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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/doing-not-thinking).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 178 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, Happy 2015.

**Craig:** Happy 2015, John. We made it to the Back to the Future.

**John:** We made it to that time that was foretold when everything would be just the way it is right now. That movie hit everything exactly right.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. Robert Zemeckis ahead of his time yet again. I think the thing I’m most excited about with 2015 is I will remember that it’s 2015. I think I’m actually going to sign checks properly. For whatever reason, the number sticks in my head properly, because I was signing 2013 for a long time. And I think 2015 I’m good and I’m golden. So, for the next 364 days I am good.

**Craig:** I have a little theory on this.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** And maybe it’s just you and me and none of the people out there, but I find that remembering the odd numbered years is vastly easier than remembering the even ones.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Odd number years — you know, this is going to sound a little weird and it’s going to sound a little idiot savant-ish, but do numbers have certain feelings for you?

**John:** Oh, absolutely Craig. Come on, we’re screenwriters. Everything has feelings.

**Craig:** Right. But so certain numbers feel a certain way and like have a certain vibe in your head.

**John:** Yeah, like fours are blue. Because they’re blue.

**Craig:** And they’re round. Even though a four is not round, it’s round to me. All even numbers are softer than odd numbers. Odd numbers are harder.

**John:** They’re pokey.

**Craig:** They’re pokey. They’re exactly right. They’re pokey. So, even though say four is visually pokier than nine, nine is pokey.

**John:** 100 percent agree with you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s also the number of dots like on a dice or something like that, because the odd ones are always going to have a little bit that sticks out.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this little extra bit. There’s something off. And so they’re easier to grab. You know, when you’re remembering that date, 2015 for me is so easy, it’s such a breeze to be able to write 15. 2016 is going to be annoying because it’s such a round, soft — because we’re in the 20s now. You know, when we were in the 19s, you have all these great dates that were entirely pointy like 1993. Oh!

**John:** Yeah. Lots of pokiness.

**Craig:** So pokey.

**John:** Well, I would say overall since we’ve been in the 2000s I tend — those years tend to slip away more easily. And also the 2000s. So, I’ll often say like 1998 when I mean 2008. And I think it’s because it slips away.

Maybe it’s also the aspect of Velcro. I think that the even numbered years are sort of like the fuzzy size of Velcro. And the odd number years are like the spiky side of Velcro. And spiky side of Velcro, it scratches and it holds on. It’s easier for me.

**Craig:** For me, for sure.

**John:** Also, 2015, it’s a five. And I just remember learning how to count by 5s. And so all the 5s are very natural to me. So, they just feel, I don’t know, it’s like a nickel. It’s a nickel year.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen, I have every reason to expect that it’s going to be a spectacular year because —

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I’m a foolish optimist.

**John:** Yes, sort of positive moviegoing transfers into positive year gazing.

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** And 2014 on the whole I would say had some suckage to it. There were some things that were incredibly frustrating and annoying and we also ended 2014 on a really weird down note. So, I’m excited to rebound into this New Year, this new act.

**Craig:** Every year has suckage.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** So, you and I because we are students of logic, fallacies, and cognitive quirks. We know that the human mind is set up to detect patterns when perhaps that does it a disservice. So, you look at trends and over the long run, over the long run the world is getting better. Hard to tell when you’re in the middle of a down spike on your jagged rise up, but overall the world is doing better.

It’s a hard thing to say to people when they’re currently not doing well.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have this problem where sometimes someone will say 2014 was the worst year ever. And I’ll say no it wasn’t. No, no, not at all. I mean, certainly 1232 in the middle of the plague was much, much worse. And then I realize that I’m talking to somebody who, you know, their parent died or they got dumped. Or they lost a job and they don’t need me giving them historical perspective. And this is why I’m not a therapist.

**John:** I would also say though I feel like the acceleration of time based on largely social media but just sort of the nature of media overall, things just move so much faster and there were so many bad things that were all stacked together.

In our episode that we recorded together we talked about the Year in Outrage which was Slate’s little thing where they talked about all sort of the year’s events and moments of outrage. And you just look back on 2014 and there were so many things where like that was crazy that that happened and it’s also crazy that the next week we had forgotten about it. Like Russia shot a plane out of the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** And we just kind of forgot about it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Oh, yeah, that happened.

**Craig:** We gave villains some great news in 2014. And we also gave the unjustly accused great news in 2014. No matter what you do, no matter how bad it is, in two weeks people will be talking about something else.

**John:** 100 percent true.

**Craig:** Two weeks. So, if you are ever humiliated. Let’s say that your email gets hacked and all of it gets out there and you said all these things about people and so on and so forth.

**John:** Like Angelina Jolie.

**Craig:** Everybody’s angry at you. You know what you do? You just go somewhere without Internet and you stay there for two weeks. You come back, and you should be fine. [laughs]

**John:** It’s the two-week cure.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the two-week cure.

**John:** Today on the podcast we are going to be looking at three Three Page Challenges from people who sent in their first three pages of their scripts for us to look at and we will be discussing them on the air. And I think part of the reason I’m so optimistic about 2015 is this — I think we talked about it before we started recording — this was the best batch of these Three Page Challenges we’ve seen maybe ever.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think we’ve ever had one where all three were very good and we have all three are very good. We have three very encouraging Three Page Challenges this week.

**John:** And all three provided interesting things to talk about, too, which is crucial. So, Stuart Friedel, well picked.

**Craig:** Yes. At last.

**John:** The other thing we’re going to be talking about today is Chuck Palahniuk has this great advice for writers about not using thought verbs. And so we’re going to dig into that a little bit, both how it applies to literary writing, but how it applies to screenwriting as well.

So, let’s get into it by first doing some follow up on Sony. The last real episode recorded two weeks ago, the Sony hack had happened. The Interview was not going to be released in theaters, or online, or ever. Everything was in chaos. I wondered aloud whether this was our 9/11. And now, again, two weeks later a lot has changed. So, let’s look through what has changed.

The movie got released. We’re recording this on January 3. The movie has been released. It was released in independent theaters, so not the big chains that were supposed to carry it, but it was released on a fair number of screens. And it was also released online, so on YouTube and later on iTunes. And it earned $15 million online.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, that was a significant change. Another thing that has changed is people have started asking more questions about whether it was really North Korea involved. And the administration has come back and said, no, no, no, it really is North Korea. So, as we’re recording this, the administration is still telling us that it was North Korea who was behind the attack.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s right. Again, this is part of the way news works, and this even applies to people who aren’t normally conspiracy theorists. So, the administration says we have reason to believe it’s North Korea and then a security firm, I believe in this case it was Norse Security says, “Whoa, hold on. We’ve looked at what we can see and from what we can tell there’s no reason to think that it’s North Korea. We think it’s these other people.” Now, at that point I asked a question that a lot of people asked: why not both?

I mean, that’s the way it used to work in the Cold War. You’d pay off some guy working on the inside to get you secrets from Lockheed or whatever. But this got passed around as, hey, Obama liar, [laughs], you know. So, either — it’s dependent on which way your bent was, either it was Obama was a liar, or America is weak and we’re stupid, whatever spin you wanted to put on it.

But point being, yeah, it wasn’t the North Koreans at all. Blah. And look at that, we shut down North Korea’s Internet over nothing. Well, we may not have shut down their Internet actually.

**John:** Yeah. Again, we don’t know what we don’t know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the thing. We have no idea what the administration really knows. If there’s other information about sort of why they believe it’s North Korea. We don’t know if we shut down their Internet. And so we just stumble around in the darkness and point fingers at each other.

**Craig:** Well, this is the new era. We stumble around in the darkness. We don’t point fingers at each other. We throw headlines at each other.

**John:** That’s true. That’s what we do.

**Craig:** We just walk around whipping headlines into each other’s faces while the truth just sits there doing what the truth is, which is remaining immutable and finite. And some people got a little feisty with me on Twitter. “You’re stupid for believing in the government.” Well, it’s just yesterday or today the federal government came out and said, “No, no, no, we’ve read all of your adorable articles, Norse Security. Yeah, we’ve been actually following some stuff for years that we think this connected up with. We have excellent evidence that we are standing by. That this, in fact, was backed by the North Koreans.”

And once again I have to say just because you don’t have the evidence doesn’t mean the evidence doesn’t exist, particularly when you’re talking about something that is protected by national security interests, whether you like that sort of thing or not. So, so far I’m going with North Koreans until I see convincing reason that essentially the government is flat out lying to me.

**John:** I will actually take a contrarian view and I don’t think it was largely the North Koreans. I think they could have been involved to some capacity. They may have hired some folks to do some stuff. But I think this — I think it will ultimately come out that it was not nearly as much of the North Koreans as is now being reported. That doesn’t mean that I believe that there’s a vast conspiracy to hide the truth from us. I just think that we don’t know what they don’t know.

It’s one of those things where I think there are levels of uncertainty here that may never actually fully be resolved.

**Craig:** Well, if the North Koreans paid off some people to do this, wouldn’t that — because that would count for me.

**John:** Would that count?

**Craig:** Yeah, that would count for me, for sure. Oh yeah, absolutely.

**John:** To me, I think the more interesting looking forward from all this is that it did, I think, initiate the era or the public awareness so that we’re in an era of hackers being able to do major things to shut down individual corporations or sort of whole areas of business.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think that is really the more terrifying thing to come out of this. Because one of the things that I thought was underreported was it wasn’t just like they published a bunch of embarrassing Sony emails. It’s that they actually shutdown Sony largely. They shut down all their computer networks.

I have friends who work there who they had to write checks manually. They couldn’t trust any of their own computers. And if you’re in an era now where you can’t do anything on a computer, you’re really screwed. And so whatever the next industry or the next corporation that gets hit by this kind of attack, it’s going to be really interesting, whether it’s geopolitical or just actually sort of the Die Hard model where it sort of seems like they’re terrorists, but nope, they’re actually just out for some money. They’re just going to try to extort you. That’s going to be really fascinating and scary.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think a lot of the stuff that went on at Sony was self-inflicted by necessity. Once they knew that their network had been breached there were just huge areas of it they couldn’t trust, so they had to turn it off.

I remember driving over to Sony to see Lindsay and it was, I think, on day three of this thing, and I pull up to the security gate and I give them my thing, “Well who are you going to see?” And I tell her and she goes, “Okay.” They can’t — and I realized, oh, they don’t have, they don’t know who — I’m just me holding up a license that says me saying I’m here to see somebody. And they —

**John:** They can’t scan anything.

**Craig:** They can’t scan. They have no computer to tell them yeah that’s true, so just go on.

**John:** And the poor guard. He had to go out and manually lift the gate up because the little computer that lifts the gate couldn’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The iPod controlled lift gate. So, they had to — you’re absolutely right. This will ideally serve as some kind of inoculation and hopefully every major industry and certainly every major industry in our town is going bananas on security.

**John:** The pro side is that hopefully some of the firms will become more serious about security. The flip side of that is that if you are an individual or a group who has an agenda, you see like, oh, look what we can do if we put our minds to it. And that’s a troubling thing, too.

**Craig:** Well, yes, but in the end — and this is a lesson that it seems terrorists learn very slowly — in the end what you basically get is publicity. But publicity isn’t an ends to anything. It’s simply a means to an end. In the end the movie came out, it made some money, Sony will continue to march on. Their computers will turn back on. People will stop talking about this. It did not bring down the great capitalist empire, nor did it improve life anywhere else in the world.

It did nothing.

**John:** If it was North Korea and their aim was to embarrass Sony and to make people remember that North Korea still exists, it did that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Briefly.

**John:** Briefly.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, again, two-week rule. It’ll pass away. Russia shot down a plane and we don’t talk about that anymore.

**Craig:** It’s already — the second — that’s all you have to do. If you’re one of these people that suddenly is the piñata on Twitter and in the news, what you do is watch the news, okay. Just watch the news. And it’s going to be awful because it’s going to be all about you and it’s going to be horrendous. Just…wait…because sooner or later a plane is going to go missing. You’re done.

Go outside, have lunch. Have lunch. Go see your friends. Everything is going to be fine.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about the release of The Interview as well. So, they followed your advice largely. They did release the movie online.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They released it through YouTube and eventually through iTunes. Did you watch it, Craig?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Craig watches nothing.

**Craig:** I’ve got screeners. I’m going my way through screeners.

**John:** All right. So, I watched it on YouTube and the experience was actually fine and it looked pretty good on a crappy hotel connection on a laptop and it looked just fine. You watch the movie and you’re like, really? We did all this for this movie? It wasn’t my favorite of the Seth Rogan directed movies. But it wasn’t, I don’t know.

It was amazing that all of this drama happened over what you, I think, were criticizing Obama for saying it’s a silly comedy.

**Craig:** Clooney. Clooney said that.

**John:** Oh, Clooney said it. Clooney was absolutely right. It is a silly comedy that had no sort of greater point.

**Craig:** I think the word that he used was dumb which I thought was — I was just presuming that he hadn’t seen it, but even if he had —

**John:** If he had seen it, I think he would have said dumb was correct.

**Craig:** It was a, you know, why editorialize. But the truth is some comedies are supposed to be dumb.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if the world had kept — if this had happened around the release of Caddyshack I think people would have been like, wait, wait, this happened because —

**John:** Caddyshack is a great movie. Come on.

**Craig:** Of course it is. But at the time I’m saying, if you had never seen Caddyshack before and then it was like —

**John:** I predict that 20 years from now we will not be talking about The Interview in the same reverential tones we talk about Caddyshack.

**Craig:** I suspect you’re right. But, regardless, I feel bad. No movie deserves that kind of — no movie deserves that kind of —

**John:** Those guys are wonderful. And so I felt so frustrated for them as I articulated two weeks ago with their movie being held hostage and their work being unseen. So, I was very happy for them that they got the movie out in the world. That people got to enjoy the movie. And I want to talk a little bit about the $15 million, because everyone is like, oh my gosh, we should just release movies online if we make $15 million.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s like, yeah, no other movie will ever have two weeks of national publicity and all the stuff only to get $15 million. That’s…no.

**Craig:** Why are people — ?

**John:** I think it shows how important theatrical is.

**Craig:** You know what? Here’s a resolution for 2015 for everyone. Stop being stupid.

**John:** That’s a good thing.

**Craig:** You know, just stop being stupid. That’s the dumbest. If you say, “Oh, you see that? They made $15 million. Every movie should…” then you need to stop. You need to sit down. You need to admit that you’ve been stupid. You need to admit that you’ve been saying things without really thinking about them. You need to make a resolution. No more being stupid. That’s dumb.

Of course the $15 million is not indicative of anything other than what happens when your movie is the topic of global speculation for two months, or rather two weeks, and also is not available anywhere else unless you live in Austin or something.

**John:** It’s that classic thing of sort of enshrining the outlier as being the new paradigm. And so it’s like saying, “Look at Titanic. Titanic was so successful. It’s super long. It’s a period piece. And that’s what we should be making.” It’s like, no, you should never try to make Titanic again. That was completely an outlier. And you should never try to do what The Interviewer did because, lord, that’s not going to happen the same way twice.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** You wouldn’t want it to happen the same way twice.

**Craig:** No. In fact, I have to admit the $15 million number to me was a little disappointing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because I thought, well, okay, that’s almost the maximum that you could expect from a normal movie that has no preexisting interest beyond the scandal. Like if you went ahead and said, “We’re making Harry Potter 8 and we’re putting it online,” or Harry Potter 9 I guess you would say, “and we’re putting it online,” then —

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’d see a lot of money. But for a little comedy that has all this stuff going behind it, that’s like, okay, that’s an average $40 million movie with all this interest, no theatrical release, now it’s online. It’s only $6, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they made $15 million. Not great, you know. Not great. If anything, I think it showed how limited that venue is for an initial release. That that venue — online — really is a good ancillary market. And, hey, good news for the exhibitors who I have been slapping around a little bit lately. People still want to go see movies in movie theaters. And thank god.

**John:** Yeah. I like movies in movie theaters.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** So, let’s segue to Chuck Palahniuk had this great little blog post article on Lit Reactor where he urged writers in 2015 to take a six-month hiatus on using thought verbs. And by thought verbs he was talking about “thinks, knows, understands, realizes, believes, wants, remembers, imagines, desires, and a hundred others you love to use. The list should also include loves and hates.” Craig, what did you think of this?

**Craig:** Yeah. Spot on. He’s expanded his list beyond what you call the linking verbs, those verbs that can take adjectives. Like if you ever hear somebody say, “I feel badly about that,” then you can feel free to correct them and tell them that that means that their fingers are numb. They feel bad.

But his point here in expanding this group is spot on. What he’s really saying is these words essentially are stealing your ability to paint the picture or reveal the information in a narratively interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, go ahead.

**John:** Well, Palahniuk is coming from a point of fiction. And so the stuff he’s writing is words you’re reading on a page, so you’re reading short stories, you’re reading a novel, and his argument is that if you say “Tom thought back to his childhood and how much he loved his mother.” That’s a sentence anyway, but by saying that he’s thinking back, by saying that he loves his mother you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to actually visualize those moments, to make those moments physical and real, and to give the characters something to do and something to explore.

Instead, you’re just short-cutting right past them and you’re not actually seeing it. It’s like you’re taking a jet from one coast to the other coast and not taking the cross country trip and really exploring what’s in there.

So, he gives some good examples of ways to show one character’s interest in another character by just really physicalizing the moment. And sort of like there’s a scene at a locker where he does a really good job articulating the moment by moment of like what it is like for those two characters to be in each other’s space. That’s writing.

And I thought it was a really smart approach, especially for talking about literary fiction and prose fiction and the kinds of words you’re choosing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this thing that bad writers will do, or let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, they’re early writers or new writers. They will have their writing describe people, describe characters or moments in a way that the reader or movie viewer would describe them after words. For instance, oh, he hated her. Well, he wasn’t happy to be there. He didn’t like that. He was scared. That’s all how they would describe what they’ve seen or heard. But that’s not what you give them. That’s like basically cooking a lovely meal and then blending it and mixing it with digestive juices and then feeding it to people like they’re bugs. You know, you have to make them work to get that.

Have them open it up. Have them unpack it. Have them draw the conclusion. You want your character to know that this one hates that one because they figured it out, not because one of them says I hate her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And even in screenwriting where the audience will never be exposed to our non-dialogue work, at least not directly textually, it’s another way for us to avoid that syndrome of writing things that cannot be shot.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, he says here, “Don’t tell your reader Lisa hated Tom.” Well, similarly, when you’re a screenwriter don’t write the paragraph, “Lisa sees Tom coming across the street. She hates him.” No.

**John:** No. Because here is what you need to think about with scene description is that when you’re writing a screenplay ultimately you’re writing dialogue that characters can say which is lovely and that’s a thing that characters can do, but you’re trying to give the actors something they can actually play. And hating is not a thing you can actually play.

Actors can only play actions that they can do something. And so you need to give the actor something they can do.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to literally map out every little beat of every little thing that they’re doing, every little twiddle of their fingers, but you need to give them playable moments and you need to give the director playable moments so that she can, you know, figure out what to aim the camera at to explain what it is that’s going on in these character’s heads.

So, what Palahniuk is trying to do here is really what screenwriters sort of innately have to do which is that, you know, as screenwriters we’re only allowed to write about the things you can see and you can hear. Everything has to be externalized anyway. He’s urging prose writers to externalize those same kinds of things that screenwriters innately have to do.

**Craig:** And interestingly a lot of the verbs that he’s singling out here correctly aren’t really things that we do either as human beings naturally. So, we’ll say words like understand. You don’t actually understand something. What you do is you put things together, you make connections. You have a moment. There’s a thing. Eventually you’ll come to say I understand this. You know, believing in something is the summation of a long process. Wanting something, loving something. This whole idea, I mean, love is the best of these words, because what do you walk up to something, oh yeah it happened, I love it. I love it.

No. No. So, Beth can’t hate Don. Beth can have a reaction to Don. Beth can see Don do something. Beth can do something in return. We should watch these people doing human things and thinking human things of the moment the way that we do of the moment and draw our own conclusion from it. So, when you use these kinds of words or when you think in this way, you are doing the audience’s work for them and therefore they are bored.

**John:** Yeah. So, the one exception I want to propose for this moratorium on these verbs is there are moments in screenwriting where these words can be incredibly useful and helpful. And so the thing that comes to mind is in the parenthetical. And so in a parenthetical I can imagine a block of dialogue where the character starts speaking and then has this moment of realization where they actually finally understand what it is that the character is saying.

So, in a parenthetical (finally understanding) or (considering) or sometimes you need like that simple word that sort of explains what it is that is actually going on in their mental process to make that line of dialogue make sense.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That feels like a good case to make an exception for these verbs, because sometimes you really do need to state the internal process for this character so that the line of dialogue makes sense.

**Craig:** What you’re talking about, and I completely agree, is the use of these words as a reward at the end of a process.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A character, if you’ve done your work, and the character then finally has that moment, that epiphany, than you’ve earned it. And then the audience will have it with them and that’s a wonderful thing. You know, at the Christopher McQuarrie screenplay for The Usual Suspects you get to that point where the detective realizes who Keyser Soze is and they give you that. And so, okay, earned. Here’s your reward. Right?

On the script I’m writing now, on the last page it says, “Because she loves him.” And that’s not in dialogue, that’s just in action. “Because she loves him.” And that has never been stated before in the movie. It’s just something that if you hadn’t figured out by then, [laughs], you know. And, in fact, it’s not there to reveal anything. It’s there to reward us all for kind of having followed through. It’s a summation.

**John:** Exactly. So, you know, clarity and conciseness are things you can get out of these words, but only when they’re used really judiciously and really to sort of articulate an internal process that is at the end of a longer thing.

If you try to write “because she loves him” on page ten.

**Craig:** Blah.

**John:** Nah. Like we don’t have enough information about the character to really appreciate what loves means in that context.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. Let’s talk about these three pages. These nine pages, because there are three Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** It’s really 12 pages because they all have cover pages. Good for them.

**John:** Good for them with your cover pages. So, if you are new to the podcast and this is the first time you’ve heard of Three Page Challenge, here’s what happens. We invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their pilot or three pages of writing that are in a screenplay like fashion.

If you would like to read these pages with us while we’re going through this, or if you want to pause the podcast and download these PDFs, we encourage that because then you’ll see exactly what it is we’re talking about because we may get really detailed stuff on the page.

So, the place where you can find this is at the show notes for this episode. Just go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and look for this episode and you’ll see the PDFs for these three samples.

So, the first one, should we start with The Grey Stallion?

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s do The Grey Stallion.

**John:** I can summarize this for us because I picked the easiest one by far.

**Craig:** Please. Do it.

**John:** The Grey Stallion, Grey with an E, Stallion, is written by Mike Litzenberg and Bridge Stuart. We start in a coffee shop. The whole scene is in a coffee shop, so it’s very easy.

We meet Clarence who is 20s, white hipster, nerdy, more than a hint of Tobey Maguire. He’s at a table at a patio. Across from him sits a second white guy in his 20s, Lawrence. He’s sort of a TJ Miller in Silicon Valley type.

Lawrence is drinking his tea. He complains that his oolong tea tastes like crap. Lawrence talks more and more about his tea. Clarence says, “What are we doing?” Clarence seems to be having sort of an existential crisis and the dialogue between them is just — it’s one scene of dialogue between them. Clarence talking about the Mighty Ducks and how he always felt like from the Mighty Ducks he felt like his team was destined to win, and then when he didn’t that was disappointing.

Lawrence decides he’s going to start a dance troupe, an experimental dance troupe and invites Clarence to join his experimental dance troupe. And those are our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, well summarized. Now, normally — the normal flow of these things is that we’ll say something nice and then we’ll get into the meat of what’s all screwed up. But I’m going to do that backwards. I have a feeling I’m going to do that backwards three times today, because there’s more that’s right here than wrong. So, Mike and Bridge, good job. I want to start with what I thought were some mistakes, and then I’m going to talk about what I thought was really, really good.

And the mistakes are fairly small. While the fact that you called out Lawrence as TJ Miller from Silicon Valley certainly helped me immediately visualize him, it also made me realize that you were copying his voice from that show. And in doing so this felt less original than it should be. In general, I don’t like the screenplay to tell me who the actor is. I have no problem with you knowing who the actor is, but I don’t like you telling me, particularly when you’re describing even how they look on another show.

It’s certainly a mistake to cite a particular actor and then cite them in the context of a particular show.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because that’s not how it works. They have him, see? And the last thing people want — and the last thing, by the way, any actor wants is to be told, “Oh, just do what you do in that other show, but do it for this.” This is not an episode of Silicon Valley, therefore that’s illegal. So, that’s a big no-no to me. The other thing I thought could be better — it’s a small thing — but what I wanted was a little bit of external context for Clarence’s problem.

They’re sitting there at this coffee shop and Lawrence is doing what he normally does. We get the sense that he’s just a creature. This is the way he is. And Clarence is more of a worry wart who suddenly has this crisis. If it were as simple as they had a laptop in front of them and they’re working on something. And Clarence — they’re supposed to be working on it but they’re not, because Lawrence is blah-blah-blahing about his tea and Clarence is finally giving up.

I needed a little something just so it wasn’t so dead. Just so it wasn’t just a guy sitting there and suddenly out of nowhere, because the screenplay tells him, you know, the tiniest little bit of context.

But let me now — that was it. Here’s what I loved. First of all, look at the pages. Everybody at home, look at the way the pages look. So, this is entirely dialogue, right? The scene is two people sitting at a table talking. Look how the pages look.

**John:** Yeah. Especially page two. I think that’s the winner.

**Craig:** Yes. You see, the dialogue is broken up by lines of action. There is white space on the page. At no point do any of the descriptions go past three lines, right, two lines or one line typically, which I love, okay? So, all that stuff, that’s the way the flow should work.

The dialogue was basically funny. I mean, I was a little put off by the fact that they are copying what they do on Silicon Valley with Lawrence, but I thought Clarence was saying interesting things. And I liked the way that they used timing. Comedy, everybody knows comedy is all about timing, and yet how do you —

**John:** Timing.

**Craig:** Timing. [laughs] How do you do timing on the page? So, look on page three. Even though they didn’t put in parenthesis a lot of overwriting about how this should go, I know how this should go. Lawrence says, “Not so much a dance troupe. Well, maybe a dance troupe. A neo-feminist-core multimedia industrial rap-collision core performance group. I mean I know that’s…a lot of words. I don’t think it’s going to be ground breaking so much as ground healing.

“Are you in?”

Now. That long pause there was not delineated by beat, it just was “Lawrence looks at Clarence meaningfully.” And having one character look at another one is sort of essential to comedic timing. So, I really like that and I think my favorite thing of all about these three pages is without telling us ever in dialogue or in action or in character description, I know that Lawrence is the alpha dog and Clarence is the beta dog. And that is something I was able to conclude from this scene, meaning this scene was working on more than one level. And I really like that.

**John:** Yeah. I really like these pages as well. And so I want to talk — let me start off with the TJ Miller thing, because I highlighted that as well in my pages. Let me read his whole description and you’ll see why TJ Miller needs to go away there. “A second white guy in his 20s – hipster, curly hair, big swagger, TJ Miller in Silicon Valley – sits across from him.” So, let’s just take out the TJ Miller in Silicon Valley and just what the description is. “A second white guy in his 20s – hipster, curly hair, big swagger, sits across from him.” Great. I got that without that.

And I may picture TJ Miller, but at least I’m not locked only into TJ Miller. And I think big swagger is a great way to describe him. And I think I got it from there, so you could even get rid of the curly hair. Give us something else. Like, describe his chunky bracelet. Describe something else about him that sort of lets us know who he is, but don’t say TJ Miller. The same with the first guy, “More than a hint of Tobey Maguire.” Yes, but you know what, let’s find some other way to do it, because the challenge is let’s say you want to actually shoot these things. Suddenly actors have to come in and have to be Tobey Maguire.

And it’s like, well, I don’t want to be Tobey Maguire. Or they see themselves like I’m not a Tobey Maguire type. How can I do that?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sorry, sir. That was only a hint of Tobey Maguire. We were looking for more than a hint.

**John:** Back off the Tobey Maguire.

So, I want to talk about what these pages actually are, because I’m not sure that they’re going to be the best way to start a movie perhaps, but I think they’re a great way to start looking at how two characters react and relate to each other. So often I encourage people to just start writing. Just start writing the characters having a conversation. And this feels like just two characters having a conversation. And I think if you were to write these pages you would suddenly like know the voice of these two characters. So, I believe that these writers can write these guys doing almost anything. And they could be doing stuff that actually involved a plot.

Because I’m not sure reading these three pages that it’s really going to involve this dance troupe thing happening.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it’s just like two guys shooting the shit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s fine for what this is, but that may not really be the start of your movie, but these guys can write these characters talking and that’s amazing and useful. And so if I read these pages I would keep reading because I really enjoy their voices and that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s some nice moments in here, too, where I always love the idea of writing harmoniously where things are happening in parallel. While Lawrence is talking in the beginning on page one, Clarence isn’t saying anything. He’s not saying anything. And finally he says, “What are you doing? What are we doing?”

And Lawrence says, “I don’t know. I’m just getting my tea on.”

And then Clarence says, “Are we moving forward here…”

And Lawrence says, “Oh god. Here we go.”

That’s a great way to imply more than just I’m not happy with what you’re saying. It also implies this is not the first time we are stuck. You like characters that are stuck in the beginning. We’ve talked about this before. The character that’s in the rut. And it helps — things like that are great ways to get across information, especially when you’re in the beginning.

A lot of people would say, “Look, we’ve known each other for 20 years. And for 20 years you’ve been…”

And I’m like, “Oh, god, no. Please no.”

**John:** Unnecessary. We know that these characters — this, again, tells us that these characters have had this conversation before. They have a history. It’s not their first time sitting down in this coffee shop.

**Craig:** You know what else it tells us? It tells us that Clarence has lost before. [laughs] He’s lost the argument before, which I love. Because he’s about to lose it again. And that’s really good. That’s the kind of conflict that’s always fun in the heart of a comedy.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the specificity of the environment, because I felt it was a little generic around it. So, we start, “EXT. COFFEE SHOP — DAY.” Two people are sitting at a table. And then we don’t really get anything more about the coffee shop. So, I didn’t know where this was taking place. I didn’t know sort of what the vibe of this place was.

Is it crucial? Maybe not, but I think it could be very useful. The other thing I would like to propose, and again, not a must but a possibility is right now the scene starts, we talk about Clarence who doesn’t do anything for quite a long time. And you have the opportunity, you could just start on Lawrence who is actually going to have the first lines. He could talk through some of his first stuff. And then we reveal Clarence, the person he is talking to, who is not paying any attention to him. And is either staring at his coffee or staring around. And that might be an opportunity to paint who else is in this place.

And so then we’re on Clarence, our newer character, and we’re on him right before he says his first line and that could be very useful.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, that’s sort of what I was going for with the idea that there would be some sort of circumstantial context. Because if you want to open on Clarence, if Clarence is trying to write. They’re doing that thing where they’re sharing a laptop between them and he’s the only one writing. And while he’s writing this other idiot is just blahing about his stupid tea and his, you know, fey description of it, and all the rest of it.

And finally Clarence just gives up and slams the laptop down. “What are you doing?” You know? You need that. If you’re going to open with Clarence you need to have Clarence doing something other than just sitting there dumbly.

**John:** Yup. On page two, another small issue I had here, Clarence asks, “So, we could just sit here doing this? Oh god, here we go again. But seriously.” The but felt unnecessary to me. The but was not in response to something. “So seriously.” Get rid of the but.

On page three, a lot of words, “I don’t think it’s going to be ground breaking as much as ground healing,” the missing hyphens there I think hurt the joke. And so putting ground-breaking and ground-healing, it’s a good joke. I think the hyphen would have helped us understand the joke a little bit better. I had to read it twice to actually understand that it was a double structure kind of joke there.

Finally, “Lawrence looks at Clarence meaningfully. Are you in?”

Clarence says, “That’s cool. But I’m not really a dancer.” His “that’s cool” didn’t feel like a possible answer for “Are you in?”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, just small observations.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Just making sure that it really feels like the characters are talking to each other and that they’re saying things they would actually say in the moment and not necessarily their own next line.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. But overall…

**John:** Overall great. I really enjoyed it. And I’d be excited to see these two characters do something in a movie.

**Craig:** So would I.

**John:** Hooray. Next up.

**Craig:** What do you want to do next?

**John:** The Devil’s Eye.

**Craig:** Devil’s Eye.

Devil’s Eye. Okay, Devil’s Eye, written by Meredith DePaolo. Inspired by a true story, which as we all know means nothing.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing. Everything was inspired by a true story, but I get it. It comes up in horror all the time. Obviously this is going to be a horror movie. They love saying inspired by a true story, as if that will make it scarier. Eh, no. [laughs]

**John:** Amityville Horror.

**Craig:** No. No. It’s not scarier because it might — it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It never happens.

**John:** A friend of mine believes every horror sort of happened, so whenever something is based on a real thing he’s like, oh, it’s based on a real…

Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** Your friend needs to go back to my 2015 resolution. Sit down, don’t be stupid, get back up.

**John:** You know, here’s the challenge is — I’m not saying that my friend is stupid — but people who are stupid, they don’t know they’re stupid. That’s the inherent irony.

**Craig:** That’s that whole syndrome or whatever they call it. There’s a name for that thing where people who can’t sing don’t know they can’t sing, so they think they can sing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember the name of it. We’ll find it and stick it in the show notes. But, yes, that. Okay, all right, so, sorry Meredith. Devil’s Eye, written by Meredith DePaolo, inspired by a true story.

So, we begin looking out at Kentucky’s Green River Valley, Dawn. And the title tells us we’re in Little Hope, Kentucky, in February 1812. We’re looking out over endless acres of winter forest and then we see a little small mining town there in the distance. We hear the sound of a raptor. We go to a forest clearing, a couple of red hawks are fighting over some raw meat and it is revealed that in fact this is from a dead man in his 30s, splattered in mud. His throat has been cut and the hawks are pecking out his eyes

We go to black. And then cut to more black where we hear the sounds of a child named Albert saying, “Let me out,” and a couple of bullies, Nathan and Tom, who won’t let him out. And, finally, Virginia, who appears to be a school teacher, frees Albert from the closet. We see now that we’re in a schoolhouse and Virginia kicks these two out. Virginia is — well, it’s a nice description of Virginia. She’s in her 20s, I guess, for the sake of this summary. And she comforts Albert by saying, hey, you know what? He’s scared that there’s something in the closet and she says, “There’s nothing in there. When I was a little kid my sisters used to torment me. They told me that when I was a baby I was discovered, abandoned in a cemetery. They told me that one day my real family would come and take me to live with them underground with the worms.”

And she said she had something that her father told her would keep evil away. It’s a protective amulet. And she gives Albert a little red marble with a yellow core. It’s called a Devil’s Eye. She gives it to him and says the devil can’t hurt you if he can’t see you.

And, that, is the opening to Devil’s Eye.

**John:** Yes. So, I enjoyed these pages. And, again, they look really good. The flow on the page is really nice. And it starts with some very strong imagery which plays really well. Good use of sound overall. So the “Keer, keer, keer of a raptor,” feels very good. And keer was just the right word to pick for that sound because it’s unusual. And so when we see that word on the page we have to think like, well, what does that sound like? Oh, yeah, I get what that is. That’s a very specific kind of bird cry.

A nice cut to as we’re moving from this first opening image to the second opening image. Pitch. Black. Darkness. Cut to: Pitch. Black Darkness. So, it’s a match cut to darkness, which seems unimportant, like why bother repeating the same things, but lets us know that we really are in just complete darkness as we’re experiencing this next moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re inside the closet with these kids. I wanted a parenthetical extension of off-screen or unseen for these guys, because by the time — there’s a lot of dialogue happening in the dark there, and it got to be a little — I got to start to wonder about whether I was supposed to be seeing anything or not see anything at the bottom of page one.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And then we get into the school house. And so I, like you, enjoyed the description of Virginia Dennison. She needed to be upper cased when she was first introduced. “Her porcelain skin contrasts with a dark mane pulled into a loose bun. She is fiercely independent and just about the only pristine thing in this hardscrabble town.”

So, like the word pristine. That’s the thing I liked most about this. The rest of the stuff — I feel like there’s a better version of some of those sentences. Because I haven’t seen the town yet, so I don’t really know what the hardscrabble means. Hardscrabble doesn’t quite mean dirty. If you can contrast her pristineness to the schoolhouse or something else that’s immediately in our environment, that could be great as well.

And then she has her dialogue. And they’re talking about sort of the Devil’s Eye and her history. I looked overall the idea that we are a horror movie set in an 1812 environment. That felt really good. Page three got kind of proppy to me. I don’t know if you noticed this. So, she has a letter opener and then on page three a charm falls from the letter opener. Albert picks it up.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** A small silver butterfly. And then she’s going to give him this red marble with a yellow core called the Devil’s Eye. It’s like, man, that’s a lot of props.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s holding a lot of stuff.

**John:** She’s holding a lot of stuff. So, that got to be a little confusing, but I think I was overall interested in sort of what kind of horror movie was going to happen in this 1812 town.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m pretty much right there with you on all this stuff. I mean, again, I’d love for people to take a look at the way these pages lay out. They look correct. There’s only a couple spots where there is — I mean, for instance on page two the paragraph, the action paragraph “School teacher Virginia Dennison,” that’s the one that goes to four lines and it shouldn’t and I’ll talk about why. But nice reportorial style on page one. The way that the body is revealed is terrific.

Using a hawk to peck out a dead man’s eyes to transition us between scenes, a great example of transition. We talk about how important those transitions are a lot.

I like how confused we are for a moment, but I do think at some point you’re going to want to consider getting a slug line in there sooner, because the question is how long do you want to be in darkness really? Let me out. So, again, we don’t have this off-screen or V/O commentary, but let’s assume that we can’t see Albert, Nathan, or Tom, or Virginia. These are the lines we have in total darkness:

“Let me out.”

“Can you see him then?”

“Is it the creeper? She said he had business with you.”

“Why are you boys still here?”

“Help.”

“Step away. Now.”

And then, boom, way too long. Way too long. We’ll just get bored. Honestly, we’ll just get bored in the darkness. We get it. It seems to me that there may be a better way to do that and we’re going to want a slug line sooner, frankly. At some point someone is going to need to put a scene number on this thing anyway.

I thought that — you want to think, Meredith, about Nathan and Tom here, your bullies. First of all, they sound way too bullyish. “Look at him. Did you pee yourself?” Eh, I don’t think did you pee yourself — did you pee yourself sounds weirdly modern for 1812.

**John:** It feels 1970s in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s got to be something.

**Craig:** Something was off there. But, more importantly, I think what you’re telling me is that Nathan and Tom and Albert all believe that there is something in there and it’s the creeper. And they don’t — they don’t seem like they’re serious enough in a weird way. They seem like both, they’ve put you in there with something supernatural and also they’re mostly just jerks who want to see if you’ll pee yourself. I was a little confused about them.

Virginia’s description, porcelain skin, dark mane, that’s all good. “She is fiercely independent and just about the only pristine thing in this hardscrabble town.” No she’s not. She’s just a woman standing in a room right now. And I do not know any of that, nor can you rely on me knowing that because of this.

I would cut all of that. Show me. As we’ve just described with the Chuck Palahniuk article. Show me how fiercely independent she is. Have a moment where we see that she is fiercely independent. When she walks outside, then that’s when you can say, as you described the town, that she is just set apart from it. This is not the place to do this.

Let’s talk about the props. In her hands she holds the day’s post. I believe that means mail. You could say mail. Either way, why? [laughs] Is the mail important now? Because she’s going to be doing other stuff with her hands. But I did like how she starts off like this very comforting typical schoolmarm. Oh you. There’s nothing in there, see? It’s just a closet.

And then she just starts on this creepy story. And I hope that the intention is that there is something creepy about Virginia, because this like very calm — it’s like if your mom said, “Look, look, see there’s nothing in the closet. Now when I was a kid, there was something in my closet.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s kind of the way it came out for me. I mean, she gives him this story that was unpleasant. And made me wonder if perhaps she does think that there are things in the closet. And if she does, then I’d love a little hint of that prior to this moment. This is not the place to do the silver butterfly. We cannot have a scene where Albert is gathering multiple talisman. But in general, there was a vibe. There was a tension to it. I liked the way that the characters were working with each other.

Albert is undescribed, I should say. I assume he’s the hero of our movie. And all I know about him is that he’s 10.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’d love a little bit more there. Even if you delay it, but that’s all I know. So, pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. And, obviously, you could really feel how this was inspired by a true story. [laughs] Oh, baloney, Meredith. But, still, good job.

**John:** A couple things to look at on the page. Title over: Little Hope, Kentucky, February 1812. Break that into two lines. Because it’s useful I find if you’re going to do a title over, show it sort of the way the title would actually look. You would probably put the February 1812 on a separate line. You wouldn’t run that through as one thing. So, give us your two lines there. That’s nice. Center it.

We talk about the camera twice in the opening and we don’t necessarily need them both times. So, right now the sentence reads, “The camera soars high over endless acres of winter forest.” And [unintelligible] could do very well for us. Soaring high over endless acres of winter forest. Get rid of the camera there.

Similarly, we have, “The camera moves beyond the hawks to a pair of dirty black boots.” Moving beyond the hawks, again, there’s a way of getting rid of that sense that some external device, a camera, is there. Just let us be the audience. We are moving through stuff. You don’t need the “we.”

**Craig:** I mean, I’ll do the we in those moments. I’ll either do the subjectless version the way you are. Sometimes I’ll do we. I never write “the camera,” ever.

**John:** Yeah. You don’t need to.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “School teacher Virginia Dennison accosts them.” Accosts? Yeah, maybe not the right verb for this. And I want to talk about sort of the nature of boys locking boys into closets, because I think there was an opportunity here to sort of rethink sort of how the closet stuff started.

Usually in sort of the Bloody Mary scenario where one kid is in the closet, in my experience, and this is just sort of me from scouts maybe, but it’s like it’s a dare. And it’s like, oh, you have to be in there and count to six, but you can’t last 60 seconds in there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so someone goes in and then they freak out. So, if we started with Albert like counting up and then he freaks out and wants to go out and they won’t let him out, that feels like there is tension there that I kind of get.

Here I just, like, well who are those bully boys? It didn’t feel as rewarding. And so if it had been a dare going in there, then I think his coming out and then the conversation he has with Dennison, there would just be — there would be a better narrative going into. And so you can get to all the same stuff with the little Devil’s Eye marble and all that stuff, but I’d understand what had happened beforehand much more easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other thing to consider, Meredith, is that total darkness, oh well actually side note, I am really tired of this Blank. Blank. Blank. Thing. You just period. Don’t. Get it.

I see this constantly. It’s very, I don’t’ know, I just find it very affected. Pitch black darkness is perfectly fine as opposed to Pitch. Black. Darkness.

But Pitch. Black. Darkness. is not actually scary, because there’s no chance you’re going to see anything. We’re not scared of nothing. We’re scared of something. I wonder if there is a possibility that we could see maybe a little.

**John:** Yeah! A little is better.

**Craig:** And if he’s in there and he’s scared of these bullies or scared of something and then there’s like a little noise or a rustling and he turns in the closet and he sees something that we see that scares the hell out of us. And then the door opens. It’s just a glimpse.

And then when the teacher kind of takes him back in there he realizes, oh, it was just a blank and a blank. Because then at the end of these pages we’ll look back at the closet, the door slightly ajar, and we’ll probably get a hint, oh, but maybe actually there was something in there. I mean, that feels —

**John:** That’s what you want. The lights filling below the door, or split or coming in through the keyhole.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s probably going to be better for you than the absolute darkness.

**Craig:** Pitch. Black. Darkness.

**John:** Darkness.

Let’s look at page three. There’s a parenthetical here in Virginia’s second block of dialogue.
“You know, Albert, when I was your age my sisters tormented me terribly. (Whisper) We’re not meant to dislike our family.” So the parenthetical should be its own line. And they’re not usually capitalized, so just look at sort of standard formatting for that.

Her third block of dialogue. “They told me that when I was a baby my father discovered me abandoned in a cemetery.” Wait, did they tell you this when you were a baby?

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** So, the when is ambiguous there. So, there is a better sentence you can find there. They told me my father discovered me as a baby in the cemetery. Or there is a version that makes it clear when this actually happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is nothing wrong with not writing this like an essay. They told me my father found me in the cemetery. I was a baby. I mean, people don’t talk in these full flowing completely sentences. You don’t have to — you definitely don’t want to get too clausal — clausal is not a word — but you know what I mean.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Clausy.

**John:** I think clausal is a word.

**Craig:** Clausal?

**John:** Clausal?

**Craig:** Clausal.

**John:** It’s a clausal disappointment.

**Craig:** [laughs] That was terrible.

**John:** [laughs] That was terrible. Let’s go to our final Three Page Challenge. Do you want to do this one?

**Craig:** Sure. This is Going Om as in Om, written by Mimi Jeffries. So, we are in Cincinnati, Ohio. We’re inside a suburban home, the Stanton household, in the bedroom. It is 5:59am.

A grandfather clock’s minute hand clicks to 6:00am and chimes. We see Allen Stanton, he’s 75, wakes up, rolls to his side, and there is his wife, Eleanor, who is dead.

He turns back and stares blankly at the ceiling. The clock stops chiming. We are now in the bedroom where a body bag is zipped over Eleanor’s head. Then we go outside. Allen sits on the steps with his dog while the EMTs unceremoniously put Eleanor in the ambulance and drive away not in any kind of rush. And he just sits watching it.

Now we have a title sequence where Allen drives his rusty Chevy through a neighborhood of old, well-loved two-story homes, listening to Johnny Cash, passing crop fields covered with winter frost. A closed strip mall. And, finally, ending up at a drab one-story building. This is the Real Copiers’ headquarters. And Allen walks in, goes through — it’s obviously holiday time. The cubicles are all decorated. The only other person in the building is a female janitor he just walks by. Goes to his office, where Mallory suddenly appears. She’s his pudgy, eager-to-please secretary.

She’s all sorts of bubbly. He’s not. He’s just about business. And then he asks her for help. He is making copies of coffin — he’s printing out basically what looks like a coffin catalog. And he tells Mallory, “Get two coffins.” And those are the three pages of Going Om, by Mimi Jeffries.

**John:** And I adored these pages.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I love characters who are under-reacting to horrific events. And I really could see this and feel this. And I wasn’t sure what was going on all the time, but I felt confident that Mimi did know what was going on and that my attention was going to be rewarded for going on this journey with her.

So, there were some moments at the very start that I worried like, oh, this is going to be overwritten. Our very first scene header is two lines long and doesn’t necessarily need to be two lines long. Whereas CINCINNATI, OHIO – SUBURBS – STANTON HOUSEHOLD – MASTER BEDROOM – JANUARY 3, 2013 – 5:59 A.M., a shorter — you could get rid of that subhead, that scene header all together. And I think I would be just as happy.

But I love that it’s just like deadpan and flat and just sort of moves through it. And then we get to our title sequence. A perfectly good way to sort of set up the nature of the town and what things are like. Is it ambiguous whether it’s the same day or the next day? Yes, but that’s kind of okay, too.

Ultimately, we’re going to realize it is the same day. He’s in the Copier Headquarters. I like the idea of Mallory. She has a line on page three that I didn’t think was quite earned.

“How many copies do you want?”

“One is fine.”

“Stapled or paper-clipped.”

“Which ever.”

She says, “This is going to be the best year yet, don’t you think?” And I was like, ooh, that felt a little much of a stretch. If she could be a little bit more specific about this is going to be our biggest sales year ever, or I think we really have a shot this year. I think we could beat last year’s numbers this year. If it’s something that wasn’t just so generically in opposition to what we know we just saw I would feel better about that line.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then it ends on coffins. And like, you know, the contemplation of like, oh, if you get two coffins then it’s a discount. That’s just a great, I don’t know, deadpan moment again. I just was really excited to see where this was going to go.

**Craig:** I agree. Loved them. Mimi, great job. Once again everyone playing at home, look at the way the pages lay out. There is not one paragraph — I feel like we’re getting to people. Honestly. I’m going to give myself credit for this. I feel like we’re getting to them.

There’s not one action paragraph that’s longer than two lines, personally love when people put the extra space in front of the slug lines the way she did. I’m a slug line bolder, so I was particularly happy with this, too.

**John:** Yeah, so this script uses double returns plus bold headlines.

**Craig:** Which is the Mazin method. So, this is all about informing me two things at once. And this is what — I keep talking about this notion that we cannot live in scenes that give us one glimpse of what we want people to feel. We need to give them multiple glimpses. We need to know what’s happening and we need to know how that matters to the people in it. And by that we learn about the people in it.

I’m learning about Allen Stanton, the character, through this reaction and experience of his wife’s sudden death. And I can tell you a lot of things, just from this first scene, which has no dialogue and has one action essentially. Allen rolls over, sees his dead wife, rolls back and stares at the ceiling. I know that this is not something that he was not expecting. I know that he is depressed. I know that he is beyond depressed. And I also know that his life is about to change completely.

This is all great, from this little tiny moment. I love that. I also thought there was something quite beautiful about these two lines. “TWO EMTs unceremoniously carry Eleanor to an ambulance on the street. They effortlessly lift her into the back.” Let me just stop there. This is why I can just say Mimi is a good writer. And we can talk all the time about structure and techniques and what to do and what not to do. And we saw and how many lines in action. You cannot teach this.

You cannot teach a feeling for what matters to people. And you cannot teach insight. So, here’s a man watching his dead wife being taken away. And Mimi so smartly says they effortlessly lift her into the back. She’s nothing. She’s literally nothing to them.

And then, “The doors slam shut. Allen watches as the ambulance drives off, its sirens silent, not in any rush.” Ah! Ah! It’s just so good. So good. Right? And I love that he’s watching, you know. It’s a choice to have characters watch things. That’s the kind of writing that’s a gift to a director.

**John:** Well, it’s a gift to a director, and I felt like the director was Alexander Payne. Like, literally by the end of the first page I was like, oh, Alexander Payne would direct this movie, because it felt like that world of like it’s a comedy but it’s not like uproariously funny. It is a characters in situations in really grounded, real environments who are sort of doing the best they can.

And I got that off the first page even before we actually hear him say anything, which is great.

**Craig:** It’s terrific. I see that there is a call out for a title sequence. I’m a big fan of calling out title sequences if you want one. Mimi, you don’t give us enough to justify a credit sequence here. You give us basically a montage of Allen driving around this rust belt winter town. That’s not going to really carry you through a title sequence, unless it just goes on and on and on, or unless you imply that it goes on and on and on.

Anyway, something to think about. Given what you have here, I’m not sure you need it.

I had a little bit of confusion — a couple points of confusion here. So, Allen goes to the Real Copiers Headquarters. And it’s decorated but no one else is there except for female janitor. Now, I think the idea is that later the place will be properly open and everybody will be there.

**John:** That it’s just early.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I didn’t get that. I got confused. At first I thought it was he’s come in on a Sunday or something. But then suddenly his assistant is there, even though we just heard there was only one other soul in the building.

So, help me out with that. If time has gone by, show me that time has gone by.

**John:** Yeah. My hunch is what she means is so Allen goes in and like no one is there yet, and then when the assistant comes in, Allen has been at his desk for awhile and she’s just now arrived.

So, if you had her like putting down her purse and like poking her head in the door, that might tell us that, oh, the assistant has just come here and we see other people like going to their desks or something like that. The day has started.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure that that would be enough for me. You know, when somebody is sitting in a place, and then the next moment with that person sitting in a place is an hour or two later, I need something. I need either to see some sign — visual sign of progress, or something, or cut outside to see cars now pulling in.

I need a little something.

**John:** Or the coffee maker starts, or someone is putting the coffee maker in. Like getting the day started.

**Craig:** Yeah. I need to know that time has jumped. I got a little confused there with that. I like that he’s all business. I wish I knew — this is another just small thing, Mimi, but I find like 90 percent of my conversations about my own writing come down to these “how can we not make the reader confused about things that aren’t important so that they can really appreciate the things that are.”

He works at a company called Real Copiers. But this is not like a Kinko’s Office because it’s an office building. It’s like the supervising office of a chain of stores called Real Copiers, I think, because it has cubicles and stuff. But now he’s going to do copying.

**John:** Yeah. I got confused about that, too. So, it’s just like, wait, so it’s like a guy who works for Xerox who makes Xeroxes. And it’s like, but wait, is it important? And I think it’s probably not important that he’s making copies.

**Craig:** It’s not. Or he’s printing out from a crusty printer. But it seems like if you’re a copying headquarters. I don’t know. I got really confused by that. And so that’s just something to think about if there’s maybe a way to help me with that.

I totally agree that Mallory felt constructed for irony. And it’s perfectly fine to have people say things that are ironic if it feels natural. We don’t want to feel like you rigged the game.

**John:** 100 percent. And I felt like it was a little too rigged for her to say that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But at the end, you get the sense also from this glum thing of if you get two it’s 25% off, actually when he says — or “Allen pours over the coffin printouts. Mallory stands nervously.”

Allen, to himself, “If you get two, it’s 25% off.”

I almost think that should be reading. You know, like he’s actually learning about this. Get two. I would actually say if you get two it’s 25% off. If he takes out his credit card he should repeat those words: get two.

But also it’s great, because it’s giving me — it’s telling me how fatalistic he is. It’s telling me he’s depressed. It’s also telling me that he believes he’s about to die, too.

**John:** Yeah. He’s cheap. It gives us a great world outlook on Allen at this moment.

**Craig:** Exactly. All really good stuff. I mean, who knows where this goes, but the good news, Mimi, is that not only were you able to structure three pages well and accomplish a lot in three pages, and honor the precious real estate of these first three pages, but you actually have interesting insights.

You’re a smart person who is seeing things. You know how to build moments. Very encouraging. So, bad news is we are now expecting you to do well.

**John:** Agreed. The only last thing I want to point out is midway through page three, “Several pages lurch from a crusty printer. Its pages filled with different makes and models of coffins.” The “its” doesn’t apply to anything. So, their pages, if it’s meant to be the pages, then it has to be their pages. But I think you can actually just get rid of that and just stick a comma there. So, several pages lurch from a crusty printer, each page filled with different makes and models of coffins.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Those two sentences together tripped me up because it was actually an impossible subject.

**Craig:** Yes. And also take a look at page one you’ve got a couple of errant capitalizations. In the first, “Allen turns back and stares blankly at the ceiling. The Clock stops chiming.” That’s miscapitalized. And down below, “Allen passes crop fields covered with Winter frost.” That should also be lower case.

**John:** Yup. But really, really good.

**Craig:** Really good.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. So, I actually have a trio of One Cool Things, but they were all gifts from Stuart Friedel. Who, Stuart Friedel who is also the producer of our podcast, but also weirdly his secret talent is he’s the best gift giver in the planet.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Like literally he’d been working for me for two weeks and it was my daughter’s birthday and he found like the absolute perfect gift for himself to give my daughter. So, he’s just really good at this.

Here are the three gifts that he got me. And all three things will be links in the show notes. First he got me a cake mold that creates 20-sided dice, like D&D dice.

**Craig:** I love that. Love those.

**John:** So, they’re like little cupcakes, but, you know, they’re 20-sided dice. And it seems impossible, but it works really, really well. It’s one of those rubbery molds and you pour in from the top and it was great. He got me a Too Many Cooks shirt featuring Smarf, but it’s in French.

**Craig:** Smarf en Francais?

**John:** En Francais? And he got me a Death Star ice mold, so for making ice cubes that are in the shape of a Death Star.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s spectacular.

**John:** It’s well done Stuart Friedel. So, those are my three One Cool Things are the gifts I got from Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** That’s just spectacular. Stuart, oh Stuart. He’s the best.

**John:** He also got my husband a bunch of Japanese Kit Kat bars, because that was just like a random conversation they had about how much the Japanese love Kit Kat bars.

**Craig:** Okay. So, when Mike eats those Kit Kat bars, what he has to do is take a bite and then put his hand in front of his mouth and giggle.

**John:** [laughs] Perfect.

**Craig:** Hehe.

**John:** He does that anyway.

**Craig:** [laughs] I love it. I got one D&D themed gift this year from Missy. She gave this — it’s actually kind of cool. They say it’s a true unweighted die. And it’s this big plastic D20. And you roll it. And if you do get a D20, it lights up and flashes.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Critical Hit.

**Craig:** Critical Hit Die. I have a feeling that it’s not truly weighted, so it will not be considered — Kevin will not let us use it.

My One Cool Thing, my first One Cool Thing for 2015, is Vitamin D3.

**John:** I don’t know what this is.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a Vitamin. Do I need to go back to that? Do you know what Vitamins are?

**John:** You know, honestly, if it really comes down it, I’m not sure I could totally tell you what a Vitamin is. But I want to learn what Vitamin D3 is. Because I know that you take Vitamins because they’re a central component to good health and they are things that your body sometimes produces and sometimes takes in from other foods.

**Craig:** Vitamins are chemicals that essentially help our bodies metabolize certain things, including certain chemicals, molecules, that we need to live or stay healthy.

And if you’re listening to this, you know from many, many rants in the past that I am a very skeptical person. Generally speaking, the idea of Vitamin supplements is baloney. Vitamin C, we are awash in Vitamin C. It is a total waste. It does not prevent colds. People take Vitamin B12 shots are wasting their time. The doctors are stealing your money. It does nothing. You do not have a Vitamin B deficiency.

Vitamin A, we get plenty of Vitamin A. It’s all in food, basically. It’s in food. We don’t need it. Our bodies make some of it.

However, there is a real legitimate issue in this country with Vitamin D deficiency. And when I say deficiency, I mean something that they can literally test and quantify. You’re supposed to have a certain amount of Vitamin D in your blood. And most people, including myself, repeatedly when they get tested have a legitimate, quantifiable Vitamin D deficiency. Why?

Because generally speaking we stay out of the sun now. Vitamin D primarily is manufactured in the skin when it is exposed to ultraviolet radiation by the sun. But, of course, we either use sunscreen or we stay out of the sun because we don’t want skin cancer. And milk is fortified with Vitamin D. It’s not necessarily the most absorbable version of Vitamin D. And a lot of people just don’t drink milk. I don’t sit around drinking milk.

So, what do you do if you’re a pasty, white, Jewish guy like me that doesn’t drink milk and doesn’t go outside? You take supplements. Vitamin D3 is the supplement you want. And why? What does Vitamin D actually do? Well, there’s a lot of stuff they say it does that it doesn’t really do. But the biggest — the biggest thing that it does, it seems to help the immune system. It does seem to be correlated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment as you go on and on.

And it does seem to have some effect on your bone health. That’s the one that people are most aware of. You know, there’s not a direct link between Vitamin D supplements and preventing osteoporosis or something like that, but they do feel that there is some degree of help in say reducing things like fracturing of bones as you get older.

It doesn’t take much Vitamin D3 to get you to where you should be via blood test. But if your doctor doesn’t test for Vitamin D deficiency, ask them to. You may be surprised to find out that you are deficient. And if you get really deficient, then you get rickets. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, no rickets for me please.

**Craig:** No, you don’t want rickets.

**John:** Well, like Homer when Burns put up his sun-blocking machine and he had enough of these damn rickets.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. Rickets! When I was a kid, I had this book, it was basically a big medical book for kids and they had one little section on vitamin deficiency diseases. And there was one picture of a kid who had pellagra which is a vitamin-something deficiency. I don’t know which one. Vitamin B something. And it was his face. And it had disfigured him.

And that scared me more than anything. The kid with pellagra. Oh my god.

**John:** So you ate your Flintstones chewable vitamins after that point.

**Craig:** Well, the truth was there was no chance — I mean, it was a picture of a kid from 1930 Appalachia and, you know, I was in Staten Island. I wasn’t going to get pellagra. I was going to get something else from breathing in the dump air.

But, you definitely do want to take Vitamin D3 supplements if you are Vitamin D deficient, not if you are not.

**John:** I think that is wise advice.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. So, that’s our show for today. I want to thank our writers for sending in their samples. If you have three pages of your own that you would like us to take a look at, the place to visit is johnaugust.com/threepage. And there are instructions there for how you can send in those pages to us so we can take a look at them on the air.

If you have a question for me or for Craig Mazin, something that is short that we may answer on Twitter, ask us on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. For longer questions you can write into ask@johnaugust.com.

You can find us on iTunes. And if you’re on iTunes, leave us a rating, because that helps other people find us and listen to our podcast. While you in iTunes, you can also download the Scriptnotes App. That’s also in the Android App Store. And through those apps you can listen to all the back episodes. There is a premium feed for $2 a month.

**Craig:** Two.

**John:** Two minor dollars a month. Gives you access to all the back catalog and special bonus episodes. We have an upcoming dirty show that we need to get recorded.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, we got to do that.

**John:** Yeah, we got to do that. And get that out to all of our premium subscribers. So, that is something you can do as well.

You can find out more information about the premium feed and all those back episodes at scriptnotes.net is where you actually can sign up for that.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. Matthew does a lot of our outros, but we also have some other great composers who have written outros for us, so if you would like to send us one of those outros, you can put it up on SoundCloud is great and tag it Scriptnotes, but also send us an email to ask@johnaugust.com and let us know it’s there so we’ll listen to it and put it on the end of a show.

And, that is it for this week. Craig, Happy 2015.

**Craig:** Happy 2015. A nice pointy year. And I’ll see you next week. Bye.

**John:** All right. Bye.

End of Recording.

Links:

* [The Year of Outrage](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/12/the_year_of_outrage_2014_everything_you_were_angry_about_on_social_media.html) on Slate
* [North Korea responds with fury to US sanctions over Sony Pictures hack](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/04/north-korea-fury-us-sanctions-sony)
* The LA Times on [The Interview’s opening weekend](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-box-office-the-interview-unbroken-into-the-woods-20141229-story.html#page=1)
* Chuck Palahniuk [on thought verbs](http://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-%E2%80%9Cthought%E2%80%9D-verbs)
* Three pages by [Mike Litzenberg & Bridge Stuart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MikeLitzenbergBridgeStuart.pdf)
* Three pages by [Meredith DePaolo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MeredithDePaolo.pdf)
* [Dunning–Kruger effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
* Three pages by [Mimi Jeffries](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MimiJeffries.pdf)
* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [D20 Critical Hit Mini Cake Pan](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1cd7/?srp=5) and [Death Star Ice Mold](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f0b6/?srp=3) on Think Geek, and [Smarf L’Héroïque](http://shirt.woot.com/offers/Smarf%20L’H%C3%A9ro%C3%AFque?ref=cnt_ctlg_dgn_2) on Shirt.Woot
* [Critical Hit LED D20 Die](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/deaa/) on Think Geek
* [Vitamin D3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D) on Wikipedia
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 176 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we will be talking about advice to a first-time director. We’ll be talking about the perfect director, part of our Perfect Series. And, finally, we will be looking at the Logic Police and why the Logic Police are our friends or our foes as it comes time to get our stories in their best shape.

But, we could not go into this week without talking about the big story which is Sony pulling The Interview and all of that madness.

Craig: Yes.

John: So I should say that we are recording this on Friday. And by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday who knows what will have happened. As fast as the story has moved, it’s very likely that some of what we’ll be talking about is out of date. So, I think we can only talk in sort of our general fears and frustrations and wonderings as we’re recording this on Friday.

Craig: Right. So, let’s sum up what we know. What we know is that Sony was hacked. We now know from at least according to the United States government that the hack was perpetrated by individuals backed by the State of North Korea. We know that it was done in retribution for Sony’s production and imminent release of the movie, The Interview, in which the North Korean dictator is assassinated. And we know that the movie is not coming out.

John: Yes. I want to stipulate that we don’t know some of these things. We know that the US government is claiming that North Korea is behind it, but we also know that in previous instances where the government has said this is what is actually happening was real, later on we find that not to be true. So, we know that as of today the US government is saying it was North Korea. So, we do know that to be true.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I would also say that an event that happened this last week that changed it from a story about embarrassing leaked emails to the movie being pulled was that there were direct threats about like if the movie comes out there will be violence in theaters.

Craig: Correct.

John: It shifted from a like, oh, here’s embarrassing information to there is now danger. And it was the theaters who said we’re not going to show your movie.

Craig: Correct. That is all true. And what has been manufactured by the Internet outrage machine is some form of the following out of conventional wisdom. Sony is a bunch of cowards, they just capitulated to terrorism. This is the death of creative expression.

John: Yes.

Craig: Now, permit me if you will, John, to fashion my own umbrage which is not outrage but rather umbrage about the situation and what I think should happen and what I think did happen. First of all, I do think it’s North Korea. I’m just going off of a gut feeling here, plus the federal government telling me it was North Korea. You know, I tend to believe them on stuff like that. Color me naïve.

I do think this was state-sponsored terrorism. I think that Sony was in a nearly impossible situation and currently they’re being blamed for something that really we should be putting at the doorstep of the exhibitors. So, the hackers threatened violence in theaters that show The Interview. There are only four or five major theater chains in the United States. If they drop out, you essentially have no real movie release, or certainly not one you can support with a marketing campaign and expect to ever make money back and so forth.

Those big exhibitors said we’re not showing this movie. Well, let me step back. Sony said, hey look, if you don’t want to show it, we won’t hold you to your commitment to show it. And they all said, gee thanks, we’re gone.

So, the primary act of cowardice if you want to call it that came from them. But, of course, from their point of view also understandable because, hey, we live in a society where if you get a warning that there is going to be violence in your theater and you run the movie and there’s violence in your theater, count the lawsuits that will emerge. Whether they’re justifiable or not, whether they’re winnable or not, this is the world we live in, at least here in the west. Lawsuit phobia.

And it’s Christmastime. A lot of these things are in a mall. It’s just a mess, right? So, they all say we’re out of here. Sony then looks at the situation and says well we can’t release the movie because it doesn’t make any sense. How are we supposed to release a movie when there aren’t theaters to put it in?

And furthermore we don’t want to release a movie and then, again, some theater blows up somewhere and now we look like, I mean, write the headlines, right? So, either you’re a coward or you’re callous profiteers who think that the ticket sales are more important that human lives. You can’t win, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, I want to say this, and I think this is important. What just happened here in Hollywood with this hack is the most significant thing that has happened in our business since I’ve been in it, by far, as far as I’m concerned. This is a huge disaster. And it’s a disaster in part because information was leaked. It’s a disaster in part because people were embarrassed. But primarily it’s a disaster of the community of the Hollywood studio business.

The real cowards, if you ask me, are the other studios. Because if I were one of these other studios, I would get everybody together as a consortium and say, look, this is not Sony’s problem. This is all of our problem. We’re all scared, okay, and we all have problems here and we’re all desperately afraid that we’re going to be exposed like poor Amy Pascal who, oh my god, if you saw my email — Amy Pascal is a saint compared to what’s in — by the way, compared to what’s in anyone’s email inbox.

John: Yeah.

Craig: She’s a saint! Anyone, all these people out there that are pointing fingers at her or even Scott Rudin — Scott Rudin who by the way basically talks in email the way he does to your face as far as I understand it. I think almost everyone complaining about this has far, far worse in their private correspondence with people. So, what a joke that is, okay.

But that aside, the studios — and I still believe there is time for this — should come together and say, look, what does this movie cost, $40 million? Everybody chip in. We all own this movie now. Everybody kick in $5 million which we won’t miss. Now we all own the movie. And then put it out on the Internet for free for the world. This is not something where we can pretend that it’s our responsibility to hide the movie. It is our responsibility to do the opposite.

And George Clooney wrote something about this recently which I largely agreed with, except for the part where he called it a “dumb comedy,” which I thought was just egregious and pointless considering that many comedies that have been called dumb are far more culturally important than a number of George Clooney films.

This is what I think the studio should do. I think Hollywood needs to band together now and do this together because if any of these studios think that they’re not next, they’re wrong. All that happens if they let this continue this way is that they are individually asking for someone to do this to them. They’re begging. So, that’s my position.

John: I’m in thorough agreement that the studios need to band together. And it’s tough for the studios to work together because they perceive themselves as being at odds with each other. But they’re 100% in the same camp on this. They cannot allow this to happen. And it was foolish for them to stand back when the emails were getting released, but now that it’s come to this they need to stand together.

The releasing on the Internet is actually complicated because they could just put it out as a torrent, which they could basically put it out in the same way that all movies have been pirated and that would be probably in many ways the cleanest way to do it. Because if they try to go to Amazon or Netflix or anybody else, one of those companies can say like, “You know what? The hackers come after us next and our entire business is digital.” So, you don’t want to be Amazon or Netflix and be the next target of that.

And this is what I think is the most dangerous thing about this whole thing that’s happened is that I don’t know whether six months from now I’m going to be looking at this event as being sort of the next 9/11, where basically the entire world changed because of this incident that happened. And how we do business had to completely change because of how this happened. Where everybody is running scared of a perceived attack from, you know, some foreign power, some international cabal and so the movies we make and how it gets released, television shows we make, and how everything works could fundamentally change because of this event. That’s what frustrates me the most is that I just don’t know.

And I don’t know whether I am overreacting or under-reacting to what has actually happened.

Craig: I think you are reacting appropriately.

John: So, the one thing that hasn’t been as acknowledged is that Sony, when you think of Sony as being like, oh, that studio in Culver City, but they’re also a Japanese corporation. And so it’s very easy for us to say here in Los Angeles like, oh, come on, North Korea could really not do anything, but North Korea could do something to Japan which is right next door. And so I think there is a national/international response that probably looks a lot different if you are Sony in Japan versus Sony here.

And it’s just a mess. And I’m so frustrated for everybody. I’m frustrated for our guest on Scriptnotes, Dan Sterling, who wrote it. He was at our Austin show. And so I’ve been thinking about him through this whole experience of like, oh congratulations, your movie is coming out. Oh wait, your movie just no longer exists.

Craig: I know.

John: And it no longer exists because of some person probably in North Korea who decided, you know what, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep this movie from coming out.

Craig: Well, look, I think that your 9/11 analogy is apt. And that’s saying something because I’m the person that thinks all 9/11 analogies are inapt. But this time it’s apt, because everyone is absolutely taking this deadly serious — every company is taking this deadly seriously. And by way, it’s untenable for Netflix or Amazon or Apple to take the position that they can’t put this on their service because then they’ll be hacked next, because if that’s true they’re getting hacked next anyway.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So, I think that, you know, in 1993 Islamic terrorists attempted to blow up the World Trade Center. And they failed. And everyone went, huh.

John: Phew.

Craig: What a bunch of idiots. Couldn’t even blow up the World Trade Center. Ha-ha-ha. And lo and behold eight years later they did it. That is a very governmental kind of reaction. Governments tend to be that way, but not business. Business is focused autistically focused on making money, on protecting its shareholder value. And I think the response from every major corporation that is reliant on information services, and that means every major corporation, right now is in crisis mode. Every major organization is going through their cyber security with a fine tooth comb. If they’re not, they are organizationally mentally ill.

So, I do think that there is going to be a point where we are protected against this. It doesn’t seem like this was unavoidable. It seems like this was a collision of aggressive action and lax security. But you can put it on the Internet. You can create a — buy a host somewhere, you know, in freaking Sweden where all the piracy is hosted, [laughs], and just create a website that’s nothing but The Interview streamed online.

John: Yeah. Maybe you could. Maybe you could essentially put it out on just the normal kind of torrents and stick like a tip jar for people to put in their money for it and sort of buy their virtual tickets. Maybe that’s possible. Here is where I’m worried about sort of for the future is that in this case this was this movie that specifically made fun of North Korea and that’s what the focus of the outrage is. But like what happens when it’s George Clooney says something inflammatory and so therefore they say like, oh, Warner Bros, you are not going to release that George Clooney movie or else. I mean, it just becomes this cycle —

Craig: Exactly.

John: Where it becomes impossible to get things made. And it also becomes impossible to get those movies insured, because one of the things we don’t know quite yet as we’re recording this on Friday is Sony has said like, oh, we’re not releasing the movie at all. That’s what they’re saying right now. But it is entirely possible the reason why they’re doing that is they’re declaring a forced measure on it and they’re basically going to make a big insurance claim for $40 million or whatever that they cannot release the movie.

Craig: I don’t think that’s going to work. I’ve read that, but I don’t understand how you can make an insurance claim based on a decision you make. You know, if the movie had been literally obliterated from existence by a cyber attack, that’s one thing. But if you say, you know what, I could release the movie but I’m scared to. I don’t see how that’s an insurance claim at all. I think that’s a red herring honestly.

John: Maybe so. But I think insurance will be more difficult now than ever and more expensive than ever to get insured on a movie, even because if they’re stopping a movie from being released they can also stop a movie during production.

Craig: That’s right.

John: They can do things to derail a studio trying to make a certain kind of movie.

Craig: That’s right.

John: And so if you are a person who has to make the decision which movie to green light and you’re like, oh god, I don’t know if I can even get insurance for this movie. I think it’s going to be just not worth my time and my hassle, then you’re just going to only make the really, really safe movies and that’s a recipe for everything getting worse and worse.

Craig: As if that weren’t already the tendency.

John: Exactly.

Craig: In fact, we’ve seen it happen already. Steve Conrad has written a movie called Pyongyang and that has been — that was green lit with Steve Carell to star at Fox, I think New Regency. That has been un-green lit because of this. And this is precisely why the response has to be so defiant, because if it’s not — I mean, everybody knows this from the playground. Either you fight back or you’re the one that gets bullied every day. There is no reason for them to not do this again. There is every reason for them to do it again. How obvious is that? So, the Hollywood community, the business community, which by the way comes together very effectively to fight their prior terrorists of concern — the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, the Actors Guild — they have no problem joining together to do that.

They must join together right now and be incredibly defiant about this, over defiant. They need to go beyond. That’s why I think honestly they need to have this movie out to the world for free, including ways for it to get in to North Korea, because if they don’t, they are asking someone else to do this again. They’re begging for it. This is why you don’t negotiate with terrorists, right? Everybody knows that. You negotiate with terrorists, you’re just asking for more terrorism.

This is not rocket science, or brain surgery, or rocket surgery.

John: All these surgeries which are so difficult because you keep adding variables.

Craig: Because I keep adding variables! Anyway, I do honestly think that everybody — that the studios need to gather around Sony as a brother or sister, however the studios relate to each other. They need to own this together. They must. This was not an attack on Sony. This was an attack on Hollywood. And if they’re smart —

John: Yeah. And I think don’t stop at the studios. It has to be the studios coming together. Theater owners have to come together and recognize that, you know what, if you stop this then you’re going to eventually stop all movies and they have nothing to show in their movie theaters, and the guilds need to come together with them, too.

Craig: Well, you know, listen, the theater owners, they’re also terrorists by the way. They are. Anybody that works in Hollywood knows that theater owners are the problem. And I think you go to the theater owners and say, hey guess what you guys, you pull this again and you’re just going to see a whole lot more day and date. You’re going to see a lot more, because you know what, everybody thinks you’re dying anyway. Either we’re in this together or we’re not.

And it just has to be that way. This is war. This is war. We don’t mess around in war. I take this incredibly seriously. And if we don’t — if we can’t figure out as a community and particularly the business community, how to achieve solidarity on this and not turn this into a — oh god, I hope I’m not next, then we’re doomed. Then we’re doomed.

And, honestly, I don’t care. Here’s the god honest truth: I don’t care what any of these people write in their emails. If there were a thousand emails about me and they were brutal, I still wouldn’t care. Because I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what people say to each other in private. I only care about what people do, what they say to me and what they do.

Unfortunately, the press — this miserable excuse of a press that we have in this country — delights in this baloney. Delights in it. So, you know there is no way to avoid this. If it happens again it’s not like The New York Times is going to change their bizarre and stupid policy of we won’t do it until somebody else does it and then we’ll publish it because, blah, blah. Pathetic. So it’s inevitable. I’m saying to Paramount and Disney and Universal and Warner Bros and Fox: it is inevitable that they will come for you unless you guys band together and put The Interview out for free to the world.

Hmm.

John: All right. Done.

To our real topics. Our first is a question that comes from Matthew Chilelli who is the person who edits this podcast. So, he wrote this question and I said, you know what, we’ll answer your question on the air and you’ll get to hear it first because you’ll edit the episode that has the answer to your question.

So, Matthew Chilelli and his writing partner are directing a movie that they raised money for on Kickstarter. And his question was what advice would you give to a first-time director of his own script. And I’m like that’s a great question. And so I had some thoughts and I’m sure Craig will have some thoughts, too, because we both directed and we both learned a lot.

My quick bullet points of advice are to remember that you’re not there to throw a party. And one of my sort of first real worries about directing a movie is I wanted everyone to be happy. And I wanted to make sure that the set was comfortable and that everyone was having a good time. And then I realized, you know what, this isn’t a party. It’s not my job to make sure everyone is having a good time. It’s my job to make sure that everyone has the information they need so they can do their jobs really, really well.

And so once I stopped thinking about myself as host and started thinking of myself as the person who is directing the movie things got much happier and better and everyone was happier.

You will be facing a thousand questions. And I was terrified of the thousand questions. Should it be a green shirt or a red shirt? Like this? Like this? Do you want a wider lens, a tighter lens? Here are some things: you will usually have an answer. And just pick an answer. And answers are great. Although you can also say, “I don’t know.” And you can solicit their opinions. You can figure out sort of what the choices really mean.

You can also say, “None of the above.” And if the none of the choices that are presented to you are the correct choices, say none of the above and let them come back to you with more choices.

While you’re directing, always remember what the intention is of the scene and what the intention is of the moment. Because when you’re in the middle of directing a scene and things are going crazy and you’re turning around shooting from one side to the other side and things are just nuts, it’s so easy to forget what the scene is actually about. And so making notes to yourself before the day starts, like the scene is about this is incredibly useful. Like the minimum viable scene will be about this, rely on that.

If you are directing actors, directing actors I find works best with verbs. So, it’s very hard for an actor to be happy, be sad, be angrier. Give an actor a verb to play. So you can say don’t let him walk through that door. Or, you can sort of give them a simile. Can we try that same moment but as if he’s just said the most horrifying thing imaginable to you? That’s something an actor can do. An actor can’t be an adjective. So, those are my quick run throughs of advice.

Craig: All spectacular suggestions. I agree with every single one of them.

John: Cool.

Craig: I’ll only add the following.

John: Please.

Craig: When you’re directing a movie that it’s your first time and you’ve written the script, you will have a natural tendency to want to be the person that is defending the guy that came before you, the screenwriter. So, in other situations where we’ve written a script and somebody else directs it we go, oh my god, what are you doing to my screenplay, and it’s bad. And you think, well, when I get in there I can defend this.

However, that’s not the person you should be worrying about. When you direct, the person that you should be solely concerned with is the you in the future who is in the editing room. That’s the person you’re taking care of. That is the person who needs you right now to figure this out.

So, give that person options. When you’re a first-time director, you may think I’ve figured out, I know exactly what I want to do with this. And you may think that’s the name of the game. But sometimes the name of the game is collect options. And then you’re going to find this movie and write this movie in editorial. And Matthew is an editor, so he understands this better than most. To that end, I believe in shot-listing, particularly for a first-time director, and especially if you’re dealing with limited time which typically a first-time director is.

You don’t have a lot of days where you can go, “Yeah, we didn’t figure it out today, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.” It doesn’t go that way for you. You’ve got to get the day’s work done. So, shot-list.

As a writer we are obviously absorbed with all writerly things: character, dialogue, theme, scenario. As a director, take a moment to just think about aesthetics. Think about your color palette. Think about movies that look the way you want this movie to look. Think about how you want to move the camera. Do you want long lenses, wide lenses? By the way, if you’re not sure what those things are, pick up a book. There are all sorts of instructional things online now so you can learn.

But really think about how you want it to look, how you want the camera to move and feel, because that is essentially the directorial equivalent of theme for the screenwriter. And without theme as a screenwriter we tend to just wander without some sort of unifying visual concept as a director. You’re just collecting footage and making a big TV show.

So, work on all of those things, but most importantly really, really care for your future self who will be in editorial because that future self is the one who is going to — every director, first-time, 20th time, at some point in editorial will curse themselves for what they didn’t do. So, you want to try and limit the amount of cursing of yourself you end up doing.

John: I think that’s fantastic advice. Let’s talk about what shot-list is, because I think sometimes people get confused about that term. So, there is storyboarding, and storyboarding is when you are sort of sketching out what you think the shots are going to be like to build a sequence. A shot-list is a much more practical thing. It’s literally a thing you’re probably holding in your hand, which is like a bullet point list of these are the shots I need to make this scene.

Craig: Right.

John: And that’s something you probably would do in preproduction. You’d figure out like what the shot-list would be for a scene. But honestly it’s a thing you might do in the morning before you’ve started that day’s work and you’re going to hopefully have people you can trust and talk through that shot-list with.

The people who are so crucial are your first AD. And your director of photography. And I found it to be so useful to like walk through with Nancy Schreiber, my DP, and my line producer, like these are the shots I need in this scene. And she could tell me like, “Okay, well let’s prioritize this and prioritize this because of light.” That was so useful.

Also, when you’re making your shot-list, prioritize within that. Because there are going to be some shots you’re just not going to get. And so you need to be able to tell the scenes, even if you never got that second close-up that you really wanted, okay, but that’s why you put that at the bottom of your list. So, no matter if you’re making a tiny movie or a giant movie, there is going to be stuff that you just don’t get. And protecting that future editor self, you want to make sure you get as much of the stuff you do need and this extra stuff is just gravy.

Craig: That’s absolutely right. That is a perfect description of a shot-list. And what you find as a first-time director is that directing — whatever you thought about directing is wrong. And that a huge amount of what directing is is breaking moments down geometrically. It is literally figuring out how to capture a moment through angles. And the angles could be moving and they could be different sizes, but ultimately you’re fracturing a moment into various geometric angles that will be repeated so that you can edit them together.

And understanding the geometry of your scene is really important before you shot-list, because sometimes if you think about it you’ll say I don’t want to break this down. I actually think this is a one-er. I think that’s how this works. I don’t want coverage here. I want this to be about these two people playing something in the moment together. And if it’s a one-er and you know it’s a one-er, no problem. Everything is a tradeoff, right? You’ll probably do nine takes of that, but there’s no more coverage, so you’re done with it, right.

If you’re doing traditional coverage with two people talking, you’ve got yourself a master, and overs, and closes. Okay. So, you don’t have to do as many takes of each one, but there’s a lot more setups.

So, one thing to do as the first-time director of your own screenplay is to go through your screenplay and start asking yourself this question: how would this moment be best broken down geometrically? What do I want to see and how? It will help you make your shot-list. And then as you said your DP and your first AD will have all sorts of great ideas to add to it and to make it more efficient.

John: One last thing, thinking about that future person you’re going to be when you’re in the editing room, a lot of times as you’re watching a shot happen before you you say like, oh, that was good, but this thing wasn’t good, that thing — like it was almost right, but this wasn’t quite right. If you know you’re going to be cutting it, it doesn’t have to be flawless all the way through. It would be great if it were flawless, where you had that one take that’s fantastic, but pushing for that eighth take to try to get one perfect take through on one person’s coverage is almost never worth it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: If you know you have the moments, if you know that I can see and feel what this is like, then you’re wasting a lot of your day to try to get to that perfect eighth take when you have the stuff you need in those earlier takes.

Craig: It’s why you need — before you direct anything you must have experience editing something. You must. You need to know where the scissors come in and where the scissors can’t come in. You need to know when something is married to something else so if one half of it is no good and one half of it is good, it’s no good.

But Matthew happily has that experience, so that’s a huge part of it. It’s how you figure out how to break a moment down very often.

John: Yup. So, a great segue to our next topic which is our Perfect Series. And this time it’s the Perfect Director. So, I want to take a look at the perfect director from the writer’s point of view since we’re a mostly a writer’s podcast. But also from what a perfect director looks like from an actor’s point of view, from different department heads’ point of view. Because how does a director do her job the best and what are the tools and techniques she’s using to make the best movie. So, obviously a very wide topic, but Craig how should we start?

Craig: Well, let’s start with what we’re most comfortable with, I suppose, which is how — what we want from a screenwriting point of view when we work with a director what do we want. And I’m going to dispense with the obvious ones. We want them to be good. [laughs] We want them to know how to shoot. We want them to be visually interesting. We want them to know how to work with great actors. We want them to be really specific, make terrific choices. But, of course, what a lot of screenwriters will say is we want them to shoot the script.

Well, I don’t want the director to shoot the script. I want the director to shoot the movie of the script. But here is what I want most of all: I want the director to presume respectfully that if something is in the script it’s there for a reason. I think the biggest mistake directors make vis-‡-vis screenwriters is when they read a screenplay they presume that some of it is just whatever. There’s moments that have to happen, but then there are moments inside of the moments that are like, eh, you know what, I actually would love to do this, or I’d love to do that or it would be more fun if the camera was here, more fun if the camera is there. This just feels like a waste of time.

And, not always, depending on the quality of the screenwriter, but I would argue if it’s a good screenwriter 99% of the time that is a huge mistake.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It is not a mistake to ask the screenwriter how can we do this differently. It is a mistake to say quite arrogantly, “Some of this isn’t important.” It is as much of a mistake as it would be to open up a human body during surgery, grab a hold of some little gibbet and go, “Eh, this probably doesn’t mean anything,” and just pull it out.

Because we put things in on purpose. And then, of course, what happens is three or four weeks later you might get a call like, “Uh, this doesn’t make sense.” Yeah, well, because you took that thing out and you didn’t realize because you hadn’t lived in it the way I did.

So, when you want to change things in a screenplay, and it’s perfectly fine to say, look, we’re changing it. We must change it for the following reasons, even if one of the reasons is my directorial taste. Tell me. How can I change this so that I don’t hurt anything? First do no harm.

That’s what I want from a director more than anything else in terms of how they interact with me and that involves obviously a certain amount of respect and acknowledgment that the screenplay isn’t just a “suggestion” or even a “blueprint,” which I’ve never understood, but rather is a conceptualized movie.

John: Yeah. So, what I’m looking for in a director is someone who can come in and channel this vision of a movie onto the screen. And it’s really like a person who can experience the movie internally and then has the skills to be able to put that up on a screen. And that is such a unique skill set. And there are people who are just amazingly good at it. You can do things that I would just never think of to do. And that’s what gets me so excited is when you see a director who can just do these amazing things.

So, I cannot underscore enough is that I don’t want this person to make my script. I want this person to make my movie. And make her version of my movie. And I want that movie to be fantastic.

So, when there are suggestions, or changes, or concerns, or things they don’t like, that’s awesome. Let’s talk those through. But don’t try to change them on the set without getting some feedback because, yes, everything that’s in the script was there for a reason and there was a reason why this whole carefully constructed puzzle fits together one way. And there are other ways it can be assembled, but there was one way it was supposed to work. And if you can talk with me about that beforehand, that’s awesome.

In those first conversations, a lot of those first conversations with the director is basically just kind of talking through the whole movie so I get a sense of what the movie looks like in the director’s head. And sometimes that really does mean as a screenwriter I’m kind of explaining scenes and like, well, I wrote it and now I’m actually talking through the whole explanation of it, but it’s so important that we be on the page. Literally the same page written, but also the same idea about what the intentions are of those scenes. And the times where things have gone not especially well have been cases where the director really thought the scene was about something completely different than what I thought the scene was about.

Craig: Right.

John: And it’s fine for us to have a difference of opinion, but we didn’t have a difference of opinion. Like, he just shot a different scene than what I kind of meant that scene to be. And then that scene no longer shows up in the movie and there are problems.

Craig: Absolutely true. And the other thing that I think the perfect director exhibits is patience. Now, directing, I’ve said this before many times, directing a movie, a feature film, is the hardest job in show business. And so directors cannot be patient with everybody. In fact, most directors really have only a very tiny amount of patience that they reserve entirely for their actors. They must be patient with their actors because if they yell at their actors or are impatient with their actors they’re getting bad performances. And, of course, this all about what they’re getting on screen from their human beings, unless they’re all computer generated robots.

I would ask the perfect director to extend that patience to actors to writers. That we need actually the same amount of patience. And the reason I say that is not because we’re sensitive flowers, but rather because you will get a better movie if you’re patient with the screenwriter. Frankly, there are a lot of directors who are least patient with the screenwriter. They find the screenwriter and the screenplay to be this kind of offensive reminder that this world that they’re creating is not entirely their world. It’s disruptive of their confidence.

And I understand that. And there are screenwriters who get fussy about changes. The perfect director is patient with the screenwriter because they will get better work and they will make a better movie if they are. I always tell my fellow screenwriters to be patient in return to the director. They need us at our best in order to survive and we are all in the same boat of trying to make a good movie.

But a good director is patient with the screenwriter.

John: You talked about how incredibly hard the director’s job is and I completely agree. And it’s like you’re a general leading your troops into battle. And the crucial thing is that you have to have the trust of your troops. Your crew has to trust and believe that you have a vision for how you’re going to win this fight, how you’re going to succeed in doing this thing.

And that means that you had a lot of planning. You really knew what you were going to do ahead of time. You were able to read the lay of the land and see like, okay, on the day we’ve arrived at this location, this location is different than how I’d expected it to be and I’m flexible enough to roll with what needs to actually happen. Because the directors who are inflexible, who everything has to be exactly the way they had storyboarded it are not going to be able to roll with the changes and roll with the punches.

The great directors can also recognize and really remember the intention of the scene. And so if an improv’d moment comes up that’s actually better than what was there, they will be able to incorporate it and be able to both have the version of the scene as it existed, but also recognize like this new version is better, funnier, more dramatic. It does something unique and wonderful and I’m so glad I’m going to have that in the editing room as well.

Craig: Right. Yeah. And that reminds me of just another bit of advice going backwards for Matthew Chilelli as he approaches his first movie. A good director leads the crew, but also understands that the crew will not be able to tell her or him that they’re making a good movie. All the crew sees are dailies, right? That’s what they say. They see live dailies going on. And they may see funny moments. And they may see an actor do a hysterical thing or a beautiful thing. But as the old saying goes, there’s nothing better than your dailies, and there’s nothing worse than your first cut.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They don’t know what the movie is.

John: They don’t.

Craig: Don’t ask them what they think and don’t be encouraged or discouraged if they offer their opinions. No one except for you and your editor has any sense really of the movie that is going to result. You’re the only ones that have seen the completed jigsaw puzzle. You’re just making pieces now, right? So, don’t overreact to that whole thing. There’s the — in comedy we call it a dailies laugh, where the crew just goes, “Oh my god,” and they’ll come up to you at lunch. “That was so funny.” And in your heart you know, ah, it’s getting cut out of the movie.

There’s something about those moments, those moments that are so funny in the moment so often just do not live in the matrix of the put together film.

John: Yeah. So, any last bits of summary for our perfect director? I mean, I would say there’s not one perfect archetype for a director. And I’ve worked with directors who I love who are vastly different from each other. And that’s fine and that’s okay. And they all have different ways of communicating their vision to their department heads, and to me, and to everybody else who has to see what it is. And sometimes it’s not immediately clear to me. Like I have no idea what you’re doing, but it all works.

The directors who I sort of admire as a viewer I don’t necessarily know what they’re like on the set, but if people are working with them again and again there’s probably something that they’re doing that’s really, really good. And they’re probably treating their crews with respect, they’re probably able to communicate what it is that they’re trying to do so that people can do their very best jobs. They’re able to inspire the best work out of people. And that’s how you make great movies.

Craig: Yeah. I think that frankly the best directors, the directors that I love as I run down the list in my mind, they’re either writers, or they really respect writers. And the directors that I find ultimately are disposable, who disappear, or who just make stuff I don’t like are directors that are notorious for not giving a crap about the script. That the script is a ha-ha-ha, I’m a director.

John: So let’s go to our final topic which is from a director.

Craig: Yes.

John: And his question is about the script itself. And so he is working on a studio feature and he writes: “I find that 70% of the notes I’m getting deal with ‘logic,’ that is a producer or exec is bumping me on something that doesn’t track for them, like why wouldn’t the daughter just call the donut shop? Why wouldn’t they go to the police? Why would she do that if…?

“Fair enough. Here’s my question. Where do you two professionals draw the line on the logic police notes? When does the tail start wagging the dog for you? I think we all know how much of the ‘logic and exposition” hits the cutting room floor, especially in comedies because nobody cares. When do you run the risk of answering a question the audience isn’t asking? When does [print the legend] apply?

“I’ve never left a movie and said, boy, that was a real stinker but so logically sound. Good for them. To me so often these logic notes are easy ways for an executive to ‘score points’ in a story meeting. See all these logic holes I’ve helped out and I’ve fixed? But seldom if ever do they actually make the movie better.”

He goes on to citing an example of Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks comes back to his Seattle home to find that his son has left a few hours ago. What does he do? He buys a plane ticket to New York City, rushes off to find his son on the Empire State Building and finally meets Meg Ryan when there’s a thousand other things he could do that would make a lot more sense.

Craig: Yeah. So, it’s a great question and everybody has a different tolerance for this kind of, well, is that logical, does that make sense, why wouldn’t they do this, or isn’t there an easier thing. And really what these questions all come down to is either is this rational or is this something that an average person will think is a sensible course of action for a human to take.

I generally err on the side of being a logic Nazi. I believe in logic. I think it’s particularly important for comedy because comedy is so much about contrasting the absurd against what we understand to be the proper rules of the world.

And generally speaking the more we get away from something that’s logical the less likely we’re willing to laugh because we start to feel like the filmmakers essentially rigged the game. It’s a cheat. It’s not as funny to see a joke that you know they had to alter certain facts to achieve. It’s far more funny to see something that existed completely within the constraints of the world and behaviors. We understand it. So, when I think of a movie like for instance All of Me.

In All of Me Steve Martin is possessed by the spirit of Lily Tomlin. The two of them are in the same body. And that is obviously an enormously broad high concept. It’s illogical, but that’s point, it’s magical, right? So, we accept that. You get one. But then what’s great about the movie is that things happen the way they would happen. So, the first thing that happens is he goes, “I’ve got to get rid of you. And first of all I’m crazy, and I’ve got to get rid of you.”

They go through all the expected things. Similarly in Groundhog Day, you watch him react in a way that somebody would logically react.

So, I’m a huge believer in logic. There are times when you must cut some corners here and there or else your movie falls apart. And you try as best you can to avoid those. There are also times when you find after screening the movie that there is a little bit too much, or the audience doesn’t need all that explanation here. I will tell you though that there have been times where we’ve got some of that extra logical explanation out and they didn’t miss it but they were the beneficiaries of us having thought about it, because it felt okay. It was interesting. Like it felt real around it because we had done the homework of putting all that in.

So, I got to say I’m a big believer in this.

John: Well, here’s what you’re describing, both in your All of Me example and Groundhog Day is you’re talking about what is the internal logic given the rules of the world you’re setting up. And so the logic rules for Men in Black is going to be different than the logic rules for The Bourne Identity, because there’s different levels of reality of the world. And so once you’ve created that world and you created sort of the universe of rules within that world, as long as you’re consistent with the rules of that world, you’re golden. It’s when we don’t understand what the rules of that world are that so many of these logic notes come up and people start to question things. I am sympathetic to this director on the sense of sometimes people are trying to score easy points. And so they’ll ask these questions like well why doesn’t she do this, why doesn’t she do this.

And, like, well, if you let characters do the things they could automatically easily do they would just call the police all the time and wait for the police to show up and help them. There are times where characters in movies are going to do things that are dramatic and that’s because they’re going to be doing dramatic things. So, hopefully you’ve built a story in which characters are not allowed to make easy safe choices, that they have to make bigger choices because that’s the nature of the world you set up and the nature of the stakes you’ve set up.

But sometimes there are other logical things that a normal person could do, but they’re not in a normal situation anymore. And so that’s my frustration. And I’ve definitely been in this director’s position where I get some just asinine notes that they are theoretically about logic but they’re also just about talking and sort of bullet points on a piece of paper.

Craig: Yeah. That is true. When I get stuff like that I tend to be patient with it because I don’t actually care why they’re saying the note. I mean, they may be saying the note because they need to talk more in meetings to get rehired again when their contract is up. But, ultimately I don’t care. My job is to listen to the note and go, “No, actually, it’s logical what they’re doing.” Or, “Okay, I see your point, we should shore that logic up.”

I mean, ultimately if a human being is asking the question, it’s likely that an audience member could ask the question. Audience members will rarely tell you your movie made no sense. They just won’t like it as much.

John: And you say there’s one gimme, and I think there’s in general sometimes you will have to sort of lean in to that one gimme that the audience will give you. And so if you’re in a high concept comedy, it’s like they’re sharing a body. If you’re in the movie Gone Girl, there is a thing that I was always worried about in Gone Girl when I read the book is like well how are they going to handle this transition that happens in the midpoint. Basically the voiceover completely shifts at the midpoint. And the truth is, and I’m sure they had these discussions or disagreements, and someone must have said, either Gillian Flynn or David Fincher said, “You know what? I think we’ll have enough audience goodwill that they won’t even notice that we completely changed the rules on how the whole thing works.” And they were right.

And so sometimes you just have to answer that logic question with, well, this is what we’re going to do.

Craig: Yes. And sometimes I will say, listen, we are always the beneficiaries of what I call the law of intentionality. The audience presumes that everything on screen is there because that’s exactly the way you wanted it to be there. So, they will automatically give you a certain amount of leeway because they’re presuming you meant to do it that way.

Now, we on our side know a lot of times we did not mean to do it that way at all.

John: No, we completely saved that in post and it’s a completely hacked job.

Craig: Or that it was kind of a cheat. Or our backs were against a story wall, whatever it is. But, yes, you just want to try and make that the last resort rather than, I mean, I remember I was in a meeting years ago. I was working on a screenplay at a studio that will remain unnamed. And one of the — and I was talking about the script I was about to write. It was a rewrite. And one of the people said, “Well, you know, what if we did this.” And I said, well you know, I’m not sure that would make sense, because if that happened then wouldn’t people just simply do this, or this, or this?

And the executive said, “Yeah, but you know, our last hit movie didn’t make any sense.”

John: Ugh.

Craig: And I said, you know, I suppose you can get to that place, but we should not start there.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s a bad place to start because it’s not like things get better, and better, and better. [laughs] I mean, the unfortunate effect of production is things tend to get worse, and worse, and worse. So, yeah, that was dispiriting to say the least.

John: One last point about your intentionality. Jane Espenson on our last podcast we talked about some terms used in the story room and Hang a Lantern on it is one of the terms she brought up. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about is sometimes there’s a thing that could happen or is happening that someone would say like, wait, does that make sense? And hanging a lantern on it is somebody in the script calling out saying like, yes, I know that this is a thing that maybe doesn’t make sense, but this is really what’s happening.

There’s sometimes elegant ways to sort of acknowledge to the audience, yes, I see this thing here. You’re not crazy. And it’s going to be okay. And those are the kinds of things, sometimes they’re throw away lines that you put in there and then you see if you actually need them in the final cut and they can magically easily disappear if no one is asking that question.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So, let’s get to our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing this week is a little short film called Interesting Ball. It’s by Daniels, who are a directing team that I actually met up at Sundance who are incredibly clever. It is a wonderful story of a bouncing red ball and the people that it encounters. It reminds me a bit of the Red Balloon, but absurdist, and disturbing in ways that I think people will find delightful.

Craig: I’d like to think that I am also absurdist and disturbing in ways that people find occasionally delightful.

John: I would say 52% of people find it delightful.

Craig: At least. At least 50 to 52% of people. My One Cool Thing is a bit of technology that is currently in I guess alpha or beta, but it seems inevitable that it will be widespread sooner or later. And it comes to us from Skype and Microsoft I believe. Does Microsoft own Skype? Is that the — ?

John: I think they own it now. I think they bought it from eBay.

Craig: Yeah, so Microsoft/Skype. And it’s called Skype Translate and it’s quite brilliant. So, we know now that we have this ability to talk to our computers and they will transcribe what we’re saying, speech to text. And what Skype Translate does is essentially take that one step further. So, you are on a Skype call with someone say in Germany. You say something, Skype turns it into text and then translates the text into that person’s language and speaks it to them.

How freaking cool is that? Now, if they get this down we essentially have the Babble Fish from —

John: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

Craig: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thank you.

John: Nice. I have not even read Hitchhiker’s Guide and I knew what —

Craig: And I’ve read all of those and yet I’m old now and sometimes, god, isn’t that the worst feeling when you’re like —

John: It is the worst feeling and it happens all the time right now.

Craig: I know this, but those neurons apparently are on strike.

John: I both forget things I should know and I have started to have that thing where it’s really hard for me to read small print.

Craig: Oh, you know what? I got to tell you, I’ve been holding on. I don’t know why I can. My wife has to wear the glasses. All of my friends hold menus a foot away from their face. I still have total ability to read stuff close up.

John: That’s great. Congratulations.

Craig: Yeah, well, I know, but I mean, what are we a year away from it falling apart?

John: Yeah. It’ll all happen.

Craig: It’ll all happen. But I can still —

John: But that will be in 2015. 2014 will come to an end and you will sail out this year with your perfect detailed vision and your vision for a grand world in which the studios come together and push back against cyber terrorism.

Craig: They have to. They have to.

John: They have to.

Craig: They have to. I can’t — they must.

John: Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. If you would like to subscribe to this podcast, go to iTunes and click Subscribe. That’s all you have to do. We are also having a premium of our show which is available at Scriptnotes.net. The premium feed has a whole bunch of bonus episodes and it goes all the way back to the very beginning of time to early episodes.

Next week’s episode is actually going to be drawn from those early episodes. It’s going to be a clip show. It’s going to be great. We already recorded it so I can tell you that it turned out just fine.

If you would like to leave a comment for us, you can do so on iTunes, but you can also write directly to me or to Craig. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

If you have a longer question you would like to ask us, write to ask@johnaugust.com.

Johnaugust.com is also where you can find the show notes for today’s episode and all of our episodes. We also have transcripts going back to the very start of the show.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who asked that great question earlier. It is produced by Stuart Friedel. And, Craig, have a wonderful rest of 2014.

Craig: Have a Merry, Merry Christmas, John, a Happy New Year, and I will see you in ’15.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Sony cancels The Interview release after theaters pull out
• Interesting Ball by DANIELS
• Skype Translator
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Brandon S Meyers (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/franz-kafkas-brother-and-the-perfect-agent).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 172 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to be talking about Franz Kafka, Jonathan Nolan, and finishing a script, and other things.

**Craig:** Yeah. All of which are interesting to screenwriters or people that are interested in screenwriting, is that — or things that are interesting to screenwriters? I’ve only heard it 172 times.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Nevermind.

**John:** Well, actually Craig insists on actually never being present for this opening intro thing. So, he just sort of leans in to say his little bit, but he doesn’t listen to the rest of the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m in the green room.

**John:** Which is crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. Getting makeup.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Craig, we have so much to get through that I think we should just start into our follow up, because otherwise we’ll never finish this episode.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** All right. You wanted to say something about the Black List.

**Craig:** Yes. So, Franklin Leonard sent us an email and he was — I believe his comment regarding our take on the fivethirtyeight article was, “Nailed it.” And so I was happy about that. And he also mentioned that, in fact, they do do the thing that I was hoping they would do, which is provide score distributions. So, when you get your average score they do show you here’s how it breaks out for how many 1s you got, how many 2s, and so on and so on through 10s, which is helpful because then the distribution will show spikes at the higher and lower boundaries.

**John:** So, when we looked at that fivethirtyeight article it was all based on data that they’d gotten from the Black List and Franklin’s concern, which was also your concern, is that the data itself doesn’t necessarily reflect the real experience of what that is. And a distribution is a crucial guide to showing what the actual trends are.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not like fivethirtyeight is a website specifically about statistics and statistical analysis, so they wouldn’t know that perhaps a distribution and sigma and various things like deviation from the mean would be useful to data analysis. They’re just a statistical analysis website.

**John:** They want the data to tell a story. And the story they were telling was not necessarily, we felt, the most accurate story.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I have an update about the Scriptnotes app. So, if you are one of our subscribers who listens to episodes through the Scriptnotes app, or actually you can listen to recent episodes even without being a premium subscriber, the app just went through a bunch of updates on iOS and some of the updates were terrific and some of the updates were not terrific.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** We believe the current app that you have out there in your hand right now is stable, but if it’s not, let us know. Because this is a rare case where we don’t actually make the app. It’s Libsyn who makes the app. But if people have problems with it, let us know so we can yell at Libsyn to try to get the app fixed. The app that you’re using for Scriptnotes is actually the same app that a lot of other podcasts use. And so it’s the same app that Jay Mohr uses and Marc Maron uses. But it should work properly for you. So, if it doesn’t work properly for us, please tell us and write in to ask@johnaugust.com and we will yell at the Libsyn people.

**Craig:** And feel free to use poor language, get angry, obviously rant in your email about this app, because that’s what motivates John and his staff.

**John:** That’s not actually true at all.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** But if, no, but if you are using the app and you are a premium subscriber, you will find that there are two brand new episodes that just posted this week. We have Simon Kinberg’s interview for the Writers Guild Foundation. That was me and Simon sitting down, talking about Days of Future Past and his whole writing career. And we also have the Three Page Challenge that we did in Austin, which was me and Franklin Leonard from the Black List, and Ilyse McKimmie. So, if you’re a premium subscriber you get those episodes, too.

**Craig:** Fantastic. That’s a hell of a deal.

**John:** That’s a hell of a deal. And maybe you’re off for a few days around Thanksgiving. Maybe you have family in town. Maybe you’re trying to hide from them. Or maybe you have to be present in the room, but you can have your earphones on and then not really be present. That’s a good —

**Craig:** Yeah. Let us help you isolate yourself from your useless family.

**John:** We’ve actually had to sort of make a rule in the house where sometimes — both of us like to listen to podcasts a lot, but if we’re in the same room together and we’re listening to different podcasts it can be a little bit frustrating. So, not always a great choice to do that. But sometimes through the holidays you need to check out a little bit.

**Craig:** Not surprisingly that doesn’t come up in my house.

**John:** Because you don’t listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. You had an update about Cowboy Ninja Viking.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, that was something that we had talked about way back when you and I did the Nerdist Writers Panel podcast crossover thingy. And somebody had asked what we were working on so I mentioned that I was writing this thing called Cowboy Ninja Viking which someone actually knew about because we were at, what is it, Nerdmelt? Melt Comics? Melt Nerd? Meltdown?

**John:** We were at Meltdown Comics. We were at the Nerd Melt stage at the back of Meltdown Comics.

**Craig:** Got it. And so somebody actually knew about the graphic novel. Regardless, Chris Pratt is going to be in the movie.

**John:** Which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Chris Pratt is a great actor and a gentleman and seems like a perfect choice for movies about cowboys, ninjas, and/or Vikings.

**Craig:** Well, he kind of is a perfect choice because the character, I mean the idea of Cowboy Ninja Viking is that it’s a guy who has these three personalities in his head and they are really spectacular at what they do. He doesn’t feel like he does anything. So, you need an actor who is physically a match for an action hero, but who at least in his face and in his persona can also be meek and humble and not at all and scared.

**John:** There’s a softness to Chris that’s great.

**Craig:** Exactly. And there are not too many people that could actually do that. So, and he’s a big movie star now and he’s the husband of one of my good friends, Anna Faris.

**John:** Which is lovely. Craig, is someone directing your movie? I don’t even know.

**Craig:** No. Right now, well, somebody will be directing the movie. Right now that’s the big thing is they’re talking to multiple folks about possibly directing it. And so I get lists and things and then we all talk about it. But I think before the end I believe we should have our answer for that.

**John:** It’s always an interesting case about whether you attach an actor or star like him without having a director on board. Because in some ways it can hamstring the director a little bit because the power relationship between sort of who is driving the ship can be a little bit off. But sometimes it can work really well. So, Drew Barrymore was attached to Charlie’s Angels along with Cameron Diaz before McG came on board. And so we were able to sort of set the tone as the wheels were turning. And then we would find like, oh, who is the right director to make this version of the movie. And so that can work really, really well.

But, we can all think of horror stories where a big actor was attached to something without a director and then the director came on board and had to sort of wrestle with these decisions that had been made in his absence.

**Craig:** Yes. That is absolutely true. The benefit I think to having the star in place before you get a director is that you know that you’re getting a director that wants this version of the movie.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** So, the director is not going to sign on if they love the actor, don’t like the script, or like the script, don’t love the actor, whatever it is. This is somebody coming on and saying, yeah, I like this package and I think I can work with this and I want to do it.

Obviously there is a certain amount of ease to getting a director for a project when you have a big movie star in place.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Because now they realize it’s a real movie and it’s happening and it’s going to have, you know, an ability to connect with an audience and a fan base. But the nice thing here is that Chris really seems to love the script. I mean, that’s the other thing. Sometimes you don’t know. You get a big actor and the big actor says, “I love the idea, you know. Let’s rewrite everything.” You know, that can happen, too. But happily, at least so far, it doesn’t seem to be the case here at all. So, anyway, I’m very excited. I just thought it was the best possible outcome and I’m really happy that he responded and that he’s going to do it.

**John:** Fantastic. Congratulations.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So, this was a big week for us. We closed the Kickstarter campaign for Writer Emergency. That was on Thursday at noon. And so inevitably at 12:01 I got a bunch of tweets and emails saying like, oh no, I missed the deadline. And I feel like I’ve done nothing but talk about this for far too long. And people would say like, oh, I was three weeks behind on the podcast. And I was like, well, you were three weeks behind on the podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can’t bend laws of time and physics.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, that crap didn’t work on your history teacher in junior year. I don’t know why you think it would work on us.

**John:** But the good news is that if you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign there is a site now called writeremergency.com. If you want to know about when the packs will become available for the rest of the world, just put in your email address there and we will send you an email when they’re available to purchase.

We’re not quite sure how they’re going to be purchased. And we kind of can’t even think about that now. So, the campaign did really, really well. So, we are printing 16,000 decks.

**Craig:** Wow!

**John:** That we have to get out. So, it’s about 8,000 to backers and 8,000 to the youth writing programs that we’re supporting. So, that’s going to be everything we can possibly do through the end of the year.

But sometime in January we should be able to make more of these and get them out to other people who would want one. And that’s where I’m actually going to ask people who are listening to this who might actually know about retail or dealing with Amazon, because we’re trying to figure out the best way to get these out into the universe. Because when we’ve done t-shirts for Scriptnotes and stuff, that’s like maybe 1,000 t-shirts we’re making and sending out. This is going to be such an order of magnitude beyond that that we just cannot do it ourselves. And so if you are a person who sells through Amazon or a person who deals with like sending stuff to retail stores and have good experience, just write me and tell me about your experience, because I genuinely want to know. And I’ve found it really frustrating to try to find out that information.

**Craig:** You should go on Shark Tank.

**John:** I should totally go on Shark Tank. And just have them just cut me down.

**Craig:** No, they wouldn’t cut you down. I think they’d be respectful. I mean, you’ve got a high profile. You go on there and you’re like, look, they always want to know how many have you sold already. What’s your margin, blah, blah, blah. And now you’re margin is terrible, obviously, because you’re giving half of them away, but they won’t let you do that.

But then you have a lot of sales. You did really well. And then you get like Mark Cuban to help you out or something. Or the QVC lady. That would be a good one.

**John:** That’s the one you want, the QVC lady.

**Craig:** Or Damon. You know, Damon is really good because, you know —

**John:** I have no idea who Damon is.

**Craig:** He’s the clothing magnate.

**John:** I love that you don’t watch any TV, but you know Shark Tank really well.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the deal. If you want to understand what I watch, I choose to watch Game of Thrones.

**John:** Well, who could not watch Game of Thrones?

**Craig:** Right? I choose to watch Game of Thrones. And that’s pretty much it at this point.

**John:** Everything else is just the TV is on and you’re in its presence.

**Craig:** Everything else is what Melissa watches on TV. And my kids. So I’ll actually see more Disney sitcoms than any normal programming.

**John:** Than anyone should ever see.

**Craig:** Right. But Melissa and Jessie love Shark Tank. So, and you know, when they’re watching it you get sucked in. It’s actually —

**John:** Oh totally.

**Craig:** It’s fun. It’s so obvious that each one of them is playing a character. But, I don’t know, they do a good job.

**John:** Whenever you watch a show about judging, it’s always like, well what would I say in that situation? And then you’re trying to predict what each person would say based on what this thing was. That’s really the fun of it. I think somebody out there should make a parody of a judging show that there’s actually no content sort of being judged. It’s just sort of the judges performing their shtick to whatever. So, basically like a stick of gum is put there and then you have each of the judges performing their shtick to that stick of gum.

**Craig:** The whole judging dynamic is fascinating. I know this is a tangent, but so the other show that Jessie and Melissa love to watch is The Voice. And so, you know, I’ll drop in on The Voice with them and all of the judges are super positive on that show. I never hear any of them say a single bad thing. And, you know, for me Simon Cowell, he’s the greatest because he was the only man to ever tell the truth on TV. And I just find it fascinating that somewhere along the line, I mean, you know those things aren’t — that’s not haphazard. That is a carefully planned decision that came out of months of committees and meetings that they’re not going to do that.

Like everything on TV is carefully, carefully planned. So, I’m just so fascinated by that that they decided no one is going to be the heel or the villain on that show, whereas on Shark Tank, Kevin O’Reilly is clearly the villain, which I love. He was like make Mr. Burns.

**John:** So, Kevin O’Reilly, not Kevin Reilly?

**Craig:** Oh, is it Kevin Reilly?

**John:** Well, no, Kevin Reilly was the Fox president.

**Craig:** No, no, I think it’s Kevin O’Reilly. Maybe I’m getting his name wrong, but he’s one of the sharks on Shark Tank and he’s some sort of investment guy, which that tells you everything you need to know about what I know about money. “Investment guy.” But, he likes to put his fingers together and make a little tent with his hands like Mr. Burns.

**John:** Oh, yeah, Mr. Burns, yeah.

**Craig:** And if he makes someone an offer and they don’t take it, then he says, “You’re dead to me.” That’s his catchphrase. He’s like me.

**John:** [laughs] He’s like you.

**Craig:** He’s like me.

**John:** So, the thing I’ve had to figure out is basically the supply chain and sort of like how you make things and physically deliver them to a place where they could be delivered again. And that is just so new to me. And it’s really genuinely fascinating. But I’ve found it very hard to investigate because if you look up sort of like selling stuff on Amazon, you get a bunch of like Amazon links to here’s how you do your stuff, but it’s hard to find the real information about that kind of thing.

So, our friend Quinn Emmett, Dana Fox’s husband, who is a great writer in his own right, his brothers actually run a health food thing that sells through Amazon. So that’s one resource. But they’re giant and they’re health foods. If people have experience with games and books through Amazon that would be incredibly valuable if you want to drop me a note.

**Craig:** Well, all right. So, help John.

**John:** Help me is what I’m saying.

**Craig:** Help him.

**John:** This is going to be an interesting segment because I think this is going to be one of those rare cases on the show where I have tremendous umbrage and you can maybe talk me down off the ledge a little bit.

**Craig:** Oh. My. God.

**John:** It’s a very special episode.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so happy.

**John:** This is something that was actually tweeted around last week. And it was this vulture piece which is also New York Magazine, and I don’t quite understand where the boundary is between New York Magazine and Vulture, but it was an article by Nate Jones. And Nate Jones may not have written this headline, but Nate Jones wrote the article. Here is the headline: Christopher Nolan’s Brother to Adapt Isaac Asimov’s Foundation for HBO.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** This is the actual article. “After spending years on the screenplay to his brother’s Interstellar, Jonathan Nolan is going back into space: The Wrap reports that the younger Nolan is working with HBO on an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. It’s Nolan’s second project with the network after J.J. Abrams’s planned Westworld adaptation and his third TV show overall. (He previously created Person of Interest.)

“If the Foundation show takes off, Jonathan Nolan will finally be ‘Christopher Nolan’s brother’ no more. At least in the career sense. In the fraternal sense, they will likely remain bonded.”

**Craig:** Oh boy. [laughs] Wow, that’s really good writing.

**John:** Ugh. So, I did slice out a little bit of sort of unimportant stuff, but that’s the gist of the article. Okay, so from the headline forward, Jonathan Nolan has written like three or four giant movies. And he’s written on a lot of stuff that’s not Christopher Nolan things. So, to set up in your headline the idea like, oh, we’re not going to say his name. We’re going to say like Christopher Nolan’s brother. That’s ridiculous. Then, to continue on and say, you know, this wrap up at the end, “Oh, if this succeeds then he’s no longer Christopher Nolan’s brother.”

He never was just Christopher Nolan’s brother. His show Person of Interest has been on for like three or four seasons, has 80 episodes. So, just, grr. I wanted to say a bad word, but I want this to be a clean show.

**Craig:** [laughs] I have to say, look, I completely agree with you. I’m only laughing because that was adorable. I mean, you tried so hard to be angry and you couldn’t because you’re just a nice person. And you’re such a good guy.

**John:** I kind of always have some beta blockers in me that don’t let get to full umbrage.

**Craig:** I know. You have natural beta blockers. [laughs] That actually made me love you more.

**John:** Oh, thank you. So, let me continue my rant, my attempted rant, because I was reminded of the Jonah Nolan story. You can say Jonathan or Jonah Nolan interchangeably. They’re the same person.

This past week on the episode of Scriptnotes I said, oh, I’m going to be adapting Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was announced in the world. So, here are some of the stories written about that. This is Time Magazine. Headline: Frequent Tim Burton Collaborator to Pen Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Movie.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** An article by Nolan Feeney. And the article includes, “Screenwriter John August, who has written multiple screenplays for director Tim Burton, will write CBS Films’ upcoming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Deadline reports.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like we’re not enough on our own. We only exist within the context of a director.

**John:** That’s really the thesis I want to get to is that journalists only want to talk about the director even if there’s no director. So, with this Jonah Nolan story, they’re talking about Christopher Nolan even though he’s not involved with the project at all. They’re talking about Tim Burton, even though he’s not involved with the project at all. I swear to God he’s not involved with the project at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they want to stick him on because a writer by himself is not worth talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. They will always gravitate towards things that they think their audience will know. And so rather than educate people on who someone is, they just make it easy. Oh, you know, here’s a name you know. Well, this guy worked with that name. It’s just lazy and dumb.

**John:** It’s lazy and dumb, but here’s the danger. And so I’m going to skip ahead to Meredith Woerner writing at iO9. And so the headline is, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark Movie Writer Could Change Everything.”

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** So, I’ll read some select paragraphs from here. “But now this befuddling movie adaptation has a whole new screenwriter, John August. Yeah, Tim Burton’s John August.”

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Tim Burton’s John August.

**Craig:** Now you’re possessed.

**John:** I am possessed. “Deadline is reporting that John August (Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, Titan A.E.) will be writing the script for CBS Films. If you noticed, August likes to work with Tim Burton, a lot.”

First off, Titan A.E., there’s like five credited writers on Titan A.E., so please put Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle if you want to stick a credit on me, but don’t do that. And also Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a much bigger movie than the other ones listed there.

**Craig:** Well, particularly since the point is that you like working with Tim Burton. It just seems so dumb.

**John:** Yeah, also, Go, maybe my first movie. People like that movie a lot.

“Then there’s the matter of Tim Burton.” So, continuing on with her story. “Then there’s the matter of Tim Burton. This project has Burton written all over it,” except not on the title page, “but that might not be a necessarily good move. When was the last time Burton was legit scary? Beetlejuice? Sleepy Hollow? HOWEVER the classic Burton ‘nightmare face’ would really feel at home in this world.”

So, there will be lots of pros and cons to having Burton helm this work.

**Craig:** Wow. [laughs] So, now even Tim Burton is getting attacked for something that he is not involved with at all. You’re basically being belittled as some sort of pinkie on his hand. You know, I have to say, you want, let me give you some umbrage. Let me help you.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Let me help you because —

**John:** Can you spare a little umbrage?

**Craig:** Yeah. I can.

**John:** All right. Craig, teach me how to be angry.

**Craig:** First you start way back. And it’s like you’re going to slowly run and then you’re eventually going to hurl yourself off a building. Journalism as a whole has always been a disaster of a business. You can go all the way back to Remember the Maine and yellow journalism pushing us into the Spanish-American War if you want.

It’s always been a mess. And it continues to be a mess to this day. But entertainment ‘journalism’ is a cesspool of stupidity unlike anything else. Everyone in it, everyone in it is doing it wrong. I don’t know, there’s no one that does it right. And what they will do is this nonsense where they literally go on to IMDb for — I honestly believe there’s a rule, if you’re going to write an entertainment journalism article you can only use IMDb as your source and you are only allowed to look at the page for four seconds. That’s it.

Four seconds. Scroll. Okay. Done. Now, start writing.

**John:** Blink twice, then begin writing.

**Craig:** It is the most insane. And first of all, think of what you just read. That article really sounds like someone who heard something from someone who heard it from someone who is now telling a friend over some coffee.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And just rambling about it.

**John:** Yeah. Bobby Moynihan has a character on Saturday Night Live —

**Craig:** Drunk Uncle.

**John:** No, different than Drunk Uncle. He has a guy who overheard some news, some second hand news.

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

**John:** And it does feel a little bit like that. So, my frustration though is that from now on because people write these stories, from now on whenever we do announce a director for this movie this article is going to come. I guarantee you it’s going to come. “While Tim Burton was rumored to beó”

**Craig:** Oh, of course.

**John:** “…directing this movie.” It’s like, he was never rumored to be directing this movie. You know, Tim could direct the movie, but I swear to God there is no director on this movie. There is nobody.

**Craig:** You haven’t even written a script yet.

**John:** There’s been no script.

**Craig:** There’s nothing.

**John:** There’s been no script. No one has been talked to.

**Craig:** There is a book and there is a contract for you to write a screenplay. That’s it. And these people are already now critiquing the work of a man that isn’t involved and deciding if he should be — like anyone gives a damn what they think. It’s so dumb. It’s so dumb. Everything —

**John:** Oh, it’s dumb, but it’s so much fun though, isn’t it, because the fun is just to take any random director and apply them to this project and think about how much that could go wrong.

My favorite example would be, “I think we should go to Nancy Meyers,” because can you imagine the Nancy Meyers version of this movie?

**Craig:** It would be great.

**John:** So, I think Something Wicked This Way Has Got to Come.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s got to come.

**John:** It’s got to come.

**Craig:** And then there’s like a kid is confronted by a ghost. And then they dance.

**John:** Yeah. But you know that the house in the movie is would be so well decorated.

**Craig:** Is going to be gorgeous.

**John:** And the kitchen would be great.

**Craig:** Gorgeous. With a lot of depth and really just glinty lighting. It would be gorgeous.

So, years and years and years ago, when I was hired to write Scary Movie 3, and it was this crazy rush job. And Bob Weinstein said, “All right, I’m going to hire you to write, and David Zucker is going to direct it. And maybe, I called Kevin Smith, maybe he’ll get involved.” And I was like, okay, and then Bob put a thing in the trades about it and said, you know, and possibly talking to Kevin Smith. That’s what he said. It was something like possibly talking to Kevin Smith.

Kevin Smith never worked on the movie. He was never hired on the movie. He didn’t have anything to do with the movie as far as I know. And I was there from the first day.

The Kevin Smith thing persisted not only throughout but even in reviews of the movie.

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** People would talk about the screenplay by me and Kevin Smith. [laughs] That’s how dumb these people — they literally just go back to IMDb, they look at the first, like the news article in IMDb. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Let me tell you something. If there was one person out there who is really smart and really driven and ambitious and believes in quality and wants to own an entire an entire marketplace, wants to corner the market on quality, go into entertainment journalism. Go into it. Because there are so few people out there doing it right.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Craig:** Which is going to endear me to all these people once again. I’ve just ensured myself another 20 years of great reviews.

**John:** Well, the thing is I actually know some entertainment journalists who I really like and I can personally really like them and in some cases like their work and still have just tremendous frustrations at what the net result ends up being most of the time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that. You know my other — can I just say my other pet peeve about a lot of these guys, some of these people work on websites and they’ll do, like they’ll play good cop/bad cop. So, the good guy will call you up and do this really lovely interview with you and it’s full of respect and admiration. And then that will run on the website with a link to the website’s review of the movie that trashes it by the bad cop. What? Why? I know. Anyway.

**John:** Never good.

**Craig:** So, anyway, congratulations Tim Burton. Good job.

**John:** Yeah. Thanks. So, let’s segue to a writer whose life was actually just delightful and full of cheer. And someone who I think embodies sort of this like laissez-faire, whatever may happen, happen, spirit that I think all screenwriters should aim for, and that’s Franz Kafka.

**Craig:** Yeah. Happiest fellow in the 20th Century. Franz Kafka, great, great — I guess you would call him, well, he’s a modern European author, possibly existentialist, absurdist.

**John:** Kafkaesque.

**Craig:** Kafkaesque. The amazing thing about him is really he is a self-defining guy. He is his own style.

**John:** In some ways the same way like Tim Burton is Burtonesque. Like there’s a definable style to Kafka’s writing, the same way there is to Tim’s world.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tarantino. I mean, some of these people sort of self-define. And Kafka self-defined. And what’s interesting about Franz Kafka, well, among other things, one thing is that he was not at all famous when he was alive. He was posthumously appreciated and tremendously so.

But what I find so interesting about him and what I wanted to talk about with you today and for all of our listeners out there is this interesting fact. Over the course of his life, Franz Kafka, we believe, burned 90 percent of the manuscripts he wrote. 90 percent of what Franz Kafka wrote is lost forever. As for the remaining 10 percent, when he died he asked his friend, Max Brod, to destroy everything. He said, I’m leaving this to you. Please destroy it. Max Brod opted to not destroy it, and that is why we have Metamorphosis and The Hunger Artist and all these —

**John:** Castle.

**Craig:** Castle. And Penal Colony and all of these incredible stories that have fueled many, many a modern lit class. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, well, it came up in mind because over the summer I took a little class at my son’s school. The headmaster offered a class for adults on great books and we sort of moved through, from Socrates on forward. And at one point we got to a Kafka story, The Hunger Artist, which is one of my favorite stories. And it came up that Kafka had destroyed a lot of his work and wished that all of it could have been destroyed. And one of the people in the class said I cannot understand that for the life of me. Why?

And all I could think of was I completely understand that. I understand that 100 percent. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had that impulse.

**John:** I’ve never had that impulse.

**Craig:** I guess here is where I would come down on it. I’ve never actually destroyed my work, although I’m sure some people which that I had. But, what I do understand is that when it’s done, I have the instinct of wishing to god that no one would ever have to see it. That just that there could be a job where you get paid to write a screenplay and then when everybody agrees it’s good, you just put it away.

**John:** I’ve had the experience after watching a first cut of something, where watching the first cut of Go where I wanted to bargain with the lords of fate that the movie could just never be released because it was just — it was soul crushing. But I think that’s a different thing than what you’re describing, because I don’t think what you feel and necessarily what Kafka felt was that their work was horrible, but maybe just that you didn’t want to put it out there in the world and have a reaction to it. Is that correct?

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s not a question of being embarrassed. In fact, it’s the opposite. And this is particularly tempting I think for screenwriting because you get your script to a place where you feel this is it. This is good. And then you know that this is a snowy field that must be trod upon. And simply by people reading it, you lose it. It’s no longer yours. Now it’s ours. It belongs to everyone. And that’s a hard thing sometimes to get around. And I do feel that sometimes this protective feeling that I don’t want this to belong to everybody, it’s mine, is the thing that keeps some people from wanting to finish.

**John:** I can completely understand that. You’re describing sort of what is a creator’s responsibility to his creations — is it to protect them from all possible harm, or to send them out into the world. In some ways it’s a parent’s function as well. Is that you want to keep your child safe and yet you know that they must go out into the world and fend for themselves. And that’s so challenging.

So, finishing — delivering your script, you know, turning in your manuscript is very much like sort of sending your kid off to school and you’re not ready to have them be out of your care and control.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And there is something paradoxical about the nature of creation of work and then what follows, the sharing of the work. The creation of the work is — it’s solipsistic. And not only do you have complete control, but complete control is required to do the work well. And so you do control it in a way that you can’t really control the raising of another human being.

And then you send it out and just by being read it is changed. And you can feel that — it’s most notable when you go to that first test screening after you’ve edited a film and you believe you know this film upside, downwards, and backwards, and then you sit in a theater with people. And as you watch it with them, you see a different movie because it’s almost like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The observation changes the object.

And so a lot of times I think, you know, we’ve talked about why people hold on to work too long. I think sometimes we have to acknowledge that we have a fear that the observation of the work will change it. And that’s a natural fear to have. Unfortunately, destroying 90 percent of your work is not a good idea.

**John:** Well, let’s play devil’s advocate. The other 90% of his work, the odds are there was tremendous work that was lost to time, to all the ages, because he destroyed it. But some of that work would not have been his best work. And so it’s part of the reason why we have Franz Kafka as such an amazing, great author is that everything that survives is the brilliant stuff. So, it’s silent evidence of all the stuff that wasn’t so good.

**Craig:** It’s possible. I mean, we do have authors who have written great things and then not such great things. And we tend to ignore the not such great ones. But considering that Kafka very strongly felt that the remaining 10 percent also needed to be destroyed makes me think that perhaps the 90 percent that was was probably quite good. I mean, he was, after all, Franz Kafka. [laughs] And it’s just — that to me is an extension, an extreme extension of what I’m talking about here. Frankly, I think if Franz Kafka could come back to life today he would be horrified that everyone has read it and that not only — it’s almost his worst nightmare. In a sense it is a Kafka story.

A man creates something for himself that no one is to see, because they will destroy it by looking at it. He begs that it be destroyed when he is too sick to do it himself. It is not. And not only does everybody look at it, but everybody then analyzes it and teaches classes on it and writes term papers on it. I mean, it’s a horror show. Poor guy.

Anyway, I guess all I’m saying is, hey, this is a natural thing if you’re a writer and if you feel this, just know that you feel it, but tough, you’ve got to put it out there.

**John:** So, the only reason we have Kafka’s work is because Max Brod saved that 10 percent. So, let’s talk about people who take 10 percent and let’s talk about the perfect agent.

**Craig:** Segue Man!

**John:** I am Segue Man. So, this is the second part of our Perfect Series. So, last week we talked about the perfect studio executive. This week let’s talk about the perfect agent and what makes the perfect agent. What that person should be doing for a screenwriter. What our expectations should be when we’re talking to an agent. Craig, get us started.

**Craig:** Well, I think that we do have quite a few agents and agent assistants who will soon be agents listening to us, so hey, lean in, listen carefully. I’m very simple about what I look for in an agent. Primarily, let’s talk about the real simple stuff. Call us back.

**John:** Always good.

**Craig:** Okay? Call us back. Don’t be impossible to reach. Call us back within a reasonable amount of time. That’s the big one.

**John:** Let’s define reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time is 24 hours at the outlier and if it’s not 24 hours than it’s some communication that acknowledges got your message, I will get back to you ASAP.

**Craig:** Yeah. My feeling is if I call before lunch, I get a call before the end of the day. If I call after lunch, I should still get a call by the end of the day, but if not, first thing the next day and an acknowledgment that the call was received. So, that’s a real simple thing. I know that this is something that is talked about a lot in the agency hallways as a kind of nuts and bolts things. I cannot stress how important it is. Ultimately, the constancy of communication is the glue of the agent/client relationship. It’s as simple as that.

The other thing I look for in an agent is clarity. When a writer asks an agent what should I do, should I do this job, or this job, should I pass on this, should I accept it? Who should we give this to? Is this the right producer? What we want desperately is the same thing that the people that hire us want. Clarity and comfort. We want our agent to give us an answer.

If there is no answer, then explain why there’s no answer and then explain that either way will be okay.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But this wishy-washiness or asking questions back — we’re not looking for an Ericksonian therapist to just rephrase our questions. We want answers.

**John:** So, when you proposed this topic I went through and sort of made my list of archetypes of sort of the things I think about when I think of an agent. And not all agents are going to be all these people, but generally these are the kind of roles an agent fulfills in a writer’s life.

One is as adviser, which is just what you described, the person who has an informed opinion about what should be done on a project, in a situation, what is the overall shape of what this experience should be.

Secondly is an advocate. You want your agent to be someone who is like on your side. And so when people are pushing you around, they’re pushing back. And that’s a really crucial role because sometimes the agent has to be the bad guy. The agent has to say like, no, he delivered, pay him. And convince on the next step if you want the next step. That’s a critical function of an agent and sometimes one that they are reluctant to perform because they’re trying to maintain all these other relationships.

But, from the writer’s perspective, we just need you to like stick up for us.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Third archetype is sort of the connector. And really good agents are smart at being able to put people together who they think can work well together. So, that’s putting writers in rooms with studio executives who actually know what they’re doing. Setting up a lunch between a writer and a director because there’s probably something they could work on together. Bringing the right material to the writer because this is a book we have and we think you would probably like it. That’s a crucial function of a good agent.

**Craig:** Let’s stop there on that one because a lot of these things are sort of constitutionally required for agents. Some of them are things that agents have to earn their way towards. The truth is that we want from our agents a certain amount of connectivity. And there are all sorts of words for this, juice, or whatever you want to call it. We want our agent to be able to get the people we need to get on the phone on the phone.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you can’t get those people on the phone, then you need to have a relationship with a senior agent who can.

**John:** That’s a crucial point. Because a lot of times as newer writers you’re going to be working with a junior agent, someone who doesn’t have all the history and all of the contacts and all the access that the top people have. But in some cases, those younger agents have tremendous numbers of contacts, they’re just at a lower level. And those can be incredibly valuable and they can actually be faster than some of the very top tier people can actually get that information. So, that can be really useful.

So, obviously if you’re agent is plugged in at CAA and they have this vast knowledge network of how everything is set up, that’s awesome. But even if your agent is at a smaller sort of boutique agency that deals with like just TV writers, that can be exactly perfect if that’s what you’re trying to do.

My first agent was just a terrific agent but his client list was mostly very esoteric indie writer-directors. And he was really good at dealing with sort of specialty film arms of things, but that wasn’t who I ultimately was. And it got to be very frustrating because he didn’t know the people who I needed to be in rooms with. And that’s why it didn’t last.

**Craig:** Exactly right. There’s another thing that I think the perfect agent is capable of doing, and that is switching their tone from every kind of communication they have, except for their communication with their writer clients, and the communication with the writer clients. We know when we’re being agented. So, what is being agented? It’s being handled, cajoled. There’s that agent talk that’s smooth and fast and all facts have suddenly become fogged by war. And everything gets twisted around. That’s what they do. And they need to be able to do that.

When they’re dealing with other agents, when they’re dealing with producers, when they’re dealing with studios, when they’re dealing with business affairs they need to agent people. That’s their job. But when you’re talking to us, before you get on the phone with us, take a breath and say this, “This person I don’t agent. This is my client. This person I can just calm down, relax, and be honest with.” I know. Sounds crazy. But we actually appreciate honesty more than anything. Don’t hide bad news from us. Don’t sugar coat bad news.

Don’t flimflam us. And if we challenge you on something and we’re right, don’t think that by saying, “You know what, that’s a really good point, you’re right,” that it makes you weak. It doesn’t. It makes us like you more.

So, save a certain tiny nugget of honest, normal you for us. And agent everybody else.

**John:** So, part of that honesty is being honest about why a project is coming to you, or why a project is not coming to you. And that’s a very difficult conversation to have.

Craig, you will be able to better articulate what the legal definitions and differences are between an agent and a manager. But my perception is that any time somebody comes to my agent with here’s work, here is work we would like John to do, I think he’s legally obligated to tell me about it. Is that correct?

**Craig:** It is. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times they will glide over that because they know that you’re busy and unavailable and wouldn’t want to do that. So, I don’t need my agent to call me up and say, “Hey, listen, we got an offer. You just started writing a script. We got an offer for you to do an episode of an animated program in Albania.” I don’t need to hear about it, you know.

**John:** Yet, I think one of the crucial things is, and this is the conversation I have quite often, is in one of those sort of check-in calls there will be like four things we’ll talk about. And the last thing will be, oh, and I got this thing for you. Here’s the project. Here’s the producer. Here’s why I think it’s a pass. And that is just a godsend when you sort of hear what that is.

Agents are fairly describing what it actually is and why it’s probably not interesting. And sometimes I’ll say like, you know, actually that does sound really interesting, or like I’ve always liked that person, so I do want to take a look at it. But a good agent is able to say, this is why it’s probably not going to be right. In some cases, especially for a newer writer, they might say, okay, there’s this project over at this studio and they’re meeting with writers. They asked about you. I think it’s a fishing trip. I think they’re just basically bringing a bunch of people into the room and seeing what might stick. And you could be wasting a tremendous amount of your time.

I so appreciate that. And as a young writer, I might be panicked like, wait, I’m not going to go in for this job? A smart agent might say, you know what? I don’t think anyone is ever going to get that job. I think it’s basically just a let’s see what sticks kind of situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. There’s another nice benefit to letting your clients know when you’re passing on things for them in that it makes them feel good, that people want you to work for them. I mean, look, if you say don’t do something, we’re not doing it. We’re very simple that way. You know, I mean, we want to do everything. We want you guys to be able to help us say no to things. It’s obviously a very valuable part of this. And, you know, sometimes as agents you will smell some blood in the water and we won’t smell the same blood.

I’ll get a call, “Something came up at the agency, our biggest movie star is excited about doing this thing. It’s a book. And everybody is running around like crazy. But, you know, I put your name in and they really responded to that. I mean, this could be huge.” Well, look, again, we’re being agented there a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. But at least he’s being candid about what’s actually happening there.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And it’s good to know. And then if we don’t smell the same blood and we go, you know what, I get why they would love that. I just don’t think it’s for me. Then, you know, you let it go. That’s okay. Just don’t jam us in because we know, I mean, we’re not dumb. We know how the agent business works. You guys make 10 percent of what we make. So, the person who makes the most amount of money, that’s the most important person.

We know that. And it’s okay to shepherd us all together. That’s part of your job. But then if we don’t get it and we don’t want to do it, just be respectful and let us not like it. That’s okay.

**John:** That shepherd function is really crucial, too. When Aline was on the show last she talked about how her agent of many, many years, they were on a phone call and Aline was venting her frustration about this project and these people and the people being impossible. And the agent basically pulled her aside and said like, “Get over yourself. Call me back tomorrow. And figure out how you’re going to actually do this project, because you’re being crazy.”

And that’s a crucial thing. That shepherding role of saying like, you know what, you’re not actually being reasonable here. This is, you know, it’s almost like a parent. Like, you know, reminding you like, you know what, this is your job. Your job is to write this movie. Write this movie. Get it over with. Get it done. And move on. And that’s a crucial thing to have happen, too. Sometimes you as the writer are the problem and a very good agent can find the right way to tell you this is a you thing. Get through it. And let’s get onto your next project.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, Aline and I actually have the same agent and I can hear him saying all that. And, frankly, we want that specificity. It goes back that we want to be spoken to honestly and we want clarity. If the clarity is you’re being insane, I mean, if my agent ever said to me, “You’re being insane,” I would think I’m being insane.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A good agent should not be afraid of his client, or her client, right. So, if you’re an agent and you’re worried that your client is not going to respond well to the truth, so your job is to somehow figure out how to hide the truth in a thing, like the way that I feed medicine to my dog by putting it in pudding. We’re going to know. Don’t be afraid of your clients.

If your client can’t handle what’s true, then they’re not going to be able to handle it with their next agent, or their agent after that. Truth is a great defense.

**John:** I absolutely agree. The last thing I would say about the great agent is like the analogy I think I’ve often made is that if you’re having heart surgery, you don’t want to go to the woman who only performs heart surgery three times a year. You want to go to the surgeon and she performs it seven times a week. You want the person who is sort of the pro at doing this thing. And sometimes as a writer you have to step back and realize like, oh, you know what? You actually do this job. You’re actually the person who makes this deal. So, I’m not going to sort of worry about every little step of this process.

I’m going to let you — and maybe my lawyer — go off, make this deal, figuring out all that stuff, and then report back to me what the results are. And I can say yes or no. But I see sometimes, especially newer writers, freak out about each little bit of a deal and that’s not generally a helpful thing.

**Craig:** It isn’t. I totally agree. There are times when we have a disagreement. And what I end up saying is, listen, let me tell you why I don’t want what they’ve offered, even though you think it’s good, because of this and this. It’s important to me. It’s important enough that I’m willing to say, no, I don’t want to do this.

And a good agent hears that and goes, “Fantastic news.” As long as you’re in sync with your client, and they’re saying, “I don’t want to do it. I would rather not do it than this,” that’s empowering, and don’t fight anymore. Now just go with that. Unless you feel that they’re being insane and then tell them they’re insane.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There needs to be that just honest communication. The most important advice I can give to you on your path to becoming a perfect agent is to not agent your client.

**John:** I think that’s great advice. Cool. It’s time for some One Cool Things. So, mine is a web series that I just started watching, but it’s actually in its third season. It’s called High Maintenance and right now this new season is on Vimeo. And so it’s $1.99 an episode. And the episodes range in length from, the one I watched was 18 minutes, but they get longer and shorter. There’s two prior seasons you can also find.

The show is set in New York. The show is created by Katja Blichfeld and actor Ben Sinclair. And it follows this guy called The Guy who is this pot dealer who has a whole bunch of clients. And the show is kind of like an anthology. So, it just follows — he’s delivering weed to different places and then you’re just staying with mostly those characters he’s delivering weed to.

The episode I watched was called Ruth. I thought it was fantastic. And it’s dramatic and comedic at the same time. The episode I saw involved chili peppers and testicles and milk. And it was really just terrific. So, I highly recommend it. It’s on Vimeo. I think you can probably get it everywhere in the world, but I know you can at least get it in the US. And so High Maintenance.

**Craig:** High Maintenance. Well, my One Cool Thing of this week is maybe an uncool thing, but I love it. On YouTube, you can find it under the Worst Line in Scriptwriting History. And I like that they called it Scriptwriting History as opposed to screenwriting history. The Worst Line in Scriptwriting History. And I don’t know who wrote it. And I don’t mean to pile on here. It’s actually quite beautiful.

Have you ever listened to — do you know the story of The Shags?

**John:** They’re the ones that their father ran the band?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And they had no idea how to make music?

**Craig:** I think I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. Three daughters. I think they were from Vermont and their dad was like I’m getting you guys into the kind of teeny band craze of the ’60s. And he bought them a guitar and drums and a bass guitar. And they practiced and then recorded an album and they wrote their own music and it’s impossibly bad. It’s impossibly bad in a way that you could not do intentionally. And this line is a little bit like that. It’s beautifully terrible. It’s wrong in a way that you could have never done intentionally.

Simply, it’s an exchange between a woman and her mother. And the woman says, “Mother. You’re alive.” And the woman says, “Too bad, you will die.” That’s perfect.

**John:** Let’s pause here so Matthew Chilelli can insert the actual audio so we can actually hear how great this line is.

**Craig:** So there it is. That’s the worst line in scriptwriting history. It’s from the movie Mortal Combat: Annihilation. And it’s gorgeous because, I mean, the first line is normal enough. She’s surprised that her mother is alive. She’s stunned. Her mother was supposed to be dead. We’ve seen that in movies before.

It’s the mother’s response that is so syntactically disruptive. I don’t know how else to put it. She’s saying something to someone else.

**John:** Yeah. The “too bad you’ll die,” let’s try to think of a setup line that could actually make that second line make sense. I’m not sure there is one.

**Craig:** I think the setup line would be, “Thank god you’re going to live.”

**John:** Oh yeah, okay.

**Craig:** Right?

**John:** Going to live. Too bad you’ll die.

**Craig:** Too bad you will die. So, thank god you will live. Too bad you will die. But that’s, see, even that would be so crazy, because nobody would ever say thank god you will live to somebody who would then say, “Too bad you will die,” with glee. But what she just says is, “Mother, you’re alive.” “Too bad you will die.” So, you are, you will, the too bad is fascinating.

Anyway, it’s just gorgeous. I love it. I love it so much. It’s beautiful.

**John:** It is beautiful. What’s also beautiful, and the reason why we’re talking about this at all, is I had mentioned before we started recording that when I finished the Kickstarter for Writer Emergency Pack, Nima Yousefi who works with us, he bought us all copies of the Mortal Combat novelization. So, it’s the novelization of the movie of Mortal Combat. And it’s an actual book. It is in my hand. It is 216 pages, which is just kind of amazing that this thing exists in the world.

**Craig:** Who is this for? I mean —

**John:** It’s for people who are giant fans of the movie Mortal Combat.

**Craig:** See, I think it’s for people who love Mortal Combat, but also love reading.

**John:** Absolutely true. Or, love Mortal Combat but hate movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] It’s just the weirdest — that’s a very small Venn diagram overlap. Regardless, I don’t know if you ever saw any of the Mortal Combat movies.

**John:** I did see the very first one.

**Craig:** First one is not bad.

**John:** So, I remember seeing, I’m pretty sure it was the first one I saw. I remember going to the Beverly Center and we went on like a Saturday morning, like the first show. It was me and my friend, Jen. And we sat down and watched it. And this is the experience of watching Mortal Combat: trailers, trailers, trailers, screen fades up, MORTAL COMBAT. [hums] And it’s literally the first seven minutes are just kind of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s why I wanted to go see it.

**John:** Then we left.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean you didn’t even stay longer than?

**John:** It’s one of the very few movies of my life I’ve walked out of.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I stayed with the whole thing. And by the way, I’ve got to tell you, that’s it.

**John:** That’s it?

**Craig:** It stays on that flat line through the end. Anyway, too bad you will die.

**John:** And that is our show this week. So, some reminders for you. Tickets are available for the December 11 live show here in Hollywood. Scriptnotes Live. It’s with me, and Aline, and B.J. Novak, and, oh, we get to announce our special musical guest finally. That is actress-singer-funny person Rachel Bloom.

**Craig:** Yeah. Very cool. She’s got this show coming on to I think it’s Showtime that she and Aline Brosh McKenna have created. She’s very funny. Very, very, very funny. And she’s going to be doing an original song for us?

**John:** I think she’s doing an original song for us.

**Craig:** Spectacular.

**John:** But in the show notes I will put a link to a song that she wrote about Ray Bradbury. I can’t tell you the real title because that would make this a not safe podcast.

**Craig:** That is correct. But it’s an excellent song. She’s very, very good.

**John:** So, our other guests include Jane Espenson and Derek Haas. It’s going to be a great time.

**Craig:** I’ll be there.

**John:** Craig will be there. So, as we’re recording this on Friday, I think there are still tickets available. So, anyway, don’t dally. Go to get those tickets.

**Craig:** I think we’re down to the dregs here. You better speed this up.

**John:** It’s Writers Guild Foundation, so it’s wgafoundation.org. But, of course, there are always links in the show notes. And you can find the show notes for this podcast at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. And there are links to the things we talked about on this episode, including many articles about how Tim Burton will be not maybe making this movie. And news of Craig’s Cowboy Ninja Viking.

**Craig:** Cowboy Ninja Viking.

**John:** If you would like to subscribe to this podcast, do so in iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes and click Subscribe. That’s also where you’ll find the Scriptnotes app, both in the iTunes and in the Android store.

If you would like to become a premium subscriber and listen to those bonus episodes and the dirty episode we will be recording, go to scriptnotes.net and that’s where you sign up to be a premium subscriber. And then you can listen to episodes all the way back to the beginning of the show, both in the web and in the apps.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It’s produced by Stuart Friedel. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli and I think it may be the best outro we’ve ever had.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Did you listen to it? I will send you a link to it if you haven’t listened to it yet.

**Craig:** Send me a link to it.

**John:** It’s really good. So, we are going to stop talking so you can hear this in its entirety. But, Craig, thank you very much. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** You too, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* If you ever have issues with the Scriptnotes app, [please let us know](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear last week’s two bonus episodes, plus our upcoming 1,000th subscriber special
* [Chris Pratt Circles Cowboy Ninja Viking](http://deadline.com/2014/11/chris-pratt-cowboy-ninja-viking-1201291185/)
* If you missed our Kickstarter, [sign up at writeremergency.com](http://writeremergency.com/) to be notified when packs are available for purchase
* If you know a lot about retail, [reach out to us](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* [Christopher Nolan’s Brother to Adapt Isaac Asimov’s Foundation for HBO](http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/jonathan-nolan-to-adapt-isaac-asimovs-foundation.html?mid=twitter_nymag), on Vulture
* [Frequent Tim Burton Collaborator to Pen Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Movie](http://time.com/3590944/scary-stories-movie-john-august-tim-burton/), from Time
* [Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark Movie Writer Could Change Everything](http://io9.com/scary-stories-to-tell-in-the-dark-movie-writer-could-ch-1659822243), on io9
* [Franz Kafka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka) and [Max Brod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod) on Wikipedia
* [High Maintenance](http://www.helpingyoumaintain.com/), and on [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/highmaintenance) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Maintenance_(web_series))
* [The Worst Line in Scriptwriting History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIt0VY7Yg2w) from [Mortal Kombat: Annihilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat:_Annihilation)
* [Mortal Kombat: A Novel](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812544528/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-show/) for the Scriptnotes Holiday Show
* Rachel Bloom’s [NSFW song about Ray Bradbury](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/finishing-a-script-and-the-perfect-studio-executive).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Sshh, me Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 171 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** That are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Oh, you’re my echo now.

**Craig:** You have latency.

**John:** Oh, do I have latency?

**Craig:** No. [laughs] I’m just pretending to be your latency.

**John:** Ah, you’re the worst.

**Craig:** I’m the worst. No one gets it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** By the way, people do get it. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Today on the podcast we are going to be talking about finishing a script. We’re going to be talking about this data that fivethirtyeight crunched about screenwriters and their screenplays. And we are going to be talking about the perfect studio executive.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. But there’s follow up to start with. And follow up about future events, including the December 11 live show.

**Craig:** So exciting.

**John:** I’m so excited. So, I put a little teaser at the start of last week’s episode, but now you and I can both talk about how excited we are that on December 11 at 8PM in Hollywood we will be welcoming our guests including Jane Espenson. B.J. Novak. Derek Haas. Aline Brosh McKenna. Plus one special musical guest that’s not even announceable yet.

**Craig:** Fantastic. I mean, that’s a great roster even including the person that’s not announceable yet. I was watching, you know I’m a huge Quentin Tarantino fan.

**John:** I do.

**Craig:** And just the other night I decided, you know what, I’m going to watch Inglourious Basterds again, because I want to. And I forgot, because I hadn’t seen it in a long time, B.J. Novak.

**John:** B.J. Novak.

**Craig:** He’s Utivich. Utivich, I think that’s his name. He’s awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Just yesterday I was reading The Book With No Pictures, which is a kid’s book that B.J. Novak has at the top of the bestseller charts.

**Craig:** Very, very creative.

**John:** It’s a great little book. And so I was reading it to Chad Creasey’s little daughter who was over, and she loved it. And this is a kid with a limited attention span. And she loved it. Because whenever you get the chance to make silly noises to a kid at that age, they’re in heaven.

**Craig:** She’s also notoriously picky. Not an easy review to get out of her.

**John:** Oh, absolutely, no. She has set opinions. And they’re usually about where is my mother, where is my father, why are you not either of these people.

**Craig:** Right. I’m tired.

**John:** So, last week Chad Creasey, who is a writer on Castle, was live tweeting his show, because the new thing is you’re supposed to be live tweeting your show so the fans can talk with the creators of the show as the show is actually happening.

**Craig:** I see this all the time. Derek Haas does this.

**John:** Yes. And sometimes it’s wonderful, and sometimes it’s kind of annoying, because maybe Derek — I don’t need to see like the 20 tweets about Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. Or the crossover episode between Law & Order and Chicago P.D., which is just — that’s like two hours of Derek Haas tweeting.

**Craig:** Wait, that was Law & Order?

**John:** So, Law & Order, the New York show, or Law & Order SVU, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, yeah. Okay. SVU. Right.

**John:** SVU crossed over into a Chicago P.D. episode. And so I happened to catch part of this change over because I don’t, honestly I’m sorry, I don’t actually watch either of these shows.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** The TV was on and I saw this crossover. And it was just so weird like, oh, that’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, it’s actually a very rare thing to have happen now because there are very few, I mean, Dick Wolf kind of stands alone. Dick Wolf and Chuck Lorre are the two people that have multiple shows. Oh, no, and Shonda Rhimes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, actually the three of them could get away with it.

**John:** Yeah. But no one else can get away with it. And so I was watching this thing happen. Of course Derek live tweets his show. Chad was live tweeting his show. And I had to interrupt Chad live tweeting his own TV show in order to arrange childcare for our children.

**Craig:** For both of your children?

**John:** Because that’s what it’s like to be a Hollywood writer is basically you’re supposed to live tweet your show to the mass audience and then figure out who is going to take care of your kid because you’re working late hours making Castle, the TV show.

**Craig:** Sometimes I’ll send out some tweets to people just because I’m at home and I need to arrange childcare for my kids because I’ve got to go score some heroin. Do you know how you know that I don’t have a heroin problem?

**John:** Uh, I don’t know how. How do I prove a negative?

**Craig:** Here’s how. I just said, “I needed to go score some heroin.” That’s not what they say. Right?

**John:** Yeah. Scoring is actually a really interesting word, this is going to be my awkward segue into Writer Emergency Pack, or maybe it’s a brilliant into Writer Emergency Pack.

**Craig:** It doesn’t really matter, does it? [laughs]

**John:** Because I made the transition?

**Craig:** That’s right. Transition Man.

**John:** We’re here now.

**Craig:** Segue Boy.

**John:** So yesterday we were going through all the text on all the cards just to make sure that everything was right and we were not disagreeing about any commas, and Stuart Friedel who genuinely loves basketball was arguing that I had said, in the card I said, “You could score three baskets in a certain amount of time.”

And he’s like you can’t score baskets. You can make baskets. But you can’t score baskets.

**Craig:** That’s right. Correct.

**John:** And I’m like, well, you’re being nitpicky. And then we looked on the Internet and he was right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Of course he was right. That’s correct. Just as you can’t make runs in baseball. You score runs. It’s just the parlance of the sport.

**John:** It is the parlance of the sport.

**Craig:** And similarly there is a Stuart Friedel of heroin out there listening to me and saying, “No, no, you don’t say I’m going to go out and score some heroin, you dork.”

**John:** Yeah. What do you need to score heroin? How do you get heroin? What is the verb for obtain heroin from a person?

**Craig:** I think we’ve established that I don’t know. At all.

**John:** [laughs] If you do know, if you are a heroin addict who knows the lingo, or even better yet, a heroin dealer, please write in to @clmazin on Twitter and let him know.

**Craig:** Let me know. By the way, this is one of the best arguments for drug legalization I’ve ever heard was from my friend [Gene Yin]. Because I remember I was saying, well you know, yeah, sure, legalize drugs. But heroin, I don’t know. And he said, “Let me ask you something. If you wanted heroin, do you think you could get some?” And I was like, yeah, I guess I could.

**John:** I don’t think I could. You know, honestly, that’s a fascinating sort of six degrees of separation. Like how many people would I have to go through to get heroin. And the way my life is set up right now, it would take awhile.

**Craig:** It would take awhile, but you could get there. It’s not hard. By the way, anyone can. Especially now. Go to the marijuana dispensary. Get your marijuana card. Hang around the people in the lobby of the marijuana place and be like, “Anybody have any heroin?” Somebody will hook you up.

The point being, if you want it, you can get it. But we don’t get it because — the law is not what’s stopping us. It’s our understanding that heroin is just bad.

**John:** Yeah. Heroin is bad.

**Craig:** It’s bad.

**John:** Lessons we’ve learned on podcasts.

**Craig:** Heroin is bad, you guys.

**John:** It’s not good at all.

**Craig:** Breaking news.

**John:** So, going back to the Stuart Friedel basketball conversation, the reason why we’re editing all these cards is because we are nearly done with the Kickstarter campaign. So, this is the last chance if people want one of these cards in the early part of 2015 is to go to our Kickstarter page. So, we are nearing 5,000 backers, which is crazy.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** We exceeded our fundraising goal. Thank you, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m one of those backers.

**John:** Which is fantastic. So, this podcast comes out on Tuesday. Thursday at noon the campaign shuts down. And it’s a hard out. Because when you actually set up the campaign you set the end date and that is the end date for all time.

**Craig:** Forever.

**John:** It’s done. No more. So, if you’d like a pack, that’s where you can get it. If you’d like to support the youth writing programs that we’re partnering with, that’s also a great place to go.

**Craig:** Hey, not to undermine the Writer Emergency Pack situation, but our live show on December 11th, tickets are on sale now for that?

**John:** They are on sale now. I can’t believe we left that out. Yes. So, if you would like to come to our live show in December 11, go to the Writers Guild Foundation. They’re the people who are selling the tickets. It’s wgfoundation.org. There will also be a link in the show notes. And the seating is quite limited, so really if you haven’t gotten tickets yet, you should maybe pause this podcast and go over there and get some tickets, because it will sell out, especially with those great guests.

**Craig:** And the money goes to charity. Once again, we lose.

**John:** Yes. Once again, a money-losing podcast.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Awesome. The last bit of follow up is previous weeks I described how I had this phone pitch and it was on a Friday at 4PM, which is the worst time for a phone pitch, but it went really well. And so now I think I can announce that the deal happened. It closed. And I’m going to be writing this movie.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** So, it’s called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is a kid’s book that you kind of probably remember from your childhood.

**Craig:** I totally remember that book from my childhood.

**John:** Yeah. So it was one of the most controversial and one of the most banned or sort of like on a lot of parent not favorite lists throughout our entire childhood. It’s written by Alvin Schwartz. Illustrated by Stephen Gammell. It’s a great collection, an anthology of sort of all of the stories that you sort of remember being creeped out by as a kid, so including like “the worms crawling, and the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.”

All of that stuff is in there. And so it’s going to be I think a potentially really cool movie, but I’m not supposed to spoil how we’re going to do it, but I think it’s going to be a very interesting and innovative way to make this movie.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. That’s a very cool project. My daughter in particular is a big fan of, there’s a current kid’s series that’s like a Goosebumps kind of series, but I can’t remember the name of it. Anyway, the idea of horror movies for children is great.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I loved like all the ghost stories when I was a kid. I loved all that stuff.

**John:** So, what I will tell you is that while this book is for children, the horror movie that we’re making out of it, I think hopefully captures how scary those books were when you were a kid, but is not strictly a kid’s movie. In fact, you should not take certain younger kids to this movie. To the degree like I can’t actually take the art into the house, because if my daughter saw it we would have nightmares.

**Craig:** Is the idea that it’s a — you don’t have to say anything that you don’t want to say, but is it a PG-13 kind of thing?

**John:** We are aiming for a PG-13.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** The same way that I loved Poltergeist.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or that I loved The Ring. Movies that are not gory, but man they can freak the bejesus out of you.

**Craig:** I love that. That’s the best kind of horror as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** So, we have high hopes. Lord knows anything can happen, but it’s been a very fun couple of weeks getting this all put together.

**Craig:** Where is this?

**John:** This is at CBS Films. And it’s such a strange experience going into CBS Films because I get there and I’m talking with the producer, and he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if you saw in the trades today.” And I’m like, oh god, what was in the trades today? And so Lions Gate is not distributing CBS Films’ films. And that was a change, but also like, oh, well Lions Gate is kind of awesome at doing this exact kind of thing. So, it feels like it’s going to be a change that will benefit the making of movies like this.

**Craig:** Who was distributing their movies prior?

**John:** They were self-distributing. They had their own distribution company.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. You know what? Good. That’s smart, frankly. Nothing wrong with —

**John:** Distribution is expensive.

**Craig:** Distributions are.

**John:** And distribution is expensive to maintain even if you don’t have a lot of movies going through it. That becomes the real stumbling block, without enough product like you have this team that you can’t keep continuously employed.

**Craig:** And distribution, we know as we discussed before that the big trick of distribution is that you need big huge right hand punches to sell your left hand jobs, you know. So, a movie like this that’s new IP and it’s not like say Hunger Games, right. A movie like this needs the weight of a Hunger Games behind it, so that Lions Gate can say, “Hey everybody, you want Hunger Games? Here is our package. Hunger Games, Scary Stories You Tell in the Dark.” You know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah. And that package is important throughout the entire process. So, that’s how you get the great theaters. That’s how you get the ArcLight versus the thing in Gardena. That’s how you get —

**Craig:** The thing in Gardena. By the way. Terrible name. Great, great cinema.

**John:** It’s one of the highest qualities that you can find anywhere.

**Craig:** Heading down to the thing, yeah.

**John:** Except for that one stain on the screen where somebody threw their Coke at the screen.

**Craig:** That was me.

**John:** All right. The old theatres that were across from USC, the USC Cinema Schools, there was this village, I think it was a three-plex or a four-plex. I remember going to see Last of the Mohicans and there literally was like this brown stain on the screen, because someone had just like taken a Coke and thrown it at the screen. And like they never washed it, they never cleaned it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And so you’re watching this movie that obviously a lot of care went in to making it. And there’s this brown stain.

**Craig:** Why do you think someone did that for — was it that movie or a prior movie?

**John:** No, I’m sure it was some previous movie. Some previous movie that really deserved to have a Coke thrown at it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that movie didn’t really.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, unless somebody was like, “Look, this is an embarrassment to the work of James Fenimore Cooper. [laugh]

**John:** “Stay alive no matter what occurs.” Splash.

**Craig:** Splash. “That was not in the book!”

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Yeah, some USC lit major.

**John:** Yeah. Daniel Day Lewis hater.

**Craig:** Oh, all one of them.

**John:** All one of them. So, anyway, it’s incredibly fun to be making this. My last point about sort of distributing in a package, it becomes important to get your film into a theater. It’s also important for getting your money out of that theater, which sounds really obvious.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, that’s right.

**John:** They will pay you very slowly unless you say like, “Oh, wait, you still haven’t paid us for that movie and we have The Hunger Games coming.” They are more likely to actually total up that money and write you the check that they need to write.

**Craig:** That’s true. Plus, you have a marketing department that likely just through the experience of marketing more movies and generally larger movies will be very, very good.

**John:** That is the hope.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** Excited to be writing that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** But, Craig I’m so excited that you just finished your script.

**Craig:** I did. Well, let’s just say that the two words that screw writers up more than any other two words in the English language are The End. We type The End and it is not at all the end. But, you do feel kind of an ending. It’s a very strange feeling, isn’t it?

**John:** It’s a little post-partum depression. You’re so excited to be done. And at the same time you’re like, but, but, but, especially in those last few weeks as you’re finishing something up. You are a person who writes this script. Like your entire being becomes consumed in the writing of this thing. And so when that thing is done, well, who are you?

**Craig:** That’s right. You have molded your day-to-day life around a routine of creating this thing. You are living in that world. And it is a world of possibility. And it’s still a world of possibility. But when you write the end and you get to the end of it, no matter how good you have felt along the way, or about the moments, suddenly it’s just a script. Isn’t that the hell. It’s just the worst feeling.

Like I’ve been living this thing and breathing this thing and imaging a world, creating — all the wonderful woo-woo stuff that writers say about being kissed by the cosmic joy. But then you print it out. And so it’s a PDF. [laughs] It’s like, huh, all that and this isn’t shooting rainbows out of its butt. It looks like every other script.

**John:** A couple memories that brings up. The first is finishing something and printing it out for the first time, and laser printers used to be quite so slow. And so a page would print out and I’d take it out of the printer and look at it. Inevitably I would find a typo just because I had pulled it out of the printer. And so it was like these weird things where like because it’s coming to you at a page at a time I started to recognize all these things and want to go through and fix them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Second is that advice that I remember being told like all the way back in probably junior high school is like well when you finish something, you put it in a drawer for two weeks and you don’t look at it. And then you pull it out so you can look at it fresh. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve never been able to sort of just completely walk away from something and look at it fresh. It’s like one of those great ideas in theory that rarely is practical or possible, partly because I’m generally giving it to someone trusted to read and I want to be able to have that conversation with them before two weeks from now.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can look at things in a fresh light, I suppose, after a year or two. No real reason to put something away for a year or two. Better to just hand it to somebody you trust. Or, if you are writing professionally, you don’t have a choice.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** You’re a week late. No matter how fast you write it, you’re a week late.

**John:** Yes you are.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you write it in three days, you’re a week late.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It’s like reverse Scotty.

**John:** So, in your situation, you were showing pages the whole time through. So, did that change your process? Because that doesn’t seem like what you would normally do. I think of you as being a Craig does the whole thing himself and then someone gets to read it. In this case, you were showing stuff all the way through. Did that change the process for you?

**Craig:** Not as much as I would have thought, in part because part of my process — this is one area where I know you and I are very different. You quite religiously don’t go backwards when you’re writing. I quite religious do go backwards. I’m constantly — every day I’m reviewing the prior eight pages.

And then that’s kind of how I ramp in to the next work. So, by doing it this way with Lindsay I wasn’t doing actually anything different than I normally do in that sense. The other very helpful thing is that she was incredibly supportive. And so all of her notes came in the form of questions. It was never, “I don’t like this.” It was more, “What did you mean by this? What if this happened? What about this?” And these were all just very positive things. And, of course, there was a lot of praise along the way, too. Not, of course. [laughs] Surprisingly I should say, there was a lot of praise along the way, which is something I’ve actually never had because when I’m writing by myself and my creative associate, Jack, can attest to this, mostly I just sit and go, “This is the worst thing anyone has ever done. I’m the worst.”

Actually, what I used to say is, “I don’t even know what this is.” You know, there’s a lot of that that goes on. So, it was great to have somebody say, “I know what this is. This is good. I like this.”

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, we’ll see what happens now.

**John:** Was there any good boy syndrome kicking in though? I wonder if having someone like Lindsay who is mom-like in the best ways, did that motivate you to work harder, work differently? How did it change your approach to the daily work? Did it?

**Craig:** It did a little bit. Yes. For one, she has a strong emphasis on clarity. Not just clarity for story sake, but also clarity for the reader. And her emphasis on clarity is actually very admirable and very optimistic. Her emphasis on clarity is this: we’re making this movie. I and you, and if it happens Scott Frank will be directing, the three of us are going to be in rooms with people who are going to ask us questions. Let’s answer as many of those questions as we can now, without breaking the script or making it — and sometimes, occasionally I would say, “Okay, I can’t do that. That’s just ridiculous.” [laughs]

And then she would agree. Mostly.
**John:** I should stress, when you say answer the questions, in some cases you’re really talking about taking away the questions.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Basically making it so that question doesn’t even come up.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. So, we had many discussions about where people were standing and how we could get across where they were standing and how far away they were and all the rest of it.

But, that did change the way I was approaching things because when I was writing I then kept in mind a certain amount of clarity, which in the end actually didn’t really — I think it helps the read. Actually, I liked it. I like that style of it.

There was a good boy syndrome in as much as there were times when I disagreed with her. But there were most notably what would happen is we would have a discussion, she would say here’s six things to consider. I would consider all six things. And then come back and say I’ve done four of them. These two, I do not. And you know what? She never once said, “No, no, no, you have to.” Every time she said, “Well, if you thought about it and that’s your reason, I agree.”

It was actually kind of great. I guess the point is that I’ll always have good boy syndrome because I want to make people happy. You can’t work in our business and not want to make people happy. But, it wasn’t a toxic good boy syndrome. And Lindsay also had good producer syndrome. It is interesting. She wanted me to like her notes.

You know, every now and then she would say something and I would go, oh my god, that’s why we get along so well. She would say, “Here’s something.” And I would say, oh, that’s very good. I like that. And she’d go, “Well thank you. I thought it was good. I was hoping you would think it was good.”

It’s the same. We’re the same. You know, so many of us are the same no matter the different jobs we do. We just want to be liked.

**John:** The other thing I think is probably crucial about the way she was framing these conversations was this is the movie we’re trying to make, so that way it becomes not a criticism of your words on the page, but it’s about this shared vision and this shared goal of like let’s make this movie. And so let’s always frame these discussions in how are we going to make this a great movie, not about this work that you just did, Craig, and whether it’s good or bad.

**Craig:** That’s right. And ideally if it goes well, then instead of what I normally have which is I wander into a room, at least initially alone, and then rally people to the cause through the script. Now I walk into the room with an ally, which is nice. It’s new.

So, I really enjoyed it. It’s not something that I would do I don’t think with anyone else. No offense to everybody else in the world. But, it takes a certain amount of deep trust there. And even then, who knows, it might have not worked, but it did. At least, I can’t speak to the [final] product —

**John:** Well, you can speak to the process. You can at least speak to like that you got through this script is terrific. And so I don’t know if you know that I was racing you and I wanted to finish my script before you finished your script, because we started our scripts at about the same time. But you finished and I did not finish.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So, I am past the midpoint, but I got pulled off to do another job, and then of course this Kickstarter. So, you finished first. Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Well, I can’t really take — there is no prize for first. Also, you had a good excuse. You had one good excuse, another job, and one ridiculous, awful excuse, a Kickstarter.

**John:** The Kickstarter madness.

**Craig:** Just disgusting.

**John:** I will say, I did write the last scene. And that is always an incredibly important part for me, because I tend to write that pretty early in the process so I know kind of where I’m going to. And the ability to sort of have that last moment fixed and encapsulated is in many ways as important to me as knowing what that first scene is going to be.

**Craig:** I agree. In fact, where I differ from you is I don’t write it, but I know what it is. And I couldn’t wait to write it because it should be your favorite scene in the movie, frankly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it was held back as this little reward for finishing. And so, you know, but man, when I finally finished it I was, you’re right, when you finish a screenplay, even though it’s intermediate, even though there will be another draft. Even though there will be changes. Even though it will be transformed into a movie and the document will disappear, as it should. You do feel like you accomplished something and it’s a weird thing for us as screenwriters to acknowledge that we have accomplished something and yet also at the same time we have accomplished nothing. [laughs] It’s very odd.

**John:** It is. Yet, there’s something very special about that first draft, which is entirely yours, before the building starts to get built. Before all the necessary changes that have to happen to change it from this idealized form to its actual form, there’s something really terrific about that first draft.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Congratulations on that.

**Craig:** Well thank you. And congratulations to you on your new project and congratulations to Stuart for being — staying alive.

**John:** For being Stuart.

**Craig:** Staying alive.

**John:** Next thing we want to take a look at is this article that everybody tweeted at us this week by Walt Hickey. It’s in fivethirtyeight, the data science blog. The headline, which is umbrage-inducing, “How Data Can Help You Write a Better Screenplay.”

**Craig:** Hold me back. [laughs] Hold me back.

**John:** And so I read this headline and I’m like, oh no, that’s just Craig bait. That’s like little someone has an algorithm for like how can we make Craig Mazin angry. That’s the headline.

**Craig:** The best part was that when I saw that headline I thought, okay, calm down. It’s not going to be that bad. And it was actually worse than I thought it would be.

**John:** Oh, see, this is going to be fun, because I actually thought the article itself was not nearly as inflammatory and actually had some things —

**Craig:** I hated it.

**John:** That were interesting to talk about. I don’t think useful for screenwriters necessarily, but interesting to talk about as a general sense.

**Craig:** If your praise is “not useful for screenwriters” and the title of it is “How Data Can Help you Write a Better Screenplay,” I actually think that’s a brutal condemnation here.

**John:** I strongly suspect that Walt Hickey did not write his headline for his article, because it doesn’t — because his article does not support that headline at all.

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** Because there’s nothing about helping you write a screenplay. There’s nothing about that in here at all.

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** So, here’s the proper headline. Here’s I would say is the actual fair headline that does not attract as much umbrage or clicks, but is actually accurate to what the article is about: “In a statistical survey of the blacklist.com’s scripts, these are the patterns we’ve noticed.”

**Craig:** That, honestly, is useless. It’s useless. And this is shocking to me, because honestly these guys should know better. And Nate Silver who runs fivethirtyeight.com should have really said, “Hey, wait a second. I mean, our bread and butter is being rational.” And this is just irrational nonsense. First, yeah, go ahead.

**John:** We should frame what is actually happening here. So, this article takes a look at the data from fivethirtyeight.com and basically anonymized a bunch of the reviews — so they weren’t looking at the actual projects themselves, but just the genre, the reviews of things, the most frequent criticisms of these different projects. And they were able to look based on genre and based on response what types of scripts are getting positive reviews versus negative reviews.

Now, I think this article tries to go too far and say like, well these are the kinds of scripts that get these good reviews and therefore become these kinds of movies. There’s actually no evidence at all to support that. All they’re really looking at is the people who have put their scripts on the blacklist.com and had them reviewed, this is data that they’re pulling from that information. Nothing about the actual finished movies. So, when it says — the first two paragraphs where they talk about Interstellar, that’s just random BS that should not be in there.

**Craig:** It’s all bad. This is all bad. And let me get to the heart of why I was shocked by this. Shocked.

**John:** Shocked.

**Craig:** Shocked. Yes, obviously the massive flaw floating at the surface of this mess is that they are attempting to analyze what makes a good screenplay from a population sample that is not at all accurate. Sorry, a sample that’s not at all accurate to the appropriate population. The sample that they’re using are Black List screenplays, which has nothing to do, frankly, with the sample of say professional screenplays from which most movies are drawn.

The Black List is open. It’s just people throwing their stuff in there. But the real — the real problem with this is that what they’re doing is they’re looking at trends. Trends have absolutely nothing to do with success. In fact, I would argue that they have the opposite to do with success. Let me explain.

They’ll say things in here like, he’s talking about courtroom dramas, I think.

**John:** Yeah. We make a lot of courtroom dramas, don’t we Craig? Our cinemas are overflowing with courtroom dramas.

**Craig:** So, you know, he talks about these courtroom dramas, and he’ll say take courtroom dramas. “Because of the legal eagles writing them,” that’s an unfounded comment, “only two percent of such scripts were flagged as having logic holes or unanswered questions. However, a whopping 47 percent of them suffered from unnatural, clichéd or on-the-nose dialogue.” So, he’s finding this problem that seems to exist with courtroom dramas, but it’s not a problem. Because here’s the fact: success in screenplays is an outlier. Success should be anti-statistical. We are looking for things that are not a trend.

Here’s the most uncommon trend in screenplays: quality. Okay? So if you have a situation where, well, 50 percent of our comedies rate an average of seven out of ten, but only two percent of our courtroom dramas rate a seven or higher out of ten, you might think, well, comedy is the way to go.

Wrong. Because, we don’t know how many of those comedies sell. We also don’t know how many of them are seven, eight, nines, or tens. And here is the other important point: all the courtroom dramas, all of them, could be a one, but one of them is a ten. That’s a great script. That gets made.

None of this analysis has any relevance. None of it. It is flawed. It is both flawed internally and flawed externally. It is a terrible — this is terrible. And, Walt, I think you know. I think you know that this was a mess. Don’t do this anymore. This doesn’t make any sense.

I mean, come on, critical thinking here. Ugh. Look here’s my problem, honestly John, this paragraph made me angry. Following what they’re talking about, you know, the complicated relationship between genres and a best picture nomination, which again has nothing to do with quality.

**John:** These amateur scripts in Black List.

**Craig:** And not even anything to do with quality. Being nominated for Best Picture is just what the Academy thinks. Okay, anyway, he says, “This is also part of a larger question about the difficulties of writing a good movie. What makes a screenplay good? What makes it bad? Are writers in certain genres at an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to certain elements like plot, premise and characters? And if so, how can we show this?”

Get ready. Hold on. Hold on. Grab something now, because this is what he says, “And if so, how can we show this? All we need is a data set to draw from.” That’s all we need! That’s it! And we’ve solved —

**John:** More data!

**Craig:** Yes. All we need is a data set and we’ve unlocked the mystery. You’ve unlocked the mystery of nothing. First of all, your data set sucks. And, no, all you need is not a data set to draw from. You don’t have the answer. You’ll never get the answer from a data set because the whole point is that the answer exists counter to the data. Counter!

And that, my friends, that is the umbrage of the week.

**John:** And mic drop.

The final chart in this thing lists the most common problems in amateur screenplays. So, if you take nothing else from this article, the final chart in here shows the most common problems in amateur screenplays, which I think could actually be useful if you were a person who had your script on blacklist.com and you got flagged for one of these things. You would at least know like how often are they flagging for these things.

These are the list from most commonly flagged to least commonly flagged. Underdeveloped plot. Underdeveloped characters. Lack of escalation. Poor structure. Unnatural dialogue. Logic holes. Commercially unviable. Derivative or unoriginal. Not cinematic. Or too long.

The only reason I kind of like that too long being last is that it’s the first thing that everyone is freaking out about. They’re like, oh my god, my script is 122 pages, it’s going to be too long and they’re going to say it’s too long. No, that’s actually one of the least likely things they’re going to flag it for.

They’re mostly going to say like your story sucks, I didn’t believe your characters.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, okay. So, this is a list of problems that a screenplay can have. This is a percentage of problems that those readers had with that pool of screenplays. We can also point out that, again, on the outlier theory, any script that actually emerges from the Black List and gets produced, and that’s been happening happily, my guess is at least one or two of their readers would pick one of these things.

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** So, again, it doesn’t reflect success. I have a different theory about the too long, and it’s a pessimistic theory actually, John, because I’m in a pessimistic mood.

**John:** No one sensed that.

**Craig:** Your theory is that people should feel free to ignore the admonition, the — I agree — inaccurate and unnecessary admonition, “Keep you scripts short,” because look they’re not really having a problem with the length of scripts. My theory is they’re not having a problem with lengths of scripts because everybody is freaking out over the length of their scripts and refusing to send in anything that is longer than 115 pages. So, they’re not getting long scripts anymore, because everybody has lost their freaking minds about page length.

**John:** Yeah. That’s probably more likely the case.

**Craig:** I read this thing and literally I needed beta blockers when I was done with it. [laughs] I don’t actually take beta blockers, but I think I could have used beta blockers.

**John:** So, here’s a possibility, and I wonder if this is a statistical study that would be meaningful. So, I don’t know if you know that there are districts across the country, they do this thing where they can sort of measure teacher’s effectiveness by taking a kid from one class and then checking to see in the next grade whether that kid progressed or did not progress in that teacher’s next room. So, it’s a way of sort of tracking kids through time. And therefore you can measure the kids in this teacher’s class tend to have progressed more than kids in another teacher’s class.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, it’s a rough way of doing that. I wonder if you could do the same kind of thing by basically rating the reviewers as a place like blacklist.com. Basically saying like how often does this reader give negative reviews to writers. Is there a specific genre that they always give bad reviews to? In cases where something has been reviewed twice, how often is it likely that they are the lower reviewer rather than the higher reviewer?

There probably is data there somewhere if they’ve done enough of these things. You could actually check and see sort of like, you know, a profile of what these reviewers actually like and what their tastes are and whether they agree with the consensus or are outliers from the consensus.

**Craig:** But the problem is what do you do with it? Because let’s say you have one guy that’s just remarkably grumpy.

**John:** Then if you’re Franklin Leonard, maybe you fire him.

**Craig:** Maybe. Or maybe or you go, this remarkably grumpy guy was the only one that loved this script that actually got bought and made.

**John:** Yeah. He was the truth teller.

**Craig:** That’s the problem is that this whole thing is all about trends and the middle, the big thick middle. So, for instance Ms. Hagen, this is Kate Hagen. Kate Hagen, does she work for the Black List?

**John:** She works for the Black List. Yes.

**Craig:** So Kate Hagen says to Walt Hickey, “Sports dramas tend to do really well on the site because you’ve got a fusion of a real-life concept or event to then structure a narrative around.” Okay. But what does that have to do with the purpose of the site? The purpose of the site isn’t to do well on the site. The purpose of the site is to get the hell out of the site. You see what my point is? So, that actually doesn’t mean anything.

It reminds me of a story that someone told me, and I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but I love it. In the early days when they were first making Seinfeld, they had to test it, and it was notoriously the lowest testing pilot in NBC history. That, I think, has been talked about before. But as the story goes, what happened was they tested it and the numbers came back terribly. And they sat down with Warren Littlefield, who was running NBC at the time, and he said, “Listen, this one low number here for this particular thing, we know that’s an artifact. We know that in television shows that have this kind of arrangement,” for instance like a show set in New York, “will always get a lower number on this, but it actually doesn’t translate to the success or failure of a show. It’s a statistical artifact.”

And they were like, okay, well that’s good to know. And he said, “But anyway, we should change it.” And they said why. And he was like, “Well, because of the testing.”

Now, you’re just chasing the testing. You’re not chasing what the testing is supposed to test for. And my sense here is that all this is doing is really just trying to figure out how to get a pretty decent middling number on the Black List. Your job, if you’re on the Black List, honestly, the perfect script is the one that gets a bunch of ones and a bunch of tens. You know, like in my mind, who cares if everybody agrees it’s okay.

**John:** Yeah. A bunch of sixes is not the same. And so you could have two scripts and if the average score was a seven, that doesn’t mean as much as if there were a bunch of tens and a bunch of ones and it drifted down.

**Craig:** You want to be the outlier.

**John:** I’m trying to do a max/median/mode, and I don’t have the right numbers for it, but that’s the thing. If there’s people who love it, those are your champions and those are the people who are doing to say, “I want to make this movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah, the least useful thing, frankly, I mean, I suppose the only useful part of this average overall score is that it might inspire some people to read that script who might not have been interested to read it. But, see, if I were running the Black List, I don’t know how they do it. If they just provide a mean overall score, that’s actually not as interesting to me as a chart, a graph, you know, where you show a one to ten and then you show the amount of people that have broken out between one and ten. I think IMDb does this for their stuff.

Because if I see spikes at the bottom and the top, that’s way more interesting to me than sort of a blob. I want spikes.

**John:** A bell curve distribution opinion on your script is not likely to be a good sign.

**Craig:** That’s right. I want spikes. I want outliers. So, this article was bad. And Walt Hickey, I want you to do better. And I think you can do better. Nate Silver, no, no, no.

**John:** Let’s move on to our series, I think you’re proposing this as a series.

**Craig:** A series.

**John:** That’s the new trend in podcasts is series. So, let’s make this a series. And the first topic is the perfect studio executive.

**Craig:** Right. So, the idea —

**John:** Talk us through what a perfect studio executive might consist of.

**Craig:** Well, the idea of the series is that we want to do something called The Perfect series where we go through each kind of job in Hollywood and talk about what the perfect version of that job would be. So, we might as well start with the studio executive because they’re sort of the bosses sitting at the top of this whole thing making these decisions.

So, you know, it’s an interesting thing. The studio executive job has changed over time, even in my time. I think you’ve probably noticed it, too.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** As the studios fell under a much more corporate control, and as they reduced the amount of movies they made, and as they began to rely more heavily on tent poles, there’s less of the old kind of job that they used to do which was read a bunch of drafts of a script and give a bunch of notes and try and try again. Now, it’s really about managing these projects that are sort of born as movies that cannot be stopped.

But to me, the perfect studio executive is somebody who is willing to focus on the filmmakers, the writer and the director. And who will support them and when things run counter to what we’ll call quality, to sit them down and explain honestly what’s going on and then ask how can we have our cake and eat it, too.

Far too often I think studio executives hide the reality because they’re ashamed. They’re embarrassed that they just got their leash yanked because there needs to be some character in there for some market. Or they’re having a bunch of problems, or somebody above them is demanding a car chase.

**John:** So, I think honesty is a fundamental quality you’re looking for in a studio executive. I would also say intelligence. And intelligence I’m going to sort of combine with knowledge, is that sometimes you encounter studio executives who will come to you with an answer, saying like we need to have a car chase here, or we can’t do this, or we can’t afford this. And they’re just — they’re basically telling you what they’ve been told, because they don’t actually fundamentally have the information about what it is that needs — why that thing needs to happen that way. They’ve just been told that, and they are parroting it back.

And so you want the person who has either the knowledge, or the intellectual curiosity to find the answer for why this thing needs to be a certain way. I remember being on the set of a film and we were doing this night shoot. And there was a real concern that like is there actually going to be enough light. And so the two studio executives showed up and they’re like, okay, where are the lights.

And I’m like, the lights are those giant condors above you that are providing the light. Because it’s actually the middle of the night and it looks really bright. Those are the lights.

And so it was frustrating to be talking with — I lost some trust and faith in these executives because, wait, I thought you’d made a bunch of movies. They really didn’t have a fundamental understanding of the filmmaking process.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s crucial. You have to have had some time on the set, in the trenches, in the editing room. I have to believe that you really know what this is like, even if you’re not good at doing a director’s job. Great. That’s terrific. You’re a studio executive. That’s fantastic. But you need to know what it is a director is doing.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s easier for them to wrap their minds around what writers are doing, because that involves reading. But directors and studio executives often clash because, you’re right, there are studio executives who are under-powered in the experience department. And that’s not helpful for them. And it’s not helpful or the director. The truth is, we want to make studio executives happy. What I always look for in somebody is somebody who will be honest with me about the why something has happened and then is respectful of the fact that I want to still make, do as a good of a job as I can. And there have been times when I’ve just, somebody has just pointed a finger at me and said, “No, I’m sorry. We’re actually saying we don’t want it to be good. We want it to be this.”

And that’s hard because you, I’m just saying to my imperfect studio executive, the Goofus, look at Gallant. Gallant sits there and gets what he wants with the filmmaker, and the filmmaker still feels good at the end. Goofus just points a finger and says, “Do what I’ve been told to tell you to do.”

And by the way, if you are Gallant, what happens is you will — the perfect studio executive has close personal loyalty-based relationships with key filmmaking partners. That actually is more job protection than just doing what you’ve been told, I’m guessing. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.

**John:** I think experience will — I think the data scientists will be able to figure that out. Because essentially if having a hit movie, that may buy you some time in that seat, but you know what — did you really make that movie? If you were the person who helped James Cameron get his vision onto the screen, that’s going to count for a lot more.

**Craig:** That’s right. Saying, look, this director that we trust wants to work with me. I’ll tell you something, studio executives, you have a nice situation in a weird way, the way that screenwriters kind of have a nice situation. There’s a lot of people out there doing your job poorly. It doesn’t take much to shine. So shine. And you will be rewarded. You will be rewarded. And if you get that pool of writers and directors that you know deliver wanting to work with you, that’s pretty great.

**John:** So, my next point about the perfect studio executive is that he or she is really good at the stuff that filmmakers are not good at. And that means a lot of times dealing with other departments. Dealing with marketing. Dealing with distribution. Dealing with all of the other layers of corporate stuff that has to be dealt with that we are not privy to and we’re not good at it.

So, the great studio executive has a vision for what this movie is. And when she goes in to talk with the marketing department and they throw a bunch of stuff back at her, she can say, “That isn’t the movie. That is not what the movie is. That’s not how this is going to be.”

It’s a person who can communicate the vision of the movie to all the different people, like the merchandising people from Hasbro about like this is what the movie is and can get their feedback and communicate it back to the filmmakers that it has to happen in ways that makes sense.

**Craig:** It’s funny. That actually is a way that I think things have changed. Because for a lot of studios now, the traditional relationship which is what you just described, has changed into, “No, the marketing department is telling me what the movie is. And the merchandising people are telling me what the movie is. All the more reason for the perfect studio executive to turn back to her writer and her director and say here’s honestly what’s going on, let’s not freak out, let’s help each other. Let’s together, I’m going to give you what I know, you’re going to give me what you know, and now I can go back to them with some substantive alternative plan. And let’s see if we can win this one.

So, something to think about, again, as you’re choosing between Goofus or Gallant, by two favorite twins.

**John:** They’re the best twins.

Now, some of what we’re describing overlaps with what a producer does, because a producer should also have some of that role of insulating the filmmakers from some of this craziness, but the producer is fundamentally CEO of this little corporation that is the movie, versus the studio executive who is part of this giant corporation that’s making ten movies at once. And there’s all this stuff going on that we’re not going to privy to and honestly we probably shouldn’t be privy to. But hopefully we’re going to have a champion in there who is making sure that when it comes time to our movie it’s being treated really, really well.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things. Craig, I see what yours is on the list and I’m just so happy that you’re keeping true to the spirit of Scriptnotes in that we are a show about women’s reproduction.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We are a show about razors. And we are a show about cooking.

**Craig:** Correct. I think in the past one of my cool things was brining. I’m a big briner. This Thanksgiving my sister and her family are heading out to the west coast to join us and I opted to get a Heritage turkey. And I’ve just been doing a lot of turkey reading, you know, so the turkeys that we get in stores like Butterball and so on, they are — essentially they’ve been bred over time, selective breeding over time to be super breast heavy. Yeah, hey, you know who’s back, Sexy Craig.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** Yeah, Sexy Craig comes back every Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday for Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** I like my turkeys with huge breasts. Huge. They’re so big that those turkeys actually can’t really stand up straight. I mean, it’s amazing actually what we’ve done.

**John:** We’ve created these deformed animals.

**Craig:** They are. But, you know, if you like breast meat and American stew, yeah, then that works. And they’re not, you know, for all people’s handwringing over corporate factory farming genetic freaks of nature, they taste pretty good.

But Heritage turkeys are turkeys that are essentially from an unselectively bred line of the original three or four different kinds of turkeys that ran around America back in the day when we were genociding our way across the continent. And they are different. They’re smaller breasted, bigger thighs, and wings. God, this is so sexy.

**John:** [laughs] I know.

**Craig:** It’s so sexy.

**John:** Yeah, when you talk about wings, everyone just immediately goes there.

**Craig:** Smaller breasts and bigger thighs. Honestly, that’s kind of my thing. So, anywho, and it’s a different kind of flavor. I’m not opting for this because, you know, I think GMO is perfectly fine. I’m a skeptic and a pro-science guy. And I know that almost everything we eat has been genetically modified either through science or just people growing stuff the way they grow them.

**John:** Look at the history of corn and you’ll see that corn is completely made up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, bananas. Bananas, like the yellow banana we have, that’s the most GMO’d thing on the planet. Not by Monsanto, by banana farmers. Anywho, as Seth Rudetsky says, anywho, I’m giving this Heritage turkey a try just out of curiosity. I want to see if it tastes better, different, more interesting. It is certainly more expensive. I will say that. But I like the fact that it’s an option.

So, I will have a turkey review for you all post-Thanksgiving.

**John:** Fantastic. I did a Heritage turkey a couple of years ago and it worked out just fine. It wasn’t the best turkey I ever had, but it wasn’t bad, and it was interesting and it was different, so I salute you in attempting to do it.

You will discover that it will take longer to cook because it is heavier dark meat. You may actually just want to change some of your technique and basically pre-cut it down so that you’re doing your legs and thighs first before you’re trying to do your breast, because it may just be forever in there. But you’ll see.

**Craig:** What I like to do, a little method, I’m a big believer in Cook’s Illustrated, they’re geniuses.

**John:** Oh my god, they’re so smart.

**Craig:** You foil tent the breast, so you can actually let it — the legs and thighs and wings will cook faster — they’ll cook hotter, I guess.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Slows down the breast cooking, speeds up the, yeah, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. And if it’s a disaster, guess what? Everybody is there for the side dishes anyway.

**John:** 100 percent. So, my One Cool Thing this week is the show that perhaps people have already watched, but I just started watching it and it’s really good. It’s Transparent on Amazon. Jay Duplass is a friend who I got to connect up with again in Austin for the Austin Film Festival. He is great in the show. Everyone is great in the show.

And I will admit to being skeptical of Amazon when they started doing their TV thing. I was especially skeptical about this whole process where they shoot a pilot and then put it up for there for everyone to look at and then they decide what shows are going to shoot.

I’ve actually been convinced that maybe that’s not such a bad thing, because having shot pilots that never aired or never got seen by the world, at least in the case of the Amazon pilots, they exist out there in the universe. And so people loves Transparent from when it was a pilot. The rest of the show is also really, really good.

So, I would urge you to watch that if you have the opportunity to watch it.

**Craig:** Guess what’s coming?

**John:** It’s a siren.

**Craig:** Multiple sirens.

**John:** I love it. So, what have you done this time, Craig?

**Craig:** It’s not good. [laughs] It’s not good. I actually really, most of the time when I commit a crime, you know, I just do it because I feel like it. And I feel fine afterwards. That’s, you know, like a real sociopath. But this time honestly I crossed the line. I should not have done that.

**John:** Yeah. Somewhere between victim number three and number four, you stopped to think for a moment like, wow, I may have gone too far. But by the time you got to victim six or seven you’re like, you know what? This feels right.

**Craig:** Sometimes the only way out is through.

**John:** 100 percent. Sometimes you’ve just got to put the accelerator down and just keep killing.

**Craig:** Just keep killing. JKK.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. So, if you would like to talk to Craig about his murder spree, you can find him @clmazin. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

That’s also where you’ll find the show notes for this show and all of our other episodes. On iTunes we are — just search for us on iTunes. We are Scriptnotes there. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app, so you can listen to all the back episodes there and on the Android store of your choice.

We have just now crossed 1,000 paid subscribers.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So, we are going to be recording a dirty episode that is just for our premium subscribers. If you would like to be a premium subscriber, go to scriptnotes.net and that will let you listen to all of the back episodes, some special episodes we’re putting up this week, and the dirty episode when we get that recorded.

**Craig:** So dirty.

**John:** It’s going to be so good.

**Craig:** It’s going to be filthy.

**John:** You can also join us on December 11th in Hollywood. The Writers Guild Foundation is throwing our live Scriptnotes Holiday Spectacular.

**Craig:** And that’s going to sell out.

**John:** That’s going to sell out. And that will be — I’ll bet it’ll be dirty in person, but then Matthew will probably cut it down so that it’s clean for air. So, if you want to hear the dirty version, maybe show up live. That would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. And just get your tickets quickly because we are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.

**John:** We’re the Elton John/Bernie Taupin of podcasts.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Plus, our special guests are super special this year, so I think it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s actually a spectacular lineup. Oh man, you know, B.J. Novak, he’s in that last shot of Inglourious Basterds, looking down at the swastika they’ve carved into Christophe Waltz’s head. It’s fantastic. It’s great.

**John:** It’s pretty great. This is the last week for Writer Emergency Packs, so Thursday at noon is the cutoff. And so if you want one, get one. Thank you to everyone who has joined us and backed us there. Our outro this week, well, I should say first off our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our outro this week comes from RJ Sampson, who didn’t compose this, but he found this thing on the Internet. It is actually a TV spot for Restasis, an eye drop, for people with chronically dry eyes.

And, weirdly, it’s exactly our outro.

**Craig:** What the…Restasis.

**John:** Restasis. I just love that you pick five notes, people are going to pick the same five.

**Craig:** Of course. Restasis, do they list the side effects of Restasis on the website?

**John:** Yeah, umbrage.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, here we go.

**John:** It’s terrible. Craig, thank you so much for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** I’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-show/) for the Scriptnotes Holiday Show
* [The Book with No Pictures](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0803741715/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B.J. Novak
* [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com) is [on Kickstarter until Thursday](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [How Data Can Help You Write A Better Screenplay](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-data-can-help-you-write-a-better-screenplay/) by Walt Hickey
* [Heritage turkeys](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_turkey) on Wikipedia, and the [Heritage Turkey Foundation](http://heritageturkeyfoundation.org)
* [Transparent](http://www.amazon.com/Pilot-HD/dp/B00I3MNF6S) on Amazon Prime
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) submitted by Scriptnotes listener RJ Sampson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))