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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/writing-for-hollywood-without-living-there).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 195 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we are going to be talking about how to have a Hollywood career when you don’t live in Hollywood. And since that’s a topic Craig and I don’t really know anything about, we have a special guest with us here today.

**Craig:** Special guest.

**John:** Ryan Knighton is the author of books including Cockeyed and C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark. He’s written essays for Esquire, The New York Times, Salon.com, and The Globe and Mail. He’s also a screenwriter. In addition to the movie adaption of Cockeyed, he’s currently writing a feature for Ridley Scott.

**Craig:** For who?

**John:** Ridley Scott.

**Craig:** Never heard of him. No.

**John:** That talented director.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He also teaches at Capilano University in Vancouver.

**Craig:** The Couve. Yeah.

**John:** Welcome, Ryan Knighton.

**Ryan Knighton:** Thank you. I think of it as like LA’s northernmost suburbs.

**John:** That’s a very good — very apt analogy.

**Craig:** Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, I’ve spent enough time there. I feel like it’s, by the way, great city. I actually love that city.

**Ryan:** Yeah, what about it?

**Craig:** I mean —

**Ryan:** Did I sound disparaging?

**Craig:** A touch. A little challenging, a little disbelieving. I hate to truck in stereotypes but Canadians in general are super nice. Sorry.

**Ryan:** Sorry. [laughs]

**Craig:** Sorry. How do you get the Canadian paparazzi off your lawn?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** You ask them to get off your lawn, please. The air is really clean. And it’s just beautiful. It’s a beautiful town. If you don’t like where you are, just ride your bike 10 minutes over a bridge and you’re in a different part. I love it. I just love Vancouver.

**John:** Yeah, why would you ever leave Vancouver, Ryan?

**Ryan:** For a career in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Ohh…

**John:** Oh, well that’s a perfect reason to have you on the podcast.

**Craig:** Yes, of course.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** So walk us through some back story. So you wrote these books and when did the bug to become a screenwriter kick in? Was that before you wrote the books? Has it always been there? What is your history with screenwriting and movies?

**Ryan:** Well, I was actually really a TV kid. I didn’t read a lot of books. And, you know, I grew up watching Three’s Company reruns basically. That was my education.

**John:** That’s great.

**Ryan:** So I’d never really had a plan of going into books but the long story is I lost my sight when I was in my late teens. So I’m actually a blind guy. And I went to university because of that. I was driving forklifts poorly when I was losing my sight.

**Craig:** Probably.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m just guessing.

**Ryan:** Yeah. You’re supposed to pick up things with the forks. Not impale things with the forks.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a weird way to find out you’re going blind.

**Ryan:** It’s a weird way you find you’re going blind.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Yeah. So I ended up going back to — well, not going back to. I end up going to university and, you know, I kind of got the bug for writing there and I started writing books and articles and things like that. And I had a great chain of mentors. And so TV was never and screenwriting was never really on my horizon. I wished it was — like I wanted to go into theater when I was a sighted guy. I’d done like improv but then when the blackouts started happening on stage, you know, my sight was going and I couldn’t get off stage.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** So, I never thought it was something I’d be able to, you know, participate in. But after I’d done my first memoir Cockeyed, you know, my lit-agent had tried to sell the film rights and nobody would buy it. And they said, you know, it’s very David Sedaris-y but, you know, it’s more like a sequence of essays than a story. But I just knew there was a bunch of stuff on the cutting room floor that actually was probably more in service of a movie than it was the book. So I just picked up the phone and called the film rights agent and I had sort of told them what other material I had. And he said, “Well, you know, it would help if you wrote a treatment.” And I said, “What’s a treatment?”

**Craig:** We’ve all been there by the way.

**Ryan:** You’ve been there?

**Craig:** Everybody that is asked to write a treatment goes, “Uh-huh”. And then they immediately run to somebody and go, “What the F is a treatment?”

**Ryan:** And that’s probably your first career choice.

**Craig:** Pretty much.

**Ryan:** It’s like if you didn’t ask that question, you would have no career, but it’s the people who say, “Okay, what’s a treatment?”

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. “Can someone please help me?”

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a weird word for what that is. Yeah.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Tell us what a treatment is?

**Ryan:** Me?

**Craig:** Well, somebody — you’re the person now that’s going to answer the question for them.

**Ryan:** Well, it’s weird, like he sent me three and he said sort of imitate these. And my first thing was, “Oh, it’s in present tense. How weird? As a book writer, as a memoirist, I mean, why do you guys write in present tense?”

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** So that was actually a strange thing to switch to. I actually had to really self-consciously work in present tense when I was writing whereas like teaching in the university now, all my students write in present tense. They have no past.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s so strange.

**Ryan:** It’s a weird glitch in the culture now. I wonder if it’s — did you guys read The Hunger Games books?

**John:** Are they written in present tense?

**Craig:** Yeah, and it really threw me but I could also see how that probably helped them.

**Craig:** They were?

**Ryan:** Yeah, and it probably helped when it was time to adapt them because everything was just — and it was all present tense first person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Well, my theory has been that it’s arisen as in speech the way like has arisen to replace said. That you’ve switched from a print-based culture to a mediated culture where, you know, “said” is for print culture. You know, “This is what I said.” And now we say, “I was like this.” Like you’re performing it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Ryan:** And sort of present tense is in that sort of more performance mode, right?

**Craig:** And there you were trying to engage in performance mode with your treatment.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** So it made sense. And, you know, I imitated. And what I learned was just, you know, tell me the sort of the short barstool yarn of the story with its big moments. And I just tried my best and it was too long because I was writing books and it took me awhile to learn less is more and less is still more. And so I did that and nobody was interested still but that was interesting.

**Craig:** So far it’s going great.

**Ryan:** It was going great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And then he said, “Well, you know, you should maybe just take a crack at writing the script, adapt the book yourself.” And I said, “Great. How do I do that?” And he said I needed to get Final Draft and so I got that.

**Craig:** Which you don’t by the way. You don’t need Final Draft.

**Ryan:** Well, I didn’t know.

**Craig:** You know, we — you were lied to. [laughs]

**Ryan:** [laughs]

**John:** He just lied to you this whole time. [laughs]

**Ryan:** [laughs] It’s like I just learned this on this spot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** I’ve been lied to for the last 10 years.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** So I got that and then he sent me three scripts and just said, “Read these and try and imitate the format.” And then I will be shameless here, I found both of your websites and I’m basically an alumni of your websites.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Ryan:** That was my education in screenwriting.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. When you say, “They sent you these,” I mean, you’re learning about the format of screenwriting, how does format work? I assume you’re reading these in Braille.

**Ryan:** I don’t actually read Braille.

**Craig:** So what are you doing? How do you pick up the — ?

**Ryan:** I have a voice synthesizer that reads to me.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Ryan:** And it’s sort of like Stephen Hawking basically.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And if you get this voice synthesizer as a blind though, the first thing you do is you write a little bit of soft core just because it’s really interesting to hear Stephen Hawking do smut.

**Craig:** So hot. [laughs] Right.

**Ryan:** It is as funny as you imagine.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Ryan:** And I hope a lot of people right now are really trying to do this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But how do you pick up the format from that?

**Ryan:** Well, the format, I mean, it reads to me. It’s case sensitive in voice.

**Craig:** I see.

**Ryan:** So I can hear when things are capitalized.

**Craig:** I see.

**Ryan:** And it tells me when I’m in the action line or if I’m in a dialogue line so I know where I am in terms of function.

**Craig:** How does it tell you then? Out of curiosity.

**Ryan:** Well, it’s just sort of key strokes, you know, I sort of figured out how my voice synthesizer interacts with the program.

**Craig:** I see. Got it.

**Ryan:** Or what it reads me. And mostly I just — I wrote action lines, you know, character names and dialogue. I never really wrote parentheticals. And afterwards I would just get somebody to proof it for me and tell me if I had actually accidentally written a dialogue line in an action line and fix it.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**Ryan:** So I had to have somebody check it. But I just, I loved it. I loved writing it. And I thought, this is so awesome to see if I can go where I’m unwanted like if I can go down to Hollywood and convince somebody that you need blind people describing pictures to you —

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Ryan:** That will be like the best ever.

**Craig:** What can’t you do after that?

**Ryan:** Exactly! I figured. I figured that is the most unwanted person in Hollywood so I’m going to try that.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** It strikes that writing, you know, both writing in just normal fiction and writing in screenwriting the visual challenges, the lack of being able to see everything else on the page would present issues just because of — or your visual buffer. Like you can’t look back up like three paragraphs what was there. You have to physically sort of scroll up there to hear it.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**John:** Like you can’t just glance at it. You have to have it read it back to you at that moment. So do you think you have a bigger overall buffer for what’s around the line that you’re currently writing because you can’t just look at it?

**Ryan:** I do. I do. I write straight. I just write directly straight ahead as long as I can without going back and rereading.

**John:** Okay.

**Ryan:** Because it is a chore. It goes up and it reads me line by line like whatever line my cursor is on, it reads that line and it stops reading at the end of a line; not at the end of the grammatical unit.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**Ryan:** So it takes a while to get used to it. And I probably should have brought it with me. You could have heard it. You wouldn’t be able to understand it. It speaks so quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But it’s sort of like, you get so used to the voice that you can accelerate it and accelerate it and still process the voice whereas people who’ve never heard it before can’t process it.

**Craig:** It’s just something you train your mind to.

**Ryan:** Yes, yeah.

**Craig:** To do. I mean, it’s funny. I was playing this, I guess , what do you call, like, a thought experiment on the way over here where I thought, okay, if I lose my sight, how would that impact my screenwriting? I could see how it would impact my life in all sorts of ways but how would it impact my screenwriting. And, you know, the technical aspects you’re describing, the chores, they’re there. But it’s funny like in terms of imagination and screen, what screenwriting ultimately is at its core is so — it’s so internal.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it’s so mind’s eye based.

**Ryan:** It is. And actually that’s what I discovered was I found a form basically or a format where what you are doing is describing a picture to somebody who can’t see it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** So it’s basically a blind format.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Ryan:** And, you know, but it put me on the other side of the table where I’m the one describing rather than being the one being told. And so I come at it from a very kind of empathetic ear to what it’s like to hear pictures being told that are paste inappropriately to how they’re actually unfolding. Like —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Action sequences that actually are quite slow. Or —

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**Ryan:** You know, when a bus is barreling down at a character, you don’t want a rococo sentence about it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** That’s not the feeling.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’ve been at the mercy of poorly told visual paintings.

**Ryan:** Yes. Because my image of the world in my mind’s eye is mediated by other people’s language, and so, I’m really fickle.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** You want that specificity and clarity. That’s not to make people uncomfortable. Like if you meet me, don’t think I’m judging you.

**John:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** But, you know.

**Craig:** Oh, you are.

**Ryan:** But if the bus is coming at me, you know, don’t take your time.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Yeah, yes.

**Ryan:** [laughs] In telling me that it’s coming.

**Craig:** Paint the story well.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Paint the story well.

**Ryan:** Paint it well in its appropriate pace.

**Craig:** Well, if it weren’t hard enough for you as a screenwriter because you are blind, you also decided, “And I also don’t want to live in Hollywood. I think I want to stay here in Vancouver,” is that —

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So are there any other challenges by the way that we don’t know about?

**Ryan:** And I’m illiterate.

**Craig:** Narcoleptic perhaps or —

**Ryan:** I actually have never seen a movie, but — [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Never seen a movie.

**Ryan:** Never seen a movie. No, well, I already had a life up there, right. I mean, I’ve been teaching at a university since I was in my 20s and, you know, it’s a good day job and I still like it, too. I only teach part time now. I have for years because I’m writing all the time. But I like to go back in the classroom and teach first or second year just basic writing or creative writing just to kind of check in with the 18 year olds —

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And see what they’re thinking about. And I also think it’s really useful once a year just to go in there and sort of reacquaint myself with the basics of things.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Just to see if they’re still true. I think sometimes you develop habits that you think are truths and they’re not necessarily. So I like that once a year to go back in. So it’s one of the reasons I stay there. And then, you know, I have an 8-year-old daughter and she’s in school and my wife has her job up there.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Ryan:** And I’m Canadian. There is a culture. I do feel different down here. I couldn’t explain what it is but I do feel like a foreigner.

**Craig:** No, you absolutely are.

**Ryan:** Yeah, yeah, so it is true.

**Craig:** The word for you is alien actually.

**Ryan:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re an alien.

**Craig:** You are. But you’re legal.

**Ryan:** Okay. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re legal.

**Ryan:** So I stayed. I stayed up there.

**John:** Let’s figure out the history here. So the first script you’re writing is the adaption of your first book.

**Ryan:** Yeah, I adapted Cockeyed at the urging of my film rights agent because it means — I came out of the book world and for those that don’t know, you know, you have a lit agent in the book world who sells the rights to different countries for your book, your publishing rights. So Canada has a sale, US has a sale, they’re all separate. And then the film rights is something that’s usually handled by a subagent and they have the connections at the studios and the production companies to try and get somebody interested in it. So at his urging, I tried to spec, you know, adapt my memoir. And he submitted it to the Sundance Lab and I made it down to the final 25 for that and came down for a meeting with the lovely Sundance Institute people.

**John:** Yeah, they’re wonderful. And I’ve been an adviser and a mentor at Sundance for many, many sessions. So what was your experience dealing with Sundance and what was that process like for you?

**Ryan:** Well, it was amazing because it came down for the interview for the shortlist and I was expecting a lot of questions about like, “Oh, you know, how do you write? How do you put on your pants in the morning?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** That’s what I’m used to. It’s like, “What do you see when you dream?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** But they asked me just a lot of really nuts and bolts, kibbles and bits questions about story.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And I realized, holy shit, I’m a writer and I don’t know much about story, particularly in the book world and coming out of academia, you know, you know a lot about rhetoric and genre theory and you don’t know the first thing about storytelling.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And they asked me one really amazing question that sold me so well on the experience which was, you know, I was adapting my own memoir. I knew it wasn’t going to be the book anymore. It was going to be a different story because it’s a different beast when you’re doing a movie. I’d have to sacrifice certain things and drop certain plots and things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But the question they asked me was, “What do you think of sentimentality?” And it was such a strong question because in my memoir, basically, the story is, you know, I started losing my sight when I was in my teens and they said, “You could lose it completely within two years or five years or ten years, we don’t know. It could, you know, go really quick or it could just stop. But, you know, plan your future around that.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And I was a working-class kid and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t have great grades in school and all that kind of stuff. And when I was telling this story in the book, I made one choice which was I didn’t want to tell the scene when I was diagnosed. It’s just sort of the medical porn of all those trauma memoirs.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Ryan:** And I just didn’t want it. So I think I captured it in like maybe a sentence like after my diagnosis. And that was it. And I moved on in the story to the things that really interested me. And I cannot tell you how many people when I went on tour with that book said how moved they were by the diagnosis scene.

**Craig:** That they filled in with their mind.

**Ryan:** What they filled in. And because the genre and the culture is so front loaded —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** That we think we know the story before it even starts and we know it’s going to be a story about triumph of the human spirit. And the worst thing that happens to you when you go blind is you become inspirational. It’s just horrible.

**Craig:** Yeah, tragic really.

**Ryan:** And you can’t —

**Craig:** Because you just want to be a bastard, don’t you? [laughs]

**Ryan:** You just do. [laughs] Well, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s sort of like —

**Craig:** I do every day.

**Ryan:** It’s like you become a —

**Craig:** I’m living the dream. [laughs]

**Ryan:** [laughs] It’s like you become a cartoon character. Now you can say anything.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**Ryan:** But anyways, that taught me something. And when I went into the Sundance interview and they asked me about sentimentality, I realized they understood that element in the culture that the culture is going to impose something on this that isn’t necessarily there.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Or you’re going to be a sucker to it, too. I mean, just because you’re a blind guy doesn’t mean you’re immune to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And they called me on it and I had dipped into it in parts of the script just because I didn’t know how else to handle it. And so I just substituted what the culture had sort of taught me to think about these stories. Nobody in the book world had said that to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And I was just so impressed by their command.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I really like the point you’re making about the difference, one of the differences, there’s many, between the world of we’ll call literary fiction and academic literary analysis and mainstream or even independent filmmaking that so much of the literary world is about deconstruction and undermining text and ripping the conventions apart and so much about what we do is to actually perfect some kind of narrative.

**Ryan:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Like a structured narrative, you know, it’s almost oppositional in its approach.

**Ryan:** It very much is.

**Craig:** You felt that jump when you —

**Ryan:** I totally felt that jump.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it also speaks to the nature of present tense story telling versus this past tense which literally fiction tends to be told in the past tense where everything can be sort of looked at through a gauze of history and perspective and you can pause for a long time to figure out like what that moment actually was and what event versus screenwriting which has to keep chugging along at 24 frames per second. Like, it’s always about what’s happening right now.

**Ryan:** That’s right.

**John:** And the only way to encounter a moment or encounter an emotion is to find some way for it to be happening in the present tense and not to reflect back on something that happened before.

**Ryan:** I think in some ways I had a perfect storm of, you know, sort of collateral education for this which was — I mean, first of all, the only kind of pros I was doing be it for articles like I still do travel writing for magazines, you know, it’s like send the blind guy to the to the revolution in Cairo and see what happens. Right?

**Craig:** [laughs] Did they really do that?

**Ryan:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**Craig:** Oh my god. [laughs]

**Ryan:** It’s like I’m basically Forest Gump in the back of a CNN shot just looking for water.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. I want to read that.

**Ryan:** I just, I mean, I love that stuff. The thing that I like about non-fiction is non-fiction is really — it doesn’t matter if it’s magazine form or book form, long-form thinking. It’s really the art of omission. You have a finite amount of raw material to work with and it’s how you remove things to make the shape of a story emerge.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** And I think especially with memoirs and true stories which I do a lot of adapting of that I think an interesting life isn’t necessarily an interesting story.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** And accomplishment isn’t necessarily an interesting story. You know, that we think of those as like these big moments but sometimes there is no story that grows from that moment or grows up to that moment that gives it the kind of punch that it needs.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yeah, I always feel like the stories about extraordinary people or ordinary people doing extraordinary things that you never get to the place where it becomes a movie until you figure out the ordinary thing that matters, you know.

**Ryan:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And I was talking about it with John Lee Hancock. I remember he was looking at The Rookie to direct that. I don’t know if you ever —

**Ryan:** John Lee was one of the advisers at the Sundance Lab.

**Craig:** And he’s the best. And The Rookie is basically the story of a high school coach who had burned out as a Minor League baseball player early on from an injury. So there he was a baseball coach in Texas I think and Mike Rich I believe wrote the script. And he made a bet with his team that if they could, you know, win so many games or whatever that he would go try out again. Because the guy had pretty live arms still. And they did and he went and he tried out and he ended up pitching in the Majors for like a season and a half at the age of 38, you know, that was the thing.

**Ryan:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** But John didn’t really know how to make that a movie until he understood that it was a story about a father and a son. And that really was what mattered that you have to find the ordinary thing under the extraordinary thing, you know. If you’re writing your own story, in a weird way, I would imagine that you’d have to kind of find the point of why does my life deserve to be a movie beyond the blindness.

**Ryan:** Yes. It’s true. It’s totally true. In fact, Cockeyed itself, I never think of as a book about blindness.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** I had a brilliant editor in New York and she, you know, that was my first lesson with non-fiction that it’s the art of omission. And my first draft was 120,000 words and she said — she phoned me and she said, “Okay, before we start editing this, I have one question for you. You have to answer it for me in one sentence and you can’t use the word blindness.” And she said, “What is your story — ”

**Craig:** What is your story about? Right. [laughs]

**Ryan:** And she said, “And you can’t answer it now. You have a week and I’ll phone you.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** “And when you figure out that sentence, it’s a razor. And with that razor we will cut away.”

**Craig:** Wow. Good for her.

**Ryan:** And it was hard. But I realized —

**Craig:** And what was your answer?

**Ryan:** My answer was that basically it’s a coming of age story about a young man who’s becoming a disabled man and he thinks it’s a contradiction.

**Craig:** I see.

**Ryan:** And it’s about masculinity.

**Craig:** Right. There we go. There we go.

**Ryan:** Right. And once you had that, it’s like, oh, it just — all the stories read differently.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Right? Because you think they’re literally about something on the surface. And, you know, when you ask young writers, you know, “What’s your story about?” They tell you what happens which is a very different question —

**Craig:** Than what it’s about.

**Ryan:** Than what it’s about.

**Craig:** Which is the most — well, because now also, I read your book and I’m not reading it from the outside point of view of somebody that’s, say, learning about in a sense of curiosity, well, what’s it like living as somebody who’s blind? I’m reading a story about something that impacts me. This is also about me. I too am a man and if you’re a woman you’re reading about your brother or your father or your son.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s relevant.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then that just is transformative. That question of what it’s about. I mean, we talk about it on the show all the time.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a thematic question. Like, what is this movie underneath all the plot, underneath all the characters, what is it actually asking and what is it trying to find an answer for?

**Craig:** Yeah, why does this need to exist essentially. Because if it’s just about what it seems to be about, there’ve already been movies about that, you know. [laughs]

**Ryan:** Yeah. Because then it becomes like Social Network is about Facebook.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Great example.

**Ryan:** And I think, you know it’s sort of — what I often say is that stories are a unit of measurement that we measure what we understand in beginnings, middles and ends. And you know when a story is over because it has understood something. Right? And it didn’t know it from the beginning.

**Craig:** Right?

**Ryan:** Right. And that’s that feeling of satisfaction at the end of the story. It’s not because the plot is over.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s because the machine doesn’t need to run anymore.

**Craig:** The plot is over because the machine doesn’t need to run anymore.

**Ryan:** That’s exactly it.

**Craig:** That’s what resolves the plot.

**Ryan:** And that was the first lesson from non-fiction that I took into screenwriting was that thing that the art of omission is really what you’re working with in screenwriting, especially when you’re adapting, is really about the art of omission.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Ryan:** And so that was one thing. And then the other side, I mean, I did a lot on radio and I’d done stuff with This American Life and The Moth and I learned a lot from working on that side of the media because, you know, when you’re telling a story on the radio, you’re telling it in a time-sensitive medium which is screenwriting as well. You’re telling a story that is going to unfold in time and you’re trying to replicate the effect in the reading of the script of what it would be like watching it in real time.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And when you write for radio, you’re really sensitive to that. You’re really sensitive to how a story is unfolding and when it’s starting to flag and somebody is going to actually go and do the dishes. And if they came back, would they still be able follow what’s going on? So it was such a great training in the economy of storytelling because you don’t get that with books.

**Craig:** No, no. If anything, I just imagine books provide you with this remarkable luxury to expand and contract your focus as you wish.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the fun of books is that they do that.

**Ryan:** Yeah. And I love making fun of my novelist friends because I’m like, “Oh, there you guys go, just whenever you got a problem, just make some shit up”.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Ryan:** Adding to the pile.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** You know, what do I got to do? I’ve got to find something else to remove.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** That’s hard. Digging is harder.

**Craig:** You have a zero sum game of time.

**John:** So it was a hard adaptation. So, is the screenplay of Cockeyed similar to the books? In what ways is it different? Is it the same thematic question in the movie version versus the book version?

**Ryan:** It’s changed in iterations, I mean, when I came out of the Lab, Jodie Foster attached for a couple of years and we worked on it. And she said something to me that was so cutting. [laughs]

**Craig:** Really?

**Ryan:** Brutal.

**Craig:** Sweet Jodie Foster?

**Ryan:** And so instructive because it was so generously done. And she read the script and she said, “I’ll direct this if…” I hope, you know, I’m sure she’s fine with me saying. She said, “I’ll direct this if you’re willing to do a page one rewrite because I think there’s a big problem in the script.” And she said, “Basically, you’ve written an ensemble story because your character is the least interesting.”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Ryan:** And she said, “You have confused a guy going blind with a transformation of character.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**Ryan:** She said, “That’s like washing your hair. It was dirty. Now it’s clean. He’s sighted and now he’s not.” She said, “But the guy at the beginning and the end is still the same person in the script. And I think, you were just avoiding yourself by making the other character stronger.”

**Craig:** Man, you know, she doesn’t seem like the kind of person that would punch you that hard in the face, but boy, that’s — but she’s right.

**Ryan:** But she was right, which is so rare.

**Craig:** I haven’t read either the book or the script but I could tell you she’s right.

**John:** But I’ll tell you like almost any memoir adapted by its own person, it’s going to have that issue because —

**Ryan:** Yes.

**John:** How you find the inherent conflict and contradiction and how do you make yourself the villain of the story in some ways and that’s a real challenge.

**Ryan:** Yes. And it was sort like, you had to go back and think about who did you think you were going to be and how was it taken from you?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And when I had that, I’m like, “Oh, this is a different story now.” And so we rewrote it by taking away the ensemble, like my character wasn’t allowed to be omitted from any scenes just as a constraint to help that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And when that happened it became a different story. It became more of a love story about me and my wife and I’d followed her to South Korea because she went there to teach English and I was losing my sight and I went with her but she helped me pretend I could see for six months so I could keep a job.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Ryan:** And it was about how we crossed from lovers to caretaker and, you know, girlfriend to mom. And you know, it’s a bit like Lost in Translation in sort of the feel of it. And we ended up sort of amplifying that section to be really a lot of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool.

**Ryan:** So it changed quite a bit because of that but every time you rewrite something, you learn something different about it. I mean, I’ve written the book. I’ve written the script a few times now in different ways and it still changes.

**Craig:** And now, you’re writing a screenplay for Sir Ridley.

**Ryan:** I’ve been adapting something for his company that’s based on a New York Times story —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** That’s sort of a big military thing.

**Craig:** Are you allowed to talk about what it is?

**Ryan:** I don’t think I can.

**John:** Well, that’s fine.

**Craig:** Well, you shouldn’t. We’ve never gotten anyone fired. We don’t want to start now.

**John:** So, Ryan, is this the first job you’ve been hired on to write for somebody else?

**Ryan:** No.

**John:** Or you’ve done other stuff for other people too?

**Ryan:** No, I’ve done — I adapted Proof of Heaven for Universal which was the brain surgeon who had the sort of [crosstalk] visions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Ryan:** It’s actually going back to what Craig was saying about, you know, what is the story about. I don’t think that thing is about the afterlife. I think it’s actually about something quite different. I adapted that. I adapted a thing called Wings of Madness for Chris Wedge which was something he wanted to do as a live action, his first live action. But it’s a really difficult movie to get made because it’s set in like 1903 Paris which everybody is just running to make.

**John:** Absolutely. 100 percent.

**Craig:** I’m about to start, the next thing I’m doing is 1903 Russia so —

**Ryan:** Oh, really?

**Craig:** I’m going to take the same shovel of the face. So, you’re not alone. [laughs]

**Ryan:** So we were writing about Alberto Santos-Dumont who was this sort of crazy Brazilian guy who was basically racing the Wright Brothers to invent a flying —

**Craig:** Oh, I love that.

**John:** That’s great.

**Ryan:** But he was the guys who invented the flying balloon. And there’s pictures of him circling it around the Eiffel Tower because he was the first person to prove you could control a balloon in the sky. And he actually had a flying machine in Paris. He’s still the only man who’s ever had an urban flying machine and he used to fly it to Maximes and tether it to the gas lamp like a horse.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Ryan:** I know. It’s like, why it isn’t that a movie?

**Craig:** Plus the costumes. What a great time for clothing.

**Ryan:** Oh my god, and the science like the things you discover, I mean, you guys know this way better than I do. But when you get into the research on these things, it’s always the weird little stuff that you stumble on —

**Craig:** I know.

**Ryan:** That opens up the story in this just totally amazing way.

**Craig:** That’s so funny you say that because sometimes this is how you find out you’re a storyteller. I’ll do research for things. And I’ll sit down with somebody who’s an expert in the field and I’ll begin asking questions. And they tell me what they think I’m supposed to know. But the thing that I seize on always surprises them.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re like, “Well, why is that important?”

**Ryan:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s dramatic. That’s why.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But they don’t think that way

**John:** It’s also why you can’t have somebody else do your research for you. You always say like, “Oh, I’ll have a researcher who will go out and do stuff and pull stuff in.”

**Craig:** No. You got to do it.

**John:** It’s the process of like exploration.

**John:** I can’t imagine letting somebody else do that work. It’s sort of like, “Here, sift through the rock and let me know when you find the good thing.” And it’s like, “I don’t know what I’m even looking for.”

**Craig:** Right exactly.

**John:** So you definitely have to dig.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, no, you have to do it yourself. And actually one of the great — the process of writing oftentimes is miserable. But research, I just love that part.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** I love that part.

**John:** Because you can’t fail at research. There’s no —

**Craig:** I’ve finally figured out why I love it so much. Yeah, I’m always looking for things that I can’t possibly fail at.

**Ryan:** John, you didn’t do the research quite well enough.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Ryan:** That’s so funny.

**Craig:** This is a cool, so whatever the — you can’t tell us what it’s about but I guess at this point now you’re — after your assignment at Universal, and this is an assignment. You’re now in the cadre of working writers, doing this working writer job.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you still —

**Ryan:** I just became pensionable, I learned.

**Craig:** Oh, you’re a vested in our pension.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Ryan:** I’m a vested. I’m a vested.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**Ryan:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Welcome. It’s actually quite a good pension.

**John:** But I want to connect some dots before this.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So you wrote this adaptation and Jodie Foster attached herself and you had done Sundance Labs. Is that what first started getting you meetings about other adaptation projects?

**Ryan:** Things went really quiet for a while. I actually had that feeling. Like from what I’d read and understood, I thought I’m going to come out of the Sundance Lab and like there’s going to be a line up at the door.

**Craig:** No.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** There’s never a line.

**Ryan:** No, there’s no line. No. And I had a couple of calls but it was much quieter than I sort of thought it would be. And it was hard. It didn’t make my life any easier at that point it seemed. I mean, Jodie definitely helped. And it was sort of nice too when you’re working in this long development process people are like, “Oh, that must be such a drag, two years.” Well, actually, it’s so nice to have those two names together side by side and nothing that anybody can judge them by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** It’s like you’re just working with Jodie and nobody can say they didn’t like it.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** But I didn’t have much happen for a while and then Anne Carey who is a producer in New York called my agent and had a book that she was interested in somebody adapting and she thought of me because I’d had a general meeting with her. I’d done a couple of general meetings, not many, like a couple in New York in the in the indie world and a couple down here. And it just was expensive to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, because you’re flying.

**Ryan:** Going back to your question about not living here it’s like you have to fly in and do that. But Anne was one of the few generals I had and it really paid off. And she brought this book to me called Rodeo and Joliet which is a true story of vein of 50/50 and it was about a comedian who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when his wife was eight and a half months pregnant. And he had three months to live and he came home and decided not to tell her.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Until he absolutely had to. And so he was going to go through some radical treatments and stuff. And he tried to keep it all from her until he had to absolutely say, “I’m going to die”. So, he pretended he was fine the whole time. He shaved his head and said he was doing a play. And it gets funny.

**Craig:** It’s that what you’ve done, John?

**John:** That’s what I did. Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear that’s what’s happened to you.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And soon I’ll be alone.

**Ryan:** But it was interesting.

**Craig:** It had to have ended well because he wrote a book.

**Ryan:** He survived and what I liked about it, it goes exactly to the about-ness question was I thought, “Oh, no, if I get any work, it’s going to be — people bring me your disease books and make them funnier.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And I’m like, “I want to be that guy.”

**Craig:** You would be pegged as the disease of the week guy.

**Ryan:** But I read this book and I’m like, “I love this guy’s story because it’s not about what it should be about.” The dramatic question isn’t, “Is he going to live or die?” The dramatic question is, “How long can you keep it from her?” And you kind of want him to get away with it.

**Craig:** Right. It’s like a murder mystery almost.

**Ryan:** It’s like a ticking time bomb story, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s about marriage. And it’s about the dynamics of men and women —

**Ryan:** I just loved it.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s great.

**Ryan:** And he was a comedian. And there was a thing I wanted to do which was, you know, because so much of his struggle was in his internal life, I said to Anne, I really want to stylize this in a way. And I had this thing like, for example, he doesn’t tell anybody he’s sick, so like, what are we going to do with that? And so I have this scene where he’s in an elevator and his head is shaved and these two women are talking and he just looks at them and they keep sort of looking at him sideways like, “Is he sick or is he — ?”

And he just says, “Cancer.” And they just carry on their conversations like he hasn’t spoken and then he’s like, “Cancer, cancer, cancer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** And he just really enjoys this moment. And then when he breaks out of the elevator and follows them out of the building it turns into Spring Time in New York and it’s a musical and he’s like, “Hey, everyone, I got cancer.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s great.

**Ryan:** And I said, “If I can do a musical sequence of his fantasy of telling everybody and everybody is like —

**Craig:** “Great for Glenn.”

**Ryan:** I love it. And the banners drop like —

**Craig:** “Glenn has got the cancer!”

**Ryan:** If I can do that, I want to do this.

**Craig:** I love that.

**Ryan:** And they were just so game.

**Craig:** They should make that movie. That sounds like a great scene.

**Ryan:** I had such a great time in it. But that was the second one. And then —

**John:** So they paid you to write that movie and that became your second sample?

**Ryan:** And that one still circulates a lot as a sample.

**John:** Right.

**Ryan:** And they’re still trying to make it and Chris O’Dowd is attached as the lead.

**John:** Great. Oh, he’d be great.

**Ryan:** Yeah, he’s just so great.

**John:** Chris O’Dowd is sort of like you. You probably don’t know that he’s sort of like you but —

**Ryan:** He is?

**John:** He has physicality that’s actually very similar to yours.

**Ryan:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. So people who are listening at home —

**Craig:** No, he doesn’t. [laughs] I’m going to tell you right now that, no way. You think he looks like Chris O’Dowd?

**John:** Chris O’Dowd if he shaved his head.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You don’t think so?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** We’re talking about the same Irish guy, right?

**John:** Same Irish guy. Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Bridesmaids.

**Craig:** No, he’s lying to you. [laughs]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** No. Look at these two sighted guys who can’t agree on what they see.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. It’s a waste.

**Craig:** [laughs] What’s the point of seeing if they —

**Ryan:** What’s the point?

**John:** Absolutely, They can’t agree on who should play you.

**Craig:** What is the point?

**John:** What is the point?

**Craig:** It doesn’t even work. Vision is baloney.

**Ryan:** Is there a Google Glass out to help you guys see people the same way?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t work well.

**John:** So, you need the Google Glass app that just like identifies like sort of who is —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Who’s crazy and who’s not crazy.

**Craig:** Well, you know, they have that thing online where you can upload a picture of you and it’ll tell you which —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Movie star you look like. So —

**Ryan:** I have —

**Craig:** We could do that with him.

**Ryan:** I think John should build an App that’s called Consensus Vision.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Ryan:** We all just see the same thing.

**Craig:** He should not because it’s going to be rigged.

**John:** It would be totally rigged.

**Craig:** I won’t believe a damn thing that I see.

**John:** It’ll be absolutely true for everybody except for Craig’s questions about Chris O’Dowd.

**Craig:** You know what? In the show notes, I want a picture of Ryan and I want a picture of Chris O’Dowd. And I want people to feedback on this. That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah, Stuart will do it and Stuart will find the two photos that are most identical.

**Craig:** I know. I know.

**John:** We’ll put some red glasses on Chris O’Dowd and people will —

**Ryan:** As a man who has not seen his face in 12 years, I’m really happy to hear I look like Chris O’Dowd although I don’t know what he looks like.

**John:** Yeah, it’s great.

**Craig:** He looks a bit like not you. [laughs] No, we’re going to find who he looks like.

**John:** We will figure it out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So —

**Ryan:** So that was my second, my second.

**John:** That was your second and that sort of got the ball rolling. So, many of our listeners are listening to this podcast because they are screenwriters who do not live in Los Angeles and you are one of the few people we’ve had on the show who is a working — –

**Ryan:** I’m a three-legged unicorn.

**John:** Yes. You are a working screenwriter who does not live here. And we could think of a couple of other people like Gary Whitta doesn’t live here.

**Craig:** Justin Marks.

**John:** Justin Marks. People, but almost all the people —

**Craig:** Well, and I don’t count New York as not here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because there are a ton of guys in New York.

**Ryan:** Well, that’s funny. When you go into generals, and people are like “Where do you live?” or “You don’t live here, do you?” And I say, “No.” And they say, “Oh, so you live in New York.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** They assume, if you’re not living LA you live in New York. And now, they sometimes will say, “Are you in Austin?”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a few of those —

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, yeah, because like Robert Rodriguez has his whole factory in Austin and New York has Richie LaGravenese and Tony Gilroy and —

**John:** And you’re dressed in black, so that also feels like New York dress.

**Craig:** You look New Yorky but the second you start talking, you’re Canadian.

**John:** Yes.

**Ryan:** Because I talk about my mum.

**Craig:** About your mum. [laughs]

**Ryan:** My mum. [laughs]

**Craig:** My mum. [laughs]

**John:** So we’re recording this on a Wednesday at 5 p.m. and we’re in a very specific time because you’re super busy because you came down here to do a bunch of meetings.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** So tell us what that process is like. How much ahead of time do you figure out that you need to come down? How many meetings do you jam in to one of these trips? What is it like?

**Ryan:** It’s funny because it’s sort of like a genre that I’ve invented over the past few years of like how I do meetings. Which is first of all, I don’t think you can do this if you live somewhere else unless you have representation in town.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** You absolutely have to have presentation in town.

**Craig:** Because they’re setting up all the meetings for you.

**Ryan:** They’re setting up meetings and also they kind of keep you as a virtual presence in your absence.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** So I’m managed at Mosaic and I’m repped at WME and I have, you know, all those people constantly circulating my stuff hopefully and keeping everybody sort of aware that my name is on the frontal lobe in case jobs come up. And you see this enough that, you know, somebody gets a book or something comes through the office that they get excited about and they think, “Okay, who is this good for?” They’re not going to think back two years to that one general they had.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And sometimes you have to refresh with people. And so that’s part of what that team in town does for me is they keep me alive when I’m not here.

**John:** They literally keep you available.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** So literally there’s lists of writers who are available or actors who are available and you’re on the available list and they want to think of you as being available in a way that you could just go in for a meeting on something if it were interesting. And so, you have to be ready to come down here when those opportunities arise.

**Ryan:** That’s right. So if there’s something that’s super urgent like if it’s really time-sensitive then we’ll do it on the phone and that’s not great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Like I’ve done pitches, a lot of pitches on the phone which is just an absolutely horrible —

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**Ryan:** It’s the worst. It’s just the worst. Especially —

**Craig:** There’s no — it’s so formalized, I mean, you want to feel them with you, you know.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s like in a weird ways you just want to feel that. And you can’t feel anything on a phone.

**Ryan:** It’s very hard to tell stories when you don’t know how people are really —

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**Ryan:** Interacting with it and you just don’t get it on the phone.

**Craig:** And what by the way, out of curiosity, because you don’t have the visual element to tell you, what are you picking up on when you are with people in these meetings?

**Ryan:** That’s a good question.

**Craig:** Is there the buzz there?

**Ryan:** I actually often bring an assistant with me. And sometimes I will ask like tell him, like if you’re seeing like they are losing it, like they’re just rolling eyes with their — picking up BlackBerry’s.

**Craig:** Nudge me.

**Ryan:** Nudge me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And sort of like pick up the pace.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Otherwise, I just go in to my own groove. I mean, I’ve done a lot of stuff with The Moth, with the storytelling which has been great training like —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Just telling somebody a story for 10 minutes is training on pitching, because you get a sense of sort of the pacing and how to set things up. And especially if you’re handling a story that has like 10 characters in it, you realize, I don’t need to tell every one of them.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Who are the ones that matter? What are the moments that you can really pop, you can kind of sell a certain moment in the script that really feels like, “Oh, that’s what this story is really going to feel like.” And until you tell it, you don’t feel that. Like, you can’t write that out and feel it the same way as telling it.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Ryan:** And the room, I still find this a very bizarre thing in this industry that, you know, you’re hiring a writer based on how they can tell you something.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a crazy way to do it.

**Ryan:** It is a crazy way to do it.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Ryan:** But it’s benefited me because I like doing it.

**John:** Yeah. And you’re good at it. You’re good at talking.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. And look, there are writers who are actually terrible at talking and they shy away from pitching, but they do — it’s a little harder for them because they have to go the route of just writing and saying, “Look, here’s a script.” And then when it’s time to get an assignment, someone will sit down with them and just sort of know beforehand from their representatives, not necessarily the best in a room but the work is great, you know.

**Ryan:** Right.

**Craig:** So there’s a certain amount of faith they have to operate on. But when you’re either relatively new or you’re kind of battling for stuff to have, you know, you could call it whatever you want to call it, the gift of gab or just a natural storytelling ability, but man, it’s useful.

**Ryan:** Yeah. And I think the danger too is over doing it like if you over-rehearse a pitch like that, it comes off as recitation.

**Craig:** Correct. And glib and contrived.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, you don’t want to feel like you’re calculating anything. You want to just — I always say to people like, the best pitch is the one where if somebody walks out of a movie theater having just seen a great movie and says, “Let me tell what I just saw”.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that buzz is, you know, what it’s all about for me.

**John:** The best pitches also tend to feel like conversations —

**Craig:** They do.

**John:** Even though you’re doing almost all the talking, you are inviting them to come in and ask a question at the right moment or to nudge the story this way or that way. You’re seeing sort of how they’re engaging with the story. So it doesn’t feel like it’s just one long monologue.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** It feels like they are present in this moment as the story is being told.

**Ryan:** Part of the difficulty I find is that, you know, it’s not visual cue either. Like I seem to be surviving without the visual cues in a room unless I’m completely missing things, like what do I know. I mean, maybe people do or just people are walking out, I have no idea.

**John:** Rolling their eyes like, oh —

**Ryan:** I’m just talking to the empty room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Everyone just hates you.

**Ryan:** But you can feel like that thing when you walk in to a conference room like —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** When I’m doing The Moth, it’s like if it’s in a theater and there’s people there that are ready to hear a story and they’re out for an evening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And you’ve got a microphone. There’s something that just sort of warms the room and readies it for a story. Whereas when you walk into conference room at 9 o’clock in the morning on the lot and people are still like drinking their coffee, and still trying to catch up on the morning email while they’re walking in, it is so hard to bring them up to temperature.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And so I find those first two minutes that are not about the pitch so critical.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Because it’s really the time you have to buffer them into your zone and get them into your sort of vibe more.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And to answer your question, I mean, so that’s one thing is I need the people down here to kind of keep my presence going around. But I will start planning usually to come down about a month before I come down.

**Craig:** To give your guys time to —

**Ryan:** They need to get scripts out to people, to give them time to read them, to get back to them, and to think.

**Craig:** Set the appointments.

**Ryan:** And all of that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And then, a month at least. And what I find is LA, I learned has a calendar that’s actually very short like, you know, you can’t come down in January because Sundance is on. You can’t come down in February because the Oscars are on. May and June, it’s Cannes, Cannes, Cannes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Summer.

**Craig:** Summer?

**Ryan:** Summer goes from June to forever, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Everyone is gone.

**John:** Yeah, they’re just gone.

**Ryan:** There gone until TIFF which is September.

**Craig:** And then it’s Christmas.

**Ryan:** You can’t come in September.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** So really, there is, like October and November are prime windows for me and March and April, those are usually my too busy windows for just doing generals. If I’m coming down just for general meetings, it’ll be those two times a year.

**John:** So within one of these trips down here, how many meetings will you try to get scheduled?

**Ryan:** So I will usually give my team about a week. Like I’ll give them a Monday to Friday.

**John:** Okay.

**Ryan:** Sometimes I’ll come in on the Monday because I find a lot of people have their staff meetings on Mondays.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Like I learned over the years, I used to come in on a Sunday and I’d only have like two meetings on the Monday and it would be like kind of a waste.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** So I tend to fly in on the Monday and start Tuesday morning and then I leave Friday night.

**Craig:** In that span?

**Ryan:** In that span, five or six a day.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** Wow!

**Ryan:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** That is more meetings I’ve ever heard of. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** That’s insane.

**Ryan:** Four days in a row. You get —

**Craig:** You’re like 20 to —

**John:** You’re a machine.

**Craig:** 24 meetings in a week?

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How do you even do that?

**John:** That’s superhuman. I mean, it’s great that you’re having somebody drive you.

**Ryan:** I’m Canadian.

**John:** You don’t have that [crosstalk].

**Craig:** You just have to be able to put up with an enormous amount of suffering.

**Ryan:** And no, I don’t want the other writers listening to this podcast and say, “Oh, so he’s the one hogging all — ”

**John:** All the slots.

**Craig:** Well, I have to say that there is something, like if I’m an agent, I’m always looking for an angle, you know. So, here’s a guy like, look, he’s in Vancouver. He’s coming down here for a week.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** We got Tuesday to Friday and it’s filling up because —

**Ryan:** This is what they say.

**Craig:** Because like Bill Morrow always said, “In Los Angeles, if you put a velvet rope in front of a garbage dump, people will start lining up.”

**Ryan:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter. So if suddenly there’s a competition and it’s like —

**Ryan:** I am the garbage dump to this velvet rope.

**Craig:** In this analogy you are the garbage dump.

**John:** But what I have to say is also brilliant about that is like look how many times you’re at bat. I mean, you’re literally going into those rooms so often. And so even if like four out of those five meetings are not going to lead to anything, one of them will and that’s great.

**Ryan:** Well, you know, the first general I ever had was with a producer named Richard Gladstein.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, sure.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** You know him from those days.

**Craig:** Yeah, back in the Miramax days.

**Ryan:** Miramax days.

**Craig:** What was it? It was FilmColony, right?

**Ryan:** FilmColony.

**Craig:** Yeah, FilmColony.

**Ryan:** And it was the first general I ever had. And I pitched him a story. It was the first time I kind of pitched a story to a producer and it was terrible. But Richard really liked my sample which was the adaptation of my memoir. It’s the only script I had. And I was working on trying to get a second one together because I knew it wasn’t enough to come down and say, “I adapted my own book.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** You know, you got to show some other chops. So I was busy doing that. And anyway, he had a book that he was, you know, looking at having somebody adapt and I read it and I loved it and it was tonally just exactly what I wanted. It was sort of like True Romance told like Raising Arizona. And so he showed my sample to the director who was attached and the director was like, “I don’t see the connection.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Like, you know, “The blind guy, this? I don’t get it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** So that was it. It was over. Two years later, Richard phones me and says, “Do you still like that book?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I still like that book.” He’s like, “Okay, I got money. I’ll hire you to do it.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**Ryan:** Two years later, I don’t know. I hadn’t spoken to him in two years.

**Craig:** That’s, wow. Richard is that kind of guy. He’s a real producer, you know.

**Ryan:** Yeah. And those kind of, like I’ve had really amazing luck with being connected with really amazing people when it comes to developing material and —

**Craig:** Well, you know my whole theory about luck is that in fact if you are talented and you seem to be, judging from everything, that really good people will find you, you know. It’s not only luck. I mean, there’s a connection between what you’re putting out and what you’re getting back.

**John:** I think there’s other advantages, too. It’s like, obviously, we talked about your experience with radio and talking to people.

**Ryan:** Yes.

**John:** That was a huge help. You’re also distinct and people remember you. There is no other person in your slot exactly. There’s like, you remember like, “Oh, that’s right. He was the talented writer who is also blind.”

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s a useful thing. And that can be great. He remembers you from two years ago because you were great and you had a good approach on that. And also, oh, there’s one other sticky detail that’s always going to be there.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, while that may be —

**Craig:** So the advice is everyone pretend to be blind. [laughs]

**Ryan:** Everybody gouge your eyes out, you know. [laughs] And Hollywood will bring you in —

**John:** Exactly.

**Ryan:** For your general.

**Craig:** Get to gouging folks.

**Ryan:** I think there’s two things. I mean, I think it’s true that if you want to try and do this living somewhere else, I also had the advantage that I came from other mediums. Like I had done books.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** I had done articles. There were things that people had read. Some people had recognized me from This American Life. It’s not like I came in to town cold from Vancouver.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And just showed up with my one sample. And that was it.

**Craig:** Because otherwise you wouldn’t have agents at William Morris. You wouldn’t have representation in Los Angeles anyway.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** Anyway, so —

**Ryan:** And prior to having them repping me. I mean, I had somebody in New York and he set me up on generals and at that time I might do two or three a day and it’s just blown out bigger since then.

**Craig:** Well, these guys will certainly, I mean, for those of you listening who aren’t in Hollywood or New York and you’re trying to play the game of, well, I don’t want to leave but I also want to do this, what Ryan is saying is kind of mission-critical here because any reasonable — I mean, look, like there’s four big agencies, right? Any one of them can fill anyone’s plate with meetings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For sure, if you give them two weeks, they’ll make you go on 80 meetings.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in a weird way, it’s binary. Either you have that where it’s a buffet of meetings or you have nothing.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just wind whistling and tumbleweeds. So, you know, I’m glad that this point came out because we get this question all the time. And what’s behind the question is a certain — I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I don’t want to make a commitment but I also want to do this, so can I do this from Peoria? And, yeah, if you have an agent, if you have like a big-shot agent —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Hollywood, yeah, you can do it from anywhere.

**John:** But Ryan’s life is much more difficult than it would be if he were living right here because then he could just easily go someplace. So I think he’s maximizing on sort of —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sort of the opposite goal of being out there.

**Craig:** There will always be that obstacle, yeah.

**Ryan:** Yes, that’s right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** I mean, what I sort of decided was, I mean, there’s an expense too. I got to fly, you know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** I got to stay in a hotel.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** I have to hire an assistant to fly with me.

**Craig:** And you can’t fly alone, yeah. You got this guy here.

**Ryan:** Oh, no, I go alone.

**Craig:** Oh, you fly alone?

**Ryan:** I do everything alone but when I get here I hire an assistant who drives me to all the meetings and sort of does my visual eyeballing of things.

**Craig:** Got it. Right.

**Ryan:** Kicks me under the table when I’m slow.

**Craig:** Table kicker.

**Ryan:** But the gain, like, that costs a lot, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** So, you know, if you live in Peoria and you want to try and do this and come in for meetings and all that kind of stuff, you are still spending a lot to come in and do this one week. And, you know, you might do 20 meetings of which you might not find —

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** 10 of them were really that worth it in the end for you.

**Craig:** That’s right. And then there are times where you really want something that they’re discussing but you don’t get it.

**Ryan:** You don’t.

**Craig:** There are times when they’re saying, “Hey, here’s something we’d be interested in you doing,” and you’re like, “I don’t want to do it.”

**Ryan:** Or it is so general, it’s a general of the general and —

**Craig:** Right, yeah.

**Ryan:** You just feel like nothing concrete will ever come out of this.

**Craig:** And those are hard.

**Ryan:** And you realize, I drove an hour for this. This was another hour and now I’m going to drive an hour to another place, so that was three hours and I don’t think I probably should have done it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But you never know which one is going to be the one.

**Ryan:** You never know.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And you don’t even know at the time because it may seem like it was nothing. And then, you know, two years later —

**John:** But the other thing you’re, I think, helping our listeners understand is that you have to physically be in the room with these people —

**Ryan:** You do.

**John:** For them to understand —

**Craig:** At some point.

**John:** Who you are and what it is. So like, they will have already read your script or they already know that you’re a talented writer, but they want to see you and be able to talk with you about things and they want to be in the room with you. And that’s why you’re coming down here to do these meetings.

**Ryan:** And I will admit, at the beginning, I was skeptical. I didn’t understand it. And I said, I remember saying to one of my agents, like, “Can’t I just do a phone meeting? Like, I mean, for me it’s the same.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** “Like I don’t see them anyways. What do I care?”

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] Ah, that’s awesome.

**Ryan:** It’s just for them, isn’t it? And does it have to be all about them? What about me?

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s so funny.

**Ryan:** But I came down and I realized, “Oh, wait, if I work with any of these people,” like I’ve done scripts where, you know, you’re working for a year with this person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And you work with them, never when it’s easy. Like it’s when things are difficult. And part of being in that room is, “Can I do a year with you? Are you open and collaborative? Do we have a good rapport? Is this going to be a good time together in the hard time?

**Craig:** Yeah. Which is exactly what they need to know from us.

**Ryan:** They need to know that.

**Craig:** Because unlike, you know, let’s say, we’re doing really well and we’re working on two projects a year or even three, that’s two or three different people a year, main people that we’re dealing with. Well, they have, I don’t know, 10, 12 things a year.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They have lots of writers, so they have way more experience with bad relationships in a weird way than we do, just by the numbers, just by the amount of swings at that plate.

**Ryan:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So I think that they need to look in the horse’s mouth and figure out, “Can I sit next to this person?”

**John:** Yeah, do I, yeah.

**Craig:** Can I trust them?

**John:** Trust is really what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s very hard to trust — I was going to say, when you can’t see, but like —

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s not in front of you. And so that’s why you being in that room is important. Like, “Oh, this is an actual real person who can actually do this work.” And that’s crucial.

**Ryan:** Well, you understand, I mean, you come quickly to understand the economy of fear in town where, you know, when somebody gives you a job, what they’re doing is putting their job on the line in some respect.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Like they’re saying, “I vouch for you, that you’re the one that we should go with. So if you don’t deliver, I’m going to pay with it too.”

**Craig:** They will. They are held accountable for — I would say it’s like the worst, as writers, if somebody broke into our house and held a gun to our head and said, “I have a script that I’ve written, put your name on it and then send it out.”

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s kind of what they’re lives are like.

**Ryan:** Yeah. And I feel like I sort of owe them at minimum the dedication to the craft that I would come down.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly.

**Ryan:** You know what I mean?

**Craig:** To show that level of commitment.

**Ryan:** Yeah. But, you know, you do the 20 meetings in the week or whatever and I think it’s also important for listeners who haven’t done generals to know you can’t just come in to those meetings and — it’s not like you walk in, they just put some stuff on the table and it’s like, “Here is this job and here is this job. And there’s this one. And, you know, what do you think of these?”

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be nice?

**Ryan:** Sometimes they have something they might pitch you and you might realize after a while like, “Oh, I was pitched that last year.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But it’s also, you need to come down prepared with things to bring to them as well.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And they might be nuggets of ideas. They might be better formed ideas. They might be fully-realized treatments. But you need to have a variety of things that you can pull out of our quiver at any given moment given what they’re interested in and what they’re looking for, right?

**John:** Absolutely.

**Ryan:** So if I’m going to fly down here and spend the money and do the grind of driving to six different meetings across town and let me tell you if you don’t live in LA you spend a lot of freaking time in a car. It’s like half the day is in the car, half the day is in a conference room.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much where people listening to this show, I think, is we’re just fulfilling people’s rush-hour needs.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Ryan:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But, you know, so you want to maximize the use of that time if you go through the rigmarole of setting up all those meetings with you agents. And when you get here by the way, many of them will just fall out.

**Craig:** Yeah, they just won’t even happen.

**Ryan:** They won’t happen. And then another one will get slotted in or one will get moved to try and get another one. And my team, when I am here, I know they are so busy. Well, their assistants are so busy, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And I want to stress the assistants work so hard supporting me.

**Craig:** Well, they do all of it. You know, they do all of it.

**Ryan:** Because they piece it altogether, right?

**Craig:** And they also, they’re the ones that are on top because what happens is the network of assistants is what suspends the entire business.

**Ryan:** Totally.

**Craig:** It’s just, that’s the matrix that people don’t see. So you’re at a meeting, right? They know you’re in town and they know, “Okay, we need him over here at 3:00.”

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you let this go until 2:15, he’s never going to get there. So you need to be back from — you need your guy back from his early lunch like you promised. So they’re all working together to make this stuff happen. And truly, all of them, the unsung heroes.

**Ryan:** I’ve heard from friends of mine in town here who are writers that they think one of the advantages I do get in not living here is that there is a kind of novelty because you’re not always available.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** And that will get you a meeting that, for them, they might get and it changes, and it changes, and it changes, and it gets deferred for months maybe.

**Craig:** Right, because you can punt somebody to next week if they live around the corner but they can’t punt you. That’s kind of bad form.

**Ryan:** And also, because you’re not always here, there is a slight newness to you, you know, that you’re not in the scene. You’re not seen at events. You don’t cross paths with people, so, you know, you’re a bit of a Dodo bird.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you know, it’s true that these people, you know, part of their DNA is to find something, to discover something. That’s part of their gig.

**Ryan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In ways that isn’t necessarily what we do. They’re looking to find and exploit something essentially. Like capitalists. And to find you and exploit you. That’s part of the fun of tracking the new guy.

**John:** I just realized we’ve ruined you because —

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Because people are going to be listening to this like, “Oh, he’s actually, you know, he’s sort of established. He has credits.”

**Craig:** He’s just a man. He can really — [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s right.

**John:** I want to wrap up with one last sort of minor topic which is that you’re not American so you’re writing all this as a Canadian and are there tax and weird implications for writing in the US?

**Ryan:** Yes.

**John:** So, can you just walk us through quickly what that’s like?

**Ryan:** There’s sort of two different ways to go. I incorporated in Canada when I started sort of earning enough of a living off of it that I realized I had to do that. Some of the studios can be sticky about it. They don’t like to pay a foreign company. One studio in particular insisted that if they did pay my foreign company that I could not be covered by a WGA contract.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** Even though I’m a WGC member in Canada too, so we would have to go through that union instead which that wasn’t nice either.

**Craig:** No.

**Ryan:** So then they wanted to put me on what’s called an O1 visa which is like the, you know, what hockey players use to come and play here and get paid on foreign soil for doing work here. So, you know, it can be very complicated. Most of the time, I’d say 75% of the time, they’re fine to pay my Canadian company. I’m covered by WGA contract. I’m a foreign member. And in that case, I pay all my taxes up in Canada. They don’t withhold any here. If I do —

**Craig:** And so they don’t withhold here either for corporations.

**Ryan:** No.

**Craig:** And then you got to pay it yourself.

**Ryan:** But when I was on the O1 visa, they withheld taxes here.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Ryan:** Which were credited against my Canadian ones at the end of the year and that was just a nightmare because I was also paying Medicare here I don’t use. I was paying all sorts of stuff.

**Craig:** Right, because you got BC Health.

**Ryan:** I got that Canadian social —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** My wife figured out the way to part the Red Sea of the lineups to the hospital, which don’t actually exist but —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** The night I went in for the hospital, she figured out the way to get me to the front of the line which was, she walked me into the emergency room very quickly. I didn’t have my cane because that’s how quickly we got in the car and she said, “Quick, my husband has electrocuted himself and he’s blind.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** And she meant them as separate facts.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Ryan:** But you can imagine those doctors just came running —

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And like the guy that like lost his leg stepped out of the way like —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** “You got to help him.”

**Craig:** Like you’re blind, like your vision has been electrocuted.

**Ryan:** Yeah, like I shoved my eye in a wall socket.

**Craig:** Right.

**Ryan:** And they’re like, “Oh, wow!”

**Craig:** That’s a great triage trick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** But that’s how you get up to the front of the line in a Canadian hospital is you try and do a mash-up of problems that they’ve never heard before.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] That’s awesome. And everyone just goes, “Oh, sorry. I’m…sorry.” [laughs]

**Ryan:** Speaking to you taxes question because that, you know, everybody is so fascinated by taxes. On the other side, I will say, right now, because I’m Canadian and the exchange rate, I get a huge bump.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ryan:** So that’s one of the reasons it’s also like so attractive to work down here.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was not that way maybe 10 years ago or —

**Ryan:** Two years ago.

**Craig:** Two years it was like 1 to 1 basically.

**Ryan:** Two years ago I actually lost money working down here.

**Craig:** Canadian dollar was stronger than the US?

**Ryan:** It was above. It was.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a national shame for us. We don’t like that sort of thing. We can’t handle that.

**Ryan:** No, I’m glad you guys rose up again like the phoenix from the ashes and kicked the ass of our dollar.

**Craig:** Because of the Loonie, I mean, we can’t let that — it’s called a loonie. We can’t let the loonie win.

**Ryan:** That’s right. I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. The toonie can win.

**Ryan:** Please don’t let it win.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. I don’t want it to win either. I make all my money down here.

**John:** I love me a toonie. It’s time for the end of our show and the One Cool Things. Craig —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** What is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is, it’s not — I haven’t discovered anything particularly new but it’s growing in popularity. If you have, it’s probably mostly for kids I would say. If you have a son or daughter that’s a dork like me or my kids, when you love gaming, video gaming, just general nerdy pop-culture stuff like that, there’s this company called Loot Crate. Have you heard of Loot Crate?

**John:** I’ve heard of Loot Crate. Tell me.

**Craig:** Okay. It’s basically, it’s kind of a brilliant business. I think it’s like 12 bucks a month. So it’s a subscription-based thing. And once a month they send you a box. It’s not an actual crate but it’s a box and every kid loves getting a box. And you open it up and there’s just stuff in it. And all the stuff I feel like the business model is they go around to a bunch of people and they’re like, “Give us promotional items. We’ll shove them in a box. We’ll send them to kids and now kids have your stuff and are interested.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you get like interesting playing cards. Actually, this month, my son got a cool D&D t-shirt.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** And there’s little games and cool stuff. So anyway, Loot Crate, if your kids like any packages and they’re dorks like my kids, in a good way.

**John:** Yeah. I should send them Writer Emergency Packs, would that fit in a Loot Crate?

**Craig:** Totally. It would totally fit in a Loot Crate.

**John:** Totally.

**Ryan:** Loot Crate, that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah, Loot Crate.

**John:** Loot Crate.

**Craig:** I mean, they may ask for quite the volume.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know how it works, but so I’m going to look into it at the very least so it’s lootcrate.com.

**John:** Very cool .

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually a bunch of One Cool Things. This last week I had to do some optimization of Google AdWords and Google AdWords are those terrible ads that show up in search results. And so I needed to actually do that and I had no idea how to do it. And so I started looking for books on it and it’s like, “Oh, here’s advanced Google AdWords and stuff.” But it’s like, you know what, I really have no idea what I’m doing so I just went to the Google AdWords for Dummies books.

And I would say like over the course of the years, I’ve discovered that for most purposes, the For Dummies books should be your first place to look because they’re actually written for anybody who doesn’t really know what stuff is. And so if you go to any of the more of the advanced stuff right from the start, you’re going to miss out on the fundamental things.

So I think a weird sort of blanket recommendation to, if you’re at the bookstore, check out the For Dummies in whatever topic that you’re going to look up. For example, Ryan, you might want to check out like Electricity for Dummies. So the next time there’s an electrical incident. Hey. You can avoid that.

**Craig:** Do you, because I’m a big — I believe in what you’re saying. I do it all the time. I get the dummies guides. But sometimes I’ll get the Idiot’s Guide, too. It’s Coke and Pepsi, which one is better?

**John:** I don’t know consistently if they’re better. But I would say, my general recommendation is just swallow your pride and pick up the book with the goofy cover.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because sometimes it actually has the best information. And I think it’s probably because it’s a big enough industry that they just actually have editors who like work really hard on finding the right people to write those books.

**Ryan:** I think dummies are just self-deprecating and idiots have Xs for eyes.

**Craig:** That’s the deal. That’s the difference.

**Ryan:** That’s the difference, yeah.

**Craig:** We should start our own thing like, you know, The Absolute Moron. Like, oh, if the Dummies books are too challenging —

**John:** Yeah, indeed. For people with incredibly low IQ.

**Craig:** Like, How Stupid Are You series.

**John:** That’s very good.

**Craig:** [laughs] All right. What about you, Ryan?

**John:** Ryan, we didn’t warn you about any of these things.

**Craig:** Yeah. You got a cool thing floating around your head.

**John:** Are there any things you’d like to endorse to our audience?

**Ryan:** Lovage?

**John:** Oh, what’s Lovage?

**Ryan:** I’m a big like food guy because like that’s sort of my way of seeing places. And Lovage is a kind of like a celery sort of basil herb that grows up in the mountains usually. But there are restaurants now that if you could find one that makes a Lovage sorbet.

**Craig:** Lovage.

**Ryan:** If you find them around, it’s amazing.

**John:** Nice.

**Ryan:** It’s like eating perfume that fell off the gods. It’s just insane.

**Craig:** Wow! I was not expecting that to be what Lovage was.

**Ryan:** I thought I would just completely do it.

**John:** Yeah, Lovage sounds like something that you use for —

**Craig:** When you started with Lovage, I got really interested.

**John:** Like pulling off skin or something.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, yeah, like frottage.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Ryan:** I figured this is the first sort of gardening endorsement on your show.

**Craig:** No question.

**Ryan:** Go grow some Lovage.

**Craig:** No question, Lovage.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** Well, that’s going to be a cool little Scriptnotes for us, Lovage.

**John:** Yeah, I think so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Lettuce and Lovage. Ryan Knighton, thank you so much for being on the show this week.

**Ryan:** Thank you. I am just so happy I got to come here. And I have to say, like truly, I am like an alumni of your programs. And I can confirm to your listeners that there are people in lab coats around here.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Very true. And there are of course cult members surrounding us. Because last week we learned that Scriptnotes is actually a cult.

**Craig:** Yeah, we were accused of being a cult.

**John:** Yeah, which is delightful.

**Ryan:** Yes, there’s the ATF.

**John:** They’re storming the compound as we speak.

**Craig:** Exactly, yeah.

**John:** So we’ll wrap it up. Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro of this week. If you have a question for me or for Craig, you can write us at ask@johnaugust. Little short things are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Ryan Knighton, what are you on Twitter?

**Ryan:** I’m @ryanknighton. And it’s Knighton like K-N-I-G-H-T-O-N.

**John:** Very fantastic.

**Ryan:** Ryan Knighton.

**Craig:** I’m going to follow you moments from now.

**John:** And that’s going to be really good. And I told Craig that you’d be a fantastic guest and I was, of course, wrong. No, I was correct. [laughs]

**Craig:** John is right again.

**John:** I am right again.

**Craig:** And we like to end every show with a confirmation that once again John was right.

**John:** If you would like to tell us that I was right, leave us a comment on iTunes. And say what a great guest Ryan Knighton is. I’m sure you’ve been on a lot of other podcasts so they could probably actually search for you and find other podcasts you’ve done.

**Ryan:** Yeah. I think the most recent Nate Corddry.

**John:** Okay, great.

**Ryan:** Reading Allowed. Reading Allowed with Nate Corddry.

**John:** Very nice.

**Ryan:** That’s great.

**John:** Another good endorsement. While you’re on iTunes you can download the Scriptnotes app. We’re also on the Google App Store and you can subscribe at Scriptnotes.net to find all the very, very old back episodes dating back to episode one.

**Ryan:** The dusty ones.

**John:** The dusty ones, those old dusty ones. And that’s our show. Ryan Knighton, thank you again.

**Craig:** Thanks, Ryan.

**Ryan:** Thanks.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Ryan Knighton](http://www.ryanknighton.com/), and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ryanknighton), [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Knighton), [This American Life](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/ryan-knighton), [The Moth](http://themoth.org/posts/storytellers/ryan-knighton) and [Reading Aloud with Nate Corddry](http://wolfpop.com/photos/711304/ryan-knighton)
* Ryan’s books [Cockeyed](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1586484400/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [Swing in the Hollow](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1895636345/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [What is a treatment?](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-treatment/) on screenwriting.io
* [Ryan side-by-side with Chris O’Dowd](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/chrisryan.png)
* [LootCrate](https://www.lootcrate.com/)
* [The For Dummies series](http://www.dummies.com/) and [Google AdWords for Dummies](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118115619/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Lovage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovage) on Wikipedia
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor 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/poking-the-bear).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 194 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, on the last episode we promised that this would be a really big show this week. And we will not fulfill that promise.

**Craig:** No. Well, it is a big show because we have a lot to talk about and it’s all good stuff, but the big thing that we were really excited about we’re kind of pushing down and episode or two. Look, here’s the best news of all: I think people are going to listen to this episode. They’re going to go, whoa, you mean that’s a B for these guys? That’s an A plus for everybody else.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re going to raise the bar even higher for that episode that we pitched and promised but didn’t actually deliver this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We will.

**John:** Yeah, we will, eventually. Last week on the show I told you about a special screening of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder that’s happening this week and it’s happening this Saturday, the 25th, at 5pm. If you are a WGA member you can RSVP for it. And if you do, you will get to see me speak with Bruce Joel Rubin, the writer of both of those movies, at a Q&A between those two films. So, if you want to come see that and you’re a WGA member, there is a special link in the show notes you can follow for that and RSVP.

There’s a pretty good chance that they may open up some seats for everybody else who is not a WGA member, so if you follow me on Twitter, @johnaugust, I will let you know if it becomes available for everybody else. And that’s it for the news.

**Craig:** Nice viewing experience there at the Writers Guild Theater. And Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, just not only two good movies, but just entertaining movies.

**John:** Absolutely. We didn’t do a special episode about Jacob’s Ladder, but we could do one.

**Craig:** We could.

**John:** And, of course, we have the episode about Ghost. You can go back to and listen if you want to get up to speed with your Ghost experience.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Craig, did you see in the news that the Writers Guild East added some new members?

**Craig:** I did. They went and organized, that’s our union term for bringing people in an employment situation under the fold of the union and under the fold of the union agreement. They organized writers at Gawker, the website notable for gawkery. Whatever they do over there.

**John:** Or for commenting on things in culture, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re kind of a gossip — they’re a gossip website. I mean, let’s face it.

**John:** Gossipy, yeah.

**Craig:** Sort of a junkie gossip website. But that’s okay. Sometimes you’re in a junkie gossip mood.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And occasionally Gawker — in that Internet way they defy their own brand. Sometimes they do remarkable stuff actually. So, they kind of —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** They hit extremes of god, and wow, very cool, as do we all. What’s interesting about this is that this is not audio visual and I think this may be the first time that anyone who does not do an audio visual job has been organized into the guild. I could be wrong, but I think this may be it.

**John:** So let’s talk about this, because we think of the Writers Guild representing film and TV writers and sort of people who make fiction stuff for screens is what I sort of think about. But we do have some journalists who are part of the Writers Guild. There’s a few little bits of things that are not what we think about as being Hollywood in the Writers Guild. And this is a new direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, the Writers Guild does represent some writers for news broadcasts in Los Angeles and back east, mostly back east. Some radio news as well. But it’s always been audio/visual. And whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

This is new. Now, on the one hand, you know, I’m fine. Look, the East — the East is the East. One day I’ll do a whole thing about the East and how they drive me crazy. But there’s nothing to complain about here. I mean, I think anybody that works a writing job that can be afforded union protections, salary, minimums, credit protections, pension and health, those are good things. I hope they get all of those things. And since they are working as work-for-hire, it makes sense.

Is there a downside? No. It’s just that there’s no larger upside for the union. You know, when the union talks about organizing, the idea ultimately is that you should be organizing, there are two basic strategies. One strategy is organize massive quantities of workers so that you can use your total strength as leverage for individual contract negotiations. Like, SCIU.

**John:** Yeah, that service workers union is incredibly powerful and huge.

**Craig:** Enormous. And they have — if you said well what’s a service worker? Anybody from a janitor to a nurse. I mean, they’ve got — it’s just an enormous range of types of employees and types of work situations with god knows how many contracts. I mean, I can’t even imagine how many contracts they negotiate on a rolling basis.

The Writers Guild has always been the other kind which is to organize a specialized group of people who do something rare and because you essentially control the rare employees that people want, you have leverage to bargain on their behalf. And that’s SAG essential, the SAG/AFTRA version, definitely the DGA version, definitely the Writers Guild version.

The East seems to be kind of dabbling with this other version, which is fine. I don’t think they’ll ever accrue massive quantities in such a way that it would kind of sway industries, but it’s good for those writers. So, I guess the winners are those writers.

**John:** I would hope so. I definitely see what you’re saying though in terms of there’s the model of going really big and sort of getting as many people into the fold as possible, but you risk losing focus. And in the times where I’ve had conversations with Writers Guild members who are working in TV journalism, it is just such a different world that I worry sometimes that we’re not able to adequately represent their special needs and concerns. You know, on a daily basis they’re not facing the same kinds of things we’re facing.

So, the useful thing about having a guild be so focused on one specific thing is we can keep our eye on that ball and nothing gets sort of dropped. and I worry that in trying to get more people involved with the guild, you’re going to lose that kind of focus.

**Craig:** You’re right to be worried about that. The way that the West and East break things out, as you know, because you’re on the negotiating committee frequently, the West takes negotiation point on the big contract for film and television writers — the film and television writers making primetime TV shows, writing movies, and so on and so forth. Cable shows, too.

The East takes point on news contract negotiations primarily. They do have a culture of this on their end of things. It’s preferable, if you’re choice is I work at Gawker and my choice is no union or the Writers Guild East, no question. The Writers Guild East will — should be at least better for you.

But what would be better still would be joining a union that actually represents a lot of shops like Gawker. And that is not the WGAe. Nor, will it ever be.

**John:** Yeah. Being naïve, I don’t know that there is any union organization that really is representing these kinds of writers right now. And I think there’s a case to be made for — right now it’s Gawker, but there’s certainly companies that are making things that are more like what we normally do. So you look at BuzzFeed with the video stuff they’re doing. You look at Maker Studios or any of these places that are doing video design for the Internet, some of those places are in this murky middle where it’s very much more like our TV kind of model.

And when we do the big negotiations for the big contract, whenever we’re dealing with our major studio partners, the web stuff that they’re doing, that’s always a concern for sort of we want to be covered when we’re doing that. But these little indie shops, maybe you start covering more of those writers and getting them the pension, health, welfare, everything else they should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. The tricky part is you would probably need to create a separate contract. So, here in this case, they don’t even have a contract. What they’ve gotten essentially is approval from those writers to represent them. And now they’re going to negotiate a contract with the company. By the way, that may not work. I mean, that’s the other thing. But hopefully it does. I would be surprised if it didn’t.

For us on our end, when you look at something like BuzzFeed, it is a non-union shop. It’s a massive non-union shop. Most of this stuff out there now is non-union. Everybody’s been trained to work non-union. So, it’s harder and harder to organize those places. If we do organize them, we will need to create a new contract.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what the Writers Guild is particularly good at is enforcing one contract that blankets one industry. What the Internet is really good at is defying that. So, you can’t find a contract that both BuzzFeed and Gawker and HuffPo, and some other major provider, that they’re all going to agree to the way that Fox, Sony… — Frankly, the situation that we have almost can’t ever happen again.

The situation we have with the studios, which is why I’m always keen to preserve it, I think, for as long as it’s preservable. But, you know, for the Gawker writers, I think this is a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing. And I hope that the Writers Guild East does a good job on their behalf.

**John:** Sounds good. So, for the bulk of our podcast today, we are going to be talking some follow up about the previous episode and the credits situation. So, we did a long podcast last week about how credit is determined for writing feature films. And so we had a bunch of questions from listeners who wanted to know more stuff, or had specific situations, so we’ll try to address those questions and concerns. We’re going to talk about Writer X, who is a mysterious figure who showed up on the scene to annoy Craig mostly.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s true.

**John:** And we’ll talk about sort of the role of anonymity and sort of authority in that space. We’re going to look at this sort of weird email we got from somebody about this iFilm group and what appears to be sort of a really shady situation. And we don’t know anything too specific about his one company, but sort of general patterns to watch out for if someone says they are interested in your script. Well, let’s make sure they really are a real person. And, finally, we’re going to take a look at the GLAAD inclusion report, which is basically the gay and lesbian group that looks at media portrayals of gays, lesbians, and transgender people in movies and how they felt we did this year, or this past year in 2014, and how we could do better. So, we’ve got plenty of show this week.

**Craig:** So much show. Let’s dive in.

**John:** All right. So, let’s start with follow up on our credits episode. So, we’ll start with a really simple one. Somebody on Twitter wrote me to ask, “Being an arbiter seems like a lot of work. Do arbiters get paid?”

**Craig:** Yes. We get paid $400,000 per arbitration. [laughs]

**John:** Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

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

**John:** Everyone would line up to do it.

**Craig:** I know. No, in fact, we get zero dollars.

**John:** Yes, we get zero dollars. So that’s another reason why it’s a huge commitment, because that’s money you’re not making doing your writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There has been discussion about should we have professional paid arbiters, and there’s logic for that and logic against that, and we won’t get into it, but it’s a source of great controversy.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re basically — it’s the jury system. Essentially you’re a citizen of the United States, that comes with a bunch of benefits. One of the costs is you got to show up every now and then and do your part.

**John:** But jurors do get paid. Not much.

**Craig:** Well, in that case it’s not at all like the jury system. Scratch that. It’s so much worse. Not like the jury system was great anyway.

**John:** It’s the worst thing ever. And also like being a juror is not that much work. It’s tedious, but it’s not that much work. Being an arbiter is a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of reading involved and thinking.

**Craig:** I’ve clearly never been a juror.

Joe from — I just like saying Rancho Cucamonga — Rancho Cucamonga writes, “A script I co-wrote is tentatively going into production this summer and I fear the issue of credit is going to be a problem. This is a non-union, privately-funded indie movie, so I know I’m completely at the mercy of how the co-writer, who is also the movie’s director and executive producer, will assign credit. But I’m curious to know where I would stand if I were in the guild.” Good use of subjunctive.

“The script originated with the co-writer/director/executive producer as a simple log line and an extremely vague outline, about a dozen general plot points with virtually no details to any of them. I took it from there and fleshed out a more detailed outline. Then I came up with character names, their jobs, the settings, the subplots, all the supporting characters, and changed the ending. We worked off of that outline and we’re each happily sharing screenplay credit, but he made it pretty clear to me that he doesn’t think I should share story credit.

“He came up with the original idea and the structure, but I really came up with everything else. Should I share credit or is he right to claim that for himself?”

**John:** So, first, Joe, congratulations on your movie hopefully going into production. I hope it turns out really, really well. Your situation is sort of why you would love to have a Writers Guild contract for your movie, so that these things could be determined correctly and fairly. You have very little leverage in this situation, so you’re going to probably take the credit that you receive, which will be the shared screenplay credit and that’s how it’s going to be. And unfortunately that’s how it is for most of the film producing world.

Most of the film producing world doesn’t have the equivalent of our Writers Guild to figure out who the credited writer should be. And it is that sort of horse trading kind of nonsense that you’re experiencing right now. Craig, do you have any advice for Joe?

**Craig:** Well, no, because you’re right, and he’s acknowledging there’s really nothing he can do. I guess his question is “but is this right?” And, frankly, unless we read the material, we have no way of telling you if it’s right or not. I mean, what you’re saying is that you contributed to story. That in and of itself does not automatically qualify you for story credit. You would need to show per the Writers Guild arbitration a significant contribution to story.

And that, of course, is a term of art and interpretation.

**John:** So, let’s pretend that we are two of the three arbiters who receive this. Let’s pretend it goes to WGA arbitration. The kinds of things we’d be looking at when we’re determining story credit is we would be looking at written material. So, probably first piece of written material we’d get was this original sort of beat — whatever this co-writer/director came up with. And if it really is as vague as he says, and it’s 12 bullet points and a vague sort of premise of things.

You would look at this thing and if there really were no character names and there were no sort of details about who these people were and what was going on and sort of how the story progressed, maybe Joe could make a good case for sharing story credit. What would you be looking for for figuring out story credit?

**Craig:** Well, right off the bat he says he has a fleshed out outline that he did. So, now he has an outline. And outlines are by definition story material. They do not contribute to screenplay. They contribute solely to story. Sometimes I think to myself one of the ways you can determine what’s what is could this go in an outline, or would it need to be part of a screenplay. The fact that he invented a bunch of characters and a bunch of subplots, the fact that he changed the narrative, the basic narrative of the ending, these are all things that do contribute significantly to story.

From what he’s describing, if I believe everything he says, then of course, yes, he should share story credit. If he’s a little delusional, and it happens to the best of us, maybe not. But, given the situation that he’s in, I think there’s really no purpose in fighting over it. There are no residuals. It is at this point it’s essentially a question of vanity and fairness. Right? It’s both things.

Well, let’s discard vanity and let’s unfortunately just acknowledge that this is what happens. When you take the money to write a non-union project, you are in part taking money to absorb a certain systemic unfairness and this may be one of those.

**John:** So, our friend Howard Rodman would be upset with us if we didn’t mention the fact that there is an indie contract for the WGA. And in the future, if in this kind of scenario, you might look into whether that indie contract would be useful for you in the situation.

I cannot recall the details, whether arbitration is a thing you get with that indie contract or not, but it does give you certain protections down the road. It does give you the ability to have a little bit more control over your work than you might otherwise have. So, it would be something for a writer like Joe to look at in the future.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** Will Eisner’s Ghost writes, “The opening title sequence for Netflix’s Daredevil reads ‘Created by Drew Goddard.’ It seems strange for Goddard to take this credit when he’s simply adapting preexisting characters and preexisting plots. I’ve noticed very little in terms of actual content creation, but direct plot and character adaptation.

“Frank Darabont took a ‘Developed by’ credit when he put together The Walking Dead. And Dexter’s opening credits are ‘Developed for television by James Manos, Jr.,’ then ‘Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.’ My question is that if enough of the creation of the plot and characters was done for Marvel comics as a work-for-hire, and then directly adapted by Netflix, might these comic book writers protest the WGA credits for Daredevil TV show? Even if they are not WGA writers and the work was done for another medium?”

Craig, what’s your take on this kind of credit situation?

**Craig:** Well, to be fair, I consider myself a feature film credits expert. I do not know much about television credits, so I can’t tell you exactly what the rules are that govern the created by credit versus the developed by credit, and how they do source material credits. What I can tell you is that the comic book writers of Daredevil have absolutely no standing to protest any WGA credits. They are not WGA members. They did not contribute material under a WGA contract to this television show.

The copyright for Daredevil is owned by Marvel. Marvel obviously made an agreement with Netflix. That agreement included a licensing of the material. And I presume a provision that the source material be acknowledged. But beyond that, no, the comic book writers unfortunately have no say. Just as, by the way, you and I have no say if they take — you know, we have some separated rights as part of our deal, which comic book writers don’t. But generally speaking when we write a movie for a studio, they get to do with it whatever they want, and we don’t really have much of a say at all.

**John:** Yeah. So, it is important, that distinction that all the rights to Daredevil, that is a copyright controlled by Marvel. And so when those writers who were writing stuff for Daredevil, everything they did, 100 percent of that gets owned by Marvel. And so when it comes time to make it into a TV show, that whole bundle of rights, it’s as if the author is Marvel, not that the author is the individual writers underneath that. And so Marvel gets to say what the source material is.

In terms of whether it should be created by or developed by, there are specific rules in the WGA contract about what that language is supposed to be, but it’s also a negotiated thing as well. And I’ve seen developed by on certain properties, and created by on other properties. And I cannot honestly tell you why some are one thing, and some are another thing.

I remember the old Lois & Clark TV show was the first time I saw the Developed by credit, but there’s been other cases where a similar kind of situation would have a Created by credit. So, I don’t know the specifics of Drew Goddard’s case.

**Craig:** All right. Well we did as best as we could with that, Will Eisner’s Ghost. We had something here from Jake. He says, “I began working on a project several years ago with a friend of mine. We did not get very far in the writing stage, just had a few of the basic plot points worked out, and some character notes. Since then, that friend and I had some problems and do not speak anymore.” Ooh, this is getting good.

**John:** I actually cut out one sentence here.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** I cut out one sentence that talked about sort of like how the friend was really lazy.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I guess it’s back in, isn’t it? Cause the problem was laziness. Jake continues, “Recently, I’ve picked that project we were working on back up. I’ve made great progress.” Boy, do we get this all the time. “I’ve made great progress and I am currently past the outline and now actually on a first draft. I’m worried, though, that if this script gets produced he will have problems with not being involved anymore. I’m willing to negotiate some credit, I suppose, but don’t really know what those credits should be. Neither of us are WGA members yet, so this question isn’t so much about arbitration yet as it is about ethics. So, what do you think?”

Well, John, what do you think?

**John:** I think this is an incredibly common situation. And you are best served by having the conversation now if possible. You might be even better served by writing something else, because it could just be a really uncomfortable thing down the road.

I think it would be amazing if Jake actually ended up being the co-writer and director from the previous — the Joe from Rancho Cucamonga example. At one time I want to have like both sides of this conversation of the same thing.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** Like this guy says he should get story credit and he’s completely insane. This happens a lot where you’re sort of sitting around and you’re spitballing something and you’re like, yeah, let’s write this together, and then you kind of start, and you kind of stop.

I can think of at least a dozen examples of this happening among my friends. And in every circumstance the best situation would be to have the conversation right at the very start about how you’re going to do it and just write up an agreement between the two of you. No one ever does that, and so the next best solution I think would be to have the conversation now. The third best solution is to write something else or write something so different that it’s not recognizably the same idea. Craig, what’s your thought?

**Craig:** Well, I think that Jake is correct that it is about ethics, but what he’s leaving out is that it’s also about the law. Because he did in fact work on material with somebody else. They co-authored stuff. He may say that it’s some basic plot points and some character notes, but it’s stuff. That person owns the share of copyright on that stuff.

What Jake is doing now is creating a derivative work based on somebody else’s stuff. That is no bueno. If you go and you sell it, then what’s going to happen is your friend that you don’t talk with is going to get a lawyer and the lawyer is going to say, no, you actually can’t sell anything without us and we could scotch the whole thing, or hold you up for a bunch of money. Either way, you’ve wandered down a fairly treacherous path here, Jake.

And John is absolutely right. You must talk to him now and you must set an agreement now. And he should be included in some compensatory manner if you do sell it. But he also needs to kind of waive other interests in it. In other words, you want to be free and clear.

**John:** You do. And I’ve been in other situations where writing teams have broken up and what they’ll do is they’ll just sort of pick the projects and like each of them gets one of the two projects, or they’ll divide everything in half so that they don’t get weirdly entangled this way. Like the things that they were thinking about writing but they never really got started, they’ll make a list and actually divide those things up just to make things clear and safe and not crazy.

Since this was apparently the only thing you worked on with this person, you don’t have that ability to say like, hey, why don’t you take this idea and let me take this idea, and we’ll all call it even and be happy. You probably don’t have that, so you have that conversation and you say, hey look, do you remember that thing we were talking about writing? I think I have some really good ideas for it and I want to be able to do that. Are you cool with that? And if you are cool with that, can we just write something down agreeing on that? And the minute you say write something down, your friend’s barriers will go up. But, maybe you get through it.

**Craig:** Well I think then if I were Jake’s attorney I would say, listen, what we’re going for here is to get him to release all claims on this material. In order to release all claims on the material and to assign full and complete copyright to you, he’s going to need something in return, otherwise he’s a goof. So, what you promise in return is some percentage of any money that you make off of the project. And you can limit it in various ways, up to a certain amount, or so on and so forth, but that’s what a negotiation is.

Essentially what we’re talking about, Jake, is buying him out. And you don’t have to buy him out with money upfront. You can buy him out with a promise of some piece of money should you get anything. But you really can’t go forward without handling this now, because you are doing something that is both ethically wrong and legally untenable.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know that he’s doing anything ethically wrong yet. I mean, I think thinking through and figuring out what something could be is a natural function of a writer. It’s trying to sell it or trying to represent it as your own would be ethically wrong.

**Craig:** Well yeah. Precisely. I mean, I guess that that’s — I’m presuming. Yeah, if he writes it and puts in a drawer, sure, no harm/no foul.

**John:** Danny writes, “I have a question regarding where ghostwriting fits within the credits system. Obviously the term implies that no credit will be given, but who makes that decision? Is the WGA cool with that practice? And I guess more broadly, how prevalent is ghostwriting within the industry?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s an interesting question. There isn’t a lot of ghostwriting the way we think of it in terms of novels and so forth where Pete Rose writes a book about playing for the Reds, but we know that he didn’t write it. [laughs] Some guy wrote it and took a bunch of money and just let Pete Rose say I wrote it.

Far more common in our industry is a bunch of people openly work on something and then one of them is assigned credit. There are times when individuals don’t want credit. I’ve worked on things where part of the deal was I don’t want credit for this. I’m not doing it for credit, it’s not the kind of movie that I think I should have my name on, or I deserve to have my name on. Or, I’ve done a job where I knew the people who I was rewriting briefly and I frankly just didn’t want to get into a thing with them, because I like them. So, in those cases you can say as a writer I’m requesting that I don’t receive credit, and the Writers Guild and the arbiters tend to honor this, unless it seems extraordinarily fishy, no problem.

There are pseudonyms where you can write something under a name that isn’t your own. Those are subject to some rules. For starters, you have the right to use a pseudonym if you make under I think it’s $250,000 for the project. If you make over that amount, you don’t have the right to use one. You have to ask. You have to ask the studio for permission. And we can understand why that exists, because sometimes they want to say “From the writer of so-and-so,” or they want to say award season voters, look, we got this guy to write this thing.

There are times, I have heard of situations where writers are paid to write something and then they do what we call farm it out. They turn around, they hand the job to somebody else who truly works in the ghostwriting way, writes the material. Then the writer who has been hired kind of does it a once over, or blesses it, and then sends it in as his or her own work.

I’ve heard of this. I’ve never actually seen it happen. There’s no concrete examples I’ve ever been shown of it happening. Personally, I find that notion to be odious, to the extreme. But I guess that would be the breadth of ghostwriting in our business.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to initially sort of dismiss this question altogether saying like ghostwriting doesn’t really exist. And it’s not a term you actually hear. Like ghostwriting is something you think about with books. It’s not a thing you think about with movies, partly because we have a whole credit system and there’s a reason why people are credited as writers.

But that last scenario you described is a real thing and whenever you hear about it happening you’re like, whoa, that’s crazy. And I actually haven’t heard about it for quite some time. But there was sort of a legend of an A-list screenwriter who apparently did have a team of people who wrote with him or all together and they would do a first pass and he would clean it up. And it always felt really, really weird and gross and fishy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not a secret. It’s Ron Bass and he talked about it at length. Ron was a lawyer prior to becoming a screenwriter. And when he became screenwriter, he hired a lot of people as essentially interns, writing assistants, writing — I don’t know what you’d call them. And he would give them assignments and he would give them assignments on things that he was writing, but the idea being and now I’ll collect it and now I will run it through my typewriter and so when it comes out it’s my work.

And he was open about it and I think that in part was why it wasn’t unethical. Nobody that paid Ron Bass money didn’t know that this was part of how he worked. And for the time that he was working constantly in the business, people appreciated the work, so everything was fine.

It’s — I’ve heard of a couple of people though that do this quietly. And the idea is, okay, as writers we know it’s a little bit of feast or famine. Sometimes it’s frustrating when you hit one of those feast patches and you take a job and then somebody calls you up five days later and says I’ll give you twice as much for this. And you think, oh well, I would sort of — I could see myself writing that, but I can’t because I’m writing this. Oh, I know, I’ll take the money, [laughs], and I’ll turn around and I’ll pay some tiny pittance of it to desperate writers who want a shot. And they’ll understand it’s a ghostwriting situation. And then I’ll get all that money.

Well, great, except boo. That’s not cool. I mean, what we have is our name. We are representing that this is our work. And, frankly, if you do that, you’re going to sink your own ship pretty quickly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s your reputation.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a different thing than I know writers who are sort of in that feast period who will be approached with something and say like I cannot do it, but I will oversee another writer doing something, and where they’re not coming in as — or basically they’ll team up with somebody to do it, like somebody who has a little bit more time on their plate. That I totally get. But what you’re describing, that sort of shady like someone else is actually doing it feels not only kind of unethical, but is actually probably in violation of the contract that they signed.

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** Because the contract that they signed with whatever studio said that you will actually do this work. And for them to farm it out to somebody else is not going to be kosher.

**Craig:** 100 percent. It is a violation of your contract, both your legal contract, and your personal contract that you are going to do the work. When writers are supervising other writers, those writers are hired as the writers. They are participating writers. They are the ones who are up for credit. They’re acknowledged. Everything is above board. Essentially the screenwriter acts like a producer in that circumstance and that’s absolutely fine.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** All right. We got one more here. Stephen Lancellotti writes, “I just listened to the credits podcast a week after IFC Midnight released a poster for my movie, The Harvest. I’m now curious, is my name supposed to be on the poster in the same font size as the director? Probably won’t make a stink about it, but just wanted to know for the future.” And we’ll include a link to the poster which makes a very big deal of — it says The Harvest, and then underneath a Film by John McNaughton. And then tiny type for everybody else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If this is a Writers Guild movie, I don’t think that’s okay.

**John:** I don’t think it’s okay either. I think if you’re crediting the director in that larger type size, I think you have to credit the writer in the same size type. I think it’s a problem.

**Craig:** I think you do. I think you do. So, but the rules are arcane. There are all sorts of little twisty bitsies. You know, maybe if it’s a promotional thing, or if it’s prior to credits being fixed, or maybe if it’s home video as opposed — I don’t know all the ins and outs. But —

**John:** That’s what I was thinking, too. I think there might be a special case for home video versus theatrical.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think Stephen has a valid point. But he also has a movie, so congratulations on your movie existing in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. You know, you can call up the guild and just ask them the question and they’ll walk you through it. I mean, I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t a guild gig, then all bets are off. They can do whatever they want.

**John:** Yeah. But you know, Craig, someone who might have the answer to this question because this person knows a lot about sort of how writing works is, well, I say it’s a he but it could be a woman. Because it’s Writer X. Writer X is a brand new person who has just shown up on the scene thanks to a blog post on the Final Draft website.

And this got tweeted at us on Thursday or Friday, and it’s just delightful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I’m going to read just a little bit of it because we’ll read the sort of preamble and then we can get into a discussion about what Writer X is saying. So, this is me as Writer X. Okay?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “Hi, I’m Writer X. I’m a working screenwriter in Hollywood. Within the past five years I’ve been represented by two of the top talent agencies in town. I broke into the business with a spec. It got on the Black List and eventually became one of those elusive million dollar spec sales. Afterwards, I sold another spec, but that one only for half a million.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Still, it’s not a bad quote for someone just starting out. In addition to my spec sales, I’ve made successful pitches to two major studios. One of those pitches I did with an A-list director. We pitched it to the president of Universal Pictures. I’ve also nabbed several writing assignments with pretty much all the major studios and a number of A-list production companies. And I sold two TV pilots to two different networks.

“A-list actors and directors have been attached to my work. I’m collaborated with them.” It really does say I’m collaborated with them.

**Craig:** And I’m collaborated with them. [laughs] Wow.

**John:** “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff. Guess what I was doing before I became a professional screenwriter? I was a dishwasher.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, I mean, I think we should maybe just stop doing the podcast because we’ve just been knocked off our perch.

**Craig:** We’ve been knocked off our perch. I mean, this person, what a life they lead. [laughs] It just sounds so awesome. I mean, they’re —

**John:** It does sound awesome.

**Craig:** They are collaborated with them. I love that “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff.” This is so exciting. Who put this forth? Oh, Final Draft. Okay.

So, how did this get received on Twitter, John? [laughs]

**John:** I think people loved it. I think among all the screenwriters I talked with, everyone loved every bit of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. The —

**John:** But maybe for the wrong reason.

**Craig:** Right. There was I think a 100 percent consistent reaction of absolute disgust for so many reasons. I mean, to start with, the boasting tone of this is kind of excruciating. There is this kind of writing that people do when they’re talking to people who want to break into something where they really casually rattle off this long list of wonderful things that have happened to them, just incredible things, and then they end up by saying, “And by the way, I was just like you.” Ooh, good sales pitch.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, if we could have gotten Tom Cruise and his Magnolia character to do this introduction, that would have been fantastic. Because you can sort of see him with a little mic and just like talking a little bit hyper and energized and the boom, like I was a dishwasher. I was just like you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty obnoxious. Well, it’s BS.

So, the first question is: is this person real? Or is this the marketing department? I honestly hope it’s just the marketing department inventing someone as a come on sales pitch because if it’s a real person, I’m embarrassed for that person. I’m embarrassed for them. And, frankly, I’m not angry at them because if they’re real, I feel like they’ve been hornswoggled and bamboozled. I blame Final Draft, because they must be getting compensated for this.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand the angle from anyone’s point of view.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was looking at this from Final Draft’s point of view, and like well is this all a marketing department thing? But if it is the marketing department, it’s just so odd because it’s not on their front page at all. And I guess people only know about it because it was in some release that Final Draft put out, or some email that Final Draft put out. But even the URL for it is really strange.

So, the actual URL to get you there, it’s FinalDraft/ —

**Craig:** Discover/Videos. Yeah, it’s under a videos thing, even though it’s not a video. Like they’ve really buried it.

**John:** It’s buried. And it’s in a folder for Final Draft Writer App for the iPad/meet Writer X.

**Craig:** It’s almost like they were like, you know what, we’re going to be viral man. I

**John:** Yeah, maybe they wanted people to discover this.

**Craig:** It’s a hidden thing. Yeah. Well, we discovered it. That’s the bad news.

**John:** We discovered it.

**Craig:** So, putting aside Writer X, if Writer X exists, I would urge you, Madam or Sir, to reconsider this. This isn’t what you should be doing with your time. It’s not, frankly, what professionals do. We really don’t talk that way, for good reason. It’s obnoxious. And if you’re taking money from Final Draft, I don’t understand why since you’ve sold a script for a million and then sold another thing for half a million, and you’ve nabbed several writing assignments with all of the major studios, and a number of A-list production companies. You seem to be doing great, so you don’t need this money.

So then the question is well what’s in this for Final Draft, why are they doing this? And it really comes down to the nature of this kind of pitch, which is very common and you’ll see it in real estate a lot where somebody who is just soaking in prosperity comes on your television set and says to you, you poor retch at home, “I used to be just like you, but then I discovered the secret. And If you share my secrets, you too will be rags to riches.”

And what’s so insidious about this is that they’re going to give you some baloney secrets. I mean, in this case one of them is apparently Writer X is going to tell us what screenwriters are supposed to wear.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That there’s these secret, what is it? The secret dress code?

**John:** The secret wardrobe?

**Craig:** A secret dress code of writers, which is insane.

**John:** I’ve written about the secret dress code and what I’ve always said before is the writer should be the worst dressed person in the room, but that’s one sentence. That’s not —

**Craig:** It’s also, it’s not a secret. [laughs] It’s just you’ve already put it out there for free.

So, they’ll give you all the — yeah, it’s the unspoken dress code. Guess what? It’s been spoken. And then how to decipher the Labyrinthine language in Hollywood. For example, “If a studio exec just reads your first draft and tells you the writing is great, you think that’s good, well it’s not.” Uh, sometimes it is. Sometimes they say the writing is great and then they make the movie because the writing is great.

“Are you familiar with the phrases too broad or character’s arc? Well, you will be.” Oh, lord.

So, they’re dolling out these things that are either stuff everybody already knows, or just things that aren’t true. But what’s behind all of it, of course, is, oh, and naturally you’ll want to write on Final Draft. I mean, you’ll want to spend the whatever it costs now, $150 or $200.

**John:** Yeah. So, there’s no sales pitch in any of this so far. And so it’s the promise of like this is the first of like a regular series of columns. I would be surprised if there’s a second column, but it’s mean to be that this is going to be a bunch of columns coming through. And maybe eventually there’s supposed to be like some sort of Final Draft sales message, or it’s just supposed to be content that’s getting you to the Final Draft site. Or lend some authority to the Final Draft site.

But it’s a weird, gross kind of authority, or it’s not even authority. It’s trying to trade anonymity for secret or sort of like, you know, insider knowledge that no one wants you to have. But we want you to have the information. There’s nothing — there’s no secret information to have.

**Craig:** There is no secret information to have, but that ruins the promise. That ruins the hook.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** There’s this sect of evangelical Christianity called Prosperity Theology, which is all about preachers telling their congregation if you follow the bible the way I explain it, you’ll get rich. But not rich in spirit. [laughs] You’ll actually have money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On TV, I’m a big infomercial nut, so I’m sure some people out there remember Tom Vu. Tom Vu was a bus boy, see, same thing, who made millions.

**John:** A bus boy!

**Craig:** He made millions starting from nothing in real estate. Went on to be sued by his former investors. And then there was Don Lapre, the high school dropout. “I’m a high school dropout who learned the secrets of making money and now I want to share them with you.” And he was arrested, charged with fraud, and committed suicide in jail, which I hope doesn’t happen to Writer X or Final Draft, but you know, when you’re kind of playing in the same field as those guys, you got to stop and ask what are you doing here. For those of you who come across this stuff, just continually ask why.

Why is this here? Why does any company that’s looking for money out of my wallet, why do they need me to believe that for instance there are places that screenwriters should hang out. No, there ain’t. Not one. There is no one special secret place where screenwriters go and money falls from the sky and your scripts get better. No. It’s all baloney, right?

So, rags to riches stories are scam bait, 100 percent of the time. Secrets I’ve learned and will now share with you, scam bait, 100 percent of the time.

**John:** Yeah. I bet you could just sort of build a regular expression matching pattern and sort of search the Internet for that and you would find that invariably that is a scammy sort of come on and proposition. Like any time that you see that phraseology used together, there’s something bad and dangerous around there.

I was thinking about this from the perspective of this guy/this woman who is writing this and sort of what made them say yes, because I don’t get it. Like if we’re taking this at his or her word, that all this true, this guy has a million and a half in his pocket and has these writing assignments, I mean, unless there’s an extra punch line is like “and then I lost it all to drugs,” then I’m interested. Then I’m intrigued. But that doesn’t seem to be the situation here. So, what is the appeal of writing this column? And why not write it under your own name or write it some place that’s not on the Final Draft website?

I just fundamentally don’t get it. And that’s a strange thing to me.

**Craig:** Well, it’s so safe to do this. You know, you and I have used our own name forever and we are really among the very few. Most writers just don’t want the unwanted attention of jerks and there are jerks out there.

**John:** Yeah, there are.

**Craig:** And a lot of writers are nervous that if they say things under their own name that there are going to be reprisals from studios and so forth, and you and I have just never — we’ve never had that problem. And I also feel like we made calculations early on that we frankly weren’t going to be saying anything that should get us into trouble with somebody. And if it did, that’s not somebody we want to work with.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Everybody, I think, has a desire somewhere in them to want to be the sage on the mountain dolling out brilliant advice so that everybody can gather around. Okay, so here’s a rule, [laughs] baseball has the 5-10 rule. The 5-10 rule says if you’ve been with the same team for five consecutive years and you’ve been a Major League player for ten years or more, then you can’t be traded without your consent. 5-10 rule.

I like a 5-10 rule. You can be the sage on the mountain after five credits, or ten years of steady work.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Until you get the five credits, or the ten years of steady work, please do not doll out advice like the sage on the mountain. And, by the way, when you finally do get that stuff, don’t actually be the sage on the mountain. You and I, I don’t think either one of us feels like gurus or anything. It’s ridiculous. We’re just guys trying to do this gig and help people. So, you know, don’t.

**John:** You know, well what’s weird is I looked at all of Writer X’s boasting, and Writer X has not gotten a movie made. And that is a fundamental sort of flaw there in the sense of, you know, you look at the 5-10 rule, like well Writer X has zero credits. And so in many ways it’s back to sort of everyone else who is just writing about how to be a screenwriter. It’s like, well, this is where you’re at so far. And I think, you know, if you and I were to sit down with this Writer X and talk with him or her about what that journey has been so far, I bet there really is some interesting stuff to learn about what it’s like being on the Black List, what it’s like having those initial meetings. The things you’ve learned and done.

But doing it under this veil of anonymity, like you’re suddenly Julia Phillips and like you’re writing a tell-all memoir about Hollywood is just crazy-pants.

**Craig:** It’s particular crazy-pants when you’re using it to humble-brag or brag-brag, unhumble-brag. You know, you and I, we don’t talk about how much money we make. We don’t talk about who bought our pitches. We don’t talk about who we sat in a room with. And we don’t talk about that stuff because it’s gross. It’s just gross.

How will that help anyone else? You know, the people that are baiting a hook are making you jealous of them so that you want to be like them so that you can spend money towards them and something, right? Well, we don’t want your money. We just want you to be you.

You don’t need Writer X. You don’t need Final Draft, now more than ever. You don’t need the secret place, the dress code. You don’t need anything other than your talent, your hard work, a unique point of view, a passion, that’s what’s real.

Sorry, no pill for your weight loss today.

**John:** No, I’m sorry.

I just wanted to close on this topic of anonymity because I look at some of the Twitter accounts I follow, and I’ll follow like Mystery Creative Executive or Anonymous Production Assistant, and I find those things really interesting because in some ways they’re telling truth about little specific things that happen in their life. And they’re not trying to give you advice, but they’re just like articulating what it’s like to be in that place.

And there are in some cases really good reasons for their anonymity, because if they told you more about who they were, they would lose their job. And so that I totally get. And there’s a long tradition of that sort of anonymity. Like, look at the Federalist papers. Like those Fathers of the American Revolution, they didn’t sign their names to all those little pamphlets, but they were trying to sort of rally people to a cause or to explain what it’s like and what their opinion was, and that’s a great, wonderful, protected thing.

I don’t feel this at all here. I don’t feel like there’s any sort of call to action other than sort of like, hey, look at me how great I am. There’s no sort of insight here that is worth my putting up with your anonymity there. Everything that this person said in that initial column, if I knew their name I’d think, well, you sound like kind of a jerk, and kind of like a boastful jerk.

And it’s not making me feel any better about the advice you’re giving. It’s just frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s why they didn’t use their name. I mean, there’s nothing that this person said warrants anonymity. [laughs] Nothing. Right?

The only benefit that anonymity provides them, other than making them sound better than they are, is shielding them from direct vitriol. And shielding them from people calling them out directly and saying, what? For instance, I know this person and they didn’t do all that. Or, I know this person, and I don’t like their scripts. Or, I know this person, they’re cool, but what do they do — why are they telling people that there’s a dress code? There isn’t.

You know, and then it’s about you. You know, you and I are accountable for what we say. This woman or man — not so much. So, don’t listen to people that aren’t accountable. You can listen to them, but, you know, take it with a grain of salt, because they’re not accountable.

I mean, that’s why I love that Rachael Prior who used to be Mystery Brit Executive came out of the closet, so to speak, segue coming, and revealed that she was in fact Rachael Prior, an executive at Big Talk Productions, which is a very reputable British production company that’s co-run by Edgar Wright. It’s a real company and she’s a real person and they make real movies. And she finally said, you know what, I think it’s okay. I think I can actually just be me. So, I like that.

**John:** That’s been the new trend, is not anonymity, but actually like owning your words. A lovely idea.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** All right, next on the docket of things that will enrage Craig. This was an email we got from a woman named Esther who writes, “A friend reached out to be for advice after getting a real scammy looking email from someone claiming to want to buy his script. Apparently these are going around and a lot of young writers are paying to get the ‘special report’ so their script can be bought, only to realize it was a scam by a company that offers script coverage for dollars.”

And we’ll link to other people who are writing about this same situation. So, this is the email exchange that went back and forth. This writer received an email from James Cole. Do you want to be James Cole?

**Craig:** I’m be James Cole, sure. I have recently reviewed your film script and as head of development for iFilm, I am interested in acquiring your screenplay with a view to producing the film in the near future. iFilm is currently tasked to produce a number of films with our partners/investors. Please let me know if you would be interested in selling the rights and optioning your script.

**John:** So the friend got this email and said, sure, yeah maybe, I’m interested. Tell me more. And this is what the guy said.

**Craig:** Great. In that case we can escalate your script up to our investors, but we would need an independent FR script report attached to. If you get this professionally done by a script editor, we will arrange rights options which are negotiable around £25,000. If you’re unfamiliar with script editors, I can recommend some.

**John:** So, do you want to guess who he might recommend?

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to guess he’s going to recommend a company called Bentley Marks.

**John:** And so, Craig, you did some detective work on Bentley Marks. So what did you find out about Bentley Marks?

**Craig:** Well, to back up for a second, a bunch of people have gotten these letters, not just Esther’s friend. Apparently, this company iFilm sent a bunch of these letters to people whose scripts they found at various levels of success through festivals and websites that host these things. Some of the scripts were quite old. And so they all say, yeah, we want an FR script report. By the way, I guess it stands for Film Ready. There is no such thing.

But then the company says, but you know, we’re not going to give you this money and we won’t give you your lottery winnings from Nigeria unless you pay for the report. But, here, use this company Bentley Marx.

So, Bentley Marx, a company that I’ve never heard of, and for good reason, seems to be located in Dubai. But if you take a look at the registry information for their domain name, they are registered to a James Hore who is at 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London.

If you look at iFilmGroup.com, their domain is registered to James Colby, 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair London. Huh. What is 43 Berkeley Square? Is it some massive complex that could possibly hold two different companies? No, it’s a virtual office service. That address is sold by a company called West One business in the UK and the idea is you pay them a monthly fee and they host this address that looks like it’s a real place and then they just forward it to your personal home, this way your company looks real as opposed to something you’re doing out of your basement, or whatever they call a basement in London. I don’t know what they call it.

**John:** Or a basement in Dubai. Or wherever this is actually.

**Craig:** Precisely. And the funny thing is like Bentley Marks, they have an address in Dubai. It’s not really — they’re not — they’re registered to the same — they’re the same people! The point is this scam is obvious. Right? I mean, as far as I can tell, unless I’m missing something here, they troll the Internet for screenplays. They send an email to that person saying we might make this, but you got to pay this other company some money. I don’t know what it would be, $150 or so for notes. And that money goes right into their pocket. And if 20 people bite on this a month, and they’re charging even $100 a pop, well all right. Now we’ve got, what is that, $2,000 a month? Not bad.

**John:** Yeah, some money.

**Craig:** It’s some money. Point being, this is not at all cool. And I have no problem, if I’ve gotten wrong, iFilm, come on the show and explain yourselves. But this certainly sounds like baloney to me.

The actual iFilm Group website does feature some movies that they have either produced or going to produce. They are not what you would think of as mainstream releases. They do look very much like direct to video, B2C kind of movies. Let’s see if we can find some titles of what iFilm Group is working on these days. They’ve got Fatal Insomnia.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the worst kind of insomnia.

**Craig:** The worst kind. They have Dark Rage 2. I don’t know if they have Dark Rage 1. And they have Exorcism. And then one of the strangest titles of movies ever, Internal. It’s just called Internal. Uh, I don’t think that too many of you have caught Fatal Insomnia.

So this is rough. I hate seeing stuff like this. It’s just really, really lame and —

**John:** We often knock against people who are trying to scam young writers saying like I’ll teach you the secrets of writing or, you know, buy my book and stuff. But this is like you are representing yourself as somebody who is going to buy their script, which is sort of the fantasy for a lot of first time writers. Like someone wants to buy and produce my screenplay and make it into a movie. And then it ends up being one of these sort of scammy not really real companies.

That’s just a shame. And even the name iFilm, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. So, there was a company called iFilm, but it’s been defunct for quite a long time. So, they’re trading on sort of like half memory of like I kind of think I remember iFilm, sort of. And, yeah, there kind of was a company that became, it was like an MTV Network that became Spike. There was a history to that name, so it sounds kind of legit and kind of real, but this is not legit or real. And it feels bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s also ridiculous on its face. A company is calling you and saying we’re interested in giving you £25,000 for the rights to your screenplay, but we need somebody else to tell us if it’s any good. What? How does that make any sense at all?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I honestly would be surprised, no, I take that back. I would not be surprised if somebody fell for this, because every year somebody falls for the Nigerian lottery scam. Every year.

**John:** Every year.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it seems. This just feels like a scam. And if we’ve gotten the facts wrong, happy to hear from the people at iFilm Group. But certainly on the face of it, it does feel like they’re doing something scammy and unethical and for shame.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, have you ever been scammed or has someone tried to do like a physical scam on you? Because last time I was in Paris for the first time, someone actually tried to do the gypsy ring scam/trick.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** It was actually fascinating. And so it happened and it’s like, oh, that must be a thing. And so I went back to the hotel and Google and was like, oh, that’s a whole thing. And that guy did exactly that act. And so this is sort of what happened. I was jet lagged, so I was just walking around Paris early in the morning. And this guy said like, oh excuse me, sir, you dropped something. And I was like, no, I didn’t.

He’s like, no, here is a ring. And he had this little gold ring he’d found. And he’s like, oh here, just take it. I don’t want it. Like, no, no, you take it, it’s fine. And I was like I don’t want it, goodbye, thank you. Because I just sensed that something was wrong. But so on the Internet, I read sort of what the rest of that story goes, and essentially there’s a whole plot that sort of happens where they get you to take the ring and it’s like, oh, but we’ll split the money, or this — and it becomes this long conversation. And you essentially have to pay this person to go away.

And so the only solution to it is just to never touch the ring and to go away. And the ring itself, sometimes it starts as a pretty good ring that you can tell it’s actually pretty good, and then it’s sleight of handed to like a cheaper brass ring. Most of the time it’s just a brass ring and it’s a way to start them talking to you.

Other times it can result in pick-pocketing and other things, but it was fascinating to see this thing happening right in front of my face. And in some ways this email had the same kind of markers of this scammy thing about to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I’ve never — that’s not happened to me. I think I just look mean. I look like a real problem. You know, [laughs] like —

**John:** Yeah, you do look like trouble. People cut a wide berth around you.

**Craig:** I kind of do. I look like trouble. I look like the kind of person whose not only going to not take the ring, but lose his mind and do something crazy. I’m just not worth it. I’m the kind of guy that’s not worth it. I just have that look. I have resty angry face.

**John:** [laughs] Our final big topic today, GLAAD released a report about the 2014 movies. And so GLAAD is the organization in the US that takes a look at media portrays of gay, lesbian, transgender people in films and in TV programs and tries to advocate for better inclusion and awareness of those issues.

And so for 2014 they looked at all of the releases by the major studios. There were 114 movies they looked at. And they do statistics year after year showing sort of like how many gay men are portrayed, how many lesbians, how many bisexuals. Sort of what the nature of those portrayals were. And in no year is it especially good. In some years there’s better portrayals versus worse portrayals.

This is the first year I sort of looked closer at it and they actually break it down by studio and they sort of articulate what exactly they are seeing and what the trends are that they are noticing.

So, I will send you to the report. I’m not going to sort of summarize it for you. But they had this interesting thing called the Vito Russo test, which was based on the Bechdel test which we talked about before on the podcast. So, the Bechdel test is a way of looking at how women are portrayed in films. And so it’s asking like three simple questions about sort of how a given movie is portraying its women and then you either pass or fail the Bechdel test.

The Vito Russo test is a similar kind of structure. And it’s pretty straightforward. So the film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. So, does it do that? If so, that character must not be solely or predominately defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity — i.e., they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight and non-transgender characters from one another.

So, it’s like if it’s a gay character, they can’t only be gay. They have to be some other function.

The LGBT character must be tied to the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they’re not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authentic, or perhaps most commonly set up a punch line. The character should matter, which is an interesting way of looking at inclusion and sort of inclusion that counts for something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we’ll send you to this report. They break it down by studio, which is kind of interesting, and within the studios, the sort of indie arms of some of those studios as well. So, Craig, what did you take from looking at this?

**Craig:** Well, the numbers are seemingly better than they used to be, I guess. I didn’t love the way they arranged the — I wish that the studio content had been broken out better, because you had to click on each individual studio and I just got tired of doing that.

But in general it seems like things are getting a bit better, not for transgender characters, but for gay men in particular seem to be — most of the inclusive films, let’s see, 17.5% of the big studio releases contain characters identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s not a bad number.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You know, I mean if you’re sort of going by general population, I mean, the percentage of the population that’s gay is a very hard thing to pin down because of lying, [laughs] but 17.5% doesn’t seem terrible.

**John:** It doesn’t seem terrible. But if you actually look through the individual reports, you realize that they’re being very inclusive about who they’re sort of folding into that. So, like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie counts as being gay because Ian McKellen is gay.

**Craig:** What? But that’s not — he’s not gay. We don’t know that. He never said anything about men or women in that movie.

**John:** Yeah. So honestly very minor gayness is enough sort of to count for this. So that’s a thing to keep in mind when you look at that number.

**Craig:** That’s strange.

**John:** It’s inflated.

**Craig:** It’s odd that they would inflate that number. You would think that it would be in their interest to be as accurate and parsimonious as possible with handing out that. Well, regardless, what’s interesting to me as a writer is maybe less the numbers than in the way the portrayals have occurred and how they have changed over time. Because it doesn’t help anybody if 80% of movies feature gay characters and it’s pejorative or negative portrayals.

There has been a remarkable evolution I think over the last ten years, some in the last three years. I just think the evolution of the portrayal of gay people in popular culture has just been moving so rapidly and in a very good way. In drama, traditionally being gay was associated with tragedy, being ill-fated or twisted somehow, or the fake lesbians to just make men happy, or the gay guy who was the girl’s best friend.

And interesting that the Vito Russo test sort of calls this point out that often homosexuality was considered remarkable and determinative in and of itself. That if you’re a gay character in a movie, that’s your character. Gay character. [laughs] Rather, meaning that has so much more significance than straight character. There’s no character that’s defined by their straightness. That I feel has been changing pretty dramatically, no pun intended. What do you think?

**John:** I think so, too. You know, you look at both in the dramas and the comedies, you see more characters who you can identify as being gay or lesbian, and it’s not being made a big deal of it, which is great. I think there’s a lag in feature films versus television. And I think television was faster because television moves faster. And television is usually much more reflective of the current state of culture and films by their long development process tend to be lagging a few years behind.

One of the real challenges though is that on television you’re seeing characters over a long period of time, so if a character is gay, you have more time to actually experience that and sort of see the richness of their life. In a film, you know, that third lieutenant could be gay, but if there’s no reason to actually know that, there’s no scene that’s going to get that to you, that information may never come out.

And so you’re going to be — gays sometimes are going to be less visible in feature films just because there’s no opportunity to actually see that they’re gay or to sort of identify them as being gay because there’s not a point to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Versus other minority portrayals, where you can visibly see like, oh, well there is a Pacific Islander and that person exists in the world. You can just spot that. And so sometimes it’s harder to spot gays in feature films because there is no scene in which they have the ability to identify as gay.

**Craig:** Yeah. If a gay character doesn’t have a love story in a movie, then you might not know, but I think an awareness now that there are certain non-romantic signifiers that we have all the time. Characters leave their home and there’s a wife who is a day player, has no line, waving goodbye.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a woman at work who has a photo on her desk of her and her husband. You know, these things I think are well worth considering as we kind of go through. And in a way it helps make the movie realer, because that’s the way life is now. It wasn’t that way ten years ago. It simply wasn’t. Now it’s different.

And movies should keep up with the world around them. So, that’s something that’s worth considering as we go through as writers. Comedy is a whole other area, because in comedy for so long, and really up to I would say just a couple of years ago even, gay was considered in and of itself funny. And I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Anybody that works in comedy, anybody, including gay comedians would find this inherent comedy in being gay, even if they were gay-friendly or gay positive.

The thing is, it’s not funny anymore. It’s just not. Now, there’s a question. Should it ever have been funny? That’s a hard question, because the thing about comedy is funny is what people laugh at. Funny doesn’t really have a morality to it. What has a morality is morality. Comedy kind of follows social mores.

So, you can watch the Friar Roasts from the ’70s, they’re on YouTube. And there will be race and gay humor in those that just make you wince. Forget not funny, you actually go, “Ooh, god.” All the people on the dais are going bananas. People in the audience going bananas. Roasts today, there is still a ton of race and gay humor, but it turns on bravery and defiance. In a weird way the joke of the race and the gay humor is, oh my god, look, they’re being bad on purpose, in front of each other, and in a way that sort of signifies how confident they are as people of color, as gay people, or as straight people around people of color, or gay people.

But I guarantee you in — I don’t know how long it’s going to be — maybe five years, maybe two, maybe 20, I don’t know, that too will one day make us all wince. I think that comedy basically echoes the world and it always will, which is one of the reason why comedies often don’t hold up, but comedians have to kind of go where the funny is.

**John:** Yeah, comedy so often it’s finding those moments of friction in the real world, like those things that are sort of you dare not really quite talk about, and like finding a way to talk about those things, but then the conversation moves on. And if you’re still trying to talk about that, like oh no, that’s not funny anymore, that’s just really uncomfortable and weird.

And so I agree with you. You look at some movies that were genuinely funny back in the day and there are moments that make you wince because it wasn’t political correctness or anything else, it’s just like that’s just not a thing that could be funny anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Now, there are really interesting cases where I think you can look at something now and laugh at it in a different way. When Airplane! came out in 1980, Stephen Stucker who played the flamboyantly gay — I don’t know what you call it, the air traffic control tower guy, I don’t know what his actual — you know, they were all up there and the air traffic controller guy. And he was hysterical and everybody loved him. And they were laughing in part because, oh my god, that guy is so gay. Look, the gayest of gays. But when you watch him now, and Stephen by the way was a member of the Kentucky Fried Theater with David, and Jerry, and Jim, and had kind of come up with them, when you watch it now it’s still really funny, but you’re not laughing at him, you’re laughing with him. He’s just remarkably witty. The fact that he’s gay is so no longer what’s funny. What’s funny is specifically what he’s doing. It’s actually — I think there is a gay comic sensibility and it is as broad as straight comic sensibility, but there is this — it’s a subset. There’s a thing there. And he does it so brilliantly.

So, there are times where these portrayals can last and actually the way we find them funny changes. But there is the idea that, oh my god, I kissed a dude. No, that’s not funny anymore.

**John:** It really isn’t funny anymore. And rape culture is not funny anymore, either. That idea like, oh, you’re going to go to prison and you’re going to get raped. It’s like, ooh, man, that’s just really uncomfortable. So, both that gay panic and sort of gay rape panic are not funny anymore.

There was a period of time that Saturday Night Live went through, and I think Janeane Garofalo talked about it when she left the show, where like every episode there was some sort of like alien anal probe rape joke. And it was really weird and uncomfortable. And thank goodness we moved past that.

And now the joke would be trying to make that joke. I mean, like it would be — it’s lucky that you sort of get to a place where like you can comment on that as a joke type.

Recently they had a commercial where it was some sort of anti-depressant for parents when your kid is acting super, super gay. And it was right at that uncomfortable level of like, ooh, but like the commercial was making it really clear that like it’s not the kid’s fault. You just have to get over it.

**Craig:** Right. That worked.

**John:** That worked, because it was understanding what the pain was underneath there, and what the uncomfortable feeling was, and sort of leaning into it in the right way. So, I would argue that you’re never trying to — you can’t stop making jokes that involve gay people. You just have to find ways to sort of use them in comedy that is appropriate for today and also hopefully for the next five years. You don’t know what ten years is going to be.

**Craig:** And this is why comedy is hard, because sometimes go out on a ledge where you need to live as a comedian, and they fail. And when they fail, especially now in our culture now, everyone goes insane. And Patton Oswalt has spoken a lot about this on Twitter and elsewhere in his lengthy protracted war of words with Salon, which Salon tends to act like the Internet’s schoolmarm.

And his point was, you know, comedy is supposed to be dangerous and occasionally when you do it you’re going to miss. You know, you’re throwing knives, you will occasionally miss and hit something you weren’t supposed to hit, or hit it the wrong way. And that’s part of the gig. That’s part of the occupational hazard of being a comedian. But we do know that you have to — as comedians, the really good ones, they’re listening all the time, really carefully.

Louis C.K. does not do some of the material that he used to do, because it’s not funny anymore. You know, there was a time when all of America loved The Honeymooners, men and women loved The Honeymooners. And the catchphrase was Bang Zoom. The catchphrase was “I’m going to beat you, Alice.” That was the joke. It’s just not funny anymore. A lot of times white people will say, “Why is it that black people get to stand up in a comedy club and make fun of white people, but if white people stand up and make fun of black people, everybody goes crazy.”

Here’s why: it’s not funny, that’s why. It’s just not funny. Just go where the funny is and be aware that it changes. So, I hope that GLAAD, I like that they concentrate on general numbers, but I also like that they’re starting to look at context, because to me that’s really where things are going to change. And I think about it now. I never thought about it. Never, never, never, never. Ten years ago, I’ll be totally honest, I never thought about it whatsoever. Wasn’t a problem. I think about it all the time now, because it’s right to. It seems like what I ought to bed doing.

**John:** Yes. I think we all ought to be doing it as well. And we should also do our One Cool Things, because it’s been a long show so far. So, I will start with my One Cool Thing. This week is Rage Quitting, and it’s this article by Chi Luu, it’s looking at this new kind of term that’s sprung up in the last few years. Words like rage quitting, ugly crying, stress cooking, humble bragging, which we used earlier this podcast, angry cleaning. It’s that construction where you take two things and jam them together. And it’s a weird construction because the first word is almost always negative and the second word is an activity.

And so you get what it means, and so like you know rage quitting is a thing. I’m storming out of this job all of a sudden. Stress cooking, ugly crying, we get what these things mean. But they’re sort of a new way of forming things. And I just love when language finds ways to sort of create new terms for things. And concepts that can exist only because we’re jamming these two words together in this sort of accepted way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hate watching, isn’t that one of them?

**John:** Hate watching, absolutely. The perfect thing. And so that first word is always negative, and you don’t talk about joy cooking. I think you could do that, but you don’t. It’s always a negative that leads into the verb. So I thought it was really fun. And the article also talks about some of the other sort of ways we create new terms, like adding holic to things, so like, you know, I’m a workaholic or whatever, adding holic as an idea.

A thon, so a podcastathon, we understand that it’s something that goes on for a long time.

Mc, as a sort of shortening down of things, or a cheap version of things, so like a McJob, not being a real thing. So, I just love when people are describing new words and especially when people are describing the way we create new words. So I will point you to this article.

**Craig:** I wish there was something called Workahol, where you could just —

**John:** I’m going to drink a fifth of Workahol.

**Craig:** Workahol. And I got so much done. I’m a workaholic, but I do get a lot done. My One Cool Thing was briefly alluded to way back in episode 150 by somebody who was writing in, but I’ve had some personal experience with it now so I thought I would mention it here on the show. It’s called Kano. And it’s for children. It’s a computer kit. And the idea is that your child can actually build their own computer. Don’t go crazy, it’s not quite your MacBook Pro, but it’s sort of like a Lego-ized version of a computer with circuit board, and a container, and connect ribbons and so forth.

And it comes with this wonderful little instructional guide that helps you put it all together. And it’s actually kind of cool. It runs on Raspberry Pi. And you can hook it up to your TV with an HDMI cable. And it’s got little games and things, but more importantly it also has the ability to instruct you on programming. You can learn to code. You can make games. It’s very cool.

And it’s a little pricey.

**John:** Did you build it or you just saw it in action?

**Craig:** I didn’t build it. My daughter built it. So, she’s ten, and she just sat down — she’s a self-starter. She just sat down and did it. She built it. She was super crazy excited. And when we hooked it up and we saw text scrolling as Raspberry Pi loaded up, she just jumped up and down for 30 seconds, which it took because this is not a fast computer. But she was so excited.

So, it’s great for kids who like building and like technology like my daughter does. And it’s a little pricey. It’s $150 at Amazon. But, I suspect maybe you might be able to find it a little cheaper if you went on eBay or something like that. It doesn’t need to necessarily be brand new.

If you have a kid who is into this sort of thing, it’s a nice place to look. So, that’s Kano. And their website is Kano.me.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So, if you would like to write to me or Craig with your thoughts on things, the place for those longer things like we read today is ask@johnaugust.com. Little short things are great on Twitter. So, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

If you follow me this week, I may be having an announcement about the Ghost special screening, if we open it up to the general public. Right now it’s only for Writers Guild people. But if you are Writers Guild and want to come, you should RSVP for that. We are on iTunes. So, you can search for us on Scriptnotes and you can leave us a review while you’re there. It’s fantastic if you would do that.

We also have an app. We have the Scriptnotes app. You can download that and listen to all the back episodes going all the way back to episode one. Scriptnotes.net is the place you sign up for all those back episodes. It’s $1.99 a month. And our show this week is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week, another great outro by Matthew Chilelli. And, Craig, I will see you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [RSVP here for the April 25 WGAw screenings of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, featuring a Q+A with Bruce Joel Rubin moderated by John August](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=229), and [follow John on Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) where he will let you know if tickets are released for non-WGA members
* [Gawker Media Editorial Staff Welcomed by WGAe](http://www.thewrap.com/writers-guild-of-america-east-welcomes-gawker-media-editorial-staff/)
* [Scriptnotes, 193: How writing credits work](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-writing-credits-work)
* LA Times on [Ron Bass and his in-house team](http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/10/entertainment/ca-20955)
* The poster for [The Harvest](http://www.screenrelish.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/the-harvest-poster.jpg)
* [Meet Writer X](http://www.finaldraft.com/discover/videos/final-draft-writer-app-for-the-ipad/meet-writer-x)
* [The not-so-well-dressed screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2004/the-not-so-well-dressed-screenwriter) from johnaugust.com
* [Tom Vu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vu) and [Don Lapre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lapre) on Wikipedia
* [Stage32 discussion on iFilm Group](https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/iFilm-Group-iFilm-Ltd)
* [The Paris Gold Ring Scam](http://www.everywhereist.com/the-paris-gold-ring-scam/)
* [GLAAD’s 2015 Studio Responsibility Index](http://www.glaad.org/sri/2015/overview)
* [More on Internet Neologisms: Rage Quitting is a Thing](http://daily.jstor.org/more-on-internet-neologisms-rage-quitting-is-a-thing/) by Chi Luu
* [Kano is a computer you build and code yourself](http://www.kano.me/kit)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor 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/you-cant-train-a-cobra-to-do-that).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**John:** It’s all done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m The Kill List.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s gone, right?

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But god, I mean —

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, they can?

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Even something from 1996?

**John:** Even something from 1996.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

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

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

**John:** Indeed.

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s huge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** They made crack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

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

**Craig:** Prime is gorgeous.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** And it’s a lot of work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Good.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

**Craig:** No.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a dolly zoom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** You can’t pan up.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Never.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m Segue Boy.

**John:** Transition Boy.

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

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

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

**John:** Transitioning Boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, they were really —

**John:** It’s polio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Indeed.

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** 10%!

**John:** 10%. That’s savings.

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

**John:** That’s unbelievable.

**Craig:** Tell me more.

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

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Okay, bye.

Links:

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

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 190 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

190 episodes in, we are doing something for the very first time today. We are going to be looking at an entire screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a 111 Page Challenge.

**John:** It is. So this is a script called This Is Working. It’s by K.C. Scott. And back in episode 187, we looked at the first three pages of this script and we thought they were terrific. We also thought K.C. Scott was a woman. So we referred to K.C. Scott as a woman through the whole thing.

But he’s a guy. His name is Kurt. He lives in Oakland. His Twitter handle is @BlackSitcomDad. And I emailed him and asked him, “Hey, would you want to share with us your entire script so that we could talk about it on the air and talk about how a whole script works?”

So if I have done things properly, I have put this up the Friday before this episode aired so you guys could all read it and have this in your heads, as you’re listening to this podcast, so we could all discuss this script together.

**Craig:** And I know that there’s a fair chance that a lot of people will not have done their homework and will not have read it. But that’s okay, because I think we’re going to talk about some things that are specific to K.C.’s script but we’re also going to talk — I mean, does he like to be called K.C. or Kurt? I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s call him K.C.

**Craig:** Okay. I think we’re going to be talking about things that are specific to K.C.’s script. But we’re also going to be talking about things that are useful for anyone in terms of writing and what it means to make it in Hollywood and what do you do when you have a script and how do you approach fixing scripts. So it’s best if you’ve done your homework. If you haven’t, think about maybe reading the script and then listening to this in the car. But if you haven’t done your homework, don’t flip out.

**John:** Everything will be okay. And here to help us make everything even more okay is one of our very first guests on the show ever. This man created The Black List. Not the TV show, but the actual The Black List of like the best screenplays in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah. The less profitable Black List. [laughs]

**John:** That’s it. The increasingly profitable blcklst.com.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** He is also a former development executive, so he’s been on many sides of the table and read many, many scripts in his life. Franklin Leonard, welcome to the show.

**Franklin Leonard:** Hello everyone. Thank you, guys, for having me.

**John:** So Franklin joins us from New York City.

**Craig:** Did you hear, he sounded just like Bane there. “Hello, everyone. Hey, Batman.”

**Franklin:** I blame my microphone.

**John:** Yeah. So he’s recording on Skype on a little ear bud microphone. But we welcome him and welcome his opinions on this script. Because my hunch is that it was just the right script for us to have on the show, because there’s stuff that I thought was delightful about it, there’s also stuff that needed a lot of work and attention, and I think we can all learn a lot from this script.

**Craig:** I don’t plan on learning a damn thing.

**John:** Before we get started on the actual details of this script, I just want to talk through the kinds of people who read screenplays and sort of the different things that they’re looking for. Because, you know, we are readers looking at the script in the context of a podcast and trying to give advice to this writer. But there’s many different kinds of people in Hollywood who reads screenplays. And so let’s just quickly kind of go through who those kinds of people are.

So one place that a writer might want to read their script is an agency or a management company. In your guys’ experience, what are agents and managers looking for? If this script landed on their desk, what would they be looking for?

**Craig:** Franklin?

**Franklin:** I mean, look, I think with agents and managers, first and foremost, they’re running a business and their product is the writing talent that they represent. And so I think, you know, a critical calculation for them is can I sell this script, one. And two, is this script representative of the kind of work that can get this writer employed elsewhere, be it in film, in television. Like can I send this person into a room? Is this a script that if I send it out, people are going to be very excited about it and call me and say, “Hey, I have to meet with this person immediately, I have a project they would be perfect to write”?

I think that it’s a pretty clean calculus for them. Because even in cases where they’re just awed by the art of something, they are awed by knowing that other people will be as well and that that will eventually put money in their pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree with that. Let’s talk about the laziest agents and managers who I suspect probably comprise 90% of agents and managers. It’s just the way of the world and humans.

Lazy agents and managers will say, “Okay, do I know somebody that wants something like this?” “Can I sell this quickly?” “Do I know somebody that’s been asking for this sort of thing or buying this kind of thing?” “Is the topic hot?” They’re just thinking 10 feet ahead of them.

The best agents and managers are people who don’t worry about what the market is telling them that day but instead look at somebody and think, “I’m going to tell the market that this is where they should be.” And those are the agents and managers that are ideal. Granted they’re few and far between but every now and then, there’s this wonderful marriage between somebody who’s new and interesting and somebody who’s brave.

So if you are writing certain kinds of material, it’s okay to encounter the lazy agent because they’re a lazy dream come true. You’re writing a fighting robot movie, about vampires, and that’s what’s exciting at the moment. If you’re writing something like this script for instance, you are going to need somebody who believes in you and is willing to make the argument to people, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is different,” and that’s good.

**John:** Now, Franklin, the original incarnation of The Black List, it’s a list of the best screenplays picked by the people who are reading a lot of screenplays, largely people who are running ,or, you know, junior executives at development companies, they’re at studios, they’re producers. What are they looking for? If this script landed on their desk, how would it get there, what would they be looking for as they’re flipping through pages?

**Franklin:** Yeah. I mean, typically, it would get there via an agent or manager who called and said, “I have a new client, this is what the script is, I’d love to send it to you, I’m really excited about it, will you read it? ” You know, as a sample. Or it will be sent as a spec, you know, sort of sent out on day and date released to a number of different production companies or studios saying, “We’re selling this script, read it tonight, and then if you’re interested, you can buy it tomorrow.”

There’s actually a lot of overlap I think between going out with scripts in those two ways because sometimes you’ll have scripts that are not likely to sell but will still be framed in terms for being sent to a producer or to a financier and say, “Hey, this is a really exciting piece of material, you should read it immediately,” in the hopes that someone will decide to buy it the next day or in the weeks immediately following.

**John:** Yeah, sometimes, scripts end up there because someone else likes it. And so, a junior executive of this company liked it, they talked to their friend over at this company. Said like, “Oh, have you read the script? You should read the script.” So that pass-around is also a crucial factor as well, isn’t it?

**Franklin:** That pass-around is actually, yeah. Thank you for mentioning that.

The pass-around is actually really critical and that’s actually responsible for the birth of The Black List. It was me realizing as a development executive that a lot of the best stuff I was getting was not coming from agents and managers who obviously had a vested financial interest in convincing me to read the script, and was coming from people, you know, who I was having breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks with, who when you sit down and say, “What have you read that’s good lately,” they’re going to tell you honestly the stuff they love, not necessarily the stuff that they think their boss is going to buy or that they think is going to make money.

And I think that ultimately The Black List ends up being, at the end of every year, you know, a snapshot of all of those conversations about the things that are sort of being most traded amongst development executives.

**John:** Cool. Now in blcklst.com which is the site where writers can put up their scripts and have professional coverage, they can also have people read their scripts, you know. People who are members of blcklst.com can download their scripts, read their scripts and see what is out there in the town.

**Franklin:** Yup.

**John:** What are your professional readers of blcklst.com looking for if they’re reading one of these scripts? If K.C. had put this on blcklst.com and paid the money to have it read, what would that reader be doing?

**Franklin:** Yeah. Our readers are actually told explicitly not to consider the commercial prospects of a script in their evaluation of it. There is a brief section where you can talk about the commercial prospects and the qualitative portion. But in terms of evaluating that quantitatively, they’re told point blank, “Do not consider that.” They are reading screenplays as samples and they’re told to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how likely and enthusiastically they would recommend it to a peer or superior in the business.

So the website really does sort of depart from that same core idea of the annual list which is forget the financial component of the business for a minute, just what are the things that you’re reading that you just have to tell someone about, which I actually think is sort of the nature of subjectivity in art, right? Like when you see something amazing, you kind of want to share it. And we’re trying to capture that with our readers as well.

**John:** Great. Well, before we get into the details of this script, just tell us our sort of snapshot opinions of this script that we read. This is K.C. Scott’s This Is Working. Sort of our first impressions and sort of the overall framework of what we want to talk about when we talk to K.C. about his script.

Craig, do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, I loved it. I’ll just say flat out I loved it.

Here’s what I generally loved. I’m always saying to all the people that come and talk to us at our live events or write in when they say, “How do I get an agent? How do I get noticed?” Da-da-da-da-da. And I keep telling them, “Just express your unique voice. And if it’s interesting, they will come. If it is not, they won’t. But whatever you do, don’t copy because you won’t copy very well. And the people that are making the originals are here already.”

Well, K.C. has an original voice. K.C. is palpably intelligent and K.C. has also written a movie that is a character study that I haven’t seen before. It’s a character I literally have not seen before in this way, expressing this thing. It is arched. There is a tone to it that is reminiscent of — it’s kind of like an Oakland Wes Anderson. [laughs] I don’t know how else to describe it.

**Franklin:** I think that’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s easy to criticize the story and we can certainly get into it where it does get very kind of story-light and episodic. On the other hand, I could say the same for some Wes Anderson movies. There are times when you read a script and you think, “I’m not really sure this is going to bear that much criticism because I don’t think the person writing it would care,” in a good way, because they’ve expressed something that is true to them and unique.

So there are some areas here and there where I feel strongly that K.C. should make some changes and there are some areas where I want him to think and expand. However, in the whole, I thought this was terrific. And this is a script that I’m glad that this is our first one that we’re doing because I want people to read this script.

I think K.C. should be working in Hollywood right now. I think depending on the nature of K.C. and his temperament and what he wants to pursue, I think I could easily see him working on a TV show right now. And I could easily see him perhaps taking an assignment based on this work. This script itself would be an independent film.

So that’s my general snapshot-y vibe.

**John:** Yeah. I overlap a lot with you in terms of really liking the script, really loving the character who I thought was unique and new. And I think as we get into story, being frustrated at times that the story itself gets really familiar and not as special as the character he’s created. And I think he has the ability to create really great, unique, interesting moments, and I want to highlight some of these great moments as we start to get into them. The script is sort of existing in a no man’s land between — it feels like some really great single camera comedy, you know, TV characters are sort of like bumbling through a movie and not really quite able to take the reins of the movie that they’re in. I have some really specific concerns about the women in the movie and there’s some terrific insight, but sometimes the themes aren’t pushed quite enough.

I so much agree with you that I think K.C. should be working in Hollywood soon, and this script I think is going to be a great sample for him. But the better version of the script will be an even better version of showing what he can do.

Franklin, where did you come at with the script?

**Franklin:** I’m very similar. I think I’m probably a little bit more in John’s camp than I am in Craig’s. But there’s no question to me that K.C. has a voice. His voice is one that I very much enjoy. The characters, not only did I enjoy them, I identified with them in many ways which does say more about me than I think the script. And also there were lines that made me laugh out loud and for anyone that reads a lot of scripts, you know just how rare that is.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. Me too.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Franklin:** And there were a lot of lines that made me laugh out loud.

And I think Craig’s point about working in TV is a really good one. I can imagine K.C. writing for a TV show tomorrow and being valuable in a room, you know, whether it’s a show — for some reason, Brooklyn Nine-Nine kept coming up for me tonally. There was just very funny stuff that I could imagine him, if he can sort of dish out comedy like this on a consistent basis, he’s going to be an additive quantity to a writers’ room.

I actually felt like, you know, if it’s going to be Oakland Wes Anderson, and I think that’s an apt description, I actually wanted it to be a little bit more arched. I think that though the first three pages and really the first 30 odd pages set the tone nicely, I thought that tone receded somewhat in the back two-thirds of the script. And I would have liked to see more tone-setting with the script, so that I as a reader, producer, executive, agent, whatever, know exactly what I’m seeing on the screen rather than just this exceptional character work.

But I enjoyed it. I think it needs work. I think that it’s a good sample now that could be an exceptional sample pushed to where I think it can go.

**Craig:** And I would just add that the funny thing is that the less I like a script, generally the less I have to say about it. I could probably talk to K.C. about every single page and give him 12 notes on every single page. I don’t want K.C. to misunderstand me. I think that I could have him working on this for a long time and revise it for a long time to make it better for sure. There is a lot.

You can see that he is new. The generally scene craft isn’t happening yet. So you have scenes where — I call them ticker tape scenes where it’s just strips of dialogues. So if our folks are playing the home game, look at page five and six, they’ll see essentially just strips of dialogue.

That’s an indication that you haven’t really written a scene. You’ve written a conversation, which is fine for a sitcom, no-no for movie. Even if it’s a walk-and-talk , I need to feel — even if nothing is happening action-wise in the scene, I need it to be broken up so that you’re giving me something about them. I need to see changes and things happening with them. So there are scene work issues.

I have character issues actually outside of Byron who I think is really well-crafted. I have Amanda issues. But let’s get into all of it.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Let’s start with the characters because I think that’s what we all responded to. And the Byron character who we first met in the Three Page Challenge is this kind of unique character that I haven’t seen before. And I’ve loved sort of hanging out with him.

So Byron is our hero of our story. He as a protagonist I would argue he doesn’t necessarily protagonate as much as I would love him to, you know, grow over the course of the story. But he is a guy who is a talented illustrator who we sort of had a hint of this in the three pages but this became his real character definition. There are women who tell him what to do and he’s sort of just come to accept that he just does what these women in his life tell him what to do.

It’s set up very ably in the very first scene about the waffles and that becomes a factor throughout the whole story. We see, you know, his progression from this company to leaving the company, to finding an apartment, to his relationship with his girlfriend, ultimately leading us to moving back in with his mom in a way that I didn’t necessarily love. But I loved him.

If I had concerns it was with Amanda who the movie plays almost like a two-hander. It’s not a romantic-comedy. It really — it’s supposed to I think be Byron’s story. But she is the other main character and she reminded me of the Ilana character on Broad City. I don’t know if you guys watch Broad City.

**Franklin:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** And that she’s really verbal and really direct in ways that were wonderful and funny. And yet I had no belief that she existed before I saw her on page two.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I didn’t have any good sense of who she was or sort of why she was in this, what her movie would be if it wasn’t this movie.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. I agree with that. I think that Byron — well, first of all there’s a question, who is the actual protagonist of this movie? And I love scripts that make me wonder about that because I’m not sure if it’s Byron or Amanda.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** And you can argue either way because, you know, Byron is passive. He is defined by his passivity which I love by the way because I love anybody that gives the middle finger to the rules. And it was fun to watch. It was fun to watch him refuse to change. [laughs] It was fun to watch him exist as this thing that could not be changed despite everybody’s desire for him to change. it was, I thought, a very touching and true portrait of somebody living with Asperger’s syndrome, you know, and possibly autism. He was so clearly socially off and yet had this brilliant focus and a certain savantism which I thought was wonderful.

I think John you put your finger on my issue with Amanda. I really enjoyed spending time with her. I need to know what the deal is. I don’t think K.C. can get away with what he’s gotten away with.

Byron we understand has a life and a past. We start to learn about his past. We learn about it from other people. We learn about it from him. Amanda was born on the planet on page 3. And I don’t know what has she had, other boyfriends, what went wrong, why is she doing this job, what’s her problem.

I mean, there’s wonderful movies about two damaged people finding each other and attempting to make something work and failing and succeeding and failing and succeeding. And I want that here. But Amanda is currently not a fully realized character in the way that she must be if this is going to work properly.

**Franklin:** Yes. I completely agree. I mean, she feels more device than character. And not to sort of invoke the Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing but I do think it’s relevant here like you see it oftentimes with scripts usually written by men about a woman who is meant to, you know, reawaken their perspective on the world and motivate them to do something.

But, I do sort of like that here Byron doesn’t become motivated. He sort of becomes motivated briefly and then decides not to be. But she does feel more device than person whereas Byron feels like a wholly-rounded individual.

And I feel like K.C. was also trying to pull this thing where Amanda doesn’t want to talk about her past. She doesn’t like — her past isn’t of interest to her and that’s why we don’t get to know anything about her. But I think that the character and the scripts suffer as a consequence.

**John:** I hundred percent agree. I wrote down Manic Pixie Dream Girl also. But weirdly there’s sort of second Manic Pixie Dream Girl which is Rosa who shows up.

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** We see her earlier on, then she shows up later on and she’s like much more literally like a pixie. She’s like the tiny little fire plug. And she serves that function as well.

A thing I enjoyed late in the story was Amanda ultimately becoming so frustrated by Byron’s passivity that she hates herself from becoming this monstrous thing that she’s sort of becoming, that have to boss him around. And so she’s been this person telling Byron to stand up for himself this whole time. And finally she becomes this woman who’s controlling him that she doesn’t want to become. I think that’s a really interesting idea.

And I haven’t seen that before in a movie or certainly not in a movie with these kind of characters. And it wasn’t until that I got to that moment in Amanda’s character that I really believe like, “Oh, yeah, maybe there’s a movie here.” And this isn’t just a very long pilot to a TV show.

**Franklin:** Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned that because I didn’t see that coming either. And I think part of it is that we have this default assumption that, you know, our protagonist which I did interpret as Byron is the one who’s sort of morally right in the world. And so, you know, he’s dealing with his girlfriend who’s a little bit sort of demanding, he’s got this mother who’s really difficult that sort of bosses him around.

And they’re like, “Oh, this guy should sort of just be left to his own devices. He’s a good guy. He’ll figure it out.” And then the person who is supposed to be helping him figure it out is like, “No, you were insufferable. Get it together.” And that I did not see coming. And there is definitely something interesting there but I think it needs significantly further mined — it needs to be significantly more further mined in order to really work.

**John:** I want to get back to this idea of who’s the protagonist. Because the reason why obviously I identified Bryon as protagonist, he’s the first guy we see, we sort of see his struggle. We’re seeing things through his eyes. And Amanda sort of appears as an antagonist trying to cause him to change.

And the first change we see is when he decides to leave Jane and shows up at Amanda’s apartment. And that’s actually one of the moments I really loved is that like he doesn’t quite know why he’s there but he knows he needs to be there. That moment really worked for me. And I felt like, “Oh, and now our movie is starting. And now we’re going to start on this journey.”

And then we sort of spin our wheels for quite a long time. And ultimately it feels more like Amanda is the character who changes along the way.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I think that it does feel like wheel spinning unless you kind of go along for the ride of that there’s a bait and switch here because Byron actually never does anything. Amanda does everything. She really does, I mean, it’s true that we start with Byron on page one but Amanda is seen on page two. And she’s already peaking at his drawing.
And she essentially drives everything. She is the one that tells him what to do at work. She tells him to quit. She essentially draws his eye away from somebody else. She starts their business. She tells him what’s wrong with him. She argues with the real antagonist of the story I think which is Byron’s mother.

And ultimately we start to realize that the guy that we thought was the moral center is in fact a problem. And maybe he’s the antagonist. [laughs]

**Franklin:** I think if anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like stories that go ahead and play around with this stuff because if you can’t play around with it now when you’re writing your original screenplay, they’re never going to let you play around with it when they’re paying you. So you might as well do it now.

**John:** Let’s look at templates though. So, you know, obviously, the classic romantic comedy, when you look at When Harry Met Sally there you have two characters who, you know, are sort of entwined and they are each other’s protagonist and antagonist. Like they’re pushing each other towards places. And I honestly think this movie could go there.

As I was reading through it the first pass-through I really saw this more as like a Working Girl where I saw, you know, Byron being the Melanie Griffith character sort of like finally sort of coming into his own and standing up for what he believes and sort of showing what he was worth. So standing up to these people who are controlling him in his life. That ultimately doesn’t seem to be the movie that K.C. is interested in doing.

Or I sometimes wonder whether K.C.’s ability to just like write funny scenes and, you know, write these characters, he just sort of wrote them in this direction and we sort of ended up where we ended up.

You said, you know, Oakland Wes Anderson. I wrote down sort of Whit Stillman Comedy of Manners. And that these characters sort of existence in this slightly heightened world. I thought the advertising agency was arched in a way that felt more almost like that ABCs sitcom Better Off Ted. I didn’t sort of believe the universe of it.

**Craig:** All right. So there is the thing that K.C. I’m just going to insist on because that’s just wrong. There are things that are occasionally just wrong. So the ad agency is a big, big mistake. You have these characters that are pushed and we talked about this all the time in development if you are pushed you need something to push against.

First of all, his job is ridiculous, that’s not a real job. The fact that he thinks that people would want to see a hummingbird torn apart is insane.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So he’s mentally ill at that point in a way that I can’t get onboard with. He’s boss is ridiculous. The way the office runs is ridiculous. That’s starting to feel like Office Space. So like in Office Space, the office was ridiculous, our heroes were totally normal people struggling against this insanity. You can do one or the other.

And in this case I find that our characters are the kind of quirky, interesting ones. The work space must be grounded and real. It has to be and his job has to be real. And what’s his trying to do has to be real or this thing is just going to feel fake as F.

**Franklin:** See, I’m going to disagree actually. I just I think that it has to be more finally tuned if you’re going to do that. I think you can have a world where the environment is still eccentric and a bit skewed, it’s just that it’s a much, much higher tightrope. I think that that K.C. doesn’t really nail it.

But again, I mean, look there were things that amused me about it sort of coming out of the corporate world that actually didn’t feel that sort of crazy to me whether it’s the sort of yes men and women analysts, whether it’s sort of Pete, the guy who doesn’t really know how to run anything and is constantly asking his employees, “Okay, what should we do?”

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I’m on board with that. And I love the fact that he would site Steve Jobs all the time. That all felt real. What doesn’t feel real is that he’s 22 and also doing all that stuff. It’s the joke on a joke syndrome. At some point you start to feel like that’s not a real place. Everything is a goof, you know, even the details of the hummingbirds.

**Franklin:** Well, the hummingbird thing I just didn’t really see that at all honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah, you just need to —

**Franklin:** But the 22-year-old VP thing unfortunately that that doesn’t —

**Craig:** I didn’t. You know what, here’s the deal. Then that’s your one thing but then make him actually really brilliant. You can’t do the joke on a joke on a joke thing. You just can’t.

**Franklin:** You can’t have a 22-year-old who’s incompetent, who’s also, okay, that’s fair.

**Craig:** Citing Steve Jobs, who also asks everybody else what to do. Who also is talking about an insane actual campaign. You have to pick some places where you push against things otherwise there is nothing there.

**John:** Yeah, another example that came up a lot for me was Silicon Valley.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** If you look at Silicon Valley you have heightened characters in a heightened world. But it’s very carefully balanced so that it doesn’t just feel completely crazy pants the entire time through.

And here K.C.’s ability to create some really unique and interesting moments between his two main characters I think it’s sometimes being undermined by this heightened world he’s created around himself.

The other challenge I really had with the workplace set up was having Jane be his boss but not his boss. That felt just too convenient and you can sort of hear the sound effect or the needle scratch as she walked into the room. It didn’t feel true to me.
So I’m kind of fine having her be part of the universe. But the actual scene in which Amanda comes in and sort of saves the day and sort of does all the stuff and sort of makes everything possible felt way too movie and not nearly real enough.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I actually when I saw that Jane was his boss I went, “Oh, okay. This could be good.” But really what I then wanted again was some, you know, when people are sort of spiraling out you need somebody in the middle going, “What the hell is going on here?” You know, “Who is this woman? Why is this? Who is this woman and why is she here? And why are you talking to her?”

And Byron, you know, you should be zeroing in on this. It’s insane. And yet the woman actually comes up, this Amanda woman comes up with something that’s undeniably good that Jane is forced to accept. But Jane seems also nuts.

**John:** Yeah. So an argument on Craig’s behalf that Amanda is really the protagonist of the script currently is that there are many scenes that involve Amanda and one of the other women that don’t involved Byron at all which is strange. And some of the scenes are actually delightful. So I’m not suggesting that we cut them.

But it’s just I think this weird thing where you have like there’s scenes between Amanda and Jane where they’re having these sort of really specific discussions and like these really cool power plays or between Amanda and Byron’s mother. And they’re fascinating and I haven’t seen them quite before. And that’s what I liked it so much. But it felt they would land for me so much better if I believed that Amanda existed before page three.

**Craig:** I totally agree. That’s why I actually prefer her to be the protagonist of the movie. That’s the thing. Amanda could be spectacular here, you know, if I just had a little bit more. And if I understood — I need to understand why somebody is in a circumstance that the typical person would find extraordinary.

She says she’s a freelancer but we kind of pick up that she’s not really working much at all. She clearly doesn’t have much money. She is the sort of person that insinuates herself really aggressively into other people’s conversations and lives. These have all the hallmarks of a personality disorder.
And since we can see that Byron has all the hallmarks of a spectrum disorder, I’m in. I’m in. I just want to get more out about Amanda’s situation. I want to understand what’s going on here because where this could go ultimately is a really interesting anti-romance between damaged people and they’re damaged in a very modern way. [laughs]

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know how else to put it.

**Franklin:** But it’s interesting on that modern question too, right, like there’s no scene where Rosa is like I Googled her, here is who she is.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, nobody ever Google’s Amanda. Exactly.

**Franklin:** Right. But it actually just occurred to me that no one — like this woman just appears and she just shows up and is in everyone’s lives all the time. And no one says, “Is she on Facebook like what’s the deal with her?”

And if you’re going to do something in that world and again in sort of a contemporary world especially in San Francisco I feel like you need to either have an excuse for why that question doesn’t come up like though she’s a coder she’s rabidly anti-social media and like scrubbed her Google history, or you need to like address it and move on. Or have it be something that motivates the plot, come to think of it.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. Because when you have somebody, say, “Oh, yeah, I couldn’t find you anywhere.” “I scrubbed my social media history entirely.” “Oh, okay. Why?”

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** Well, if I wanted you to know why, I would put it on social media. But I’ve scrubbed my social media history, you see. It’s like there’s the mystery, you know. There’s got to be something going on here.

**John:** Yeah, but the minute we introduce that idea, you’re going to have to pay that off.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The minute the words are given to it.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But that could be great. And it could be lovely to see what that is. And clearly, if she is insinuating herself into his life at the restaurant, this is a pattern. This is something that she does before. And we should see her do it again over the course of this movie. We should see her sort of pick another Byron and change that other person’s life too. And that could be a great source of conflict.

I think my biggest frustration story-wise, I guess we’re really segueing into story and plot here, is I felt there wasn’t enough conflict between our main two characters. Once they sort of got their apartment, things are just kind of chugging along. And there’s little moments, but there’s not — I hate to use the word stakes, but it didn’t feel like there was a lot of challenges ahead. They lose their money because of the fight with the mom. But even that’s like not a very big deal.

A thing I think happens a lot of times with newer writers is they love their characters because who wouldn’t love Byron? And they don’t want to see their characters suffer. But your characters need to suffer. And it didn’t feel like K.C. was willing to put either of his, you know, two lead characters into quite enough of a predicament.

**Franklin:** Well, I mean, Byron is really never in a predicament, right? Like worst case scenario, even when he loses the money, we always believe that he can just go back to his mother who is wealthy and where his 30-something brothers still live. And Amanda, because we don’t know anything about her past, we don’t know whether there are any consequences to her being out but she seemed to be doing fine prior to her relationship with Byron. So, losing the money that she didn’t have isn’t really a loss either.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the stakes are going to be. I mean, this is definitely what we would call a low stakes movie no matter what the stakes are going to be. I’m alone again or I failed again, or I’m not going to change, I’m going to be stuck in a sort of depressing route. This is how a lot of smaller movies, well, we’ll call them art movies. I don’t know, I think all movies are art movies regardless. This is a low stakes movie, and that’s okay.

I enjoyed the fact that these two people rushed headlong into an idiot hipster fantasy. Because I, you know, like a lot of rational people, I find those to be amusing. [laughs] And of course, there’s a certain amount of almost Schadenfreude as you watch the idiot hipster fantasy start to disintegrate. But then, you also see that they’re fighting for it. Now, these two people are suddenly fighting for something, which was touching.

But I completely agree that there is currently no price for failure because our punitive protagonist, Amanda, didn’t have a life before this and there is apparently no life after this. I don’t know anything about her. It’s the biggest thing that I think K.C. has to work on.

**John:** You know, we often talk about want versus need. And in the case of these two characters, I have a hard time articulating what either of them wants and/or needs.

**Franklin:** I was just going to say that.

**John:** I can sort of apply my own sense of need to like where these characters need to sort of grow up. But, you know, if this were a musical, Byron would have his I want song. It would probably be really, funny. And it would probably be sort of self-defeating in a really charming way. You know, Amanda clearly seems really driven, but I don’t actually have a good sense of what her end goal is. So it becomes frustrating along those lines.

I also want to circle back to Craig’s diagnosis that Byron is somewhere on the spectrum. I didn’t feel that at all. I felt what was so fascinating about Byron as a character is that he was, you know, a pushed version of where I think a lot of American men are these days. And they’re just sort of like these big man-babies. They sort of never really fully grow up and never take ownership of their lives. And he was just a sort of extreme example of that.

Where I did notice, I think, of what Craig’s describing is Byron’s voice changes sort of based on situations. He could be really, really articulate in some cases, but more often, he’s like he is in the first three pages where he’s just like sort of kind of mumbling his replies to things. And I didn’t necessarily believe that it was the same character page-to-page based on the words he was using.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. I mean, my diagnosis of him, which is, you know, anytime you diagnose a character, you’re just guessing. And who knows.

**Franklin:** Do you mean because they’re not real people?

**Craig:** Probably. [laughs] That’s probably what it’s about. I’m not sure that any of you are real people either, frankly, so I don’t really know. But he has an extraordinary artistic talent. He tends to fixate on details in front of him. He is easily overwhelmed by things. He vomits at the prospect of having to, you know, change his routine. He seems socially awkward in all phases. And everyone around him is accustomed to taking care of him.

Now, this brings up another question for me for K.C., which is just how much of a genius is this guy, because he’s attracting people left and right. He is considered special by almost everybody. This is another area where I think grounding the workplace could be of great value to K.C., because if I understand that this is a guy that has a history of generating money for a company and succeeding for a company, then all of his weirdnesses and strangenesses are worth it.

Then I would believe that it’s okay that he walks into a room and sells them on this ripped up hummingbird because you know what, he’s done this before and then he was the guy that redesigned the Diet Coke can. Whatever it is, I need to know that he’s valuable and a genius, because I’m not quite sure why everyone is fighting over this chubby, passive — [laughs]

**Franklin:** You mean chubby Basquiat, scruffy Colin Powell and big —

**Craig:** Right, exactly, exactly.

**Franklin:** And my favorite, big boned Drake?

**Craig:** Yeah. That one’s great, big boned Drake. I mean, all of that stuff is so smart. I mean, this is why I love K.C. because he’s so smart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s just this palpable intelligence coming off of this thing. All the things we’re talking about now are things you can either learn or just grind out or whatever. You know, you can’t teach smart.

**Franklin:** No, no. And I also like the callbacks on the description thing are hilarious.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** I also think that the question of his genius and sort of why the company has him on board actually solves another problem which is the stakes question and the want/need thing. Okay, this is just a guy who’s a savant and is sort of like he works at this company and the company is milking him dry and he doesn’t believe in it. And he just kind of wants to go paint.

Then we understand that like he’s not the kind of person who can actually make a decision that’s in his own best interest. He’s got this job, it’s a fine job. He’s, you know, he’s sort of valued, but what he really wants and needs is to be doing something that he cares about, but he lacks the ability to actually make the step to do it. That’s interesting to me.

As is the dynamic of this sort of, you know, this guy who everyone’s obsessed with because he does generate amazing work who then has to step away from that because he wants to choose his own path. That’s a much more interesting conflict for me. And it also creates the possibility of conflict in the second and third act as the company tries to get him back into the fold. Maybe Rosa is sent in to bring him back. Maybe his mother is somehow connected to bringing him back.

You know, you don’t want to make it too plot-heavy, but at least then your low stakes movie has real stakes about who is this person and what is he going to do with this life, and what is he going to do with his extraordinary talent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If the movie is about his journey, if the movie is about the two characters’ journey, then I think you may want to steer away from that sort of plotting and really get back to the fundamental issue of like, you know, he refuses to change. And I love very late in the story she has a line, “You’re just this big squanderer of women’s lives.”

**Franklin:** That’s a great line. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great line. It’s a great thematic summation of sort of the frustration everyone feels about him. And at the same time, I get him. I understand like maybe he just kind of wants to sit in this room and paint. And like everyone has all this pressure for him to do other stuff. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And that’s kind of a great character too.

**Craig:** Well, the idea of the artistic squanderer of women’s lives is a — that’s a really interesting and time-tested motif. I’m thinking of the Scorsese segment of New York Stories and the notion of a tortured artist who burns through women until they inspire him, because he has to suffer to create. And of course, they are nothing more than fodder, although they don’t realize it at the time. And the cycle repeats.

There is something there. I mean, what we’re watching is essentially somebody saying, “I don’t want to be that. I’m different. I’m not going to be that for you.” But I don’t necessarily get the sense of what Jane does for Byron, because we don’t need — I mean, while Jane is clearly watching what he eats, I need to see that there’s a little more utility there for Byron.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, Jane is using him as an asset. She’s watching an asset. And she may care about him the way you care about, you know, a pet but not as a boyfriend.

**Craig:** But I also want to know how that started too. In other words, if we’re getting to a place where Amanda’s saying, “I’m not going to be the next in this long list of people for you,” then I need to know how Jane fit into that list. Did Jane inspire him? Did she discover him? Was she the one that found him in a gallery and put him into a job? And he says, “She hired me,” but I don’t understand like what did she? How did that love affair begin? How did it go wrong?

It’s fun to watch somebody say, “I don’t want to end up like the two of you, but I feel like that’s exactly what you’re doing to me right now is pushing me in a place where I end up like her. And then, you just go on to the next one.” There is something really interesting there, but again, it really hinges on us getting why Amanda is different, because she is.

**John:** The last big story point I want to hit from my side is the lack of sex in the movie, because I felt like Byron was this weirdly asexual creature. And it felt weird that by the end of the movie, I’m not quite sure they ever had sex. And that feels strange for me for this kind of movie.

**Franklin:** I think they had sex —

**John:** It’s clearly R-rated.

**Franklin:** In between the two periods, like at the very end it just jumps forward and they’re all living in his mother’s house. They had sex in between those two periods.

**Craig:** Yeah. When he texts her and says, “Put your pants on,” I presume that this means at some point they’ve had sex. But, yeah, it was a weird choice. I noticed it, too, and I didn’t quite understand it. I didn’t also understand why you would have a scene where somebody goes, they have the crazy I have to kiss you thing and then they don’t have sex. That’s not how —

**Franklin:** Oh, no. They definitely have not had sex when he texts her to put her pants on because his mother asked directly about it.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Franklin:** And she —

**Craig:** Oh.

**Franklin:** And she’s like, “I am amazing in bed but your son doesn’t know.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. Yeah. So what is that?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know what that is.

**Franklin:** I don’t know what it is either.

**John:** I don’t think it’s helping, because I think within Byron’s man-babyness, we don’t actually want him to seem like he is, you know, literally a special needs, you know, character. I mean, you don’t want to sort of make him so childlike that you’re like, “Okay, now everything is just weird and creepy.” You want him to be able to have something to him.

**Franklin:** Maybe this is a film set in the asexual movement.

**Craig:** Well, we would need to know that. I mean, that is a thing. I mean, that’s very modern. And we would need to know that. And that would have to be a thing. But that almost feels like it deserves its own movie. I mean, I agree with John. I found that very odd. I particularly found it odd when he came to her place and kissed her. And then she kissed him back. At that point, that’s the scene.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s where you have sex now.

**Franklin:** No, it’s when you go to a diner and talk, come on.

**Craig:** Well, but, right. I mean, the thing is it’s such a great cutaway to — like she says, “We need a break. Yes, are you hungry?” But they should , they kiss. It’s only been two days, they kiss and then they should have sex. We don’t have to watch it, there’s ways to do it.

**John:** Yeah, I would argue against it. We don’t necessarily have to have sex at that moment, but whatever the first moment they have sex is, that’s going to be a really good scene. And so to not give us that scene is crazy.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where adults have sex, I think. [laughs] But regardless, whatever, I think it would be really funny for them to have so that we hear them having sex and the next shot is then in a diner eating huge waffles. That’s a huge laugh. That’s a huge laugh, much bigger than the laugh now, because we would understand that not only — they’ve now satisfied both major desires. [laughs] And it would just be very funny.

**Franklin:** But I actually think you want to see these two characters, you know, not actually the actual intercourse, but I think you want to see what their dynamic is at this highly intimate moment between the two.

**John:** Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, and you can play that out that way as well. But if we’re going to do a modern love affair, this is the — I mean, we talk about, I give this criticism all the time. So I’m sent comedy screenplays all the time and half of them, when I send back, I just say, “This is a ’90s script.” This is a 2016 script as far as I’m concerned. Like I got to give K.C. a ton of credit. This thing feels so right now. And so I really loved how that was working. And I’d love to see how the right now of their sexuality works. And this is really on point.

**John:** Yeah. So we’re not going to have time to get to all of our little page notes because I circled a whole bunch of little things, but I thought maybe we’d flip through pages and as we found stuff that we really loved or things to think about, we could just highlight and flag some of those moments. Sound good?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** All right, from the very start. I flagged just “Jane’s car. Jane drives. Byron’s in the passenger seat, still drawing. They’re both dressed for work.” We’re still on page 1. A little bit more detail that shows us what dressed for work looks like. I just want a little bit better sense of who these characters were so I could picture them in my head. So, is he the kind of guy, like what does Byron dress like? If I saw an image of what he was like at the very start, I’d have a better, more concrete version of who Byron is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Flipping?

**Craig:** Yeah, flipping. I mean, just a similar thing on page 2. When I meet Amanda, I need to know more that she’s white and 30.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Well, that was actually another thing that I mentioned. And it was definitely something that I noticed immediately is that every single character is described in terms of their racial backgrounds. Which I think ended up having value down the line, but it was jarring the extent to which it was always parentheses white something. So even the waitress is white, perky.

**Craig:** Well, that was my fault. I asked for that.

**John:** That’s Craig’s fault.

**Franklin:** Well, there you go.

**Craig:** In the Three Page Challenge because he didn’t know — that was one of the few characters, well, I don’t know. It was all on Page 1 and 2. I kind of wanted to know, I mean because the waitress is talking about African-Americans and diabetes, I was like, “It’s a totally different vibe if she’s white. It’s a totally different vibe if she’s black.”

**Franklin:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** You know, I needed to know. I actually have no problem with this. I feel like this script was like racially true.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That it felt like a script where not — people weren’t theorizing about race or being like really weird about it, but they’re actually being a like race the way that people are in reality about it.

**Franklin:** Don’t tell Nellie Andreeva.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** Oh, who’s — what, why?

**John:** There was a Deadline article this from Nellie Andreeva and everyone tweeted at it saying like, “Oh, you have to have Malcolm on to respond to it.

**Craig:** What was it about?

**John:** A thing I learned this week is sometimes the best response is just not to respond at all.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Well, listen man, I had a guy call me a liar on something about I don’t know — don’t even get me started. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. That’s why I’m not getting you started.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to get to page 6. There’s a moment where Amanda and Byron are both walking and she’s like, faster. Like I’m here at my coffee shop. And it was this moment of really false urgency. It sort of felt like they were on a bus and she’s getting off her stop, but there’s no reason why she needed to go in there right then. So, if you’re going to create a reason why the characters need to stop talking in that moment, I need to believe that reason. So it could be that she had a phone call scheduled at a certain time or there’s some reason why they couldn’t stand there forever. And I didn’t believe it the moment on page 6.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be the ticker tape scene for sure —

**John:** Yeah. On page 7 is the first time we’re entering into the PET CORP conference room and I wrote “sitcom.” And just the way the dialogue played and sort of the pithy one liners back to things. Like I was suddenly in a sitcom and it wasn’t a sitcom I loved.

**Craig:** Yeah I agree, this is my whole tonal issue with PET CORP. And also, I would say to K.C., this is an area where you want to do a pass through of this thing where you don’t think like a writer. Now you say to yourself, “I’m directing the movie. Okay, I’m directing the movie.” Maybe you won’t, but think you are. Now, how visually do I want to do this? How do I want to make this interesting for people? I mean, you’re going to cut from a dead shot of Byron on the street, to a dead shot of a conference room?

No, no, no. Let’s be a little cinematic here. You could do it, it’s cool. Spend a little time. There’s other stuff to cut in the script anyway. So, you want to look at your transitions. This is just simple craftsmanship, how you get in and out of places. Every introduction of a place or a person needs to be its own mini movie. Really think that way about all this stuff.

**Franklin:** That advice about a pass, specifically focused on transitions and character introductions is incredibly good advice. Like every writer should take that time before showing their script to anyone.

**John:** Yes, on page 11, Amanda says, “This is how people get kidnapped on 24, no, thank you.” 24 is just a too dated reference. You know, I like her idea that she doesn’t want to come with them, but 24 felt just weirdly a time machine.

**Franklin:** Yeah, you could use a more dated reference and have it work weirdly or a contemporary one, but 24 is sort of in that valley where it’s just like the script was written while 24 was still on the air and you’ve, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. So, like Colin Powell will be acceptable forever and [laughs] Basquiat is acceptable forever. Actually, I frankly avoid current. If you can avoid current or near current references, you’re always better off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Drake will be around forever so it’s fine.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Drake is endless.

**Craig:** Just killer. That’s —

**John:** He’s the alpha and the omega. Page 16. Here is a moment that’s stutter stop, I had to read it a couple of times. So, Rosa is saying to Byron, “Actually, one of the directors had a conflict, so they bumped it up. The meeting starts in 90 minutes.” Byron pukes again. Amanda bursts through that back door. “There you are. You realize the meeting starts in two hours?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, Rosa had information that Amanda didn’t have. And so Amanda is saying old information but as an audience, we’re just confused. Like, when does the meeting start? Do I care when the meeting starts?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I actually, what I wanted there was Rosa goes — so Byron says the meeting starts in two hours. Rosa says, “Actually one of the directors had a conflict, so they bumped it up. The meeting starts in 90 minutes.” He pukes, we laugh. Amanda burst through the back door. “There you are. You realize the meeting starts in an hour?” “What?” “Yeah, they called. They just bumped it up. One of the directors — ” [laughs] I mean like I want —

**John:** That’s escalation. Comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I want — and then he pukes again. I get that, you know. Yeah, you don’t want to kind of unsharpen your pencil there.

**John:** On page 17, Amanda asks, “Are you too young to have seen The Godfather?” Rosa says, “I’ve seen episodes…” That’s a great, great line. Amanda says, “For Christ’s sake.” No, no, no, don’t undercut the joke with a line back. That’s like, “I’ve seen episodes…” Let that be the joke and let’s move on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think as you’re doing that pass for, you know, character introductions and for transitions, also do a pass through to say like what lines can I cut after jokes, so that we can keep moving on and that’ the kind of thing that you’re going to cut.

**Craig:** I’m a big fun of just penciling in reactions. You know so, “I’ve seen episodes…” Amanda stares at her. Wow. You know, anything.

**Franklin:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Then I understand the rhythm of the scene and then, you know, she’s about to say something when, “I’m okay, Rosa, you should probably,” bwah or he pukes right then and there, whatever it is. But John is right, you don’t want to do that.

**John:** Yeah, on page 20, hopefully this scene will not exist anymore, but there’s a lot of numbers and prices. Numbers and prices if they’re in dialogue, it’s usually helpful to spell them out rather than have digits for them because that way you can actually control what is being said. And people just don’t make weird random choices for how they’re going to say things.

**Craig:** Yes, I mean, so, what we have here is essentially four, four-and-a-half pages where he’s doing something we’ve seen before. We have seen this scene before where somebody starts pitching something and it seems to be going south and then they pull it out with some little brilliant twist. And that’s great presuming that things are a little more grounded here in the office. It’s just too long. It can be compressed down for sure.

**John:** And we’ve also seen evidence of the script that Byron can write completely new scenes that are unlike anything we’ve seen before, so, why give us a scene that’s kind of like the scenes we’ve seen before?

**Franklin:** I also think that for moments like this, they need to not be super on the nose, but they need to talk about the theme of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** I mean I keep going back to the slide projector presentation in Mad Men and how this idea of nostalgia and the sort of longing for home becomes an undercurrent for all of Mad Men. And I feel like if you’re going to do something like this, like hummingbirds and all this stuffs feels very arbitrary. And the sort of Canadian Snowbird thing, just, it feels irrelevant. And it’s tacked on. And I love to see something that actually like talks about and that sort of elucidates who Byron is and then the reaction from Jane and Amanda, we can learn more about them as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. There are times when you can be thematic and not on the nose. Let us figure it out or let us just — even if we don’t figure it out, just osmotically, we’ll start to sense that there’s something emerging here.

**John:** From Byron’s point of view, if the product is something about like taking control of your life or like, you know, you know, taking ownership of things, you know, there’s probably a way you can, you know, capture some aspect of what is the theme.

**Craig:** You could also like, if for instance, the problem is that that hummingbirds, we design this thing that has to move around but they don’t want to move around. They want to sit still. The hummingbird’s fine, it’s the thing that we designed around it that needs to change. You know what I mean?

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like somehow or another, he doesn’t even understand that he’s talking about [laughs] himself but he is. He’s making a plea to his girlfriend to leave him alone but in doing so — and then Amanda backs it up, and then Amanda comes later to kind of regret this philosophy. It’s that kind of vibe that I think could be really useful there. Yeah.

**John:** On page 26, Byron introduces his cousins. “Amanda, this is Jane and her cousins Grace, Faith, and Yunjue.”

[laughs]

**John:** “They threw in a Yunjue. Cool.”

**Craig:** So funny. I laughed at that.

**John:** It’s such a great line, I love that moment.

**Craig:** That killed me.

**John:** Then through the rest of the scene, though, those cousins stick around. Don’t call them cousin 1, 2 and 3 anymore —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just say like, Jane, cousin one, Yunjue. Even if you put their names in parentheses, just so we could keep them straight.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Because the cousins never show up again. So I think in that level it’s fine to keep labeling them as cousins, but give them their specific name.

**Craig:** Yeah. On page, middle of page 27, Amanda has a long run and that felt not up to snuff for the other stuff that K.CK had done. It was a bit forced and I — and it had that kind of rambly, I’m going to give an impromptu speech. It felt written and so much of the other stuff didn’t. So, that one probably — it would be better if it were shorter. Amanda works really well when she gives little tiny bullets.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** So here is a great tiny Amanda bullet on page 28. So, this is just Jane and Amanda having a conversation. “I do my best to make him see he has the tools to really do well for himself if he pulls it all together…” Amanda says, “Well, it’s obvious he adores you.” “Is it obvious?” “I mean. Sure.”

**Franklin:** Right.

**John:** And so it was, I mean period, sure period. It’s so telling, and it’s so encapsulates where those two women are coming out at that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So good.

**Franklin:** The other one that I have also is he and Jane are living together and does she have no idea that his mother is filthy, filthy rich?

**John:** Yeah. I guess it only comes up when he finally checks his bank balance and that’s when he explains that there is this trust. I actually like the discussion like, you know, “So you’re a trust fund kid.” It’s like, “No, no. I just — ”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. And he starts defining what it means to be a trust kid. There was something to — again, this is why I started to diagnose Byron because he is unaware that he has six hundred some odd thousand dollars to his name. And didn’t even know how to login to the site to see it. And that feels — that is such a specific choice to not even know. Forget like, “I’m uncomfortable with it. Yeah, it’s something like this but I don’t really know.” No, he has no clue. That is so infantilized and it should be maybe more of a red flag than it is, you know.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean it’s kind of shocking.

**John:** So here’s a great thematical speech that Jane gives. And I think it’s fun to look at the movie from Jane’s point of view, because clearly she’s puts a lot of time into Byron and sort of like keeping his shit together. Jane says on page 55, “Listen to me. There will always be someone to tell you that you’re special and quirky and deserve more than you have, and that if you burn your life to the ground, you’ll have something new and better in its place. But there are only so many of us who will tell you the truth, you’re a child, and there’s nothing rare or special about children.” It verges on being overwritten, but it’s such a clear statement of where she’s coming from and if I could feel those kind of moments from the other characters in the movie, there would really be something special here.

**Franklin:** I actually really liked that line. I actually didn’t think it was overwritten, because I sort of view Jane as like sort of type A. Like she’s been mentally preparing to have this, to give this speech to him through some significant part of their relationship, I feel like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** And it’s also why, you know you’re also sort of surprised by the fact that, you know, not too much later, you’ve got Amanda basically being like, “Jane is right. You are a child and there is nothing very special about you,” because you’re setting up this idea again, that sort of Byron is this misunderstood guy who’s dealing with this woman who doesn’t treat him special and whatever and then you can completely invert that by the end of it and you’re like, this is a guy who basically moves his girlfriend into his mother’s house and that’s the end of the movie.

**Craig:** I half loved the speech and half had a huge problem. Love the front half because that is a great summation of what temptation is. The second half, I had a problem with because it essentially negates their relationship entirely. I have no idea why she’s interested in being with this guy, why she even has a problem, why she even tried to defend their relationship. She’s literally saying, “There’s nothing rare, special about you. Everybody is telling you you’re special and quirky and deserve more than you have, they’re all not right. You’re just…you’re nothing.”

And that’s a mistake. And this goes back to my point about why was Jane with him in the beginning? And why is Jane defending this? If Jane is kicking him out of the house before he can leave, I get this. If Jane is fighting to keep this relationship, then I want her to essentially articulate, “And you are special and quirky, but you don’t deserve more than you have. This is exactly what you deserve. This is the best you will ever get with me. And if you burn your life to the ground, you won’t have something new and better in its place.” Then I would get it. But this second part of it rang false for me.

**John:** I hear you there.

**Franklin:** That’s a good note.

**John:** Page 63, we go into a printing shop and we meet Emeka who’s going to show up in later scenes. But throughout this whole page, we don’t know and Emeka is an ambiguous enough name, I didn’t know if that’s a man or a woman. And it changes how you sort of read the scene. And so ultimately we’re going to learn that it’s a man, but that needed to be established right from the very start.

**Craig:** Wait, Emeka is a man?

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really? Oh.

**Franklin:** I think it technically is pronounced Emeka. I only know that because of Emeka Okafor, the basketball player.

**Craig:** Oh, Okafor. Great.

**John:** Okay. Except that, the reason I say Emeka if you actually look at how his name is spelled in the dialogue below, it shows up a couple different ways. There’s Emekea.

**Franklin:** Oh, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, that may be a…that’s a typo I think.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a typo twice.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Anyway, just let us know that it’s a man because it helps us out a lot. Give us some visual description.

**Craig:** Now, this scene by the way, I remember thinking, “Okay, here’s a scene that needs to have a point,” and it’s not that it’s pointless right now, it’s halfway there. This is a place where I go, “Something’s wrong with Amanda.” And I want Byron to see [laughs] that something’s wrong with Amanda and I want Amanda finally at this point, an hour into the movie, to admit that she’s not just haha funny confrontational. She has a problem. There’s something wrong with her.

**John:** I think she got released from some sort of mental facility quite recently. I think there’s something — I think that she could be rapidly, you know, bipolar. It’s something that could be really fascinating and really wrong about her.

**Craig:** There’s something there. Yeah.

**John:** I would love to see — I’d also love to meet those character who knew her from before because it feels really strange like, why do you have no friends?

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] No friends. No family. No life.

**Franklin:** Yeah, she does have her own apartment, though.

**Craig:** I will tell you that if at the end of the movie it turns out that Amanda is his invisible friend and it’s a Shyamalan twist.

**Franklin:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You wouldn’t have to rewrite much, I mean that’s…and that’s a bad sign.

**Franklin:** I actually thought that was where we were headed for a while —

**Craig:** A bad sign. A bad sign. Yeah.

**John:** I really love the moment on page 80, with Byron and Rosa. And Rosa showing up there and Rosa has this long speech, which is I kind of believed, which is basically like, you know, she’s just sort of fascinating and intrigued and she’s a little bit Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but I loved that character coming in at that moment. And if I really understood Byron and Amanda before then and believed them, her entering into the picture could be really fascinating. So I dug Rosa when she comes back in.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was good. And it was made plausible by the fact that she was high. So, they’re wasted and that works. This is one area where I want K.C. to really think carefully. When we watch Byron start to fall for Rosa, in the way that he fell for Amanda, the same way and then he kisses her, we all I think in the audience if we’re watching this movie go, “Oh, no. Oh no.” It’s not just that he’s just cheating on this girl. It’s that we realize that his interaction with Amanda isn’t special, that she thinks it is and it’s not.

He is that guy that falls in love every day. It’s like a twilight zone episode. It’s chilling and I think it’s traumatic and K.C. runs backwards from that conflict as fast as he can. And I think that’s a huge mistake because we want Byron be held accountable there and this is really cutting to it where Amanda has to suddenly realize, “Oh, no. I’m not special. This is just what he’s…” It’s like that moment in Glengarry Glen Ross, they just like salesmen. You know?

**John:** I mean, in many ways I think that’s pointing towards what it is like for these two characters is like Amanda interjecting herself into a situation. That’s what Amanda does, and so we need to see — we see her do it at the very start. We need to have a sense that she did it before then and she’s going to keep doing it.

Byron is the guy who whenever some woman will come in and sort of take care of him, he will gravitate towards that woman because that’s what he does. And that can be the question of the movie is like, “Can these two characters stay together when their basic natures will always try to pull themselves apart?”

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, and similarly, just as you have Rosa coming in as Byron bait, is there somebody else that’s Amanda bait. I mean, that’s an interesting idea here. You want to — this is where, I mean, and I was like, “Okay, great.” It’s page 82 and this is where the conflict should begin to emerge. We should start hitting the bell because we’re entering into the final lap. But then K.C. backs away from it entirely and the balloon deflates and it’s the worst time in a script to do that.

**John:** Here is a possibility to consider. It’s like maybe Rosa can be sort of both of their projects. So essentially, pushing a little bit further than how it is currently in the script where Amanda sees Rosa having a problem. Like, she’s in a terrible relationship or whatever. And so, she intercedes and pulls her out of that relationship. And sort of brings her to the apartment. And then, of course, Rosa becomes this center and the focus for Byron. That might be an interesting way to sort of like, they both have a — there’s a love-triangle aspect there that could be great.

When we get back to Byron’s mother’s house, I just felt like the movie was trying to wrap itself up and didn’t kind of know what it was doing.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, I don’t think going back to Byron’s mother’s house would be where we want to end up in the version of the movie that we think can happen.

**Craig:** I mean, I will say that I thought it was very brave. And for that reason, I liked it. It’s the kind of ending you talk about. Now, you go into a test screening, this ending will kill you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this isn’t a movie designed for test screenings clearly. And it’s shocking. I mean, in terms of like a writing sample, it’s the craziest like weird horror movie ending. So I kind of loved how brave it was. The problem I think is that we’re not quite sure what to think at the end and maybe that’s okay, but I wouldn’t necessarily dismantle this. There is something fascinating about it.

**John:** I think there is something fascinating about going back to the scene of the crime. Basically, like, how did Byron get to be so messed up and just see what that is is potentially great. And for him to make the choice to sort of go back into that place is great. But maybe then it’s shorter than where we actually are, because I feel like we’re back at that house for a long time and I didn’t necessarily believe how Amanda fits back in that. It just felt like a new little movie was starting and was like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Oh, but we’re kind of done with this movie.”

**Franklin:** I also didn’t understand the dynamic in that house. It just seemed so utterly preposterous to me that it felt either insufficiently described to be the scene of the crime. Like I don’t understand how Byron ends up as Byron having grown up in that house.

**Craig:** I agree. Yes, yes, and I think that that’s a mistake. I don’t think there should be siblings. I think that this feels like such mama’s boy story. And mama’s boys or mama’s boys because mama has one boy, not three or four or I think one of these is a girl. I can’t remember.

**Franklin:** I think it’s all boys.

**Craig:** Oh, they’re both boys?

**John:** I think it’s all boys.

**Craig:** Okay, yeah, so I thought that that was a mistake and I didn’t get anything from the siblings that mattered anyway. But I think part of what doesn’t work about the end is that it involves Amanda whom we don’t yet understand. But there is an interesting story of two — a woman coming to rescue a man-child. And then we start to realize, oh, she’s a woman-child. And they’re both children and then they both end up back with a mommy. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** It’s kind of fascinating but I need to know where Amanda came from if I’m going to believe this ending.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Franklin:** I also think we need to know more about the mommy in that case, in that dynamic too. Because I think she is very much presented as a device right now as well.

**Craig:** But she’s hysterical —

**Franklin:** Oh, she’s amazing.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, the way that K.C. described her is wherever she sits it looks like a throne.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I saw her immediately. Like I didn’t need — I could draw you a picture of her.

**Franklin:** Totally agree.

**John:** Yeah, she’s doesn’t need to move quickly ever.

**Craig:** And the flowing, whatever the shawl.

**Franklin:** The shawl.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s like, “I got it.”

**Franklin:** Which Amanda actually specifically mentions.

**Craig:** I know [laughs] It’s so great. And I got to give K.C. a lot of credit. The scene between Amanda and the mom is a — here’s where K.C. just has a natural gift. K.C. understands what is said between what we say.

**Franklin:** Yes.

**Craig:** He’s really good at that. And that confrontation was very well done. It was the kind of thing that actors would love to do, because it’s tactics. John and I did the episode about conflict. This is a quiet, silent fist fight. And he really does it well. So that’s why I know that he can do this. The other, I mean, look, he picked a very whimsical, indie-flowing structure, la-la-la kind of thing to do here as a movie. So no one is going to buy this script and make it at a major studio, never in a million years, right? Somebody might fund this and make it as an independent which I think would be really cool. But we’ve always said on the podcast, the goal with scripts like this isn’t that somebody buys it and makes it at Warner Bros. The goal is somebody reads this and goes, “I want to represent you.”

**Franklin:** Yup.

**Craig:** “I want to hire for this. I want you to meet some people.” You tell me Franklin, and I know you can’t predict these things, but I think that other than the, yeah, the support we’re giving him here on the show that he would do very well on The Black List website.

**Franklin:** I think he would. I think that the script needs to — he needs to make all the adjustments that we’re talking about. Like, I think that, because even in these sort of indie free-flowing scripts, the best versions of them are ones that bring the level of sort of psychological study and focus that the scene between Amanda and Byron’s mother but they bring it to every single scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Right? And that deliver the kind of like “every seat she sits on feels like a thrown” to every character introduction. And I think if he can bring that kind of quality work to all aspects of this script, the office space, how the third act evolves if we’re calling it a third act. Then yes, I think this is absolutely the kind of script that does well on The Black List. By the way, I think it’s the kind of script that done — the best version of it is the kind of script that people pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** That people are quoting in offices like, “Oh, did you read that script? Oh, my good, the big boned Drake line is hilarious.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**Franklin:** Like these are things that you actually do. You sort of quote, you dialogue check this kind of work. I just don’t think it’s all the way there yet. And I actually think that K.C. is best served by going back and doing like a heavy — not a heavy rewrite but like a really focused scene-by-scene rewrite so that every scene is written at the quality that the best work is.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk about some specific advice for K.C. This script now exists in the world for lots of people to see. We’ve had this discussion. He’ll have some exposure, you know, people reading this script based our talking about this script. What would be our advice to him for what his next steps are? Craig, what do you think his next steps are in terms of pursuing a writing career? Right now he’s living up in Oakland, what do you tell him to do?

**Craig:** Well, we’ve kind of stepped in to his puddle here. I don’t think we can ignore what we just did. So if I were him, my next step would be to contact us and then ask us, “Can you help me with this?” And I would say, yeah. I would love for K.C. to come down and there are a couple of people that I think, you know, we could try and figure out if he could meet and might be interested in taking him on maybe a manager or if he doesn’t have an agent maybe find him an agent or have an agency read the script and maybe meet some people that might just give him some general advise. I’d love to know about him first what his situation is, I mean, his Twitter handle is BlackSitcomDad.

**Franklin:** Which by the way I loved and even just on the cover page alone I was like, “All right. I want to like this.

**Craig:** [laughs] So cool. But is he actually a father? Does he have a family? Are they situated in Oakland? What’s going on up there? What’s his job? How does he make his living? What’s his flexibility? All that stuff that we would need to find out. I would urge him to go on The Black — Franklin, can you just give him — can’t you give him like three free months?

**Franklin:** Yeah, I’m happy to hook him up with three free months and three free reads. But with one caveat, which is I do think it needs a rewrite.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. No, for sure, yeah.

**Franklin:** I think for his benefit. And, you know, I’m uncomfortable saying this but it’s like, if you are an agent or a representative or manager or somebody listening to this podcast, you will read this script and there will — I think you will have a similar reaction to what we’ve already had. And you will definitely see the talent here. I think K.C. is probably — it is best for him if he does a rewrite on the script before he goes aggressively seeking that representation.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And I was really encouraged by the fact that he, you know, incorporated some of the notes that John and I had from the first three pages. I could see that happening. I do think he needs to rewrite as do we all, right? I mean, a first draft is a first draft.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know what draft this is here but it’s the first draft as far as I’m concerned. So, yes, a rewrite. But once he’s kind of gone through and gotten this a little more down the line towards polished, I think he should put it on The Black List. I think it will get some good attention there.

**Franklin:** And when he does, it would be for free. Here’s the other thing I’d say —

**Craig:** Nice.

**Franklin:** And I think this is something that like is maybe a broader conversation. I’m sure you guys have discussed it before. It takes a heck of a lot of courage to allow someone to do this with your script.

**Craig:** Huge.

**Franklin:** And I think it’s the kind of courage that you see reflected in the writing and the choice of subject matter. And I think it speaks incredibly well of his potential future to be a risk-taking writer, both in terms of his career and how he chooses to go about it. Which for me, as somebody who used to work on the sort of producing financier side and was once an agency assistant, it’s something that I think that all people working in the industry desperately want to see because those are the people that end up doing things that we all want to be associated with.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, my enthusiasm for K.C. basically turns on this. It’s less about, “Oh, he’s written a script that is perfect or 80% of the way there.” My enthusiasm is based on what I see is a very high ceiling for him because I would much rather read a script like this which needs a lot of work but indicates inherent talent than I would a script that is just perfectly crafted and all the nuts and bolts are screwed in tightly and it’s whatever.

**Franklin:** Are you saying you don’t want to read another Taken rip-off?

**Craig:** I haven’t read any of them. [laughs]

**Franklin:** Congratulations. That in and of itself is an accomplishment.

**John:** Yeah, see, that’s a luxury that we have, Franklin. So we don’t have to read scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s the nice thing. And I would say that this is where like the lazy manager will go, “Well, if it were another Taken, I could sign…” right? But the smart manager will look at this guy and say, “Here is a diamond in the rough.” And those don’t come along very often. And we don’t know what will happen here. There’s a lot of diamonds in the rough that never turn into diamonds in the not rough.

**John:** So my question for K.C. and, you know, what I would talk about with him when I talk with him because I will talk with him at some point is we described him both as like, well he could get staffed on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Blackish or he may be the Oakland Wes Anderson. And those are two different people. And you shouldn’t try to do both. I think if you try to do both, you’re going to not succeed in doing either one of those especially well.

If he perceives himself as a filmmaker, that’s awesome. And then this is a script that maybe gets into Sundance Labs. You have that whole route ahead of you. Trust me, I have done a lot of Sundance Labs. We would be delighted to have a script like this that has an interesting voice, has interesting things to dig into. That would be fantastic. And I can totally see that working.

I don’t staff TV shows and I certainly don’t staff half-hour shows. But I got to think that if you were reading through a lot of samples, if you read this sample, you’d be like, “Wow, this guy is kind of pretty good. And he might be a right person for our show. Now, does he have any real experience, you know, working in a room, doing all that stuff? Maybe not but I might have a meeting with this guy because he seems interesting, he seems good.”

And so, again, I’m not a person who’s staffing those half-hour shows but I have to think that these people love to read good voices, good characters, and I think he’s showing that here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to make an assumption that because his Twitter handle is BlackSitcomDad that he’s black and that is going to be something that he just has to prepare that Hollywood will naturally go, “Here are some black movies. Here are some black shows. Why don’t you do those?” Because that’s what they do. I mean, we talked about it with Malcolm.

I mean, Malcolm told the story — I don’t know if he told it on the podcast or he just told it to me, but early on in his career he had gotten his initial attention off of a script that wasn’t a “black script”. And he had general meetings and he came in and somebody said after the chitchat, they were like, “So, look, here’s the thing. We don’t really do black movies here.”

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s like, “But I also don’t do them. And so, what?” And so, yeah —

**Franklin:** My response to that would have been, “You don’t want to work with Will Smith? That’s cool. Okay, fine.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, yeah.

**Franklin:** Or Denzel or —

**Craig:** We are presuming that this individual, his mind was not expanded appropriately.

**Franklin:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s something that K.C. has to be aware of. I think what’s interesting about this script is that he’s essentially saying, “I’m in my own peg over here. I’m a peg in this hole. It doesn’t fit in any of those holes,” right? But just be aware, that’s what they’re going to push him towards. And if that’s not what he wants, he just has to be really clear and firm to that because racist Hollywood [laughs] will do it every time. Set your watch.

**Franklin:** They will. Well, on the bright side though, I think that that peg, he’s not the only sort of peg in that hole, which is to say I think that the notion of the kind of work that African-Americans and people of color can do in Hollywood is expanding semi-rapidly. You look at something like Dear White People which is still a movie with, you know, themes about what it means to be African-American is very much in the sort of Wes Anderson tradition in terms of its design, its style of comedy and things like that.

So there’s a rising wave, I think, of change in that regard. But, yes, you will absolutely have to be very, very clear about what it is that you want to do and possibly turn down opportunities that are financially very lucrative because they could force you further into that, I don’t want to call it a ghetto, but —

**Craig:** Pigeonhole.

**Franklin:** Yeah, a pigeonhole that is not representative at all of who you want to be as an artist.

**Craig:** And just to be clear, I’m not saying that K.C. is in the special place of a black writer who writes this kind of movie. I’m saying that he’s in the K.C. place. Like I think [laughs] K.C. has written a movie that’s a K.C. movie. I don’t know other people that write this. I don’t know [laughs], you know, it’s very, very specific to him, which I think is actually the — that’s the double-edged sword, right, is that it is unique to him. And so he automatically becomes very interesting. On the other hand, it’s unique to him, so people are like, “Well, but that isn’t a genre yet,” [laughs] you know?

**Franklin:** Right, no, but I mean, look, the default is, I mean, like you could literally have written Grand Budapest Hotel and walked into a room if you are African-American and there is a significant percentage of Hollywood executives there that would be like, “So we have this Tyrese movie. You want to write that.”

**Craig:** [laughs] We have the Tyrese biopic.

**John:** So good. So we’ve given K.C. some really specific advice but if you’re just a normal listener listening to this podcast who read the script, who listened to this conversation, what do we want the take-home for them to be? Like what should you gain from reading the script and hearing this discussion?

**Craig:** Well, for me, it’s to be creatively brave, to not over calculate and attempt to homogenize your script to whatever the world of rules are. I mean, clearly K.C. doesn’t give one sweet damn about what people are looking for in specs. And good for him because I think what “people” are looking for in specs isn’t what actual people in Hollywood are looking for in specs. If you are writing in a certain genre, then, sure. But K.C. has decided, has opted to be original and brave. And while he is far from perfect here and has all sorts of challenges to overcome with the script, guess what, so does everyone, including all the people that have followed the rules and calculated.

Everybody will have issues that need work, everybody. But K.C. has been brave. So I would just say to people out there, no matter what genre you’re working in, even if you are writing in the fighting robot or teenage vampire genre, be brave, because if you don’t stick out, even if you stick out with some of the crazier choices, you won’t stick out.

**John:** Franklin, what do you think our listeners should take with them from this discussion?

**Franklin:** A lot of that, although, I do think that, you know, the black Aspergers anti-romantic comedy is very much in vogue right now.

**Craig:** [laughs] There’s like a hundred of them.

**Franklin:** There’s so many. I really —

**John:** Everyone is trying make one.

**Franklin:** I really feel like, you know, that’s the new thing. But no, I think that’s right. I think it’s be creatively brave with the subject matter that you choose and how you choose to tell the story. I think the importance of voice, I think even within the subject matter, K.C. has moments, inconsistent moments where you can see that in any environment, he’s going to come up with a point of view on that material that is uniquely his and it is very much on display. And I think that that should be the goal of every writer because if anybody could do it, why should you be the one that does it?

And then lastly, I think it’s also the importance of craft and what Craig was talking about earlier, go back and look at your transitions, go back and look at your character introductions, go back and look at all of these sort of scenes of dialogue and make sure they’re as strong as your strongest scenes because, you know, any one of those three things is not going to get you all the way there. You can have all the craft in the world, but if you don’t have an interesting point of view and an interesting subject matter, you’re not going to get there. If you have an interesting point of view, but you don’t have interesting subject matter and you don’t focus on craft, you’re not going to get there. And if you have a great idea, congratulations, so does literally everyone else.

**John:** Yeah. I think my take home would be that we respond to original characters and we will follow those characters kind of anywhere. And so a lot of the script didn’t work. And I think we were pretty honest about the things that didn’t work for us in the script. But the reason why we’re so enthusiastic is because there was something really special underneath there. And you sense this writer had real talent and could write these characters doing anything, and could probably write many other movies and that was exciting for us and that’s why we spent 90 minutes going through all these details.

So again, I want to thank K.C. for being super brave and giving us this script to talk through. That was awesome.

**Craig:** Sure paid off for him, didn’t it?

**John:** I hope. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is another podcast called Lexicon Valley. And one specific episode, which is all about Try And. And so in a sentence like I’m going to try and write three pages before lunch. So is that grammatically correct or incorrect? How does that feel to you guys?

**Craig:** You mean, in terms of a plan?

**John:** I’m going to try and write three pages before lunch.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean like try to as opposed to try and?

**John:** Yeah.

**Franklin:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s fine. I mean it’s grammatically correct. I’m going to get to try and write three pages before lunch. But I prefer to. I like to try to.

**Franklin:** Yeah. I would assume that try to is correct because if you try to, that doesn’t mean you will. But if you try and, that’s suggesting that you both try and are successful.

**John:** Yeah. So this podcast sort of digs into the Try And. So the podcast overall talks about sort of quirks of language and sort of where words come from. But it turns out that try and actually is an older form, at least in current research, is an older form than try to. So in most cases, you can substitute try to for try and. But what’ weird about try and as a phrase is like, you can only do it with those two specific words. So you can’t say, “Tries and,”. You can’t put it in the past. You can’t put it in a gerund form, “I’m trying and,” you know, make something. it’s just a weird quirk of language.

And it’s one of those things, it’s sort of a marker of a native speaker versus a non-native speaker. You can’t really explain why it works a certain way in English. It just does work that way in English. And so basically, I want to give people permission to say try and if it makes sense to them, they don’t have to go the try to. But I can’t explain why.

**Craig:** Neat. Works for me.

**John:** Neat. So there’ll be a link to that. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing today is a subreddit called WriteResearch. So we’ll put a link in, but it’s just the capital Write, capital Write, capital Research, all slammed together. And it’s fascinating what they’ve done here. There’s a guy named ParallaxBrew. That’s his Redditor handle.

**John:** That’s one of the most classic Redditor handles —

**Craig:** ParallaxBrew. And he’s the moderator. And the idea of WriteResearch is that it’s a Reddit where they have created a database as they of hard-to-find or exceptionally useful information for writers. In that database, they also interview professionals to gain insights into what they do and they allow users to request information on a profession or character trait.

So they’ve essentially built up this repository of research aimed directly for writers who are trying to essentially make their characters more believable. And because of the way Reddit works, their voting system has kind of curated it down, so they have sort of the best stuff there. They don’t do Wikipedia as a general link. And I’ve just sort of flipped through it and it’s fascinating. I mean they have all this stuff — I mean it’s just an amazing resource. And of course, it’s searchable. I just thought it was remarkable actually.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** And I kind of wished I had known about it.

**Franklin:** Is it stuff like what it’s like to be a CIA agent or like what it’s like to be over 7 feet tall?

**Craig:** Well, I’ll just read a few of these things. Cults and cosmic, consciousness, religious vision in the American 1960s, cult, placing the Stockholm syndrome in perspective, victim, kidnapping. Then there’s job description, custodian, Sharp v. Baltimore Police Department, letter from Department of Justice to BPD.

**Franklin:** Wow.

**Craig:** Then they have things like self-awareness to being washed and socially desirable behavior, a field experiment on the effect to body wearing cameras on police, human reciprocity among the Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. K.C. should check this out because they have a ton of these things on personality disorders.

And then you have information requests, like for instance, here’s one. Request information about hobbyist light aircraft flight, request information about Al-Qaida, request information about working on a military nuclear launch site. [laughs] If all those three people are the same person, we have a problem. But hats off to ParallaxBrew and his other moderators for putting this thing together. It’s kind of crazy. It’s cool.

**John:** Franklin, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Franklin:** Sort of. I have a one very cool thing, but the details of which I cannot reveal, but they will be revealed tomorrow if you’re listening to this on March 31st. And I know that’s April 1st but it is not an April Fool’s joke. So check us out on social media @theblcklst with the blcklst part has no vowels or me @franklinleonard on Twitter. Go to our website on April 1st. It’s a very cool thing. It’s something that we at The Black List are very excited about.

Craig is initially involved as are some other friends of the Scriptnotes podcast. And hopefully it will be something that everyone will be very excited about. And will provide hours upon hours upon hours of entertainment.

**Craig:** [laugh] It will be mirthful.

**Franklin:** It will be mirthful. I think that’s very well said.

**John:** Awesome. So Franklin, thank you so much for being our guest on this inaugural episode of we were calling this Full Script Challenge. I don’t even know what to call it. But this experiment in going through and entire script. If you are listening to the podcast for the very first time, you should probably subscribe to us. We’re on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re on iTunes, you can also search the App Store for the Scriptnotes app. That gives you access to all the back episodes dating back all the way to episode one. At Scriptnotes.net is where you can sign up for that premium feed that gives you bonus episodes and gives you access to the very ancient archives.

I am on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is on Twitter, @clmazin. K.C. Scott is on Twitter, @BlackSitcomDad. So you might want to tell him what you thought of his script. You should tell him only like nice things. Don’t be a jerk.

**Craig:** Just don’t be a jerk. I mean just, people are such jerks.

**John:** People are jerks. People are also really jerks when they like link you to something and like —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Someone wrote a really nasty review of Big Fish in Boston and then like just mentioned me in it. I was like, “Why would you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s a really — that’s a dick move.

**Craig:** Yeah, people send me this like, “Gee, look what I found. This lunatic is saying stuff about you. Gee, don’t send me that.” Thanks, I don’t need to — I’m not going to read it.

**John:** If you want to send us nice things, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the place where you can send in your questions. Those are always lovely. If you have a Three Page Challenge, like how we found K.C. Scott’s script, just go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And that is where you can find a form to submit your Three Page Challenge.

Stuart Friedel is the person who read through all those Three Page Challenges and found K.C. Scott’s script. So our producer, Stuart Friedel, needs to get kudos for that.

**Craig:** You know what, let him out of his box today.

**John:** [laughs]For at least 20 minutes he’ll have some free yard time.

**Craig:** Yeah, give me some yard time.

**John:** Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. Thank you, Matthew. And we will be back with a normal episode next week.

**Craig:** Instead of this abnormal one.

**John:** Thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**Franklin:** Bye, everyone.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* K.C. Scott’s [This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/THIS-IS-WORKING_screenplay_2015.pdf)
* K.C. on Twitter, [@BlackSitcomDad](https://twitter.com/BlackSitcomDad)
* [Scriptnotes, 187: The Coyote Could Stop Any Time](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-coyote-could-stop-any-time) featuring This Is Working’s Three Page Challenge
* Franklin Leonard on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Leonard), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/franklinleonard), and on Scriptnotes episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular) and [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Lexicon Valley episode 56 asks, [Is “Try And” an Acceptable Substitute for “Try To”?](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/03/lexicon_valley_english_grammar_quirk_in_which_an_infinitive_morphs_into.html)
* Reddit’s [r/writeresearch subreddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/writeresearch)
* Follow [@theblcklst](https://twitter.com/theblcklst) on Twitter for tomorrow’s announcement
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))