Search Results for: residuals

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/thirteen-questions-about-one-thing).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes episode 16, yet another podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

I should correct or amend, a friend of mine was listening to the podcast. He says, “I’m not a screenwriter and I find the podcast interesting. So you need to stop saying that header thing.”

I felt that just because we might be interesting to screenwriters doesn’t mean it’s exclusively intended for screenwriters.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** You’re welcome to listen to this if you’re a nurse, for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, dresses are made for women but men can wear dresses.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s completely your choice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is in the digital world. Listen to whatever you want to listen to. That’s really the goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why should we stop saying that it’s for screenwriters because you like it and you’re not one? Look at this. I’m doing everything I can to lose listeners.

**John:** Yeah, you really are.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the worst.

**John:** Yeah. I should explain to you listeners that often Craig will sort of ramble at the start of these podcasts and we’ll have to snip thing out, because we’ll always end up talking about terrible things about tragedies that happened during the second World War to certain groups of people. It just never really plays well in the podcast. So I’m always flagging to Stuart, “Maybe you could lose that little part of what Craig said at the header here.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** I won’t do it today.

**John:** Good. A little bit of housekeeping before we get started. This is Episode 16 of Scriptnotes and I keep getting confused about what number we’re on because you and I did some episodes that got thrown out because they were terrible.

On iTunes, only the last 10 episodes are listed. So someone who is coming to the show for the first time, they think, “Oh, they have 10 episodes recorded.” No. In fact we have more episodes recorded and you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcasts to see everything that we’ve done and listen to everything that we’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Dig deep into the archives.

**John:** Indeed. And if you’re digging deep into the archives, you’ll also see transcripts for all of our previous episodes. And not every podcast is going to give you a complete transcript of everything that’s said.

**Craig:** But ours does.

**John:** We do. Craig, you meticulously check the transcript to make sure it’s exactly what you said, correct?

**Craig:** I pour through it. Well, first of all, I do the transcripts myself. John pays me $33. I do the transcripts. It takes me about six hours.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then I recheck it and then we put it up. I try and put back in the stuff about the Holocaust that he takes out.

[laughter]

Try and edit that out, Stuart.

**John:** Ugh. And here’s the best part about our conversation right now is a day from now somebody, I presume in India, is going to be transcribing this conversation about the podcast being transcribed.

**Craig:** I mean no offense.

**John:** No. But I think it’s kind of great. I think it’s just wonderful that there’s a cycle of digital creation in the world that hopefully is making this profitable for someone to transcribe.

**Craig:** Somebody somewhere should be making money off of this because I’m not.

**John:** No, I’m not either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A podcast — people are interested in like, “Oh, I want to do my own podcast.” A podcast is not expensive in any real way. I mean, Craig and I had to buy our microphones and that was kind of it in terms of actual hard costs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although you made me buy this $16,000 microphone. I don’t know why. John insisted that we both get this very rare Neumann microphone that was used initially at the old RCA. I think Toscanini used it for recordings.

**John:** Yeah. If you want a visual for it, it has the springs all over it and it would be very good if you’re a lone singer at a USO Show and you’re on a spotlight. This is the kind of thing you might do. Or if you were George Clooney and you were making Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s the kind of microphone that the woman would sing into in Good Night, and Good Luck.

**Craig:** Yeah. We always go vintage. We don’t like…

**John:** The other thing the microphone is fantastic for is recording all the bus noise outside Craig’s window.

**Craig:** Well, it was designed originally for bus noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting fact.

**John:** It does that really well.

**Craig:** By Germans.

**John:** By Germans.

**Craig:** Right before that thing they didn’t do.

[laughter]

You should have never said anything.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, I think you wanted to bring up our first sponsor. Our podcast has its very first sponsor this week.

**Craig:** Yes, yes!

**John:** I’m so excited to be able to introduce this, a sponsor who will pay us absolutely no money.

**Craig:** That’s right. He’s not really a sponsor because we have no costs, but our mutual friend, Derek Haas, a terrific screenwriter who works with Michael Brandt. They’ve written movies like 3:10 to Yuma and Wanted. Derek is a novelist as well. He is writing a series of books based on a hit-man character and his latest book, Dark Men, is out. You can get it on Amazon. Dark Men by Derek Haas, H-A-A-S.

If you’re saying, “That’s not right. It should be Derek Haas,” correct, but he insists on pronouncing his last name Haas. I have to say, look, you change your name because people didn’t pronounce it correctly. Haas seems like the worst choice of pronunciation for that name. You just imagine what a fourth grader does with that. But he insists.

**John:** Derek’s also from Texas so I think that explains a lot.

**Craig:** Oh, you think it’s easier in Texas to walk around with the name Haas?

**John:** Well, I think you also might just make bad choices if you’re from Texas.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Well, listen, Texas is a big place now. Our friends in Austin, for instance —

**John:** Our friends in Austin are fantastic. There are many awesome things in Texas. I just feel like if you’re going to be in Texas, maybe Haas really is a better way to pronounce your name because it might be the more natural way people are going to say your name anyway.

**Craig:** It matches the drawl.

**John:** It matches a little bit of a drawl.

**Craig:** Well, Derek, I hope you got your money’s worth. I hope you got your zero dollars worth from that bit of promotion, most of which was spent on how ridiculous your name is.

**John:** Yes. We will include a link to Derek’s book on Amazon in the show notes. Every episode of our podcast has a list of links. You can go to the actual post on the site johnaugust.com and find this post, and you’ll find a link to it. You’ll also find a link to Popcorn Fiction, which is the short story collection that Derek initially created and I think, introduced to maintain that editorial control over…

I wrote a short story for that. You wrote a short story for that.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Many screenwriters have written short stories for that. That’s another Derek Haas creation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Derek, by the way, somehow is able to write all the movies for Brandt and Haas and write fiction on top of that. That seems kind of crazy and impossible.

**Craig:** Well, Derek has this thing, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t have a thing that I have, which is a neurosis. He is the least neurotic writer I have ever met in my life. He’s happy. He sits down to write and he writes. He doesn’t sit there and torture himself and then suddenly novels are done and scripts are done. It’s remarkable.

One of the happiest people I know. I don’t get it.

**John:** Yes. Some part of his brain got burned out early on. I think they reached up a wire through his nose and shocked the little part of self doubt. And God bless him. We have Derek Haas to —

**Craig:** By the way, if they offered that as an elective surgery, I would absolutely do it.

[laughter]

**John:** You would completely take it.

**Craig:** I feel like my brain is mostly that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Self recrimination.

[crosstalk]

**John:** The self doubt and…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Our last podcast was talking about residuals. We got some good questions and we already provided some good answers I think on residuals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we got really just an amazing essay, which I’m going to call now Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley, which feels like a short film — or actually a long film — that you’d find at the Sundance Film Festival, but is in fact a series of questions by Daniel Barkeley, all of which were worth answering. So I thought we would just quickly power through Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do you need a breath? Do you need a drink of water?

**Craig:** No. Although I remember that some of them were about TV and I’m a little fuzzy on that so I’ll say “Pass” for the ones I don’t immediately know the answer to.

**John:** I looked up answers kind of for the TV ones.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But we’re going to do our best. That’s what we’re going to do.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We can’t promise more than our best.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “In television, how is the residual allocated between the Created By, Storied By, and Teleplay credits?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Guess.

**Craig:** I don’t think Created By gets any residuals. I think Created By gets some sort of pass of payment that’s negotiated individually by the writer and that all of the residuals are attached to the story and the Teleplay By.

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Woo! Ding-ding-ding!

**John:** Ding-ding-ding! And the split is the same as features, which is the next thing we’re going to talk about. “So how is the percentage credit on a film or TV episode determined?”

**Craig:** 25 percent of residuals are attached to Story or Screen Story By and 75 percent of residuals are attached to Screenplay or Teleplay By.

**John:** What a perfectly concise answer, and actually correct.

**Craig:** Thank you. Woo!

**John:** Question three. “The Hangover Part II used characters created by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Did Mr. Lucas and Mr. Moore” — I love the Mr.’s in there.

**Craig:** Misters, yes.

**John:** “…receive residuals for Hangover II?”

**Craig:** They do not. The Characters Created By is part of a separated right. If you are the credited story writer, so if you receive Story credit or Written By credit for an original screenplay that is produced, on all sequels you will receive contractually a Characters Created By credit. That credit comes with no financial attachment whatsoever.

**John:** Yeah.

“Who pays residuals when Go airs on HBO?” — And Go has been airing on HBO quite a lot, so hooray. — “Is it HBO that pays the WGA or is it the producer of the film or the original distributor of the film?”

The answer is it is the distributor of the film. So there is one entity who is responsible for paying residuals, and that is the entity that has the, in this case, home video rights to the movie Go. So in this case it’s Sony or Columbia TriStar or some giant shell corporation.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** You don’t think that’s right?

**Craig:** Well, I’m just wondering because I always thought that the people who paid were the people that employed the writer under a WGA contract. If, for instance, one company employs the writer and produces the movie, and then another company simply distributes it, I think the employer pays the residuals.

**John:** You could be correct. In the case of Columbia TriStar, they are on entity so therefore that could be a little bit murky. I’m also, though, going based on The Nines, which is a movie that we independently produced and then we sold to Sony Newmarket. Sony and Newmarket, which is really just Sony, is responsible for handling all the residuals on that movie. And me and the production company are not responsible for the residuals.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because what happens is, yeah. There’s something called an assumption agreement and it gets really complicated. But once they buy it and they purchase it, they have to do it under a WGA deal. For instance, on The Nines, they didn’t just buy the movie. They also bought the screenplay.

Once they buy the screenplay, then they are the owner and they are the WGA employer. I believe it’s the WGA employing entity. So either way, it’s never the “producer.” It’s always the company that’s actually making the WGA deal, I believe.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not HBO. It’s not the people who buy the movie.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s the people who are showing the movie on a channel.

**Craig:** Certainly not, no.

**John:** It’s not, yeah.

**Craig:** It would be the people that hired the writer and produced the movie, usually one in the same.

**John:** Yeah.

Question number five. “I often heard it said that writers/producers ‘have a piece of the show.’ How is this distinct from residual payments?”

**Craig:** Well, a piece of the show is some sort of profit participation. You are a part owner of the show so when receipts come in that are above and beyond costs, and there are all sorts of ways of defining that, people who have a piece of the show get paid a portion of the money the show generates.

Residuals have nothing to do with whether the show is in profit or not. They are simply attached to exhibitions or repeat showings of something. Having a piece of the show is something that you negotiate individually. Residuals are something that are already negotiated as part and parcel of the union contract.

**John:** Yeah. If there’s nothing else to take from our repeated discussions on residuals, it’s that you get residuals no matter how successful the film is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Whether it makes $5 at the box office or $50 million at the box office, you will get residuals. You’re more likely to get more residuals from a very successful run in post-theatrical life if your movies are incredibly successful. But the movie does not have to be profitable for you to see residuals.

**Craig:** But there’s probably some examples where I can imagine a movie that did fairly well in theaters and maybe just wasn’t a big seller on DVD. The writers of that movie could make less in residuals than, say, Mike Judge on Office Space, which made nothing in theaters and was massive on DVD.

**John:** Yeah. You know what? That actually was question number six. You kind of got ahead of us.

**Craig:** Hm.

**John:** His question was, “In film, it seems that the example John gave means that it is not uncommon to earn more in residuals than upfront payments. Is this a common experience in television as well?” So we were talking about film. In TV would you make more in residuals than you made on the first writing of a show? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not anymore. I think those days are gone. It used to be that that could be the case, back in the days of the healthy network rerun. I think those days are gone. I could be wrong. Maybe we’ll hear from somebody that writes in TV frequently.

In movies, that would be the exception to the rule, generally speaking. Well, no. I take it back. In movies, if it’s a big hit I could definitely see you making more in residuals than in payments.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would you please discuss the differences between foreign levies and residuals?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. So a big topic, and I’ll boil it down very quickly. So we have work for hire here. We don’t own the copyright to our work. The rest of the world doesn’t have work for hire. Not only that, the rest of the world thinks work for hire is a big scam and that, in fact, an individual must be the copyright or the author in law and in fact of any particular audiovisual work.

So in other countries, one of the things they do to reward authors for reuse of things it they charge a tax or a levy on blank media — cassettes, rewritable CDs, even hard drives, things like that — anything that people might be using to make copies of television shows or movies. That tax money in part is then parceled back out to the authors.

The problem is who is the author of Go? Is it John August or is it Sony? In the United States it’s Sony. In France it’s John August. So when they started collecting this money and we started looking for it, the MPAA here in the United States said, “Uh, we’re the authors so we’ll take that money.”

And the writers and directors who considered themselves both in authorship position on these movies, and foreign countries consider writers and directors both authors of movies, said, “No, no, no. That’s our money.” And essentially there was this massive threat of a lawsuit that would have ended up in The Hague for God knows how long.

So a compromise was struck. Over time I think we have moved to a place now where writers and directors receive half of the share of this money and the companies receive the other half.

In time, I think given the trend, eventually writers and directors will receive all of it, I think over time. In the meantime what it means is that every few months you might get a check. It’s not a lot of money but it’s some money, hundreds, maybe a couple thousand for more popular fare. That is sort of an aggregate amount of money that’s been collected from all of these foreign tax collection agencies.

**John:** Yeah. And the math behind it is crazy.

**Craig:** Insane.

**John:** You couldn’t possibly imagine it, because it’s not really tracking the success of one of your movies. It’s the success of your movies and the tax collections across a whole range of European countries. It is nuts.

**Craig:** It is nuts, and it also gets stranger for television, because a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll re-chop these things up. I mean, Germany may buy a package of five shows and chop them up and make one weird long show out of it. Well, who gets the…? It’s crazy.

The bookkeeping is crazy. And frankly, the Writers Guild doesn’t do a particularly good job of getting this money to the people quickly. There’s a lot of controversy about whether the Writers Guild should be collecting this money at all because it doesn’t just collect money for Writers Guild members.

These countries collect those foreign levies on behalf of any author. That doesn’t mean just Writers Guild authors. It means non-Writers Guild authors. It also means, frankly, people who write and direct porn. Yes, porn generates a ton of foreign levies.

So the Writers Guild has become a collection agency on behalf of both Writers Guild members and non-Writers Guild members, which has led to a lawsuit, I think more than one lawsuit, and those are still wending their way through the system.

**John:** Yes. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Question number eight. “Could you please discuss the new media residual that was gained in the last strike? Has it been a good deal for writers overall?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the feature side is easy. Is it a good deal? It’s better than what we had. We already had 1.2 percent of 100 percent for Internet rentals of movies. We got that in 2001.

In this last go-around, what they wanted to stick us with was 20 percent of 1.5 percent for Internet sales of movies. What we got was the equivalent of 40 percent of 1.5 percent for sales of movies. So we doubled the DVD rate for Internet sales.

Is that good for writers? Yeah. It’s twice as good as… Well, let’s put it this way. It’s twice as good as a terrible rate. So I don’t know what you’d call it, not great but not the worst thing ever?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the streaming and the media, that stuff gets crazy.

**John:** It does get crazy. And you also have to consider if you’re doubling that rate for DVDs, the price points are also potentially a lot lower, too. So it may be less money actually coming into your pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bunch of factors. The price point may be a lower. We don’t know, frankly, if Internet sales will ever even come close to what DVD sales used to be.

My big hope is that, frankly, rentals are the things that capture the wave of the future, because we get a bigger piece of that. Even though that’s a smaller number, if rentals happen consistently and frequently, that could be a big upside for us.

**John:** Yeah. I want rentals. Just as a consumer, I want rentals. I want that media should be available to me when I want to see it and I don’t have to worry about holding onto it or storing it or doing anything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I just want to be able to see the show I want to watch when I want to watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now for television, it gets pretty complicated and there’s actually a pretty good rate for television streaming and reuse over the Internet. However, some of it is then qualified by the fact that they do this thing called imputed value, where essentially we’re talking about $2,800 for a year of streaming new programs over the Internet. It gets complicated.

If you go to the Writers Guild website, I think they do a pretty decent breakdown of how that works.

**John:** Cool.

“Have you two ever received a check from Netflix or Hulu’s reuse of your work? Who is paying the residuals in this case to WGA?”

That’s exactly like HBO.

**Craig:** Yeah, same deal. We wouldn’t get a check from Netflix or Hulu. Netflix and Hulu pay money… They don’t deal with residuals at all. They pay fees to the studios for the right to purchase those DVDs that they send out in the red envelopes or the right to host them and resell them on their servers.

The companies get this gross amount of money. It’s attached to a movie and they give us a piece.

**John:** Yep. And now currently — I actually don’t know the answer to this question — let’s say Netflix buys a block of Sony movies and Go is one of those movies. Are they splitting the money equally between the movies that Sony is selling at that block or are they apportioning for each play of Go on Netflix’s servers?

**Craig:** Our deal is structured so that every time your movie is rented you get a piece of the gross that that movie generates. However, I don’t believe the companies are restricted from doing the kind of deal you’re talking about.

If they did the kind of deal you’re talking about, somehow they would have to figure out, in some sort of lump sum arrangement, how to apportion that money. Because obviously Go deserves a certain amount of money and Moneyball deserves a certain amount and an Adam Sandler movie deserves a certain amount, and they can’t just make it equal across the board. That’s where it gets crazy. I don’t really know.

And frankly, that’s why the next few negotiations are going to be so difficult because the truth is no one really knows how the stuff is going to work. We have to smash a very mature contract to pieces and make a new one based on the way the market’s changing.

**John:** Exactly.

“What makes you think that new technology…” It’s always a bad sign when a question starts “What makes you think that?”

[laughter]

“What makes you think that new technology won’t enable the studios to escalate their underpayment shenanigans?” That’s a loaded question. “If a television program or film is re-aired on cable, it’s pretty easy for the guild or writer to determine how many times it was re-aired and what his compensation should be. With new media, there is no publicly accessible way to see how many times an episode or film has been downloaded or streamed.”

Some of that’s a good point, some of that I would take exception to.

Yes, one of the nice things about traditional broadcast and cable is that you can see, “Oh, that show is on HBO right now so I will get a payment for that.” It’s harder when it’s split across a whole bunch of different platforms. You don’t know how many times it’s actually being played. That I totally get.

But I don’t know that you’re necessarily going to know what the numbers were behind the cable deal or TV deal at the start.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You don’t know how much they paid Sony for the rights to show that show on cable.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. The truth is, the part of the question that’s correct is the part that presumes that there are shenanigans. Absolutely there are shenanigans. They occur on a daily basis. The part that’s incorrect is presuming that it’s any more difficult to run those shenanigans with an old model than it is with the new.

What the guild has built into its contract along with the DGA and SAG AFTRA is the right to do something called a tri-guild audit, where the three guilds essentially force an audit of all of the signatory companies to check their books and to go through the accounting and make sure that we’re getting paid properly.

This is one of the great failings of the Writers Guild over the last 15 years, I would say. I don’t know the last time we actually imposed the tri-guild audit. That is part and parcel with the strange political culture at the guild that is fetish-ized appearance over results. We will go to strike to get a better rate on a deal that we aren’t checking.

I would much rather us spend the money to do these audits every year, and collect money that we are probably missing out on every year, as opposed to shutting the town down to try and improve our rate by some minuscule amount.

As I like to say, you can get 100 percent of nothing, it’s still nothing.

**John:** So, a true life example, here. For The Nines, we had to endure a motion picture television fund audit. And so, here’s how they audit an individual film: they came, we had to pull up all our boxes out of storage, and a guy sat at a table for two days solid with a laptop and went through every single file, checking everyone’s payroll, their time cards, and everything else like that. And at the end, gave us a bill for, like, $7,000 for underpayment on something.

Now, it was a pain in the butt for me. And it was kind of a pain in the butt for them. And we were able to negotiate it down, because there were disagreements about how some stuff was done, but they were enforcing their contract. They were making sure they were collecting every penny that they were owed, and that’s their job. And so, I would love to see a more aggressive tactic taken.

**Craig:** Yeah, and as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with three unions, each of which, maybe, have, I mean, for instance, the Writers Guild, I think it’s yearly income from dues and so forth, is somewhere in the 20 millions, you know, maybe 28 million dollars, let’s say.

28 million dollars isn’t an actual amount of money for, say, Fox. Does not exist, it doesn’t even compute. So, we’re talking about very small companies going into very large companies, and obviously, they’re going to resist these audits and do whatever they can. And, frankly, I think it should be job number one. I think we should be doing these audits, literally, it should be the most important thing we do. But, I’m not in charge.

**John:** No.

Question 11. “Are you aware of web only television series, such as Jane Espenson’s Husbands, or Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy?”

Why yes, I have. And I will put links to both of those on the show notes.

“For now, these seem to be passion side projects. But is it possible one day we will live in a cable-less world where there are thousands of shows online, all produced on a shoestring budget? Could it be, one day, that everyone will have their own show, but no one’s making much money?”

Again, that is not really a question we can answer, it’s really more a statement with a question at the end, not the answer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you’re asking me to prognosticate, I would say, no. And the reason why is, people who are very good at what they do want to be recognized for it, because they will be recognized for it. So, if one person that’s making this terrific show that hundreds of thousands of people tune into because it’s really, really cool, somebody else is going to come to them and say, “You know, you could make a ton of money on ads and stuff.” And suddenly, there’s budget and there’s ads and the cycle begins again.

We always reward; attention is a resource. We don’t just spread resources out willy-nilly. The marketplace will draw resources to the stuff that deserves it, generally speaking. So, no, I don’t think we’re going to live in a time when everything gets equal attention, that just goes against human nature.

**John:** Okay.

Question 12. “How do you see film marketing evolving in the new media era during the home video window? In the old days, a writer’s film would be sold to HBO, HBO has an interest in promoting it, so it runs a few ads during its other programs. The fact that it’s playing gets put into TV Guides, newspapers, and to cable set top boxes across the country.”

So, the question’s really asking, with new media, how do we maintain the profile of big movies across the different platforms, I think?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a little scary. And I mean, movies, the studios’ marketing divisions rely heavily on television. And if television becomes fragmented to the point where no one’s seeing anything, then they obviously lose a massive tool.

Now, I will say, and I like using the word massive tool, when I talk about marketing.

**John:** I knew you did that, yeah. I can see the little glee in your voice.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, those massive tools. And I did start in marketing, so.

But look, let’s face it: it’s already happened. So, instead of companies spending 100 percent of their budget on television spots on three networks, they spend 100 percent of their budget on television spots across 80 networks. And, theoretically, the cumulative eyeball factor adds up. But, of course, you see movie ads everywhere on the Internet, all over the web. And then, there’s outdoor. And outdoor, I actually think, is going to become more important over time, because you can’t escape outdoor.

**John:** Yeah. Motion pictures are one of those things that you need to have everybody there your opening week. Your opening week is so crucial, that we’re going to continue to spend a ton of money on network TV, because that’s the only way you can sort of make sure to reach everybody all at once. And, to the degree that stuff gets fragmented, you’ll just have to buy up all the little different places that they could be watching something, to do it.

This is, I think, in marketing, or in ad buying, called a “roadblock,” where you’re buying a commercial on every channel at the same time so that at 8 p.m. on Monday, you’re buying out all the channels, so that you make sure that everyone is seeing your ad.

And you can do the same thing on the Internet. It’s called the Internet roadblock, where you’re buying massive ads on the top 20 sites, so that you make sure that everyone has been exposed to your thing on the same day.

And you’ll see some of that sometimes with other product launches. Like when Apple has a brand new thing. You’ll see a roadblock where they basically, they’re buying out everything on the New York Times, or they’re buying out a major ad on New York Times and all the other newspaper sites, same day.

**Craig:** I will also mention this other thing that is going to get worse and worse. The one advantage that studios have over car companies or Apple is that they own most of the delivery systems. So, as obnoxious as it is, these local news stories that are really just ads for the stuff that the parent company of the local news station is producing, it’s going to get worse. No question.

You’re going to see characters on TV shows talking about upcoming movies. You’re going to see, it’s going to infect everything, because it is becoming harder and harder to reach a unified audience.

**John:** Yeah.

Question 13, finally. “Craig, my web browser is full of Hangover two DVD ads for the December 6th release.” —

**Craig:** — See? —

**John:** — “Presumably, a big residual day is coming up for you. How soon after a film’s release on DVD do you get your first check?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s a formula, I believe it’s something like the company has — I think — six months following the beginning of the first quarter in which they receive grosses. There’s some very complicated thing. But the short answer to your question, my guess is something like a half a year later.

**John:** Yeah. So, my prediction will be, you will see a spike, and that will be like, “Oh, that will be a big check.” It’ll be actually the second check you get is going to be the big one. Because you’ll see, like, “Oh, there’s a bunch of things sold,” and then the next one is bigger. Based on other, bigger movies that I’ve sold.

Like the first check for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was nice and big. Like, “Oh, wow, this should be great.” And the second one was, like, “Oh, twice as big. It should keep growing.” And then it goes and it crashes and it does the familiar sort of long tail thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of, I’m very curious to see what happens. That’s actually, the Hangover II DVD is an interesting case study, because it’s one of the first ones that’s really promoting this UltraViolet concept, where the studios are doing their own digital locker. And it’s also an interesting test case just to see, just to check the DVD market itself, because the first Hangover was extraordinarily successful on DVD and that was two years ago.

Granted, it’s a different movie, it’s a sequel, it may not even, apples to apples, it may have not done as well. But I’m kind of curious to see what the effect of the allegedly eroding DVD market is on the sales of this one.

**John:** Yeah, UltraViolet is stupid. I just don’t think it’s going to work. I think it’s a bad name. I just don’t get it at all.

**Craig:** It’s, you know what? I used to think that I understood this good name, bad name thing. But, man, I say Blu-ray now, and I thought that was the dumbest name I’d ever heard of in my life. But now, when I say it, it’s like a thing.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I didn’t like the name iPad, but now I can’t imagine them calling it anything else.

**Craig:** Well, everybody was “iPad, yeah, it’s tamponesque.” And yet, here we are, just like sheep.

**John:** Beyond the name, I just don’t think I want to trust these other new people to hold on to my media in any meaningful way. I mean, Apple, I get, I mean, Apple has reason, I believe Apple’s going to be around five years from now. I don’t know what UltraViolet is, I don’t know who those people are. It just feels too much like HDDVD or all those other things. It’s like, I’m waiting for the winner, and I just don’t feel like that’s going to be the winner.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Because the truth is, anybody, look, I save all my screenplays on my Dropbox account. I don’t know who the Dropbox people are, either. But, so, it’s not like, security wise, or will it still be there? It’ll always be there, it’s the studios, they own the movies anyway.

The real thing is, who the hell are — most people don’t know it’s the studios. And studios, what they’re good at making and selling isn’t this. What they’re good at making and selling are movies and TV shows. I don’t think they’ve done, as far as I could tell, a particularly good job of convincing people that UltraViolet is this great new idea. It’s great for us as writers, in terms of residuals, if it takes off. But this is all, this is a war between the studios and Apple.

**John:** Yeah. It basically is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, as we’re doing follow up, and some wrap up, too, we had a previous conversation about Follies, the great Steven Sondheim musical. So, two bits of exciting news that I think you’re going to be excited about. First off, the soundtrack to the Broadway production of Follies is now available on iTunes, and it’s great. It’s great. It’s actually really, really great.

Second off, and probably more exciting to you, Follies is coming to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Well, it looks like we should go.

**John:** We should totally go.

**Craig:** I’m going to make you go again.

**John:** We actually have season tickets to it, because this is actually going to be replacing Funny Girl, because Funny Girl was supposed to be coming to Broadway.

**Craig:** I can’t go see Funny Girl with you. It’s just too gay. Sorry.

**John:** It is, it’s too gay.

**Craig:** Too gay.

**John:** So, Funny Girl got nixed. It got, it fell apart.

**Craig:** Why, do you mean, fell apart? Just the, no one wanted it, or?

**John:** No, it’s actually, this was interesting, because it was while we were doing our second Big Fish reading, for our producers and investors and theater owners and stuff. It was that same week that we were in rehearsals, Funny Girl fell apart.

So, it was Lauren Ambrose and Bob Cannavale to star in the show, and it was originally, it was going to do its out of town at the Ahmanson, before traveling to New York, to Broadway, to open. And kind of at the last minute, it evaporated and fell apart. And so, the Ahmanson was left with this big hole, for like, “Oh my god, what are they going to do for their production now?” And they’re going to take Follies. It’s great.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Everyone loves Follies. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, I’m there.

**John:** Cool. And I think we’ll leave it at this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a lot of good follow up today.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and thank the great questions.

**John:** All right, absolutely. That was Daniel Barkeley, who did, really, the heavy lifting on today’s show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Daniel.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/screenwriting-gurus-and-so-called-experts).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, a weird thing happened this last week. I thought I would share this anecdote, this story about a thing that happened this past week. It’s dinner time and we’re sitting down to eat some good dinner and we hear a helicopter overhead, which is not that unusual in Los Angeles. We have a lot of helicopters in Los Angeles because we have a lot of news copters, we have police helicopters. It’s pretty common to hear some helicopters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then I noticed this helicopter is persisting. It’s like, “Oh, well that’s kind of unusual.” While this is my most favorite time of year because of all the great stuff that happens this time of year, I don’t like that it gets dark so early, so it’s quite dark out. I notice that the helicopter’s light is going on. So they’re looking for something or someone in this area, so it’s a police helicopter, not a news helicopter.

We go out front and there’s two police cars out in front of our house. Well that’s not great news. If you’re a single person, you have the option of freaking out because you can just freak out that there’s a police helicopters overhead and there’s police cars out front. But when you have a young child, you’ve given up the right to freak out about things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re going to mirror your anxiety.

**John:** Yeah. You have to just completely play it off like, “Oh, hey, how neat. There’s those policemen. Aren’t policemen great? Let’s talk about how wonderful policemen are while we’re locking the windows and locking the doors. Oh, you know what, I think I’m going to turn on the alarm now instead of late at night. Hey, that’s great. By the way, did we shut the gate? Yeah, everything seems to be pretty good.”

We’re trying to watch the police officers out front to see what’s going on and then I notice the helicopter overhead is circling around. The light just keeps going over the back of our house. They’re looking for something right here. This isn’t one of those things where they’re following somebody down the street. Literally something is happening right next to our house. It’s probably the house that’s under construction next door because houses that are under construction tend to invite problems because no one’s actually living there.

All this time I’m trying to keep really calm and not freak out the kid. Then I saw something that was actually kind of amazing. Police helicopters, the light is incredibly bright. It’s sort of like a second sun in the sky. Because it’s pretty low overhead, it’s casting these really cool shadows across the driveway. The silhouette of the trees is really cool. You see every little branch projected onto the driveway.

But what’s even cooler is helicopters, they have to circle a little bit and so the shadows of the tree branches keep sweeping across the driveway in this really, really cool way. It’s like one of those stop motion Vimeo things where they do those long exposure landscape things where you see all the stars going in circles across the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that but it’s happening right in front of you.

**Craig:** It’s Koyaanisqatsi in your front yard.

**John:** It’s basically that word I can’t say in my front yard.

**Craig:** [laughing] Right.

**John:** I bring my daughter over to see it. “Hey, this is really cool.” I can genuinely say this is a very cool moment that is happening despite the fact that there could be murders next door. By the way, I’m completely holding onto this idea. If you see the next movie I direct has helicopters that are projecting branches onto the ground, you’ll know where it came from. This was my Alan Ball plastic-bag-blowing-in-the-wind moment because it was just really, really beautiful.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is the moment you’ll bore thousands and thousands of people with.

**John:** Oh, completely.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** People will be talking about it, reverentially at first and then they’ll just hate the moment.

**Craig:** Then they’ll realize, wait a second, [laughing] it was a plastic bag. That’s great.

Alright, so the helicopter is circling. What happened, murder?

**John:** That’s the thing about all police activity that happens in a city like Los Angeles is you never really know what happens. The next day we find out that it probably was a break-in, somebody trying to steal power tools next door. No one was hurt, nothing bad happened. It’s just one of those things where someone saw that there was a construction site, waited until it was shut down and then broke in to try to steal all the power tools.

**Craig:** You know, I used to live not too far from where you live so we would get the helicopters all the time. In fact, I was probably a mile or two away from where most of the bad things happened, which meant that the helicopter often was right over my house because they’re shining the light at the center point of their circle. I’m on the edge, I’m on the circumference of their circle.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes they start talking to the people once they find them. Have you heard the helicopter guys talking?

**John:** I have yet to hear the helicopter people talking. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, they’ve got this massive loudspeaker on those helicopters. You just hear them giving very specific instructions. It’s so odd to just be sitting in your house and then you just hear this chopper noise and then, “The people on the roof, move to the ladder. No, the other way,” [laughing] this very casual conversation with the people on the roof.

I live in La Canada now, which is up against the mountains northwest of Pasadena. Our interesting thing was last night there was this amazing windstorm that brutalized Los Angeles. For whatever reason or function of geography, Pasadena and La Canada always get the worst of it. Last night was no exception. We had winds up to 95 miles an hour. My little thing for a movie is, I always like it when mundane things are slightly out of place because it’s more shocking, I think, than, I don’t know, just the sweeping shots of CGI devastation.

I’m driving back from my office — because we lost our power, I had to go to my office to work. I’m driving back on the highway and there’s a large oak tree in the highway just sitting there. Yeah, you don’t see that every day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of cool.

**John:** When I was in Boy Scouts, there was one time we had a winter campout. It was really windy while we were up in the mountains but we drove back into Boulder and the traffic lights were down. The traffic lights had been knocked down or bent around themselves by this huge windstorm that happened while we were gone. It was very much like coming back into a post-apocalyptic scene.

We got home and there was no power at home. I’d come from a weekend of cooking over a campfire to building a campfire in the fireplace so we could actually have heat.

**Craig:** It doesn’t take much to remind how fragile our little grasp on civilization is.

**John:** It is. One thing I should say in reference to my earlier story about the police helicopter is there’s a danger that in telling that story I’m contributing to the fallacy of misleading vividness, which is that by telling you this story of this police action that happened next door, a listener in Topeka might thing, “Oh my god, I could never move to Los Angeles because it’s so dangerous because I just heard this story of this police thing that happened right next door to this guy whose podcast you’re listening to.”

That would be a mistake because if you actually stop and think about that story, it’s that the police you could say overreacted a bit to sending two police cars and a helicopter to potentially someone stealing power tools next door. It was really a very minor thing that I just had a very big reaction to and it felt very cinematic but it was really not that big of a deal.

**Craig:** That’s right, you don’t know. Maybe it was a murderer next door or maybe it’s just that the Los Angeles Police Department has this enormous arsenal of tools, so they bring the sledgehammer out for everything.

**John:** Yeah. While we were talking I actually looked up — Wolfram|Alpha is a really good place to go if you want to look up crime rates for places. The crime rate for Los Angeles I know had fallen a lot. The crime rate for Los Angeles is actually lower than the national average. It is lower than the California average. It is lower than Pasadena.

**Craig:** I believe that. You’d have to figure out which parts of Pasadena you’re talking about because there are parts of Pasadena that are pretty rough. But in general, one of the strange things about our culture is that — there was an interesting study I read a couple years ago: The violent crime rate in the United States has been dropping precipitously, I think, since the early ’90s and we are now back to levels that we haven’t seen since, I think, the ’50s or early ’60s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yet at the same time the reportage of violent crime has skyrocketed. While we live in this relatively un-violent period of time, we tend to think we’re living in the most violent period of time.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But in fact, we don’t.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No, it’s pretty good out there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop complaining.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought we might start today by doing some follow-up on previous episodes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Our last episode was on residuals and there was one question which came up in the comments section which I thought was pretty good. Residuals: do they count towards maintaining your health insurance?

**Craig:** They do not, not for the Writers Guild. They do for the Directors Guild, and I think we mentioned this last time. The Directors Guild automatically lops off, I think, half of the residuals. It may be a little more complicated than that but let’s just say for the sake of argument roughly half. And they steer those residuals into the health fund. Thus, as a result of that, your residuals count as earned income towards qualification for health care.

The Writers Guild does not lop any of your residuals off for health care. The exchange that we make, however, is that our earned residuals do not qualify us towards health care, only writing income.

**John:** Yeah. If you write a movie which is produced and you are earning residuals for it but you don’t continue to write other movies, your health plan will run out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You will stop being qualified for health insurance.

**Craig:** Yes, whereas in the Directors Guild — actually I directed a movie and all of my income was within one calendar year, so obviously I qualified for health insurance for the following year, but then I qualified again because the residuals the following year were enough to get me another year.

**John:** A weird loophole that happened for me was I’m not a member of the Directors Guild, but for a year I had Directors Guild health insurance which happened because maybe you remember a couple of years ago, Heroes was a TV show on NBC that was a huge success originally. After the first season of Heroes they decided they were going to do obviously a second season but they were also going to do these origin episodes.

They went to a couple filmmakers to say, “Hey, would you direct these one-off episodes of Heroes Origins that are creating new characters that could be folded into the universe?” A couple of us said yes, and so Kevin Smith was supposed to do an episode. I was supposed to do an episode. And they made a deal for us to do this.

Then the air went out of the Heroes balloon and they decided not to do it, but the money they paid me, for whatever reason, counted towards DGA. I ended up having Directors Guild health insurance for a year.

**Craig:** When you do, what no one tells you is that obviously you qualify for Writers Guild health insurance. Then this other health insurance becomes your secondary insurance.

What they don’t tell you, and you have to kind of figure out yourself is, that secondary insurance works, but every time you get something back from the Writers Guild, you have to then send that form to the Directors’ Guild so that they can process it. It’s the worst. It’s a full-time job. I was actually happy to not have secondary insurance. It was killing me.

**John:** Yeah, it was kind of a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mess.

**John:** Yeah, we should talk about health insurance sometime. That’d be a good thing to talk about.

**Craig:** The Writers Guild health insurance, like every health insurance system, is absurdly complicated and it’s not their fault. Frankly, the more complicated it is, it’s usually because the better it is.

We have an excellent health care system, but there are a lot of weird little ins and outs and things that people don’t know. You’re right, it would be — I mean, listen: god knows we risk boring everyone to death every time we delve really deeply into this stuff. But, why not?

**John:** I’ve actually had mostly good experiences with the WGA health insurance people. But I had one very bad experience where we were adding my daughter to our health insurance. The woman on the other end of the phone said, “No, I need the adoption papers.”

“Well, you don’t understand, I didn’t adopt my daughter.”

It was like, “No, you have to adopt your daughter.”

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It was this bizarre thing where she just couldn’t quite process what our family situation was. I was like, “I really need to talk to your supervisor right now.” It got all resolved.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the question for you is, does the Writers Guild handle your specific situation relatively better or worse than, say, if you were with Aetna or an even more faceless massive bureaucracy. Because you obviously have a twist.

The other thing is that the same-sex couple rules are changing constantly, it seems to me, at least. They seem to be in flux, whereas, the traditional man/woman/kid situation is in stasis.

**John:** Yeah, I would say, overall, the WGA seems to be handling it as well as any place handles that stuff, so, I’m not particularly worried about it.

Another note follow up question here. We were talking about video games and getting union representation, WGA representation for video game writing. One of the readers wrote in and said, “Nobody in game development gives a rat’s ass about the writer. If anything, we’re viewed as an inconvenience to most game developers, a necessary evil, if you will. I predict you have something to say about that.”

**Craig:** I don’t really care if people in video game companies look down on writers. They can look down on anyone they want. The question is: Are those writers serving a role that makes it such that it’s hard to replace them if they all walk? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter.

Unions aren’t about making people like you. They’re about protecting your job, setting some basic parameters for what you ought to be paid, and how you should be acknowledged for the work you do.

**John:** Yeah. Where would you start with the video game people? Would you try to go after everyone who works at the video game company, or just people who are doing, who are putting words on paper, or on a screen?

**Craig:** Well, this is one area where I tend to veer a little bit off from a lot of the more hard-line organizing folks at the Writers Guild. There is a tendency to want to overreach with these things and suggest that we should represent everybody that is, quote unquote, “contributing to story.”

The problem with that is, producers contribute to story, actors contribute to story, directors certainly contribute to story. Story isn’t the functional aspect when we’re talking about employment contracts.

The functional aspect is literary material. Who is putting their fingers on the keyboard, typing in words and printing them out? That is writing that we can represent, as far as I’m concerned. It’s provable, it creates literary material. Literary material is something you can take a look at and credit and assign authorship to.

I would say, if, let’s say, we were talking about organizing Bethesda, who are the people that are writing stuff down? Those are the writers.

**John:** I want to get on to our main topic today. Now, Craig, a question I get a lot, and sometimes at panels or forums or other things is: What books should I read if I want to become a good screenwriter? Are there any really good manuals or how-to guides for screenwriters?

I never have a good answer, because the short answer is that I don’t have one that I should say you should absolutely read. The longer answer sort of make me sounds like a jerk, because I end up sort of espousing too much opinion about other people who write books about screenwriting.

What do you say when people ask you that?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look: Obviously, a big difference between you and me is I don’t care about sounding like a jerk. I just do it. I immediately go to answer number two.

I mean, okay, short answer number one. What book should I read? You can read any book you want. None of them will be as useful as reading screenplays and watching movies and thinking about story and then writing the script. That is the only basic instruction set that you need. And that works. The books are useless, I do believe.

**John:** Useless, though? I mean, I would — okay…

**Craig:** Useless. Because, look, we live in a time now where we have the Internet. Okay? If I need to know how long a script should be, if I need to know how it should be formatted, if I need to know what it’s supposed to look like, if I need to know how much description I should use and all. That stuff is out there, it’s on your website, it’s all over the place. There’s no need to buy anything.

**John:** But some stuff that you learn in books is not about…it’s not the simple answers to a question; it’s more — it gets you thinking a certain way about how to do stuff. If a book provides… I’m genuinely playing devil’s advocate here, because I do share a lot of opinions with you on this.

But I feel like there could be useful information in these books, and useful ways of thinking in these books for people who have never thought about story in a way before. It gets them really thinking about story, or thinking about how puzzle pieces might go together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. I still don’t know if that is as instructive as reading the screenplay to a movie you thought you knew well and seeing, in a kind of reverse engineering way, how it came from a script. Because that’s all we’re really doing, is kind of pre-engineering a movie when we write a script.

Look: There are some basic instructional guides that aren’t harmful to you. Syd Field isn’t harmful, I don’t think, unless you somehow view it as a religious choice. I don’t think that Chris Vogler’s book is harmful.

**John:** You think it’s not harmful.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s only harmful if people actually think that that’s the book that’s going to teach them how to be a screenwriter. It’s not. There is no such thing.

**John:** Okay. In research for this podcast, I looked up, and there are 2,123 books about screenwriting on Amazon. —

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** — It’s really a small subset of them are the ones that I think we often hear or talk about here. Certainly Syd Field is the one we have to talk about first. Syd Field, his famous book is called Screenplay. I didn’t, I had to look it up, because we don’t, we just call it the Syd Field.

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember when I was a kid in math class, that there were kids who wanted to understand basically why multiplication worked a certain way and grasp the concept behind it, and then there were kids that just wanted the 12-step algorithm, and just push it in one side and it comes out the other. It’s like a dumb box in between.

You can’t approach screenwriting that way. People who use these books to sort of try and reduce the process to something easy and controllable are failing. The only value, really, is what you’re saying, maybe plug into some common vocabulary and get a basic sense of the fundamental, most common shape of a screenplay.

Frankly, I would much prefer to see people go online and read a free public domain copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, which I think has more actual philosophical meat behind it about what the point and purpose of drama is, both good and bad.

**John:** I have to think about why there are so many people who aspire to be screenwriters and why there’s a market, apparently, for books about screenwriting. I think it’s because the form looks so different from everything else. The format scares people. Yet, it seems approachable in the way that everyone has seen a bunch of movies. Therefore — like, I get so frustrated when I hear people say, like, “Oh, I could never write a novel, but I think I could write a screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As if it’s like, “Oh well, it’s just people talking.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly why they do this, because everybody thinks, “I can write a screenplay, I have a great idea for a screenplay. I just need a book to tell me how to do it, and then I’ll do it. But I’ve already done it in my head. I’ve already done this hard part, which is to come up with this great idea for a movie. Now, I just need to shove it through this process and the Screenwriting for Dummies will tell me about that. That’s just window dressing.”

No, that is the screenwriting. Your idea is useless. Useless. The screenwriting is everything. The process is the job.

That’s why I find these books to be, essentially… They are sold in bad faith by people who, quite frankly, were they better at screenwriting, would be screenwriting.

**John:** That is a source of frustration for me as I look through the people who are selling these books, is that most of them have no significant, or, really, any screenwriting credits whatsoever. They are aspiring screenwriters who probably have written some screenplays but have never actually made movies from their screenplays.

An exception: Blake Snyder, who has the Save the Cat books, which I’ve not read, but people seem to like a lot, has done. He unfortunately passed away. But he has two genuine credits to his name — just really makes him an exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Everyone else has zero.

**Craig:** That’s right. We used to just have the plague of wannabes and pompous professors who insisted that they would give us the key to all this stuff. Now, we have this new scourge, which are underemployed readers.

For those who don’t know, because there’s so many scripts in contention at studios and production companies, the executives and gatekeepers hire people to read them, evaluate them, and score them. There’s a whole shadow industry of people that read and rate scripts.

Many of those people, I think, quite a few of whom don’t even want to be screenwriters, they want to be executives. Many of those people, faced with underemployment or lack of employment, begin to sell that service to others as a screenwriting consultant. Now they’re leveraging thousands of dollars out of people by reading their scripts and giving them so-called expert coverage. It’s atrocious.

**John:** And frustrating. I guess I come back to a question of, you know, I went to a university, I went to a film school. I went there to learn how to make movies. I had screenwriting classes. They were genuinely helpful. I’ve been a guest lecturer at screenwriting classes. I’m trying to in my head differentiate what that is versus what my frustration is with the guys and experts.

**Craig:** John, I have it. It’s — look, I just did, yesterday or two days ago, I guest spoke at Howard Rodman’s class at USC. I came there in good faith. You go to these things in good faith. And I think that for well-credentialed, respected academic programs, they’re offered in good faith.

So much of this is not. So much of this is simply a scam. You can smell it from a mile away. The truth of the matter is, there’s not much value in me reading some random person’s script, then giving them advice, because, almost always, they just don’t have it.

I want to be clear, and so, by the way, that would be in bad faith, especially if I took money, obviously. It’s about me.

I want to be clear, because a lot of times, people who are aspiring to be screenwriters feel that people like you or me are saying this stuff because we’re trying to keep them out, or hide the truth from them. Quite the opposite. I want more and better screenwriters. I want many, many screenwriters, better than I am, to come and make better movies than I make. Books aren’t going to make that happen. Talent is going to make that happen.

I really, more than anything, I’m actually trying to be very prosocial about this and say, “Please, save your money.” Screenwriting is free. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that by spending $3,000 you’re going to exercise a control that you so desperately want to have. I want that control, too. I don’t have it either. None of us do. Sorry.

**John:** One thing that occurs to me as we’re talking: While I didn’t honestly read a lot of the screenwriting books growing up, I have read a ton of programming books, because I love making apps, I enjoyed programming since I was a kid. I’m not especially great at it. I can do it, if push comes to shove. But I have real blind spots towards it. It’s not something that comes very naturally to me.

I’ll teach myself a language. I’ll teach myself Perl or Ruby or try to teach myself Objective-C, which just doesn’t fit my head very well. I can buy as many books as I want to buy, but I am searching for that book that says, like, “Oh, this is the magic formula for how you make any app.” And it’s like I said, I guess I’m guilty of that, too, is that I want there to be an easy way that just makes it all simple and possible. And it’s not.

You look at actual real programmers, Nima Yousefi, who does the programming for our stuff now, it’s just — it’s good and it’s natural for him. It’s just the work. He didn’t get to be good at it by reading a bunch of books about it. He got good at it by doing a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, the fabled 10,000 hours of doing something, it really does. I empathize with anybody who, faced with writing their 1st screenplay, or their 3rd or their 12th, who is seeking to be recognized for their work. I empathize with the pain and the fear that they have. Certainly, I empathize with their psychological craving for some kind of secret trick, control, leverage point, anything. It is a terrible drowning feeling when you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You desperately want to do it right.

It is discouraging to say to people, “There is no lifeguard on duty. The only way you will survive this drowning is by swimming through it.” But, unfortunately, there is no lifeguard on duty. These books will not help you. These people who charge you money will bleed you dry.

Think about this for a second. You are, let’s say, somebody who has a modicum of talent. But you’re raw. You are craving some assistance, some help. You spend money on a professional script consultant. They read your script.

They have a choice, they can say to you, “This is very far off the mark, you need to go write two or three more scripts and really figure out what this is about. Then, spend your money with me.” Or, they may say, “You have no talent, stop.”

Or they may say, “Wow, there’s great potential here. Here’s a bunch of notes,” that by the way, anybody could have given you. “They’ll make your script better. You go work on that, then come back, I’ll read it again, or I’ll read your other script, or I’ll read your third script. You’re the one. If only you, three or four more of my amazing sessions at $1,000 a pop and you’ll make it.”

They’re always going to do that, because it’s a scam. It’s a scam. Don’t do it.

**John:** We should probably differentiate between a couple things we’re talking about, here. I would come down on the side of, if somebody wants to read a book, it’s a small cost to reading a book. It’s going to cost you, now, $10, $15, and it’s going to cost several hours of your time. There’s the danger that it’s going to lead you in a very bad direction. But everything is a danger that’s going to lead you in a bad direction. It’s not a bigger gamble than anything else.

I would come down on the side of, “Hey, if the book seems interesting, go ahead and read it.” That’s basically what I’ve done with Stuart now, is that, Stuart is, you know, a young aspiring writer. As people ask questions, like, “Hey, is this a good screenwriting book?”

I would say, “Hey, Stuart, read this book and write a review for the site.” That’s what we’re doing with that.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Seminars, I am opposed to seminars. I am opposed to seminars where the masterful instructor comes in and teaches you how to write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, me, too, yeah.

**John:** Linda Seger’s known for them, Robert McKee is known for them.

**Craig:** Linda Seger. Linda Seger. Derek Haas was at some event and Linda Seeger was there speaking. She was peppering her speech with authoritative comments about how she assisted somebody who once wrote a Cagney and Lacey.

Good Lord. People are spending money? Why? Why? It’s crazy to me.

Listen, I completely agree with you on this. If all you lose is 80 bucks on six books, whoop-de-do. Go for it.

By the way, when it comes to… Look, there are books that I actually, I like recommending to people, because I don’t want to be a total jerk about it. I think, actually, rather than reading the Chris Vogler books, which are sort of a screenwriting view of Joseph Campbell’s work, just read Joseph Campbell.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re wonderful books to read anyway, just to understand the commonalities of human narrative. But I would certainly say, before you start spending even money on books, you should read John’s site, you should check out, god, there’s just a whole bunch of sites out there.

**John:** You should also read screenplays.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing you keep coming back to, is that, you need to read as many screenplays as you possibly can read. You need to read the great screenplays. You need to read the screenplays to the movies that you love to see how those movies were made.

But you also really need to read bad screenplays. People don’t take my word for this, but I was a reader for TriStar for a year, and for other places for six months before that. I read, and had to write coverage on 150 terrible screenplays. You learn so much about what never works by reading bad writing.

**Craig:** So true. Not just what doesn’t work, but also where it could have worked, but the writer wrote himself out of something good, because they overwrote or they underwrote. You know, good advice, read bad scripts.

I have a few, if people want to read them. [laughter]

**John:** I’m saying, fine on books if you find that helpful. Just make sure that you’re also reading scripts. No on seminars. No on paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just — if people can write in with comments if they’ve actually had a good experience where it has completely changed their…

**Craig:** They will. By the way, John, they will. They get so defensive. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who are so defensive, but in the end.

**John:** I want to see one produced writer —

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** — who can show me where they paid a script consultant and that’s what got them where they are.

**Craig:** Thank you, thank you. It’s very dispiriting to have to argue with somebody about why they’re wasting their money. It’s a little bit like, arguing with people who spend money on psychics. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead, spend your money. I don’t care. it’s not my problem.”

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I think that’s it. I mean, is there anymore to say about gurus or experts?

**Craig:** Ptheh.

**John:** Ptheh. Ptheh basically summarizes Craig Mazin’s position on that.

Well, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Very good.