Search Results for: slugline

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi. This is Craig. If you’re in the car with your children or at home with your children, you may not want to play this episode too close to their delicate little ears. We’re going to be using some bad language, some R-rated language. John asked me to do this warning this time because he was concerned that usually when he does it, people think at first that I might have died, but I didn’t. I’m alive. Now get your kids out of the room.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 225 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we have Tess Morris, the writer of Man Up, and she’s here to talk with us about romantic comedies. And we’re so excited because we just saw her movie and it’s really great. And so everyone can see her movie but we can also talk about the thing that her movie is which is a romantic comedy and it’s not a shame to be a romantic comedy.

Craig, you just watched it so I know you have so many things you want to say to Tess.

**Craig:** Fresh in my mind, the tears have just dried on my freshly bearded cheeks.

**John:** Yeah, people might have a chance to see that beard on December 9th. We’re doing our live show in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Hi, I’m Segue Man. Natasha Leggero, Riki Lindhome, and Malcolm Spellman will be our guests for that show along with some other folks who are not quite confirmed yet, but who I think are going to be fantastic.

People have been writing in with questions, questions like is there a Three Page Challenge at this live Scriptnotes? No, there’s not. Do I need to reserve a specific seat? And my belief is that no, it is general admission. But the most important question is, where can I get a ticket? And the tickets are available at the Writers Guild Foundation website, wgfoundation.org. They are $20. The proceeds benefit the great programs of the Writers Guild Foundation.

So you should come see us because as we’re recording this, we’re more than halfway sold out. So we might be sold out by the time you listen to this. You should probably pause the podcast right now and get yourself a ticket to the live show.

**Craig:** Fools, fools for waiting.

**John:** They are fools.

**Craig:** I mean do they not know that we’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting?

**John:** Yeah. I mean the younger people might not even know what that reference is but, you know, they might think that is important.

**Craig:** Hey, kids. We’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting. If that doesn’t motivate you, you’re right, we’re old.

**John:** Yeah, Wikipedia that. In the mail bag this week, a couple of questions came in about Amazon Storywriter. Do you know what Amazon Storywriter is?

**Craig:** Not only do I know what it is. I went and actually fiddled with it even though you suggested on Twitter that I never would, I already had, by that point.

**John:** Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So what did you think of Amazon Storywriter? Or do you want to describe what it is for people?

**Craig:** Well, as far as I could tell, I mean I didn’t go in-depth, but it appears that Amazon has created their own screenwriting software. So it’s basically a word processor that formats automatically in our screenwriting format. All the standard stuff. It’s Courier. It’s got all of your basic elements. And it works pretty much like they all do, combination of tab and return.

And it’s free and it’s Cloud based so everything saves on their servers and then you can then very easily pipe it through to their Amazon Studio thing for submissions. Also, it does export to FDX which is the Final Draft format. This whole thing by the way, side note, Final Draft I believe, I believe that company is going to die. The format will survive and I hope that we eventually kill that format too because it’s nasty, but the format will survive.

Anyway, back to this. It actually worked quite nicely. I mean, it’s not fully featured in terms of revisions and production work and all the rest of it but it was quite elegant. It worked very nice. It was smooth, looked nice.

**John:** Yeah. So you say it uses tab and return but really it’s more like — it’s based on Fountain, which is the format that I co-created the syntax, so you’re just typing in plain text and it’s interpreting what you’re doing and figuring out what the different pieces and parts are. And that part actually worked reasonably well.

**Craig:** Wait, Amazon stole your shit?

**John:** Didn’t steal it. Actually, it’s a public format that we created called Fountain.

**Craig:** They don’t have to even acknowledge that they took it?

**John:** No, no. That’s what open source is. It’s like it’s out there in the world for the world to use. And so their implementation of it is actually pretty good except they left out some kind of important things like bolds or italics or centering.

**Craig:** Yeah, I noticed that I couldn’t bold slug lines, and also I couldn’t, like there’s no way to automatically set it. So for instance, I like to have two line breaks before a new scene header, and it didn’t seem like that was automatable.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not automatable yet. So it does some of the stuff that Highland does where you can throw a PDF at it and it will melt it down and bring it out as plain text so you can edit. So that’s kind of nice. It’s just trying to do a lot of things that Highland is trying to do or that Slugline is trying to do or really any of the other screenwriting apps are trying to do and it does an okay job with it. It’s all online. It’s free-ish.

I don’t really think that many people are going to use it in any meaningful capacity. Though I think you’re going to have a lot of people who write like two scenes in it and then never touch it again. That’s my hunch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out. I mean listen, you know, my whole thing is, I’m basically rooting for whoever Final Draft is playing against so if it doesn’t hurt anybody, I’m all for it. I mean I still think that there are better options. I get very squirmy about the Cloud based option. Just the idea that it’s only Cloud based, I know that you can export it and save it locally but I don’t like it so much.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Next bit of follow up in the mail bag is from Pam. And Pam writes, I have this one-woman crusade. It’s futile, but I persevere nonetheless. I would love if people would stop using the word dick derogatorily. My dad’s name is Dick. He’s an amazing, wonderful, caring man. One of the most important people in my life. Whenever I hear people using the word dick pejoratively, it hurts me on his behalf. You guys use it a lot especially this [laughs] — that’s the voice of Tess Morris breaking through, not even —

**Craig:** [Laughs] Tess, you’re not even on the show yet. You have to wait for your spot.

**Tess Morris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I’m glad you’re here.

**Tess:** Sorry.

**John:** It feels like it’s been increasing exponentially in film lately actually. Craig, what is your opinion of the word dick?

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite words. It’s weird but this whole thing is basically delusional except for this one moment of awesome clarity where she says, “I realize it’s futile.” Yes, Pam, it’s futile. The word dick exists simultaneously as both a pejorative for penis or a person who’s a penis-like person.

**Tess:** Thanks for clearing that up, Craig.

**Craig:** Right. Or it is short for Richard. Your dad’s name is Dick. I know a lot of guys named Dick and they’re cool guys. And I mean Dick Cook was a beloved executive at Disney. Everybody loves him still. And the thing is, if your dad, trust me when I tell you, whatever pain you’re feeling on his behalf, he’s heard it way worse, way worse. If he’s made it all the way to this stage of his life, I’m assuming that he’s at least middle age, if not older, and he’s still going by Dick, this is a hardened man. He’s going to be fine. He knows the world isn’t going to stop using the word dick. That’s crazy.

**Tess:** My dad’s called Richard.

**John:** Oh, yeah. And is he okay?

**Tess:** He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine. But also, I think one of my favorite quotes ever from a film is 37 Dicks from Clarks, you know. “Was it 36 dicks?” When he finds out how many dicks that his girlfriend —

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Has and he just can’t get it out of his head, can he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And it always makes me laugh.

**Craig:** I think that dick is a great counterbalance to some of the pejorative words that we toss on people that are related to female genitalia. Dick is our kind of cool balanced way of saying, no, no, no, if you’re called either male or female genitalia, we’re saying we don’t like you.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to Pam’s dad. I feel like —

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** The challenge is how we —

**Craig:** You mean Dick?

**Tess:** You mean Dick.

**John:** Yes.

**Tess:** We don’t know Dick.

**John:** We don’t know him at all. And so Pam —

**Craig:** Some of us know him more than others.

**John:** Pam’s objection to us using the word dick pejoratively, well, it’s been used his entire life anatomically. And the anatomic thing is probably actually worse or sort of more annoying than pejoratively because I think when we’re saying dick, we’re saying like don’t be a dick.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** It’s quite a British word I must say. I don’t hear it that much.

**John:** Oh, yeah? We use dick all the time.

**Tess:** Yeah, I hear it much more at home.

**John:** Craig and I are both Anglophiles. So we try to be British.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Where did it come from? I mean what is the dick?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Tess:** What is it? We should find out.

**Craig:** You know what I love is, in England, I love spotted dick. I mean I don’t love the actual food. I just love that it’s called spotted dick.

**Tess:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Sounds like a venereal disease. I love that.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a pudding or dessert as you call it.

**Craig:** It’s a pudding or dessert. Exactly. Like would you like some spotted dick? Absolutely not.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** Nobody, by the way nobody, I don’t care how much you love dick, if it’s got spots on it, you don’t, you just don’t. By the way, Pam’s realizing now this is backfired terribly. Look, Pam —

**Tess:** Pam’s regretting it.

**Craig:** It’s just funny. What are you going to do? Funny is funny. I’m sorry that you’re hurt. You need to get over this. You need to accept that this is the world and nobody is going after your dad. And I think if you talk to your dad about it, he would probably say, “Pam, I love you. You’re awesome. Thank you for caring about me but it will be okay. We’re good. We’re good.”

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** I like that this is how we started though.

**John:** Yeah, this is very important, your introduction to the podcast was discussion over dick.

**Tess:** Thank you. My laugh about dicks.

**John:** Last week’s episode, we talked about Whiplash. And so we had a bunch of listeners writing in with different things. One of the questions was good and maybe you will have an opinion on this as well, Tess. We talked on the podcast about there was a scene that was around a big dining room table and how scenes around tables are actually much more difficult to film than you would think they would be because you have to match so many eye lines and angles that it actually just takes forever to do.

And so listeners wrote in to ask, what are other scenes that you think would be really easy to shoot but end up being like really difficult to shoot?

**Tess:** Ooh, that’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, do you have any thoughts about scenes that are deceptively difficult to shoot?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you listed a couple of great ones. I mean the ones that are I think most deceptive are montages of any kind.

**Tess:** I was just about to say a montage, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, because a montage is like shooting 20 minutes. It’s basically the work equivalent of shooting 20 minutes of finished scenes for 30 or 40 seconds. And of course the stupidest, meaning the most work inefficient montage of all time, I still maintain was Allen’s flashback in Hangover 2 where he remembered all those events, but as they were all children so we had to film a montage twice but with children.

**Tess:** I think the easiest montage is probably the Rocky montages, though. I imagine that they were not stressful to film.

**John:** No. But I think looking back at your movie, Man Up , there’s one —

**Tess:** Two montages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Montage, montage.

**John:** Yeah, montages.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** Montage.

**John:** Deux montage.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** So I was thinking there’s a montage in which they’re bowling and that’s actually a fairly — and you’re shooting a scene, so it’s a bunch of different little setups.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** But you’re all in one place. The really killer montages are things that look like it’s just two-eighths of a page on your script but you’re going to a whole bunch of different locations.

**Tess:** Yeah, we did that for the second one. The first one was the bowling one that we shot that the first week of filming as well and we just played loads of loud rock music and got Simon and Lake to, you know, get on down. But the one when she does the triathlon through the streets of SoHo, that was quite tricky.

**Craig:** And that one looks so, it’s just like, okay, she’s running down a street, she turns down an alley, swims through some bachelorette party girls, then asks a guy for his bike then bikes on over. It’s like, yeah, it goes by —

**Tess:** No.

**John:** That was probably two nights of filming.

**Tess:** That was, I think it was two nights, we had to obviously shoot — Lake had a stunt, well, also a funny story. The bit where Simon like legs her in the taxi with her, she’s our taxi driver, a stunt taxi driver actually crashed into the car in front of him during filming.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Tess:** So that delayed things slightly.

**John:** It does. So montages are a time suck. He goes to over the window is my example. So like you’re in a scene and then like characters just move around in a room. You’re like, oh, the characters are moving around the room, but you don’t realize until you actually need to film one of those things is that like once a character has moved over from this place to that place, all the other angles in the room have changed and, you know, you may be crossing a line. There’s complicated things that may have happened because those characters have shifted their position.

And it may be the right choice to have those characters move around, but it’s taking up extra time. That’s why you sort of, you know, instinctively love to have characters just like find a place and park.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it saves you time and geography problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll sometimes and this is something that DPs will, it’s fun watching DPs and first ADs fight because of course the first AD is like shoot it as fast as you can and the DP is like, “I want it to look great.” A lot of times for things like this, you know, you have a scene of people in a room, and that’s your master and then you start covering it, but if somebody moves and changes position, well you need to — now you need a new master, and new coverage. So what they’ll do is they’ll lay down some track and as the person moves, they’ll move the camera along the track and so they’re repositioning their master as they go and then they try and do on the opposite side the same thing so they can reposition their coverage as they go.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and then yeah, you’ve screwed yourself especially if somebody goes to the window and looks out the window.

**Tess:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh my God, now you got to be outside looking up at them looking out and you got to see their POV, you got to be pointing it down. Ugh.

**Tess:** Talking of tracking in two shots. What nearly didn’t, well we did — our DP, he’s called Andrew Dunn. He’s incredible. If you look him up on IMDb, he’s just got the most brilliant, eclectic CV. And him and our director, Ben Palmer, knew that they wanted to shoot everything with two shot, absolutely everything so we got all those little comedy reactions that you really need obviously in a romantic comedy, but we nearly didn’t get Waterloo Station because it was so tricky to film there. And then our DP went down there with the director and just was like, “Okay, we can do this, but we’re going to do it at 3AM in the morning with 50 extras and we’ll have a tracking thing and we’ll just move with them the whole way through right up until she’s under the clock.” So otherwise it would have been like with — I think us and Bourne are the only two films to have shot in Waterloo Station.

**Craig:** I know, it’s actually amazing because when — it’s such a different scene.

**Tess:** What are you talking about? Bourne is very similar.

**Craig:** I mean, I just love the total — I mean — but it’s the same setting, and it actually looks different because it’s a different scene. I don’t know. It’s just a funny thing.

**Tess:** Well, he goes up all into the scene.

Well, he’s all angles. Like everything in that scene is all sniper angles. Like either it’s you’re looking up where the sniper is going to go or you’re looking down at the sniper and this thing is all eyes and misconnections and straight aheads and so.

**Tess:** We didn’t need a sniper. Yeah but I like that that might go down in sort of Wikipedia facts.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The two movies shot there. The last thing that comes to mind for me that seems really simple but is actually really complicated or at least requires complicated decisions is anything with driving. So usually with driving, you have two choices. You can have a real car, or you can green screen it. And so green screening it saves you a lot of time because you can park it on a sound stage, and just shoot whatever angles you want to shoot and then just like put the windows in in post. And a lot of things do that these days and they do it so well that you don’t really notice.

**Tess:** Yeah, I mean nowadays you don’t know the difference, yeah.

**John:** It looks so much better.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s often a good choice and sometimes it just means like not moving around. So the other choice is to put the car either on a trailer or really drive an actual car and mount the cameras to the car and that can look more realistic but it also limits your ability to move around in the car. The thing you also realize once you actually have to start putting cameras on actors in a cars is that there’s a limited number of ways that you can get both actors into a shot or to sort of cut back and forth between reactions. So that’s a reason why don’t you see movies that have a lot of time in the car.

Or you see rare exceptions of movies like that Tom Hardy movie which was entirely in the car.

**Tess:** In the car, yeah. I always think about Thelma and Louise, and I think about those driving shots because I always wanted to know how they did that. I’m sure there is a behind the scenes document.

**John:** But there’s a really good reason why they were driving a convertible.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** They could get shots —

**Tess:** Keeps it open, yeah. But it’s also very cool as well.

**John:** It’s very cool, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Most of your road trip movies at some point or another, I mean, nowadays, you will do a lot of it with green screen. It saves you a ton money and time and effort. You can go so much faster. It’s brutal shooting processed cars where either they’re on a flat bed or you’re driving ahead of them and the actor is actually driving just because you got to do an entire take. You need a run of road. You have to have the cops shut it off. There’s noise. But, there’s nothing like it for the reality of getting in and driving and getting out, you know. So you build an enormous amount of time for those things and enormous expense beyond it. Driving, to me, is number one. The thing that seems the simplest and is the most annoying.

**Tess:** It’s almost like a movie is quite hard to make isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, you think so. I think writers never quite appreciate.

**Craig:** Well, here’s another question that we got in from Brian from Syracuse. And he writes, “After following along with this week’s script to screen exercises involving Whiplash, and hearing you guys quickly discuss how both scenes really underline the dramatic arguments posed both in the micro sense of the individual scenes and in the macro sense of the entire film, I was wondering if it might be possible for you to elaborate a little more on the subject and maybe provide a couple of examples how these types of scenes pertain to your own films. Do you usually have the dramatic argument of the entire film and then look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses or accentuates this argument/conflict?” Brian —

**Tess:** It’s a long question.

**Craig:** Yeah. But you know, like he put a lot of thought into that question. I appreciate it.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a good question.

**John:** I would say that in my experience, I won’t necessarily know what the dramatic question or argument of the film is as I’m starting to write it, but it’s there already. Like, it’s the reason why I’m writing the movie and it’s sort of central to the DNA of the movie. And so that if I’ve picked the right movie and I’m approaching it from the right way, that central question — that central theme kind of permeates every scene regardless. And so, if a scene isn’t about that central question, it’s just not going to last in the script, it won’t last in the movie.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would say, it usually takes me the first draft to find my axiom — my central axiom.

**Craig:** Good word.

**Tess:** Thank you. I know especially because I write mainly romantic comedies, you are sort of always wanting to look for the bigger question for your leads or your leading lady or leading man. So I think — yeah, at the moment, I’m writing something, I remember I got my axiom about two drafts in which was when is the right time to meet someone, is there a right time to meet someone, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think mine comes about as I get into the — probably the same as you, really. I have to get into it a bit.

**Craig:** I think I’m a little different than you guys.

**Tess:** Of course, you are, Craig. You got to be different.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I mostly just ask what you two do and then I think, “Do the opposite.” I do try and start before I begin crafting scenes, I do need to know. It doesn’t have to stay this one. It can change and evolve. But I need to at least begin with some central question because I need to know that my character believes the opposite of that central question. And I need to start designing scenes — and he said, like, do you look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses? Yeah. I try and design scenes to test the character and lead them towards the truth or punish them for —

And by the way, your movie does this beautifully. Like, every time — like, I always talk about two steps forward one step back. Your character moves towards something, the possibility of an entirely opposite way of living, and for a moment it’s working and then you punish them. This is exactly how I approach these things. So I do need to kind of know. And over time, the question might change and thus the scenes might change. It’s just hard for me to start unless I have something there to build off of.

**Tess:** I mean I have — I think with Man Up, because I wrote that on spec. And I really did know, probably from the very beginning, I knew what I wanted to say about life. But then I need to — what I have to do — Philip Seymour Hoffman had a really good quote which was that writers need to fill up and then they can kind of write. And I think I sort of — I have to take a few more years to fill up again, to write again, if that makes sense. Because I sort of put everything into one script. It’s not very financially a good thing to be.

**John:** That’s not a viable strategy.

**Tess:** Yes. It’s not a viable strategy.

**John:** I was watching a friend’s cut of his movie. And it was a very early cut and so it was a place where a lot of stuff was still fungible and could change. And this idea of stating your central dramatic question, that’s I think my underlying note for him was that I had never heard any of the characters articulate what the movie was about.

**Tess:** Yeah, But you sometimes think as well, I mean I’m so into that. But I do sometimes think as well that you have to — when you’re just starting your first draft, I think there’s also opportunities to not be so sort of like regimented with yourself as well. Because I think newer writers sometimes say to me, you know, “I know exactly what’s it about.” And I’m like, “Oh, you know exactly what it’s about and you haven’t even started to write it yet.” You know, like, I think sometimes, especially if you’re writing in a comedic sense as well, like it can suddenly jump up at you what you actually were trying to say within a scene and then you go, “Oh, great. Now, it is thematic. Hooray.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say, “I know exactly what it’s about for now.”

**Tess:** Yes, that’s totally fair. Yeah. But then allow yourself the freedom to you know —

**Craig:** Always. Always.

**John:** I think what I’m trying to articulate is that it’s good that you know what it’s about. But if you’re not letting any of your characters speak to the theme —

**Tess:** Oh, yes.

**John:** Or speak to what it’s about or actually ask the question, or take actions that invite the question, then maybe you’re missing an opportunity.

**Tess:** Yeah. Sometimes I put the actual question in. But then you realize that you’ve put it maybe in the wrong scene or at the wrong time. And then you’ll get to the point where you go, oh actually now I can have them say that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked in the last episode about how sometimes you will overwrite a little bit knowing that you can always pull it back.

**Tess:** I overwrite so much.

**John:** But it’s very hard to sort of put stuff back in the movie if you didn’t actually shoot it. And so having a character state the central thematic question may be a really good idea. And if it becomes too obvious, you can always find a way to snip out but it’s going to be very hard to stick back it in.

**Tess:** We thought long and hard about whether he should actually — anyone should actually say the phrase, “Man up,” in Man Up. And then I went for it but I went with the man saying it to the woman rather than the way around. But it was a real sort of thing about do we actually say the title of the film?

**John:** So everyone clapped when —

**Tess:** Yeah, everyone cheered, like, “Yay — ”

**John:** “He said the title.”

**Craig:** They did it. They know they’re in this movie.

**Tess:** They know they’re in the film acting.

**Craig:** Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?

**Tess:** I haven’t seen it, you know. And I need to see it. I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t seen it.

**John:** I’m probably the only person in the world who has not seen Hamilton.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to see Hamilton.

**Tess:** I’m obsessed with that.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the greatest.

**John:** Man up.

**Tess:** But you haven’t seen it yet?

**Craig:** Man up is the —

**Tess:** Man Up the musical which I would like to do, obviously, next year because I think it could work really well as a musical.

**Craig:** You want to do Man Up as a musical?

**Tess:** I’d love to do it as a musical. Do you want to do it with me, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I like it as a movie. I don’t think —

**Tess:** Yeah. Give it five years.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see — I don’t think it needs music.

**Tess:** No, that’s true. But I just like the idea of doing it. Come on, humor me.

**Craig:** Let’s just make a new musical.

**Tess:** That’s true. Okay.

**John:** There’s a dance fight in Man Up and that would work very well on the stage.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And you know, it’s quite a chamber piece of a film, two-hander.

**John:** It’s a heightened chamber piece, and that’s a musical.

**Tess:** It is. Thank you.

**John:** Aaron writes, “I really appreciated your most recent episode discussing Whiplash. I totally agree about your take that Fletcher obviously offers Andrew the performance slot in order to embarrass and ruin him. But would Fletcher really put his reputation further on the line to ruin Andrew? Especially since Andrew was nowhere on the scene anymore, not at the conservatory, not playing clubs, nobody knew who Andrew was, and certainly nobody in the music community.

“He would be ruining a non-entity who already seemed to have given up. And yet Fletcher decides to get his revenge on this guy in a public performance at New York’s largest jazz festival in an ensemble he’s conducting. Sure Andrew would look terrible, but Fletcher is the person standing at the forefront of the crowd. He’s already lost his job, his reputation remains intact enough that he was asked to lead this ensemble performance, and now he’s out to give a crap performance. I just had trouble seeing him as that selfless in his vengeance. To sacrifice himself and his reputation in order to embarrass someone nobody knows.”

I thought that was a really interesting point. I never really thought about Fletcher’s choice to set up Andrew at the end. We’re spoiling the movie Whiplash for you.

**Tess:** Spoiler alert.

**John:** It is really an interesting idea that like Fletcher is going into this knowing he’s going to publicly embarrass himself, but he’s going to get a lot of blowback from that himself. If things go as disastrously as it seems like they’re going to go.

Tess; Yeah. I mean I don’t remember feeling — I remember just feeling so like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards in a good way after I saw that film. You know what I mean, I don’t know what you guys said about it last week because I unfortunately haven’t listened yet, but I will listen obviously.

**John:** Leave the room immediately.

**Tess:** Leave the room immediately. No. But I mean, it’s so visceral the whole film. There are things that you can pick apart. I understand why he’s questioning that. But in my heart of hearts, it’s such a film about being bullying and this whole journey that actually because he is such a bully, I kind of do believe that that’s sort of part of his awful journey. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way — let me offer our listening audience some certainty. There is absolutely no way that the intention there was that the character of Fletcher rigged the whole thing to bring some great performance out of Andrew. He absolutely did that.

**Tess:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** He did that to humiliate Andrew and punish him because he truly believed Andrew had cost him his job and he was a revengeful bad person. And you can tell because Simmons’ performance shows joy, true sadistic joy at ruining him.

**Tess:** Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

**Craig:** And then also shows absolute shock when Andrew comes back and starts doing what he’s doing. And then epiphany when Andrew becomes something. And that is not the performance of somebody who goes, “Good. This is what I wanted to happen.”

**Tess:** It’s so incredible that performance because you still like him. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. So I loved Aaron’s phrase of selfless vengeance. I just think that’s a great, you know — it honestly was circling back to the question of the central dramatic argument. Is there such a thing as selfless vengeance? Because Fletcher is not acting in his own best interest at the moment. Like vengeance is actually kind of never in your own best interest. A rational person would never probably seek vengeance.

**Tess:** Rare. Well, Craig is —

**John:** I mean, is vengeance only emotional or can vengeance be intellectual as well?

**Tess:** I think it can be intellectual. I think you can play the long game in terms of vengeance.

**Craig:** You see, what’s going on here, John, is that you have a full Jew and a half of a Jew.

**Tess:** Oh, God. Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Both of us are like, no, no, long term vengeance is part of our culture.

**Tess:** It’s part of our life.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s what our parents did to us. I think that vengeance is always selfish. It can be self-destructive, but it’s selfish.

**Tess:** I think in the creative sense it can be very liberating. You know, write who you know, not what you know. So you know, I think there are times when it can be incredibly helpful. But it shouldn’t be to your own detriment or anyone else’s detriment. You know, you should just be secretly vengeful.

**Craig:** Well, we all know as writers that it’s fun to write characters who are looking for vengeance. And we also know that characters who are obsessed with revenge either die in the fire of their own self-destruction or finally let it go. We all know that’s kind of that’s the deal.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s the journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the journey. And I’m amazed all the time at how many times I will meet writers who behave in ways that they would never allow their characters to behave. It’s like they haven’t learned those lessons at all.

**Tess:** It’s bizarre behavior, but we are all weirdos, that’s the other problem isn’t it? Most writers are —

**Craig:** You have no idea.

**Tess:** We have issues. So we write about them and then we pretend that we’re okay afterwards.

**Craig:** We’re not.

**John:** So Tess Morris, tell us about your issues. Maybe that’s a good segue into —

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Talking about romantic comedies. So our special guest who’s not said a word yet in this whole episode —

**Craig:** Yeah, who’s just rolled over tradition, steam-rolled.

**John:** Is Tess Morris, she’s the writer of —

**Tess:** Hi, I’ve been here for a while, yeah.

**John:** She’s the writer of Man Up, a new romantic comedy which you can see on demand now everywhere.

**Tess:** Yes. In theaters this weekend, wider, this is my pro language that I’m using.

**John:** Yeah, nice.

**Tess:** Thank you. In about ten or 12 cities, I think, LA, Grand Rapids, which really excited me.

**John:** Grand Rapids, Michigan. Come on.

**Tess:** Houston, Dallas. Yeah, but on demand as well on your special iTunes box.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Tess:** To purchase.

**John:** This is a romantic comedy starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. And it is just delightful. So I saw it at the Austin Film Festival.

**Tess:** I was so excited that you sat behind me but I was also obviously really nervous. I was like, “Oh, shit. John August.”

**John:** It was really quite funny. And Craig just saw it through the magic of Internet connection.

**Craig:** But I knew that it was going to be good because my wife, Missy, went with you, John.

**Tess:** She did.

**Craig:** To see the movie and she loved it, loved it, loved it, and cried a lot.

**Tess:** She’s a big laugher. I loved her a lot.

**Craig:** Yes. She’s a big laugher, she’s a big crier. That’s why I married her, for the emotional extremes.

**John:** And the critics seemed to have laughed and cried in appropriate numbers. And it’s certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so congratulations on that.

**Tess:** We are certified Fresh.

**Craig:** I don’t care about that. You know that I actually hate that.

**John:** Do you have questions for Tess about what it’s like to get reviews like that?

**Craig:** No. I have no interest. I don’t care. I hope that you choke on those reviews. No.

**Tess:** Oh, you know what, we only remember the bad ones as well.

**Craig:** Well, of course the only review that I care about is my review.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** My review.

**Tess:** It’s the only one I care about for you, Craig, about Man Up, as well.

**Craig:** It’s the only one of my reviews that you care about is my review.

**Tess:** Yes, your own review.

**Craig:** Well, I loved it.

**John:** So Tess, as you were introducing this movie at the festival up on stage, you talked about how this was a romantic comedy and people shouldn’t talk shit about romantic comedies.

**Tess:** Yes, I did.

**John:** So tell us about romantic comedies and what do you even mean by romantic comedies?

**Tess:** Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because ever since I wrote this film and it got made, I’ve become like the spokesperson for defending the whole entire genre. My big thing with it is that people sort of dismiss it so quickly. Like no other genre in the history of film. It’s quite a strange phenomenon that people are all, “I don’t like romantic comedies.” Or “Rom-coms are dead.” Or “Rom-coms are alive.” And et cetera, et cetera.

And I find that incredibly frustrating because there have been some brilliant ones in the last sort of 10 years or so. And I think also what happens is when they win awards, they’re suddenly not romantic comedies. So Silver Linings Playbook and As Good As It Gets and those kinds of, you know, brilliant movies.

I mean when you talk about romantic comedy, you’re just — you’re talking about something that has probably I’d say 72 percent — 68 percent comedy ,and the rest is romance. If you take your central love story out of the film and it falls apart, then you don’t have a romantic comedy, you know well you do have a romantic comedy on your hands rather. And I just adore them as a genre and I always have and I like all the ones, the hybrids. Like I love Romancing the Stone, the ones that are like the action rom-coms.

So I wonder if Long Kiss Goodnight is technically a rom-com? No, it’s not — her and Samuel L. Jackson, it’s not, that was a stretch. But yeah and I mean I love Sideways which is a rom-com between two men and I love Bridesmaids which is a rom-com between two women and Muriel’s Wedding. And I think like people sometimes forget that they’re watching one, and the art of a good one is that you don’t realize sometimes that you are as well. So yeah I’ve become sort of like this strange irritating person that constantly is like “I like rom-coms” and get annoyed when people you know say that they don’t.

**Craig:** I think you’re making a terrific point because I don’t — I personally love rom-coms, I mean and I really agree with your point that what we think of as romantic comedy is across almost every comedy genre. Identity Thief is a rom — it’s like an asexual rom-com, it’s like a platonic rom-com.

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I happen to love the genre and I miss it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly but and maybe we can figure out why —

**Tess:** I think I can tell you, yeah. I can tell you what went wrong actually.

**Craig:** Okay, what went wrong?

**Tess:** Well and it’s — and this is not me talking, this is me using the voice of Billy Mernit who’s a good, brilliant friend of mine and also wrote this book called “Writing the Romantic Comedy” which I’m addicted to and obsessed by because it’s the one book on screenwriting that I’ve read that just really inspired me and unlocked lots of structural points for me and thematic things. But I had a big chat with him about this. And he works for Universal actually, is a story editor, and he was saying that essentially what happened in the sort of late 90s, early ’00s, is that they had these huge hits with you know, the kind of Katherine Heigl set of vehicles and made loads of money, the studios made a ton of money.

But then they essentially killed the golden goose because they then started to make identical versions of those films, just probably like they do with most genres but for a longer time period with romantic comedies, which caused everyone to say the romantic comedy is dead which only really people started saying in the late ’90s early ’00s, before then, you know you didn’t really talk about it like that because they have such a rich history of movies that are romantic comedies. So I think there was just this you know, lazy time period where everyone started to say that and now people just resort back to that whenever there’s a new one they go, “Oh the rom-com is alive,” or something bombed at the box office, “It’s dead.” It’s like, give it a break.

**John:** Christopher Orr had an article called Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad, and the sub-head is, the long decline from Katharine Hepburn to Katherine Heigl, which I thought was —

**Tess:** It’s a great — it’s click bait — it’s a great title, great headline, but it’s not true.

**Craig:** Good anger. Anger.

**John:** Anger. We like that.

**Tess:** Can you feel it?

**Craig:** Umbrage. Umbrage.

**John:** We’ve got dual umbrage in this episode.

**Tess:** Vengeance.

**Craig:** Vengeance will be ours.

**John:** But he actually raised some interesting points in terms of what has changed. And one of the points he brought up was that actors will sometimes do one romantic comedy and they’ll just stop —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as doing that, so you look at Will Smith in Hitch, who was fantastic in Hitch.

**Tess:** He’s great in it. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great romantic comedy and he will not do anymore of them. You look at Julia Roberts and she made her start in romantic comedy but didn’t want to keep doing that so they want to do serious roles and —

**Tess:** Although I read an interview with her recently that said if she read a good one for a woman who was whoever old Julia, lovely Julia is now, I’d happily write you one, because I love her. Yeah, I mean I don’t know whether that’s because they feel like they don’t have as much integrity. I mean comedy as a whole thing and you all know this, both of you from writing yourself, that it doesn’t ever get the kudos that any other line of craft does.

**Craig:** No. It’s crazy.

**Tess:** And I would argue that to write comedy is far harder that to write drama overall.

**Craig:** Because you’re right.

**John:** So, a theory I want to posit is that part of the reason why it’s looked down upon is because almost definitionally a romantic comedy is going to have one woman in it, and like one prominent actress who has a major role in the movie. And we sort of don’t want to write for women anymore — or we don’t want to make the movies for women anymore.

**Tess:** Yeah, but I mean It’s so weird because I’ve done so many interviews about Man Up and someone ask me the other day, “Oh is your character a hot mess?” And I was like, “Oh piss off, she’s not a hot mess. She is a messy person.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Who’s just going through some stuff and I think —

**John:** And she’s literally a very messy person —

**Tess:** Yeah literally a messy person. And I think also like you could switch the roles in Man Up and very easily either/or could play you know man or female roles. I do worry when people sort of think that there aren’t still stories about sort of romance to tell, because especially in the modern world.

**Craig:** I actually feel like were telling romance in every genre now. Part of what’s happened is everything — it doesn’t matter what it is.

**Tess:** And actually it’s too much, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, like no matter what the genre is, even if it’s like a wrestling movie, there has to be some sort of love story.

**Tess:** Or a Marvel movie.

**Craig:** Yeah by the way exactly, superhero movies like Ironman has to have Gwyneth Paltrow in a romance story. And we put romance into everything.

**Tess:** You know what, someone said to me recently that Superman wasn’t about his love for Lois Lane, and I got so angry.

**Craig:** Right well from the start —

**Tess:** That’s all that the film is about.

**Craig:** By the way that’s all Superman is about like —

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I’m going to get some more angry letters, I don’t like Superman. I like that relationship. And I think It’s a really good relationship story and I don’t care about his powers but —

**Tess:** But it’s not a rom-com to be fair.

**Craig:** No, It’s not a rom-com, but I do think that we actually are more interested now, it seems to me in writing comedies for women that we have been in a long, long time. There are really prominent female comediennes that are stars now, whether it’s Tina Fey or Melissa McCarthy —

**Tess:** Kristen Wiig, yeah.

**Craig:** We’re getting a lot of them and — but were not doing the traditional romantic comedies in the sense maybe there’s a vague feeling that they’re old fashioned but I disagree. I don’t think they — I think that they are old-fashioned only in the sense that movies used to be awesome and like I thought what Man Up reminded of is a good — a movie like the kind they used to make and that’s not to say stodgy or old but —

**Tess:** No, no I take that as a huge compliment because that’s what I — the screwball kind of element and the kind of classic structure and whenever I read the bad reviews which I obviously I always do. Whenever I read the ones that say “Oh God It’s just like so obvious,” I’m like, no, you’ve totally missed the point like we’re embracing all the tropes because that’s what any good genre film does, embraces them but then turns them into — gives them your own sort of angle on it. So —

**John:** Let’s talk about the tropes because I think that’s actually one of the things that people sort of single out romantic comedies for, it’s like “Oh these tropes,” and we sort of slam on these tropes. So let’s talk about tropes. The meet-cute, is that —

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah I mean like — I mean there’s technically you know, seven —

**John:** Oh my gosh, there’s seven tropes —

**Tess:** Well they’re not really tropes, actually that’s wrong they’re more like the beats of a rom-com.

**Craig:** Can I try? I don’t know them I just want to take a stab at it.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m going to start with a woman who is single and vaguely unhappy with her life.

**Tess:** Can be a man as well. Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Correct, I’m just going with the — I’m going to do the female version.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** She has given up on — she’s tried to — she’s gone through bad relationships and is about to give up.

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** There’s a meet-cute — so far so good — there’s a meet-cute where she or he runs into a person and they have sparks but they aren’t — the circumstances are such that they can’t just say fall in love. There are circumstantial things that are keeping them apart, obstacles.

**Tess:** All together. Yeah.

**Craig:** Good exactly. But they then start to — they go through a honeymoon phase where things are kind of exciting and they both think is it possible that this person, nah, we’re just friends, it couldn’t be, so they’re like kind of moving towards and away from each other out of fear because there’s a problem — the problem that they had in the beginning of the movie isn’t resolved. There’s a lie that one of them tells —

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** They get caught in the lie, they break up, and in the breaking up they return back to the world they started in, but no longer find that world satisfying and then one of them goes running.

**Tess:** I would give you a B-minus.

**Craig:** Okay, the B — by the way B-minus is not a bad grade because I never — I mean, you know — what did I — tell me where I went wrong and tell me what I left out.

**Tess:** No you didn’t, It’s all there really, I mean essentially what you’re talking about in terms of the girl who’s single — I’ll talk about Billy Mernit’s beats because that’s how I write. And he talks about the chemical equation which is the thing that in all writing you’re looking for your leading characters, what they’re missing in their life, what they are not doing. So in Man Up she is not getting out there, she is not putting herself in a position to meet someone. She is closed down, shut down. Yeah, then you got your cute-meet. I mean, in the history of time cute-meets are the hardest things to find original ways for your two leads to meet each other.

And I always love it, I always try and think about how do — like say you said to me how did you meet your partner, and I said, well I stole his date from under the clock at Waterloo Station. If that’s going to make me laugh, then that’s a good cute-meet. And then what you’re talking about in terms of your — Billy calls it the sexy complication turning point.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**Tess:** Which is your end of act one, which is when — really in a romantic comedy you’ve got to find emotional obstacles to keep your two leads together. And really at the end of act one, in lots off these films, they’re not the great examples of it, they could just walk away and the film could end. Sorry, I don’t fancy you anymore, bye.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** So you have to find either a plot driven thing but obviously what’s much better is an emotional obstacle or thing —

**John:** So either literal handcuffs or emotional handcuffs.

**Tess:** Exactly. Very good analogy, John August. And then you keep them together all through to your midpoint which is in terms of romantic comedy, you want to, in the smack bang of your middle of act two, you want to send them in a different direction to where they thought they were going, emotionally speaking.

And then they kind of start liking each other, but then you’ve got to get into the end of act two, your swivel second act turning point where someone makes the wrong decision. Someone always makes the wrong decision in a romantic comedy. It can be both of them and actually in Man Up, both of them don’t Man Up at the end of act two. And then all is lost from there onwards and you just have no idea how you’re going to get these two people back together and then in — you know When Harry Met Sally kind of did the brilliant run.

Weirdly now when I think about it, probably if you wrote that montage into a script now, someone would go “Nah,” wouldn’t they?

**Craig:** Of course, they say nah to everything.

**Tess:** And then he has a flashback so all of the moments in the film. And then he realizes that he loves her and then he runs.

**Craig:** Right, someone’s always running. I got that right.

**Tess:** Yeah, but you know what, they can be running metaphorically, they can be actually running. In Man Up, he does do an actual run, but I tried to sort off find a unique way without spoiling it for him to do that run.

**Craig:** Yeah and you did.

**Tess:** So it wasn’t just traditional —

**John:** Well you were calling out the trope.

**Craig:** Right exactly, you’re acknowledging, oh this is where they run, so we’ll give you a little something like a present.

**Tess:** Yeah. I mean you know, were quite on the button with the beats in Man Up, but hopefully, and I was saying to John actually when I first got here, when I wasn’t actually here, when I was pretending not to be here. I really — I sort of like love the fact that we are unashamedly saying, here they all are, you know, that I have no sort of fear in admitting. And I also think when you watch it again and this is not a plug to watch it twice, but the second time around, it’s a very fast movie the first time you watch it. When you watch it again, you can relax a bit more and understand some of the — you know catch some more of the jokes and more of the humor. So I think the first time you watch it, you can be like “Oh my god what is happening?” It’s like one night of kind of you know craziness.

But yeah and I mean I love — I just get so bored and tired of people sort off saying — the amount of times I get emails going would you like to talk about defending the rom-com for this, this, this? And I’m like yes.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like —

**Tess:** I will talk about it.

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like the movie is a great defense. And what you’re describing when you say —

**Tess:** That’s my exhibit A.

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you. If you said look, I have a collection of tropes, and the job is not to throw them out, the job is to execute them in fresh new ways —

**Tess:** Yeah and hide them.

**Craig:** Well that’s what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.

**Tess:** I know

**Craig:** All of us.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the point. So to me, I loved how traditional it was, and proved that a traditional romantic comedy still works because in the end — you know Lindsay Doran has this great remark, she says that movies are about what we care about at the end of movies, is relationships. And if you watch a movie, no matter what that movie is, the last scene is almost always about the relationship even if the movie is about robots blowing each other up, the last scene is the boy and the girl, or the boy and his car, or something, and it’s about the relationship. And you know the last scene — she always points out the last scene of Dirty Dancing. Everybody thinks Dirty Dancing ends with —

**Tess:** Oh, let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** She — you know, everyone says, “Oh, how does Dirty Dancing end? With her leaping?” No it doesn’t. It ends with Jennifer Grey talking to her dad.

**Tess:** No. To her dad exactly.

**Craig:** The relationship.

**Tess:** When I’m wrong I say I’m wrong.

**Craig:** Right. And so what Lindsay says is, what’s interesting is, they make these movies for boys and men about robots exploding, but then they put in this little relationship thing at the end to sort of say, okay, but also, you like movies about relationships. She said, when we make movies so called for women, that are about relationships, we’ve kind of said you’re smart enough to know that what you’re here for is the relationship. That’s the part everyone cares about anyway. The exploding robots, meh.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So romantic comedies are the purest form of that, I love that.

**Tess:** They are because like my favorite thing in the world, I love people, like even if I meet someone that I don’t like, and I’ll be able to use them at some point in my writings, so I’m like I’ll talk to you, even if you are dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. But like I sort of feel like — especially like when people sort of say, oh, you know Lake’s character in the film, because she is very, you know, it is very autobiographical. I’m not going to lie. But like — but she’s a person, not a woman, if that makes sense you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And I think that’s the key to sort of — I mean, I know lots of men that have seen Man Up, and I get random messages on Twitter all the time sort of going “God, I really love that film,” like you know, I really like this and I love Simon’s character in it, and Simon Pegg is so brilliant in it and actually very underrated actor, I think genuinely in terms of like his actual dramatic chops. I mean obviously he’s not underrated comedically, but he’s very vulnerable in the film, and he’s very, you know, effed up, and all those sort of things. I’ve already sworn. I don’t know why I did an “effed up” then. I could have just said it, couldn’t I?

**Craig:** Say it.

**Tess:** Yeah they’re two people and no one really wants to be on their own, do they, in life, whether you want to be in a relationship or just be with your friends or be with your family, you know, that’s what life is about for me, being with people.

**John:** So one thing that occurs to me though about the nature of a romantic comedy is that, the — you can have a central dramatic question that is about sort of like, can men and women be friends, you know what is the duty to think — you can have central dramatic questions that aren’t necessarily specifically about that relationship, but the fundamental plot question that the audience is going to expect to have answered is like, will this couple end up together?

And the answer in romantic-comedy generally is yes. And so the challenge of the screenwriter is like how do you believably keep them apart?

**Tess:** Yes. You know your ending already, so in life, in writing, you’ve got to be so full of questions, I mean, that is just a part of the job, do you know what I mean? So it always really fascinates me when people, with romantic-comedies, they don’t think they need that, they think they just need two people who are they/aren’t they — it’s like, no, you’ve got to have these huge, big emotional things that kind of are running through it.

**Craig:** That’s, I mean to me, all the differences that keep people apart that are circumstantial, I think of as MacGuffins, they are the glowing stuff in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. I kind of don’t care about those things. I always care about the things that are internal to them, and their fears that are keeping them alone, or keeping them apart from this person, that if they only could take a risk with, things would go well. Why I think, to me, the joy of a romantic-comedy is not in wondering, will they/won’t they, because the answer is, they will.

**Tess:** It’s how they. It’s how they.

**Craig:** It’s really, it’s being reminded, this is why men should always go to romantic-comedies with their significant others, is because it’s reminding everybody of the joy of falling in love, and the value of falling in love, because over time, I mean, you know, John and I have both been in monogamous relationships for years and years and years and years.

**Tess:** All right, don’t rub it in.

**Craig:** Sorry, you can’t maintain a heightened level — and you talk about this in the movie, a heightened level of passion for all that time. If you did, your brain would explode, and you would be mentally ill. It’s just not possible.

Going to romantic-comedies, revives it, it makes you look at the person you’re with, and makes you remember the risks you took with them, and it also reminds you of the value of what you built together because in the end, when you watch a movie about somebody stopping the world from exploding, that’s never my job, but at the end of a romantic-comedy, when I see a man and woman come together and make an agreement to mush their lives together and build a thing, and I always love in romantic-comedies when they’re old couples too, like in yours, it reminds me that I did something really good.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s worth it, you know. I think that’s the value of the —

**Tess:** That’s the job, isn’t is? I mean actually, it’s funny because someone was asking me the other day whether they think that Nancy and Jack, the two leads in Man Up, stay together. And I actually said, “No.”

**Craig:** You’re terrible.

**Tess:** Well no, I said no because I feel like the film is actually about putting yourself out there and taking chances. That’s part of her mantras within the film, and it’s something that I struggle with myself, you know, I’ve been single on and off now for bloody years, and I go into a very closed in kind of environment and I don’t want to kind of like take any chances.

And I think the film for me, is trying to say to people like if you do something, enjoy it, and see where it goes, but don’t try and maybe over-analyze it and worry about, okay, is this the man I’m going to marry and is this my life I’m going to have? So I love that they get together in the end, obviously. I would always get them together at the end.

But strangely, with Annie Hall, when they are not together at the end of that, I actually love that film, but that’s the only thing I find slightly dissatisfying, although you know, arguably, from the beginning of the film, you know that they’re not very well suited.

**Craig:** Well, I mean that movie, you know, the original title of Annie Hall was Anhedonia.

**Tess:** Yes, good fact. Nice fact.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Tess:** Fear of what?

**Craig:** Fear of pleasure.

**Tess:** Fear of pleasure. Exactly.

**Craig:** And so it really was a meditation on — definitely more Woody Allen in the —

**Tess:** Exactly and then it became her story, I mean you know.

**Craig:** That’s an existentialist movie, it’s in a weird way, people talk about it as a romantic-comedy. I don’t think it’s a romance at all. I think it’s actually an existential drama crisis movie.

**Tess:** Well, I think it is a romantic-comedy, but I think it’s fascinating that once the title changed to Annie Hall, you don’t really think about him as much in that film as you do about Diane Keaton. And I think that’s what turned it around, you know, he then probably hopefully realized, ah okay, this is actually much more about the breakdown of a relationship between two people that are a bit mismatched.

**Craig:** I do think that your characters, they get married, and they grow old together —

**Tess:** That’d be nice.

**Craig:** And then when one of them dies like at 92 —

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** The other one just sits down in a chair and dies like 10 minutes later.

**Tess:** Like six months later? Oh, 10 minutes? I was going to give them a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Yes, because that was just the way it was going to be. I believe that. I believe it in my bones.

**Tess:** Well, I have to believe to write it. Otherwise —

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think by the way, that you’re going to have this.

**Tess:** Thanks, Craig. You know what though, I’m fine though, like I think that like being single, I keep an edge.

**John:** Yes, absolutely, you get more writing done when you’re single.

**Tess:** It keeps me writing, yes.

**John:** Here’s a question for both of you. Do we think that romantic-comedies are by their nature dual protagonist stories, or can you have a romantic-comedy that has a protagonist and just an antagonist who does not change? Do both characters have to change?

**Tess:** Well Trainwreck kind of did that recently.

**John:** Yes, so Bill Hader’s character just barely changes.

**Tess:** He clearly doesn’t change. I would argue, actually I would — I liked it as a film, but I would have quite liked him to have a little bit more of a sort of journey, to use that word.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that the best of them, I always feel like there’s one protagonist. The dual protagonist thing to borrow a Tess Morris thing, I always feel it’s like 68, you know, 32. In this movie, it’s Nancy who is the protagonist.

**Tess:** Yes, she’s — I mean it was originally much more her, actually, and then I turned it more into a two-hander and brought Jack’s character in a bit sooner.

**Craig:** So I’m going to argue against sort of that because if you look at what Nancy is actually doing, especially in the bar scene where she’s like getting him to actually stand up to his ex-wife and that like, he is a character that has the most growth. He does the most things over the course of a lot of the movie to change.

**Tess:** He does, yes.

**Craig:** So ultimately, she is the person who has to do something at the end. He is the guy who does the big romantic run at the end, so he fulfills that Harry function.

**Tess:** Well, it depends where they meet as well. With When Harry Met Sally, they meet in the first scene, you know. And they’re together, they’re in every pretty much every single scene together about bar five or six or whatever, and I think with Man Up, it’s Nancy’s story for the first 12, 13 minutes, and then it’s entirely both their sort of journeys, but obviously she has more, I think it begins with her. She is the catalyst for the things that happen in the film.

**Craig:** I also think that, I mean you’re right, there’s the quantity of change that happens for Simon’s character, for Jack, but the profundity of the change, and the resistance, he’s already somebody who feels he’s defined as passionate, somewhat plastic in that nature, he’s emotional, he’s honest, he’s free with his feelings, he just needs to get over something. She’s bottled up to me that it’s like it’s the — he can make 12 changes over the course of the movie, but for her to uncork is like the hardest thing because it’s so — see, my problem with the single protagonist, and this is another thing I actually think hurt romantic-comedies is that for a long time the model was one person meets another person, the main character is flawed and can’t see that this other person’s perfect for them.

And they continue to fail in front of that person until finally, they succeed, and that person is essentially fixed in place as a moral ideal that you’re just waiting for them to grow up enough to earn. And that’s not quite satisfying for me as a moviegoer.

**Tess:** All my favorite rom-coms I would say are dual protagonist, you know, As Good As It Gets, and Silver Linings, actually, which is a great example of like something that begins with Bradley Cooper’s character, and then she just comes along and changes his whole life. And there’s a great sort of sub — I read a thing recently about how in the first scene when he meets her, when he says to her, you know, I find you — you look nice, I’m just saying that, I’m trying to get back with my wife, it’s not that I’m trying to come on to you, and actually, that’s the moment he falls in love with her, the first time he sees her.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And then she just bowls in and they have that brilliant kind of Hepburn/Tracy-esque kind of sort of dialogue between each other. And then it becomes their film, like once they meet, it should become a dual thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** To wrap this up, so romantic-comedies, we’re saying they are not dead. We are saying that the things that people identify as being formulaic about them, are the tropes that are common to the genre, but you could say the same things about the tropes in any genre. And so we don’t slam on superhero movies for having those tropes and genres, I guess because they’re wildly successful.

**Tess:** Can you imagine if everyone got upset about set pieces in superhero movies.

**Craig:** How about like, how about the part where they discover their powers and don’t have control over them at first? How about the part where they make their suit for the first time. God.

**Tess:** I love it when they make their suit. I’m like, how are they going to make their suit?

**Craig:** Who cares? So boring, I’m so done.

**Tess:** Yes, sorry, John.

**John:** So we’re also saying that romantic-comedies are comedies which we are expecting to see one or two characters grow and change, but you can say that of course with any movie.

**Tess:** Any movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And I think sometimes when people really hate a genre, I’m suspicious of them as a person.

**Craig:** Me too.

**Tess:** I’m like, “You hate romantic-comedies? Have you got no joy in your life that you — ” I mean I get a bit like —

**John:** That’s why I think you actually need to question them on what they’re defining as romantic-comedy because I think what they really mean to say, like I hate Katherine Heigl movies. It’s like, well, that’s fair, it’s fair to hate Katherine Heigl movies.

**Tess:** That’s fine, yes. I mean, I had an argument with someone recently about How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They hated it like with a passion. I was like, you know what, dude, it’s fine. I quite enjoy that film when I’m a certain kind of mood, but this kind of like association that it’s a chick flick, that I’m going to sit there in my track suit bottoms, well, I don’t know what you call them. Do you call them track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Sweat pants.

**Tess:** And eat a massive bag of Maltesers. Do you have Maltesers?

**John:** I have no idea what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Here it would be sweat pants and a pint of ice cream

**Tess:** Yes. Like don’t get me wrong, I love Bridget Jones, she’s a fantastic creation and always has been, but like we’re not all just doing that. I might do that when I watch Con Air, and that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s what is making you feel a certain thing, and I don’t know.

**Craig:** Also, why are we apologizing for things that are true? Like there are moments in movies when men are depressed and they do male depressed things.

**Tess:** Yes, and they’re allowed to do that.

**Craig:** They’re allowed to do it. Nobody goes, “Oh my god — ”

**Tess:** Exactly. In Sideways, no one went, “Oh,” which is one of my all-time favorite films, no one said, you know, “Oh god, he was so unlikeable.” The whole point is that he’s brilliantly unlikeable, you know?

**Craig:** We just did a whole episode on how angry that gets me —

**Tess:** Did you?

**Craig:** Unlikeable. The worst note. I believe it’s the last episode that you didn’t listen to.

**Tess:** I would say it’s the worst note particularly when you’re talking about female stuff when they go, “She’s just not likeable enough as a woman.”

**Craig:** For all genders, even if we’re dealing with genderless aliens or androids, it’s the worst note.

**Tess:** Do you think they got that note in Marley and Me.

**John:** The dog’s not likeable enough?

**Tess:** The dog’s not likeable enough.

**John:** Can we see the dog smile a little bit more?

**Craig:** Yes, people are going to want it to die.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. CG that smile in.

**Craig:** You know what that dog is?

**Tess:** What?

**Craig:** That dog’s a dick.

**Tess:** He’s a dick. [laughs]

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Tess, we should have warned you about One Cool Things.

**Tess:** Oh shit.

**John:** So you could be the third to go. You could say something that’s cool about your time in Los Angeles, because you’ve been here for a couple of weeks. My One Cool Thing is a profile of Nick Bostrom who is a scientist and a philosopher. He writes a lot about AI and sort of doomsday scenarios. And so the profile I’m going to link to is in The New Yorker.

And the things he was talking about are really interesting, but I thought it actually more interesting as a character profile, so just sort of digging into sort of what it’s like to be that sort of scientist guy who’s warning you about doomsday. It’s the character who in movies would be played by — I’m trying to think who is —

**Tess:** Kevin Spacey?

**John:** Kevin Spacey, yes, somebody like that who would be like, you know, I told you this is going to happen, this is going to happen. But the actual character that they outlined here is actually really fascinating and I think worth looking at.

**Tess:** Liam Neeson may be more —

**John:** Liam Neeson might be — Jeff Goldblum would be —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Goldblum is sort of the classic —

**Tess:** You didn’t stop to think whether you should.

**John:** Exactly, indeed, so be it Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park, he’s the guy who’s going to warn you about that. You’re playing god.

**Tess:** I’m with him. I’m with him.

**John:** What is so fascinating about this profile though is it goes into sort of this early decision to sort of like, you know, I am going to change my life completely. And sometimes we’ll see this in movies, but it’s so rare that you see this actually happening in real life where like you sort of have an epiphany and sort of like wrote like this is how my whole life is going to change and sort of did that.

And so a really interesting character profile, and also some good science in there as well.

**Tess:** Some good science.

**John:** Some good science. And if you like what they talk about in the fermi paradox stuff part of this, I’m also going to put a link in the show notes to this really great Wait But Why article on alien civilizations and what the fermi paradox is

**Tess:** Can you see my face? I’m just like what is he talking about?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like you’re talking about crisps. I have no idea. And track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Crisps. Crisps. I want Crisps. Look, you know what I think about all this. We’re living in a computer simulation.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re not real either.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** End of discussion.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Did you say, “Thank you?”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like I had put you at ease with that horrible proposition.

**Tess:** I felt suddenly like really relaxed.

**Craig:** That’s the opposite of what I wanted. You were supposed to start gazing up —

**Tess:** No, because I’m worst case scenario person. It’s the way I live my whole life in a state of panic, so when someone just says like, well, it’s over, it’s going to end, I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well fine. Good.”

**Craig:** Great, yeah. I get take a nap now.

**Tess:** Yes, that’s good, excellent.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I would have done it last week, but I did the whole blood brain barrier business last week, so this week, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be Fallout 4?

**John:** You’re enjoying it, Craig?

**Craig:** A little too much.

**Tess:** Is this a game?

**Craig:** It is a game, well done, Tess Morris.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Fallout 4 — everyone else knows what it is, so I will just say this, the crazy thing about Fallout 4 is that it is exactly the same as Fallout 3. I mean, with like one tiny change that’s actually kind of semi-fun, it’s the same damn game, and I don’t care, I love it.

**Tess:** Is it shooting?

**Craig:** It is shooting, but it’s mostly, it’s quest-based, so people — yes, so you have missions and you go on and you find things, and sometimes you have to kill people, sometimes you have to talk to people.

**Tess:** Like the Fall Guy, then?

**Craig:** Like the what?

**Tess:** The Fall Guy, the show that was on in the ’80s?

**Craig:** Not at all like the Fall Guy. Literally not anything like the — so think of the Fall Guy —

**Tess:** There’s no Jacuzzi that you jump in at the end with some ladies?

**Craig:** No. It takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston.

**Tess:** It’s nothing like the Fall Guy.

**Craig:** It’s more like Mad Max than The Fall Guy.

**Craig:** Thank you. It’s more like Mad Max. But I don’t know, whatever it does to me and my brain, because I love following storylines, I can literally feel the dopamine squirting out of my brain while I’m playing it. When I’m done, I can feel the lack of — I know I’m taking drugs, I know it. I know I’m smoking crack when I play this game. And it’s disrupted my sleep this week, but it’s been great.

**Tess:** It’s been great. Like MacGyver?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Goddamn it.

**Tess:** Good storylines, though. My One Cool Thing, now I’ve had two minutes to think about it.

**Craig:** Is it either The Fall Guy or MacGyver?

**Tess:** It’s the A-Team.

**Craig:** It’s A-Team? I love that you watched all those.

**Tess:** Oh my god, of course. So my One Cool Thing, since I’ve been living here, I’m coming back because I love it so much, but I’ve had my little six weeks here, and I’ve been living in Los Feliz — you say Los Feliz?

**Craig:** You can say both, actually.

**Tess:** What would you say?

**John:** I say Los Feliz.

**Tess:** Los Feliz. Los Feliz.

**Craig:** You did it right.

**Tess:** Los Feliz!

**Craig:** Never that.

**Tess:** Never that? So I’ve been living there which I love because I can walk everywhere, because I’m British, I love to walk, so I’m like, brilliant. And I discovered the Vista Cinema since I’ve been here which I think is the coolest cinema I have ever been in. And it’s just at the bottom of Hillhurst and Sunset and I just — it’s like my dream cinema, I mean not only was True Romance, I think the opening sort of scene is filmed there, but it just has everything I need.

You do cinemas so well here when you have that kind of old-fashioned sort of like art deco-y kind of sort of thing. And I got quite drunk with a friend when we went to see Spectre, and we arrived so late, so we couldn’t sit together and we were like, oh, god, what’s going on?

And then they brought out some folding chairs for us.

**Craig:** Oh, how nice.

**Tess:** So we sat drunk at the back, and then realized it was two-and-a-half hours long. Let’s not even —

**Craig:** But you know you can walk out at the last half hour, and —

**Tess:** At one point, I did turn to my friend, I was like, should we go? And he said, I think we need to see it through, we just need to see it through. And I had sobered up by then, so it was fun, but anyway, I just love how there’s just one film on there, once a week, and it’s just got a beautiful atmosphere to it, and I just — if I could be in there every night, but the only thing is that they have only one film a week, that’s the only thing. So I can’t go every night, but I just love it.

**Craig:** You could go every Saturday night.

**Tess:** I was like a pig in shit when I was in there.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** What a great guest.

**John:** Tess Morris, thank you for joining us on the podcast this week.

**Tess:** Thank you. It’s on my bucket list now, I’ve done it. I’ve been on Scriptnotes.

**John:** So is it no longer on your bucket list?

**Tess:** I’ll just keep coming back. I’ll just keep annoying you.

**John:** The buckets confuse me.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** John can’t handle it.

**Tess:** His whole face just went, what, uh?

**John:** I’m so confused. My programming won’t allow for this.

**Tess:** I won’t allow for this.

**Craig:** Literally, you divided by zero, just froze. You can find us at johnaugust.com, for show notes, where we talk about a lot of things we have discussed on the show today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Tess, are you on Twitter?

**Tess:** I am @thetessmorris.

**John:** She’s @thetessmorris on the Twitter. If you have questions like some of the ones we answered on the show today, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. If you would like to listen to back episodes of this whole program that we’ve made, you can find us at scriptnotes.net, you can also find us through the app. There’s a Scriptnotes app on the applicable app stores.

While you’re in iTunes, you should subscribe to Scriptnotes because why not? It’s free. And you should leave us a comment which actually helps us a lot and helps other people find the show. So thank you for doing that.

You should come and join us on December 9th for our live show with our special guests. And if there’s still tickets, hooray. Well, or, I don’t know, but you should come to the live show on December 9th.

Last but not least, we have a few of the USB drives left of all the 200 back episodes of the show, so you can find those at the store at johnaugust.com, and we will send you one with all 200 of the first episodes of Scriptnotes.

Our outro this week is by John Spurney, and it is a really good one. So John Spurney, thank you very much. We’re not even going to talk over it because it’s so good. And Craig and Tess, thank you so much.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome, Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) and [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Jon Bon Jovi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bon_Jovi) on Wikipedia
* [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/) and [Fountain](http://fountain.io/)
* Scriptnotes, 224: [Whiplash, on paper and on screen](http://johnaugust.com/2015/whiplash-on-paper-and-on-screen)
* Tess Morris on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTessMorris), and [Man Up](http://www.manupfilm.co.uk/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Up_(film)) and [Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_up_2015/)
* [Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/why-are-romantic-comedies-so-bad/309236/) by Christopher Orr
* CinemaBlend’s [30 Best Romantic Comedies Of All-Time](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/30-Best-Romantic-Comedies-All-Time-43134.html)
* The New Yorker on [Nick Bostrom](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom)
* Wait But Why on [The Fermi Paradox](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)
* [Fallout 4](https://www.fallout4.com/age-gate), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016E70408/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Vista Theatre](http://www.vintagecinemas.com/vista/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 188 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, if I bring up the term “midseason finale,” what does that evoke to you? What does that mean to you?

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

**John:** Nothing?

**Craig:** Nothing. I have a blank.

**John:** You don’t watch TV. I keep forgetting that. I keep trying to bring up these things that involve television.

**Craig:** I mean, I watch some TV but I don’t, like, I never realized there was a midseason finale.

**John:** I think it’s a fairly recent construct. And what it is, is generally as a TV show, especially a show that has a 22-episode season, they sort of break into two chunks. And so, you’ll go through a long narrative arc that will sort of like culminate after like 13 episodes or something. And this often happens sort of around Christmas time and then there’s a break and then they come back for the second half of the season later on.

And so, the midseason finale I think about sort of wrapping up a bunch of plot lines but also establishing the new stuff that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this episode of Scriptnotes kind of feels like a midseason finale to me because even though we’re not taking a break, even though next week there’ll be a show, there’s a whole bunch of stuff on the outline to go through which is basically let’s just wrap this stuff up and be done with it for awhile.

**Craig:** Well, I like that. I’m a big believer in getting things off the plate. Some of these things I never want to see again.

**John:** Yes, and so some of these things will be buried forever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk through some of the things we’ll talk about today.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** We will have a follow up on a previous Three Page Challenge. We will talk about the WGA diversity numbers.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll look at Road Runner cartoons.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Gerritsen’s Gravity lawsuit.

**Craig:** Wait, we’ve already done all of these things. Oh, this is the point.

**John:** This is the point.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** More rules on screenwriting.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** But then we’ll be looking forward to the future.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** And so establishing the second half of the season of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, I see, I didn’t even know we had a season. That’s how far ahead of me you are.

**John:** Absolutely. The new thing in podcasting is seasons.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah, so Serial has seasons. We haven’t had seasons to date, but maybe we should have seasons and then maybe that’s a thing we should talk about.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, Serial I presume is going to find somebody else who’s definitely guilty to talk about for awhile about how maybe they’re not guilty which you could do with literally anyone.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fun to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Go back and revisit things that are already decided.

**Craig:** I have stolen my pronunciation of literally from Seth Rudetsky.

**John:** Oh, good.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has his own.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He has — like the English people say “literally” and Americans typically say “literally” but he says, “literally, literally”. It’s his own thing. I love it. Stole it.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s like a lit tree.

**Craig:** Yes, literally.

**John:** As an adverb.

**Craig:** Right, literally yeah.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good. All right, so before we get in to this big batch of follow up, there’s a little bit of actual news. So news on my end, we have a brand new version of Weekend Read out which finally adds the thing that Craig has been asking for the last year for is support for the iPad.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** So the new version, version 1.5 of Weekend Read adds iPad support but also adds iCloud Sync which is very useful. So you can start reading a script on your iPhone, continue reading it on your iPad and it will know where you are and it will keep those files together and in sync.

**Craig:** Great

**John:** It will also let you do folders, which is super handy, so you can group things together. And you can even build a folder on your back, in the little iCloud folder and just drag a bunch of files in there. So, super useful. I want to thank Nima Yousefi who literally went —

**Craig:** Literally.

**John:** Literally ripped his hair out and went insane trying to make it all work. But it works, so thank you.

**Craig:** Do you think he did it for me?

**John:** Mostly he did it for Craig. Whenever he was about to give up, I said, “But think about Craig.”

**Craig:** And he literally went back to work.

**John:** Yeah. And so, Craig, you signed up as a beta tester but we can actually check how many times you installed the beta and it was zero.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s so me.

**John:** That’s so Raven.

**Craig:** That is so Raven. I’m going to — look, I don’t, listen man, now that I know it’s real —

**John:** Now it’s real.

**Craig:** I’m just going to —

**John:** Now it’s on the App Store.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just going to buy it. I’m just going to literally going to buy it.

**John:** Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

**Craig:** How much does it cost?

**John:** Yeah, well, it’s free to download and then to upgrade it for all the new extra features, it is a one-time purchase. If you upgraded the original version of Weekend Read, just click Restore Purchases and it would already be there.

**Craig:** And if I upgrade it because I’m going to — you know me, I love to upgrade.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m an upgrader.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What am I looking at here? 400, 500 bucks?

**John:** $9.99.

**Craig:** I can do that. I can swing it.

**John:** You can absolutely do that.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve seen your house. You could totally afford that.

**Craig:** I could totally afford it. And you know what? I’d could have done ten.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could have just done a flat — nobody does that by the way, right? Is there anyone that does that on the iStore?

**John:** You actually can’t do it on the App Store, there are set price tiers, so.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** They do these price tiers because depending on what country you’re in it’s a completely different amount of money.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so they set the price tier so it can be convertible to whatever currency it’s in.

**Craig:** And 9.99 is more convertible than 10?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Everyone understands it’s 10.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s actually literally called tier 10.

**Craig:** It’s literally tier 10.

**John:** God, oh no.

**Craig:** I hope that’s Seth —

**John:** I mean, Mathew is going to have to go through this and just cut out all of these.

**Craig:** We have to send this to Seth. I don’t care.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I want him to listen to this. I literally want him to listen to it.

**John:** Our friend, Aline Brosh McKenna, has issued a jeremiad against the term “seriously.”

**Craig:** Well, I’m with her. I mean, “really” and “seriously” both need to go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both.

**John:** They’re clammy.

**Craig:** They’re gone.

**John:** The other new thing we put out on the same day as Weekend Read 1.5 is brand new versions of our flagship font. So we make Courier Prime. We are the people who released Courier Prime which is free for everybody but we made it. And we also put out today Courier Prime Sans and Courier Prime Source. And so these are, the Sans version is basically it’s the exact same metrics as Couriers Prime but without the serifs on it so it is more like a Helvetica that there’s not little feet on the letters and heads.

And Courier Prime Source is designed for people who are writing programs who wanted a great mono space font. It is the same font as Courier Prime Sans but the Os have slashes through them so they don’t get confused with zeros. Actually the zeros have slashes —

**Craig:** Yeah, I was going to say the zeros are supposed to have the slashes.

**John:** That would be a huge mistake if we made that.

**Craig:** That would have been, literally, we could have brought the world down.

**John:** Yeah, like literally —

**Craig:** Literally.

**John:** Oh, we’ll never stop this.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Satellites could have crashed because of this one mistake.

**Craig:** Absolutely, a lot of lives would have been lost. I like that it’s your flagship font as opposed to, what, your 10 other not-flagship fonts?

**John:** Yeah, we have a lot of other internal fonts that we use for other things.

**Craig:** Oh, you have internal fonts?

**John:** Yeah. We have a busy font making —

**Craig:** A little font factory.

**John:** Operation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so Courier Prime Sans is actually the same face essentially as Highland Sans, the face that we use inside Highland. We just wanted other people to be able to use it. So Slugline was the first people who came to us to say, “Hey, can we use that?” And we’re like, “Yeah, sure,” but it feels weird that it’s called Highland so we changed the name of it. And then the Source font basically because the font we made as just as a Sans didn’t really work right for programmers, so we fixed some things for programmers.

Things like the asterisk which, you know, for a normal typewriter face you want the asterisk to be a certain way. But if you’re actually coding where you want it to be a much bigger, a more centered thing because you use it for multiplying numbers and such or pointers.

**Craig:** Is there a term, a linguistic term to describe a word in a language that is a foreign source but everybody mispronounces it just as a general — like Sans is, everybody knows that like a font is a Sans font.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s from sans, the French without. And there are words like San Pedro here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** What the hell is San Pedro? That’s the weirdest thing. It’s not like we — why would we say that? Why don’t we just say San Pedro?

**John:** I’m sure there is. So, please listeners, if you know the name for the word that Craig is searching for, let us know. Because it’s a special consistent thing, like you have to learn that it’s La Brea, like le, le, but it’s La Cienega, same word pronounced completely differently based on what street it’s associated with.

**Craig:** Le Brea, La Cienega. You’re right. And my wife speaks fluent Spanish, and so she really gets rankled by Los Feliz. That makes her nuts. Because we all know Feliz Navidad, it’s not like we go Feliz Navidad. We all know how it’s supposed to be but we say Los Feliz. And her favorite is in Florida, there is a lake, Buena Vista. But in Florida they call it Buena Vista.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** It’s madness but it’s just the way it is. And I would also argue that Los Feliz and Los Feliz, you hear both being pronounced and it’s partly because that neighborhood in Los Angeles still has a large Spanish-speaking population who choose to call it what it’s actually — more like what its actually Spanish would be.

**Craig:** They have to be so angry every day.

**John:** I don’t think they’re so angry.

**Craig:** I think they, I would be.

**John:** I think they recognize they’re living in a period of language transition.

**Craig:** I would riot. I mean — no, I’m not — listen, when I say I would riot, please understand I’m not trying to instigate a riot. But if I were walking around, I spoke Spanish, I was raised speaking Spanish and someone is like, “Oh, where do you live?” And I said, “Los Feliz”. And they said, “Oh, you mean Los Feliz?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would light a garbage can on fire at that point.

**John:** So, I think in the SNL app that you highlighted earlier, two weeks ago probably, I do recall an SNL sketch where they over-pronounced Spanish words and it’s just so terrible, like “Chimichanga” like, you know, really go too far in pronouncing a Spanish word in a Spanish way. That’s one of the worst things you could do, also.

**Craig:** That’s the local news anchor disease.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**John:** The last bit of news I had that was just sort of news because I got to experience it for the first time is I went to PAX East which is the big game convention here in Boston which happened to line up with the dates that I’m here in Boston for Big Fish. And it was just overwhelming and amazing.

Now, Craig, do you like conventions? Do you like going to big nerd-out bunches of people?

**Craig:** I love nerds and I love so much what happens at those conventions. Like when E3 comes around or when Comic-Con comes around I will definitely look and see what the news is coming out of them. But I cannot explain how much I hate being in an enormous box room with people jammed against me…eh…ah..eh…do you hear that noise?

**John:** Yeah, that’s pain.

**Craig:** That’s my brain every sec. I went to E3 once.

**John:** I went to E3 once too and it was —

**Craig:** Once.

**John:** Yeah. So I would rank this on the whole scale of like these kinds of conferences and conventions. So I went to CES once in Las Vegas and it was one of the most overwhelming and terrifying things I have ever encountered where like I wanted to stare just at a blank wall for like 20 minutes just to sort of get my eyes to shut up. I did not enjoy that. And then I also went to E3 and that was a similar kind of thing but a little scaled back. This was actually much better. It was a huge number of people, just a crazy number of people.

And so as you descend the escalator into it, you’re like, “Oh, my god, I’m going to have a panic attack.” But I realized quite early on that half of the convention floor is all the videogame stuff. And that’s the big, bright, loud, noisy part. And there’s probably amazing things to see and you’re seeing things like Over-Watched the new Blizzard game and there was Oculus stuff and there’s amazing stuff if you’re in to that. I just bee-lined straight through there and went to the other half of the hall where they had all the table-top games and it was just so much more sedate and calm and just delightful.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** One of the best things that I saw there, which I had anticipated is they have these tables where they have a bunch of opened board games and box games and table-top games and you can just check them out. You basically give them your ID. You can check them out. Like go over to a table and play them. And it was just a brilliant, simple idea but the chance to actually see what those games are like when they’re played. And I just commend everybody who sort of ventured over into that half of the arena.

**Craig:** That’s probably where you would find me. I like to go in the quiet place. I like quiet and cool. I don’t like it to be too hot.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** I don’t mind too cold. I’ll put a jacket on.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine. Yeah. So, part of the reason why I wanted to see this PAX East board game space is because we actually are developing a board game in my little company.

**Craig:** What aren’t you doing over there?

**John:** We’re kind of doing a lot. We got a lot of —

**Craig:** Are you guys going to build a car?

**John:** Shh.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m just saying because I, you know —

**John:** We know you love cars.

**Craig:** Well, if you could out Tesla the Tesla. I’m just saying

**John:** Yeah, out Apple the Apple cart.

**Craig:** Anyway, all right. So back, so you’re developing a game.

**John:** We’re developing a game. And so part of the reason why there were some specific people there I needed to talk with about this game we’re developing and trying to figuring out and one of the things we need to do next is actually put it in front of a bunch of people to play test it. So this is a callout to listeners and I’ll also put this on Twitter, but in Los Angeles on which day, on — ?

**Craig:** March 23rd at 9:00 p.m.

**John:** We are going to be testing this game.

**Craig:** That was a wild guess, was I right?

**John:** You were absolutely right. You were looking at the Workflow ahead me.

**Craig:** I might be cheating.

**John:** You might be cheating. We are going to need about 30 people to test this game. So if you are a person who really likes board games, table-top games, card games, that kind of thing, we might really benefit from your just spending 90 minutes and helping us figure out this game. So if you’d like to do that, the sign-up for that is johnaugust.com/game and that would be cool if you want to come join us. So it’s in Los Angeles. It is on March 23rd at 9:00 p.m. It’ll be somewhere in the Hollywood area/Mid-Wilshire area. And we will make sure the game actually makes sense, that the instructions make sense.

**Craig:** Am I allowed to go to that?

**John:** You are allowed to go to that, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m just, like, I mean, because, I mean —

**John:** So we now need only 29 people, so tick-tock.

**Craig:** Well, maybe, I mean, hold on a second, March 29th.

**John:** That’s a Monday.

**Craig:** That’s a Monday, I got — wait, it is?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I’m looking at April.

**John:** Oh, March 23rd, March 23rd.

**Craig:** March, I’m not wrong, March 23rd, right. Yeah, I think I might do that.

**John:** That’d be really fun. We’d love to have you.

**Craig:** If I go there and I start playing and people are really enjoying it but then I just started saying eh… Is it really that good? Eh?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I start turning people against your game.

**John:** That’s absolutely fine.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** You have to, you know —

**Craig:** Challenge accepted. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Follow your heart, Craig.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Let’s get in to the meat of our show which is all of this follow-up.

**Craig:** Follow-up.

**John:** So the first bit of follow-up is we got an email from Chris French who was one of the writers from our Three Page Challenge last week. And he’s the guy who wrote the script called Seven Secrets which involved a forest fire.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And if we recall, we were so intrigued by sort of what was happening. And we were really frustrated and confused by some of what we were reading on the page. And so, Chris sent through a much longer description about sort of real things that were happening there. But I wanted to read a little bit of what he wrote.

He writes, “To begin, yes, this is a screenplay where we will never see the faces of an adult. The entire film will frame the camera exclusively on the faces of five 9-year-olds in Big Sur, California. As for the grownups and their lives we’ll see silhouettes hands, feet, clothing, but never their faces. The film focuses on the way these five kids struggle, connect and eventually escape life-threatening circumstances forming unimaginably strong bonds with one another.”

So that was — you and I had that fundamental question because —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The first line of the script kind of says that but was it only a rule for that scene or was it a rule for the whole movie and he says, “That’s a rule for the whole movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah, so, in our little back-and-forth with him, I think he acknowledged this when he wrote to us, he realizes now, yeah, I probably do need to put something between the title page and the beginning of the script that says, “Hey, this is the way this is going to work and this is the rule, the cinematic role of this movie,” because no one would ever — it’s not something you can casually put in there.

**John:** No. Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page? Is there a term you would use for that?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because I — that came up this week. Because the script I — the other reason why it’s a midseason finale, I turned in a script.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** And I ended up doing that intermediary page and I guess intermediary page makes sense. It would be kind of a dedication page kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, people will use that page for quotes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’ll see that fairly frequently. So it’s like a — but in this case it’s really just a — what do they call it, a nota bene page.

**John:** Yeah, a nota bene. So you’re trying to frame the experience of reading it based on that one page that goes before the movie starts. And I had a back-and -forth with the producers about whether or not to put that page in. And I originally left it out and then they had this concern and I said like, okay, right before I sent you the draft, I took that page out. And so this is what was on that page. And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that page needs to go back in there.”

**Craig:** Okay, yeah.

**John:** And it was just a way of framing the read that helps people understand what they’re about to get.

**Craig:** Was it a quote or was it note from you?

**John:** It was a single sentence and I don’t think I can say more than that.

**Craig:** No, no, you shouldn’t say anything more than that.

**John:** It was a single sentence but it basically framed expectation in a way —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was useful. So in Big Fish, that page exists and it says, “This is a southern story full of lies and fabrication, but truer for their inclusion.” And that was always in the script and that never was meant to be filmed or shot, but it was a useful way of sort of framing people’s expectation that like you’re going to see a bunch of really crazy tall-tales and that’s sort of the point, it’s like what’s really underneath those.

**Craig:** Yeah, anytime you feel like you need to put that context there, because remember, when people go see movies, of course, they have the context of the trailer and the commercials and all of the publicity that goes around it. There is a hundred ways to prepare people for a certain kind of viewing experience. There is no way other than what we’re talking about to prepare them for the script-reading experience. So I’m always in favor of that being really direct with people.

In Cowboy Ninja Viking, I didn’t put it in between the title page and the front because I wanted to have the audience experience confusion for a bit, and then when it was time, I broke out a little paragraph in italics and said, “This is how this movie works.”

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But the one thing, I’m not a huge fan of what I would call the inspirational quote. You’ll see that a lot of times, somebody will throw a quote on there from Thoreau or Nietzsche or Plato, I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I always feel like, “Oh, yes, well, we can’t hire them,” so perhaps you’re just trading on somebody else’s wit and wisdom. I like what you did with Big Fish. You like said this is — because you know, like people are going to read this going, “Wait, is this happening? Is this not happening?” They’re a little confused because they’re not experiencing the movie. You just come right off the bat and say, “There’s going to be a bunch of lies in this. Have fun.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s also trying to tip off the reader that the language is going to be a little bit more flowery than they’re probably used to.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s a very deliberate choice.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, you’re setting that tone of the tone of tone.

**John:** That said of, you know, maybe 60 screenplays I’ve read, I think I’ve done it twice. So it’s not a thing you do all the time.

**Craig:** No, that is a particular ingredient that you add when required.

**John:** Our next bit of follow-up is the WGA diversity numbers which we discussed in the last episode. Friend of the show Dennis Hensley writes, “On the heels of the WGA’s diversity report, which you talked about in the last show, the WGA offers a writer’s access program which showcases mid-level guild writers from different diversity categories. I ticked the GLBT box. I was one of 11 writers who got in out of 171 scripts submitted.”

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “I’m one of only two comedy writers, the rest are drama.”

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** “I want to thank you both for the practical tips I learned listening to you as well as the overall morale boost reality checks you offer. It really helped me with the script I submitted.” So there’ll be a link to this in the show notes but this is essentially the WGA TV Writer Access Project, a program designed to identify excellent diverse writers with television staffing experience.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s great. I mean, the downside of the WGA diversity report which is the annual collection of depressing statistics that do not change is that they don’t do anything except point backwards in time and say, “Eh, bad.” This program which has been going on for a bit now, this is what you would want your union to do, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To go out and say, “Okay, well, we’re not going to sit here and just complain. Look at these people. We pick them. We read their stuff. We like it. You should take a really close look.” So I love that. Interesting also that the Writers Access Program does include sexual orientation or gender status whereas the diversity report doesn’t seem to get into that, as far as I could tell, at least, the diversity report is really about race and gender unless I’m missing something, and age.

**John:** And age, yeah. So this program has five diversity categories, minority writers, writers with disabilities, which the diversity report I don’t think singled out, women writers, writers age 55 and over, and gay and lesbian writers.

**Craig:** Oh, so they’re putting the number at 55, which again, probably —

**John:** Makes a lot more sense.

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot more sense than using the 40.

**John:** 40.

**Craig:** Yeah, 40 makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, anyway, I’m really happy Dennis that we gave you any tips that were helpful to you and we are rooting for you and the Writers Access Program.

**John:** So one of the things they highlight about this program is that it’s all blind submissions. And so the idea of blind submissions I think is really interesting and crucial. And so, I was talking with Andrew Lippa who is here during Big Fish with me, the composer of Big Fish. And they were talking about how many more women players are in orchestras and then how much higher chairs they have reached in the last 10 years. And apparently, the reason why that change has happened has been blind auditions. So essentially, the player is playing behind the screen and the judges are listening but not seeing the player play.

**Craig:** Fascinating.

**John:** And so blind submissions for this project. And also, I’ve read the same thing for like John Oliver show. Everybody came in with just a number on their submission page and it was all read based without names or any other information about who that writer was.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I mean, I don’t know if you recall. At one point, we talked about that study, the Princeton study where they sent out the same play under a male name and a female name and female authors actually ran aground of discrimination from female readers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This issue of whatever you’d call it, gender bias, whatever, all the bias. Bias, how about that word [laughs]? This issue of bias, it’s not necessarily always the stereotype of the 50-year-old white guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think that blind submissions are really smart. I love that.

**John:** And sometimes people will make a misassumption based on a name on a title page. So just last week we had, I think it was K.C. Smith. We loved what we assumed was her sample, which was that great script about this guy who really wanted to eat waffles and was not allowed to eat waffles.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so we said, this woman wrote a terrific script and it turns out K.C. is a guy and an African-American guy. And so, hooray.

**Craig:** Yeah, we didn’t know if K.C. or Chris were men or women. But it turns out they’re both guys.

**John:** They’re both guys.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Two guys wrote in with a link to a live action Road Runner short. So last week we talked a lot about sort of Road Runner rules, the rules that the creators of those cartoons had set for themselves about how the Coyote and the Road Runner should function. And so this was an interesting example of trying to do that in a live action world.

I didn’t find it entirely successful. But I found it kind of just fascinating to try to apply cartoon physics and cartoon logic to a live action scenario. And one thing it reminded me of is we didn’t talk about in that list that sense that in a Road Runner cartoon, you only fall once you realize that there is no ground beneath you.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah, which is just crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Falling is a function of awareness, not gravity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, just odd.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, that’s the best part of those cartoons was when Wile E. Coyote was midair and was still really happy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, huh.

**John:** Huh, wait.

**Craig:** And then he would look down and then he would look at you like, “Oh, you got to be kidding me.” [laughs] And then his body would fall while his head stayed there [laughs]. And his neck would expand, which by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the slow motion video of somebody dropping a slinky, it kind of works that way. Like they let the slinky go and the bottom drops while the top essentially stays and then it drops like Wile E. Coyote.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** On the subject of gravity, we have some follow-up on the Gravity lawsuit.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So Med writes —

**Craig:** Med.

**John:** “I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón.”

**Craig:** Baffled.

**John:** “Unless there are significant errors in the revised claims, Tess Gerritsen definitely did get robbed.”

**Craig:** I thank God that this guy or woman is writing because they definitely know what happened. Continue.

**John:** [laughs] “You both seem pretty quick to decide against anyone who is not closely aligned with the screenwriting community maybe due to your union allegiance.”

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

John “I’m not sure.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “In any case, I suggest you put yourselves in Ms. Gerritsen’s shoes and tell me you would not be outraged.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “She was right to state that writers in general should be ultra cautious in selling properties to Hollywood. For successful writers like Gerritsen, it seems like ‘cash and carry’ with no bonus, earn out, or residual options is really the only bulletproof option. This is a doubly true if writers cannot even depend on their own larger community to support them when they are wronged. Still enjoying your show very much even on those few occasions when I disagree.”

**Craig:** [laughs] So, John, you hear people say, that begs the question all the time but they misuse it. You probably know the real meaning of begging the question, correct?

**John:** Absolutely. Assuming facts not in evidence.

**Craig:** Begging the question, actually, it’s building an argument around something that needs to be figured out by the argument. It’s essentially saying, people are definitely hungry because they’re hungry. This guy is basically saying I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón because they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah [laughs].

**Craig:** But you’re supposed to prove that, you see [laughs], your argument. You are begging the question. So going through this very quickly, you say that Tess Gerritsen definitely did get robbed. I have no idea how — we are not saying that she definitely didn’t. I’m not sure what access to the cosmic oracle you have that we don’t [laughs]. No, we are not pretty quick to decide against anyone who is not closely aligned with the screenwriting community. We’re not quick to decide anything. And union allegiance surely has nothing to do with it I think. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing at all. It doesn’t work that way.

**John:** So in our very long and very exhaustive episode about the Gerritsen lawsuit, I recall making it very clear that if I were in Tess Gerritsen’s position, I would probably perceive things the way Tess Gerritsen perceives things because from her perspective, it does feel like that. And so our objective with that episode was to show, you know what, if you zoom out and take it outside of her personal experience, it probably looks quite a bit different. And that was the perspective we were trying to provide.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But a great example this last week of like, “Well, I just can’t believe that happened,” was the Blurred Lines lawsuit. So we are not a music industry podcast or we’re not a show for songwriters and people who are interested in songwriting, but I thought the Blurred Lines things was nuts. And so to summarize for people who don’t know what we’re talking about, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams and another collaborator were sued by Marvin Gaye’s estate arguing that Robin Thicke’s big, giant hit song infringed upon the copyright of a classic Marvin Gaye song.

And if you listen to the two songs back to back, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, they’re in a similar kind of vibe.” But in any sort of like one thing is directly lifted from the other, I was astonished. And most people were astonished who were sort of music industry legal scholars were amazed that they lost this lawsuit.

**Craig:** Well, you know, obviously this comes down to juries and so forth. I, myself, was completely rooting for the Marvin Gaye estate and was thrilled. I, unlike you — so, here, Med, you can see. We do not have union allegiance or whatever the hell. Or even allegiance to each other. I thought the song was a dead rip-off, I really did. I thought it was —

**John:** Wow, that’s amazing.

**Craig:** A straight up rip-off. Look, if they had contacted the Marvin Gaye estate when they were making it and said, “Listen, we want to basically do a version of your song,” because they didn’t copy it directly. What they did was a version of it. I think there was infringement. I don’t know if the — the award seems a little whacky [laughs] but the damages. But, you know, I was on the side of that.

But, look, Med says, “I suggest you put yourselves in Ms. Gerritsen’s shoes and tell me you would not be outraged.” Why? Who cares if I’m outraged or not? Okay, I’m in her shoes and I’m outraged. Whoopty doo.

**John:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** Outraged doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, outraged generally means that [laughs] feelings are clouding my logic. She was not right to state that writers in general should be ultra cautious in selling properties to Hollywood. Let me remind Med that she did get paid $1 million, I believe, regardless. She had a lawyer. That’s the caution that you take. This was not her first rodeo, as far as I understood either.

I actually think she liked the way this turned out. But, no, I don’t think any of the conclusions here are correct, nor do I think the larger community of writers is meant to support a writer just because the writer says I’ve been wronged.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Frankly, we supported one of the — we supported the people that wrote Gravity in our estimation. But we are still enjoying your listenership very much.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** Even on this one occasion where we have disagreed.

**John:** We shouldn’t spend too much on the show about the Robin Thicke thing because obviously it’s — several other episodes could be about the Robin Thicke thing. What I found so fascinating as I was reading sort of the reaction to this lawsuit, clearly, the fact that Robin Thicke seems like an incredible douchebag, hurt him. Clearly, the fact that he spoke about his influences hurt him.

But if you look at other songs, though, the same claim could be made against them, they are enumerable. And so the same way that I worry that a success by the Tess Gerritsen lawsuit would have a horrible chilling effect on Hollywood, I feel like this verdict of the Robin Thicke thing could have a horrible chilling effect. Basically, imitating a style rather than imitating the exact notes.

So the thing I’ll link to, Jon Caramanica for the New York Times, wrote a piece talking about how copyright law is focused on the sheet music. It’s focused on like this is literally what is on the page. And by that standard, it doesn’t actually work at all. I mean like there should be no basis for it. Instead, we’re just sort of basing it on like, well, they kind of feel like the same thing. But feeling like the same thing is a really murky, dangerous thing to try to talk about.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, there’s the publishing right and then there’s obviously the performance which is its own copyright issue. And I’m sure the Gaye estate was going on the basis of the publishing as opposed to the mechanical, as they say. But, look, I just call them like I see them like everybody else out there. And I actually thought that that one was overt, which is overt infringement to me.

The second I heard that song, just to be clear, the first time I heard Blurred Lines, I’m like “Oh [laughs]. Oh, that’s Marvin Gaye.” You can’t do that. I mean, even down to the people like chitchatting at a party while, I mean, you’ve ripped him off. That was a rip-off. Now, people can argue about, you know, how you define what was ripped off specifically and what wasn’t, I understand that.

I see you brought up Stay With Me, which absolutely is a rip-off [laughs] of Won’t Back Down. It’s a dead rip-off.

**John:** Here’s why I think they settled quickly and did not actually go to the full-on trial is because they wanted to sort of protect Sam Smith from being dragged into it. I suspect if they actually did the research and proved it, you would find 15 gospel songs that have the exact same chord progression.

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings].

**Craig:** It’s not the progression.

**John:** [sings]

**Craig:** It is both the progression and the rhythm. So it’s not only the notes but the dots and the rest. [sings] That is very specific. That is pretty much the definition of unique expression and fixed form.

**John:** Right, so —

**Craig:** And it’s a dead rip-off.

**John:** So that never went to trial, so we will never know sort of how that would have sussed out.

**Craig:** See, I think the opposite. I think it didn’t go to trial because I think they knew that they had screwed up [laughs]. I think they knew were wrong.

**John:** I think it didn’t go to trial because of, you know, Sam Smith’s meteoric rise and just trying to protect him. I do strongly, strongly, strongly suspect that they would have been able to find five gospel songs with that exact hook in it. And that doesn’t mean that Tom Petty took it, it just means that I think it was a thing that exists in the world.

**Craig:** It is possible. But again, I got to back up my ’70s.

**John:** Got to back up Tom Petty.

**Craig:** My ’70s era stars [laughs], you know. Don’t mess with Marvin, not when I’m around. Marvin, I mean, really, truly, I love Marvin Gaye. I love Marvin Gaye. I think the world is so worse off for not having more Marvin Gayes out there. And so worse off, frankly, for more stuff that kind of is like, “Oh, we’ll just do Marvin without Marvin being here.” And I love Tom Petty and, by the way, I love Sam Smith.

I don’t think Sam Smith knew. Did he write that song?

**John:** He did.

**Craig:** Oh, then he knew [laughs]. He knew. He took Don’t Back Down and he slowed it down.

**John:** I don’t think he deliberately did it. But we will never actually be able to suss that out.

**Craig:** We’ll never know.

**John:** But what we can suss out are some other rules that were broken or unbroken. This is from Josh who wrote in with a note about coverage he got, which he described as being, in part helpful and in part maddening. So he writes, “The reader wrote, ‘A few other issues that jump off the page are the use of underlining in slug lines usually done only in sitcom scripts, the improper use of italics and narrative in dialogue, and occasional placement of parentheticals at the bottom of dialogue. Bottom line, to avoid development of one’s own script formatting conventions and confer regularly with Trottier for accepted formats.'”

So he’s referring to the Screenwriter’s Bible which is a book that’s often held up as being the standard.

**Craig:** Oh. I don’t have the Trottier. Trottier or Trottier?

**John:** I don’t know if it’s Trottier or Trottier.

**Craig:** Let’s go with Trottier. I don’t have the Trottier book. But if I did, I would hold it up and then throw it down forcefully into a wood chipper. I underline my slug lines. No, I’m sorry, I bold my slug lines. But, yes, people do underline their slug lines. I don’t care. If I’m reading a great script and the slug lines are underlined, I don’t care.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the improper use of italics in narrative and dialogue are. I will occasionally use italics when I so desire. Not often but when I feel like it. “The occasional placement of parentheticals at the ends of dialogue,” I’ve seen people do that to imply this is unsaid but this is sort of what I want them to act as being unsaid. “To avoid development of one’s own script format conventions.” F-you.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s what I’d say to — and by the way, Josh, your script might be terrible.

**John:** It could easily be terrible.

**Craig:** But the reader really should be concentrating on that because if your script was great and this is what the reader was saying, then I think I would also lift the reader up and throw the reader into a wood chipper.

**John:** Oh, this could be a whole wood chipper festival because that’s all a means of teeing up this article from Script Magazine written by Ray Morton.

**Craig:** Wait, Ray Morton? How did they get Ray Morton? [laughs]

**John:** Well, Ray Morton is a writer and script consultant. His new book, A Quick Guide to Screenwriting, is now available online and in bookstores.

**Craig:** Oh, good. As long as it’s quick because nobody has time for a lengthy guide to something as easy and obvious [laughs] as screenwriting.

**John:** Morton analyzes screenplays for production companies, producers, and individual writers. He is available for private consultation.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** So this is all available online. There will be a link to this in the show notes. And so he has, how many points is this, 12 points to talk through. And I thought we’d talk through them. And because, actually, a fair number of them I agreed with. But some of them were wood chipperable.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s go through it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, would you want to start reading the first one?

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] You know my, this is great. The script is short, between 90 and 110 pages. If a script runs longer than 120 pages, that tells me the writer does not know the industry standards or worse, thinks that he/she is an exception to them.

This always reminds me of The Holy Grail, you shall count to three, not four, five is right out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the script is short between 90 and 110 pages. If you’ve gone over that, you don’t know the industry standards or you think you’re an exception to them, or you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you’ve written The Godfather again.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So I predict that Craig will say, no, that is poppycock and —

**Craig:** That is.

**John:** Many terrific scripts are larger than 110 pages.

**Craig:** And by the way, some of them are under 90 pages like, I don’t know, The Artist that won the Oscar. This is poppycock. It’s foofaraw and I reject it. [laughs]

**John:** Number two, the front cover is free of WGA registration numbers and fake production company names.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, again, if I see a WGA registration number, I’m not going to go, “What an idiot,” and then never read the script. If it’s a great script, what do I care? It’s like I don’t care. Yes, it’s true that amateurs are the only people that are concerned about [laughs] piracy literally. The only people that are concerned about thievery.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** None of — the rest of us don’t care. Fake production company name, all production company names are fake. They are as fake as, I don’t know, Ray Morton’s expertise. It’s just because you’re saying you’re an expert, you’re an expert. They’re saying they’re a production company, they’re a production company. I don’t care. If it’s a good script, what do I care?

**John:** Yeah, you don’t care. And the only reason why I say I basically agree with this is because if I see the WGA registration number or that goofy production company name, it’s just the first impression. It’s just the first impression like, “Oh, oh, this might be one of the scripts of a person who doesn’t know what they’re doing.” So it’s useful to not have that there because I don’t have any negative thing as I turn to page one.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it is true. Like if you don’t want people to know that you are an outsider, don’t put that. That’s just a fact. If you put your WGA registration thing on, you’re an outsider.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** On the other hand, my guess is people will know you’re an outsider anyway because they won’t know who you are.

**John:** The first page contains a lot of white space. If I open up a script and I’m confronted with big blocks of uninterrupted type, I know immediately that the piece is overwritten, that the author has employed excessively flowery literary style and action lines and/or that he/she has incorporated lots of unfilmable material. Craig, what’s your opinion?

**Craig:** Yes, it is true that if you see big blocks of uninterrupted type that the first page is going to be hard to read which is certainly not what you want. You want people to feel easy reading it. I know that everybody, myself included, if I have a choice of screenplays to read and the first one is just like, “Whoa, lots of text,” and the second one is, “Ah, nice and airy,” I’ll go for the airy one. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to read the other one, especially if it’s —

**John:** It means you’re lazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m lazy. Like every human, I am essentially lazy. I don’t agree with these conclusions. When I open up a script and I’m confronted with big blocks of uninterrupted type before I draw any conclusion, I only make one — I know one thing only, for sure. And that is that this person could use their return key more frequently. That’s all I know. The rest of this may be true, may not.

**John:** Yeah. I know who the protagonist is by page five.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you’ve written The Godfather again or maybe you wrote Star Wars.

**John:** The premise is clearly established by page 10.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola and you wrote The Godfather again or you wrote Star Wars.

**John:** Something interesting/entertaining happens in the first five pages.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo and you wrote The Godfather again —

**John:** No, I would basically stand up for him here. I think the overall point is that if by page five nothing interesting has happened, I’m going to have a harder time getting to page six.

**Craig:** Well, let’s —

**John:** I mean, that’s human nature.

**Craig:** Okay, but let’s define interesting.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, so —

**John:** Intriguing. It could be, you know, if you don’t have me curious by page five, I’m less likely to want to read page six.

**Craig:** Look, I’m interested in good writing and then I’m interested in interesting things, right? So The Godfather opens with Bonasera who is the undertaker, in a beautifully underlit single, telling a story in broken English about why he’s come to this man for help. And he tells a story.

Now the story I think is very interesting. But nothing’s actually happening. He’s describing something that has happened. We will never meet the person he’s talking about. What has happened to him, not important to the plot of the movie, particularly at all. He is not a secondary character. He’s like a quadrary character if.

And what he’s describing will contain no stakes in and of itself. It is interesting because it’s an interesting story and then it brings out this interesting relationship with a character who is also not the protagonist of the movie. Point being that this is the dumbest thing to say if you’re a so-called screenplay expert. What you’re really saying is be good. Yeah, thanks, we know.

By the way, how about this? Something interesting or entertaining should happen on every page.

**John:** The first 10 pages contains plenty of action. By action, I mean dramatic action, stuff happening. Not just car chases, although car chases are fine, too.

**Craig:** Okay. So unless you’re Francis Ford Coppola [laughs] and Mario Puzo and you wrote The Godfather because it’s a guy telling a story.

**John:** Or it’s Harry Met Sally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s not action, per se.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s just, eh.

**John:** Number eight. I can tell what’s going on.

**Craig:** Oh, well —

**John:** I’m sympathetic here. As we talked about pages we’ve read this last week, I had a hard time understanding what was going on. And that can be frustrating, like literally understanding what it is I’m seeing on screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if what the person’s describing is not visualizable, sure. However, if what the person is describing makes no sense to me at the moment, we talk about grace period all the time, right?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** So like I didn’t understand what was going on in The Matrix for the first five minutes. Why was he — who’s talking about the Matrix? Who’s Morpheus? What the — what?

**John:** What? What?

**Craig:** Why is she whispering in his ear? Who’s that lady running from? Who are those guys in the suits? Why are they different from the police? How did she jump across the thing? A million questions, right? I love that.

**John:** Yeah, the dialogue is short and to the point. There’s nothing worse than opening a screenplay and getting faced with a single speech that goes on for a page or two or five.

**Craig:** Unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola and you’ve written The Godfather, again.

**John:** Well, also, there’s nothing worse, like literally, nothing is worse? Like it’s worse than Hitler?

**Craig:** And there’s nothing worse. There’s something worse.

**John:** That’s the worst thing that happened to mankind.

**Craig:** Here’s something worse. You open the screenplay and it’s not a screenplay at all, it’s actually like a fake screenplay and inside there’s a little indentation. And in the indentation is anthrax.

**John:** Yeah. Or it’s just a single note saying like we’ve kidnapped your wife and family.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. Or you open it up and it’s some kind of amazing existential mirror and through that mirror you realize that you’ve been living in — it’s a fake world, everyone’s been putting on a play, you don’t actually exist.

**John:** Yeah. That’s actually the line I added to the script or to the page. And in between, is that was we’ve kidnapped your wife and family.

**Craig:** This guy, I swear to God, I wish I could send this guy back to the ’70s so that he could advise Puzo and Coppola on that terrible, terrible script they wrote.

**John:** Well, one of the things he might help with is the script doesn’t begin with a flashback.

**Craig:** Yeah. Except that it kind of does because this guy is talking about something that happened.

**John:** Yeah, it is. It’s basically a flashback.

**Craig:** It’s like amazing how bad this guy is at his “job.”

**John:** There are no camera directions, shot descriptions and editing instructions.

**Craig:** Oh, unless you’re Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.

**John:** There are no coffins. I once received a vampire script packaged in a miniature coffin, complete with the screenplay’s title on the lid and a spring-lidded bash positioned that would jump out when the coffin was opened.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

**John:** I fully agree with him. Do not send gimmickry trash along with your script.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Send your script.

**Craig:** Sure. I can’t imagine this is a common thing. But yeah, sure, thanks for that Ray, you nailed it. Can I just say? Look —

**John:** You absolutely may say.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to beat up on this dude specifically. But let’s say that I were a con artist by constitution. I’m a charlatan. I flit around from con to con looking for ways to bill people out of their money. And my current scam is dried up, I’m looking for a new one.

What I’m looking for is a situation where a lot of people want access to something, but don’t have it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that thing that they want access to is behind a curtain. So I can tell them I’ve been behind the curtain. And if they give me money, I’ll tell them what’s behind the curtain so that they can go behind the curtain. And they’ll never know if I’m telling the truth of not.

And what’s so amazing about all these people is that they never contradict each other. And they never contradict each other because they literally do not have the vocabulary to contradict each other because they, unlike you or me, haven’t been behind the curtain in any real substantive way. So they just write these baloney things and they create this stack of them, this massive whirling stack so that they can basically get people to pay them 200 bucks at a time for information that I have to tell you all is not worth it at all. Stop paying these people. Stop it. Stop it.

**John:** As you were talking, I was thinking about like what other industries have similar kinds of things and clearly the financial industry in general, like investments and stock market. Real estate has a very specific thing because there’s all these little esoteric terms and you feel like, “Oh, this is how you’re going to do it. This is the churn, how you’re going to do it.”

**Craig:** Medicine.

**John:** Medicine, absolutely.

**Craig:** Always, yeah. Because people don’t understand medicine, they don’t understand finance, they don’t understand real estate. And somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to give you the secrets that all those swells are using. And because, by the way, they’re only successful because they know the secrets. And I’m going to share them with you. How about exercise? Same thing, exercise.

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s just like every single one of these things has the same deal. And there’s no way for somebody who is ignorant to question what they’re saying because they’re ignorant. That’s the scam.

**John:** Well, but the thing is you have to recognize, you know, within your own ignorance that there is very likely no correct answer. That’s the hard thing to sort of accept is that there may not be a way to do that. So, you know, as we get questions about like, “Well, how do I break in? Or how do I break back in?” Or how to all that stuff?

Part of my frustration, and I suspect you share it too, is that like, there is no answer. There’s no one answer for like how you and me everyone else “broke in.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there’s no answers for how it’s going to work for you. It’s just like it’s just a bunch of stuff happens and suddenly you are being employed to do this thing that you really wanted to do. But I can’t tell you why it happens for some people and doesn’t happen for other people. There’s no proper answer.

**Craig:** There is no proper answer. Frankly, the vocabulary that has been defined by the con artistry industry, “breaking in,” there’s no breaking in. Sorry. I mean we just talked — did we talk about the case of the screenwriter who ended up living in his car?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean he broke in and then he was in his car. There’s no breaking in. There are these interesting dribs and drabs and suddenly one day you look in the mirror and go, “Am I screenwriter now? I can’t tell, I think I am. I guess I’ll just keep trying to do it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All the things that they’re promising you, rules don’t exist. Breaking in doesn’t exist. Getting rich quick doesn’t exist. Things that you should or shouldn’t do, they don’t exist.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And if they did, trust me when I tell you, John and I, I like to think of you and I like as Penn & Teller a little bit. Although, we both talk.

**John:** And we don’t do magic.

**Craig:** And we don’t do magic. But Penn & Teller were always amazing about saying, “We’re going to dispel the cheesy fake nonsense around magic,” or all those magicians that walk around. I mean this was really started by James Randi who’s one of my personal heroes. James Randi was a magician and he would do things like cold readings as part of his act and people would believe it.

And part of the reason they would believe it is because magicians have always done that thing that Doug Henning would say, “It’s an allusion, it’s a World of Magic. I come from.” No, you’re not. You’re doing tricks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Penn & Teller always said, “No, no, no, there’s no magic. Trust me when we tell you this. We’re doing tricks. And in fact, we’re going to show you how we do some of them and that’s — and then we’re going to do more and still seem like magic and that’s the real fun of it.”

**John:** Yeah, so classically Penn & Teller like it’s done with string. And so they talk you through the whole thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s like, “Oh, and it’s done with string.”

**Craig:** And then sometimes they’ll do, they did the whole ball and cup thing once with clear cups. And it was still amazing how complicated the whole thing was. You and I, I feel are like that. If we found something, anything that we thought would help everybody that was a magic bullet, we would rush to the microphone and tell you, “We assure you.” But there is nothing. I say this not out of arrogance, but just out of fact, because of the amount of time that you and I have been doing this professionally. Ray Morton, whoever he is, could not possibly know anything more about this than we do. It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t ascribe — actually, I want to be clear. I don’t ascribe any negative motivation to Ray Morton. I think he genuinely is trying to help people.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** I want to say that. And I think he’s also noticing patterns in his own response to things. And I think those are valid personal experiences. The frustration I have is that in observing his own personal reactions to things, then trying to go to the next step and codify these out as like these are things, prohibitions of things you should never do. And I think that is incorrect.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean look, you’re right. I cannot ascribe con artistry as a motivation to Ray. I don’t know him. And I can never say what’s in someone’s heart. That said, you and I do not charge for this and he charges for what he does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he writes these things in Script Magazine which has their marketing deal with Final Draft. There’s money involved. And when there’s money involved just really remember my golden rule, screenwriting costs nothing. Nothing. It is free. Don’t pay money.

**John:** Don’t pay money. Which is a great segue to the next thing I want to talk about which is sort of the future and sort of like as we sort of wrap up this midseason finale and look forward to the second half of the season and sort of what is going on ahead. There’s things that you and I need to figure out and sort of our listeners need to figure out.
One of the things that came up was —

**Craig:** Am I getting fired? It sounds like I’m getting fired. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, I’d like you on the phone at 3pm because we have some things to talk through.

**Craig:** And HR will be there.

**John:** So our podcast is like really successful, which is just terrific. We have like a lot of listeners. We have like so many listeners that by most metrics, we’re in the top 1% or 2% of all podcasts out there.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is just crazy.

**Craig:** How many listeners do we have? Are you allowed to say that?

**John:** Oh yeah. We have 60,000 listeners a week, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s great. So that’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh now, I’m scared. You should have never told me that.

**John:** Well yeah, don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** You should have told me 60.

**John:** We have 60 listeners a week, we count them off.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So we have Malcolm and we have Aline. And we have Rian Johnson sometimes. And Kelly when she’s in town. So we have a great number of listeners and fantastic listeners and we love them all. So one of things unusual about our show versus other shows is we’re like kind of the only show in that group of things that doesn’t have ads. And I kind of enjoy not having ads. But you and I have both talked about like, “Well, should we do ads? And what would be that like? And would it ruin the show?” And I honestly don’t know. And we don’t know what that would be like if we do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had a good conversation about it. And, you know, my feeling — I have sort of competing feelings on this. I mean on the one hand, I am, you know, like you I really love the fact that we are essentially editorially as pure as the undriven snow. No, sorry, the driven snow because I used to think the driven snow was that a car had driven through it, but it means the wind has moved around. So we’re as pure as the driven snow.

However, I’m also really aware that you and your staff do all this work that I don’t do. Now granted they are supported by our premium subscribers.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And things like we make a little bit of money on the t-shirt sales. When we say we make money, we actually don’t make money. Correct me if I’m wrong, we are still losing money.

**John:** We still lose money. So we still, you know, through the premium subscribers, through t-shirts and stuff like that, we make enough money to pay for Matthew who cuts the show and bless you Matthew for cutting the show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And for sort of the basic keeping the lights on stuff. We don’t actually make enough money to pay for Stuart. But Stuart is my assistant normally so like, you know, he has to be sitting at a desk doing some things anyway.

**Craig:** Right. But what about like the hosting?

**John:** Hosting is cheaper than it used to be.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So again, it’s the economies of scale. So we’re much closer to breaking even. So it’s a question of, though, of whether we should just stay and stop at that point or whether we should do the, you know, the Mail Chimp sponsor at the start of the show and at the end of the show, which sort of all the other podcasts do.

And so I don’t honestly have the great answer for that because I don’t want to change the show in any way that’s sort of detrimental to the show. I don’t want to do something stupid. Either to do it or not to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean this is always the dangerous time when you fix what isn’t broken. But I mean look, I think, I’m just going to give you, ‘m going to give you my opinions like I’m a listener because and in a sense I really am kind of a listener because you really, I mean, people need to know that John and his crew over there do everything. I show up and I talk. I hate the idea of losing money consistently only because it ultimately becomes a strain on you and me and that just seems crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So at the very least, breaking even sounds good. There are a lot of charities that you and I support, not only writing charities but just, you know, off the top of my head, I support three different educational charities. I support a bunch of medical charities.

So if money did come in, I would pledge to people, you just have to take my word for it, I would give it to charity. I wouldn’t keep any extra. Because the thing is you could say, “Well, we just want to make enough to break even,” but there’s no easy way to do that. You get what you get.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I mean on my end, I would kick it over to charity unless it was millions of dollars.

**John:** Millions of dollars. And it’s not millions of dollars yet. But the thing is it’s actually more money than it was like a year ago. And so the thing, because you don’t listen to other podcasts, you’re not sort of aware of like sort of that the advertising universe in that has actually changed to the point where it’s not like, you know, oh someone will give you $100 for a sponsor read. It’s like a lot more money than that.

**Craig:** And we’re the freaks that don’t do it essentially.

**John:** Essentially, we’re the freaks. And maybe it’s great to stay the freaks. And part of the reason I bring this up in this conversation is because I’m really curious what our listeners themselves feel like about this. And so we always invite you to write into to ask@johnaugust.com or which I thing I always forget we have, what we actually have is a Facebook page.

And so if you actually go to Facebook/scriptnotes, there’s a whole page of Scriptnotes stuff. And no one ever comments on it because we never mention it. But maybe on the link for this episode, basically click on this episode, leave a comment. Just tell us what you actually think because I’m really of two very different minds about what should happen with the idea of advertising on the show and sort of whether it’s a good thing or bad thing for us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think a lot of the bigger podcasts also are part of networks and we’re not.

**John:** We’re not.

**Craig:** We are floating alone. So it’s actually, look, on the plus side, it’s pretty amazing that we have this kind of listenership for whom we are truly grateful without the benefit of any promotion, any money coming in, any network, anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we want to do right by people. We don’t want to screw people up. But on the other end, I don’t want to like have to write a check for the rest of my life for this thing either.

**John:** Yeah. The second thing I want to bring up is we floated this idea of, you know, we always do the Three Page Challenges and it’s great to look at the first three pages of a script. But it would actually really useful to look at like a whole script and have an episode where we could take a look at an entire script from something.

But we’re not quite sure how to do that because to sort of open up the flood gates, it’s just like terrifying.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** So I would invite our listeners to absolutely never send us your script. But maybe provide some suggestions for ways in which we could get a script that we could actually all look at. And so perhaps it is a Black List script or perhaps it is some other script that is chosen by some other means to do it.

We had floated this idea of like, “Oh maybe we’ll only take a list from our premium subscribers,” and that also felt weird like you’re paying for access. So I’m not sure what the answer is to that. Although, I would say I think it would really helpful for us to be able to look at a whole script for an episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love the idea of giving the subscribers a little something special. Maybe we do like one week, we do a Three Page Challenge that’s only from them. But we don’t just limit Three Page Challenges to just them, you know?

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** For the whole script, also another possibility is maybe we take one of the three pages that we all, you and I were both really enthusiastic about and go back to that person and say would you like the full post mortem? And maybe we go through that whole script.

**John:** Craig Mazin, that’s a very smart idea.

**Craig:** I’m so smart.

**John:** You’re just so smart. See, you think you don’t do anything for the show, but every once in a while, just randomly you’ll have a really good idea.

**Craig:** I don’t like the backwards nature of that. That was very backhanded. You think you’re stupid and 99% of the time, you’re right.

**John:** Yeah. But really, it’s that 1%.

**Craig:** It’s the 1%.

**John:** Yeah. That 1% really makes it all worthwhile.

**Craig:** I’m incredible.

**John:** Anyway, so if you have thoughts about what we should do with either advertising in the future or whether it’s a great or a terrible idea, let us know about that. And if you have thoughts about sort of how we could do a full script for an episode, give us thoughts about that. Please do not send in your script.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do not. We will delete immediately.

**Craig:** Yeah, we will delete.

**John:** So you can tweet at me or Craig about those things too. But let’s get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I have two very short ones. First off is Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was the Tina Fey/Robert Carlock show which was supposed to be on NBC which is now on Netflix. I watched the entire thing here in my hotel room, all 13 episodes. I just loved it. So I would strongly encourage you, if you we’re a fan of 30 Rock, to watch it. Because it’s a very premisey pilot. And so you might watch the pilot and go like, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to sustain.” But then you’re like, on episode six, you’re like, “This is just delightful.”

**Craig:** Yeah, 30 Rock was a really premisey pilot too. And then you’re like, “Yeah, it works.” Ellie Kemper is great. A Princeton graduate by the way.

**John:** Okay. She’s just incredibly talented.

Second thing I want to highlight is this thing called Draftback for Google Docs. It’s this really clever — I think it’s a Google Chrome extension. But essentially, if you ever are writing in Google Docs, it’s actually recording every keystroke. And so it’s fascinating. It’s this little plug-in lets you replay the writing of an entire document. And so you can see like all the edits and all the changes you made and it basically creates a video of you writing the whole thing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So it’s fascinating to sort of see what the writing process looks like for different writers. I think it could also be terrifying if you were not the person who had access to seeing you type it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. I want it.

**John:** It’s of those things that is both like fascinating and dangerous and troubling. So I will steer you to that for a demonstration of it, not necessarily encouraging you to use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a little scary. I mean it’s very smart, but it’s very scary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing comes from one of our wonderful Twitter followers. I love this thing, it’s called VeinViewer. So smart. So everybody has had the experience of having their blood drawn or having an IV line put in. And if you’re young, or if you’re in good shape, you’re veins are usually pretty clearly accessible, but in some people they’re not. And if you’re older or overweight or if you’re really pediatric, you know, a lot of times with babies, it’s hard to find veins. So what ends up happening is they stick you a bunch of times, they cause bleeding, it’s a mess, there’s pain involved. Nobody likes that.

So this company, VeinViewer came up with this brilliant idea to basically pick up, to scan your arm or your wrist or your elbow with infrared because, you know, obviously blood is hotter, you know, as it’s moving through than say your skin. So they can essentially map your veins because they’re closer to the skin’s surface and then they project it back right on to your arm.

**John:** Neat.

**Craig:** Yeah, so that whoever is sticking you, they don’t have to go hunting for a vein. They can see exactly where your veins are. It’s so smart. And we’ll throw a link on as well, it’s very, it’s just so cool. I love stuff like that.

**John:** That’s good stuff. Because I have high cholesterol, I have to get blood draws a lot. And so I’ve just learned that like it’s like my left arm, it’s exactly this one vein, they’re like, “Really? That’s going to hurt.” Like, “Yeah, it’s going to hurt, but otherwise you’re going to be poking like 15 times. So just put it in that vein.”

**Craig:** I’ve always had like full big easy pipey veins

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re always thanking me when I go through, they’re like, “Oh, thank you.”

**John:** It’s the umbrage. It’s all the umbrage.

**Craig:** It’s like, yeah, my rage.

**John:** Just pushes it to the surface.

**Craig:** I have rage veins, which is great.

**John:** Hulk.

**Craig:** Yeah, I have rage veins. They’re great. You know, cholesterol, so, I mean not that we have to get into your medical history.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But do you take the Lipitor?

**John:** I do take the Lipitor. I was on a different thing first and now I’m on the Lipitor.

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant medicine.

**John:** Yeah, it’s worked out just great for me. And it was one of the situations where I do eat really quite healthy, but just my family will always have the crazy high —

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just the deal.

**John:** Both good and the bad cholesterol, so —

**Craig:** It’s just the deal. You know what, it’s German.

**John:** It’s strongly German.

**Craig:** It’s sausage blood.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Kristian Gotthelf. Thank you, Kristian, for sending in your outro. If you have an outro for our show that uses the [hums theme], theme music for our show, send it to us. You can send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a great place to send questions or longer thoughts about what we should do with the future of the show.

On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Facebook, we are Facebook.com/scriptnotes. So leave us a comment there. Leave us a comment on iTunes as well. That is where you can find the show. It’s also where you can find the Scriptnotes app. The Scriptnotes app lets you listen to all the back episodes if you’re a premium subscriber. You sign up for premium subscriptions at Scriptnotes.net.

And that is our show which is produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli. And we will be back with the start of our second half of our season.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s just ridiculous.

**John:** Next week. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read now has iPad support, iCloud sync and folders](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [Download Courier Prime Sans and Courier Prime Source now](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [PAX East](http://east.paxsite.com/)
* [If you live in LA, sign up to help us test a new tabletop game on March 23](http://johnaugust.com/game)
* [Scriptnotes, 187: The Coyote Could Stop Any Time](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-coyote-could-stop-any-time)
* [WGAw 2015 Writer Access Project](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=3436)
* [Wiley Vs. Rhodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ5p9WttVhE) on YouTube
* [Scriptnotes, 186: The Rules (or, the Paradox of the Outlier)](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-rules-or-the-paradox-of-the-outlier)
* [Begging the question](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question) on Wikipedia
* The New York Times on [What’s Wrong With the ‘Blurred Lines’ Copyright Ruling](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/arts/music/whats-wrong-with-the-blurred-lines-copyright-ruling.html?_r=0)
* [12 Signs of a Promising Spec Script](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/meet-the-reader-12-signs-of-promising-spec-script) by Ray Morton
* [Email us at ask@johnaugust.com](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or [leave us a comment on our Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/scriptnotes?_rdr)
* [Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/80025384?locale=en-US) on Netflix
* FiveThirtyEight on [Draftback for Google Docs](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/watch-me-write-this-article/)
* Laughing Squid on [VeinViewer](http://laughingsquid.com/veinviewer-a-medical-system-that-projects-an-image-of-veins-on-skin-to-help-clinicians-insert-an-iv/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kristian Gotthelf ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/selling-without-selling-out).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, last night at 1:30 in the morning my phone rang.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So what do you do when your phone rings in the middle of the night?

**Craig:** Well, I have to answer this hypothetically because I turn all my ringers off at night. But if the ringer were on and it rang at 1:30, I would definitely answer the phone.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s never good news at that time of the night so you’re going to have to deal with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Something is going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the phone rings. It wasn’t my cell phone which is always downstairs. It was my house phone, so I pick it up and it is a wrong number.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Or if it’s not a wrong number, because the guy on the other end sounded just as confused as I was. So it could have been somebody who actually just like was being a dick and just called two random numbers and connected them.

**Craig:** Oh, you can do that? Oh, when you put the phones together?

**John:** Yeah, or I think you use like three-way call to people.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s actually kind of brilliant. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Kind of love that guy. [laughs]

**John:** A whole new kind of terrible pranking —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For awful people.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** So anyway, so it’s 1:30 in the morning. I’m wide awake suddenly now. And so my brain is sort of stewing and ruminating. But the best thing happened. So this product that I’ve been sort of thinking about for quite a long time and I haven’t really started writing because there was a thing that I couldn’t figure out about it, I suddenly figured it out like 1:30 in the morning.

**Craig:** That’s the way it works. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So I was up until 4:30 in the morning sort of actually —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Working it all through.

**Craig:** Is this all a way for you to say that this is going to be a terrible podcast where you’re super sleepy?

**John:** No. I’ve had a lot of coffee. It’s going to be either one of those podcasts where I’m super sleepy or I’m a little bit too wired.

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

**John:** So we’ll see how it all goes.

**Craig:** Very exciting.

**John:** But if three years from now you see a movie that I’ve written where one of the key plot points is she’s looking for her phone that she lost, that came from last night.

**Craig:** That was last night.

**John:** Everyone was part of the genesis of that moment.

**Craig:** You know that they say that generally speaking that we are at our most creative neurologically in the very beginning of the day when we wake up and at the very end when we’re going to bed. So there are days where I actually just wait, and then as I’m going to bed I’d start thinking then in that kind of weird middle-dreamy place. And it is amazing how often in that little place you will figure out things.

**John:** Yeah. That’s our liminal state between fully awake and asleep.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Today on the podcast we’re going to be answering a whole bunch of questions. People write in with questions, sometimes on Twitter we can get to them right away and we answer right when they send us their question. But sometimes people send in longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. We have a whole bunch saved up and we are going to get through those today. So you’re ready, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. Well, let’s start with some follow up because one of them is from this guy James Topham who writes, “I hope you don’t mind, but as an alumnus of the Three Page Challenge, I thought I’d drop you a line to let you know how I’ve got on since your kind feedback.” His script was the one with the killer robots in the desert called Proving Ground and I kind of vaguely remember that. Do you remember that, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t but I like everything that he said, so. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. I like that he likes us. So —

**Craig:** I like that he likes me. Yeah, so I’m going to say that it doesn’t matter if I remembered or not.

**John:** It’s true. “Last year the script went out to a number of producers in LA and here in the UK with your notes faithfully executed of course. I flew stateside for a week to do a whole series of generals and met some great people. Since then I’ve been talking with some producers here. And the last couple of weeks I have sold my first feature pitch.” Congratulations, James.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** “It’s a micro-budget horror but on the slate of a great company but I want to say thank you for your direct feedback and for all the advice in the podcast for the last couple of years. For those of us remote from LA and support networks out there, the show provides such a resource to aid our understanding of the craft and gives me hope that there’s a slim chance of forging a career. So thank you.”

**Craig:** What a great — that’s fantastic. I mean, you know, the whole purpose of the Three Page Challenge was really just to help focus people on some of the very practical things that we deal with when we’re putting together a scene and so it was never really meant to be promotional in any way but I kind of love that that’s sort of what happened here. First of all, I love that we were right [laughs] because we really liked it apparently. And the company that he’s sold his pitch to is a very good company, it’s a top notch, A-list production company here in town.

So obviously, we’re brilliant, that’s really the point. I mean, I understand that James is proud of what’s happened to him but I think what he’s saying is, “Once again, John and Craig, you are brilliant.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s see if we can be brilliant today for other folks. So —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Here are some questions people wrote in with. We’ll get through as many of them as we can.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we have to start with Lynette Oliver because how can we not start with Lynette Oliver.

**Craig:** Lynette, she’s my favorite.

**John:** Craig, why don’t you read Lynette’s question —

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Because she will like that.

**Craig:** Yes, she will.

Lynette writes, “Recently, Craig was part of a Twitter conversation that basically ended with the advice to write query letters to get representation or get your script to somebody rather than just relying on The Black List site, my preferred method before this conversation. I definitely want to do the proper research before querying. My question is how does one do that research? InkTip, IMDbPro, some other subscription service? I’m a good researcher and in this case I have no idea where to begin, what listings I can trust since everyone and their Hollywood insider dog wants to take money from people like me in exchange for ‘access.'”

What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I don’t know people who’ve gotten agents through or managers through query letters but I know it does happen. So what she’s really asking is, “How do you find it? Who is the person who you should even sort of bother sending out that email to, sending that, you know, reaching out to because who do you know who’s real and who’s not real.” I think, it’s, you know, paradoxically, there’s more, just better research than there ever was before, so you can actually just look stuff up on the Internet in ways that you couldn’t and you can see what people’s credits are. But there’s just so many names that it’s just kind of overwhelming. Craig, where would you start if you were Lynette?

**Craig:** Well, I’m a little confused because the question implies that I gave the advice to write query letters rather than just relying on The Black List site and maybe I did but if so I’m recanting it because I actually don’t really think much of query letters. I know that people are constantly talking about query letters. My whole problem with query letters is that they’re kind of self-selecting. The people that answer query letters are precisely the people that you don’t want answering your query letter.

The better people don’t answer query letters because they don’t have to and that’s what’s so good about The Black List is that it allows the better buyers and the more reputable and powerful buyers to access your material. That aside, you’re right. I mean, I assume that query letters must have worked at least once or twice or people would finally stop unless it’s some kind of cargo cult.

I don’t know anything about InkTip. I can’t imagine there’s much of a point in spending money on a subscription service other than, I mean, The Black List is the only one that I think actually has gotten results as far as I can tell, So…

**John:** Yeah. I mean, there’s probably some bias just in that we know, you know, we know Franklin, and we know people who have gone through The Black List and so therefore there is a confirmation bias that’s sort of inherent to that.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Where it really comes down to is a push versus pull. And query letters are a way of like pushing your script out into the world and saying like, “Hey, please look at this thing.” And maybe that’s effective sometimes, but everyone I know who’s gotten agents or gotten managers it’s been a pull situation where that agent or manager has asked to read something because someone else has said, “This is really good,” or they found this through a competition, they somehow came up across this writer, this idea, and they wanted to read it. And most the people I know who’ve gotten representation recently, it’s been that situation.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, a writer who I was working with recently who I just had lunch with just last week, he did the more classic thing where he was working at a desk at an agency, was able to get himself on as a writer’s production assistant on a TV show and they noticed that he seemed good in competent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they asked to read his stuff and that got him started and that got him that whole process beginning. That’s much more typical than the sending out a query letter to the world.

**Craig:** I absolutely agree and let’s remind ourselves that these services, all of them, simply didn’t exist, say, I don’t know, 15 years ago or all the way back 19 years ago when you and I got started and somehow still people were discovered and hired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they are not necessarily. You know, I’ve always, you and I have been fairly consistent on this that what a lot of these services are doing is essentially charging you a fee for dipping your toe into the pool as opposed to jumping in.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And that is attractive for people who prefer that method. The problem of course is that it’s simply not as effective out of a general population. Of course, none of those general statistics apply to the outliers and, of course, it is the outliers that tend to do well no matter what the restrictions are. So, I don’t know if that answers the question but it’s certainly complicated and long-winded enough. I think, [laughs], I think I did that part right.

**John:** The only last sort of data point I’ll give is as I mentor to five writers who are sort of new WGA members. And one of them Jonathan Stokes, I don’t think will be upset to hear his name in the podcast to say that he wrote a ton of scripts and nobody would read them. And so he had this whole trunk full of scripts and then he finally wrote a script that someone through various means read and was like, “Oh, this is really good. You’re a good writer.” And that went on The Black List, like the list of best scripts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then he suddenly had this other trunk full of scripts and like they’ve all just sort of sold and been out there because he was a really good writer. It just took awhile for people to notice that he was a really good writer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the awesome part of it. Actually, more consistent to the real story of how these things happen then I wrote a query letter to exactly the right person who is looking for it and therefore said, “Yes, I will represent you.”

**Craig:** You know, that also brings another thing to mind that I think we’ve talked about before. Most of the services that are available are, I guess, sort of wide net averaging services, you know, so people will evaluate your script and give you a general rating.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But, we don’t achieve success through general ratings. We are again about the outlier scores. So we’re about the Russian judge that gives you the 10 instead of the eight that everybody else got.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** That’s the person that’s going to buy your script. More importantly, in Hollywood typically what happens is people follow passion. So when one person gets very passionate about a certain screenwriter’s screenplay and people respect that person, they just presume they ought to be passionate about that writer as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s all led by the outliers both on the talent side and on the acquisition side.

**John:** Yeah. What I don’t want this to sound like is a recipe for, well, just do nothing and somehow magically it’ll all come to be. You have to put your script out there in a way that people can find it and that people can talk about it and then discover that it’s good.

So, you know, there’s a middle ground between spending six hours a day sending out query letters and sticking everything in the trunk and then not letting anybody read it. We sort of really encourage people to let people, you know, have people read your scripts because that’s the only way people are going to find that you’re a good writer.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes I feel like the query letter thing becomes a job onto its self. You know, people send query letters, then they feel the need to send the follow-up query letters, and then the follow up to the follow ups and how long should I just wait before I follow up and it never ends.

**John:** It’s also weird that we call them query letters when they’ve got to be emails at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, they’re emails and they’re not, what are they, what’s the question?

**John:** Yeah. “Hey, would you read my script?”

**Craig:** Right. They’re not query letters. They’re sales letters.

**John:** Yeah, to sound good.

**Craig:** By the way, that’s how everyone views them too. They’re basically spam. It’s sales spam.

**John:** Yeah, speaking of it. This last week we did a press release that we had to push out to the world for the new Bronson Watermarker and so I was writing and rewriting this press release and I just hated it so much because it was so incredibly boring.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** But it kind of needed to be boring because I could look and see like, well, what is the net result of this press releases on all the sites that end up running these press releases, and they’re kind of boring. And so I had to do kind of exactly what Lynette is describing which is like figuring out like, “Who was it worth reaching out too? What is right address? Do I find the person’s name that I can send this to so it’s not just going into a general tips ad or whatever line?” And that never really stops.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. It’s just, it’s too much.

**John:** It’s too much.

**Craig:** It’s too much.

**John:** Ryan from Singapore writes:

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I understand your writing process starts with cranking out a large number of pages very rapidly. How sloppy is too sloppy for a first draft? Do you force yourself not to think about it and go with your gut even if things don’t make total sense? What about refining what you’ve written? Is it something you only do once you completed the script start to finish?”

So there’s two kind of things that we’re talking about here. Some writers talk about the vomit draft which is sort of just like everything as fast as you can, get it down on the page. I don’t do that as much as I do barricade myself and handwrite something so I can go back and rewrite it. But in both cases, I think sloppiness is a fair question.

Craig, what is your barometer for sloppiness?

**Craig:** Yeah, well, I don’t do any of this. I don’t crank out a large number of pages very rapidly and I definitely try and write my first draft as if it was going to be shot.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I know it’s not going to be shot but I should have said as if it were going to be shot.

**John:** Yeah. Subjunctive is your friend.

**Craig:** Subjunctive. I know it’s not going to be and I know that I am going to have to refine and refine and refine and rewrite and rewrite. Nonetheless, I am not writing something just to say, “Look at me, I made it to the end. I’m writing something that reads like a movie.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It’s going to help and more than anything, first of all, it requires you to work harder which is important because that’s work you need to do. If you don’t do it now, you’re going to have to do it later, might as well try to do it now. I find it very difficult to write things that don’t, like he says, “Go with your gut even if things don’t make total sense.” Well, if they don’t make total sense then maybe there’s, A, a problem with your gut. Or, if your gut is correct and you just haven’t figured out the one part, unfortunately everything that’s built on top of that will suffer from the foundation not making sense.

You’ll start to lose some unity to the piece and I want the people that are reading it to be able to give me the best feedback possible which I think they can only do if it reads like a movie. So, I’m actually very careful about how, I mean, The Huntsman, by the way, that’s an example. So on The Huntsman, I wrote one draft and I wrote it as if they were going to shoot it and they’re going to… — Well, I mean, you know, they got Frank Darabont to do it, so if I had just done a sloppy draft, I think everybody would have said, “Now, can you do it for real?” You know?

**John:** Yeah. I can see Ryan’s point here in that sometimes perfectionism can be a trap. And so, you can go through and sort of diddle with every scene so carefully that it’s like pristine and precise that you never actually get the whole thing done. But I think I’m much more in your camp where I always write a scene, even if I’m handwriting a scene that I still have to type up, I write it as if what if I never get the chance to go back and fix it?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I always write it as if this has to be able to be shot and I won’t let anything go in the script that doesn’t feel like it could be shot. All the time knowing that I’m going to go back and do another pass through there, things are going to be improved just by a second look at things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I definitely write sort of for the final version of things. Where sloppy can be your good friend is if you’re just trying to figure stuff out about who the characters are, what they are, I’m a big fan of writing off the page and writing a bunch of scenes that you know are not going to be in the movie but just to get the characters talking.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Figure out what their voices are like. And that’s an absolutely fair and valid process. And that’s kind of a thing where just kind of being stream of consciousness can be a really smart move because you get to hear what those characters’ voices are, what the world is like, just it’s, you know, it’s just getting your mind in a more fluid place. That is totally valid. But when it comes time for your real scenes, don’t shove crappy scenes into your script because they’ll be there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, ultimately this is our job is to write a movie and to write scenes that feel like scenes and have harmony and expression and theme and character and purpose and all that stuff. I mean that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. When I hear that people are doing vomit drafts or just chucking stuff down a page, I feel like they’re trying to figure out the plot through writing screenplay pages which is a terrible way of figuring out a plot anyway.

So, yeah, I, like you, I get to be as sloppy and as verbose as I want to be when I’m writing down notes and doing my index cards and redoing my index cards, all that stuff. But if you write your screenplay carefully, I guess is how I would say it, just sort of do it with attention and care and craft. I mean, I typically, you know, on a decent day I can write three pages. And while that may not seem like a lot to the vomit draft people, I’m sure it isn’t, in six weeks I will have a screenplay no matter what.

**John:** So there are days that I will do 17 pages, 21 pages early in the process. But those are good pages but those, and it’s also because I’m writing like 12 hours a day. I’m literally on sort of a lockdown just doing it —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And not out of a panic-fear situation but a genuine sort of mania and love for this thing that I’m doing. So honestly, my 1:30 in the morning phone call got this movie figured out in a way that I probably will go off and barricade myself and do some of those giant page days.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’re not all going to be like that. And at the same time, like those pages I write will hopefully be really good. They’ll hopefully be the kinds of scenes I want to have in the final movie. They’re not going to be, you know, approximations of them. They should be shootable scenes. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Next one, you?

**Craig:** All right, yeah. So we’ve got Laura in London and she writes, “I’m a UK writer. My first pilot is set in the UK has some interest from a US producer with a first-look deal at a big network. I have two producers already attached, both with a proven track record in film but not television. The US producer made some great stuff in the ’90s and not much since and has offered to option the script with a view to taking it out to cable. However, he wants to bring in a more established US writer to write a US version of the pilot. So my question is threefold. One…”

Oh boy, this is a complicated question, hope you’re taking notes.

“One, once I sign the option, what are my rights as the series creator? Obviously, it might go absolutely nowhere, but in the unlikely event it does go to pilot and get picked up, will I get to be in the writer’s room? Will I get to write an episode of my own idea?”

**John:** Let’s stop there and just sort of address her questions one at a time.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Once you sign that option, there’s no magic contract about how these are supposed to always work. And so you have, you know, as we often say in the show, you control everything now because you control everything. And so you can dictate some of those terms about what’s going to be happening in that room, what the relationship is going to be like with another showrunner that they have brought in. You can say no and sometimes you may want to say no.

**Craig:** I agree. And I’m going to read, let me just jam the next two through because I think they kind of all connect together.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So that was the first one. Number two, “Is this a step forward in my career? My goal is to be a working screenwriter and I would love to be based in the US in the future. So is this a step in that direction or should I write a US version myself, try my luck elsewhere? Three, the neurotic bit; he wants another writer. I know this script’s not a total steamer.” I guess that’s a —

**John:** A bad thing.

**Craig:** Local. That’s local custom. Yeah, so a steamer’s a bad thing. “And the script’s not a total steamer. It has won and been a finalist in a few writing comps, I’d give it a B minus at least. But still, I get that I’m new, untested and British, but there are plenty of shows on now that have newbie writers teamed with experienced showrunners. So what does him passing my script really mean and how it will be viewed?”

And to me, this is all, I guess, Laura, this is all leading to me picking out what your instinct is in the way you’ve even set this up and are asking the question. I think you know the answer to all of these questions. I think what you’re saying is, “This isn’t right, is it? This isn’t a good idea, is it? This isn’t going to help me, is it? This isn’t what I want, is it?” And it seems to me like the answer is, no, it’s not.

I mean, look, you’ve written a pilot and you have producers, I assume they’re UK producers, and somebody in America who perhaps is getting a little long in the tooth likes the idea of it but wants to hire people that he’s comfortable with and make it over here in the US. I don’t really see how that helps you one bit. And I’m not sure would you be the series creator? Do you want to be the creator for a series you have nothing to do with that isn’t like your show at all? I don’t know. I don’t —

**John:** I think you’re taking the most pessimistic view of what the end result of this will be.

**Craig:** Shocker.

**John:** Because let’s also remember most TV shows don’t happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s an entirely possible situation here as well. So —

**Craig:** Wait, that’s the optimistic? The optimistic view is that the show never even happens? [laughs]

**John:** I would say that in TV, you go into TV knowing that a show not getting picked up, a show not running, like failure is not the same kind of failure in TV as it is in features. And so getting anywhere down the path to progress is considered success.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So a couple of things that I’d talk to Laura about. First off, there was a WGA panel I did with Kelly Marcel a couple episodes ago, we’ll put a link in the show notes, where Kelly talked about her experience on Terra Nova which actually sounds kind of similar in that here’s a British writer —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Who’s come in who got partnered up with people she didn’t necessarily believe in.

**Craig:** It’s eerily similar, yeah, although the people that she was paired up with were not like some guy that made some great stuff in the ’90s. It was Steven Spielberg.

**John:** No, no, they were big.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, he’s made some good stuff in the ’90s and other decades, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** But I would encourage you to listen to that and listen to her experience about it because it was really hard for her to walk away from that but she ultimately realized she needed to walk away from that. But I would also say, look at what the upsides of what happened with Kelly because of her decision to at least pursue with the process partway. She got to meet a bunch of folks in Los Angeles. She had a reason to be in Los Angeles and to be in rooms talking about her writing. And that could be a good thing even with this producer situation you have here.

So if their option is saying you are meeting with the American writer, you’re going in and you’re talking to US television, at least you’re suddenly now in the rooms with those people who are reading your script and thinking like, oh, here is a British writer with an interesting voice. That is a positive step in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say that Laura picks out the key to success here when she says there are plenty of shows on now that have newbie writers teamed with experienced showrunners.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And I think that since she controls this property completely, it is fair to say to this producer, “If you want this and you want to put a different writer on it, then I have to be paired with that writer and I’m going to be working with that writer on it and that’s that or you don’t have it.” And at least then you’re buying your way into an experience. And if it goes terribly south, then like Kelly, you can walk.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But at least you took your shot, your name is on it in a meaningful way, and you got involved and learned, you know, along the way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You really have to look at… — The worst outcome here is that this guy takes your thing, puts somebody else on it, they make something else that has no resemblance to what you wanted to do and it’s on the air and you had nothing to do with it. Or they take your thing, it does resemble what you did and you have nothing to do with it and you get no credit for it either. That would be terrible, so yeah.

**John:** It would be terrible but, again, the lesson we often come back to in Scriptnotes is that a writer is not one script.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so if she wants to have a career as a screenwriter working in Los Angeles, this may be a way to get her closer to that dream even if this project itself doesn’t work out magnificently.

**Craig:** Yeah, you just don’t want to have to beg your way into your own writing room, that’s all.

**John:** I completely agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** John writes, “I am a college grad with degrees in psych and communications with no family obligations. Here’s my concern. I’m a practicing full-blown Mormon.”

**Craig:** Hello!

**John:** “I support marriage equality and I believe I differ from most of the negative stereotypes associated. That being said, I don’t swear, I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I feel like that would be found out quite quickly even if I attempted to keep it on the down low.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “My concern is that given my faith’s very overt stance, will it hurt my chances? Lord Umbrage” — that’s you Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, yes.

**John:** “I will say that if I write a great script, that’s all that will matter. But I worry that my particular subgroup will be bearing the burdens of Orson Scott Card and others for quite some time.” So what’s our advice for John?

**Craig:** “Turn it off like a light switch. Just go click…” Um, you don’t have to worry about this, John.

**John:** I don’t have to be worry about this at all.

**Craig:** Not even one iota. Look, Orson Scott Card isn’t just somebody who is a Mormon, he is outspokenly against the idea of marriage equality. He’s made it a big huge thing and he also has a lot of other very strongly held political beliefs that he’s pushed out there in an overt way. This town has all sorts of folks ranging up and down various religious axes. If you don’t make a big deal out of it, then I really don’t see what the problem is. You know, I live in La CaÒada. We actually have quite a decent sized Mormon population there, so like two families. [laughs] That’s a Mormon joke.

No, no, there’s a lot of Mormon families and they are lovely people. And frankly, I’ve known people in my town eight or nine years and then my wife would say, “You know that they’re Mormon?” I had no idea, had no idea. I mean, it’s not like they’re not walking around with a big M sign. You know that. I think it’s great that you support marriage equality and this won’t cause you any trouble.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, you will find so many people who don’t drink or do drugs who are essentially Mormon in all but faith all around you. You’ll find there’s actually a ton of Mormons that you wouldn’t realize that they are Mormons working in the industry anyway. But also, I feel like it’s, I don’t know, I want to say, wow, like white people creating problems for themselves.

**Craig:** [laughs] White people.

**John:** Only in the sense that like, here’s John writing in and saying like, “Oh, I’m coming in with this giant handicap being a Mormon.” It’s like that’s crazy. Like if you want to come in with, you know, issues that are going to make it more challenging for you to start, that’s like the least issue you could possibly imagine.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I agree.

**John:** So right now I bet there’s a whole bunch of sort of like, you know, black women writers who are going, “Who is this person and why is he complaining?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, I understand because the truth is, he’s not here and I think that he’s receiving a kind of view of Hollywood as a politically monolithic place that rejects Christianity, religion. It rejects conservative ideologies and all that stuff. And look, there have been times when people have been outspoken about things and, but this will not be an issue for you. By the way, don’t drink and don’t do drugs, go ahead and meet half of Hollywood that’s in a recovery program.

So when you don’t accept a drink in a bar, people will just assume you’re a recovering alcoholic and that’ll be cool. [laughs] I don’t…this is not.. — By the way, I know a lot of Mormons in Hollywood too and every Mormon I have met who works in the film or television business, as far as I can tell, they’re all gay. Gay, well, gay ex-Mormons.

**John:** Yeah, gay ex-Mormons.

**Craig:** Gay ex-Mormons. A lot of gay ex-Mormons.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question comes from Thomas in Charlotte, North Carolina. “A friend of mine has talent representation at CAA. I’m a writer-director, and the friend introduced me to his agent for the purpose of having her forward my resume/work to her literary rep colleagues. A few weeks later, she told me that one particularly literary agent at CAA would meet me “for coffee.” I live in the Southeast but make frequent trips to Los Angeles, so I’m currently in the process of trying to schedule said coffee meeting for this month.

“This is my first meeting of this nature with an agent. What sort of weight or expectations should I be putting on this meeting? Is it a significant first step, is actual landing representation still a ways off? What should I do at this coffee to make sure it’s the right step?”

**Craig:** Coffees are great ways to meet with people without feeling like you’re trapped necessarily in a long lunch or that you’re not torpedoing the middle of your day.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But in a sense, they work as a proper meeting. And I never put any weight or any expectation on any meeting ever in my life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you sit down with this person, you should have some things in mind that you want to get answers to, you can have questions. The worst thing that happens when I sit down with people is that they’re boring.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They have nothing to say. They can’t hold up their end of the conversation. They have no questions or interesting things about them. So be prepared to talk about yourself, have questions and don’t be shy about saying, “Listen, the next step for me is representation. What do you advise here? I need to kind of get this thing going.” But more than anything, you should be your impressive interesting self.

**John:** 100%. Coffees are fantastic because it’s such a flexible definition of what it’s supposed to be. So it could be 10 minutes, it could be half an hour.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It doesn’t have to be more than that and it’s fine whatever that duration is. If I were Thomas coming into this coffee meeting, I would be able to talk about the things that you’ve done, the things you’re looking at doing, and the questions about sort of, you know, this is what I’m planning to do for my next step. What do you think? What would you advice? And about representation, exactly what Craig phrased it as is basically what would you want to see that would convince you to represent a writer-director in my situation?

Be able to talk about some of the other clients there, clients who are similar to sort of what you’re doing or it doesn’t even necessarily need to be a CAA client but you could point to, you know, recent successful writer-directors who’ve made smart choices and just be able to talk about them. They want to see that you’re not a crazy person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They want to see that you kind of get how things work and that you have an interesting voice, that you’re somebody they could imagine putting you in a room with an executive and that executive will say, “Oh, yeah, the guy seems really cool.”

**Craig:** Right. I mean, passion, all the things that work when you’re meeting somebody for the first time on a date, these are the things that work in these situations. I mean, agents in particular look at us, they evaluate us, not just by the material but by our appearance and I don’t mean to say “Oh, this is a really hot guy.” It’s more about does this person look like a weirdo, do they look presentable?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And also by the way we come off, you know, are you passionate, are you funny, are you interesting, are you smart? They really like smart people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they’ve had, if you are a kind of just middle of the road, bland person, what do they need you for, you know? That’s not a prescription to go nuts. I’m just saying, you know, you just don’t want to be boring more than anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

All right, Justin from Vancouver writes, “I was wondering if doing Scriptnotes has changed how studio executives and producers treat the two of you when in meetings. It is easier to have your opinions be taken seriously because they know you and your personalities from the podcast. Have you gotten work?” I feel like we’ve gotten this question before. “Have you gotten work because of the podcast?” John, have you gone from an A writer to an A++ writer because of Scriptnotes?

**John:** I know. I honestly feel very few of the people I work with on a daily basis know the podcast exists, at least at the big executive and studio producer level.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of there. I do think that on the assistant level, people listen a lot. I mean, occasionally, an executive will mention to me that they listen. But no, it seems like the stuff that gets you work is the stuff that always got you work. They like your script and/or your last movie was a hit, et voila. [laughs]

**John:** Et voila.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s really, no, nobody takes me more seriously because of Scriptnotes, no. It would be cool if they did.

**John:** I think it will be interesting 10 years from now as this generation of assistants rises up —

**Craig:** Ah. Yes.

**John:** And replaces their forefathers. Will they look at us with affection and hire us when we’re no longer, you know —

**Craig:** Right. When we’re gum in their food.

**John:** Yeah, when we are no longer young and in our 40s, but the creaky old men in their 50s.

**Craig:** The grumpy, yeah, grumpy, “Yeah, yeah, I did the Scriptnotes. I also wrote movies.” [laughs] Yes, you know —

**John:** So really, this is an investment in our future.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is like a pension. It’s like an IRA. We’re just throwing money, well, I hope that that works one day, but no, for now, Justin, no, not at all.

**John:** So, Nicolai writes what’s sort of a long question but he kind of perfectly described one of my frustrations with certain screenwriting software, so I’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “I’m desperate to switch to a sleeker, no filler screenwriting app. So why can’t I buy Highland on my Android devices?” That’s a simple question, because we don’t make it for Android because we don’t know how to make it for Android. “But I recently tried unshackling myself from Movie Magic in favor of Fade In, but I stuck with Movie Magic purely because it requires the fewest amount of key strokes to type a script.

“The most basic example: in Movie Magic, hitting tab always brings up a new dialogue line whether from a proceeding line or scene direction. Hitting enter always begins a new slug line/scene description. But with Fade In, hitting tab creates another parenthetical within dialogue which I try to avoid anyway or a line break even within a block of dialogue. The results, ending your line of dialogue requires two key strokes, enter/tab plus tab, whereas Movie Magic only needs one. It’s a tiny difference that adds up to a huge drag over five to 10 pages. How does Highland deal with this controversial issue and why won’t you let me give you my money? Thanks.”

So, again, Highland is Highland. Highland’s the app we make and it’s very sort of minimalist and stripped down. But what he describes about sort of like you’re in a box, you’re in dialogue and you’re moving from character to thing and you’re hitting different keys to move to the next point. It can get really annoying and you get to have a muscle memory for how a certain app does it. And I’m sure you found that too, Craig, is that you’re now using Fade In —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As your main screenwriting app. And so you’re totally used to it, right?

**Craig:** I don’t even know what he’s describing. In Fade In, I write a character name and then I hit return and I’m in dialogue. I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I don’t see any difference between that and the way Movie Magic works whatsoever. I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** Yeah, the issue of —

**Craig:** Maybe he’s hitting tab when he should be hitting enter, I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that Movie Magic does that I really like is when you’re in dialogue if you hit an open parentheses, it moves you into a parenthetical with the theory being how often do you actually want to have a parentheses in your dialogue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I always thought that was very smart. But, look, if you are incredibly fastidious about key strokes and, again, I don’t know that he’s correct here but regardless, then I think a stripped down version of things would be perfect for you. If you are like most people and the extra key strokes become invisible to your process, then it’s not a problem. But I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** So I made a video about writing in Fountain and one of the points I made in that, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, but one of the points I made to it is that as you’re writing in the sort of more traditional screenwriting app, so Fade In, Final Draft, Movie Magic, you’re constantly thinking about sort of what element is what element. And so you’re always hitting those extra keys to sort of move and that becomes character name and there’s a parenthetical underneath it, and now you’re in your dialogue.

And it is a small tax that you’re placing on your writing to do that. And so one of the advantages in writing all in the left-hand margin, the way you can in a plain text editor or you can in Highland or Slugline is that you don’t have to think about that. The word processor, the text editor is doing that for you. So you’re just putting in the words and it is smart enough to figure out what those words would end up being. So that’s the thing. So the kind of situation he describes where he gets stuck in the wrong element can’t happen in Fountain because you’re never actually changing those elements consciously.

**Craig:** Right. For me, I think that because I’ve been using what I’ll call a formatted format for so long, I mean, I started on Final Draft, then I went to Movie Magic, and now I’m in Fade In. That process is invisible to my brain.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think if you start on Fountain, then you would — that’s what you would want and the other method would be very cumbersome. So it is about what you’re used to, to some extent. And there’s no right or wrong here. I guess, I would say to Nicolai, if you, I don’t know. Oh, because he doesn’t have Highland on his Android devices. Why is he writing on an Android device? What is this guy doing?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m starting to get angry. Why are you writing on your phone? Now I’m like David Lynch. “Watching movies on your phone, watching movies on a fucking phone.” [laughs] He’s the best. I mean, why are you writing a script on a phone? Get out of here.

**John:** While we’re talking about screenwriting software, what is your feeling about like auto complete and Smart-Type? Do you like it when a character name fills itself in —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Or does it drive you crazy?

**Craig:** No, I do like it a lot. And I like it for two reasons. One, because particularly when I’m writing a scene where there are two people having a conversation, it does flow beautifully. And two, it confronts me when I’ve created characters with similar first letters or the same first letters, I should say, because then sometimes I get the wrong one or it gives me that stupid menu. So that I do like quite a bit.

**John:** Yeah, I do like Smart-Type when it makes sure that I’m spelling the character’s name the same way every time because that can be a huge problem.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** When there’s five ways you could spell it and now you’re spelling it the one way. What always drives me crazy with Smart-Type lists is when it really wants to fill in sort of the wrong character’s name. For me what always happens is I’ll have a situation where you have like two characters talking at the same time, so like Sandra/Laura.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, yes.

**John:** And then like, ugh, so then you have to manually go through and delete that Sandra/Laura so it doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s right. That is the one thing that is very annoying and you do have to go to your Smart-Type list and blow that one out because for whatever reason, it defaults to the long one. You know what, I’m going to have to talk to Kent at Fade In and tell him to default to the shorter one in those circumstances.

**John:** Yeah, that’s probably a good solution.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it is.

**John:** We’re making software better on this very podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m not writing it on my phone. [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to let you take the Iceland question.

**Craig:** Yes. Erlinger, oh god, I get the best, I don’t know how to do the Iceland accent. Is Björk from Iceland?

**John:** She is?

**Craig:** She is so cool.

**John:** The coolest.

**Craig:** You know, I was listening in my car the other day and I was just, I had my phone on random songs and Human Behavior came up.

**John:** A great song.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. And when you listen, yeah. It just doesn’t follow [laughs] any kind of normal song structure, melodic structure and yet it totally does in its own way. What a cool, that lady is cool.

**John:** So I saw Björk with the Sugarcubes at Red Rocks in Colorado.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And it was one of my favorite concerts ever.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Human behavior — if you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever…” Okay, so Erlinger from Iceland writes, “I’m a long time listener and a big fan of the show from Iceland but based in New York. And I wanted to ask you about credit when it comes to treatments in actual screenwriting. It was reported recently that Shane Black would be directing the new Predator movie and that his old Monster Squad buddy, Fred Dekker, would be writing the script based on Black’s treatment.” Very exciting news by the way says, Erlinger.

“And I started wondering how does that work credit-wise. Will Shane Black, an accomplished screenwriter with a very specific style be credited as a writer on the movie or just have a Story by credit?” Oh, there’s so much about this question that makes me angry.

**John:** Yeah, I knew it would be the perfect question for you, Craig.

**Craig:** It’s not your fault, Erlinger. I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the universe. Let me just boil down the part that infuriates me. Will Shane Black be credited as a writer on the movie or just have a Story by credit?

Story by is writing.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** Story by is writing credit. It is, there is story credit and there is screenplay credit. Story credit, the credit that, Erlinger, you are sort of implying isn’t really writing credit, is the credit to which separated rights are attached. In many ways, it’s the more important credit. So in this case, if a screenwriter is writing a script based on another screenwriter’s treatment, then a couple of things happen.

First, the screenplay automatically moves out of original screenplay mode into non-original screenplay mode. In this case, it would have been anyway because it’s a remake or a sequel. And if this were the only writing arrangement, so Shane Black writes a treatment, Fred Dekker writes the screenplay, they shoot the movie, then in fact the credits would read, Story by Shane Black, Screenplay by Fred Dekker, and both would receive a writing credit.

**John:** Yes. Now, it’s entirely possible that Fred Dekker would also receive a shared story credit if his screenplay contributed tremendous story elements that are not present in Shane Black’s script. Shane Black directing this doesn’t change the nature of the story by credit. The only thing that it will cause is that because he is a production executive on it because he’s directing it, it would go through arbitration automatically. It would have to happen.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is one other potential. And that is, if it’s a remake, well, I’m assuming this is a remake.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay, in the case of a remake, a couple of interesting things. First, simply writing a treatment doesn’t guarantee you a story credit because if your treatment isn’t sufficiently or significantly different from the story of the first movie then you won’t get story credit and you know who will? The writer, the credited writer of the first movie.

So the credited writers of the first movie become participating writers in the remake, they become writer A in fact. So a lot of interesting, tricky little things going on there. But I think more importantly then the specifics of the question here is just for me to remind everybody that Story by is a writing credit.

**John:** Yes. A zillion years ago, I was in the discussions to do a Predator movie and did not proceed with it. But I love Predator as a franchise. I think Shane Black will do an amazing job.

**Craig:** Predator is a fascinating movie because it came out at a time when a lot of movies like that were coming out. There was a Schwarzenegger era.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you had a bunch of guys in that movie that were sort of that steroidal ’80s action film. You know, Carl Weathers was in there. So it was a bit of, you know, some Rocky guys. Jesse Ventura was from wrestling, and of course, Schwarzenegger. And so I remember when I saw the ads I thought, okay, I’ll go see this because, hell, if I saw Commando, I should see this, right, I mean —

**John:** Totally

**Craig:** I basically, you know, I’ll go see whatever this guy does. And it was a great example of when you walk into a movie theater and say that was so much better than it had to be.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. It didn’t have to be that good at all. I mean, I still to this day, time makes everything better.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At the time, I remember thinking, I’m sorry, did Arnold Schwarzenegger just outrun a nuclear explosion? Did he just dive in front of a nuclear explosion and land in a ditch and he’s okay now?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at that time I just thought that was insulting. Now, of course, it feels somehow brilliant. Time has made it brilliant. It’s made it an audacious choice.

**John:** [laughs] Well, he didn’t go into a refrigerator. So there wasn’t that.

**Craig:** Yes, he did not go into a refrigerator. They literally, they dispensed with any kind of lead lined box.

**John:** Arnold Schwarzenegger is his own refrigerator.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. He just, you know what, it’s that scene we’d seen a million times where somebody runs and then as something explodes in the background they dive away and they did it this time but with a nuclear explosion, with a mushroom cloud.

**John:** I haven’t seen the movie in a zillion years. I remember watching it the first time on VHS over at my friend Matt’s house at like a slumber party and so we watched that and Purple Rain and other stuff, but loving it. My recollection of the movie is that after a certain point, it becomes essentially a silent film because it’s basically a two-hander between Schwarzenegger and Predator.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And none of them is talking which is just kind of great.

**Craig:** It turns out that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a far better silent film actor than he is a talking film actor. And you can see that in The Terminator.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because in The Terminator, he says, you know, “Are you Sarah Connor?” It’s only four lines, you know. “I’ll be back.” He’s a great silent actor.

**John:** “Fuck you, asshole.”

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. He’s got a great silent actor face. He’s all physical. The more he talks, the less well it tends to go. So, of course, we made him the governor of a state. How stupid. How stupid are we? I don’t care what your politics are. How do you make that guy a governor? What? And then Jesse Ventura became governor. Two governors in that movie. From Predator.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why isn’t Carl Weathers a governor? What’s he —

**John:** In an alternate universe, Carl Weathers is the president.

**Craig:** Carl Weathers. President Weathers.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so great. Oh, I love it.

**John:** Is Carl Weathers Action Jackson?

**Craig:** You know he was. Action, Action Jackson.

**John:** So Craig, let’s wrap up questions with my question to you.

**Craig:** There was a guy, a friend of mine went to a movie. And it was an action movie, but it was not Action Jackson. And there was a kid sitting in front of him, 14-year-old kid. And every time some action happened, and this was about a year after Action Jackson came out, every time any action occurred in the movie, the kid would go, “Action, Action Jackson.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] And it was incredibly annoying. But then by the end of the movie, it became better than the movie.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Action.

**John:** So Craig, my question for you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How was Dungeon World?

**Craig:** Oh, Dungeon World was great. So we had talked about the fact that we were going to play Dungeon World and it was your One Cool Thing before we played Dungeon World.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** And our Dungeon World Group was a great group. We had Phil Hay of Ride Along and many other wonderful films.

**John:** R.I.P.D.

**Craig:** Clash of the Titans.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We had Chris Morgan of The Fastest and Furious franchise. We had Michael Gilvary who writes on Chicago Fire. We had Malcolm Spellman. He’s written the, what was the family movie, the family…it was at Fox.

**John:** Yeah, and now I forget the name of it.

**Craig:** The something Family Wedding.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But he’s also currently working on a television show, Lee Daniels’ new television show called Empire. He’s on that. This is a great group and myself and you.

**John:** We had played over four nights I think.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it was four crazy nights. And you were the Dungeon Master and whipped together a fantastic story with a great twist ending. It was such a good ending that my character was strongly contemplating suicide.

**John:** You know you hit a good point in the story where a character’s reasonable choice might just be to kill himself.

**Craig:** That’s right. But I thought it ran exactly the way it was supposed to go. You had the basic bones of a story. So there was a back story that connected to the end. There was a destination, some goal posts along the way, and there was one key artifact.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then we kind of put it all together as a story as we went, you know. And with you guiding us, that’s exactly how it was supposed to happen. And there was a lot of deaths. Chris Morgan and I were the only characters to survive and even our survival was ironic and Twilight Zoney, a little Monkey’s Paw-ish.

**John:** It was a Monkey’s Paw. I found Dungeon World mostly pretty good. So for people who aren’t familiar with what Dungeon World is versus Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeon World is an attempt to make an incredibly stripped down version of a game like Dungeons and Dragons where you’ll be rolling two six-sided dice. It’s much more about the conversation and talking back and forth rather than looking up charts and doing that kind of stuff.

And one of the goals is that the players themselves should have much more responsibility for the storytelling. And that’s where I thought you guys really stepped up. And it’s also nice that you have like, you know, five screenwriters doing it. But you guys found some really great interplay between your characters and sort of I could let you roll with things and most of the times it was really good. For each night of play, I would create sort of two encounters and then let you guys figure out how you were going to get through them.

**Craig:** Yeah, to me the most fun really was in the way the characters interacted and how they solidified and became certain types. I think of all the character interplay, I guess my favorite of all that was when Malcolm’s character, Big Luther, continually harangued Michael Gilvary’s character, he’s ranger character, Patty, for attempting to shoot arrows through animated skeletons.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just a terrible choice.

**John:** It was a terrible choice. And that was the first night and he never gave up on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, he really never, yeah. And I like that Patty in his kind of depressive Eeyorish way kept saying, “That could have worked.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s pretty great. But I also liked the interplay, my character was definitely the Loki of the group and sort of a selfish, liar. And he was a thief, so he’s all about, you know, profit. And Phil Hay’s character, Reynard, was the pompous, sanctimonious cleric. And those two guys hated each other. It was great.

**John:** Yeah. So one of the smart things about Dungeon World was you start with this concept of bonds and so as you’re figuring out your character, as you’re figuring out what their bonds are and sort of what their relationship is with each other. And it reminded me of a similar dynamic when we were playing Fiasco with Kelly Marcel, is that before you start the whole process, you figure out the relationships between the characters and then you figure out the characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that was really helpful because I remember playing D&D growing up. It was so much about like which character class you are and what the plus was on your sword.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it wasn’t about the story. And this, to its credit, was very much about the story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was very, it’s funny actually, I was looking, because, you know, you and I are now talking about continuing on with you as a player and us doing a campaign in the new Dungeons and Dragons, the fifth edition which is on its way out. And I was looking, just reading a little bit and I thought, you know, I’m really interested in creating a character that’s the wrong race for the class.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I just think that would be a cool way to begin, you know, because the truth is, yeah, does it hurt you a little bit statistically in the beginning? I suppose. But, you know, by the time you get to level whatever, who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just more interesting.

**John:** It is. If I had an overall criticism of Dungeon World, I felt that it was so stripped down at times that when you actually got to fighting things, it became really hard to figure out when should you roll again. And so, you know, if Luther is fighting this guy over here, how often should you be getting back to Luther and having Luther try to attack this thing and roll his dice versus the results.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that was sort of a mess. And that was me not being especially, you know, great with the structure and the rules of it all, but it didn’t seem to scale especially well to the five of us. And so the lack of initiative which is basically a system for going through and figuring out who’s turn it was to do something got to be a bit of a problem.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see how it goes with this next thing, but I had a great time regardless. And I’m looking forward to the next. And mostly because my wife hates it. She doesn’t hate it like, she’s not angry at it, it just more like, “Oh God.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re going to nerd, I literally put it in my calendar which she can see, I write down Nerd Fest.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. So Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is not a repeat, although, it might sound like a repeat. It’s David Kwong who I’ve talked about before. But today, right now, on Friday the 11th of July, his TED Talk is up and available and we’ll have a link in the show notes to that. It’s a great example of what he does.

So in the TED Talk, he talks about the idea that we are all hardwired to solve and he even talks about some scientific research with infants. And then he does a trick, and the trick has a component that involves that day’s crossword puzzle. It’s very intricate, it’s very meta. David always figures out how to be meta and the meta on top of meta and meta on top of meta on top of meta. It’s a great trick, I don’t know how he does it. It’s brilliant. You should all check it out. And the best news of all it’s I think like a 13-minute video.

**John:** Yeah. So actually I haven’t seen the TED talk as final, the final version of it, but I got to see a rehearsal for it over at Aline Brosh McKenna’s house several months before he did it. And it’s great and he’s super smart. And just this last week, my daughter came home from summer camp and she wanted to show me a card trick and it was a mess, it didn’t work at all. And so like, I went on YouTube and like, “Let me show you David Kwong doing a real card trick.” And it was terrific. And there’s actually one YouTube clip where he actually shows you how to do a very simple card trick that would impress most people at parties.

**Craig:** That’s such a great father-daughter moment for you. “Oh, that’s terrible, sweetheart. Here, let me show you the best guy.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “This is the guy who’s the best in the world. You’ll never be as good as him.” Behold, behold, have I crushed every ounce of passion out of you for this? Good. Good. You be a screenwriter like your father!”

**John:** To be fair, she had actually gone with me over to see David’s rehearsal so she knew who he was.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So it wasn’t just like… — He was fantastic. But it was actually a good father-daughter moment where she asked me, “Papa, why do you know so many famous people?”

**Craig:** Aw. Because daddy is special.

**John:** Daddy is special.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually related to last week’s —

**Craig:** Wait, she calls you —

**John:** Procrastination talk.

**Craig:** She calls you Papa?

**John:** I’m Papa.

**Craig:** She calls you Papa? That’s so German, I love it.

**John:** Well, we’re a two-dad family so —

**Craig:** I know, but see to me it I would just be dad and dad. But papa, or papa is, whatever. Let’s say, okay fine, you want two different dad type names, but papa is so wonderfully old school. It’s so Little House on the Prairie.

**John:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** Papa.

**John:** Papa.

**Craig:** Papa. Why, Papa?

**John:** But of course whenever she really just wants something, she doesn’t care who it is that gets her the thing, she’ll go, “Daddy, Papa.”

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

**John:** It’s like one thing like, I don’t care who does it. Just one of you do this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, one of you —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Guys. Hey guys.”

**John:** Guys.

**Craig:** “Guys. Guys, I need a thing.”

**John:** My One Cool Thing is related to last week’s procrastination topic and it’s how I actually came upon those procrastination articles was I was in a deep click hole researching the Fermi paradox, which you’re probably familiar with.

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** So the simple way of stating the Fermi paradox is that if you assume that the Earth is not special, the Earth is mediocre in terms of places in the universe, that our solar system isn’t special, that our Earth, our planet is not that special in terms of its possibility of existing. If you look at it that way, there should be tremendous numbers of civilizations out there across the universe, across the galaxy. And our galaxy is actually fairly old, so there should be some younger ones out there that would have progressed to the point where those civilizations should have been be able find us or at least done something that we can see. But when we look out into the galaxy we don’t see any other civilizations. So the Fermi paradox is basically, where is everybody?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it turns out there’s some really good explanations about, you know, why we may not be seeing other people and it could be everything from the universe, the times spans are just too huge, the distances are just too huge. It could be that there’s, the most troubling article I went through is that there may just be some filters and there may be some filters that sort of prevent civilizations from progressing beyond a certain point to where you would actually leave your home planet and travel across the wide empty spaces. So a really interesting thing. I’ll put three articles in the show notes this week.

**Craig:** It is interesting. There’s a lot of possible explanations. I have to say that I’ve always been the sort of person who wondered where all these people were and why aren’t they contacting us. And then I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about this thing. I don’t know if I mentioned on the show before. He was talking about how we all wish to meet an alien intelligence and we always presume that when we meet them they’ll be basically like us.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But he says, you know, we share something like 99% of our genetic material with chimpanzees. And the genetic material in that last 1% is that’s the difference, that’s why we are as smart as we are compared to a chimp. What if the people that we meet improbably are 99% is similar to us. That’s how similar they are to us. But unfortunately that 1% difference makes us as chimps to them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We wouldn’t even understand what they’re saying and we would be like children to them.

**John:** Well, I think of the different possibilities with Fermi paradox, my default answer to this point is that version of we’re asking the wrong question because essentially when you get to be so advanced that you could travel across the galaxy, there’s suddenly something else that’s much more appealing to do. And so —

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** One of the ways they described that as beings is like if you were building a freeway and you pass by an anthill, you wouldn’t care about the ants on the anthill. And it’s very possible that’s we’re just the ants in the anthill. And we’re not even really aware of the freeway that’s being built.

One last bit of news on my side, I’m hiring somebody. I’m actually hiring a new employee.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s very possible that someone listening to this podcast is that right employee for Quote-Unquote Films, Quote-Unquote Apps, my app development company that makes Highland and Weekend Read and Bronson. We are hiring a full time position, a UI designer. Somebody who’s really good at designing interfaces for apps both on the Mac and on iOS. We’d love somebody who is a combination of good design skills but also coding ability. We want somebody who can actually build things in Xcode. So if you are that person, there is a job posting on johnaugust.com and you should send in your resume because you might be exactly the right person.

Other bit of news and announcements, we have the first 150 episodes of Scriptnotes are now packed onto those little USB drives. So if you are a latecomer to the show and want to get caught up, that’s an easy way to get all those back episodes. So if you go to store.johnaugust.com you can buy that little USB drive that has all 150 episodes of the show, both in AAC format and mp3 format. So you can see where it all began.

**Craig:** How much does that cost?

**John:** It’s a really reasonable question. And I don’t know, I think they’re $19.

**Craig:** Okay. So what is a year of tuition at the worst film school cost?

**John:** Oh, God, I don’t know, $10,000?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s minimum. That’s 10 grand for the worst experience.

**John:** The worst.

**Craig:** The worst. And then upwards of what, 30, 40 for like an NYU or USC?

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we’re —

**John:** Yeah, USC has got to be 40 or 45.

**Craig:** Right. And so you said we were $19,000 for this?

**John:** [laughs] No, just $19.

**Craig:** What? $19?

**John:** Move that decimal point.

**Craig:** Oh my, that’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t buy it.

**John:** So it’s a reasonable thing to buy, if you want to buy that. Another choice if you want to go all the back episodes is you can got to scriptnotes.net and if you sign in there, if you get a premium membership there, it’s $2 a month. And that gives you access to all the back catalog. There’s an app that you can use to listen to that back catalog. There’s also occasionally we have some bonus episodes and you can find stuff in there too. So that’s another choice. $2 as opposed to $20,000, if it makes sense for you, go for it.

**Craig:** No, $2,000 a month is way better than —

**John:** Yeah, it’s way better.

**Craig:** Yeah, way better.

**John:** Oh God, if we charge $2,000 a month that would be crazy.

**Craig:** We would just need one person.

**John:** We can do one person.

**Craig:** And we would finally cover our bills.

**John:** One student at $2,000 a month.

**Craig:** We, as always, run at a loss.

**John:** We do run at a loss. Proud of that loss.

**Craig:** Proud, that’s our pledge to you.

**John:** If you have question for Craig Mazin, you should write him at @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. These longer questions like we answered today on the podcast, write your email to ask@johnaugust.com. If you’re on iTunes, click subscribe so that people know that you’re subscribed to this and leave us a comment while you’re there, that’s always nice too.

Podcast is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** The editor is Matthew Chilelli who will have his work cut out for him this week. And we love outros. And so we’re not sure which outro we’re going to use this week. But if you are a person who writes music and you would like to write an outro for our show, go to johnaugust.com/outros, I’m guessing that’s the URL. And you’ll listen to many great examples of previous people who’ve done outros and you should write us an outro and send us a link because we would love to feature it on the end of our show.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** And so I’ll also say this is our first time ever trying to do a live broadcast, the live stream online. It kind of worked.

**Craig:** What did our people in the chat room, what are they saying?

**John:** People say —

**Craig:** Boo?

**John:**”John and Craig, great show. Thanks. Do you have time to take some questions from the people in the live audience?”

**Craig:** Oh, we should have done that. That would that have made —

**John:** Well, because we didn’t do it, but maybe next time we’ll try it again.

**Craig:** Your answer to we should have done that is, oh, we should have done it but we didn’t do it. That’s the answer. Why we didn’t do it? Because we didn’t do it. But I hope you people in the chat room see what I’m working with here.

**John:** So maybe at some point in the future we will do another one of these live-ish kind of shows. We should probably do them at night if we’re going to do them because —

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. For sure.

**John:** People are going to be at work. But we will try to do another one of these, is at mixlr.com, M-I-X-L-R.com/scriptnotes is where we live-streamed this and it seemed to kind of work.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** So maybe we’ll do that again.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I did a lot of preparation and research into this. So I’m glad that my whole system of doing the live podcast… — Never mind, I don’t do anything. Everyone knows it. I’m useless.

**John:** Craig Mazin, you host a great podcast and it’s all we could ever ask of you to do.

**Craig:** Right, that is in fact all you could ask of me because I have no other skills. [laughs] All right. Thank you, John.

**John:** Craig, thanks. Have great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** And thanks everyone in the chat room.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, 76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), with Three Pages by James Topham
* Scriptnotes, 115: [Back to Austin with Rian Johnson and Kelly Marcel](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* David Lynch [on the iPhone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0)
* Björk, [Human Behavior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCGveA39VYA)
* [Dungeon World](http://www.dungeon-world.com/)
* Scriptnotes, 142: [The Angeles Crest Fiasco](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-angeles-crest-fiasco)
* [Action Jackson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvMn2Vh0fQ) trailer
* David Kwong at TED2014: [Two nerdy obsessions meet — and it’s magic](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_kwong_two_nerdy_obsessions_meet_and_it_s_magic)
* The Fermi paradox on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox), [Wait But Why](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html) and [Praxtime](http://praxtime.com/2013/11/25/sagan-syndrome-pay-heed-to-biologists-about-et/)
* Neil deGrasse Tyson [on chimps, humans and aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ro9aebFZhM)
* John is [hiring a new UI designer](http://johnaugust.com/2014/hiring-a-ui-designer)
* Our USB drives [now have the first 150 episodes](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-100-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* Archives are also [available on scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* This episode was broadcast live on [Mixlr](http://mixlr.com/scriptnotes/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jeff Harms ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))