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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/rewrites-and-scheduling).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 216 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, for a second I thought you weren’t going to introduce yourself as Craig Mazin but rather as Louis B. Mayer because that is the name I associate with you having heard you on Karina Longworth’s podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. Now and forevermore, Louis B — so I’m playing Louis B. Mayer on her new series of You Must Remember This. So her last series was about the Manson family and how they were intertwined with Hollywood. And the new one is about the history of MGM, which is kind of the most classic of the classic movie studios. And Louis B. Mayer was the guy who ran it.

And so, I don’t [laughs] — I keep joking like I got the job because I sound like a quietly angry Jew.

**John:** [laughs] Seething with rage. And I really loved hearing you affect a voice on a podcast. So I want to make it clear to all our audience that sometimes I love it when Craig does voices. And this is a voice you just did spectacularly well. And it’s a great podcast. So we’re going to highly recommend people listen to it.

So Karina Longworth is a film historian. Her podcast, you can go back through in iTunes and find all the episodes she’s done. This new series she’s doing, it’s just about, you know, really the birth of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you can’t think about Hollywood history without thinking about MGM. And so she’s tracking not just how the studio came to be but sort of all the changes throughout the generations. And MGM is still a label that exists today but is not sort of the same —

**Craig:** It’s not the same.

**John:** Kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know specifically where the next episodes are going but I have recorded lines for the next one or I think it’s the next one. From the few lines that I do, I get a sense of what it is and she’s going to get into some interesting things, you know.

The shocking difference between the Hollywood that Hollywood presented to America and the actual Hollywood and the stuff that was going on is just startling.

**John:** You know, I’d be a little bit jealous except I have exciting news of my own, is that I just signed on to be the killer in the next season of Serial.

**Craig:** Ah, great.

**John:** So at least that way we’ll both be doing other podcasts and, you know, sort of raking in money for ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s not going to be much of a mystery. If someone’s named John August, they did it.

**John:** I probably did it.

**Craig:** It’s a killer name.

**John:** It’s a great name. It’s a good name.

**Craig:** What’s your middle name?

**John:** It’s my original last name which is Meise.

**Craig:** Oh, so you made that —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You pulled that in. But did you jettison a prior middle name?

**John:** I did. It was Tilton, T-I-L-T-O-N.

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs] That’s the most —

**John:** Which is a family name but wasn’t really related to anything.

**Craig:** I mean, John Tilton August. Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shivers.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like, you know, who was that Arkansas serial killer? Oh, it was John Tilton August.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. [laughs] You listen to that name you can smell the mold in the basement in which he is keeping you.

**John:** Yeah. There’s also a distant banjo playing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the anatomy of a rewrite. We’ll look at how production schedules work and we’ll answer some questions from listeners. We have so much to do on the show this week that we should probably get started.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** And so first some follow-up. We need to thank everybody who bought a Scriptnotes T-shirt. And we had a whole bunch — this is the biggest order we’ve ever placed. Dustin and Stuart are at the printers right now, placing that order. We will be packaging and shipping these out to all of the people who bought them probably the second week of October so everyone will have them in hand for Austin Film Festival. So, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Next up. Last week we talked about the odds of making it in the NFL versus making it as a screenwriter. And Nathan wrote in with some good statistics. Do you want to share those?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So he mentions that there are 32 teams in the NFL and each has a regular season roster of 53 players. This I did not know. I’m more of a baseball guy. So the total number of players in the league at any given time is 1,696. Let’s call it 1,700. So you could say that the number of people playing in the NFL is slightly larger than the number of people who are feature screenwriters in a given year, assuming the 1,500 number you gave for 2014 is representative.

Granted the yearly numbers for the NFL are slightly higher than 1,700 as players are added and dropped from rosters but 1,700 is a good ballpark number. And I agree. So we are, I think, under that number, clearly. I think the 1,500 number is correct. And mind you, that 1,500 number also includes our version of pickups and drops, you know, people who maybe worked for a month and then didn’t again.

So, yeah, I think we’re right on in saying that it’s harder to be a working screenwriter, at least statistically speaking, than to play in the NFL. And a lot of people on Twitter pointed out also that there’s another major difference in that if you’re trying to become a professional screenwriter, you’re competing against all people that want to be screenwriters, including women.

In the NFL, there are no women. Women cannot play in the NFL. Not by rule but just by physical reality. So men are only competing with men.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you’re going to get so much email just for that one sentence you just said.

**Craig:** You think so? That —

**John:** That physical reality? Yeah.

**Craig:** Because women —

**John:** By tradition —

**Craig:** It’s not tradition. [laughs] They physically can’t — I mean, I can’t compete in the NFL physically. I mean, you would have to be just an incredibly roided up woman. Yeah, I probably will get [laughs] a lot of letters but I don’t —

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I’m not judging. It’s just that there’s a reason why we haven’t seen a woman in the NFL, just physical realities. But that’s not the case happily for screenwriting. Anyone with a brain can be a screenwriter. So the competitive pool is quite a bit larger. So, again, tougher to be a screenwriter than to be a football player.

**John:** I think it’s a very useful statistic for your Aunt Sarah. So if she has in her back pocket like, “Oh, my nephew is a working screenwriter in Hollywood, like it’s harder to be a working screenwriter in Hollywood than it is to be an NFL player. It’s like less likely.” And that’s actually probably true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another crucial difference is that anybody who — that 1,700 people who are in the NFL, those people are all making a living. Their whole job is to be in the NFL, by definition. Of the 1,700 screenwriters, a lot of those are also doing other jobs because they are not making a real living as a screenwriter. So they might be getting paid something over the course of the year. That doesn’t mean that that’s enough to actually support themselves.

**Craig:** Yes. So we continue to crush everyone’s dream with remarkable efficiency.

**John:** So as we crush people’s dreams, let’s go on to lawsuit time. So we’ve talked a lot on the podcast about the Gravity lawsuit. We’ll never talk about that again.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But there was another lawsuit this week settled or at least another development on the lawsuit. This is over The Cabin in the Woods. That’s a movie directed by Drew Goddard, with a script by him and Joss Whedon. So Peter Gallagher was suing, claiming that Cabin in the Woods was based on and inspired by or took from his novel, The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines.

And so this week, it came down that Judge Otis Wright II who’s just the best name ever for a judge.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right up there with John Tilton August.

**John:** He wrote, “The few alleged similarities that are not grossly misstated involve unprotectable forms of expression, such as the group going to a cabin or the alpha male character attempting a risky escape plan to bring back help. A list of random similarities only further convinces the court of one thing. After thorough analysis of both works and application of the extrinsic test, The Cabin in the Woods and The Little White Trip are not substantially similar.”

So we’ll have a link on the show notes to his whole ruling. It was the first time I’d seen this extrinsic test mentioned, so I went through a little Wikipedia hole on what extrinsic test and intrinsic tests are. But they’re ways of judging substantial similarity.

**Craig:** Right. Well, first we should make it clear. This is not the actor Peter Gallagher. This is —

**John:** But wouldn’t it be great if it were?

**Craig:** It would be [laughs] fascinating, to say the least.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It would be a weird move by Peter Gallagher.

**John:** It would be like Sex, Lies, and Videotape 2. It would be great.

**Craig:** It would just be like Peter Gallagher sitting down, he’s like, “What could I do that would be the worst possible thing for my career? I know. I’ll sue Joss Whedon. That’ll be fun.”

**John:** Good choice.

**Craig:** This is how all of these end. I don’t know how else to put it for people. This is how they all end. And we’ve said this before. The feeding frenzy and excitement and, “Yes, stick it to the man-ism” that happens at the advent of these things is never matched when they all inevitably fall apart because it’s just not true. It’s just not true every single time.

And when he says something like “grossly misstated”, yeah, I mean that’s basically what we see all the time when you and I look at these things. We see that things are grossly misstated.

**John:** The reason why I want to bring this up at all because we hadn’t mentioned this lawsuit in the first place is that I do feel like we only see the news of these things being filed and we never see the outcomes of them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I just want to sort of highlight the outcomes. And I think there are actually three possible outcomes. There’s the outcome where the plaintiff actually wins, which is very, very rare and it’s so exceptional that we actually note when the plaintiff won like the Coming to America case was a rare case where a plaintiff won something there.

We sort of note sometimes when these things come down with negative opinions and the plaintiffs say they’re going to take it to another court and they’re going to appeal or whatever and they just sort of disappear. But 90% of these cases just magically disappear. And they never get to any sort of meaningful state or they get to a sort of pre-trial finding and there’s some sort of settlement that happens that doesn’t acknowledge any fault but basically says it would be cheaper just to make this all go away.

And that’s the other thing that happens frequently.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the statistics are when you compare, say, in we’ll call it somewhat failure, the difference between cases that are dismissed and cases that are settled. I suspect that if it’s already going to trial and they’ve gone through discovery and there’s a judge that the studios have decided, “No, we’re not giving this guy a dime or this woman a dime. We’re fighting this because, you know.”

Look, if they just routinely settle, just because, all they’re doing is inviting more of it. It becomes a gold rush.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** So I think actually a lot of times what happens is these things get dismissed. I don’t know what the ultimate stats are but I do know that in our lifetimes, I can think of only one case where it was a win and that was Art Buchwald in Coming to America. And he was Art Buchwald. And he wrote a treatment and they definitely ripped the treatment off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was it. I mean, everything else either if someone has a real case, they do quietly settle. They don’t even bother with the — the last thing they want is this being written about in the media. So I always feel like by the time we’ve heard about it, it’s a loser.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Alex in Miami wrote in to say, “During the Deflategate portion of the podcast about how would this be a movie,” so we talked about Deflategate and Tom Brady, “you mentioned it might be best to just create new characters that represent these people to avoid conflict.” So rather than use the real people, create new characters that sort of take the place of those real characters. “Can you guys explain what the difference is when compared to a film like Game Change which portrays real people like Sarah Palin and John McCain? How did they get away with it?”

So, yeah, let’s talk about what the difference is between a movie based on real events like Game Change was and what we were talking about you might want to do with this football movie.

**Craig:** Right. Well, when you’re dealing with public figures, you have a lot more latitude. When you’re dealing with private individuals, that is people that have an expectation of privacy and don’t live their lives on the public stage, they have a right to their own life story. You can’t just tell someone’s life story. You have to actually buy their life rights.

But if somebody’s a public figure, then essentially what the law says is the part of your life that’s lived in public and the things that we know from public disclosure, they are public already. So you don’t have to buy it.

Now, obviously politicians, a lot of their lives are lived in public. Similarly, Tom Brady’s life and Deflategate was lived in public. So it wasn’t a question of life rights. What concerned me about the potential movie adaptation was in fact this issue of how to deal with the fact that you want to show logos and you want to be in the NFL and you want to say, “Well, he plays for the Patriots,” and use the names of all these people, some of whom are not public figures.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you cited a really interesting article from Business Insider. So tell us about that.

**John:** So this is something that another listener had sent in. I think several listeners sent in. Business Insider wrote a piece about Ballers, the HBO series that stars Dwayne Johnson. And that uses real football logos. And that seems surprising because we think like, “Well, how can you use those football logos because they’re trademark things. NFL is going to come after you.”

And they just did it. And the explanation they give in this article, I don’t completely buy. I think they’re saying like, because we weren’t portraying the NFL negatively or in an untrue manner, we can get away with doing it.” I think they basically just felt like, “You know what, NFL try to come after us and you’re not going to succeed because NFL doesn’t have the ability to allow somebody to not show, you know, their logo on screen. It’s a real thing that exists out in the world.”

And they basically just had the courage to say, “You know what, this guy plays for the Dolphins and we’re showing a Dolphins logo.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There is always a space in between the obvious yes and the obvious no. And every studio has a different tolerance for playing in that space in between, because being sued is a problem. It’s expensive and it’s embarrassing in the media. And if you lose, it could be disastrous.

I think for Ballers, I think they were like, “Please sue us. This would be amazing publicity.” And it’s not like HBO is a lightweight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that was exciting. And I think also that they felt from a legal point of view that in that gray space, they were way closer to yes than no.

**John:** I was thinking like the counter examples, like you show character opening up a bottle of Coke and saying like, “This Coke is poison,” and they drink the Coke and then they die from poison, that would be an issue where Coke would probably come after you and would have a little bit more ammunition that you are lying about their product.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And showing their product, you’re associating their product with death.

**Craig:** Correct. In the case of our prospective Tom Brady movie, the problem is that the movie would need to make some kind of statement and take some kind of position to be at all interesting. And all those facts are disputed. And we just saw how the report was disputed and the penalty was overturned by a judge.

So you make your movie and you’ve got people wearing NFL logos doing things like actively cheating, Tom Brady actively cheating. Yeah, you’re going to get sued because he’s going to argue, “No, I didn’t do that, so you’re defaming me.” You can’t defame public — the only thing you can do with public individuals is satire them in such a way that it’s obviously satire. And that goes back to The People vs. Larry Flynt and the Jerry Falwell stuff.

**John:** So, circling back to portraying real people and the difference between Game Change and what this movie was describing, a good movie that sort of falls in the middle of that is The Social Network. And so Social Network shows Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg does not come off especially well in The Social Network. And those are real people and many of those people are real.

But I have a suspicion that as they were thinking about making the movie and as they looked through the people who were like less and less famous, they were actually much more careful about how those people were portrayed. And in some cases may have changed the names of some people just so they weren’t going to run into problems.

And like you said that I did this thing but I never did this thing and I’m not a public figure. Mark Zuckerberg is such a huge figure that he’s sort of impossible to libel. The smaller people have a much greater claim to protecting their own rights to privacy of their own life story.

**Craig:** I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg was a little jammed on this no matter what. Even if some of the aspects of the movie could be considered defamatory or libelous and he had a case or could make a case, the costs of disputing the movie would be the Streisand effect. You’re familiar with the Streisand effect?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for those of you who are not, Barbara Streisand once sued some random guy who had basically published a picture of her home on the internet and said, “This is Barbara Streisand’s home.” And Barbara Streisand went after this guy. On a website nobody even knew about. And suddenly because she went after him, everybody knew about it and everybody now knew where she lived.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, sometimes I think that’s the wedge against a guy like Zuckerberg because he’s just like, “Ugh, let me just ignore this until it goes away.”

**John:** Yeah. For sure. Our last bit of follow-up, this is actually just a nice email that somebody wrote in. And we get a lot of these and we get some nice comments on iTunes, too, but this was a guy who’s been listening to the show who had some good stuff happen. So I thought we would just read one of these.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Robert writes, “You don’t know me. I’m an avid listener to the podcast and the advice you’ve given to listeners since its inception has been incredible. It’s been such a pleasure and honor getting insight into the industry from you two and the fact that you both generally seem like standup guys makes things even better. I was recently hired by [big company] and started my first job as a staff writer on [big television company’s] show. I’m only on week three but I had to reach out and tell you that your guidance and advice has been absolutely priceless in helping me find and navigate the choppy waters of executives, showrunners, and other writers.

“I use something I picked up from the show probably every day. So I guess the reason I’m messaging you guys is because I wanted you to know that you are making a difference and doing something good for every writer out there who listens. So from all of us little guys who will hopefully be the big guys, let me write something in all caps for emphasis. Thank you. All the best, Robert.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s just wonderful. I mean, that’s why we do what we do. I really do believe that we are training an army of people. An army. And then one day —

**John:** An army.

**Craig:** When we need them, [laughs] we will call upon them.

**John:** We will rise. They will rise. [laughs] But I think part of the reason why I like to have this conversation with you every week is that it’s just talking about sort of the way things are and the way you sort of wish they would be and finding that balance between the two things. And so, hopefully, Robert is entering into a job at big television show where he can both do the work in front of him but also chart a path forward for himself and for writers like him that is at least as good, and maybe better than what we have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the dream is that as people start to enter the business and people in their 20s, so they’re new, that maybe a writer is sitting in a room with a producer and a studio executive and all three of them maybe have listened to the show and have heard some things about how to behave and how to be kind to each other and how to help each other in the middle of this very difficult process, and how to put themselves in the other person’s shoes.

And who knows? Maybe things will get better. Nah, probably not but that’s when we —

**John:** [laughs] Probably not.

**Craig:** That’s when we mobilize the army and then —

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And then, my friends —

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Oh, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. So, we won’t know if it gets better but hopefully it won’t be any worse for it. And hopefully there’ll be some people who know not to do certain things because of what they’ve seen on the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And this is going to be a great sort of object lesson in this because you’re going to talk us through this idea about rewrites and the anatomy of a rewrite and sort of best practices both for managing it psychologically and for the words on the page.

**Craig:** So this topic was suggested by a listener and it kind of shocked me because I thought — I don’t think we’ve actually done this and it’s kind of crazy that we haven’t. So she wrote, “I know you guys have touched on the etiquette of reaching out to writers when you’re hired to rewrite, but I wonder if you guys could discuss the creative process of rewriting. Maybe it’s too broad of a question but I’m curious how your approach is different compared to starting from scratch or compared to each other.”

Excellent question.

**John:** Very good question.

**Craig:** How do we go about this thing called rewriting? So first thing’s first, we have to figure out what the actual scope of the gig is. And sometimes the first thing that happens is you engage in a kind of a triage. You take a look at the material and then you start asking questions of yourself and others. How extensive is the perceived problem? Is this something where we kind of need to go back to scratch and start from page one and write something new? Or is the problem that there are sequences that aren’t working? Is the problem that the story is in good shape but maybe this character needs help or the climax of the movie needs help?

The first thing that you have to do when you’re rewriting a script is to get everybody to agree on a diagnosis of the problem.

**John:** That’s really smart. I think it’s a question of what do I think needs to have happened. But more importantly, what does everyone else who has a stake in this think needs to happen and can I convince them of my vision, if possible?

**Craig:** And sometimes, you find that you’re the only one who thinks there’s a major problem. And that is a great indication that this is probably not a job for you. And that’s good information. I need to know if I’m a good match for what they think is required.

**John:** This happens to me a lot. And tell me if you’ve had this similar experience where I’ll get sent a script and I’ll read through it and like so, “Wow, okay, wow. I just don’t — I mean, I think I know where to start but like I’m starting really kind of from scratch.” And then I’ll get on the phone with my agent and it’s like, “Yeah, I think this is like maybe a week or two of work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that mismatch, it’s just like it’s so fundamental that I know that like there’s no reason for me to try to pursue this project.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And in fact, that becomes one of the initial questions. What’s the timeline here? They always seem to give you one. Sometimes, if something is in early development stages, there isn’t a timeline. It’s just, “Look, we really love this project. We would love for it to be something. We don’t like where it is now. What do you think? So sky is the limit. Let’s just figure this out.”

A lot of times, there’s a timeline. The movie will be getting made. Or more commonly, “We need to get this movie in a place where we can show it to this actor by this point or this director by this point because that’s when they become available.” So I always ask, “How much time is there to do this work?” Inevitably, when you hear about these jobs from studios, they’re going to lowball you on the time every single time.

It’s not because they want to pay you less. It’s just standard wishful thinking.

**John:** Yeah. In terms of time, sometimes they’ll come to you with, you know, “We think it’s two weeks work. We think it’s a significant amount of work but, you know, we want to hit the certain date or time.” There have been jobs where it’s like, “Literally we’re shooting this next week, so you have days to get this done.” And you’re getting on the phone with the crucial people right away. And that’s where you have to really be able to discuss exactly what you think you’re going to be able to do and be honest about sort of what’s possible and what’s not possible in the limited amount of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good rule of thumb. When they say it’s a week, it’s two weeks or three weeks. When they say it’s three weeks, it’s six weeks. When they say it needs a rewrite but it’s not a page one, it’s a page one. Just upgrade every single thing [laughs] because that’s what’s going to be true.

You do then have this new challenge, which is you’re coming into a process that pre-exists you. When you start something new, you sell an original or you’re the first person on an assignment, a team is assembled and starts to gel. And you have time to figure out who’s in charge. “See, I know he’s saying he’s in charge but I think she’s really in charge.”

When you come in on a rewrite, that team is there. And you need to figure out pretty quickly who the real boss is. And just as important, you need to figure out how things went wrong before because they did. That’s the one fact for sure you know coming in on a rewrite.

So there was a problem. And the problem may entirely rest with the writer. More often than not, it’s a combination of wrong writer for the project and then problems with the process. As much as you can, if you can try and clear the mines off the field before you start marching through it, you’ll be in better shape.

**John:** And this is a mistake I’ve made before where I would come in to a project, it was a page one rewrite. We were starting over from scratch. And, you know, I had forgotten that like, “Oh, that’s right. They’ve actually been through this all once before.” And it wasn’t until I was like four meetings in on a project and one of the producers said something that was referencing the previous draft. I’m like, “Wow, you still think we’re making that movie that was that movie, you know, six months ago.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I had forgotten that there actually ever was something before because it was such a fundamental rewrite. And so, clearing the field is exactly the right idea. But even if you get all the mines off the field, you have to remember that they’ve fought a war before you even got there.

**Craig:** That’s right. And there are going to be areas that are emotional for them. In the way that for us, when someone casually says, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” And you look at that line and think, “Yeah, fine.” Or, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” You look at that line and think, “But that’s the line that I wrote that made me love this. That’s the line that made me feel proud to be a writer.”

We are attaching emotional weight to something that can’t bear it and shouldn’t have to bear it. Well, they do the same thing. So they’ve had fights. And when you come in and you sit in that room, just be aware when you say something like, “Well, I just have no idea why Joe is being mean to Sue.” That’s not motivated. You are taking a side in an argument that’s happened. Somebody is getting angry [laughs] and there’s nothing you can do about it except to be as impartial as possible. It’s not like you wrote it. So, you get that benefit.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I find those conversations I’m always trying to phrase the possibility of what the next thing is going to be rather than crapping on what is there right in front of me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can acknowledge that things aren’t working but don’t try to be specific about like, you know, this was a mistake or a fault or a problem. Rather it’s like, “Here are the opportunities for how we can get to this that we all want to get to.” Always talk about the movie you want the make, not the script that’s on the page.

**Craig:** And with that in mind, when we are asked to rewrite something, part of what we need to accomplish is rekindling the spark of the thing that got them all excited in the first place. Somewhere before you showed up, people got excited and they fell in love. And then something went wrong.

So, yes, you can say, “Look, here’s what isn’t working here but here’s what could be working.” But you need to recognize that once there was love. And you have to figure out what that is because what you love about it needs to connect with what they love about it. That’s how your movie will get made. That’s how your version of this will get made because, and this is maybe the most controversial thing I’ll say about rewriting.

Rewriting is not really the right word for what this is. When we say we’re rewriting, that’s like an employment term. We’re writing. Because, look, when we write something, we write a draft and then we rewrite our own draft. Fair. But when we’re rewriting somebody else’s work, it’s the first time for us. It’s not a re anything. It’s new for us. It’s a new write.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the rest of the world can call it a rewrite, but it’s a new write. And as part of a new write, and this goes directly to the question, you have to be concerned about all the things you’d be concerned about if it were not a rewrite. That is, theme, character, narrative, tone, scenes. All the things that you bundle up to fall in love with, you need to bundle those up into this because it’s new to you.

**John:** Absolutely. There have been jobs where I’ve come in where I’ve just done incredibly surgical craftsman work to fix one little thing. And those I was literally just applying my skills to a small little bit. And they never felt like my movie.

But if I’m going in and doing a real draft, that is now my movie and I have to think about it on a fundamental level on answering all those questions. What does this movie mean to me? Who are the characters to me? What are the voices? And really start from scratch. That’s no slam on the previous writer. That’s just, you know, the process. It’s how you write a movie is to write it from the inside out.

**Craig:** No question. In many ways, when we take on what’s called a rewrite, what we’re really doing is adapting in the way that we adapt a novel. So I get a novel, I read the novel, and then the first questions I have are, “How faithful am I going to be to this novel? What parts of the novel should I keep and what parts should I not keep? What did I fall in love with? What’s great but probably not right for a movie? How could I change the ending to make it work better with the beginning in a movie?” You know, all those things.

Or should I touch nothing and just really do what the book — all those questions are the questions I ask when I get a screenplay because I’m adapting it. That’s how I think of it. I’m adapting it into a new work. Yes, there are times when you’re only there for a week or two and that’s not adaptation. You’re literally writing lines. “Give us five lines for this.” Or “Write a scene that does this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you are working on something that’s lengthier, for instance, I don’t know about you but even if it’s not a page one, and when we say page one, we mean we are keeping the rough idea of the prior movie, prior screenplay and just starting over. Even if it’s not that, even if it’s kind of a half a “rewrite”, I start a new document in my software. I can always go back and take things from their file and put it into mine. But I need to do the thing that I do when I’m writing, which is I imagine what’s the opening image, what’s the first thing, what’s the first person, what did they say, what does this mean.

I go through that same process. How do you approach that?

**John:** Exactly the same way. So anything where it’s a fundamental rewrite of something, you know, I guess a new write of something, I do start with the blank document. And then I bring over the stuff that’s actually working really well and I’ll look for the stuff that’s great. And if there’s stuff that I don’t need to rewrite, I will happily keep every little bit of it.

You know, the original writer made choices and often those choices work terrific. And if I can make those same choices, I will make those same choices. So I’ll make the same choices of especially character names. If those character names are right and those characters feel like the right characters for the story, they stay. If the locations and settings are the locations and settings that we feel like we want to make for this movie, all that stuff stays.

So often, it’s really the storytelling. It’s the order of how things are happening. It’s all the new stuff is what I need to do. And so, a lot of what’s in that current script I shouldn’t even try to bring over. And if I find that if I just try to rewrite within that other writer’s original document, it’s going to just feel weird and forced because I’m trying to park in too tight of a parking spot. I’m trying to make my stuff fit into their stuff rather than just make my own movie.

**Craig:** And it just won’t work. It’s important to acknowledge that there are times when, as part of our adapting choice, we are taking things from that existing script and porting them over because they’re consistent with our vision of what this is supposed to become. But it’s just as important to note that you need to give yourself room to be the writer that you are. You need that room. There’s no other way for you to express yourself freely and interestingly.

And after all, they didn’t hire you to squeeze little new things in between the existing stuff. They hired you because of your voice and your expression. So you have to essentially approach it as an honest broker but give yourself the room to write your version because that’s why you’ve been hired.

**John:** I think I’m very mindful of it. It’s like I won’t change something just for the sake of changing it. Something will change because I need something different to make this movie work. And I need to get from this place to that place in a different way. Or the way this works in my brain is different than the way it works in the previous draft. And that’s okay. I don’t feel a responsibility to anyone as much as the audience. Like, what does the movie want to be, and it’s my job to sort of be a conduit to getting us to that movie.

**Craig:** Well, that sort of brings me to some basic dos and don’ts because you’ve outlined a really good one. And I guess we’ll start it as a positive thing. What you do want to do is be an impartial judge. There’s no honor in saying I obliterated the other writer. And similarly, there’s no shame in saying I preserved the stuff that worked.

I think sometimes people that have a rewrite assignment feel like, “Well, they’re paying me money. If I just take this scene over then it’s cheating,” it’s not cheating. They don’t mind that. They don’t care. What they want is a movie that works. And believe me, you’re going to new write plenty of stuff.

Similarly, don’t be squeamish about what you have to do to get there. The greatest gift you can give the prior writer is a green light. And the deal is this. And there used to be a lot of strife between writers over this stuff, less so now because I think everybody’s been on both sides of the coin enough.

That writer got fired. They didn’t get fired because you got hired. They got fired. They’re done. Their script will not get a green light. Those are facts. Yours might but you need to give yourself the freedom to do what you think needs to be done to get there. So you can’t operate in fear and you can’t misinterpret respect for another writer with a preciousness about what they did, nor can you misinterpret my duty as a writer with, “I got to get rid of everything they wrote.” You just have to aim towards what’s going to get this movie made.

**John:** And I will say that my relationship with some of my favorite writers came because I was being rewritten by them or I was rewriting them. And we had that conversation when the handoff happened and we were grownups to say like, “I know that I’m not going to be the person to get this movie made. Maybe you can be.”

And when you approach it that way, like please take care of my child and see it to, you know, the safe shores of moviedom, that can be a real gift. And when you can have that conversation openly and honestly with the person who’s going to be writing next, that is a terrific joy because you get to first explain all the stuff we said before about who the stakeholders are, where all the bones are buried and sort of, you know, you guys know sort of what went wrong because something obviously went wrong. But something went right. And to sort of get to know what was it that was so fantastic that sort of got this whole process started.

And that’s true, I’ll say because, you know, she’s our podcast Joan Rivers. My first conversation with Aline Brosh McKenna was about this kind of situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And neither of us was particularly excited to be on that phone call but it was a good phone call to have because it made it clear sort of what was really possible with this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes people will say, “Do you really do the thing where you call the prior writer?” They don’t believe me. And I just, yeah, I do it. I do it. I don’t do it if there’s been 20 writers because then it doesn’t matter. But, yeah, I mean if there’s been very few, absolutely. Of course I do it. And it always works.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes I’ll do the even more awkward thing which is when I’m being rewritten, I will reach out to go to that writer who’s replacing me. And that person is usually terrified that I’m reaching out.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I assure you, I’m only doing it because I want them to succeed and I want them to know sort of what things are really happening. And I will say that with the advent of Twitter and social media and just general accessibility of emails, it’s much easier to make that conversation, that connection happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was very hard in the days where I had to go through their agent and then it’s like, god, this is awkward for everybody. But it doesn’t have to be awkward for everybody now.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. It’s just a nice collegiate thing to do. It always helps. Some other dos and don’ts. Don’t change the character names unless you have good reason. That’s something you already mentioned. What’s good reason? I mean, I just don’t do it if I don’t have to.

Even if I don’t really like the name, I just don’t do it because, eh, it just feels cheap. You know, it just feels cheap.

**John:** If there’s some fundamentally bad or confusing choices, I will change a character’s name. Like there have been scripts that I’ve gotten where like two characters have the same first letters of their name and it actually is just genuinely confusing —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then I will do it. But I’ll always think twice about doing it because I don’t want to be the guy who just changes names to make it seem like it’s a different character when it’s not really a different character.

**Craig:** Yeah. You change names if there’s a gender change. You change names if there’s a nationality change. You change names maybe if there’s a racial change or a class change. But, you know, if it’s the same person, don’t just go, “Ah, I just hate Denise. I just hate that name. It’s stupid. She’s, you know, Sophie now.” Don’t do that.

**John:** There have been situations where I’ve gone in on a rewrite and the character who was taking the place of that — taking that function was so vastly different than the character before, it was helpful to change the name just so that there wasn’t the baggage of that previous character being there. But that’s honestly one of those situations where you’re changing it almost as much as changing the gender.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just fundamentally different characters serving the same function that I don’t really consider that being changing the character’s name. I put a different character in that place.

**Craig:** Right. That’s a different thing. So if you have, you know, a script where somebody is married and you say, “Look, the character of the wife is just not working at all. I propose an entirely different character.” Then you’re not renaming that character, you’re making a new character. That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really more about like, come on, why did you change his boss’ name? [laughs] It’s the same guy. He doesn’t even say it that much.

**John:** Here’s a good litmus test. If you’re changing all the names and mostly their dialogue is staying the same as it was in the previous draft —

**Craig:** Then you’re a dick.

**John:** You’re probably making a dick move.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re a total douche. Similarly, another douche move, don’t think about the arbitration. It’s not a common thing, but every now and then somebody will tell me, “Well, you know, I just took this job and I’m going to be rewriting this thing. I wonder if I’m going to get credit.” I’m like, “Stop. Just stop.” It’s like, you know, when they bring a reliever out in the middle of the baseball game, as he’s walking to the mount, he’s not wondering like, “Well, let’s see, if this works out, who’s going to get credit for winning the game? I mean he went six innings but I might go three.” Forget it, just do your job. Just do your job. Don’t worry about the arbitration. Later on. [laughs] it will happen one way of another.

**John:** But, Craig, I will admit to myself and to you and to everybody listening to the podcast, there have been jobs where I’ve gone in for where I just know from the start, there’s just no possibility I would ever get credit. In some ways, that’s really liberating, to not even have to think about sort of like — I don’t have to think about the future. I can only just think about this work in front of me and doing the best work that gets this movie made. And that’s actually kind of liberating too because it frees from the burden of possibility and wonder and indecision. Like I know for a fact there’s absolutely no chance my name will be on this. And that is sometimes really good.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me that is the ultimate expression of not thinking about the arbitration because you don’t want credit. You’re not there for credit. There’s never going to be an issue. If there is an arbitration, you’re going to say, I don’t want it. Those assignments are nice sometimes because you get to feel like a ninja.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nobody will know, you know. I like that. A couple of other dos and don’ts. Don’t blame the prior script for your current problems. If you are rewriting something and you’re struggling, the last thing in the world you want to do is to say, “Well, you know, the script before me — I mean all this stuff.” You know, you took the job. Shut up and fix the script.

**John:** That’s why you have the job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s probably the reason why you’re doing this job, is because the script had problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll tell you a little story without names. A little blind item story. So once I was hired to write something and then someone was hired to rewrite it. And that person, I heard from a reliable source, said well, you know — when the people were unhappy with his work, he said, “Well, I mean look what you gave me.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I just filed that away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then when he was fired —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I was brought back. And then —

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s not a rational, supportable argument to make. If you take a gig to rewrite something, you’re saying you’re paying me and I can help, not you’re paying me and, “Well, yeah, but the script is bad. And he — ” Shut up.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. If you’re taking only easy jobs, you’re not really doing your job.

**Craig:** No. No. And also, if you take — it doesn’t matter whether it’s easy or hard, [laughs] you took the job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. Stop blaming the other script. Lastly, do be a calm voice. This is one of the few times in our business where we actually begin with a good hand because everybody is nervous and upset and something hasn’t worked and in you come to save the day.

You may not end up saving the day. But at least in this early moment, you have a good hand. People are looking to you. And this is the time to project back confidence and coolness. Nobody is blaming you for what’s there because you weren’t there. So as best as you can, try and be a soothing presence. You don’t want to sew panic. You don’t want to come in and say, “All right, so you guys — I’m going to be rewriting this but I go to tell you, it’s in bad shape. And I know that you need it for six weeks from now. And there’s just no way. This is going to be bad because still — because this is — ” No, no, no, no, no. Don’t take the job then. [laughs]

**John:** No. Don’t take the job. Run away.

**Craig:** Don’t take the job. Just you got to come and say, everybody, it’s going to be okay. I got this.

**John:** Yeah. So the advice we’ve just given you is I think really good advice if you are the writer who’s being brought in to work on a project that is not crazy town. And so if it’s like, this is a movie that’s going to be made or is it that, you know, it could be made but you’re the person who is going to get it into production.

If you have a movie that is speeding down the tracks at 1,000 miles per hours, some of the stuff may not apply quite as much because you’re on an insane trainful of explosives. And so we have friends who are working on those insane trains full of explosives. And I think you can aspire to the kind of things we’re about here. You can certainly aspire to be calm, you can certainly aspire to be gracious and generous and never trash the earlier stuff and be the hopeful problem solver.

But sometimes you’re just going to be the person who’s like chugging through pages and emailing them in because they’re going to be shooting them in two hours and it’s just crazy town. So I would say, if you are in one of those situations, just know that — just do the best you can and be the best, most generous respectful writer you can be, but also know that you’re in a war and it’s a war to sort of get this movie made.

**Craig:** You know, when you were talking about that, it occurred to me that one of the things that trips new screenwriters up is that they don’t understand that there’s one name for job, screenwriter, there’s five different jobs that —

**John:** Yeah, you’re right.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing to say, yeah, you know, the same person that sits down and creates an idea and writes 120 pages and invents a world is the same person that has three hours while they’re on a plane to fix dialogue that’s being shot six hours from now. And then when they land, they got to get to a set and rewrite something to bring the budget down. Two different jobs, but often times, same person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you just need to be able to shift those hats around as you go between the various kinds of rewriting.

**John:** Yeah. And I would just say, don’t confuse those two roles and don’t try to be that crazy, mercenary person when you have, you know, three weeks or you have, you know, time. The gun is not always aimed at your head. You don’t always have to act like the gun is at your head and that it’s always a crisis situation. Most times, it isn’t that. And most times, you have days or weeks to get the stuff done and being that calm, cool presence is really crucial. I want to make sure I’m offering some sympathy to the writers who do find themselves in just those nutso situations.

Reaching way back so it’s not anything shooting right now, but like the first Charlie’s Angels had a bunch of writers who worked serially and so I know that each of those people who’s coming in was coming in to just crazy town. And so for them not to reach out to me individually to get my feeling on the script, that is totally cool. I knew what they are going into. How I met the Wibberleys is they were brought in do the second Charlie’s Angels and we had that great phone conversation and it was so useful because it wasn’t crazy town yet.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. You just have to kind of suss out, am I one in the line? Is this is a mill? You know, some of these movies turn into like, what I call, a weekly mill.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where they just start paying people’s weeklies one after another after another. Less so now in the 2000s, more common — it was the —

**John:** At some point, they got — the studios got really smart and they would make all services deals for writers who they thought could carry it to the finish line. And so then they would pay a flat fee to these writers and keep them as indentured servants on these runaway productions.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think they also started to look at the quality of the patchwork of seven different writers on a movie and think, eh, big ticket items, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not quite knitting together. So yeah, but if you’re one of a procession, nobody cares. Everybody gets it. But if you’re not, yeah sure, give a call.

**John:** Give the call. All right, our next topic — this is something that occurred to me because it occurred to me this week is I just finished up a script that is hopefully a script that I will direct at some point in the future. And one of the things I needed to do is figuring out like, well, how much would this even cost? And so I went to a line producer friend who is fantastic and I asked her if she would take a look at it and figure out for me how much this might cost.

And so one of her first jobs is to figure out a production schedule. And so I want to talk through what a production schedule is and sort of what is involved in figuring out how long it takes to shoot a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, good idea.

**John:** So production schedules, the reason why you need to do it first is that your budget is so dependent on how many days it will take to make a movie. That’s probably the single biggest factor in how much a movie costs is how long it will take to shoot it.

**Craig:** Right, shooting days.

**John:** Shooting days. Time equals labor and labor equals money. And so if you are at Sundance Film Festival and someone raises their hand and says, “How much did the movie cost?” Everyone will shutter because you’re never allowed to ask that question. But what you’ll hear people ask is how many shooting days did you have? And people will happily answer how many shooting days. And shooting days is a useful proxy for how much the movie costs.

When I’m talking to a friend, he says like, “Oh yeah, we’re shooting it in town. It’s 30 days.” Like, wow, you are racing and that budget is much lower than I would have guessed for that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, the amount of pages that you can shoot in a day vary wildly, so, you know, television they’ll sometimes shoot all the way up to nine pages in a day. But they’re shooting certain kind of material that can be done that way. For feature films, big studio movies, page-and-a-half to three pages a day is about the normal thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some pages take three days to shoot because it’s an action sequence and, you know, some pages take — you can get four pages done before lunch because it’s two people talking on a bench.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re doing it as a oner. So that’s what a line producer can kind of help figure out. But overall, yeah, if somebody says, “Oh, how many days did you shoot?” “42, 45.” Oh, it’s average. Okay, it’s typical. “How many days did you shoot?” “30.” Fast. “18.” Oh my God. “79.” Whoa. [laughs] You know, you —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Work around. I always just work around 50, seems like — that’s sort of the —

**John:** 50 seems like just a solid, you know, studio feature.

**Craig:** Yeah, 50.

**John:** And so Go was a movie shot in town, shot in Los Angeles and was 30 days. And that’s become sort of my benchmark sort of like it’s not a total indie, but it’s not a big studio feature either and so I sort of keep that as my threshold.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Nines was also about — it was 22 days and that’s not a crazy amount of time for a small indie feature. So talking with this producer, I sent her over this script, but I also sent over a list of kind of assumptions. And this is a helpful way for her to think about the schedules she’s trying to build.

So some of the assumptions that are useful for her to know. Which scenes do you think are practical locations versus sets? And the difference is when I say sets, that’s stage work. Those are sets that you’re building in a black box to do certain things. And that can be really useful for anything with visual effects, you can sometimes move a lot faster on sound stages. Cheaper movies tend to use a lot more location work, but also expensive movies use location work, too. You can get production value by using real locations and not having to build things.

If you look at most television shows, they have what’s called in days and out days. And in days means that they’re on their standing sets. They’re on the police precinct headquarters. They are at Central Perk in Friends. Those are the days they’re shooting inside the studio and that can be a huge difference for a line producer is just figuring out your schedule.

**Craig:** It’s kind of remarkable how much sets cost, just to build — because it’s not like they’re building a real house. I mean you can’t live in it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it costs a lot, like just a wall costs a lot.

**John:** So to help people figure out like what is a set and what’s not a set, in the movie Go, almost everything is a practical location. So we’re in Todd Gaines’ apartment, that’s a real location. It’s a real apartment off of Western.

But there are certain things we had to build sets for because you couldn’t do it in a real location. So an example is Simon sets a hotel room on fire. That hotel room — the inside of the hotel room had to be a set because we had to have fire control there and be able to light it all on fire and put it all out.

There’s a sequence where Ronna tries to flush these pills down the toilet. We had to build that bathroom and the toilet because the real location wasn’t big enough. And it’s just actually very hard to get flushable things and make a bathroom big enough. Bathrooms are sort of weirdly a thing you end up building a lot because they’re hard to control.

**Craig:** Right, you can’t fit equipment into a bathroom. I mean more than anything, how do you shoot inside a bathroom?

**John:** Yeah, walls are your enemies.

**Craig:** Right. So on sets, walls can fly in and out. And this how you get stuff done. That’s half of the time you’re doing stuff like this is because of that. Sometimes you’re doing it because you can’t find something practically. Sometimes you can, it’s just too expensive or arduous. There are always — I mean in the end, they’re always trying to decide what’s going to be the most efficient way to do something in terms of time and money. And there are times when you get jammed and you have to build something you wish you didn’t have to build. But, you know, hey, look at it this way, at least, it’s cover. Every now and then, you need somewhere to go if it’s raining.

**John:** Yeah. And so that idea of rain cover becomes crucial specially later on as you’re budgeting to figure out like, what happens if it rains. And so Big Fish was a movie we shot in Atlanta. And it rained all the time. And so the crew could be out on location, it starts to rain and they could suddenly pull back to our sound stages which was built in these warehouses and shoot these interior scenes. And that was because it was cleverly constructed in a schedule that there’s always stuff inside that we could shoot if we needed to.

The next thing we’re talking about with the producer is locations and which locations in the scripts could we shoot at other places? So you may have experience with this with like your Hangover movies and also with Identify Thief, you had to decide like how much flexibility is there between going to the real places and faking it.

**Craig:** Well, so much of it comes down to budget. There’s also a general feeling of, well, why are people coming to this movie? This is one of the bummers. You know, everybody that writes a screenplay imagines in their mind the place. If they’re going a good job, the place is its own character, it has a vibe, it has a feeling. And a movie like Identify Thief which is a road trip, the terminal points of the trip are really important. And then if you have a travel movie like The Hangover Part II, which takes place in Bangkok, good luck faking that. You’re going to Bangkok.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the point, you know. Now, on Identify Thief which cost, I don’t know, what fraction of Hangover II — I think it cost I think $30 million or something like that, all in. The original plan was that the road trip would be from Boston to Portland. I liked the idea of taking the Northern route because I hadn’t really seen that travelled in a lot of road movies. It was just a different look.

**John:** Yeah. I saw your movie and they didn’t take that route.

**Craig:** [laugh] No, they didn’t. So the initial suggestion from physical production, so at a studio, physical production is the department that handles budget-making and all the rest of that. So their suggestion was, what if it was from Miami to Orlando? [laughs] I kid you not?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Then they expanded to Miami to Atlanta. And I was like, “Look, guys, Miami to Atlanta is a day. You can do that in a day. Forget Miami or Orlando. That’s not a journey. That’s just a day. That’s like saying, ‘Oh my God, we’re going on a road trip from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo.'”[laughs] It’s like who cares?

So when all was said and done, they’re like, “Look, fancy pants, we’re shooting this movie in Atlanta entirely for tax reasons and budget reasons, so figure it out.” And what we ended up doing was starting the movie in “Florida,” which was not Florida. We faked Florida, you know, so we shot Georgia for Florida.

And then the other area was Denver because Denver is — I mean —

**John:** It’s generic.

**Craig:** It’s just generic. I mean that’s the thing, it’s like a generic skyline. People in Denver and people in Atlanta, I’m sure, looked at this and went, “What?” Everybody else was like, “Yeah, okay, I guess that’s American city.” I hate it. I mean I hate, hate, hate it because it just cheapens the movie.

And what happens is when people watch movies like this, they don’t realize it necessarily but they’re quietly going generic America, did they not care? No, no, no, trust me, there were fights and fights and fights. We, making the movies, care very much. The people spending money on them, they’re a little more calculating. And look, hard to blame them. They’re like, people aren’t showing up for the awesome cinematography of Portland. So yeah, we’re faking it for Denver. And that’s basically what happened.

**John:** And so that conversation starts right at the scheduling thing. So this is the email I sent through to the line producer said, “These are the locations that I think are important. There’s a section of the movie that takes place over there. I would be fine shooting that some place different all together. So I can tell you where it’s actually set, but I would be happy to move that somewhere else. Also, I’d be happy to break the interiors from the exteriors if that becomes a helpful thing, too.” So I just let her know where the flexibility was.

I had to tell her which characters were minors and how old they would be, not miners with a hat, but like young people —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that would affect how many days they could work. And I’m sorry, how many hours they can work per day. And that could be a real factor. And so for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, those kids were really young. And in the U.K., they could only work like four hours a day or something. And so they had to build their whole schedule so that they would have the Oompa Loompa stuff to shoot in the afternoon. So they have kids in the morning on stage, and their whole schedule is built around the Oompa Loompa numbers. And so that becomes a factor.

**Craig:** And don’t forget, you’re also paying — you’re paying for teachers because they have to go to school when they’re working.

**John:** Yeah. And the last thing I had to tell here was how much of the things that’s felt like visual effects in the movie were meant to be visual effects and how much was supposed to be done on the day in camera.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it’s really expensive to be in production. But post-production is really expensive, too. And I wanted her to know what I saw being a visual effect and what I saw not being a visual effect. So those are some of the assumptions I had to send through in email with the script so she would have a sense of how to being scheduling this movie.

**Craig:** Well, I mean it’s all magic to me how they do it. I mean I know that it’s not magic [laughs], but — yeah.

**John:** So Craig, you’ve never had to physically make a schedule —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** For a movie, have you?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I had to do it. I had to do it in film school.

**Craig:** Oh my God.

**John:** And so for my master thesis, we had to actually do a breakdown of a schedule. So I will talk through what that process is. Not that a writer will ever have to do this herself, but to know what the thing is really kind of magic. So back in the day, this is back in film school, this is, you know, the 90s, this was still done by hand. So you’d have these cardboard strips and in order to get the information to put on those cardboard strips, you’d go the script, carefully number each scene, you’d number each character and which characters were in which scenes, not just the characters who speak, but the characters who are present in a scene because those are the actors we’re going to need for those scenes.

Then you would measure how long each scene was. And you measure in eights. Craig, do you know why eighths of a page came to be?

**Craig:** No, why? Why did they do that?

**John:** You know, I’ve heard different explanations but I think it’s essentially, it’s very easy to conceive of half a page and when you get to a quarter of a page, like, “Oh yeah, I can see a quarter of a page.” And then at an eighth of a page — well, an eighth is about as short of a scene as could possibly be. And if you actually look at a script, an eighth of a page is essentially a scene header and like two lines of action.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s an eighth, and so that was a small as they decided they ever wanted to make a portion. But every scene is measured in eighths which is just nuts, but that’s just how it’s done.

**Craig:** It’s so annoying.

**John:** We all know as screenwriters that because of how we write screen description, you know, a scene that’s three pages long could be really short in terms of actual screen time or could be incredibly long in terms of screen time but we still measure in pages and eighths of pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one of the first things I do when a movie is about to go in production and they issue that schedule. I go through and I’m like, “Hmm, let’s see. Let’s see if they’re right,” [laughs] and they’re almost right. But every now and then, I’ll go —

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** “Hmm, you know — ” and usually, what it is, is that I think to myself, they’ve said this is two days, I bet it’s one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they’re being fooled by the fact that it’s five-and-three-eighths, you know.

**John:** And back in the day when this was on cardboard strips, you would literally pad the strips. So you’d, basically, on each cardboard strip, there’d be a different color for whether it was day or night, interior, exterior. On that strip, you would write and code whether it was interior or exterior, who is in the scene, there’s like coding for which characters are in the scenes, where the scene is and sometimes you would even squeeze in like a description of what the scene was. You would have all these strips of paper of cardboard that were flexible enough that you could slide them into a binder and literally slide them up and down. And then you’re trying to group them together to maximize and sort of optimize how you’re shooting this movie.

So now this is all done with software. But it still mimics the way that it was done when it was cardboard strips.

**Craig:** You’re so old.

**John:** I’m so old. It was really fun to do it. I was really happy to do it once because, as you know, Craig and I both wrapped sign posts or wrapped strike placards once.

**Craig:** We did.

**John:** And I was really good at wrapping stuff with duct tape. I’m really good at like physical crafts and it felt fun in a very physical craft kind of way.

**Craig:** [laughs] Do you remember what mine looked like?

**John:** Mine were prettier.

**Craig:** I mean I have always feared arts and crafts class. When I was in school and I would get to arts and crafts, something would always go disastrously wrong. And you think like how could it go that wrong? All you had to do was just assemble the Popsicle sticks. You just had to glue the things.

I remember, we were given an assignment. Collect some local foliage, bring it into school and we’ll make a winter scene on construction paper. And so people brought in little bits of things.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And they glued them on and made little winter wonderlands. And I was like, “Okay, so I just gathered up a bunch of vegetation without any concern [laughs] whatsoever, sat down, started gluing it on. It all smelled. There was something about like the weeds I had picked up. Like they were smelly weeds.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** It wasn’t marijuana, it was just nasty weeds. And then I thought, “Well, this looks terrible. I know what I’ll do. I’ll cover it in glue because glue is white and it’s like snow and it will look nice.” But when glue dries, it’s clear. So what it ended up being was just this horrendous pile of nasty street mulch covered in a crisscrossing of clear crust.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is how I do with arts and crafts.

**John:** Like it could be art. You never know.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a possibility you made art.

**Craig:** No, it could not be art. It was not art or a craft. It was neither.

**John:** So the line producer has all this information now broken down into strips, either real strips or in this case, virtual strips in her software. And there’s a specialized software. Movie Magic Scheduling. What’s the big one? I’m not sure what people are using these days. But then she’s trying to arrange a schedule. And she has a bunch of competing goals. And that’s where it becomes less craft and really an art and really knowing how to make a movie.

So she’s trying to keep her days together and her nights together as much as possible because it’s really brutal on a crew when they have to be shooting — it’s actually impossible for a crew. Like a crew can’t shoot all night and then turn around and shoot the next day.

**Craig:** No, you’re protective — like what it is, like 12 hours in between or something?

**John:** Yeah, that’s called turn around and so that’s, you know, going from night to day, you have to have time off. And so what you’ll find is that usually, let’s say, your schedule runs from Monday through Friday, you’re shooting five day weeks in town and you’ll start shooting early on Monday morning and then your schedule will drift a little bit later and later over the course of the week. And so your start times will be later and later each day until you reach what’s affectionately known as Fraturday, which is where you have a really late call on Friday and you’re essentially shooting into all of Saturday night and then driving home on Saturday morning. That is a pretty common schedule.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But you would never start your week as nights unless you were shooting nights the whole week.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are the dreaded splits. So splits are when you’re going to be shooting half day, half night. Nobody likes those.

**John:** It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** It’s just terrible. It’s just terrible.

**John:** Craig, have you run into situations where you’ve had to shoot interior at night, but as daytime? So I’ve been on movies where if you had to like blast —

**Craig:** Oh my God, are you kidding me?

**John:** Bright lights in through the windows to make it seem like it’s daylight but it’s, of course, it’s like three in the morning?

**Craig:** Always. And it’s so distressing to your circadian rhythm. You have no idea what’s going on. I mean people talk about how casinos don’t have clocks. And I mean a sound stage is the ultimate casino that way. It’s a huge windowless box where no noise or light can penetrate.

So yeah, you’re shooting on a set. There’s some huge ass light on a thing shining through a window blasting light and it’s — I’ve shot scenes that were morning scenes in the middle of the night. And morning is the worst because it’s like, your brain is really getting fooled because it’s the color temperature of morning light. You’re like, I should be waking up. I want to go to bed. This is all wrong. It’s terrible. It’s really bad for you. It’s bad for your health.

**John:** It is really bad for you, I agree. And for me, it’s always that I will be on the set and it would seem like daylight and then I’ll go out and realize like, “Oh, that’s right, it’s three in the morning.” Like it’s just night and it’s cold and you hear the crickets. And like, wait, what, what am I doing? And then the worst is always like driving home like as the sun is coming up, that’s just the worst feeling.

**Craig:** Well, it’s also a real problem because there have been deaths and no doubt there have been quite a few accidents that were less than fatal, but still serious. It’s just dangerous. I mean the way we shoot movies is so — and I understand why there was that flirtation for a while where big directors were drifting towards all mo cap, you know, Spielberg did Tintin that way and Zemeckis disappeared for a while and only did those, you know, like Beowulf and The Christmas Train. [laughs] I don’t know the actual name. I want to call it The Christmas Train.

**John:** Polar Express.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s called The Christmas Train in my house. Because you could actually have a normal day. You could show up, you shoot your time and you go home. It doesn’t matter what time the movie — if it’s a night scene, you’re still shooting it during the day. And morning, you shoot — and you have total control. And I understand that because the way movies are actually made is just distressing. It’s brutal. Every time I do it, every single time, I will stop at some point and think, there’s got to be another way. Nobody would believe that this is how we do this. It’s so dumb and inefficient. But I think it’s the way and I don’t think there’s another way.

**John:** I don’t know if there’s another way either. So this smart line producer, she is creating the fantasy optimized schedule and the optimized schedule will have less brutal situations like that. It’s only over the course of the production and things go wrong that the schedule has to shift and you run into those jam situations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s trying to optimize for not moving between days and nights or being smart about that. She’s trying to finish off all the work at a location because you don’t want to have to go back to a location. Once you’re done — ideally, you want to shoot all the scenes at a location and then move on.

But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe you want to have, if it’s a lot of scenes at a house, an interior house, maybe build that as a set and then it becomes your cover set for rain or for other disaster so you can always shoot something there in case something goes wrong out in the field.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, also you want to avoid the dreaded company move, which is when you have two different locations on the same day and they’re not right next to each other. So you’ve finished shooting at the first location and everybody piles all the crap up into their trucks and drives over to the new thing, just a day killer.

**John:** Yeah, that’s terrible. She wants to finish all the work with one actor, ideally, to the degree it makes sense you want to finish all the work with one actor. So if an actor has six scenes total in the movie and it’s possible to schedule those scenes together, you will try to schedule the scenes together so you can “shoot them out”. And there may be reasons why you can only get that actor if you can compress all his days down to a certain window of time.

There may be just budgetary reasons why. It can sometimes be very expensive to drop an actor and pick up an actor. There’s weird union rules about sort of how you do that. So sometimes you have to have an actor who just sits around a lot and that’s just the nature of it. But ideally, you try to get through all of an actor’s scenes in one chunk if possible.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** She will ask me and I will tell her how important it is to stay in sequence. So there are movies in which characters go through physical transformations where you actually need to shoot them in order. Most movies are shot wildly out of order. But for both performance reasons and for just like logic reasons, sometimes you have to stick closer to order.

In my movie, The Nines, Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy have wildly different hairstyles in the three different sections. They look very different. And so we had to shoot those basically in sequence. Once we started one of those chapters, we had to stay in that chapter and we couldn’t mix and match things. And that meant that we had to come back to some locations three times which was a production nightmare, but it was just the nature of the movie.

**Craig:** They hate stuff like that. They hate it.

**John:** They hate it.

**Craig:** They hate it.

**John:** The last thing which she may need to factor in is maximizing the use of certain equipment. So let’s say you have a techno crane, like a really fancy crane and there’s like three scenes that need it, there may be a reason why you want to board those together so that you can rent that thing for one day and be done with it.

Or if you have like a boat sequence or there’s some reason why there’s special equipment you need that might drive sort of how you’re doing stuff. Even like a camera package like, let’s say, you have a high speed camera that’s used for these two moments, you might want to put those two moments together so you don’t have to rent this incredibly expensive camera rig for, you know, two different days over the course of your shoot.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, no. I mean —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everything that they’re doing is to save money, everything. Sometimes they come to you and then they’re like, “Is there any way we could not have him wear his hat? It would save us $400,000?” [laughs] It’s like sometimes they have these little things and you’re like, “Wait, what? Of course not. Yeah, no.”

**John:** Wait, yes.

**Craig:** Burn the hat.

**John:** Burn the hat. You don’t care about the hat, whatsoever. Like who said there was a hat? Like there’s —

**Craig:** I mean exactly. But then sometimes they come to you and they’re like, “Is there any way they could all be 20 years older and in one room?” No.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry, the multiple classrooms of second graders can’t be one group of 25-year-old post collegiate — no. Yeah, they — it’s amazing the things they ask. And I’m always shocked by how much you — sometimes you can save so much with tiny little things. So I don’t blame them for asking.

**John:** No. So usually, a screenwriter will not have to get super involved with a schedule, but when it comes time to make a movie, you will see what that schedule is. And what I find so helpful about it is like it’s that first glimpse of like, how will this be made as a movie? It’s that first snapshot of this is what it’s going to take to move from what I have on the page to actually going into production. And you see it like, “Oh my God, that is so much more than I thought,” or like, “Oh, that’s actually much more achievable than I thought.”

In the case of Go, it was my first moment of horror/revelation, like, “Oh my God, I wrote a script that takes place entirely at night and we’re going to be outside at night for like 20 days.” And that was terrifying and it made me rethink [laughs] how I use night in movies that I want to be part of because it is just a debilitating condition to be outside at night all the time.

So I’m looking forward to what she says with this script and what the schedule turns out to be because it will be my first indication of how possible it will be to make the movie I have on the page and then she may be able to come back to me with some suggestions for the things that are making this crazy and impossible are these things and think about whether any of those things could change and where the flexibility is because it will make your life happier and easier.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** And on the subject of time, we went way over time. So once again, we’re going to kick to the curb two other great questions that came in from our listeners. But we will get to them in a future week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll be real brief. My One Cool Thing is called Escape Room LA, the Detective. Escape Room LA is one of these outfits where you go downtown and they stick you in a room and they lock it and it’s full of puzzles and you have to solve all the puzzles to find the key to get out and you have an hour.

And the detective is one of the themes they have. I believe it’s their hardest one. And I did this with my wife, Melissa, and Alec Berg and his wife, and Megan Amram and her boyfriend, and David Kwong, and Chris Miller of Lord and Miller. This is a powerhouse team. I just want to point out, of this team, three Harvard grads, two Princeton grads, and a Dartmouth guy, okay.

**John:** So all idiots.

**Craig:** All idiots and we failed.

**John:** Oh, Craig.

**Craig:** And we were so — and it’s actually heartbreaking how we failed. We were flying through this thing. Like the record I think was something like 48 minutes. At minute 50, we had just one thing left to do. So we were close to even the record. And then we just died on the shoals of this one problem. And once it was revealed to us at the end, we were like, “Oh my God.”

**John:** So I think we skipped over a little bit of the set up of what this actually is. So they are locking you in a room and you’re trying to get out of the room?

**Craig:** And it’s full of puzzles. So all the clues are leading to other clues. They are leading you to unlock things. And the puzzles are all different varieties, there’s logic puzzles, math puzzles, there’s Morse code puzzles. There’s so many different ways. So you have to solve something like probably 13 or 14 major problems to finally unlock the thing that gets you the key to unlock the room.

And so much fun and it’s designed to be for anywhere up to 12 people. We were a little small. I think we were eight. But that’s a good —

**John:** But I have a hunch that 12 people wouldn’t actually necessarily improve it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Maybe like that one more man problem actually like slows you down.

**Craig:** It will. And I think — yeah, I imagine every group of 12, one person is going, “Yeah, I’m lost, I’m going to sit down.” [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, after we wrap, you could tell me who the dead weight was in the group and how it slowed you down.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ll throw many people under the bus.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is a television program called You’re the Worst. It’s on FXX. It’s actually on its second season, but I just last night watched the pilot from the first season which is on Hulu. And I really enjoyed it. And I would highly recommend people watch it just because it’s such a fascinating look at how you do the anti-romantic comedy and sort of how you take the tropes and play against the tropes.

So the show is created by Stephen Falk. And the natural comparison is with Catastrophe which I think was a previous One Cool Thing which is another great show you should watch on Amazon. Like Catastrophe, weirdly, it involves this one American and this one British person. They’re falling in love. They seem like a terrible couple. Catastrophe takes place in London. This takes place in Los Angeles.

What’s so different about You’re the Worst is the characters in it seem like they are the sidekick characters in other romantic comedies. They’re like the hyperactive, terrible like slutty people in the other romantic comedies. Like you would have the upstanding, like the Meg Ryan, but then she has her slutty best friend.

**Craig:** The wacky friends.

**John:** Sort of the slutty best friends.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nicely done and does some interesting things and there’s moments where I worried it was going to just be pushing buttons to push buttons. But it actually manages to find some humanness underneath there. So again, I’m basing this off of just watching the pilot. But I would recommend people watch the pilot because it’s a very great exercise and sort of like thinking about how you take the tropes of a genre like a romantic comedy and really play with them.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on the list.

**John:** Craig is not going to watch it. Craig won’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Put it on the list of things I won’t watch.

**John:** It sounds very good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Who is off ordering t-shirts right now. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week. Thank you, Matthew. He got a new cello so you’re hearing his new cello. If you have a question for me or Craig Mazin, we’ll eventually answer your questions, ask@johnaugust is the email address you want. Craig on Twitter is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We are on iTunes, so subscribe to us there if you wouldn’t mind and leave us a comment if you would like to.

We also have all the back episodes available at scriptnotes.net. If you sign up there, you get the whole back catalog for $2 a month. And you can find those episodes in the Scriptnotes app which is available both for iOS and for Android on their respective stores.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [You Must Remember This: MGM Stories, Part 1](http://www.vidiocy.com/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/9/14/mgm-stories-part-one-louis-b-mayer-vs-irving-thalberg-ymrt-56) guest starring Craig Mazin
* [Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard & Lionsgate Get $10M ‘Cabin In The Woods’ Suit Tossed](http://deadline.com/2015/09/joss-whedon-drew-goddard-cabin-in-the-woods-lawsuit-lionsgate-chris-hemsworth-1201526687/), and [Substantial similarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity) on Wikipedia
* [Here’s why The Rock’s new HBO show, ‘Ballers,’ can legally use NFL logos without the league’s consent](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-rocks-ballers-can-use-nfl-logos-without-consent-2015-6) on Business Insider
* [Streisand effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) on Wikipedia
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](http://www.ep.com/scheduling/)
* [Escape Room LA](http://escaperoomla.com/)
* [You’re the Worst](http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/youre-the-worst/episodes) on FXX, and [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/youre-the-worst)
* [Catastrophe](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00X8UKEEQ) on Amazon Prime Instant Video
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/pg13-blood-boobs-and-bullcrap).

**John August:** So, hey, this is John. Today’s podcast, we’re going to be talking about the PG-13 rating and kind of necessarily we’ll be using some bad words. So if you’re listening to this podcast in your car with kids, here is just a warning about some bad language coming your way.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 215 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the PG-13 rating, why it exists, and what it means for screenwriters. We’ll be talking about healthy and unhealthy relationships between writers and their representatives. And we’ll be answering some listener questions about what to do on an L.A. visit and using real stuff in your movies. So a big show today.

**Craig:** It is a big show. And I have to say that now that you — well, now that we have made it to episode 215, now it’s impressive. Every time you say it, I think, “Wow.”

**John:** A lot of episodes.

**Craig:** We have a body of work.

**John:** This past week we were on Franklin Leonard’s podcast and we talked about the show and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And it was weird being on someone else’s show with you talking about the show because it felt just like an extra episode that I didn’t have control of.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, we’re starting to learn about you and your issues.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** For me, it was exactly the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Show up and talk.

**John:** Actually, it was exactly the same because you did show up late and talked.

**Craig:** I know. It’s getting bad. Well, today, as people saw on Twitter, I thought I was 10 minutes late and in fact I was 1 hour and 50 minutes early.

**John:** Yeah. So maybe that’s good. Maybe that should be the plan is I’ll always pretend that the time of recording is a different time than it actually is. For people who just listen to the podcast and don’t look at us on social media, last Friday, I did post a long series of text messages between me and Craig from the very start of the show up until last week about Craig is running five minutes behind. So that’s up there for everyone to see. There’ll be a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** I mean, in my defense —

**John:** In your defense.

**Craig:** Those texts are over years.

**John:** Mm-hmm, true.

**Craig:** And, you know, obviously I don’t text when I’m on time.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] So that’s my defense.

**John:** That is an absolutely fair defense. And it’s worth waiting for you, Craig.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww. As I was putting together that series of text messages, I had to trim some stuff out that was just like not germane to it. But I regret, there’s a text message, I texted a photo of me and Malcolm watching Fantastic Negrito while you were off playing D&D with the rest of our friends. And I regret taking that out of the feed because it was just a nice moment of just me and Malcolm.

**Craig:** You know, I remember that and I still haven’t seen Fantastic Negrito live. But I do feel like I am responsible for his success.

**John:** Clearly, because you mentioned him on the podcast and talked about him for a few minutes. That’s really how a person becomes successful.

**Craig:** Well, that plus just a general mental exertion. In my mind, I’ve been willing him to be successful.

**John:** That’s good. Well, you’ve dis-secreted him into his success.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Most people, in order to implement the secret, they have to believe in themselves. But actually, just Craig believing in you is enough for it to come to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not even a secret.

**John:** No. The Secret is no secret anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, my book is called the fact.

**John:** [laughs] So the other thing which is a complete fact is that our Scriptnotes T-shirts are available only for one — not even one more week. If you’re hearing this podcast on Tuesday, you have exactly two days left to buy these shirts and then you will not be able to buy the shirts. So you probably want to get on this.

So go to store.johnaugust.com. You’ll see that there are three designs for the T-shirt. There’s the classic Scriptnotes logo in purple. There is the Three-Act Structure shirt by Taino Soba in blue. Both of those have been very popular. And this year we have two different colors of the Camp Scriptnotes shirt, which is a brand new design. There’s Craig’s shirt which is blue. It’s a navy blue.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s my shirt which is green. And this really hearkens back to the first batch of Scriptnotes shirts which we had two colors. There was umbrage orange for Craig and there was rational blue for me. And we’ll see. Right now we’re neck and neck, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I’m really curious who’s going to pull ahead.

**Craig:** You know —

**John:** Do you want to pitch anything to your navy fans, your blue cabin buddies?

**Craig:** Well, I just want to say, you would look really sexy in that blue shirt.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig loves blue. Ah, so sexy.

**John:** That’s a strong argument for or against the blue shirt.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think it’s both really.

**John:** It really is. So depending on what your reaction is to Sexy Craig imploring you to buy the blue shirt, you might —

**Craig:** Oh, come on.

**John:** Choose to buy the blue shirt or the green shirt. But whatever you do, the nice shirts are $19 each. We are posing the order into the printers on Friday. So that literally is your last chance on Thursday to order one of these shirts. We will be printing them. We will be folding them up on the very table on which we record our live sit-around-the-table episodes of Scriptnotes and sending them out to your homes so you’ll have them for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re going to be in your house.

**John:** Yeah. So maybe as we’re looking out at the crowd in Austin we’ll see how many blue shirts and how many green shirts there are.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig has been away for a while.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** [laughs] I feel like he should be back more.

**John:** Yeah, maybe he can have his own spin-off podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. He should.

**John:** He could do that on Earwolf.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I feel like Sexy Craig and Dan Savage could probably do a great podcast together just about sex, you know —

**John:** Mm-hmm, yeah.

**Craig:** And advising people.

**John:** Yeah, being sexy.

**Craig:** Just being so sexy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** We have some follow-up to get to. First off, couple of episodes ago, we talked about misleading reviewer quotes, that thing where you sort of excerpt certain words out of a review to make it sound much better than it really was.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** So talk us through this one example here.

**Craig:** Well, so there’s a review here for a film called Legend. I think it’s about The Krays, the British mobsters, stars Tom Hardy. And so they put up a very typical review-oriented ad where they just listed four stars, four stars, four stars, four stars. And underneath the four stars, who gave it the four-star review. And then in the space between their heads, they have what you would think would be yet another four-star review and the person who said it which was I think it was The Guardian.

**John:** It was The Guardian, yeah.

**Craig:** Benjamin Lee from The Guardian. But in fact, [laughs] because it was situated between their two heads, it wasn’t that their heads were obscuring the other two stars of the four stars, he actually just gave it a two-star review. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s just —

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** I think it’s just remarkable because it’s such a different way of doing a careful excerpting. And a good graphic design can hide many flaws.

**Craig:** I loved it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I loved it. And I actually think that everyone should do this. It’s so brilliant. And it again boils down ultimately the only value that reviews have for studios is to flack their movies. And so, yeah, I mean, hats off. Whoever did that should get a promotion.

**John:** I agree. And I was going to say like slow golf clap but now I’m questioning whether — do you think that is worthy of a slow clap or do you think it’s a negative thing to say a slow clap? I think a sort of an appreciative like slow clap like well done, well done. But there’s also you can slow clap in a negative way. How do you perceive slow clap?

**Craig:** Both. I think slow clap is flexible. And in this case, I would give it the honest non-ironic slow clap.

**John:** I think it’s a slow clap with a nod is really what the differentiation is.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup. In a previous episode we talked about Apple Watch. And I complained/bragged that I didn’t think the Apple Watch was doing a great job tracking my exercise because I have an incredibly slow heartbeat.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or my heart rate is low.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think you had said a similar kind of thing. And a listener sent us a post about, I think it was a Swedish study, that low heart rate is linked very strongly to criminality. And so people with low heart rates are much more likely to be criminals.

**Craig:** Well, I guess that makes sense because they’re generally calmer in situations that would make everybody else nervous. So I guess we could say they’re just dead inside. So they need crime. They need crime to get their heartbeat up a little bit.

**John:** That’s what one of theories is is that maybe it takes a much larger amount of activity to get them excited. And so therefore they are pushed to criminality. But I think it’s one of those interesting/troubling kind of findings because it strikes back to like what is it called? Phrenology, where they start to feel the bumps in your head.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like, well, that’s a thing you can’t control at all. Then what? Are you just like going to lock up people with low heart rates or you’re going to give them drugs so their hearts beat faster?

**Craig:** Well, no. I think that you would just kill them early.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** The idea is you would screen everyone I think at the age of three.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That seems reasonable. And if your heart rate is below a certain number, you’re exterminated.

**John:** That’s true. And of course very easy to overlook in this study is that the odds of any of these people being criminals at all was really, really low. Period.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** So it’s one of those things where, you know, people freak out because like, oh, this raises your risk of something 1% but it raises it from like it’s never ever going to happen to it’s never ever probably going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was essentially a valueless study and a bad headline.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. But even in those sort of bad headline stories, sometimes there is something interesting to study about why that correlation exists. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s anything you can do about it. But it’s a correlation.

**Craig:** I think I’ve already suggested what we can do about it.

**John:** Is to kill all the slow heartbeat people.

**Craig:** At the age of three.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When they’re at their cutest.

**John:** But those people might not grow up to be professional athletes, which leads us to our final bit of follow-up.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** Segue man. I’ve said on the podcast several times something like you are much more likely to be a professional basketball player than to be a professional screenwriter. And that my perception was that there are actually more professional athletes than there are professional screenwriters. That was an unverified, un-really-thought-through statement.

But someone tweeted at you and I this graphic that’s been circulated around which was apparently from — it has NFL logos on it, so it really is from the NFL, the National Football League, so not basketball but football, talking about what your odds are of making it in the NFL.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really cool graphic. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes. But, Craig, talk us through some of these numbers.

**Craig:** Well, they start by looking at high school football players, which according to them, you’re looking at around a million. And this is I think per year, essentially. So you have a million high school football players in a year, and that’s a million kids with at least one parent who thinks, “Oh, this is it. You’re going to make it.” But narrow it down a little further, let’s just presume we’re talking about seniors since they’re probably the most developed. That’s still 310,000 seniors.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a lot of kids.

**Craig:** It’s a lot. Of those kids, 70,000 will play NCAA football, college football. Still an enormous amount, 70,000. 20,000 of you will only play as a freshman. That’s what FR means, okay. Overall, 6.5% of high school players will play in the NCAA. So right off the bat, only 6.5% of those kids will even play college football.

**John:** So really 1 in 20 almost.

**Craig:** Right. Eventually, you get down to this number. The amount of players scouted by the NFL, 6,500. So out of the 70,000 NCAA football players in college, which again was culled out of the 310,000 high school football seniors alone and the million kids playing in high school football, 6,500 get scouted by the NFL. 350 are invited to the combine which is essentially the tryouts. You know, John, it’s like auditions. It’s like Broadway auditions.

**John:** It is. American Idol.

**Craig:** Exactly, but on a field where you’re hitting things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of those 350, 256 are drafted by the NFL. 300 rookies actually make a team. Percentage of players from the NCAA to the NFL is 1.6%. So to recap, 1.6% of 6.5% of 1 —

**John:** Million.

**Craig:** Million make it to the NFL.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s very tiny. And then, how many of them actually last? How many NFL players actually play more than three seasons? 150. This would be of that year’s class.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Very few. But I will say that I still think the odds are worse for screenwriting.

**John:** Look at these numbers. It does strike me that the number of actual professional football players is smaller than I was kind of guessing. So if you look at how this narrows down, it really does narrow down quite dramatically.

Compare that to WGA numbers. In 2014, there were 4,899 writers reporting earnings, which is basically writers who were working in some capacity. And of those, 1,556 were writing in features.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you have NFL players making your four — we have a number for 150. We don’t have the total number of football players who are playing in the NFL. But it’s not going to be 1,500.

**Craig:** No. It won’t be. So on that metric, yes, easier to be a screenwriter than to play professional football. But the metric that interests me is how long you play because I think from what I understand, at least from the WGA, is at any given point, a very large percentage of worked are people that will work once. Maybe twice, and that’s it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So to have a career as a feature screenwriter, I bet there are fewer people in the WGA who have, let’s say, we’ll call it five years of earnings as a feature film writer than there are NFL players who have played regularly.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m going back to sort of my sort of off-the-cuff analogy of professional football players or professional basketball players to working screenwriters. The jobs are so different. And I think one of the reasons why it’s such a strange comparison is that it becomes very clear who can be a professional football player versus who can be a professional screenwriter. So there is almost nobody playing professional football, I would say, who wasn’t a high school football player and a college football player.

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**John:** And screenwriters, it’s not the same thing. You can’t say like, “Well, that kid from high school who wanted to be a screenwriter is now a working screenwriter.” There’s not the hierarchy process at all for becoming a screenwriter. Like literally, someone could have written their first screenplay when they were 40 and now they’re working as a screenwriter. So that’s a very different thing.

Also, the NFL, your career is short because of there’s always new people coming up but also because you get injured. And you don’t get injured in the same way as a screenwriter. You may stop working, you may sort of lose heat and nobody wants to hire you to write stuff, but it’s not the same kind of thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, there is a built-in limitation on that which we don’t have. I mean, even if you stay healthy, you will age out of the NFL. You know, as you get older, you lose athletic ability. That’s just life.

But there is something on the flipside of that that is tricky for people that want to be screenwriters. And that is you can. You know, anyone can, theoretically, be a screenwriter. If you are 5’10” and 170 pounds, unless you are a brilliant kicker or super duper fast, you’re not going to be in the NFL.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you inherently can’t. But anyone can. So that’s the lottery mentality of screenwriting that you don’t see when you look at the NFL because it’s not a lottery. I mean, there’s an enormous amount of genetics and hard work and talent that should have been tracked along the way.

**John:** I guess it’s one of the reasons why if someone doesn’t succeed as a screenwriter, they might feel like a failure. But if someone doesn’t succeed as a professional football player, well like, “Well, no, you didn’t.” But no one’s going to say like, “Oh, I can’t believe you didn’t make it as a football player.” It’s like, “Well, of course you didn’t make it as a football player.”

Like it seems so remarkable that anybody would make it as football player. Like you can just sort of look at the person, it’s like, “Well, no, obviously you’re not going to make it as a football player.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Versus a screenwriter, you can just keep slogging and slogging and slogging. Also, the only way you’re playing professional football in the U.S., basically, is to play for the NFL. Versus as a screenwriter, you can be doing your screenwriting thing and be still trying to make it as a professional screenwriter for a very long time on the edges. And that is a thing that doesn’t exist in football either.

**Craig:** Right. And so the opportunities are paired with the traps. I know a few guys who played Minor League Baseball and I know a couple of guys who played Major League Baseball. And, you know, the Minor League guys are, yeah, I mean they wished they had made it to the majors. But they’re awesome. I mean, they were in the Minor Leagues of baseball. I mean they were really, really good. They just weren’t good enough for that final level.

There’s no such thing like that in screenwriting. It’s not like there’s anyone out there where people are like, “Man, you are really good. I mean, you’re not great enough but, boy, you’re good. I mean, you’re really good.” It just doesn’t work that way.

So the opportunity is there but then there are the traps of, “Well, I just got to write one more script,” or “Well, I just got to try a little harder,” or “Well, you know, my time is coming.” And you can chase the lottery your whole life.

**John:** Well, I think what you’re pointing to is that good versus great is in professional athletics, there are clear metrics. You can tell how good a player is by, you know, whatever the metrics are of that sport. So I mean, how many runs, how many whatever, how many hits. You cannot track those metrics for a screenwriter. You can track how many things they sold, how many things they set up. But that’s not telling you how good of a screenwriter they are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no objective measure about how good your writing is versus another writer versus, quite famously in professional sports, you can really track that and sort of predict how good a team will be based on the players that are on that team.

**Craig:** And so, again, no one can tell you that you don’t have what it takes to make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one will stop you from trying. Well, I mean, they can try but they can’t make a great argument. I mean, I can’t say, “Look, you want to be a pitcher but your fastball is 78 miles an hour. It’s never going to happen.” I can’t say that to anybody as a screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s nothing to stop you. And you just have to be aware of that because unlike these other things where they will stop you, no one can stop you. And so, good, but also, beware.

**John:** I remember talking with a writer after one of our live shows. It was at the WGA. And I can picture his face but I don’t remember sort of all of the details. But he said, “I just wanted to thank you because listening to your show gave me the permission to let myself stop trying to be a screenwriter.”

**Craig:** I remember that guy.

**John:** And I thought that was actually such a brilliant, smart thing. And this is a guy in his 30s, I would say. And that is a sort of brave and wise thing to sort of come to is the realization that there’s an opportunity cost to pursuing one dream, and that is the exclusion of other dreams. And that if you are monomaniacal about this one thing and that one thing isn’t working, you have to also be aware of the things you’re not trying to do because you’re pursuing this one goal.

**Craig:** Precisely. And there is a very interesting aspect, at least it’s interesting to me. A strange aspect to what I would call American dream culture where we are encouraged to imagine this wonderful and romantic and exciting, passionate, creative life for ourselves. And then if we just believe and try hard enough, we will achieve it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The problem aside from the inherent unrealistic nature of that kind of dreaming is that the thing that you’re dreaming about, you do not understand. What you’re dreaming about is only what you can understand, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to dream it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When you get there, it will not be your dream. Your dream is not attainable because it’s dreamlike [laughs]. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** I think Miley Cyrus might put it best in one of her lyrics is like there’s always going to be another mountain.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it has to be the climb. And that’s the thing that feels so cliché when you hear it in a song lyric but you find it to be very true is that you kind of think like, “Oh, I’ll reach this destination and then I’ll be happy.” And then you reach that destination and like, “Oh, wait, why am I not happy? This is what I always wanted.” It’s recognizing that you have to find satisfaction and fulfillment in the work itself and in the struggle because there’s not an actual, necessarily, an outcome, which ties in very well to my One Cool Thing at the end of the episode.

**Craig:** And I feel like my One Cool Thing has been brilliantly set up as well.

**John:** Well, we should get on to our next topic so we can get to our One Cool Things at the end.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. So our first big topic today is the PG-13 rating. And it’s one of those things where once you start looking for something, it’s just sort of everywhere. And so this has been in my week a lot. So I finished this script and this script is intended to be a PG-13 script.

Originally, I thought that this was a pretty hard R. And I remember pitching it to a really good director and he said, “Oh, that sounds really cool. So we can do it PG-13?” I’m like, “Oh, no, no, it’s a hard R.” And I can see sort of the light dim in his eyes a bit. And then as I was driving back, I’m like, “Wait, why is it a hard R?” And I started thinking about like what are the things that absolutely would make it have to be a hard R. And by the time I reached home, I was like, “You know what, I can totally do this as a PG-13.” And so I believe I wrote this as a PG-13 now.

So I want to talk through what those characteristics are of a PG-13 movie.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But the other thing which struck me this last week because we were watching Reds. And Reds is a great movie.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it is rated PG. And I’m watching this movie, I’m like, “How is this rated PG?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s rated PG because it’s from 1981.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so, in this movie, there are multiple fucks, there’s actual fucking. There’s, you know, sex scenes that are sort of more explicit than you would sort of guess would be there. There’s a lot of stuff in this movie that would not pass PG now and would probably actually push it to R, like you would have a hard time getting a PG-13 on Reds right now.

**Craig:** Well, if there’s multiple fucks and fucking, you’ll be R.

**John:** You’ll be R.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I want to talk through sort of what that is and sort of what that means as you’re having a conversation about making movies in Hollywood today. So, some back story on the PG-13 rating. We’ll put up some links in the show notes.

But PG-13 rating comes from 1984. And there’s an article by Frank Pallotta that sort of talks through the genesis of it. But it’s basically Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 was the breaking point for the PG-13 rating. And you look at Temple of Doom and it’s a darker movie than the first movie is. There’s human sacrifices, a lot of blood. And there was enough outcry that the PG-13 rating came into being.

The text of PG-13 is “Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.” Again, it’s the MPAA, it’s the U.S. rating. Different countries are going to have different ratings around the world. And as we get into this, you’ll see that some movies that are rated one way in the U.S. are rated very differently overseas.

**Craig:** Right. And this was a rating that Spielberg himself pushed for because he felt that his kind of filmmaking wasn’t supposed to be R. It was meant for a wider audience but also it wasn’t quite as namby pamby as PG either.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I think that he was right. It’s a useful rating to an extent. What’s happened over time is that PG-13 has replaced PG.

**John:** Yeah. So few movies that I see these days are PG.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the feeling is, “Well, if we’re not PG-13, why don’t we just be G?” Or, you know, people view PG as G, which is startling when you consider what PG used to be. Because you’re right, PG there was nudity. [laughs] It’s backwards from what you’d think. I mean, it seems like over time society becomes more permissive about these things. When it comes to movie ratings, it’s gone in the other direction. We are less permissive.

**John:** Clearly. We were talking about this at lunch in that there’s this overall perception that culture has gotten more liberal over time. But on everything about sex and language, it’s gotten much more conservative, especially when kids could experience it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I’m not here to debate that. But I will tell you that as a person who’s trying to make movies, you are always having that conversation about what rating we think this is. And from very early on in the discussion of a movie, just like what I talked with the director about this movie, or when I talked about Scary Stories, that discussion of like, “Is this a hard PG-13?” The answer is yes, it has to be a hard PG-13 and not a soft R, because who wants a soft R?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I remember early in my career I co-wrote a bad movie called Senseless. And it was never intended to be R. We wrote it to be PG-13 and they came back with R. And the problem was there was a bit where Marlon Wayans is making out with a girl. They are both clothed but he experiences an orgasm.

We don’t see nudity. We don’t see ejaculation. We just see him shutter and have an orgasm. And they said, “Yeah, that’s enough. R.” And for whatever reason, and again, just backwards, the studio was like, “Well, good. We want to be R.” I’m like, “No, we don’t. We really don’t because this is the softest R in history.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was. When you make a rated R comedy in particular, there’s an expectation that there’s going to be — you know, it’s going to get edgy.

**John:** Yeah. And so let’s talk about for international listeners, they may not really understand what the difference is in terms of practically like boots on the ground. A PG-13 movie, teenagers can go to it and they don’t need special permission. A rated R movie, theoretically, most places in the U.S., they will not sell you a ticket if you are a teenager unaccompanied. You cannot get into the theater. They may check IDs at the door.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Are they doing that all the time? No. But that is the expectation. And as a parent, I will tell you that my expectation of a PG-13 movie is like, “Yeah, my kid could probably see it. It would really depend on sort of like the nature of the movie.” But there’s no way I’m going to let my kid see a rated R movie —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Unless I’ve seen it first.

**Craig:** Exactly. And interestingly, they will not check on PG-13. So that’s not a legal thing. That’s just a general signal to parents. But if a 10-year-old kid walks up to a movie theater by himself or herself and asks to buy a ticket to a PG-13 movie, they get it.

**John:** Meanwhile, I should caution people internationally who come to U.S. theaters. There’s nothing prohibiting a parent from bringing a baby into a rated R movie —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That will scream at a 10 o’clock show. So there’s nothing that stops parents from being terrible because of the rated R movie.

**Craig:** Nothing except my fists.

**John:** So let’s talk about what the things are that are involved in a PG-13 versus R decision. So it comes down to really three things. It is blood, boobs, and bullshit. And basically, it’s what we’re seeing in terms of violence, it’s what we’re seeing in terms of sex, and it’s what language we’re allowed to use in the movies.

So let’s start with blood. So I did a quick survey of some writer friends and director friends about what their experiences were with blood in movies because the last two things I wrote have some blood in it. I was concerned that like the amount of blood could just push us over the edge.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what they came back to me was descriptions of the experiences they went through. And it seemed to me that if you have blood plus a verb, that is a potential problem. So if you see blood spattering, if you see blood oozing, that is more likely to trip you up than if blood is just an adjective.

So if something is bloody, not so bad. Something is bleeding, blood is flying out, that can be the problem, specifically if it’s human blood. Seems like the ratings board is much more forgiving of alien blood, violence happening to non-human creatures —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Not a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course there are times when we see movies and I think to myself, how did that get — I’m like, I know for a fact that I got jammed by the MPAA on something. And now I’m in the theater watching a PG-13 movie and they’re doing it. I’m like, “What magic did you guys use?”

I mean, for instance, I mean you’ve put this down in our summary to discuss. In Jurassic World, there’s that moment where the dinosaur eats someone off-screen and there is a splatter of blood all over the frame. And I think maybe they got away with it because the blood comes from off-screen, so you don’t see that it’s generated. But we know what’s happening. My daughter was terrified. She knows where that came from and it’s a big shower of blood.

I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s, you know —

**John:** Yeah. But they go back multiple times and they’re —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And one of the things that was a common refrain is that just like language, which we’ll get to, if you think there’s going to be a problem, you put in too much at the start so you can cut something out. And so you can go back to the rating board multiple times and you can show that you’ve cut stuff out and eventually sometimes you can win those arguments.

You’ll also make really strange logical arguments about, “Well, this superhero character is not actually human.” So the violence that you’re doing to him is not the same as violence to a human, because they seem to be very fixated on human to human violence. So even just in a fist fight, they don’t want more than a certain amount of blood. And they’ll be very deliberate about sound design or the feeling of fleshiness, the feeling that a body is being penetrated is a real issue and problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a problem for Sexy Craig. I will tell you, one of the strangest blood rulings that ever came down was for Kill Bill.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** It’s that sequence where Uma Thurman fights off the Crazy 88, I think they’re called, this enormous gang. So Lucy Liu’s gang.

**John:** So it’s the sequence that’s inside the pagoda, sort of the indoor sequence —

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Not the one that was outside in the snow.

**Craig:** Right. So the indoor sequence where she essentially slaughters everyone. And it goes on and on and on. And there’s dismemberments and a ton of blood. And when they went to the ratings board, they came back and said, “It’s NC-17. There’s just too much blood. There’s so much blood and there’s so much spurting and splashing that it’s even beyond R.”

So rather than cut the sequence down, that’s when — I believe I’m correct about this — that’s when Tarantino decided, okay, I’ll have a moment where we’re kind of inside Uma’s mind and she blinks and the whole scene turns into black and white.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And in the black and white, the blood is not red anymore, it’s just wet. And then later she comes back and then it’s okay. And they bought it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is insane to me. But I actually think it made it a really cool sequence, so.

**John:** Yeah. Several directors said that it’s the redness of blood that can be the problem. So if you desaturate it, you can get away with more than you could otherwise.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it seems crazy but it’s true. So another friend recommended this really great side by side comparison of The Possession, which is a movie about a —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A terrible Jewish box and — [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Just like my mother.

**John:** Aha. This movie was released as PG-13 in the U.S. and it was cut down in the U.S. in order to hit that PG-13. But in the U.K., it was released just in the original cut. And so you can see what they actually did to trim to get to the PG-13. And it’s really interesting.

And so, there’s less blood spattering. They hold on blood not as long. So there’s a moment in the U.S. version where some blood drips on his shoe but you don’t see where the blood is coming from in the U.S. version. There’s just a little less violence and it feels like they also scale back on some of the sound design so that less bad things were happening to a person’s body.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was one moment where they didn’t include a particularly graphic injury. You know, so in one version, you see a woman smash into a table from behind. You’re behind her. She smashes head first into a table and flops backwards. In the U.K. version, you’re looking up through the glass as her head makes impact.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I got that. I understood, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That made sense.

**John:** That’s violence. But let’s talk about boobs and let’s talk about sex. And so my —

**Craig:** [sighs].

**John:** Oh, Sexy Craig’s favorite topic.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** My perception, and I don’t know this is actually true but this is sort of like screenwriter allure is that you’re allowed to show boobs once as long as they’re in a non-sexual context. So classic examples are Kate Winslet in Titanic.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so he’s sketching her and she’s topless but it’s okay because they’re not actually having sex at that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s essentially artistic. And similarly, if you had a scene where a mother was nursing a baby or there was a scene where a woman was getting a breast exam, I don’t think that would push you into R. But again, this is an area where PG used to be more permissive.

So in the movie Airplane, Airplane was PG. And that was 1980. And there’s that famous moment where a woman goes jiggling by topless in the plane. And that was clearly meant to be sexual, and it was for me. And you would never be able to get away with that now. And not even PG-13, much less PG.

**John:** Yeah. And in terms of the actual seeing sex on screen, you know, I was looking through the movies that I’ve done and I don’t have a lot of sex scenes in my films. And the ones that do have sex scenes are rated R anyway.

So the first Charlie’s Angels, Drew wakes up in Tom Green’s boat and so she’s like half-covered naked. There’s moments in the first movie where she’s dangling naked from the Chemosphere over Hollywood and falls and rolls down a hill naked. And we were able to do it, but it was very careful to sort of like not show nipple.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can get by with showing a lot of boob and a lot of butt, as long as you’re not seeing nipple and sort of no pubic hair. And as long as you can do that, we can get away with the sequence. And again, it was not a sexual sequence, it was a comedic sequence.

**Craig:** Nobody has pubic hair anymore anyway. It’s all gone.

**John:** It’s realism.

**Craig:** It’s used to cover the plains. It’s all gone.

**John:** [laughs] it’s all gone now.

**Craig:** All gone.

**John:** But I don’t have a lot of other experience with sex in PG-13 movies. And so the thing I wrote — one of the things I wrote has a sex scene and I was careful it in ways that like, yeah, I could see the (inaudible) you wouldn’t see more than you would see on TV.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I hope that works. I hope it feels like, you know, I’m seeing the right amounts of sex to let us know that a sex scene happened, but that we’re not dwelling on it.

**Craig:** I have a pretty good amount experience with the MPAA and sexual innuendo because when we were doing the Scary Movies, Bob Weinstein just loves sex humor and would just demand it be jammed in. [laughs] And it wasn’t really our favorite thing. But we did it. And inevitably, I would say to him, “This is — here you go, Bob.” And he would say, “No, it’s too soft. This feels like it’s PG.” That’s what he would always say, it’s PG. And I would say, “No, that’s going to be R. I guarantee you, that’s going to R. And we need to be PG-13 per your — ” And he’s like, “No, it’s PG.”

And then we would send the movie [laughs] and the MPAA and come back and say, “You can’t do that. It’s R.”

**John:** And give me an example of what that would be.

**Craig:** So for instance, a bad joke where we’re doing a spoof of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. And Regina Hall’s character, Brenda, is attracted to one of the villagers. And you cut to him, he’s standing. And we just see him waist up and he is moaning in ecstasy. And then we see her, she’s — essentially, we’re looking at her from behind. She’s waist level with him and she’s making a jerk off motion with her hands. And it clearly appears that she’s jerking him off. And then you reveal that she’s actually churning butter and he’s just so excited and the butter is delicious and it’s terrible joke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I mean —

**John:** That was too much innuendo?

**Craig:** Oh my God, way too much. So we had to go back and forth and it literally came down to how many times does her hand move up and down. I mean it’s the dumbest. These conversations get so stupid —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so, I don’t know, like when it’s how many thrusts, how many hand movements and —

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** It’s so ridiculous. And because the point is the joke, it’s not about length. Either it’s offensive or inappropriate for a child or it’s not. I always thought it was. I would hate it. I would sit in these screenings and something like that would come on and I could just feel like 14-year-old girls squirming in disgust. [laughs] And I didn’t blame them. It just was — it felt creepy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, but what could we do?

**John:** Yeah, that feels creepy. Test is actually a really useful one, is that, you know, especially when you are a parent or even if you’re not a parent and you just have to sit in an audience and watch something with some teenagers or kids and you’re like, “Oh, that feels really uncomfortable.” It happens, it’s a real thing.

I worked a little on the first Scooby Doo and so I saw an early cut of that. And I just loved it and then I saw it at the premiere and they had changed the word demon to monster in a bunch of places, and they’d done a lot of weird softening. And it was because they wanted a PG rating and they couldn’t — I think it was a combination. They wanted a PG rating and something about demons pushed them too hard. But it was also that parents felt — parents really didn’t like the word demon. And that they thought it was too scary. And so they went through and did a whole bunch of sort of careful softening. And I just thought it really hurt the movie.

**Craig:** I bet you that was a religious thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, because there —

**John:** I bet it probably was.

**Craig:** There are a lot of Christians that believe in demons, which is, you know — I’m just going to out on the limb here and say that it’s — there are no demons [laughs]. I’m going to go out on a limb, guys. They don’t exist.

**John:** A thing that is probably most evident from a script stage is language. And language is one of the few things that you sort of can control as a screenwriter on the page. And so let’s talk about what the beliefs are of screenwriters as they’re approaching language in movies. My rule of thumb and I don’t know if this is true, but this is just what people say, is in a PG-13 movie, you’re allowed one fuck as long as it is in a non-sexual situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So fuck you, fuckin’ a, go fuck yourself, all lovely. Let’s fuck, no. That’s not acceptable.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or I want to fuck you, that’s not acceptable.

**Craig:** That is correct. As far as I know, that is the rule. That was always what was cited back to us. We would get one fuck and that was it. And it couldn’t be in a sexual context. What’s that woman’s name? I think her name is Beth Hand or something like that. She’s the MPAA lady who comes back to you and says, “Yeah, you have one too many fucks and one too many hand motions, whatever.” And I believe that was the rule. And I haven’t seen that rule violated, actually, in any PG-13 movie since I heard of it.

**John:** As screenwriters, I think we have watched every movie and we sort of like listen for that one fuck and it’s like, “Oh, there it was.” And then you sort of — I was just watching Wolverine, Days of Future’s Past — is it that one? No, sorry, First Class. And they try to recruit Wolverine and his only line in the whole movie is, “Go fuck yourself,” and then they walk out. And go fuck yourself, I guess it sounds like it’s a sexual situation, but it wasn’t — he wasn’t talking like I really want to fuck you.

**Craig:** Yeah. No. Everybody knows what that is. I mean we would carefully — there would be debates when we were doing the parody movies, “Where do we use our fuck?” And we would have — so we’d have three or four spots where we would shoot alternates because we weren’t sure where we wanted — I mean, and it’s sad, but it’s true. [laughs] It’s like salt on food. You add the word fuck in and the laughs get bigger. It’s bizarre.

**John:** They do. So let’s talk about shit and how often we can use the word shit and — because I’ve not ever run into a problem where I had to cut them out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But do you run into that problem in your movies?

**Craig:** No, I believe that you are essentially unlimited. The only limitation is probably just how many times could people say the word shit anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, fuck, you can say constantly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shit, not so much. So you’re basically, if you use it, you can probably even say shit once in a PG.

**John:** Yeah, you can.

**Craig:** But for PG-13, you know, go for it.

**John:** Yeah. So we’re talking about movies and sort of the MPAA. But there’s also, of course, restrictions when you’re writing for television. And in many ways, those restrictions are stronger, at least, on broadcast television. And this weird sort of nebulous of cable television and sort of what you’re allowed to and what you’re not allowed to do on cable television. So the shit barrier has been broken in cable. And so most cable networks will let you say shit, throw it in as much as you want to do. And there’s a South Park episode where they go — they famously go way overboard with shits.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And do it. Watching Mr. Robot this season, which I really enjoyed thoroughly, I noticed they were saying fuck so often. And what they would do is they would say the F and then just like silence out the rest of the word. And so it was it — you see them on screen, so clearly, they were saying fuck but you just didn’t hear the “uck” of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I tweeted at the show’s creator, Sam Esmail, to say, “Hey, are you like breaking new ground there? Like I’ve not seen this on basic cable before.” He’s like, “No, I don’t think we’re breaking any new ground.” And a bunch of people jumped in to say that, “I guess on Breaking Bad, the approach was they would do it once per season. And in Mr. Robot, they’re doing it like seven times in an episode.”

**Craig:** Right It’s interesting. I seem to recall going around with the MPAA on a movie where we were going for PG-13 and we were trying to play that game of what if we bleep it. And they said, “No.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “You don’t get to do that in a movie. It still counts.” I guess in television, it’s a bit different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know, the whole thing is so stupid. It’s like, who’s watching the show? And my feeling is, if you can put a rating on the show, then put the rating on the show because — especially now, if your kid’s at home and you have no parental controls on your television, they can watch whatever they want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can watch a rated R movie with a press of a button. So put the ratings on the television shows. They’ve done it. And then just let it go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let there be rated R TV.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And not do this dumb shit.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say in the U.S. at least, there tend to be different standards for 8 o’clock shows, 9 o’clock shows, and 10 o’clock shows on broadcast networks. Cable networks tend to be much more liberal and sort of increasingly liberal when you get up to the pay cable, the HBOs, the Showtimes, the Netflixes, anything goes. And so they’re incredibly permissive about sort of what you can do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If all this conversation is making you think of the documentary by Kirby Dick, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, you don’t have to tweet at us. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well. So that’s a full documentary that talks through the MPAA’s rating system and sort of the controversies about how it all works.

**Craig:** It’s so worth seeing, especially because the documentary itself was then subject to the MPAA’s bizarro rating system.

**John:** Yes, it becomes very, very meta.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our next topic. Craig, how do you have a good relationship with your representatives, your agent, your manager and how do you have a bad relationship? What are some signs you can look for whether your relationship is going well or poorly?

**Craig:** Well, first, let’s start by acknowledging that when we talk about our agents and our managers if you have a manager, it is a relationship. I think a lot of writers feel like there’s some special category called representative and that’s its own thing and then — but it’s not really like — it is, it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship between people. And there are things that you can do to make that relationship work better and there are definitely things you can do to make it work worse.

So let’s start with the good stuff. I think the first thing that’s important for writers to do is be realistic about what their representatives can actually accomplish. Agents and managers are not magicians. Basically, what they are are people that are leveraging what you provide them.

**John:** Exactly. So they can only work their magic or to the degree they have any magic in showing the work that you’ve provided and getting that out in the town and getting other people interested in what you’ve written for them. They can’t tell you what to write. They can’t tell you how to write your stuff better. They can only work with the material you’re giving them.

**Craig:** Correct. And ultimately, they can’t force people to like something. They’ll do their best. Let’s remember that they get paid when you get paid. But they can’t force anything. So you have to be realistic about what they can accomplish. They’re just people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Secondly, I think it’s important for writers to set the agenda of how the relationship should work. I think everybody that gets into the entertainment business, on some level, is a child with issues looking for parental approval from the world, which you will never get.

Specifically, you will not get it from your representatives and yet I hear often times writers describing or talking about their relationship with their agent like that person was their mom or their dad. They’re not. And what the danger of that transference in saying that my agent is like my mommy or my daddy is that what you’re then saying to them is, “In this relationship, you set the agenda. I’ll be sitting here waiting. You tell me what to do.” Bad idea.

You need to be in charge of your career in that sense. I actually think agents and managers appreciate it when a writer can sit down and say, “This is who I am. This is what I write. This is what I want to write. This is what I want my career to be like. And this is what I’m willing to do. Now, you help me do that.”

**John:** What you’re describing, I find so often. I think part of it comes because a new writer comes into the business and is so excited to have anybody taking them seriously, whatsoever. And if that person has more experience, if that person is 10 years older, naturally you’re going to fall into those I’m the child, you’re the parent roles. That’s not usually helpful for anybody.

And I remember my relationship with my first agent was sort of that thing. We were friends, too, but it was more that he was the person who knew everything and I knew nothing. And while that was accurate, it wasn’t overall helpful. And so when I moved to my current agent, we were much more peers. We were rising together and we could very much understand what each of us wanted.

**Craig:** Exactly. And when you lay out what you want, you actually enable them to get you what you want. It’s hard for them to get you what you want when you haven’t told them, when you’re just waiting for them to describe it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’ll start to lose faith in you, too. Everybody wants a strong client. They want missions. They want goals. They want just as we do. Like when we’re sitting with people and they give us notes, we don’t want, “Can you make it 5% funnier?” We want actionable items.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So give your representatives actionable items. And to that end, it’s important that you communicate purposely with them. We get a lot questions and I see a lot of questions. How often should I talk to my agent? Should I bother them every week or every day or every month? How about this? Bother them when you have something to bother them about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t talk to my agents every day. Sometimes I go a month or two without talking to them. But when I talk to them, there’s an agenda and there’s a purpose. And that I think is very helpful because I’m not grinding the relationship with my insecure need to chitchat or gossip. We have a professional relationship. And I find that helpful because when I do talk to them, everybody takes it seriously.

**John:** Absolutely. I talk to my agent much more often than that. But, you know, there’s times where like weeks will go by. It’s because I’m busy writing something. And there’s really nothing to actually talk about. There’s no business to get done. And so those day where I’m talking to them five times, it’s because there’s something really pressing and decisions have to be made right away. And so I think, communicate purposely.

And also, get back to them quickly. So if they’re looking for you to read something or to respond to something, do it promptly. Because you’re expecting them to respond promptly, you have to respond promptly as well.

**Craig:** 100%. And similar to the get back to them promptly is listen to them. And this is something that I think a lot of writers say they do but don’t actually do. Our agents are constantly trying to tell us things. But because of their training and I think just the personality that goes along with agenting, they sometimes struggle to relay bad news or negative information. Listen carefully to what they’re saying. You can be skeptical about what they’re saying, but you can’t be a denialist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because sometimes there’s bad news.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you have to listen to it and you have to be — you have to show a willingness to hear it and absorb it because there’s no way to move forward or get better or improve things if you’re denying what they’re saying.

**John:** And sometimes it means asking the tough follow-up question. So the kinds of bad news that you’re going to get from your agent is, yeah, they didn’t think the meeting went well, they’re going with another writer, they’re not going to take you for your optional step, you got passes from these places on your spec script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The question which is harder to ask, but which is sort of needed to ask is, is there any feedback? Is there any sense of sort of what happened there? And sometimes they’ll have the answer, sometimes they won’t have the answer. Sometimes it’s a thing you can fix or change, sometimes it’s not. But by asking that question, you might find out like, you know what, they really just liked this other writer better. And like that’s going to happen. Or they just didn’t sort of believe in the draft. That’s going to happen too. And I’ve had to ask sometimes the tough questions like, was it me? Am I being unreasonable here? And sometimes I’ve heard like, “Yes, you are being unreasonable.” I remember Aline talking about her agent who said like, “Shut up and write the next draft.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you need the agent who can tell you that and you’re only going to get that relationship by asking those questions that could have negative answers.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes I find myself talking to a writer who is wondering out loud about something. And like, “It’s been a while. I’m trying to get work. It’s been a bit of a struggle. I’m wondering if maybe like somehow I’m on the outs.” And I just want to say, “If only there were someone you could ask. Pick up the phone, call your agent and say, ‘I am giving you permission to speak as frankly and honestly as possible, where do I stand?'” Only then can you do something about it. So you have to listen.

What you shouldn’t do — let’s talk about ways to poison the well — where I think things can go wrong, is when writers start to lean on their representatives like they’re therapists.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or they’re emotional dumping grounds. You’re the person, I call it, a cry — you know, I’m going to cry on the phone to you because I feel upset. Or I’m going to treat you like my parent. Or in the worse case, I’m going to be abusive to you and blame you for everything that’s going wrong. Or on the flip side, I’m going to count on you like my angel. So I don’t have to worry about taking control of things. My angel will come and save me if I just pray to them hard enough. That’s not what they do and you will be disappointed.

**John:** It’s so tempting to vent to your agent because people are annoying and frustrating. But that person who you had a terrible meeting with could honestly be one of their good friends. And so you have to sort of, you know, be honest but measured in your criticisms with people and just not sort of slam a lot of doors.

**Craig:** Agree. You should not be passive. Don’t think of your agent as person who gets me a job. They actually aren’t people who get you jobs. They’re people who negotiate employment for you. You get you a job. Yes, they can help put you in rooms. Yes, they can help get you opportunities to get a job, but you are going to end up with a bad relationship if you view your roll in the partnership as entirely passive. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not at all. So you’re responsible for landing the job. They can sort of get you — they can put you on the runway, but you have to like fly the plane.

**Craig:** Precisely. Another mistake that, I think, people make in their relationships with their agents is being naïve about the nature of the agency business itself. So what will happen is someone will say, “I’m going to fire my agent. I hate them. I really wanted this job. And they knew I wanted this job. And then their other client got the job. And how can he do this to me. And it’s not fair, nanananananana.”

And I just want to say, did you not know? Oh, were you at the Just You agency? Did you not know that were other clients there that could also do what you do, that would also want what you want? Did you not think that they also had this conversation? Get used to conflict of interest. It’s inevitable. You can’t get around it, so don’t hold that against the agency.

**John:** You know what, I’ve sort of been at one agency for a very long time. And I really sort of only dealt with sort of one person, and sort of one way, it all works. But there are some writers, and I think you may know who I’m talking about, who play this sort of strange meta game where they’re at one agency, but they actually know agents at other agencies and they’re talking to other agents. And the other agencies are working for them, too.

There’s ways you could sort of be very connected with more than just your fundamental agent and really have a good sense of the overall, how it’s all working. I’m not sure that’s helpful for most writers. But there are people who, in some smart ways, really understand how everything fits together. And they can end up getting those jobs or having better relationships with filmmakers and with other talent because they are, you know, they’re friendly to everybody and they’re not sort of focused only on this one relationship with this one agent.

**Craig:** Right. And you should know as a client that if you end up in a situation where you feel your agent somehow screws you over in favor of another client, fire them, get a new agent, but just know that the new agent will be in the exact same position.

**John:** Yeah, I have a friend who’s looking at replacing his agent. And it’s one of those weird situations where he has to decide, do I stay at the same — he’s at a big agency. Do I stay at the same agency and go to a different team or do I leave the agency? And I don’t understand how it can possibly work that you stay at the same agency with different agents. I feel like, especially today, everything is so connected and you’re going to end up dealing with those other agents no matter what. And so just like you kind of fired them but you’re still around.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels like a mess.

**Craig:** It does feel like a mess. And lastly, I would say to our writer friends that when you talk to your agents, it is a mistake to on the one hand simply assume that they’re right because they’re talking to you. And then on the other hand, get angry when they’re not right. The fact is they’re just people. I don’t listen to my agents and invest 100% faith in what they’re saying. I have a conversation with them the way I would with anybody else. There are things that they know that I don’t know and I can — I know the difference between fact and opinion. But we have a dialogue about the opinions.

And there are times where I have challenged them and I was right. There were times when I challenge them and then they were right. But we have the discussion. It’s important that you do have that discussion with them because you will then forgo the disappointing ‘you were wrong’ discussion. Yeah, that’s right, sometimes they’re wrong. Shocker.

**John:** I think you also have to remember like what are agents actually trying to do? Agents are trying to keep their clients employed because agents get paid — we’ve said this a thousand times — agents get paid when you get paid. So their goal is to keep their clients employed. Their goal is not to make the best movies in the world. Their goal is not to make everybody happy or make one studio incredibly rich. Their goal is to keep their clients working.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so look for their expertise in sort of what deals are happening right now, where things are getting set up, that kind of stuff. They will actually know a lot of information about that. Don’t look to them for great advice about like how this could be a better movie or what the nature is of — would this filmmaker be the right fit for you. Like that’s not going to be their expertise. Their expertise is in making deals, making connections, and hoping everything works out okay.

**Craig:** And even when you’re talking about their area of expertise, don’t be afraid to express your opinion. If they say, “Listen, we want to go in and ask for this.” It’s okay to say, “I actually want you to ask for this,” and then have the discussion. You can, eventually they may say, “You’re nuts and you just got to trust us on this.” And then you can. Just the way that it works in any discussion with people where they just finally look at you and go, “No, no, no, you just got to trust me on this.”

But there have been times where we’ve had those discussions and we came up with a new plan together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have input and this way you don’t feel like you just got jobbed somehow.

**John:** Yeah. You have to remember that you have a relationship with your agents and your managers, but you also have a relationship with studio executives and with producers and other people who are involved. And so sometimes, that triangle is sort of strange. And like, that producer will try to play you against your agents, or you’ll be trying to play the producer. And it’s a complicated thing especially as you’re trying to talk about money or how are we going to get this movie made? And recognize that different people have different agendas.

So invariably, as you’re trying to ask for a raise on a project, you’re going to get these weird phone calls saying like, “Oh, we can’t possibly do that. Business affairs is slamming us down.” And you’re going to have to make some calls yourself because your agent won’t be able to do it. Like there are going to be tough decisions that you yourself have to make and you can’t just expect your representatives to do it all for you.

**Craig:** No. But whatever those decisions are, you just have to know that you’re going to be making them in concert with your representatives.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So they need to know. And that requires you having those grown up discussions with them.

**John:** Yeah. You went through this whole thing without talking about your fundamental, underlying advice which is to fire your agent.

**Craig:** Well, you know, because it’s not going to necessarily [laughs] help you to have a good relationship with your agent.

**John:** No, it’s not.

**Craig:** But yeah, don’t forget that this is not a marriage. It’s a work partnership. It’s a professional partnership. So in the back of your mind, just know I can end this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That in and of itself helps you be a little more confident and a little more aggressive — and when I say, aggressive, I don’t mean angry aggressive, I mean active, a little more active in the relationship because I want it to work. I chose this person to partner with professionally. I’m not going to then now lean back and just let them do everything and complain about how they do it. I want to work with them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So keep that in mind that if it’s not working, you fire them.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to underline the point you made, that it’s not a marriage. And that so we talk about how important it is to have a relationship and we may talk about things that sort of sound like marriage terms and about open lines of communication and expressing clear agendas. But you are not as bound to this person as you think you are. And if things are not going well, both parties have the ability to walk away and it’s actually very simple and relatively unencumbered. You are going to be dealing with them on some projects that they may have set up. Sometimes, there are lawsuits about, you know, certain things and who set what stuff up. But most cases, you just walk over to another agency and stuff is fine.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** You will live. You’ll survive.

**John:** We have run out of time in this episode for two of the things we want to talk about, which is about what you should do in L.A. if you are just in L.A. for a short time as a screenwriter, and how to use more real stuff in your movies. So we’ll save those for next week. But I think we have to get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** They’re so cool.

**John:** So my One Cool Things is an article by Tom Chivers writing for BuzzFeed where he asked — he sat down with a bunch of atheists. And he asked them how do they find meaning in a purposeless universe? And I thought it was a really great conversation with a bunch of smart people because I think the default assumption is that if you are an atheist, you’re going to have a view that nothing really matters. And so well, how do you find stuff that does matter if there’s no sort of end game to it?

And for screenwriters, I think it’s really interesting because we have this incentive, this instinct to narrativize everything. And so there has to be a final goal. Like your hero has to accomplish something because they’re going to achieve something at the end. And as we look at our lives, we have those little small milestones, but we want our overall life to have some sort of purpose like my being here on Earth was meaningful for this reason.

And there’s going to be this natural instinct to, well, I do this and then because I did this, there’s a reward at the end. And the reward at the end could be heaven if you’re a religious person. But if you’re not a religious person, how do you find rewards in the present day? And I thought it was a bunch of smart conversations about how you find meaning in the present day. And if you don’t perceive life as being a dress rehearsal for this next stage, what does your daily agenda look like?

**Craig:** It’s a fascinating topic and certainly close to my heart because I am an atheist and because I do believe that I live in a purposeless universe and yet I also derive great personal meaning from my life and I have values and I have morals and I believe that those things are all compatible. And I’ve never actually met someone who is an atheist who says, “You know what, I’m going to drive my car into a crowd of people today, because why not?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t work that way. That’s not the way we are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s another great talk by Sam Harris. I believe it was a TED talk and we’ll throw the link on, where he talks about science and how even if you eschew metaphysics entirely, that the pursuit of scientific truth in and of itself helps us live a good life and helps form the bedrock of certain moralities. It’s really, really well done. So if you’re of this sort of bent, take a listen.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing is a one cool person. And it’s an athlete so it ties in a little bit to our NFL discussion with the coolest name, Didi Gregorius.

**John:** That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Isn’t it great? So Didi Gregorius is the starting short stop for the New York Yankees. Why is he so cool? Well, for starters, he had just about the biggest shoes to fill ever. He was Derek Jeter’s replacement. Derek Jeter isn’t just a future first ballot hall of famer and former Yankee captain, but he’s an institution. He is just truly beloved, not only by the Yankees, but by all of baseball. And that’s a rare thing indeed. So you can’t get bigger shoes than that to fill.

And who did the Yankees turn to? Well, very odd guy in, at least statistically speaking. Didi Gregorius is a black man who’s Dutch. He was born in the Netherlands. He is, I think, one of two black Dutch men to play [laughs] Major League Baseball in history and maybe one of six or seven Dutch nationals to play ever. He speaks four languages. Born in Amsterdam, raised in Curaçao. And he’s young. He’s really young, he’s 25 years old. He’s never been an everyday player until this year. He gets paid $533,000 which is barely above the minimum. So the union minimum in Major League Baseball is $507,000. So he’s not even getting scale plus 10 on that, you know, in that sense.

So already, we have this very interesting character for our sports movie of a guy that has to fill in for legend. And he’s first month was a disaster. [laughs] He was terrible at the plate and even worse, he was terrible on the field. And that was really where everybody had kind of hoped he would shine because God love Derek Jeter, but as he went on in his career, his defensive skills did start to wane. And it was costing the Yankees some games.

Well, just like a sports movie and life doesn’t usually work like this, but in this case, it did. He turned it around. And he started to do amazing things in the field, truly amazing things. And he even started to hit the ball really well. And at this point in the year, so it’s his first year where he’s an every day starter, filling in for Derek Jeter, plus his name is Didi Gregorius which is the coolest name ever, plus he’s Dutch. He currently has the second highest WAR in the American League. And that means wins above replacement. It’s a fancy statistic that basically says, if we replace you with a scrub, how many games would we lose? [laughs] In other words, how many games do we win because you’re not a scrub?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is the second highest in the American League and fifth among all short stops. How cool is that? Didi Gregorius, awesome season. One cool guy.

**John:** What I love about your choice there is it plays on both of our instincts in that, you know, in baseball now, it does come down to so much the numbers. So you’re citing a number with this WAR figure and yet what is really appealing to you about him is not his numbers but about his sort of unique story —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And his unique character. And that’s honestly what we’re drawn to is we’re drawn to characters and we want to see the story even if the story may not necessarily always be reflected in the numbers.

**Craig:** Indeed, indeed.

**John:** And that is our show this week. So a final reminder. This is your last chance to get your t-shirt for Scriptnotes. And so if you want one, you should go to store.johnaugust.com. If you want to support the John side, you should buy a green camp t-shirt. But if you really need to have Sexy Craig’s blessing —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, you want the blue shirt, don’t you, baby?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Was that like a shiver of disgust? [laughs]

**John:** It’s whatever you want to be, Craig. They’re only up there until Thursday. So if this is Tuesday, you’re listening to the show, you should chop, chop, get on it. Our outro this week is by — comes via Chris French. And so it’s actually a snippet from the Coming to America soundtrack which actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So some time traveler listened to the podcast, went back in time and wrote it into the theme for Coming to America.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you have a question for me or for Craig, you can write those longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. johnaugust.com is also where you can find the show notes with links to many of the things we talked about. If you’d like all the episodes back to the very start, you can go to scriptnotes.net, that’s where you sign up for membership for $1.99 a month. That gives you access to all the back catalogue and through the app that you can find on the app stores, you can listen to all those back episodes.

We’re on iTunes. So while you’re there, leave us a rating. Leave us a little comment because we love to read those little comments.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** We’re on Facebook, but we almost never check the Facebook, but we — because I mentioned it this week, we’ll actually check the Facebook comments. But we do check Twitter a lot. So that’s where I make fun of Craig for being late.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. And that is our show for this week.

**Craig:** Good show, John.

**John:** Good show. I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Next week, bye.

Links:

* [For two more days, Scriptnotes shirts are available for pre-order in the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Black List Table Reads, with John and Craig](http://blacklist.wolfpop.com/audio/39626/john-august-and-craig-mazin)
* [Craig is running a few minutes behind](http://johnaugust.com/2015/craig-is-running-a-few-minutes-behind)
* [Tom Hardy’s Legend snuck a 2-star Guardian review onto its poster, made it look like 5](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/tom-hardys-legend-film-snuck-a-2star-review-onto-its-poster-made-it-look-like-5-10492505.html), from The Independent
* [The biology of crime: Low heart rate may predict criminal behavior, study says](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-low-heart-rate-criminal-behavior-20150909-story.html), from the Los Angeles Times
* [The odds of making it in the NFL](http://imgur.com/gallery/zNOVaO6)
* [Addition of the PG-13 rating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America_film_rating_system#Addition_of_PG-13_rating) on Wikipedia
* [How ‘Indiana Jones’ Finally Forced Hollywood To Create The PG-13 Rating](http://www.businessinsider.com/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-doom-created-pg-13-rating-2014-4), from Business Insider
* [The Possession: PG-13 Vs. Uncut Edition Comparison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1vwu2R6ox0) on YouTube
* [This Film Is Not Yet Rated](http://kirbydick.com/thisfilmisnotyetrated.html), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated)
* [I Asked Atheists How They Find Meaning In A Purposeless Universe](http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/when-i-was-a-child-i-spake-as-a-child#.em1Y5xnxG5), from BuzzFeed
* Sam Harris’s TED talk: [Science can answer moral questions](http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right?language=en)
* [Didi Gregorius making a name for himself with Yankees](http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/88945/didi-gregorius-making-a-name-for-himself-with-yankees) on ESPN.com, and Didi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DidiG18), [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didi_Gregorius) and [baseball-reference.com](http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/gregodi01.shtml)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) from Coming to America, sent to us by Chris French ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))