and your electric cars. What are some other fun high end toys or home improvements that you recommend?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s one thing that I’ve signed up for, you know, when they make a big splashy thing, “Look, we have this new product coming but it’s not ready yet,” so you put your email on it and they tell you when it’s ready. And it’s called Kevo and it’s basically a lockset for your door that fits right in the regular deadbolt that locks that thing, but it’s controlled by your phone.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And I think it’s as simple as like a Bluetooth thing. So, you walk up to your door and it unlocks.

**John:** That would be great.

I like our Nest Thermostats. They’ve been really useful for us.

**Craig:** Love those.

**John:** I love that I can on my iPhone app see like, is the air conditioner running? I will turn it on. Or, I can turn it on like when I’m at the restaurant saying like let’s get it cooled down before I get home. That’s been awesome and great.

My husband has also been really good about sort of switching out all of our light bulbs to LEDs and energy efficient lights. So, throughout the whole house we’re all that way, and that’s part of the reason why we’re able to generate so much power and sell so much power back to the City of Los Angeles. We actually use very little power now which has been terrific.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Next question, John Ligget asks, “Hey, I think you should talk about food on your podcast and your favorite restaurants.”

Favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. I love Mozza. I love — both Osteria Mozza and the Pizzeria Mozza are fantastic. What are your favorite restaurants in Los Angeles?

**Craig:** You know, I’m not like a favorite restaurant guy. I guess if I had to say one, I really love Sasabune.

**John:** Okay. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Sushi place on the west side. And Sushi Nozawa and Sugarfish. I like really, really good sushi. But I’ll go to any restaurant. I’m pretty easygoing about restaurants. I’m not really a foodie. I love interesting food. I love the food that foodies eat, I just don’t love obsessing about food, and the trucks, and, oh, this new spot, and this guy used to own this place, and opens that place. And when people start having that discussion my eyes roll back in my head and I lose consciousness.

**John:** Yeah. I like to go to dinner with friends, but I’d much rather go to a mediocre restaurant with good friends than a great restaurant with people I don’t like.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Next up.

**Craig:** All right, next up we’ve got Hanu Carl. [laughs] Hanu Carl — so cute, in the Valley, question mark, exclamation point, exclamation point. “Kwanzaa or Diwali? Which of the non-Christmas holidays is cooler? Feel free to address history, music, fashion, and food.” My answer is none of them. The only cool holiday around Christmastime is Christmas. Sorry.

**John:** I’m 100 percent Diwali. I love Diwali. I love kind of everything Indian and I love Indian food. Come on, Diwali for me.

**Craig:** I love Indian food, too. I love everything Indian. I’m a big fan of the culture. I don’t need to celebrate Diwali though, or Kwanzaa. Frankly, I don’t even celebrate Christmas. Here’s the truth: I’m the Grinch and I don’t like celebrations. But I do love Indian food.

**John:** You’ll love the hundredth episode of Scriptnotes celebration, though. That’s a celebration you’ll endorse?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a holiday, you know?

**John:** I heard they’re actually going to shut down the town, though. I mean, everyone is going to take the day off and it’s going to be big deal.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Carmen in Missouri asks, “What are your thoughts on bacon? What are your thoughts on bacon in desserts?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Bacon is very good, it’s very tasty. I don’t care for the ridiculous internet obsession with bacon. You know, this is the worst of the internet. Take something that’s perfectly good but a little downscale and then turn it into like a meta, quasi-ironic worship thing. Yeah, it’s bacon, whatever. Isn’t there other stuff to talk about?

I do think that bacon in desserts is perfectly fine in the sense that savory plus sweet can be a nice thing. But, the whole bacon thing, it drives me nuts.

**John:** I’m glad to hear you say, because it drives me nuts, too.

**Craig:** What is that, John?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s the obsession over things that you don’t need to worry about being obsessed with. So, I don’t eat normal bacon, because I don’t eat beef, or pork, or mammals. So, I eat turkey bacon. And so I obviously like suspect because I eat turkey bacon which is not really a thing and I should be shunned for eating turkey bacon.

But I like turkey bacon just fine.

**Craig:** Turkey bacon is good. I like turkey bacon.

**John:** It’s delicious. And so whatever you want to do with bacon, great, go for it. But don’t push it at me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And like stop inventing fake obsessions, the point of which is that obsessions are silly but yet cool. All right, hipsters, go ahead with your bacon.

Ooh, Fabrizio from Italy. “If your podcasts weren’t about screenwriting or anything related to filmmaking, what would it be about?” Huh? What?

**John:** Mine would be yet another tech podcast, another sort of Mac Geekery podcast. And so I guest on some of those podcasts at times and I enjoy talking about that stuff, but really we don’t need another one, so I shouldn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think I would talk about anything else. I’m just simply not qualified. I’m barely qualified to talk about this. Let’s put it that way.

**John:** Chris Han in East LA writes, “What lessons do you have for nerds for a successful marriage?”

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know. Because they’re nerds?

**John:** Or for anybody.

**Craig:** You know, okay, here’s my big lessons — these are not shocking. Be faithful to your spouse. Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of time on your own. Don’t be afraid if they spend a little bit of time on their own. Don’t be contemptuous of your spouse. And, you know, avoid things like violence. I mean, it’s not really — I’ll tell you the number one, the number one thing. Honestly, everybody’s going to give you a bunch of platitudes. Number one thing: Be faithful. Be faithful. There you go.

**John:** I think all your points are very good. The other thing I would say is to always understand that your spouse is his or her own person and to always keep in mind what do they want or what do they need to do. And to figure out how you can be supportive to what they want or what they need to do, because their needs and wants may not immediately line up with what your needs and wants are. But you need to be aware of what they are so you can together both get to places you want to get to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, part of that is respect, but that’s also understanding that it’s not just about the two of you. It’s also about you as individuals.

**Craig:** Correct.

Oh, look at this, Robert…

**John:** Robert James Cross asks…

**Craig:** Robert is, yeah, he’s going for this question we’ve kind of trotted all over, kind of gone over this a little bit. “Where’s the best place for sushi or pizza in Los Angeles?”

**John:** Yeah, so when I was in Chicago we had the conversation about Chicago pizza and New York pizza. Honestly, the pizza I love the most is Los Angeles pizza. It is at Pizzeria Mozza. I think it’s just the best pizza you’re going to find.

**Craig:** That pizza is not what I call pizza, but that’s sort of what I call Italian fancy pizza. And that is excellent Italian fancy pizza. No question.

For traditional pizza, the kind of pizza that comes from New York, there are a couple places in and around there. There’s a Joe’s, I think, in Santa Monica now which is a transplant from New York. And there’s actually a little booth in The Americana on Brand in Glendale that sells pretty good pizza.

Sushi wise, like I said, Sasabune. Big fan of that. Nozawa. Sugarfish.

**John:** So, I go to Nobu and I like Nobu quite a lot. I’ve been to Nobus in many different countries, but the Nobu in Los Angeles is lovely, as is Matsuhisa.

But my favorite sushi, actually Sushi Azami which closed, but the owner Niki has opened up another restaurant on the west side which is amazing, but it’s always omakase, and it’s like a three-hour thing to eat dinner there. It’s completely worth it, it’s just that you have to plan for three-hours to do it. So, I’ll have a link to her restaurant.

**Craig:** That’s interesting that it’s three hours long, because Sasabune is the same thing, it’s omakase, but it doesn’t take that long.

**John:** Yeah. I was with Josh Friedman and we drank a lot of wine, so maybe that’s why it took three hours.

**Craig:** Maybe you thought it was three hours, it was 20 minutes.

**John:** Ha. We actually had to walk around the block just a few time just to, you know, settle your stomach and feel like you could actually move in a car again.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon,” oh, this is a question from Jessup, I love Jessup, from Vacaville. “You’re on the first passenger flight to the moon. Because of carryon restrictions you only get to bring one book, one snack, one beverage. What are they?”

**Craig:** I don’t care.

**John:** I have answers for all of this. My book would be Pride & Prejudice, because I just love Pride & Prejudice. I could just read it again and again. One snack would be almond butter. And it would specifically be Whole Foods Almond Butter, the one that you can actually get from the grinder. Like fresh ground almond butter is one of the best substances on earth. And one beverage, I suppose if I’m going to go…well, it’s a question, do you go for the alcohol? You’re flying to the moon…

**Craig:** You’re going to the moon. This is what I don’t understand about this question. You’re going to the moon and you’re reading? My eyes are glued. I’m like, I want to just watch the trip entirely. I don’t care what my snack is. I’m going to the moon!

**John:** Yeah, the moon.

**Craig:** You know what I’ll have, moon snack. Whatever moon plane gives me. I feel so simple.

**John:** I will say one of the things I miss most about Chicago is a chain called Protein Bar. And Protein Bar is this sort of healthy fast food that is all over Chicago, and I haven’t seen here, and I really which were here. But they have these amazing smoothies. And they have like a peanut butter/chocolate chip smoothie that’s actually kind of healthy that’s really great. So that would be my beverage.

**Craig:** That sounds good.

Josh from San Luis Obispo. “If you had the option to either own a real life light saber, or an actual working hover board from Back to the Future, which would you choose and why?”

**John:** I’m full on light saber. I would love to have a light saber.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. That’s not even a good question.

**John:** It’s not a good question at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s not a fair question.

**John:** It’s a light saber. How can you not pick light saber?

**Craig:** Yeah, working hover board? Who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Oh, look at me, I’m on my hover board. Whoop-de-do.” All right. Or, you can just go get a Segway and also look like a dork.

Or, you can have a light saber. Come on, Josh. [laughs] I’m getting angry.

**John:** Mark Thorson writes, “Now that even Rush Limbaugh has admitted the gay marriage issue is lost, what’s the next milestone for gay rights? The only thing I can think of is the first gay president. Is anything more important that happens earlier?”

Uh, yeah, I think marriage is happening really quickly, and I’m delighted that it’s happening so quickly, and delighted that just last week we picked up another giant state. And whatever the Supreme Court decision is, it will be incredibly useful. And I’m excited to be able to get off of planes and be married in more states. That’s a wonderful thing.

I talk to the people who run these organizations and one of the things I say when I talk to these people is it’s fantastic that gay and lesbian couples can have the rights they need, I think the next frontier is going to be to make sure that people who don’t fit into nice categories, transgendered people, get the same rights that everyone else does. And I think that’s one of the things where, you know, we talk about gay people as minorities. Those people are super minorities. And making sure that they have full and inclusive rights to things that every American should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, ultimately the most meaningful milestone beyond this one is that there’s no longer a topic because it’s just nobody cares and everything is equal and fine and it’s just not an issue.

I think that employment rights are probably where I would look if I were running one of these organizations, because there are going to be states soon, I think, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of federal gay marriage — there are going to be states where it is legally possible for two men to get married but also legally possible for both of them to be fired from their jobs because they’re gay. That’s bizarre.

**John:** Yeah. That is bizarre.

**Craig:** So, I mean, it’s bizarre right now, obviously. So, that’s where I would probably — that’s where I would load up my ammo.

Let’s see, we have Brian from Tampa, “Morally speaking, what’s the worst thing you’ve done to get out of some type of obligation?”

**John:** I will say personally I feel good that I’ve never used my kid as an excuse. I’ve never pretended that it was like my kid that was why I couldn’t do something. But I have, I feel like I’m coming down with something, I have done that. And I feel terrible when I do it. And sometimes I get sort of the symptomatic cold that I imagined from doing that. But, I’ve feigned some illness to get out of a meeting or to reschedule something.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure I’ve done that, too. I mean, it’s hard to quarrel with somebody who’s telling you that they just threw up. Even if you think they’re lying, even if you think there’s a 90 percent chance they’re lying, that means there’s a 10 percent chance that you’re forcing somebody to show up in your office and they might throw up.

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to do that.

**Craig:** Near you. Yeah.

**John:** Malibu Jack asks, “If the universe is infinite, how can it be expanding? And if space is mostly empty, how can it be warped by gravity?”

**Craig:** I can’t answer the first question, because I don’t know. The second question I think misunderstands gravity and space time. But, I’m not smart enough to explain why. I just know that in my head I’m looking at that diagram in A Brief History of Time and Thinking. No, that’s not a good question.

**John:** I think it’s a reasonable question, but it’s not a good question in the sense that we are not — as human beings we’re not well set up to deal with things at a giant, giant, giant scale, or at a really tiny scale. We’re used to being able to deal with things at a scale that we can see.

Our whole mind is set up for like there’s that bison over there. I will throw this rock and hit this bison. And so our minds work really well for that scale of thing. And so scale of things we can see and scale of things we can do.

And so we have this tendency to try to use our understanding of that kind of world and apply it to much bigger things, and it actually just doesn’t hold up very well. And so we say the universe is expanding, but it’s infinite. Well, that makes sense at the giant levels that we’re talking about. And, you know, say, “Well what is this expanding into?” It’s like, well, that’s actually not meaningful in a way that you sort of want it to make sense. This is because we think in very physical, relatable terms that aren’t actually accurate to how the big universe works or how the tiny universe works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or, spice.

**John:** The spice. The spice explains it all.

**Craig:** The worm. The spice. What is the connection?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s my favorite line from a movie ever. “The connection is that the worm is the spice.”

**John:** The worm is the spice.

**Craig:** And then he just kept asking the question. “It’s got to have something…the worm and the spice. What is it?” [laughs] “They’re the same. They’re the same thing.”

**John:** Let’s skip this next question because another one down the list asks the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Ferdinand from Constantinople asks, “If Craig and John did a life swap, who would be better at being the other?”

**Craig:** I think I’m good at impressions, so I think I could actually convince some people that I was you.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’d actually do a pretty good job with my life. And my life is not that difficult. I think I would have a harder time being you because I don’t care anything about baseball and I would not be able to coach your son’s baseball team.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are lot of dads that also can’t coach their kid’s baseball teams. And, you know, you would just watch.

**John:** But I could love your woman. There’s no question.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’d like to see you try!

**John:** [laughs] Gary from Orlando, Florida asks, “Craig, how’s the Tesla been so far?”

**Craig:** Awesome! Greatest car in the world. And it was terrific to see that Consumer Reports, which is very fussy, super nerdy guys — one thing I like about Consumer Reports, when they review cars they don’t get a car from the factory. They have somebody go and buy a car anonymously. So, it’s actually just a random car and they put it through ridiculous paces. And it got a 99 out of 100. Only one other car in history has every gotten that. It was a Lexus from 10 years ago.

And they said essentially, “This may be the best car we’ve ever tested.”

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s an awesome car. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

**John:** Hooray. And for the record, I still love my Leaf. It’s been a great car, too.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Doug Jay asks, “What are your thoughts on automobile safety ratings? Would a bad safety rating be a deal breaker for you?”

**Craig:** It would for me. Absolutely.

**John:** It would for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, this guy mentions that the Camry rated poor in the IHS Small Offset Crash Test. Well, it turns out that most crashes are offset. I mean, very few people just slam into each other headlight to headlight. And if a car structurally is doing very poorly in a test like that, well, yeah, of course it’s a deal breaker. What, like a Camry is so awesome that I need to overlook the fact that it could possibly be a death trap? It’s a Camry.

**John:** I honestly feel the same way about motorcycles. Because, you know what, no motorcycle survives a crash well.

**Craig:** That’s right. No, motorcycles are just dumb. And, listen, if you ride a motorcycle, I get it, and that’s cool. I understand. My wife has this whole theory — you deserve to die. It’s the whole “you deserve to die theory.” That she just can’t muster sympathy for people who die doing things that are kind of safe but just generally not safe. Like it’s kind of safe to go skydiving. But not really. So, if you die skydiving, screw you. [laughs] That’s basically her theory. So, I don’t do a lot of — I used to go diving in the ocean. Don’t do that as much anymore. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Bryce from LA wonders, “What were both of your drinking habits before you made it and while you were rising the echelons of the industry? Perhaps to a lesser degree, what are they now? And would you mind speaking to Hollywood’s atmosphere of rejection in conjunction with the drunken writer stereotype?”

**John:** Yeah, so I think, you know, we have this stereotype that like writers are drunks who, you know, are functioning alcoholics and that kind of thing. And there are some. I don’t think there’s very many. And you won’t meet a lot of drunks and you won’t meet a lot of drug addicts who are actually working in the industry. That’s been my experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, people go through their phases, like everybody else. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, at all. I’ve had a problem with nicotine, food, wanking. I don’t have any problems with drinking. I am that guy who can have one or two glasses and then just drop, in fact, prefers to stop.

You know, it’s funny — I often think, sometimes my wife will buy like a cake. And the cake will sit there for four days in the fridge. And I’ll think, “How is she buying the cake and not eating it?” Like if I buy a cake it’s to eat it. Do you know what I mean? So, she’ll just buy a cake and just leave it there. And then I think, but wait a second, that’s the way I am with alcohol. Like I’ll buy a bottle of wine or a fancy bottle of scotch or something. I won’t open it for a year. I don’t care. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky, too. So, I will have a glass of wine or two, and that’s been fine, and great, and good. And I was never much of a drinker-drinker. So, you go through your periods of your 20s, and those are going to be those times when you’re out drinking with friends and you’re going out to much and drinking too much with people. But you sort of grow out of it, and I just grew out of it. And I was happy and lucky.

So, there is some sort of going out with the gang to do stuff, or that sort of social drinking, that happens. But it’s not awful. I would also say that my husband when he went to get his MBA, that crew would drink so much. And they would drink all the time that it was really surprising and kind of crazy to me that they were able to sustain a graduate school program.

**Craig:** You know, I live in La Cañada, this little town, and it’s not a Hollywood town. It’s very kind of finance and law and accounting and so forth. Good god people drink in my town. I mean, I go to these parties, [laughs], and people get wasted. And they’re adults. I don’t get it.

**John:** I want to fall back on a piece of advice I gave on the blog a long time ago, but I would say if you’re out drinking, my basic rule is alternate with water. So, if you don’t want to get drunk, you don’t want to be problematically drinking, you have a drink, great. Have a full equal glass of water before you get your next drink, and that will slow you down. It doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be — it doesn’t mean you’re safe to drive, but it means that you’re not going to make a horrible decision if you were to stick to that plan.

**Craig:** Good idea.

**John:** Josh asks a series of questions that we’re going to get to really quickly. “How much weight, if any, do you give to conspiracy theories about the new world order, water fluoridation, 9/11, JFK assassination, etc?”

**Craig:** I give negative weight to those.

**John:** I give negative weight. And anyone who believes them, I have a hard time taking seriously.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like you. I think you’re an idiot.

**John:** “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I think you die, you die.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “How have your feelings about money changed throughout your life?”

**Craig:** They haven’t.

**John:** I would say they really haven’t. I’ve always been like hold on to as much money as it makes sense to hold onto.

**Craig:** Save.

**John:** Save.

**Craig:** Save. Yeah. Don’t spend a lot. Don’t need to.

**John:** “Do you believe we are alone in the universe?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, there have to be other civilizations. Here’s the thing — I don’t think the Earth is actually all that special. I think we’re going to find that there’s actually a lot of earth-like planets and it’s going — other planets will have life that has existed or will exist. Will we be able to talk to those other civilizations? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not any time soon. [laughs] No, that’s narcissism to believe that we happen to live in the time…

**John:** The best of all possible worlds.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. No, no, they’re out there, but they’re way out there.

**John:** Yeah. “What’s the secret to a close and comfortable shave?”

**Craig:** Get yourself in the shower, get a nice hot shower going. Get your face nice and steamed out. And then shave with the grain, not against the grain. And then after you’re done shaving with the grain, which changes depending on what part of your face your shaving, then go against the grain.

**John:** Yeah. Shave in the shower. That’s where you should do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** David in Wellington, New Zealand asks, “I’m ready to propose for marriage next month.” I love that he says “propose for marriage.” That’s not how we would say it in the US.

**Craig:** Yeah. Propose for…

**John:** “Can you give some creative ideas on how to ask the big question. Cheers. Please no Hobbit jokes.”

**Craig:** Well, Gimli, oh no, he was a dwarf, sorry. No, no Hobbit jokes whatsoever. I like people from New Zealand. They’re very cool people. They’re good people.

I can only tell you how I did it. I had kind of a cool idea. And that was I like cold places. So, I surprised my then girlfriend by flying us to Alaska. And, by the way, I wasn’t rich. I had no money, but it just seemed funny. I saved my money and then I flew us to Alaska. And I went all the way out to the middle of Alaska in Fairbanks, and it was around the beginning of April. And I had sort of timed it because I knew that the Northern Lights were super, duper active around that time.

And so we went outside at night under the Northern Lights and I proposed to her.

**John:** That’s beautiful.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Nice. But she kind of had the idea that you were going to propose if you were…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** So, I didn’t have the proper proposal because essentially we always talked like, oh, whenever marriage becomes possible let’s get married. He’s like, so of course. And so suddenly the California Supreme Court decision came down saying that yes they have to have marriage. And so suddenly it just could happen.

So, I was in Arrowhead writing on something. And so Mike called. He’s like, “Oh, it went through. Great. So, let’s get married.” And like we literally picked a date. But neither one of us asked the other person. It just happened.

**Craig:** Right. You guys actually kind of got saved. I mean, the truth is that men don’t really care about any of this stuff. We just want to jump to the conclusion. Women care.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, even if this hadn’t been shortchanged by legal maneuvering, my guess is that you probably would have been like, “Marriage? Yeah, cool.”

**John:** Yeah.

Bin Le asks, “When can we hear Stuart’s voice on the podcast?”

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, we could just keep him like Maris, Niles’s wife on Frasier. [laughs] Just sort of a presence.

**John:** Yeah. So people last night, Stuart was there, and people would ask, “Is Stuart…?” And I was like, yeah, I pointed, “That’s Stuart. He’s a real person. He’s not Snuffleupagus. He’s a real live little boy.”

**Craig:** And you pointed to an empty space in the room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And everyone slowly backed away from you.

**John:** Indeed. It’s like in Fight Club the whole time through. I’ve actually been Stuart the whole time through.

**Craig:** Hercules Rockefeller the Third, certainly his real name, asks, “How can someone stop falling for the wrong woman and/or man?” Answer, you can’t.

**John:** You can’t. The heart wants what it wants.

**Craig:** That’s why they call it falling. If you can stop falling, that would be great. But, eh, I don’t think so.

**John:** But, going back to an earlier topic, you know, maybe don’t fall for married people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good choice. And so look for what your type is and find your type in a type that is actually available. Because maybe your type is unavailable people because you don’t actually want that commitment of a relationship. And then you need to have some therapy and deal with your issues.

**Craig:** Yeah. Deal with your issues, Hercules.

Who’s next, Hector?

**John:** Hector from Canada writes, “Serious question here, perhaps life’s most serious question. How do you cope with mortality? Does the inevitable prospect of death borrow you? If not, why not? If so, how do you cope, or do you?”

**Craig:** It bother me now, but I know that when I am — assuming that I don’t die an untimely death — I’ve talked to enough elderly people to know that you, your mind starts to prepare you for death as you get older. And you get to a point, frankly, where you’re not afraid of it at all. It’s just a natural thing. It’s almost like, well, this is what all my friends are doing. Might as well do it, too. It’s cool. It’s okay.

You don’t get scared anymore. I asked my grandmother. She was 94. And she said, “No, somewhere around like 82 or 83 you totally stop caring.”

**John:** Maybe so. I’m afraid of death, but not in a weird way. Not so much the fear of like well I will stop existing, because I don’t believe in an afterlife necessarily, but just having a family and a young kid, that’s what I think about, sort of most afraid of sort of mortality wise. And you want your kid to be able to get to a place in life where they are stable and they don’t need you as much.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But, the truth is, they always kind of need you. And as I face sort of my own parent’s mortality, that’s, you know, it’s tough.

**Craig:** It is, but the truth is, let’s say you’re 85. You’re daughter will be 40-something I assume, or something like that, right? She’s an adult. She’s your age now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’ll be fine. She’ll have her own kids, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

Clint Williams asks…

**Craig:** Good question. Yeah, Clint Williams.

**John:** “Adoption of the designated hitter by the National League? Idle chatter? Good for the game? Umbrage?”

**Craig:** I think it’s idle chatter. I don’t think it’s good for the game. I don’t have any umbrage about it. I’m a Yankee fan, so I grew up in the American League. So, the designate hitter isn’t a matter of religious objection to me. But, you know, we’ve changed so much about baseball in the last ten years. You know the wild card, and the expansion of playoffs, and teams bouncing around from national, to interleague play. All this stuff. Yeah, leave it. Leave it the way it is. No DH in the National League. No DH.

**John:** I barely understood a word you said.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You’ll understand this. John from Albany, New York, says, “Should I buy my 16-year-old son condoms now that he has a steady girlfriend? And at what age did you lose your virginity? Full disclosure: I was 16. So, that’s why I ask question number one above.”

**John:** So, number one question, yes, you should buy your 16-year-old son condoms. And you should have those frank conversations. People freak out way too much about having the conversations about sex and they shouldn’t. Just have the conversations. It’s awkward at the start, but then it’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s better that you have the conversations. And don’t be intrusive but just make sure they know that it’s an option there and it’s there and you want them to be around.

**Craig:** Yeah, he could also buy his own condoms. That’s what I did. [laughs] I mean, he doesn’t have to have daddy go buy him condoms. There’s no condom law, is there?

**John:** Yeah, there’s no condom law. But, I think it’s a good first gesture to buy condoms for your son.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And at what age, and certainly you should not just let him go condom-less. At what age did you lose your virginity, John?

**John:** If we were going to define virginity in a sense of the activity that I was engaged in if I was engaging with a woman could have led to a baby…so, like, it’s a question of virginity. Like, what’s fooling around and what’s more than fooling around?

**Craig:** I would say penetrative sex is virginity.

**John:** Penetrative sex — 23.

**Craig:** I was 16. I was a man-whore, obviously. [laughs]

Kevin Williamson, for real.

**John:** The real Kevin Williamson?

**Craig:** The real Kevin Williamson, creator of Scream and so many other wonderful television shows, Dawson’s Creek and so forth, his simple question, “Zoloft or Lexapro?”

**John:** I’m on neither anti-depressant, but I think they’re both good choices for people who need an anti-depressant.

**Craig:** Neither am I. I’m not on anti-depressants. And I suspect that they don’t work as well as people think. But, you know what does work? Kevin Williamson.

**John:** Yeah. He works hard.

**Craig:** Best guy ever.

**John:** Nima, the actual Nima, wrote in to ask, “I want Bride & Prejudice,” which is apparently a movie. “iTunes has it in SD to buy and HD to rent. Should I buy SD or wait for HD?”

So, I would say you should never wait. I think waiting for almost anything that’s going to cost $3 or $4 or $5 is never a good idea, because the world could end tomorrow. So, if you want to watch this movie, do whatever it takes to watch this movie now and don’t wait another second.

**Craig:** Yeah. Totally. Just rent it. Yeah, of course. I mean, how many times really are you going to watch this thing? Also, I should say that we do better on residuals when you rent things.

**John:** Yeah. Rent it.

**Craig:** Matthew Kingshot wants to know, “Where does the podcast’s opening musical riff come from?”

**John:** So, that actually is something I wrote and it is from The Remnants, which was a web pilot that I did during the strike, so 2008. And I needed some opening little jingle, so I wrote that opening little jingle. And I liked it and I needed something for the podcast, and so I put it there.

So, if you go back to really early episodes of the podcast, I would use sort of super hero or cartoon music for the thing, and I just got really tired of looking for new stuff every week.

**Craig:** Finding new ones, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so I went to [hums opening]. And that’s what it is.

**Craig:** [hums opening] What’s next? We’ve got David Wells. David Wells, great picture.

**John:** Yes. He writes, “What surprised you about being a father?”

**Craig:** I think the — when I had my son and I became a parent I was surprised by the amount of innate violence that had been in my bloodstream and I didn’t realize it was there. I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been in a fistfight. I don’t believe in hitting. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t spank them or do any of that stuff. I’m not a violent person.

But, I remember somebody accidentally waking my baby up and I wanted to kill them. Not like, ha-ha, I want to kill them; I mean, I actually wanted to kill them. It’s powerful stuff.

**John:** I would say that I was not prepared for sort of how, I would say sort of like your violence — how primal it feels when you have a newborn kid who you are protecting. And how you are — it’s like this beautiful jailor who has like locked you to care of them. And how day becomes night, night becomes day, and you’re just in this weird dreamed fugue state of taking care of the newborn.

And eventually you sort of pass through that thing. But, because of that intensity you feel this tremendous connection to this kid. So, like any scratch on the kid becomes an affront to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is intense. Indeed intense.

**John:** Jeff Orrig writes, “How would Craig redesign Kickstarter?”

**Craig:** You know, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t redesign Kickstarter. I would just simply say to the people who are participating on Kickstarter to Kickstarter Emptor, you know. Oh, I’m sorry, Caveat Kickstarter. I got it totally backwards.

Just really think critically before you toss your money out there. Kickstarter can be a good thing. Kickstarter appeals to your most pro-social noble instincts. That doesn’t mean that the people appealing to you are pro-social or noble themselves. So, just be skeptical, be cautious, and if somebody is asking you for money that you think ought to just be asking a traditional investment community for money, don’t give them money. There’s other things you can do with your cash. That’s all.

**John:** Sounds fair.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see, we got Mike Bowman in LA saying, “We often hear about the crazy things athletes and actors do with their money or fame once they have it, what was the craziest thing you did once you became a working screenwriter simply because you had the money or recognition to do it?”

**John:** So, this wasn’t right when I first became successful, but I really liked the movie Lost in Translation a lot. And so we got the idea, my husband and some friends and I, like let’s just go to Tokyo for 48 hours. And so we did. And it was kind of amazing. So, we flew to Tokyo. We stayed at the Park Hyatt, the same hotel they used in there. I swam in that same pool they shot. And we had like a Lost in Translation weekend. And it was kind of amazing.

And we sang at karaoke bars. And we went to the Imperial Palace, which happened to be open that day. And it was kind of great. So, it was a lot of money to blow, but it was also a really great time and a great experience.

**Craig:** I haven’t done really crazy things with money. I mean…

**John:** Tesla.

**Craig:** Well, is that really crazy? I mean, it’s a car and people have cars and people have expensive cars. I don’t know if that’s that crazy. You know, it’s okay. Does that count? Okay, Tesla.

**John:** I think it counts.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s it. Cool.

**John:** Hawke from Berlin, Germany writes…

**Craig:** [How-ka].

**John:** [Ho-ka], sorry, I should have put the E in there. “I always feel guilty for the Holocaust. I am 30-years-old and I had nothing to do with the war, or the Holocaust, or anything. Even my father was born in 1947 when the war was already over, but I want to apologize as soon as I meet a Jewish person. Do you think that a person should carry the weight of the most horrible crime ever, or let it die after my grandfather left this world?”

**Craig:** Hawke, you are adorable. No, Hawke, you should stop. That’s ridiculous. You don’t — first of all, don’t apologize as soon as you meet a Jewish person. As a Jewish person, that would probably be the only thing you could do to me that would make me feel kind of awkward and weird.

You didn’t do anything! And your dad didn’t do anything. And, frankly, people who were alive during the war, a lot of them didn’t do anything. A lot of them did, but a lot of them didn’t. And a lot of them were just kids, you know.

And the truth is that it was a terrible thing that happened but I don’t believe collective guilt. I don’t believe in sins of the fathers. And, no, you should just stop. You should just stop and breathe easy and be a good person. And you’ll be fine.

**John:** Yeah. Sins of the father just drives me crazy in that sense of like things carry over past a generation. You didn’t choose to be born to that person, so why should you inherit any of their guilt for things? That’s nuts.

And so we have the equivalent in America, it would be slavery. And so slavery was a terrible thing that we can look at, learn from. We can recognize, are there aspects of what happened there that are still happening in society now. But we can focus on what is the present tense and not focus on that thing that happened back then, or of feeling culpable as a modern day human being for what that was then.

We can acknowledge what happened and try to avoid that sort of situation happening again. But, we shouldn’t feel guilt about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not about you, basically. You know what I mean? It’s not. You don’t have to feel this personal connection to that because you’re not personally connected to it. And that’s just a fact.

Let’s see, Tim says, “Describes your home entertainment setup and talk your tech in general perfected platform/gamers. Outside of movies, what’s the first thing you read or seek information about each day?”

**John:** That was too much. Let’s just talk about home entertainment center.

**Craig:** Home entertainment center. Done. What do you got?

**John:** Our main TV, our DVR is just the standard Time Warner, no, I’m sorry, it’s the DirecTV box, which is actually just fine. It’s the DirecTV DVR.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I have.

**John:** It’s just fine. And I was for a long time holding onto my TiVo but then I got this thing. And you know what? It’s just fine. So, we use that and then we use a Mac Mini that we use as both our DVD player and to watch things off Hulu or Netflix or anything else with that. So, we just switch between the two. It’s fine, it’s painless, it’s easy.

Our old house had a projector and all that stuff, and we never used it because it was a giant hassle. Some people love the projector stuff, but I honestly believe in a TV that you can turn on, you can watch, and it sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have TVs and we have the DVRs for DirecTV. And then we have a couple of nice setups with surround sound, which I like. Surround sound things are — one particular super cool surround soundy thing which I like a lot. But, yeah, you know, nothing crazy.

**John:** I think people will spend way too much time and money tweaking and adapting their situations which they shouldn’t.

**Craig:** Well, and that entire industry is based on a fastidiousness that simply doesn’t apply. It just doesn’t apply. It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Treat asks, “So, how do you and Craig feel about marijuana? Have you ever smoked before writing? Do you know other screenwriters who do this, or on an occasional or regular basis?”

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t care about marijuana. I had my get high a lot in senior year of high school phase, and then I smoked a little bit in college but not that much. The truth is I don’t smoke marijuana. I don’t get high ever really anymore just because I kind of don’t want to. Again, it’s sort of the alcohol thing, frankly.

And the other issue with marijuana is the dosage concept, because I know exactly how much alcohol is in a glass of wine, or in three fingers of scotch. I just don’t know if I’m smoking marijuana, what is it, how much — how intense is it? There are so many different kinds.

No, I wouldn’t smoke before writing. I just think that that’s crazy. I don’t drink before writing, either. I just think that would be dumb.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t smoke pot. I smoked pot in college some, and a little bit since then. But, the problem with pot for me is I’m really stupid the next day. It just lingers with me for a while in a way that’s not helpful or useful. So, I think it should be legalized. I think we should tax and regulate it and treat it much the same way we treat alcohol, but it’s not a useful thing to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Next question.

**Craig:** Oh, Hugo von Giggle-Bottom.

**John:** Ha. Hugo von Giggle-Bottom writes, “I’m interested in your opinions on baldness, John more than Craig, because you are winning the race to hairlessness. Do you care? Does it affect your confidence?” And related questions.

So, here’s my hair situation. I started to lose my hair in my early 20s. And at a certain point, my friend Tom Hoffman says, “You know, if you ever want to just shave all your hair off, I’ll totally do that.”

And I was like, “You know, we should do that, and we should do it as a public event.”

So, I was at my friend Jen’s house and it was sort of like a white trash party and we were watching Miss America. And it was like, yeah, shave my head. And so we shaved it. And I don’t regret it at all. I never looked back.

The weirdest thing about shaving your head though for the first time is I would catch my reflection in a mirror or even just like walking by a window it was like, “Ah, who is that?” I did not recognize myself for a while. But, then, god, my life is just so much easier not having to think about hair.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would totally shave my head, I guess, but my wife doesn’t want me to. She just likes a very close-cropped balding look. The one thing I won’t do is anything to delay the balding. I don’t put any medicine in there. I don’t put any of that stuff. I don’t take the pills.

I know guys that are injecting stuff directly into their scalp. I don’t do anything. I don’t care. This Dr. von Giggle-Bottom, who is German nobility, apparently, says he’s been struggling with hair loss for years and “I just can’t seem to get comfortable with being a bald guy.”

Dude, you’re not a bald guy. You’re a guy. No one cares.

**John:** No one cares.

**Craig:** No one cares. Honestly. It’s just hair. It’s hair.

Let’s see, Jessie asks, “Did Craig ever get to read the rest of the script for that three-page challenge he likes so much? Did he like it?”

I did. And I did. It turned out that it was actually a short. It was about 10 pages, so I got super lucky. Because, you know, you ask to read something, you’re like, oh boy.

It was a very fun read. And when I read it I thought it felt very — it felt like a script for something animated which didn’t come through necessarily when we read it as just three pages. And it was a little reminiscent of Paper Man, the Oscar award-winning animated short. So, I’m actually hooking up the writer with somebody at Pixar who is going to read the script as a writing sample.

**John:** Great. That’s a perfect choice for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would think so.

**John:** Matthew from California writes, “I have a hard time waking up in the mornings, no matter what I do, no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten, I cannot seem to rise when my alarm says it’s time to start the day. Part of me thinks it’s a habit ingrained to me after a long period of depression, but regardless of its origins it’s really messing with my ability to get stuff done. Any advice?”

I would say that you are not a morning person and you should somehow rearrange your life so that you don’t have to be a morning person. I think it’s honestly kind of maybe okay that you’re not a morning person. Just take night shifts or something.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s possible. There are a couple things that you generally ask in a situation like this. What is your caffeine intake? Try stopping all caffeine after noon. Don’t smoke. Exercise a little bit more. And then just try for three or four days to wake up when your alarm says wake up, let’s say 8 o’clock. So, don’t get crazy and say, “I’m waking up at 6:30.” 8 o’clock. Give that a shot. Do that for three or four days in a row and see if you don’t start to get super tired around midnight.

And then you may be able to adjust, if it’s important to you.

**John:** I will say the 11 weeks I was gone in New York and Chicago, that whole time I did not have to set my alarm once, and I could just wake up when I woke up, and I was so much happier for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Jonathan writes, “Two questions because I’m a greedy bastard. What was the clichéd love at first sight when dating? Or was there a clichéd love at first sight meeting? And since you guys are fairly popular, what would you say is the proper etiquette for people to come up and say hi?”

**Craig:** You walk past them two steps and then turn around, thrust yourself at them.

**John:** And say, “So good to meet you Jerry Seinfeld.”

**Craig:** “So good to meet you.” And then walk away.

**John:** So, let’s handle the second question first. It’s fine to say hi if we’re not clearly engaged in some other conversation or place. It’s situational, but I was at a restaurant and the server recognized who I was and could say, “Oh, I’m a big fan of your podcast.” That’s lovely. That’s great. If I’m in the middle of doing something, or if I’m sort of like doing stuff with my kid, that’s the only time it gets kind of weird, because I’m busy doing other stuff here and there isn’t a great time for me to talk with you.

But, our fans are super cool, so I’m never scared about that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a good rule of thumb to not approach any famous people or people that you don’t know when they’re with their children for the aforementioned reason that parents get — they’re like bears with cubs. They just get weird about that. I mean, the people that have said things to me that I’ve met about the podcast have been very nice.

And, look, the truth is there’s not a great reward. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of meeting me. I just go, “Oh, that’s nice, good to hear.” And then I just move on. But, yeah, just don’t trust yourself into my personal space, because that’s the sort of thing an idiot does to Jerry Seinfeld.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Don’t be an idiot like Craig Mazin.

For me and my wife it was not love at first sight. It wasn’t not love at first sight. It was interest at first sight. I don’t know if there is a love at first sight. I’m suspicious of that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s lust at first sight. And so we weren’t love at first sight, either. We were like, this is good. This is great. And then three dates became four dates, became ten dates, became, you know, everything else. So, I think sometimes we’re guilty in movies of creating this situation of love at first sight and it becomes the expectation about how love is supposed to work. And that’s not how love usually works.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. It is not.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** So many books just are lies. The world is a huge blanket woven from threads of lies. We just cover ourselves in it.

**John:** Craig, that was actually our last question.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s so anticlimactic, but that was love at first sight, so that’s a good way to end a podcast.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Why not? So, I have no One Cool Thing, because I thought that was about 90 Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh my god, yeah, no, we can’t keep talking. That would be ridiculous.

**John:** But thank you everyone who sent in these questions. I’m looking at the list now. There were 106 questions. We answered maybe like 50 of them. That was a lot of questions.

**Craig:** We answered a lot of questions. I think we answered them well. We didn’t fight.

**John:** No, we didn’t really fight. We didn’t even disagree. I would say our answers lined up much more than I would have guessed they would.

**Craig:** Well, because, here’s the truth — the two of us are right.

**John:** That’s the thing.

**Craig:** We’re right. And I wish people would just stop fighting it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just let us be right.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Standard boiler plate language here: If you like the show, find us on iTunes, give us a rating, tell people that you like the show. And if you have questions about screenwriting, which is mostly what we talk about here, you can send them to ask@johnaugust.com. And you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you very much and we will talk to you guys next week.

**Craig:** [hums opening] See you later.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

LINKS:

* The Writers Guild Foundation presents [The Screenwriter’s Craft: Finding Your Voice](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/the-screenwriters-craft-finding-your-voice/) featuring Scriptnotes Live
* [Zach Braff’s response](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1/posts/482298) to [The Hollywood Reporter’s article](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-zach-braffs-kickstarter-film-523352) on his film’s gap financer
* The Hollywood Reporter on [E!’s Fashion Police writers strike](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fashion-police-writers-strike-begins-441421)
* [Highland v 1.0.2](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) brings shift + return caps, lyrics and various minor bug fixes
* Try [Cignot.com](http://www.cignot.com/Default.asp) for all your eCig needs
* Thumbs up for [UC Verde Buffalo Grass](http://ucverdebuffalograss.com/)
* [Kevo](http://www.kwikset.com/Kevo/default.aspx) is on its way
* The [Nest Thermostat](http://nest.com/) is fantastic
* For LA pizza, check out [Pizzeria Mozza](http://www.pizzeriamozza.com/), [Joe’s Pizza](http://www.joespizza.com/Tel_310_395-9222.html) in Santa Monica or the pizza kiosk at [The Americana](http://www.americanaatbrand.com/)
* And for LA sushi, we like [Nobu](http://www.noburestaurants.com/) and [Matsuhisa](http://www.nobumatsuhisa.com/), [Sugarfish](http://sugarfishsushi.com/) and the former [Nozawa](http://sushinozawa.com/), [Sasabune](http://www.trustmesushi.com) and [Chef Niki Nakayama](http://www.n-naka.com/about/chef/)’s n/naka
* If you’re in Chicago (or Washington D.C.), try [Protein Bar](http://www.theproteinbar.com/)
* Craig still loves his [Tesla](http://www.teslamotors.com/) and John still loves his [Leaf](http://www.nissanusa.com/electric-cars/leaf/)
* [Alternate with water](http://johnaugust.com/2009/alternate-with-water) when you’re drinking
* OUTRO: George Michael’s [Father Figure](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_EGdiS2PEE) covered by Cantaloop

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/ugly-children-and-cigarettes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 88 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, we have a very big show today and we’re already getting a late start, so I thought we’d just dive right in. Is that okay?

**Craig:** Boom. Dive. Go.

**John:** Boom. Three things I want to do today. I want to talk about this New York Times article that everybody tweeted me this morning, because I think it was just designed to provoke outrage…

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** …umbrage from screenwriters. We will answer some questions that have been stacking up in the mailbox. And we will look at three Three Page Challenge entries from our listeners.

**Craig:** Great. Oh my god, so much. Let’s go.

**John:** So much.

The only bit of housekeeping I need to do is that on May 15 of this year I will be hosting a panel for the Academy with some nice screenwriters and other film professionals including Damon Lindelof and Mark Boal. We’re going to be talking about the impact of technology on filmmaking. And it is a $5 panel, so come see us at the Academy Theater if you want to. That is on May 15.

And there will be a link in our show notes for how to come see that panel if you’d like to come see it. So, please come.

**Craig:** Nifty. Good group.

**John:** Yay. Let us start with this article that everybody tweeted me this morning. It’s an article by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times and it is about a man…

**Craig:** Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** Vinny Bruzzese, who is, “‘The reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,’ in the words of one studio customer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Yes. What Mr. Bruzzese does is he provides notes for filmmakers — really studios — on screenplays they are considering going into production. And he’s looking at them from the perspective of here is the data of a whole bunch of other movies and these are concerns about the script based on genre, based on specifics in the actual script and giving them suggestions on how to improve the screenplay based on the data that he has. So, for this knowledge he may charge $20,000 for this consultation which results in, I think, a meeting and also 20 or 30 pages of notes.

The article ran this morning and I think it’s interesting to talk about both from the perspective of what this guy is doing, but also to talk about from the perspective of entertainment journalism, because I think there are concerns I have about both areas.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where should we start? Should we start with the article or start with what this guy is doing?

**Craig:** I mean, why don’t we start with the article because that will probably go faster and then we can did into Mr. Bruzzese.

**John:** Great. So, this article is written by Brooks Barnes, and I met Brooks when he first started working for the New York Times and he does a lot of these kinds of articles which is talking about the nature of the film industry.

And I was about halfway through the article when I scrolled back to the top thinking, “I bet Brooks Barnes wrote this,” and I was right.

Here’s what tipped me off that I thought it was a Brooks Barnes article, because he used the word “script doctors” in a way that’s actually not the way you use the word script doctors. He meant script doctors in the way talking about like a script consultant, which is what Vinny Bruzzese is.

But Vinny Bruzzese is not a script doctor. A script doctor is a screenwriter who comes in to fix a problem in a script. So, at times in my career I am a script doctor. That’s not what this guy actually is or what he’s doing.

The other concern I had sort of overall was that no one was on the record. Other than this guy, Vinny Bruzzese, and one screenwriter who was horrified, nobody was actually named by name in the article, which I think was really telling.

Now, at the end of the article Brooks Barnes talks about his theory on why people don’t want to go on the record, they don’t want to offend people. But I think it’s just really telling that nobody wants to actually talk about this by name because it doesn’t seem like a good useful thing that’s going to track well into the future. And nobody wants to be able to be Googled that they contributed to this practice or behavior in the industry.

**Craig:** Brooks Barnes…you know, I teed off on this guy years ago because he wrote an article — I think it was about residuals and he simply did not understand how they work.

Brooks Barnes tends to approach Hollywood the way that an anthropologist sometimes approaches some local tribe that they’re just encountering, describing it as if they’re alien life forms. This guy needs to just stop writing about Hollywood because he doesn’t really understand it. He doesn’t really get it. And the people he’s talking to, frankly, it’s like, you know, some of these people that he’s quoting, you know…Scott Steindorff? Okay.

I mean, is Scott Steindorff really representative of people that are actually holding Hollywood up with their hands? Not really.

**John:** I will actually amend my earlier statement, because Mark Gill is also mentioned by name, and Mark Gill is a person whose name you will see in actual trades and is actually making movies. Mark Gills is president of Millennium Films.

**Craig:** Yeah, but he’s president of Millennium which is just… — I’m sorry, I guess this will disqualify me from working for Millennium. They stink! That’s a bad company.

**John:** Millennium is a genre filmmaker that does a very specific kind of movie.

**Craig:** Well, they also do a very specific kind of thing where they treat writers poorly, I have to say, in my opinion. I think they treat writers poorly. We’ve seen this before from there where, you know, there was a whole thing recently where they had been asking writers to write stuff on spec for them in order to get a job, at least that’s how I recall it.

I just think that…I’m going to get sued now by Millennium films. Oh, whatever. What am I going to do? This is my opinion. My opinion is that they stink!

**John:** Yes. Now, let’s bridge a little bit into the actual work that Mr. Bruzzese is doing. So, basically they are providing this advice and in the article says, “But you can ignore the advice at your peril, according to one production executive. In analyzing the script for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer…Vampire Hunter…”

So, this is the example they’re actual citing. It’s the only movie that I think they’re actually talking about by name. “The company worked on behalf of the film and the production company supplied 20th Century Fox with notes. The movie flopped. Mr. Bruzzese declined to comment.”

So, the one movie you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is the movie we worked on,” was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer? Hunter. God, I keep saying Slayer.

**Craig:** I know. I like it.

**John:** Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This is the movie that you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is one we did notes for, and they didn’t take all our notes, and that’s why it flopped.” Really? Really? That’s why it flopped?

**Craig:** Well, now let’s get into this dude. So, can I just say first of all I kind of love some parts of him. So, first of all, I love that he’s Vinny Bruzzese because, you know, I’m from Staten Island and there’s a lot of Vinny Bruzzeses. And he seems like a cool guy actually in that regard.

I love that he drinks Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper and smokes Camels all at the same time. I mean, the guy is cool. And I will also say this much about this guy: I love how totally upfront he is about how he’s trying to make money. And I have to say one of the things that drives me nuts about the cottage industry of these awful so-called script consultants — or people that Brooks Barnes bizarrely calls script doctors incorrectly — is that they’re always couching what they do in some sort of altruistic, artistic form.

And this guy is the opposite. And I love that he’s literally like, “Yeah, you know, basically I got into this to make money. And I really like making money. And I also am providing the service to studio executives so that they can cover their ass in case of a failure.” He literally says that.

**John:** He does actually say that. I do totally respect that.

**Craig:** I think that’s so great.

**John:** And so I will also defend him to some degree in the sense of using data to look at which movies should get made, because there is some value to that. And if you step back, studios have been doing this for a long time because there is actual Data-data that you can look at. You can look at what movies you’ve made. You can look at what movies have grossed. You can look at what dates you release them. You can look at what actors were in those movies and what other actors were in those movies with them.

There is a whole big giant set of data that you could look at that can be invaluable for determining, like, do I green light this movie? Do I not green light this movie? That is valid. And that is especially valid when you’re looking at, like, how will you be able to market this movie?

The challenge is that’s actually objective data. When you’re looking at a screenplay there’s almost nothing objective you can say in there. And one of the examples they cite quite early on in the article which I found just the best, and worst, and most telling was he talks about movies about demons and horror movies.

So, it says, “‘Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,’ Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. ‘If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.'”

What is that? So, you’ve created a distinction between summoned demons and targeting demons, which I’ve never even considered. I don’t think any writer has really ever considered. You’re saying, “Well that’s the difference between why this movie does a certain amount of box office, and this one does a different kind of amount of box office.”

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah. So, with data, when you have enough data you can look for correlations and you don’t necessary need to say that that’s the cause of why this thing was what it was, but if you’re just making arbitrary distinctions you’re just cherry-picking little things in whatever movies were hits and whatever movies were not hits. And you’re using that to defend what really your decisions are. And that’s not actually using data. That’s just manipulating things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s take the demon example, because it’s so bizarre. First of all, it’s pretty rare for marketing to specify whether someone has been targeted by a demon or has summoned a demon. So, right off the bat people don’t read the script for opening weekend. I’m not sure how anybody would know that for opening weekend.

But, let me give a counter example, and this is where this guy kind of, you know, look, you made your bed, let’s sleep in it. There’s a Ouija Board in The Exorcist. She uses a Ouija Board to talk to Captain Howdy. I’m pretty sure that’s in there. I’ll have to check and make sure, but either way there’s some kind of implication that she has summoned Captain Howdy. It’s just dumb.

Look, the thing about this guy is he’s not the villain here. What he’s really doing is basically hustling and giving notes on stuff. If his theory is that people like some things more than others…duh. Right? Okay?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If his theory is that, I don’t know, let’s go out on a limb here. I’m going to crunch some quick data here using my statistics program. In romantic comedies, people like it when the couple ends up together. Duh! Okay. We all know. We get it. We got it, okay? That’s called giving notes and that’s what studios always do. They’ve always done that. And we as writers have always tried to write towards an audience, but also sometimes challenge an audience, maybe turn things on their head a little bit.

The villain here are the people hiring this guy! Because it used to be — it used to be — that people in Hollywood who gave notes, while maybe not the smartest people all the time, had the courage of their convictions. That’s why they had a job. What the hell is their job if they’re hiring this guy to do exactly what they’re supposed to do? And the data doesn’t mean a damn thing. We all know that. The data…Fight Club.

Let me back up for a second. One thing that this kind of stuff will never account for are the Black Swans. You’re familiar with the whole Black Swan theory?

**John:** Absolutely. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think, is his name.

**Craig:** I believe that’s correct.

**John:** And so his theory is that — a gross simplification of his theory — that there are going to be events or things that happen that are so outside of your expectation that you can consider them Black Swans. And those events you can’t fully prepare for but in a weird way you have to be ready for the fact that because you can’t prepare for them you have to prepare for them.

**Craig:** And also that when Black Swans occur they tend to have very large impacts, because the world is set up in such a way that we expect things. And when the unexpected happens it is either very, very good, or very, very bad.

In Hollywood, I think what we find is that there are a lot of Black Swans that in retrospect we look back as White Swans because so many White Swans follow them.

So, Star Wars is a Black Swan. Nobody thought Star Wars was going to work. Nobody. Fox literally let Lucas put his own money into it and gave him merchandising, because they didn’t — I mean, everybody thought the thing was going to be a disaster. And, frankly, based on the early screenplays and ideas it probably was going to be a disaster.

And, by the way, it may even be a Black Swan within the world of George Lucas. It may have been that Lucas just fluked himself into Star Wars and really Lucas is far more Howard the Duck than he is… — I don’t know. I mean, he did a good job on American Graffiti. But I guess the point is those are the things that make Hollywood Hollywood.

If you want to be in a business that follows various predictable patterns in order to grind out predictable income, what the hell are you doing in Hollywood anyway? The whole point is to chase things that are surprises. Isn’t that the point?

I mean, yeah, of course, you want to make Avengers, go for it, make Avengers. And when that works you can point to how it basically fit everybody’s expected pattern. Except take three steps back and then say, well then why didn’t the Hulk make all that money? And why didn’t the Bryan Singer Superman make all that money? And why didn’t, you know, they’re on their 12th iteration of Iron Man, it’s still working great, but when they hit the fourth Batman back in the ’90s it didn’t work great.

Nobody knows. And you can come up with all this nonsense, but the truth of the matter is what this guy is peddling is nothing special at all except comfort.

**John:** Yeah. He’s peddling comfort. I mean, he’s doing that retroactive pattern fitting to say, “This is the reason why these were successful, therefore we’re going to take this pattern and template and apply it to these future things. Oh, but never mind the things that don’t fit that template because those were flukes or we’re going to find somebody to explain why they do fit the pattern magically.”

What I will say is especially telling is that nowhere in this whole article does it talk about the quality of the actual product. And in a weird way I’d argue that the quality of the product is largely irrelevant to sort of how well it does. It’s not completely relevant, but it’s not the most important factor in how well it does. So, his notes and his opinion on what movies you make and how you make those movies is about the screenplay and it’s about sort of the actual movie you’re going to make.

But, the movie you made has very little impact on the actual opening weekend. The opening weekend is the biggest predictor of how much a movie is going to make. And nothing that they’re doing here is going to bump that needle for what that opening weekend is.

**Craig:** It’s right.

**John:** Your opening weekend is determined on somewhat the movie that you made, somewhat to a large degree the stars you have in it, to a huge degree the weekend that you’re choosing to open, the competition around that weekend.

So, all of these factors have nothing to do with this 20-page report that you pay $20,000 for. And it’s maddening to think that it’s going to all come down to these formulas.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And I have to say that his whole, that Brooks kind of skews this article and Bruzzese feeds into it, to suggest that the only people — the ONLY people that don’t like this are the writers. We’re the only ones.

I don’t care. Let me tell you something. If I’m working for somebody and they want to give this guy $20,000 to write up a bunch of notes, great. I’ll read them. If they’re good, I’ll do them. I have no problem with that. I mean, the fact that Mr. Bruzzese bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein, notwithstanding, if he writes good notes, terrific.

It’s just that what he’s trying to do is this game that I’ve been watching. He’s formalizing a game that I’ve been watching and experiencing for nearly twenty years now. And that is the game of, “My opinion is not an opinion; my opinion is a fact.” That’s the game people play.

When I’m sitting in a room with people and they’re like, “I think it should be like this.” Really? Because I think it should be like this. “No, no, no, it can’t be like this. It has to be like this because of this, this, and this. It’s a fact.”

No it’s not. Your opinion is not a fact. Nobody’s opinion about any screenplay is a fact. Ever. I can’t take it! That’s got to stop.

And all this guy is doing is dressing up opinion as fact so that these executives who don’t have either the courage of their convictions or convictions at all can present them to the writers as fact. But, look, if you can come up with all the pieces, do it! Go, spend another ten grand, maybe he can actually give you the demon movie that will do the best. But, until you can do that you have to acknowledge that there is an enormous ghost in the machine over which you have no control.

And, frankly, that’s what we do. So, I don’t mind that this guy is doing this. I applaud any hustler. I am so sad that people are lining up to play his three-card monte though. That is…oh god.

**John:** I wonder how many people are actually lining up to play his three-card monte, though. Because if you look at it, like no one else went on the record. No one else said that they were actually talking to him. So, my concern sort of from the journalistic perspective is it feels like a terrific press release for this guy. And in some ways selling the controversy is a way to sort of get more people talking about him and talking about this idea and this service that he’s providing when there may actually be nothing to it. There may not have even been sizzle before this article ran yesterday.

I don’t know. I mean, there’s a photo of them in a nice-looking office where he’s talking to some young woman who is a development executive there. Great, but I don’t know that there is anything to this at all.

**Craig:** We don’t even know that that’s his office.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t know where he is. But I just think, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not plugged in enough, but for instance it says, “Major film financiers and advisers like Houlihan Lokey confirm…,” who?

**John:** Who is Houlihan Lokey?

**Craig:** Houlihan Lokey doesn’t even sound like a real name. Is that a person or…?

**John:** It’s an amazing name, though. I love it.

**Craig:** It is a pretty good name, like Houlihan Lokey. Houlihan Lokey is like the old drunk in the saloon who ends up killing everyone because he’s still really, really good with a six-shooter.

**John:** Yeah. He’s notorious.

**Craig:** “Who did this? Houlihan Lokey! Ugh.”

I don’t know how that would be analyzed by Mr. Bruzzese’s spreadsheets, but all I can say is my reaction is not… — In the end he tries to, I love it when people do this, they try and basically pre-but you, you know, so in a rebuttal but a prebuttal he says, “All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful. I’m here to tell it like it is. Some babies are ugly.”

No shit. I mean, like do you really think that we’re all so stupid and narcissistic that we think that all of our scripts are beautiful? No. No!

Go ahead, ask how many screenwriters after their first draft, okay, you have a choice: you can get notes and we can work on this, or we will turn around and shoot this exactly the way it is and put you name on it and we can’t change a word. How many screenwriters are going to go, “Um, uh…”

**John:** Yeah. You want that chance.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. Of course. So, no, we don’t think that all of our babies are beautiful. And, no, we don’t have a problem with notes and we don’t have a problem with anyone’s notes.

Compare this, by the way, to Lindsay Doran’s terrific talk about joy where she says, “Look, movies that end on joy really please audiences.” That’s a very dramatic statement. It is not specific. It doesn’t say, “You cannot summon demons.” You know why, because it is talking about an audience experience. It’s not talking about a story point.

She, unlike Mr. Bruzzese has made movies. She has actually sat and worked with writers. She understands how to talk to us. This guy understands how to talk to executives, who don’t make movies.

**John:** So, let’s talk about that specific example and Lindsay Doran’s perspective on it, and his perspective on it. He would come to saying like, “Well, the data says that moviegoers don’t like movies with summoned demons, they prefer the other kind of demon.” But he might have ten points of data. That’s not actually meaningful data.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So he’s only looking at correlation. Lindsay Doran can come to it with that same note, but she could say, “Here is why I think that’s not going to work, because in this situation it’s going to track through this way, and we as the audience feel this way about the characters at the end because of the nature of what happened with that demon situation.”

That is a meaningful note that you can actually think about and use and implement throughout your script. His saying like, “Don’t summon the demon, don’t use a Ouija Board,” that’s not…

**Craig:** Because it’s a fact. And by the way, all we’re doing now is just waiting for the movies that contradict those facts because that’s the business we’re in. We’re in the business of surprises and subversions of expectations. It’s constantly changing. There are movies that come out that don’t do any business in the theater at all and then in home video become phenomenon.

Look at Austin Powers. I think made $40 million in theaters and then was just enormous at home. Office Space. Nothing. Enormous at home.

Who knows? I have a movie coming out where we decapitate a giraffe, how does that work out on a spreadsheet?

And I’ve watch this with comedy testing all the time. Inevitably the highest testing joke is also the worst testing joke. But, you know, this is the same old snake oil as always, and shame on anyone who is so bad at their job — it’s your job. And you have to hire somebody else to do it for you? That’s embarrassing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why don’t you just quit at that point. Why don’t the people who employ you just fire you and hire this guy instead? What do we need you for, to write a check to this guy? Oh my god. This guy is fine. I love this guy. Good for him. Way to go, Vinny.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** So, Jill writes in to ask, “A friend of mine wrote a pilot for a web series and decided to get some of our smarter writer friends together to punch it up. That’s when I realized I have no idea how to run a punch-up session. Can you give us some tips and tricks?”

So, Jill is talking about an informal punch-up session. Sometimes on a big movie, you and I have both been in these situations where it’s a WGA movie, and so therefore there are kind of rules about how you do it. So, you are bringing in people for a day, you’re paying them for a day, and you’re sitting around a table. We all sign these contracts saying that we know what we’re doing. And eventually we have to sign another form saying we’re not going to try and get credit on it.

That’s not what we’re talking about here. She’s just doing a little web series. So, let’s give some suggestions on the smaller version of what she should do.

**Craig:** Well, I have done these before. And the basic rule of thumb is if you’re running the session you should try and participate very little. Your job really is to kind of move people through the script. So, you’re sort of saying, “Okay, let’s just start,” usually you’ll say, “Here are some general areas where we’d love to punch up. Here is our kind of thing we’re looking for, some specific questions, but really more than anything, let’s just go through the script page-by-page and pitch out some thoughts as you have them. So, let’s just start. Let’s just start with page one. Anybody have any thoughts on page one?”

So, you can do a little preliminary “let’s just talk about the big issues,” if anybody has any big story issues, if you want. But then just go, page one, and then people start pitching and you’re like, great, great. And just be encouraging and you’ll find that some people are really good at it. Some people are terrible at it.

As the person running the session you have to kind of rescue and be kind to the people who are floundering because you don’t want to be mean. You don’t want the room to turn on somebody because they may have one joke that works, and it may be the best joke ever. So, you just don’t want to kill them. And just keep things going and keep things light. And just keep moving through pages.

You will find, inevitably, that most of what people have to pitch are on the first 30 pages or so. The last 20 pages everybody gets really quiet because they either stopped reading or it’s action and climax and it’s not joke time.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you have the opportunity to do a reading of it right beforehand, that’s helpful, so it’s fresh in everyone’s head. Just read through what’s actually on the page so everyone agrees that they read the same thing together, that’s really helpful before you start flipping pages. You won’t always have that chance, but it’s great if you can do that.

I’d say provide plenty of food, a lot of carbs, to keep people going.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Pizza is always good. Be genuinely thankful for everyone who is there.

Inevitably in any group situation someone will probably kind of dominate the conversation, and maybe that’s a really good smart person who is actually really funny and that’s great, but if it’s the wrong person then you have to sort of do some judo to sort of get the other people talking a little bit more.

If you can get Nick Kroll to come to your punch-up session, he’s really good.

**Craig:** Nick’s funny, yeah.

**John:** So, that’s a good, funny thing, too. But have fun with it. And always ask the questions, like the what-if questions, and try and never shut down an idea because like, “Oh, that’s going to be impossible based on what everything else is.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t shut down now. Just sort of improve rules of like, “Yes, and?” And just keep rolling because even if it is not an idea that is implementable right then, right there, you may find a way the next day, like, “Oh, I know how to do that kind of thing,” or that sparks something that’s really good.

So, take notes for yourself about not even what they’re talking about right there but what it inspires for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you have a producing partner or somebody that’s there with you, don’t worry and think that they’re going to somehow think that you can do something you can’t do, and vice versa. For those of you who produce don’t think that this is the time to jump in and say that’s not possible.

The two of you, knowing the script and the situation better than anybody, will have the exact same reactions afterwards. “Okay, well, we can’t do that, we can’t do that, we can do this, we can do this. What about this? What about this?”

So, just keep it light. Keep it moving. Don’t freak out. And, also, just be aware that when there’s a ton of stuff that people are going to be like, “That is so funny,” and in your mind you’re like, “And will never be in this movie because it’s totally off-tone or it’s going to stop the movie dead.” That’s okay. Just keep that to yourself. That is, 95% of stuff that gets a room laugh in these things — unusable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can think of one guy in particular who is awesome at these things and I never once have gotten anything usable from him. [laughs] But he’s fun to have. And he keeps the room laughing which in and of itself has great value.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But, you will find some… — And you know, the fact is there will be all these little dramas that occur, usually little soap operas that happen at these things. People get jealous, they get weird, they get quiet, they get too talky. Sometimes they go after each other as part of like the comedy sport. Just, you know, you be mommy or daddy and just gently encourage everybody to stay on target.

**John:** Yeah. Next question. Matt in Orlando, Florida asks, “When you look at the pilot script for Modern Family you’ll notice the character introductions are done in list form directly under the title page before the actual script begins. It seems like a great way to save space, especially in a sitcom script where you have a lot of characters to introduce and a limited amount of time to do so. Is this common?”

The answer is, yes, it is common. That is a very standard sitcom format. And so I encourage all writers no matter what genres you’d like to work in to take a look at the different formats for how things are done. And in sitcoms, yes, it’s common to do that kind of character introduction, a page of these are the characters who are the regulars and these are characters who are unique to this show. And that’s a standard way of showing stuff in sitcom land.

Even a single camera comedy like Modern Family will often do this.

**Craig:** I take your word for it.

**John:** Yeah. But don’t do it in a screenplay.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** No one ever wants to see that in a screenplay. Don’t ever…don’t do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a sitcom thing. And that’s why it’s important that if you’re writing a spec episode of Modern Family, which is probably not the right one to do because that’s an older show, but if you’re writing a spec episode of whatever great new sitcom, find an episode that’s a common — actually just mimic their formatting exactly because that’s what people want to see, that you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, I just have to interrupt because I just remembered one thing also that makes me angry about Brooks Barnes. [laughs]

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Can I say it? God, so, in the beginning of his article he makes this really weird analogy to what Vinny Bruzzese is doing to what Facebook and Netflix do by analyzing the way people use their websites. They’re so not analogous…

**John:** [laughs] Not even remotely.

**Craig:** …in any way, shape, or form. They have nothing to do with each other. It’s just a totally different business, purpose, and point. Brooks needs to stop writing about Hollywood. Okay, sorry. Back to the questions.

I get nuts. I get nuts!

**John:** I know. I mean, it could have been the whole episode but it came up very late and so I thought we’d…

**Craig:** I know. We have so much to today. It’s a very busy show.

**John:** Heather in Dahlonega, Georgia writes, “Can you tell me why so many movies starting big names are going straight to DVD? I recently watched one on Netflix streaming called Fire with Fire starring Bruce Willis, Rosario Dawson, Josh Duhamel, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Julian McMahon, and Red Lights with Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and Robert De Niro.

“In the past a cast like this would garner a theatrical release, or if the movie just wasn’t good enough the actors wouldn’t have signed onto it in the first place. What’s going on with these movies?”

**Craig:** Ah-ha! Typically when a movie ends up going direct to video like that, and Netflix, however you want to describe direct-to-video these days, it is because the movie just didn’t turn out very well. Actors sign up for movies because they think the movie will be good. Sometimes, though, that just doesn’t happen. You know? Sometimes the movie doesn’t come out well.

And basically if it’s an independent movie — and these are almost always the case — if there is independent financing the idea is “let’s find a distributor.” And nobody wants to distribute it because distribution comes with great costs. There’s typically the cost of marketing, the number one, plus also making the prints, putting it in theaters and so forth.

And if they can’t find enough theaters interested and they can’t justify the marketing budget based on what they perceive to be the interest in the film based on test screenings and so forth, they have no choice. They have to cut their losses while they can.

**John:** Absolutely. So, back in the day when Variety was a print publication I would get, I always loved once or twice a year AFM would come up, and AFM — American Film Market — and, I guess, maybe it was twice a year. I always got confused about it. But, there would be this thing out in Santa Monica where these foreign distributors and foreign filmmakers would come in and they’d show the packages of movies that they were going to get made.

And so in Variety they would have these mockup one sheets of all these movies. And it was like you’d never heard of these movies. And sometimes they were movies that were going to go into production, sometimes they were movies that were already done. You’re like, “Really? This movie exists in some way?”

And that’s sort of what some of these things are. Like I suspect Fire with Fire was that situation where someone raised the money to make this movie, foreign financing/other financing, they were able to make this movie with the hopes of selling it to a major distributor because it was going to be so good and everyone was going to love it. And often that just didn’t happen.

I’ll also say that, you look at Nicholas Cage as sort of the classic example of this, like who’s in a lot of movies, and you can’t believe he’s in so many movies. Some of those actors, they’re meaningful overseas in ways that they’re not meaningful here. And so even if it doesn’t have a theatrical release in the US, it may have a theatrical release overseas.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Or home video may be enough overseas that it is worth it to make the movie with them.

**Craig:** I think that’s what — I remember the same thing at the same time, flipping through Variety as a twenty-something and going, “What is this AFM and what are these movies?” I remember the one that made me laugh the most was, it was shortly after RoboCop, somebody made a movie called Cyborg Cop. This is obviously just RoboCop. But it was like a flea market of movies, and that’s exactly what was going on.

Basically they were selling them to foreign distributors and then here in the US they would either get no distribution or direct-to-video. So, that’s what’s going on there.

**John:** That’s fine. And, you could say like, “Well, why would anybody be in these movies?” Well, they got paid to be in the movie. It may be the kind of role that they really wanted to try to do. And sometimes those movies are giant, great, big hits.

And so things like the Jason Statham movies, like The Transporter, that was probably that kind of movie and it actually took off well enough that it sort of established him as a bit of a star. So, sometimes those movies that seem like they come from a major distributor, they really were pickups and they were bought by some distributor here and it always seemed like they were a Columbia movie but they weren’t.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s look at some Three Page Challenges. So, while we open these up I will give you sort of the backstory on these. If you are new to the podcast, every couple weeks we invite listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay and Craig and I will read it, and take a look at it, and share it on the podcast so people can listen to our critiques but also read the pages themselves and see if they agree with what we said.

If you have a screenplay that you want us to take a look at the first three pages, and only the first three pages, you can send it to us at the website. The link for it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will maybe take a look at it.

Stuart reads through all of them, all the ones who come in with the proper boilerplate language on it. And Craig and I get a small sampling of them. And Stuart sent us three today. Which of the three should we start with?

**Craig:** You know, I’m just ready to do any of them. And if you want me to summarize one, let me know. You know, I’m back to being your apprentice. Dad’s back.

**John:** [laughs] Let’s start with Sue Morris’s script. We don’t have a title for this. I can do the summary on this one if you want to do the next one.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, we start, we fade in on the nib of a quill pen, it’s moving in small, neat strokes on the paper. And there’s a super with text over it. We are in England, Christmas, 1126. So, we see a young woman giving birth. She has given birth to a baby girl. Next, we see at the Palace of Westminster we see two, we see Sir Thomas and Sir John, both knights, talking about the fact that she’s just given birth to a daughter and that daughters can still be useful.

Next scene we meet King Henry in his late 50s. He says that, “It has been six years since the death of our beloved son and heir, William, in that great tragedy which took the lives of so many sons and daughters.” He says that the next heir will be his daughter, Matilda, will be his successor.

Actually, no, “My daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, will be my successor, to rule over the lands on both sides of the sea.”

Some raised eyebrows but no one questions it. So, there’s obviously some sort of court intrigue happening there. More discussion, as we wrap up page three, more discussion about sort of what this means, and then we jump forward at the end of page three to a hunting lodge near Normandy and the king has died. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin, talk to me about these pages.

**Craig:** I feel like I’ve read this kind of thing many, many times. I’ve seen a lot of spec scripts that are medieval dramas. More than you would imagine, actually. There’s quite a few of them out there.

This scene where the child is born I feel literally like it just gets repeated over, and over, and over. There is always the woman on the straw mattress and there is always the screaming and the blood and there’s always the midwife. I guess that’s how children were born back then. And no one ever wants a daughter; everybody always wants a son.

I got a little confused by the fact that King Henry is the king, but there was a boy who was the Holy Roman Emperor. Maybe I just don’t know the difference between the two, but I thought that once Charlemagne became the Holy Roman Emperor he was the king? I don’t know. I guess it’s two different things.

I didn’t really love the fact that we cut away from this to show the drowning. It just seemed a little strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To have a flashback there on page two of a character we’ve never met. It felt very TV. And maybe this is TV. I don’t know. It feels very TV to me.

And then there’s just like sort of generally generic court murmuring. “So the King’s nephew precedes the King’s bastard.”

“You should know our man by now. Always determined to be the first.” You know, like political intrigue and stuff. It’s all fine, I mean, it’s written fine. I have no problem with the writing. I just feel like hopefully something crazy happens after this because otherwise, you know, been there.

**John:** Yeah. I was lacking point of view on this. I didn’t see what was going to be special about this versus The Tudors or sort of every other kind of big medieval drama. And, so, let’s start from the very top.

We see this quill pen writing. Okay, that’s a little cliché, but fine; quill pens can write, that’s great. But then there is a super. It’s listed as a super, but I can’t believe anyone would read this much onscreen. Here’s the text of the super: ‘If on the death of a baron or other of my men a surviving daughter is the heir, I will give her [in marriage] with her land following the advice of my barons.’ Clause in the coronation charter of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, 1100 AD.

That’s a lot to throw at me to read. And it’s not especially clear writing. That’s a hard, hard sentence to pierce. So, that’s throwing up a bit of a wall to me at the start.

Then we get to the actual birth stuff, and while it’s a kind of cliché scene I thought it was actually nicely written. Those are nice short lines breaking the action down.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree.

**John:** Two paragraph little chunks. I get it. I love it.

When we get to the Palace of Westminster we meet Sir Thomas and Sir John. Sir Thomas I’m told is in his early 20s. Sir John I get no information about. And if you’re just going to call them Sir Thomas and Sir John I have no way of really keeping them apart or separate. So, why am I watching these two people and what’s really going on?

I also got confused because, here’s the description of Sir Thomas and sort of what he’s doing:

Bright, cold sunlight. Leather boots crunch on frosted grass as SIR THOMAS (early 20s) strides across to meet the newly arrived MESSENGER dismounting from his horse. They confer briefly, breath condensing in the chill air.

Sir Thomas spins on his heel and strides back, towards a fellow knight, SIR JOHN. Sir Thomas says, “Another daughter.”

What was weird to me is like I think we were supposed to be in a really wide shot so therefore we weren’t hearing what the messenger was saying, but if you’re going to have people confer and we don’t hear it, kind of say that we don’t hear it, because otherwise that dialogue we’re going to assume is somehow between the people who — I just confused where we were at in the scene and whether that messenger was still there.

**Craig:** Let me also mention: a knight doesn’t walk across the lawn to go talk to a messenger; the messenger walks across the lawn to him. Much more interesting. I mean, these things are all about power, and rank, and privilege, and all the rest of it, so much more interesting to follow some exhausted courier to walk over to a guy and whisper something in his ear.

**John:** Exactly. So, if you’re going to have a similar situation, if you keep Sir Thomas on his horse or whatever, the messenger comes over with him, and then they pull back to reveal that Sir John is watching this from a distance and not able to hear what’s going on. That may be more interesting. That, again, suggests some cinematography here that’s happening.

With King Henry on page two, “King Henry may not be the largest man there, but by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles, all feel it.” Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of clauses to throw at me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, “He’s not the largest man there,” but he is the King. It was just a weird sentence to me. It didn’t help me understand the power dynamic of that moment as much as it probably could.

**Craig:** And it is, I mean, “But by God, he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS,” so he owns them too. “The great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel it.” Oh, I see what’s she’s saying. You know, that’s that kind of tortured writing, the tortured sentence structure.

Also, his first line, I don’t, “My lords, it is time.” Eh.

**John:** Eh. Yeah. It’s cliché.

So, here’s a problem with those clauses there. “But by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel lit.” The “and the assembled barons,” does he own the barons? He owns this place and the barons? What? Huh?

So, it could read either way. It’s actually sort of interesting both ways. It’s actually probably more interesting if he believes he owns the barons.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I agree with you, there’s a flashback on page two which is like, oh my god, I don’t know who anybody is and we’re already getting a flashback to somebody who dies and therefore is not going to be part of our show. So, that’s…

**Craig:** We just don’t care.

**John:** These are all issues. And then we jump again at the end of page three and at that point we may be ready to actually start the story and so that jump may feel great if we hadn’t jumped around in time on page two.

**Craig:** And if the idea here is that these two guys, Stephen, late 20s, the golden boy of Henry’s court, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a decade older than Stephen, are going to be competing with each other for the favor of this newly minted widowed queen, I’m suspecting as much.

Then, that’s the perspective we want to play here. That’s what we want to do. And it certainly can’t be manifested by a weird shoulder scuffle fight. “A few moments of shoulder-barging and scuffling between the two men. They glare at each other.” That just seems comedic. And I don’t think that this is supposed to be comedic. I mean, that’s just funny to me in a bad way.

**John:** Yeah. I would say I hadn’t guessed that Stephen and Robert would be the focus of things. If they are the focus of things I want to see them on page one or page two, rather than page three. And, honestly, we could get them there just by cutting out some stuff that I didn’t think we needed in page one or page two.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Agreed. Not bad, Sue. Not bad.

**John:** Not bad at all. And, you know, everything on there was nicely written. I didn’t have any sort of issues with sort of how you were describing things on the page. It felt professional. It just felt like something I had seen before too much.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Next let’s do Robin Peters. The Gaffer. Do you want to do the summary here?

**Craig:** Sure. Okay, so we begin at a fancy restaurant, and we’re in England, where Simon page, in his 20s, is proposing to his girlfriend, Trudy, and he’s given her a small diamond ring. And she doesn’t feel that it’s big enough and basically says I can’t, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a market trader.” So, she’s unhappy with his status in life.

Next, we’re in Simon’s office, sort of, and someone is congratulating him and they don’t even know his name.

Now we’re in a park and she’s very happy because I guess she’s heard that he’s gotten a promotion but he tells her the catch is it’s in Texas. So, he’s been promoted but he has to go to Texas. And she basically says, “I’m leaving you because that’s not good enough.” She hands him his ring back. He begs for her to come back. She does not. And he chucks the ring away, hitting a duck.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, my first concern here is specificity. And that’s a word we use too much on the podcast, but I think it’s actually really important for here.

We start, “EXT. NORTHERN ENGLISH CITY — NIGHT.” Uh, just tell us the city.

**Craig:** Right. Manchester takes fewer letters than Northern English City.

**John:** “Lights flicker against the night sky.” Yeah, but maybe you could think of something more specific. Maybe you could just paint our world a little bit more specifically because I have a hard time clicking in because I just don’t feel like you know what these things are. And I lack confidence because you don’t seem confident in your choices here so far.

We’re “INT. FANCY RESTAURANT.” Okay. I mean, if you don’t want to give the name of the restaurant, that’s great, but just paint our world a little bit in that first line here.

Simon and Trudy, okay, proposals are an interesting thing, or diamond rings are a thing we’ve seen a lot at the start of things, but it’s a natural way to start something, but that scene never really quite clicked. I wasn’t sure at the end of that first scene how I was supposed to feel about things.

Then we jump to the next “OPEN PLAN OFFICE,” again, really generic, before we start this next thing. Every place we go to is just the most basic description of what it could possibly be. And I just don’t feel — I never click in because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is a comedy. And I don’t know if Robin is English or not, but it certainly reads English. The problem is that it’s not very funny. And it’s not very funny, I think, in part because the characters are so broadly and thinly drawn.

You’re absolutely right about all the specificity. And there’s also a kind of TV-ish quality to it, for instance, starting with the first line of dialogue on an establishing shot that’s rather boring, and then coming inside and moving through diners. You might as well have a waiter carrying a tray through. It’s all very kind of cliché and generic.

Bu the biggest issue is, if I can summarize, Simon is basically a schmo and Trudy is a gold-digger, mean lady. I don’t know why these two are together at all. I don’t believe, frankly, that they are together. I don’t believe that anybody talks like Simon. When she finally breaks up with him, because she doesn’t want to go to Texas, he keeps begging after her and I hate him for it. And she’s acting in a way that’s just sort of broadly sociopathic in a mean girl way which I kind of just don’t believe.

I’ll give Robin credit for getting the plot out on page two. Englishman is going to be a fish out of water in Texas, I presume. That’s fine, but I don’t know anything about his job. I don’t really know why market trader is better or worse than “junior” — “They could use a junior in Texas.” I’m not sure what that means.

His office was very odd. Talk about generic: INT. OPEN PLAN OFFICE — DAY. Simon exits a room into a gleaming corporate open plan office, reeking of wealth. A SUIT comes up to him.

Well, let’s count the genericisms here: Open plan office. Room. Reeking of Wealth — gold? A suit. I don’t understand what’s happening. Frankly, this would be a much more interesting scene if it were one scene and it started with a guy proposing to a woman and she was super happy because he was giving her everything she wanted and he’s telling her that he knows that she was waiting for this promotion because she knows, I mean, explain it in terms that women — so women watching this don’t feel like you hate women. She really wanted to make sure that she was supported and secure in her life because of how she grew up, whatever it is. And he says, “But the only thing is we’re…” And as part of the surprise, because he knows this is the big pitch. It’s not the ring is the big pitch. The big pitch is, “Texas.”

And off of her face the next shot you see is him at the airport alone. And, you know, the airport lady is like, “And you are traveling alone?” “Yup.”

Just there’s so much… — Be more interesting about this. This is just not interesting to me.

**John:** Well, also what you described in that take of a scene is you were giving a moment where he could actually be funny.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Because none of these scenes that he’s actually funny now does he have the capability of really being funny, because he’s just reacting to other people.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so in either his trying to sell this idea to her, what’s his motivation? What is he attempting to do? And you need to give him something to attempt to do. So, either he’s attempting to get her on board with this idea of moving to Texas, or, alternately, we can see that whatever that room he came out of, well what happened in that room? Was he like making a pitch for himself and trying to stand up for himself about why he should get a promotion, and then he gets Texas out of it, which is not what he wanted, but it’s something new — that’s a moment where you can see him actually driving something.

I would also back up one step, because when I talk about sort of Northern English City, you know, working on a musical for the last 10 weeks I’m very keenly aware of you kind of need the “This is our world” song before you get to the “I want” song. And I didn’t get either of those so far.

And it’s fine, if the first three pages were really just like a “This is our world” song, that’s great. And you can setup this is the nature of the universe that we’re in. That can be wonderful.

And then by letting us see that guy in his world, then we can see the decision of what is it he wants. What is it he’s trying to do? And I wasn’t — none of those gears were sort of clicking in on these first three pages for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. If it is, in fact, going to turn into a fish out of water comedy, we do need to see the fish in water. And we need to know what that means. And it can’t just be simply one shot of him at a park, which we describe as “Park,” kicking a stone around like a football, and then mentioning a local fast food joint. It’s just not enough.

Yeah. I think that this needs a little bit more remedial work and study to make… — And you’ve got to be careful about these jokes like, she says, “I don’t mean to be heartless, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with a market trader, can I?”

“Yeah, of course. Sorry, which bit of that wasn’t heartless?”

Well, okay, if you know it’s heartless, why are you still there? She’s heartless. What is going on here? And the issue with this, yes, we know people in real life who are pathetic doormats, but we don’t root for them in movies. We need to see some spark of something with this guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s why so typically people will find if the movie starts with a breakup they find their mate in bed with someone else because we understand that they were deceived. But this guy — she is such an open book, I really hate this guy for not getting it.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right, our final Three Page Challenge of the day comes from Kevin Pinkerton.

**Craig:** Pinkerton.

**John:** It’s called The Morning Briefing. And I will attempt to give a summary here.

So, we start on the Pentagon Basement Corridor.

**Craig:** Wait, did you say Pentag-AN.

**John:** Pentag-ON.

**Craig:** Pentagon. You said Pentigan.

**John:** I did say Pentagan. That doesn’t make any sense at all. I rhymed it with Alyson Hannigan and Bennigan’s.

**Craig:** [laughs] Bennigan’s. Exactly. Or it’s like Houlihan O’Reilly, or that guy, one of the biggest financiers in Hollywood? What was his name? Houlihan Lokey or something?

**John:** Yeah, something like that.

**Craig:** That’s great. Pentagan!

**John:** So, we’re at the Pentagon Basement Corridor, and the president is walking next to a Special Forces Sergeant. They’re appearing and disappearing into pools of light. The president wipes his forehead with a red, white, and blue handkerchief.

They come to an unmarked door. The president says, “Let’s get this over with.”

Inside is a chamber. It’s sort of dark and ominous inside. And, in fact, on a low circular dais is a creature, a giant creature — looks like it’s made of rotted meat in over-muscled humanoid form. There are also children on bleachers who are chained there watching, and terrified.

The president expects this creature to be there, and the president says, “Begin.” The creature gives the president advice about what’s happening in the future. And so tells him to, “Deploy the ships to Bosporus. Acquiescence is certain.”

The president asks about press reaction. So, basically this monstrous creature is an advisor who has some ability to see into the future. And so at the end the president thanks him to some degree, but also says, the creature is hungry, and the president agrees, okay, well, you can eat the children. And then the president leaves and we hear in the background the sounds of the children being eaten by this monstrous creature.

**Craig:** I love this.

**John:** I loved it, too.

**Craig:** I loved it.

**John:** And let’s talk about reasons why we love this.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, just from a craft point of view, it’s really well written. At first I was nervous because on the first page it seems like, oh no, this is just a bad version of a Roland Emmerich movie, because they’re doing that thing where they walk down the hall, “lit overhead by a row of dim bulbs.” And I’m like, dim bulbs?

He’s got a red, white, and blue handkerchief which feels like…

**John:** Yeah. I flagged that, too. I was like, oh, no, no, no, that’s cheesy, but then I was like, no, it’s deliberately cheesy.

**Craig:** Deliberate, exactly. It’s deliberate, which is great, because it’s a choice, and it’s a smart choice given what we’re about to see. And then we go into this room, and again, I’ve seen this room in the basement of the White House before, so everything just feels like, oh god, I’ve seen it…and then there’s like an alien there. Oh no, but then there’s these kids. And I’m like, well, what the hell is that about?

A dozen children, and I love how unapologetic Kevin is here — he doesn’t pull a punch at all. “a DOZEN CHILDREN, ages five to seven,” [laughs], the cutest age, “wide-eyed and weeping in horror at the thing before them, as they sit gagged and chained to their seats.” Brilliant. I love how audacious this guy is.

And then the president snaps his finger at the creature and one word, “Begin.” So, you know, here’s just so you guys playing at home, the home game, what I love about this line, it’s the first line of dialogue, or rather the second line, and it is, “Begin.” And what that line tells us is this has happened before. In fact, this is so frequent that the president is actually annoyed. It’s like, “I don’t have time, let’s go, begin.”

That is such a great tonal shift, because we’ve been set up to believe that this is like so horrifying, like the way in Independence Day they visit that alien that they’ve captured and it’s like so super serious. This guy is like, “Begin, let’s go.”

And the creature delivers these predictions. And the funny thing about the predictions, even though it’s not done funny funny, is that they’re so mundane. “Press reaction?”

“Acceptable.” [laughs] It made me laugh. “On the crux of the Senate standoff, the weak vote…” The creature is like a Beltway insider at this point, which is so great. He even gives a weather prediction.

**John:** Yeah, so the creature says, “Thunderstorms in the D.C. Metro area. Hail.”

**Craig:** Hail!

**John:** “But I’ve scheduled a speech.”

“I have seen the storm. It is already cut on the lathe of time. What more? Enough.”

**Craig:** On the lathe of time! I know. The creature is like, “Get out, I’ve given you…stop questioning me.” And the president is trying to figure out exactly, like his concern isn’t about the world, or any of that stuff, his issue is he’s got a speech and it’s supposed to hail. [laughs] It’s like, “Are you telling me? I just want to be clear.” And then he’s like, “Back to the Russians.”

Creature: Tired.

“I just want to be clue, the carriers, the Russians won’t be –”

Creature: Hungry.

And the president is like, “Eh.”

**John:** So, let’s talk, I do have a little bit of some criticisms here. On page one, “THE PRESIDENT walks beside a SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT.” Well, how are we going to know he’s the president? We’re not necessarily going to know he’s the president. So, you’re telling us he’s the president. I’m not sure we’re going to necessarily get that originally. And it’s very important that we know that he’s the president.

So, you may want to throw in a, “Mr. President,” like he comes out of the elevator, “Mr. President,” just let us know. Because it’s much funnier if we know from the first frame that he’s the president.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The overall more general concern: this was a tremendous little sketch, a little moment. There’s nothing there that leads me to believe that this is a good sustainable idea over the course of a full-length movie, but I kind of don’t care, because I’ve enjoyed reading these three pages so much that I want to read the next pages.

And that’s, there’s a lot to be said for that. Kevin had a perspective, and a voice, and it was enjoyable to read. And these are — it felt confident. And, god, just give me some confidence…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …and I will just keep reading.

**Craig:** Such a great point. I mean, he is totally in control of this. And he is unapologetic, and specific, and frankly, there’s just a lot of craft. I really like the way the dialogue flows. There’s a great rhythm to it. And we cannot teach that to anybody. There’s just a really smart rhythm to it. I can tell you that Kevin is a funny guy. He’s a very funny writer. I thought it was really good.

And I think, if I were to predict what this kind of movie is, it feels a little bit like those early — you ever see the early Peter Jackson.

**John:** Oh yeah, early Peter Jackson.

**Craig:** Just like over-the-top comedy/horror/grotesque/funny, obviously satirical. I think it’s really cool. And I think Kevin did a great job.

**John:** I think so, too. It reminds me of sort of mid-era Whedon or sort of like the Buffy and Angel sort of at their peak. This would be like the cold teaser opening to something and you’d meet, like the new villain of the season would be the president and he would have this monster. And that would be the villain for the season, or half the season.

It felt great and solid that way.

**Craig:** Yeah, very cool.

**John:** Nicely done, Kevin. And nicely done, Stuart, for picking that sample for us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s so nice to leave on a high note.

**Craig:** On a high note. Left on a high note. Well, well done Kevin Pinkerton.

**John:** I have a Cool Thing this week. My Cool Thing is actually, this is going to sound really self-indulgent, but it’s a book that I’m featured in. It’s a book called The FilmCraft Book of Screenwriting. And, as we’ve talked about on the show, I don’t like most books on screenwriting. And what’s nice about this book is it’s just a bunch of interviews with a bunch of screenwriters. And so there’s me, there’s Billy Ray, there’s Whit Stillman, there’s Mark Baumbach, Guillermo Arriaga.

It’s a really nicely put together, really pretty, pretty book that this British publisher put together. It’s $20 and it’s actually kind of great. And so I have an interview in there where I’m talking about sort of different movies I’ve worked on and sort of process, but everyone else is really fascinating and great, too.

And so if you’re looking for a book on screenwriting, or want to give a gift of a book on screenwriting, I think it’s actually a really well put together book. So, edited and written together by Tim Grierson. And there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Oh, I also have to say, it also has the most misleading cover in the history of any book you’ve ever seen. So, the cover is Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Bed from Benjamin Button. And it’s this incredibly sexy shot. And it says Screenwriting over the top of it. [laughs] It’s like there is nothing sexy at all about screenwriting.

And so this was waiting for me when I got back from Chicago. I opened the envelope and I’m like, what the hell is this? And I had no idea that I was featured in it. Then I found it inside and it was good.

**Craig:** Nice. I’m cool-less this week. But it’s such a big podcast.

**John:** It was a big podcast.

**Craig:** Maybe my Cool Thing this week is Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** Vinny. I love…Vinny is like, “You know what? I’m busy. I’m smoking. I love Diet Dr. Pepper, but sometimes I also like Diet Coke.”

**John:** Yeah. Mix them together it’s good.

**Craig:** Boom. “Open, hey, genie, I want both. Give me both. Open them both! And Camels.”

I don’t know why I imagine Vinny yelling at genie.

**John:** Because he probably does.

**Craig:** He might.

**John:** He might.

**Craig:** But he may be a very soft-spoken guy. The point is, I love him. I love this guy.

**John:** I love him, too.

**Craig:** He’s cool.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. If you have questions about anything we’ve talked about, including how to submit Three Page Challenge samples, or this book I just hyped, or any of the Three Page entries that we talked about today, you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcast.

This was Episode 88, but there’s 87 episodes before this if you want to go back through and look at them.

If you are not subscribing to us in iTunes you probably should, because that way we know that you’re subscribing in iTunes and other people can find us. So, look us up on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

And we will be back next week. And next week I think we’re going to have exciting news about our 100th episode live show.

**Craig:** Very excited.

**John:** Which could be very exciting, because we got a great email today. So, I think that could work out nicely.

**Craig:** It could. Could!

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And welcome home.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Turning the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/05/turning-page.html) at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater
* [Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-equation-of-a-hit-film-script-with-data.html?hp&_r=0) by Brooks Barnes
* Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s [Black swan theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script format](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* Three Pages by [Sue Morris](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SueMorris.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Robin Peters](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RobinPeters.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Kevin Pinkerton](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KevinPinkerton.pdf)
* [FilmCraft Screenwriting](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0240824865/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Tim Grierson on Amazon
* OUTRO: Thompson Twins’ [Doctor Doctor covered by Danny McEvoy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpHAgyUKn-0)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/first-sale-and-funny-on-the-page).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mmm…my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 84 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh, recovering. I got sick again.

**John:** Oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, enough already with this. But much better now. Feeling good. I think I’ll be less phlegmy in this podcast. And recuperating from, you know, traveling with… — You ever have that thing where you’re descending on a plane but your ears are all stuffed up?

**John:** It’s the absolute worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. And you feel like something inside of you is dying.

**John:** Yeah. It reminds me of the classic scene in Star Trek II where they’re putting the little bugs inside, is it Chekov’s ears?

**Craig:** It is. It goes inside Chekov’s ear. And it is a scene that I have tortured my sister with for… — I mean, when did that movie come out? 1981?

**John:** Sounds right.

**Craig:** So, I’ve been torturing her with that for 32 years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just so awesome. What a weird Jungian nightmare that they just sort of uncovered.

**John:** Yeah. I think anything going into your eyes, or honestly, the knife going across somebody’s eye is the thing that I just can’t possibly stand.

**Craig:** You know, but the knife going across somebody’s eye, like, Un Chien Adalou did that very famous thing, it’s so ridiculous that I don’t even like, eh. Because there’s a lot of stuff that they do in movies where you’re like, “Oh god, that would really, really hurt.” But there’s something about a thing crawling into your ear. It’s an opening you already have, so they’re not cutting you. And then it’s going in you and staying in there.

**John:** We’ve already lost half of our listeners by disturbing imagery.

**Craig:** But we may have picked up some new ones.

**John:** Ah! Maybe so. Well, hopefully they’ll enjoy listening to our topics for today which include the First-Sale Doctrine, which is a big copyright concept that has important ramifications for people who make movies and people who like to watch movies.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Second, I want to talk about what’s funny on the page versus what’s funny on screen.

**Craig:** Hmm, like I know?

**John:** Yeah, I think you can answer a couple of those questions.

**Craig:** I have no clue.

**John:** And a couple of other just random listener questions that have been in the mail bag that I think we can tackle today.

**Craig:** Great. Before we do that, real quickly, how’s everything going over there?

**John:** Things are going really well. So, I’m in Chicago right now. This was our first week of previews for Big Fish. And it was terrifying but really, really good. Everything kind of came together. And our Tuesday night went terrific. And our Wednesday night really well. And Thursday night was even better. So, it’s really been amazing.

The strange thing is we go through this tech rehearsal where you’re trying to put all the pieces together and you’re never quite sure what the whole show looks like. And it was literally not until we started on Tuesday night that it was like I thought we could get through the whole show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And people cheered at the right things, and laughed at the right things, and it was great. That said, you still keep doing work. And so we are performing every night but we have rehearsals starting at noon. So, basically 11am we meet with the creators and talk about sort of what we want to try to fix. And then you’re scrambling from noon to five to make changes, to make cuts, to change lines, to move stuff around.

And then everyone has to go have dinner and come back and put on the show with those changes in it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, it’s been amazing. But, I’ve said before, it’s like production and post-production at the same time. This is like being at the Avid but the people are actually in front of you and you’re trying to make this thing happen. And every night there’s — you don’t know what’s going to happen because it’s actually live in front of you. So, the second or third night one of the lack scrims didn’t come up in time. Last night we had one of our actresses get sick during the show.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Like she got food poisoning during the show. A swing had to go in. And our swings are brilliant, so Cynthia stepped up and did the job. So, that’s remarkable and that’s been fun to watch and experience.

**Craig:** Wow. Yeah, it’s funny, I have a friend who has been in musical theater for a long time, and while I don’t think she ever quite made it to Broadway she did a lot of Off-Broadway stuff and a lot of theater out here, like Santa Barbara and stuff like that. And we went to go see her in Peter Pan and she told us that the night before she had food poisoning and actually puked, I think puked on stage, [laughs], which I think is amazing.

And the great part about it is that it’s Peter Pan, so there’s all these kids in the audience. And they’re just like, “Why is Peter Pan throwing up?”

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully she wasn’t like in the aerial sequence of Peter Pan when the vomit happened.

**Craig:** God, you know, if she had been. “Unforgettable,” says the Santa Barbara News.

**John:** And one of the most remarkable things about Big Fish here in Chicago is a bunch of people from our podcast and from the blog have come to see the show. And so I had an open invitation, like if you’re coming to see the show send me your dates, and your times, and your seat numbers and I’ll try to come visit you. So, I’ve sort of done that Where’s Waldo thing of trying to find people in the balcony. And that’s worked only okay.

It’s actually much more difficult to find people up there than I thought it would be. I really needed Nima and Ryan to like make me an app to find people, but it’s been challenging.

**Craig:** Well, why don’t you just tell them when they see you to hold up something?

**John:** Yes. I’ve asked them just to grab me if they see me because I’m pretty identifiable. And so many people have grabbed me and said hello and they’ve enjoyed the show. And it’s been remarkable for them to come. So, I look forward to shaking more hands as we go through our five weeks here in Chicago.

**Craig:** Great. Awesome.

**John:** Let’s get started. First off, the First-Sale Doctrine, which is this legal concept that exists in US Copyright Law, but I think probably other countries’ copyright laws as well. What First-Sale Doctrine means is that if you make something that is subject to copyright, so let’s say you make a movie or a song, or a book is a good easy example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s say you created a book. You have the exclusive right to distribute that book. That’s one of your rights in copyright. What First-Sale Doctrine holds is that once you’ve sold that book to somebody, they can go off and resell that book again. And that’s why we have used book stores. That’s why we have libraries to some degree. It’s an important thing that’s one of the important tenets of US Copyright Law.

So, these last couple weeks, two big cases came up that challenged our conceptions of First-Sale Doctrine. And I thought they were important to talk about because they have big implications, not only if you are making movies, but if you are watching movies.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of them definitely has implications for the movie business. Maybe more so than the other.

**John:** Great. I’ll be curious which one you think is more important.

So, the first one that came up, the ruling came back, it was a Supreme Court Case called Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. And so here’s the situation that happened in that, and this was actually a book situation. It was a textbook situation, like literally it was about textbooks.

Somebody from Thailand came to the US to study and found that the textbooks were incredibly expensive. But they found that, “Oh, wow, if I actually bought those same textbooks back in Thailand, they’re much, much, much cheaper.” So, not only did he buy the books in Thailand for himself, he started bringing in those books from Thailand and selling them in the United States to help pay for his college education.

John Wiley & Sons, which was the publisher, said, “No, no, no. You can’t do that.” And they sued him. They won at a lower court, but the Supreme Court overruled that 6-3 and overturned that decision, and ruled that First-Sale Doctrine holds true even if the books were purchased in Thailand or outside the US, that concept still holds true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s a fascinating issue because a lot of times we want to discriminate on price based on different markets. And so from a movie perspective, a lot of times we may say like, “Okay, we’re going to price this movie at this price in Asia, but it’s a higher price in the United States.”

**Craig:** Yes. And if we were still living in DVD culture I would say this would be definitely — this is an issue. Because first, I think the notion is that the First-Sale Doctrine is kind of a US thing. I mean, our copyright laws are different from other countries in a number of ways.

So, okay, First-Sale says you’re the copyright holder and the reason that the word “copyright” is copyright is because that’s the biggest right of all, to make copies. You’re the only person that can make copies of your work. You’re the only person that can distribute your work.

However, you get the right of the first sale. You don’t get the right of the second, third, and fourth sale. Once you sell it to somebody they can sell that discrete copy to someone else — as you said, used book store. The same goes for textbooks.

What this case seemed to be about was basically, look, Thailand maybe doesn’t have the doctrine of first-sale, or even if it did it’s a different doctrine of first-sale because it’s a different country. So, if you go and you sell intellectual property in somebody else’s jurisdiction, with somebody else’s copyright laws, and they take that and they come back to the United States, does the Doctrine of First Sale somehow magically appear all of a sudden, even if it wasn’t purchased originally in a place where Doctrine of First-Sale exists?

And the Supreme Court said: Yeah, it does. If were still living in a world of DVDs, and the studios were selling DVDs here for $20, and overseas for $5, then it would make total sense to just start buying your DVDs overseas and then selling them here. The whole point, this guy didn’t just buy a textbook in Thailand, bring it over, and then sell it to somebody. Nobody bothers with that. He was running a business. He was basically arbitraging the difference between the textbook prices of the same textbooks, reselling them and keeping the profit.

So, you could say, “All right, I’m going to buy 100,000 copies of Transformers in India where it costs $2.00 and sell them over here for $8.00, which is still cheaper than the US price and make a lot of money.” True, that there’s this whole DVD region thing that makes it a little more difficult to do, but really that’s not as big of a deal for us right now in the movie business because we are increasingly out of the physical object business, which is why this next case was so, so important.

**John:** Yes. So, the second case is Capitol Records vs. ReDigi. I think they call it ReDigi. And what ReDigi does is it says, “Okay, you have bought these mp3 files on iTunes or through some other store. We will let you resell that mp3 to somebody else who might want it. And in selling it we will delete it off your computer and put it on their computer.”

And ReDigi was the company that was serving as this broker. It was doing this work of moving your mp3 to the other person’s computer, the buyer’s computer.

This is much more sort of obviously troubling for people who are making digital goods, such as digital movies or songs that are mp3 files. The studios really did not want this to happen. It was Capitol Records in this case who came in.

So, it was a lower court decision, but this lower court said that ReDigi’s business model, their plan of doing this, was not realistic. Was a violation of the First-Sale Doctrine. Wasn’t covered by First-Sale Doctrine.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** And I do like that the judge in the case actually cited Star Trek’s Transporters and Willy Wonka’s Wonkavision. And so as a writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I love that he cited Wonkavision.

**Craig:** He did cite Wonkavision.

There’s a lot going on in this case and it’s not final obviously. I have a feeling that this one will be appealed and maybe make its way to the Supremes as well. But, it was an encouraging decision for us.

So, the crux of it is this: You buy a digital file from the copyright owner. And the question is how does the First-Sale Doctrine apply to you? Okay, they made the first sale to you; how do you then resell this? And really the truth is you can’t. And the reason you can’t is because the First-Sale Doctrine doesn’t say you can make a copy of what you’ve bought and sell the copy. It says you have to sell that thing you bought. So, because copyright is exclusive to the copyright owner — only they can make copies — unless they’ve licensed you some limited ability to make copies for personal use, which they can do.

So, how do you sell a digital file you have purchased without making a copy? So, ReDigi’s argument was, “Easy. We just take it from you and move it over to here. And we make sure that you’ve deleted it.” But, the judge rightly is pointing out, “Well, that’s still a copy.” Once you transmit the file to another space, you’re copying it. The fact that you are copying the book and then burning the other book behind it doesn’t mean you haven’t made a copy.

The truth is there is nothing that discrete about these digital files. The only real way to resell digital files, I think, and still be consistent with the First-Sale Doctrine is to sell them with your hard drive to someone. But barring that, you have made a copy. Furthermore, it’s really impossible for any business to ensure that they’re not making a copy, because the only way I, as ReDigi, can ensure that I’m not making an illegal copy when I accept your file from you is to make sure that you haven’t already duplicated your file on your end.

And that, of course, is where the opportunity for abuse is and it would be abused. Why wouldn’t any starving college student want to sell his entire music library knowing full well it’s copied, [laughs], and it isn’t going anyway? It’s sort of an obvious one.

Now, here’s what I think is interesting about this: When, I would say about two or three years ago, the movie industry got together and was trying to figure out how are we going to sell movies digitally, away from physical objects, and I suspect one of the things they were wrestling with was this very question, even though it hadn’t occurred to a lot of us. If they do sell things that are re-sellable, it’s not good for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, what his all points to ultimately, I think, and the way around this mess for the movie business, and the music business, too, is that ultimately we’re never going to own any of these copies ever. We’re never going to have them. We are going to have to own access because if I’m the movie studio, here’s what I know: The person at home wants to watch the movie when they want to watch it. And they’re happy to pay to watch the movie. I do not want them to have a copy of the movie for so many reasons. So, I stream it to them.

I stream it to them and what they’re paying for is access to that stream. And on their end it ought to be no different than popping in a DVD. Now, that’s going to require infrastructure improvements to download speeds and all the rest of it, but that’s ultimately where it has to go.

**John:** I would agree with you. I also feel like this coming generation is sort of used to this “assetlessness.” It’s been interesting even just me living in like two corporate apartments over the last two months, I’ve kind of come to treasure the fact that I don’t actually have anything I need to own. Like I don’t have any printed books here. I don’t have any DVDs here. I don’t even know if I have a DVD player in the room, because if I want to watch Game of Thrones I just pull it up on my iPad and connect it to my Apple TV. I don’t want to have to own those physical things if I don’t have to own those physical things. And not owning those physical things is wonderful.

The problem comes when I don’t have an internet connection. That breaks down. And that is a huge flaw in this.

So, just so we can talk it out better, I’d like to try adopt the opposite point of view so I can see like these are the real problems with what you’re describing and sort of what the issues here.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I will now be the counter voice here.

**Craig:** You’ll be the “copy-fighter.”

**John:** I’ll be copy-fighter. So, here is the challenge. What you are doing by saying that you cannot transport this material from one person to another person is you’re essentially going back to the dark ages where things were written on scrolls, and like only certain people had access to certain things. Because what you’re saying is like only — you can’t ever own anything, that you can only license something. Then you’re controlling who can have access to anything that you don’t want them to have access to.

So, right now it’s the corporation saying, “Oh, we don’t want to license that movie in certain countries.” But then you’re denying everyone in that country the ability to experience that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or even to import that movie, or to find a physical copy. We’re saying that 100 years from now there may not be a physical copy that somebody could use in a library. You might say that a copyright extension is a whole separate other issue, but it’s sort of meaningless to say, “Oh, it will become in the public domain eventually,” if there’s never an ownable copy up until that point.

**Craig:** My response would be this. I think that there’s a reasonable case to be made that there ought to be full and open access to these things, and I don’t know how you legislate this. Because ultimately, well, maybe not. I mean, look, the copyright owner has the right to distribute, which also includes the right to not distribute. I don’t have to sell my novel in Wisconsin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No publisher is required to sell a novel in Wisconsin, nor is any publisher required to translate the book, nor is any publisher required to sell it in any particular country. So, I would say that that’s actually not that different than it is now. The only difference is that you can’t — we’ve effectively barred those people from any kind of re-buying of that.

And, all I can say is, again, I tend to side with the rights of the content creators. I also feel like in general the marketplace tends to solve this problem. The whole point of making movies for these companies is to have people watch them and pay for them. So, I have a feeling that they would be all for open access as long as it didn’t feel like they were letting the foxes in the henhouse.

As far as libraries, I think their day is coming to a close. And I love libraries, but they are not going to be — libraries will ultimately not exist. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

**John:** So, let’s go to books, although of course you can apply it to movies as well. If libraries cease to exist, if you are a person who doesn’t have the economic means to get that book, to purchase that book, to purchase whatever the license is to read that book, then you have no access to that book. And that is a potentially huge problem for not only the educational system but sort of our system of culture.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there will ultimately become some sort of virtual library. And I don’t think that we’re going to live in a time 30 years from now where access to the internet will be seen as the privileged outcome of owning a device. I think at some point it’s going to — for instance, telephones.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** — were just given to people, you know, the impoverished got telephones. At some point they were like, “Everybody needs a phone. You’re going to have to have a phone. And they’re so cheap and here’s a phone. And here’s a connection.” And everybody that uses — even to this day — when you pay your bill, part of your bill is a tax for people who are poor and can’t afford a phone.

And I think that’s where it’s going to go. I think ultimately everybody will be connected. I think there will be literally hobos in the street with tablets.

And there will be some sort of access to free material through there in some form or another.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back to our core demographic here of writers and screenwriters. How do these issues affect screenwriters, people who are making movies?

**Craig:** Well, the biggest way is that by shooting down the ReDigi model we’re essentially protecting our residual base. So, we get paid when the studios get paid. Our residuals for reuse, our percentage of their gross for reuse, and in a ReDigi world where people can just sell each other these copies over, and over, and over, there’s just little incentive for them to buy the premium copy from the studio, which means we just don’t see the revenue.

It’s a little bit like eBay. You know, eBay is an enormous underground market. It’s a huge flea market of resale and the manufacturers get nothing of that resale. And that’s fine. I mean, people are selling objects and that’s the deal with objects.

For us, however, it would decimate what is already a wobbly system and what is already a system that has been knocked down so severely since the fall of the DVD. And by extension, continues to put pressure on screenwriting as a viable career.

Forget the average person, since it’s never been a viable career for the average person. It wouldn’t even be a viable career for the average screenwriter today. And that’s the scary part. So, that’s where the rubber hits the road for me.

**John:** Yeah. I would say going back to the Wiley decision, the ability to bring in things from other places, I’m glad it sort of ended up where it ended up. I feel like if we are not able to import things from other places, to see them, to experience them, then all the Japanese anime that you might want to go see could become locked off to you.

So, I think it’s important to be able to have access to — to bring stuff in from other places — or sometimes things that you would want to have a copy of that is just not available in the US market. And so I think it’s generally a helpful thing for people who want to see movies, that you can bring stuff in from other places.

**Craig:** Well, that decision didn’t really say that you could now do that. What it said is you can now do that and then resell it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is a different deal. I mean, any of us can go online right now and buy a textbook from Thailand. It was just that this guy was pretty enterprising about it.

**John:** Yeah. But I respect the business model, and you see it more in big cities, but like the place that just sells the stuff that they brought in from Asia. And that can be kind of great. And I think it’s good that you can actually get some of those physical things from other places, copyrighted works.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I would worry that had this decision done the other way you could see many more barriers put up to being able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, for the textbook industry and for the — let’s just say the widget industry where people are selling physical objects, sorry, physical manifestations of intellectual property like books, and CDs, and DVDs, and works of art, this is a little bit of a challenge because they do price things for their marketplace.

I mean, yeah, obviously we pay more here in the United States for the same thing than they do in the developing world. And while we could stop and say, “Well, wait a second. That means we’re getting ripped off.” Uh, yeah, I guess we’re getting ripped off, but then again we have a lot more money than those people do and we’re willing to pay for it here. And, so, that’s that.

**John:** A couple reasons I think for the price discrimination. First off, we have more money, so therefore they can just afford to charge more for it. Second off, I mean, the reverse of that is they don’t have the money in those other markets, so if you price certain things, not only can no one buy it but you’re incentivizing piracy. Essentially like you’re trying to compete with free, or nearly free.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, there’s a little part of me that gets annoyed when I see, okay, well, if you can price it for that in Thailand, and still make money, because I know for sure you’re not pricing it below your cost, then you’re just up-charging me a massive amount for the privilege of having enough money to pay for it.

But, then again, I think, okay, but they sort of average it all out. And there’s like a medium price. The thing is, what do they do about — it does make a challenge for them because they can’t… — The only reason they can charge $5.00 in Thailand is because they charge $25.00 here. If the average is, you know, whatever, is $15.00, well, we’ll all buy them for $15.00 merrily, but they can’t in Thailand. So, what happens then? You know?

**John:** I suspect that the real costs are considerably different based on just the market. So, you know, a lot of the costs that we’re associating with our movies is all the — it’s the store, it’s the shipping, and all the other stuff, which might be quite a bit lower in other markets.

**Craig:** Yeah. But like for instance textbook publishing, I mean, look, I don’t know, but I suspect that most of the books that we buy here are actually assembled and published overseas.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, it’s just that, you know, and yeah, maybe we’re spending a little bit extra for the — you know, because they have to ship the books over, but not that much more. We’re getting gouged. We know we are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I’m kind of… — In a weird way, who this ends up hurting are the people getting the lower prices. Their prices will go up and that hurts them more than our prices coming down, if this becomes like a huge thing. We’ll see if it does.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Let’s move onto our next topic which his about comedy. So, a completely different thing. This is a question that actually starts with Joe D. who wrote in to ask.

**Craig:** Where is Joe D. from, by the way?

**John:** He didn’t say.

**Craig:** Oh, because that sounds like a New York guy to me.

**John:** Joe D.!

**Craig:** Hey, Joe D.!

**John:** So, yes, if you’re writing in with a question, and I should stop and say that if you have questions that you want me and Craig to talk about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And so a big list of questions comes in, and I cull them, and Stuart culls them, and eventually we answer the ones we think are interesting.

So, Joe D. wrote in to ask: “When writing a comedy script do you think there is a one-to-one correlation between funny on screen versus funny on paper? Meaning, should a laugh out loud moment seen on the screen be equally laugh out loud moment on paper? In your experience, has this rung true? At what point does a smile on paper become a chuckle or a laugh?”

**Craig:** There is not a one-to-one relationship at all.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Not even close. You know, there are books that have made me laugh wildly, but if you were to shoot them they wouldn’t work at all. I mean, prose designed to make you laugh is very different than prose designed to be produced and make you laugh. It’s just a different thing.

Similarly, the same goes for situations that you’re describing. Knowing what to write to turn into something that makes people laugh, that’s why there are so few people that write comedy in movies. It’s not easy. And it’s an art. You know, it is an art in and of itself. It’s a strange debased, silly art, but it is an art.

And there are very few times where I’ve… — You know, sometimes I’ll write a line and I think, “That’s gonna work.” And it does work. And I think, “Okay, so there you go. That was a one-to-one moment, you know.”

**John:** But, I mean, that’s not quite what he’s phrasing. Like how often do you actually laugh when you read a script? For me it’s almost never.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** I mean, I’ve read very funny scripts that become very funny movies, but they’re not funny when you’re reading them on the page because they’re funny because you’re visualizing, like, “Oh, this is how it’s going to work.” And you can tell that, “I think that’s going to be funny,” but you have no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You aren’t laughing as you’re sitting there with the script on your iPad in front of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t remember reading any script that made me laugh through it. And, frankly, if I did I would be suspicious that something was weird, because it was designed to do the wrong thing.

Sometimes producers or executives will say, “I laughed out loud when I read this,” or “I laughed out loud when I read that,” and I’ll think, okay, yeah, you’re probably lying. You know the way people say LOL but they never really LOL?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think it’s that. But, no, there’s not a one-to-one thing. Comedy is about performance. You’ve probably heard the old saying about timing. So much of comedy is about timing. So much of comedy is about staging. So much of comedy is about editing, or more specifically the lack thereof. And you simply can’t get that from the page. So, comedy writers are basically putting down a chemical formula and then you’re mixing the chemicals in front of the camera on the day.

So, no. No one-to-one relationship with there.

**John:** That said, that’s not to give a carte blanche to not try to be funny on the page. And so I’ll definitely notice that as you refine your work you’ll be taking out certain words, or trying to put back certain words so that it will read funnier, and so that you will give the actor a plan for like how that line can actually be funny.

And I’m sure we’ve both had situations where an actor just doesn’t understand how to make that line funny, or they’re trying to change something that is actually cutting into how that thing should be funny.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A classic example is an actor will change the tense in a sentence. They think, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” but it actually makes it not funny because of how they’ve changed the tense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or, it’s a misdirect. So, one of the lines in Big Fish that every time I watch the show I have like my little scribbly piece of paper and I take notes on what things are. And because I know every line of the show, if a line isn’t delivered right I can make a note and we can give that line reading back.

One of the things that’s happened a couple of times is exactly that. A very specific thing — in this case it was a joke where if you say, “Luckily, years earlier I had been bitten the Chucalabra snake of Tanzania.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** “Luckily, years earlier,” it’s important that it be that way. Because we say “luckily years before I had been bitten by the Chucalabra snake. “The years before, before I had been bitten,” it becomes a separate clause that makes it not funny. So, earlier versus before is actually a very important thing.

**Craig:** You are hitting on something interesting and sometimes I seethe quietly over this, because comedy requires a certain mastery of grammar. There is a reason why things are funny in their order with specific words. You can look at two versions of a joke where it’s slightly different, and one is clearly funnier than the other. And you could spend all day talking about why, but really nobody has the time for that. Either you know or you don’t.

And the people who write comedy routinely tend to know. And the people who don’t, don’t. And it actually requires quite a bit of intelligence. And just instinct. And that’s why… –What’s so great about comedy, too, is that unlike drama, which I think drama is always about representations of tragedy. There can be new comedy invented. Comedy actually can just come out of nowhere — and suddenly there’s a new comedy that didn’t exist before it.

And those people and their instincts are incredible. But it is so instinctive and so scientific. And, frankly, it’s OCD. Comedy is OCD. If you’re not OCD about the language that you’re using, comedy may not be your thing.

**John:** Yeah. One other thing I want to make clear, when I say like it’s not necessarily funny on the page, that’s a different conversation that voice. And I remember when we had Aline on the show we talked about voice. And the successful writers, the ones you can tell like, “Oh, this person is going to succeed,” a lot of times it’s because they have a voice. And many times it’s a funny voice.

And so the good comedy scripts tend to be funny even in the places that aren’t necessarily jokes. It’s just enjoyable to read in the right ways and it has a sense of humor to itself that’s not just scene, scene, scene, line, line, line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a hard thing to describe. But even not just what the characters are saying but the way that the script actually feels on the page is funny, or it is just the way it should be.

And so even if people aren’t laughing out loud, they’re going to the next page because they’re hearing a voice. And they’re having confidence that this person knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** And there are writers who are really funny and write really funny stuff. They don’t have necessarily a great mind for structure. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for theme. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for drama. They’re just funny.

A lot of times those writers end up having incredible careers working on hysterically funny television shows, because television shows do rely less on a kind of self-encapsulated structure. I mean, there’s a structure to each show, of course, and there’s a room full of people to kind of help you get there. But a movie is a self-encapsulated structure. It’s its own thing that begins and ends. Permanently.

So, a lot of times they do that. But then there are a lot of writers who also work in movies who really do come on to projects to make them funnier. They’re not there necessarily to write something that is comedically dramatic or dramatically comedic.

**John:** Yeah. And there are cases where like you just literally need a laugh here. And so that’s where a writer who’s good at figuring out what could be funny in that moment can be really valuable.

You and I have both been on comedy panels, roundtables on movies that are about to go into production. And those are not ideal situations for figuring out the big funny of a movie, but they can be useful for figuring out those little surgical moments of like how do we get a laugh here that can propel us into the next moment.

**Craig:** And it’s funny because you’ll have a lot of people in a room — we do this all the time — where we go through a screenplay that’s about to go into production looking for opportunities for jokes. And all of these really funny people, I mean, I’ve done these things with Patton Oswalt, and Dana Gould, and big comedy writers, Lennon and Garant, and we all go around the table and we do this stuff. And at the end of the day on a movie if two jokes come out of that whole thing and end up in the movie, that’s a good day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s really hard to just sort of come in and throw stuff into a movie that would actually work in that moment, in that tone, is doable, consistent with the characters, translates from what was funny in the room to funny on screen. It’s just a whole different thing.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes those sessions can help get the other writers, or the writers who are working on it longer term, or if it’s a writer-director, can get them in a good spirit to be thinking for other things, thinking of other moments that can help. So, that can be useful.

And, honestly, if those two jokes end up in the movie but they also end up in the trailer, then you’ve just made things…

**Craig:** Big time.

**John:** Big time. It’s been completely worth everyone’s time to go do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. For sure.

**John:** Our next question comes from Michael who asks — again, I don’t have locations on people. Tell us where you’re from. We’d love to know where you’re from. Michael asks: “It seems like you get a lot of things done with screenplays, musicals, the website, podcast, apps, games, etc. Do you have any tips on time management and self-actualization?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, this is all about you, because I really only get one thing done.

**John:** [laughs] What I liked about this question is that the actual question is like time management and self-actualization, and weirdly I think those things have been bundled together in a way in the last couple years that’s not necessarily healthy or productive.

So, time management is basically, you know, getting the stuff done in your day that you can get done and not being so stressed out about it. And that’s good. And so I do have some things to say about that.

Self-actualization is really a different thing. And self-actualization is sort of feeling good about who you are and what you’re doing and sort of how life works. And overtime management is probably bad for your self-actualization. You’re like a machine who gets stuff done, but isn’t anything other than a machine who gets things done.

So, I think it’s just weird that we packed those two ideas together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For time management, when I’m back in my normal Los Angeles I have pretty good stuff and I can actually churn through a lot of things. Since I’ve been doing the show, it’s all gone out the window. So, I’ve barely my OmniFocus which is where I store all that stuff. I’m late for everything. Stuart, god bless him, sort of keeps his master list of who’s coming to what show of Big Fish every night so I can try to find those people. But then I forget to print it out. I forget that people travel cross-country to see the show.

So, I don’t have like a perfect system for this.

**Craig:** You’re a bastard.

**John:** I’m a terrible, terrible person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like literally in the lobby, I just happened to be in the lobby and three people I knew sort of separately came up and said like, “Oh, John, thank you for meeting.” I’m like, “Yes, I planned…” No. I didn’t plan to be here at all. I just happened to see you.

**Craig:** You’re such a bastard because even the lies you successfully told to hide your bastardy have been undone right here.

**John:** Right on the show.

There are general theories on time management. One is that you should focus on whatever the most important thing is and get the most important thing done, to the exclusion of all other stuff. And that’s sort of been how I’ve treated Big Fish this time is that there’s a lot of other stuff in my life, work stuff in my life, that needs some attention that I just can’t give it.

So, I’ve been sort of stalling on phone calls, or just not engaging on stuff because I can’t I have to sort of devote every brain cell to this.

But, in my normal life I will sort of — I’ll look for what the easy things are and just knock out a bunch of easy things. And I think that sometimes people, and I’m definitely one of them, get sort of paralyzed because they know that the big thing is too hard to do. So, the trick is to break it down into smaller steps and just get those little smaller steps done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** In terms of writing, sometimes there’s that scene that I just don’t want to do that. And so, like, well don’t write that scene. Write the other scenes that are around that scene that are simple that you can do right now.

**Craig:** A lot of times when I don’t want to write that scene I have to confront the fact that something’s wrong with the scene. [laughs] That’s usually the big thing. But I have to say that my approach to scheduling stuff, writing, this, you know, I do a lot of charity work in my town, I do work with the WGA, I’ve got a family — that’s a big one. We’ve often talked about our kids are killing us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have come to accept in a self-actualized way, I think, that I have a method that is methodless, and that through various impulses — guilt, desire, whatever they are, shame, happiness, excitement — the things that I want to get done get done. And what I would say to you out there is if you’re having trouble with these things, there’s no problem whatsoever with looking for help. Maybe there’s a system out there that you would find services what you want. Just make it what you want.

Don’t follow some plan, some artificial plan, to your nature. Because that’s not going to work, either. And you’re absolutely right. It is going to get in the way of you just being a happy person. Productivity is not the same thing as happiness.

Productivity in something that makes you happy is the same as happiness. And we can always get better at things. If it excites you, it’s a good thing. If it exhausts you, it’s a bad thing.

**John:** Yes. That’s definitely been my theory with sort of the app stuff I’ve done and sort of Highland has shipped, and Bronson, and the other things. I did it because it was really interesting to me. And so I have no trouble sort of spending a lot of time on things that are actually fascinating to me and exploring how to do that.

And so the musical was a brand new thing, and it was terrifying, and it was fascinating to do it. It’s exhausting right now, but I recognize that I’m sort of through the sloggy/exhaustion part of it. But I also get to see it every night, and that’s a remarkable, amazing thing.

So, I will say that sometimes — here are the two sides of it. The bright shiny things are always going to be bright, and shiny, and attractive. And sometimes you just have to go chase them because they’re what you sort of want to do. And sometimes you’re going to be in the third draft of something that is just a slog. And it’s recognizing that it’s a slog because it’s a slog. But then you’re going to get through it and you will finish it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a child. There is delayed gratification. We all have the experience of not wanting to work out, and then working out, and then feeling great that we worked out. So, writing is no different sometimes. Sometimes writing is awesome and it’s fun. Sometimes it’s working out. But then when it’s done you feel great.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve talked about the marshmallow test on the podcast, because you as a psychology major must be familiar with the marshmallow test. Have you seen this?

**Craig:** Maybe not under that name. Is it the kids who are given the marshmallows and told to wait and they get more marshmallows. Is that the one?

**John:** Exactly. The classic setup is that you have a young kid who is presented with like a marshmallow on a plate. And the tester says, “If you can wait, I’ll be back in a few minutes. And if you can wait, I’ll give you a second marshmallow.” So, basically they time the kid, like how long it takes the kid to not just eat the first marshmallow and delay gratification in order to get two marshmallows.

And I’ve always been the kids who like I could probably wait there a day to get that marshmallow.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is interesting because they find that some kids are just better at it than others. That there is a kind of innate capacity for delayed gratification.

For some people it seems that gratification is only gratifying if it’s immediate. Those people do tend to become drunks. But, [laughs], or substance abusers, or sex addicts. They are also sometimes the most fascinating people in the world.

Writing, unfortunately, is not for people who find gratification only in the moment. It is not an impulsive person’s task.

**John:** I would say sketch writing might be, writing for like a Jimmy Fallon. That could be that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that might be so. Writing for stuff that’s immediate like that, sure, like a daily variety show where every night it’s a new thing and you just burst it out. Absolutely. Yeah. I can see that. That is fun. That is as close to standup comedy as writing gets probably.

But writing anything long form — writing anything that’s not being shot that day requires a sense of delayed gratification. Screenwriting requires a sense of delayed gratification that is monastic…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …in its requirements. You need to be willing to not only write for a very long time to reach the gratification of finishing; you need to be aware that you haven’t finished at all and that you may have another six months, another year, another lifetime ahead of you on that movie. Or it may never gratify in the end ultimately which is the movie experience.

So, those of us who screen-write, yeah, we’re waiting for the second marshmallow.

**John:** I have a theory that perhaps the ability to delay gratification is partly the ability to visualize an alternate future. So, it’s the ability to see a future in which you had waited and this is the result of having waited. Because that’s really what you’re talking about is being able to picture yourself as the person who got the two marshmallows because you waited.

And a lot of the projects I’ve been involved with, it’s knowing that, okay, it’s going to go through all these different steps, but this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And both the movies I’ve written and now the show, and even the apps I’ve done, it’s being able to see like, “Okay, this is what it looks like at the end.” And because I can see what it looks like at the end I am willing to go through all of the stuff that gets you to that place.

**Craig:** Well, that’s an expected confluence for somebody who writes because, after all, writing is imagining stuff and being excited about what you imagine. So, it seems like that would go hand in hand.

There’s an interesting experiment that — a little game that they play. And so you at home can play along with us. I want you to take out a piece of paper, or if you’re in your car just imagine this. You’re going to draw three circles on the paper. The first circle represents how important the past is to you. The second one represents how important the present is to you. and the third one represents how important the future is to you.

And by important I mean to say how much of your thoughts and your mind are occupied by these things — the past, the present, and the future. And, you know, for me, when I did it was sort like a very small circle, pinpoint, huge circle. [laughs] Because, you know, I really don’t think about the past that much at all. I just don’t. I’m not one to go roll over things. If anything, it’s all very dream like behind me. The moment to me right now is the moment right now. But it’s hard for me to access. I’m constantly thinking about tomorrow. I’m constantly thinking about the future.

**John:** Yeah. I would wonder whether that’s necessarily the healthiest balance. I agree that the past is maybe not as instructive and people tend to dwell too far in the past. And therefore we have terrible world situations.

But what’s interesting about the future, and if I could improve one thing about myself, and find myself doing it, I would say I clock it that I’m doing it, is I will visualize the future and I will visualize conversations — hypothetical conversations with people that are not productive. I will visualize, like, “I’ll say this, and then they’ll say that, and then I’ll say this, and I’ll do that. And you know what? That’s not going to really work out so well.”

**Craig:** [laughs] No. No, no, it’s true. I have occasionally caught myself in loops like that. I remember when I was on the board of directors of the Writers Guild, after the first few meetings it became clear to me that the nature of those board meetings was endless talking.

And it was frustrating talking because, frankly, so much of it was just wrong. You know, it was just sitting in a room listening to people say things that were wrong. And saying them with conviction. And when you hear people saying wrong things with conviction, something happens inside of you that is — well, maybe something happens inside of me. It was terrifying. [laughs]

And I would find myself sometimes at night playing out conversations in my head in which I attempted to make them see why they were wrong. And it never worked. Ever. It is, in fact, a waste of time.

But, it may also be neural flotsam and jetsam that is unavoidable to those of us who write because that is precisely the mechanism we use when we’re creating characters and writing dialogue.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** So, it’s hard to make that muscle stop being a muscle.

**John:** Yes. But I think it is important to recognize that writing yourself into imaginary fights with people is not maybe necessarily the healthiest thing to be doing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, I’m recognizing when I do it and hopefully not doing it as long as I’ve done it.

**Craig:** How many fights have we had in your head?

**John:** I don’t know that we’ve had that many fights. Maybe two.

**Craig:** [laughs].

**John:** And I’ll tell you, one of the fights I had in my head was over a script of mine that you read. And in a lovely way you were trying to talk about some aspect of it, but you said it did not hit my ears especially well.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sorry.

**John:** And so therefore I started having the very unproductive conversation with you, the imaginary conversation in my head. How about you? How many fights have you had with me?

**Craig:** None. [laughs] Because, well, and I’m sorry. You know, that’s why I hate reading people’s scripts and talking about it because then I think like, “How can I say something here and not upset them if there’s something that I feel is wrong, or incorrect, or I don’t like.” And I don’t want to be pedantic about it.

But then there’s always the risk that that will happen. And it’s certainly not intentional.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

**John:** Oh, no, it’s fine. And people who are working on Big Fish know that I have about — you can sort of watch me and know sort of like where my meter is at. Because I can start crying at about 15 seconds at any given point. It’s been a very sort of stressful time. But it’s gotten to the point where it’s just like it’s almost kind of funny because it’s like I don’t have — I’m aware of it, and so it’s not so terrible.

**Craig:** I didn’t make you cry?

**John:** Oh, you didn’t make me cry at all. Not at all.

**Craig:** Because I thought that script was good. I really liked it.

**John:** Well thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, any thoughts I had were just — they were probably, you know, if you heard anything strange in my voice it was probably that I was encountering things that I had done in the past and paid terrible prices for. And maybe there was memories of old mistakes that may not necessarily have translated to your script, but maybe that was what it was.

**John:** I want to thank you for that.

Let us wrap up with our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** But now I’m going to have a fight in my head with you later though.

**John:** Oh, good. See? “How dare he be so sensitive about that thing? And how dare he call me out on a podcast about it?” That’s really what you’re fight is going to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the more, frankly, the more you do that to me the better the podcast gets.

**John:** [laughs] Because it’s really the podcast where I knock Craig Mazin down a little bit.

**Craig:** But the best podcast. I wish every podcast were me defending myself. It’s my natural position.

**John:** Good! Yes. I very much enjoyed our Veronica Mars podcast for that reason, because we genuinely did disagree.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And I didn’t have to just take the opposite point of view.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week which is actually courtesy of two members of our cast. Alex Brightman and Cary Tedder. And this is a recurring joke in the dressing rooms. It’s Carl Lewis “sings” The National Anthem at an NBA game. You may have seen this. This is from a long time ago.

**Craig:** Seen it! Seen it!

**John:** It’s really just amazing. So, it’s not a surprise — he does a terrible job. And there’s moments in it that are just brilliant. Because he recognizes, like, oh, this is not going well, so he says, “Uh-oh.” That uh-oh is great.

**Craig:** I know. That’s my favorite.

**John:** And so we’ve had some uh-oh moments in Big Fish. And nothing has gone horribly awry, but there are cats that have fallen out of trees when they weren’t supposed to. So, there have been some uh-oh moments, shot guns that are broken. And so “Uh-oh” has become sort of a recurring thing. So, I will include a link to it in the show notes. It’s only 30 seconds long, so it’s not going to take up a lot of your time.

What I think is fascinating about it is it’s not just to make fun of Carl Lewis, or not even to make fun of him. He’s given us a great illustration of why our National Anthem is so problematic. And I think some guidelines on sort of if you do need to sing The National Anthem, here is my personal piece of advice: You need to recognize that our National Anthem can only be sung if you start at near the very bottom of your singing register.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, National Anthem, the third note is the lowest note in the whole song.

**Craig:** “Say.”

**John:** Yeah. So, [sings] “Oh, say…” You have to figure out — well, that was a terrible one — but you have to figure out where your lowest note is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The lowest note that you can sing well should be the “Say.” And then you have a chance, just a small chance, of being able to get through the song.

**Craig:** Basically you’re going from “Say” to “Glare.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the range of the song. And it’s a long range. And it is very difficult.

**John:** And if you don’t think about it ahead of time you’re going to make a natural assumption for most songs that you sing, which is that the first note is going to be somewhere in the middle of where that song is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that holds true for America the Beautiful. It holds true for Happy Birthday. Through most of the normal songs you sing. It’s just a fluke song. It requires far too much of a range.

So, figuring out this piece of my own, everyone is like, “Well, someone else must have given some good advice on how to sing the national anthem.” So, I’ll also include a link to this ten-point guideline for how to sing The National Anthem without embarrassing yourself. The zero point on that is never sing The National Anthem.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You basically can’t win with The National Anthem, unless you’re Whitney Houston, or Zooey Deschanel did a great job, too.

**Craig:** Lots of people can sing The National Anthem. And I actually like singing The National Anthem. You just have to know — you have to know that you can do it. The only way to sing The National Anthem is to sing it confidently, because the whole point is it’s a song about confidence. It’s a song about victory.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** And you cannot be confident if you, while you’re singing or thinking, “I wonder if I’ll hit the word Glare.” Maybe not. [laughs] You know?

**John:** One piece of advice in this blog post, and then I’ll stop talking about The National Anthem, is don’t look at a printed copy of it. Instead, listen to the song and handwrite out all the words so that they make sense to you. So, you can detect the through line of the story and that will keep you from messing up the “rockets’ red glare” and a couple couplets that always get messed up when people try to sing it.

**Craig:** [sings] “Bunch of bombs in the air.” You gotta put Leslie Nielsen’s version as Enrico Palazzo is the greatest version of The National Anthem ever.

**John:** I’ll have Stuart find that and link to it.

**Craig:** “Bunch of bombs in the air” is the greatest. You want to talk about one-to-one writing funny and being funny — “Bunch of bombs in the air.” That’s just amazing. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, do you have one this week?

**Craig:** I do. Yes. This is a Cool Thing that a lot of people already know is cool, but perhaps you don’t out there, and it’s the video game BioShock Infinite.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** People love it. I love video games. I loved the first BioShock a whole big ton. I’ve really enjoyed the second BioShock as well. This one sort of takes it to another level. So, BioShock, the series created and masterminded by a guy name Ken Levine who’s super duper smart. Interestingly, started his career — attempted to start his carrier as a screenwriter, and didn’t happen for him.

So, then he went out east to New York to become a playwright. Didn’t happen for him either. He is, however, I would argue the preeminent video game writer of our generation. No question he is actually. I mean, you could argue maybe that the Houser Brothers who do the Grand Theft Auto games are up there, too. But, frankly, I think Ken Levine is in a class all of his own.

The game is easily the most fascinating world conceived for those of us with a brain in the video game genre. It is remarkable. It is incredibly literate. It is incredibly literate almost to a fault. I will say — so I’ll give a little spoiler alert here — I’m not giving away the ending at all. I’m simply talking about the nature of the ending.

The nature of the ending is presented in such a curious way and is so much about you figuring out. I mean, there’s that metric of how much do I tell you, how much do I let you figure out. So, okay, I need you to know that Bruce Willis is really dead. So, I’m going to let you figure it out by showing the breath and then showing little flashbacks from the movie and then you’ll get it.

I’m not going to just have somebody announce, “He’s dead!” Well, end of BioShock Infinite, I think, errs a little too far in the “you figure it out — here, we’ve told you everything you need to know.” I couldn’t actually quite understand all of the intricacies of it until I went online and had people sort of explain it in depth, which reminded me a bit of the second Matrix film.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which had that scene with the architect, which if you understand, is amazing. What he’s saying is amazing. And what they are presenting there is amazing. It’s just that nobody understood it, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t get credit for it. So, I think that the end of BioShock Infinite got a little too that way for me. But, now that I understand it, it’s pretty awesome. I just wish that it had been presented sort of in the way that Ken Levine presented the big twist inside of BioShock the first, which was done flawlessly and hits you like a ton of bricks.

And not only — that may be the greatest twist in video game history because not only did it create a twist in the story, but it created a twist for you as the player. You realized you hadn’t been playing the way you thought you had been playing, which was wild.

So, anyway, BioShock Infinite is a game worth playing if you are a writer, if you are intellectual, if you are fascinated by the connection between humanity and the crimes of humanity. So, that’s my big Cool Thing of the week.

**John:** Wonderful. I’m looking forward to that when I get back to Los Angeles. I will barricade myself and play some of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun podcast. Our standard boilerplate here at the end. Anything we talked about on the show today you can find at johnaugust.com/podcast, along with back episodes. If you like our show, it helps us if you give us a rating in iTunes so other people can find us. We are just Scriptnotes on iTunes.

If you have a question for us you can write at ask@johnaugust.com. Even better, you can go to johnaugust.com/podcast and there is a little thing, a link, that shows how to send a question in and the things we will talk about and the things we won’t talk about.

For example, we’d love if you’d put your location so we know where you’re writing from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I am @johnaugust on Twitter. You are @clmazin?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And thank you, Craig, again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** All right. Bye.

LINKS:

* [First-sale doctrine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) on Wikipedia
* [Reselling Digital Goods Is Copyright Infringement, Judge Rules](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/reselling-digital-goods/) from Wired
* [Capitol Records LLC vs ReDigi Inc.](http://www.scribd.com/doc/133451611/Redigi-Capitol)
* New York times on [the ReDigi ruling](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/redigi-loses-suit-over-reselling-of-digital-music.html?\_r=0)
* [Carl Lewis “sings” The Star-Spangled Banner](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLvCM4j2mg)
* Jonas Maxwell’s [tips for singing the national anthem](http://www.jonasmaxwell.com/pages/index.cfm?pg=298)
* [BioShock Infinite](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003O6E6NE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon.com
* How to [ask a question](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* OUTRO: Leslie Nielsen (as Enrico Palazzo) [sings the national anthem](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ZsDdK0sTI)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/rhythm-and-blues).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 80, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Episode 80! That’s just a lot of episodes.

**Craig:** A lot of talking. I don’t know about you; I was sure that by episode 5 it would just be awkward silences punctuated by an occasional cough.

**John:** I would say actually the early episodes had the biggest number of awkward silences because it took awhile — I think, honestly, especially for me — to find a rhythm for us talking. But, we’ve made it to 80, so if we made it 80, I think there’s a very good chance that we’ll make it to 100. And we need to start thinking about what we’re going to do for our hundredth episode.

**Craig:** So funny that you bring that up. Because I was in the car the other day, pondering this very topic. And you and I had talked about maybe doing a live podcast here in Los Angeles. Hopefully you’ll be back by then. It’s 20 weeks from now.

**John:** Yes. It is this summer. So, actually in our staff meeting — I have staff meetings now.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** Yeah, I know. I don’t want to blow your mind, but with Stuart and Ryan, there’s actually enough stuff that we actually have a weekly staff meeting. And even while I’ve been here in New York we do staff meetings via iChat or Skype or whatever.

And we were talking about it in the staff meeting, and so I asked Siri, “Siri, what is 20 weeks from today?” And she told me it was this summer, like July 23 or something, which is a time that I’m going to be in Los Angeles. So, yes, I think we should do a hundredth episode live. I’m going to say it right here on the air: I think we need to do a live episode.

**Craig:** I think so, too. And it’s going to be a celebration. We finally get to look upon all of the dorky faces of the people that listen to us. They can look upon our dorky faces. It will be a massive dork out.

**John:** Listeners should know that we are starting to talk with venues and finding a good place for us to do this, preferably a place where people could actually drink alcohol if they chose to drink alcohol and make a little party out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah! It will be the best podcast ever.

**John:** Best podcast, by far.

Now, Craig, I am still in New York, but tomorrow I’m so excited because I get to fly home for just a long weekend, which is so blessed. Because, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I get really, really homesick. It’s just one of my things — I get really homesick.

And I was describing to a friend that I think homesickness is actually not something that you accumulate. It’s like you have a reservoir of non-homesickness, and it depletes. And eventually it just runs dry and then you’re just insanely homesick.

**Craig:** When you say homesick, homesick for Los Angeles or homesick for your family?

**John:** Homesick for my family. I miss Los Angeles, but I really miss my family. And seeing them on the computer is just not the same.

**Craig:** It’s not. I am with you 100%. And we’ll sort of actually talk about a related topic shortly in this whole — you know, we moved to Los Angeles to be in the movie business, and then they keep sending us places. And, of course, you’ve made a choice to do this other business that is naturally somewhere else. But, it’s very hard for me to be away from my family.

Two weeks, I start to go a little crazy. I don’t know what your threshold is.

**John:** Yeah. Two weeks is where it really kicked in for me.

**Craig:** Plus, also, I mean, I don’t know if you get these calls. There’s the, “You have to talk to your son,” call. And so then you’re doing this parenting and you can already detect the resentment that you’re not there from your spouse. “Why did you leave me to deal with this?” [laughs] No good comes of it. None.

**John:** So, hopefully the only good thing that will come of this long protracted period is Big Fish, which is actually about a father’s issues with his child, and all of those sorts of family issues. So, hopefully that will be the good thing that does come out of this protracted time. And today we were actually staging through the end of the show which is one of the weepiest things I’ve ever encountered in my life.

And so I’ve spent the last two days crying, which is not helping to stop up that homesickness thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I get to get on a plane and go home tomorrow and I’m so excited.

**Craig:** Well, I’m very glad. One of the cruel ironies of our business is that — any storytelling business — is that the theme of the father who does not spend enough time with his wife, husband, or children crops up constantly. And all of those stories are put together and produced by people who are not spending time with their spouses or their children while they do it.

**John:** Indeed. And one of the things that I mentioned on Twitter this week is I get to show this Big Fish finally to people in Chicago. And I asked people like, “Hey, do you want to come see this thing I’ve been working on?” And people said yes. And I asked, again, like, “If I could get you a special discount promo code so that you could come to those first early performances, would you come?” And people said yes enthusiastically.

So, I have good news. People can actually come see this show of fathers on the road, and sons, and dysfunction, and come see me in Chicago because I would love to see you. And I would feel less homesick if I knew that my listeners were out there in the audience.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, here’s the actual deal. There will be a link at the show notes at johnaugust.com. But, it’s honesty simpler if I just tell you to Google “Ticketmaster Big Fish.” The first thing that’s going to come up is tickets for Big Fish in Chicago.

So, here’s the deal I made with producers. The first four previews, which is a Tuesday through Friday, April 2 through April 5 at 7pm, if you use the promo code “Script” as you’re checking out, you can get tickets for $30 rather than $100.

**Craig:** Whoa! Nice.

**John:** It’s $70 off. So, that’s pretty great just for being a Scriptnotes listener. So, if you would like to come join me in Chicago to see Big Fish, I would love to see you. I genuinely honestly would love to see you. I’m going to be there at least through opening. If you do come, whether you’re coming on those first four days and you’re using special promo codes, or if you’re just coming some other time, or group tickets, or whatever, if you know you’re coming to the show and you want to tell me that you’re coming to the show, just send me a tweet @johnaugust and let me know what show you’re coming to, what seat you’re in.

And if the world isn’t crashing down and I’m not needed to do something to fix something, I’ll come say hi because I’m just going to be in Chicago and I’ll just come say hi.

**Craig:** And that is priceless.

**John:** That’s the kind of personal service you’re not going to get from, I don’t know, the Nerdist Writers Podcast.

**Craig:** Or any podcast, let’s face it.

**John:** Let’s face it. So, anyway, if you want to come join me in Chicago, it’s an open invitation to listeners. And to you, Craig, if you find yourself in Chicago. Derek Haas is going to be there. Derek has to come see Big Fish.

**Craig:** I know. He’s shooting his wonderful show Chicago Fire there. You know, I ran into your producer, Dan Jinks — your wonderful producer Dan Jinks — at a party a couple weeks ago. And he also extended a lovely invitation to me. And I would love to go. I just don’t know how I’m going to get away to Chicago at that time. But, I will try.

I know that in the back of my mind what I know is that it’s going to be successful, it’s going to be on Broadway no matter what. So, I’m going to see it.

It’s interesting — it’s a challenge — I mean, I actually can see you running into it. We’re in the movie business, we’re in the television business. We never have to worry about people seeing it. You know, it’s like just go down the street, you’ll see it. Or, walk into the room and you’ll see it. But this is tough. It’s like a destination entertainment thing. And so I have to plan it.

**John:** One of the things I’ve noticed this week is I was trying to describe the process to people who come from the movie business. And it’s like we’re in preproduction, production, and post all simultaneously on the same thing. And so we’re in preproduction in the sense that we’re using temporary props and we’re sort of blocking things and getting things to work, but we’re also in production because we really are finishing up numbers and literally getting every foot stepped down to exactly where it is.

But this last week we started doing the orchestrations. And so it was very much like the experience of like film spotting, where you’re trying to figure out where the music is going to go, or like color timing. You’re doing these really technical things.

And when we get to Chicago, it gets even more technical because there’s like lighting and tech and all that stuff. And, so, it’s a whole new world for me, but it’s also all these things happen simultaneously.

What’s most honestly genuinely terrifying to me is all of the variables that I can’t control, which is literally like that tech thing that doesn’t work right. Or, the audience is live there in the theater. And so what happens when that guy has the heart attack, or just weird stuff happens?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s exciting, but it’s also just terrifying to me. Because the worst thing that can happen when we have a movie released is like, oh well, a print can break. But then they fix the print and they just keep going. It’s not, you know… — Things are finished in a way that they can just never be finished in theater. And it’s lovely but also frightening to me.

**Craig:** There’s also this other thing that I think about with live theater and that is film, when it’s finished, that is the film that every single person who sees the movie will experience. But every night is a different performance. Every night, sometimes the performers will have a great night. Sometimes one of them will be off. One of them is sick. That whole thing is just fascinating to me.

You know, every time you invite somebody to see a show you must be wondering in the back of your head, “I hope tonight will be a good version of the show.” Crazy.

**John:** Yeah. So, for every role in Big Fish we have understudies and we also have the swings. And their responsibility is to be able to fill in for these certain tracks of roles. And so if that person is out, this person can slide in, and there’s this whole logic math problem about, like, how you can cover every role in the show so that the curtain can go up?

So, as I’m watching the show with the people who I’m expecting to be there, also in the wings — and sometimes swapping-in in front of me — are swings who are going to take over for that part. Or, we’re also teaching the understudies every line so that they can do the show. It’s just a completely different thing that doesn’t exist in the movie business.

**Craig:** Wow. I love it.

**John:** Great. So, let’s get to our real business today which is I wanted to talk first off about the challenges of the visual effects industry. And Rhythm & Hues, which is going bankrupt, so we’re going to talk through that. I also want to talk about some reader questions because we’ve gotten a whole bunch and it’s been a long time since we’ve gone through the viewer mailbag. So, this time we’re going to actually share it a little bit and you’ll read some questions so it’s not just me…

**Craig:** I feel like you have an illness and you’re not telling me. And so you’re like a dad that runs a store and you keep giving your son more and more responsibility. And he’s so excited, but other people are sort of nodding sadly at him, like, “Yeah, it’s good that you know how to do the cash register now.”

And I think, “Well, it is good, of course. I’m a big boy.” And then I hear you coughing and I don’t get it.

**John:** I cough a little bit, and there’s a little blood in my handkerchief?

**Craig:** Yeah. The little blood in your handkerchief and you pat me on the shoulder and say, “You’re going to do fine.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I will do fine.” And the old lady that does the books is crying and everything is so confusing to me. But, I feel like a big boy.

**John:** Yeah. I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last night, and Big Daddy, that’s the state he’s sort of in. It’s sort of the opposite — everyone knows that Big Daddy is dying, and big daddy doesn’t know that he’s dying, so everyone is treating him strangely and he catches wind of, “That’s right, I’m dying.”

But, let’s get started. Let’s start with visual effects, because I sort of saw during the Oscars there was controversy over Life of Pi and the guy accepting the award for the visual effects of Life of Pi got cut off during that time. And it started this sort of firestorm. And I’ve noticed people’s twitter badges were green suddenly. And I’m like, “Wait, is it Iran again?” I didn’t know sort of what was going on.

And I saw the YouTube video, it went kind of viral, of what big movies that you have seen would look like without visual effects, and of course they look terrible.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I want to talk through that because the issues are actually really complicated. And it’s not a thing you can sort of boil down to one thing, but it’s difficult to make a living as a visual effects artist for certain reasons. It’s difficult for an American company to stay in business. And all the stuff that’s happening in visual effects could happen in other parts of the industry, including what writers do.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a tough situation. Let’s just wind back to the Oscars. The gentleman who was part of the team that won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, his speech was too long, and they — I thought it was very funny that the play-off music this time was the theme from Jaws. I thought that was hysterical. But, he got cut off just as he was about to talk about the loss — or potential loss — of this company Rhythm and Hues which has been around forever. Well, at least as long as I’ve been in the business.

And they recently filed for bankruptcy and they’re in real trouble. And this is one of the A-list top visual effects houses. First, I just want to say any controversy about the fact that the guy got cut off is ridiculous. Everybody who goes to the Oscars is told you have this much time. So, if it’s really important for you to make a statement about Rhythm and Hues, you know, plan and time your speech — just a thought — because frankly it’s kind of obnoxious to go over time. I really do think so.

Okay, that aside, here’s what’s going on: Rhythm and Hues is a visual effects house. So, movies and television shows, when they do visual effects shooting the production itself doesn’t complete the work. 9 times out of 10 what we’re talking about is green screen stuff. Green screen has become the most common visual effect, maybe I guess second only to like wire removal and stuff like that. These are somewhat simple things, except that they’re not simple. And the take time to do right.

And so outside companies like Rhythm and Hues do all of that work. Some of it is rote and some of it is not at all rote. When you talk about creating visual effects, for instance the Tiger in Life of Pi, that’s a big deal. Now you’re talking about true artistry; you’re not talking about rote work.

What’s happened to the visual effects industry, just as it has happened to general production, is that movie studios and other visual effects supervisors have basically been outsourcing it to overseas because it’s cheaper. And when we say overseas I think people immediately jump to the notion of a sweatshop full of kids in China that are painting out wires.

But it’s actually — Canada is a huge problem for us here in the United States in that regard. And the way it works is pretty simple. There are two ways that we get outbid by international companies. Their labor tends to be cheaper. And they offer tax incentives. And the tax incentives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but it’s always some version of this: If you hire people here in Canada they get a salary here in Canada. Part of their salary, of course, goes to tax here in Canada. We will collect that tax and we will not keep that tax. We will send it back to you in the form of a rebate. So, you get to write that part off of your overall bill.

And even though we’re not as a state profiting off of the work through taxes, the fact that these people are being employed, they’ll spend money and it will help improve the economy. That’s the whole theory.

**John:** Let me pause right there. Because what you’re generally saying about tax incentives also applies to actual feature production or to television production. That’s one of the draws. That’s one of the reasons why you shoot shows in certain parts of Canada, or you shoot in certain states is because either that state or the country provides tax incentives that makes it really attractive to shoot in New Mexico, or Michigan, or…

**Craig:** Atlanta.

**John:** …whatever the state is that has that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, Georgia is a big one now.

**John:** Georgia is a big one. And so that happens in movies and television overall, but there’s also some special things that are kind of unique about the visual effects situation, which is that because it’s not right during the middle of production, it’s this thing that goes on afterwards, different companies are bidding against each other to try to do the visual effects for this project. And some companies have the advantage of the tax rebates. Some of them have other advantages of being overseas. And it’s a crazy situation of a race for the bottom to see who can submit the lowest price to do that work.

**Craig:** Everybody is racing to the bottom. The companies are racing to the bottom. And curiously the people who are providing these tax benefits and lower labor costs are also racing to the bottom.

And this is the trick: Nobody seems to really be sure if these tax rebates are actually beneficial to the people that offer them. It does seem that certain states try them and then go, “Whoa, we lost money.” And then they stop them. And, of course, you always have an issue with the quality of the labor you’re getting.

Let’s pick a state. North Dakota could suddenly decide we’re going to have the best rebates in the business. But, are there crews there? Because that’s part of the deal; you’ve got to hire local crews, otherwise it makes no sense for North Dakota.

So, we’re dealing with the stuff. Here’s where it gets rough — really rough — with visual effects. When we’re talking about the artistry that we think of, the creation of that tiger, the movement of the tiger, the installation of emotion into the eyes, these things that truly are amazing — we think of highly talented visual artists who combine technology and craft to create something wonderful on screen.

But then there are times when the visual effects are a man in a car parked in front of a green screen, and somebody goes and shoots plates, and then they comp the plates behind that man. But the man has long hair, and so fifty people in South Korea spend a week going frame by frame roto’ing individual hairs against the plates.

And, frankly, that’s not artistry. That is labor. I mean, there’s some craft to it, but it’s the kind of thing where suddenly companies are like, “I could do that for $8,000 in a week, or I could spend $30,000 here. I think I should probably spend the $8,000, because the work ultimately will be similar enough.

Those are the choices that are being made. And it’s tough because, you know, I want all movies to be made in Southern California, frankly, and I want all production to be here. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m frustrated from a writing point of view that when I write movies half the time they tell me, “And it will be shot in Georgia.” Then everything looks like it’s in Georgia all of a sudden. It’s a bummer.

Identity Thief is a road trip that takes place entirely in the state of Georgia. It makes me nuts. You know? I had this whole nice road trip planned out state by state with a map that went from Boston to Portland. That was the first thing that got torn up. I had to argue so that it wouldn’t be just Miami to Atlanta which is a four-hour drive.

**John:** Yeah. A four-hour drive that has to take the entire movie.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I share your frustration here. So, let’s talk about this situation in visual effects and how it applies to things that are listeners may be doing, which is screenwriting.

We talked about the difference between artistry and craft. And one of the lucky things about screenwriters, at least as its perceived right now, is it is still falling in the artistry camp, and that it’s a — what I can write is going to be different than what you can write, which is what that third person is going to be able to write.

So, there’s some unique special benefit to hiring this person versus hiring that person, which is not applicable to this wire removal technician versus that wire removal technician. That’s very much you are doing one specific kind of job. The same way like I think back to the old Disney, they’re painting in the cells. There was a person who had to draw everything. That was remarkable artistry. The person who was painting in the in-between cells, that took real talent, but it wasn’t the artistry in the same way that the other jobs were.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, right now we cannot be replaced by international labor. We can’t — they could hire Canadian writers to do things, but they’re not finding the quality of Canadian writers that can do what we can do. So, for now that’s really good.

What can happen even in the absence of that though is a race to the bottom. And what keeps us from hitting all the way to the bottom is scale, is that we are organized as a labor union, and because of that no writer is able to say, “Well, I’ll do it for less than that amount of money.” That’s one of the lucky things we have for feature films in the US right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that is why the things that worry me the most from a writing standpoint are any of the cultural shifts that threaten that. For instance, we talk a lot about the toxic combination of one-step drafts and producer-steps and free drafts. Because, what happens is — and I’ve said this directly to the heads of two studios now — if you’re paying somebody $1 million for a single draft, and you’re not happy and you want four more weeks of work, eh, what am I going to do, stamp my feet here? Okay.

If you’re paying somebody scale for one step, or close to scale for one step, and then you ask them for another four weeks of work, you’ve obliterated scale. Now it’s half scale. And the more that that becomes entrenched, the more that ground beneath us loosens. If we lose scale, everybody suffers and it truly is a race to the bottom. The one thing I know about screenwriting is there are, I’m going to guess, 500,000 people in the United States alone that would like to be professional screenwriters. And if you said, “Warner Bros. will hire you to write a screenplay for $5,000,” 490,000 of them would say, “Great!” Possibly all of them would say great.

And that’s super bad. Super bad for the professional status of screenwriters and it injures the value of what we do. Not super bad that people want to do it, but the potential for that is super bad, that the economics would shift on us like that.

So, the Writers Guild, for all the stuff that they panic over, that’s really the only thing they should be panicking over in features as far as I’m concerned. So much more than over residual formulas or anything like that. It is protecting our scale.

**John:** The other way in which our scale can be threatened is by reclassifying the job that we normally would do in features, or in television, as a different kind of job that doesn’t need to be covered. And that’s one of the things were always eternally vigilant that writing sort of a proposal or a treatment, that they’re not going to ask you to do other kind of work that’s actually really functionally a screenwriter’s work and not pay you screenwriter money for that.

So, not just extra drafts, but like saying, “Oh, you’re writing this for our digital division. It is a promo thing for this,” and trying to find a way to create things that don’t have to fall under the WGA auspices.

**Craig:** Yeah. And something funny — television and screenwriting developed along two different tracks. And it’s kind of fascinating to see how they divided.

In television, what they did with writers was they said basically, “Look, we’re going to pay all of you roughly scale for things. We’ll even base your residuals on minimums. But what we’ll also do for those of you who are the primary writers of shows, the creators, the showrunners, we’ll make you producers. We’ll pay you all the money that you would expect to be paid as a producer. You won’t pay dues on that,” which is great for them, “and also we will give you access to the big prize which is sharing in the true profits, not the fake profits, but the true profits of the work.”

So, somebody like Chuck Lorre who creates hit television shows is worth more than any screenwriter will ever be. Period. The end. He makes more in a month than any screenwriter probably makes in 10 years.

Now, on the other side you have screenwriters who at the highest levels get paid so much more for a script than any television writer does, but don’t have any access to that big profit number. And, frankly, that’s why success in television has always been so much brighter and sparklier, but success in screenwriting seems to be a little bit more accessible in some way.

Now, if they successfully erode scale for screenwriters, the way that they have successfully eroded scale for visual effects, we lose the only good part of being screenwriters. [laughs] And then we got nothing. And that’s scary.

**John:** The other danger is to look at — and so far Netflix seems to be a largely good thing in terms of creating more opportunities for more people, but if a Netflix-like model of you’re doing a show for Netflix, or you’re doing a show for Amazon that is not sort of a networky kind of show, it’s not even a cable show, when you’re in that Wild West territory you could theoretically be writing something that sort of feels like a television show but they don’t have to pay you any of the money that they would normally have to pay you for a television show.

And, if that model were to really take off then that could sort of explode what we are counting on for getting paid in television. So, that’s the other thing to always be truly vigilant about. I’m genuinely optimistic about Netflix or Amazon or the other people who are trying to do television-like things. I’m just worried that their business model isn’t going to include paying writers.

**Craig:** I am genuinely pessimistic. I think that the instinct of any new business arriving into the content creation industry is to not get hung on the hook that the studios are “hung on,” which is to pay this kind of scale and residuals and all the rest of it.

When the Writers Guild…uh…umbrage…umbrage is coming. It’s been awhile. It’s been awhile, John, so let me just uncork for a second here: One thing that makes me nuts about the Writers Guild is that in its anti-corporate zeal, and I get it, I get it that the Writers Guild does not like these companies. The companies negotiate with them every three years and they stick it to them. And the companies do stuff that’s just wrong.

And so the Writers Guild gets angry, angry, angry. And then you combine that with the fact that the constituency of the Writers Guild tends to be very liberal and progressive and very anti-corporatistic, and I understand that, too. What that creates unfortunately is this knee jerk reaction that anybody who is going to hurt the companies is our friend. No!

This is ridiculous. That is such a mistake. To look at these guys out there like Google and say, “Well, we should help Google compete with these companies because then we’ll have another buyer. And that will stick it to the man and make more money for us.” No! No. No, no, no.

It will be a race to the bottom. When these companies come in, they will dig out that floor. They will try and go below it. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. Look at the way they run their business. Look how they pay their coders. Open your eyes. I love saying stuff like “open your eyes,” because now I sound like a lunatic, but that’s okay.

I’m a pretty sober person, normally, but now I’m saying, “Open your eyes.” And once they do that, these competitors that we are cheerleading, “Come on in, come on in,” well, then the studios will go, “Well, now we’ve got to compete with these guys.” Generally speaking, I would say 7 times out of 10 the Writers Guild ends up shooting itself in the foot. I’m just going to ballpark it at 70%. Whatever the name is for the rule of unintended consequences — I don’t know if there’s a Moore’s Law type of name for it — they should chisel into the concrete facade of that building so that everyone who works there and sets the policy at that place has to read it every day when they arrive.

**John:** In no way trying to diminish your umbrage or actually re-stoke the fires of umbrage, but what I will say is that the ground is changing regardless. So, no matter what the Writers Guild were to try to do, that kind of stuff is going to change. And Netflixy business models will kick in. And so while I agree that we don’t want to sort of burn the house down just to burn the house down, we have to recognize that this stuff is going to happen and try to be as smart as we can about shifting our strategies to deal with how this is going to be.

Because our current business model probably can’t be directly applied to it. It’s just a different thing. And we need to figure out how to do that.

**Craig:** You’re right. And I guess my point is that we should, as much as it pains us, just to look at the person that keeps poking us in the eye and say, “You may be the best friend I have. Maybe we should consider it.” Because, the people that keep poking us in our eye aren’t slapping us in the face, and there are a bunch of face-slappers out there waiting.

And I would encourage as best as we can as an organization — I would encourage the health of these five companies because they pay us the most.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say the other people, we can’t even go on strike against them.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** We can’t go on strike against YouTube.

**Craig:** Oh, they would love that.

**John:** They would love that.

**Craig:** Oh, please, “Good, go on strike.” Yeah, what do they care? Do you know how many unions there are at Google? Zero. They don’t have unions. They don’t believe in it.

Have you noticed that Pixar is non-union? That’s the culture up there. They don’t believe in it. Period. The end. Umbrage.

**John:** Done. Let’s get to some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, we have a bunch, and it’s been awhile since we’ve done this, so let me start with the first one. This is from Alexander in Los Angeles. And I’m going to start and stop because there’s a few things along the way.

“Way back in 2008 I wrote into the blog at johnaugust.com to ask for some advice on taking phone meetings, back when I was a fledgling writer living outside of Los Angeles. Since then I landed a manager from my Nicholl placement and relocated to LA, writing, shooting, and networking as much as possible.”

Well, congratulations Alexander. Good for you.

“Over the past few months a spec script of mine started getting some traction. I had a shop around agreement with a pair of well respected producers.”

And I’m going to pause here and define a shop around agreement. What does that mean to you?

**Craig:** You know, I think it means basically that you’re giving the producers the exclusive right to take it to places. It’s kind of an option, isn’t it the same thing?

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of like a handshake option. It’s like, “Yeah, you control it, at least for these places.” And it’s pretty common with specs where if you were officially sort of going out on the town you might say like, “Okay, Producer X, you can have it for Paramount, and you have it for these certain places where I know you have relationships and that’s great.”

And so when Go went out as a spec we assigned it to certain places and Paul Rosenberg who ended up taking it to Banner, that was one of the few places that we sort of gave it to him, but he had a shopping agreement that he could take it there.

A shop around agreement could also mean like for a certain period of time it’s okay to expose it to certain places, just sort of negotiate it on the fly as it came out.

So, he had a shop around agreement with a pair of well respected producers. “And we were going after directors. One director in particular really connected with the material and he flew in from Europe to discuss his vision for the story and necessary rewrites to shoot in his home country. And now, after meeting with the producers and the director, a studio exec is interested in the project, which is awesome. But, there’s a downside.

“The studio exec doesn’t feel the script is quite in the right place. The director is flying back to LA for a week so we can all sit down and discuss what needs to happen to the script for the studio to take the next step. In short, I’m kind of freaking out. Basically I’ve been told to come into the room and just ‘be brilliant.’ And this particular exec I’m pitching to is notorious for having a huge slate of projects in development, with his attention constantly divided between all of them. So, there’s that. No big deal.

“Any advice you guys would like to share with me and your other listeners in this situation?”

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I have a bit of advice. When people tell you in advance of a meeting that you have to achieve a certain thing specifically like that, “be brilliant,” “impress this person,” “make them feel this,” “do this,” please tell yourself that they don’t know what they’re talking about, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Because the truth is nobody — there is no magic formula. There’s no “be brilliant.” There’s none of that.

Half the time they are trying to control something they have no control over. And the currency of people who don’t create things is to appear in control. That’s their currency, to appear as if they have some sort of knowledge or inside track on the future, which of course, they do not.

Agencies are famous for this. “Nobody’s buying this kind of thing,” until they do and, okay. “Be brilliant in the room.” They don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what it means. Go into the room and be confident and present yourself and be a grownup and listen and see if you have a connection with the person.

**John:** I would say that “be brilliant” is a useful codeword sometimes to say, “This is a really flexible situation and we just kind of don’t know how this is going to go, so you need to be ready to go in a lot of different directions.” And it may be worth having some pre-meeting to talk about what are the range of flexibilities you’re willing to talk about for this movie or for this take or how you’re going to do it. And who’s going to be responsible for following the lead of the exec if the exec starts to go in a certain direction.

I can recall some of my earlier meetings where I went in and I pitched one executive on a project I really wanted. I’d already met with the producer. We went in there. And he was sort of notoriously sort of hard to please and hard to sort of peg down. But, I went into the room and he showed me like, “Oh here, I’ve got to show you this.” And he showed me this trailer for this movie that he had coming out. He’s like, “That’s coming out the same weekend as your movie Go. We’re going to crush you.”

And I’m like, “Well, that seems like a great movie, and this is getting off to a really terrific start.” That’s a brilliant way to start a meeting.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I mean…

**John:** When they say “be brilliant,” it’s basically like be ready to be quick on your feet and negotiate some difficult turns there, but since you already have a director on board, make sure that there’s a range of options that you’re all willing to go to or talk about. Or, have language that you’ve already figured out in terms of, “Yeah, we’ll think about that.”

**Craig:** Yeah, but here’s my problem: That’s always the case. You should always be brilliant. Sure, it’s like this advice is along the lines of “be good and achieve your goal.” It’s not advice. And all it really serves to do is freak you out, which mission accomplished, apparently.

And the worst possible outcome is that you cease to be your natural self and attempt to orchestrate this meeting towards some sort of synthetic brilliance. And I guess really I just want you to calm down. There’s a part of the script that you love that is worth protecting. And if the vibe in the room is we-would-all-like-to-bargain-that-away, and you don’t want to bargain it away, don’t.

Hard advice to swallow, but don’t. On the other hand, be open to the thought that perhaps there is another way that you could succeed at and also be pleased with. Always be on the lookout for somebody else’s suggestion that could turn into something that you would not only be able to do, but would do so well that that would be the new thing you want to protect.

But, just take a breath and relax. In the end these people are just people. This man who’s very, very powerful is meeting with you because he needs movies. So, you have a power, too. Be aware of it. Be humble. Be nice. Be charming. Be confident. Look him in the eye. Remember, nobody wants to hire somebody that seems sweaty, shaky, and scared. They want to hire somebody who seems confident, in control, and pleasant to work with. The rest is up to you.

**John:** So, one last bit of advice I can offer in terms of being brilliant is sometimes if you need to stall or think through something, because sometimes they’ll make a suggestion and you have to sort of ripple through your head all the stuff that it’s going to do to your script if they actually were to take this thing, and sometimes you just need some time.

Two options. First off is to ask sort of a clarifying question. A question that sort of seems like I really am listening to what you’re saying and here is a smart, clarifying question that will buy me another 30 seconds so I can think of a better answer for that.

The second thing to do is to talk about what’s important to you. And phrase what’s important to you in what’s obviously very important to them. And so I will do this in meetings where what’s important to me is that we can really track this character through from the start and what the character wants and walks into, and it sounds really obvious and sort of pedantic, but you’re making it clear to the person you’re talking with that your priorities are also their priorities.

And if you can be smart and specific about it, you can at least sort of get them on the same way. It’s like sort of mimicking somebody’s body language. You’re saying back to them the things that they are saying to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the last bit of advice I’ll impart to you — because that’s excellent advice — is to talk about the movie as much as possible as opposed to the script. They’re not thinking about a script. They can’t sell tickets to a script. So, talk about the movie. And when they talk about things, and when you talk about things, never get trapped in the position of defending a printed document. Always defend the movie. Talk about the audience.

It will put you in the same goal state as these people in the room.

**John:** Definitely. So, why don’t you take our next question?

**Craig:** Yeah, very good. Dad, are you okay? Are you okay, dad?

**John:** [laughs] I’m doing just fine. I just want to make sure that — I think you’re ready now. And so I think…

**Craig:** Gee, thanks Dad.

**John:** You’ve learned how to do a lot of things, and I’ve taught you how to load the gun, and we talked about some reasons why you might need to fire the gun, but many reasons not to fire the gun.

**Craig:** [laughs] Why is mama crying? Okay. Gosh, dad’s cough is getting worse. I hope he’ll be okay.

All right, this is from Nick from Long Island. [New York accent] Hey, Nick, how you doing?

“The script I’m writing deals with a kid hanging with rock bands backstage during a festival. He attaches himself to one band throughout. The kid also lingers around with three other bands who have lines but are few and far between. Currently I have the band members’ names such as Beating Hearts Number 1, Beating Hearts Number 2, etc, and the Uninspired Number 1, the Uninspired Number 2.” I assume those are the names of the different bands.

“I know it is best to not give true names to these characters, 12 of them in total, so there isn’t an overload of names to remember. I was considering writing each band name and a trait to go with it, for instance, Beating Hearts Number 1 (Mohawk); Beating Hearts Number 2 (Grumpy), and so on.

“I would like the band name to stick in order to group certain characters together, but I’d also like to differentiate them in some form rather than using a bland Number 1, Number 2 type setup up.” John, how would you address this conundrum?

**John:** Nick is definitely thinking along the right lines. If you can possibly avoid it — which really honestly you can always avoid it — don’t do Number 1 and Number 2, because it doesn’t help anything or anybody. Some sort of descriptor to go with these minor characters is really helpful, so some adjective that separates this person out from every other person in the script.

The parenthesis is going to get really tiring, to sort of like say like Band Name (Grumpy), but if the band were The Dwarves, for example, then like Grumpy Dwarf, Tall Dwarf. Then that would be a natural way to do it. I think two-word descriptor names for these kinds of characters are fantastic.

Most of my scripts have a couple characters who are just like Hot-Blooded Shotgun Toter. And that tells you everything you need to know about that character. And next time you see that person come back in the script, well it’s funny, because like, “Oh, I remember that from before.” And so it gives you a visual. You don’t have to do anymore work on it. So, that’s my suggestion for band members.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right in line with what I’m going to say. I will, however, caution you that when it comes time to make your movie, the first thing that the producer is going to do is come back to you and say, “Uh, is there any way we could not have 12 people say one line a piece?” Because every time someone opens their mouth on screen they cost more.

And if they are not key characters in the movie, then ideally you’d be able to get away with maybe, say there’s the Bleeding Hearts band, maybe it’s just the guitarist that does the talking and the other guys are just sitting around. Is that possible? So, really think about: is there a way for me to consolidate some of these things down, not only for looking at it to production, but just for the reader so that they’re not constantly trying to… — Every time you introduce a character, subconsciously or not, the reader will attempt to visualize that person in their head. And that’s actual mental exercise. And you’re just going to tire people out by the 12th person.

And when you have 12 such individuals in a compact temporal space, the trick of Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, etc, is going to start to wear thin. It’s actually going to get annoying.

One thing you can do is just use the natural discrimination that exists here, and that is to just go by instrument. If it’s really just one line, Beating Hearts Guitarist, “Who is this kid?” would be fine. It depends on the context and if they really are so specific in their characterization then I think you definitely want to think about limiting how many of them are actually talking.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve talked before in a podcast about when you have groups of people. And there’s a certain number of people in a scene that just becomes too many to really handle. I think we do sort of like a mental tally of like who’s spoken, who hasn’t spoken. And you can do that a little bit on the page, but when you actually see it on the screen it’s like, oh my god, there’s just too many people who could potentially speak.

So, I think Nick’s instinct was right to try to keep the bands lumped together. But your instinct is probably more helpful in that if there are a couple of funny things to say, make sure it’s the same person in that band saying them each time so that’s the actual mouthpiece of that band and that that’s the only person we have to sort of put any mental energy into following and tracking through the scene and from scene to scene.

**Craig:** There you go. All right, next question.

**John:** Next up, Gabe. I’ll start with this because it’s my turn.

“The good news, I just got a short film accepted to play at the Aspen Film Festival.” Yay, Gabe. “The bad news: I have been asked to provide a short bio. I’ve had to write bios for myself before. I’ve always leaned towards being funny or absurd, not taking myself seriously. I can’t bring myself to do that again. But writing a straight bio about one’s self feels icky, like being a door-to-door salesman. What have you guys done in the past?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I have to congratulate you, Gabe, on feeling icky about it. It’s a sign that you are a normal human who isn’t a sociopath. Sometimes I come across these Wikipedia entries or IMDb bio entries that are so clearly written by the person and they’re the most grandiose, epic, multi-paragraph pans to their amazingness, and that is icky to read.

Yeah, it does feel icky. I generally recommend however that you just bite the icky bullet and do it, because funny bios are never funny. I have never laughed at a funny bio. Frankly, they themselves feel a little icky because it’s like, “Look, I’m too cool to be just normal.” Just write a real short simple sweet bio and be done with it. That’s my advice.

**John:** So, I agree with you. And I actually just went through this again because I had to do my Playbill bio. For Playbill, which will come when you sit down with your seat for Big Fish, I had to write the little bio for that. So, this is what I wrote, and I decided not to go funny. So:

John August (book) received a 2004 BAFTA nomination for his screenplay for Big Fish. His other credits include Go, Titan A.E., Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Corpse Bride, The Nines, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which he received a 2006 Grammy nomination for lyrics. His most recent film is the Oscar-nominated Frankenweenie, for which he wrote the screenplay and lyrics. He is a graduate of Drake University and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. On Twitter @johnaugust.

So, they gave me a certain number of words that I was allowed to use to fit in, and I had to decide, you know, am I going to thank god? Am I going to thank Mike? Who am I going to thank? Am I going to dedicate this to my father? And I decided to go sort of straight with it, but also it’s definitely a bio written for a theater listing rather than something else. And so I lead with BAFTA nomination for Big Fish because that’s what we’re sitting down to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the show.

**John:** I put the Grammy nomination, which I wouldn’t normally do, but just to tell people like I’m not kind of new to music and stuff like that. I put in Frankenweenie because it’s recent.

So, I would say, in general I’ve kept like a bio, a relatively well updated bio that’s always sort of sitting in Dropbox which I can sort of throw at places, but I kind of always have to keep redoing it.

The same way like if you had a resume, like if you were in a kind of job that has a resume, you don’t send the same resume out to different people. You should always kind of customize that resume for what the situation is.

**Craig:** Agreed. Yeah. I mean, I have a bio that the PR firm that I’ve used a couple times has put together for me. And then I tweak it depending on what’s happened. So, for instance, Identity Thief came out, it’s a big hit, that goes in the bio.

But, what I liked about your bio was that it was short, sweet, dispassionate. It’s just facts. “Just the facts, ma’am,” you know?

**John:** Yeah. A great bio, depending on what the audience is for, it can feel good that it sounds like it was written by somebody else rather than written by you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, if you’re doing a bio that’s going to be intended for like a workshop or for like, you know, into the Sundance Film Festival, like not the festival part but for like the labs where you’re going to be seeing these people, that’s a great time to be like a little funny or be a little more personal or get into that kind of stuff.

If it’s just sort of going out into the world in a general sense, you have to think about, like, this is a person who’s sitting down in a theater seat reading this — what do they want to see?

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

All right, well, next question is from Gustavo in Jersey City. [Jersey accent] Yah, I got all my guys back home writing in. They got questions. No problem, Gustavo. I got ya.

[laughs] This is how we talk.

**John:** Evidently this is how you talk.

**Craig:** This is how you talk if you’re in…

**John:** If the podcast were this way every week, I would — there wouldn’t be a podcast.

**Craig:** You would end yourself?

**John:** Or I would find some sort of filter that would make your voice not be that.

**Craig:** [New Jersey accent] Hey, come on, John, it’s a good question here. Come on, I’m talking. [laughs] It’s the worst. This is how I grew up on Staten Island. Oh, hey, where you going? All right, Gustavo, here we go.

“I’m finally taking the leap and working on my first screenplay after years of working as a musician. My question is, would you be able to describe the key differences between the ‘inciting incident’ and the alleged,” I’m adding the word alleged, “plot point one. What considerations should you make for each? How dramatic should the inciting incident be versus PP1? I’m starting off with outlining but I’m finding conflicting definitions on line of what each should do for the story.”

**John:** So, this is — I included this question because it’s a very classic sort of like, “I’m just now for the first time approaching screenwriting, and I’m hitting this term and I don’t know what it means and I’m paralyzed by not knowing what this term means, these terms mean.”

I don’t know what “plot point one” means. I think it means different things in different people’s schemas. Inciting incident is a thing that you will hear talked about, a lot, and so it’s worth knowing what people are talking about when they say inciting incident.

Inciting incident is what’s beginning the plot of this movie. Like, without this inciting incident we would not be watching this movie happening here with these characters right now. So, the inciting incident is how we’re starting off our story, not just like how we’re meeting our characters, but what is the fuse that has been lit that is beginning our story.

But things like plot point one, or plot point two, or plot point 17, those are schemas that different people have different ways of doing it, so I wouldn’t freak out over that at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, I mean inciting incident — the idea is the first few pages of your screenplay you’re presenting a character and she’s in her life, and here is what her life is like. And then something happens. And that something is going to change her life.

It doesn’t mean that it’s now Act 2; it just means suddenly a thing happens. This whole “plot point one,” “pinch point,” blah, blah, blah, you’ve been suckered like so many before you into thinking that there is a calculator through which you can run ideas and out comes a screenplay and you just simply calculate your way to success. There is no faster, easier, simpler way to arrive at failure then attempting to calculate the process of screenwriting.

The books that have been written are being written by people who have failed at screenwriting, possibly because they were over calculating, and now they offer you the gift of the very process that failed them. I am not a fan of this nonsense.

There is nothing that these people can teach you that you can’t learn yourself by watching movies, reading screenplays of those movies, reading screenplays by professionals, and then writing, and writing, and writing. Simply, the rigidity that they prescribe is seductive. Of course it’s seductive.

What is more horrifying than the threat of a million choices? And which one should I choose? Well, that’s life, buddy. That’s screenwriting, Gustavo, unfortunately. So, put the books down. Chill out about the terminology. You’re not fitting your story into any box at all. You’re going to write from your heart and you’re going to learn from the structure that has been provided to you by the movies you love and the screenwriters and the scripts that you love, as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I’m wondering if we can boil it down to the minimum number of terms you actually need to know about structure, just in terms of what you will hear when you are working in the industry. So, inciting incident is one of those things that I think it’s worth knowing what people are talking about with that, because you’re going to hear that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re going to hear first act, second act, third act. Here’s all it means is the beginning part, sort of the beginning 30 pages, the second act is all of the middle 60 pages kind of. The last act is the last 30 pages kind of, so, in a 120 page screenplay.

That’s worth knowing what people are talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know climax.

**John:** But the danger with something like a climax is you’re going to think like, “Oh, that has to happen on a certain page.” No. I mean, a climax, you’re talking about a sequence that goes up to and reaches its most biggest dramatic point, that’s important to know that that kind of thing happens, but it doesn’t happen on a specific page.

**Craig:** Watch movies, Gustavo. I’m telling you, it’s all there. They are flimflamming you, buddy. They’re flimflamming you.

**John:** Next question comes from Kate in Los Angeles.

“My writing partner and I are writing a script centering around a brother and sister duo. Do we need to make one of them the clear protagonist, or is it all right for both of them to be the hero?”

So, heroes and protagonists. It’s a classic conversation. Craig, what’s your opinion here?

**Craig:** One of them is the protagonist. The idea of the protagonist, traditionally, is that our capacity for drama as humans and such that we prefer — we prefer — that once character is the focus of internal change. One character is going to have an epiphany and a catharsis and a transformation.

But, another character with them can be instrumental to that. Another character with them can change, also. Another character can change in such a way that changes the protagonist.

I mean, there are a lot of movies where we think the hero is one person, but it’s another. It seems like the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is Johnny Depp, is Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s the one we come to watch. He occupies space in the movie. But, the protagonist, for instance, in the first film is Keira Knightley’s character. She’s the one who changes.

The protagonist sometimes isn’t the biggest one, or the most heroic one, but they’re just the one that changes. So, think about it that way. And just remember, we will be trying to — we will be connecting with somebody’s change. And if two people are changing we want to know which one is primarily changing.

It’s just sort of ingrained in the way we experience story.

**John:** In the show notes I’ll put a link to an old post of mine about heroes and protagonists. And we always think of them as the same person, but they aren’t necessarily the same person. Sometimes the hero of the story, the guy where it’s like, “Oh, it’s about him,” isn’t really the protagonist. It’s not the person who changes in the course of the story.

Examples being, in my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka is the protagonist. You actually see he has an arc that he goes through in the whole movie. And Charlie, who it seems like, oh, well he’s the guy it’s about. It’s the guy whose name is in the title. He is the antagonist. He is the one who is causing the change. He is the person who does that.

In terms of dual protagonist, it does happen. Big Fish is a dual protagonist story, but the protagonist structure is happening in sort of different spaces. You have Will, the son, is a protagonist who is going on this journey to figure out who his father was and understand this change. And so he’s a changed character over the course of it. We’re following Edward Bloom’s entire life, and he is a very classic sort of Joseph Campbell kind of hero mythology protagonist change, complete with like denial of the call to adventure. He does all that sort of great Joseph Campbell stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that does happen. There are situations like that. But if it’s like a brother and a sister duo, if it’s a You Can Count on Me, which was a brother/sister duo, that’s not that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And they both could change, but You Can Count on Me, she is the protagonist, he is the antagonist who has arrived to change her life.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. I think some people might think that in Identity Thief Melissa McCarthy is the protagonist because she seems to change, and she does, but Jason Bateman’s character is the actual protagonist. That’s the one who has to actually learn a lesson about his life in a way that she learns a lesson, but our emotional connection is to his life.

It’s a very… — You just have to know this stuff when you’re doing it, and you have to figure it out, but you can’t divide your attention. You have to actually — you have to know.

The audience, by the way, doesn’t need to… — You ask most people on the street who’s the protagonist of Pirates and they’ll tell you it’s Captain Jack Sparrow. No problem. Didn’t seem to diminish their enjoyment of the film. You need to know, though.

**John:** You’re next.

**Craig:** Oh, god, this is so good. We’ve got Dave in Columbia, Maryland. I have no accent for you.

“Is it okay to give captions in titles explaining quick blubs for historical context so the audience isn’t lost? I know I should try and get those kinds of things in dialogue while trying to avoid being on the nose, but that can be really difficult sometimes.”

Captions and titles. Quick blurbs for historical context?

**John:** Rarely are they good and appropriate. Where I will say, like sometimes you need to place a certain year, or you need to say like, “Near Lexington,” or you need to establish where we are in the world. So, a caption can sometimes be useful. And like in the Bourne movies you’ll see like where we are in the world and sort of like 16 hours later. There’s a certain style of movie in which it can be completely appropriate.

But I’d be really careful because nobody goes to movies to read. You have to find ways to tell your story visually so that the audience doesn’t need to know that information.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can situate time and place, essentially slug line information anywhere you want in a movie, just as long as tonally it seems acceptable. The one place in a movie where you are allowed to put a pamphlet on screen is the very, very beginning. Star Wars seemed to get away with it just fine.

You can open up and people… — The first ten minutes of a movie-going experience I call “grace period” because the audience is completely open and accepting. They haven’t gotten grumpy yet. But, hopefully they don’t get grumpy at all during your movie, but they’re willing to sort of go along with your little adventure here for five or ten minutes on faith alone.

And so you can do it right off the top if you want — still a little risky — but at no point else in a movie would I ever try and pull that number on anyone.

**John:** Agreed. And if you’re going to do something with captions or titles or I would say you need to do that really close to the start. You can’t be like halfway through a movie and suddenly then be throwing up those little tag things, because that was not the contract you made with your audience. First, I agree, that grace period. You’re sort of establishing what the contract is between the movie and the audience. And like as long as you’re consistent with your audience, they are going to have faith in you. But if you start just wildly changing things, they may decide that you’re not honoring your contract and they will get up and leave the room.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Next question comes from Matt in Boston.

“I recently received coverage upon submitting a feature script to a screenwriting contest. The script contains three fairly explicit sex scenes.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah!

**John:** Oh yeah!

“It was mostly favorable feedback, but one critique the reader had was that the explicit nature of the descriptions of the sex scenes may be a turnoff to actors, investors, agents, and producers. He said that if I could tone down the sex the script would be more readily accepted by readers. Though the sex scenes are admittedly rather explicit in nature, they are not gratuitous and they are important to the story and in developing the characters involved.

“How can a writer go about portraying a heavily erotic sexual encounter without scaring off potential investors or talent? Would including a note at the beginning of the scene help?”

Craig?

**Craig:** Well, obviously we don’t have the pages so I don’t know quite how explicit this is. I would caution any writer to overreact to one reader’s comment. The fact of the matter is that the only person whose scruples matter here is the person who will potentially purchase this script and produce the movie, not this one reader.

In general, I tend to believe that it’s the scripts that do stick out and make themselves known unapologetically that attract attention. You say here, kind of nicely for us, because this would be what I would say — this is what I would ask — that they are not gratuitous and they are important to the story and in developing the characters involved.

That’s it. You’re done. You don’t need to do anything now. No notes. No apologies. That’s the script you wrote. And if somebody out there is squeamish about the sex then it’s not for them. But it’s sort of a strange thing. the stereotype is the producer that wants more boobs, so I think that you can just go ahead and just in your mind silently and politely thank this reader for their opinion, but you believe in what you wrote.

**John:** I agree with you. There’s two things I would say.

First off, sex scenes are like fight scenes in that you don’t want to describe blow-by-blow [sighs] what’s happening.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** But, you want to give a sense of what’s important about the scene and what’s different about sort of other scenes like it we might have seen.

One of my favorite sex scenes in any movie is in the first Terminator, which is just a great movie for so many reasons. But I remember seeing that sex scene and thinking like, “Man, I want to have sex. That looks great!” And so if you look at the actual description of it, it’s there, but it’s not like gratuitous, but it’s clearly what needs to happen in that scene. And if that’s what you’re doing on the page, that’s fantastic.

Second off I would say about sexual content in movies overall is if it’s honest, and if it’s interesting, keep it. I mean, don’t run away from it just because R movies right now tend to be less sexy. Well, maybe yours will stand out because it actually has some sex in it. It can be a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. In general keep this in mind: Things that are noticeable in scripts, that are not run-of-the-mill, that are maybe towards the edges, the boundaries of extreme, there are certain types of people who just react to that stuff by saying, “Oh, well, I noticed it therefore maybe tone it down.” Their instinct is to tone everything down.

I will tell you that the audience’s instinct is for everything to be toned up. They don’t want the soft-edged movie. They want something that is interesting to them. Quentin Tarantino’s entire career is a testament to this. He continues to defy our own expectations of what we will laugh at, what we will be entertained by.

And more importantly, the people who say yes are attracted to things that are out of the ordinary. The people who say no, yeah, of course, they’re like, “Why don’t you put it more in a box so it’s safe for me to say yes to?” That’s why they don’t run studios. That’s why they don’t direct movies. That’s why they don’t write movies.

So, don’t be afraid to break a few dishes while you’re writing a script.

**John:** I agree with you fully.

Let’s let that be the end of our questions and let’s do our One Cool Things, okay?

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is really simple. And it’s this great little Tumblr called Unfinished Scripts. — Wow, that’s a hard thing for me to say. — It’s this great little Tumblr called Unfinished Scripts, which is basically screenshots of somebody who is writing these scenes that inevitably go horribly, horribly awry.

And what I like about it is, first off, it’s very screenwriter-oriented. But I love that Tumblr and Twitter to some degree — eh, both Twitter and Tumblr — have created this thing where there is sort of like an imaginary user. And so by seeing a collection of tweets or posts you’re sort of like getting the idea of who this person is, this imaginary character who would actually write all of these things.

So, I love that that exists in our culture. And I really liked Unfinished Scripts as an example of that.

**Craig:** Sounds cool. I will check that out for sure.

I have for all of you today a pretty cool thing that’s a little bit of a game. It’s a lot a bit of a game, but it is also connected to my favorite little thing which is the brain.

So, at MIT there is a specific department called the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. And they’re dealing with this problem of trying to map the connections between all of the neurons in the retina, and I actually spent an entire year in college just learning how vision works from literally photon all the way to our sort of conscious understanding of sight.

So, I’m fascinated by all of this. They have this — this is an area where one technology has outstripped another. They have the technology now to map, I think they’re using rat retinas actually for now, they can map all of this stuff. But it still requires computational power to figure out what’s connected to what, because it’s all in slices and it’s basically a game to figure out, okay, is this thing connected to that, or connected to this? And once they essentially color in all the connections so that this chunk over here is the same color as this chunk, and is continuous, then they’ll actually have a complete map of all of the connections of the retina, which is pretty amazing.

How do you do this? Well, the geniuses over there at MIT, and this is sponsored by the National Institute of Health, have created a game. And they had this brilliant idea that we’ll just put this game online and people can play it. And it’s basically a coloring game. And the way it’s set up is that the game is smart enough to tell you if what you’ve colored in does make sense as a connection or doesn’t. So, you’re basically doing the hard work of just filling in these connections. And the more you play, the higher your points or whatever, but you’re also helping the medical community map the retina!

It’s fascinating. And so I played the game for awhile. It’s incredibly calming. It’s super Zen. And if you want to play, obviously it’s free, it’s web-based. It works particularly well with the Chrome browser on either PC or Mac. And it’s called EyeWire. And so you can sign up for a free account and play the game yourself at eyewire.org.

And know that for once in your miserable little lives you are not wasting time playing a game, you’re actually helping advance the cause of neuroscience.

**John:** Great. So, Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast. I never actually talk about our outro music, and I usually just pick outro music after the episode is done and I just pick something that seems relevant to what we talked about. But this week I actually know what the outro music is. It is Andrew Lippa’s overture to Big Fish, which you can actually hear in person in Chicago if you choose to come.

And, again, if you want to come see me and the show in Chicago, starting April 2, we will be there. And Ticketmaster, Big Fish.

And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** See you next time. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Big Fish in Chicago](http://www.ticketmaster.com/Big-Fish-Chicago-tickets/artist/1781632?tm_link=seo_bc_name) at Ticketmaster
* [Green Scream: The Decay of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry](http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/oscars-vfx-protest/)
* [How to handle a phone meeting](http://johnaugust.com/2008/how-to-handle-a-phone-meeting)
* [Unfinished Scripts](https://twitter.com/UnfinishedS)
* [What’s the difference between Hero, Main Character and Protagonist?](http://johnaugust.com/2005/whats-the-difference-between-hero-main-character-and-protagonist) on johnaugust.com
* Play [EyeWire](http://eyewire.org/) and help map the brain
* OUTRO: Big Fish prologue by Andrew Lippa