Search Results for: scene headings

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/putting-words-on-the-page).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 349 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we’ll be talking about the tools we use to get things written. For me that’s Highland 2, the screenwriting app that is finally coming out of beta. But there’s also outlining and treatments and all the other peripheral things that writers write. We’ll be talking about that. We’ll also be answering questions from the huge stack that have piled up over the past few weeks.

But first, Craig, we have guests for our live show finally.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s going to be a good one. Now these live shows, these are the ones we do to benefit Hollywood Heart. These tend to be our kind of biggest live shows. These are the live shows where we’ve had our Rian Johnsons. And we’ve had our David Benioff and Dan Weisses. And we’ve had all sorts of big fancy–

**John:** Our Jason Bateman.

**Craig:** We got our Jason Batemans for these. And this one, no exception. Maybe honestly our best lineup yet.

**John:** So what I love about this lineup is they are people doing very different things but also kind of similar things when you think about it. So our guests are Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan, they are the co-creators and showrunners of Westworld, an HBO show that is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite shows because I am a robot and therefore I am rooting for the robots.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But we didn’t stop there. We also invited Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. They are the co-creators and showrunners of The Avengers franchise. So they are the folks who are writing the Captain America movies. They wrote the most recent Avengers movie, upcoming Avengers movie. So, we are going to be talking with all four of them about writing big cinematic stories that take place over multiple episodes that are hugely complicated that have spoilers and secrets. They’re under intense spotlights. I think it’s going to be a great conversation.

**Craig:** Just to point out that Christopher and Stephen, their movie Avengers: Infinity War I believe had the biggest opening weekend of any movie of all time.

**John:** Yes. So it is superlative in many senses. And I should stress that we are going to spoil things. So you’re buying a ticket that is three weeks from now, or a little less than three weeks from now when the episode comes out, so you’ve got to see the movie. You’ve got to understand what’s happening on Westworld because we are going to spoil things. So this is not going to be one of those like oh cover your ears. No, no. You are buying this knowing that we are going to spoil things.

**Craig:** Well, and if you are familiar with the Avengers movies and you’re familiar with Westworld, I’m going to go out on a limb and guarantee something, OK. Even if we have to cut it out of the actual episode that airs for all the poor saps that don’t show up, if you show up one of these folks is going to give you a piece of juicy info that you can’t get anywhere else.

**John:** Yeah. Right after we finish the show one of these four will pull us aside and say, “Can you please, please, please cut out the part where I said this thing?”

**Craig:** It’s inevitable. Happens every time.

**John:** And we will.

**Craig:** But if you’re there in the audience and remember this benefits kids, and I believe they’re nice children. I don’t think it benefits like jerks.

**John:** We only let the nice children benefit from these shows.

**Craig:** And so if you go to Scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com, you can help these kids and also help yourself. And honestly even if Markus and McFeely hadn’t written the biggest movie of all time, and even if Joy and Nolan hadn’t written this incredible TV show, you would get to see me. Also John will be there. Yeah, no, John will be there.

**John:** I’ll be there as well. Yes.

**Craig:** But you’ll get to see me.

**John:** The show is May 22nd. It is at the ArcLight in Hollywood at 8pm. You cannot buy tickets through the ArcLight. You have to buy them through Scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com. There’s also some special VIP tickets we found out about, so there’s going to be a little VIP after-party show thing. So if you want that that is a chance to talk with us and get more information about the things that were spoiled in the course of the episode.

**Craig:** I’m so excited.

**John:** I’m very, very excited about this. All right, next we have some follow up. So Jack wrote in about default white. Do you want to take what Jack wrote in?

**Craig:** Sure. Here we go. So he says, “I’ve worked in casting for more than ten years, both inside the company that releases the majority of the casting breakdowns for the industry, and as a casting director. Right now breakdowns are generally prepared in one of two ways. A casting director either submits a fully prepared breakdown ready for release, or production sends the script to the breakdown company where an in-house writer will read it and create the character breakdown which is then sent back for approval.

“If the character does not have a defined race in the script, the role is listed on the breakdown for all ethnicities.”

**John:** So this is a topic that Christina Hodson and I got into on Episode 346 which is basically how much should the screenwriter be defining who those characters are in the script so that the breakdown comes out the way you want it to. So, let’s continue with what Jack says.

**Craig:** So Jack says, “Once the breakdown is released, agents and actors begin submitting. The casting director will receive an overwhelming number of white submissions for ‘all ethnicity roles.’ Part of the reason is because the database of actors is primarily white. Another part of the reason is that agents will always submit their ‘best’ first. That’s defined as the people who will make them the most money. These actors have historically been white. And, finally, casting directors will reach out to actors they know and trust first, again mostly white.

“So if the role is ‘all ethnicities,’ chances are very good that a white person will be hired. There is no conspiracy here. No effort to deny anybody anything. It’s just people doing what is familiar and easy. I understand that it is uncomfortable to define race. If you select one race you are eliminating all others, including white, and that’s not fair. But the reality is that the odds are stacked against people of color. That’s not an opinion. It’s a numerical fact.

“If, however, a writer defines a character as Asian, agents will submit Asian talent. Casting directors will audition Asian talent. Producers will hire Asian talent. It’s that simple. Those best lists will start to change as more people of color are hired. If you cannot bring yourself to define your lead roles, please consider at least defining your day players. Describing that under-five lines’ Chatty Waitress as Asian will make a difference. And why not throw in Over 40 while you’re at it.

“There’s a Japanese actor who hasn’t had an audition all month who will thank you.”

All right, well that’s a pretty good summary there. What do you think about all that, John?

**John:** I thought it was great. So first off, we have fantastic listeners. So, Jack, thank you for writing in with that because that is a perspective we wouldn’t have known. So, telling us basically how breakdowns are happening and urging us as writers to just be more explicit on race because it does actually make a difference.

Now sometimes I’ll say that if we define a race in a script we can get called out for it. Basically like why are you being so specific? This gives us some ammunition on our side for why it is useful to be so specific for races in scripts because it’s going to help change things a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s another axis that I want to bring up just because it often gets overshadowed in the discussion about race and gender. We have something like 108 speaking parts in Chernobyl. There’s a lot. And everybody – every character – is a citizen of the Soviet Union from one of the many various republics, but primarily we’re talking about Ukrainians and Russians and Belarusians. And because we’re casting out of the UK and Scandinavia, one of the inherent biases in casting came up immediately. And that was that actors tend to be really good-looking. So when we talk about sort of historical biases, actors – both men and women – tend to be people that are attractive, they have facial symmetry, they have good hair. They don’t have – well, the quirkier facial features that you see in what we’ll call just regular people. And, of course, they are typically in good shape.

And for us we thought a lot of this is about having believable people as part of this cast. And that doesn’t mean that we’re saying we wanted a cast of people that are not attractive. It’s not about that. But it’s rather we want a spectrum of people and we’re not going to allow traditional facial attraction be our definition of what attractive is. Nor are we going to limit ourselves to certain body types. So I think as we’re writing and we’re listening to people like Jack telling us how this actually works, how the food is cooked in the kitchen so to speak, to think about body type as well and facial types. Even things like hair and hair color. All these things – anything to kind of add some flavor and get yourself out of a lot of these default positions.

You know, if we kind of come up with a bunch of defaults, let’s start pushing against them where we think it will help us out and, I don’t know, set us apart a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. Another way to sort of reach beyond sort of the usual people that we’re always seeing for these kind of things might be to early on bring in some folks who are interesting for a project. I’m really more talking for the writer-directors out there. But Mike Birbiglia when he was doing his movies he does these table readings – not even table readings, just like sit around in his apartment reading through the script. And it’s a useful process for him to hear his script and figure it out. But I think it’s also useful for getting a sense of what if we tried to mix things up. What if I tried some different people in these roles? What if I consider this actor who sort of seems like a reach or a stretch for this, but I can see what they can actually bring to that role?

This last week I was at a table reading for Alan Yang’s new script. And he brought in these actors who were fantastic. And it was a chance for them all to sort of hear each other and for everyone in the room to sort of experience these actors. And I made notes of some of these actors who I never would have encountered before. And like, wow, I want to write something for that person because they are great.

So, just reaching out and broadening past the first instinct on casting can be a great thing. And that can start by what you’re specifically saying about that character in the script.

**Craig:** No question. By the way, funny, I went to one of those readings in Mike Birbiglia’s place and one of the roles was being read by this lovely gentleman, he was an older guy, and he seemed familiar to me and his voice seemed familiar. But I don’t think he’s an actor, so I think he might just be a friend. But he did such a good job and I just thought, “Wow, Mike Birbiglia is so lucky that he just has a friend who is like a 65-year-old guy who is just really good at being a guy at a table read.” And then afterwards I found out it was Frank Oz. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Because I didn’t know exactly what Frank Oz looked like. You know, I know what he sounds like. I know that he’s Miss Piggy and that he’s Yoda and Grover. And obviously he’s a wonderful filmmaker, an amazing filmmaker. And I was just like “This guy is so great. I wonder who he is. Oh, he’s Frank Oz, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.”

And another interesting story like the one you were just describing with Alan’s table reading was a table reading that we had all the way back in 2003 for Scary Movie 3. And when you are pretty early on and you’re still casting a lot of times casting agents will help you fill your round table by bringing in actors that are just there to read for the roundtable. That’s it. And this young actor that no one had ever heard of named Kevin Hart showed up. And we thought Kevin was just the funniest guy. And I was like let’s just make him – this guy is him. Let’s just keep writing it for him. And so we cast him in Scary Movie 3, and in Scary Movie 4, and in Superhero Movie. He’s just great.

And it was all because he just was sort of a fill in guy in 2003 at a table reading.

**John:** Yeah. I think what’s nice about table readings is the stakes are just lower. Because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and the world doesn’t come crashing to an end. And it’s a chance to experiment and play a bit. And so I always wonder about sort of you don’t want actors to be exploited by being brought in for table reads where they’re not actually going to be able to land that part maybe. But what you described with Kevin Hart is a great example of you got to know who he was just because of that table reading. And that’s a great bit of exposure.

**Craig:** And they’re aware of the deal. They are told, listen they’re not offering you this part. This is just a show up for the day, make a few hundred bucks, get some exposure in front of some people that are making movies, and that’s it. No promises beyond that. And it’s not surprising to me that Kevin did that because he is just, I know from my own work with him but also just watching him do everything since, he’s like one of those guys that fits the hardest working man in show business category. He never stops. He’s just amazing that way.

So, that’s all pretty great. Just, you know, as people go through this and they’re writing their scripts if they can just think about – I love what Jack said about day players, too. It’s not just the big parts. That you have these roles where people run into a waiter, or a bus driver, or a delivery person and the default is going to be, oh, that’s an incredibly handsome or beautiful waiter or delivery person. But then it almost weirdly takes you out of things. I mean, Hollywood distorts the way people actually look. People don’t look like they do in movies. At all. They look how they look. You know? So what’s wrong with kind of edging back towards that reality? I like that.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

Our final little bit of follow up on race and ethnicity is you had talked in a previous episode that you and Megan Amram are distant cousins. You found out through 23andMe. I just got my 23andMe back. So we just checked to see whether we are related and sadly we are not.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, to start with I’m an organic life form.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** It was not likely.

**John:** It was going to be a reach. It would be a surprise.

**Craig:** It would have been a real shock. Also I’m Jew-y as hell. And you are not.

**John:** I’m not. So I’m 100% European and British and Irish and French and German. We are on different Haplogroups coming out of Africa. And I am slightly more Neanderthal than you are. That’s sort of a surprise.

**Craig:** I like that. I like that you’re slightly more Neanderthal. I feel that. I got to be honest with you. I sense sometimes there’s a certain kind of club you on the head rage just lurking behind your eyes. I am also 100% European, like you. I am 98% Ashkenazi Jewish. That is incredibly Jewish. That is almost like a weaponized level of Judaism.

I am 0.6% random Eastern European. So perhaps a Lithuanian in my past. And then I love this 1.1% broadly European, so from everywhere. And then 0.1% Finnish.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Oh I like that.

**John:** I love that Finnish is so specific. Yes.

**Craig:** It is. The Finnish language is very specific. Related to the Estonian language, interestingly enough. But I like that I’m just a little bit Finnish.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I sent through my 23andMe kit a couple weeks ago and in the meantime they caught the Golden State Killer basically using this genetic information, which does give me some pause about like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. Now my genetic information is in a database someplace and they’ll be able to track me down when I do something horrible.” Or not something horrible. That information could be used in ways that I would not like. So that does give me some pause now.

**Craig:** You know, I realize now at my age, and you and I are basically the same age, that our time for doing terrible things is essentially over. I think we would have been doing them, right?

**John:** I could have been doing them the whole time and just blacked them out.

**Craig:** There’s no maybe about that. That’s for sure.

**John:** People are either going to be nodding along or slightly horrified. Sometimes when you hear about a murder do you ever get that little moment like, “Wait, did I do that?”

**Craig:** Oh no. No, John. I don’t. And nobody does except for murderers. I am one of the people that is just starring in horror right now at my own microphone. [laughs] Because you hear about murders and go, “Oh, was that one of mine? Did I do that one?”

**John:** Yeah. Did I do that one? No.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** For the record I have committed no murders that I’m aware of. But I always do wonder what if I’m that character in a movie who has no idea that they’re actually the villain?

**Craig:** If I am that character my villainy is definitely sort of like petty nonsense. Removing the tags from furniture before it is sold. That kind of thing.

**John:** I have seen you sneaking into bedding stores and cutting off those tags.

**Craig:** Oh, that just sent a frisson down my spine in delight.

**John:** Let’s get back to our Neanderthal things because I am a toolmaker and I have a tool that–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Yes. That just came out – well, this week it’s coming out. So it may be out by the time this episode drops. It might be out Thursday of the week this drops. But for the last three years we’ve been working on a sequel to Highland, the screenwriting app my company makes. Highland 2 is still a screenwriting app, but it also does a lot more things. It’s what I wrote both Arlo Finch books in. It’s what I wrote Aladdin in. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s ever open all the time on my computer.

And it’s finally available for people to use and download. And so I want to talk a little bit about that and sort of why I built it and why I love it. But more generally sort of like what stuff we actually use to get things written. Because you’ve talked on the program about Fade In which is your preferred screenwriting app. But I’ve never actually asked you what do you use to write treatments and outlines and the peripheral documents that you’re doing for things like Chernobyl. What are you using for that?

**Craig:** It’s a little embarrassing, but I use Word.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** I know. And the thing is I know I don’t have to. I’ve got Pages for instance which is the Apple version. It’s just become this sort of thing. And especially now, I’m such an idiot because I’m on the stupid Office 365 thing now where now I’m apparently renting software and I can’t even buy it. But when I do treatments and like the show bible for Chernobyl, I did it in Word. Possibly just because I have some sort of blah-de-blah kind of familiarity with it. And unfortunately I do get a ton of stuff in .docx format. I presume that these other applications open .docx files with ease. But, you know, then you’ve got to export it back out I guess for other people. So that part’s annoying.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say Word is sort of the default. I mean, sort of like we talked about casting default white, it’s sort of default Word. So for things that aren’t a screenplay it becomes sort of default Word. And even for Arlo Finch I turn in all my early drafts as PDFs and I get notes back on the PDF. But at a certain point it goes into copy editing and I have to turn in the book in Word. And it’s just so horrifying because a thing I hadn’t really realized until these last two passes on Arlo Finch and having to convert the document is Word is really slow. Word is really slow at long documents. Not even just converting it, but actually opening it and scrolling through it, it lags even on a fast machine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll put a link to the video. I did in a speed test I downloaded from Project Gutenberg the text of War and Peace. And I opened them in Word, iaWriter which is a plain text editor, Pages, and in Highland 2. How long do you think it would take to open War and Peace in Word? Just a plain text document.

**Craig:** Um, what’s my benchmark here? A MacBook Pro?

**John:** A recent iMac desktop computer.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty good computer. Well, just knowing the way it is with all the dumb baloney it has that you never use, I’m going to say it takes eight seconds.

**John:** It took six minutes and ten seconds.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** There’s a link here in the video for it. It took so long that I actually ended up putting a little marker in the video so people can speed through to where it gets done. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**John:** So Pages took 47 seconds. iaWriter takes a minute ten. Highland opens in less than eight seconds. And that’s what it should be.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** I mean, it’s just text. It should just be able to speed through it. And that’s – and Arlo Finch is only 80,000 words, but when you deal with big documents you realize like, man, that is just brutally slow.

**Craig:** It is brutally slow.

**John:** It’s just not a good way to work.

**Craig:** I presume it’s because Microsoft Word is bloatware. I mean, it’s the definition of bloatware. It’s essentially offering you every possible freaking thing that you would ever theoretically need and then some. And so it’s got to chug all the text into its own proprietary burdened/over-burdened document format with all of the metadata that it’s generating.

I mean, Microsoft Word is – I find it useful when I’m dealing with tracking.

**John:** That’s the only reason why we have to do the Arlo Finch last changes in it, because it has this track changes and the copy editor will change things and I’ll say yes or I’ll rewrite them or I’ll stet them. And that’s a process, but brutal. Just brutal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Wow. That’s really freaking long. So maybe I should get Highland 2. And how much does that cost, John?

**John:** Highland 2 is a free download.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And if you like it then it’s a $49 in-app purchase to unlock everything, or $29 for the first week. So it is a much cheaper application. And it’s a one-time purchase. It’s not rental.

**Craig:** So if I buy it today it’s $30.

**John:** If you buy it today it’s $30.

**Craig:** I’m buying it right now. It is on the store?

**John:** It will be on the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** It is on the App Store right now? It is available now?

**John:** Not as we’re recording this, but it will be either by the time the episode comes out or afterwards. But I sent you an unlocked version. So you already have it.

**Craig:** Oh. I should really go through my emails.

**John:** We talked in the episode before on conflict of interest, and this is so clearly I need to disclose a conflict of interest because I’m talking about this thing that I love but also I’m the company that makes it and profits from it. So, full conflict of interest disclaimers here. But I want to talk about why the app is the way it is because it’s just basically I wanted the app a certain way and it’s very particular to sort of my taste in how things should be. But there are also just tools in there that were useful for me.

So, here’s an example. Craig, as you’re working through stuff if you have things you want to cut but you want to hold on to what do you do with those things? Like a scene or a line of dialogue?

**Craig:** Sure. So I used to take that scene or dialogue, open a new file, for instance in Fade In, and then dump it into a new file, retitle that something, some descriptive word, and snip it and keep it in the same folder. But now Fade In, because I asked Kent to do it and he just did it because he’s a cool guy. Now there’s this kind of versioning alt system where I can create an Alt within the document itself, and so it’s holding it there.

**John:** So you’re just doing that for dialogue or you’re doing alts for like a scene?

**Craig:** I can do it for anything. But yeah, if there’s a scene that I’m like oh, you know what, this doesn’t belong in this episode anymore. I’ll just kind of alt it out. So it’s in there but it’s not visible or printable. I have options but that’s kind of what I do.

**John:** So for me I was always frustrated that when you use video editing software you have a bin where you can just throw all the little clips and bits and bobs and stuff. And so we added that for Highland 2.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So you can take any bit of text and just drag it over to the side and it sticks in a bin. And it holds there. So it’s useful for those things you want to hold onto, but it’s also good when you need to rearrange a lot of stuff. Because I’m sure you’ve been in situations where you have to move this scene and this scene and that scene and the copying and pasting of it all becomes quite ornate, because you have to remember what is going where, where are things.

So this way you can just drag that scene over to the bin, then move it and drag it back out where you want to do it. So it’s useful for sort of the rearranging function as well.

**Craig:** I like that. Here’s the truth. There are times in my life where I suddenly go, “Oh my god, if I don’t break out of this rut of some tool, like Microsoft Word, I’m just going to become the annoying person for my kids when they’re an adult.” Like I had to get my mother-in-law off of AOL. And I failed.

But, yeah, I don’t want Jack and Jessie to be like, “Oh god, Dad still uses Microsoft Word. It’s embarrassing.” So maybe I’m just going to switch over and use Highland for like–

**John:** Yeah, use it for that stuff first. And then if you like it for that stuff you might try writing some scenes in Highland. See if you like how it feels for that. Because it’s just very different underneath your fingers.

**Craig:** Now I’m very dizzy.

**John:** So two other tools which I think you might find useful, even if you’re not using it fulltime. Highland’s sort of big marquee feature when we first launched it, version 1.0, was that you can take a screenplay PDF, drag it onto Highland, and it will basically melt the PDF down and give you an editable script.

And so since we did that, I think Fade In can do that.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Final Draft still can’t do it. We’re still the best, and I’ll say that pretty confidently, because between Highland and Weekend Read we just do it a lot. So we just have a much bigger database of how to work through those scripts and so our algorithms are just sort of tighter on that.

But a thing we added for this most recent version, which is also fun for people to play with, is gender analysis. And so you can take a script you’re working on, a Final Draft script, a PDF, anything and throw it on Highland and underneath Tools there’s a new tool called Gender Analysis. And so it goes through your script, it takes a look at all the characters. You can flag them whether they are male/female/or undefined. And it will give you a chart showing the breakdown of the dialogue in the script, who has the lines, whether two female characters are interacting with each other in any scenes.

**Craig:** Ah, the Bechdel Test section.

**John:** Yes. And so it gives you a quick look at sort of what that is. So two scripts I looked at recently, first was La La Land. And so where do you think the breakdown is going to be for La La Land? Do you think it’s going to be equal male/female? What are you guessing?

**Craig:** I’m going to say that La La Land edged toward female.

**John:** You are correct. So character wise, La La Land has 20 male characters, 11 female characters. I left ten unspecified. These are people like waiter or things that are just not necessarily clear or it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. But in the actual dialogue spoken it was basically even. Men had 49% of the lines, women had 48% of the lines. When you actually look at words spoken, which Highland can also track, it’s exactly equal. So 49%/49%. That’s a pretty useful thing.

If you take a look at Thor, 2011 Thor, what would you guess the split is there?

**Craig:** It’s going to be weighted quite male.

**John:** Yeah. You are correct. 70% of the lines spoken are by men. So even though there’s two female characters – well, there’s more than two – but there’s two principal female characters in Thor, it’s Thor and he does most of the speaking.

**Craig:** Oh, god, wait until you run Chernobyl through this thing.

**John:** Well, you can.

**Craig:** Well, I could tell you what the answer is. I mean, we’re talking about a situation in a male-dominated society in a power plant full of men and an army full of men. We’ve tried to put women everywhere we can. We really have. We’ve made the best of what we can. We’re also like weirdly by definition the whitest show that’s ever existed because they were all white.

But what I really like about this is in a sense the value that you’re providing with this feature may be in the use of the feature rather than the output of the feature. Just having to do it forces you to think about it and you might even start changing things before you even do it just because you kind of know what you’re in for if you haven’t really, you know, kind of thought it through right.

**John:** Yeah. So I wanted it to be sort of not a scolding kind of thing but actually a tool you can use along the way. So because you can click and change a character from male to female you can say like, “Well, what if I took this character and made it female. Oh, that actually does balance things out a lot more.” Or if you see that the chart is just wildly off and it doesn’t feel like you’re making a Chernobyl where it’s very difficult to adjust those things you might say, “Oh, this is a thing I could do to get you through this.”

This all came from, you know, over the past year there have been these big studies of going back through past scripts and you talk to them about how they actually did it and they were going through and hand-coding all this stuff to figure out whether things are male or female and counting lines individually. That’s something computers should do.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So we’re doing it.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Excellent. What are you using for outlining or do you outline?

**Craig:** I do. Oh, yes.

**John:** I started using Workflowy for some outlining stuff, but what are you using for outlines?

**Craig:** Microsoft Word. [laughs] Well, so–

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Again, one of the things I actually like about Microsoft Word is when I’m doing a proper outline it does have a very simple kind of scheme to roman numeral to number one to letter to little roman numeral. It kind of does that for you. And it does that well with tab and return.

And then sometimes I might make an outline where I just go Act One, and then it’s 1….and then the next 2. And it does lists automatically. And if I go back and stick something between 2 and 3 it knows to bump everything down. So things like that kind of make it easy so that’s what I do for that stuff.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve started using Workflowy which is what we use for our podcast outlines. For some of that stuff and also just making lists of these are the things I need to make sure I fix in this next pass of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I like it. I don’t love it. It’s not my sort of most favorite tool. So I think I’m still looking for an outliner. Inevitably I’ll probably have the company build it for me, but I’m still looking for a thing I really like for that.

**Craig:** Put Nima to work, you know? He’s just sitting around with nothing to do. Let’s go, Nima.

**John:** Absolutely. A thing we haven’t talked about at all so far is Final Draft. So, if you want to hear the history of John and Craig and Final Draft you can go back to the one with the episode, the one with the guys from Final Draft.

I had to use Final Draft this past year for – I did a small little rewrite on a superhero movie that was in production. And so there was no getting out of just dealing with the Final Draft file they sent. And so I could have converted it and like, nope, it was going to make everything much worse if I tried. So, I did it in Final Draft with revisions on. It reminded me of why Final Draft is so maddening.

**Craig:** So bad.

**John:** To try to move stuff around, it was just not a good experience.

**Craig:** Ugh, the worst. I just went through it myself. I was rewriting something. The director had written a draft and was asking me to do a new draft. And I just needed to stay in Final Draft for them. And, first of all, you feel like you’re going back in time.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** For sure. There were moments where I would delete something, or I would say, “Oh you know what I’m going to do, I’m going to take this line of dialogue here. It’s the second sentence of this dialogue block and I’m going to actually add it in front of the first sentence of this” and it thinks, “Oh, you’re trying to make a character name that’s 14 words long.” And I’m like, what? Why would you think that’s what I want to do? Why would you think that? Who adds things onto a character’s name with cut and paste? It’s the dumbest – oh god.

**John:** Yeah. So in general I find trying – after working in Highland I get really frustrated sort of going back to that stuff because it is – every line has a definition of like what it is and you’ve had to declare like this is a character name, this is dialogue. And it’s not doing any logic about what could you actually be intending here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that just gets really frustrating. And sometimes trying to delete across things gets to be hard because–

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** Because you’re in different spaces. Or you get stuck in a parenthetical.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s another thing. You delete a bunch of stuff and then it just changes the format of what comes next. Why would it do that? Why would any – oh my god! What’s wrong with you, Final Draft? Why do you do that?

**John:** Yeah. It is maddening. And so these are some of the reasons I made Highland 2. If you want to see it and download it it’s for the Mac. It should be on the Mac App Store this week as we are recording this. So, I hope people enjoy it.

**Craig:** I think that’s fantastic. And I have just downloaded – now I have the beta. But, you know what John? I’m kind of beta. I’m OK with it.

**John:** [laughs] I’ll get you a magic unlock code so you can get the full power version. I will say one last thing about pricing on it is that we were trying to figure out what to price it at. And so the reason why we went from $30 to free because I wanted just a lot of people to be able to use it and try it. And we always had problems where like schools would say, “Oh hey, we want to install it on all of our school computers.” And then it was like, ugh, like we couldn’t find – you had to make a special version for them. It just got to be a whole deal.

So I wanted students to be able to use it for free. It prints a little watermark saying Made in Highland, but otherwise it’s the full app. So I wanted people to be able to try it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So we’re going broad.

**Craig:** Well, I’m rooting for you.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some questions. Noah writes, “I’ve just been reading William Goldman’s screenplays lately and it’s hard not to take note of his formatting, in particular how he writes his scene headings. He doesn’t use INT or EXT, nor does he use day or night. Just whomever or whatever he’s directing the camera to focus on. It’s aggravating when I think about the times I’ve been instructed how to properly format while writing and then see Mr. Goldman’s work.

“There’s even a spot in Princess Bride where a scene heading is Something We Hadn’t Expected, on page 64. When I read that I laughed and swore out loud. But honestly what’s an aspiring writer to do when he’s trying to get the form right and yet he reads that?”

**Craig:** Here’s the truth. Noah, if you write like William Goldman then you just write whatever you want. William Goldman, I suspect when he was writing, as we sometimes write as like service people, you know, so you and I will be hired to help on something and then like we were using Final Draft because that’s what the production was using. When you help you stay in their format. I don’t think William Goldman was unaware of the format. But when William Goldman is adapting his own novel, The Princess Bride, into a screenplay The Princess Bride, he can write whatever the hell he wants.

And it’s also a different situation. That’s a situation where it’s sort of like, “Hey, let’s all make a movie together with this incredibly highly accomplished screenwriter adapting his own novel.” It doesn’t matter. And the truth is none of it really matters anyway. Even if you’re not William Goldman, you’re not adapting your own famous novel, and you haven’t written anything, if you write some amazing – if I just pick up your script, I open the first page, and the first three lines are gorgeous, I don’t care. In fact, at that point if you’ve just decided to reinvent the format entirely what do I care? The most important thing is as I’m reading it I have to ask this question: can I shoot this? Right?

And if you can shoot it, then it works. Something we hadn’t expected is shootable. It’s actually really interesting information. You and I say this stuff until we’re blue in the face and it doesn’t really matter. We are essentially just howling at the moon because there are a million people out there who undo the work that we do on a daily basis. Go, John, just wander over to Reddit screenwriting and witness the weekly conversation about how no one should ever write “we see”. It just blows my mind and there’s nothing we can do to stop it except to just say to those of you out there willing to come along in faith and trust us, this stuff is not that important. OK? It’s just not

If you’re writing a screenplay, probably you’re going to want to stay in the format that everybody is comfortable with. But if you want to experiment a little, or if you want to just pick a moment, a sequence in your screenplay where something wild is happening and you want to unmoor yourself from this stuff, go for it. Be creative. Have some fun for god’s sakes. This is a dumb format invented for stupid typewriters in 1920. You know what I mean? Whatever. Go nuts.

**John:** Yeah. So I would say what is important about the standard formatting is there’s just an expectation. And it’s simple and it’s clean and people sort of get it. And so the degree to which you can just stay in the format that everyone already gets, basically it’s free. Like INT and EXT and all that stuff just come for free and people don’t even notice it anymore, which is useful. So as long as you’re just doing the stuff that nobody notices they’ll actually read your words.

If you are doing something that’s really weird and strangely formatted and it doesn’t seem like you know what you’re doing and you don’t seem confident and it doesn’t seem like this is going to be worth their time, that’s when you have a problem if you’re doing strange formatting stuff. So just write brilliantly and then your formatting just won’t matter as much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, 99% of people are going to write a bad screenplay and then it doesn’t matter if it’s properly formatted or not. And 1% are going to write to write a great screenplay and it doesn’t matter if it’s properly formatted or not. That’s basically my attitude about this.

**John:** Do you want to take a question from Lee?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Lee writes, “I wrote a dark comedy horror. A guy, someone I know at a management company, liked it and thought it worked as a sample for a director who wants a co-writer on a project he’s already got sketched out. I had a call yesterday. The director is sending a beat sheet my way next week. Question number one: any advice on how to write a draft from someone else’s beat sheet?

“Question number two: they also like the piece I originally sent and seemed like they may be interested putting that together, too, if I can deliver on this one. Any general advice for a person in my situation? I want to take full advantage of this opportunity.

“And, question number three: what should I look out for misstep or danger wise?”

John, we’ve got one, two, three. What’s your answer for Lee?

**John:** My answer for Lee is that the thing that you’re thinking about doing with the director, great. And go with god and try to basically sit down with that person, figure out if there is a common vision for this movie that you’d be writing I guess together. He’s already got this beat sheet. If you agree with the approach of the movie that probably goes beyond just what this beat sheet is, I say go for it. You don’t have a lot to lose from working with somebody who probably already has some stuff happening.

In terms of this management company may want to represent you on this script, that’s great. And so I would just say let that be a separate thread of your relationship with this management company and this manager. They may not be signing you right away as this whole process begins, but get their honest feedback to see if you could work with them as a management company. And let those two things sort of go separately.

A question will naturally come up like if you do decide to write this thing with the director are you guys just working on this together? Is this your joint project? Is that person hiring you? That you’re going to have to figure out. But it’s not quite clear yet how real any of these things are.

**Craig:** Well, yes. So it says that the director wants a cowriter on a project he’s already got sketched out. So, with that in mind I think one thing to look out for, Lee, is you’ve received a beat sheet, but a beat sheet is not tablets from the top of Mount Sinai. It’s a beat sheet. And if you’re going to be a cowriter, you’re a cowriter. That means you’re an equal writer. And that means you don’t have to go down this path if you don’t quite get it.

It’s fair to say, “OK, I’ve read your beat sheet. Let’s just have some conversations. Let’s start talking about this. If we’re going to write together, let’s feel these things out. And let me tell you what I’m loving. And then I have a bunch of questions I want to ask.” That’s the way I always pose, by the way, I don’t talk about problems. I talk about questions. And sort of take that beat sheet and make a new beat sheet that is instead of His, Ours.

And then talk about how the writing is going to work before the writing happens. How does he see that happening? You do ten, I do ten, we swap? Or we sit in a room together? Here’s what you don’t want. “Oh, you’ll write a first draft and I’ll just come and sprinkle some of my magic dust on it.” That’s not actually co-writing.

**John:** That’s not writing, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s something else. So if that’s a situation then it’s story by the two of you, screenplay by you, directed by him. So these are things that are just good to work out. Do not rely on the manager to advocate for you here. If the manager is representing the director then the manager will advocate for the director. You’re going to have to advocate for yourself. Gently, but firmly.

**John:** Yep. And good luck. Again, let us know a year from now what’s happened with this. I’m really curious what happens next.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Nick writes, “I recently finished the first episode of a TV show I’m writing. When I started the second episode I realized I didn’t know if I needed to re-highlight or capitalize the name of the first appearance of already established characters from the first episode in the second episode. Is this something I need to do or can I just leave them un-highlighted or un-capitalized?”

Craig, what would you do? What are you doing in Chernobyl? In Episode two, the first time we see one of those recurring characters are you upper-casing his name?

**Craig:** No. I uppercase the name just the first time we see them in the first episode. I don’t re-uppercase because it just seems silly. But, you could. I don’t think it would be – I mean, in the end what we’re really talking about is one instance of capitalizing, so do it or don’t do it. Generally speaking, no one is going to read the second episode if they didn’t like the first, which means they’ve seen this character and they read about them. No one is going to pick up the second one without reading the first. So there’s no concern there.

Hey, you know something I didn’t know, John? I’ve learned so many things about television all at once because I had to. So, they asked me to number the scripts. Obviously this is quite some time ago. Put scene numbers on. And so I put scene numbers on each script and we had this for all. And then eventually when we had our first AD on he said, “You know, we generally start like in episode three the first scene is scene 301, not 1.” Well, I didn’t know that.

**John:** That would make sense.

**Craig:** I did not know that. And it’s a very simple thing to do in any normal screenwriting program. But it’s so useful. And like, duh. I didn’t know. Silly me.

**John:** So even if you end up moving a scene from one episode to another episode, like that scene 302 might end up in episode two for some reason in post, but it was 302. That makes a lot of sense.

I have two things I want to address with Nick’s question here. So, first off, I want to distinguish the type [unintelligible] he wants to distinguish between capitalization and uppercase. Capitalization is the first letter of a word being capitalized. So you can say “all caps,” but really uppercase would be the better way to describe when everything is the capital letters.

Uppercase of course comes from typography where in old middle type there were two cases, the case above, the case below. The case above had all the uppercase letters. The case below had all the lowercase letters. The capitals and the lowercase. I just think it’s neat that it was actually a physical case.

In terms of uppercasing the names in that script, I bet different series do different things. And I can imagine some series, their house rules are that the first time a character appears in any given episode you uppercase it so you know that’s the first time we’re seeing that character. I bet other shows don’t do it all, more like what Craig is doing with Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the end – you’ll be fine, Nick. Don’t you worry.

Oh, Colin O’Connor tweets – oh, I like this, he’s tweeting. “Do you have good advice for interesting characters who are onscreen but not important yet? How about intro-ing during a heavy action scene when a character is important but you don’t want to take a break from the urgency of the scene?”

All right, so you get what he’s going for here, John, right?

**John:** Absolutely. So basically you’re trying to plant some sort of flag saying like pay attention but not too much attention to this character because we’re going to come back to this person later. Sometimes you’ll end up saying kind of that. Where it’s just like obviously you’re uppercasing their name because it’s the first time we’re seeing them. I would give the quick description and like, comma, becomes important later. Just because you want to clue into the reader like this is the first appearance of that character and it’s helpful if you remember that he existed there.

The scene in which the character is actually doing something important, you may want to actually then do the bigger description of who that person is if you didn’t want to break the flow of the action beat for example to put in a real character description of that person.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s a character at the end of episode four that we meet in the middle of just the final bits of that episode. And there’s no dialogue or anything. We’re just moving around, sort of a montage of different people and different places and we haven’t seen him before. And he’s going to be a big part of episode five. I’m sorry, it’s the end of three, he’s going to be a big part of episode four. And I just write here’s a young man, he’s 21, and then in parentheses “we will see him again.” That’s all.

So, OK.

**John:** Classic.

**Craig:** And then we do. So that’s all. You know, in general, I have to say folks not that – we love all these questions. We love all questions. But you know just general common sense in a weird way. Not that you guys don’t have common sense. I think you do. I think the problem is so many of you are scared of your own common sense because the screenwriting amateur net has freaked you out that you are running through some sort of minefield and your script is going to explode in your face and shrapnel everywhere if you miscapitalize or don’t introduce somebody. It’s not like that at all.

In general, I think you should take some good deep breaths. These things will never kill you. Never.

**John:** Yep. Our final question comes from Josh in Seattle. He says, “I’m reading the script for Logan in Weekend Read and I’m curious if there’s a term for the establishing material that writers insert on page two after the first instance of violence. Here’s the quote, ‘Now might be a good time to talk about the ‘fights’ described in the next 100 or so pages. Basically, if you want a hyper-choreographed gravity-defying, city block destroying CG F-athon, this isn’t your movie. In this flick people will get hurt or killed when shit falls on them. They will get just as hurt or just as killed if they get hit with something big and heavy like say a car. Should anyone in our story have the misfortune to fall off a roof or out a window, they won’t bounce. They will die.’

“I’ve never encountered this type of contextual prose in a script but I really liked it when I read it. Can a first-time screenwriter get away with this type of technique in a screenplay? Are you aware of other examples of this type of creative license?”

**Craig:** No, you can’t. I forgot to mention this is the one mine that if you step on this you will explode. Your family will die. Your pets will drown. Even if they’re not near water. And children all over the world will have nightmares.

You can do whatever – ugh. So, there’s a paragraph that I did like this for Cowboy, Ninja, Viking because it’s a weird concept and you have to explain the cinematic language of what’s going on. When I call the character this, when I call the character this, this is what you’re seeing, this is what you’re feeling. It’s just description. It’s like an aside, essentially.

In journalism sometimes you’ll see a parenthesis and then N.B. for nota bene, meaning here’s a note from the author to you on how to read this. You can do that. I tend to put these things in all italics to discriminate between onscreen action and, oh, I’m talking to you.

Let me rephrase your question, Josh, so I can give you a different answer. Can a first-time screenwriter get away with blank? The answer to you is yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Put anything you want in the blank.

**John:** 100% yes.

**Craig:** That is legal. That does not violate laws. Yes.

**John:** Nice. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing came out of a sort of YouTube hole I fell down in. I’m doing some research for a period movie I may be working on. My first period movie, actually. I’m not a big period movie person. But this thing that I might be working on takes place in the ‘50s. And so I was looking at a bunch of ‘50s videos and I came across this video called Welcome to Southern California.

It is produced by the Santa Fe Railroad. It is a tourism video about how great Southern California is. And I’m going to play one little clip here because I found it absolutely fascinating.

[Clip plays]

So I find this pronunciation of the city I live in, Los Angeles, I pronounce this Los Angeles. And it’s like who is this person talking? And then as you do more research you realize like, oh, that actually was a very common pronunciation of the city at the time. And so obviously this is a Spanish name. It’s been converted a bunch of different times. We’ve finally come to a consensus that it’s Los Angeles. But at this time there was a real controversy over how to pronounce the city. And the pronunciation in this video, which is Los Angle-ease was really common. And it’s just really strange that a city that I’ve lived in all this time is that way.

I also love that he puts four syllables in California. Cali-for-nee-ah.

**Craig:** I know. I love that.

**John:** Cal-eh-for-nee-ah. Oh, five syllables. I’m sorry. California. It’s just so odd. And so he does it through the entire video. And so it’s just so funny – first off, to see these places that I know so well, but to have them narrated as if it’s some sort of alien landscape. It’s just great. I loved this video.

**Craig:** When Barton Fink shows up to the hotel in Barton Fink, the bellhop who is played by Steve Buscemi says, “Welcome to Los Angle-Ease, Mr. Fink.” And I love that Los Angle-Ease. But we have these now in Los Angeles. And my wife points them out all the time because she is fluent in Spanish, so obviously she knows how to pronounce things properly.

And these phrases grate on her all the time. Like, for instance, Los Feliz, that’s just insane. We all know it’s Feliz. There’s the song Feliz Navidad. Why are we calling it Los Feel-Is. That’s nuts. Why do we call it San Pee-dro? That’s crazy. It’s San Pedro, obviously. It’s San Pedro.

Sepulveda is Supple-Veda. We do this all the time.

**John:** And we’re also not consistent about how we change things. And so two major north/south streets in Los Angeles are La Brea and La Cienega. Both of those are “La”s. They’re both “laws.” But we’ve decided it’s Le Brea but La Cienega. Why? Who knows? But that’s how we’ve done it.

**Craig:** Right. Like why isn’t La Brea?

**John:** Because it sounds crazy to say La Brea. You could totally tell somebody does not know the name of the street if they say La Brea.

**Craig:** Do you know when I first moved to Los Angeles I was driving around looking for an apartment in North Hollywood. And I came across this very large thoroughfare and the street sign said Laurel Cyn. And I thought, oh, is this like a Welsh name? And it’s Canyon.

**John:** It’s just short for Canyon.

**Craig:** It’s just short of Canyon. I’m like, “Oh, Coldwater Cyn? Huh.”

**John:** Yeah. Even in sort of your neighborhood is also Cañada or also Canada? Some things have the Ñ and some things don’t. And I don’t know whether the Ñ got dropped off just because of the sign or if it really isn’t there. And sometimes you’ll see the Y put in there to make the sound for the Ñ. So it’s all frustrating.

**Craig:** It’s really weird. So La Cañada, the official name of La Cañada there is a tilde over the N. And usually people will include it, but when people are typing things, you know, filling out forms and such sometimes the tilde will freak out poorly designed forms. And so you’ll see like when they spit your address back it’s got some crazy ass characters shoved in there.

But my street, they just shoved a Y in because I guess–

**John:** Just because.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like back then somebody was like I don’t understand this tilde thing. Let’s just put the Y in. That’ll make it easy. No. It’s made it really hard. It’s really super annoying, because I’d love to be able to just say Canada and be done with it to the people on the phone that I’m trying to order something from. But, no. So, yeah, no, what can you do.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Well that’s excellent. My One Cool Thing is a bit – I’d like to read you something.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It’s a short little clip. So I’m reading this book called Less. Have you heard of this book, John, Less?

**John:** I have heard of Less, but I don’t know the context of it, so tell me.

**Craig:** It just won the Pulitzer Prize. Well, I’m fairly early on. I’m say about a quarter of the way in. And it’s about a novelist who is suspicious that perhaps he might just be mediocre, but he does write things that have gotten some notice. And he was in this very long relationship with a poet who actually was really, really good, but when that guy dies he’s kind of now – and this guy was much older than him. And now he’s approaching his 50th birthday. He’s starting to panic. His younger boyfriend has gone to marry somebody else. He’s alone.

And, so you know like John we get invited to seminars and these like, “Oh, come to the such-and-such festival and be a judge at the Wichita Best Screenplay.” He decides, “Screw it, I’m going to accept all of these and just go around the world from one of these baloney things to another, whether it’s a symposium or being a judge, or having my book up for an award.” And so that’s where I am in the book.

But there’s this wonderful paragraph that he wrote that I thought was, oh my god, just so beautiful in terms of how it described the torture of writing. And he’s talking about his life living with his former lover who was this brilliant poet who won a Pulitzer Prize in the novel. And this is what he writes. And, by the way, I don’t mean to imply at all that I am saying that I or you are a genius. It’s just that he refers to this notion of a writing genius and I thought there was something fascinating about it. Oh, and the novel is called Less and it is by Andrew Sean Greer. And so here’s this little bit.

“What was it like to live with genius? Like living alone. Like living with a tiger. Everything had to be sacrificed for the work. Plans had to be canceled. Meals had to be delayed. Liquor had to be bought as soon as possible, or else all poured into the sink. Money had to be rationed or spent lavishly, changing daily. The sleep schedule was the poet’s to make, and it was often late nights as it was early mornings. The habit was the demon pet in the house. The habit. The habit. The habit. The morning coffee and books and poetry. The silence until noon. Could he be tempted by a morning stroll? He could. He always could. It was the only addiction where the sufferer longed for anything but the desired.

“But a morning walk meant work undone and suffering, suffering, suffering. Keep the habit. Help the habit. Lay out the coffee and poetry. Keep the silence. Smile when he walks sulkily out of his office to the bathroom. Take nothing personally. And did you sometimes leave an art book around with the thought that it would be the key to his mind? And did you sometimes put on music that might unlock the doubt and fear? Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained. Where did the genius come from? Where did it go? Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you. Someone you’d never met, but whom you knew he loved more than you. Poetry every day. A novel every few years. Something happened in that room despite everything. Something beautiful happened. It was the only place in the world where time made things better. Life with doubt. Doubt in the morning with the oil beating on a cup of coffee. Doubt in the pee break, not catching his eye. Doubt in the sound of the front door opening and closing, a restless walk, no goodbye, and in the return doubt in the slow sound of typewriter keys. Doubt at lunch time taken in his room. Doubt vanishing in the afternoon like a fog. Doubt driven away. Doubt forgotten. Four in the morning, feeling him stirring awake, knowing he is staring at the darkness at doubt. Life with doubt, a memoir.”

Isn’t that great?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I just love that.

**John:** It also reminds me of sort of the worst of my habits and trying to recognize when I’m veering in that direction.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And I think he really just nails something here in terms of, you know, you and I have talked before about what it’s like to live with us. What it’s like for Mike, what it’s like for Melissa. And, again, not that we’re the geniuses of this particular summary, but I think all writers to some extent, all professional writers share these certain things. We do have these – it’s this addiction where we long for anything but the desired. And I love the notion that there’s for the people that live with the writer they are aware that there’s this other lover that this person is always chasing.

And it’s fascinating. And I just thought it was so beautifully written. I mean, I just – I’m just so enamored by this guy. Andrew Sean Greer. He’s so good at sentences. I just love him. So, I’m really enjoying this book. So I guess the larger One Cool Thing is this novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer. But at least individually and in a small component way, I love this little passage.

**John:** Very nice. All right, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. Short questions on Twitter are great. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes, or wherever you find your podcasts. If you want to leave us a review that is swell.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. There will also be transcripts. They go up about four to seven days after the episode posts.

If you want to come to our live show you should. It is May 22nd. You should buy tickets now because they will probably sell out. If you want the VIP tickets, I think those are much more limited so move on those quick if you would like those.

And you can find all the back episodes, including the previous live shows, at Scriptnotes.net. Or on one of the USB drives. So once we sell out of the 300-episode USB drives we will make some 350 episodes so that we can keep them safe for any potential world-ending calamities.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Because we’re important.

**John:** Yeah. We are important. And we are European but not related.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** If people ask. We know that now. Craig, enjoy your next week of shooting there and I hope it all goes well.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll talk soon.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Our next live Scriptnotes with Jonah Nolan & Lisa Joy (Westworld) and Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus (Avengers: Infinity War) will be Tuesday, May 22nd at the ArcLight in Hollywood. [Tickets are on sale now](https://scriptnotes.brownpapertickets.com) — proceeds benefit [Hollywood HEART](http://www.hollywoodheart.org), which runs special programs and summer camps for at-risk youth.
* [Frank Oz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Oz), in case you’re curious
* Look how fast [Highland 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehKDtQ3Dbhw) loads War and Peace compared to other programs!
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 125: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* [Welcome to Southern California](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-l13UMBlkM&app=desktop) includes a 1953 pronunciation of “Los Angeles”
* [Less](https://www.amazon.com/Less-Winner-Pulitzer-Prize-Novel/dp/0316316121) by Andrew Sean Greer
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by [Larry Douziech](https://www.larrydouziech.com) ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_349.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 291 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at listener’s scenes and offer our honest critique. We’ll also be discussing techniques for letting the audience know your characters’ names. Plus, Craig has been stockpiling his umbrage for weeks and may have found a worthy target. So, hold on.

Before we get to the umbrage, Craig, we have exciting news.

**Craig:** Yes we do. So, last year fans of the podcast might recall that we did a live show here in Los Angeles to benefit the charity Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity. And our good friend, John Gatins, is the connection to that. I believe he is on their board of directors. Well, we’re doing it again. This year, in fact, it’s coming up fast. It’s going to be March 28. Now, do we have tickets on sale yet? As of this minute of recording, no. But very, very soon.

You will want to get them. Obviously, John, you will not be with us because you’re in France.

**John:** You have a pretty amazing replacement guest host for this event.

**Craig:** We do. So we have Dana Fox, who is the best version of you I can imagine. So, screenwriter, television writer, director Dana Fox.

**John:** Former John August assistant, Dana Fox.

**Craig:** That’s right. Basically everybody that’s successful in Hollywood is a former John August assistant as far as I could tell. But for all of you out there in film fandom, you might want to check this out because we have a number of guests, but perhaps our featured guest we’ll say is Rian Johnson, director of the upcoming Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson. Also, the screenwriter of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You’re going to want to see Rian Johnson, aren’t you?

He’s probably going to tell everybody in the audience what happens.

**John:** Probably so. Assuming like small nondisclosure agreements and it’s the only chance you’ll ever get to know what happens in Star Wars ahead of time. By the way, that’s not his only credit. He’s directed many other incredibly great movies and episodes of television. But, the thing we may want to talk about this time is how you go from directing those amazing movies to one of the biggest movies of all time.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So, I cannot contain my jealousy that you will get to talk with him then live. I will be asleep while you’re recording it, but I will send through some sort of prerecorded welcome to all of you people. Or, I’ll give Dana special instructions for how to really get under your skin.

**Craig:** Dana can’t get under my skin. It’s just – I love her too much. Here’s the problem. You’re going to tell her to do things that if you had done them would get under my skin. And when she does them, they’re just going to be adorable.

**John:** Yeah. She’s a pretty wonderful person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, if you are interested in coming to this live show, there will be a link in the show notes assuming that the tickets are actually available by the time the episode posts. If not, keep following us on Twitter because it’s going to be a popular show. I suspect it will sell out, so you will want to–

**Craig:** It will.

**John:** Follow us to make sure that you will get a chance to see Rian Johnson and Dana Fox. And a third guest to be announced soon.

**Craig:** And it will be a third guest of high caliber. We don’t just, I mean, you know what we do. Last year we had the Game of Thrones guys. We had Jason Bateman. It was a great show.

**John:** It was a good show.

**Craig:** Yeah. This time we have Rian Johnson, Dana Fox. It’s only – frankly, it can only get better from there. So I presume Steven Spielberg. I haven’t checked with Steven Spielberg. Maybe I should check with him.

**John:** You know who it should be? It should be Stephen King.

**Craig:** Ooh, I would love Stephen King.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to fly out to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But Stephen King would be great.

**Craig:** But we have Rian Johnson.

**John:** And Rian Johnson is fantastic. So, if you are curious about what Rian Johnson might say, you may want to check out the previous episode that Rian Johnson was on. A live show in Austin where he was one of our featured guests. That is a segue to my next topic, which was the Scriptnotes Index. So, last week we talked about this idea of, you know, there’s all these back episodes and people are coming to the show and they are staring at 300 episodes and trying to figure out like where do I even start.

So I proposed, and Craig stole the idea and co-proposed, doing an index for the show in which our listeners who have listened to every episode could point new listeners to. These are the episodes you don’t want to miss. And so this might become a book. This might become a website. We’ll figure out the best way to get this out in the world. But, so far 47 of you – this is only three days after we announced it – have written in with recommendations on the can’t miss episodes.

So, if you would like to add your own recommendations for which episodes listeners need to make sure they hit, it is johnaugust.com/guide. And that’s where you can leave a review for individual episodes. Let people know why they should listen to it and who it is for.

**Craig:** I think we should call it the Scriptdecks. I like Scriptdecks.

**John:** Scriptdecks?

**Craig:** Scriptdecks.

**John:** All right. We’ll workshop that. So, it’s definitely a contender. We’ll put it on the whiteboard.

**Craig:** I don’t like the sound of that.

**John:** So, at least we can always fall back to Scriptdecks.

**Craig:** You know what you did? You just Kellyanne’d me. You dodged. You bobbed.

**John:** A little bit. But people should know that Scriptnotes is actually Craig Mazin’s title for the show. He was the one who came up with the title Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That’s right. But I’m going to be honest here. I might have Camel cased it if the typography had been up to me. So, phew. Bullet dodged.

**John:** But it wasn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, it sure wasn’t.

**John:** Bullet dodged. But one bullet will not be dodged which is the next bullet–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Craig has put in the chamber and he’s been ready for this all week. So, this is a person who runs another website. Craig and I are not really bloggers so much anymore. I still have my site. Craig sort of let his site disappear. But this is a site called ScriptShadow. And it is run by a person names Carson Reeves, who I’ve never met, but I sort of encountered online various times. And a person who has very strong opinions about screenwriting, which I generally do not share.

But this was a breaking point for Craig. So, Craig, for our listeners at home or people who are driving who can’t actually pull up the blog post, could you just read aloud the moments that really set you off?

**Craig:** Sure. So, this is from ScriptShadow who puts himself forth as an expert on screenwriting and screenplays and how to become a professional screenwriter, even though he is none of those things. And here’s what he wrote recently. “Moonlight and Manchester By The Sea won the Adapted and Original screenplay awards respectively. And they’re both terrible screenplays. There isn’t even a discussion to be had on the matter. They’re awful screenplays that display no skill in the screenwriting department whatsoever.

“How can I say such a thing? One of the easiest ways to judge a screenplay is to ask, “Can someone else have written this?” Is the skill on display at a level where other writers could’ve written something similar? I can say without hesitation that there isn’t one writer of the 10,000 members in the WGA who couldn’t have written either of these scripts.”

**John:** Wow. So, first off, welcome King George to the podcast. So, he seems to be claiming that all 10,000 members of the WGA could have written Moonlight. They could have written the story of a gay black kid growing up in Florida over three different periods of his life. Because that’s, you know, it’s a universal experience and we’ve all had that. We all could have written that script.

**Craig:** How many times have we seen that movie? He’s right. I mean, it’s like the staple of Disney sitcoms. And not only could any of the 10,000 members of the WGA, which I wonder if he’s even one of them, not only could any of them have written it, they would have all written that way.

You know that scene where he’s cradling him in the water. That obviously would have written that way with those words in that sense. And similarly Manchester By The Sea just feels so obvious in all ways that, you know, it’s kind of weird. Like why haven’t all of these people written these screenplays? Seems kind of crazy, right? Since we all could have, why didn’t we?

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s also why are these two films so acclaimed when they clearly are just coasting on good cinematography and good performances. Because what ScriptShadow is teaching us is that the screenplays themselves really have no bearing on why the films turned out well. Which seems ironic considering it’s a site about screenwriting and the importance of screenwriting. So–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s all a conundrum really why these films turned out so well despite not being good screenplays.

**Craig:** But here’s the strangest thing of all. You and I are having a discussion on this matter. And ScriptShadow has told us quite clearly there isn’t even a discussion to be had on the matter. Because ScriptShadow, as far as I can tell, he is either an idiot or he is suffering from delusions of grandeur. To say that two screenplays that have won these awards are both terrible screenplays is something you’re allowed to say to a friend if you choose. Your opinion is that they’re terrible screenplays. I understand.

It’s usually not the case. Even when movies win an Oscar award and I think, oh, I did not like that movie. It’s not that they’re terrible. It’s just that I didn’t love it that much. And so it goes. But what this idiot is saying, and he’s saying publicly so that we can all see him be an idiot, is that they are objectively terrible screenplays, both of them, that display, “No skill in the screenwriting department whatsoever.”

And I must ask, of course, what makes him the arbiter of skill in the screenwriting department? By the way, I’ve seen something that ScriptShadow has written. I’ve seen an actual piece of work that he wrote. Did you know that?

**John:** I think I do remember this. This was years ago, but yeah, I do remember this.

**Craig:** Yeah. He sucks. I mean, like sucks to the level where he would not be picked for our Three Page Challenge. That Godwin would just go, oh yeah, this goes in the slush pile. He’s terrible. So when he asks rhetorically, “How can I say such a thing,” the actual proper response is, “Idiot, delusions of grandeur.”

**John:** All right. Enough ScriptShadow. Let’s get on to our real business today. This was a question that came to us on Twitter. Erin McGinley wrote in to ask, “Can you do a bit on the ways to introduce character names? How do we escape, what’s your name, or hi I’m Sally?” Erin, that is a great question.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever done an episode about this. If we had Scriptdecks we could look that up. But I don’t think we’ve really talked about this as a topic.

**Craig:** It’s catching, isn’t it, by the way? [laughs]

**John:** I know. I’ll say it three more times and suddenly it will feel like, oh, well of course that’s the right answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of those things that plagues us all, Erin, so thank you for asking this question. And certainly we all know the worst way. Actually, you haven’t even noticed the worst way, because you’re saying how do we escape, “What’s your name? Hi, I’m Sally.” Sometimes, “What’s your name? I am Sally,” works – depending on context.

The worst way is just when two people who know each other are taking like John and I are talking right now. And I’m like, well, you know John, out of nowhere I just mention your name. Scott Frank always blows up about this. He’s like how many times do we use each other’s names when we’re talking to each other? Zero percent of the time. We both know each other’s name. That’s always the worst.

**John:** It is the worst. So, but I think the reason why we try to do it, and sometimes do it awkwardly is that the audience really does want to know characters’ names. I think there’s an inherent story sense that as we’re watching something, if a character feels important, we want to know their names. And if we are not told their names pretty early on in the story, we will just assign them our own name. So we will assign like, oh, Albino guy, or French Idris Elba. Like we’ll assign something that sort of takes the place of name just for simple mental categorization.

So we are always listening for a name. And so let’s talk through some ways to get that name out there. The horrible way tends to be sort of like two people having a conversation and awkwardly using their name. But if you have more people in a conversation, then there could be a natural way of like, you know, you’re distinguishing who you’re actually talking to, or you’re calling to somebody. That can sometimes do it, as long it doesn’t feel forced.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You can sometimes show it. So, there’s ways sometimes you will show a name on a desk, on a door, on some other bit of business that will naturally do it. That can feel really forced as well, but it’s sometimes a way to get that name out there. Craig, other thoughts?

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there are moments where your name gets called for things. You’re waiting for something at an office and somebody calls your name. There’s pieces of paper that might have your name on them that you’re filling out a form and then we have phone calls. Sometimes the best way to learn someone’s name is through two people that aren’t that person. So, we see – a very typical thing in the beginning of a movie is we see our main character and she’s working at her desk. And then we see two other people who are across the hallway and they’re like, “What’s with Virginia this morning? I don’t know. She’s…”

So, sometimes that happens, because it is natural at that point. You wouldn’t say what’s with – if there’s more than one person, you wouldn’t say what’s with her. The person would say what’s with which one, which who.

So there are ways to do this. Here’s the thing, Erin, and all the rest of you. It’s all annoying. It’s all annoying. I hate it. It’s one of my least liked – well, because it’s hated – parts of screenwriting because it always feels artificial. The truth is I have no problem writing a script where nobody ever knows somebody’s name. In fact, I do it all the time. And here’s the crazy part. Usually people don’t notice. Every now and then, somebody towards the end will go, “Is anyone going to ever say that person’s name?” And I’ll just no. They won’t. You know what? They’ll just know who they are, because they’ll see them.

But, you know, everybody seems to want to try and get the name in. I hate it. I hate it.

**John:** I completely agree that there’s characters in scripts who you don’t ever need to know their name, and just whatever their category of that they do is fine. But I think she’s talking about a principal character in your film. If we don’t their name, and sometimes it is awkward to get that name out there. And so you can imagine scenarios in which a person is alone for a lot of the movie, if you didn’t get that name out there pretty early on it’s going to be really challenging.

If you can have a character speak their own name, it’s simple, but it has to be sort of natural to the world of the story. So it’s like they’re introducing themselves or like they’re signing in at a reception desk. They are on a phone call. Like, hi my name is blah from this. So, Big Fish does that. My name is Will Bloom calling from the AP. That’s the kind of thing where people do actually use their name.

So, I would also just recommend as you go through life over this next week, this is sort of everybody who is listening to this, listen for times where people say their names or you learn somebody’s name in a natural way. And just take note of that. And maybe you’ll find other good ways to get that name out there in your script.

**Craig:** There’s also games you can play with it. In Identity Thief I had Melissa McCarthy tell her name to Jason Bateman, and then we hear somebody else yell her actually name, so we get that she lied when she was telling him her name. So you can play around with it.

You know, I’ve never actually written a scene, I just thought of this, but I assume that people have introduced names in movies by having somebody order a coffee at Starbucks. Because they always ask you your name.

**John:** I’ve absolutely seen that. So, it feels kind of TV, but–

**Craig:** Right. It feels TV because it’s such a boring scene to put in a movie. Somebody ordering coffee.

**John:** Yeah. But, it’s a way to do it. It gets it out there in the world.

**Craig:** I hate the name thing. I really do.

**John:** I hate the name thing, too. [Unintelligible] wrote a whole movie about it, but yes, I hate it, too.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our big marquee feature today, the Three Page Challenge. So for people who are new to the podcast, every couple weeks we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It can be a screenplay. It can be a pilot. It can be anything that looks like a movie or TV show. And we will read it. And Godwin sorts through all the entries. He picks the three that he thinks are most interesting for us to talk about. So, what we’re about to share with you are people who wrote in to say like, hey, please critique this.

So, unlike ScriptShadow, who is just critiquing other people’s stuff, we are inviting people to send stuff in. And so people have very nicely agreed to let us talk about these things. We will have the PDFs for all of these entries linked in the show notes for the show, so you can read along with us. But, because you might be in a car or someplace where you can’t actually open the PDF, we do a summary before we start.

And the summaries are not always our most favorite part of this. So, a few episodes ago we tried having a guest reader, and so we had Jeff Probst come on. He did a fantastic job.

**Craig:** He did.

**John:** Doing the summaries. And we thought we might try to top that. We might try to go a little bit more. So, we reached out to Elizabeth Banks to ask if she would be willing to read the summaries for this week’s Three Page Challenge. And she said no. But eventually we convinced her, and she said yes.

So, this is Elizabeth Banks. She’s an actress, producer, director from Pitch Perfect, The Hunger Games, Wet Hot American Summer. She’s Rita Repulsa in the new Power Rangers movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s the real deal.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what else.

**John:** What?

**Craig:** She’s fantastic. You’ve worked with Elizabeth, right, at some point or another?

**John:** I never have. I only know her socially.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Very, very smart person. Sometimes I have to be like, I don’t want to use the word alpha, but in working arrangements I feel like I’m driving the bus somehow, just because sometimes as a screenwriter that’s what you have to do, especially if you’re coming in and you’re rewriting stuff. She so drives the bus. She’s the bus driver. So, I sit next to her on the bus, but she’s driving the bus. She is in charge. I love that lady. Excellent person.

**John:** I played Catan against Elizabeth and her husband. And, man, they’re hardcore Catan players. They don’t mess around.

**Craig:** Again, yeah, and Max, who is a great guy. They’re bus drivers. Just there are people in life – I feel like there are bus drivers, there are people who sit next to the bus drivers. And then there are passengers. They’re bus drivers.

**John:** They are bus drivers. So, we can ask Elizabeth Banks, will you please introduce our first entry in the Three Page Challenge?

Elizabeth Banks: Carne by John Lambert. In a sterile room we see a pair of gloved hands turn over a slab of red meat for inspection. The meat is then dropped onto the sheet of brown butcher’s paper. A thump from outside. The hands freeze for a moment, then hastily wrap and tape up the meat. A pair of feet rushes down the hallway and out a set of steel doors. The package is tossed into an igloo cooler in the passenger seat of a Chevy van.

The van drives off through the streets of New Orleans. The unseen driver of the van meets up with Levi Cheval, a prick in his 30s. Levi asks the driver what he brought. Flanks and tenderloin. Levi asks about the ribs, insisting that he always wants the ribs.

The driver drops the package into Levi’s trunk. Levi hands over a thick envelope. The van drives off revealing a decal that reads Cheval Funeral Home.

Later, a butcher’s cleaver cuts into a slab of meat. We read the embroidery on the chef’s coat. Levi Cheval, Chef de Cuisine.

**Craig:** So, we’ve got ourselves a nice little short film here to open up a pilot and it certainly is going to tell us the topic of the show which is that a chef is using human body parts in his restaurant. This is kind of a thing now. There’s that, what is called Santa Clara Diet?

**John:** Yeah, Santa Clarita Diet.

**Craig:** Santa Clarita.

**John:** Drew Barrymore and Tim Olyphant.

**Craig:** Right. People are eating people now. It’s en vogue.

So, let’s just talk about the – there’s a broad issue, and then I’ll get a little more granule. The broad issue is that we are stuck, I think, in a situation where we can’t see the driver’s face, because we’re not allowed to for some reason. I assume it’s important later. And it’s just too long. There’s two pages and it’s a two-page conversation. That’s a two-minute-ish conversation, ish, where we’re not allowed to see one person’s face. And it’s really awkward and uncomfortable that we’re not seeing his face.

You can get away with that for a page, I think, maximum. A page. Two pages and I’m like, why is the camera just avoiding this? And now I’m not watching the scene. Now I’m like show the freaking face already, because there’s no reason for me to not see his face. If there were a reason. If I had a better sense of why I was not allowed to see this person’s face, because he was an important person, or a dangerous person. But he’s not. He’s actually submissive to Levi. He’s clearly just a work-a-day guy. He’s a little scared of him.

And so I really don’t understand why I can’t see his face and it’s really annoying. And the second issue is that we – we kind of are a little ahead of the reveal, I think.

**John:** Yeah. I think we’re way ahead. And this is really my fundamental issue with it is like by the third paragraph I knew what this was. By the time I see the meat on the butcher paper and it’s called Carne, I was like this is going to be about cannibalism. And so that’s my first thought. And then everything is just backing it up. And so I feel like I’m 2.5 pages ahead of where this three pages is. And that’s a real challenge.

And so my proposal, and this is just John take this for what you want, but I think you cut out that first scene. Cut out the meat. Don’t show the meat. And get to the delivery, get to something else first. And maybe then open up the package and see that there’s meat inside there, because I was just way ahead of you for far too long.

**Craig:** Yeah. I understand that on page three when Levi says, “How is he?” And the driver says, “Same as always,” clearly he knows somebody that the driver knows. So they have someone in common. And then when the van drives away it says Cheval Funeral Home. OK. And then the next thing we see is that his name is Levi Cheval. This is actually kind of bumming me out. It’s one reveal too many.

I wouldn’t mind the reveal that Levi Cheval, the cannibal chef, is buying meat from a funeral home. But then I would make the second reveal – I would hold it back. Because that’s another thing. He’s related to, I guess his dad or something who owns the funeral home.

Frankly, for something like this, I would do this backwards from the way that you have done it, John. I would start in a restaurant. And I would start with somebody eating and it would be delicious. And the chef comes out and compliments, “It’s the most amazing. It’s just fantastic. Thank you. We go through remarkable lengths to procure the finest.” And then he goes back in the kitchen and someone is like, “Oh, the meat guy is here.” And he goes, “Oh, great, great, great.” And he comes outside and it’s just business as usual. “What’s going on man? You’re supposed to deliver me blah-blah-blah and blah-blah-blah.” “Sorry, I got held up. We couldn’t get that, but we have these.” And he’s like, “All right, I’ll take them. Thanks.”

And the guy drives away and then we see funeral home as the reveal. I would just do this backwards. And I would also make it so much more mundane because it helps inform the audience that this is not new. This has been going on for a while, you know. I always feel like criminals who are stuck in a kind of recidivist, repetitive criminal act are as work-a-day about it as anybody at any job.

This felt very cloak and dagger and unnecessarily so.

**John:** I agree. You know which movie had really great work-a-day criminals in it? Moonlight. You know, good street drug dealers. Felt like it was their ordinary business.

**Craig:** Anyone could have written.

**John:** Anyone.

**Craig:** Why didn’t ScriptShadow write that script? If only just to get the notoriety of having an Oscar. Because what he’s saying is he could have written it. So, he should have really written it.

**John:** He really should have written it.

**Craig:** That’s just silly. That’s just business silly.

**John:** It is business silly. So, let’s go back to John’s script here. And I think it’s an opportunity to look at some of what he’s doing on the page and highlight some things that are working really well and some things that could work better. If you are using dashes at the end of a line, so it’s an abbreviated line, it’s two dashes, not one dash. In another Three Page Challenge we’re going to look at, it really is just – I know this sounds horrible as a person who comes from typography, but it really is. It’s two dashes. It’s not an em dash. There’s no such thing as an em dash in Courier really. So it’s just two dashes.

So, there’s a couple times here where I’m seeing a single dash, which just doesn’t cut it for me.

Midway down the first page, INT. HALLWAY. Day? Night? It’s just normal to put the day there. And I know it seems weird because we’re not necessarily seeing the sunlight, but you put the day. It’s just standard.

I liked the sort of two-thirds the way down the page, as we get to the asphalt parking lot, it sort of feels like quick cuts. “IGLOO COOLER ON PASSENGER SEAT Opened. Fresh ice. The package is tossed in. Cooler shut. THE GRILL OF A WHITE CHEVY VAN SHAKES as the engine ROARS to life.” Great. I get the feeling of movement. So nicely done there.

With “VARIOUS SHOTS. STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS. DAY.” That’s an Exterior. Give us an EXT. It’s fine to say various, but again we’re outside. Just let us know we’re outside.

At the bottom of page one, this is the paragraph as written. “It pulls into an empty parking lot, in a seemingly empty industrial district. Empty, aside from a murdered-out Cadillac coupe in the corner, which it parks next to.” Too many empties. Kind of an awkward phrasing there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A simpler version of this might be, “It pulls into a parking lot in an industrial complex. Empty, aside from a murdered-out Cadillac coupe.” Great. So just simplify.

**Craig:** Simplify is a good thing. I like to use capitals the way that John does. I like to call out things with all caps. And I don’t necessarily do it in any rigorous way. Sometimes I call out things. Sometimes I call out actions. Sometimes I call out signs. So all the things he’s doing here.

When you do call out things with capitals, I think that’s when it becomes helpful for the reader if you bold your slug lines. Because the capitals start to mush. And even though slug lines have an extra line break in front of them, the bolding of the slug lines really helps you kind of focus. And it helps make the other capitals pop more. Otherwise you start to feel like you’re taking a slight moment to determine, especially if you’re not going to put a traditional EXT/INT in front of something. Is this – am I being told a location here, or is this something that’s actually happening in the scene? And any tiny little pause is bad for the read.

John puts periods at the end of his slug lines. They’re not necessary. I don’t do that. I don’t think many people do. But none of these are fatal sins.

**John:** No, not at all. I will say that there’s some terminology which is a little blurry here, and it’s just the nature of screenwriting. So, I will apologize on behalf of screenwriting for it. Slug line can mean the INT/EXT, but you can also call that a scene heading. And scene heading is a little bit clearer, that you’re really talking about the start of a scene.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Slug lines can also refer to what Craig is talking about, which are these sort of intermediary slug lines. They’re in the middle of a scene and they give you a sense that you’re looking a different way or it’s a change in the action. They’re incredibly useful. It’s just the terms are sort of blurry over the two of them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sorry. So I mean bold the scene headings is what I mean.

**John:** Yeah. And I agree on bold scene headings. I was a late convert to it, but I think it’s really helpful. Also I stopped doing the extra return before scene headings. If you’re bolding them you can get away with the single–

**Craig:** Ooh. I keep those in there. I keep those in there. I know, listen, I know that it’s literally six pages on top of my script by the time it’s all done, but I don’t know. I agree that there’s a lot of really good evocative stuff here. In a sense, sometimes it goes a little too far. So I love things like, “The sound of latex snapping against skin.” But then we have “INT. HALLWAY. The sound of quick feet echo, growing louder, as we peer down a long and empty hallway of white sterility, save for the red exit sign and steel double doors at the end.” That’s too much.

**John:** Too much.

**Craig:** Too much. Also quick feet echo, that’s a rough three words. The sound of quick feet echoing is probably what I would put there. That’s where I would want the [unintelligible], because “quick feet echo,” it’s just there’s two nouns in a row there that I struggle with.

**John:** The reason why we say it’s overwritten is because you’re giving us three sentences for like it’s a hallway. There’s nothing actually that’s going to happen here, so don’t give us this marathon sentence that it’s just, you know, a hallway.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t mind things being described to paint the picture so I can see it, as long as they’re purposeful. So, the red exit sign and steel double doors at the end, it’s really not that important, especially because two steel doors swing open in the very next bit.

This is the epitome of over-writing. “Two steel doors swing open and the nervously cadenced legs hurry past us.” Well, if you’re going to do that, you need to hyphenate nervously-cadenced, but more importantly, no. Right? That’s just crazy. Two steel doors swing open. Someone hurries past us. Or we see legs hurrying by.

This is starting to get purple, right? When we say purple we mean ornate, overwritten, Rococo, pick your – baroque, pick your adjective here.

**John:** Pick the most baroque word for Baroque, and that will be the right one.

**Craig:** And so there’s little too much going on here. And none of it is impactful. What’s so much more impactful is the “THE GRILL OF A WHITE CHEVY VAN SHAKES as the engine ROARS to life.” I get it.

**John:** Got it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I want to talk about something I really liked on page two. So Levi is having the conversation with the driver:

Fiiine. Whadya’ got.

Just flanks and tenderloin.

No ribs?

Too skinny. You would’ve passed.

We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass.

Okay. You would’ve passed though.

That feels like sort of the ordinary give and take. That feels like the flow and it tells me a little bit about their relationship. It tells me about Levi in terms of like he’s just kind of being a prick there about this. But that he’s looking for a specific thing. So that got me clicking back into what was actually happening here.

There definitely are moments here I can sort of see the shape of what this wants to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This is supposed to be a pilot, and so I am curious sort of like what the series out of this would be. But I’m not sure just based on these three pages if I would have made it to the end of the first act, honestly.

**Craig:** I think it’s the wrong opening. I think that there is a – I think it’s backwards, personally. I think there is a better opening and a better reveal. But, there is promise. I mean, I think that John has a very good sense of sound and sight. Maybe just needs to pull back a little bit on how much he gets into it. By the way, that one line that you read, I really liked it once I understood it. “We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass.” That’s where you actually want an underline or an italic on the word me. Because the phrase “allow me to pass” is actually an unnatural enunciation of that phrase. Normally it’s allow me to pass, as in let me go by. So, it’s, “We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass,” and I’m like allow you to pass what?

Allow you to pass?

**John:** Oh, yeah, exactly right.

**Craig:** Yeah, so allow me to pass.

**John:** Underlining either allow or me would have made it clear that that’s what you’re trying to say.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Right. So you needed a little bit of emphasis on that one. But, by the way, I swear to god, the biggest issue here is you’re forcing the camera away from somebody for two pages. That is nearly impossible to do well.

**John:** That’s really challenging. All right. I think it is time for Elizabeth Banks to come back and talk us through our next summary for our Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Elizabeth, take it away.

Elizabeth: Cult of Personality by Nathaniel Nauert. High in the hills of Topanga Canyon news helicopters and law enforcement agencies surround an old ranch home. They’re eating KFC and drawing analogies to bin Laden. Inside, 30 cult members sit in a circle holding hands. These are the Valentines. They chant in unison while their leader, Simon Ducis, stands alone. Simon decides it’s time to face the music. Getting ready to give himself up. Stephanie, one of Simon’s disciples, throws herself at his feet, unwilling to let him go. Simon reassures her that his physical absence changes nothing. If they destroy the school where you learned, do you lose the knowledge you gained there?

He then instructs another Valentine, Beth, to take everyone to Andromeda if the plan fails. Simon emerges from the house with his hands raised. The police captain tells Simon to lower himself to the ground. But instead, Simon begins to levitate. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**John:** Nathaniel, I really dug your three pages. And there’s some really exciting stuff here. I have some questions about certain things, but I can see what you’re doing here. I would definitely have kept reading this script if this had been dropped on my desk.

First off, I love cults, so like I’m always a sucker for cults. But I really liked the tone you were able to find here. Because it’s funny without trying too hard to be funny. And that’s a challenging thing. It would be so easy to sort of go for the easy laugh, and you didn’t do that. And at the bottom of page three we have a mystical moment that seems impossible. Well, you sort of sunk your hook there and I thought that was really effective.

We’re going to talk about some things that aren’t working here, but that was my sort of bigger headline is like, Nathaniel, I think you did something really cool here.

**Craig:** Yeah. If I get to the bottom of page three and he’s not levitating, I don’t love these. But he is levitating, so now I’m kind of loving them. I mean, I was a little more wobbly on the tone than you, only because some of the comedy felt weirdly broad for what was happening. Or what he was saying. So I wasn’t quite sure – like at times I thought is this sort of spoofy? It’s really when he was dragging Stephanie around with his leg. That felt Naked Gun-ish to me.

**John:** Yeah, but I could also picture it, though, because I could picture the version where like it’s sincere and yet it’s also absurd at the same time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And some of our great sort of HBO comedies are able to do that thing where like it’s both believable that that character in that moment would do it, and it’s also just absurd because you shouldn’t be dragged around like a child by a parent.

**Craig:** The tonal break in a weird way wasn’t that she was doing that. It was that he calmly walked around the room and then we revealed that he’s been dragging her. The reveal is a physical comedy broad way of doing that.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

**Craig:** To say like, oh, she’s so – that was the only tonal break where I was like, OK, am I in spoof territory or not? But then we do have that last line, where he starts levitating and Jason says, the cop says, “Hold still Simon. That’s an order. You hear me? Quit floating?” So I–

**John:** I’m a little nervous about that line, too.

**Craig:** Sounds like Naked Gun to me. Is this Naked Gun cult or is it – I’m not sure about the tone.

**John:** Yeah. I like that it was a little ambiguous about the tone, honestly. I felt like it could go both ways. So like the cultists are called the Valentines. A bit that I was confused about it says 30 people. But I felt like Nathanial meant 30 women, because I don’t see any men actually singled out or mentioned. And it felt more like a sex cult kind of place because there’s a waterbed and a Jacuzzi.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So my guess is that it’s a woman-dominated cult, or like he’s the only guy left in there. A major problem, we talked about characters speaking their names. The captain should be named Dixon, not Jason. And so all of his character cues, his character names above his dialogue, it gets confusing because Jason and Simon are just too close together.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, you set up a character who feels like he should be named Dixon. Just call him Dixon throughout this whole thing. Even Dixon and Simon are a little bit close considering they’re the only two men speaking. So if you have another name for one of these two characters, I would go for that.

I was singling out in the last script about dashes at the end of lines. Here Nathaniel is using em dashes. He’s using the very long dashes. And in typography you use those all the time. You just don’t use them in screenplays because screenplays are 12-point Courier. And they look weird. They look sort of strangely out of place. So I would just go back, and I know it’s going to kill you, but just go back and do your two normal hyphens. It will feel much more natural on the page.

**Craig:** So really other than the things I’ve mentioned here, the only other thing that I felt needed looking at was the – and again, this implies a spoof sort of tone – is the first paragraph says, “High in the hills of Topanga Canyon, California, sits a LARGE RANCH HOME, surrounded by lush gardens and grazing livestock. It’s pastoral, idyllic, and tranquil as F.” It doesn’t say F, but I’m trying to keep it clean here.

OK, fine. So, then the next paragraph says, “WHUP, WHUP, WHUP. Maybe not. NEWS HELICOPTERS jockey for position in the sky above the quiet sanctuary. Surrounding the compound, it’s mayhem: LAPD, FBI, ATF, and KFC (delivering breakfast)” – see, it’s a spoof – “crouch in silence, eyes and guns locked on the old wooden structure.”

So, it can’t be pastoral, idyllic, and also mayhem with news helicopters. It’s one or the other. That’s a joke that only works when you’re reading the screenplay, but it’s not really a joke that works on screen, so I would not do that.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you there. My other notes about stuff I’m seeing on the page is top of page two, Simon says, “He’s right. Dixon’s right. It’s time for me to face the music.” Well, first off, he’s calling him Dixon, so we should call that character Dixon throughout. But why is he saying this to himself? He’s not saying it to anybody around him. And it just felt really strange. It’s a weird moment at the top of page two so he says this seemingly to himself, but everybody hears them, and then they respond to him. I think you’re going to be in a much better place for him to sort of reach the decision and then for everyone to react. So for him to actually just announce it to the group or somehow otherwise expose what his next step is. It just felt too odd that he’s just talking to himself at that moment.

The same kind of thing happens on page three, though. So, middle of page three, Dixon is on the megaphone saying, “Okay, Simon, you’re doing the right thing here… That’s far enough. (then, lowering the bullhorn) Been waiting a long time for this, psycho.” Wait, who is he saying this to?

It’s always really odd the–

**Craig:** It’s a spoof.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Well, spoof tone. Because that’s a very spoofy sort of thing. Because the traditional spoof mode, not the crappy new spoof mode, but the old school spoof mode is to be like a bad soap opera essentially, where people do these sort of weird mannered things like mutter to themselves and turn away from camera and say, “Oh, I don’t know.”

So, I don’t know. I feel like maybe that’s what’s going on here. It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s well done and I agree with you, I would keep reading to find out what’s happening. So I think overall Nathaniel, you know, he’s on to something here. I’m not sure what it is, but he’s on to it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our third and final Three Page Challenge. It’s our last chance to hear the lovely voice of Elizabeth Banks. Take it away, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Music Festival by Alexandra Gioulakis. We fly over sand dunes, Joshua Trees, and dried out cattle skulls as we come upon a massive music festival in Tehachapi, California. In voiceover, 18-year-old Dylan tells us that today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. She’s at home while her friends are stuck in detention. As she lounges in the pool, Dylan’s friends show up in a minivan. Dylan introduces them, still in voiceover, as they file out of the van.

There’s Stephanie, Dylan’s butch BFF since childhood. Steph brings the beer. There’s Josh, hot, and Dylan has a crush on him. And Matt. Matt and Dylan have a history, including seven minutes of not-so-heaven in eighth grade. Then comes Madison. Stephanie is secretly in love with her, but Madison is dating Matt. Dylan is Team Stephanie.

Finally, Goldie, the nerd everyone thought would be a computer whiz, but is really just awkward and clumsy. Dylan is the only one of her friends not to get into college. She plans to either kill herself, or go to cosmetology school. That, and travel across Egypt. She’s got plans. With that, we hit the bottom of page three.

**John:** So, interesting that we had our topic of how do you introduce character’s names. Well, this is one way. You sort of shotgun them out. And as they file out of the van you identify them by name. And talk us through their descriptions. I thought this was a really interesting mess. And I don’t mean that to be disparaging, really. I think there’s some really promising signs of talent here, but these three pages didn’t really work for me.

How did you feel?

**Craig:** I agree that this feels new. In that it feels like Alex – I’m going to call her Alex because that’s part of her email address – that Alex is approaching this kind of from a neophyte position because it’s doing that thing that new writers do, which is talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. It’s very mannered. And that’s not terrible. I mean, some of that’s just a matter of taste, right? And I don’t really like to get into matters of taste so much. But, this is a case where I think much less would be much more. Because if you clear out some of the extra, then the things that are kind of lovely and interesting start to pop out more.

**John:** I agree. So, you know, it reminded me of sort of Don Roos’s scripts, so Don Roos, Opposite of Sex, sort of great movies with Christina Ricci and other talented young actresses moving up. It also reminded me a bit of sort of the feeling of the CW teen shows. Sort of the Riverdales where it’s – everything is heightened in a way that’s sort of interesting.

So, that’s where I think the voice is promising. But there was just too much voice. There was just too much being in Dylan’s head and hearing her talk without anyone actually doing anything in these three pages. And I thought that was the real limitation.

So, we start by flying over Tehachapi, and sort of seeing this music festival. But then our initial voiceover has nothing to do with the music festival at all, really. It’s talking about these three friends who are in detention who we’re not seeing, and then we’re coming to her in the pool I really felt like the tone of this movie should be like when we arrive in this music festival she needs to say something about this music festival, or disparages music festivals, or do something to let us know what is her relationship with this music festival before she starts introducing all of these friends in sort of shotgun manner.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also, you know, I love line breaks. I’m a big fan of line breaks. I like making – to me, the fewer words you can get away with on the page, the better off you are. However, too many line breaks in this. This is actually – so congratulations in a way. You’ve somehow managed to out-line break me. We have ten lines of action and description, most of which are half of the length of a line long. It all starts to turn into like – it almost feels like a teleprompter at some point. Those need to be squished together because it’s actually becoming hard to read that way. When usually we break things up to make them easier to read.

And I agree that the opening voiceover doesn’t really have much to do with that. And neither does what she say – I’m going to read what she says. So, the opening line, while we’re watching all this music festival visual stuff is, “Today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. My friends were all stuck in detention while I was lounging at my subdivision pool.” Ok. I’m going to stop there. Stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.

Then, here’s the last line, “I chickened out like almost immediately because I don’t like tight spaces.” Smash to black. Title card: Music Festival. I don’t know what that has to do with that. I don’t know what the – I don’t know what either of the handles on that speech have to do with the things before and after them.

And if you’re going to throw to a title, kind of needs to feel purposeful and ironic or reflective or something.

**John:** A big problem I had with the first sentence is, “Today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. My friends were all stuck in detention.” Wait, so is this present tense narration or past tense narration? And it managed to be both in the first two sentences. So, you’re going to need to pick a tense for where her voiceover is at. Is she talking about what’s happening right in front of us, or is she talking like this is a thing that happened?

Later on, she’s decided to stick with sort of present tense narration. So she’s talking about all these people in the present tense. So, that’s great, but if you’re going to do that, do it throughout the whole thing. I also felt like, again, these first sort of single lines that are setting up the music festival, the last two of those, “This is Tehachapi, CA. Population: 8,451 Population this weekend: 72,107.” That’s kind of interesting, but it would be more interesting to have somebody say that than just to read it in a script.

**Craig:** It’s trivia otherwise. It’s just a random trivia fact.

**John:** It’s a trivia fact. So, if you’re going to use that, I would say just put that in dialogue or find a way to make that speakable, because it’s not doing anybody any service by putting it in the scene description right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then we get into the body of these pages which is an iteration of her friends and a description of her friends. There is a high degree of difficulty for this. And the reason there is is because you’re telling us who people are. And generally speaking we like finding out who people are. Unless they are a menagerie of interesting side characters. You know, like in Goodfellas you can kind of go, “That’s Tony Two-Times. He said every two times. And that was Maury blah, blah, blah, he wore a wig.” Then, OK, that’s fine because the whole point is I’m going to introduce you to a bunch of side people. They’re not important.

These people seem important. So, you’re just going to tell us who they are. You’re going to tell us everything about them. This is a massive info dump. And what – now, Alex makes it interesting because she’s clever. So, she’s clevering us, and that’s what I mean by mannered. For instance, “She’s my main chap from another mud flap.” That made me laugh. That’s really funny. I never heard that before. Maybe Alex invented that. It’s really funny. That’s not going to necessarily overcome the fact that you’re telling me everything about your relationship with her, who she is, what she wants. It starts to feel like I’m being force-fed something, like one of those ducks that’s being raised for foie gras.

**John:** You know where this voice would actually be amazing is honestly the YA novel version of this, where you actually are inside the character’s head and you’re right in Dylan’s head as she’s saying all these things. That would be great, honestly, and that would feel really natural. But here just sort of stop the movie just for these long chunks of voiceover from the main character who I think by the bottom of page three no one has said any lines to each other. It’s all just been her voiceover. And it’s just too frustrating here.

But, I do want to come back to like I think there’s really good lines within this. And so like I had high hopes that Alex can write dialogue because she can definitely – she has a voice for how these characters speak, and at least how Dylan speaks. I suspect she can have these characters talk to each other in ways that are really interesting. I would just like to see that, because I don’t think I was going to be enjoying the rest of just seeing Dylan’s point of view on this.

**Craig:** Well, one of the things that I was sort of desperate for, and it’s not here, is anything that makes me feel with Dylan. There’s actually – one of the remarkable things about this run where she’s describing her friends is how clinical it is. Everything that she says is clinical. There is no real emotion. In fact, there’s general denial of emotion. It’s this high irony, highly detached voice. Even when she gets to herself and she’s describing herself, it feels so dead inside.

And so that may be part of this character’s problem, but that’s a problem that I want to kind of come to experience, and also frankly I never really believe anyone is dead inside. They’re just hiding something. Right?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I don’t even know what she’s hiding here, because I get no clue. So I actually don’t know how to relate to Dylan because I haven’t been given that little tiny piece of humanity. A little itsy bitsy bit of something that makes me go, ooh, I love you, or, ooh, I feel for you. Ooh, I’m worried about you. Nothing. I feel nothing for her. And I want to feel something. Even if it’s anger. I just want to feel something about your main character. And right now I don’t. Right now I just feel a kind of intellectual superficial cleverness, but no human underneath it. And that’s where I would attack this to start with, Alex.

Because you’re obviously smart. I mean, you can see the intelligence throughout, but the intelligence is kind of masking a little bit of something here I think.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if this is sort of stealth Stuart Special, in that we see this musical festival and then we’re actually jumping back to an earlier time. And if that is sort of what the play is, I would love to see Dylan at that music festival and we see something that is honest and real about her or genuine moment or there’s something that sort of clues us in there’s a real interesting character here, before we get to this sort of hardened cynical Dylan who we’re seeing voiceover for her friends. That might be an interesting contrast between the two of those. Because then there’s a question that I’m eager to answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I was trying to think about movies that had these long runs in the beginning and I don’t know weirdly Ferris Bueller came to mind, because it does have such a long monologue. Now, it’s not voiceover. He’s talking to us. That automatically makes us more relatable. And he’s funny. And he just seem engaged with life. Actually the whole point of Ferris Bueller is that he’s so alive and he loves things. There’s like a double removal here, because what Dylan is saying feels removed emotionally, and then she’s not even saying it. She’s just thinking it and we’re staring at somebody floating, which makes it doubly removed.

So there’s just a cold distance. I want to feel more. So, Alex, make me feel more.

**John:** Aw, give Craig the feels.

**Craig:** Give me the feels. I don’t need all the feels. I just a feel. I need a feel.

**John:** Give Craig a feel.

**Craig:** Give me a feel. That sounds weird.

**John:** That sounds just horrible. But what does not sound horrible is our fantastic guest reader. So thank you again, Elizabeth Banks, for doing that for us.

**Craig:** Thanks E.

**John:** And that’s our Three Page Challenge for this week. So, if you have three pages that you want us to take a look at, the place you send that is johnaugust.com/threepage. There’s a little form you fill out. You attach a PDF. It goes into Godwin’s inbox and he will sort through them for us. So, thank you to the three writers who wrote in this week with your pages. You were very generous to share them with us and I hope that was helpful.

And it’s time for our One Cool Things. So, Craig, why don’t you start us off? Give us your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Sure. You know, I haven’t really talked about what this HBO miniseries is that we’re going to be doing. You know, I may be over where you are next year. Well, not France, but Europe. So, we might be doing a little swappy on this terrible time zone nightmare.

But one of the things we have to do is find ourselves a good filmmaker. And so I’ve been watching television, which as you know I never do. I don’t like watching stuff. But I was pointed at a couple miniseries. They are British miniseries, because we’re going to be based I think in London. And I have encountered this writer that I think everybody must have known about this guy, but I’m just discovering him.

So Jack Thorne is a British writer. He has written movies and he has written lots of television. And the two miniseries that I’ve seen that he’s done there, one I think is six episodes and one is four episodes. So they’re short run series. One is called The Last Panthers. And the other is called National Treasure. No relation to the Nicholas Cage movie here. Their National Treasure is the story of a beloved television personality in England who is late in life accused of a series of sexual assaults, sort of a la Cosby.

And they are brilliant. This guy – first of all, they couldn’t be more different. And they’re both brilliant. I’m kind of in awe of this guy. Jack Thorne. I don’t know how he does it. I’m watching these things and I’m just thinking, boy, is there any mistake here? Won’t he make a mistake? Won’t he upset me at least once? Even just as a matter of opinion. No. Absolutely wonderful work.

He is really, really good. Like if I ran a movie studio, I would say, “Hey Jack Thorne, write a movie. Just write a movie. I don’t care what it is. And we’re making it. If it costs under $50 million, so you don’t bankrupt my studio, we would make it.” I would make any movie this guy wrote. I just think he’s amazing.

**John:** Holy cow. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Jack Thorne. Jack Thorne is my One Cool Thing. Plus, that name. Jack Thorne.

**John:** Come on, it sounds like a spy hero.

**Craig:** Right? Thorne. Jack Thorne.

**John:** Good stuff. My One Cool Thing is a telephone. And, you know, I feel like over the past couple years innovation has really sort of died in phone making. Because it feels like every phone looks the same. It all sort of looks like an iPhone. Whether it’s a Samsung or whatever. They all basically look the same. They do the same kind of thing. They’re like these flat black pieces of glass that are magical. And it’s fine. I think we live in a time of wonder that we have such great phones. But I like it when there’s still some innovation out there.

So, this is the most innovative phone I’ve seen this week. It’s called Beat the Boss 3-in-1 J8 phone. And what’s remarkable about it is it’s incredibly small. So, it weighs 18 grams. It’s dimensions are 68mm by 23mm by 11mm. That’s smaller than many key fobs are. And it’s also 99 percent plastic. You might ask well why is that so good, like who wants a plastic phone that’s so small? And the answer is you could still lit up your butt. So it is a phone that is perfect for smuggling into prisons.

**Craig:** This is not cool.

**John:** It’s an innovative use of technology to serve a market that was being underserved. It’s like people who want to smuggle a phone into prison.

**Craig:** You’re not supposed to have phones.

**John:** Well, they’re not supposed to have phones, but that is a market and they see the market and they go after the market. And because it has very little metal in it, even a lot of the sort of X-ray detectors like the Boss can’t actually find it. The Boss being a chair kind of X-ray designed specifically for looking for phones up people’s butts.

**Craig:** That’s terrible. No. Because hold on a second. Some guy is going to get this key fob phone up his butt. He’s going to go into prison. He’s going to hand it over to another guy. And that guy is going to use that phone to call somebody on the outside to murder people. That’s why they use phones. Well, not all of them. But some of them. Someone is going to die because of this.

**John:** Theoretically someone could die because of this phone, but theoretically someone could die because of any phone. Like, we can’t outlaw all phones. And so this was a market that was underserved. I just think it’s fascinating that there is a–

**Craig:** Theoretically someone could die from any phone.

**John:** Yes. I’m doing the Bane defense.

**Craig:** I smuggled it up my butt. [laughs] Bane Craig is a whole new guy. I just want you to know that when I do Bane Craig voice I actually put my fingers over my – like I make a Bane mask for my own face.

**John:** It’s important because it not only mimics the sound, but it really gets you into character. You have to really feel like Tom Hardy being strangled while he says that. I’m also sort of bringing up the prison phone up the butt thing, I’ll put a link to the other sort of horrible thing that’s happening with prison phones now is the FCC is rolling back its protections on sort of prison phone price gauging. And so if you are trying to have a phone conversation with a person who lives in prison, the prices of a phone call into or out of prison are just absurd. And they should not be absurd. And it’s a weirdly profiteering way of dealing with people who are incarcerated.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that stinks. But also–

**John:** But a phone up your butt kind of stinks, too.

**Craig:** Ha-ha. Get it. Because it’s up my butt. Bane Craig was born on, what is today, March 7. So many different Craigs. So many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** I don’t like the way you said too many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** I said so many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** You made it too many. Too many Craigs. Too many Craigs.

**John:** Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Panic Moon. Oh, and it’s a good one. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We love to answer your little short questions on Twitter. We are on Facebook. Just look for the Scriptnotes podcast on Facebook. You should also search for us on iTunes and subscribe.

You can leave us a comment there. Occasionally we read through those comments and we love to see them. You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find show note, the links to the Three Page Challenges will be there, too.

Reminder that if you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage to send that in. If you want to send something for the guide, a review of a previous episode, go to johnaugust.com/guide.

Longer questions, send in to ask@johnaugust.com.

You can get all the back catalog, including the previous Rian Johnson at Scriptnotes.net. And if we have a link to tickets, look for the show notes right now, because that link will tickets will be in the show notes. If they’re not there, it will be on Twitter as soon as we have it.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [ScriptShadow](http://scriptshadow.net/and-the-oscar-goes-to-here-you-read-it/)
* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* Three Pages by [John Lambert](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JohnLambert.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Nathaniel Nauert](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/NathanielNauert.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Alexandra Gioulakis](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AlexandraGioulakis.pdf)
* [Jack Thorne](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/)
* [Beat The Boss 3-in-1 J8 phone](https://www.amazon.co.uk/J8-World-Smallest-Mobile-Phone/dp/604016994X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)
* [Prison Phones and the FCC](https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/the-fcc-has-stopped-defending-its-own-rules-lowering-the-cos?utm_term=.vnw3p0GZ8#.sjAXp79EW8)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Panic Moon ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/you-cant-train-a-cobra-to-do-that).

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

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

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

Today’s episode, we will talk about last week’s episode, follow-up on K.C. Scott’s This Is Working and what people had to say about it and what more we now know about K.C. Scott, also known as Kurt. We’re going to talk about craftsmanship. We will talk about camera direction. We will answer two listener questions.

But first, we have some news. We have things that happened in the town that we need to talk to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been a busy, busy week. This is a jam-packed show, by the way.

**John:** It’s a lot of different things. But that’s sometimes a good mark of an episode. Lots of different things to talk about.

**Craig:** I think strap in, guys, because this one’s going to be cray cray.

**John:** I don’t know if this is going to be a long topic or a short topic. CAA lost several of their agents to United Talent Agency, UTA. And, Craig, does it matter?

**Craig:** For us? I mean, for feature writers, I would say not at all. Not at all. For television writers, possibly because, you know, in television they do all this packaging. But even then I’m not sure that the packaging of shows is exclusive to their clients. I don’t even know how that works. I mean, I find frankly that my interest in the who’s getting fired, who’s going where is essentially at a zero. It’s never been that high.

When Amy Pascal got fired and then there was the, “Who’s going to take over? And, oh, it’s Tom Rothman,” it was like everybody was talking about this at lunch. I couldn’t have cared less. Adam Goodman got fired. I don’t care. Somebody has replaced him. I don’t care. I’m just over here doing my job, you know.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. The only thing Craig does really care about when it comes time to talk about firing and agents is Craig wants to fire your agent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It’s really Craig’s favorite thing in the world to do.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, I am here for you at a very reasonable rate for $500. I’ll get on the phone and fire your agent for you.

**John:** You know, that’s actually kind of a great little sideline business.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig would do a fantastic job. He would just call up the person and say like, “You have this client? He’s not your client anymore.” The client doesn’t have to explain why. It’s just done, move on.

**Craig:** Yeah. The strategy is when they pick up the phone, you say, “Hi. So listen, I’m going to get right to it. I’m letting you go.” So, in the case if I were firing your agent for you, I’d call him up and say, “Hi. So just let me get right to it. John August is letting you go. You’re no longer his agent. Let me just briefly tell you why but the decision is final.” Now you’ve cut the — there’s no wind in their sails. They’ve got nothing. And the best part is if this becomes a real business, then they’ll know just because I’m calling them, they’ll know. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. They will never return your calls.

**Craig:** Literally. It’s like give me $500, I will log a call to your agent and that will be all it takes. I won’t even say a word.

**John:** It’s all done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Craig would need to have a little bit of a pre-interview where he was like — so his little checklist where he would just like you know he marks off, like, “Which are the reasons why we’re firing him? Okay, great. All done. All set.”

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. It’s a web form, honestly. Just fill up my web form. I don’t need to hear your sob stories about why. Just check off these things. And then, you know, when they give you a comment box but it’s like, “Okay, you can describe anything else you think we need to know but you have 200 characters.” We’re telling you we don’t care. That’s why we’re limiting you to 200 characters.

**John:** We’re telling you it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** We’re telling you we’re not going to read it. But go ahead, if it makes you feel better.

**John:** We’re creating new businesses even as we speak. Franklin Leonard has The Black List, you’re basically The Dead List.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Just tell us which agent you want to fire, it’s done.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m The Kill List.

**John:** So we initially recorded the podcast on a Thursday and right here on the podcast is where we talked about the death of Scripped.com which was just a breaking story at that point. That next day, on Friday, we recorded a whole interview with the co-owner of Scripped.com which became a special episode on Saturday. So most of what was in this portion of the podcast is no longer relevant.

But I wanted to save one little conversation Craig and I had about how you keep multiple backups of things even if you are doing stuff on your own computer. So this is a portion of what we talked about originally on the podcast on Thursday.

And I’m also probably a little too reliant on Dropbox. The other thing I would take sort of personally is that all of my stuff, you know, that I’m working on currently, you know, it’s on Dropbox. So granted Dropbox is both local and it’s in the cloud, but I probably rely a little bit too much on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad you brought that up. First of all, I’m in the same boat. I have the scripts and because you and I got started around the same time, I would imagine we had the same technological issues. Because when I look back, for instance, at my initial work, you know, way, way back when. So like RocketMan, so that was the first movie I did. Well, when I look at the files for that, which I have, they are unopenable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m looking at files like — and I think they were Final Draft 2 files that now show up as exec files. [laughs] The system has no idea what to do, even the Microsoft Word files are no longer openable. And we’re talking about like for instance this one that I’m looking at here was created November 1st, 1996. It’s gone, you know. However, because everybody now moves with this, we know, okay, if there’s a format change we kind of change our files along with the formats. I think we’ve probably gotten past that.

My worry is this Dropbox worry because like you, that’s how I do my work. I have everything locally but it’s synced to Dropbox. Well, I know if I go into Dropbox and I delete a file there, it deletes on my local drive. Well, let’s say there was a problem at Dropbox and instead of everything just going kaput, somebody went in and just started deleting stuff.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s gone, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So that brings me to my next point. Well, I’m going to put this out there for our listeners. How can I essentially double sync backup my stuff? Wouldn’t it be great if I could — on my hard drive, I’m writing something and it knows to sync it both with Dropbox and save with Google Drive, so I’m double backed.

**John:** Yeah. So in some future world in which this podcast has advertising, one of the very, very common advertisers who is always advertising on podcasts are services like Backblaze. And what they do is basically they make a copy of your hard drive and they store it in the cloud. That would take care of your situation in this case. So anything that’s ever on your hard drive is also in the cloud. You can download it back off the cloud.

**Craig:** By the way, how sick would it be if this was in fact our first ad? How insidious of us.

**John:** [laughs] It would be incredibly insidious.

**Craig:** It would be so insidious.

**John:** And we guarantee you it is not our first ad.

**Craig:** It’s not. We are not being paid for this. But it’s called Backblaze? Well, they should advertise with us because I’m going to go check them out now.

**John:** So if you’re listening to some of the tech podcasts, they’re a common sponsor. And there’s another company, or several other companies that do similar kinds of things. So that would be a solution for that type of scenario.

What I do realistically is I do backup from one hard drive to another hard drive. And I try to do that weekly, which isn’t really enough. But that would at least give you a snapshot of where you were at. And that’s been fine for sort of our stuff.

There’s also kind of lazy backup because sometimes I’m sending stuff to Stuart. And so in those emails back and forth to me and Stuart, that’s a way I could find some of those files. Again, nowhere close to perfect.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, you know, helpful.

**Craig:** Helpful, yeah. Well, I used to have a Time Machine, you know, where you would save all of your stuff on that. They just never worked very well. I just found Apple’s Time Machine —

**John:** They would never work great for me either.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I don’t know if they’ve gotten better at that or if there’s some other solution. Because I think actually and, you know, buying some cheap-o external hard drive that’s — I mean, now you can get a terabyte for what, $20 or something stupid? And just having that and doing some kind of regular backup to that is probably a good idea.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But god, I mean —

**John:** Especially for the working folder, the thing you’re actually working on most commonly, that’s the one you really want to make sure you’re keeping a good clone of.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now I wanted to also back up to what you were talking about with, you know, you have these old files, these old Final Draft files, these old Microsoft Word files that you can’t open. That was really one of the big motivations behind Fountain which is this plain text file format we have is that it is just text. So you will never get stuck with that with a Fountain file because you’ll always be able to open it. As long as there’s something that can open any text document, you know, you’ll be able to get to that stuff that’s in those files.

**Craig:** Can you get to it if you’re using Final Draft, John?

**John:** You could get to it using Final Draft. Final Draft can actually import Fountain just fine.

**Craig:** Oh, they can?

**John:** They didn’t mean to. It just happens that they can.

**Craig:** [laughs] But they’re hard at work to see if they can undo it.

**John:** I will say that the good folks at Final Draft who obviously we have had some disagreements, they have engaged on some level to Fountain. They really can kind of import it. It’s not a deliberate thing on their side but we sort of designed the format in a way that Final Draft could just get it also. So it is helpful on those fronts.

And I would say also Highland, the other app we make, we don’t ever advertise that we can open old Final Draft files. But if you have an old Final Draft file that you can’t get to open or even open in Final Draft, if you change the extension to FDR and throw it on Highland, Highland will take a sledgehammer to it and smash it and try to put it back together. And so that’s a thing you might also try with those very old files.

**Craig:** Even something from 1996?

**John:** Even something from 1996.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

**John:** Mr. Nima Yousefi, our coder, is very clever and he will smash things up and he will try to put it together.

**Craig:** He is clever. I’ve looked in his clever eyes.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s the thing. If I’m sitting here worrying about Dropbox and Google, you should definitely be worrying about anybody else. I mean, I can’t imagine Google in particular, I just don’t — essentially, it’s like when they talk about earthquake insurance in California.

So earthquake insurance in California is regulated because basically no insurance company wanted to ever give anybody an earthquake insurance in the States and you have to. And here’s what it is. It’s called the FAIR Plan. And the FAIR Plan is you pay a whole bunch of money every year and then if there’s an earthquake, they will take care of damage to your structure. But after you pay a 20% premium, that is 20% of the value of the home.

**John:** Yeah. It’s huge.

**Craig:** You know, and so what I was always told is, “You know, if the earthquake’s that bad, you got bigger problems than insurance. Like, basically everything is gone.”

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I was always told about, especially land in Los Angeles is that the land itself is what’s worth money, as to your point, the structure isn’t. So the structure will be destroyed but the land is still the land. And the earthquake is not going to destroy the land probably.

**Craig:** Probably. [laughs] Exactly. But it’s the same idea like —

**John:** Anyway, you’ll be dead. It will be totally fine.

**Craig:** You’ll be dead. But if Google goes down, I think it’s essentially Mad Max follows that. Yeah.

**John:** [laughs] By the way, how good is the new Mad Max trailer?

**Craig:** It’s actually concerning to me because I loved it. But what concerned me was, “Oh, no. Now this is the thing.” Like it’s how they keep figuring out in the food industry to jam more calories into a thing and more flavor into a thing. This is the most engineered — it’s crack. They made crack, right?

**John:** They made crack.

**Craig:** Like Guardians of the Galaxy, they’re, “Stop drinking coffee. We have this new thing called cocaine and you can freebase it. It’s freebasing cocaine.” And now Mad Max it’s like, “No, no, no. We mixed it with baking powder and we cooked it into a thing and now it’s crack.” It’s scary. I just worry that this is the thing everyone’s going to chase because that movie is going to open huge and it should. It should.

**John:** It should. So our good friend Kelly Marcel had some hand in it. I don’t know if she’ll ever want to come on the show and talk about what her involvement was. But it sounded just like madness to make it. It’s been in post for forever and I’m just so excited that it looks like it’s so good.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I understand why it would have been in post forever. Everything looks like a processed shot. Processed shot, I sound like an old man. Everything looks like a VFX shot.

**John:** But it wasn’t effects. So that’s the whole magical thing about it. So like most of what you see, they actually did. So all those cars flipping and everything going nuts, that all actually really happened. So except where like the giant —

**Craig:** Well, yeah. No, that is happening.

**John:** Except for the giant storm.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Apparently, it’s like crazy real.

**Craig:** But everything looks like something needed to be done in post. In other words, yeah, we definitely shot that car doing that but there’s going to be things we have to paint out. Or the whole background world needs to be painted in. Or it just seemed like — I don’t know, it just seemed like there was a lot of work.

**John:** They were in Namibia for forever making that movie. So I was excited to see what they did.

**Craig:** Sick. It looks sick.

**John:** It looks so good. Our next bit of news news. So last week we recorded the episode and I almost mentioned it on the episode last week but I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to launch. So Writer Emergency Pack which was the little deck of cards for writers when you get in a jam and you sort of get stuck. It was a Kickstarter we did back at the end of last year. They’re now finally available in stores. So you can find them at WriterEmergency.com. You can find them at the John August Store. You can also find them on Amazon. So just search for Writer Emergency Pack and we are there on Amazon.

So I wrote a Kickstarter update where I talked through sort of the whole process of how you actually put things on the store in Amazon and how you ship things out because it was crazy. It took me three months to sort of put it all together. Like literally just clicking the buy button in the John August Store, there’s like six different companies involved to like make that transaction happen, which has just been nuts.

But it’s actually working. And people are buying them and people like them. So they are available and out there in the world. So if you missed the Kickstarter and you want one, you can now go get one for yourself.

**Craig:** Spectacular. If it’s on Amazon.com, can I get it through Fresh Delivery? Will it show up in the morning before I wake up?

**John:** I don’t think it will show up with Fresh Delivery. But you can get Prime Delivery.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So you can get that sort of sweet ass Prime Delivery even the next day delivery. So that’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Prime is gorgeous.

**John:** So, before, we were talking about like sort of stealth advertising and whether we want to do advertising. This is a perfect chance for us to test whether advertising will be annoying on this podcast if we were to add it.

So let me try to do this properly. Our practice sponsor this week is Writer Emergency Pack, an illustrated deck of useful ideas for writers to help you get unstuck. Last year, it was the most backed card project in Kickstarter history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now it’s available for anyone to buy. It makes a great gift for writers, which I suspect is pretty much anyone listening to this podcast.

You can find Writer Emergency Pack on Amazon. Just search for Writer Emergency. But we have a special offer for Scriptnotes listeners. Go to WriterEmergency.com and click the buy button to buy it on the John August Store. When you check out, use the special promo code Scriptnotes to save 10% on your order and help us figure out whether our listeners will actually use promo codes.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So our thanks to Writer Emergency Pack for helping to practice sponsor our show this week.

**Craig:** I mean, my character in the advertisements is going to be Golly Gee guy. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. I didn’t know that was possible. [laughs]

**Craig:** What? Save $10? No, I’m still on Backblaze over here. And we’re not getting paid for that at all.

**John:** So last week we talked about K.C. Scott’s script, This Is Working. And I just loved that conversation. I went back and listened to the episode. I was just delighted with it. Have you listened to it again?

**Craig:** I listened to it and I thought it was really good. And we did get a lot of really good feedback. People seemed to want this some more. They, you know, “Do it every week.” Well, no. Look, you can’t have your birthday every week, you know. This kind of thing or when we break down a whole movie, it’s actually work. And we have our own work. So —

**John:** And it’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** Yeah. We already have jobs. So that’s something that we will do not quite as frequently as many of you would hope. But I was really encouraged by all the positive feedback. And I thought it was particularly good to have Franklin on because it was nice that we had that other perspective, the non-screenwriter perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So we got a lot of great comments on Facebook and Twitter. So thank you all for sharing your thoughts.

It was also fun. A couple of people wrote in, like before the episode, saying like, “These are my thoughts.” Like one woman did her sort of breakdown analysis of where she thought the work was and her notes on it before the episode aired. And she was right on. So it was great to see that there was excitement and consensus about it.

So, yeah, I would love to do this again too. I think it’s not going to be a very often thing because it is a lot of work. But it was really a fun challenge.

And Kurt, K.C. Scott, was just fantastic. So I wanted to share a little bit more about the emails we had back and forth after the episode aired. So, a little more detail about Kurt.

He writes, “I’m married. We’re expecting our first child in August. I spent most of my career in progressive politics and now I do research for a labor union. I’ve been writing for a while, a mix of short fiction and sports blogging mostly until three years ago when I began writing feature length specs. TV is intriguing but my passion is film.”

And that was a question, like is he a TV person or is he a film person? And he says he’s a film person.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “As my screenwriter career goes, I’m willing to be patient but also aggressive, whether that means flying to LA for meetings or taking time off from my day job for assignments. With a child on the way, economic security means something to me. But both my wife and I are on-board with this, so whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

“As far as travel to LA goes, the good thing about my job is that I’m there once a month for work. We have an office in Commerce City, plus I get to bank Southwest miles, and I have a Southwest credit card, and buddies will put me up if I need to stay for a few days. I’m working every angle to cut costs, no choice really.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. You definitely want to cut costs. People sometimes feel like they need to invest in a new place to make it seem real. It’s that syndrome of, “I’m starting a business, so I’m going to spend a ton of money to make that business look like a real business. And now, I just need customers.” Well, with screenwriting, you don’t need to spend anything. So if you have to come, if you have to travel to LA, you know, and you don’t have a lot of money or you have people that are relying on you, like a child on the way, then I just always advise to be as cheap as you can.

Just be cheap. Spend nothing. Spend as little as possible. There’s no value in — and by the way, no romance in being the person who is putting hotel rooms on credit cards because you want to feel better about yourself.

**John:** Yeah. What I loved about Kurt’s follow-up email there was that he’s both all in but he’s not sort of like all in. He’s not, you know, “Oh, I’m going to quit everything. I’m going to move to LA and start over, start fresh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, I think you have a moment where you can do that right after college, where like there’s really you have no commitments to anything. So like, “Well, why not? You got to start somewhere, why not start there.”

So here’s a guy who has a kid on the way. He has a pretty good job in Oakland. He’d love to become a screenwriter, but he’s doing exactly the right things. He’s sort of iterating. This wasn’t the first thing he wrote. He’s written a bunch. He’s sort of built up his experience he sort of has. By the time he shows up in LA, he’ll have some sort of screenwriting capital. He has stuff he can show. He has a plan for what he wants to do next.

But he’s also being smart. And he’s not like getting himself a fancy apartment on the west side. He’s like going to sleep on some couches, and take those meetings, and get stuff started. And I think that’s going to be a key to success for Kurt.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. So I actually was talking to a friend of the podcast, Mike Birbiglia, today, or as I call him, Mike Burorgaberbium. And he listened to that podcast and really enjoyed it. And he said, “I bet this guy’s phone is going to start ringing now.”

Now, I wasn’t sure because, you know, he’s got to rewrite his script and people are going to want to read the script, and eventually he’ll put it online at The Black List. But what do you think? Do you think his phone is going to start ringing?

**John:** Well, his phone would have literally started ringing because his phone number was on the cover page originally.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I emailed him saying like, “Hey, do you really want your phone number there?” He’s like, “Yeah, maybe let’s take that off.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So he sent a cleaner version that has his phone number off of it. But I hope that he would be getting some direct emails from folks who liked it and folks who want to pursue him. If I were a junior agent, not just in a big agency but really kind of any agency or a manager, I would say, “This guy seems like he sort of meets the criteria of like he’s a really good writer and he’s really smart and seems to get it.” These are the things you want if you’re an agent or a manager.

So I think a month from now, let’s follow up with him and see —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll reach out to him and sort of what is happening next for him.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess we’ll find out if anybody listens to this show.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. So the thing I appreciate I think most about Kurt’s work is that he had good craftsmanship. Like the work was good on the page, but he also seemed to be approaching it from the right perspective. And over the spring break, I read a book that kind of reminded me of the same idea. It’s this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, and I’ll have a link for it at the show notes.

But what I liked about it was he was reframing this argument about sort of, “What do you want to do with your life?” Rather than saying like, “Oh, you should follow your passion. Like there’s a dream job out there, you just have to find your dream job,” he said, “Instead, what you need to do is figure out what is it that you are good at by just doing it and seeing how it all sort of works out.” So saying like some people will make themselves miserable by switching from job to job or like they’ll get stuck in sort of the hard part of it and never realize there’s a place beyond that they’re trying to push to.

And what I liked about what Kurt was doing was he was at it every day and he was clearly focusing on getting the best things he can written and not trying to pursue screenwriting as a sort of lottery career, the sort of this dream of winning it. At no point in our conversations does Kurt ever bring up the idea of like, “Oh, you know what, I thought I’d write this script and sell it for a bunch of money and then be a screenwriter.” That’s never been part of the conversation.

**Craig:** No. I mean, he’s doing that thing that I talk about where you take your plan A and make a plan B, take your plan B, make a plan A. My guess is that he’s probably pretty darn good at his job. And even if that job is in terms of his long-term view, plan B, if his plan A is be a screenwriter, he’s probably made that plan B job as plan A.

He shows up on time, he does his work, he thinks, he applies himself, he has energy, he supports a family, helps support a family. And then he also does this, which is how I think it should be done. I love this advice about follow your passion being flawed.

It’s a little bit like saying, “Look, if you want to have a marriage that lasts your whole life, follow your passion. When you meet somebody and your heart is pounding and you’re sweating and you have that like rush, that chemical rush of just falling head over heels, that’s it, get married that day.” No. That’s not what love is. That’s just infatuation, right? Love is the product of the work. It’s the product of the commitment.

**John:** Yeah. Falling head over heels, that is, you know, lust and attraction. And it’s wonderful. And there’s a reason why we have so many great things written about that. But that’s not marriage.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Marriage is, you know, the getting up and doing it again every single day. And so figuring out how you can be good at being married is like how you can be good at being in any kind of career. It’s like how do you make the situation that you’re in as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean settling for a bad situation.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It means looking for what it is about the situation that you can work on it and sort of continuously kind of get better at.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And thinking back to sort of all of our friends who have become screenwriters and trying to find unifying themes, because so often the knock becomes, “Oh, well, you had this access, you had these sort of magical things that happened.” You know what, some of those things are true, and some of those things were luck, and some of those things were, you know, starting on, you know, second base.

But some of it is also just the constant practice. And when you sit down to write, that first 10 minutes for me is generally kind of awful. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, if I can push through to 15 minutes, then I’ll be done.” And then I’ve written an hour. It’s the same thing with finishing that first script, and then finishing the second script, and then finishing the third script.

No one that I know sold their first script. No one sold the first thing they ever wrote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if that is the standard, then people are going to start their career and be disappointed and look for reasons that aren’t their own reasons about why it didn’t happen.

In this book that I was talking about, the Cal Newport book, he talks about the difference between people who were in like a high school band and the people who — you know, like a high school rock band and the people who became big musical stars. And it tends to be people who were just disciplined about practicing.

They were looking at every day how can I get better. They were looking at like how can I have fun. They were looking at how can I do this really hard work and be better at it for having done the really hard work.

And I think that sometimes we don’t, especially in screenwriting, we never see that really hard work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we just assume like, “Oh, it must have been easy for them.” And in most cases, it wasn’t easy at all.

**Craig:** That’s right. A lot of this is about shedding our romantic understanding of what success is, our romantic understanding of what it means to be a professional, and our romantic understanding of what passion is all about. What he says here is the better you get at something, the more it becomes a passion, a true passion.

When we are children, we fall in love with things and we do them for a month or two and then we stop. And you have a daughter, I’m sure you’ve seen her go through these phases where she becomes obsessed with something. And then —

**John:** Oh, yeah. Rainbow looms. Oh my God, like she could not get enough rainbow looms and making these little elastic bracelets. And then suddenly she never wants to look at it again.

**Craig:** That’s right. My son was obsessed with rocks for five months. I have a drawer full of these rocks. [laughs] But he don’t look at the rocks anymore. But that’s normal. That’s part of growing up.

What I see sometimes in a distressing way in people who are recent college graduates is that they’re still doing it. And the mistake that they’re making is they’re mistaking initial excitement and novelty and the romance of the what-can-be for something that’s real. What is real is the day-after-day work that exists when the novelty is long gone.

There is nothing new about writing a screenplay for you or for me in a sense. But because we are professionals and we practice and we try and get better, we are inspired to do better. There is something beyond the rush of the novelty. There is a true professional joy, I think. And that just requires commitment.

**John:** So I’m just speculating here. But I’m looking at sort of other people who work in our industry. So you look at agents. And so you’d never just become a talent agent. There’s a whole hierarchy you go through.

And so you start in the mail room, and you work your way up to a desk where you’re answering the phone for an agent, and then you might become a junior agent, and you might finally have clients of your own. That training ground, those initial steps are terrible. And they’re sort of deliberately terrible. And it is not to punish anybody, but just so you can actually see from the ground up this is how it all works, this is how it all fits together.

And so if somebody bails on it saying like, “I hated being in the mail room,” well, okay, you hated being in the mail room but that really wasn’t what you were trying to do anyway. That wasn’t what being an agent was. That was just the initial thing. And if you can push through it, if you can look for like what are the ways in being in the mail room that I can figure stuff out, you are the person who’s going to move ahead.

I remember having an internship at Universal, the summer between my two years at Stark Program, and I had the most boring job. I was the intern below three assistants to the head of physical production at Universal. And there was literally nothing for me to do but like file a couple of papers every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one of the things I recognized I could do is there was this moment, like there were 10 minutes after lunch where my boss, Donna, was sort of in a happy place.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so during that happy place, I’d go —

**Craig:** [laughs] You mean drunk?

**John:** [laughs] She was just sort of like sedated. Like there were like no crises for like just a little while.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought she just had like a three martini lunch or something.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve told you some great stories from that summer.

But one of the things I recognized is I’m filing all these papers and there’s all these budgets. At that time they were shooting Greedy and The Flintstones and a few other movies. And I was reading through all the budgets because the budgets are in front of me, I’m going to read them.

And if I saw things I didn’t understand, I could ask her like two questions. I could ask her those two questions. And if they were smart questions, she would say like, “Well, that was actually a good question.” Like she could see that I was actually paying attention and was moving forward. I was getting something out of this. And that helped me there and it got me a better internship at the end of the summer.

**Craig:** What’s interesting is that these other job paths in Hollywood will quickly burn out, I think, the dilettantes. You can say you want to be a filmmaker, you direct a film, you go through that exhaustion and that misery, you come out the other end, and you don’t want to do it anymore, I understand. And if you do, you do.

Working at an agency, working at a studio, there is that long military march through the ranks. But not so with screenwriting. It’s the one gig. It’s like the — I guess, acting, a little bit, too. Acting and screenwriting, you could just keep banging your head against that wall for a while.

**John:** But here’s where I think there is an opportunity for writers. And maybe this is part of the reason why television has gotten so much better. If you look at television, there is that system where you work your way up through. So, yes, you’ve gone off and you’ve written your own specs and people are hiring you based on material you’ve written before, but there’s also people who get hired on as writers’ assistants or get hired on as sort of the script coordinators, the ones who are like sort of around the writers all the time but are not actually being allowed to write the scripts.

And those are the jobs in which if you can show that you are a smart person, that you’re adding value, that you are getting your job and understanding how to push beyond past it, that’s a real opportunity.

I have friends who are on the fourth season of a TV show and they are remarkably capable. And because they’ve been capable, they’ve been given more and more responsibilities in terms of like not just being on the set, but like shadowing the director and getting to do things that a writer in their position wouldn’t normally get to do. Because they have not only done their job well, but they’ve recognized, “You know what, I see what this next thing is and I can ask those smart questions and I can be trusted to do those next things.”

**Craig:** We don’t have that in features, obviously.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But what’s interesting is you’re describing somebody that seems remarkably free of a sense of entitlement. And that is a lot of what the problem is. When we say chase your dream, when someone says, “I’m going to keep chasing my dream because it’s my dream and I believe in it and I know that it’s what I’m supposed to do,” what I hear is “I’m entitled to this. I’m entitled to it. I’m just going to keep chasing because I’m supposed to have it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re not supposed to have anything. You get what you earn. And there are remarkable stories of people with extraordinary talent who squander it because they’re just waiting for somebody to give them something. And of course there are people who have no talent who are also waiting.

And, you know, when you talk about that TV room, it sounds to me like none of those people got there and said, “Well, look, just privately, I’m smarter and better at this than the people that are my bosses. So, you know, I’m going to wait for them to realize that.” Okay. [laughs] Good luck. Good luck.

**John:** This all reminds me of like sort of the final thing that Cal Newport’s book points out called “The Law of Remarkability” which says, “For a project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.”

And this thing, it makes me think back to Kurt’s script because, you know, we’re talking about sort of in the preamble to it, we’re talking about how scripts get passed around and how the Black List formed. And that really is something like you need something that you think is so good that you comment on it to other people. And, you know, the network of Hollywood is set up in such a way that things can get passed around. There’s a venue for it.

So if Kurt was just writing his scripts in Oakland and never showed them to anyone, there would be nothing for anyone to remark about. There wouldn’t be any sort of venue for that to be happening in. So by sharing it with us, but also sharing it in screenwriting competitions or blcklst.com or other places, sending it out there in the world, it gives people a chance to talk about, “You know what? This is really good.”

**Craig:** Well, I like that second point. It must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. And part of what that says to me is that the venue has to be authentic. It has to be valid and meaningful because in general in Hollywood and I think in every business, people remark on things that have been given some sort of imprimatur. Somebody that they trust has said, “I like this.”

So the Black List service essentially is that, right? It’s a venue that was designed to be trusted by the people that remark about things.

I think that what we do with our Three Page Challenge, we’re trusted I think. So hopefully, people will see our opinions as trustworthy. And it doesn’t mean they have to like what Kurt did. But what it means is that they’re going to take it seriously.

It’s also my problem with a lot of the contests and pitch fests and all the stuff that go on because what they’re doing is they’re selling themselves as a legitimate venue when they aren’t really compelling. You’ll see people say things like, “Well, you know, I was a quarter finalist at the, you know, blah blah blah contest.”

And I’ll think no one cares. No one cares if you win that contest. I think they care about Nicholl. I think they care about Austin, the, “Oh, I was selected as a top ten pitch at the pitch fest blah blah blah.” Nobody cares. No one cares.

And so, you know, the endless refrain of caveat emptor on this podcast, when people tell you, “Give us money because we’re going to offer you a legitimate venue that real professionals are watching,” almost always that’s not true. Because they watch very little. Frankly, if they watch even one venue, that’s more than most of their co-workers.

So I think the blcklst.com, Nicholl, Austin, that’s — I don’t know. Any other ones?

**John:** I don’t know if there’s any ones that are meaningful enough that I can recommend them.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But this also reminds me of what your advice was to Malcolm Spellman and Tim Talbott when they came to with Balls Out. They were writing as The Robotard 8000. They came through with this crazy script.

And I think you recognized two things. First off, that it was remarkable enough that people would talk about it because it was just outrageous and it had a compelling thing, it had hooks to it that people could talk about which is great. Second, you said, “You know what? Put it up on the web. Put it up on the Internet. Let people see it and let people talk about it and let it get it out there in the world because it is, you know, special and remarkable.”

And so not to worry about selling this as a spec script but letting people see what this thing was. And so I think you had both of these instincts from the start.

**Craig:** Well, that one was an interesting case because I felt — I wasn’t thinking in terms of venue but trying to put it into context of what Cal Newport has written with his book. That seemed to me like they should create their own venue, that their whole, their entire aesthetic was, “We’re not like anything you’ve ever seen. We’re not called what you think, we don’t write what you think. So we’re going to create our own thing.”

And they did and the website that they made, so their own venue featured — is it Gamera? Was that the turtle? [laughs] It looks like it was a turtle.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** It was like a huge monster turtle swinging on a gymnastics thing. It was so bizarre and just right. And then from there, they got picked up to the Black List, not the service, but the actual annual Black List. And they made the annual Black List. So that was the second level of legitimacy.

And curiously enough, we just did a reading of that script, Balls Out, for the Black List and it’s on a podcast that’s coming up. And so I did the narration. But really good actors read the parts including Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas. So you should check that out. It came out really well, I thought.

**John:** Craig Mazin is recommending another podcast. So something unusual is happening —

**Craig:** I don’t know the name of it. [laughs] So I feel like I’m still okay.

**John:** Stuart will research the name and we’ll put a link in the show notes so you can find —

**Craig:** It’s going to be on a thing —

**John:** Craig’s narration for Balls Out. Do you get to say filthy words?

**Craig:** Oh, my God. There were a few of those where I just thought, “Well, if people complain, I’ll just say I was reading what I was handed.”

**John:** So Craig also wrote up some great bits of advice on the outline that I thought were terrific. So this is camera directions for screenwriters. Craig, talk us through what words screenwriters should be using if they’re using camera directions in their script.

**Craig:** Well, I thought this was only fair. I mean, here we are, we’re the guys saying, “Oh, ignore these people with their stupid rules. Like never put camera directions in scripts.” But it’s not fair. I don’t think for us to say, “No, no. Go ahead and do it,” if we don’t talk about how you should do it. And this all comes under the general title, “You can’t pan up.”

So I’ll see this in scripts all the time, “Pan up to find.” Okay, so let’s just talk about some of these terms and what they mean. None of them, the mistakes that you could make with this are going to ruin your screenplay. Don’t get me wrong. If you write a terrific script, nobody will care. But some of these things are just binary, they’re right or wrong.

So panning. You can’t pan up. A pan is essentially the camera version of shaking your head no. The camera is on a spot and it doesn’t go up or down. It hinges left and right. The opposite of that is tilting. You can tilt up and down. That’s the camera equivalent of nodding yes, right? So sometimes you want to tilt up or tilt down.

But just think about in your mind a head moving no or a head moving yes. Think about how that means the camera’s moving in relation to what’s in front of you. A lot of times, that’s not really what you want. What you really want to do is keep the camera pointing forward in a certain horizontal way, but moving the entire camera to the left or right or up or down.

So in that case, what you want to talk about is move right or move left. You can also say dolly right or dolly left if you want. And then for forward and backwards, you can say push in, pull out. By the way, dolly right and dolly left, those aren’t technically right either. You’re supposed to dolly forward and dolly back, and truck right and truck left. But trucking is a weird term that nobody uses really.

**John:** Yeah. No one ever says truck.

**Craig:** Right. So I think dolly is okay there. Sometimes I will see this mistake, people will say, “Zoom in on.” And I think, “Well, do you mean zoom in or do you mean push in?” So two very different things. John, I’m sure you know this.

**John:** Yeah, if you’re making a ’70s paranoia thriller, then yes, zooming in is absolutely correct. But rarely we call that a zoom. You know, there might be some case where you really want that effect of, you know, the zoom, or you want sort of the vertigo zoom. You know, if that really is appropriate to your moment, call it out. But that’s rarely — what’s called a dolly zoom, that’s often what that’s referred to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a dolly zoom.

**John:** If that really is appropriate, that’s fine. Go and do it. But most cases, you know, you are moving in, you are, you know, revealing. A lot of these things I find in my own script, I will say, “Move to reveal.” That way, I’m not saying it has to be a dolly or a pan or whatever else. It’s just like the camera does something to show us something we did not see before.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. You’re not there so you’re not sure if it’s going to be right or left or back or forth. But the point is move the camera to reveal something.

So when you’re pushing in, you’re moving the whole camera forward. And that means that everything in the screen starts to — you get closer to everything sort of at the same time.

A zoom is a lens. On a zoom, the camera doesn’t move at all. Instead, the camera operator is turning a lens and changing the focal length of the lenses they turn. So what happens is it’s almost like you’re blowing up the image. Rather than moving, you’re blowing it up.

So if you want to see an example of zoom in — Quentin Tarantino will still use them to ironic effect in Kill Bill when the Bride shows up to train with Pai Mei, he does lots of zooms on Pai Mei’s face because he’s — the whole thing, I mean, even the film has been treated so it’s supposed to look like it’s a ’70s karate movie. So that’s a zoom. You generally aren’t going to be zooming.

If you want the camera to go up or down without tilting, right, then you could talk about booming up or camera rises or crane up or crane down or boom down.

And then let’s talk about some angles. There are times when you want to be looking down on something and there are times when you want to be looking up at something. You can say we look down on or we look up at. Or you can also say high angle on, low angle. Low angle means you’re down low looking up. High angle, you’re up high looking down.

**John:** If you ever get confused just think a giant is high. What would a giant be looking at? A dwarf is low, what would a dwarf be looking up at? That’s the difference between high angle and low angle.

Again, you’re not likely to have to call these out very often. I mean, it would be a very specific case that really needs to be in the script if you’re going to be using either one of those.

**Craig:** Well, that brings me to the cardinal sin of camera direction. And the cardinal sin of camera direction in your screenplay is not, “Don’t use camera direction…” The cardinal sin — that’s my impression of these idiots. The cardinal sin of — “Give me money now.” The cardinal sin of camera direction is unmotivated camera direction.

Unmotivated camera direction is a bad thing to do when you’re making a movie, as a director, as a cinematographer, you don’t move the camera pointlessly. You want to move it for a reason, right? Okay, what’s your reason? Maybe your reason is just to create a feeling. Maybe your reason is to see something specific.

As a screenwriter, you want to make sure that if you’re calling out a specific camera move or angle, it’s for a purpose. Ask these questions, why does the camera need to move? Why do I have to see what it is showing me? What information do I learn from what it showing me? And through those, the answers to those questions, you will have intentional motivated camera direction.

**John:** Absolutely true. And I was thinking back to recent things I’ve written. And in Scary Stories there’s a moment where a character leaves the room and we stay behind the room. The camera turns around and very slowly creeps in on something. That’s the definition of intentionality. It’s like there’s nothing making us look over in that direction so the choice to do that makes it really clear something very big and unsettling is about to happen and be ready for it. That’s motivation. But so I have to write all that stuff into the script.

But in most cases, you’re not going to do that at all. And so it’s not going to matter to me whether something’s a two shot or a single shot or how we’re dollying or how we’re moving through these things.

Sometimes, you want to call out a general style for how things are supposed to feel. And so there’s moments in the script that definitely have a different feel. And I would talk about sort of like there were times I would say sort of very loose documentary style footage. That’s great, but rarely am I calling out stuff otherwise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So in the script I’m writing now, there are two characters who are scared to go somewhere. They’re scared to cross something. And they decide the only way they’re going to be able to do it is if they do it together. And so they sort of push themselves together and start walking slowly.

And then I call out a shot on their feet to see how close their feet are kind of and how trembly they are. You know, look, you can watch movies and see a shot like that and go, “Oh, you know what? It’s nice to occasionally look at the feet. That’s cool.” Not good enough. Why am I looking at feet? What am I learning from the feet? I need to know.

So unmotivated camera direction is just like unmotivated dialogue or action. Don’t talk to me if I don’t need to hear the words or they don’t mean a damn thing. And don’t show me something that doesn’t mean anything.

So that stuff needs to be built in. But if you have a moment where you know why you want to do it and you know what the audience is going to get out of it, here’s a sense of what the vocabulary is so you don’t write pan up.

**John:** Don’t write pan up. Never write pan up.

**Craig:** You can’t pan up.

**John:** So on the topics of the words on the page, Dave wrote in with question. He’s writing, “My protagonist is traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood. For my scene headings, should it be as generic as EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD — DAY and EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD- TODAY? Or do I need to be more specific?” Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I think you need to be much more specific than that. First of all, there’s no such thing as neighborhood. Even if you were in one neighborhood, I wouldn’t write neighborhood. That means nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is a vanilla pudding description. So I want to know where he is. You need to define my space. EXT. BLANKETY..WILLIAMSTOWN — DAY , a da-da-da kind of place. Fine. He crosses out of Williamstown into EXT, da-da-da, a new kind of place. Here’s what it’s like.”

No, of course I need to know. Neighborhood is, that’s like EXT. BUILDING.

**John:** Absolutely. Or INT. ROOM.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What is a room? I have no idea what a room is. So what Craig is pointing out is that you’d probably have both in your scene header something that encapsulates the idea of what the place is, so a name for like it’s Williamstown. And then the first time that you are there, you’re giving us a sense of flavor of what this thing feels like. The next time we see Williamstown, we’re like, “Oh, it’s that neighborhood.” But you have to be really specific in those scene headers so we know what it is we’re looking at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t want it over describe in the scene header. Don’t throw us 15 words in the scene header. But just give it a name so that once we — so that sticks in our head. And it may be a very good idea to make sure you’re not naming two different locations really similar things. So if you have Williamsport and Williamstown, we won’t be able to tell the difference.

**Craig:** Correct. Now, if you have a situation where your character is on a bus or a train and the ideas is they’re traveling rapidly through, you know, from place to place or it’s montagey, you can shorthand it because we’ll never know, we’re never going to be there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we don’t know the name and we don’t need to know the name and we could just say, you know Jim looks out of a train as it passes through, you know, urban blight, suburban blah, blah, gentrification, whatever. Describe, give me a flavor of it. So just think to yourself, some locations scout has to go out and figure this out. Where am I sending them? They need to know. You know, neighborhood 1 and neighborhood 2 tells nobody anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** 100% agree. Next question, Brian writes, “I’ve written an animated pilot script and I’m wondering if I should denote anywhere in the script that it is in fact animated. I made the mistake at an early table read of not indicating this and most of the notes I received assumed it was live action. Like, ‘It would be impossible to make,’ or, ‘You can’t train a cobra to do that,’ et cetera.”

**Craig:** [laughs] You can’t train a cobra to speak.

**John:** “As my script is now getting in the hands of agents, producers and et cetera, I’m wondering if there’s anything I should add in the script itself to make it clear to the reader immediately that we’re talking about a cartoon to avoid any confusion?” What would you do Craig?

**Craig:** Very simply. Let’s say the title of this were, you know, John the Cobra, then I would say John the Cobra an animated pilot by Brian, right? Just put it right on the title page, put the word animated pilot and this way no one will even get to page one without knowing it’s animated. I mean, yes, for sure, I think you’ve got to just call it out.

**John:** I think you got to call it out too. But I’ve had this actually happen to me. There’s a project I wrote recently, you know, I say recently, three years ago, and people who read it were like, “Oh yeah, so this is animated, right?” “Like no, no, no, I really mean for this to be live action.” They’re like, “Oh.” And it’s like, “Oh, I really should have told you that before I had you spend, you know, 90 minutes reading the script.” So, that’s also a great case for whatever we’re going to call the intermediary page between the title page and the first page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you have something to talk about like this is the animation style that it’s going for, that’s the perfect place to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but no, you need to make that clear. You can’t train a cobra to do that.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** That cobra is having a discussion with a rat. [laughs] How do we do that?

**John:** But Craig, could you train cobra to fight polio?

**Craig:** No, but I’ll tell you what. You can train polio to fight glioblastoma multiforme and that is my One Cool Thing. Look, it’s like now Segue Man has gotten a sidekick? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely, Segue Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Segue Boy.

**John:** Transition Boy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m Transition Boy. My parents died in a fire.

**John:** Transition Boy started as Transition Girl but —

**Craig:** Yeah exactly, transition — no, then I’ll be Post Transition Girl. So I’m Transition Boy.

**John:** Transitioning Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Transitioned Boy. Anyway, so here’s my One Cool Thing. Polio, so here’s a crazy idea, take a disease that used to kill and paralyze millions of people and was finally eradicated by vaccines and use it to treat glioblastoma multiforme. Glioblastoma multiforme is pretty much the worst diagnosis you can get from a neurologist.

**John:** I don’t know what it is. So tell me what that is.

**Craig:** Glioblastoma multiforme is a kind of brain tumor. It is malignant, it is incredibly aggressive and it essentially becomes inoperable. And here’s why — it’s operable. It’s very operable, but pointlessly operable. Because what happens is they’ll go and they’ll take out as much of it as they can. But it’s impossible to get 100% of it. So they can literally remove 99% of this glioblastoma multiforme tumor and the tiny remaining cancer cells will just go bonkers again. It is incredibly aggressive.

And the deal with glioblastoma multiforme is that if you were diagnosed with this, you’re looking at anywhere from four months to four years. Nobody makes it past five years, period, the end. This is terminal. And it is super bad. And that’s with surgery and radiation and chemo. And the chemo, they say, will give you maybe two months. I mean, it’s the worst.

Well, so [laughs] a group of brilliant people have come up with this idea and it’s showing early promise. It’s not perfect yet but it’s showing early promise. What they’ve done is they have engineered poliovirus. They’ve taken poliovirus and they’ve genetically altered it. So, if you are afraid of genetically modified organisms, I’m so sorry, they’re wonderful. And they actually spliced it with some genetic code from the common cold. One of the things about polio is that it’s really good at replicating itself.

Well, this polio isn’t so good at replicating itself but what it does do is it attaches to these very specific receptors on the cancer cells themselves and starts to destroy the cancer cells without infecting healthy cells. It’s kind of brilliant. It is incredibly painstaking. They have to figure out exactly how much to put in. They have to surgically implant it in there. Then they’ve got to wait. And essentially what happens is the polio isn’t really killing the cancer cells because it’s a weakened poliovirus anyway. What the polio is doing is turning the cancer cells which normally exist like ninjas that the good guys can’t see and they’re basically shining a light on them, so that the immune system which normally cannot tell that the cancer cell is bad, now sees, “Oh my God, it’s polio”.

And it goes rushing in to kill the cancer cells and they’ve had some initial very positive results, not perfect yet by any stretch. But this could be a big deal as in they could, if this is refined, this could actually cure a number of — and it seems to have already cured a few people and this was an incurable disease so that’s just a remarkable breakthrough and I hope that it pays off in the way that they’re thinking it eventually will.

**John:** Yeah, I hope it works well. I just have this real flashback to Emma Thompson at the very start of I Am Legend. And it has one of the best intros to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s basically this CNN interview with Emma Thompson and she’s like — so the interviewer says like, “So you’ve cured cancer?” It’s like, “Yes, we’ve cured cancer,” and then smash cut to the end of civilization and basically they genetically modified something that became the disease that killed everybody.

**Craig:** Well, this is where Hollywood makes me angry because it’s easy for us — that’s a great way to get into a movie and it is. The problem is that what is narratively convenient for us is actually damaging the credibility of really good science. Because in truth, that’s not what we should be scared of. What we should be scared of is glioblastoma multiforme, not these fascinating treatments to cure it.

So, yes, ever since War of the Worlds, I mean we’ve always dreaded the virus, you now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now, we dread vaccines, or at least some idiots do. Because we’ve been taught that science is messing with the primal forces of nature. Yeah, well, that’s how we got aspirin and that’s how we got Advil and that’s why don’t all die when we’re 40. So I’m entirely in favor of these things.

And by the way, if you read about this polio treatment of glioblastoma, you’ll see that it was subject to some of the most rigorous controls by the federal government. And they were really careful.

**John:** Oh, I could imagine why.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were really —

**John:** It’s polio.

**Craig:** It’s polio, you know, so they were really, really careful. And they did a spectacular job. So, here’s hoping.

**John:** Hurray. My One Cool Thing is the resolution of a lawsuit about Three’s Company and an Off-Broadway play called 3C which was a parody of Three’s Company or a very specific satire based around Three’s Company.

So what happened is a federal judge in New York, her name was Loretta A. Preska of the U.S. District Court, a rule that the play 3C did not violate the copyright of Three’s Company. So, it’s a complicated situation, so essentially there was this Off-Broadway production of this play called 3C and it was essentially a parody of Three’s Company.

And from what I understand, I never saw it but it was happening in the same time we were doing Big Fish, is — so basically all of the constructs of Three’s Company, so like the set and the basic characters and sort of what their situation was and played it as if they were all really real. So like what if Jack Tripper really were gay and were around all these sort of homophobic insults. And like what if all this leering and all the stuff this happened sort of around him.

And so it was a very pointed thing. And it got sort of mixed reviews. But it also got a lot of concern by the copyright holders. So it’s a company called DLT Entertainment owns the copyright, owns the rights to remake Three’s Company. And they said, “Uh-uh-uh.” And they filed a cease and desist.

And so this playwright was stuck in this weird situation where the play closed. And he couldn’t publish the play, he couldn’t find other stages for the play, he couldn’t do anything because there was this specter that this other company might come after him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, he went and sued them and basically this is the first rule and it says, you know what, this was fair use. This was a fair way to sort of take this existing property and, you know, satirize it the same way that an SNL sketch can satirize Scandal or any other sort of popular cultural thing. So, I thought it was really fascinating. I could feel for both sides of the situation as a person who might create the thing that gets parodied. Like, “Well, at what point do I have the opportunity to sort to say like, ‘You can’t do that, that’s my thing?'”

**Craig:** Well, pretty much no point. I mean, that’s fair use. It’s pretty clear about the parody exception and then the Supreme Court expanded that concept as well to include what it meant to parody public figures.

As somebody that did parody, you know, we wouldn’t have been able to do a thing if we didn’t have that fair us. I mean we were copying things down to – when and we did the — here’s how close we were. We, in Scary Movie 4, part of the parody was the movie Saw. So, we recreated the bathroom, the iconic bathroom from Saw. And we did it so well that when they went back I think and made another Saw, they used part of our set.

Because people buy sets back and forth from each other all the time. And I think we even had part of their set when we made ours. So the key is, is there any chance that people are going to confuse these two things? There’s no chance that people are going to go see the play that you just described and think, “Ah, this is Three’s Company but on stage.” No, it’s not. It’s clearly not. It’s clearly parody and I’m not surprised. I don’t like it when people try and get heavy-handed about copyright stuff because I do believe in copyright. And I do believe in the rights of intellectual property holders.

So, when they truly are bullies, I think it weakens the general cause because there are people out there who want everything to be free all the time, you know. And I’m not one of those people. So, I’m glad that this prevailed. I presume it’s going to stay this way because it just sounds like a classic case of fair use to me.

**John:** I agree. It sounds like fair use. But part of the reason why I want to bring it up is because if you were this playwright, you know, he was correct and was ultimately vindicated but this is two years where he has not had the ability to actually show his play to anybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so just as a warning that if you’re going to walk into dangerous waters, you might ultimately be right. You might have the law on your side, that won’t necessarily help you for a period of time until you get those decisions back.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, you know, he would much rather not have had to file a lawsuit and then be able to make other plays and he wasn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And some of these cases, unfortunately the way the law is set up, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. What we found was that if you ask a company for the right to parody a product by let’s say, “Can we please use your logo to parody you?” And they say no, it starts to fall out of fair use because you’ve essentially demonstrated that you didn’t think it was fair use. So, you kind of just proceed like it is fair use.

And then they come after you and then you go, “Oh, what? Well, fair use.” And you usually win. But you’re right, this is the cost of doing business. And this is why in general, you’re better off with somebody big behind you when somebody big comes after you. Obviously, that isn’t always possible.

**John:** Yeah. So it was pro bono representation in this case. So thank you to whoever lawyers who stepped on his behalf.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** That is our show this week. So you can respond to me or to Craig on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We also have a Facebook page which we sometimes check and we actually looked at some of the things on Facebook this week. So you can find us at Facebook/Scriptnotes. We’re on iTunes. You can find us there, just search for Scriptnotes. That’s where you can subscribe and listen to all the episodes. You can also leave us a comment. We look at those comments as well. If you are on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app that is available for iOS, for iPad and for iPhone. That’s where you can also get to all the back episodes of the show.

The service is called Scriptnotes.net. That gets you back to episode one, all the way back to the beginning of this very show where we didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It has an outro by a very talented listener, but we haven’t decided which one yet. So, if you are a listener who has an outro for our show, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to it. And that’s also where you can send your questions, like the two questions we answered today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you would like to buy a Writer Emergency Pack, you can go to the store@johnaugust.com or just writeremergency.com and click the links there. The special code this week, and it’s actually good for this whole month, is Scriptnotes and that will give you 10% off your orders.

**Craig:** 10%!

**John:** 10%. That’s savings.

**Craig:** It’s all that guy. 10%? Wow.

**John:** That’s unbelievable.

**Craig:** Tell me more.

**John:** And we will be back next week. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Okay, bye.

Links:

* The LA Times on [the CAA to UTA exodus, and CAA’s resulting lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-takeaways-caa-lawsuit-uta-20150403-story.html)
* [Scriptnotes, 191: The Deal with Scripped.com](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-scripped-com)
* [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/) and [CrashPlan](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/) online backup services
* [Fountain](http://fountain.io/) is future proof
* [Mad Max: Fury Road trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8)
* [Writer Emergency Packs are available now](http://writeremergency.com/) (use the code “scriptnotes” at checkout on the John August Store for 10% off through May 1st)
* Writer Emergency Kickstarter update on [how online retail works](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck/posts/1182012)
* [Scriptnotes, 190: This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/2015/this-is-working)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), by Cal Newport
* [The Robotard 8000](http://www.therobotard8000.com/Robotard_Main/Main.html)
* [Announcing The Black List Table Reads](http://blog.blcklst.com/2015/04/announcing-the-black-list-table-reads/)
* Forbes on [Duke’s Polio Virus Trial Against Glioblastoma](http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2015/03/30/60-minutes-covers-dukes-polio-virus-clinical-trial-against-glioblastoma/)
* [Play Reimagining ‘Three’s Company’ Wins Case](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/theater/play-reimagining-threes-company-wins-case.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0&referrer=) from The New York Times
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener JT Butler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))