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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-script-graveyard).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 234 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Very often on the program we will talk about the birth of a project, the excitement of bringing a movie to life. This is not one of those episodes. Today, we’re going to take a look at what happens to scripts when they die. So join us, won’t you, as we visit the screenplay graveyard.

**Craig:** I like that you did the “Join us, won’t you?” You’re picking up — it’s a Longworth-ism.

**John:** It is. I’m playing the Longworthicon.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s — yeah, is it Longworthism, Longworth-ism?

**John:** Longworthism, yeah, sure.

**Craig:** But I like long. It’s like because it’s worthy.

**John:** As long as it was Longworthy, that’s important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Karina Longworth, we’ve talked about her podcast often. You Must Remember This is the name of the podcast. And also, like a good advice is that you must remember her podcast because it’s such a terrific resource for people curious about the early years of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Right. And all the people that she talks about are dead. So it’s a good — it’s in keeping with our theme today.

**John:** Indeed. On our last episode, we promised that if you left a review in iTunes for us, we’d read those reviews aloud. And so we’ve got a few of those. They’re all five-star reviews because you are the best, and apparently, you think we’re the best. So we’re going to quickly read some of these reviews that were left for us on iTunes this past week.

**Craig:** Should I start?

**John:** Start.

**Craig:** I like that the reviews get little titles. You know, people come with fun little titles.

This title is “Yes. This. Yes” by Arlow Thompson. “Possibly the most useful screenwriting tool ever created, not to mention engaging and very entertaining. I can’t thank John and Craig enough for the wisdom and humor they dole out weekly.”

**John:** Oh, thank you Arlow.

**Craig:** That’s really nice.

**John:** So Breezy Nuts writes — [laughs]

**Craig:** You know, I wasn’t planning this but it’s worked out great. [laughs]

**John:** “A Free Neuro Exam. If you have any interest in screenwriting and you do not like this podcast, please see a doctor immediately because something is horribly wrong with you.”

**Craig:** Like for instance, you’ve got breezy nuts. [laughs]

**John:** What I like about Breezy Nuts is like that’s actually the handle here she had to create in order to leave this thing. So if he or she leaves other comments somewhere else — let’s say — it’s a he — when he leaves comments for some other thing, it will be Breezy Nuts. [laughs]

**Craig:** There is literally zero chance that Breezy Nuts is a woman. [laughs] Women are simply too good. They’re too good to call themselves Breezy Nuts. [laughs] What is a breezy nut?

**John:** I don’t know, someone who is free-rolling, someone who’s not refined by briefs.

**Craig:** Right. Well, here’s somebody called Josephine. I’m not sure how to pronounce that. But regardless, it says, “Interesting even though I’m not in the industry. I write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and I find this podcast incredibly useful in terms of what makes a good story. It’s also just interesting to get a window into the screenwriting world, to hear about what goes into the movies and TV I love.”

**John:** Oh, well thank you Josephine.

**Craig:** I like when people that aren’t necessarily doing movie and TV listen to this anyway. I like — I think there’s — you know, we have a nice little community of writers. And writers, no matter what you’re writing, we’re all in the same boat of misery.

**John:** Absolutely. And Becca Baldwin calls this, “Team Scriptnotes. Interesting, inspiring, empowering, and free even, or $1.99 a month, so you know, free.”

So thank you, Becca, for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** The $1.99 reference is for people who want the premium feed at scriptnotes.net where you can go back to the first 232 episodes of this show and listen to those and catch up if you’re a new listener.

But thank you very much for everyone who’s left a review. It actually really does help us a lot because it gets attention within the iTunes ecosystem and gets them to feature us more prominently. So it’s nice for that.

**Craig:** Thank you folks.

**John:** If you are a person who attended our Lawrence Kasdan session with Jason Bateman last night, I hope you had a great time. We’re recording this before that time so we have no idea how it went, but hopefully it was great. That episode will be in the feed some point in the future. So I’m not sure if it will be next week but we will definitely have that episode for everyone to listen to.

**Craig:** Can you just promise me that if, for some reason, Jason goes crazy, attacks Larry, Larry has a fatal heart attack.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Jason is arrested and sent downtown for murder, that we will not edit what you just said. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. I will leave it exactly untouched. Matthew has strict orders to not address reality in this podcast.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Yeah. Matthew is mostly there to make sure that my fumbles and misspeakings are not corrected.

**Craig:** Misspeakings was almost self-definitional. [laughs]

**John:** So it’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some follow-up from last week’s episode.

So we talked about How Would This Be a Movie? And two of the three things we talked about like How Would This be a Movie actually are movies or are about to be movies. So first off we had the Hatton Garden’s robbery, which was a bunch of old men who committed an audacious two-day bank heist.

**Craig:** Yeah. And not only is this something that I think is currently in production — or I guess it’s about to go into production or something. But I actually got an email from a producer friend of mine who said, “I went after the rights to that thing and lost to the guy that’s doing the version that they’re planning.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now, we never know. You know, people get the rights to a story, and then they develop a screenplay and try and get financing. And sometimes the movie happens, and sometimes it ends up in the dead letter file we’re going to be describing later.

So we don’t know if it’s going to be a movie. But it certainly seems like, yeah, that was — I mean, we both felt that was the obvious one. And it turns out yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s pretty obvious.

**John:** So we’ll put a link in the show notes to an article in The Guardian that talks about the movie that’s apparently going into production. The script written by Simon Cluett. They say it’s in production. But really, if you’ve look at the language that they’re talking about, they’re not announcing the director or the cast. They’re really in development. But it sounds like they’re trying to get that movie made.

Also, a listener, Andrew Aman, wrote in to point out that the real men in this robbery were not nearly the Robin Hood characters that we sort of had described. They’re actually — I’ll put up an article that also shows sort of their criminal history and sort of the things that they’ve done, including like dousing a man in gasoline.

It seems like they’re actually a little bit more like old Reservoir Dogs rather than old Robin Hood. So sometimes real life doesn’t match what you kind of wish it would be for movie purposes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, we did — I think when we were talking about what it could possibly be, we started to zero in on the idea that maybe one of these guys was actually pretty dark. Criminals tend to be dark.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. It reminded me a little bit, once I started reading about the real thing, it reminded a little bit of Begbie, you know, from Trainspotting, you know, there’s a group of mates, and then there’s one of them that’s just psychotic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it does sound like — yeah. You know, all too often, we get suckered into the narrative. The Robin Hood narrative is very seductive. But generally speaking, people that do stuff like break into banks are not good people.

**John:** Yeah. I would tend to agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We also talked about — sleep paralysis was the second topic we talked about in our How Would This Be a Movie? And there actually was a sleep paralysis movie that I’d forgotten about. And so this was not strictly a fictional film. It’s by Rodney Ascher who also did Room 237 which looked at the conspiracy theory surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.

So he made a movie that’s about sleep paralysis that uses a similar kind of technique to explore people’s experiences with sleep paralysis. So that’s out there in the world. But it’s not the horror thriller version that I think we both foresaw someone trying to make.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not too late.

**John:** It’s not too late.

**Craig:** Somebody will do it.

**John:** It’s an open ball.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Someone dive on that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Also on an open ball, I tweeted this this morning, you’ve seen about the ninth planet they’re pretty sure exists now?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, I did see that.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean, someone will make a movie called Planet Nine. And we’ll see what that is.

My pitch for it was that it turns out it’s not a planet whatsoever. It’s actually some very massive alien thing that’s been lying dormant out there. And in our attempt to discover it, we will turn it on. And we’re going to regret that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that.

My pitch is, we discover this ninth planet and it’s totally inhabited. In fact, it’s almost exactly like ours.

**John:** Yeah?

**Craig:** And then we start to think, “Wait a second, is that a real planet, or is that just a reflection of ours? Or are we the reflection?”

**John:** Yeah. I mean, we’re already — we’re living in a simulation, regardless.

**Craig:** Regardless. But I’m going for — I’m going for trippy. I’m going for a head trip.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I like you’re going alien super structure.

**John:** They’re both great choices.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

The other bit of follow-up was from our discussion of Matt. And so if you remember, Matt was a guy who had a 10-block walk in the cold to his favorite coffee shop. He couldn’t do it in the winter. He’s in New York City. But he lives in a studio apartment with his wife, so he couldn’t write in the apartment.

And so we asked our listeners for their suggestions about places Matt could write or solutions to Matt’s problem. And five of them wrote in with really good ideas. So I thought we’d read through some of their suggestions.

**Craig:** All right.

So RJ has a pretty decent one. He said, when he first moved to LA he lived in a two-bedroom, one bath with his wife and another couple.

Wow, that’s a lot of people. That’s almost Charlie Bucket-esque.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There was no space for him to write. So what he did was he ended up locking himself in the bathroom. He put on headphones and he just worked in the bathroom, which, you know, he says worked like a charm.

Eh, you know, it’s still a bathroom.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s your own room.

**Craig:** It’s your own room, I guess, yeah. You know, if there’s — I would think that there would have to be — he says it’s a two-bed, one bath. So all the other people in your crash pad are just going to have to hold it in for a while until you finish your scene.

**John:** Yep. I got it. Someone has needs. You have needs, too. Your characters have needs. They need to be written. [laughs]

**Craig:** You know what this guy has?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Breezy nuts.

**John:** Yes, breezy nuts. He’s free-balling.

Liz writes, I have two four-hour blocks per week in which my boyfriend is not allowed in the apartment at all. My boyfriend uses his time to practice flying his quadcopter or to go to the gym.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It took us awhile to come to this, but the degree of stress and resentment relief he saw in me when we made this time sacrosanct was significant enough to make it totally worth his while. And he actually likes having an enforced me-time out of the house that can’t be wasted on Reddit.

That’s a smart solution.

**Craig:** It is. And I feel like I know Liz’s boyfriend just from the description. He goes to the gym, okay. Gym bro.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But likes to practice flying his quadcopter and Redditor.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I feel like actually we’d get along pretty well with this guy.

**John:** I think it’s going to be a good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

David says that he finds himself in Matt’s exact same position. His solution, his apartment, and most have a TV room. Some call it a theater, some call it a movie room, but most apartments I’ve been in have something similar. If not the lobby, lounge is also good.

Well, Matt, I think said he was in a studio apartment. Studio apartments don’t have more than one room. They’ve got a room that bleeds into a kitchen. And the only separate room really is the bathroom, right?

**John:** So I think David is mistaken because I think he — wherever David is living, which may not be the US, stuff may be set up a little bit differently. I think he’s thinking sort of like more how dorms used to work, where there was like a TV room or like a —

**Craig:** Oh, like a common space.

**John:** A common room.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so that lobby aspect of it is true. And there very well could be some sort of public entry vestibule kind of place where you could kick back with your laptop and write. It’s entirely possible.

The laundry room is a possibility, too, if your building has a laundry room.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting one.

**John:** Some place that’s not your main space.

**Craig:** Yeah. In New York you’ll see that less frequently than you will in LA.

**John:** Oh, for sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. They just don’t have the space to waste it on lobbies and so forth, or big ones.

**John:** Yeah.

Do you want to do Tom?

**Craig:** Sure. Tom says he does a lot of writing at a local pub. So Tom is an alcoholic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Tom.

He does a lot of writing at a local pub to the point that the first serious script he co-wrote was based in a pub. And when the owner — he’s such an alcoholic. [laughs] And when the owner of the pub heard about it, the owner offered up the actual pub as a location for the project. And they ended up shooting there for a couple of days. So that actually worked out pretty well.

**John:** That worked out great.

**Craig:** Yeah. As long as Tom isn’t just, you know, drinking himself to death, that’s the only thing.

**John:** Yeah. I’m a big fan of going to sort of bar kind of places for lunch because if you’re not actually drinking there, there are sometimes decent food and they are really quiet. So there have been times where I’ve been in New York and I will go to a place that’s sort of mostly a night place. And if you’re there during the day, it’s kind of empty.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

Finally, Jessica writes, “If he doesn’t mind spending money, there’s an app called Breather that lets you book a workspace for an hourly fee. It’s available in New York.” And so we’ll put a link to their website, an article in Fast Company.

So this is not something I was aware of, but it does make sense, especially in a city like New York where everything is just so busy and so crowded that just assuming you could — you know, Uber for a car, you could probably Uber for some space to do some work.

**Craig:** This is really interesting. It’s sort of like the Airbnb of offices.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you could just hire an office for an hour. Because that’s the thing about New York, everything is so constrained and all resources are so diminished that if you have an office and you’re not in it for a day, you’re losing money by not renting it to somebody.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Which is crazy, but true.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean, some sort of shared workspace might be a possibility. And you’re going to find some combination of things that will get through it. There’s probably not going to be one way that’s going to magically solve all of these problems. But just, you know, carve out the time more than anything else, and then find the space.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely. When there is a will, there is a way. You’ll figure it out.

**John:** Cool.

We have a question from John Hess. And John Hess has this website that does a series of videos about filmmaking that’s really useful. So there will be a link to his website in our show notes.

John Hess writes, “I am in the process of putting together a video for filmmakers and the general movie goer that tries to explain the function of every credit they would see in the end titles. It’s a big task, obviously, and I can only dedicate a little bit of time to each role. But I do want to dedicate more time to explain the role of producers, directors, and screenwriters. So I want to ask you, is there some common misconception about the screenwriting credit you wish the average movie-going audience would know?”

Craig, how about you? You can start.

**Craig:** That’s really good. I’m glad that he’s doing it.

Well, here’s one, a simple one. Unlike everybody else’s credit, which is, okay, you acted in the movie or you directed the movie, or edited the movie, we have two kinds of credits. We have story credit and screenplay credit.

So it would be great for people to know, first of all, that when they see Written By, it means story and screenplay. If they see a story credit, what that means is that those writers were responsible for what we think of as the basic plot, the basic characters, the basic idea, the basic themes. The way I like to put it is those people are responsible for stuff that could have been put in a prose document describing what the movie would be.

Screenplay is the credit we give to people that actually then are responsible for the authorship of the execution. So individual scenes, how they are crafted, the ins and outs, the transitions, all the dialogue, the way that the basic characters are expressed.

So it’s an interesting dichotomy. People aren’t aware that it exists. And sometimes you won’t see any story credit. And in that case it’s because the movie was based on an underlying property and the story of that property really is the story of the movie, so no writer is going to get additional story credit for it.

**John:** Yeah. I do think when people see the story credit, they assume like, “Oh, it’s based on a short story, or it’s based on something like that.” It just means that, you know, it could have been based on a screenplay but the screenplay’s story, a certain writer got credit for that and someone else got credit for writing the screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes somebody will write a treatment, which is what we call a summary of a movie. You know, a prose summary of a movie. And then someone else will write a screenplay. Well, the person that wrote the treatment, that’s a story credit thing. And the person that wrote the screenplay is a screenplay thing.

Where it gets tricky is sometimes people do write screenplays. But then a subsequent screenwriter is really just taking the story elements from it and writing a new screenplay of it.

So you know, how you can get to a story credit? Lots of different ways.

The other thing you’ll see is Screen Story By. And all that means is, it’s the same thing as Story By. It’s just the term we use when the movie was based on a book or something. But the story of the movie is significantly different from the story of the underlying property or the underlying property didn’t have much of a story at all.

**John:** I’m trying to think of the simpler way that he can explain that because that was so long.

I would say a story is what we kind of think of as plot and screenplay is everything that you think of as being the movie. So the scenes — the scenes, the characters, the dialogue.

That’s the very short version. That’s not quite fully flushed out but would get people through most of it.

The simple thing I want to point out to people is the difference between the word and — A-N-D — and the ampersand, because people often ask about that.

An ampersand means that those two writers worked together as a team. The words A-N-D mean that those two writers worked separately. So you could tell if someone’s a writing team because there’s an ampersand between their names.

And so sometimes those credits look kind of strange because it will be Writer A & Writer B and Writer C. And that’s because letter A and B are a team and writer C worked on his own.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s a very good summary.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s get to our main topic for the day.

So this actually came up because over the weekend I decided to do some housecleaning. And I went through a bunch of old file cabinets, like literal file cabinets where I had stuff from a bunch of old projects. I also went through and cleaned up some stuff from my hard drive, moved some stuff on to Dropbox, got rid of some stuff I didn’t need. And I came across so many old things.

And one of the things I came across was this project called Father Knows Less. I’m like, “What is this?” And it’s like, “Oh, my god! I actually wrote this script and I did not even remember it.”

But I didn’t even start writing it. Aline Brosh McKenna, our friend of Scriptnotes, she wrote this script. It was a spec script she wrote and sold. And how I first met Aline Brosh McKenna is I was hired on to rewrite her.

And so I called her before rewriting and saying like, “Hey, this is incredibly awkward. But our mutual friend John Gatins said that you are an awesome person and I should talk to you before I start rewriting this.” And that was our first conversation ever in this entire history of the world was about her script. And so —

**Craig:** See, that’s wonderful, actually.

**John:** That’s wonderful. And that’s why — by the way, that’s what you should do when you’re coming on to a project, is talk to the previous writer. Unless there’s some crazy bad blood reason why you don’t talk to that writer, talk to that writer.

And so she was great. And she told me the history of the project and sort of where the bodies were buried and why she wasn’t writing the next draft. And I did my very best on the project and it never got made. It became a dead movie.

So I thought we would talk about dead movies, dead screenplays, the things we’ve written that have never gotten made.

**Craig:** I like the idea of dead movies. And I’ll tell you why. I always feel like I have two possible jobs. Either I’m going to convince everybody that we’re making this movie or I’m going to convince everybody to kill it. [laughs] To me, the only failure is when you don’t convince them to make it. And they’re also like, “But we do want to make it, just not with you.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I like — I’m always trying to either make it or kill it. And I’ve succeeded to kill quite a few of these things. [laughs]

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately killed a movie. I think anything that died on the table was — it was just going to die by itself.

**Craig:** Well, no. I mean, I didn’t set out to kill it. But in my effort — I think what I did was I proved beyond a shadow of doubt that there was no possible movie there. [laughs]

They’re like, “You did the best possible job we can think of and you’ve convinced us to not make this.” [laughs] So this has happened a number of times. It’s very gratifying.

**John:** So each of us has in front of us a long list of movies that we’ve written that have not gotten made. And when I say movies we’ve written, I deliberately excluded anything that was just a rewrite. So these are only projects that I was the first writer on or sort of initiated.

**Craig:** Oh. Okay.

**John:** So you have a few that maybe some rewrites. But like, my list of like 15, these are like original things I wrote.

**Craig:** Actually, I’m looking at it. And nope, they’re all — one was a page one.

**John:** Right. So why don’t you quickly go through yours, I’m going to quickly go through mine. But then let’s talk about the patterns we notice about why these movies are dead movies.

**Craig:** Sure. Okay. So mine range from 1998 to 2011, and here they are in the order.

1998, the Texas Grease War. This was a spec script about guys in Texas who were stealing grease from fast food places to sell them. And it was this very morose, sad downer that I wrote mostly just to show people that I can write other things.

**John:** And that was a spec script.

**Craig:** It was a spec and it was based on just some information that a couple of friends of mine had brought me. They were producers. But it wasn’t anything anyone had ever asked for. And after people read it they’re like, “Yeah. Nice. But we don’t want it.” So that went to a drawer.

Next was a sad one, A Short, Happy Life. This was based on a Phillip Dick short story. And I wrote it for Miramax.

And that script actually got me a lot of attention, and it was really rewarding to work on. It was very sweet and people really liked it. But unfortunately, Miramax. So they couldn’t quite get their act together. They lost the rights to it. It just — it never — and it was also intended for Robert Benigni — I’m sorry, Roberto Benigni. And between the time I started writing it and the time I turned it in, Pinocchio happened. [laughs] So —

**John:** Oy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then in — that was 2001.

Also in 2001, Into the Fire. This was a broad comedy that was loosely based on the idea of a guy going into the Iron Chef competition. This was during the Iron Chef craze.

And this was something that Neal Moritz and Erik Feig wanted far more than Sony ever did. [laughs] So I think they twisted Sony’s arm to hire me to write this thing. And then, Sony was like, “Well, as we said before — [laughs]

**John:** “We never wanted this.”

**Craig:** “We did not want this.”

Really sad one, from 2004 to 2006, Berkeley Breathed and I worked on various ideas for an animated movie based on Opus, his famous penguin character from Bloom County, a comic strip that has returned.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It was incredibly rewarding because I was a lifelong Bloom County fan. I became friends with Berkeley. I’m friends with him to this day. And it’s just — it was so rewarding to work with him.

On the downside, Miramax. They —

**John:** There seems to be a recurring pattern here?

**Craig:** Yeah. They didn’t seem to understand that animated movies cost money and stuff. So they just couldn’t ever get their minds around the budget. It was a rough one.

In that same period, another great disappointment for me, I was hired by Miramax to adapt, Harvey, the Mary Chase play upon which also the famous Jimmy Stewart movie was made. And that one also got me a lot of great attention. And I was feeling really, really good about that. Miramax just couldn’t quite, again — it was like — it was hard. [laughs]

And none of those, like on every single one I’ve mentioned, after me, nothing, you know. I think they developed Harvey later. After the rights went away, they started a new chain of titles, so I don’t count that. At a different studio.

In 2009, for Jerry Bruckheimer, I was hired to — this was a page one rewrite. It was called Game Boys. And it was basically kind of a new take on The Last Starfighter concept.

And I loved working with Mike Stenson over there. And you know, they were really good about, you know, paying for drafts and stuff. They were total gentlemen.

Don’t write comedies for Jerry Bruckheimer. [laughs] He’s not funny and he doesn’t — he’s literally just like, why would I make a comedy?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Amazing.

Right after that, in 2010, The Secret Lives of Road Crews. This was a screenplay for Paramount. They were attempting to make a movie based on a series of Hasbro toys, which I don’t think people were familiar with then.

**John:** I’ve never heard of these.

**Craig:** I don’t think they’re familiar with now. Or they were trying maybe to create a movie that Hasbro then could create toys for. Anyway, don’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** I needed a gig at the time. I was young and I needed the work.

And then lastly, The Game Changer. This was another spec script I wrote in 2011. This one I wrote for Michael Shamberg and Carla Shamberg, the producers.

And that was a great experience because, again, I was getting a chance to show like, “Look. I can do other things, you know, not just rated R comedies.” And that actually was very helpful. A lot of people took notice of it and it helped kind of open eyes. But it wasn’t a movie anyone was ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to make because it’s a very like small, thinky piece about stuff no one cared about. [laughs]

**John:** Before we get to my list, just on to that last thing, The Game Changer. At the time you were writing it, did you have the inkling that like, “Oh, this is too small, too quirky, and it’s never going to get made”?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. No. I mean, in my mind, it was entirely about, “Hey, let me just show some people what I can do and if for some wackity schmackity reason somebody…” — and by the way, at this point, now even in 2016, I wouldn’t show it to anybody else again. I’ve got — I’ve done better and I’ve had better opportunities and it’s a little dated, even now, after just five years. But it served its purpose.

It was more — if anything, it was more of like a confidence builder, I would say.

**John:** I think I get that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. I’m going to quickly plough through mine because I have so many.

First is Here and Now, which was my first spec script. It got me an agent. But really, no one should read it. Very small. It’s sort of a Sundance movie. It’s just not fantastic.

How To Eat Fried Worms was my first paid assignment. It was for Imagine. I went through like six drafts on it. It got a director on it, Tommy Schlamme. And it was great to learn how to work with a director.

Eventually, that movie got made, but I think it’s really a very different chain of title. So I was not even involved with the arbitration on that. So it was a good first experience.

A Wrinkle in Time was based on the classic Madeleine L’Engle book. That movie I think also did get made from my chain of title but it was — I think they got — they made it really quickly as a way to sort of lock down the rights on something. So they made it like a cheapo version which I’ve never seen.

I wrote a spec called Devil’s Canyon, which was kind of aliens out west. It was like aliens in a Colorado mining town in the 1800s.

I like it. It was one of the few things I’ve rewritten sort of massively a couple of times. But then Cowboys and Aliens came along and everyone was like, “Oh, it’s like Cowboys and Aliens.” It’s like, “No. It’s not.”

**Craig:** I hate that.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s going to be a recurring theme here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Demonology was not — it was actually technically a rewrite, but it was a page one rewrite. It was for Paramount. It was for Galen Hertz’ company. It was — like, if the girls from Clueless had to stop the apocalypse in Manhattan. And so it was a big, sort of very expensive action movie but with like Cher from Clueless. It was not going to be a movie.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I did Barbarella for Drew Barrymore. This was after Charlie’s Angels. And I loved Barbarella. And Barbarella is actually a movie I’d still love to get made. But rights became impossible on Barbarella. Two different studios controlled portions of the rights and so they got together, Warners and Fox got together to put the rights together. But still it wasn’t even clear that even they had the rights to make this thing. So they paid me.

American McGee’s Alice is my only Miramax experience. And I got Miramaxed. [laughs]

Fantasy Island was for Sony. And my take on Fantasy Island was Roarke dies on about page 10. And then the island starts falling apart and all the fantasies bleed together. And so it was — there were funny aspects but it was more of a thriller. And that was not the version that they were going to make. [laughs]

By the way, they’ve been trying to make a Fantasy Island for forever. There was an Eddie Murphy Fantasy Island.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** They’ve done everything.

**Craig:** I love those because eventually it gets made and then they send out the notice of credits and there’s like a thousand names on it.

**John:** It’ll be crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Fenwick’s Suit was — I should be giving years, too. This is 2001 Fenwick’s Suit. This was an adaptation of a charming, little book about a man whose suit comes to life. And it was actually very fun to write. It was fun to write a completely silent character and try to express emotion with a character that has no face and just has lapels. And it could’ve been great but it never went anywhere. That was Fox 2000.

Fury is a spec I wrote out of, kind of, anger. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Ruh?

**John:** Roar. And it is a very violent thriller about a guy who comes back from the dead. It’s actually sort of like Deadpool, in a way, but not even remotely funny.

**Craig:** So it’s like Deadpool without the thing that’s makes Deadpool good. [laughs]

**John:** Pretty much. If Deadpool was a straight, eh, or I guess that’s kind of The Crow.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** It sort of was like The Crow now that I think about it.

**Craig:** Crow-ish.

**John:** I actually had an offer on that. Sony wanted to buy it and they wanted to turn it into Ghost Rider at some point. And I didn’t want them to do that and so I just sat on it.

Shazam. I wrote Shazam, which was Captain Marvel, and I loved it. It was a great comedy about Billy Batson who has the power to become Shazam.

At some point The Rock was attached and The Rock is still apparently attached somewhere. But there’s some plan that he will fit into the DC Universe. That’s where I first met Jeff Johns, who’s a great, wonderful human being who runs the DC Universe. But it was not a great experience.

I did Preacher, which was based on the amazing series.

**Craig:** I liked that script.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I’ve read that script. That was a good one.

**John:** Thank you. Preacher was great. And I was — I really wanted that to be made. That was with Sam Mendes. And then it was with another director after that. I just never had the love from Sony to try to get it made.

Monsterpocalypse. I wrote a movie in which people in these giant metal suits have to battle these aliens who’ve come to destroy the world.

And at the same time, there was a movie called Pacific Rim, which was about big monsters being fought by guys in big, giant metal suits. And they were remarkably similar. And theirs got to the starting line first. And so I remember the call where they said like, “You know what? That other movie is too close. Sorry.”

**Craig:** Argh!

**John:** I wrote a Lovecraft movie for Ron Howard. That’s not a good combination of director and —

**Craig:** No. [laughs] But I love the — was it about Lovecraft himself or was it —

**John:** Oh yes, it was about Lovecraft.

**Craig:** Okay. Okay.

**John:** It’s basically — I mean, all the things he was writing about were coming true.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh, so, okay. So it wasn’t like a bio pic, it was —

**John:** No. It was like a bio pic where everything became true. So it was trying to sort of be both. It was completely historically-based —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And yet there were aliens coming true.

**Craig:** And yet there was Cthulhu.

**John:** Yeah. Cthulhu. So good.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I wrote my Fox project. So, I — on the previous episodes we’ve talked about the deal that you and I and a bunch of other screenwriters made at Fox where we owed them an original script. I wrote that script. It could still technically happen but it is — it’s not happening right now.

And then I put two pilots on here just for good measure. I wrote a pilot called Chosen, which was for ABC, which was about a young woman who may or may not be the reincarnated prophet of this cult. And then I wrote a pilot about an industry undergoing tremendous disruption which was about two years ago and which also seems to have stalled out completely. So neither of those shot.

So those are some of the projects we’ve written that we’ve been paid to write in some cases but are not movies.

**Craig:** You know what strikes me is, if I were listening to this podcast —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would think good God. It’s not like you and I haven’t had a bunch of movies made.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we’ve been working on those movies and when you do have a movie that gets made, you tend to work on that one a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It takes up a lot of time because once it’s made, it’s like okay, now we got to deal with this actor’s notes, now we’re going to deal with the producer, now we have to deal with production issues, now we have to deal with the director, and on and on and on and on and on. It takes up a lot of time. So all this time dedicated to the movies that we’ve done that people know got made. And then on top of that, a bunch of time dedicated to movies that got made that our names aren’t on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And in between all of that, all of this.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And one of the things about this job that we have as a career for those of you listening and thinking and dreaming about doing this is, the amount of writing you have to do, if you stop and think about it is insane.

**John:** It’s incredibly daunting. I mean, just thinking about like those 15 projects I listed, each of those is 120-page scripts that I rewrote multiple times.

**Craig:** Exactly. And it gets to the point, you know, I’m now about like 50%, 40% of the way through this script that I’m writing now which is the first draft of an adaptation and I’m the first guy in, so there was nothing, right? And I started writing it and it’s like I don’t even feel Fade In anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know that feeling of like, “Oh, boy, here we go.” I don’t even feel it anymore, nor when I get to the end do I feel like, “Woo. Did it.” It’s all — it’s like —

**John:** It’s all middle.

**Craig:** It’s like my life is one big middle. There is no beginning, there’s no end. It’s just this endless iteration. It’s kind of a crazy thing. It reminds me a little bit of like people that want to be baseball players and you’re like you pitch and stuff, but now, “Okay, you’re going to pitch year-after-year, year-after-year, year-after-year.” Once every 5 games, 162 games a season, season after season. It’s like the grind. You have to be mentally prepared for the grind. That’s what —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s what this drives home for me.

**John:** The other thing — once I put these scripts in order that it made me think about it, is sometimes you’ll look at a writer’s credits and it seems like wow, there was a long gap between those two movies that got made. Like — maybe they left the industry for a while, maybe like — no [laughs]. They wrote a bunch of stuff for other people that just was never made.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s — that — you look at like starting with Shazam in 2008 to this pilot in 2014, there were seven movies there that I’ve written, but none of them made.

**Craig:** Well, precisely. And then sometimes your — and sometimes the weird thing is you’re writing them in and around movies you are making, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So people go, “Wait, you had a movie that came out that year, and you also wrote two other movies that year?” “Yeah.”

**John:** Yup, yup, absolutely true. Or you wrote movies that were not your movies, so you didn’t get your name on it.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** That’s the thing. So let’s talk about some categories of what happened and try to break these down and figure out the patterns for why these movies are not movies. The first and most obvious ones are, the movies that just never — you never actually wrote the script. And so the things we listed ahead were the full scripts we wrote, but my files are full of these things that never actually became movies, these are the projects you pitched on, that you didn’t get, these were —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ideas that sort of never fully came together. So you have a couple of those, right?

**Craig:** Sure. And this is a big thing that occupies time especially earlier on in your career. It still, as you go on, you will occasionally, depending on what you want to do, sometimes you will get caught up in these deals where you’re trying — you’re working hard to get something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you start, that’s almost all you’re doing, is working hard to get things. There’s a bunch of these. The one that comes to mind that I remember is, there’s a AY novel called Skulduggery Pleasant. I don’t know if you ever heard of it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It was an Irish guy who wrote this series of books and they’re really interesting. It was about this girl whose uncle was like this cool, like an Edgar, like a modern Edgar Allan Poe. And he’s the only one in her family that she really likes. She doesn’t seem to fit in with anybody else in her family. He dies and leaves her his entire fortune but she has to spend a night in his house. And that night, she discovers this portal into a world and she realizes all the things he had been writing as fiction were true and there’s this world of darkness and ghouls and demons and all this cool stuff.

And I really loved it. And David Dobkin was attached to direct, and he asked me to write up a treatment because he wanted me to work on it and I just remember at the time it was like, you know, this could — you can — if Warner Bros approves you, so a couple of guys from like British Warner Bros approve you, you’ll have the job, there’s only one other person going up against it but, you know, it should work out. Then, you know, I did this whole thing and in the end, these British guys who were very snobby about this property like it was, I don’t know, a Pulitzer Prize winning book or something, they didn’t hire me and they didn’t hire the other person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this was in 2009. And the other person, Kelly Marcel.

**John:** Our own Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Yes, and we didn’t — I didn’t even know until like later on, you know, I don’t know, like last year or something, I mentioned this whole thing. She’s like, “Oh my, God. I was the other person. You were the other person? I also had the other person. It was you?” So the two of us — although I actually like wrote up a thing and she was like, “Yeah, they were like you need to write a treatment. I was like, Nah. So I didn’t and then so I just pitched something. And they were like, where is the thing? And I was like, Nah.”

**John:** Nah.

**Craig:** So none of us got it and nobody — by the way, I don’t think anyone ever wrote it. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That’s sort of an indication that there’s no Skulduggery Pleasant movie out there for someone to watch.

**Craig:** You have not seen that franchise, have you?

**John:** So back in 1996 or so, I pitched on Highlanders. Basically a sequel to Highlander and I didn’t get it then and I think Goyer got it. I think Goyer did a draft. He was the person they hired on to do it. And in the meantime, they tried to do Highlander so many times. And like Ryan Reynolds was supposed to do Highlander and so it has come back to me several times, but that was a project I pitched on I never got.

I pitched really hard on Catwoman, and this was back in 1999. I went in to Warner Bros with Denise Di Novi, the producer, and we sat down with Lorenzo di Bonaventura and pitched Catwoman which is Michelle Pfeiffer who was still Catwoman and I had a really great take. And it was very exciting to do it and he said no.

And then also there was a movie I was going to write for George Clooney and Brad Pitt set in Sierra Leone and that didn’t happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s — I mean there’s a ton of these, you know, the “that didn’t happen”. I guess in part, if you try and get something going and it doesn’t happen for you, and it doesn’t happen for anyone else, that’s a little comforting.

**John:** Yeah. I had one movie that I’d set up and never wrote, and that was called Monster. It was over at Sony, and it was a big monster movie. It was a sort of like a King Kong/Godzilla kind of monster movie set in Tokyo and it never happened. And so it’s one of those rare cases where I actually made a deal but then the movie itself kind of never came together and I never wrote it and we all just sort of agreed to walk away from it. Have you ever had one of those?

**Craig:** I — no, I’ve never had one that fell apart like that. I had one that we kept talking about like it was going to happen and all these people were interested and then just didn’t. It was this crazy independent comic called The Invisible Nine. And it was about — it was actually kind of awesome. The premise of it was that there were nine people in a space station circling the earth that were manipulating the world through the creation of brands. So for instance this conspiracy explains why there’s Zima because nobody — have you ever seen — does anyone drink Zima?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s still for sale. So this explains Zima, but what was fascinating about the comic was that the nine people, the Invisible Nine, men and women, each were an outrageous racial stereotype. It was awesome. It was bananas. I don’t know why — and we — you know, I had my writing partner at the time, Greg Erb, I don’t know why we thought that this would ever be realistic. Betty Thomas was like, “I’m directing this. This is going to be great.” We would go around and pitch this thing and people would be like, “Wow, that is great.” I think everybody was just high, completely high [laughs].

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, that never happened.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, nothing.

**John:** Never happened. So those are the movies that we never wrote. So at least there was less time wasted because we never wrote them, but let’s talk about the ones we did write, and sort of patterns about why those movies we wrote are not movies these days. So first off, it just wasn’t right. So there’s just something — it just fundamentally didn’t work. It could have been a flawed idea, it got developed the wrong way. What are some other reasons why the script just didn’t work?

**Craig:** There can be this weird thing that happens where you pitch something or you describe something and people get excited, and you think they’re seeing the same color you’re seeing but they’re not. They’re seeing a different color and so you turn it in and they go, “Oh, no, no, no, wait, what?” That’s actually exactly what happened to me on that Secret Lives of Road Crews. I said, “Look, I want to make kind of a science fiction ode to the working man. I want to talk about what it means to have true blue collar heroes and make them actual heroes and pit them, I mean, the enemy is going to be monsters, but the real enemy are the people that keep blue collar workers down.” You know like, yes, yes, and then I wrote that. They’re like, “Wait, why isn’t this Ghostbusters?” It’s like, because it’s my ode to the working man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they’re like, “No.” I don’t know. They didn’t see the same color I saw.

**John:** Yeah. That sense of where you just couldn’t get everyone on the same page is probably a recurring theme for a lot of these things where especially you pitch a certain idea, you went in and did this. Maybe they were excited by the draft you handed in, but by the time they attached a director, that director had a different idea and it just got steered off track and it just never sort of went back to a movie that people were excited to make.

**Craig:** That’s a whole category of the — well, you know, let’s call them the toxic attachment.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** There are directors who attach themselves and then never — literally just never pay attention to it ever again. This is typically a very big director, an A-list director, somebody with a lot of weight at the studio. They say, “I love it. I want to do it,” and everybody goes, “Okay, back off, that guy says it’s his.” And then that dude just puts them in a drawer because maybe he’ll do it, maybe not, but in the mean time, you can’t have it and then it just dies, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it just goes into this weird phantom zone. Sometimes the studio says, “We’re jamming this actor in there,” and the actor starts to unwind everything because they’ve been emboldened to do so and everybody is just saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” because the name of the game is let’s see if we can get this person to finally agree to step in front of a camera with a script that isn’t completely unwound. And sometimes they lose that bet.

**John:** Yup, and you can understand why the studio is servicing that relationship because they want to be in business with that director, they want to be in business with that actor, and as long as they say yes, they’re still kind of in business with that actor or director. So Big Fish is sort of an example of this for us because Steven Spielberg was attached to Big Fish for about a year and he’s not a toxic person, whatsoever. He’s a lovely, wonderful, talented director, but it became kind of clear that he wasn’t actually going to direct the movie.

And so we had to had the really awkward conversation about, “Hey, are you going to direct this?” And he said, “I guess not,” and he left and Tim Burton came on board and that was great. But I have to give props to Sony for having the — you know, cojones to actually ask that question because so many other studios at that point would not have asked and they would just be happy that Spielberg was considering directing one of those movies.

**Craig:** I don’t know what he was making at the time. It becomes really difficult when that director is making a movie for that studio.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Because then they’ll say, “Look, yeah, I like the script by Craig. It’s at Universal. I, Steven Spielberg, I want to direct it.” “Okay, cool,” “But first I’m going to direct this for you, Universal,” “Oh, well, okay.” And then I’m going to direct this for you at Universal,” “Oh, okay.” Well, every movie takes two to three years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So in the meantime, these six years go by and you could think, “Well, that’s okay, I’m in the hopper, right, I’ll be next.” No, you won’t.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Because along those — during that six years, 14 other scripts come in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s getting — you know, I can’t blame directors because they need those opportunities, right, especially directors that aren’t writing their own material, they need that great script. They’re not going to say, “Well, I just got handed a script that I think would be incredible and I know I can knock it out of the park and I’m ready and available, but it’s not in the queue.” They don’t that.

**John:** No, they’re not going to do that. The other real challenge is, if you’ve been on their list for two years, they are bored with that project by now. They have no — you’re not exciting and new. They already know they have you, so they’re not going to focus on you. They’re not going to want to finally go back and direct that thing. They just won’t, so that’s why you have to be so careful about attaching people. It’s nice to be able to say, but like you could be so excited that a big director signed on to your project and at the same time go, “That’s just doomed.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and similarly it can happen where you have a powerful producer who is obsessed with something and believes that they can jam it through a studio and they can to an extent. They can jam a studio to pay a writer to write it, but what they can’t do is make the head of the studio press the green light.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And eventually, they just get — it’s a war of attrition. And you’re hired, you’re paid, I guess it’s a nice writing exercise, but none of us want to go into these things thinking that this is just academic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, we’re trying to get a movie made, we all are. And you can occasionally get swept up in the enthusiasm of a producer who’s got a few chips they can cash in but to no real end.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. Another common pattern for why these movies stall out is a change of regime in the studio. So basically the president of production, the head of the studio has left and a new person comes in, takes a look at all the projects in developments and says like “Nah, not this one. This does not fit our needs at this time.” And this project that you’re writing is suddenly no longer a priority for them.

**Craig:** It’s probably the most common cause of script death.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would say maybe the second most common cause of script death is regardless of what we think about your screenplay, we have read it and we determined that it’s going to cost too much for what it is.

**John:** Exactly. A related factor can often be a similar movie has just bombed and they look at that movie and they look at your movie and they say, “Uh-uh, this similar movie just tanked. People don’t want to see this movie. Therefore we are not making this movie.” So that could be the genre, it could be the actor, it could be the director, it could be something else that they feel like it’s too similar to this, we just can’t do it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** In some cases, it’s another movie is about to go into production that is just too similar which was what I described for Monster Apocalypse, because everyone sort of knows that you don’t want to be the second movie in those circumstances, you don’t want to be the Deep Impact to Armageddon.

**Craig:** Right, or the Dante’s Peak to Volcano, or I can’t remember which one came first, but you’re right, this is always an issue. Although occasionally it works out, I mean everybody looked and said, wait a second, DreamWorks is putting out a movie called Ants, about animated ants, and then a month later, Pixar is going to put out a movie called A Bug’s Life about animated ants. And A Bug’s Life did pretty well, did better than Ants.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, sometimes it works out, but you’re right, there’s two kinds of stinks you can have, you have the stink of being the also-ran and you can have the stink of being something that people think has just been proven to be a failure at the box office. Of course you and I both know that’s nonsense.

**John:** It is nonsense. So let’s talk about how dead things are because there’s different kind of levels of dead, so there’s completely dead, there’s movies that are impossible to make, that are no longer relevant, they’re are too much like another movie. So I would say, Monster Apocalypse for all intent and purposes is completely dead because it was too much like Pacific Rim, and because at this point the rights are gone, so you’d have to reassemble the underlying rights and get the rights to that script. It’s just very difficult for that movie to not be dead.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. I mean on my list, a number of these feel dead, dead, but Into the Fire could, I mean you can’t be deader than that movie. There was one draft written of it, it was buried under concrete somewhere, you know, in Culver City. Nobody wanted it in the first place, and it was capitalizing on a trend that is now 15 years old. Dead.

**John:** Dead. There’s another status which we’ll call not really dead, but not really alive. And so these are the specs that you owned that never sold, they are things that a studio still owns, they could theoretically make it any time, they just don’t seem to be making them. They could be movies like are passed around all the time. So Unforgiven is a movie that sat on a shelf for 10 years, 15 years, the great David Webb Peoples’ script and Clint Eastwood said, “You know what, I’m going to make that script,” and he basically shot the white script and it became Unforgiven. So it does happen where those movies just sort of sit for a long time, and then suddenly are made, but they’re very rare.

**Craig:** Yeah, that one actually is a special case because Eastwood bought it early on and said, “I’m going to put this in my drawer on purpose, I’m not old enough to play this guy yet.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** I need to wait 12 or 15 years until I can actually play this character. But yeah, there are these scripts that kick around for year and years and years, and then suddenly, oh my god, it gets made, it can happen, you know. There’s that, you know, list of the Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays and you know, maybe one day, somebody might make one of them. The thing about the things that I have that haven’t, that are original to me that I haven’t sold, I don’t want to show them to anybody. In my mind, I’ve killed them, they’re dead.

**John:** Yeah. That actually is a conversation you will have with your agent after a certain point is which scripts that they have are they allowed to send out. And so my agent a couple of years ago said, like, people have been asking about Here & Now, your first script, do you want people to see that? I’m like, god, no. I can’t believe that anyone would ever read that script now. It doesn’t reflect my writing today.

**Craig:** Well, this is the scary part, like, so even as I was thinking about doing this podcast and you start to say these things, well then you’re like, you know, I’ve had meetings where people were like, well, what else do you have? Do you have anything that, you know, like a spec that nobody else bought, you know? Because then they can go, “Hey, you know what, I can get a John August script and I can get it cheap, and who knows?” But you know, maybe people didn’t buy it for a reason. And if I super duper loved it, you know, I would have pushed it earlier than this.

**John:** The final set I’ll say is like, things that will never die, and so I have two of those movies, so Shazam which I talked about before eventually, they’ll make a Shazam movie, and also Tarzan. So I was the first writer on Tarzan, and so the Tarzan movie which the trailer is out for now, I was a part of the chain of title on that Tarzan. My movie was completely different. My movie took place in modern day Africa with civil unrest, and it was a completely different sort of way of doing Tarzan. There was khaki and pith helmets, but that was my chain of title for Tarzan. So someone was going to make a Tarzan of movie and that chain of title is still uninterrupted. So that’s kind of a third theme. So like, my Tarzan is dead because this other Tarzan exists.

**Craig:** That’s really interesting. I always wonder about my Harvey script. I always wonder if it might get somehow revived, but probably not because see, it’s a rights thing, you know. So they followed Tarzan all the way through at Warner Bros. And similarly, you know, for Shazam, it’s a DC property, it’s Warner Bros, they could follow through. You know, Miramax blows the rights on something, can’t figure out how to pay for a movie, it’s dead. That thing is dead.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about raising the dead and sort of when that happens and when it doesn’t happen. You know, Passenger, which is a Jon Spaihts script, wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t getting made. So it was a really great script that people loved, Keanu Reeves was attached to star in it. He wasn’t a big enough star to justify the budget. It was stalled out and they were able to shake Keanu Reeves off and suddenly now they’re making that movie with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt and suddenly it’s going to be a big, giant movie. So it is possible to resuscitate some of these movies at times.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean so that’s an example of a movie that — well, first of all, it got Mirmaxed. So there. You’re looking for a pattern here, Miramax. So there are certain movies that tempt lots of people. Lots of people creep up to it and go, “I know how to do this. I know how to do this. I know — oh, no, I don’t.” “Okay, well, I do,” “Oh no, I don’t.” In that case, I don’t even think they — it’s not that they shook Keanu Reeves off. I think that Keanu Reeves was going to make the Miramax movie. Miramax couldn’t figure out how to pay for it or didn’t want to pay for it, so they let it go.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** And then Sony picked it up and Sony had a different theory about who should be in it and —

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** But yeah, there are some movies that kick around and I don’t think of those movies as dead. I think of those movies as like dodging bullets.

**John:** Cool. So what conclusions can we draw from our visit to this script graveyard? Maybe we could talk about sort of letting go and sort of how you say goodbye to a script because the process of cleaning out these drawers, it may be looking at some of these projects and say like, “Oh, you know what, you were lovely but you’re gone now. I’m going to let you go. I’m going to stop ever thinking about you again.” Because they just — there’s — I’m never going to bring you back to life and that’s maybe okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like the value of these things in the past is that you did them. And I never think about these things as failures per se, I don’t think about them as wastes of time. I think of them as experiences I had writing.

The truth is that you can’t do all the work that you and I do without finding some internal pleasure in the experience itself. So that becomes its own reward, you know. For a while, I got to live in the world of Harvey. For a while, I got to live in the world of even the Secret Lives of Road Crews. And it was my world, and I lived in it, and I did the best I could, and I like to think that, you know, hopefully, I honed a few things here and there that made me a little bit better for the next time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there’s no sense in crying over this stuff because it’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah. There’ve been a few things I’ve circle back on that I was really glad I took a second look at. One of them was Writer Emergency Pack. So I started Writer Emergency Pack four years ago. It was going to be an app and so I had the artwork and it just sat dormant. And then when I looked at it again, it’s like, oh, you know what, it’s a card game, so like, that was a good thing to sort of resuscitate. As I look at some of these scripts I’ve written, there are a few that are probably worth a second look, both for, there’s essentially a really great idea there, or there’s a way to make this now, that I couldn’t have made it before. So there’s a few that I’ll probably revisit, but most of them, I have to honestly look and say, is my time better spent trying to rejigger one of these things that didn’t work, or doing the new things that I’m excited about. And I have so many new things I’m excited about on the list, that that’s probably where I should spend my time.

**Craig:** I completely agree. And I think that that spirit is why you’ve written so much because you’re always excited to move forward. I think the people that dwell on these things in the past are trying to continually resuscitate them over and over. I mean sometimes it’s prudent, but a lot of times, it’s a tacit capitulation to the thought that you don’t have something new to do or think and that you just can’t let that one go. I am thrilled, the second I’m done with a script, to me it’s like a plate of food I’m finished with, get it away from me. I don’t want to look at it. New. Next. Let’s go.

**John:** Yeah, maybe if there’s a lesson to take from a visit to the cemetery is that, to be glad that you’re alive and that you can write new things.

**Craig:** And to avoid Miramax.

**John:** Yes. And notice like cause of death, Miramax.

**Craig:** So many of these people died here. Most of them died of Miramax, that one was small pox.

**John:** All right, let’s do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing is a French company called Wyvings. They’ve been around for a while, they make a lot of Internet of things devices.

**John:** I have a Wyvings scale.

**Craig:** There you go, so as do I. So it’s mostly health products. The Wyvings scale is very nice, you step on it, it measures your weight, it measures your body fat, and then it pipes that info wirelessly to an app on your phone, you can track things. And there are a lot of versions of that sort of thing. But, they have a new thing that is not yet on the market, it’s coming soon, and it’s called The Wyvings Thermo which is the most French way of saying thermometer, ever, thermo. Now here’s what’s so great about it. I hate thermometers. Thermometers, like the whole category drives me nuts. You have thermometers that you certainly don’t want to put them up your butt anymore, that’s old school.

You can stick them in your mouth, they move around, and then is it digital, if it’s digital, is it accurate, nobody really can tell, and then you have the ones that you put on your forehead which are junk. You have the ones that you can put in your ear, but if you’re holding it slightly wrong, it doesn’t work. There’s a million things about these things. Well, these guys seem to have solved it. So what they do is, and it’s you know, Internet of things, it’ll pipe into your app and all that, and that’s great, but here’s the genius part of it.

There is a way to take your temperature by using an infrared sensor on your temple. The problem is, it has to be done the right way, it has to be the exact proper distance from your temple, and ideally, you take a lot of readings at once, to try and you know, counter for fluctuations and things. So this thing is designed so that there’s a cup. The cup goes right up against your temple, and then it’s inside the cup, the proper distance from your temple.

It takes 4,000 measurements with 16 different infrared sensors in two seconds, and finds the hottest spot, which is the one you’re most concerned about, and gives you your proper temperature. And it adjusts the temperature because, you know, our body temperature like the whole 98.6 thing in the thermometer, really probably is supposed to go up your butt, so if you put it under you arm, or on your forehead, you’re not quite getting the same up your butt reading.

So if you have 101 from your forehead, you might actually have a 102 or 102.5, so I love this thing, I can’t wait to get this. This finally, I mean like, good, I know that I’m actually getting the right temperature here. Not so much for me, I don’t care if I’m sick, I’m sick, but when you have a sick kid, you kind of want to know.

**John:** Yeah, you do want to know. Cool.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is an app that Apple put out this last week. It’s called Music Memos. And it’s a very smart little app for a very specific need. So if you are coming up with a song, you have a melody, and you want to record it, you can use the voice memos app, you can use Evernote, you can use — there’s lots of different ways you can record it. This is just so much better for the music of it all. And so when we’ve been doing stuff for Big Fish, we’ve been working on other songs, very often I’ll be sitting with a composer and we’ll plunk it out and we’ll just record it in Voice Memos, and you’ll label the note.

This is what it does, when it records it, it actually breaks it into measures, it tracks the keys, it can even build a simple accompaniment with it just so you can actually hear that idea and share that idea and really have a good sounding track to listen back to. It’s very smart, it’s very Apple, just really incredibly useful if you’re a person who works with little snippets of songs.

**Craig:** It’s like they knew that I was a few weeks away from handing a script over to Jeanine Tesori and then we were going to start making songs. It’s like they knew. I’m so excited to use this. I think it’s great.

**John:** Cool. All right. That is our show this week. So as always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, it is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Sam Tahhan. If you have a comment for me or for Craig, find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin.

If you have a longer question like some of the ones we answered today, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. Johnaugust.com is also where you can find the show notes for this episode, they’re always in order there. You can also find us on Scriptnotes.net, that’s where you find all the back episodes. On iTunes, search for Scriptnotes, while you’re there, you can also download the app. We have the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to the back catalogue, and it’s also on the Android app store.

As a reminder, I am hosting a Q&A with most of the writers who are nominated for the WGA Awards. That Q&A is happening on February 4th at 7:30 pm. There are still some tickets left, so if you would like to go to that, go to wgfoundation.org, or there’s also a link in the episode notes for this show.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Have a good week.

**John:** You too.

Links:

* [You Must Remember This](http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/) podcast
* [Scriptnotes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scriptnotes-podcast/id462495496?mt=2) on iTunes
* [Become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) for access to the entire back catalogue
* [Hatton Garden heist film goes into production](http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/18/hatton-garden-heist-film-goes-into-production) from The Guardian
* The Sun on the [Bloody past of Blingo Blaggers: PC stabbing, armed robbery and mayhem](http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6862427/Bloody-past-of-Hatton-Garden-Blingo-Blaggers.html)
* [Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare_(2015_film)) on Wikipedia
* The Atlantic asks [A New Planet or a Red Herring?](http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/a-new-planet-or-a-red-herring/426810/)
* [Breather](https://breather.com/) helps find a place for you to work
* John Hess’s [filmmakeriq.com](http://filmmakeriq.com/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com/)
* [Withings Thermo](https://www.withings.com/eu/en/products/thermo)
* [Music Memos](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/music-memos/id1036437162?mt=8)
* [Tickets are now available](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/beyond-words-2016/) for the Writers Guild Foundation Beyond Words panel on February 4
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Tahhan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/oceans-77).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Now batting number 27, Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 233 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we are doing another one of those how would this be a movie episodes where we’re going to be taking a look at three stories from the news, and look at how those would become feature films. So the stories are including one about pensioners, performing a heist, demonic visitors, and revenge porn.

**Craig:** Those all could be one movie, I mean why not just combine them into one and make a movie.

**John:** I think it absolutely is. It’s sort of like Ocean’s 97 that takes a very dark turn.

**Craig:** So creepy.

**John:** Yes, like an Ocean’s 11 movie, but like one of the guys is actually already dead, like Danny Ocean is already dead, but he’s leading a heist from beyond the grave.

**Craig:** Hey, have you seen — speaking of creepy and not what you think it is, did you see the trailer for that new J.J. Abrams movie, what is it, 10 Cloverfield Lane or something?

**John:** No. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m behind on this.

**Craig:** I don’t know, like your whole thing like you can make a surprise movie, and I keep saying, no you can’t. Well he did. So he made a surprise movie. You got to see the trailer for this thing. It’s wow.

**John:** Great. Well I think we’re doing to stop the podcast right now and I’ll just go watch it, and then — no, no we’re recording, but I will watch it immediately after the podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. You will be pleased.

**John:** Cool. We have a lot of news and follow-up to get through.

**Craig:** Good news.

**John:** Such good news. First off, how about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rachel Bloom, won the Golden Globe this last week.

**Craig:** Is there any limit to what you and I can do?

**John:** We can pull shows from one network to another network, and make sure that their star is a Golden Globe winner.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s Rachel Bloom from episode 175 of Scriptnotes. She was on, not this past year’s but the year before Christmas Special with Aline, and now, look at her.

**Craig:** Now, look at her. And on that show as I recall, she sang her own original song, set to the tune of our theme. It was very funny. And so I mean obvious Aline is the living Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes. So she’s been on the show a ton, she’s our friend, and this is terrific news for her and her show, but also, just an amazing thing. You know, this is one of those deals where — because I guess, you know, I don’t know anything about television, I don’t understand television ratings. I know enough to know that the show has not been doing what you would call good ratings, and so what’s fascinating is you can rescue a show, I think.

I think the show has just been rescued, don’t you?

**John:** I think it’s definitely gotten a boost, and I mean it’s going to come back because she’s the Golden Globe winner, I mean it singles it out for the attention it really deserved from the very beginning.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The song she sang on Scriptnotes was When Will I Be Famous, set to the Scriptnotes theme. And the answer is, now.

**Craig:** Now.

**John:** Because now, she just won the Golden Globe, and she has a TV show that she co-created, that she stars in. One of my favorite moments from that whole experience was seeing a photo of Rachel waving to Aline, so it’s behind Rachel, waving to Aline out in the crowd, while she’s up at the podium accepting her award. And they’re both so happy and excited and crying.

**Craig:** The word, the word that you would say, if you were me, they were kvelling.

**John:** There were kvelling.

**Craig:** They were. It was in full kvell. And I was kvelling because another one of our live Christmas show guests got an Oscar nomination.

**John:** That’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff, nominated for an Oscar, for Straight Outta Compton.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just fantastic.

**John:** Yes. So Andrea Berloff and Drew Goddard are both nominated for Academy Awards for their writing in different categories, so they’re not actually competing against each other, and they’ve both been previous Scriptnotes guests. You can listen to the special bonus episodes with both of them.

There’s an episode I did with Drew Goddard where I — there’s a long interview with Drew that you can listen to. And, also, I did the special Straight Outta Compton thing with Andrea and the whole rest of the team, and those are available in the premium feed, so at Scriptnotes.net, you can listen to those.

**Craig:** It’s just fun watching it, you know. Now, it’s kind of fun like every year, just because of the amount of screenwriters that you and I know, it feels like every year I have a friend in it. And so it’s so exciting. And I also did this past week, I did an interview with Charles Randolph and Adam McKay who co-wrote The Big Short, and Adam directed it, and lo and behold that very day Adam got a DGA nomination, and then of course, this week, they both received a nomination for screenplay, and Adam also received nomination for director, and then the movie received a nomination.

So it’s just fun. It’s fun, because the truth is I don’t really care, I mean I’m sorry, I don’t care, I know you’re in the Academy. I don’t care about the Oscars. I don’t care about any of this beauty pageant baloney, but I do like watching my friends get dressed up, and I like rooting for my friends.

**John:** I like rooting for friends, too. Craig, I need to remind you the next time you host one of those things, you need to get the audio because we’ll put it up it in the premium feed.

**Craig:** I can. I can get the audio.

**John:** You should get the audio, put it up in the premium feed.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m going to get it from — because I did it for another fund raiser for the foundation. So sure, they’ll give us that. That would be great.

**John:** Yeah. I’m doing my own special thing for the WGA foundation. Just today, I signed on to do the Beyond Words 2015, 2016 whatever you want to call it this year. So I’m going to be talking with many of the nominees, all up on stage together at the Writers Guild Theater. That is on February 4th and if you want tickets for that, it’s just wgafoundation.org. So confirmed so far, Drew Goddard, John Herman, and Andrea Berloff from Straight Outta Compton, John McNamara from Trumbo, Phyllis Nagy from Carol, Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy from Spotlight.

So it’s one of those sort of bigger shindigs, so there’s like 6:30 cocktails, there’s 7:30 panel, and there’s desserts and coffee afterwards, so it’s a bigger night of sort of all of the nominees up on stage.

**Craig:** When you say dessert and coffee, I mean like a good dessert, you think?

**John:** I think it’s going to be a caliber of dessert that you would anticipate getting at the Writers Guild Theater.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Yeah. I may not be staying for the coffee part, but you know what, wine is good because it comes in a bottle.

**Craig:** Listen, wine is great, but just watch out for those union desserts.

**John:** And I’m going to have to really be careful with my alcohol intake because I will just come from our own Scriptnotes official thing with Lawlence Kasdan and Jason Bateman which also has cocktails involved.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that’s this Monday, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday, it’s six days from now. Our Hollywood Heart special benefit panel with them, not really panel, special conversation with them, which I’m so excited about. So we just today figured out all the sound check stuff. It should be a cool time.

It is a 6:30 cocktails for a 7:30 start. So come join us for cocktails, and then join us for a live show.

**Craig:** When I was at the guild right before we did this thing with Adam and Charles, they said, “Would you like some wine?” And the answer is always, “Yeah,” because wine is interview juice, and it’s great. But all they had was white wine. I was like, “You don’t have any red wine?” Like the worst red wine to me is better than the best white wine in the world.

**John:** Oh, Craig.

**Craig:** And they said, “No, we can’t.” And I said, “Why?” Why do you think, John?

**John:** Oh, because of stains.

**Craig:** Because of stains! Because they were worried that it would stain the carpet on the second floor of the Writers Guild. And I was like, this carpet is pediatrician office standard. This carpet should be so lucky as to get stained.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anyway, I drank a glass of white wine. I got to tell you, I was furious.

**John:** Yeah. In general, I think people should have a choice of red and white wines. I do respect that, but having been the person who spilled an entire glass of red wine on somebody’s white carpet, I do sympathize with the only clear liquids approach.

**Craig:** You know what, if you spill a glass of red wine on somebody’s white carpet, you got a couple of choices, as I see it. One, flee the country, just start a new life, that’s it, right? Just let everything go, and begin again. Option two, you’re just going to have to take out a loan and buy them a new rug.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in no case is there a third option called drinking white wine.

**John:** There are many delicious white wines, and actually, two years ago, so every year, not for a New Year’s resolution, I declare an area of interest for that year, and one of my areas of interest for I think it was 2013, was Austrian white wines because they’re fantastic.

**Craig:** You know what? 2013 was the worst year for you.

**John:** Give me a Gruner Veltliner and I’m very, very happy.

**Craig:** That’s not even a real word.

**John:** Yeah. This next thing on the outline is something you should say, because it sounds really boasty if I say it.

**Craig:** Oh, it does, it does, it does. So our very own John August, 50 percent of this podcast, has been awarded the very prestigious Valentine Davies award for civic service for 2015. This is the WGA’s highest honor for… — I mean, look, I could read you what the WGA says, but the truth is what it comes down to is being a great person. It’s being a writer that contributes to the writing community in a very positive way.

Now, I wish could say that all the winners fit that criteria because there are some on the list where I’m like, “What?” But in this case, they got it right. I mean they got it right so much. In fact, John, if you check the next Written By Magazine, you just might find a little essay in there about this, written by, hmm, someone.

**John:** I can’t believe that Craig Mazin who does nothing but mock Written By Magazine could have actually written something for Written By Magazine.

**Craig:** I’m sure Richard Stayton also couldn’t. He’s the editor. He’s probably also like, “Oh god, I got to talk to this jerk again.”

**John:** I thank you in advance. That sounds very, very lovely. Yeah, I didn’t know what this award was before I got it. And so I’ve known about it for a while, and they asked me to just sort of not say anything so they could announce it publicly in a fancy way. But last year, it went to Ben Affleck, and previous years it’s gone to like Alan Alda, just like the most random people, some of whom you’ve heard of, and some that you haven’t. But I’m really flattered. It made me feel really old. That was my very first thing because it feels like a lifetime achievement award, and I’m kind of young, so that felt a little bit weird.

**Craig:** Yeah, but everybody’s sense is that your basically finished. You’re all washed up.

**John:** That’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So they’ve been talking to my doctors and they know that I only have, you know, six months left and they wanted to give it to me while I was still alive because that’s what they said, they want to give it to somebody who’s still alive.

**Craig:** They wanted to give it to you before your product cycle has deprecated. When do you think I’m going to get an award from the Writers Guild?

**John:** I don’t think it’s going to be too long. I think, you know, a lot of the things they said about me, they could say about you because you certainly had a lot of guild service. I think this podcast is a notable thing. I think your website was a notable thing. I have a whole separate software company which is a sort of different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not really the big difference. The big difference is that they hate me and they love you.

**John:** Oh, they don’t hate you. They just don’t know how to use you.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I love it, I personally love it.

**John:** Yeah. I mean they will put you on the committee for the professional status of writers because you’re good to go into those rooms, and be just the right amount of confrontational.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, definitely, I’m a good bullet for certain situations. Yeah, that is true.

**John:** So anyway, if you are a Writers Guild member who wants to attend the awards, I think you can get tickets. I’m not really clear how the whole thing works, but it’s February 13th. So I’ll be in a tuxedo, and I will have one and a half drinks in me when I accept my award, and will try to say something not embarrassing.

**Craig:** I feel like that show is the Golden Globes of writing stuff, so you could actually get completely drunk.

**John:** I could get completely drunk. I think in previous years it’s been streamed on the Internet, so if that does happen to stream on the Internet, I will be sure to put up the link to that.

**Craig:** That would be lovely.

**John:** It would be lovely. A little bit of follow up from last week’s show, last week’s show we were talking about Scriptbook, which I guess it’s still in existence. I don’t think we knocked it out of existence in one week.

**Craig:** We were close enough.

**John:** But Sam in Seattle makes his living as a data scientist, and he wrote in to say, “Data science aims to enable hard core data driven decision making when there are numbers and models that do correlate well to give an outcome, it makes sense. Solely evaluating the script ignores the most important component in making a movie, human collaboration. Scriptbook might be better served in developing analytics for production companies in project management. Which projects are likely to fall behind, which ones are at risk of overspending, etcetera. At least with those objectives, there’s a clear path from the data, to the desired outcome.”

**Craig:** It’s a really good point. I think what’s kind of funny about it is that’s basically what the executives do, that’s kind of their job, I mean aside from developing. When you’re at that upper level of things, and you’re deciding what to green light, and what not to green light, that’s kind of exactly what they’re doing. Without the data, they’re just looking at the people involved and saying, “Okay, how much of a pain in the ass is this particular person? Does this budget feel real or does it feel like something that’s going to explode on us?

Their pulling on their own experience, it’s a little bit more like the Malcolm Gladwell Blink side of the equation. But his point is correct, if you were going to engage in data driven analysis, that’s exactly where you should do it, and not attempt to impose it upon something like creative work.

**John:** Yeah. I think, you know, number crunching is great when you actually have numbers, the problem is the script is not actually numbers, and so you’re arbitrarily assigning things, numbers to things that really can’t be measured in a meaningful way. But that sense of like, trying to take a big sample of like these are all the production budgets of movies that went over the last 10 years, and you’re looking for trends out of that. That’s totally meaningful. I could see useful things being drawn out of that. I don’t think Scriptbook is going to find anything meaningful to draw out of this thing.

**Craig:** Nor if they were to provide the proper kind of data driven analysis would they be giving the studios anything that is unique. The studios already have larger departments that are much better at it than these ding-a-lings.

So Scriptbook, just, you know, save your money. If you work at Scriptbook, everyday pocket the half and half.

**John:** Cash your check the minute it hits your hand.

**Craig:** Cash it the minute it hits your hand. Go ahead and maybe take a few extra, you know, laser ink cartridges because that ain’t going to work.

**John:** A friend of mine, his company didn’t pay taxes for something and so he ended up being furloughed. And it was this weird situation where he was neither like fired, nor laid off, but he was like furloughed, so he couldn’t collect unemployment. It felt like an impossible thing that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

**Craig:** No, no. It’s a very possible thing, and it should be allowed to happen. If you don’t pay your taxes, they’re going to get them from you. And if you’re earning money, yeah, they’ll garnish your wages.

**John:** Oh, no, no, no. What I’m saying is that the company hadn’t paid its taxes.

**Craig:** Oh, the company.

**John:** The company essentially went broke. And so they didn’t lay off their employees, they furloughed them. And I didn’t know you could do that.

**Craig:** You can, but you’re basically — the people have a choice of whether or not to believe it and stay, you know. Yeah, I would get the hell out.

**John:** You’d get the hell out?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Speaking of getting the hell out, we have a question from Matt. Matt says, “I recently moved neighborhoods in Queens and there are no coffee shops, which is where I used to get my writing done, for nearly ten blocks. Now that it’s getting cold, taking that trek after work can be a nuisance. Normally I would be fine writing at home but I share a studio apartment with my wife. We used to still live in a 2-bedroom with doors that shut. Now I find it hard to focus on the task at hand if I try to write at home. Any tips?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, that is not a great position to be in if you’re trying to write. You do need some kind of quiet private space or you need a quiet incredibly public space where the publicness kind of washes away to nothing. But to write in a room with your spouse just kind of looking at you is tough.

**John:** Yeah. So I was in the situation for a long time when I was renting and when I had roommates and I do definitely appreciate what that is. So I have the luxury of having my own office now. But I also write in public spaces quite a lot. And I think it depends on sort of what your needs are in terms of privacy.

If you’re writing by hand, you can kind of write by hand anywhere. And as long as you’re good with headphones, you can sort of check out and to be writing. And so, while coffee shops are sort of the natural place to be thinking about doing that kind of stuff, really kind of any lobby might be okay. Basically, any place where people will leave you alone is fair game.

One option might be if there is another apartment in your building or somebody who’s just not around during the day. See if you can use their place for an hour or two. If you had a place where you could essentially check-in to and do some writing, and when you’re in that space you’re only writing, you’re going to get a lot more done.

So, if there’s a person who is a waiter who you know is always gone during those times, see if you can make a deal with him or her to, you know, essentially borrow their space for a certain amount per week or whatever.

**Craig:** It does, unfortunately, it sounds like Matt has a day job because he is talking about the difficulty of taking that cold trek after work to the coffee shop. So I suspect probably there isn’t something as convenient as a loaner apartment in his complex.

**John:** But except depending on sort of who his neighbors are. There are definitely people who are waiters who are actors in Broadway shows. There are going to be people who are going to be gone during that time anyway, so finding some other space to be in sounds like a good choice.

Libraries are always good. I mean sometimes you deal with like the homeless people hanging out in the library is a problem, but as long as you got headphones, you are able to tune people out and you can do stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think unless something wonderful emerges for you Matt in your own apartment complex. I think you might have to just deal with the cold there and those ten blocks. Get yourself a nice jacket because I would gladly suffer the 20-minute cold walk over writing in a space with my wife staring at the back of my head.

**John:** Another option is to look at — we don’t know where you work. But if there’s a place at where you work that isn’t your office so that you can sort of be in that same facility but not at your office or at your desk, that might be another good choice.

Just like find some place that’s warm and dry and just buckle down. And like having a place you go to that’s only for writing, you will get stuff done. And if you get an hour a day of writing, you’re beating most of the Hollywood screenwriters we know.

**Craig:** Isn’t that sad?

**John:** It is so sad but it’s absolutely sure.

**Craig:** It’s so true. You know what? I remember I talked to a group of Princeton kids who would come out to Hollywood and, you know, probably it was the first time I felt old. Now I feel old every day. [laughs] But it was the first time I felt old because I was like 32 and they were all 21.

And I said to them, “You guys have to destroy people like me right? You have to want to beat us all.” And what you have going — what we have going for us is our experience and at this point we’ve accrued a lot of connections and friends. What you guys have is energy. We’re all tired and jaded and slow. Just write circles around us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So true. Everyone out here is just — but you know, there is a theory that a good writer will get more done in an hour than a bad writer gets done in a year.

**John:** That so often is true. And you know, I think I’ve always like moved past those things and then I’ll find myself just like spinning my wheels for, you know, most of the day. And then suddenly at like 3:20pm like, “Oh, I suddenly know how to do all that stuff.” And I got more done in that, you know, half an hour than I did the rest of the day.

**Craig:** Endlessly frustrating.

**John:** If you want to be annoyed by how wonderful someone’s office can be, I’m going to provide a link to Aline’s office. So the academy did a video with Aline showing her office space. And Craig, I don’t know if you have seen this video. It’s amazing and her office is incredible. So it’s over at the Henson lot.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I’ve been there.

**John:** Yeah, and she has two writing desks. So she has one for like doing a certain kind of thing and one for doing another kind of thing, and she has two separate computers and two separate spaces.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

**John:** That’s ridiculous but that’s Aline and look what she’s been able to do. She has —

**Craig:** You think it’s the desks? [laughs]

**John:** She created a show that won a Golden Globe and we didn’t.

**Craig:** No, that’s absolutely true. I should probably invest in more desks. It’s so funny because I’m, I mean, I have a nice — you’ve been to my office. It’s nice.

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice.

**Craig:** It’s perfectly fine.

**John:** It has two rooms. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s two rooms. It’s very, it’s like, you know, the kind of place that a private investigator probably worked out of in 1930.

**John:** I was just about to say that. It is such a private investigator’s office.

**Craig:** It really is, which I love. In fact I kind of like — the furniture I bought is all — the only criteria I’ve ever had is would a private investigator have this? [laughs] But honestly, especially if I’m on location and there’s an option and someone says, “Okay, where would you like to work?” The answer is, in a cave, in a CAT Scan machine. Something with — I don’t need windows, I don’t need light, I don’t need — I need a plug. Give me an outlet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m very mushroom-like.

**John:** Yeah. There is that. Question from RJ who writes, “What are your thoughts on onomatopoeia? Pro or anti?”

**Craig:** Is that really something that one needs to come down on one side over?

**John:** I don’t think so at all. So let’s define our terms. Onomatopoeia is the technique in which you have words that sound like what they are, so roar sort of sounds like the sound a lion makes.

Onomatopoeia is awesome and I think you end up using a lot in screenplays to reflect this — you pick words that sound like what it’s going to sound like in the movie. So I think it’s actually really common.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t use it a lot. I think it can get a little cutesy if it’s overdone like anything I suppose you know. So, you know, occasionally I’ll pick up a script and someone’s got a kaboosh and a kershplat, you know, on every page.

But the script I was working on with Lindsay, there is a little bit where we wanted a chicken to just cross the road, and we wanted animals to watch it. And so I did it, and the chicken just goes brgak, B-R-G-A-K. [laughs] And I got more mileage out a brgak than all the stuff I really cared about.

**John:** Your poor director, when has to shoot that sequence and it is like “But the chicken won’t say brgak.”

**Craig:** The chicken will not say brgak.

**John:** It’s only funny if the chicken says brgak.

**Craig:** Well, we’ve started breeding them right now just for that purpose, brgak.

**John:** For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we did breed squirrels specifically to do the tasks they had to do in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

**Craig:** Squirrel. I want a squirrel.

**John:** Squirrels are so good. Before we get on to today’s topics, I want to back up to the previous question. If you have a suggestion for Matt about what he should do in a situation where he doesn’t have a writing space, tell us. Because I think people listening to the show probably have really good ideas for what Matt can do to not write in his studio apartment with his wife and not walk ten blocks to the cold coffee shop.

All right, let’s get to today’s topic which is how would this be a movie. And some of these were listener suggestions. Some are just things I found. But the very first one was kind of amazing and feels like why is this not a movie yet. Why has Working Title not made this movie?

So this comes to us from a listener, Mariana Garcia, and here’s the setup. So, over the Easter Holiday in 2015, so last year, millions of dollars worth of cash, gems and jewelry were stolen from this London jeweler’s facility. And it’s what we would think of as being like a safety deposit boxes, so it’s that a big secured concrete block thing with a heavy vault door and the metal box is inside.

So that kind of crime happens. What makes this so fascinating is the criminals themselves. There were eight men who pulled it off and they were almost all in their 60s and 70s.

**Craig:** Right. So they were calling it — what are they called, The Dad’s Army. That is what the BBC had dubbed these guys and apparently that was an old British sitcom about old people.

So, lots of different ways to go here and unfortunately, well — no, I’m sorry. Damn it, you see this is the para-narrative. Fortunately they’ve almost all have been caught. [laughs]

**John:** There is one person who is still on the loose. And actually before we get into like how would this be a movie. Let’s play a little clip. This is from the Metropolitan Police. They’ve put together this video that actually walks through of how they did it and it’s really great. So, we’ll have a link in the show notes to how they did it and articles about it and these video walkthroughs. But let’s play this little clip that talks through how they actually got into the vault part of this.

[Video Plays]

**Male:** Once in this further corridor, they were now outside the vault door in which contains 999 storage boxes.

During the first night, they spent their time drilling this 51-centimeter hole of cement but were confronted with the rear of the safe deposit cabinets. They were unsuccessful in forcing these cabinets over. And on the first night, left the premises having not made their entry into the vault itself.

They returned on the second night with an extra piece of equipment, a hydraulic pump. With this equipment they were able to force over the cabinets and make their way through the hole and into the vault.

It’s inside this vault that they broke into in excess of 70 safety deposit boxes and removed the contents and took them back up through the fire escape and out to their waiting van before making off.

**John:** So first off, I love this guy’s accent, it sort of sounds like Adele’s brother. Every word he says is just kind of awesome. But the actual crime itself, they went in, they thought they could do it in a night but they couldn’t get it done in a night. So like they had the gumption to like “Oh well, we need to get this special tool. So we’ll come back tomorrow night and do it tomorrow night.”

It’s just like it was three years of planning but also just a lot of stick-to-itiveness that I just — I don’t know. I feel like our millenials today couldn’t pull this off.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There is an old joke — it’s a dirty joke. Should I tell a dirty joke?

**John:** You can tell a dirty joke and we’ll bleep stuff out.

**Craig:** We’ll bleep stuff out. So two bulls are standing on a hill, an old bull and a young bull, and they’re looking down at this meadow where all these cows are gathered. And the young bull says to the old bull “Hey, how about we run down there and each fuck one of those cows.” And the old bull says “How about we walk down and fuck all of them?” That is the wisdom of old men. You know these guys are like I could see young guys absolutely panicking and turning on each other or getting stuck in the hole. These old guys are like, “Right. Let’s come back tomorrow with a pump.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “No big deal.”

**John:** And they did it. I love that the guy like brought his heart medicine with him, like they had the whole thing planned. Ultimately, how they got caught was partly because there are some security cameras they hadn’t known about that recorded part of it. But they also were overheard bragging about it at a pub.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They were using Cockney Rhyming Slang but they got drunk enough that people could hear what they were saying and make it out.

**Craig:** Yeah that part, not so smart. So then the other, you know, I was talking once with a police detective. And I said, you know, why is it that all these criminals are so stupid? I mean, when you hear about like how they get caught, it’s always something so stupid. And he said, well, you have to understand that people that think the best way to solve their problems is crime are usually dumb. That’s kind of the deal. So they were — they are really smart about crime but then, you know, this is the problem with criminals.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They just can’t help it. It’s their flaw. That’s why there are so few people that get away with some huge crime.

**John:** Well, when you talk about flaws, thought, you think about great characters and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It felt like this was a story that was just chock-full of great characters, not even honestly knowing the individual personalities, the people involved on this team. You just felt like there were so many great spots for really amazing characters performing the heist, investigating the heist, the family of people involved in the heist. It just felt like, I mean, it felt like a Working Title, you know, logo at the very start of this.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. I mean there is an old movie. I don’t know if you all saw this movie Going in Style.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** 1979, George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg. Three old men who are — I don’t know if they are in a, like they are not in an old age home but they all live in the same apartment complex. And they are just like retired and just bored to death. They don’t need to rob a bank. They just decide to do it for fun.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And they get away with it. And then, so it’s a comedy but then it’s sort of a dramedy because a couple of them die and it’s sort of sad and it’s about family and about growing old and all that. And so it’s — there has been an “Old people rob a bank” movie. These guys aren’t that old. But in a weird way, I probably — I can imagine a lot of people saying this should be a comedy. I would probably not make a comedy out of it.

**John:** Okay. Well let’s talk about that. So let’s talk about, I mean, you can’t really talk about genre without talking about point of view. So what is your point of view on this movie? Who are the people you want to focus on?

**Craig:** To me, I would think that this was about one guy who can’t quite let it go. So it’s a story about masculinity and it’s a story about the end of masculinity when you define your worth through that typical masculine point of view. Vocation, power, control, authority, strength, competition, winning. All those things are so caught up in what crime is especially when you think about stealing something from someone. It’s kind of the ultimate sports victory right?

So one of these guys can’t let the life go and some of the other ones kind of wish they could and one of them is kind of gives them that inspiring, “You guys, look at your lives. Look at how boring it is. Look at who you are. Don’t you want to live again? Don’t you want to feel?” And inspires these guys to do it but out of a sense selfishness because really it’s just his pride.

And I could see an interesting — I guess, yeah. I would probably — it is — there are comic elements inevitably. But that’s probably how I would attack this and the heart of it about, something about toxic masculinity. Because what is interesting to me is that these men have lived long enough to let that crap go and they can’t. They’re still using power equipment to destroy things, to steal money, after which they get drunk and boast about it. That is 18-year-old testosterone, you know, nonsense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s still there.

**John:** It’s 80 going on 18.

**Craig:** Right, right, and they can’t let it go. That’s the part that fascinates me.

**John:** So my first instinct was that — the reason why I kept say Working Title is it felt like The Full Monty but with old man robbing banks. That sense of like, you know, we’re going to show those guys and like that we’re rooting for this team of oddballs and sort of underdogs to pull off this big thing. So you would have to set up in some way that they’ve been wronged and that there’s some reason why you want them to succeed. Right now, they’re just trying to get a bunch of money and that’s great if you’re doing a normal heist movie, but I think this has to be something specific they’re trying to get. So if there’s something in one of those boxes they’re trying to get or something that have been stolen from them, then you feel victory and validation when they’re able to break in and do this thing.

We talked about with Rawson and Aline. We were talking through The Martian, we were talking through Spotlight, this idea of competency porn where it’s great to see people being really, really good at their jobs.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we could see that these guys are really, really good at the thing they’re doing but they keep facing these setbacks and I love the setbacks that happen here. I love that they like have this whole plan for how they’re going to drill through and they hit this metal box and they can’t get through it and have to figure out a new way through it. So I think plot-wise, I’m not nervous about sort of getting together a story. It’s just a matter of finding the right characters and tone and approach. There’s a various, you know, broad sort of it’s De Niro in this comedy with some other folks that isn’t as interesting to me.

**Craig:** No, not to me either. But you’ve raised a really interesting point if you’re going to do a heist movie. What you’re stealing has to be more interesting than what you’re stealing. So in Ocean’s 11, Ted Griffin had this wonderful scenario where George Clooney and his men are going to steal money from the Bellagio vault but really what he’s trying to steal is his wife back from the owner of the Bellagio and everything is connected to something personal that we care about because most people that go to see a movie aren’t interested in robbing a bank and that isn’t really something that they can root for fully. There has to be something connected to the object or the substance that we connect to.

So that leads you to the question, what is the need of these men or what is the need of the man who’s leading this but, you know, this is a fascinating topic because it’s a genre, right? Heist is its own genre. So this story could be told five different ways. Those five different movies could all come out the same weekend and I wouldn’t blink because they would be very different movies.

**John:** Yeah, and part of talking about point of view is also talking about timeline. And so is this a movie that’s tracking the three years of planning on this? Does it start when they like are breaking in to the building? Does it go on past the break-in? Does it go on through their arrest? How you sort of mark the edges of the story completely change what the actual movie feels like.

**Craig:** Have you seen the trailer for Eddie the Eagle yet?

**John:** No. What’s this?

**Craig:** So this whole discussion reminds me of it. Eddie the Eagle was a British ski jumper. He was in the Olympics. I think the Calgary Olympics. And he was terrible but the whole point was that England doesn’t have ski jumpers and he struggled really, really hard to get acknowledged so that he could represent Great Britain and ski jump. And it was very much a Cool Runnings kind of story but when you watch the trailer, it’s this fantastic — I mean, it’s very funny but I’m already kind of tearing up watching the trailer because it’s about this little boy who’s just desperate to be a great athlete and he’s terrible at every sport.

He’s even terrible at ski jumping but his heart is so big. And it’s this really dangerous sport, you can die doing it and he doesn’t care and he’s got this like ridiculous under bite and these big glasses and he’s just pure spirit and pure joy. And it just reminded me of this discussion because there’s a great example of taking a story like that and figuring out what actually matters and how it connects to everybody in the room. So many times, I think these things go wrong when they don’t find that thread back to you sitting in your chair, you know.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, going back to The Full Monty. The Full Monty is not really about stripping. The Full Monty is about, you know, these four guys coming together and, you know, sort of taking back control of their lives.

**Craig:** Yeah, about dignity.

**John:** Yeah. On the topic of strippers, both of the Magic Mike movies really aren’t about that either but they’re about that sense of like modern masculinity and that’s why they resonate so well. To this movie, the gem heist one, if I had a fantasy director for it, it would be Bart Blayton. So Bart Blayton did The Impostor. Have you see The Impostor? The documentary about the guy who pretended to be — I don’t remember if he’s British or Australian but he basically pretended to be this couple’s missing son.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That showed up years later and it’s a fascinating documentary. I recommended it as a One Cool Thing many years ago but I’ll put a link to that. I think Bart would do a fantastic job. I read a thing that he’s going to do next which is not this kind of heist at all but that same sense of like trying to dig into what it means to just beat the system. And I think that’s — when you talk with these guys about why they did it, they didn’t necessarily need the money. They just wanted to do something and it was sort of one of those sitting around bullshitting things. It was like, “Well, we could just actually do it.” And I think that’s a real human instinct.

**Craig:** It’s a really good question. I think who came to my mind was Edgar Wright.

**John:** Oh my god, he’d be fantastic.

**Craig:** Just because I think that I’d love to see him do a kind of a movie like the Cornetto trilogy but not with those guys, with old guys. Like what does that feel like? How is that different? I’d be fascinated to see like how that changes his approach in storytelling but there’s something very — you know, there are a few directors that are really good at getting into the heads of men which is its own little thing and he’s definitely one of them.

**John:** The other guy who would always be on this list is Joe Cornish. And so Joe Cornish from Attack the Block. And it’s one of those sort of weird situations where people who don’t work at Hollywood must say like, well, he has one movie, like why are people are so excited about him? It’s because he’s really good and he actually ends up being attached to a lot of different things and whatever he does next will be fantastic and people love him because Attack the Block was just so great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** All right. Our next how would this be a movie is this article by Theresa Fisher was the inspiration but it’s really the general syndrome that I want to talk through. It’s called sleep paralysis and in this article she talks through how this neuroscientist named Baland Jalal has been studying what happens in sleep paralysis and sort of how you get through it. Sleep paralysis is the sense that you kind of wake up but your body can’t move and you have this dread and sense that there’s somebody in your room watching you. You feel like, you know, you’re going to die, that there’s a mortal enemy there at your feet. This story talks through Pandafeche. Did I pronounce that right?

**Craig:** Yeah, Pandafeche.

**John:** Pandafeche. This sort of Italian witch, demonic witch that some Italians will encounter. But essentially, in every culture, there’s this history of people having these kind of experiences and this is one guy’s explanation about what’s actually happening when that occurs. And so I want to talk about the general idea of a sleep paralysis movie or this researcher and his findings.

**Craig:** Right. So it’s a really interesting topic. Our brains paralyze us while we’re dreaming so that we don’t run around and do stuff unless you’re Mike Birbiglia and then you do run around.

**John:** Poor Mike.

**Craig:** Poor Mike, who is hurling himself out of windows.

**John:** When you see the movie Sleepwalk with Me, you’ll see a slightly fictionalized version of his experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly as he runs away from the jackal. But for most of us, the brain is really smart. It essentially paralyzes us so that we can experience what it means to run around and move but we aren’t. And then there’s this weird glitch that occurs where we, you know, it doesn’t seem like you become fully conscious. You are in like a weird half-in like Twilight sleepy state where you are no longer dreaming, you are awake but you’re kind of hallucinating a little bit. And you are aware that your body is paralyzed. You try and move but you can’t. This is obviously in and of itself frightening. What this researcher found was that there’s this incredibly robust consistent thing across cultures which is that people see some kind of creepy humanoid figure hovering over them in their bed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it manifests as a witch or as a creepy man or some sort of oil slick creature or Ted Cruz or something horrifying. And so you — so why? What’s going on there? And —

**John:** So —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Craig, you’ve never had this happen to you?

**Craig:** I’ve never had it, no.

**John:** Oh, I have had it three times. It was absolutely true. It’s absolutely terrifying.

**Craig:** And so you saw the creature?

**John:** I saw the creature. And so the creature for me is a man made of shadows and so he has no face. He’s always just at the edge of my vision but he’s absolutely there and it is 110% terrifying. And so you try to yell out, you try to move, and you can’t do it. And eventually it just passes and then you wake up again. I would not wish it on anybody. Well, there’s some people I’d wish it on. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody I like.

**Craig:** Well, there is this, you know, we know all about these out of body experiences. Very often somebody will say, “I, you know, I floated above my body when they were doing surgery on me,” and this and that. Well, as it turns out, they can actually force these things to happen in a laboratory. And it seems like this is what’s going on with this. The person you’re seeing is you. That your brain is getting incredibly confused about input and so it’s kind of giving you a memory of looking at yourself because it’s totally tripped out and misfiring. But the people that repeatedly see these demons, they’re essentially now integrating this weird trippy vision of themselves into what they understand to be culturally true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Obviously, you hear the story and you think but what if it’s real, get me Stylez White, and, you know, give me Stylez and Juliet and let’s make a horror movie.

**John:** Absolutely, it lends itself so easily to a horror movie. So let’s put that on shelf for a second. Is there any other kind of genre movie you want to approach with this?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. Is it even a movie? So part of me thought like, oh, is this actually more of a series and then I thought like, oh my god, it’s going to be the world’s most boring series where it’s like a bunch of sleep researchers. And that’s honestly a part of the problem with this as a cinematic concept whatsoever. It’s like you’re relying on people going to sleep and it’s like, eh. So there are examples of course. There’s Nightmare on Elm Street where people are trying not to fall asleep.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There is Flatliners where people are sort of deliberately killing themselves or stopping their hearts so they can crossover to the land of the death, but in general it becomes a very frustrating routine when you have people deliberately knocking themselves out in order to go into a fantasy world.

**Craig:** Yeah, I could see a movie where somebody is doing research on this because they don’t believe it, you know. So our hero is maybe a scientist and he comes up with a way to force it, you know. He wants to force it to be seen. Maybe a loved one died of fright as they say and so he’s on a bit of a crusade and he achieves his goal. He sees it and then he wakes up and he’s like, “Wow, that was terrifying. I’m not going to do that again.” Except now it’s out, you know, Pandafeche is coming for him. I could see that but here’s the thing, like I don’t really like these movies. So I mean people love them, I’m not a huge horror movie fan so I feel a little weird about this one but I don’t know how else you could possibly do it.

**John:** So I think one of the things you hit on in your approach is that you quickly moved past one of the aspects of it which is paralysis. If your movie involves people who can’t move a lot, that’s not going to be a very good character. That’s going to be a very frustrating character. So you have to find ways to allow your hero to be active in a situation where they really are naturally a passive victim and so you’re going to have to find ways to let them take some ownership of the story, take some control.

**Craig:** Although have you ever seen the movie Patrick?

**John:** I have not.

**Craig:** They remade it recently but it’s a 1978 Australian movie and my — I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. My wife was terrified by this movie as a child. Patrick is a young man who is paralyzed, I think in like a swimming pool diving accident or something and he can’t speak. So he’s in a hospital bed and he can’t speak. All he can do is he can do the following, he can go “th” or “th-th” and that’s — one is yes, two is no. And he gains telekinetic powers and begins killing and destroying from his hospital bed and he never moves.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** He never moves. Patrick.

**John:** But he’s not the actual — he’s not the hero of the story so someone has to figure him out.

**Craig:** Yeah, definitely but he’s the villain and he didn’t go anywhere. Yeah, Patrick.

**John:** So I say, mixed bag on sleep paralysis. I’m going to put up a link to this article, but I feel like there’s another approach that’s probably not going to involve a sleep researcher. There’s something, I don’t know. If people have a shared vision, or there’s something, a message is being communicated from beyond there, that feels more likely the story area. I just feel like a producer could come to me with this article and I’d say, yes, but the Wikipedia entry on sleep paralysis would be about as useful.

**Craig:** Yeah. If somebody came to me with this, I would say, “I totally understand why you want this to be a movie, and it will be a movie, but not with me.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I can’t. It’s not my thing.

**John:** All right. So our third and final topic is about Revenge Porn. It’s about this guy named Scott Breitenstein, who runs a site that allows for people to put up photos of their exes, basically nude photos of their exes. And the way his site called Complaints Bureau works is he will not take anything down, and so it’s becoming a notorious place for people to post revenge porn, essentially like, “You broke up with me, and I put naked pictures of you up on the site.” And it’s sort of most notoriously, not only will he not take things down. If you try to file DMCA suit to get those photos taken down, he will countersue you. So here is a clip from this to set up sort of what he’s doing.

[Video Plays]

**Male:** So what they do is they file a DMCA complaint, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We disable it for the 72 hours within 10 days, 10 to 14 business days if they don’t file for an injunction, then the post is going back up, that wastes our time. So what we do is we charge them $10,000

**Male:** From a woman whose nude photos ended up on Complaints Bureau, and I try to get them taken down, I can end up getting sued by you, for $10,000.

**Male:** Right. Yes.

**Male:** Scott also optimizes Complaints Bureau’s search engine rankings so that people’s revenge porn is often the first thing that comes up when you Google their names.

**Male:** How much money do you make off these sites?

**Male:** I make — I make about $1,200 a month on Complaints Bureau, STD Registry and Report My Ex, some months it’s $600, some months it’s $900. Sometimes $500. It just varies.

**Male:** And where does that money come from?

**Male:** Google.

**Male:** You have like Google ads?

**Male:** Yes.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Yes, so this guy’s a winner. So I’ll fast forward to essentially Kevin Roost did this documentary, interview with him, and over the course of it also played women who we’re talking about sort of like what this had done to their life, and so this guy took down all of that and basically after years of putting it all up, took all that stuff down. So that is the outcome of the real story. But I’m curious what you think the movie universe is for something about revenge porn.

**Craig:** It’s a real scummy little corner of the world. God, and for an amount of money that it’s just like every time you hear a documentary like this, you’re waiting for them to say, $30,000 a month. $500, like what? What? You can get that working at Walmart. Why are you doing this, you know?

**John:** So when you hear about these, he’s going to charge $10,000, if you don’t actually file this lengthy paperwork, that scares these women away. Essentially, it’s kind of a blackmail. I’m sure there’s a specific term for where you essentially are saying the threat of the countersuit is enough to sort of make people back away, or you just charge them.

**Craig:** Yeah, I get, maybe he made a little bit of money there, but it’s not like he was running a proper blackmail scam where women would write in and he would say, well, for a $5,000 fee, I will remove this. He’s saying, “No, no. I’ll sue you for $10,000 and I’ll keep it up there.”

So these guys, I mean the video is eye-opening because it’s almost too cliché, I mean you’re looking at these folks in Dayton, Ohio who just seem down on their own luck, really hardcore, self-professed Christians, who are doing the most bananas thing with no rhyme or reason, and this is what’s challenging to me about making a movie out of this.

I demand that my villains are rational. I don’t necessarily agree with what they’re doing, usually I don’t, that’s why they’re villains, and so — but I need to understand that there’s a reason for what they’re doing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean sure, occasionally, you can have fun with somebody like the Joker, but even the Joker had a reason, like —

**John:** Yes, there’s a consistency of thought behind his actions.

**Craig:** Right. This is inexplicable.

**John:** And the fact that he backed away from doing it after all these years, basically like he didn’t have — it seems like he hadn’t actually done the introspection to figure out what he was doing. And that’s a person in the real world, but I don’t think we would take that as a dramatic character. I don’t think we’d buy into the movie if that was his same motivation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess I’m struggling with how to portray this in a way that is anything other than punishing.

**John:** Let’s talk about our characters in general. So the characters we could have in this universe is we have this guy who runs this terrible website. Our frustration is that the real life person is, he’s doing a despicable thing, but he’s not interesting enough, and he’s not consistent enough, he’s actually not a great character at least from what we see so far.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a journalist, we have the wronged women, and they are potentially fascinating. And so if you are a woman in the situation, you are potentially fascinating because what you’re doing and sort of how you rise up, is potentially great. There’s sort of a missing Erin Brockovich character who could be fantastic for this.

I wonder honestly if the villain of this story is essentially part of the reason why I left Google in there is essentially, Google is what’s making this possible. He’s selling Google ads — are paying him his $1,200 a month off this, is that you know, there’s some systemic villain who might be the real person you want to go after here.

**Craig:** The problem is that Google, $1,200 for Google is a rounding error in their coffee budget for the day, you know, it’s like, I don’t believe that they are — my guess is, they had no idea, it’s just the robots are, you know, picking up crumbs of money from everywhere. There’s a movie to do, maybe that gets off of the website completely, and connects into somebody who does it.

So a guy posts a woman’s picture, and she comes after him. You know, I could see a revenge movie, I could see a cat and mouse game.

**John:** Yeah, that’s actually really interesting. So I think the systemic movie is basically Spotlight. I think you could do a movie that is essentially Spotlight that is taking down revenge porn. So, the same way Spotlight was about the Catholic Church and pedophilia, this would be about the revenge porn and the industry that is protecting revenge porn out there.

But the personal version of the story doesn’t involve computers to anywhere to the same degree. It’s really about sort of what is the relationship between these two people now that they’re no longer together. And what is the motivation behind revenge porn? What is the drive to punish somebody who has wronged you? That sense of, you know, betrayal, and that would drive someone to post these nude photos.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is a cinematic tradition of revenge against people that sexually exploit others through media. So thinking of the movie Hardcore, the George C. Scott film, there was, I think the Joel Schumacher film, 8mm.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Joel Schumacher did that one? So about an underage girl who is caught up in the world of pornography, or people making snuff films which as it turns out, I think is just ultimately an urban legend. Somewhere I read an interesting article that it just doesn’t exist. But so there’s that kind of old school way of doing it where a girl has her picture posted online as part of a revenge porn, she kills herself, the father decides he’s going to track those bastards down with a shotgun. And we actually like stories like that, I think.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** They’re very satisfying in a very primal way in that kind of — there’s something deep in our evolutionary genetics where we want to see daddy hurt somebody who hurt his little girl. But it’s been done, there’s nothing new to say there, and it’s also distasteful. You know, as an aside, don’t let people take pictures of you naked, just don’t do it. And don’t send them pictures of yourself naked. And I know that there are people that do it all the time. But I don’t. I mean, I don’t have anyone to send them to anyway, [laughs] but you know, I just don’t.

**John:** I whole-heartedly agree with you, Craig. And at the same time, I want to acknowledge that my endorsing that advice doesn’t mean that somebody who does take pictures of themselves naked is a bad person, or that there’s anything, I don’t know, I don’t want to undermine the ability of you do you, and if you’re doing you, that does not give anyone else permission to post those photos.

And so I don’t want to sort of — I think there’s a victim blaming that can naturally happen whenever I give the advice to not take pictures of yourself naked, but of course, that would be my general blanket advice is that, we know we live in a time where you can never count on anything not getting out. And so the only way you can make sure that there are no naked pictures of yourself is to make sure there are no naked pictures of yourself.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly. There’s nothing — it’s not a crime to take a naked picture of yourself, it’s not a crime to take a picture of somebody you love, or any of that, but it’s not prudent. There’s a difference between something that is acceptable and okay, and something that’s imprudent. It’s just imprudent because you’re relying on the goodness of other people. And I do rely on the goodness of other people every time I cross the street, I just hope to god that I’m crossing in front of the guy that doesn’t like running over people, but then there are situations where I’m like, I just don’t know you well enough to bank all of this on that.

**John:** That’s why I’m always making eye contact with that person before I cross in front of the car because if I made eye contact, I know they saw me. If I don’t make the eye contact, I’m just not convinced.

**Craig:** So funny, I do the opposite. I don’t make eye contact because I feel if I look into their eyes, they’re going to be challenged.

**John:** They’ll recognize that they should just hit the accelerator.

**Craig:** They’re either going to see something in me, or they’re going to feel like I know who they are, really, and then they hit the gas.

**John:** So circling back to don’t take naked photos of yourself, I think if you are going to make the revenge porn movie, that has to be an argument that’s raised in the course of the movie because that is a meaningful part of this, is that, there’s a natural instinct to blame the victim here and say like, well, you shouldn’t have let him take photos of you. And so I think you have to raise that as an issue because the audience will think that as well and so address it. You have to hang a lantern on that idea and make sure you are really doing an interesting job of dramatizing that argument and that discussion.

Going back to your sense of the revenge story, so it’s the daughter who killed herself, it’s the father who’s going after this guy. The guy he arrives at the house, finally to confront, if it’s this guy, it’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s dramatically satisfying for the movie, but I think he is an interesting character because he’s not this terrible demon that we sort would assume that he is. I think you might be kind of — you might end the movie kind of frustrated the same way I was frustrated at the end of Prisoners, or at the end of Zachariah where it was just like, well, but I wanted some closure, you’re not giving me closure.

**Craig:** Well, if you arrive at this guy’s house and confront him, the frustration for you, the hero, and we in the audience that are identifying with you, is that this guy is a dullard. He’s not — there’s nothing there, it’s almost like you’re — what are you going to do? You’re going to beat up a guy that’s kind of — low IQ, checked out, depressed or something. Like, I don’t know what was going on with that guy. He just seemed so weirdly disengaged with his own life and his own thing. Like, here’s a news crew coming to talk to you about this website that has affected, like at one point, they show some post with revenge porn, and a guy has put up a woman’s pictures, and he shows that a million people essentially have looked at them. And he just doesn’t seem to care about any of it. He seems so weirdly detached.

We don’t want weirdly detached villains that have — when we get them in movies, we’re waiting for that moment where we finally go, “Oh, that’s the thing. That’s the thing. There’s the sickness.” There’s just nothing to this guy.

**John:** Yeah, that’s frustrating. Basically, we’re anticipating an argument that never comes, we’re anticipating a showdown that never actually happens, which actually reminds me of my sort of New Year’s resolution for this year, which was to stop having imaginary arguments. There’s a bad tendency I’ve noticed with myself, and I’ve always done it, but I think I’ve just been much more aware of it recently, is something will annoy me, or piss me off, and I’ll anticipate the conversation I’m going to have with that person, and I will spend an hour thinking thorough like, well, they’re going to say this, and I’m going to say that. Basically, I’ll work through all of my arguments and all of my points specifically and clearly, but then, that phone call never happens, it never comes. Or if it does come, I’m never able to say the things I wanted to say because I’ve scripted this thing, this interaction that will never actually happen. And so my 2016 goal is to not waste the time to have those imaginary arguments.

**Craig:** That’s a good goal because, yeah, that’s — well, it’s just silly, John.

**John:** It’s just silly.

**Craig:** Later, after this podcast, John will have an hour-long argument with me in his head about why it’s not so silly.

**John:** 100 percent true.

**Craig:** I’ll show you.

**John:** Craig, out of the three movies we discussed today, which of these do you think will actually happen?

**Craig:** Easter gem heist.

**John:** I completely agree.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. There’s just so many different ways to do it, and people love heists and it just feels like there’s way more opportunity for human drama.

**John:** I agree. I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** I put one here, but I’m going to throw a little audible, because I just remembered something. I watched a documentary the other day that I thought was great and in the middle of it Kayla Alpert appeared.

**John:** I love Kayla Alpert. She is a writer and friend of ours.

**Craig:** Yeah. She just appears in the middle of this movie. So the movie is called, Do I Sound Gay? Have you heard of this movie?

**John:** I’ve heard of this movie and Dan Savage is also, who is a previous podcast guest, in there, too.

**Craig:** Yes he is, as well as George Takei, and Margaret Cho, and David Sedaris who is hysterical as always. And it’s a documentary done by a guy named David Thorpe, and it talks about this really fascinating thing that everybody is kind of aware of and yet nobody has ever really thought about it as thoroughly as this guy does. And it’s the speech patterns of gay men and how some gay men you listen, you go, “Oh yeah, you sound gay.” And this is a man who wants to sound less gay. And he goes through this interesting journey where he talks about it with his friends, he talks about it with straight people, he talks about it with gay people.

He shows you a straight guy that everyone thinks sounds gay. He shows you a gay man that everyone thinks sounds straight. He talks to linguists, he talks to a straight linguist, gay linguist. They analyze speech down to these little bitsy things. They get into this whole thing about the lisp, you know, there’s the stereotype of the gay lisp, and it’s actually not a lisp, it’s just a sibilance.

And David Sedaris tells this amazing story about how he was in speech therapy as a kid, and they were all boys in the speech therapy class. And as he grew up, he kept meeting other gay men who are like, “Oh yeah, I was in speech therapy,” and he would meet so few straight people in speech therapy. And he finally realized, like oh my god, all of those kids in that class were gay. We just all sounded gay, and they put us in speech therapy. It’s a really interesting movie about this fascinating topic. And I liked it. I just liked the way it ended, and I liked how kind of honest and confrontational it was about this quirky little aspect of human communication.

So it is available on iTunes and Amazon, and all that stuff. So, Do I Sound Gay by David Thorpe.

**John:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is how Mickey Mouse avoids the public domain. So we talked about copyright and copyright extension on our program previously, but this was a really good article by Zachary Crockett for Priceonomics that talks through sort of how copyright extension has kept Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain which it should have many years ago, and many times before. And essentially, we keep kicking the can back, and we extend copyright for years longer than it was originally supposed to be. So it’s not just Mickey Mouse that stayed under copyright, but a whole bunch of works that should be public domain are not public domain because we keep extending it.

Right now, I think it’s up through 2023, but inevitably it’s going to extend longer, and it really raises the question of, “What is copyright supposed to do, what is it actually doing, what is the sort of function copyright serves society, and to what degree is it disserving society by extending it for so long?

So as screenwriters, we like copyright because copyright lets us get paid for our work. Hooray. But as people who actually need to make things, it can be really frustrating that certain things are impossible to make because of copyright extension.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question that our law in this country has been weirdly distorted by one character. And you can understand why. Disney, I mean because, you know, okay whatever, so let’s say it goes into public domain, whoop-dee-do. Well, you know, there’s all that Disney World here and Disney World there. I mean, they have this enormous business built around this character. And it’s not so much that they would stop having that business, I mean, look, they don’t make Mickey Mouse cartoons anymore. They have Star Wars now, they have Pixar, they have Marvel, they have all this stuff that makes money. They’ll be fine.

It’s just more that I think they don’t want the black eye of other people, you know, kind of lampooning Mickey Mouse in front of them. I mean, once Mickey Mouse is in public domain, the next thing you will see that day is porn in which Mickey is having sex with Minnie.

**John:** Yeah. So the kicker I think to this article which is absolutely true, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, is Disney has trademark over the Mickey Mouse character, his design, and a lot of other things. So even when the copyright on Mickey Mouse goes away, that trademark thing will be incredibly difficult to get around. And because their whole identity, because their logo is his ears and stuff like that, they’re still going to have so much protection over that image that’s going to persist beyond that.

So it’s a mess, but I think this is a good article, really showing how the Mickey situation has influenced the way we’re able to approach things. And if you really look at Disney’s output, so many of their movies are based on stories that would not be in the public domain if the same copyright law had applied.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I mean, that’s the fascinating thing about Disney, is that they have done an incredible job exploiting a wealth of works in the public domain while savagely guarding their own original creations from being in the public domain. So you get Cinderella, and you get Maleficent, and you get Sleeping Beauty and you get —

**John:** The Little Mermaid which is actually very specifically the Hans Christian Andersen Story.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So yeah.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly. I mean, tons of it, almost all of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s kind of amazing. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. It’s going to be harder for them, I think, to re-extend it once it goes past 2023. It’s going to be hard.

**John:** Cool. All right. That’s our show for this week. As always, you can find the links to many of the things we talked about on today’s program at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. You can also find all of Scriptnotes, all the back episodes, at scriptnotes.net if you want some of those previous episodes. You can pay us $2 a month, and that gives you access to all the back episodes, and you can also listen to them through the Scriptnotes app which is available on the app store for both Android and for IOS.

If you are on iTunes for any other purpose, please do stop by and leave us a review on iTunes for Scriptnotes, this podcast you’re listening to. That actually really does help people find out about us, and every once in a while, Apple will feature us and it’s just great to have new people listen to our show. So thank you for that. So leave us a comment because we actually do read through those. And maybe next week, we’ll make it a goal to read some of our favorite comments from that.

**Craig:** Great, sure.

**John:** Up on the air. If you would like to write something to Craig, he’s on Twitter, @clmazin, I am @johnaugust on Twitter. For longer questions like the ones we addressed today, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Our outro this week is by Martine Charnow and this is actually something she found, I believe. So this is from a Honda Days thing, so basically an ad and the Honda Days little theme music is actually the Scriptnotes outro.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So put together a couple of notes and they’re going to sound the same. So if you have a Scriptnotes outro you’d like to send to us, just write in to ask@johnaugust.com and provide us a link like Martine did. And Craig, I will see you next time at the live show on the 25th.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** With our great guests, Jason Bateman, and Lawrence Kasdan. This is coming out right before then. So if you’re listening to this, you can still check to see if there are tickets, there might still be some tickets left. That’s at hollywoodheart.org/upcoming. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [10 Cloverfield Lane trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQy-ANhnUpE)
* Rachel Bloom at the [Golden Globes](http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/rachel-bloom-golden-globes-speech.html), and on [Scriptnotes, 175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes)
* [Kvell](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kvell) at Merriam-Webster
* Andrea Berloff on [Scriptnotes, 144](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-summer-superhero-spectacular) and the [Bonus Straight Outta Compton](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-straight-outta-compton) episode, and the [Bonus Drew Goddard](http://scriptnotes.net/drew-goddard-the-origin-story) episode
* [Tickets are now available](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/beyond-words-2016/) to see John talk to Andrea, Drew and more at the Writers Guild Foundation Beyond Words panel on February 4
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* On February 13, [John will receive the WGA’s 2016 Valentine Davies Award](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=6133)
* [Creative Spark: Aline Brosh McKenna](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE_BekA3GWE)
* [7 British Men Guilty Of Massive Easter Gem Heist](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/14/463081162/seven-british-men-guilty-of-massive-easter-gem-heist) on NPR
* [Eddie the Eagle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyzQjVUmIxk) trailer
* [The Imposter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imposter_(2012_film)) on Wikipedia
* [The Demon Vanquisher](http://vanwinkles.com/the-demon-vanquisher) by Theresa Fisher, on sleep paralysis
* [Dream Warriors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDveKxl7Ohs) by Dokken
* [Patrick](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078067/) on IMDb
* [At Home with a Revenge Porn Mogul](http://fusion.net/video/252712/complaints-bureau-revenge-porn-mogul/), from Fusion
* [Do I Sound Gay?](http://www.doisoundgay.com/)
* Priceonomics on [How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain](http://priceonomics.com/how-mickey-mouse-evades-the-public-domain/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) submitted by Martine Charnow ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))