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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-coyote-could-stop-any-time).

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 187 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will be talking about Road Runner rules —

**Craig:** “Beep, beep”.

**John:** The WGA Diversity Report, living in your car and we’ll have three new entrants in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Big show today.

**John:** Big show.

**Craig:** Big show.

**John:** Big show of little things.

**Craig:** We are — I have to say we are on a roll. Again, thanks to the Redditors over there at the screenwriting subreddit who helped us out with all those wonderful bad rules last week. We’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback on the Malcolm Spellman episode and then that episode last week, so we’re on a roll.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s keep it going.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s the goal of this episode. So let’s dig right into it. This is something that was just randomly in my Facebook feed. I think Howard Robin had posted and this was a bunch of rules for the Road Runner cartoons. So essentially, Chuck Jones in his book Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of Animated Cartoonist Chuck Jones claimed that he and his artists and writers had a set of rules that they went back to when they were writing the Road Runner cartoons. And having just been through an episode where we talked all about the rules of screenwriting, I thought it was so interesting to look at the rules and limitations that a group of writers put on themselves when creating something as iconic as the Road Runner cartoons.

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to go through some of these?

**John:** Let’s alternate here.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So first rule. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep, beep” to scare or surprise him off a cliff.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. He never touches him.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah. No outside force can harm the Coyote; only his own ineptitude or a failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.

**John:** Absolutely. And trains and trucks are sort of like natural forces that he was, you know, he was always too close to them anyway, so. And generally, they were like a follow-up punch line. And basically, like, everything would have failed and then he gets run over by a truck.

**Craig:** And the trains and trucks in this area of the desert would appear out of nowhere without warning of any kind. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] The Coyote could stop anytime if he were not a fanatic. To repeat, a fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim as George Santayana said. So there’s no reason why the Coyote has to do it. I mean, I guess, sometimes they motivate it through hunger to some degree but it’s more that he’s driven to pursue the Road Runner. That’s just his function in life is to try to get the Road Runner.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s a mono-maniac as we say.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dialogue is strictly forbidden except “beep, beep” and yowling in pain.

**John:** Yeah, it’s absolutely true. And I don’t think I realized that when I was a kid watching them in the morning. It was like, that was what was so special about them, are these little silent movies. And, you know, even when he’s going to fall off a cliff, he just holds up his little sign that express his dismay.

**Craig:** Yeah, the little sign thing was, you know, they were like silent movies basically, you know, the old style and they forced these guys to be incredibly physical and everything. So I love that. What’s the next one here?

**John:** The Road Runner must stay on the road for no other reason than that he’s a Road Runner.

**Craig:** Which, by the way, you know, okay, so [laughs] I saw a roadrunner once, I wouldn’t have known it except that my wife who is a bird watcher, she said, “Oh, my god, that’s a roadrunner.” And I guess it’s actually kind of rare to spot one. They don’t look anything like the Road Runner and —

**John:** No at all.

**Craig:** Not even. I mean, the Road Runner looks more like an emu or something in the cartoon. But, yeah, they’re actually — I didn’t see it on a road. [laughs] They don’t actually follow the road but man, if you’d asked me that when I was a kid, I would have thought, no, no, it’s what Road Runners do.

**John:** Well, again, we always talk on this podcast about specificity. But like, you know, we’re talking about the specificity of this one unique bird and the one thing he does and it’s not trying to do anything else. It’s just he’s this one bird doing his one thing and all he does is run and he runs on this one road and it seems to be, just like the Coyote is a fanatic about catching him, the Road Runner just wants to run.

**Craig:** He just likes running. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters, the southwest American desert.

**John:** Yeah, and again, very specific and I know that intuitively like, oh, that’s right, they’re always falling off cliffs and stuff like that but it hadn’t occurred to me until I was an adult that like, oh, yeah, it’s always in the exact same place.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. That’s right.

**John:** It’s the backlot.

**Craig:** I know, yeah. But it was actually quite beautiful, I mean, and they made real use of the rock formations that he would always fall off of. I mean, I always loved the ones where, you know, the Road Runner goes out on that little separated ledge of rock —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a mile in the air and — but the huge rock falls [laughs] that the Coyote is on, I mean, they’re very smart about that.

**John:** Well, and also, I think, in its time the American Southwest obviously wasn’t new but I think it was the westward sort of migration of America towards, you know, the Southwest but also towards California. So it was like, it was the right kind of imagery for that generation. That was a place where people hadn’t seen and people were going to the Southwest for the first time to explore it.

**Craig:** You know what’s cool about these rules is that David Zucker and Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker had a similar set of rules. And rule number 15 is there are no rules. But in comedy, when you can confine yourself like this, what you’re essentially doing is forcing a certain amount of a degree of difficulty. And you get rewarded for it because everybody knows that you’re stuck in this desert and you’re stuck not talking and you’re stuck with these same motivations. Coming up with new variations on a theme becomes a little more impressive when you actually successfully do it.

**John:** You’re also, you’re taking away all those other choices. And so, it allows you to really focus in on who are these characters, what is their predicament because all the rest of the world is stripped away from it. And that’s a lovely thing in most cases.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree.

**John:** Example here, all or at least almost all tools, weapons or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.

**Craig:** Of course, I mean, that’s just the coolest company in the world. And I know that Warner Bros is always trying to figure out new ways to revive these cartoon characters. And Acme, I mean, it’s just such a great — you have to use Acme, I mean.

**John:** Oh, it’s the best.

**Craig:** It’s the greatest. And they really did make some very dangerous stuff.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So I’ll just do, I’ll do a couple of here quickly. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy which we’ve already discussed. And the Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures, which, you know, frankly, has to do with squash and stretch, I mean, he was terribly, physically harmed but he didn’t seem to feel that much pain. I mean, I would imagine that if we walked through life able to survive being hit by trucks and falling from the sky, we also would feel more humiliation than harm. Just sort of an extension I guess.

**John:** And related to these, the audience’s sympathy must always remain with the Coyote because even though he’s kind of the villain, he is also your hero. You’re the one — you relate to his struggle.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner unless he escapes up the grasp.

**Craig:** So he’s not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner unless he can catch him and then the Road Runner gets away.

**John:** And really, I’m trying to remember instances where he really got the Road Runner for any more than three seconds. It’s mostly like, he’s held on to him and suddenly the Road Runner is smoke in his hands and the Road Runner is gone.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t really remember him actually holding the Road Runner but I will say that the Coyote, Wile E. Coyote, people sometimes struggle with the concept of what is an anti-hero. Wile E. Coyote is an anti-hero. He’s somebody that is doing something that you know is wrong. By the circumstances of the drama, he is the villain and yet we are rooting for him.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Anti-villain. I mean, anti-hero. Sorry.

**John:** Is there such a thing as anti-villain?

**Craig:** No. I don’t believe there is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I guess, maybe you could say, like, Gru from Despicable Me —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Is an anti-villain. Yeah.

**John:** That’s true. Yeah, because he’s identified as a villain but he ultimately is forced into heroic deeds.

**Craig:** Yeah, anti-villain.

**John:** That’s a lovely thing. So the reason why I wanted to bring up these Road Runner rules is that we were talking in the previous podcast about how all these prohibitions that people put on screenwriters saying, like, “Oh, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. You can’t do that.” And most of those cases, there’s a good reason why that thing sort of seems like a rule or like why generally it’s a good idea but it should not be a blanket rule.

And these are examples of rules that you’re placing on yourself that really should be iron-clad rules if you’re going to make a very specific thing. They are how you focus your story, you focus your art into a very unique frame. It’s providing boundaries for yourself that’s really helpful. Unlike the things we talked about in the previous show which were in many cases I thought destructive rules.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the big distinction is rules that you put upon yourself as opposed to rules that you accept from someone else. You can place any rule you want on yourself for any reason whatsoever. If you feel that that’s going to make your work better or more interesting, do it, absolutely do it. And you’ll hear, there are rules that are specific to a piece of work, which is again different than the rules we were discussing last week which are meant to be these blanket bits of orthodoxy that apply to everyone. So every script, somebody sooner or later will say, “Well, what…” you know, if you have a script where somebody is magical, inevitably a studio executive will say, “Well, can we talk with the rules of the magic?” “Okay, sure.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah, big distinction there. You’re allowed to put any rules on your work that you’d like, just don’t necessarily go follow blindly other people’s rules.

**John:** I had a meeting today with an executive and we were talking about sort of the writing process and she works in animation. And she was describing how over the course of the screening process they’ll screen thing multiple times. There inevitably hits a point at which everything just completely falls apart. And you end up sort of fundamentally questioning the assumptions you’ve made about what this project is. In some cases you are taking a character who you thought was a subsidiary character and that now becomes your main character or you’re doing either just these massive overhauls.

When we had Jennifer Lee on the show, we talked about, you know, the massive overhaul of Frozen where you just really reconceived how everything works. But these kind of rules that you’re setting for the Road Runner cartoons are that kind of massive reshaping and you might be well down the road in a feature length project, whether you formally codify these rules or haven’t codified these rules, you may find yourself like, you know what, these are the wrong rules. These are not the rules that are getting us to where we need to be and we need to write some different rules or just restructure our story based on some different underlying assumptions.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s amazing how animation goes to, I mean, part of the benefit they have is that they can reimagine their movie and look at it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, through storyboards. They also have the time, generally. Because everybody is so frightened of actually animating something they don’t want, and I mean, animating, like full animation of something is super expensive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they give themselves the time. They also don’t have to worry about actor availabilities. That’s the other thing that —

**John:** That’s a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Huge flexibility for them.

**John:** So her question to me this morning was like, “Well, do you think there’s a way to sort of speed through that process or to get to the breaking point sooner?” And I had to say, no.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think —

**John:** I think the process is the process and the process is just, it’s kind of always terrible. And in live-action features, that breaking point is generally when you see the first assembly of your feature and you want to kill yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You pray that the movie can never be released. And I remind myself every time before I watch it that, okay, that’s going to happen. And every time I forget.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, no question. There is a, you know, I’ve been talking about built-in inefficiencies. There is a built-in inefficiency to the system. It is impossible to achieve something even good, much less great without going through an inefficient process. Sometimes there are inefficiencies we can avoid that it’s just that the business won’t let us avoid them. But a lot of them, they’re just part of being human. And, I mean, you simply can’t see the story in its totality before you can see it in its totality. I don’t know how else to put it, you know.

**John:** Absolutely. And so the kind of thing where you recognize that your subsidiary character is actually your main character, you wouldn’t know that until you’ve written, you know, scenes with her and sort of heard her voice and saw what was possible. That’s just the reality.

The challenge I think in animation often is that the teams are so much larger. Whereas, making a live-action feature, you have your writer. You have your director. You have your producer. You have your studio executives. In some cases, you have a very powerful actor. In the case of animation, you often have a much bigger brain trust to go through and that can be really beneficial because you have more brains to apply to it but is everyone looking at the same movie, you don’t know. So it’s challenging.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s go to a much simpler challenge to solve which is diversity within the ranks of the Writers Guild of America.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a breeze.

**John:** It’s a breeze. I mean, honestly, Craig, I’m just so happy that it’s been solved.

**Craig:** We solved it.

**John:** It’s all good and done.

**Craig:** We solved it.

**John:** We’re talking of course about the diversity report that the WGA published this week that details the numbers for employment. And this was TV and features or was this just the TV report?

**Craig:** I think we will eventually get TV and features but for now it’s the TV report since that’s frankly where the majority of writers are employed.

**John:** Absolutely. So we’ve discussed this before in previous episodes and we’ll have a link to the earlier episode and I honestly wonder if we could just clip the audio from —

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** The previous show and talk about it again. The headlines on the story were, you know, numbers are down. Diversity is worse than it was before. If you actually look at the report, you see that it’s largely a flat line and there are cases where numbers have dropped or numbers for white men in their 40s have risen slightly but it’s not — it’s good news for no one.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, part of what I struggle with at times is that the Writers Guild, if their argument is that things are bad for racial minorities, for women, for people over a certain age as their argument should be, well, the data supports them. It supports them so sufficiently that they don’t need to exaggerate and yet they do anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, for instance, they’ll say things like, “Well, we’re really down from 2000 and they’ll pick a number, like, they’ll pick a low point but then, you know, you don’t realize, well, yeah, but we’re also up from the year before. So, you know, for instance, women writer’s share of TV staff employment is actually up incredibly slightly from 2013 over 2012, but down ever so slightly from 2011. So they’ll pick that 2011 number. Either way, I’m looking at this and I’m just seeing, this is the most dispiriting graph ever because it’s charting female writer’s share of television staff employment from 2001 to 2013 and the line is flat. I mean, yes, it’s true, in 2001, it was only 26.8 and in 2013 it’s 29, whoopty doo.

It was also 29 in ’07. It was down 27.4 in 2004. It’s basically hovered between 26.8 and 29 for 12 years and this is despite all of the talk and all of the reports. It’s just, like, I look at this and I just think, well why are we spending money on this report? Just keep reprinting the number from last year. If you’re not going to do anything different, why even do the report?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just the same. Anyway, same deal. Minority writer share of TV staff employment here, there’s a slight uptrend, ever so slight. When you look at 2001 and 2013, you’re looking at actually somewhat steady growth from 8.8% in 2001 to 13.7% in 2013.

**John:** But that’s over the course of 12 years to have, you know, minimal. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the same old story there.

**John:** Yeah. The chart we’re looking at actually shows the percentage of US minority population, you know, as a sort of midpoint of sort of like, you know, you’d think you would be able to get somewhere near that and of course it’s nowhere near that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And for women, you could — I can even just tell you that about half of Americans are women.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. That’s the way biology works. In fact, if you want to feel really bad about the minority writers’ share of TV staff employment, here’s the saddest thing of all. Yes, there has been a slight uptrend. There’s also been a slight uptrend in overall minority population. Basically, the hiring line has sort of risen ever so slightly along with the actual line of racial minorities in the country.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So just terrible news there in terms of just the incredible stagnation. Now, here’s the one interesting chart. Here’s something that’s changed, like an actual change. And it’s what they call older writers’ share of TV staff employment. Back in 2001, 40 and under was at 58.2% and over 40 was at 41%. This was sort of viewed as an ageism issue. Those lines —

**John:** That’s flipped.

**Craig:** They have diverged and then they have converged. They converged and diverged, so we have an X. So now it’s flipped, exactly. Over 40 writers are now at 57% and under 40 are at 43%. So I guess now we should be concerned about the employment of younger writers frankly. [laughs] I’m not really sure what this means.

**John:** Yeah. It’s always a problem and it’s always a crisis. Do we need to be mindful of older writers? Yes. Is 40 years old a good barrier for us to be thinking about? I’m not sure it is. You know, as a person who is in my 40s, you know what, this is a gainful time to be employed. I am very much mindful though, as I hit my 50s and my 60s and beyond, that employment may not be as possible.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think 50 probably makes more sense. I mean, obviously people are, you know, life expectancy and so on and so forth. But I think there’s something else going on here. And this is entirely conjecture. It’s just a theory.

The business used to do a much better job of cultivating new talent. And so it is not surprising to me that in 2001, there were many more writers under the age of 40 because the business was generating the farm system, taking care of the younger writers to some extent, and encouraging them and there was frankly more business to do. I think over time that started to fade. And so a lot of the people that were in their under 40s in 2001, well, they’re still there working.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** But they have not been replaced, there isn’t that churn, which isn’t a bad thing. You know, we talked about this last year, the segment of population that’s been hit the hardest in terms of age are the 20-somethings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And to me, that’s a sign of bad news. Moving forward, just as an interesting stat, this is something, a trend that continues that the distribution of minority TV writers is weighing more and more heavily toward hour-longs as opposed to half hours. I don’t know if that’s — what they don’t do is correlate this data with the actual number of hour-longs versus half-hours in script —

**John:** Yeah, because I have a strong suspicion that there are a lot more hour-longs than half-hours these days.

**Craig:** Right. So this is an area where I think the statistics are either leaving stuff out on purpose or just leaving stuff out because they haven’t really thought it through. God, look at this. Women’s share of staff writing positions and other programming in the 2013-14 season, 18%.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** 18%. Embarrassing. Minorities’ share of staff writing positions, 3.5%. So whatever the numbers are overall, it gets much, much worse when you start looking at actual staff writing positions as opposed to, I guess, freelancing coming in or, you know, part-timers.

**John:** Or the showrunners.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s that question of sort of like maybe there’s women who are at that sort of higher level but like staff writers are the people you need because they are the ones who become the showrunners of the future.

**Craig:** And they also are a decent indication of new people coming in.

**John:** Yeah. So, are there any things to be hopeful about? Well, when we had Malcolm Spellman on the show, he was convinced that something had broken in a good way and that there will be more black shows than ever. That would hopefully be good news for African-American writers and for minority writers overall. He’s on a show that has, you know, women running the show. That’s good too.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. I mean, we’ll see.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Right now, all I can say from this data is nothing has really changed. Based on this data, it’s the same old same old. Hopefully, because this is essentially an echo report of, you know, so this is a delayed snapshot. So it may have already changed. The number at the next report, hopefully, is better.

I do want to draw your attention to some of these. [laughs] This is what I call the WGA pointless spin. Percent of shows with no women staff writers, which is obviously a bad thing, they do two charts. They showed that in ’11, ’12, it was at 10%. And ’13, ’14 it went all the way up to 11% which is not a significant growth but —

**John:** Yeah. This chart is amazing. So we’ll have a link to this in the show notes. So we’ll have a link to the whole report in the show notes. But this is figure 12 we’re talking about. And so let me just try to describe it to you.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s a bar chart. And so if I’m looking at it, on the left-hand side, it’s 2011-2012 and it’s a very low bar, it says 10%. On the right-hand side, it says 11% and it’s a very tall bar chart. And then you look at the Y-axis and you realize it starts at 9.4% and it goes to 11.2%.

**Craig:** Yeah. So they have broken down these incredibly tiny increments to make the bars —

**John:** Fox News would be so proud.

**Craig:** [laughs] This was very Fox Newsy but that was nothing compared to figure, oh, this is my favorite, yeah, figure 14, percent of shows with no staff writers over 50. [laughs] So obviously you want that number to be lower. Well, in 2011-2012, it was at 31.1%. In 2013, the bar is literally three times taller at 31.5%.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s gone up 0.4% and they now, the Y-axis is divided in increments of 0.1% each.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That’s just silly.

**John:** It is very, very silly.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why do they do that? I know why they do it, obviously. You know why they do it? Because they think we’re dumb. And frankly, a lot of people are just going to go, “Oh my god, look at the two huge blue blobs here. [laughs] One is so much bigger than the other.”

**John:** I think if I wanted to visualize this though, I kind of want to see — I want a picture of like what a group of people is. And sort of like, you know, in this room, let’s just say that you have a writer room of like 20 people, how many would be, you know, over 50. If you represented it that way and you would actually see like the little people showing there that essentially, you know, whatever number of little people figures out of the whole group would be, you know, white men in their 40s or a woman or something like that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Something that would actually make it feel more what it’s actually like there because this little bar chart doesn’t tell me anything.

**Craig:** I agree. And I would actually say to the Writers Guild that the value — so this report is put together by Darnell Hunt who is the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African-American Studies at UCLA and he’s a professor of sociology. And he is the guy that they’ve gone to for almost all of these reports, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s the deal. The collection of the data is the collection of the data. What is I guess proprietary for somebody like Mr. Hunt is — or Professor Hunt I should say — is the analysis of the data and the presentation of the data. I don’t actually think this data has been analyzed and presented particularly well.

I actually think that there are ways to portray what is very bad news in a more impactful manner. And I also think that there’s a way to be a little more honest about the news that isn’t so bad or at least doesn’t become kind of laughable in its overstatement. I don’t love the way this report is done. Now that we’ve had a bunch of years to look at it, I think the Writers Guild should actually think about maybe switching it up here and seeing if somebody else can do a better job because I’ll say this much, if the report is supposed to be influencing anything, it is a failure.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If the report is just here to say, “Yup, it’s still bad,” well, success.

**John:** Success.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. So that was some familiar dispiriting news. Another thing that came up this week was a blog post by Todd Farmer who is a screenwriter. And that was sort of a new sobering kind of story —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is Todd Farmer describing how he went from writing two movies, big feature movies, Jason X and Drive Angry, to living in his car and being homeless.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so we’ll link to the blog post and he does a really great job sort of talking through what all happened and he’s sort of come out the other side of that. But I thought it was a really interesting look at — we always talking about breaking in and there’s this sort of myth of breaking in. Just because you’ve broken in and you’ve had two movies produced doesn’t mean everything is going to go remarkably well. You know, Craig and I both know writers who have found themselves struggling in their careers. And it’s a challenging career to be sort of working at if you’re not actually working.

**Craig:** For sure. You know, a lot of people tweeted you and me about this particular article. And so on the one hand, it is a very sober look at how things can go very wrong, that there are no guarantees attached to selling a screenplay or even getting a movie made or even having a hit movie, frankly. There are no guarantees that things will go well for you and we also saw that unfortunately with the very tragic death of Harris Wittels.

But I also think that, you know, in any population, things are going to go wrong for some people in a dramatic way. I don’t know if there’s any larger conclusion to draw from this. This felt like a very individual circumstance but it was a very good reminder to people that there is no breaking-in nor is there a making-it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is no line over which you are safe until you have actually put together a career and enough resources that somebody independent of you can look at and say, “Yes, at this lifestyle, you are now fine.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** But until that day, and, you know, we’ve broken this down before on the podcast. It sounds great. You sell a movie, “I’m making $300,000.” No, you’re not, not even close.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go ahead, give your managers money, give your agent their money, give your lawyer her money. Now, give the government their money, give the Feds, the state, the city. And then in this case, the writer in question had been divorced and now there’s child support and child. When all is said and done, you know.

**John:** Yeah. The thing for people to keep in mind is that unlike other jobs in which you might be unemployed, employment for a screenwriter is very come and go. And so you are working for yourself. And you don’t necessarily know when that next paycheck is coming and that can be really challenging.

So on the blog, I’ve often done first person reports. And going back many years, I’ve done first person blog posts where I have writers talk about their sort of early adventures in the business and sort of how they got their first jobs. And there were people who like just, you know, got off the boat to Los Angeles and are just figuring out how they’re starting their careers and really talking through what it’s like to just start it out here. What you don’t see so often reported is those, what I think Todd did a huge service to us all by writing about it, is what is life when things go wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the realities of things don’t always work out so well. And you may have IMDb credits but you may have no place to live, and that’s a reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. It turns out that hard times in this business look a whole like hard times in every business. All the glamour and all that baloney, it’s just an illusion business. In the end, everybody goes home and they’re still — they need a roof over their heads and they need to be able to pay their rent and put gas in their car. And I do worry.

I mean, look, it goes back to the discussion we had with Malcolm a couple of weeks ago, that feeling of heat and how reality-warping it can be and you think that it will last forever and then suddenly it just stops dead, you know. And then the cold wind blows, not good.

**John:** Not good.

**Craig:** Not good. Yeah.

**John:** So let’s go on to our main topic today which are three new entrants to the Three Page Challenge. So I sent Stuart to finding us three things we could talk about today and he read through 60 different Three Page Challenges yesterday.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, Stuart.

**John:** And so without even my asking, he slacked over his common patterns he noticed in the different things he was reading. So I’m going to read aloud. These are Stuart Friedel’s observations from the 60 scripts he read yesterday getting ready for the segment.

So things he saw very often. Opening on a night sky or space, zooming in on a town or a house.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Opening with pronouns as character names to hide who the characters are. Opening on a speech/presentation/awards ceremony in a large lecture hall. Opening on breakfast, so not the opening on an alarm clock cliché but very close.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** War movies, either ancient like Game of Thrones, fantasy style or real stuff or modern. Common errors he spotted. Opening on an event describing the event in general but giving us no indication of what the camera is actually looking at.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, interesting.

**John:** Bad children dialogue, like these people were born 30 [laughs] and never bothered to listen to what children sound like. So it’s all cliché of what children-haters imagine children must sound like.

**Craig:** I love that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s Stuart editorializing here.

**Craig:** Children-haters.

**John:** Bad uses of we see or we hear. And in parentheses he says, “I have no problem with those, but when they’re unnecessary, interrupt the flow of the writing.”

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Unnecessarily flowery age-defining, an example being, “Stephanie who is currently 16 years old” instead of “Stephanie, 16.”

**Craig:** Yeah, [laughs] is she currently 16 years old? I love that.

**John:** And here’s the reason why I think people sometimes do that is that they’re going to age up the character. But you don’t need to tell us if you’re going to age up the character later on, just give us her age.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just do it.

**John:** And Stuart’s last observation, “Multiple spaces between sentences like three or four. I’ve seen this five times today. Maybe it’s a problem with the form used to submit or something but I don’t see why that would mess up a PDF. So I’m going to assume the problem isn’t on our end.”

So the people who are submitting to the Three Page Challenge, and this is a good reason for us to bring it up. People submit to the Three Page Challenge by going to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s a form you fill out and you click a button and you attach a PDF. So the answer, no, Stuart, we couldn’t possibly be changing their PDF —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But for some reason, people are sending in stuff with like crazy returns and things. And while there are no hard and fast rules of screenwriting, random white space, not your friend.

**Craig:** Well it’s just sloppy. Just don’t be sloppy.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Well, what do you say? Should we crack one of these open?

**John:** Go for it. You can decide which one we hit first.

**Craig:** All right. I’m going to go with Theo & Rabbit.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Theo & Rabbit was written by Mark Denton. So you guys all have the screenplay at home, but I’ll do a quick summary.

We open on a sun-baked desert. A Baja Bug, which is a kind of off-road vehicle is traversing the landscape. And in the vehicle, we see Theo Meeks, in his 30s, driving. And next to him is Rabbit, a robot, who’s actually a pleasure bot. Imagine the Iron Giant but six feet tall and painted off-white. And Rabbit is reading a porno mag.

The engine seems to be suffering from a problem, which Rabbit knew about but didn’t mention. And the car dies. Theo discovers that the car’s been tampered with, in fact. And then the two of them are attacked by men in the distance with rifles and Gatling guns. Theo and Rabbit both hide behind the car while they’re being shot at. And they have a discussion about who might be doing this, and it turns out it’s probably bandits.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Theo & Rabbit.

**John:** Theo & Rabbit. And I should say, if you want to read along at home with us, all of these scripts are available in the show notes. And so there’s PDFs, you click them open. Read along with us because that will really help you out because we’re going to get very specific because there’s a lot of things I specifically liked about this.

The onomatopoeia in the script was really great. And basically, the use of words to describe the sounds that we’re hearing, which is really fun. So page three, “We see flickers of fire from the gun before we hear anything. Then whump-whump-whump-whump-whump.”

We have some “tunks”. We have, you know, the little bits of sound information that are showing us what kind of thing is shooting at us. It’s really cool.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I liked, overall, the environment of this. I like the overall style of it. I was more enjoying the idea of Rabbit as a character than sort of how he manifested quite on the page so far. But I was going to read page four if page four had been there.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I really enjoyed this. I’m going to talk through some of the things that stopped me or things that I wanted to be different, but then I’m going to say what I like. Because in general, there’s much more here that I liked than there was a problem. And the problems were minor.

First, Theo Meeks is described as a ruggedly handsome man. Don’t do that.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** That is the sort of Swiss coffee paint of descriptions. It’s just the most bland overused thing. Also, Rabbit is a pleasure bot. Well, we have no idea of that.

**John:** So I thought he was a robot that you have sex with. But then it made me really confused about the relationship between him and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we may discover that. And I would much rather discover that. I’d rather have Rabbit explain to somebody at some point, “Oh, no, I’m a pleasure bot. Yeah, yeah, I’m here to give pleasure.” And somebody looks at him like, “Well, you don’t look very pleasurable.”

I really love the reveal. He’s reading a porno magazine. I loved it so much the idea of a rabbit, I’m sorry, a robot reading a porno mag that I wanted that to have its own line. There’s nothing wrong with adding a little line break there for that just to give me that kind of vibe.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Rabbit says, “I was trying to be positive.” Next action line, “He tries the ignition, it turns over.” If you’re going to follow a dialogue line from one person with action by another, don’t use the leading pronoun. Use the name. It just makes it easier to read. You don’t get stopped and wonder.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say, look for not repeating the verb. So Rabbit just says, “I was trying to be positive.” Next line, “He tries the ignition.” If you can avoid, you know, saying “try” twice, do it.

Also, I would say Rabbit’s line, “I was trying to be positive…” dot, dot dot, I don’t know if the dots are helping you in any meaningful way.

**Craig:** I agree with that. Further down on the page, “Theo pops the hood to be met with a cloud of steam.” Now, I had to read that a couple of times to get it because there are sentences where a collection of words could lead our minds in one way. “Pops the hood to be met.” “The hood to be met,” that’s not good.

**John:** Yeah. Did the hood hit him? Yeah, it’s like it implies a change or a relationship between his head and everything else that I didn’t like.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could say, “Theo pops the hood,” comma, “only to be met with a cloud of steam.” You know, just something to not make that. There was I think maybe an error here on page two. Middle of the page, they’re, “Clipping a belt of bullets into a mounted Gatling gun. Two drivers behind wheels,” no punctuation. I think that there was probably something you meant to get rid of.

Larger note here. I don’t like it when things happen in a movie and I immediately know what those things are and the characters don’t, unless they’re in the dark. Clearly someone’s shooting at him. We’ve seen this before where someone’s talking and suddenly there’s a red dot on them or there’s a bullet hole. And we’ll give them a chance to be surprised, but then they got to get it pretty quickly.

Well, Theo sees this hole, “Tunk!” Then he turns. He sees a bunch of guys, he sees them with guns, he sees them with Gatling guns, that’s what the movie’s telling us, I see. But now, he’s shielding his eyes, going, “Huh?” Like he doesn’t see, but we see him see because that’s the way cameras work. And then he figures that after another shot. I think he needs to see that much quicker.

I did like Rabbit being confused. Because, you know, Rabbit , we didn’t have his POV there. And I just like a robot shielding his eyes. That’s hysterical to me. There’s a very clever bit that Mark does on page three. I’m just not sure it’s working exactly the way he wants it to.

The idea is that when Rabbit, the robot, gets scared, his nose which turns, like, along with his processing, freezes the way that like a Mac pinwheel freezes and then restarts again. I’m not sure any of us would quite know what that turning disk was on his nose because we don’t get that. If in fact he had a display on his nose or something that was a more precise copy of the freezy icon, I think maybe then we would get it. But if it’s an actual analog disk turning, I’m not sure we would know that that’s what that is indicating.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s the description that he puts. And he puts it in italics. I might put a similar kind of thing in parenthesis rather than try to italicize it. He writes, “It’s the physical equivalent of the Mac pinwheel or the Microsoft Hourglass, denoting the fact that there’s too much information for his central microprocessor to handle.” There’s a shorter version of that. “He’s locked up like a Mac pin-wheeling.” I mean, it’s something like that just gives you the sense of what it is without stopping us for, you know, three whole lines.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. It’s not quite working. I mean, the bigger issue to me is that a physical equivalent of a Mac pinwheel is a new thing for everyone. No one has seen that before. And now you’re adding it on top of this action. So that’s part of the problem with that.

And then finally, at the end of their conversation where they’re being shot at, Theo, you have a rhythm of Rabbit, the robot, being a little sort of deadpan-ish, “That was a gun.” And Theo, angry, you know, “Yeah, why’dya think?” Right?

And then it turns and flips where suddenly Theo says something and then Rabbit flips out. And there was something a little odd about that last line there because he was kind of being weirdly while they were being shot, or at least his comment was. And then at the end, after they’ve stopped being shot at, he starts to get crazy. So there are some issues with that.

But overall, what I really liked about this was, A, I absolutely want to keep reading it. I’m already interested in this very unique pairing. These pages are very confident. They just present a man and his robot hanging out. They’re not worried about making us believe any of it. There’s not a whole bunch of overdone stuff about what the robot looks like.

The robot has a terrific voice, I think, for most of this. It’s very unrobot-like. And we’re immediately into action. And I don’t know what’s going on or why. I know that they kind of know what’s going on, and that’s good enough for me. So good job.

**John:** I agree. Good job. The thing I want to point out at the top of page three, here’s the sentence that I highlighted. “We see flickers of fire from the gun before we hear anything. Then whump-whump-whump… It’s aimed too low,” comma, “and 50 caliber bullets kick up giant spades of dry earth fifty feet in front of the car, heading right towards them!”

Way too much happens in that second sentence. Just like, “whump-whum-whump… It’s aimed too low,” period. “Bullets kick up giant spades of earth heading right towards them.” In attempting to over describe things, and attempting to sort of make all that into one sentence, it was actually more confusing than it needed to be. And it actually took away the action.

And so this is a moment in which, you know, big stuff is happening and it’s meant to happen fast. Short sentences are going to help you a lot when you’re trying to describe bursts of things.

**Craig:** Yes. And in general, the actual caliber number of the bullet will be undetectable to us.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** For many readers, they simply won’t know what a 50 caliber bullet means.

**John:** I really don’t, so.

**Craig:** And we’ll get it. It’s a machine gun. It’s dangerous. So, good.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** All right, well, which one would you like to proceed to, Mr. August?

**John:** I will read “This is Working” by K.C. Scott.

**Craig:** I love that title.

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

**Craig:** Such a good title.

**John:** It does feel like an Albert Brooks movie.

**Craig:** Well, I just like it, you know, it’s one of those titles where I looked at it and I went, you know, ambiguous titles seem kind of corny, you know. But yet I get like, I’m looking at them and I’m kind of fascinated by a title like “This is Working” like “This is working.” But really more, “This is Working.” I think there’s something really interesting about it.

**John:** This is working.

**Craig:** Yeah, I liked it.

**John:** Yeah. A Judd Apatow’s movie could be also called “This is Working.”

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] This is 40 Working.

**John:** [laughs] And I think Judd Apatow would do a good job with this movie. I think Judd Apatow would like this movie. That’s my hunch. So we don’t know if K.C. Scott is a man or a woman. So I’m going to say she’s a woman. I’m going to say K.C. Scott is a woman.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** All right. We open in an elegant San Francisco apartment where we see Byron and Jane. And it’s breakfast time. Byron is African-American, chubby, in his 30s. He’s drawing a good illustration of a hummingbird. His girlfriend, Jane, who’s Chinese-American, sets down a bowl of berries beside them.

Byron wants a waffle. Jane says, “You had a waffle on Sunday.” And he’s trying to bargain for a waffle. And she says nope, he’s going to get berries. We move to a busy diner where Byron is working on another drawing. This time, it’s the same illustration, but sort of a more graphic version of it.

And the waitress, Carol, and he have a conversation, and he asks for a waffle. And she has a conversation with someone else there and was like, “You know what, we talked about this. You’ve had a waffle before. Let’s get you something healthier like a parfait.” And they’re talking about how African-American men, diabetes is a big factor, and so basically lecturing him on this.

Amanda, who’s sitting in the next booth over, argues she should just give him the waffle. If he wants a waffle, he should have the waffle. They go back and forth. Carol says, the waitress says, “I’m trying to be a friend.” There’s a whole discussion of like would a friend really intercede there, what is the nature of the relationship between a patron and a waitress. And, ultimately, it becomes sort of a heated moment. And then Byron still wants a waffle as we end page three.

**Craig:** Right. So, K.C., really good. I really enjoyed this. Because generally speaking when I like stuff, I like to talk about little problems first and then just say what I liked. So let’s talk about some little problems, then we’ll talk about the good stuff.

Top of the first page, “His girlfriend, Jane, Chinese-American, sets a bowl of berries beside him. After a long sad look at the berries…” Who’s looking at the berries? These are little things that I find come up all the time when I’m writing, too. This is not just you or anyone. We all do this because we see it so clearly in our heads that we elide certain things. But the readers often get confused.
And in fact, I read this as Jane was looking sad. I made that mistake and then I realized, “No, it’s not possible.” It must be him. So anyway, just make that a little clearer.

**John:** So let’s talk about ways you could actually implement that. So —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Honestly, if you’d broken that, “After a long sad look at the berries,” dot dot, and then Byron says a line, I would’ve described that that he was looking at the berries. But it’s because it’s in the same paragraph where you just introduced Jane and she’s the last person we’ve seen, I’m thinking it’s that.

But honestly, just say, “Byron looks at the berries.”

**Craig:** Or “he”.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. “He takes a long sad look at the berries.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right? Okay.

**John:** Yeah. And honestly, if there’s any possibility of confusion, just repeat the character’s name.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, we’re not being pedantic about this although it is pedantic. But we’re not being pedantic about it because the truth is, these little stupid confusions really do impact people. And you’d be amazed how often it comes up professionally. You know, you’re making a movie and somebody will say, “I got confused. Who are we talking about here?” It happens all the time. It’s just normal, so, but no worries. It’s little stuff like that.

Here’s something that I think. At the end of this little first conversation where he’s trying to get this and he’s bargaining for it and he says, “What if I make it myself?” Jane, more sternly, “Byron.” And Byron says, “I know. Sorry.” “He goes back to drawing.”

I would argue that in moments like this where people are apologizing, it’s more natural for us to delay apologies. If we give quick apologies, they feel insincere. And it is a little insincere here, but not. I mean, he is sorry. He knows that he’s doing the wrong thing. And in a very simple way, K.C., what I would recommend is just floppiness.

“Byron. He goes back to drawing.” Byron, “I know. Sorry.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** You know, it just feels a little more natural.

**John:** Yeah, you’ve bought yourself a beat and therefore, you know, it changes that last little bit of the scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s talk about page two. First off, I’d love to know if the waitress is black or white. Only because you’ve pulled out everyone else’s race, but also because the waitress is going to talk about race. And it’s just a different vibe. If she is a black woman who’s saying to a black man, “Hey, this is our problem,” it’s one thing. If she’s a white lady lecturing him about the problems of African-American men, it’s another thing. So I kind of want to know what the vibe is supposed to be here.

**John:** I went back and forth about whether the waitress should be named, should be titled “Waitress” or “Carol” because we’re ultimately going to learn her name.

**Craig:** I would’ve said “Carol”.

**John:** But she’s a waitress —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the pros and the cons. If you make her Carol, then suddenly three women’s names we’d have to remember in the first two pages of the script, that’s a lot. So “Waitress” just gives her a functional title. But because we’re going to refer to her as Carol throughout, you can think about sort of whether you want to do it again.

Obviously, if this waitress character ever appears again in the script, you should’ve named her.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** You should always be using by her name. But if she’s a one-scene character, maybe stick with just “Waitress.”

**Craig:** And maybe also not say her name, you know, it may not that be that interesting or maybe just say, put her — we can see her name as Carol from her nametag, you know. People generally speaking don’t announce each other’s names, you know, so already that’s an issue.

**John:** Yeah. So it becomes a plot point. I mean I think it was actually a really well handled plot point here. So we get into page three, midway through page three. Amanda and waitress are having a little showdown here in which she says, “Are we friends, Byron?” And Byron isn’t exactly convincing when put on the spot, “Sure, when you see me and you say, ‘Hey, Byron’ and I say, ‘Hey, Carol’.” See?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s the only reason her name sort of gets dragged into the scene. So I go both ways in whether she should be named.

**Craig:** I’m okay with it either way. But I would love to know if she’s black or white because she’s going to talk. And if she’s black, it just changes the tone of what’s going on with that line about diabetes is the number one killer of African-American men which is really funny by the way that she’s — I mean, I love that. This is all very funny.

I don’t understand this parfait thing. To me a parfait is a sundae, it’s not healthy at all.

**John:** Yes, I agree with you. And, you know, it’s meant to be as berries and yogurt. But I didn’t believe that it’s enough better than sort of like, you know, if it was oatmeal then I’d buy that.

**Craig:** Yes. A traditional parfait is actually an ice cream dessert. So I understand that they’ve kind of, you know —

**John:** So if it’s specified like how about the yogurt parfait?

**Craig:** Right, exactly. That would help. So let’s talk about what’s working here which is just about everything. I really enjoyed this.

**John:** I think the characters’ voices are really clear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Byron is meek but still goes back for what he wants. I think the characters are really well named and Byron is just a terrific name for this guy who’s, you know, African-American, chubby an artist. I like that a lot. Amanda, we don’t know as much about but she feels good. Jane, I can totally believe as the Chinese girlfriend.

**Craig:** Well, you know, this is — these three pages are a great example of lots of different kinds of conflict, you know, going back to our conflict episode. The unfulfilled desires and the arguments and the negotiations. All this is coming through here.

And you can tell that K.C. is a smart — we decided that she’s a woman, so she’s a smart woman. I really thought this was great. This is the kind of stuff frankly folks at home, sorry can’t teach it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She says, “Amanda is challenging the waitress on this, challenging the fact that the waitress really isn’t the friend.” And Amanda says, “I’m a stranger and I just undermined her. Now you have to order the parfait out of loyalty, that’s what a friend would do.” What’s great is that this character has excellent insight into the way this scene is working.

And what’s great is the scene didn’t overdo that. It’s just that this one person suddenly pulls the plug on her baloney, on the waitress’ baloney. And what I like is K.C. is very confident to just presume that we’ll get it and we do. So really good job, I like this a lot.

**John:** Yeah. What’s so smart about the exchange that you’re talking about with Amanda because I highlighted it too is that Amanda sort of flips on Byron too. So the first is like a challenge to the waitress and then she’s like challenging Byron again. So like, “Oh, no, we have to order it because, you know, only a friend would do that.” And so poor Byron is just sort of stuck in the middle here and then she challenges him again. So it was just really smartly done.

So if these pages crossed my desk, if the whole script crossed my desk, I would be fascinated to read it. And if this were a sample, I think it would do really well. If this were in a competition, I could see it doing really well. Granted, I have no idea where the actual story is going.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** And so I don’t know that K.C. has the ability to tell a two-hour movie but I know she can write characters and scenes. And lord knows that’s a lot of this job.

**Craig:** Yeah. K.C. can do this, she knows how to write.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And here’s something else you can’t teach. When the waitress calls him on his waffle thing, “I know I just I have a big morning at work” and then she starts lecturing about diabetes. And then at the end of the scene when Amanda challenges him and says, “Or do you want the one effing thing you came in here for, a waffle.” After a tortured beat, Byron renders his decision. “The thing is Carol I just have a really big morning at work,” [laughs]. That’s perfect, right.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s perfect. It’s the worst way to render a decision. It’s passive, it tells us a lot. And it’s funny because there’s just a rhythm to it. K.C. understands rhythm. If you understand scene structure like that, I’m pretty sure you understand story structure.

**John:** Yes. Another little example of rhythm. Top of page two, waitress, “What can I get you?” “Um, a waffle please.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And I highlighted the um. The um is exactly right, you know —

**Craig:** [laughs] Because he knows.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He’s trying to pull a fast one but he doesn’t have the skill to pull a fast one. See all this stuff that we’re pulling out of this guy that isn’t on the page is on the page but not on the page. That’s the job, is to just start to pull stuff out from people that isn’t there. It’s all the good stuff in between the words. So very good, very, very good.

**John:** Nicely done.

**Craig:** All right. Here comes Seven Secrets written by Chris French who also maybe a man or a woman. I think this time we’ll say man just because we gave K.C. — we’re just flipping coins here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So it’s called Seven Secrets. We open on a girl’s dark bedroom. Clara who is nine is hiding in bed listening to her parents argue outside of the room. The mother is saying very cryptically that, “It could be over the ridge by sunrise.” The father is saying, “We’re not leaving until I say it’s okay.” And then the mother says, “Let me out. Please. John.” The dad says, “No, you’re staying put until I get back.”

Then Clara, the little girl, leaves her room, waits for the sound of her dad leaving, then finds a key in a potted palm tree in the house, unlocks the bathroom door and finds her mom trapped inside. Her mom makes sort of an excuse about how she locked herself in. Clara uses the bathroom, then tells her mom to get back into the bathroom and locks her back in again.

Then she goes back to her room and looks outside and sees flickers of flame in the distance, a forest fire. Her mom yells for her, “I need you let me out right now. We need to go.” Clara apparently does, off-screen. The mom starts packing stuff, tells Clara to pack up her things. And Clara packs up her favorite childhood items.

Next thing Clara is in her mom’s car, they are driving. There are fire trucks, they’re in a California suburb, there’s a fire nearby, clearly. And she’s on the phone with somebody saying, “I can see the fire from here and you know something it’s — believe it or not it’s beautiful.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So of all the Three Pages Challenge we’ve done, I can’t think of an example of three pages in which I found the moment so compelling and what was happening was so compelling and yet the writing is so frustrating to me.

**Craig:** [laughs] Couldn’t agree more.

**John:** Because, I mean, let’s just talk about the situation, just the story situation that was being described here is that clearly the dynamic between the husband and the wife, the mom and dad, what is that and like it’s so intriguing. And is he locking her away sort of her own safety because she’s going to do something rash and stupid. Is she dangerous?

**Craig:** Is she a werewolf?

**John:** Is she a werewolf? And I think my gut was like she’s prone to making really bad choices, that he was doing it for a right reason and not for sort of just being an asshole reason. But I don’t know. And to have, you know, it felt very weirdly I want to say Australian to have like this Clara character who was like, who seemed kind of independent and yet was really a little girl and, you know, didn’t want to disobey her father. It was all those dynamics were so fascinating and then to have a fire coming was great. It started off with, you know, just a lot stakes and it was just great.

**Craig:** And mystery, lots of mystery.

**John:** And mystery. There’s so much mystery. And I was actually genuinely really fascinated about what’s going to happen. And yet, I had a lot of problems with the actual writing on the page.

**Craig:** Me too. I mean. So, yeah, because the summary it’s hard to kind of get this across. We have a situation where there is a fire. There’s a large fire near a suburb. For whatever reason this feels like this has happened before, by the way the discussion feels like the same old discussion in a weird way. The father seems to be somebody who either fights fires or goes out and looks at fires for some reason. He is acknowledging that this situation is serious that in fact there’s a 10% chance the house will be gone by morning. But this is what you always do, you get hysterical is what he says to her. And he locks her in a bathroom.

The daughter is quite familiar with this because she knows exactly where the key is and she knows exactly where her mom is. The mom doesn’t get that Clara knows all this, so she lies about the circumstances. Clara makes her mom get back in and locks her in again which is really weird. And then they both leave and Clara’s mom is on the phone with somebody who we don’t know, she’s crying, she’s so excited that she’s leaving. I couldn’t begin to tell you what happens with the story, what’s going on. But it’s obviously it’s like cliffhanger galore.

**John:** Yeah. And honestly that weird stutter stopper where like, she locks the mom back in and then like, you know —

**Craig:** Well, that’s the biggest —

**John:** But then like three lines later you’re like you’re letting out here again. It’s really strange but I kind of love it because it feels like we’re living in sort of like this no time kind of thing where it’s just like, you know, you don’t know what to do. And that felt very real and very true. And yet, I had a hard time getting through these pages. So let’s go down to actual words on the page.

**Craig:** Absolutely. All right.

**John:** So interior girl’s bedroom, night. We will never see the face of the adults, only the kids.

**Craig:** Oh, you already added a word that should’ve been in there. We will never see the faces of the adults, only the kids. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you added it in because it needed to be there.

**John:** Okay. So that’s the very first line of the script. It shouldn’t be there because we’re not going to see them in the scene anyway.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But I also, I’d forgotten that by page two and I don’t understand how it is supposed to work like through this whole thing, was I never supposed to see the mom’s face?

**Craig:** I think what Chris was going for was the idea that this section where Clara’s mom and dad are talking off-screen, they’re not on-screen, [laughs], right. That’s what OS means.

**John:** Yes. Well, you know what, OS means that.

**Craig:** Right exactly.

**John:** So get rid of that sentence.

**Craig:** Right. Also it says only the kids, there’s only one kid.

**John:** Yes. So, yeah. So don’t say kids.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s imagine that line was not there. So our next sentence would be “A door slams, a nine-year-old girl who’s lying in bed, Clara, blinks with a jolt.” Just an awkward sentence. Clara, nine, blinks with a jolt, she rolls over in bed, just move the bed to the next sentence, do something different there because that was a stopper of a sentence for me.

**Craig:** Yes. By the way I’m just, now I’m hung up on this. I mean, do think that Chris does what he means here is that truly through the movie no adults face?

**John:** That we’re in Peanut’s land?

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if that’s the case, Chris you got to make that like — you got to billboard that like crazy like —

**John:** Yes. That’s where you actually put like a whole separate page or before we get to the first scene because —

**Craig:** Yes. Like there’s a page in-between the title page and this that says throughout the movie, “No adults’ face will be seen, all their dialogue will be framed in such a way that we will never see their faces.”

**John:** Yes. If you’re going to do that, you got to pull that out and make that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it can’t happen within a scene.

**Craig:** That’s not going to happen.

**John:** That’s going to happen for your whole movie.

**Craig:** That’s not a casual thing. We’ve literally never seen a movie like that before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I mean, it’s interesting but, okay, so.

**John:** It’s interesting. So then we go into the off-screen dialogue. The parentheticals for off-screen dialogue feels really weird. So Clara’s mom on edge but quiet and Clara’s dad reasoned, calm. I would say before you get into that off-screen dialogue, just give us a sense of who those characters are talking with before they start talking. And then you can keep all their dialogue together.

**Craig:** I mean, frankly the stuff in the parentheticals were essentially baked in to the lines anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think he needed either of those. I mean there’s, “Let me out, please, John,” was really cool like, okay, I was nice and surprised and happy by that. I like the description of Clara’s face and what she did I was so like I got to the bottom page one and I’m like, great, we’re going to find out something. Really interesting moment I thought between her and the mom in the bathroom and the way that played but —

**John:** But at the start of page two, so, as she opens it up her mom has been trapped inside. And then you go into Clara’s house bathroom that moment, don’t — if you’re already in a scene, don’t give us the slug line for that.

**Craig:** Right. Just move us through, exactly. You don’t have to worry about that so much like what you find is eventually when you get to production and you’re nowhere near it now, somebody will just go ahead and add something to that or literally say, where her mom has been trapped inside, they’ll turn that into a slug line and give it a scene number. It’s totally — you don’t have to kill yourself over that now.

I have a huge problem with this swing around thing that happens. I found it fascinating that Clara, a nine-year-old, pushes open the bathroom door, a silent command for her mother to go back in, after a moment’s hesitation she does and Clara uses the key to relock the door. Okay, that just told me an enormously crazy thing: not only does the father go ahead and lock the mother up in a bathroom, the daughter does too. And has so much authority over the mother that the mother just agrees to do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is then completely thrown out the window when just moments later the mom says, “You got to let me out.” Well, why didn’t you say that before you walked in voluntarily, [laughs], back into the bathroom, right, it just makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah. So Clara sees the fire coming more closely, if we had a cut away with the mother seeing it’s coming closer or the mother has a dialogue that’s like, “Clara it’s over the hill, we got to go, we got to go.” Then I would believe it. But not enough had changed for me to necessarily understand why —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Clara simply agreed.

**Craig:** Well, also remember Clara’s mom has been nervous about this fire since the beginning of the scene. So why is she suddenly, and why a girl, why her nine-year-old daughter can order her back into a lockup, why Clara feels that’s a good idea to begin with? Very strange.

**John:** So some confusing language through here too. So Clara gets in the bathroom she’s going to pee. But it says, “As Clara relieves herself, she looks out the bathroom window.” And then relieves herself is like, okay, you’re not saying pee but just say pee because relieves herself like I sense there’s that weird thing of like she’s giving herself relief. I wasn’t entirely clear that she was sitting on the bowl peeing.

**Craig:** Well, yes, also —

**John:** Let’s be literal here.

**Craig:** Where is this bathroom where a little girl is sitting on the potty and there’s a window, [laughs], at that height straight out right next to her. That’s a little —

**John:** That feels weird.

**Craig:** Yes. It feels weird. Normally, windows aren’t staring directly at a toilet for good reason.

**John:** [laughs] A few sentences later, “As she opens the door, her mother’s feet, in trendy sandals, pace the hall.” So, again, we’re seeing mother’s feet, so maybe we really aren’t seeing faces.

**Craig:** Maybe. But what’s this OS stuff then, it’s like sometimes it’s OS, sometimes it’s not.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I mean, she’s on-screen but you’re not seeing her face. “She sweats through fraying cargo shorts.”

**Craig:** Like that is a sweaty ass.

**John:** That is a sweaty ass.

**Craig:** Like your ass is so sweaty we’re watching it sweat in real-time.

**John:** But again, we’re having problems with pronouns because this paragraph opens with, she opens the door but the she sweats through fraying cargo shorts is the mother, so, you know, again I was unclear whether we’re looking at Clara’s cargo shorts or her mom’s. It’s probably her mom’s and I’m like I’m now 80%, I but I had to think about it, and I should never have to think about that.

**Craig:** Also, I mean nobody sweats through their cargo shorts unless, just like pacing, that’s like a medical problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we would laugh at that. We would think that she was peeing. I mean that’s a weird choice. You can show that’s she’s sweaty or, you know, her t-shirt is soaked in sweat, that I believe. Then we get to this final page and there’s some very nice writing here, I really liked the choices of, again, by the way Clara sort of, suddenly innocent “Dad said the red powder planes” that sounds like a normal nine-year-old hopeful child, not the kind of child that Twilight Zone style orders their own mother back into a bathroom for a lock-up.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But Clara goes to her room and chooses all of her favorite stuff to take with her and it was very nice. I like the specificity of all that, I like the specificity of “strips two Barbies of their outfits leaving the dolls.” That shows that, you know, that Chris has thought through this character and I really like this line “years of childhood smooshed into a pink pleather bowling bag” like I could see that, you know?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** But then following, we’re in Clara’s mom’s SUV. Clara’s mom’s SUV. I’m already suffering from the fact that mom doesn’t have a name because I hate the blanks, blanks, blank. Clara shudders in the back seat. I do not think that word means what you think it means. Shivers? Trembles?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shudders, that’s pretty big time.

**John:** That’s not the right verb.

**Craig:** No, no ,no. Also, this sentence is no bueno. “With flashing lights and sirens, firemen coordinate the evacuation of a California suburb,” so they’re using the lights and the sirens to [laughs] herd people like cattle?

**John:** Yeah. So, if you wanted to keep that sentence structure, you could do amid or a sea of flashing lights and sirens.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Firemen coordinate the evacuation.

**Craig:** I mean, also, “Her mom weaves between police cars and fire trucks. Flashing lights. Fireman coordinate, or flashing lights and sirens.” You don’t have to like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is almost like bad poetry, “With flashing lights and sirens, firemen — ” yeah, so anyway that sentence is not doing at all what you want it to do. So I’m with you, I felt like, “Oh, my gosh, here’s three pages full of these really interesting ideas. I don’t know if Chris is entirely in control of his or her script here or her story. There’s multiple confusions going on and character wonkities but hey I mean he gave us a lot to talk about.

**John:** Absolutely. The last thing I want to talk about is just scene headers, so you can call them scene headers or slug lines, but the INTs and the EXTs and so just look at the ones on page three here, “Int. Clara’s House – Parent’s Bedroom – Moments Later” we’re going to assume that were going to be in Clara’s house no matter what. Unless you tell us we’re someplace else, we’re going to assume that we’re going to continue the space, so I don’t think you need to necessarily repeat the Clara’s House. Parent’s would be the apostrophe at the end of parents’ for ownership.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s look at that line you said for Clara’s Mom’s SUV.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So “Int./Ext. Clara’s Mom’s SUV. Int. SUV, you know, we’re going to assume that it belongs to the person who’s driving the car unless you give us some reason not to think it, so just, you know, always think, you know, specific but simple with these headers so we don’t need to read them.

**Craig:** And we don’t need the “Int./Ext.” there because it’s fine. I mean look, on this page you got Int. — like kind of an over specific Int. Clara’s house — parent’s bedroom — moments later, where it should just read “INT. Clara’s parents’ bedroom” or “parents’ bedroom” then you have “Back to Clara’s bedroom” not slug lined.

**John:** Yeah, that’s odd.

**Craig:** So, pick one or the other and then “Int./Ext.” unnecessary, “Clara’s Mom’s” unnecessary, “SUV – Night” and then in brackets “driving”. “Her mom weaves between police cars” I think we’ll get it from that.

**John:** Now, I am a bracket driver. If I do have a car that’s driving versus not driving I will tend to single that out in scene headers, it’s not a must, it’s a style. And I will tend to do that for driving and for raining and that’s just something I do but it certainly is not a must.

**Craig:** Do you do it even if like the action makes it clear right off the top the car is driving?

**John:** I will tend to do it even if it makes it clear, particularly if I have scenes in cars where they are moving and where they aren’t moving. I think sometimes, the script I finished up today I do that very specifically because there’s times where you’re on the road and times where you’re not on the road.

**Craig:** Well, all right. I mean I know what my comment is on your three pages.

**John:** So our general comment on all these pages is thank you so much for sending these in, it’s so amazing that — certainly these three people who sent in their pages for us to look at, but the other 50 to 60 people who Stuart read through, you’re all awesome for sending in your pages. If you would like to send in your own three pages for us to look at, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage and submit on a little form there and occasionally we will look through there and Stuart will burn his eyes out by looking at all those different submissions.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Good, I hope he goes blind. [laughs]

**John:** You’re the worst, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] I just, I really like the runner of me being mean to Stuart for no reason whatsoever. I hope he gets sick, I hope he goes blind.

**John:** Yeah. Stuart’s parents listen to the show, by the way.

**Craig:** I know. Well, I love Stuart’s parents. His parents are great.

**John:** Oh, they’re the best.

**Craig:** Oh, my God. Stuart’s dad is the greatest. He’s the greatest. No, we love Stuart of course, it’s just that Stuart’s adorable and he’s like our Muppet so I have to go dark.

**John:** All right. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is a video by Joss Fong and Alex Abad-Santos done for Vox and they’re looking at Kevin Spacey’s accent in House of Cards. And so Kevin Spacey’s character in House of Cards is a South Carolina — I guess he starts as a senator but he moves up. If he were to pronounce the name of his show he wouldn’t say, “House of Cards,” he would say, “House of Cahds,” and he would get rid of the R and so the video very specifically talks about Spacey’s character and his choices in trying to portray his specific Southern accent and essentially he has gone non-rhotic and rhotic is whether you’re pronouncing your Rs or you’re not pronouncing your Rs.

The video talks through sort of how that non-rhotic style came to be, that it was really an affectation and it’s really an affectation that’s passed. You don’t see current Southerners doing it, so like you’ll see Jimmy Carter doing it but not a lot of modern day Southerners do it. So from that perspective you’d say, “Well, Kevin Spacey you’re wrong,” yet at the same time he’s making a character choice and for that character choice it may be kind of right and delicious. The Foghorn Leghorn kind of thing that people complain about Kevin Spacey’s.

**Craig:** It is. Yeah, I mean the problem is that in fact Southern dialect in the United States, it’s broken up into many, many, many sub-dialects, but for the most part it’s incredibly rhotic, I mean it’s like they’re super R R R, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that whole, “I say I saw a man who was driving a car.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That feels like a cartoon character old school plantationy kind of guy, it doesn’t seem like — I’ve literally never heard anyone actually speak that way. No one in my life.

**John:** Yes and when you find actors trying to do a Southern accent, they’ll often go there. And so when we were doing Big Fish which is set in Montgomery, Alabama, both when we were doing the movie and when we were doing the Broadway musical, we brought in dialect coaches to talk through what the sound was supposed to be. And one of the things I was very specific about is like we are rhotic. We do pronounce our Rs and so when Edward he goes off he fights in a war, not a wah.

And what you do find which is consistent, you know, certainly in the Alabama accent but really all Southern accents is a degree of vowel shifting and this video talks about sort of how the vowels shift and sort of why they shift, but, you know, that’s why pens become pins and most vowels have a pretty logical shift, particularly based on whether the consonants that are near are voiced or if they’re not voiced. And, you know, actors can do it, they can get it and they can sort of learn how it all is supposed to be.

From a writer’s perspective, sometimes you do need to point out certain things that need to go a certain way. And so for the show notes for Big Fish with all the other productions we’re doing, I very clearly point out that we are rhotic, that we are pronouncing our Rs and that certain characters have exceptions and so, you know, Sandra is always pronounced Sandra, it’s never Sondra. And Jenny Hill is always Jenny, not Ginny, even though naturally her name should switch to Ginny. We always say Jenny Hill so you can always recognize we’re talking about the same person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So a fun video.

**Craig:** Have you ever met anybody that says, “I was in the wah”?

**John:** “I was in the wah”? I’ve seen so many people in movies do it.

**Craig:** I know, but have you ever actually met a human being that talks like that? No.

**John:** No, I don’t think so.

**Craig:** That’s why I don’t get it. Weird.

**John:** Yeah, I find people talk more like Adele than I would ever imagine could be possible.

**Craig:** Adele the singer?

**John:** Adele the singer. I don’t know any other Adele’s, do you?

**Craig:** They — but — what? [laughs]

**John:** The strange — the F shifting, yeah the VF shifting —

**Craig:** Oh, that. Oh, that thing. You know, that actually does happen. That’s a very Englishy thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s also a very Northeastern thing. For instance in Boston or around Boston you’ll hear that sometimes. There’s an area of Boston called Fall River where I believe our friend Nancy Pimentel is from.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And my wife is from near there and she said a lot of people from Fall River call it Fall Vivah.

**John:** Yeah. That and sort of the TH frontings are the Britishisms that you hear and I think we’re only going to hear more of them as young people, you know, love their British people and try to imitate the way they speak.

**Craig:** Is TH fronting is that the after erf syndrome?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Erf.

**John:** That’s where the TH has become “fa” sound. Or a V sound after certain vowels, so “My brova.”

**Craig:** Brova. My brova. Right. Well, if that wasn’t dorky enough, watch this One Cool Thing folks. I was a contest winner.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Did you win best co-host of a podcast about screenwriting?

**Craig:** They didn’t have that award.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** While everybody else was worried about nonsense like the Oscars, I was hard at work attempting to win the Enigma Variations Crossword Puzzle contest. So around the movie The Imitation Game, a lot of puzzles were sponsored by the movie to just drum up some publicity type stuff but they were good puzzles and I actually did one of them with David Kwong which he won and then because we did it together and then he just put his name down because that’s the kind of person he is. But I did one on my own and it was a really cool puzzle and, you know, there were a bunch of people that won but I was one of the grandmaster level winners.

**John:** So this is a puzzle you designed, not a puzzle you solved?

**Craig:** No, it’s a puzzle I solved.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So it was a crossword puzzle that then you had to kind of find a meta-theme from and then from that meta-theme you actually have to figure out how to get one key word as the ultimate answer which turned out to involve using a replacement code like an Enigma code.

**John:** Well, fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, my prize, I had a choice of prizes and what I chose was what they call a vanity puzzle. It was a custom crossword puzzle that was done for me by a proper crossword puzzle maker named Tom Pepper who has been published in the New York Times before. And what I did was I helped him because I have a little Twitter crew that does the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**John:** I know I see you tweeting each other. I find it annoying.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course you do because you’re not part of it and you’re jealous.

**John:** I am a little bit.

**Craig:** You’re jealous. Hey, start doing the puzzle. So David Kwong, Rian Johnson, Steve Asbell who is an executive VP at Fox, Megan Amram who was a writer for Parks and Rec. And Shannon Woodward who was on Raising Hope and is about to be on Westworld, we’re all like little crossword puzzle buddies. So I had each of their names built in as answers and I helped clue those and made a little private crossword puzzle for our friends, but Tom Pepper helped me with that, so he — Tom Pepper and the Enigma Variations Puzzle are my One Cool Thing of the week, because it was super nice that they did.

**John:** That’s fantastic. Having a puzzle maker make a puzzle for you and your friends is maybe the most sort of bespoke kind of thing you could do, which is like it’s just so — it’s fancy, it’s fun.

**Craig:** It’s artisanal, it’s bespoke, [laughs] it’s all of that stuff. Incredibly dorky in a way that I like, but you know how dorky I am.

**John:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** We play D&D together, we both know how dorky we are.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Oh, I should tell people that last week we played D&D, John wasn’t there so I piloted his character.

**John:** And how did Bao do?

**Craig:** Great and I really tried to stay in character, so we did encounter some undead and they were —

**John:** And did you kill them all?

**Craig:** Not only did we kill them all and Bao killed a bunch of them but they were in a room. We opened a door and they were in a dark space and everybody was like, “You know, we could lure them out one by one,” and Bao said, “No,” [laughs] and just walked in and started killing them because he doesn’t wait.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** He’s a paladin and he doesn’t wait.

**John:** Yeah. The dead must die.

**Craig:** The dead must die, so I was very John Augusty about it.

**John:** Well, thank you very much.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Cool. And thank you all for listening. So, this was an episode of Scriptnotes but there are many more episodes of Scriptnotes you could find. You look for us on iTunes and you’ll find the most recent 20 episodes. The episodes before that you can find at Scriptnotes.net. It is a subscription service, it’s $1.99 a month. If you subscribe then you get all of those back episodes and bonus episodes, the dirty show, some other interview episodes.

**Craig:** So dirty.

**John:** So dirty. There’s also an app that you can install for your Android phone or your iOS phone or other device. You can find that on the applicable app store. If you’re on iTunes, leave us a rating, leave us a review because that helps some people find the show.

**Craig:** Come on. Just do it.

**John:** It’s so nice. If you go to johnaugust.com, you will find the notes for this episode and including the Three Page Challenges that we talked about today, links to the different articles we talked about and other great information. You’ll also find a transcript for this show and many other shows, basically all the other shows that we’ve ever done. So we’re one of the very few podcasts you will find that has transcripts dating back to episode 1. So I want to thank our producer Stuart Friedel who puts those transcripts together. Our show is edited by Mathew Chilelli and we have an outro this week by somebody awesome but I don’t know who is it going to be this week.

**Craig:** Oh, by somebody awesome.

**John:** Somebody awesome.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, I will be talking to you next week from Boston where I will be there for two weeks doing Big Fish, but we’ll keep it going.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ll keep it going. Good luck out there. I will hold down the fort here and the entire State of California.

**John:** That’s what you basically always do. All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Chuck Jones’ Rules for Writing Road Runner Cartoons](http://mentalfloss.com/article/62035/chuck-jones-rules-writing-road-runner-cartoons)
* [2015 WGAw TV Staffing Diversity Report](http://wga.org/uploadedFiles/who_we_are/tvstaffingbrief2015.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, 141: Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* [From Hollywood To Homeless](http://badassdigest.com/2015/03/02/from-hollywood-to-homeless-the-writer-of-jason-x-and-drive-angry-on-screenw/), Todd Farmer tells his story
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Mark Denton](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MarkDenton.pdf)
* Three Pages by [K.C. Scott](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KCScott.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Chris French](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ChrisFrench.pdf)
* Vox’s video on [Why Kevin Spacey’s accent in House of Cards sounds off](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgCeH3xovDw)
* [Enigma Variations contest](http://www.chem.umn.edu/groups/baranygp/puzzles/enigma/index.html)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat).

**John August:** Hey this is John. Today’s episode contains some strong language, so listener warning in case you’re listening to this in a place with kids in the car, or somewhere where four letter words are not appropriate. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Ooh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 185 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to talk about directors being credited for a wordless economy. We will talk about trailers. We will talk about writing under a pseudonym. And the TV show Empire. That last one we are not at all qualified to talk about, but fortunately we have a guest who is. We would like to friend of the show, Malcolm Spellman.

**Malcolm Spellman:** Hello. Malcolm Spellman.

**Craig:** That was a perfect introduction for you. I have known Malcolm for, what are we going on now?

**Malcolm:** A decade?

**Craig:** A decade. A decade of Malcolm, of sweet baby.

**Malcolm:** A four course meal.

**John:** Malcolm Spellman is a screenwriter. His credits include Our Family Wedding, but most recently he has been writing on Empire. So, we brought him in here to talk about that and what it’s like to be a feature writer writing on pretty much the hottest TV show on the air at this moment.

**Craig:** And like for a long time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a phenomenon.

**John:** The rocket that is just hitting the stratosphere.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**John:** The other reason why Malcolm Spellman is great to have on the show is that Craig’s One Cool Thing last week was Fantastic Negrito. Malcolm Spellman is quite involved with the career of Fantastic Negrito, who as we are recording this just today charted on Billboard.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, that’s the most exciting thing in my life right now. It’s pretty amazing because — and I was telling John earlier, this whole process has been — it’s sort of like how I broke into screenwriting. It’s been completely fly by the seat of your pants. I mean, I got no idea what I’m doing. He doesn’t. And my other partner does. So, it’s to wake up in the morning. Billboard calls you and says, hey dude, you’re on Billboard.

**Craig:** So, Billboard — so like what is that call? Like Bill? Who calls you exactly?

**Malcolm:** I don’t remember the dude’s name.

**Craig:** But he calls — ?

**Malcolm:** And he’s just like, hey, you’re charting.

**Craig:** And Billboard is still a thing.

**John:** It’s still a thing.

**Craig:** It’s kind of crazy because back in the day DJs would spin records, Billboard would rank all that stuff. Casey Kasem would do the countdown. I feel like, but my son has no concept of countdowns or charts because everything is just like they just pick it up off of the Internet. But Billboard is still out there and still matters.

**Malcolm:** No one else wants to be the person that says, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So there’s still a number one. And he’s on the chart, too. What was he, like number four?

**Malcolm:** He’s seven now.

**Craig:** Seven, with a bullet.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, exactly. Our shit hasn’t even really started. Like we got a big show for NPR coming up at the end of this month.

**Craig:** As a result of him winning the Tiny Desk.

**Malcolm:** And that’s when it’s really going to — it’s already on fire, but it’s really going to —

**Craig:** He deserves it. He deserves it. Frankly, it would have happened faster without you. That’s my theory. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** It only took him 15 years.

**Craig:** I know, exactly. Exactly. If he had had me, think about where he’d be right now. He’d be sick.

**John:** Now, he’s had a long career rise, but you’ve had a long career rise, too, because you’ve been at this for quite a long time. The first credit I found for you in IMDb was like a videogame version of The Sopranos from 2006. So, can you give us the history of Malcolm Spellman, screenwriter.

**Malcolm:** There were the years before I made it, right, I think that was like seven years of trying to learn to write screenplays on a professional level. I broke in in 2002 with a spec sale. That’s still the highlight of my Hollywood career in that I didn’t know anybody in this business. You know what I’m saying? Like there is — I’m a type of dude. You know what I’m saying? I’m the type of dude that doesn’t know people in Hollywood. And I did a blind submission to ICM I think it was at the time. I was still drinking. You know what I’m saying?

And I woke up hung over with like 40 messages on my phone on Monday from Nichelle who is my current wife, then ex-girlfriend.

**Craig:** That’s a show, by the way.

**Malcolm:** And ICM saying, dude, we want to rep you or whatever. And the agent literally came straight to — as soon as I called her back she’s like, you could tell, she was like I don’t want no one else to find out about you. I’m coming right now to sign you.

**John:** That’s crazy Entourage stuff. So, what is this script and how did it come to be? It hasn’t been yet?

**Malcolm:** No, it’s never — none of my shit ever gets made. That’s my specialty. [laughs]

**John:** Tell us about this. It’s 2002. It’s a spec script. Your first script?

**Malcolm:** Yup.

**John:** And what is the script? What’s the title?

**Malcolm:** The easiest way to describe it is it’s called Core. And it’s basically Blind Side, but about a skateboarder. It’s a skateboarder from the hood, who I saw a real life version of, meets a burnt out Tony Hawk type, and X Games ensue.

**Craig:** Right. X Games ensue.

**John:** So, ICM signs you. You reconnect with the woman who is now your life. What happens next? After they sign you, are they sending you out on meetings? Are they trying to get directors attached to this thing? Like what happens from 2002 until this more recent renaissance?

**Malcolm:** It’s a cautionary tale.

**Craig:** Of all the things you did wrong.

**Malcolm:** Yup. And that I see other screenwriters doing versions of. You know what I’m saying? So, because I’m black and at that time —

**Craig:** Wait, what?! [laughs]

**Malcolm:** At that time, I know, I don’t look black. By the way, no one on your Scriptnotes knows what I look like, but I’m black as fuck.

**Craig:** Well, you don’t look white.

**Malcolm:** Whatever.

**Craig:** Well, you’re half white.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have blue eyes. I don’t.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. But I also got history. [laughs]

**Craig:** Exactly. You got history. You got the Bay Area, you got the ‘fro.

**Malcolm:** So, I break in and because I’m black there aren’t many people like me on — and there still isn’t. In feature writing there were, I think, where’d I hear the stat last night, something like 40 something movies about predominately black people, three black screenwriters. It was worse back then.

My shit was ringing off the hook. I’m literally getting calls from people like, you know, this guy is — but I’m not going to name names — but this big director — people were taking me to premieres. Execs at Fox, because they were fighting over me.

**Craig:** They were excited that you were black. They were excited that they had a black feature writer.

**Malcolm:** Well, what is this guy? Yeah. Like there’s a black dude who no one has ever heard of who in one week is now at ICM and has a script sold at Fox. And so I did the rounds in Hollywood and this the tail end. So Hollywood had just died. The spec system had just died or whatever, but no one knew it yet. Like this was still a time when my agent was giving me advice at the — . She’s a great agent. “You want to be the only writer on a movie if you can.” You know what I’m saying? Like the people still said shit like that.

And I was being offered, well, I was up for a ton of shit of just a variety of stuff because people were excited like, you know, I don’t believe in false humility or whatever, right. Dudes like me weren’t walking into rooms. You know, I had cornrows back then. You know what I’m saying? Like this was before every athlete had them. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** So I was an exciting thing and a ton of jobs I was up for, but more importantly a few places were like, dude, we’ll go to you exclusively. We just want you. You know what I’m saying? And —

**Craig:** How’d you fuck that up?

**Malcolm:** Here it comes. You know how we — there are guys who will remain nameless who right now are having a good run and they’re not aware of the various plateaus in Hollywood? Right?

**Craig:** They think this is lasting forever.

**Malcolm:** I’m thinking there’s me, and then I was telling John before you came, and then there’s Scott Frank. And that’s where I’ll be in a minute.

**Craig:** I got it.

**Malcolm:** I don’t know if there’s anything in between.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** And I don’t like any of the stuff I’m up for. But I don’t know shit. Dude, I’m literally coming straight off the straights, straight from sobriety or whatever. I don’t know what — I don’t know what the process is. I don’t know you turn it into shit you like. And so I’m literally getting offers like he has the job if he wants it, we’ll develop it, we’ll figure that out later. And my response was — I can tell the truth because everyone is gone from there.

So MTV Films has a movie that they’re doing a remake on. They wanted to buy my spec and went to Fox. And they had a movie they were doing a remake on. It’s active, so I won’t name it. And they’re like, Malcolm has the gig. And my response was is it rated R. And they’re like, no. I’m not doing it. Shit like that. Right?

And I told my agent, that’s it, no more — I’m not doing no more meetings. These jobs suck. I should be writing Oscar movies. If I’m not going to be doing that, then I’ll just write my own thing.

And then I took two years to write that project. And when I came out of that hole —

**Craig:** Who are you?

**John:** Yup.

**Malcolm:** Three years of no work. Maybe four.

**Craig:** Okay, so, I mean, I have a question then. That is — we’ve seen this happen before. That’s not a unique story, sadly. This happens a lot. I guess my question is there’s no way to avoid it in a way. I mean, in a weird way I always feel like there are some people who need a certain amount of ego strength and insularity to get that first big explosion.

And unfortunately that’s who they are. Like I think sometimes these things are unavoidable. You have to kind of fall apart to be put back together as the guy that you are now.

**Malcolm:** I agree. Go ahead, John.

**John:** Well, I was wondering, in the cautionary tale of it all, it sounds like you had heat and you didn’t know how to use that heat in order to sustain a career. You didn’t know how to sort of play the game in terms of like taking the meetings even on projects you don’t really want to build relationships. And you were so focused on writing your own next thing that you didn’t sort of keep up all of the stuff about like how to be an employable writer.

**Malcolm:** But, you know what? Here’s the real cautionary tale. You believe — we all think we’re special. Every screenwriter I know thinks they’re better than all the screenwriters. And it doesn’t mean shit. And your heat doesn’t mean shit. And you aren’t special. I wonder if I should name my boy. Because I have a dude who was literally driving — he was Nichelle’s assistant and part time assistant. I work as a mentor with a bunch of writers. They’re all doing — and the same with Negrito, right? They’re all doing better than me. I take great pride in that.

And so my boy is the hot dude in town. And he’s genuinely talented. He listens to Scriptnotes, so he knows —

**Craig:** Oh, he’s a smart guy.

**Malcolm:** Who I’m talking about, right? And because you know there aren’t many — I consider myself a “real writer,” meaning I do something interesting and unique on the page and people seem to respond to it. Still that doesn’t mean shit. And that’s the cautionary tale is like you have to somehow understand that in a weird way, as special as you are, you aren’t special.

And that’s the thing — it’s really hard to grasp. I literally like my lawyer at that time was like I’m going to put you in contact with this great writer. He should be a mentor to you. Name is John Lee Hancock. Nice guy or whatever, right.

And I was like, fuck that, I don’t need a mentor. Because I’m starting to rail, man, you know what I’m saying? Because —

**Craig:** That would have been useful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** I don’t get that I’m not special and I don’t get that dude. There’s a whole fucking system in place that all you are is a part of that system, ultimately. Like meaning, I know that’s unromantic, right.

**Craig:** No, but it’s right. I mean, isn’t it like sports? I mean, everybody that plays Major League Baseball was not only the best, they were the best of the best. They were the best player not only at their high school, but in their high school’s history. Then they get to the Major Leagues and they’re just a guy. And sometimes they’re not even that good there.

Or they realize, oh, I actually don’t know how to hit a Major League curveball. I used to crush curveballs. I don’t — this is a new thing. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know where I belong. I have to start over again in a weird way. I’ve got to figure out who I am.

**John:** Well, the other thing is like you had learned how to write a screenplay and you had learned how to write, but that wasn’t about how to make a movie. And so you didn’t have any training on sort of like how do you do those next ten steps in order to make this thing into an actual movie. And for me that was Go. If I didn’t have a chance — if Go hadn’t happened, I would never have really learned that. And so I was lucky that that wasn’t my first swing at the bat.

And yours, you know, you had this great burst of heat on that first thing —

**Malcolm:** You can say it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. But you didn’t know how to do the next thing. And so like I was very lucky I think that my first two things were just assignments and there was no great spotlight on me. And so by the time I had that spec that was that sort of spotlight moment, I was ready for it.

**Malcolm:** I agree. And that goes with what Craig was just saying which is this: ultimately because of how awful I would have become as a person, I did need to be torn down. But I do think there are writers who listen to your podcast who might not become awful people.

**Craig:** We’re trying.

**Malcolm:** And what they have to understand is that there is a whole thing going on and you are having a moment and if you do things right, your moment will parlay into more moments, but this thing is so much bigger than you. If you can just check your ego you will understand if it’s not you, it will be someone else. And that’s what happened to me.

**Craig:** Hollywood has, just by nature of what it is, and what it produces, it’s always been excited by something that’s new. It gets incredibly excited by new things. But just as quickly, becomes unexcited with them. Hollywood is a bored 11-year-old boy flipping through channels, stopping at one thing going, “Oh, awesome. Eh, no, keep moving. I’ve seen that. Oh, okay, I watched four seconds of it. I got it. Next.”

There is no real heat. Heat is — it’s all false heat.

**Malcolm:** Yes. That’s the thing. And it is — you can’t imagine when you’re the new thing that, dude, literally my agent told me I couldn’t fucking — she was like, dude, you are the new piece of meat in town. And I couldn’t imagine, no, this is different. You know what I’m saying?

And one last thing. I really regard, I hope this somehow gets back to him. I had a meeting early when I was in my downward spiral and I didn’t know it was happening, with Jon Jashni.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And he was coming up. And you know he’s got this mellow vibe or whatever, right?

**John:** Very mellow.

**Malcolm:** And he, I know he won’t remember this, but he saw the arrogance, right, and knew it was misplaced. And he pulled me to the side and said, Malcolm, this is what I want to tell you. There is no real satisfaction in this business. And you need to look to things outside of this business to satisfy you or whatever, because basically what you’re chasing here isn’t real.

And you know what I thought?

**Craig:** What?

**Malcolm:** There’s no satisfaction for you.

**John:** Ah!

**Malcolm:** I’m special. You know what I’m saying?

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

**Malcolm:** And then four years, no work.

**Craig:** Right. So it turns out that Jashni was completely correct.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, it was a great, but I was —

**Craig:** He is totally correct. I mean, I’ve never, I’ll say this much: I don’t know why. I have never once believed in any heat. I’ve always thought it was false heat, maybe because I just generally don’t trust people. But I never had the problem with, I don’t know, thinking that Hollywood was going to be the answer to my problems.

Hollywood is another problem to me. It’s just another problem to be solved. And I hope that the young writers who are listening or the writers who are just getting started in their career, really listen carefully to this because Malcolm isn’t — he’s not — you know, you’re not a monster. You’re an awesome guy. And you figured out how to put it back together.

Actually you’re right. There is something very common about this egocentric “I’m special, I’m the one.”

**Malcolm:** John, before you jump in. Real quick stat. The average career for a screenwriter, I believe, is five years. Which means the average screen — but you know what that five years is?

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**Malcolm:** It’s you sell a spec. You get hot. You flame out. And you’re done.

**Craig:** That’s right. Even that number is a lie.

**Malcolm:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, let’s talk about how you sustained and how you came back. And what were the next steps. So, you wrote this second thing, it took too long, the heat — whatever heat there was had evaporated. What did you do next and how did you get to this next place?

**Malcolm:** I got angry for awhile, which doesn’t help or whatever, right. But one thing is because of how I made it into this business, same thing we’re doing with Negrito right now. Because of how I had to learn to make money before I ever got to Hollywood, and because bless my mom’s heart I was always told that life isn’t fair, my reaction eventually became fuck that shit, I’m going to keep writing, and I ended up having to reinvent myself and —

**Craig:** What did you reinvent yourself as?

**Malcolm:** Well, black died.

**Craig:** Now, when you say black died, you mean black movies, black TV —

**Malcolm:** Black everything.

**Craig:** Everything.

**Malcolm:** Black everything was done.

**Craig:** Like everything died. What years are we talking about when the black death occurred? [laughs]

**Malcolm:** It was, so I sold in — 2002 is when I really broke in. Had a couple years. So, let’s say the early to mid 2000s.

**Craig:** Black died.

**Malcolm:** Right. Black died. And it’s been dead up until a couple years ago. Tyler had his run, but that’s —

**Craig:** He was his own brand.

**Malcolm:** Right. And so —

**John:** And when you say black died, it was just impossible to get a black movie made, a predominately African American movie made at a studio system?

**Malcolm:** Think about this. They’re making them now, and out of 42, three have black writers. They weren’t making them back then. That’s what I was getting at.

**Craig:** Right. So even when they are making them, they’re still not hiring black writers.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. And that’s in features. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Features. Right.

**John:** So, you see this landscape, so what do you do? What’s your next choice?

**Malcolm:** It was I turned towards basically I had to get out of urban crime, which is where I was at, right, and I got into white comedy. And even then it was really difficult. What I discovered was a unique niche. Because I was telling Mazin this, John, is there aren’t really any writers — not any — there aren’t many writers out there like I had been before Empire which is this: there isn’t any reason to hire me. Right? I have no hit. I’m not new like the kid who is listening. He knows who he is, right? That’s a reason to hire you.

**Craig:** That’s a reason, yup.

**Malcolm:** A good screenwriter is not really a reason to hire you, right?

**Craig:** It’s not a compelling reason.
**Malcolm:** So, because you’ve got to get on the phone and say who are we hiring. Malcolm. Who the fuck is he? He’s good.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** Okay, what about the other guy you think is good and he’s hot?

**Craig:** Right. He’s not new. And he’s not a hall of famer, so you are that middle class writer. When we say middle class we don’t mean economically middle class. We mean that middle, big thick middle of writers in Hollywood.

**John:** Middle tier, yeah.

**Craig:** That are like, okay, I’m not the new rookie. I’m not the — whatever, the top of the heap. I’m that guy in the middle that’s punching my way towards jobs.

**John:** What’s an example of white comedy? So what did you write that was a white comedy?

**Malcolm:** The shit — well, none of it gets made, right?

**Craig:** That’s your specialty. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** Yeah, that’s my specialty.

**Craig:** That’s your genre.

**Malcolm:** So, I wrote a couple of like ensemble comedies, similar to like what Craig does with The Hangover, right. During this time period, let’s just include it all, because I had a couple of dry spells. And we can rewind it. I did write that script in 2009 which is — I had come out of the dry spell and was going dry again, Balls Out with Tim that that got on the Black List or whatever.

**Craig:** Let’s talk about that first, because that was actually kind of a big deal. So, you guys did — I remember when you showed me the script and I read it and I thought this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

**Malcolm:** I was surprised how good your notes were, too. Because I didn’t —

**Craig:** I know. Everyone is always surprised.

**Malcolm:** I didn’t get your whole thing yet.

**John:** So let’s back up.

**Craig:** I’m slow to warm up to. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s back up. The script we’re talking about is Balls Out and it’s written under a pseudonym, it’s you and Tim Talbott as the Robotard 8000. And did you write this movie with the intention of getting made, or just to make the most outrageous sample you could possibly write? What was the thought as you went into it?

**Malcolm:** What makes the Robotard great is Tim writes with no intention to get made and wants to be outrageous. And I’m like, you know, and I write from a different place. And that goes on all the way, even into the creative DNA of this thing.

I knew this: I knew about labels. I knew — I was starting to learn — I was very resistant when I was coming up to being pigeon holed. Again, I wanted to be Scott Frank who I was told works in all genres, right.

**Craig:** Which is true.

**Malcolm:** But I didn’t know, I was just saying this to John, is you need a platform from which to jump off, whether it’s an Oscar, or a hit, or whatever, you’ve got — meaning — or it could be Craig Mazin writes spoof comedies and from there can jump off of that into other shit. But if you don’t have nothing, if you’re just writing scripts in different genres, you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** You have to start somewhere.

**Malcolm:** So, I’ve been over the last — if 2009 was Balls Out, I was starting to become clear that I need to give people, fuck my writing, whether I think it’s great or not, people need to get on the phone and have something to say. And so we did the Robotard thing because it was like I had to brainwash my reps into understanding this is going to be a different entity and a different — you are going to sell the Robotard as if Malcolm doesn’t exist.

**Craig:** And you can imagine —

**John:** Oh, they seem delighted.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. You and some fucking guy are writing a script that will never get and made and is disgusting.

**Malcolm:** Fuck you. It’s going to get made.

**Craig:** Under the name Robotard 8000. But, you know, I thought that — first of all it was evident to me, what you just described in that script was clear that it was absolutely chaotic and tasteless in the best way, the way that John Waters was tasteless. But there was also a formulism to it. There was structure. There was an actual story. So, you could see you and Tim and all that stuff going on in there. And you asked me like, what do you — and I was like no one is ever going to make this. But what did I tell you to do? Do you remember?

**Malcolm:** I remember one of the notes was really good —

**Craig:** No, what did I tell you to do with the script?

**Malcolm:** Oh yes, that’s right. So, Craig has us put it — which is funny because this kind of shit is the kind of shit people do now. But in 2009 — Craig was like, dude, throw it up on the fucking Internet. Have some people read it. And see what the fuck happens because that’s — you’ve done something.

**Craig:** And the key — I mean, there’s a big risk in that, right? If you put your entire script on the Internet what you’re saying is we’re pretty sure no one is going to make this movie, but we also think you’re going to love us.

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And it worked out because early Black List, right, I mean how many years had the Black List been going at that point?

**Malcolm:** It was mid Black List. But I’m very proud to say look at the shit we were up against. Social Network. And off the Internet, like —

**Craig:** Still, like those are the movies they love.

**Malcolm:** I don’t want to bad mouth no one, but all the reps who got fired, let’s just say that. Right?

**John:** They loved you.

**Malcolm:** Refused to get behind it. Our shit got on on its own. But, by the way, again, another cautionary thing — this has to do with like people who are going to Sundance or whatever, or whatever kind of heat you’re getting, me and Tim didn’t really have a clear follow up to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** So everyone in town wanted to meet us, 100%, at high levels.

**Craig:** And you just didn’t have anything to say?

**Malcolm:** Yeah. We were like give us a job.

**John:** So, give yourself advice now. Step in the time machine and give yourself advice about what you should have done at that moment.

**Malcolm:** The key is the second you understand that there is heat going on, you have to create a reason for that to turn into something. Right? Part of it might be building a narrative. That’s another thing that I’m still learning, like what is the Malcolm narrative. Like I know who you guys are. And I bet you whether consciously or not that has to do with some of ya’ll. Like it’s not just your reps building it, you guys are putting yourselves out as certain —

**Craig:** My agent doesn’t talk about me ever. I won’t let him talk about me.

**John:** He’s not allowed to mention your name.

**Craig:** I was just going to say, you’re not allowed to talk about me.

**Malcolm:** But, so there’s that, but also it is understanding you have something like Balls Out, right, who are the kind of people that would make a movie in this genre? What are you telling them when you get into the room that is a reason? You know what I’m saying?

It should have been a script. It at least had to have been a pitch. Otherwise, there is this idea that Hollywood will give you a job.

**Craig:** Never.

**Malcolm:** I was acting, well maybe when I was hot off my first spec, people were trying to give me jobs.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, sure.

**Malcolm:** That shit don’t happen no more.

**Craig:** No, not like that. And when you’re new and you cost scale, maybe then they say we have something we want you to rewrite. But see the interesting thing is when you guys did Robotard what you were essentially putting out in the world was we are this new team that’s wild and irrepressible and unique and original. No one goes to that with a job. They say what do you have that we can get behind, that we can actually make, unlike this thing.

**Malcolm:** But you know what that also is? So, that is — everything is a failure on yourself. If anyone is working harder for your career than you, like again, this goes to reps. Right? What I’m about to bad mouth, and those reps are gone.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Malcolm:** But there is this sense new writers have. All our friends, right, are jaded and don’t expect much from their reps. And, you know, their reps are awesome people who are not being regarded by, because we’re bitter motherfuckers right. But in general this idea that your rep should go out and do shit for you is a monumental failure in how you — right?

**Craig:** It’s not what they’re good at. I’ve always said what agents in particular what they’re really good at is getting you the most money for the job you got yourself.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** Every now and then they will put you in a room with someone. Like, I give Todd Feldman a ton of credit, like —

**Malcolm:** You do give him credit.

**Craig:** I mean, look, he didn’t put me in a room with Todd Phillips for the first time. That was Bob Weinstein. But he was the one that kind of brought me back around to Todd, which was — I mean, you have to get your own jobs, but they really — they get you the most money once you’ve gotten the job. So, leaning on them and thinking that they’re going to go up — it’s a romanticized view of what agents do.

**Malcolm:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then writers will say things like I don’t understand, like I have an agent — every job I’ve ever gotten I’ve gotten myself. And I’m like, yeah, every writer every job they’ve gotten themselves. Why would anyone give you a job because your agent is yelling at them to give you a job? It doesn’t work that way.

**Malcolm:** No.

**John:** Nope.

**Malcolm:** It doesn’t. Go ahead.

**John:** So you wrote this thing with Tim Talbott as the Robotard. Did you write other stuff with him, or has everything else been your own stuff after that?

**Malcolm:** I wrote a second thing that I’m proud of that Craig killed us on, but I’m very, very confident in my work.

**Craig:** I like Balls Out.

**Malcolm:** You know what I’m saying? I’m very, very confident. Like I don’t — I read everybody’s shit. And I don’t think I lack for anything, so it’s weird. I have zero self-esteem in so many crucial areas in how to navigate this business. I don’t even need people to read my shit if they’re not giving me a job. I don’t crave that shit, because I feel like —

And so we wrote something else that went down in flames. But I actually believe is really, really strong. The problem was there was fatigue for what was out there. We wrote it, again, fucking Tim man will tell you compromised. Like I don’t write from that place, right? I wrote what I thought we should be writing and what we like. Tim feels like we compromised, whatever.

What is true is whether or not the script was good, everybody was doing Hangover type of movies.

**Craig:** It was yet another Hangover.

**Malcolm:** It was even in Vegas. And we wasn’t doing it for that reason.

**Craig:** I mean, even at The Hangover we were getting yelled at for being too much like The Hangover.

**Malcolm:** But you do remember at the end of Balls Out we talked about the whale, right?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, no, there was intertextuality.

**Malcolm:** It did not come from cynicism.

**Craig:** No, no, you guys weren’t purposely copying anything. It was bad timing. Which I think, you know when I read it, that was largely what I was concerned about.

**Malcolm:** It was. You know what Craig’s note was, John?

**John:** What?

**Malcolm:** Good structure, someone will buy this. We give him our script, he says, “Good structure. Someone will…” I’m like fuck you, dude.

**Craig:** I was actually not even right.

**John:** All right. Let’s talk about good timing.

**Craig:** Nobody bought it.

**John:** So this is from an article in Variety this last month and it’s talking about the staffing on the TV show Empire. “Malcolm Spellman, who had long resisted staffing a TV series, was ultimately lured by the show’s premise. ‘I’m bananas for hip-hop,’ he says.”

**Malcolm:** I get killed on that.

**Craig:** How did you — you must get killed for that.

**Malcolm:** I make that shit sound cool though when I say it. It doesn’t look good in print.

**John:** No it doesn’t.

**Malcolm:** But if you hear me say that —

**John:** Say exactly that line. I’m bananas for hip hop.

**Craig:** In print it looks terrible.

**Malcolm:** I’m bananas about hip hop.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s still not a great line.

**Malcolm:** Fuck you guys.

**John:** “Now, he says, he’d join again in a heartbeat. ‘The show feels historic, onscreen down to the room,’ he says. ‘To have a show that’s this black, from the stars to the writers, it’s going to be like a nuclear bomb. It’s a watershed moment.'”

That before the show debuted.

**Craig:** I mean, talk about like now. There is one theory. One theory is that Malcolm talks that way about everything he does. This time coincidentally he was right.

**Malcolm:** No.

**Craig:** But I think that actually he was calling the home run. He called the home run.

**Malcolm:** I’m not in general a clear thinker. But when I am clear, I’m really, really fucking clear. And that was one of the things I wanted to talk about in general was sort of race and what’s happening in Hollywood right now.

So, there is — for Empire, I didn’t have no idea it would be this big, but one of the things I was saying to the people in Variety is this: now you have to cut through the noise. We do it with Negrito, right? We know this. When Negrito is on point, no one else is doing his shit like that. You know what I’m saying? People will imitate him.

When you’re looking at the TV landscape where everyone — I heard Overstock is about to start doing original content. I’m not lying.

**Craig:** Overstock?

**Malcolm:** Overstock.com.

**Craig:** You’re kidding me.

**Malcolm:** They’re like, fuck it, Amazon did it. We’re doing it.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Malcolm:** When you’re looking at a landscape that’s this saturated, how do you cut through the noise? I think — is it appropriate for me to talk about a show I think is going to do good that hasn’t come out?

**John:** Oh, absolutely.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Malcolm:** I think NBC is making a smart move with this DiGilio project called Warrior which is basically going to be — you should check it out. I don’t know how far — I think it’s public. It’s been in Deadline. I don’t want no one to get mad at me.

**Craig:** No one is going to.

**John:** If it’s in Deadline it’s fine.

**Malcolm:** All right. So, it’s Crouching Tiger and what they’re focusing on from what I heard from the execs is the right shit, which is that feeling of magic in Crouching Tiger. Whether or not it works, you know why that show deserves to live and why it could hit.

With Empire, you couldn’t at the time turn on the TV and see shit that looked like that or sounded like that. And the equivalent is if you were going to do a sci-fi show, this would be the sci-fi show that has $100 million worth of effects on it, because when you turn on that screen you’re like that’s a soap and that’s all black folk up there.

**Craig:** No one has ever done, I mean, there have been a ton of primetime soap operas. No one has ever done an all black or mostly black primetime soap opera in the history of TV. Is that correct?

**Malcolm:** I bet so. And this shit is —

**John:** Yeah, I mean —

**Malcolm:** This is a type of black. This is black like hip hop was black when it came out, and white folks were like, fuck, that’s hot. You know what I’m saying? That’s what’s happening right now.

**Craig:** It feels authentic.

**John:** It feels like, I mean, you could step back and say like, oh, you know, hindsight being 20/20, like you look at the Shonda Rhimes shows that are doing awesome. You look at Nashville, which is working. There is probably a version of that’s an African American driven show that is about music. This show could exist. But the show could also — you could make that show and it could be awful and it could not be a hit.

So, at what point did you encounter Empire? Had they already shot the pilot? How did you get involved?

**Malcolm:** They shot the pilot already. And for sure it was like, okay, this isn’t just black folk, right? This shit sounds black. If you know Lee Daniels, and I’m not dissing Danny or Ilene, who I love. They are equal — they are all equal voices. Those are all our EPs or whatever, right. But Lee will do little shit, you know what I’m saying? Like he’ll give you that shit.

**Craig:** That guy is amazing to me. So, I’m kind of curious how, because you know I’m a huge Precious — I think Precious is one of the best movies ever made. I love Precious. I’m obsessed with Precious.

**Malcolm:** It’s a great, great, great movie.

**Craig:** I actually think one of the things about Precious that people don’t understand is how fucking funny it is. It’s one of the — that weird thing where Precious imagines herself in like an Italian neo-realism movie with her mom. There’s just amazingly funny stuff, but it’s also that scene — like I’m still, like sometimes I’ll just if I’m bored I’ll just go on YouTube and I’ll just watch that scene near the end where Mo’Nique is sitting there with Mariah Carey.

It’s one of the best scenes ever put on film. It’s astonishing. Mo’Nique is astonishing in that film.

**Malcolm:** She scorches it.

**John:** She’s amazing.

**Craig:** Like I’m just kind of obsessed with Lee Daniels. And I feel like, so Lee Daniels, is he kind of like the tonal godfather of this thing?

**Malcolm:** What happens is you’re dealing with creative people, right? So, if you start doing shit, it gets absorbed by everybody. And other people can somehow put themselves in that place. You know what I’m saying? Where the tone becomes universal for us in the writing room. You know what I’m saying? Like everyone starts to understand what this show is.

An important point though, for Empire to exist, I do believe — so this is a watershed moment. Empire is a watershed moment. Like all watershed moments, on the heels of some other watershed moments. Everything in Hollywood I think is about to change, particularly because they’re finally let black folk in the game again. And in a different way than they did before.

**Craig:** As creators.

**Malcolm:** And they’re not letting. Black folks are putting themselves in the game.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they seem to want it now, too.

**Malcolm:** That’s the fucking win. It’s all we do. And Shonda is the spearhead of that shit, meaning two years ago on the heels, when there was only Scandal, right, I’m out pitching and literally being told like the conversation wasn’t this blunt. It’s much more elegant. But here is my conversation in the room.

Can’t do the show. Has a black lead. Won’t sell international.

My response: What about Scandal.

Their response, and this builds into our thing we were emailing about earlier: That’s the exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Right. It’s always the exception to the rule when it’s black people right?

**Malcolm:** Now, Shonda has already populated Grey’s with a diverse thing, and it’s crushing, right? And it’s crushing in the demo. Then she fires off Scandal and they’re still hating. And then she comes with How to Get Away with Murder and at that point you know how Hollywood is. They’re like, fuck, we need black chicks to lead our shows.

**Craig:** Right. Because if there’s three exceptions to the rule in a row, maybe the rule is wrong. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** It is. And so there’s a certain amount of rage I feel. Craig gets these emails, John. Because what’s about to happen — there’s been this myth in Hollywood that’s going to — and it takes fucking logical contortions to support that overseas in particular black folks diminish your appeal. And what’s about to happen is so many things with black leads are about to do well, particularly coming out of the TV camp, but they can’t lie no more.

Like if Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Blackish, and Empire — got to shout out to Blackish.

**John:** Absolutely Blackish. Yeah.

**Malcolm:** Which is cutting edge stuff. Like I saw Kenya last night. I didn’t get to talk to him. I don’t know him well, but that’s high level on top of having black folks.

**John:** When he pulls out his African American Express Card, like that was just a great moment.

**Malcolm:** If all that shit does well overseas —

**John:** Well, here’s a question. What if it doesn’t do —

**Malcolm:** It is though. Too late. It’s already happening.

**John:** But I would postulate that even if Empire was not a giant hit overseas, it’s such a massive hit here that it kind of doesn’t matter. Things don’t always have to transfer.

**Malcolm:** There are two levels to my rage. Empire, I don’t know what it’s doing overseas, but I know those other shows are doing well overseas. And so the general thesis is what I feel like as a — and I don’t even just write black shit, but here’s an example of what happens to me, or used to.

I walk into a meeting at a studio. I can’t even name the specifics because everyone will know who I’m talking about. And there is the exec who breaks new writers. And he sits down, he’s not white, he’s not black, but he’s not white. And he starts off our conversation, because he read a project I wrote for Warner called Soul Train, and he says, “I just want you to know, we don’t do black projects here.”

**Craig:** Right. That’s it. Like, oh so —

**Malcolm:** Oh, I’m done. I’m done.

**Craig:** Yeah, because what else could you possibly do?

**Malcolm:** And I want to say, motherfucker, do they do your race’s project here? No. So, let’s fucking do some white shit, right? [laughs]

**John:** For a time there was UPN. For a time there was a whole broadcast network that was predominately, like all the black shows were there. And then it went away. But in some ways —

**Craig:** But were those black shows, or were those white shows with black actors? Like there’s a big difference. I feel like part of the —

**John:** Well, Girlfriends, though, was a black show. Wasn’t it? Wouldn’t you call that a black show?

**Malcolm:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There is a black sensibility there. Like we’ll kill the whole timeslot if we get into definitions of when something becomes black or not, but what I do think is important for us to talk about is do people overseas not want to spend money —

**Craig:** Okay, so here’s what we were talking about, and this is my theory about this whole thing, because we get into this with movies all the time. All the time they talk about this with movies. And what they’ll say is black movies don’t travel overseas. And my whole thing is, no, there are certain movies that are culturally very American that don’t travel overseas. A lot of black movies are very culturally American. Because when we say black, what we mean is African American. We don’t mean, like for instance in France, France we were talking about — what was the movie where in the UK it did great, but in France it didn’t do well? I think it was Ride Along.

So, Ride Along it made like $6 million in Britain and it made like $25,000 in France, because it’s just a different kind of black person there. Like our thing here, African American is a certain cultural niche. But the same is true for fucking NASCAR, right? So Talladega Nights does not travel. Talladega Nights makes $120 million here. And then makes $2 million overseas and nobody says white movies don’t travel.

**Malcolm:** And let me jump in here, because this fucking important. African Americans are the pillar of global pop culture.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** We travel and the whole thesis has been — and look at the Sony hacks. This isn’t paranoia. Right? I don’t know if that’s appropriate to say, but —

**Craig:** Go for it.

**Malcolm:** But this shit is stated by studio heads, right? The general thesis is that first they didn’t want us in sports, right? And there is the same arguments where if too many black people play baseball, people will stop coming out to the park. So, sports, music, we are dominant. We sell overseas. And they are saying that racist people are making the distinction that though we will buy their music, and watch — and buy their tennis shoes and all that shit —

**Craig:** We won’t watch them.

**Malcolm:** We won’t watch them. And all these motherfuckers are saying this. And the problem is it’s because they’re comparing Tyler Perry movies to fucking a Tom Cruise movie, as opposed to as the stuff we were saying back —

**Craig:** You should compare like, Tyler Perry movies, they don’t even release them overseas anymore. They used to try. They gave up. Because it’s an American cultural experience.

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**Craig:** It’s about the Bible belt, for god’s sakes. They probably shouldn’t even release Tyler Perry movies in New York.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** But, The Equalizer, right, has — we heard for years, we heard for years, “Well black actors, they don’t travel.” Denzel is traveling just fine.

**Malcolm:** Let me tell you how sick this business is though, dude. Amy Pascal doesn’t think that.

**Craig:** Well, she’s wrong.

**Malcolm:** But, that’s what you’re dealing with if you’re black. This is where the rage comes from.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** So, for the people out there who don’t know, me, John, and Craig, Craig built this community of writers. It’s giant. And it’s very, very social. And we all interact and email each other. And so I’m having this argument with two of the writers that we know. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Should I get rid of them?

**Malcolm:** No, they’re great guys. And there’s this pathological insistence that race is the reason. And so Denzel becomes the talking point. “Look at Denzel. He doesn’t do well overseas.”

**Craig:** But he does.

**Malcolm:** But that’s the fucking problem with racism.

**Craig:** Will Smith does great overseas.

**Malcolm:** Let me, without naming names, a lot of black people have bought into this belief, by the way.

**Craig:** Really?

**Malcolm:** I believe you were one of the people, proponents of it at a point. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Well, I’ve been a proponent of everything at some point. I take every side of every argument at some point or another.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. But my point being there’s nothing you can do, like the statistics that undermine the idea that black folks don’t matter overseas are wealthy, but they’ll always make, “Well, Will Smith is an exception. Well Denzel…”

Do I have time to go through the etymology? No, we should actually just —

**John:** Well, let’s talk through — you were trying to decide when did this show become black. Is it a percentage of the cast that we see. Is it the percentage of creators? Is it the specific culture that the show is portraying?

**Malcolm:** So, again, this has been discussed ad nauseam. I don’t know — it’s an amorphous thing. You kind of know it, or sometimes you don’t know it. It’s hard to tell. And the fucked up thing is there’s like if Empire does well overseas, that show is black, meaning it has a black sensibility.

**Craig:** It’s undeniably black.

**Malcolm:** It’s black folks up in that room. It’s white folks, too, but white folks who are getting down with black folks. And I have a feeling it’s going to travel, and then it just becomes stop fucking talking about race.

**Craig:** Well at that point it’s undeniable.

**Malcolm:** And by the way —

**Craig:** It’s a shame that it has to be undeniable, though, right?

**Malcolm:** That’s the fucking rage which is in the wake of what’s happening in Hollywood, right, I believe that there’s a chance — by the way, they don’t push movies with black leads. They start to believe, like they forget Bad Boys starred two people that were not — they’ll tell you every reason, “But Will Smith…”

**Craig:** Everything is a but, but but.

**Malcolm:** Exactly. And I have a feeling Ride Along might get a push overseas, and I think it’s going to do pretty well.

**Craig:** For the sequel, yeah.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, the sequel. You look at my career, 13 years in the game, right. All these doors are opening up for me now. Motherfuckers want to deal with me. They’re letting me in. I’m stacked up, right? And —

**Craig:** Don’t get crazy with the false heat.

**Malcolm:** I’m not. I’m not. That’s over with.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re scaring me.

**Malcolm:** I’ve got — Negrito is on fire now. I don’t give a fuck. I’m like what can we capitalize on. What can we do well? And Negrito ain’t like that either.

**Craig:** That’s my guy. You know. That’s the start of this thing.

**Malcolm:** For me and a ton of black actors and directors, and dude, there’s a big time black director who if you look at his list it’s like, dude, you got almost all wins in studio movies and you can’t get hot. Right? And for me who is a brilliant fucking writer, right, you guys have been killing me for ten years and you don’t even know you’re doing it, but look at the Sony hacks and what’s being said. You guys really do believe that. And that applies to me when I walk in the room.

Now, by force of us — by Kenya, Shonda, Lee, and Danny. Danny is honorary black fucker. You know what I’m saying with that, right? By just us being determined because we know our shit is hot, to make it happen — oh Malc, here’s more jobs than you can fucking handle. And you do feel like, fuck you.

**Craig:** I know.

**Malcolm:** I’ve been here the whole time and now you all are about to — here’s my metaphor, before we move on. It feels like — do not give me fucking hate mail. It’s not the same. This is a fucking metaphor what I’m about to say.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Malcolm:** Because I got boys doing time or whatever, so I know the difference between what I’m about to say. But these brothers who get out of the pen after 36 years for a rape or murder they didn’t commit, thank you for letting me out the fucking penitentiary for those 36 — after doing 36. I am grateful. I am also fucking furious.

**Craig:** Right, of course. Of course. I mean, look, the problem is that it doesn’t — the system is unfair across the board. It is particularly unfair to black writers. I think it’s particularly unfair to female writers. But I think, I don’t know, like I’m not into ranking unfairnesses, but definitely — it’s undeniably unfair to black writers. The whole system is undeniably unfair to black writers, to black culture in general. The problem is that in success you kind of have to let that go.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Otherwise it’s going to ruin in. Then they win in a weird way. You know what I mean?

**John:** Let’s wrap this up, because —

**Malcolm:** I don’t want to seem angry.

**John:** No, no, but let’s wrap this up with just sort of you’ve been able to shoot more than any feature writer can ever shoot. And actually be able to get your words on screen in ways that no one else has ever been able to do and really learn how to do that. And you’ll come out of this with the opportunity to make your own show, make your own movie, demonstrate that you’re the person who can run this next — you can carry the ball yourself next time.

**Malcolm:** My inclinations will always be bad. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** “My inclinations will always be bad.” [laughs]

**Malcolm:** They just are. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** At least you’re aware of it.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, that’s how the fuck I got sober and got out of the streets.

**Craig:** That’s the double edge sword of you. I always feel like that stuff is like — it’s whatever fuels that bravado, you are fun to hang around. You’re confident as hell. Like, I know that you are, I mean, look now you’re a professional for whatever how long it’s been, a decade right?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You walk in that room, you haven’t written on a network TV show before and I guarantee you without me being there, without me knowing a thing, when you walked in that room you were the most confident person in that room.

**Malcolm:** It’s true. It is. And I know am aware of the cost of that. And I do value like — particularly like Ilene who is in charge of, she’s the grand collector of all the stuff that’s happened there, is really out of like I’m in the showrunner training program and it is textbook of all the right ways to nurture.

**Craig:** She knows it.

**John:** So I didn’t know that you’re in the showrunner training program, the WGA Showrunner Training Program?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**John:** Oh, that’s great. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** So, for people that don’t know, this is this incredible program that Jeff Melvoin spearheaded at the WGA and John Wells. And the idea was that there are all these great writers that are high level television staff writers and at some point they’re asked to run a show. But running a show is not writing. It’s writing, but then it’s also management. It’s managing staff, personnel, budget, the studio, production schedules. All this stuff that nobody teaches you at UCLA Extension. You just have to know how to do it from people that have done it before.

So, they have this incredible program. It’s for basically you can’t get in unless you are certain — you’re a pretty high up TV writer.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. People got shows. Like there are people in the program whose pilot has been picked up and it’s going to go.

**Craig:** Right. Like they’re either going to be show-running something, or they’re going to be asked to. And so you have guys like Glen Mazzara who runs Walking Dead, or ran Walking Dead.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. He’s great. Matt Nix.

**Craig:** Matt Nix. Guys who have just been doing it for years who essentially say here is what the real job is. It’s an amazing thing. There is nothing like that for screenwriters coming up.

**Malcolm:** And it’s real. It’s not bullshit. Like it’s the real —

**Craig:** It’s vocational.

**Malcolm:** All this stuff is the real winners are coming in who are still winning and talking about how they win and how they lose. Like it’s happening now.

**Craig:** It’s not like the retirees saying, “You know, back when I was running…”

**John:** Right. It’s the guys who are coaching the teams are coming in to tell you how to coach your team.

**Malcolm:** This is happening now.

**Craig:** Player coaches.

**John:** We have a bit more stuff on the agenda. Let’s power through this. So, you put something on about directors.

**Craig:** Oh, this is just a real short thing. Somebody sent me this review that was in The Guardian I think. Oh, sorry, in The Independent. Sorry, Guardian, it was in The Independent. And it was a review of Casual Vacancy which was a BBC adaptation of this J.K. Rowling novel that I think she originally wrote under a pseudonym.

**John:** Robert Galbraith.

**Craig:** Oh, was that her pseudonym? And it was a positive review and the reviewer is named Ellen E. Jones. And Ellen E. Jones had the following to say: “The Casual Vacancy does better than either Broadchurch or Fortitude at wrangling a large ensemble into a coherent story. The structure was already there in Rowling’s book, but director Jonny Campbell deserves credit for scenes that cleverly established character with a wordless economy.”

The director deserves credit for scenes that establish character with a wordless economy. And I presume that Ellen doesn’t know that what the director did was shoot the screenplay. It’s just unbelievable.

**John:** Is the screenwriter actually mentioned?

**Craig:** No! The screenwriter is not even mentioned and the director deserves credit for this wordless economy. What do these idiots think we do?

**Malcolm:** Well, what I’ve seen from all the people on Twitter now with these — the people who write about movies and TV really don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

**Craig:** None of them is truly —

**Malcolm:** Like they made fun of Hass and Brandt once for being on a movie — props to being on a movie with so many writers and it’s just two writing teams who pretty much worked together. Yeah, you got them, you know what I’m saying.

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**John:** All right. So, my little bit is this Nathan Rabin article for The Dissolve and he’s talking about trailers and how so much of fan culture is based on the anticipation of movies coming and that the focus point of that anticipation is usually the trailer. And yet if we actually look at trailers, they’re not generally representative of the movie at all.

Like we remember trailers from the ’90s where like every trailer would have like a Smash Mouth song, or Two Princes. [laughs] And it’s like it became a thing. And it was a call for us to all remember that the trailer is there to try to convince us to see the movie, but the trailer may not actually represent the movie at all. And so it’s how frustrating it is that we spend so much time talking about this trailer, which is the only evidence we have of the movie, as if it represents the movie, when many times it doesn’t represent the movie at all.

So, I’ll link to his blog post. He actually has a good example of this Frank Whaley movie. There’s two different trailers, and one of them is cut like a comedy, and one of them is cut like the actual downbeat movie it actually is. And —

**Craig:** Well, you know, they have these great ones where people re-cut Mary Poppins as a horror movie.

**John:** Or The Shining as a comedy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the point of a trailer. It’s designed to fool you.

**Malcolm:** But didn’t they used to be more accurate? They did, right?

**Craig:** Trailers used to be terrible.

**Malcolm:** No, I’m not saying whether they were better or worse. You knew what the fuck the movie was.

**Craig:** Sometimes. Sometimes not. Trailer science is like — I think of it a little bit like fast food science. Like you know how the fast food companies have figured out exactly what proportion of chemicals, fat and sugar, to make your brain high? The trailers are really good at making your brains super high. Like I watched the trailer for the new Age of Ultron.

**Malcolm:** I know. It’s fucked.

**Craig:** It’s just calculated perfectly.

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** And, frankly, they will come to you know with marketing the way they are. They will come to you and they will say, hey, I just went through this on a movie I was just writing where they said, “We need a line like this for this person for the trailer.” Done.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, it is. I do think though there is a really — in the end, as soon as you accept that, then you are accepting that somebody knows and they actually don’t. And that’s a dangerous fucking thing. Like we forget that there’s a great movie that a major studio put out that marketing killed.

**Craig:** Oh, marketing screws — yeah, bad marketing —

**Malcolm:** But if they knew then —

**Craig:** Well, good marketers, I think, know. Bad marketers don’t.

**Malcolm:** You don’t think that that’s the same marketing team that did a great job on a movie right before it?

**Craig:** All I can say is this: nobody is perfect. Nobody bats a thousand. There are some marketing teams, and by the way, here is the other dirty secret. The marketing teams aren’t cutting the trailers either. They’re hiring companies to cut the trailers. So, and then you have the directors and the studio heads involved, everybody is, you know —

**Malcolm:** Short trailer story. My boy worked at the trailer house that decided upon watching Snow Dogs, fuck it, let’s just say the dogs talk.

**Craig:** Absolutely. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** They don’t talk in the movie.

**Craig:** [laughs] No they don’t. That’s right.

**Malcolm:** But that would be good.

**Craig:** That would be good.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** That would be good. That would be good. By the way, I had to look it up because Ellen E. Jones failed to mention her — Sarah Phelps was the writer of The Casual Vacancy miniseries on the BBC. Ellen E. Jones, you win my umbrage award of the week for frankly being stupid and not knowing how to do your job.

**Malcolm:** Wow.

**Craig:** I mean, you got to call it like you see it.

**Malcolm:** Wow.

**Craig:** If you don’t mention the screenwriter and then you give the director credit for a wordless economy, yeah, you’re stupid and you don’t know how to do your job.

**Malcolm:** Someone tweet her that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Somebody will.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. I’ll start off. It’s a book I’m reading right now that was actually sitting on the shelf for a long time and I just randomly grabbed it and started reading it. And it was actually fascinating. It’s The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. It is the history of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys mysterious, which I didn’t really read that much growing up. I was more of a Three Investigators guy.

**Craig:** I love the Three Investigators.

**John:** Oh, the Three Investigators are great. You were a Jupiter Jones, weren’t you?

**Craig:** Well, I liked all of them, but I love that Jupiter Jones lived in his secret hideout underneath the garbage.

**John:** Uncle Titus’s junkyard.

**Craig:** Yeah, garbage. Junkyard. I wanted a secret hideout in the junkyard.

**John:** I suspect there are a great number of screenwriters of our generation who were huge Three Investigator fans. So, this one talks about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys which are a product, they came in a little bit before the depression, and what I hadn’t really appreciated was what a uniquely weird character Nancy Drew was, because she was like this oddly empowered teenage girl who went out and solved crimes and dealt with adults and was able to do a lot of things that a girl her age should not have been allowed to do. And she was a huge phenomenon.

So, the other thing I wasn’t aware of is that all of these books have one name writing it. So, Nancy Drew is written by a woman, but it’s actually all the creation of one guy, Edward Stratemeyer. And he would write, talk about writing under a pseudonym for Robotard, he would write all the outlines for all the books, for the Nancy Drew books, for the Hardy Boy books and all these other adventure things. And then he would just hire ghost writers in to write them. And so it’s always different writers writing those books.

**Craig:** And like all work-for-hire.

**John:** All work-for-hire, like paid a hundred dollars a book.

**Malcolm:** He’s a book showrunner.

**John:** Yeah, he’s a book showrunner. That’s what he was.

**Craig:** My dad had his collection of Hardy Boys books. He had the whole collection from when he was a kid, so I think they were originals. And I sat there and I read them as a kid. I went through a Hardy Boy phase. I never read Nancy Drew.

**John:** Yeah. Hardy Boys has that classic sort of cliffhanger. Every chapter is like they’re in mortal danger. And Nancy Drew has sort of more subtlety and stuff. But I just thought it was fascinating.

**Craig:** You’re right. Like actually the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were incredibly insulting to boys, because they just were like boys like idiots running around and action, being hit and stuff. Fires.

**Malcolm:** Boys are so stupid.

**Craig:** Yeah, like lava. There was one with lava.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then girls are like, they’re going to reason their way and using inference of deduction, solve a crime.

**John:** Like Nancy is going to perform a perfect sonata, like even though she’s never really played piano.

**Craig:** Right. She’s going to use just inherent skill and quality whereas the boys were just running in circles yelling.

**John:** Like smash, smash.

**Malcolm:** I can’t believe you guys read Nancy Drew.

**Craig:** I didn’t read Nancy Drew.

**John:** I didn’t really read it.

**Malcolm:** Sorry, there’s a difference to me.

**Craig:** There is. The Hardy Boys are boys. Nancy Drew is a girl. If you were a boy, you know —

**John:** But, I mean, the Three Investigators are really, I mean, they’re our generation. Because the Three Investigators I think were relatively new in the ’70s, and that’s why —

**Craig:** The Three Investigators actually were cool. So, like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew was all about 1940s and ’50s, like gender stereotypes. The Three Investigators were three dorks. Well, really one dork, one athletic kid, and one —

**John:** So Jupiter, Pete, and Bob.

**Craig:** Yeah, Bob I never got a read on —

**John:** He was a librarian. Bob was going to be gay.

**Craig:** The cool thing about the Three Investigators was that they were friends with Alfred Hitchcock. And I don’t know how this worked out that they got Alfred Hitchcock’s name and the rights to use him. They would go visit Alfred Hitchcock. They had one —

**John:** He was their sponsor sort of. Yeah.

**Craig:** And they had won the right by guessing gumballs in a thing to have a limo drive them around. And Alfred Hitchcock would give them an assignment and then they would go solve a mystery.

**Malcolm:** Oh, that’s great.

**John:** But then later on in the series, after Alfred Hitchcock died, they had a new, like some other famous mystery writer was their sponsor. And so they changed —

**Craig:** They couldn’t keep having ghost Hitchcock.

**John:** And so another point of trivia, my last name August is kind of derived from one of the books of the Three Investigators. There was a character named August August August which I thought was just the best thing ever. And so when I was picking my new last name, it was August.

**Craig:** Wait, I thought that was your middle name.

**John:** It was my father’s middle name.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, so that counts.

**John:** So, it’s family.

**Craig:** You know that John wasn’t really John August.

**Malcolm:** Listen, I didn’t know that. There is a story here, huh?

**John:** Yeah, my last name is German.

**Craig:** Misa? Misa?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Miza?

**John:** Meise.

**Craig:** Meise.

**John:** That’s why I changed it.

**Craig:** Meise.

**John:** You got Spellman. Yeah, Spellman is pretty easy.

**Craig:** Meise is such a Nazi. It’s so scary.

**Malcolm:** Someone named Spellman owned slaves many years ago.

**Craig:** Somebody named Spellman.

**Malcolm:** My French mama got that last name.

**Craig:** You’re French — Rifkin. You’re French Jewish.

**Malcolm:** Rivlin. That’s a big name, by the way.

**Craig:** She’s a Jewish French.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, yeah. Came from Russia to France, no, Russia through Germany, then in France.

**John:** I wonder if you’re related to Aline.

**Craig:** Oh, because we all know each other, John?

**Malcolm:** No, that clan is huge. Like we got —

**John:** French Jews.

**Craig:** The French Jews.

**Malcolm:** No, no, but it’s not just French. In Israel there is a Rivlin Street.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of Rivlins. I’ve heard that name.

**Malcolm:** It’s a common name.

**Craig:** My guess is that Rifkin, I bet you Rifkin and Rivlin are the same thing, it’s just because like when the Hebrew letters got translated over in this. Anyway, the point is you’re Jewish to me.

My One Cool Thing is this SNL App. Did you get this?

**John:** I didn’t install the app. Tell me.

**Craig:** It’s awesome. I actually can’t believe they did it.

**Malcolm:** What is it?

**Craig:** It’s the Saturday Night Live — of course, Saturday Night Live. Yeah, you still carry around like an old briefcase.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, do you know Rian had to talk me into how to get hardcore history. I loved it, though.

**Craig:** He talked you through it?

**Malcolm:** He was like, dude, just download. Because shit scares me.

**Craig:** I know. I know. You get a little —

**Malcolm:** I’m scared of technology.

**Craig:** You are. I can tell.

Well, Saturday Night Live did this amazing thing. I honestly don’t know why they did it. So, it’s great. They have an app and the app gives you access to everything.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I mean, like as far as I can tell, everything. And they organized it by eras, but they also — you can look for certain actors, or kinds of things. You can look for the commercials. It’s just like, you could sit there all day and just watch old Saturday Night Live.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** And, you know, I’ve got say, Saturday Night Live, for all the shit it takes, it’s still —

**John:** Come on, 40 years of doing that.

**Craig:** It’s still like, yeah, after 40 years, I don’t know.

**Malcolm:** See, I haven’t fucked with it in like — every time someone says you got to watch whatever, there’s not enough for me to be like that was worth it.

**John:** That’s why it’s a classic DVR show. If you’re bored with a sketch, just keep going.

**Craig:** By the way, the app is for you, because you don’t have to watch it in the moment. You don’t have to sit and wait for it to get good or bad. You just find what you want. You know, you find the best-ofs, and those are pretty great.

**Malcolm:** What’s going to happen if I try and download it?

**Craig:** You’re going to be calling me, so don’t.

**John:** Malcolm, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Malcolm:** It’s random, but I just saw a voice pathologist today. I lose my voice. I get stressed out and then I found out — I thought it was my vocal chords, but it was actually the muscles on the side of my throat constrict to the point that I have no — like that’s what had been happening to me.

**Craig:** Because your voice sounds fine now.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. Because a few days I didn’t have no voice. Remember, I said, I think I sent an email. And I went to a laryngologist, whatever. She was like, dude, your voice is fine. I think I know what’s happening. She sends me down the hall and this woman does deep tissue stuff and literally she’s like, ooh, there it goes. And the muscle just relaxed and I could talk.

**Craig:** Whoa. Like that instantly?

**Malcolm:** Yup.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That is our show for this week. I have one little tiny bit of news. Is that I’m going to be heading to Boston for the next three weeks, so we’ll still keep doing the show. But while I’m in Boston, on March 13 I’ll be there for a Q&A after the premiere of the Big Fish Boston show. So, we’re doing a very stripped down version in Boston. So, if you’re in the Boston area, come see Big Fish there.

**Craig:** Is that going to run for awhile?

**John:** It’s running for a month. So, it starts on March 13. There’s a hundred stagings of Big Fish this year, but this is the one that Andrew and I are going through and making some tweaks to make a fit with a much smaller cast, a much smaller space. And it should be really good. I’m excited to have the chance to dig into it again. So, come on March 13th, or any time in Boston. There will be a link in the show notes.

Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth, who did some other great outros for us.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s a good one.

**John:** He’s a good one. As always, it has been edited by Matthew Chilelli and produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Oh, Stuart is the best. Stuart is running and getting us lunch right now.

**Craig:** Stuart’s got a Mohawk now.

**John:** Stuart has a Mohawk.

**Craig:** He’s got a Jew-Hawk.

**Malcolm:** But it’s red, isn’t it?

**Craig:** He’s got a red Jew-Hawk. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** Is he Jewish?

**Craig:** Oh, my god. Like the most.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stuart is like 12 Jews smashed into one.

**John:** If you are listening to this show on a device that listens to podcasts, you should subscribe to us on iTunes. You can look for us on — just search for Scriptnotes on iTunes. While you’re there, you should leave us a comment. You should talk about what a great guest Malcolm Spellman was.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** So good. I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Malcolm, you are…?

**Malcolm:** @malcolmspellman.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** And you got to watch Empire because —

**Malcolm:** Oh, and @fantasticnegrito. That’s the one that matters. But that shit is on my thing.

**Craig:** And @robotard8000. Or is Robotard — ?

**Malcolm:** No, Robotard is still happening, but I’m all about Negrito.

**Craig:** You’re all about Negrito.

**John:** So, the Robotard account, but either one of you can tweet it, so therefore I never knew who I was talking to.

**Craig:** No, but that’s the best game. What is it, @robotard8000?

**Malcolm:** @therobotard8000.

**Craig:** @therobotard8000. The best thing is you try and figure out who is tweeting what, and there is sometimes there is little subtle clues, but a lot of times you cannot tell. It’s a good social experiment.

**Malcolm:** We do that on purpose.

**John:** That’s good. If you would like to listen to the premium feed that has many more episodes with swearing, like this episode, you can find it in the premium feed at Scriptnotes.net. There is also an app you can download those episodes in. Scriptnotes, just search for it on the App Store, or in the Android App Store.

Malcolm Spellman, thank you again for being here with us.

**Malcolm:** Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Do you?

**Malcolm:** I do.

**Craig:** But do you? He’s looking at his phone. He doesn’t appreciate it.

**Malcolm:** Shit’s happening.

Links:

* Malcolm Spellman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/malcolmspellman)
* Fantastic Negrito on [Billboard](http://www.billboard.com/charts/blues-albums/2015-02-28) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MusicNegrito)
* [The Robotard 8000](http://www.therobotard8000.com/Robotard_Main/Main.html) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/therobotard8000)
* [‘Empire’ Revels in Diverse Dynamic in the Writers’ Room](http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/diversity-authenticity-key-to-assembling-writing-crew-for-foxs-empire-1201393872/) from Variety
* [Overstock.com Plans Streaming-Video Service](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/20/overstock-com-plans-streaming-video-service/?mod=mktw) from The Wall Street Journal
* [Phillip Noyce To Direct ‘Warrior’ NBC Pilot](http://deadline.com/2015/02/phillip-noyce-direct-warrior-pilot-nbc-1201366425/) from Deadline
* [Writers Guild of America 2015 Showrunner Training Program](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=1190)
* [JK Rowling’s story is a far better drama than it is a book](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/the-casual-vacancy-bbc-tv-review-jk-rowlings-story-is-a-far-better-drama-than-it-is-a-book-10047499.html) from The Independent
* [The trailer is not the movie](https://thedissolve.com/news/4859-the-trailer-is-not-the-movie-in-fact-sometimes-the/) from The Dissolve
* [The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006CDQ6SE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric
* [Three Investigators](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators) on Wikipedia
* The [SNL 40 app](http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/app)
* [Voice therapy vs speech therapy](http://www.fauquierent.net/voicetx.htm)
* [Get tickets now for Big Fish in Boston, where John will be doing a Q+A after the March 13 show](http://www.speakeasystage.com/big-fish/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/go-set-a-spider-man).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Uh, uh, uh, uh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 184 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you are in the thick of it.

**Craig:** I’m in the thick of it. Every now and then, you get a writing job that is truly a job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. You have three weeks. We’re shooting a movie. Fix a whole bunch of stuff. Go very, very fast — faster, [laughs] faster.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Please write for budget, please write for schedule, please write what the movie stars want, please write what the studio wants, please write what the producer wants. Listen to everybody, do everything right. Get it right the first time. Go, go, go, go, go.

**John:** Yeah. And I’ve been in your situation before and I know how stressful it is. And then I remember that people who write for one-hour dramas on television, that’s their life every day. As tough as it is for us, at least at some point, you’ll be able to hand this in and say, “Bye. Enjoy making the movie.” Versus a TV show, you turn this in and they’ll be like, “Oh, your next script is already late.”

**Craig:** The only thing I’ll say —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** In our defense —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Is that while episodic television is brutal, particularly primetime network episodic television where you’re doing 26, 22?

**John:** Yeah, it’s 22, but it keeps cranking up —

**Craig:** Keeps cranking up.

**John:** Because they want more.

**Craig:** So you’re doing a ton of these things. But the characters are there, the voices are there, the settings are there, a lot of the plots have been broken before or at least the general storylines. You know, you’re not shouldering this burden of all of it and kind of building a train as it’s rolling down the tracks. That’s the scary stuff.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But, you know.

**John:** What you’re doing is a little bit more analogous to shooting the pilot where it’s just like there’s a real question like what is this thing even —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Supposed to be?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And there’s a lot of competing voices for what this thing is supposed to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The challenge of course of network TV or really any TV is you could be already making the thing and they could tell you, “No, it’s not the thing that we want you to be making.” And then you’re going to have to deal with stuff you’ve already shot, stuff that’s going to come down the pipe, it’s just — it’s bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is the stuff where you just want to be able to say to people who are observers or analysts of movies and how movies are made, I just wish that we could all work in some sort of Plexiglas booth so they can watch and go, “Oh…”

**John:** “Now, I understand.”

**Craig:** “Oh, that’s why sometimes movies are the way they are.” [laughs] And the crazy thing is sometimes it works.

**John:** Sometimes it works brilliantly and sometimes that pressure cooker creates great stuff, so.

**Craig:** Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. All I know about this is certainly these jobs are difficult and they are exhausting. And it’s a little bit like giving birth, I think. You know, my wife said after our first kid, “Well, I’m not doing that again.” And then she did. You sort of forget because time passes and then you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s no big deal.” So, whatever, two, three weeks. Whoop-tee Doo. You know, these two, three weeks, they feel like five years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They feel like five years. So anyway, I’m almost out of the woods on it. I’m doing the best I can. And in many ways, it’s been a lot of fun. But I’m a little a tie-tie.

**John:** I understand it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today, we’re going to walk you through a very gentle discussion of many different topics, some of them suggested by our readers. We have follow-up on previous episodes, talking about Gravity, talking about Australian television, some suggestions about the premium feed, a question about film by credit.

And then because rights are so much in the news these days, we have three sort of related stories about film rights and how much studios want to hold onto things. So it’s a good continuation of our chain of title discussion.

**Craig:** Great. I thought that our, I don’t pat myself on the back very often for our podcast. But I thought our last podcast about the Gravity situation was one of our better podcasts.

**John:** I’m really happy with our episode. It was one of our more sort of detailed and planned going into it episodes where we really figured out what we were going to talk about. And this is going to be completely the opposite of that because I literally just put the notes together about half an hour ago.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But we can start with a follow-up question about Gravity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Nick writes, “Let’s say that there is indeed absolutely no evidence that Gravity, the movie, was based on Gravity, the book. However, what if there were evidence that the screenplay, what Gerritsen did subsequent to publishing the book was directly lifted and used in Cuarón’s movie?” So essentially, what if she really did write some other stuff and somehow Cuarón or Warner Bros read this stuff and tried to incorporate it into the movie?

So her book was not utilized, but her script work was. What kind of case would she be able to make against the WB? Certainly, nothing about her book contract would necessarily directly apply. But would there be an arbitration claim? What would the scenario be like if the work she had done that wasn’t part of the book somehow made it into the movie, Gravity?

**Craig:** I’m going to presume that she is aware of this. I’m going to presume that prior to the movie coming out, she is aware that in this scenario that the movie has appropriated what she believes is work that she’s done in her screenplay stuff.

Now, if she’s written this material and it was not purchased by the studio and then she lobbed the charge here, most likely what would happen is the following. There would be, yes, it would be a WGA issue. There would be pre-arbitration. So a pre-arbitration and/or a participating writer investigation which is sort of like a pre-pre-arbitration, where you’re trying to figure out is this person a participating writer, did they provide literary material that was used on screen for this movie?

If that’s the case, the studio is going to need to give her a contract for her work, pay her at least minimum, and then Ms. Gerritsen would become a participating writer for the purposes of arbitration, and then her material would be entered into the arbitration, and people would decide, “Okay, does she deserve screen credit or not?”

Now, the tricky part here with this is if that were the case, the next question would be a non-WGA question. This would be a question for her attorney and that would be does the stuff that she’s written that ends up in the movie, is that so closely related to the material in the book that we can now assume that the book is part of the chain of title here, that this is a derivative work of her book, in which case, we’re back to this contract claim situation.

**John:** And so, in our discussion of Gravity, this last episode, we noticed we didn’t really bring the Writers Guild into it at all. And usually, when we talk about credits and we talk about sort of who’s the author of the movie, we’re always bringing it up the Writers Guild. Because the Writers Guild is who determines, in US movies, who gets screenplay credit, who gets written by credit. All that is the screenwriting work of creating a movie.

The Gerritsen case is about these underlying rights to this novel and her belief that the underlying rights to her novel were utilized to make the movie, Gravity, and Warner is saying, “Uh-uh. That’s not what happened.” So if she truly had created screenplay material that somehow made it into the movie, and again, it’s not just like a Warner’s executive says like, “Hey, you know what would be a great idea is if this kind of thing happens.” It has to be real material that makes it in.

If that somehow happened, then that becomes — that enters into the universe of the Writers Guild. But independent of that, it would never be a Writers Guild thing. And I think a lot of times people assume that, “Oh, well the Writers Guild handles everything related to rights in movies.” And that’s not actually correct. Everything that is sort of underlying material is ultimately something that’s being dealt with in contracts and copyright law. It’s only when you have to figure out who gets that written by credit on a movie that that underlying material becomes a factor for arbitrations and for the Writers Guild.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Written by,” Story by,” “Screenplay by,” and so forth. I mean, the Writers Guild has control over what their deal with the companies gives them control over. It’s entirely tautological. So we have a collective bargaining agreement like any labor union does with the companies. And Theatrical Schedule A, which is online if you choose to read it if you’re suffering from —

**John:** Masochist.

**Craig:** Insomnia one night or you’re a masochist.

Theatrical Schedule A lays out exactly what the rights are of the Writers Guild and how these processes are handled, and what the procedures are. And from that comes our Screen Credits Manual and all that. There have been cases. I know of some where writers have said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re using some of my stuff that you never bought.” And the companies have had to very quickly buy it, and naturally, they don’t have a lot in the way of leverage, you know.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So one of the things that the Writers Guild has raised a red flag about numerous times, and it’s not germane to the Gerritsen case, but there’s this odious practice of inviting multiple writers in to pitch on projects to try and get a job. And then sometimes the studio executives will say or sometimes the producers will say, “Well, can you write us up a, you know, write us up a little pitch.” Or, “Write me the first ten pages.” Which we are, by our working rules, not allowed to do at the guild.

Writers may do this. “May,” meaning they could realistically do it, not properly do it. And if they do, the companies expose themselves because they don’t own that material. They haven’t bought it. If they don’t buy it, they don’t have the rights to use it. If any of it shows up in a movie, they’ve got a real problem. So that’s one of the tactics that we have used to say to the studios, “You got to stop doing this stuff.”

And frankly, the business affairs people completely agree. The business affairs people who do write up the contracts are fastidious about securing as many possible rights as they can. The fact that the folks over in the creative wing are sort of willy-nilly having people write stuff that they don’t buy or get the rights do freaks these lawyers out and for good reason.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to issue a caveat here which I think Craig is going to agree with me on. If you are a writer who’s going into one of the situations where it’s an existing project and they’re inviting multiple writers in to pitch, and the producer or the studio executive says, “Hey, would you write me up something?” You have a choice. You have a choice to write that thing up or not write that thing up.

And you might have just heard what Craig said, it’s like, “Well, it sounds like I should write this thing up and turn it in because then maybe I have like a copyright claim.” I don’t think that is your best course of action.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you should actually follow the instructions and the rules of the Writers Guild and not write up something without being paid for it because that is part of the whole reason we have a guild and a union to make sure that people aren’t doing work they are not paid for.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, that’s the moral argument which is a correct argument. And here’s the practical argument. 999 times out of 1,000, they don’t use the work. You’ve just wasted your time, and more importantly, you have once again lowered the bar for all of us. You know, this is the proverbial race to the bottom that we’re trying to avoid here where the ultimate end of it is everybody write a script and we’ll just pick the one what we want and buy that one.

If you’re a professional writer in the Writers Guild, you get paid to write. You don’t have to get paid to pitch. You can go and tell them as much as you want. You can go and say, “Hey, look, I will talk about this all day long to anybody you want. I’m not writing a word. I am not printing a letter until I’m hired.” That’s the deal, that’s how we’re supposed to do it. And I would argue that those of you who are not doing this are actually hurting yourselves because you are, A, being taking advantage of, and B, signaling that you are the kind of person who is willing to be taken advantage of.

**John:** Well, it’s a dangerous position to put yourself in.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So speaking of people doing their jobs properly, we have follow-up from Ben in Australia who writes in reference to the Rebel Wilson episode and the clean Rebel Wilson episode, not the Dirty Show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the clean episode, she talks about writing her show for Australian TV and how there really aren’t censors and it was a completely different experience than what she found on American television. So, Ben, who actually works in Australian TV writes, “You call it ratings. We call it classification, tomatoes, tomatoes.

“I want to clarify a misunderstanding. Rebel mentioned that Australian TV channels don’t have the equivalent of standards of practices. This is incorrect. All the commercial networks equivalent to NBC or CBS, the public broadcasters like PBS or BBC in the UK or pay TV, like cable TV, have in-house professionals called classifiers. Network TV in Australia is relatively tame like the USA. However, there is plenty of scope for provocation in the evening. Rebel probably didn’t hear from a classifier because her TV series didn’t require edits.”

So Ben is saying, yes, it’s looser. Yes, they probably have some different standards, but there are sort of standards and practices. And they actually have people who have the equivalent jobs of the American ratings people.

**Craig:** Well, all I can say to Rebel, who we know listens, is for shame, you’ve failed to discuss the classifier to such an extent that they call you.

**John:** Indeed. So, Rebel, basically, you had extra head room. And you could have gone even dirtier and you didn’t. So basically, you sold Australia short.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I hope you feel good about yourself.

**Craig:** You weenie.

**John:** Rebel, you’re the best.

**Craig:** Not bad.

**John:** Oh, I just love her.

**Craig:** I do too.

**John:** She gives good hugs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. We have a question or sort of a suggestion from John who writes, “Big fan. And all about paying Stuart and Matthew’s bills.” So he’s a premium subscriber and so he’s saying that he’s paying Stuart’s salary and Matthew’s salary because he is a premium subscriber. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** He asks, “What if you did a premium Three Page Challenge episode where you only receive submissions from premium subscribers? Or even do a Golden Ticket thing again where you choose one Three Pager from the show and privately read their whole script or pilot. People go nuts for that. Not sure how you’d verify. Maybe you only say the URL in a 30-second premium clip or through the Libsyn site, just an idea. Stay funky.”

Maybe. I sort of throw this out there as a, “What do you think, Craig? And what do other listeners think?”

**Craig:** Well, first of all I’m not going to stay funky. I want to be clear about this, I’m funky on my own schedule, I don’t just stay funky. I go in and out of funky —

**John:** Actually, if you followed his orders to stay funky then you never had funk.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. You know what the most funky thing you can do? Not stay funky. Okay, now that aside although that one —

**John:** Craig, you were a normcore before there was even a norm.

**Craig:** Damn straight. I think it’s a perfectly — Look, I believe in rewarding our premium subscribers as much as we can if there is a simple way to check a username against a subscription account. I think that that’s a perfectly good idea to say, “Okay, this is only open to premium subscribers.”

**John:** We’ll look into it. It’s all through the Libsyn stuff and so Libsyn is the people who host our podcast. It’s the people who make the app. It’s what makes putting the podcast out in the world not onerously expensive. So it’s a matter of whether we can actually get that user ID sort of detail information, but maybe. And I’ve been, you know, honestly, I’ve been happily surprised by how many people subscribed I think apparently for the Dirty Show and for the extra bonus episodes. So, maybe. I think it’s kind of a good idea.

**Craig:** Great. Okay. Well, we will work on that and see if we can’t get that going, but thank you, John, for writing in and for helping to pay Stuart and Matthew’s bills.

**John:** It’s very nice. Craig, while we’re on sort of the metatopic of the Scriptnotes podcast, we’ve discussed off air the possibility of doing a live show sometime spring/summer and I think you and I both sort of said like, “Yeah, maybe not,” but then Stuart pointed out that our 200th episode is actually going to be coming up, like, in May. Maybe that it is a call for a live show.

**Craig:** Yeah, 200, geez Louise.

**John:** Two hundred episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are we going to do for a 1,000th episode?

**John:** Yeah. With a thousand episodes we’ll be — that’s like 15 years from now.

**Craig:** I know, we’ll both be in the home.

**John:** Yeah. Or at that point maybe there will just be like artificial intelligence that will speak with our voices very knowledgably about contract-related things.

**Craig:** Thank god, so I can just sleep. Well, for the 200th episode it does sound like maybe we would want to do something, I mean, when we talked about it I was just a little concerned that we were maybe falling into the “If you don’t go away, how can we miss you?” trap, but if there’s demand for it, you know, if people like it.

**John:** Yeah. So , I would ask our listeners, if you have suggestions or things you would like for our 200th episode or if you think we should maybe not do a 200th episode like live show, that’s a valid opinion as well. Short thoughts like that, just hit us on Twitter I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin or if you have a longer thoughts or suggestions about things that would be great for our 200th episode write in at ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, our next question is so in Craig’s wheelhouse, I mean, like this person just woke up in the morning and said like, how can I ask a question that Craig will know the answer to?

**Craig:** I’m feeling it.

**John:** Craig will know the answer.

**Craig:** I’m feeling funky already.

**John:** So, this person, this is a guy named Jay I actually met at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** He writes, “I recently wrote and directed my first feature film, Seven Minutes, an indie film. It premiered at the Austin Film Festival and we sold it to Starz.” Congratulations!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I had a film by credit at the top of the credits. The WGA called me to make sure the story originated with me and that I was the only writer. DGA had approved the credit as well, they did or at least they appear to. We got a letter saying that the film by credit was no good and had to go because WGA says a film by credit at the top of the film can only go there if all the credits are at the head of the film. Our credits are at the end. This is because according to WGA’s logic audience members assume that film by credit is the director’s credit and they don’t stay until the end of the movie. They would not know who the writer is.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Craig, I have no idea about the current state of a “film by” so can you catch us up to speed?

**Craig:** Well, this has been a long, longstanding debate between the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild. A film by credit started to appear some decades ago and began to stick in the craw of writers as you would imagine. It initially was meant for, well, first of all it naturally blossomed out of the whole auteur theory which drives writers crazy and because also it’s not true or at least it’s invalid, but it was initially was like look a film by Steven Spielberg, a film by Martin Scorsese, you know, something that might mean something.

But overtime it became a film by anyone and what the hell does that even mean? So, the Writers Guild has hated this credit. As the story goes, the Writers Guild apparently convinced the studios in the ’80s, I believe, that they should get rid of it, that they should disallow a film by credit. And as the story goes, I’m not sure this is true or not, this is just a legend.

As the legend goes, the DGA heard about this, freaked out and threatened to strike for the first time in their — or at least legitimately threaten to strike for the first time of their existence and the company said, “Well, we don’t really care about this. It’s fine you can have it.” And so, in fact, every three years when the Writers Guild negotiates this big collective bargaining agreement included in it is a letter that basically says the Writers Guild is saying that we hate this film by credit and the companies are saying, “Yes, we have heard you, you hate it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It has become enshrined as something we permanently hate. Now, the WGA and the DGA have been sort of trying to get a grip on this thing because even the DGA started to feel, I think, a little embarrassed by the proliferation of this, what we call the vanity credit. It’s one thing to say film by somebody that we all respect. It’s another thing to say film by some effin guy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah, I think that this is part of the brokered solution between them is, yeah, if you’re going to do a film by credit, you have to also have the writer’s credit up in the front of the film, otherwise, yeah, it does seem like you just did everything.

**John:** So, my question is really, what is Jay encountering? Is he encountering a policy? Is he encountering a formally agreed upon rule? Like, what is he actually bumping up against? Because if it’s not part of our contract with the studios, is it just a mutual agreement between the WGA and the DGA? What is he actually hitting?

**Craig:** I cannot say for sure that it is in the contract, but I suspect if the WGA is saying you can’t have it there, it’s in the contract, I can get confirmation of that. Let’s say it’s not in the contract and it’s just effectively an agreement between the DGA and the Writers Guild. That’s just as good essentially.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I will say that aside from the rules here I’m going to talk to Jay and anyone else that’s directing movies. Whether you write and direct it or just direct it, really think about this film by credit and think about what it means. If you’ve written and directed it you can say, “Well, I understand why this would be offensive to a writer, but I am the writer,” well, yeah, great, so we have a credit called directed by and we have a credit called written by or screenplay by, but then there’s the editor, there’s the DP, there’s the costume, there are the actors —

**John:** There’s the producer.

**Craig:** The producer. I mean, what is this film by? What does that even mean? It certainly not a film by any one person. It is the most bizarre credit, the most pointless credit designed to aggrandize one person in defiance of fact. I don’t get it. I don’t even know what it’s for, why even have it? It’s embarrassing. I find it embarrassing that you have to announce that this is a film by you. You directed it, take credit for what you’ve done. It’s really egregious when someone says, “A film by me, but I didn’t write it, I didn’t come up with the story, I didn’t come up with the characters, I didn’t come up with the dialogue, I didn’t come up with the scenes, I didn’t come up with the point, the theme.” That’s just embarrassing.

**John:** So, I’m looking for examples of where I feel it makes sense and so I look at sort of, you know, people who kind of feel like they are auteurs in a way, like a Wes Anderson. So, like, if somebody says like “a film by Wes Anderson” I can sort of imagine that because I can sort of imagine what font it’s in, it’s all in that cohesive universe. And yet if that card weren’t there it would still be a We Anderson film. I mean, it’s a Wes Anderson film because it is completely his, you know, it’s in his universe, it’s his canon.

So, I take weirdly greater umbrage at the word “by” than having someone’s name there. So, weirdly for me a Joe Schmidt film is not offensive to me because you could also say the thing about a George Clooney movie, I mean, when he’s an actor not a director. It’s just like it’s identifying what category it falls into rather than the authorship of the movie or the, you know, the creator of the movie.

But again, this is opinion, this isn’t sort of standard practices and rules and that’s what Jay was encountering was apparently was some form of agreement between the WGA and DGA about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what you mean about Wes Anderson and I — there are directors that have clear styles just as there are writers that have clear styles. And I do think that that’s what the directed by credit means. The style, the look, the fonts, those are directorial choices.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But why should Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film by Wes Anderson, when Roald Dahl wrote the novel. I just don’t , I mean —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it’s a film by a whole ton of people but you’re the director, so I just find that credit to be obnoxious. I’ve always thought it’s obnoxious. I find it to be like a weirdly insecure credit.

**John:** I think I agree with you there. And I have friends who’ve taken the credit, dear people who I love, but if I really sort of scrape back the layers and get to it I think it’s insecurity that is feeding their desire to have that extra credit on the movie.

**Craig:** Well, I think also to be fair to a lot of directors it’s like a thing where now it’s harder to not take it. Well, okay, all my friends take it, everybody else is taking it, why am I not taking it? Why am I the one guy that’s waving this flag against this credit? So it’s like the path of least resistance now to take this credit.

So, you know, I’m not a big fan. So, I would say to Jay, hey, you know what? The way to avoid this whole brouhaha: don’t take that credit.

**John:** Exactly. The easy solution to the question he writes in with.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, while we’re making suggestions for people to stand up and do something that’s against the grain of things, this is off the show notes but — so every year I host a couple of the Director’s Nights at Film Independent and I love doing it. So I do a Q&A. I just did a Q&A last night with Damien Chazelle of Whiplash and his editor and his composer. You met Damien. He’s just the best, I loved him.

**Craig:** What a jerk, right? [laughs]

**John:** What a jerk! He was fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s a sweet, sweet dude.

**John:** And so we showed clips and we talked through stuff and answered questions and then he had to do another Q&A right after that because that is what you do this time of the year is you — if you have a movie that’s up for awards consideration or in this case nominated for many awards, you are on this circuit where all you do is press for your movie, screenings for your movie, and I kind of think it has to stop.

I think it’s weirdly a destructive practice that I would love to see — I don’t think this is going to ever actually happen because I think if one director or one film said, “You know what? We’re not going to play this game. We’re not going to sit down for The Hollywood Reporter for two hours for this roundtable. We’re not going to go to this photo shoot. We’re not going to waste all of our time doing this because it is a waste of time.” But if you were the one movie that did that you’d be screwed because you potentially would miss out on awards, you’d missed out on some of the box office bump.

But if a group of the top films sort of got together and said, “You know what? Let’s not do this. Let’s just not play this crazy game,” our system would be so much better and we’d allow filmmakers to go back to actually doing what they should be doing which is making movies, not answering the same question a thousand times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I suspect that a lot of the people that are involved in it agree with you. The problem is that they’re not really the ones that are pushing it. It’s the studios, it’s the financiers, I mean, you know, if anybody has any misconception that awards are about merit or art, they are not. The awards exist to support two financial streams: one, the actual award show which is a financial stream; and then the promotion of the winners to create box office bonanzas.

**John:** So, here’s where I push back on those two things. I think you can honestly still have the award shows without the 17 weeks of promo and special issues and other madness and special screenings that sort of go into this. I think you can actually have those award shows and we wouldn’t sort of suffer. I think you’d still be able to make money off of those.

In terms of the actual financial gain for doing all that stumping, I wonder and I’m sure some very clever statistics person could go through and do a study of these are the movies that came out over this 10-year period that were sort of “for your considerations” and look at their box office and chart sort of how much the bonus they got from their award. And I don’t know that it’s fundamentally worth it.

I like the idea of awards as we talked about before in a sense of celebrating great works of cinema and just look at these awesome movies. It’s a great thing that happens and I love that movies like Whiplash which might otherwise not sort of get a bigger audience get that bigger audience because people know them from the awards. But I think, I’m frustrated not just for Damien, but sort of for all directors and writers and cinematographers who are pulled away from doing the stuff that they should be making which is their next movie because they’re having to feed this industry.

**Craig:** Yeah, some people put the — lay the blame at the feet of Harvey Weinstein, and certainly those feet are surrounded by lots of blame for lots of things.

**John:** And lots of Oscars.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, that’s the thing, you know, so people can go, “Well, hey, you know, do you remember when, I don’t know, Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar? Well, that’s because Harvey went bananas and promoted like crazy and then that movie made a lot of money afterwards.”

And, you know, unfortunately it’s a cheater’s game. And so the game theory is everybody either has to be decent together or the cheaters win and then everybody suddenly just goes, “We’ll, I guess we’re all doing it now.” And look, I’m with you. I mean, the part of the awards that are great or the part that are pro artists and pro art and the part that’s bad is the cynical part where it’s being used to, you know, line pockets and it’s a shame because you’re right. It’s kind of nuts that anybody would have to suddenly have this new job of three months of self promotion. Even actors get a break. I mean, they don’t do self-promotion for that long, you know, on a typical movie. So —

**John:** So a director who you and I both know who has a reputation for being a bit of a jerk, I remember someone talking about his availability on something and when he’d be free to do something. And he had a movie coming out that he said, like, “Oh, yeah. Well, I won’t be available for these three months because I’ll be doing all the Oscar season push stuff for it.”

And he said it in a way that had the assumption that, like, his movie was going to be so well received that everybody would be talking about it for an Oscar, and then it wasn’t at all. And there was something, I remember feeling this wonderful schadenfreude when the event didn’t happen. But in a weird way, he was being realistic in a way that I as a younger self had not appreciated that, like, it really is three months of your time that would be sucked away. And so he was being — if his movie had turned out better, he really would’ve lost all that time.

**Craig:** You just can’t say that. I mean —

**John:** Yeah. You shouldn’t say it. Exactly.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, you never say that. I mean, that’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. You say, like, you know, “My newborn daughter is going to be a supermodel.” You don’t say that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, I can’t, yeah, I know we’re supposed to have a reunion of five years. I probably won’t be there because my kid is going to be at Fashion Week.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Maybe. Could be.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know, the bone structure is changing.

**John:** My closest experience with the awards season stuff was Big Fish. And so Big Fish, we got some nominations so we did that whole push, but we didn’t get any serious Oscar nominations so it just stopped. Once Oscar nominations came out, largely it just stopped. And there were parts of it that were actually great. And so I got to meet, like, other filmmakers. And so I got to meet Peter Jackson and all these folks who are on that same circuit doing all the same stuff. Anthony Minghella I met and just loved.

And that part of it was really, really cool. But, you know, after, like, the third time you’re sitting around a table with the same people, it just becomes this grind and it’s not — I don’t know, it’s not a good thing.

**Craig:** I was talking about that whole thing with John Gatins because he was on that circuit when —

**John:** Oh, for Flight.

**Craig:** When he was nominated for Flight. And he said something that made me laugh that they would — the same, you know, so all the same writers are gathering over and over and over and they’re all around these tables. And everywhere they would go, there would be some sort of lunch. And at every single lunch, all of the actors and writers and directors would get served lunch with rolls. There would always be a roll and nobody would eat the roll. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because they all were like, “I got to be on camera.”

**John:** Can’t eat bread.

**Craig:** Can’t eat carbs, yeah. Just wasted rolls.

**John:** I think I remember talking with you and Aline on the balcony at the Chateau Marmont at a special little party for John Gatins.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so here’s the thing. I love John Gatins. I love Aline. I love so many people that were up there. But the fact that that was considered a necessary part of what you do at this stage of the awards season was frustrating. I mean, it was lovely to see people, just it was annoying that that’s a thing that needed to happen.

**Craig:** Was that something that, like, because I just thought that that was just a, “Hey, I’m gathering my friends.” But was that like a studio thing?

**John:** Oh, no. There was a list formed, yeah, of people who —

**Craig:** Oh, the studio do that?

**John:** The studio did that and I think, you know, smart people. And I think Aline probably had a hand in that, too, because she wants to make sure , because here’s what you do in those early for your consideration stuff, you want to make sure the people who might love your film see the film early enough and so they can start talking about it, so that there’s a critical buzz of this kind of thing. And that, the management is crazy.

**Craig:** You know, it’s not probably going to be an issue for me but — [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** If it ever does, somebody else is going to have to do all that. I can’t. I can’t even —

**John:** Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have just basically Sia. We’re going to have somebody who’s acting the part of the writer and saying the things you would say but it’s not actually you.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea. You mean like that girl that does the dancing?

**John:** That little girl, the little dancer. I’m going to hire that little girl.

**Craig:** You get me that little girl.

**John:** She’s going to wear the same blonde wig. People will ask her a question and she’ll just dance the answer.

**Craig:** I want that girl to do all my stuff.

**John:** I want Shia Labeouf to do it. That’s what I want.

**Craig:** I don’t want to do, like, any more interviews. I don’t want to do another interview for the rest of my life. And I just want that little girl to just dance some stuff.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** With that wig on.

**John:** So good. I think I just got an interview request to talk about one of the other topics that we’re going to get to in the show and it’s for a magazine. I think I’m just going to send the woman back a little gif of that little Sia girl dancing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s my answer.

**Craig:** That’s my answer. [laughs] That’s my answer. I mean, we should — I don’t want to — I mean, we should pay her.

**John:** So, here’s literally the question that I was asked. It was about the Harper Lee case.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And this is a new thing that came up this last week. So Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, famously has kind of nothing else you can read of hers, no other books.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But apparently she had actually written another book called Go Set a Watchman which To Kill a Mockingbird is sort of excerpted from. So it’s kind of a sequel, kind of a prequel. It’s the same characters. And so there’s lots of sort of general news stories about this because there’s a lot of question, Harper Lee is 88. Why is she doing it now? Is she really in full control of her decision process?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s all interesting but I have no special insight to that. What you and I can talk about, because we talk about it all the time, are rights. And so what’s interesting about this situation is the rights to those characters because these characters first appeared on screen in the Universal movie. So Universal owns rights to the 1962 movie and that was a huge hit. So $13 million back in the day, that’s more than $100 million today, won three Academy Awards, Best Actor. But would they own the rights to the characters to make another movie? So, you know, they obviously don’t automatically get the rights to this book, but would somebody be able to make a movie version of Harper Lee’s new book without the rights to those characters? And it’s confusing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I would presume that some of it, a lot of it, has to do with the nature of the rights that Universal owns. So there’s a piece of paper somewhere, I hope that they still have it, that delineates precisely what the rights are and what the terms of those rights are and if they have the rights to all of the characters in that book. Like, for instance, you could see, “Oh, it says here we have the rights, the exclusive rights to make movies based on the characters in this book.” Well, yeah, well, those characters are now in another book. Does that mean you have the rights to the characters in this book also or just the characters in this book?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** This is how lawsuits happen. This is why contracts are so awful and why the language is so tortured because, you know, contract law is kind of a game of, “Yeah, but you didn’t say exactly that.”

So who knows? I mean, this has come up before a lot of times. What happens is in lieu of the very expensive lawsuit, the two interested parties kind of just agree and do it together.

**John:** Exactly. We’re going to link to an article in the Hollywood Reporter that talks about Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter, and sort of the complicated rights to the Thomas Harris books, and ultimately, the way they got out of it without sort of like suing each other to death was to do a coproduction —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because apparently the Clarice Starling character complicated the whole issue. So to be able to do stuff with her was incredibly challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so they worked this stuff out. This is an interesting case though because it does have this added twist of is this her family making some cash here, is she really, why, you know, why suddenly at the age of — how old is she? 88.

**John:** 88.

**Craig:** And she’s had a stroke so, and it’s not like she has gotten on the phone and said, “Yeah, I’m Harper Lee. I’m into it now. Let’s do it.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, you know, I mean, it will be a mess.

**John:** It’ll be a mess.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** The easiest solution would be for Universal, if Universal wants it, Universal wins the rights, there’s not going to be a problem. If some other studio pushes really hard for it, they’re going to always have to have in the back of their head, like, we’re going to have to deal with Universal at some point. So that’s a decision going into it. We don’t know that people necessarily want to make a movie of this book because we haven’t read the book.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the other thing. Who knows if it’s any good?

**John:** Who knows if it’s any good? So on a similar topic of studios coming together to work out complicated rights about a character is this last week it was announced that Sony and Marvel had come to an agreement about how they were going to handle Spider-Man. And also it is all related to — it’s interrelated with Amy Pascal stepping down from running Sony Pictures.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the plan at this point, as I best understand it, is Spider-Man will be allowed to enter into the Marvel Universe through the Disney Marvel Universe. He could appear in Captain America: Civil War or other Marvel properties down the road.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Sony will essentially still be allowed to make Spider-Man movies. And so Sony gets out of this the ability to have a fresher, newer Spider-Man that they like, that people are excited about. But they are sort of kind of leasing the character back to Disney/Marvel. Apparently, Marvel really, really, really wanted Spider-Man back and wanted to pursue an outright sale. And Sony’s only agreeing to lease it back.

**Craig:** I guess I’m a little confused about the way this works. So they can both make Spider-Man movies?

**John:** No, as I understand it, Spider-Man can appear in Marvel movies but —

**Craig:** Okay. He can appear in them, okay.

**John:** It’s not a standalone movie.

**Craig:** Got it. So now I get it. So basically, Sony is saying, “Yeah, you can now use, like, he can show up in The Avengers, say, and that’s awesome promotion for our Spider-Man movies.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And so that, now what’s so fascinating about this is that it underscores how valuable Marvel’s brand is and this is in a business where there are almost no true brands. You know, for a long time, I think the only real brand in Hollywood was Disney. And then Pixar became a brand for sure. Marvel may be the strongest brand of them all at this point.

**John:** Marvel or Star Wars, they’re both incredibly strong brands.

**Craig:** Well, Star Wars is a movie. It’s not a — you know what I mean?

**John:** Oh, come on, Star Wars is a brand.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s a brand. I mean, I’m talking about companies. I mean to say, like, studios.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Studios didn’t have brands. Like there’s no, Universal doesn’t mean —

**John:** I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So, I mean, surely, there are movies that are brands, no question. But Marvel, as a company, has the most brand value of any studio and they’re literally getting the right to use this guy that they didn’t otherwise have for free because of their brand equity, because their brand equity actually boosts Sony’s product. That’s wild to me. That’s amazing.

**John:** It’s wild. So the other news that was announced. So Amy Pascal will produce the new Spider-Man movie which can happen on a faster time schedule. But Kevin Feige from Marvel will also produce it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There can be, again, he’s been very, very smart about making really good movies and it certainly is in his best interest and Marvel’s best interest for the Spider-Man movie to be excellent because that helps them for using the Spider-Man character in their own thing. So it’s a weird synergy but potentially kind of cool.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, a counter example of this is a less valuable character is Quicksilver who appears in both the X-Men movie and in the new Avengers and they didn’t reach some sort of a magical agreement. Somehow they both had the rights to the character but they cast him as different actors. They didn’t try to make it one character across those two franchises.

**Craig:** Yeah, because Quicksilver isn’t sort of a needle mover the way that Spider-Man is. And so, I mean, it’s fascinating that Kevin Feige, who is essentially the head of a studio, is going to be producing a movie for another studio. But what’s so smart about it, and Kevin Feige is clearly one of the smartest guys in Hollywood, is that he can now integrate the Sony Spider-Man storylines into the Marvel storylines.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He is essentially giving the fans what they want. What a surprising thing that he would put the fans first and play the long game and show foresight.

**John:** I love the long game.

**Craig:** Kevin Feige, are you nuts? Don’t you know you’re supposed to just be shortsighted and make as much money? Now, now, now.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** So good on him. Very smart. And as for Amy, I have to say, having never worked — and you did a lot of work for her.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Never worked for Amy, never met Amy. I’m thrilled because I’m so disgusted by the nonsense, the Internet nonsense and the shame machine and the outrage baloney. And this is a long, a well respected, long-serving professional who, I said it before, came off better in her emails than practically anybody else would if their emails were exposed. I’m glad that she has this and, frankly, I suspect she will be much happier.

**John:** I think that is a very strong possibility.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So our last story is really about rights once again. And this is something that a reader had sent in to me and I wasn’t aware of it but you had actually already seen the clip from it. It’s just fascinating. So it’s this thing that aired on FXX 1:30 in the morning on Monday, February 9th.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s incredibly popular Wheel of Time series. And so this series started in 1990. It’s a 14-book cycle. So it started in 1990, went through 2013. And so huge books, a lot of people said, like, “Oh, this could be the next Game of Thrones.” It’s incredibly complicated but has super fans. It’s a bestseller. And the rights to this are owned by a group called Red Eagle Entertainment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so what seems to have happened is there was a ticking clock and they had to produce something or the rights were going to revert.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they made this thing that they aired at 1:30 in the morning. And Craig, you watched more of it than I did so can you —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Tell us?

**Craig:** All right. So to be fair, I’m not familiar with the Wheel of Time series but from what I understand, it is very much — it’s very popular. It has a huge fan base like the way Game of Thrones has, the novels.

So I clicked on this thing because I though, I think the article I read said something like, “Watch the worst show ever made.” [laughs] So I clicked on it and it was fascinating. I watched about 10 minutes and I would say the first five minutes featured a man walking through an empty mansion and he’s shouting for his wife and his children. And they appear to be playing a hide-and-seek game so we’ll hear occasional giggles. I believe his wife is Ilyena. And he yells Ilyena maybe 30 times. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so it’s just four minutes of, “Ilyena! Children!” And then, “Hehe,” and then he turns, “Ilyena!” on and on and on. It’s the most insane thing.

As if somebody said, “Look, we have nine minutes of show. How can we have an hour of show?” “Let’s take every single bit of footage we have of this guy playing hide-and-seek and string them all together.” [laughs] It’s wild. I mean it’s really weird.

**John:** So there is precedent for this and most of the articles including the article that we’ll link to talk about Fantastic Four. So what happened with Fantastic Four is the rights to it were going to revert back to Marvel or whoever Marvel was back in those days. It was quite a long time ago. And the studio hired Roger Corman to make the cheapest possible version of the Fantastic Four. And so little bits of that Fantastic Four movie have leaked out and it’s predictably sort of what you’d expect. It’s horrible special effects but just apparently the bare minimum of what you needed to do to say, like, “Well, it is a Fantastic Four movie.”

And so that sense of, like, again, how important it is to hold on to these underlying rights. You will do crazy things like make a crappy version of an adaptation because you know that there’s a great adaptation out there that is potentially incredibly valuable.

**Craig:** Yeah, the trick of this all is that a lot of these rights deals say, “Okay. We have the rights to make a show of this thing until this day, you know, five years from now. And if we don’t then you get it back. But if we do, then we have the exclusive option to renew the rights cycle for another five years, right? So if we just keep, if we keep making these things, they still belong to us.” I suspect that’s probably why Fox will hold on to the X-Men forever. We keep making X-Men movies, we still get the rights.

**John:** And that same thing happened with Spider-Man so —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sony basically had to keep making Spider-Man movies or else the rights were going to revert. And I think Marvel was clever enough that there was a [laughs] — they can’t just make a $1 million Spider-Man movie. There was the requirement for how much they have to spend on a Spider-Man movie. And so talking with people involved in the reboot, the Amazing Spider-Man series, there really were ridiculous time pressures placed upon them not just to hit a release date because of, “Oh, we have a slot in schedule,” but like, “No, no, no, we’re going to lose Spider-Man if we don’t make this movie.”

**Craig:** Right. That’s why you can see the natural alliance between Sony and Marvel where Marvel is saying, “Look, if you guys just keep doing this, you’re going to damage this thing that we care about, that we think there’s a lot of value to. Why don’t we all just take the foot off of each other’s necks here and work together?” So that’s smart. Now, this thing, this is bizarre. And almost certainly there’s going to be some kind of lawsuit as a result because, you know, at some point, you have to say, “Well, define making something.”

I mean, was this made in good faith? Now, when I read this article, and it’s not in the link you have here, and I believe this is the case, adding to the strangeness around this is that the director died in a car crash like a day after he finished shooting this thing. So for those of you who are into conspiracy theories —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Now, I’m not. I just —

**John:** I know a well known screenwriter who’s a big conspiracy buff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m sure he has a whole plan on this.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m sure that he does while he’s figuring out how we filmed the moon landing and so forth. But no, I think it was just a terrible coincidence or maybe not a coincidence. Maybe he was so tired because from what I understand, they were shooting like 30 hours in a row and they literally made the thing in like, I don’t know, two or three weeks or something. It’s insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What a weird, weird thing. I mean, we’ll have a link to the pilot. It’s on YouTube. But I don’t know if FXX is going to be defending their copyright on this particularly aggressively so.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not also clear whether FXX is really the people who instigated sort of making this thing or if they basically just rented out the 1:30 time slot, that someone else did that because that —

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** Was going to happen, too.

**Craig:** Also, I didn’t know there was a channel called FXX. [laughs]

**John:** Well, yes, you did, because The Simpsons marathon played on that.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That’s the channel that did the 24-hour marathon.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, so there’s Fox, there’s FX, there’s FXX.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But is there FXXX?

**Craig:** Oh, probably.

**John:** It’s going to be a big franchise. Vin Diesel will be in it.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know who likes that channel?

**John:** [laughs] Sexy Craig loves FXXX.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just going to be at home watching FXXX.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Why don’t you come on over?

**John:** But in the interest of, like, wrapping this all up, it’s like there’s really a time situation where, like, you’re scrambling to make this movie really quickly so the rights don’t revert. It’s almost the situation described at the very start of this podcast where you’re talking about how in the race to get something into production, you also end up making these choices which, lord knows, you hope they’re the right choices. But the train is leaving the station and you just got to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I —

**John:** I think whatever you wrote is probably better than The Wheel of Time.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope so.

**John:** [laughs]

Craig. Yeah. No, it is a rare film and perhaps a non-existent film that is made under ideal circumstances.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is always something going on. In this case, there was a lot going on.

**John:** Well, honestly, art without any constraints is generally dismal. I mean, constraints are what make art possible. It’s just sometimes the constraints are ridiculous constraints or choices made for reasons that wouldn’t be, you know, artistically awesome choices.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, so much of the job of these last weeks as you’re moving a movie into production is figuring out, like, “Okay. What movie are we making and what’s staying and what’s going out?”

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that everyone had said was really, really good and I just kind of ignored them for a long time because I think I misunderstood them. And now that I just took a chance on it, and now I understand them and I was wrong. So my One Cool Thing is Broad City.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** A comedy on Comedy Central. And I think I thought it was, I don’t know, edgy and gritty in sort of a, I don’t know, “how to make it in America” kind of way. And it’s actually more of like if you were to just take Girls and Workaholics and put them together, it’s just great. And I just love it. If you sort of took Laverne & Shirley and just, like, had them sort of doing shit in Brooklyn.

**Craig:** Oh, I like Laverne & Shirley.

**John:** Oh, my god. Who does not love Laverne & Shirley?

**Craig:** I love Laverne & Shirley.

**John:** And so there’s just these two girls hustling and [laughs] they’re really funny and they’re hustling. So the first season is up on Netflix. It’s also on Comedy Central now. It’s on demand. Watch Broad City. It’s really, really good.

**Craig:** You know, before I get to my One Cool Thing, let me just say Laverne & Shirley, I’ve often thought, is the kind of sitcom we need again. The physical comedy of it, it was so great. I just love, you know, the only people that do that now are like Disney sitcoms for kids.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s like they stopped doing physical comedy. I loved that stuff when I was a kid. I just loved it. And I love it now. I love Laverne & Shirley. They’re the best.

**John:** They’re great.

**Craig:** Really great.

**John:** I mean, we think of Penny Marshall but Cindy Williams was awesome on that show.

**Craig:** Cindy Williams, Michael McKean, and I mean —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** It’s the first show I remember traveling where they started, it’s Milwaukee, right?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**John:** Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then they moved to Hollywood in the last season, or last two seasons, and it’s just, like, it was just bizarre.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. They would occasionally do that back then. [laughs] That was, you know, trying to goose the ratings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But hey, come on. Carmine Ragusa?

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** The Big Ragu.

**John:** Big Ragu.

**Craig:** Big Ragu. I mean, God, she had an L on. She would always drink the Pepsi and the milk.

**John:** So, again, one thing I appreciate about Broad City is that like Laverne & Shirley, they’re kind of broke and, like, their being broke factors into it a lot. And, you know, I really love Blackish which is sort of the opposite of that show and, like, the characters are really rich. But it’s so much fun when you find sources of external conflict and being broke is a large part of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And their show is about women living together that are broke. I think there was one that was — wasn’t there 2 Broke Girls, wasn’t that a show?

**John:** That is a show.

**Craig:** It’s a show now?

**John:** It’s a show but it’s not really about —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s not?

**John:** It’s a multicam.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s multicam? It’s not, well, Laverne & Shirley was a multicam show.

**John:** That’s true it is a multicam show. I don’t know why, I’m being so weirdly judgy because Laverne & Shirley was an awesome multicam show. And maybe 2 Broke Girls is fantastic. I just — modern CBS multicam shows just give me —

**Craig:** They give you hives.

**John:** Hives.

**Craig:** You know, I don’t have that. I can’t say anything about 2 Broke Girls because I haven’t watched it. What a shock, okay.

**John:** It’s always a safe bet.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a band. And the band is largely the work of a singer/songwriter. It’s called Fantastic Negrito. And Fantastic Negrito is out of the Bay Area and I’ve been following these guys for a while because my friend, Malcolm Spellman, who writes on Empire, which is now an empire, has been friends with the lead musician/songwriter of Fantastic Negrito for many, many years. And so I, you know, sort of follow him on Facebook and so forth. Outstanding stuff.

The guy’s name, one of the greatest names of all time, Xavier Dphrepaulezz. Xavier Dphrepaulezz. There are more Zs in there than you think. Outstanding stuff. And so, you know, I’ve been just following them, well, it’s like, well, my friend has a band. Cool, they’re actually awesome. Great. NPR ran this thing called Tiny Desk Concert Contest. It’s basically like, you know, a little original song and video contest. And guess who won?

**John:** Fantastic Negrito.

**Craig:** Fantastic Negrito, the winner of the Tiny Desk Concert Contest, very cool. We’ll provide a link. I just think Xavier is the coolest and it’s just good music. You know what it is? It’s like real black music. It’s old school black music. It’s soul. It’s like real soul from the ’70s. It just feels — it’s not Hip-Hop. It’s not modern. But it’s not like lame-o old, old. It’s just real. It’s so good. I love it. I just love it. I just think this guy is the best.

**John:** Yeah. So Fantastic Negrito played at the Black List party this year.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so I got to see that. And he was fantastic. I’m going to call him he. It’s one of those weird situations where you can say it’s a band, or you can say it’s a person, but it’s really his music project.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you really just identify it as him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He is fantastic and he is, like, this weird, like, James Brown and Beck sort of like somehow merged souls or something. And as a performer he’s just spectacular and electric and fantastic. It was the completely wrong venue to see that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it was just too loud for the small space. But he’s one of the people I would track down and see at a club anywhere in this country. So we will provide links to this and videos as well because he’s great. And Malcolm has been a huge promoter from the start and I should’ve listened to him earlier.

**Craig:** Yes. And we will try and get Malcolm on the show as well because he is in and of himself blowing up right now over Empire which is a phenomenon.

**John:** Yes. So Craig, you’re going to need to watch the show Empire at some point.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that —

**John:** I’m sorry. Homework.

**Craig:** Is it on TV? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s a show on the television.

**Craig:** I don’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know I’ve been watching —

**John:** Have your son explain how to turn on the TV?

**Craig:** He won’t know. He’s the last person to know how to turn on a TV. I’ve been watching Togetherness.

**John:** Which I hear is great. I haven’t watched it yet. And I feel bad. Jay Duplass — I adore him, so I want to see it.

**Craig:** Ooh, it is good. It had the best depiction of bad sex I’ve ever seen in my life in the last episode. If you’re a fan of bad sex the way I am, check it out.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So our outro this week is provided by Manoel Felciano. It is great and involves Craig’s voice a lot. So Craig, you’re actually going to want to listen to this one. If you have an outro that you would like to provide to us, send us a link to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the email address to which you can send questions or follow-up comments. Short things, you should write to us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. This show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And if you’re on iTunes, you should leave us a comment or leave us a rating because those are helpful to help other people find the show. Subscribe to us while you’re there. Our premium feed, which we’ve mentioned before, is available at Scriptnotes.net. We also have an app that’s in the App Store and at the Android App Store.

**Craig:** John, is it expensive?

**John:** And it also gets you all stuff —

**Craig:** Is it expensive?

**John:** So the app is free to download.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not expensive.

**John:** If you, no, that’s free. It’s the best you can get. What is costing you some money is the monthly subscription to the premium feed.

**Craig:** Oh, no. How much?

**John:** $1.99.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yeah, it’s a crazy bargain. That gets you all the back episodes to the very first one, and it helps pay for things like Stuart and Matthew and all our transcripts, so thank you very much for people who subscribe to that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** That’s our show. Craig, I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Deal with the Gravity Lawsuit](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-the-gravity-lawsuit)
* [The One with Rebel Wilson and Dan Savage](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-rebel-wilson-and-dan-savage)
* [Get premium access at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Sequel Sparks Questions Over Film Rights](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harper-lees-kill-a-mockingbird-772176) on THR
* [With Marvel Deal, Sony Opts to Lease Rather Than Sell Spider-Man](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/marvel-deal-sony-opts-lease-772251) on THR
* [Spider-Man: How Sony, Marvel Will Benefit from Unique Deal ](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/details-spider-man-appear-in-sony-and-marvel-movies-1201429039/) on Variety
* [Wheel of Time is the sad lesson of what can happen when you sell the rights to your books](http://www.vox.com/2015/2/10/8014499/wheel-of-time-pilot-fxx) on Vox
* [Broad City on Comedy Central](http://www.cc.com/shows/broad-city) and [Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/broad-city)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/), Winner of [NPR’s 2015 Tiny Desk Concert Contest](http://www.npr.org/2015/02/12/385540871/meet-the-winner-of-our-tiny-desk-concert-contest)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Manoel Felciano ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-the-gravity-lawsuit).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Uh…I am John August.

**John:** You’re not the only person who can change things up.

**Craig:** My name is John August.

**John:** Yeah, but it’s really not. He’s Craig Mazin, I’m John August, and this is Scriptnotes, Episode 183. Scriptnotes is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Look at this, you’ve shaken me up, you’ve shaken yourself up.

**John:** I know. Everything is upside down and topsy-turvy.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. The world has gone mad.

**John:** Before we get into the world going mad, one mad thing that happened this week is our insurance company was hacked.

**Craig:** Everyone’s insurance company, basically. Yeah, so no doubt you’ve seen the news. Anthem, which is a massive provider of health insurance to millions and millions and millions of Americans was hacked. They have yet to really indicate — they’ve indicated the scope of it. They’ve said about 80 million people, so not that many.

**John:** No, just a few.

**Craig:** Basically everyone. At that point I would say 80 million people, we’re discounting children, so everyone’s information has been hacked, possibly by the Chinese they’re saying. It wasn’t clear if they meant hackers who were Chinese, or the Chinese government. But, regardless, here is the deal — all of the major SAG, AFTRA, DGA, and WGA, our health plans, are funneled through Anthem.

The DGA sent an email — the Writers Guild did as well — and the long and short of it is that they don’t really know much yet beyond what Anthem is saying. Anthem is saying that they’re going to send out letters to people letting them know if their information was compromised, which I think is a fair bet.

**John:** That’s a fair thing to do. So, we’re recording this on Friday, February 6, so by the time you listen to this podcast may information may come out. But the information may include mine and Craig’s Social Security numbers, so who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah, great. I did take with Chris Keyser today who is the president of the Writers Guild of America West and he confirmed that they’re trying to figure this out. The only possible silver lining is that for the DGA and for the WGA, I assume it’s the same for SAG although I don’t know, Anthem actually doesn’t provide the health insurance. Anthem is processing some of it. I guess the deal is that because our plans are fairly small, for instance, the Writers Guild health plan — I don’t know how many people are members, but we’re talking under 10,000 I would imagine. That’s very small.

So, the health plan insures us — our health plan insures us. But they use Anthem’s purchasing power to get better rates and things. So, there is a question as to how much of our information actually gets funneled to them. There is a hope — and I’m basing this just on the fact that it’s possible — that what Anthem has from us are our names, addresses, and our health plan numbers, which aren’t Social Security numbers.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But, I mean, we just don’t know yet.

**John:** It’s going to be a mess.

**Craig:** It is currently a mess and everyone is saying, well, you know, you’ll get free credit protection. You know, these credit protection things, you know they don’t work, right?

**John:** Yeah, it’s basically an alarm. Basically like, oh, something is happening.

**Craig:** It’s not even that good. To me, as far as I can tell looking at what they provide, it’s more like you hired a security guard and when you get home he’s sitting there in a chair, on your lawn, drinking. Going, yeah, someone broke in.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** Yeah, they took some stuff.

**John:** But someone has a job.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] But somebody has a job. So, anyway, it’s the end.

**John:** It might be the end.

Today on the podcast we are going to be talking about the deal with the Gravity lawsuit which has been one of the most tweeted things that I’ve actually had in the last maybe six months. Like a lot of people asked me about it, and kept asking me about. And we promised that we would speak about it on the show today. So, we are going to spend most of the episode really talking through it because it’s a fascinating way of looking at what are contracts, what’s chain of title, what are books, what are movies. And so we’re going to spend a lot of time on that.

But I want to talk a little bit about writing, because that’s a thing that Craig and I both did a lot of this week. Craig, how was the writing?

**Craig:** Frantic and fast-paced, but so far so good. I’m in one of those production rewrite things where, you know, I finish 15 pages and turn it over to director and a production manager or studio executives, producers. It’s wild and wooly. But so far so good.

**John:** And I am in the opposite situation where I am in a first draft and I’m at a place now where I’ve assembled things together. It’s not all written, but like a lot of stuff is being assembled and there is still stuff to write. And I had to do this thing which comes up occasionally which is not my favorite thing is I had to start cutting stuff, which is normally I would love to write the whole draft and then like cut the stuff that should get cut. But I started to recognize like, oh wow, if I don’t cut this now, I’m going to be writing stuff that’s going to have to payoff — I’m going to try to payoff things that aren’t going to be in the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s one of those situations where I think most writers who have written a couple of movies, you have encountered this where you’re still in that first draft but you’re recognizing that thing I wrote can no longer fit because it just can’t be there anymore, which is both sad because they’re like lovely little scenes and they’re moments that are no longer going to be part of the movie, but very, very necessary.

**Craig:** Yeah. I am far more of a cutter I think, just inherently, a writer-cutter. As I go I get really parsimonious about stuff at times, maybe too much, so it’s good to have somebody working with me who can read it and say, no, no, no, you’ve hit bone there. You don’t want to do that.

It is true. The process is one — sometimes people will say, “This is not the time to worry about that. Go ahead, explore, right what you need.” And I do, I want to, but there is — I was listening to Lord and Miller, Philip Lord and Chris Miller, were talking at an event last night. And they were talking with Damien Chazelle. They were talking about the theme of Whiplash which was, you know, do you have to suffer for your art. And something Phil said that was really interesting to me, he said on the one hand he’s always appreciated people who are incredibly encouraging of everybody because there is something in there that only survives in the environment of encouragement, even if it’s just you writing.

But that rigor is essential. And that word rigor I think is why at times we need to cut while we’re writing.

**John:** So, some strategies if you find yourself in this situation. And they could be when you’re done with a draft, or as you’re writing, is there are moments that I needed to cut out, including something I talked about on the show this last week which was that police interrogation which I was so proud of. I had written a great police interrogation scene that was different than anything I’d seen before. And I cut it last night.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** I was supposed to be at the same event with you last night and I was writing and I cut the scene. So, if you’re going to do that, make a new file, call it Trim, and then the name of the scene, and paste that stuff in there. So, at least you’ve held onto it. It’s still there if you ever needed to go back to it. It’s existing in its own little universe. You remember that it’s there. But that scene that I was so delighted with, I recognized that it was, while I love it, it wasn’t absolutely essential. And it became time in the script that I needed stuff that was absolutely essential.

**Craig:** I do love that advice, though. I do that all the time. If I’m going to take out any significant chunk of something, I always save it in its own little file because you never know. And at times, that has come in handy.

**John:** What I was looking at in terms of pacing in this project I’m writing right now is a lot of times we talk about we’re not in Kansas anymore, so basically at the end of the first act and you come into your second act, it’s like Dorothy when she reaches Oz. Like, oh, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re in a whole new world. And my script got to Kansas really well, but then I recognized that, wow, I’m spending a lot of time with the Munchkins of Lollipop Guilds.

And so I needed the characters to sort of hit the road. I needed the things that needed to happen to happen. And there was just more setup that wasn’t going to be able to be paid off. So, those were the brutal scenes I had to cut last night.

**Craig:** Well, it’s part of the gig.

**John:** It’s part of the gig.

Let’s get to our big topic this week which is the lawsuit over Gravity and sort of what the situation is.

**Craig:** And we got bombarded by everyone on this one.

**John:** Yeah. And it felt like it was a slow trickle, so like a few little hits and then three days later I’d get another nine little bursts of things. And not just from our normal screenwriters. It was actually a bunch of novelists and sort of other fiction writers who were tweeting me saying what’s the deal with this. And even some DMs from like people who were genuinely freaked out. So, let’s give some context here.

We’re all familiar with the movie Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It stars Sandra Bullock. It was a giant hit. There is also a novel called Gravity which was written by an author named Tess Gerritsen. And she’s not a random crank. She’s actually written a bunch of books, including a series of books that became the basis of Rizzoli & Isles, a TV series that I never saw. But it’s real.

**Craig:** It’s got —

**John:** Angie Harmon.

**Craig:** Yes, thank you. And also the other one.

**John:** Yeah. And now you have to tell me which character is which character.

**Craig:** From ER. I think it’s Julianna Margulies?

**John:** That’s not her. No, Julianna Margulies is on The Good Wife.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh, geez. Man, who’s on — I’m looking it up right now. [laughs]

**John:** Okay, while you look it up, I’ll continue on with this. So, on April 29, 2014 —

**Craig:** Sasha Alexander. I’m so sorry, Sasha Alexander.

**John:** I don’t know who Sasha Alexander is.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh. Yeah, she’s Medical Examiner, Dr. Maura Isles.

**John:** The other one is Rizzoli.

**Craig:** She does, by the way, looks nothing like Julianna Margulies. And Julianna Margulies is on a bit hit show. [laughs] This is like — it’s just a failure, a remarkable failure.

**John:** But everyone who is a fan of the podcast knows you don’t see any television or movies.

**Craig:** None.

**John:** None. So, the fact that you pulled Julianna Margulies out of the air, it was just kind of remarkable in and of itself.

**Craig:** Because I saw her in NYPD Blue, right?

**John:** I think you get a gold star for just even knowing who Julianna Margulies was.

**Craig:** I really do think that I’ve achieved something. Anyway.

**John:** So, Tess Gerritsen, the author, she filed a lawsuit on April 29, 2014 and she sued Warner Bros claiming that she was owed money for the film Gravity. And then on June 20 Warner Bros filed a motion to dismiss that lawsuit. And then just very recently, on January 30 of this year, the US District Court issued a ruling that seemed to mostly agree with Warner Bros saying that, yes, the suit is going to be dismissed, but there were some caveats in there that we’ll talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But most of what people were tweeting at you and me about wasn’t about the lawsuit per se, but really one blog post that Tess Gerritsen had written about the lawsuit, and this is what happened this last week, and the repercussions. And so I read this, I read people’s responses, and I emailed you, Craig, saying like, well, maybe we should have Tess Gerritsen on the podcast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you said?

**Craig:** Uh, no. Because, and the reason why is not because — it makes sense to have her on the podcast, but it seems to weird to have one side of this argument on the podcast and not the other side. It would start to become a bit lopsided and biased of a discussion. And there is no chance that Warner Bros is going to be sending a lawyer to talk to us about this on our podcast.

I mean, frankly, the actual other party that would be of interest would be Alfonso Cuarón, who I also doubt would be available for the podcast. So, I thought that maybe we should sort of stay in the more neutral zone.

**John:** I think the neutral zone is a perfect place for us to stay. And the reason why I really want to talk about this case is that actually it gives us an opportunity to talk about contract law and what authors do and what adaptations are like. And we can sort of take what she’s written in her blog post and really look at it from that perspective.

If we had her on the air, we’d have to be sort of talking with her. And here we can sort of take the word she’s written and what everyone else is saying and have a discussion about what it actually really means.

So, if this were a blog post we were doing ourselves, it would be one of those things where we do a lot of block quotes, where we like sample from her things and put a block quote and then respond to it. That’s really awkward to do in a podcast. So, what I did is I asked a friend of the show, Christy Miller, if she would record just some snippets from Tess Gerritsen’s blog post so we could play those, you can hear it in not Tess Gerritsen’s words but in Christy’s voice so we could actually respond to what she was saying there and talk through the issues that are being brought up.

**Craig:** Very clever.

**John:** So, let us do the first of these clips. This is from Tess Gerritsen’s blog post about the lawsuit.

**”Tess:”** In 1999, I sold the film rights to my book Gravity to New Line Productions. The contract stipulates that if a movie is made based on my book, I will receive ‘based upon’ credit, a production bonus, and a percentage of net profits.

**John:** Great. So this is talking about she sold the rights to her book and let’s just sort of dig in on what that actually means. And it’s one of the unique things about this court case is all this stuff is public record. This has all been filed, so you can actually read what that document looks like. What does it look like when you sell your book to a studio?

Well, we have a link to it. So, in the show notes we’ll link to the actual contract for her sale of the book to this company called KATJA which was a subsidiary of New Line.

And have you looked at it, Craig? It’s a pretty standard contract. It’s 12 pages long with a lot of additional exhibits and things about music rights and publishing and other stuff. She notarizes it. You see where she signed it. But it’s a straightforward contract.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is. And this is why for those of you listening along who might be wondering well why — what’s in this for me? What in this podcast is of value for me? This suit is going to help us explain quite a bit of how the machinery of this business actually works. So, listen carefully because there’s a lot of good stuff here as we go through.

So, yeah, a novelist has copyright in their novel. Tess Gerritsen owns copyright in her novel. Unlike, for instance, screenwriters who almost exclusively work on a work-for-hire basis for the companies where they commission a work to be created by us, but they retain copyright. So, in the case of somebody who owns the copyright of a novel, they’re not giving their novel to New Line and saying you now own this book, you’re the author of the book. No, no, I am the author of the book. However, I’m licensing through a sale the rights to make a film of this book. And when you license the rights to make a film, almost always they are exclusive rights, of course. Why would anybody buy the rights to make a book that somebody else could also turn into a movie?

And then there is a negotiation of other rights that may be incorporated, how long you get to hold onto the rights, do you have the rights in the United States, over the world, throughout the universe? They literally will say throughout the known universe at times in case they start opening up IMAXs on Mars. And the idea being that you’re going to get money either if they decide to make the movie out of your book, or you may get money, period, the end. In this case, she gets some money, right, right off the bat?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then there is additional compensation that is provided to you if in fact the company does go ahead and make a movie of your book.

**John:** And we could see right here in this contract she is paid $1 million for the film rights to her book.

**Craig:** Which I’ve got to say, that’s a big sale.

**John:** That’s a huge sale. That would be one of the biggest sales of the year. And I should remind everybody, this is 1999. So, this is 16 years ago that this happened.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s a big sale.

**John:** That’s a big sale — in any year that’s a big sale. And there’s also a $500,000 production bonus if the movie goes into production. There is backend in there, which I didn’t look through really carefully, but Craig and I will just tell you in general the backend is going to be meaningless. Even on a movie as successful as this, it’s unlikely she would see net profits out of a movie like this.

**Craig:** Yeah. Net profits are sort of the imaginary things that — now, we should also mention that when she sold this to New Line, that New Line was technically part of Warner Bros, but here’s what was going on at the time: New Line existed as its own company and then in 1994 it was bought by Ted Turner, by TBS. So, they were not part of Warner Bros. In 1996, three years before this occurs, TBS, Ted Turner’s company, merges with Time Warner.

Now, interestingly, at that time there were some companies that were part of TBS like Hanna-Barbera and Castle Rock, which became full functioning units of Warner Bros itself. But, New Line was not. New Line, although it was owned by this parent company Warner Bros, was kept as its own entity until quite recently, about four years ago, or five years ago, or something like that.

So, it had its own kind of control within this parent company.

**John:** Yeah. If you look at the contract, the contract is between Tess Gerritsen and KATJA, but it’s care of New Line. So, this KATJA, which you will see referenced a lot, and New Line, I think we’re safe to look at them as being one entity.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** What’s going to become an issue later on is whether New Line and Warner Bros is one entity. That becomes a big issue.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about, this is an outright sale. So, it’s $1 million for the film rights. They write a check and they own the film rights from that point forward. This isn’t an option. And if this had been an option, they would be paying her some money to hold onto the rights for a period of time, or to hold on to the chance to buy the rights at a certain price for a period of time. That was actually probably much more common for both spec screenplays that are sold and for novels that are sold is that for a period of 18 months, three years, you get to hold onto the rights to this thing and you can’t sell them to somebody else. But we don’t have to write you a giant check right now.

In this case, they wrote her a giant check.

**Craig:** They wrote her a giant check and what that tells me — this is conjecture — is that in 1999 when she went out with this book, that there was a bidding war. It tells me that multiple studios were interested, so the seller, in this case Ms. Gerritsen, had quite a bit of leverage. And that she was saying, look, I don’t have to option it to anybody. Somebody has to actually pay me for this if they want it. And New Line must have thought, yeah, we’re making this movie. Nobody spends $1 million on a book if they’re not going to make the movie.

Granted, in 1999, there was still a very healthy DVD market. An enormously healthy DVD market. And things were a little, well, the money ran a little more fluidly back in that time.

**John:** Definitely. So, let’s also talk about what chain of title means, and this is where the chain of title begins. And chain of title does not refer to the title Gravity, which is not the title of the movie. Chain of title is more like the title to your car. It is ownership of a property. And the chain of title begins with the original copyright holder, which is Tess Gerritsen, and then the chain of title on the film rights to it through this contract has been vested in New Line and KATJA, this production entity.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chain of title, and people get really confused because of the word title, and I don’t blame them. Because a lot of times you can tell what the chain of title is by the title of the project, you know. But in this case to be really clear, because it’s going to start to get confusing, title is really nothing more than your interest in certain rights. And why it’s important in this case is because when you are told something contractually like if we make a movie from your book you’ll get this, then a movie gets made, you need to be able to say that movie was part of the chain of title of this project.

You took my rights to my novel, you then hired somebody to write a screenplay based on my novel, you then hired somebody to rewrite that guy. Then somebody rewrite that guy. Now, you’ve made a movie. I can follow the chain all the way back to your initial interest in the title, meaning the rights to my novel. Therefore, you owe me the money.

**John:** And clearing the chain of title, which is that term you go through for making sure that you actually have the rights you think you have to something, can be incredibly complicated. And sometimes it will hold up — contracts will hold up a production or development because they’re trying to make sure all that stuff is done and done properly. Because when it’s done improperly, it can be a huge disaster.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Quite famously, the Dukes of Hazard movie, it turned out the chain of title was not clear and the Dukes of Hazard, the TV show, was based on some other property and they hadn’t gotten that property properly and it became a very expensive thing for, I think it was Warner Bros.

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** And I can also tell you from personal experience, I wrote an adaptation of Barbarella, and it became clear between the first and second draft that the chain of title was impossible to clear and that different people could claim different things about whether they had the rights to make the movie. And that froze it, because no one wanted to spend any more money because they were pretty sure they would never be able to make that movie.

**Craig:** Right. So, you can’t go out there with something based on something that you don’t control from start to finish. Every link of the chain has been cleared through you. My personal experience was a very odd one. And that was the tattoo in Hangover 2, which turns out that that tattoo apparently was very similar if not exactly similar to a tattoo that Mike Tyson has on his face. And the tattoo artist improbably had specifically retained copyright on that tattoo. And it was not cleared.

So, there’s its own little chain of title of a tattoo. And he got something, as far as I know. They settled with him. Yeah.

**John:** So, in 1999 when this contract is signed, the chain of title is about as clear as you could ever hope for it to be, because Tess Gerritsen wrote the original book and New Line/KATJA bought the film rights for it. Everything is happy and good.

**Craig:** And, I should also say, that when we are hired on a project that has underlying material, that’s our term of art for everything that you are basing a movie on — a book, a song, a play, a picture, whatever the hell it is. We know that the chain of title of sure as we get our contract because it always says that they’re assigning this material to us. So, we know in our screenwriting contract, yes, I’m writing this based on this novel. It’s assigned material to me.

**John:** Yeah. Everybody remember that, because that becomes an issue quite a bit later in this discussion.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right. So, let’s talk about what Tess Gerritsen’s book actually is. And so here is how she talks about her book in the blog post.

**”Tess:”** The book is about a female medical doctor/astronaut who is stranded aboard the International Space Station after the rest of her crew is killed in a series of accidents. A biological hazard aboard ISS traps her in quarantine, unable to return to earth. While my film was in development, I re-wrote the third act of the film script with scenes of satellite debris destroying ISS and the lone surviving female astronaut adrift in her spacesuit.

**John:** All right. So, there are two things to sort of get into here. First, her description of what the plot of her book is, and then this rewrite she did which is sort of unexpected and certainly makes it seem more like the Alfonso Cuarón movie we saw.

So, let’s get into her description of it, because from that quick summary description it’s like, ooh, I can see how that’s kind of like the Cuarón movie I saw.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then as I looked online at other people’s summaries, and these weren’t people who were weighing in on the lawsuit, these are just like summaries that existed on Amazon or on Good Reads, they weren’t quite as similar. So, I want to read you two of the summaries that I found online about her book. And the first one is from Good Reads.

“An experiment on microorganisms conducted in space goes wrong. The cells begin to infect the crew with deadly results. Emma Watson struggles to contain the deadly microbe while her husband and NASA try to retrieve her from space before it’s too late.”

**John:** So, it’s odd that her name is Emma Watson.

**Craig:** I know, isn’t that strange?

**John:** Yeah, like the actress Emma Watson. But, no, that’s just a good name. And this is the summary from Amazon.

“Dr. Emma Watson has been training for the adventure of a lifetime to study living beings in space, but her mission aboard the international space station turns into a nightmare beyond imagining when a culture of single-celled organisms begins to regenerate out of control and infects the space station crew with agonizing and deadly results. Emma struggles to contain the outbreak, while back on earth her estranged husband, Jack McCallum, works frantically with NASA to bring her home. But there will be no rescue. The contagion now threatens Earth’s population, and the astronauts are stranded in orbit, quarantined aboard the station — where they are dying one by one…”

**Craig:** Now, you can see that the summary that she provides in her lawsuit or I guess is it connected to it through her blog post has been somewhat massaged to seem more like the movie Gravity than say what other people have read. And I haven’t read the book, but certainly this from the other summaries, it does sound like this book is more of the contagion in a spaceship kind of model.

**John:** Yeah. It sounds like Outbreak in space.

**Craig:** Right. Outbreak in space.

**John:** And, by the way, Outbreak in space is totally a book that would sell.

**Craig:** It did sell. [laughs]

**John:** It did sell. Exactly. I can completely imagine why someone would buy that. And, you know, there were actually several outbreak movies that were in development at the same time. Outbreak was one.

**Craig:** The Hot Zone.

**John:** Crisis in the Hot Zone. So, I can see what that movie would be, but I think she’s very carefully crafting something that’s not leaning in towards what her book sounds like it really is about, which is much more of a medical thriller in space and less about one person drifting through the whole movie.

**Craig:** But then there’s this interesting thing where she says she rewrote the third act of the film script, so somebody else was writing the script. And then she says, “While my film was in development, I rewrote the third act of the film script.” So, and when she rewrites the third act of the film script it says here from her complaint “to assist in the development of the Gerritsen Gravity project, Gerritsen wrote and delivered additional material that constituted a modified version of a portion of the book. The additional material included scenes of satellite debris colliding with the international space station, the destruction of the space station, and the surviving medical doctor/or astronaut left drifting in her spacesuit alone and un-tethered, seeking the means rather to return to earth.”

Now, what’s interesting is what she’s saying here is that she didn’t rewrite the third act of the film script, she’s saying she rewrote additional material that constituted a modified version of a portion of the book. She’s saying two different things.

**John:** I find it strange. I also find it kind of weird that we’re not ever talking about the development of the actual screenplay. So, I think you and I know who the screenwriter is, or at least one of the screenwriters who worked on this, and his name hasn’t been brought into it, so I don’t want to be the first person to bring his name into it, but there was active development on it.

At some point she claims to have written this material. We don’t see what this material is, but she’s talking about it because it makes it sound more like Cuarón’s movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s a change.

**Craig:** And this is one area where this is kind of like our version of Serial, I guess, because we’ll never know. But she says two different things. On her blog she’s saying I rewrote the third act of the film script. In her complaint, she’s saying I rewrote the book. And, now, she may have done both. So, one thing that’s interesting that has not been indicated by her complaint, as far as I know, is it doesn’t appear that she had a contract to write screenplay material.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not been introduced by her or by Warner Bros as far as I can see.

**Craig:** And if that’s the case, I mean, look, if she had she would almost certainly introduce that. So, I’m a little puzzled by this. But, let’s just take it face value that what she’s saying is, look, let’s say even if she didn’t write screenplay material, she did write essentially new book stuff. And that per her licensing agreement for the novel, New Line also had access to and the rights to this new book stuff.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think part of the reason why she’s introducing it in this way is to make it clear that she didn’t just go off and write something else that no one ever saw that was more like the ISS stuff. She wrote it, she sent it in, and it was — to her telling of it — it constituted more of the underlying literary material from which the project was based.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. So, next, let’s hear her talk about the Cuarón movie Gravity and sort of how that relates.

**”Tess:”** Sometime around 2008 — 2009, Alfonso Cuarón wrote his original screenplay Gravity about a female astronaut who is the sole survivor after her colleagues are killed by satellite debris destroying their spacecraft. She is left adrift in her space suit, and is later stranded aboard the International Space Station. I noted the similarities, but I had no evidence of any connection between Cuarón and my project. Without proof, I could not publicly accuse him of theft, so when asked about the similarities by fans and reporters, I told them it could be coincidental.

**John:** All right. So, here she’s saying that she was aware of the Cuarón movie Gravity and she assumed that it just had to be a completely different thing because she assumed that Cuarón would not have known about her book and that it was just a coincidence.

**Craig:** Yeah. She says, “Without proof, I could not publicly accuse him of theft, so when asked about the similarities by fans and reporters, I told them it could be coincidental.” That’s not quite her saying that she actually believed it was coincidental. That’s her just saying I can’t prove that he’s stolen anything.

Now, again, this is at a point now, sometime around 2008/2008 where, in fact, Warner Bros has now fully absorbed New Line. New Line is now not its own completely independent entity. They’ve now absorbed it and there’s a much closer interaction as Cuarón begins to write his original screenplay, Gravity.

**John:** But we should point out that Cuarón is not writing the original screenplay for Gravity for Warner Bros. This project, I believe, is at Universal at this point.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re absolutely right. It is, in fact, at Universal. Correct.

**John:** And so an interesting thing, so a year ago I actually hosted Alfonso Cuarón, the conversation about Gravity. And I talked to him about the early development and I don’t have any of the audio from our talk. This was for Film Independent. There are other clips of me talking with him, but like this part didn’t make it in, at least to the stuff online.

But, I did find Dave Poland talking with him during the run ups to the award season last year — last year — two years ago? — about Gravity and sort of how this all came. So, I want to play two little short clips from David Poland talking to Alfonso Cuarón about his development of the screenplay for Gravity. So, this is with his son, Jonás Cuarón, and sort of how they wanted to write a story about adversity.

**Alfonso Cuarón:** In this one, so we sat, we started talking about the themes and the set themes and there was space and we immediately recognized the amazing metaphorical possibilities that space would offer. So, we start pretty much mapping the story and it took us like three weeks to finish the script.

**Jonás Cuarón:** The first draft.

**David Poland:** That’s not bad. Do you usually write that quickly, or — ?

**Alfonso Cuarón:** Yeah, look, I believe that screenplays they take three weeks or five years to write. And, you know, usually I prefer to do the ones that take three weeks. I would like to do something about adversities. You know, I was going through a lot of adversities and it was just — I actually was in the midst of the adversities. And in many ways sometimes you do things just trying to make sense of where you are.

And so that we defined that that was going to be the theme. So, when we started coming out with the scenarios, like the debris as a metaphor for these adversities. But then many other elements, you know, was the first image that we had was this thing of an astronaut floating into the void. And so we started discussing the metaphors of that. You know, it’s a character who is drifting towards the void, a victim of her own inertia, getting farther away from human communication. Living in her own bubble. You know, so we started having all these elements. So, there was already kind of like — that was our — our springboard for where to jump.

**John:** Okay, so that’s Cuarón’s description of what Gravity was like when he and — or his project of Gravity was like when he and his son were writing the screenplay for it.

So, right now you could say like, well, you could argue that maybe these are just two completely separate projects and Cuarón would have no idea that her project exists. But, she says, she recently learned that he did know about her project and her book. So, here is her talking about that from her blog post.

**”Tess:”** In February 2014, my literary agent was informed of Cuarón’s attachment to my project back in 2000. Now the similarities between my book and Cuarón’s movie could no longer be dismissed as coincidence. I sought legal help, and we filed a Breach of Contract complaint that April. Please note: this is not a case of copyright infringement. Warner Bros, through its ownership of New Line, also controls the film rights to my book. They had every right to make the movie ó but they claim they have no obligation to honor my contract with New Line.

**John:** So, there’s a lot to unpack here. First she says that Cuarón was attached. Craig, what does attached mean?

**Craig:** Well, in a general understanding, attached means that someone said I am interested in working on this movie. If I’m an actor, I’m interested in starring in it. You can tell people that I want to star in it. If I’m a director I’m saying, yeah, I would like to direct this. But, I haven’t been hired to do it. My interest in it is more like planting a little flag and less like actually showing up and doing a job. From a legal point of view, people attach themselves to stuff all the time and it’s simply not even papered because no services are actually rendered.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, when she says “My literary agent was informed of Cuarón’s attachment to my project back in 2000,” what we don’t know is, well, we don’t know, A, who informed her literary agent. We don’t know, B, if that information is correct. But most importantly, C, if we stipulate that all of that is true, we don’t know the nature of his attachment.

**John:** Yeah. So, it could be anything from he read it and said like, oh yeah, that’s interesting. Or, he was like, I’m determined this is going to be my next movie.

So, I think it’s also important to look at, this is in 2000. So, let’s look t who Alfonso Cuarón was in 2000. He had directed A Little Princess and Great Expectations. Great Expectations, which was not a giant hit. This is before Y Tu Mamá También. It’s before Harry Potter. It’s before Children of Men.

So, if I were New Line would I go to Alfonso Cuarón to direct this probably expensive movie in space about a medical disaster? Maybe. Maybe I recognize that he’s so brilliant, that he’s the person who should do this, but I kind of wonder whether you’re going to him with a giant property at this point.

I’m not saying they didn’t, but it would be sort of surprising to me if he was attached in a sense of like scare-off all other directors because he’s our guy.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the problem with this phrase attachment because you never know really what it means. Sometimes people attach themselves to stuff and a studio will go, oh, have they told you that they’re attached to this? Not according to us. All sorts of funky things go on with that. But, I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt here and say that he was attached, which is not a — it’s nothing formal. You know, sometimes, and this is where the legal — these legalisms kind of hit the reality of the road. You know, they may say:

Hey Alfonso, what are you interested in doing?

You know what I really want to do, I’ve got this idea and I want to do this movie about a woman drifting in space.

You do? Guess what? We have a book. We have a book. It’s got that.

Really?

Yeah.

All right, let me read it. Oh, yeah, well this isn’t quite what I was thinking. This is more like, you know, Contagion — well, they didn’t have Contagion — it’s more like Outbreak in space. I’m not really thinking that. But, you know, maybe I could figure something out.

Well, you know what? We want to attach you to this and you’ll have some interest —

Yeah…okay.

**John:** To be clear, Craig is just conjecturing. We have no idea what the real situation was.

**Craig:** That’s the point. It’s all conjecture. Yeah.

**John:** And so I think what I would like to stress is that attached means maybe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s really what it means. Because one of our mutual friends is a hot director and he’s attached to like seven projects. And so you ask him, what are you going to direct? He’s like, I don’t know. One of them.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. We hear this all the time. Sometimes you have a screenplay and the studio wants to make it and an actor says I want to do that. And then someone says, well wait a second, I hear that they’re attached to this. And then you ask them, well, how are you going to do my movie, you’re attached to that? Oh, no, no, no, that’s nothing. That’s not real.

You hear that every day. So, this idea of the attachment isn’t particularly — it’s not particularly compelling. But, what it does for Gerritsen is it obviously removes that roadblock that she felt was kind of between her and a lawsuit here.

And what she’s saying is that unlike most of the cuckoo nuts out there who say “you stole my life from me, you ripped off my script,” which is always — and 99% of the times bananas — she’s saying, no, no, no, I’m saying that what’s happened here is Warner Bros through its ownership of New Line has violated my contract. They made a movie that I believe is connected by chain of title to my book. They owe me money.

**John:** Yup. So, there’s really two ideas competing here and we don’t want to gloss over them. First off, “could not be dismissed as coincidence.” So, she’s basically saying like, oh, no, no, he saw it, I know he saw it, so you can’t just say that it was completely independent because I know he saw it. That’s not a fact we actually know, but she’s stating it sort of like it’s a fact.

And this third point which is Warner Bros, through their ownership of New Line, also controls the film rights to my book. And that weirdly becomes the whole issue here is whether they do, or don’t control the rights. What she’s I think very smartly saying in this block is, “Please note: this is not a case of copyright infringement.” So she’s trying to really lean into this sense of like I know you think I’m going to be one of those kooks who says that my book was stolen, and it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been stolen because Warner Bros owns it through New Line. And weirdly the case is about, well, maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they didn’t in the way that we sort of think they did.

**Craig:** Well, yes. Now, she’s also doing something — and her lawyers — are also doing something kind of clever here with this as well that’s a little more subtle. When she says this is not a case of copyright infringement, in addition to separating herself from the pack of lunatics, she’s also doing a little bit of a sleight of hand — these are not the droids you’re looking for.

In fact, down the line somewhere that’s exactly what’s going to need to be figured out. And here’s why — what she’s arguing is, hey look, Warner Bros is saying that they don’t have any responsibility for their contract with me because that’s a contract that was made with New Line, it had separate management, not them, they’re not responsible. Which, by the way, the judge has agreed with. They’ve agreed with Warner Bros’ argument there.

And she’s saying, no, no, no, but we’re going to come back and show that, in fact, they do control the film rights. If she is successful in that, that’s not going to be enough. Then, she’s going to have to show, okay, fine, okay, the judge has said we’re responsible for your contract. Great, we’re responsible for it. Still, this is a different project.

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s just the stage one. Let’s talk about what the judge actually did rule in this case. This is judge Margaret Morrow. And this is from her decision. I’ll just read one little quote here. “Even when her allegations are construed in Gerritsen’s favor, it is apparent that she cannot plausibly allege a claim under traditional contract law theories. Gerritsen pleads that she entered into contract with KATJA and New Line that entitled her to payment if KATJA produced a motion picture based on her book. And that Warner Bros, not KATJA, produced a film that is allegedly based on her book.

“No plausible inference arises from these allegations that Warner Bros was a party to the contracts or that KATJA produced the final film. Thus, absent an alternative theory of liability, Gerritsen’s claims must be dismissed.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Morrow’s decision is about 48 pages long. It’s super long. And in it Gerritsen is now allowed to file an amended complaint within 20 days, so probably ten days from now. And one of the things that Gerritsen is seeking is discovery. Gerritsen is seeking the ability to look for things that sort of bolster her claim that this has happened, that it’s based on this. And Morrow is saying basically, no, like you haven’t shown enough facts to lead to discovery.

And there’s a quote here which is from somebody else, but I thought it was a really interesting quote. “The court will not unlock the doors to discovery for a plaintiff armed with nothing more than conclusions.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, basically saying like you kind of want to go fishing but I’m not going to let you go fishing because I think you don’t have enough to bolster your claims here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, and just to make it really clear — that quote that you said was not from Judge Morrow.

**John:** That’s not Morrow. She’s quoting some other decision.

**Craig:** Right. But that’s what it comes down to. I mean, look, discovery is a really powerful thing. When you are involved in a civil case, discovery means, yeah, I get to actually look through everything. I can look through all your emails. I can look through all your stuff. You have to show it to me.

It’s not like a criminal case where you can plead the fifth. And, yeah, so Morrow is saying you haven’t actually given me any reason to think that you would discover something. You can’t just come up with a conclusion and then use that as some kind of pry bar to open up Warner Bros’ stuff to look for something that would fit your conclusion.

But, the judge did on some level at least, you know, this is what Gerritsen believes, kind of guide her to sort of say, here, if you sort of change things this way or this way, maybe then I would entertain your case. Well, not quite as sanguine about her prospects as she is there.

But, normally at this point it would be the end of it. And I should mention that Warner Bros has settled things before. For instance, the tattoo case. In this situation, they did not settle. They said, no, no, no, good, court. We like our odds. And they won. Typically it would end here.

But it is not what ended here. In fact, Gerritsen does something that people don’t typically do and she is a unique situation as far as these things are.

She went public.

**John:** She did. So, the snippets that we’re playing are actually from the blog post after she lost this case, or had most of this case dismissed. And she went public and the reason why we’re talking about it right now is because everyone tweeted this link to her blog about sort of what the situation was. And so this is the alarming language that was in there that set everybody off. So, let’s play one more snippet of that.

**”Tess:”** This is why every writer who sells to Hollywood should be alarmed.

It means that any writer who sold film rights to New Line Productions can have those rights freely exploited by its parent company Warner Bros ó and the original contract you signed with New Line will not be honored. Warner Bros can make a movie based on your book but you will get no credit, even though your contract called for it.

**John:** It’s a call to arms. It’s a call to arms to all writers who might sell their books to Hollywood.

**Craig:** Well, first, before I talk about her alarming comments here, I should say that if you’re listening and you’re thinking to yourself, boy, John and Craig seem a little hard on this lady and a little soft on Warner Bros, I want you to understand that every time these things happen I make a real effort to remember and consider that it is never a case of one writer accusing a corporation of ripping them off.

It is one writer accusing a corporation and another writer of ripping them off. And my feeling has always been that in our brother and sisterhood of writers we need to give all of the writing parties’ benefit of the doubt. There is no greater accusation to make than plagiarism. And she is accusing Alfonso Cuarón and his son of plagiarizing her.

So, everyone flipped out. And they flipped out because she said her case means that any writer who sold film rights to New Line Productions can have these rights freely exploited by the parent company, Warner Bros, and the original contract you signed with New Line will not be honored.

In fact, that is not correct at all. That is a ridiculous jump in logic from her situation. What she’s saying, to be clear is, because I failed to convince you that Warner Bros doesn’t have to honor this contract, Warner Bros never has to honor these contracts. That’s actually not true.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a fallacy of over-generalization. So, your one specific incidence of things that happen to you is a universal truth. So, if your Toyota catches fire, all Toyotas catch fire. And this was a really sort of unique circumstance. And I don’t know that she’s consciously doing a sleight of hand, but a sleight of hand has happened where she’s taking the results of this lawsuit and trying to say well this is what’s going to happen to everybody else in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look. Let’s say Gerritsen never sells her film rights to New Line Productions. Okay? She just publishes her book. She goes on her merry way. And then one day Warner Bros makes Gravity. Same situation. The only thing that’s different is that she didn’t sell the film rights to New Line. Would she not be able to sue Warner Bros? Of course she would. And what would the lawsuit be? It would be a copyright case.

Now, when she sells the film rights, she’s not giving up copyright of her book. So, when she says, well hey, it’s not a case of copyright infringement, what I’m hearing is I’m saying it’s not a case of copyright infringement because I know I can’t prove copyright infringement.

That’s what I’m hearing. Now, I don’t know if that’s true. But that’s what I’m hearing. So, what I want to say to you at home is, no, if you sell your film rights to your novel at New Line and then Warner Bros goes and makes a movie of it, if they’re using your unique expression in fixed form, you absolutely have legal recourse. No question.

**John:** Yes, so that legal recourse is complicated to a degree because let’s say it wasn’t New Line. Let’s say, oh, let’s pick Disney. Let’s say she had sold it to Disney and then Warner Bros makes Gravity. And Disney say, uh-uh-uh, that’s really based on this book that we control the rights to. Disney is the one who would go after Warner Bros.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Probably more likely than Tess Gerritsen. So, in this case, New Line is not going to sue Warner Bros. And so I am sympathetic to — I can very much see how it feels to her, because she’s saying like, uh-uh-uh, I’m not — New Line should be suing you and New Line is not suing you.

New Line is not suing them I really think for one really clear reason that it’s probably not based on the book that they bought, but clearly even if they thought it was based on the book they bought, they would not be suing Warner Bros.

**Craig:** I still feel like in the case that you said, Disney says we’re suing you Warner Bros because we have exclusive rights to make a film based on this book. That’s fine. But if they have, in fact, made a movie based on a book that they don’t have rights to. The author, too, has a copyright case because —

**John:** They absolutely do.

**Craig:** Because the rights to make derivative works is incorporated in copyright. One of the things of copyright is the right to make copies, but it’s also the right to make derivative works, including films of your novel. So, if somebody goes and makes a derivative work of your book and you haven’t given them that right, absolutely you can sue them. What I feel like — and I can’t say this is true — but what I feel like is that she knows she can’t prove that, so she’s trying to basically get them from a chain of title argument. And the judge is saying you can’t.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s listen to the last little clip of this, and this is how she sort of wraps up. And this was the final call to arms, which I think is what got so many people tweeting this at us this week.

**”Tess:”** It means that any parent film company who acquires a studio, and also acquires that studio’s intellectual properties, can exploit those properties without having to acknowledge or compensate the original authors.

This is alarming on many levels, and the principles involved go far beyond my individual lawsuit. Every writer who sells film rights to Hollywood must now contend with the possibility that the studio they signed the contract with could be swallowed up by a larger company ó and that parent company can then make a movie based on your book without compensating you. It means Hollywood contracts are worthless.

**John:** Craig, are Hollywood contracts worthless?

**Craig:** No, of course not. Now, when you — look, I have to be fair and honest here. When you enter into a contractual agreement with a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation, you know you are in an asynchronous state. You are an individual and they are not. And if they — if you perceive that they have violated your contract, it’s going to be a tough fight. There’s no question. And I’m aware of that. That said, I have never once in 19 years ever had a situation that even approached a company violating a contract. It costs them too much to violate there.

If they clearly violate the contract, they know they’re going to lose. In this case, what she really — here is how I would sort of express her argument. Let’s say you write a novel and you sell it to a studio. And then that studio is bought by another studio that makes a movie that you think is connected to your novel in some way, but doesn’t actually contain stuff that you think is pulled from your novel in terms of intellectual property, then they don’t have to compensate you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. [laughs]

**John:** That’s really what it comes down to is that like in many ways what she doesn’t perceive is that her book Gravity is still a New Line property that they could still make into a movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** And so I think it would actually be really fascinating if just New Line said like, you know what, it still is a really good idea, because you know what, it kind of does sound like a good idea. They could just make it. They probably wouldn’t call it Gravity because that title has already been used, but I mean, she perceives that her book has been turned into a movie, and New Line says it hasn’t.

**Craig:** And let’s talk about what — okay, she’s alarmed by how she perceives reality now. I’m alarmed by the reality that she wishes to impose. And here’s why.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So let’s say that Ms. Gerritsen gets her way and Warner Bros is held responsible for this and now Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is no longer considered an original screenplay, but in fact it’s based by a novel by her, a novel that he may or may not have read, and it doesn’t matter. That’s the way it is.

So, now, let’s talk about what that means for screenwriters. You go to a studio and you say I have an original idea and I’m going to sell it to you. Or, I have an original screenplay, I’m going to sell it to you. And they say, great. We love your spec script. We want to buy it. However, because of Gerritsen v. WB, we have had to run through our archives of all material that we own, including material owned by companies that purchased it before we purchased the company, and we have found seven different books that we have contractual obligations to that are similar in topic.

**John:** In that sense that they involve horses.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have a horseracing movie. That’s a perfect example, because there have been about, I don’t know, one every three years. Okay? You have a horseracing movie. We have seven different books that are basically about the horseracing and they all include a character of a girl who falls in love with a horse. They include an alcoholic. They include a horse that nobody had — that was going to go to the glue factory. Basically we have seven books that include a lot of horse movie tropes. So, your original screenplay is now actually based on seven different books. It’s a nightmare.

It’s a nightmare.

**John:** So, let me give you a scenario that I think is actually much more plausible and likely, that you could really see happening. So, let’s say you are Sony and you buy a great book about Harry Truman and it’s like, oh, we’re going to make a movie about Harry Truman. And then two weeks later Aaron Sorkin comes out with a really amazing spec script and it’s like, oh my god, this is amazing, so you buy it. Do you then have to go to Aaron Sorkin and say, oh, Aaron, by the way, I know you wrote this original script but it’s now based on this book? That’s really the scenario that you’re running into now is that like anything that looks like it could be similar that you already own the rights to, well it’s suddenly source material for this project.

That does come up, by the way. There definitely are situations where a spec script — they’ll own a book and they’ll say like, you know what, we’re going to incorporate some of this stuff but I’ve also had it happen just in bizarre ways. I had a friend who was in production on her movie. And this was a pitch she sold and she was so excited and they were in production. And they’re like several weeks in and they said like, oh by the way, this movie is based on a book. And she had no recourse, essentially. This thing that she thought was an original thing is now based on a book.

**Craig:** Right. It happens. What we don’t want is for it to happen sort of post hoc, you know, where you sell something and then a book is thrown on top of it, or you sell something and somebody throws a book sort of in it as we have to, sorry. We mistakenly have the rights to a book that is sort of the same kind of topic. You know, we’ve talked about what is and is not unique expression in intellectual property. We’ve talked about how ideas are not intellectual property.

I’m a little concerned — the thing that concerned me maybe the most about Ms. Gerritsen’s complaint was what was not there. And what was not there was any kind of literary material that I could read, a passage, a paragraph, a sentence, and say, oh, you know what, I saw that in Gravity. Nothing. And what concerns me then is that she is suing, she is casting aspersions on the authorship of Alfonso Cuarón and yet she can’t actually back it up. And I have to say that is not a good feeling there. She may be right. And she may be proven right. And if that’s the case, then I hope she gets every dime she deserves.

But right now, I’ll tell you what, there is a very famous short story called Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury. Have you ever read Kaleidoscope?

**John:** I never have.

**Craig:** It’s probably on the web. We could probably throw a link on, well, actually, that’s copyright violation anyway, so we won’t do that. But it’s an amazing story and it’s about a bunch of astronauts on a rocket ship and the rocket ship explodes from something, meteors or something. And all the guys basically are falling through space and as they’re falling through space they can talk to each other. So, they’re basically above the earth, just like Gravity, and they’re falling in freefall towards the earth, just like Gravity, and they can talk to each other.

And the short story is entirely about what they say to each other in these last minutes knowing full well this is it.

**John:** Well, I can’t believe Cuarón ripped him off.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s the thing. You know, this is where we have to be so careful because, you know, if she got her way here basically everybody would just be locked into the strangest world, you know. It’s not feasible.

**John:** You know what it actually reminds me of? It sort of reminds me of patent trolls. You know how the way that technologies get patented and then people use them as weapons against each other. And I could definitely see if this were to actually come to pass where you could say like, uh-uh, you can’t do anything involving this little subset of intellectual property because I own all of these things. And that would just be a horrific situation.

**Craig:** Yes. I’m really curious if anyone has actually read the book and if they perceive any real specific connection beyond the fact that the hero is a woman and that she’s in space and falling. That’s not enough at all.

**John:** So, I want to address sort of like why I think so many writers are so freaked out about this.

**Craig:** Ah yes.

**John:** And I could totally feel why they were panicked because you look at it, especially look at it from how she is portraying it. And I also would say like I genuinely think and believe she believes what she’s writing. I don’t think there’s anything false about this. I think sometimes she’s optimizing her words that she’s using to describe her own book, but I think she genuinely believes what she’s writing. And I think if I were in her situation, I would kind of genuinely believe it, too.

Because I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to defend my authorship of a movie that goes into production, or arbitration where I say like, well, clearly this is my work. And it’s frustrating when sometimes that’s not acknowledged. But — and so, well, the writers who tweeted us this link, they felt like, oh my god, this is something that could happen? This is awful. And so what I’d love for people to remember though is there is a whole bunch of other writers that aren’t being acknowledged in this conversation.

There is the screenwriter who adapted her book who that movie never actually happened, but there is a script somewhere with this guy’s name on it that’s based on a book that could be a movie at some point. And there are the Cuaróns who wrote this movie. And to hold up on a pedestal this novelist for her book and for her idea, which is sort of a different idea, over the actual creative work and expression of writing a movie and making a movie feels like a — you’re omitting a really crucial part of the discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everybody roots for the underdog. I mean, sure. And, you know, when she comes out and very candidly frames this as writers versus companies, of course every writer is going to go Defend, Defend, yes, circle the wagons. Always, I say, always defend the writer and circle the wagons. Just make sure that you’re not circling the wagons and excluding a writer while you’re doing it, or running over a writer while you’re doing it.

In that case, that’s what’s happening here. And the writers are — the writer of the screenplay that was actually based on her book and by chain of title and also Alfonso Cuarón, unless — by the way — unless in a court of law she proves that Alfonso Cuarón and his son plagiarized her work. And if that’s the case, well then, they ought to get what’s coming to them. I mean, you know, I mean, I’m all for that. But, you know, when we sign contracts, it’s one of my favorite little hypocrisies of the screenwriting contract is on the one hand we say, look, for the purposes of copyright, Warner Bros is the author of the screenplay. However, I also swear to you that I am the author of the screenplay. Nobody else. I am not stealing anything. I wrote this. Me, me, me.

Meaning, you can sue me. If I sell you a screenplay that in fact I’ve ripped off from somebody else. So, it’s not like we — when we get jobs that we are aware that we are warranting college honor code style that this is our work. And we’re not stealing anybody else’s work. The only work that we’re allowed to access is the work that’s assigned to us. The prior screenplays and the underlying material.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, Craig, thank you very much for a discussion, a very thorough discussion through all of this, and we’ll keep an eye on it. We’ll see what happens. There’s supposed to be another ten days or so before she has to file a new thing. So, if she files that and it goes to another round, we may see more about this.

**John:** Yeah, for sure.

It is time for our One Cool Things and keeping with our science-fiction theme, my One Cool Thing is two blog posts by Tim Urban on Wait But Why, his site. And they’re both talking about artificial intelligence and they’re very, very long posts where he just sort of goes through what modern artificial intelligence thinkers think is going to happen with artificial intelligence. And at what point we will achieve artificial intelligence that can sort of do what we do, and then at what point will we create a superior intelligence that can do things we cannot possibly imagine. And what the timeframes are for that and what the outcomes are for that.

And it’s just a really good, thorough deep dive into that whole area of discussion. So, I had read some of the books that he’s referencing, and Kurzweil, and your best friend, Elon Musk, has huge concerns about artificial intelligence.

**Craig:** Yes, I wish he were my best friend.

**John:** Well, yeah. But one day. And Bill Joy, who is famously sort of negative about the future not needing us. So, I think it’s just a great look at sort of where our thinking is for artificial intelligence right now. One interesting little statistic I’ll pull from it is they did a survey of artificial intelligence experts to f figure out — really asking them when do you think artificial intelligence will achieve human intelligence?

And the median answer was 25 years, which is really soon. The question then becomes, at what point after achieving our intelligence would it become super intelligent and those range from about two minutes to 20 years. And there really isn’t that — we cannot know, because it’s potentially an exponential growth that would fundamentally change everything. And so, while you’re there reading those two stories, it ties in well with the Fermi Paradox, which I’ve brought up before, about why we don’t see other civilizations. How it’s entirely possible that they are computers now and that’s why they’re not in our universe.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s possible that we are also computers.

**John:** This could all be a simulation anyway, so what does it matter?

**Craig:** Right. What does it matter. Well, while we’re here stuck in the matrix, my One Cool Thing — why not — let’s make it Ray Bradbury and his book The Illustrated Man, which was published in 1951, and it contained 18 science fiction short stories, including the aforementioned Kaleidoscope. Did you go through a science fiction short story streak like I did when I was a kid?

**John:** Absolutely. I think it was seventh grade that I read a lot of them.

**Craig:** Yeah, I just went bananas. I mean, I went bananas on Bradbury, Asimov, various collections, Heinlein, and Bradbury was, I thought, the best writer. Some of the writing of that time period isn’t great. A lot of times you feel like the people writing the stories are really good with plot, terrible with character and dialogue. Everybody speaks ridiculously and on the nose.

Bradbury was a very good writer. And loved actually the idea of what he did with Kaleidoscope. I mean, granted, it’s dated. It’s from 1951. But, definitely check it out if you can, literally, from your library. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, including Kaleidoscope.

**John:** Fantastic. So, you’ll find links to Ray Bradbury’s works and these two posts I just talked about. All of Tess Gerritsen’s stuff we’ll try to have links up to the PDFs from the lawsuits and from the original complaints, so you can see them and look through them and maybe even sort of read through them with us as we take a look at what the Gravity lawsuit means.

If you would like to talk to me or Craig more, you can tweet at him. He is verified —

**Craig:** Oh yeah!

**John:** @clmazin.

**Craig:** Who do we have to thank for this?

**John:** Well, weirdly, so we have to thank Brian Koppelman for it. But we also literally at exactly the same time that that was happening with Brian Koppelman, I was dealing with Twitter about a bunch of impersonators. And thank you to everyone else who helped me with Twitter and those other stupid impersonators.

But I got verified sort of at the same moment, so it was all a glorious blue check moment for us all.

**Craig:** Yeah, Brian Koppelman, he’s — I don’t know how he does it. He’s just like one of those guys that knows every person that you should know or that you would want to know.

**John:** Yeah. You sort of feel like, you know, if you were walking up to a club, Brian Koppelman will get you in.

**Craig:** Oh, no question. That’s like — that’s elementary Brian Koppelman.

**John:** And I saw that Rian Johnson also got verified at the same moment. So, I think it just all happens.

**Craig:** Oh, no, Rian did? Because he was unverified and dangerous.

**John:** Yeah, now he’s verified. I have a hunch that Twitter said like, oh you know what, these screenwriters, let’s just verify them.

**Craig:** [laughs] While we’re at it…

**John:** While we’re at it. Gary Whitta had one a long time ago, but that was because of Star Wars.

**Craig:** I’m looking to see if Rian still says he’s unverified. No, he says, “Dignity. Always Dignity.” He’s changed it. Oh, well, you know, the truth is the blue checkmark doesn’t mean a damn thing, but —

**John:** [laughs] No, I thought there would be like a giant parade or whatever. I thought they would send me a little sweatshirt with a little blue checkmark, but it was a momentary little adrenaline rush.

But, anyway, I am @johnaugust. He is @clmazin. You can tweet at us with your thoughts about this episode or other episodes. If you have longer questions, the place to send them is ask@johnaugust.com.

You can find this episode at johnaugust.com along with the show notes and all these links.

If you would like to listen to the premium feed and all the special episodes, including the dirty episode from last week, you can find that at Scriptnotes.net. That will also be playable through our app which is both on the App Store and the Amazon Android App Store.

We are on iTunes. You should subscribe there and leave us a comment. Just look for Scriptnotes there.

And I think that is it. So, I want to thank Christy Miller again for providing the voice of Tess Gerritsen for this. Our outro is probably by Matthew Chilelli. We’ll see. But he also edited the show.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And Stuart Friedel produced it.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah! Stuart.

**John:** Oh yeah! Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You, too, John.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* [SAG, DGA & WGA Members Could Be Victims Of Anthem Hack](http://deadline.com/2015/02/sag-dga-wga-anthem-hack-cyber-attack-1201367324/), on Deadline
* [Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H83EUL2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Gravity: A Novel of Medical Suspense by Tess Gerritsen](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WEA9P2/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Warner Bros. Aims to Shoot Down Author’s Gravity Lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/warner-bros-aims-shoot-down-715806), from The Hollywood Reporter
* [My Gravity lawsuit and how it affects every writer who sells to Hollywood](http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-lawsuit-affects-every-writer-sells-hollywood/), from Tess Gerritsen’s blog
* [DP/30: Gravity, co-writer/director Alfonso Cuarón](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c2EQP5nIAA) on YouTube
* [Judge Morrow’s decision, dated January 30, 2015](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/wb-gravity-lawsuit-order-wm.pdf)
* [The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) and [The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html), from Wait But Why
* [The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451678185/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))