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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 292 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, we’ll be answering listener questions about credits and casting, pilots, and professional experience. But first, Craig, we have some follow up.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Let’s follow up.

**John:** So the biggest announcement in last week’s episode was about the live show and we have news about the live show.

**Craig:** Yeah. So maybe people were wondering, hey, when will the tickets go on sale so that I could see Craig talk to Rian Johnson. And the answer is not yet because we have been postponed, not indefinitely. The folks that are running the charity asked for a little more time because they’re trying to find the right venue. So, I think probably instead of at the end of this month, which is what we were talking about, we’re looking more towards the end of next month. So, calm down, take a deep breath. We promise we will give you plenty of lead time to purchase tickets once we know where it will be.

**John:** Because we do have people who like fly in from across the country to do this. So I hope no one actually bought the tickets for that time, but if you did buy tickets to come at the end of March, maybe come anyway. I mean, if you look around Los Angeles carefully enough you’re likely to find Rian Johnson somewhere. He’s got to be here somewhere, right?

**Craig:** Well, or people that look like Rian Johnson, and there are so many.

**John:** That’s really true.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** A baby-faced genius is what you’re looking for. That’s Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Baby-faced blond genius with circular glasses. Basically, you remember Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch?

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Of course.

**Craig:** Cousin Oliver, age him up, stick the glasses on. You got it.

**John:** Yeah. Rian Johnson ruined The Brady Bunch but he saved cinema. So, it balances out.

**Craig:** You know, to defend Oliver, The Brady Bunch ruined The Brady Bunch. And I say that as a Brady Bunch fan and aficionado. But Oliver didn’t make it worse.

**John:** I apologize to Cousin Oliver, because of course he did not ruin it. It was just a late season addition. It was the Pucci of the show.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And you can’t really blame Pucci. It was just a bad addition.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pucci died on his way home to his own – I also have to apologize. Because last week during our Three Page Challenge I made an error, a grammatical error, which as you know hurts me so. But important to correct these things. You know, because we live in a time when our leaders make it clear that when you mess up, you should fess up, right?

**John:** Yep. Completely.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s obviously what’s going on. So, a gentlemen named Richard Komen called me out on Twitter and he was correct when he said that I was wrong to say that nervously cadenced should take a hyphen. This was in Carne, I believe, was the Three Page Challenge that we were reading last week. And he said, no, it shouldn’t take a hyphen. It’s an adverb modifying a noun. That’s that. And I checked. So I checked, because I was like, hmm, that does sound compellingly true.

And here’s what I found. The Chicago Manual of Style, which is a pretty good reference, says you should only hyphenate combinations like that if the adverb doesn’t end in LY. Sorry, it’s adverb/adjective, so for instance much-needed takes a hyphen, but nervously cadenced does not. So, in the adverb/adjective combo, if the adverb doesn’t end in LY, you stick a hyphen in there. Otherwise, you don’t. I was wrong. I apologize Thank you, Richard. You were right.

**John:** I want to just open this up a little bit. So Chicago Manual of Style is a good reference source for writers looking for how do I actually get this thing on paper and make it make sense. But Chicago Manual of Style is not the end all/be all of everything. And so I believe you will find other references or other authors, other works that do put the hyphen in there. So I don’t think you were necessarily wrong to suggest that a hyphen could be put there. It’s all style and usage. Again, it’s like there are no hard fast rules here.

So the Chicago Manual of Style does not call for a hyphen there. I would not be upset to have a hyphen there. I can see sort of why your instinct was to put the hyphen there. I don’t know. And the difference between an LY adverb and an adverb that doesn’t have the LY is really a very arbitrary distinction. Would you agree?

**Craig:** Well, so much of grammar is arbitrary. And I know that ultimately clarity prevails. But in this case, well, at the very least I was wrong to say that it was wrong to not have it. So, yeah, sure, if you say, well, it’s my preference. Nobody, just to be clear about this, because people do get really wound up about this stuff when they talk to ding-a-lings and charlatans and frauds about how to write screenplays that no one is going to grade your screenplay like a test paper in tenth grade English.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** So, clarity should rule the day. But I was wrong to suggest that it ought to be that way. If anything, it probably shouldn’t. But, yeah, I agree with you. If you want to throw a hyphen in there for funsies, because you feel like it makes it read better, throw it in.

**John:** I have a hunch that if people went through all my scripts and looked for those situations where I was doing this, I probably was putting the hyphen in there and I suspect you were, too.

**Craig:** Well, it was clearly my instinct. Yeah. So I’m sure I did. And you know what? John, it hasn’t slowed us down, has it?

**John:** No. Somehow we’ve been successful despite our over-hyphenation.

**Craig:** So successful.

**John:** Another thing we sort of referenced but is not actually available in the world from last week’s episode, so Roman Mittermayr is a guy who has written I think outros for us. He’s also a coder. He’s done some great things called FRUJI, but he also created this app for Amazon’s Echo. So, I don’t have Echo because they don’t work here in Paris. Craig, you don’t have an Echo, I believe. Is that correct?

**Craig:** No, I’m a little – I don’t like it. [laughs] By the way, let me just say, I don’t – my problem with the Amazon Echo and all the rest of it isn’t that I’m worried about surveillance, although I am kind of excited about this new crop of crimes that are being solved by Amazon Echoes. But that aside, my problem is I just hate talking to the Internet. I feel like such an idiot to say, “Hey Siri, Hey Alexa.” I just feel so dumb. I feel dumb.

**John:** Yep. So what you did just did there just annoyed a bunch of people because they were driving in their car or they’re at their house and you now activated a thing. So, we’re going to let that one pass. But we’re not going to do that anymore. So any future instances where we accidentally do it, we’ll have Matthew bleep those out.

So, I end up using Siri on my phone a lot for certain things. I use it for setting timers. I use it for starting exercise on my watch. I find it really good for that. It’s now on my computer. I don’t use it at all. So, I’m not a person who is used to being in my house and sort of using it for things, but I’m used to using it on the go or like when I’m in my car.

But Roman most crucially has built a skill for Amazon’s Echo. So, you can now say, “Lady in a Can, enable Scriptnotes.” So, Lady in a Can is the name of the – it’s the ALEXA word. I’m just saying Lady in a Can so you don’t actually, it doesn’t trip it on your–

**Craig:** Why don’t you just say Aloxa?

**John:** Oh yeah, just mispronounce it. So, Aloxa, Enable Scriptnotes. If you do that, it will install the skill. And then you can say, “Aloxa, ask Scriptnotes for latest episode,” and we will start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m never going to do that. I’m just being real clear.

**John:** You’re never going to do that, but you know what? People with this Lady in the Can, they might do it.

**Craig:** Maybe can we call her Malexa? What about Malexa? Does that trigger it?

**John:** That sounds a little evil.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, yeah, it’s so interesting how you have to name these characters and make them seem like they’re helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So Alexa I think is always female, but Siri is actually male in certain markets. And so I think in the UK Siri is default male.

**Craig:** My son has rigged his Siri to be an Australian man. [laughs]

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I don’t know why. Every time. And by the way, kids, I will say, well–

**John:** They love it.

**Craig:** I’m going off of my sample size here of one teenager, because my daughter is not yet a teenager, but my son and his friends, they talk to their phones all the time. It’s terrifying.

**John:** I mean, and dictation on the phone has gotten so much better that I will sometimes find myself starting to type and realize like why am I typing? This is going to be so much faster if I dictate it.

**Craig:** I love typing.

**John:** And 80% of the time that dictation works great.

**Craig:** I love it. I love typing.

**John:** You love typing on your phone?

**Craig:** I do. I love it. I just love typing in general. I feel like–

**John:** I hate typing with my thumbs.

**Craig:** Really? I’ve trained my mind to think through typing. I mean, right now I’m not typing, so I can speak. But when it comes to composing something intentionally, my fingers just start to go. The neural pathways have been wired so directly to the manual activity of typing that I just have to do it.

**John:** That’s absolutely true when I’m at a real keyboard, but on the phone it just does not work the same way. And so a lot of times I’ll be so far ahead of where my thumbs are at with my thoughts that speaking aloud is a much better case.

**Craig:** I want to write that song, by the way. I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** [laughs] It could be a song about typing or about hitchhiking.

**Craig:** Well, it just sounds like a great show tune. It’s an 11 o’clocker. You know? It’s a big song.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s like you finally realized I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** I don’t think it’s an 11 o’clock number, Craig. I think it could be an I Want song in a certain way, about the vision you have.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so.

**John:** Or it could be an end of the first act. [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**Craig:** See, I think it’s more like [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are. Anyway, we’ve lost listeners. We’re losing listeners in droves.

**John:** So many listeners. Who has two thumbs and no listeners? This guy.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Let’s get to our questions this week. We have a whole bunch of questions. We’ll try to speed round some of them. Other ones we’ll dig in deep. Owen writes in to ask, “How long should it take your agent to read your script?”

**Craig:** Exactly 3.7 days. Next question.

**John:** I say a week. And if you haven’t heard back in a week, then you should ask, “Hey what’s up?” Because your agent should read within a week. And a week needs to include a weekend, because basically no one reads anything except over the weekend, which because Hollywood is messed up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s about right. Basically the first weekend they have available. They’re your agent. They should read it. If you are – look, you got to know your place in the world. If you’re the lowest man on their totem pole and you’re a brand new client and you’re just starting, it may take them two weekends. And that’s fair. I mean, the larger question is who cares what your agent thinks about your script. But I know it matters. I know it matters because they’re the ones that have to go and sell it and they have to understand it.

But as I say to my agents all the time, “Yeah, you can read it if you want to.”

**John:** Let’s pause here for a second, because it is interesting like how much more important it was for our agents to read our scripts when we were new. And now it’s like it’s good that they read them, because that way they can have meaningful discussion with people about next steps on things. But like it’s actually not that important that they read them. And so [Cramer] calls, like, “Hey, do I need to read this?” Not really. It’s sort of the thing you read before. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Sometimes my guys will be like, “Can we read this?” Yeah, if you – oh, yeah, of course. It’s not like you can’t read it. But it is true, at some point their purpose really does shift out of advocacy for you and into more of they’re mediative. You know, they’re about getting you a deal and then handling problems along the way as they might crop up. But they’re not really advocating for you specifically about things as a writer.

They never stop being advocative for talent, you know. I mean, I hate that word, because writers are talented, too. But we’re called literary and then on the other side is talent. So actors, they’re constantly advocating for actors. That never stops.

**John:** Yeah. Because they’re trying to make sure the actor is positioned properly for this kind of role. Or you might not have thought of her for this, but she would actually be great as that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because writers like ultimately people can read us. They can see the movies we’ve done. They can talk to the people we’ve worked with. It’s not the same kind of thing. And so once you are established, there’s less of that need. So, there may be a reason why let’s say you’re a writer who has been writing low budget thrillers and now you’re trying to segue into something different, then yes they need to be able to read you and sort of position you differently. But that’s kind of the exception. That’s not really–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Where most people are at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way, it’s the same with directors, too. They advocate for directors. I got a call the other day from an agent saying, “Hey, for this thing you’re doing, have you considered my client blah-blah-blah to direct?” And they do that because directors and actors both are to some extent waiting for script material. Whereas we’re not, because we’re writing it. But you’re right. When you’re trying to break out of a mold, and particularly when there is an open assignment, your agent can lobby for you and make a case. And in that sense it’s good that they know what you’ve written.

But that was a very long answer. Owen, oh, a week or two. How about that?

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** All right. We have Thomas writing in who says, “On the poster for Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford has two credits. Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford. I realize the writer on a movie gets a credit on the poster in the same font size and weight of the director, but did they have to be separate for any reason if it’s the same person? For instance, on There Will Be Blood, the credit is Written for the Screen and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Both appear to be screenplay credit.” I’m not really sure what they mean by that.

“Or, does Tom Ford just like seeing his name on things over and over?” John, do you have guesses about this?

**John:** I believe the answer to the question is that if you have the director’s name on the poster in a certain size, you have to have the writer’s name on. You can say Written and Directed by, but the challenge with Tom Ford’s movie is that it is based on preexisting material, so therefore he cannot have Written and Directed by because Written by includes both story and screenplay. So, it has to say Screenplay by Tom Ford. There can be an exception for Written for the Screen. And so we’ve seen it here in Paul Thomas Anderson’s credit. I’ve seen it also for the Coen Brothers.

So, I believe his credit could have read Written for the Screen and Directed by Tom Ford. Is that your understanding?

**Craig:** Not sure about that last one. I have to check on that. Written for the Screen and Directed by may refer to somebody who has gotten screen story and screenplay credit. Or that may just be an alternate way of saying Written and Directed by. I have to check on that. But I think you’re absolutely correct though that when you say Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford, this is not Tom Ford’s choice. It’s because he does not qualify for a Written by credit.

Unless maybe Written for the Screen does qualify as screenplay and maybe he could. I don’t know. I have to check into this. The truth is I’m not sure.

**John:** So, I was pulling up this Written for the Screen and Directed by Coen Brothers, which I think was off of True Grit, which was a remake, so therefore they wouldn’t have gotten story credit, but they could have gotten screenplay credit. So that’s my assumption for why that and for Paul Thomas Anderson it made sense. I agree it looks just weird. And so you would love to be able to combine things in ways that are nicer, but it’s here because the WGA is trying to protect writers from getting knocked off the poster.

And the WGA is very particular about what things you can combine. So, you can combine written and directed. You can’t combine written and produced. You’re not allowed to sort of stick those guys together. So I was a writer and a producer on Go, so we asked if it could say Written and Produced by John August. You cannot. Written by has to be its own thing.

**Craig:** Yes, you definitely can’t combine producing credits with that. So, we’ll double check with our intrepid credit staff and I will get the firm answer on this one.

**John:** If you’d like to know more about sort of the politics of credits, not sort of the business of credits, but sort of like why directors and credits are such a complicated thing, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Vanity Fair article by Margaret Heindenry, where she talks through the history of A Film By or A Blank Film, and sort of how complicated it has been in Hollywood and sort of the arguments between the DGA, representing the directors, and WGA for the writers. And the mess it has become.

So, that’s another sort of in depth look at sort of where we’re at in terms of possessory credits for filmmakers on their movies.

**Craig:** What a dumb – I hate that credit.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s try Sue in the UK’s question. She writes, “I’m reasonably clear about how writing credits for features are worked out, but what if a producer buys a feature spec and then develops it as a TV show instead? What credit would the original writer be entitled to in that scenario? If they’re not involved in writing the TV show, might they get some sort of producer or creative consultant credit instead?”

Craig, what’s your instinct here?

**Craig:** If they develop it as a TV show, and I guess what Sue is saying is that the person writing it for television is somebody different. So, Sue, let’s say they buy Sue’s feature spec, and then they just turn around and hire somebody else and say, “Start writing a pilot that is based on this.” I think that’s kind of what she’s getting at, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a couple things. First, the question is, because Sue is in the UK, was the spec script written under the WGA? If it wasn’t, then we have an easy answer: it becomes source material. Just like a novel or anything. And in fact I don’t think you’re really guaranteed much of anything at all in this circumstance.

But if it was done under the WGA, and then the next person goes and turns it into a television script, I mean, first of all usually when you sell feature scripts there is a deal that says that you get the first shot at writing a television adaptation. But I don’t know. That’s a tricky one, too.

**John:** So, I do know. And I know that the answer is complicated. So, I don’t want to reveal which projects are involved here, but there are recent shows that have been based on films. Sometimes produced films or sometimes not produced films. And this issue of whether the underlying script was literary material, that it’s an adaptation from that, or that it was actually sort of WGA material, that it was actually script material became a very important issue in arbitration.

So, ultimately arbitration did happen. And there had to be sort of pre-hearings. It becomes quite complicated.

So, I can talk through sort of my own experience. If you look at Charlie’s Angels, so Charlie’s Angels is based on a TV show. But at the time I came onboard to write Charlie’s Angels, it was an adaptation of this underlying piece of property called Charlie’s Angels. And so therefore the original writers were credited as like having created Charlie’s Angels, but they were not credited – they weren’t part of the overall arbitration process. It wasn’t like they had screenplay material in the final thing. Other properties along the way, and more recently, they have been found to be actually part of the chain of title that led up to the script and therefore have gotten some WGA credit, which is a thing that can happen.

**Craig:** You know what I like about these two questions is that they’re the Writers Guild equivalent of Stump the Ump. Have you ever – yeah, why I am asking you if you’ve read a Stump the Ump?

**John:** I know Stump the Ump.

**Craig:** OK. So, I mean, there was like a book, I remember as a kid where they would say, OK, here’s the situation. What would the ump, what would you say if you were the umpire? And they’re really complicated. These are like a couple of those. These are definitely a couple of those. They’re tricky. And they depend. So, sorry, ish questions.

But you know what? I’m going to run both of these by credits staff to get firm answers. How about that? We’ll follow up with those next week.

**John:** You know what? A more sophisticated podcast might have like looked at these questions and actually gone to the staff ahead of time and gotten the right answer. But we’re not that podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] You say sophisticated and I say boring.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** That’s a boring show. This is more exciting. We have a cliffhanger now. Let’s go from England to Canada. Mark in Toronto writes, “I’m looking for an efficient way to make it clear that some pieces of dialogue are basically unimportant. The dialogue is only there so the actors have the words to say, but what they say is intentionally throw away and irrelevant to other things that are happening in the scene. Does it need to be spelled out in the action preceding it? Something like Jill launches into an irrelevant and boring story that no one listens to, followed by her dialogue? Or is there a parenthetical that would work? Something like (irrelevant) or (throwaway)?

So, John, how would you handle that situation?

**John:** I think trying to – the challenge with irrelevant or throwaway, like throwaway I could see as a parenthetical. That means the actor is meant to be throwing those lines away. But that’s not really what you’re telling – that’s an instruction to the actor, but it’s not really an instruction about the scene. I think your better instinct is to set it up in the action ahead of time and set it up in the reactions of the other characters so we can make it clear that it does not actually matter that much what the speaking character is saying.

And that’s a fine line because you have this temptation to sort of underwrite what the speaking character is saying, but you shouldn’t do that. You need to actually think about what can I have her say that is actually not crucial or germane and will let us tune it out so that we can focus what the other characters in the scene are doing. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** Well, when I was working with David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, they had a word for this, because in their style of comedy a lot of times people are just rambling in the foreground while funny things are happening in the background. And the rambling is part of the point of it all. And they had this Yiddish word for it called [Flucher] dialogue. And I’m not even sure if that means anything. Somebody will let us know. [Flucher] dialogue means anything. But they would call it [Flucher] dialogue. But you would write it. You would always write it out. It was actually very important because you wanted to make sure that the actor was saying it in such a way that the story was clearly intentional from them, right? They weren’t aware that they were just rambling. Otherwise they’re going to run out of words and then the gig is up, or the jig is up.

So, you would always write that out. What I would do in those circumstances is I would put a parenthetical in and it would usually be (drones) or (droning). And then they would start writing. But it was clear that therefore that wasn’t important. And then the next time they would talk, (still droning, still droning). So I would say droning. That was my word for how to kind of get across that they were performing this essential foreground but unimportant task.

**John:** Absolutely. What I think is good about that parenthetical is make it clear – it’s something for the actor to be aware of. That it’s not just a meta scene kind of thing. Because irrelevant or throwaway is not a playable moment in a weird way, but droning kind of is a playable moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like you’re commenting on its purpose in the movie, and I just want the actor and that character to do what they’re doing. Because the truth is that’s what they’re doing. They’re droning. They’re droning on. And oblivious. The other thing is sometimes I would say (oblivious). Because that was also important that they not notice what was going on in the background, otherwise that dialogue isn’t funny anymore. You know, its function isn’t funny anymore.

So, there you go, Mark. A couple of different ways to handle that.

**John:** Cool. Next up we have Mickey Fortune which is, again, an impossibly wonderful name. I don’t’ know if it’s a real name. But Mickey Fortune writes in, “If I am writing an original pilot as a writing sample, can I use the first episode of a limited series, or should I try to focus on creating a more traditional pilot for a series that would have multiple seasons?”

So, Craig, you are not a person who staffs TV writers. What’s your guess on whether what Mikey Fortune is trying to do is a valid choice?

**Craig:** Well, we certainly talk to plenty of showrunners, and every last one of them tells us that what they want is some kind of original work. They want a pilot of an original series. I’ve never heard any of them say and it has to be intended to be an ongoing series. Not one of them. I think if you wrote the first episode, of what was intended to be a six or ten episode series, well first of all, I’m not sure they would know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And second of all, who cares? Right? They’re not really evaluating you on your ability to generate a premise that could last 12 years. That’s what network executives might be looking for. But they’re just looking for good writers. So I don’t think it would matter at all.

**John:** I don’t think it matters one iota. You have to write the best 30, best 60 pages of scripts you possibly can write that will keep them incredibly intrigued. And if that is for a limited series, fantastic. And if anything, you know, the fact that it could be a little bit ambiguous whether it’s an ongoing series or something short, that’s something you can talk about in the room if you’re so lucky as to meet with this showrunner, this executive. You can talk about what this pilot was and what it might want to be.

Especially in an era where there are so many great limited series happening, there’s nothing to be avoided about having a limited series as your writing sample. People are making those all the time, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I am making one right now. Steven in Los Angeles writes, “I try to be mindful of representation when describing characters in terms of race. However, in my current project the characters races don’t play any significant role in the plot or interactions with other characters. They could be played by an actor of any color, despite how I’ve described them. Is it better to simply describe the character in colorblind terms? That is to say bright eyes and flirty smile? Or with racial implications, like dark skin and dreadlocks?”

OK, John, how do you approach this?

**John:** So I think the crucial thing to start off here is there’s no sort of perfect answer to this. And you’re always going to be wrestling with two sort of competing instincts. So, if you as the writer say nothing, the reader will likely default to thinking of these characters as white. Unless you’ve done something in the universe of your script to make them reach a little bit beyond white. So if the other characters in your world are diverse, they might be thinking more diverse about this character. But in general you can kind of safely assume that people are going to think these characters are white unless you give them some other reason not to think that they’re white.

The second thing to keep in mind is that every choice is a choice. And so the more specific the choice, the more important the reader is going to think it is that you’ve made that choice. So, they’re going to be asking like why is the boss Jamaican? They’re going to feel like there’s going to be some good reason why that boss is Jamaican. It’s going to pay off in some way. And so you might be sort of over-signaling things you don’t mean to signal.

So, you have these sort of weirdly competing things where you’re trying to be both specific about who your characters are, and also not just go back to default white on all these things. So, as an example, let’s think about a character in your script who is like a paralegal. And do you specify a race for that paralegal who is in like two or three scenes? It’s really hard to say. Craig, where do you come down at defining race for a character who is going to recur but whose race sort of by nature is never going to be a crucial aspect of the plot?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t call it out, but when I don’t call it out I am aware of something which is that I have a certain influence over these things, at least now in my career. So I can say to – when I submit, a lot of times when I submit the script to the producer or the studio, I will say, “By the way, here’s some of the people I was thinking about.” And in that email I will include people who obviously have race. Everybody has a color of some kind, right? White, black, or whatever. And so as I call people out, some of the actors will be what they are. And they will get a general understanding, OK, that there is no default white in this script, at least I didn’t write it as default white.

If I call it out specifically in a script, it’s because that character needs to be that race for a reason. So, for instance, I’m writing a movie for Disney and there’s a character who is largely CGI, so we’re really talking about a voice. And I’ve recommended somebody who is not white. But I don’t say that they’re not white in the script, because they don’t have a race at all. Similarly, there’s another character who is a human being and I’ve sent in a couple of recommendations that are different races, because the race is not important. It’s really about age and gravitas and other things that are just more important than skin color.

So, I think it’s fair for you, if you’re writing – especially if you’re writing a spec script to include here are some general ideas of who I was thinking when I was doing this, and that gives a general sense. Even that, that small thing, will unlock people from default white. They can start to see a more appropriately reflective cast to actual humanity.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s also worth looking for how do you sort of try to figure out race when you don’t have any more information, and what you probably are looking for is description, like as you’re reading through books how you’re trying to figure out race or to what degree are you aware of race as you’re reading things. And some of the things that tend to tip people towards certain choices are character’s names, their first names and their last names. So if you’re giving a character a first name and a last name, or however you’re identifying that character, that’s going to signal something about race. And so you can choose to be explicit by giving somebody a last name like Kim that strongly suggests that they are Korean, but you can also be mindful of like don’t give them a name that makes it sort of very difficult to imagine them as something other than that race.

And so if everybody in your script has a very Swedish or Norwegian name, those characters are unlikely to be cast as anything other than sort of white people. And so be mindful that you’re not putting up weird roadblocks in your script by naming characters certain names. And so it’s a balancing act.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** To the degree you can suggest people, you know, outside of the script for things, then you’re doing your job to sort of help make sure that the world of your movie is diverse and inclusive and representative of the world you’d like to see. But you’re always going to mindful of what you’re putting on the page there, so you’re not over-limiting your choices.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I think sometimes what ends up happening is people start to get nervous. And it’s white people that are getting nervous. Let’s be clear about this. White writers get nervous, not all of them, but some of them about seeming racist or falling into some kind of trap. And so they overthink. And they start to suddenly pepper the script with all these racial descriptions to signify look at me, look at me, I’m not default white. Which is fine, except that you’re actually doing something somewhat artificial at times. Because it doesn’t really matter.

If you have a waitress and her job is to look up and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you forgot your credit card,” that’s not necessary to call race out there. The script starts to feel almost pedantic in it’s like everybody gets a race.

Race is – you know, my whole attitude towards race is the ideal world is nobody gives a crap, right? And that’s the ideal world where it’s just like it doesn’t matter. Now, it does matter in the world today, so we have to be aware and conscious of it. But you don’t want to be artificial about it. It starts to remove the reader from the experience. I think it’s better to just think broadly in your mind about actors who are not just white or male.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then write and then let people know here are some of the people I was thinking about. It’s just a more artistically honest way of approaching it. I guess that’s how I would put it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say as I’m working on a project I’m trying to do a lot of diverse casting in my head as I’m writing it. So this sounds like what you’re doing for your Disney project as well. You are trying to envision the world of your movie as a diverse place and having lots of different kinds of people in it. And so I’m thinking about certain roles and certain actors in certain roles. And that may naturally sort of tip sort of some of the choices I’m making writing towards that theoretical actor. But you want to make sure that in writing for that theoretical actor, hopefully a whole range of actors could play that. And the degree to which you have influence over the process of actually making the movie, try to make sure that, you know, good choices are being made by everybody else.

**Craig:** There you go. I think that’s the perfect way of putting it.

**John:** Cool. Greg in Los Angeles writes, “As I listen to Episode 285, specifically the discussion about Sea Monkeys’ creator, I couldn’t help but think of the Spirit of St. Louis. It may seem like an odd connection. But when writing that film, Billy Wilder chose to ignore the racist aspects of Charles Lindberg’s life. Obviously when writing a film based on a real life person, we cannot include every aspect of their life. But would you consider it amoral to ignore such a defining characteristic, especially when considering such a crucial part of someone’s personality could to some degree affect the general public’s historical understanding of that specific individual?”

Craig, what do you think? So we talked about this, you know, on that episode where we talked about Sea Monkeys, like do you go into the racist stuff or do you not go into the racist stuff? What’s your thought overall about historical people?

**Craig:** It’s tough. You know, when I was a kid, I read – my dad had that book, The Spirit of St. Louis. So, I’ve never even seen the movie. I’ve just read the book. And it was pretty good. It was a good book. It’s a good story. An impressive guy. And also a Nazi. [laughs] So there’s that.

Yeah, you know, do you ignore these things? Let’s put it this way: it’s getting harder and harder. We live in a time now where no one is going to be turning a blind eye to any of that. If anything, people are looking for it. And I don’t think you can really get away with it anymore. It’s just about the culture. I think it feels too salient. So there are people still that because I guess they’ve been grandfathered in – Roald Dahl notoriously said some terrible things about Jewish people and, you know, we’ve kind of grandfathered him in, you know, function of his time and all that.

Then, you know, Lindberg you could argue function of his time. So, yes, the Founding Fathers were slave owners, but it’s so widely known and understood and people have contextualized it as, OK, yes, so George Washington clearly was a slave owner. And Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. And they’re on our money. And we have had a long national discussion about that. When you’re introducing new people that people aren’t quite as familiar with, like for instance the Sea Monkey guy, I don’t see how you can avoid it. Because somebody is going to dig it up and go, “Uh, did you not think this was worth mentioning?” You know?

**John:** Yeah. I completely agree with you. So, there is a different responsibility when you’re being the first sort of movie to introduce the world to this person. And especially a person who you could frame as a hero, it’s really problematic if you’re framing this person as a hero and the reality is they did some horrible things. That will come out. There’s no clean way to do that.

But I want to circle back to the Founding Fathers, because I think it is actually a really challenging time to make a movie about the Founding Fathers, because you sort of can’t ignore the slave stuff now. I think 20 years ago if you made a Washington movie, oh, you could sort of like do a little lip service to it. But you sort of can’t get away from that stuff now. And I don’t know that we really have had sort of the thorough national discussion about what slavery was like. I think it continues to sort of – more stuff does continue to get out. We still are grappling with sort of how we’re going to deal with that.

So about two years ago I went to Mt. Vernon and I’d been there as a kid, but going back there as an adult, they completely changed everything around and about it, so they were very much more upfront about sort of here’s Washington’s slaves’ house, and this was what it was like to be a slave on Washington’s plantation.

And so there was still the pretty house, and there’s still the family, and still sort of the normal Washington stuff, but it was all in the context of like these are the slaves and this is sort of what the reality of their life was like. And I have a hard time imagining a movie about Washington right now that would not go back and explore that. So, you look at Hamilton and Hamilton was able to sidestep some of that, but by making the racial aspect of it both a focus and sort of a recontextualization.

**Craig:** Yeah. But even in Hamilton, someone as brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda has to at some point submit to the demands of narrative. So, he makes a point of Jefferson being a slave owner repeatedly. Jefferson even says, “Sally, be a lamb,” refers to Sally Hemings, famous slave that he had an affair with in the first song that he sings, What Did I Miss? And it is to Jefferson that Hamilton says, you know, talking about the south, “Keep ranting. We know who’s really doing the planting.” And they talk about slavery a lot.

Washington is never mentioned in the context of slavery. And Washington is presented really as a pure hero in that musical. That’s part of the problem with slavery is that it unfortunately unwinds all heroism and all goodness. So, choices have to be made even in a show like Hamilton so that you can root for someone. And it doesn’t start to feel like it’s nihilistic because these are very difficult things. And when you’re creating a narrative, you are forced to simplify. And you could make a good argument that simplification is an inherently amoral act. It’s a very complicated topic, to say the least.

I would love to talk with Lin-Manuel Miranda about that very thing. I’m very curious how he approached that character of Washington given the circumstances of how – because the show is so clearly – goes out of its way, not just through the casting, but through the subject material itself and the lyrics to comment on slavery repeatedly.

So, interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see. We’ve got Jason writing in. “For an aspiring screenwriter, how much weight does the industry give toward professional experience in a given field? Me, Jason, I have 19 years in law enforcement, specifically detective work. If I write something that uses that experience, a crime thriller for example, would my biography and background give me an advantage beyond hopefully a sense of verisimilitude? Basically, do pieces speak for themselves, or is the writer as a person taken into account?”

That’s an excellent question, Jason. John, what is your answer?

**John:** So I think Jason has a leg up in a couple ways. So, he definitely has experience. Hopefully he’ll be able to translate that experience into the words on the page. If he can’t translate that experience into the words on the page, his real life experience is not so helpful. But I think he’s starting from a great place in that he actually does understand what the real life is like. And that should help him in his writing.

Secondly, the degree that he actually gets in the room with people, that’s fascinating. And so I think that sort of experience would help get him staffed on a TV show or help get him a certain assignment to do a police thriller because it’s like, oh, this guy actually knows what he’s talking about in a way that’s incredibly useful.

In general I would say that if you have a lot of experience as like an emergency services dispatcher, that’s going to be less valuable than sort of a cool cinematic experience like being a police detective. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question in my mind. No question at all. If you have this kind of background, I think people love that in Hollywood. They actually love it too much. So, it is a great calling card. They will immediately grant you a certain legitimacy as a writer. Definitely if you are writing something that draws on that experience, it’s a great calling card. It’s a great way in. If you’re writing something that doesn’t, obviously it’s irrelevant. But there are some writers who were physicians and then turned to writing. Zoanne Clack, for instance, is one. And they tend to work on medical shows. I think David Shore–

**John:** He’s a real lawyer.

**Craig:** Oh, he was a lawyer. Because he worked on House and–

**John:** Oh, maybe he was a doctor.

**Craig:** But, no, he also worked on Law & Order, so he might have been a lawyer. Look, there’s a ton of lawyers. I think there’s so many lawyers that turn to writing that that doesn’t mean anything anymore. But, being a detective in law enforcement I think would absolutely grab people’s attention. So, I would encourage you if you’re interested in writing material based on that, you should. Yeah, I think you use the phrase leg up. Perfect phrase for it.

**John:** David Shore. Prior to becoming a writer, Shore was a partner for a law firm in London, Ontario.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Canadian there. Where he practiced corporate and municipal law. But yeah, people coming from law firms who then write legal thrillers, the John Grishams, that’s a really common experience. For you to go from being a police detective for 17 years to then writing those things, that could be great, but it’s ultimately going to come down are you a really good writer? Because that’s going to be more important than your experience really?

**Craig:** We should get Zoanne Clack on this show. So, Zoanne Clack worked on Grey’s Anatomy and – is that show still on the air? Is that on the air?

**John:** Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air. Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe she still works on it. Sad, I don’t watch the television. But, she is a real doctor. Real doctor. She actually worked even for the CDC. So that’s obviously a huge boon, certainly if you’re going to be writing a medical show. Can’t beat that. So, yes, Jason, go for it.

**John:** You know who we need to get on the show? Shonda Rhimes. I know she’s been a fantasy guest for a long time, but we know people who know her. I don’t know why we – maybe when I get back to Los Angeles, that will be a goal. We’ll get Shonda on the show.

**Craig:** I feel like we don’t need to know people that know her. We just call her up. Just say hey.

**John:** I went to film school with Shonda Rhimes. I used to hang out with Shonda Rhimes way back in the day.

**Craig:** Then you know you who knows her.

**John:** I know me who knows her. But it’s been years. But it would be great to catch up with Shonda Rhimes.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Let’s go to Sam in Australia who writes, “How do you implement a broad ‘make it funnier’ note? For example, you submit a scene and the reader doesn’t think it’s that funny, so they say, ‘Make it funnier.’ On one hand, it’s your audience, so you should try to appeal to them. On the other, you love it and you think it’s hilarious.” Craig, make it funnier.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] That’s not a note. That’s stupid. That’s a failure. Look, that is an indication that something has gone terribly wrong. Either you’re not as funny as you think you are, or there is a mismatch of sense of humor here. Or mismatch of tone. Now, sometimes comedy technicians can get together and say, OK, here’s why I think this isn’t as funny as it could be, and here’s what I think we would need to do to make it funnier. That’s different. That’s the sort of discussion that – and I call them comedy technicians. I’m one of them. Because if you write comedy, and I’m talking about comedy-comedy, whether you’re on a sitcom or you’re writing like heavy comedy movies, like comedy-comedy-comedy, jokes-jokes, jokes, there is technique involved. There is a lot of machinery involved. It is a science.

And so that’s one thing. But if you’ve got some note-giver, a producer or an executive sitting there going it just needs to be funnier, well, you’re done. There’s no – I don’t know what that means. So, no.

**John:** Well, I do know what it means. I’ve never actually given the note Make it Funnier, but I definitely have thought the note Make it Funnier, where like I see a scene that sort of feels like it’s jokeoid-ish. Like it has the – it feels like it wants to be funny, but it’s not actually funny. And sometimes I can be specific about like this is why it’s actually not working for me. But sometimes it’s just like this just isn’t a funny way to do it. Or like you’re trying to make a joke out of something that’s not really a joke.

And so I will never give the note make it funnier, but I will try to focus on why this is not making me laugh. Now, this note that you’ve gotten, if this is the third time they’ve read the script, that Make it Funnier may be partly because they’re just sick of it. Jokes aren’t funny like the third time through. And so it’s hard for you as the writer to remind them that like, you know what, that is actually funny. It was funny the first couple times they read it. It’s just it’s not new to them anymore. And I’ve encountered that with real life stuff where like a movie that’s been in development for a year and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if like this relationship was funnier.” It’s like, “Well, it actually is funny, but you just don’t remember it being funny because you are seeing it for the 15th time. And when you stick actual actors saying those lines, it will be funny.”

And that’s hard for you as the writer to say. But sometimes that is the reality.

**Craig:** Look, comedy is the hardest. The hardest. And the truth is we don’t really know. I mean, even the best – best, best comedy people – are guessing, all the time. That’s what writing comedy is. It’s an endless series of guessing that you are going to put this combination of words and actions together and shoot it and edit it in such a way that people are going to have this involuntary physical reaction and start laughing at it. You’re guessing.

And nobody bats a thousand, right? I mean, that’s why things get cut out all the time. You just want to be batting as high as you can. But I can’t tell you how many times I have been surprised by how strongly people have laughed at something. And then also on the other hand, people just, no. Nope. That doesn’t work at all.

You know, most of the time you get the response you expect. But there are those things on either end. So it’s just very, very difficult. Sam, the truth is you may be really, really funny and this person may just stink.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Or, you may not be that funny and they’re just telling you. Or, something in between. There’s really no way to know. But if you think you love it and you think it’s hilarious. That’s it, right? That’s what you think. And now really what it comes down to is does anyone else agree? And if you can’t find anyone to agree, then there is a mismatch between your sense of humor and the rest of the world, which happens.

**John:** It does happen. This last week I posted a long blog post and someone pointed on Twitter, which was absolutely true, like you’re blogging a lot. Are you avoiding other work? I’m like, yes, I’m avoiding other work. I’m trying to avoid starting on something, and so therefore I’m blogging a lot.

But I blogged about this Twitter joke which I thought was just fantastic and was so clearly destined to become a clam, which is Hold My Beer. So, one of the first times I remember seeing this joke set up on Twitter was around the election. And so this was a Tweet from Brian Pedaci. It says, “BRITAIN: Brexit is the stupidest, most self-destructive act a country could undertake. USA: Hold my beer.”

So the structure of the joke is basically like, you know, speaker A says something outrageous and impossible to top and speaker B says, “Hold my beer,” like I’m going to get in this, I’m going to be able to do this.

And so I wanted to sort of look into why is that funny and why does it work and why does it not work? Because one of the great things about Twitter is you can search for phrases or exact matches of phrases and figure out like how are people trying to use this joke and sort of what are the actual requirements for this to be funny?

So, I say this not to our Australian friend to encourage him to study the structure of comedy jokes and try to figure out why his jokes aren’t working, but there can be sometimes clear reasons why a person’s joke is not working. So, for the Hold my Beer joke to be funny, you have to know who speaker A is. And that’s sort of a fundamental thing in most jokes. Everything about the premise has to be incredibly straight forward for us to be able to understand it. So, you have to understand who speaker A is, the thing that speaker A says has to be reasonable for who speaker A is. Speaker B has to be recognizable. And the Hold my Beer has to relate to something they’ve just done, or something they’re just about to do.

And so almost all jokes, whether they’re like this sort of Twitter joke, or the kinds of things you’re setting up in your scene, there is a fundamental kind of logic behind them. There has to be a very simple believable way to get into it and the payoff, the surprise, has to be related to it in a meaningful way. And so this is a long discussion of like spoiling a really funny Twitter joke that was very clearly destined to become a clam.

**Craig:** I think you just killed it. [laughs]

**John:** As I sort of wrote the post, I recognized that like it was destined to die anyway. So, I just wanted to actually look at it and also a lot of times in a dead joke beautiful things grow in the bones of that dead joke. And so I’ve seen already some really good second wave of those, which is like, “Girlfriend: I’m sick of people barking patriarchal instructions at me. Me: Hold my beer.” That was a Tom Neenan joke.

So people who use the format of the joke to make sort of a meta joke. And that’s the delightful time we live in.

**Craig:** We do. We do. Yeah, that one has been around for a while. I feel like that one has been around for a while. It’s kind of the grandson of Now Watch this Drive, which was based on a George W. Bush moment.

Yeah, but Hold my Beer, it actually goes way back to – it used to be just something that dumb people said before they did something stupid and then hurt themselves.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And now it’s evolved into this thing. But I’m pretty sure you just assassinated it.

**John:** Back in 2014 it really was the setup. It was the frame around a stupid thing that someone was going to do. And so by putting it as the punchline though, I think it’s actually a much better form and a much better form for Twitter. It’s going to die, and so I think I hastened its death, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I also loved the variant forms of it. So like there’s obviously Hold my Drink, or Hold my Juice Box, but I also love Hold my Earrings, because just the idea of a woman taking out her earrings because she’s going to like go into somebody.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s a whole different thing. Yeah.

**John:** That’s an amazing – because you can see the action when someone is taking out their earrings. It’s just great.

It’s come time for our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is an episode of Girls from this season called American Bitch. And so it is written by Lena Dunham. It is directed by Richard by Shepard. And it’s a two-hander. It just stars Lena and Matthew Rhys, the guy from The Americans. And if you’ve not watched Girls or if you’ve watched a few episodes of Girls and sort of stopped watching it, it’s absolutely worth going back and taking a look at this one episode, because it’s all self-contained. It’s two characters on a set talking. And it is remarkable.

And it deserves all the acclaim it’s gotten. So, I’ll link to an Emily Nussbaum article. She wrote about it in The New Yorker. But I think it’s just actually a great study in how much you can do in a short basically real time piece of two characters in a room talking. So, in this case you already know Hannah’s character, the character Lena Dunham plays. But to set up a character and set up the conflicts to allow the viewer to sort of fill in the details of what must have gotten them to this place, it was just great. It started in the middle of an action. It was just a really well done episode. So I strongly encourage everyone to watch American Bitch from this last season of Girls.

And while you’re falling back in love with Matthew Rhys, you should watch the new season of The Americans because it’s a great show and he’s great on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on my list of things that you know I’ll not get to.

**John:** Craig, I would argue that you would very much like this episode. And doing the things you need to do in television these days particularly, it’s so remarkably well done.

**Craig:** What if I hate it? What if I hate it?

**John:** If you hate it, it’s 25 minutes of your life.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** 25 whole minutes.

**Craig:** Do you know what I normally do with those 25 minutes?

**John:** We know exactly what you do with those 25 minutes. The door locks. Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. John. Locks from the outside so you can’t get in.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That doesn’t make any sense.

**Craig:** No. I don’t have to make sense. I just have to make love. Oh, Sexy Craig, beat it. Well, my One Cool Thing is – this is not at all what you said. It’s totally different. Yes, it’s another app.

You know, I’m on an app kick lately, but my son introduced me to this one. It’s one of these games that you can play with your friends and it’s called Stop. But it’s very, very clever. So the game, Stop, that’s what it’s called. And it’s essentially just like a category game where you spin a wheel, a letter shows up, and then you have five categories. And you just have to fill in a word that fits that category that starts on the letter that you’ve picked.

But, the little brilliant twist to this is that at any point if you’re the first person, so if you won the last round you get to go. You can hit stop. So, if you look at the five categories and you’re like, oh god, I only know one of these. I’m typing in real fast, I’m hitting Stop. That amount of time you spent is the only amount of time the next person gets. But they don’t know how much time they get. So, when you’re going after somebody, part of your equation is like, oh god, how much time do they take? How much time do I have? How should I prioritize my answers?

Very clever little game. Lots of fun. You should play it.

**John:** Very good. It sounds like there’s some game theory involved in the game itself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. Before we wrap up today, I want to thank everybody who submitted their reviews for the listener’s guide, or the Scriptdecks, or whatever we’re going to call this big compendium of user reviews for Scriptnotes. Basically what episodes do you think are the “can’t miss” episodes of Scriptnotes for new listeners.

So, we’ve gotten more than a hundred now of people writing in to review sort of which episodes they think are crucial for listening to. And surprisingly few repeats. I mean, there’s some which I sort of knew were going to be really popular. But like from all seasons from all years, there are things that have been singled out. So thank you very much for everyone who has contributed. Please continue to do so. Whenever we have enough of these, I don’t know what enough is going to be, but we’ll figure out some good form for those. It could be a book. It could be another site. Some other way for people to experience Scriptnotes. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Pow.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s where you can also send questions like the ones we answered today on the podcast. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your short questions on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Also search for Scriptnotes in the iTunes store and leave us a review there. That’s lovely when you do that.

We have an app for both iOS and for Android. That lets you get to all the back episodes, all nearly 300 episodes of the show, including some bonus episodes. To subscribe, you go to Scriptnotes.net. And it’s $2 a month and is a bargain at that price.

**Craig:** Bargain.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this week’s episode and all previous episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts. They go up about four days afterwards. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Let’s do this again next week.

**John:** We will.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** End of Recording.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The Vanity Credit Turns 100](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/vanity-credit-a-film-by)
* [“The Cunning “American Bitch” Episode of “Girls””](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cunning-american-bitch-episode-of-girls)
* [Stop](http://www.stop-fanatee.com/)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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_292.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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