Search Results for: spaces after a period

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-lost-lost-austin-three-page-challenge).

**John August:** Hello, this is John. Craig Mazin is not here, but he was there back in 2013 when we sat down with some people at the Austin Film Festival and did a live Three Page Challenge. Now, this episode has actually been sitting in the vault for a long time. We’ve been holding on to it for a certain emergency like rip cord, like pull the rip cord, there’s no episode this week, we got to put up a new episode.

Well, we haven’t had any of those emergencies, so this episode has been sitting around for a really long time. And we feel bad for the people who are waiting for this episode to come out, specifically Krista Westervelt, Melody Cooper and David Elver, who were so generous to submit their pages and have us talk to them. And they kept waiting for this episode to come out and it’s finally coming out. So, sorry it took so long, it’s been like eight months I think. But it’s a good episode.

So next week we’ll be back live with a normal episode, but this is a good Three Page Challenge and I hope you enjoy. Thanks.

[Intro tone]

Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is the Three Page Challenge, and we are here in Austin to talk about writing pages and specifically three pages. This is a thing that Craig and I do on our podcast not every week but every couple of weeks. It’s really Craig’s suggestion, so what Craig loves to do is to read the first couple pages of a person’s script and tell them whether they should stay as a writer or should give up the business completely.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I said three pages. I could’ve gotten away with one. I actually do believe one page is probably enough. But we’ve been beneficiaries to some great Three Pages. A lot of the people who send them in, a lot, really do a good job. I think we’ve got some good ones today. But it’s a nice way also for us to not have to worry about whether you have a good idea for a movie or where it’s going or how it’s developing, but we just talk about the craft of how you’re actually putting the scenes on the page.

**John:** Yes. So Craig and I host a podcast called Scriptnotes and every week we’re talking about the business and craft of screenwriting. And it’s very hard to talk about the craft portion of it without having words in front of you. And so people have been really generous to send in the first three pages of their scripts and letting us talk about them on the air and hopefully give some constructive feedback.

At the Writers Guild Foundation about six months ago we were able to do the first time where we not only read through these pages but actually met the people who wrote these pages and then talked to them more about what was on the page and the rest of their script. And we’re so excited that here in Austin we get to do that again.

And so many of you in the audience have in your hands this little handout, this packet of these first three pages, which is awesome. If you didn’t get one of these or if you’re listening to this after the fact, you can also just go to my website johnaugust.com/austin and I have these three pages up here, so you can follow along with us if you don’t have those physically in hand.

So we have three very brave people who’ve shared with us their scripts.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And let’s just get into it.

**Craig:** No. Before we do that we should just say congratulations. Everybody in here is at least a second rounder of this competition.

**John:** Which is great. So these are people who submitted to the Austin Film Festival and their scripts were considered awesome and made it through to the second round of the competition, which is great.

**Craig:** You’ve earned this. You and everyone who listens to a free podcast has earned this.

**John:**[laughs] For this chance.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** The first script we’re going to take a look at, first three pages we’re going to take a look at, is a script called Graceless and it’s by Krista Westervelt. Krista, where are you here in the audience?

Hi, Krista.

**Craig:** Hey Krista.

**John:** Thank you for coming to Austin. Hello. And so for people who are at home or like are driving in their car and therefore shouldn’t stop and try to read the pages, we’re going to give a little summary of what happened in the first three pages before we get going. I’ll do this first summary.

So we’re starting in Angela’s bedroom. So Angela Reeves, who is her early 20s, she’s sort of half-dressed, she’s getting dressed and she’s listening to voicemails. And the voicemails are from her mom saying where are you, the service starts in 20 minutes, are you hung over. Her dad also has a voicemail saying, “For the love of god, please show up.”

Angela arrives at this mega church parking lot. It’s the First Savior and Living Lord Church which is filled towards capacity. It’s there where we meet her father for the first time. Henry Reeves is 47. She sits down with him. The choir church is singing. Doug Richards, the pastor, scans the crowd from the pulpit. We meet Melinda Reeves, Angela’s mother, who we heard in the voicemail. She’s 47. A little description of her. She says, “Would it have troubled you to wear a skirt?” That’s sort of their first interaction.

Afterwards, we’re in the church sanctuary and we’re being introduced to Dottie who’s in her 50s, attractive woman with just a bit of menopausal softness and who’s greeting people as they’re exiting the church. We also see Dottie’s daughter Jamie who’s in her 20s. We end up with a conversation between Dottie and Jamie. Ultimately the conversation finishes up with just Jamie and Angela. They’re dialogue is bumping over each other. Jamie runs the singles, how long have you been, that sort of overlapping dialogue conversation.

And we exit the three pages on midway through their first conversation. And that is what’s happening in three pages. And Craig Mazin, start us out.

**Craig:** Well, are we going to be joined up here by —

**John:** I think we should talk a little bit about what we’ve experienced first.

**Craig:** Okay. And then we will — and then if they run out and then we can, they’ll come up here and…

Well, I enjoyed these pages. I started to get a little lost here and there but there’s a lot of good things. I like the use — I generally like the use, any time you can introduce a character without introducing the character is interesting. And I like that I was learning a little bit about the relationship between Melinda and her mom through the voicemail in theory. In practice, I’ve seen this a gazillion times. I’ve seen the voicemail and nobody has this voicemail anymore, by the way. That’s the other problem. Nobody has the beep, next message. You know, we all have our phones now, and so it’s a little cliché to hear the carping mom over the phone.

Also, I loved that, well, I liked that she sniffed her laundry because I do that. And that was interesting. And it was a nice touch that the dad also calls and has a different — already has a different voice from the mom. This is good, that’s good that you’re establishing those things. Mega churches are awesome in the sense that they are designed to make you feel like, whoa, I mean either you’re horrified or in love with them. Either way, they leave an impression.

And the name is spot on. But you didn’t give me the mega church feeling. I wanted a mega church feeling. If you walk me into a mega church, you say it’s a mega church but you write it like it’s a one-room chapel, you know? It seems very — even though there’s a stage and everything, everything seems short and down. There’s no spectacle. I want more spectacle. I want a feeling — I want to know what my main character is feeling walking into this mall of Jesus.

Her mom’s first line, would it have troubled you to wear a skirt, right idea. A lot of words to say that when I think my wife, if she sees my daughter doing that would have just said, “No skirt?” You know what I mean? There’s the — tailor the length of dialogue to the relationship because mothers and daughters have shorthand, obviously.

Where we’re going to get to is what, I mean, I don’t know, either this does or doesn’t turn into a lesbian church movie but it’s starting to feel like a lesbian church movie which I’m totally in favor of. But the way that Jamie and Angela meet feels un-cinematic. We’re just, you know, Dottie is the mom and we get that the mom is clueless and there’s just chitchat. There’s just chitchat going on. And when people are interested in each other I want to watch the spark happen. I don’t want to hear it. I want to watch it. It happens before words are ever said.

So I was — that’s what I would suggest to you is to really think about how you can create a moment before you get to the dialogue which has raced immediately to an almost 1930s-style screwball comedy, you know, repartee. It’s like two Jean Arthurs. So I would think about creating a moment before you have the moment. But by and large, it was — the characters felt really interesting and certainly there’s the promise of a very interesting story here, particularly if that mega church gets mega churchy.

**John:** Like Craig, I was really excited by where we were ending up on page 3. I was really fascinated just to know what was going to happen next, so congratulations on that because a lot of times we get to three pages like, “Oh, and I’m done with those three pages.” So that was exciting for me to be curious about what was going to happen next.

The issue of, you know, hearing the voicemails and the woman getting dressed, it’s just a thing we’ve seen before and it’s a little bit of a television kind of thing. It feels like a TV pilot kind of first moment. Maybe this is a TV pilot, I don’t know. But that felt a little both familiar and also not quite present day because, like Craig, I would say no one really has that sort of normal — the speaker phone. And that’s absolutely possibly a way to do it is essentially her iPhone is down and it’s going through those and she’s pressing the next one.

But it was the specificity of checking the smell of clothes felt really good and appropriate. Like Craig, I’m so excited about the mega church but I didn’t know where we were. I didn’t know sort of what part of America it was. I didn’t know if this was a southern mega church, if this was a western mega church, what kind of environment we were in. So more specificity and dressing about that would be great.

And I got a little misled in the wrong ways about sort of come to the service because like I was thinking like, well is it a wedding or is it a funeral? I immediately went to one of those two things. And if it’s a normal service then why does she need to go? And so if we’re not going to get those answers before we meet this new character who’s going to clearly be important, that just let me hanging a little bit.

But we should bring you up here because, you know, I’m talking directly to you —

**Craig:** Yeah, come on up.

**John:** Please come on up. And let’s welcome Krista.

Thank you very much.

**Krista Westervelt:** I can breathe now because I got through this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, you got through the hard part. You got through the hard part.

**John:** So please, Krista tell us what happens on page four.

**Krista:** What happens on page four or just in general you want me to —

**Craig:** Well, four and…

**John:** Four and beyond.

**Krista:** Four and beyond.

Basically, Graceless is kind of dealing with the fallout that happens when this evangelical mega church pastor’s daughter starts dating a woman. So, yes, you were on the right track there —

**Craig:** Yay!

**Krista:** With the lesbian love interest thing.

**Craig:** I’m so good at picking up on lesbian church movies.

**Krista:** There you go.

**Craig:** It’s my thing.

**Krista:** There you go.

**John:** He has a wheelhouse. And so tell us about the impetus behind writing this thing. Is this the first thing you’ve written, have you written a bunch of other stuff? Where are you at?

**Krista:** This is actually the very first thing. I had originally, years back, started kind of playing around with the idea of writing as a novel and it just wasn’t happening. And then the spark that got me to finally sit down and write it because I was kind of seeing it sort of like a movie in my head and I wanted to kind of play around with that. My husband died in 2011 and it’s sort of that spark of, okay, life’s too short, stop putting shit off, you know, so to speak . And so I sat down and gave it a shot and got through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m glad we didn’t beat you up because this would have been awkward. [laughs]

**John:** So talk to us about Angela Reeves. So she is our protagonist, I’m assuming.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** She’s the first character we’re meeting.

**Krista:** Exactly.

**John:** Tell us some things that are special about her and let’s think if we can find some ways to learn about them earlier on or set them up.

**Krista:** Sure, sure. I think she’s close with her parents but her mother’s disappointed in her because she’s a lesbian and she’s this member of this church and she’s trying to be good and get her daughter saved. And maybe if I can get my daughter to come to church, maybe I can get her saved. If she can become friends with the pastor’s daughter, everything’s going to be perfect because, you know, who’s a better role model than the pastor’s daughter to get her saved and gay or whatever.

**Craig:** Well, okay, now that’s interesting because here’s an important fact that I want to start gleaning immediately from the beginning of the movie. There’s a difference between Angie’s mother and Jamie’s mother.

**Krista:** Right.

**Craig:** Angie’s mother knows she’s gay.

**Krista:** Right.

**Craig:** Jamie’s mother has no clue. Now, there’s a way that that can kind of come through.

**Krista:** Sure.

**Craig:** There’s a way that that can be indicated. I mean first of all, what John said about the TV-ishness of the voicemail is true. And when we’re writing a screenplay, that’s when we don’t — I mean unless you are, you know, blowing the earth up and we have of those coming soon, you don’t have to worry so much about budget. So think about space and think about ways to be cinematic.

I mean, here’s a woman and she’s waiting in this line to get into the mega church in her car and you’re just like, uh-uh-uh, and she finally gets up and then it’s her turn to go in and she turns around and leaves. And then, no, and then she turns around and gets back at the back of the line to go in. Something so that you start to sell this reluctance. And when she comes in and you’re selling it with a movie, you know?

**Krista:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When she comes in and sits down next to her mother, I could see her mother looking at her, just looking at the pants. And she’s like, “Mom…”

“No, no, it’s better than I thought. It’s better than I expected.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like the weariness of the mom who just is slowly just dealing with it.

**Krista:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting circumstance. So let that inform how these two talk to each other.

**Krista:** Okay.

**Craig:** They’ve had — this is an old fight. But there’s a new fight that’s coming with the other ones, you know, so that makes it fun.

**Krista:** Yes.

**John:** I have a question for you.

**Krista:** Sure.

**John:** The first scene is set in Angela’s bedroom. But we know so little about her. We don’t know if she’s living in an apartment by herself or if she’s living at her family’s house, what is it?

**Krista:** I figure she lived in a studio apartment on her own.

**John:** Okay.

**Krista:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. So that might be a good thing to tell us here in this opening thing. So maybe get us out of that bedroom and see what her real living environment is because when you just give us bedroom we don’t know any bigger context. So if it is a studio apartment, then that is a studio apartment. There’s no such thing as a bedroom.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** The fact that her bed is also her couch is — everything is really meaningful. And the fact that her dirty clothes are out, not just on the bedroom floor but like they’re out in the apartment. Like everything is together.

**Krista:** Right.

**John:** And so use each of those little things to give us more space. I don’t think you need to tell us that she’s a lesbian right from the get-go, which is great, but I do wonder if over the course of your movie we are going to have these two girls meet too — so early that there’s no surprise. We’re not going to get to know our hero before we meet the love interest. And so as much as you can do to let us know and love this girl before we sort of know who she’s going to love is going to be helpful.

**Krista:** Okay.

**Craig:** Cool. I think that’s right.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** But you can do this.

**John:** Yes, you absolutely can do this.

**Krista:** Thank you.

**John:** And the words on the page felt solid and consistent and you definitely know what the form is and so I have no doubt you’re going to make some awesome scripts.

**Krista:** Wow, thanks.

**Craig:** Good job, good job. Way to go. Nice work.

**Krista:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Next victim.

**John:** Not victim. Next hero is Melody Cooper with Monstrous.

**Craig:** Hero. If you wish. Okay. And it’s Melody or Melanie?

**John:** Melody.

**Craig:** Melody. Is that you?

**Melody Cooper:** It is me.

**Craig:** Well, then I’ll have to trust you on that. Okay. And so Melody’s three pages are from a script called Monstrous. We open up, the sky over the Atlantic Ocean, night, and then along comes a single engine airplane. We’re now inside this small private plane. It’s dark and then we just see the flash of a woman’s face whispering, “Where is he? I can’t see anything.”

Another woman says, “Stay close, we can’t let them…” And then they scream and scream and they’re lost in the darkness. In the last row of the plane, we meet Moira. She’s 20s, red head, freaking out, she is shoving a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag, sealing it. Somebody dies near her. Blood splatters over her. She keeps going. She puts the bag, she attaches the bag to a life vest, says, “Stay bound together,” to herself in Gaelic or I guess, no, to the camera and the life preserver.

And then she gets out from her seat, tries to basically get out of the plane. But as she’s trying to get out of the plane, she’s dragged back by some unseen terrible thing, dismembered arm attached to the door handle, blood spraying everywhere. She kicks the vest out of the door, the life vest sails down towards the ocean, the airplane crashes into the water. But the vest is there along with the Ziploc bag holding the camera, which presumably has some evidence of what we’ve seen. That’s all on Page 1.5.

Now we’re in New York. We’re in Queens on a residential street. And in a building, David Harrison, 20s who’s a bit of a mess, he’s a gamer, he’s playing some sort of shoot them up game, first person shooter, while he’s drinking beer from a straw. He’s pissed off. He’s playing a game with a werewolf and a Griffin that are killing each other. He thinks he’s won until the zombies come. And when he finally pushes back from his TV having lost, we reveal that he’s in a wheelchair. And that were the first three pages of Monstrous.

**John:** Great. So this is a classic example of a cold open where the initial thing we’re seeing isn’t going to — the characters we’re seeing and the characters we’re meeting are setting up things about the story or things about the nature of the movie, but they’re not specifically talking — this is not — the hero of the story isn’t going to continue because she dead.

So it’s establishing what the world of the movie is like and then we’re going to cut to something brand new and ultimately this thing that we’ve established, this camera will end up becoming an important thing when we get to this guy.

So let’s sort of talk about these two things as separate things. We need to talk about this opening image and then what we’re learning about how the real engine and how the new story is going to start.

I really like the idea of the vest with the camera going out and like that’s the thing that is going to continue long after because we have this expectation that the woman will somehow survive and this things will get out. The idea of this vest and this camera are what remains of this seems really, really smart. And I have not seen that before and I’m really excited.

I got lost inside a small plane. And so I think a lot of my questions about this opening is really the geography and specificity of where we’re at in this place and what we as the audience are supposed to be expecting because sometimes as a reader I got confused and I didn’t know whether it was because I just wasn’t smart enough to do it or else it was just described in a way that wasn’t — I didn’t know if I was supposed to get it or not supposed to get it and it got confusing me in a way that was not especially helpful.

Some examples for it would be midway down the first page, “Slicing of flesh, blood sprays against the seat next and window next to Moira, some of it splatters on her face.” Slicing of flesh, I don’t know what that image is. And so it’s given to me as a slug line as an important thing but what’s slicing what? Like what’s doing the action? Is a knife cutting something as opposed to if it just said blood sprays. Well, blood sprays from something, that would be enough for me. Blood spraying as image —

**Craig:** Did you mean it as a sound?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Oh, great. And so when we see that line by itself, we’re going to assume that’s an image. We’re going to assume that the camera is looking at something. And slicing of flesh is not a thing we can sort of see. So if it’s meant to be a sound, I would say —

**Craig:** We hear —

**John:** We hear, either we hear or do the blood sprays as the slicing of flesh, you know, happens. Another thing that confused me would be Moira’s line here, in Gaelic, “Stay down together.” So she’s in Gaelic, but is that subtitled? Like how are we, as an audience, supposed to be processing that? Because as a script reader we know what she’s saying and so if it is supposed to be subtitled, in Gaelic, subtitle would be the thing.

Earlier on and the first lines we hear, “Where is he, I can’t see anything, stay close, we can’t let him,” and then there’s screams. And yet, I’m told that we’re in a private plane, so my internal geography of what a private plane is is that it is so small that how can anything kind of be loose in a private plane. So entirely possible, I just wasn’t seeing how it would work.

I got confused if there’s other people. I assume there’s other people but I’m only experiencing Moira, so that again. So sometimes that confusion is okay. But you sort of need to make it clear to the audience that like you’re kind of supposed to be confused. Like it’s chaotic and you end up using those words, but you’re not really quite sure what we’re seeing. Any more reaction on the first opening?

**Craig:** Well, it is fun. I mean, you know, it’s exciting to be thrown into the middle of a sequence like that and the camera and the life preserver are great. It seems to me like what we’re missing is something to ease us into it. I don’t think, given the circumstances of who’s on this plane and what he or it is doing, you may not be able to show the moment when things start to go bad.

But what I would — first of all, there was a huge question. Who’s flying the plane, right? That’s a big one. But let’s presume the plane is just flying. Now one thing you could do is you could just, you show this plane… — And by the way, I would try and eliminate a little bit — it gets a little too much like “a calm, clear night, high full moon, a single engine airplane across the sky, cabin windows are completely…” we’re not, we’re just seeing, you know what I mean?

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then we’re inside of it. So we can get a little tighter on that. I know you want to see what’s on the tail. Then you could sort of say, interior plane, a man is sleeping calmly, you know, as the plane hums along. You know, he nods and then his head flops to the right, blood. You know, okay, so, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not a sleeping business man, that’s a dead person.

Now, you could then see cockpit. The cockpit door is open. The pilot is dead, you know, the plane is on autopilot. And then you could see, you know, the lights go out or something. And then you could see a woman, like “Don’t move, don’t…” you know, whatever it is. Somehow you need to let us in slowly and make this, build it up so that we feel like the point is we’re supposed to be completely disoriented. Disorient us while orienting us. [laughs] I don’t know how else to put. You know what I mean?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** But that’s kind of the —

**John:** He’s saying you can’t be disoriented until you’re oriented in some capacity.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Right now it becomes just spinning wildly and we don’t know sort of where to start focusing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to push back a little bit of what Craig said. It’s like I honestly thought your first sentences started stronger in that they were so short. And maybe there were a few too many —

**Craig:** You like short sentences, yeah.

**John:** And so it starts, “A calm, clear night. High full moon. A single engine airplane crosses the sky.” But then when we get inside the plane, suddenly our sentences get super long in a way that feels weird because the action is really choppy and the sentences got really long. So here’s the first sentence inside the private plane. “Moonlight, punctuated by the pulse of light from the wings, illuminates the darkness of the cabin of the 12-seater.” Those short sentences you started with would be a great thing to continue into this place.

Moonlight. The interior cabin is dark. You know, 12 seats and focus on whatever we’re supposed to be focusing on. That would invite me in a little bit more. Another very long sentence here. “In the last row of the plane sits Moira, 20s, red head, breathless and frantic, she keeps her eyes in front of the shadowy cabin as she shoves a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag. She seals it.”

As a reader, I’m having to store a lot of information in one sentence. I have to remember Moira and she’s a read head and she’s 20s and she has a digital camera and she’s panicked in the shadowy cabin. Breaking that into smaller bits is going to make it easier for me to process what’s happening and really give us a better feel of what the situation feels like to Moira.

So it’s a beautiful autumn afternoon and she’s strolling through the woods. These long sentences give you that sense of sweet. But if it is short and panicky, short and panicky sentences will be your friend.

**Craig:** Totally. And I just had an idea. So, okay, I realize why you keep talking about moon and moonlight. I get it finally. Here’s my suggestion for you. If you want to make a point, make the point, right? Don’t talk about the moon, don’t show the moon. Don’t refer to the moon. But when the plane crashes, “The inflated vest rocks in the rise and fall of the ocean as the water laps against it, the Ziploc bag that holds the camera still attached to its side. We crane up to see the full moon.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? Like end on it, make it a thing, make it a reveal. Otherwise, we’re just going to be getting a lot of — some DP is going to be putting a dumb filter on a light and calling it a moonlight and no one’s going to care, you know?

So let’s talk about the Queens, the Astoria section.

**John:** Before we get to the Astoria section, on page 2 we’re moving from the wreckage of what happened with the plane and this camera. This is the moment where I think you really do need some sort of transitional element. So either transition to or cut to something to let us know that we’re not in a continuous bit of action, that we’re going to something completely new. So on the right margin, something that ends in TO: to let us know we’re at a new place and time.

**Craig:** Maybe the moon is a nice transitional element that could turn into a thing or a thing —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we’re in Astoria. Quite a bit of set up just to describe what was going on outside. I’m not sure any of it is relevant or not, perhaps it is. But that’s a third of a page of just, you know, slice of life on a Queens street. What did you think about the David Harrison scene?

**John:** So in the David Harrison scene, again, we have a lot of sounds that are given their own slug line. And so whenever we see a slug line, we think like that is something the camera is aimed at and the camera doesn’t aim at of sound. So that inhuman screech is probably a prelap. That’s probably something that we’re hearing before we make the cut inside the building, which is a great suggestion that something terrible is going to happen inside and it’s normal inside, it’s actually a video game is great.

I felt like once we were inside David Harrison’s apartment, the surprise we’re going to get to is that he’s in a wheelchair and sort of what his nature of stuff is. We spend a lot of time on a video game that was very specific and yet, you know, no one likes to watch people play video games. And so I would say as much as you can do to tighten that action and give us a general sense of the kind of thing he’s doing, but not sort of beat-by-beat what is happening on that screen because it felt like I was watching a guy play a video game for a minute. And that’s not going to be really the best.

**Craig:** Yeah. A couple of things. One, you have a tall, narrow figure staring out of the — standing and staring out of a fifth floor window. I will presume that the next shot I see of somebody inside a building is that guy. But at first I thought, well she just made a mistake here because he’s sitting now while he’s playing. He’s not standing. But it couldn’t have been him because he’s in a wheelchair. He’s not standing. So that’s a confusing juxtaposition.

If you want to show that he’s in the same building, you can see that guy and then camera can come down to find another window where we hear the growl, you know, but help us out there. The issue with the video games in movies is that unless you’re watching somebody play a real video game, they just, oh, they feel like that thing in a movie where somebody picks up a can of beer that says beer on it, you know. It’s always some fake game. And it’s hard to do well. So hearing it and maybe catching quick glimpses and giving us less and just having us fill in the gaps in our head is fine.

What he’s saying to the TV is also not real, you know. I am the guy that plays these games. I don’t do that. We don’t do that. We don’t talk like that. It’s pushed. You know what I mean? I think it’s a business like way of talking to your TV when you’re playing these games.

**John:** If he’s on a headset game playing with other players, then maybe some of that kind of dialogue could happen in a way that’s —

**Craig:** That’s its own kind of taunting thing. But when you just won a game, you’re like, yeah suck it, you know. But you wouldn’t, “You are no match for…” You know, he’s starting to do exposition here while he’s proud of the TV. And, you know, it’s rare that you play a video game and are surprised by the fact that zombies are suddenly on a level. It doesn’t quite work like that, you know.

Also, drinking beer out of a straw generally doesn’t work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean just physically doesn’t work very well, you know. Beer, straw and beer and beer straws.

**John:** Can you come up so we can actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, come on up.

**John:** And talk through questions. So, applause.

**Craig:** There, it’s over.

**John:** There it’s over. So the scary part’s over and so let’s talk beer through a straw. Beer through a straw, is it because he is paraplegic? Is there a physical reason why you need to do that, or is he just really lazy?

**Melody:** Well, because his hands are engaged playing and like friends of mine who do the beer hats at games kind of —

**John:** Nice.

**Melody:** Version.

**John:** We’ve learned so much about you that you have friends who have beer hats at games. So I feel like that’s a character detail. So tell us about the script and tell us… — So, Craig’s right: you got a werewolf on a plane, did that just happen?

**Melody:** Yeah.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Werewolf on a plane. I am two for two.

**John:** Yeah. He’s really good at spotting lesbians and werewolves. So.

**Craig:** Super useful at different times. Both things are useful.

**John:** Can you fast-forward us through some of the things that we would experience in the script if we read the whole thing?

**Melody:** Sure. The werewolf that you meet in the beginning is actually a person who’s a serial killer that takes on the guise of other monsters once he kills them and kills people via those powers. And Harrison who we meet in the apartment is someone who ends up trying to track that serial killer with a next-door neighbor, the receding character in the building is the brother of a woman he ends up falling in love with who is half-human/half-monster. And they, the two of them team up to try to track this serial killer down before he kills more people by using the powers of monsters.

**Craig:** And Harrison is going to be tracking these monsters down?

**Melody:** Yes, yes.

**Craig:** In his wheelchair?

**Melody:** He doesn’t stay in a wheelchair because the women who were killed in the beginning are witches. And they figure in later.

**Craig:** Okay. So they cure him of wheelchair issues?

**Melody:** They help him out.

**Craig:** All right.

**Melody:** They give him a way to get out of the chair.

**Craig:** All right. That would be cool.

**John:** That’s great. So you have a real world that is populated heavily with supernatural aspects?

**Melody:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**John:** And so that is compelling in its pitch in a sense of like it’s a story about serial killer who is a werewolf and supernatural forces will have to stop him. So is that the thing that you’re trying to do both things at the same time to be procedural and also be supernatural?

**Melody:** Yes, and he takes on the power. He kills different types of monsters throughout the entire film. So he starts off as we see him in the very beginning, as a werewolf, but he takes on different forms and different monsters throughout the entire film and he has to be stopped. And so it is procedural and it’s also supernatural.

**John:** So it’s Sylar from Heroes. But the movie version of what that character could be.

**Craig:** And the video game isn’t a thing that matters later on, is it?

**Melody:** No, not that. It’s only a way to introduce the character especially that he himself is fascinated and thrilled by monsters. So that’s why it’s specific.

**Craig:** Sometimes it’s better when people who are asked to fight monsters are not fascinated and thrilled by monsters.

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in fact, they’re just like us. Just because it starts — one thing that happens that’s a little tricky is in movies with monsters, if everybody is either a monster or knows a monster or is interested in monsters, the audience starts going, what town is this? You know, how do all these people live in the same place? Is Moira a witch?

**Melody:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay, good. So another suggestion for you because the scene that you have in the beginning on the plane tells me one thing, there is a monster, that’s it. And all these people are scared as they should be because of monsters.

But what if this one woman turns around when she sees the monster and isn’t afraid at all and just starts talking in Gaelic and then starts, “Whoa,” you know, and then the thing goes flying and you see blood and the plane goes down. And we go, okay, it’s not just that there are monsters. There are also people that know about the monsters who can fight with the monsters. It starts to at least give me a little bit more of a grounded sense of the world.

Once you do monsters, that’s your buy-in and if then you add on top of that buy-in that there’s also witches, you start to end up in that thing that happened in, was is it Stephen Sommers who did the movie with the werewolves versus the —

**John:** Van Helsing?

**Craig:** Van Helsing.

**Melody:** Van Helsing, yeah.

**Craig:** Where it just seemed like every 20 minutes are like, wait, here’s something else that is in this world that you did not know about.

**Melody:** Right, right, right.

**Craig:** And it gets exhausting, you know.

**Melody:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** So the more you can give a sense of this is the deal, we’re in a world with da-da-da. And that in a sense Underworld I thought did a good job with that, you know, where they introduced where you’re like, oh okay, cool, you know, there’s two types of monsters. So anyway, things to think about.

**Melody:** Thanks.

**John:** As you start to establish your world where I wonder if it’s going to be a challenge is the rules of the world. And what he’s talking about with Van Helsing really is that. It’s like it feels like every time you’re going to introduce a new thing, it’s going to be like, “And here’s a new bit of exposition to explain this part of the rules.” So as simple as you can some of these things, the better. As you are re-approaching stuff, I wonder if you might want to just take this, think about this first moment.

And what if this first moment were 30 minutes. And what could happen on that plan, because I think you created a really amazing environment. And if that thing could go longer and really detail all that stuff and you can establish what is it like to have a werewolf on plane, that’s kind of awesome. What is it like to be a witch fighting a werewolf on a plane? That’s kind of awesome. That would be a great, that’s a great in and that might be a way to establish some of the rules of your world so that when we cut to our normal guy who’s in a more normal environment we can sort of have a sense of the scale of what kinds of things can happen in this movie.

**Melody:** Great idea.

**John:** So how many scripts have you written? Is this the first full-length thing you’ve done? What’s your —

**Melody:** No. Well, this is the first draft of the script. I’ve written a few others that are in the sci-fi/horror genre and some TV scripts. And they’ve, you know, placed or won in different festivals. But this is a very complex one. And I really wanted to submit it here to just to get this kind of feedback. And as I was, you know, struggling through, I since revised it, you know, quite a bit and actually simplified it because it had a lot going on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Melody:** But those are great comments in the opening scene in particular. I think that I already see ways that I can actually feed into, you know, how I can revise it to make it stronger.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, as you go through these movies that are about science fiction and mysterious societies and secrets and re-presentations of things that we thought we knew, don’t forget that ultimately we’ll only really care about people and that the people part of it is the most important part. If you can, you know, get the people part right, the rest of it you can always massage into place.

**Melody:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the character. And there’s something in the fact that you’ve got a guy in a wheelchair who eventually is going to walk or fly or something is really interesting. That’s a good people part, you know.

**Melody:** He flies.

**Craig:** There you go. See, flies? I am so good. Well great. Thank you so much.

**John:** Awesome. Melody, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you. All right, next item up for bid is a script by David Elver. Elver.

**John:** Hello, David Elver. Thank you for joining us.

I am going to attempt to summarize the script we’ve read. So, in case people have had not the chance to read this all, as they are sitting down here with us. Over black we hear the distant sounds of amplified Arabic voice, a Muslim call to prayer, and also the beep-beep-beep of an EKG. We’re in a hospital triage tent outdoors. We’re near Cairo, it’s daytime. That eye snaps open. Blood red eye. We’re with a pretty young nurse who’s working with a respirator mask on this person who seems to be dying. The beep falls violent. There’s still the call to prayer. All this sequence is happening without real dialogue, just a bunch of sounds and images.

There’s a handful of doctors and nurses. Clearly like a big thing is happening because of this huge triage unit. The woman, the nurse goes back to check on this man, to check for his pulse. The skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand, which is nasty.

Pops, pops, explosions in the distance, artillery, a bigger explosion, a huge ball of fire and metal falls from the sky. It’s a city-size starship and envelopes in a halo flame. It’s crashing into central Cairo, destroying the city, the hospital, the pyramids, everything is consumed by fire. So a small contained little drama that we’re talking about here.

Now we’re in interstellar space. We’re black. And we learn some things about this giant ship we’re seeing, this giant cancerous, tumor of a ship. The ship is called Lazarus. We’re in 2349. We have an estimated time to Earth that is 23 hours, 47 minutes, 15 seconds and counting down quickly. We’re in a service quarter. We’re going to see Abel in his thirties. He is racing down the corridor, jumping and ducking over things. He’s a scruffy guy. At a huge power terminal he’s trying to turn something on or off. He’s trying to reset something. His arm gets stuck behind it. And as we get to the end of page 3 he’s trying to get his arm free from where it’s wedge behind this machinery. And that’s the three pages.

Craig?

**Craig:** David, these were good. Really good. I really enjoyed it. There’s a kind of writing for this sort of sequence. We’ll get to the spaceship sequence. But the beginning sequence, it’s essentially impressionistic writing. It’s something that people started doing in the 1800s and then forgot about somewhere in the 1900s.

But it’s great kind of writing where you are confused as you read it and then it’s resolved. It’s smart. It’s a good way of going about things. You have a lot of good imagery here. The beep-beep-beep of the EKG and the boop is something that we’ve seen lots of, but I’m okay with that. I don’t mind feeling like I’m in a normal situation. And then you pull back and you see this bigger situation with all these people and the pyramids in the background which is odd, what’s going on, war in the Middle East or something?

And then some horrifying disease. Little things give you information. When you think about how to get information across, here’s one way. A nurse turns back to the dead man. She checks for a pulse. The skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand. She turns to a doctor, “You need to look at this.” That’s one way. Or the other way is, the nurse stares at the smear of dead skin in her fingers, horrified. That’s a better way, you know, because I’m seeing that she wasn’t expecting that. That’s more visceral for me. It’s a little hard sometimes to see those things through glasses and masks, but it’s okay. That’s the director’s problem.

Really great reveal of the spaceship coming down. So we hear it, we’re not sure what it is and then it crashes. And, you know, these little things like the way you did the city, the hospital, the pyramids, I want stuff like that. It makes it interesting. I mean we all read billions and millions of scripts. So just, I don’t know, make it fun.

So everything is consumed by fire. Hard to do better than that as a screenwriting sentence. “Everything is consumed by fire.” I got it. Great. So I really enjoyed all of that.

Then we go into space. Interstellar space. “One by one, stars bleed into the darkness.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant exactly. I don’t know what stars bleeding into darkness means. But I do know what the loud mechanical rumbling is. The Lazarus, a vast ugly, cancerous, tumor of a ship. So I get exactly what you mean. I know what it looks like. And then here’s this title. I don’t know. I suspect that we’ve jumped ahead in time. I suspect, but I’m not sure exactly. So you’ll have to let us know later on in the script.

The interior of the ship is really well-described. I enjoyed all of these descriptions of both the interior of the ship and Abel himself who’s running. And it’s really when he got to the terminal that the — I guess my only suggestion is I’m not sure, is this terminal really important?

**David Elver:** Yeah, what happens to it is on the next page.

**Craig:** Okay, fine. Then it is. Great. Then I understand why I’m wasting time with it. But I don’t know that he’s trying to hit a reset switch. That’s the only thing. If I need to know what he’s doing, right now he may be reaching for, you know, something he dropped back there or not. If it’s a reset switch show me his hand almost near the reset switch.

**John:** With the glowing amber switch right past.

**Craig:** Do you know what I mean? But geez, that’s my big freaking comment. I mean, good job. You hated it?

**John:** I hate it. Hated it. No, I adored it. But what I especially really appreciated was how you’re showing us and how you’re talking us through things and how you’re making the words on the page feel like what the movie would ultimately feel like, because we have to remember is that we’re really not writing scripts. We’re trying to write movies.

And the challenge is we’re only allowed to use 12-point Courier Prime on white paper to show what that movie is going to feel like ultimately. So we have to use those words very smartly to create the feeling of what we’re going to see and what we’re going to hear. You use both sound and visuals really well.

So let’s start at the very start. “Over black we hear the distant sound of an amplified Arabic voice.” I’m fine with we hears. This is a case where I don’t think you needed it, because if you took that out, “The distant sound of an amplified Arabic voice” Great. It’s a sound. We know. We’re hearing it and it’s over black.

This triage unit is really nicely set up and done. And a good example of midway through the page, a pretty young nurse wearing glasses over a respiratory mask. She’s not given a name. It’s awesome that she doesn’t have name because it tells us that she is an important character at this moment, but don’t bother learning her name because it’s not going to be important. And that’s good. And so you’re not causing the reader to have to make a little memory slot for who that person is. We don’t have to stop to remember her name. And you don’t remember her name because we didn’t need to. And it keeps going.

I did have an issue near the bottom of this page. The nurse turns back to the dead man, checks for a pulse. The fact that you said dead man and pulse, it’s looks like, well, she’s an idiot. He’s dead. So maybe that could be a way to —

**Craig:** It’s a good point. The EKG told her that there was no pulse.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I hate this. It stinks.

**John:** You hate this. I also had a little question of the skin of the man’s wrist peels off in her hand. Is it her gloved hand? Because I would believe that if it is this kind of infectious place and they know this that she’d wear gloves or not. It doesn’t necessarily need to be one or the other, but it stopped me for a second.

**David:** Yeah, she’s got a gloved hand.

**John:** Okay, great.

**David:** A slender gloved hand.

**John:** Great. So maybe remind us of that, because otherwise they’ll think it’s literally on her skin. And I got obsessed with that. But what Craig talks about on page 2 is a good example of some really non-traditional formatting that I think really helps sell what’s going on here. So, “The ship explodes like a sun going nova. A shockwave of fire flies outwards obliterating everything in its path. The city.” Indented, “The hospital.” Intended further, “The pyramids. Everything is consumed by fire.”

And so it feels very poem-y to do that kind of thing, but it’s actually very appropriate because it helps sell the idea of something going down, falling down. And that’s a really usual thing to do.

Where I thought you had an opportunity to further what you were doing, after consumed by fire. From the deafening war, we cut to interstellar space, black, silent. And give us that silent moment to also underscore that contrast because you’re going to have the mechanical sound come in. But that contrast between fire and noise and light to the blackness of space is going to be really rewarding. And let us know as a reader that that’s going to happen because that’s going to be amazing in the actual film.

Like Craig, I was confused in way that it may not have been the best way about where are we and what time are we at now. And I started to unfortunately go, I started to look back at the first statement and be like, oh wait, was that present day or was that the future in a way that was not the best choice on page 2. Where I was like suddenly re-questioning everything that happened the page before. So by giving us this year, 2349, being so specific, that may not necessarily help you in that moment. Just to be considering that. But I love the time is literally counting down as we’re going. That’s exciting too.

One grammar note on page 3. Interior service corridor. “Cramped, cluttered, claustrophobic.” Love those C-words. “Every square inch of the walls and ceiling are covered in battered pipes.” Every square inch IS covered.

**Craig:** IS covered. Every.

**John:** Every square inch is covered. But again, near the bottom page 3, you’re doing something else that’s really smart. “He strains at the effort, wincing. Can’t. Quite. Make it.” Again, it feels, the sentences feel like what the action feels like which is great and the way screenwriting drives.

**Craig:** That’s the point of it all. I mean in other words, the point isn’t to put together the best, most interesting vocabulary, the point is that somebody would read that and go, [makes struggling noises]. They get it. They know what you want them to see. So this is what it means when we talk about, constantly talking about writing a movie as opposed to writing a document. Movie, movie, movie. So very good, very good. And I don’t even like these kinds of movies. So, very good.

**John:** [laughs] David, come up here so we can talk more about some of this. Thank you. So talk to us about page four. What happens next? I assume, did he hit the switch or did not hit the switch?

**David:** In honor of Craig, it becomes a classic lesbian love story.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Classic lesbian love story?

**David:** Traditional.

**Craig:** Did you say classy or classic? I don’t like the classy ones.

**John:** The classy ones, no.

**David:** Abel is about to be murdered. So he’s struggling with this terminal and —

**John:** Please tell me the person who kills him is not named Cane.

**David:** No. [laughs]

**Craig:** My god, I would have been so angry if that —

**John:** He’s about to be killed by a human being?

**David:** By a human being. By a human being who we don’t quite see until quite near the end of the film.

**John:** The opening sequence, is that present day or like present day?

**David:** You’re absolutely right, it’s present day and that was 300 years later.

**John:** So we did jump forward.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** And what is the thrust of the action forward in the story? What is the quest of whoever we’re going to finally meet as our hero?

**David:** Essentially what happened was there was this pandemic that swept the globe, and so all the carriers were loaded up into a huge quarantine ship and sent away for 300 years. And now we start one day away from coming back to Earth. And this man, Abel, who’s murdered, the only law man on the ship is sent into and basically covered up so that there’s no hiccups on their way back to Earth and he finds symptoms that the virus is back. So he has to go through the ship and it’s a kind of tribal fiefdom —

**Craig:** That’s a cool story.

**David:** And he has to go through all these different levels from the bowels to the uppers to find out if the virus is back and, if so, by whom and why and —

**Craig:** Great, great.

**David:** And then —

**Craig:** You know what I like about that story is that I could start talking about what is dramatically interesting to me as an audience member. You know, I could, anybody could hear and say, okay, well, obviously this is dramatic for the people on the ship. But there are some universal things that are sort of implicated in what that story starts to set up. So very smart, very good, very good.

**John:** Well what’s also useful about that description is, we know what kind of movie it is. We know that movie can be made. And we’ve seen not that exact story, but conversions of that . You’ve seen the Neill Blomkamp movies that have done similar kinds of things that other, the more recent Judge Dredd, or Dredd, which have that sort of lockdown environment, futuristic, dystopia and the contrast between those two worlds.

We know that’s a thing that can be made and therefore it’s to read something, I don’t know. Sometimes it’s great to read a script that you’re like, well, this could never shoot. And it’s like this great writing but you can never shoot. It’s more exciting to be, like, I want this movie to get made. I can’t wait to see that film.

**David:** I would hazard to say, not only can be made, but should and must.

**John:** Great. Thank you. Important word substitutions. Now —

**David:** You’d be surprised how poorly that works. Yeah.

**John:** Indeed. You will it into existence. So talk to us about your writing and where does this fall and what you’ve written before and what you’re writing now.

**David:** I’ve been a writer all my life. I started out as an actor. Actually, I worked in TV. I’m from Vancouver. So I worked in TV.

**John:** I was going to ask where in Canada you’re from.

**David:** Vancouver.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**David:** But I worked as a writer my whole life. I was a speech writer for kind of our equivalent of senators and some —

**Craig:** Senator Ted Cruz?

**David:** That’s the man.

**Craig:** Canadian Ted Cruz?

**David:** Yeah. He says hi.

**Craig:** What an asshole.

**David:** And, but no, this is the second script I’ve written. So I just recently started to become passionate about writing for film and television.

**Craig:** Great.

**David:** And just a few weeks before I came down here, I just found out I was hired to write a couple of episodes of an animated show up in Canada.

**Craig:** Excellent. Good.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got the goods.

**John:** Any questions we can answer for you about this next part of the process or where you see this script now. So when you submitted this in, we only see the first three pages. How are you feeling about the rest of this? Is it working?

**David:** I’m in a bit of a conundrum about it because I think it’s working well, but I actually through a friend of a friend of a friend, I had it looked at by an agent at WME and he loved the first 60 pages and then wasn’t as crazy about the last 40 pages.

**Craig:** Okay. That can happen.

**David:** I’m not sure why. He didn’t give me any sort of feedback on what exactly. And I didn’t feel like there was a sudden drop off. But it’s kind of where I am with it right now.

**John:** My hunch is that the way that this movie gets made is the right person reads it and the right person who has the weird financing out of some place and like the one director connection which is crazy, somehow it all fits together. Or there is some role that you have in there that is perfect for that person who should be in the right kind of genre movie to make this a possible thing.

So I’m optimistic based on my naïve reading of three pages that I think you can get a movie made.

**Craig:** Have you thought about maybe putting this on the Black List website?

**David:** I just came from the panel with —

**Craig:** Franklin.

**David:** Franklin.

**Craig:** Yes.

**David:** And exactly the first —

**Craig:** I think that’s a good move. I think you will get a lot of interest and attention. This is very well-written. Awesome.

**John:** David, thank you so much.

**David:** Thank you.

**John:** Now we have a few minutes before we need to be finished up here. So I’d like to open up to some questions. If you guys have things you’d like to ask us about three pages, words on the page, things we’ve said today or things in general that you — questions you’ve always wanted to ask me or Craig, we are happy to answer them if anyone has a hand —

**Craig:** We also take medical questions.

**John:** Yeah? Does anyone have a bit more to say? We can wrap up early. It’s allowed. There’s no rule you have to go all the way to the bitter end. Cool

**Craig:** Oh look, he thought about it.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** He thought about saying something.

**John:** We have a question about —

**Craig:** Medical questions. Anything.

**John:** Oh, you have a question now?

**Clever:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** Was that the question? Does it have to be three pages?

**Clever:** Like three wishes.

**John:** Yeah. All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Clever:** No, my question is about a script I’ve got in the second round is a horror comedy and it’s very, very self-aware and it’s very convoluted. It’s like Charlie Kaufman writes a slasher film or something. And the structure is extremely complicated. It calls in on itself. It refers to things that the audience is seeing and seeing as part of the movie. Then suddenly is on the script page.

So it’s that kind of thing and it’s the Austin Screenwriting Group that told me this is entirely too clever. Just, you know, how do you feel about just working on weird structure and doing, just that example that I gave you. Is that off-putting to you?

**John:** It’s not off-putting to me. And I think the horror-comedy is one the few genres in which that you can get away with that more easily because we have this expectation like horror-comedy has already just been broken so thoroughly that we can sort of do anything with it after Scream and the after-Screams.

Like we’re used to that in a way that’s very useful. But even the Muppet Movie has the place where they stop and they look at the script itself. And so I wouldn’t rule that out. The challenge I think you’re going to face is that sometimes it just becomes so perplexing on the page that like you just sort of give up, or you stop caring about the characters as real things because it becomes just an intellectual exercise about the genre. And that’s going to be the real challenge you’re going to face is, yeah —

Male Audience Member: I understand and I think my characters are people —

**John:** Yeah. So finding a way to navigate that is challenging.

**Craig:** Good answer.

**John:** Yeah. You had a question.

**Page Count:** Yeah, I had a more general question about the formatting. I’m writing a pilot for a single-camera comedy. And I’m trying to compress it into 32 pages. But I think I’m, or actually 31 pages. But I made this in Final Draft and I eliminated like one of the spaces between the periods. I did a tight formatting —

**John:** Oh, don’t do tight formatting. Tight formatting looks gross.

**Craig:** What are you doing?

**Page Count:** And so I just wanted some basic guidance.

**Craig:** Yeah, here’s some basic guidance. Stop doing, I mean, what are you, you can’t, you’re not — who are you fooling?

**Page Count:** I know.

**Craig:** Who are you fooling?

**John:** And so here’s, let’s talk about what’s valid, valid ways to shrink page count which is so, I see. The space after a period is fine now. I’ve given up on two spaces after a period. Even in Courier, whatever. We’re used to it now. One space. Saves you a little bit of time. But as you’re going through, what Craig will confess to doing too is you’ll look for every place where something is knocking to the next page and wondering like how do I make that not knock to the next page?

And so there’s places where you’re carefully rewriting one sentence so that everything —

**Craig:** Cut words.

**John:** You cut words.

**Craig:** Cut words.

**John:** The other thing I will tell you is that, yes, you want your script to be short so that it doesn’t seem too long. But most of our half-hour comedies are going page-wise longer than that. So you’re not going to be alone in that universe to do that stuff.

I’d also just really take a hard look at it. Is there anything big you can cut. And if you can cut a big thing that saves you two pages, that’s going be much better than just trying to like, you know, move commas around to save it.

Like all this stuff, simplification can be your friend and by eliminating something that is not the best thing in the script, the stuff that is the best in the script will elevate and will seem that much brighter and sharper.

**Page Count:** I will beat them down.

**John:** All right.

**Pitcher:** I thought of a general question. It has to do with pitch fest that’s going on, too. What got me here is basically an ensemble piece. And I’m wondering in your experience is it better around town back there, is it better to try and pitch that as just talk about the main character and then stick in at the end, oh, I’ve got the multiple story lines. I’ve got — there’s depth to it, you know.

I’ve been told that it might be better when you’re doing your log lines with someone in an elevator to just stick to the main character, who the main persons are. But to me, it’s always been about — it’s a college reunion.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, but that’s, just do it.

**John:** No, you have to. You have to describe it that way. And ensemble things —

**Craig:** Just say The Big Chill of something, something, something.

**John:** Exactly. Ensemble things are tougher to summarize in a pitch. Like I could never really pitch Go because it’s just so complicated. And yet, sometimes you do pitch things that do have a larger ensemble. Like, Big Fish, I had to pitch a bunch of times, and so you talk about it from the perspective of the two main characters and what their relationship is and sort of how it’s going to feel.

If you’re talking about this, I mean, The Big Chill or some other good reference is a way into it. But you need to clarify like these are the threads we’re following and this is how they overlap. And you could still do that one-minute pitch version of that, you just have to really practice how you’re going to get through that. It’s possible.

We’ll take two more questions. How’s that? In the back, on the couch?

**First Pages:** Back to the three pages, what was for each of you like the first script that really brings you in or got you an agent, what happened in the first three pages of each of your scripts, and what was good about those three pages?

**John:** The script that got me an agent was this thing called Here and Now, which never sold, never got produced, should never be seen. But I will say that the opening sequence of it was, so there was this young woman like getting into her car, like, you know, post-holiday shopping and it was — I did a really good job in selling what it’s like to be in a wet, muddy, snowy parking lot and then to have an accident there. And like the scene painting was really good. And that was a usual thing for me.

The thing that sort of broke me out was Go. And in Go it has that sort of flash forward. So it’s giving you a sense of like these are the kind of things that are happening in the movie. But it’s all structured around one conversation and then we’re on Ronna as a checkout girl.
So you got a good sense of like this is the world of the movie. Here’s our main person. Go. And those were my first three pages of that that really I think landed attention for me.

**Craig:** Well, this is embarrassing. Of course, you know, your first scripts are tough. The first screenplay that got me noticed, some attention, the first three pages we saw a kid, he was a nine-year-old boy playing. He was pretending to be an astronaut. And he had his Legos and his stuff and he had his little helmet. And it was all very, it was just a very low-tech innocent thing where he would do, “Houston, I’m entering the lunar module. “And he was just sort of walking down the hall and he just toddled into the laundry room in his house and then got in the dryer and turned the dryer. And then closed the door and actually started rotating and started narrating his own terrible space disaster.

Maybe it’s not that embarrassing. Maybe it’s actually kind of good.

**John:** It is quite funny. It’s cute.

**Craig:** It was just not what you would have expected. I have a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Child abuse. Authorities came. If you were like adopting, like going through the adoption process, you should not show them those pages.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, there’s a few other things I can’t show.

**John:** Yeah, probably so. Do we have one more question out there? Yes, hi.

**Notes:** I just wanted to add one more thing to this because, just how great it is to take notes like this that I think are great, and to go through the revisions and to keep working on it. The revision that I’ve done on this script got me my agent. I just signed a few months ago with Abrams Artist. And when I started out with, the lesson was, when something needs work don’t give up on it. This is so very helpful.

**Craig:** Well great.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** That’s the idea. Thank you.

**John:** A wonderful place to close. Guys, thank you very, very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [The Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Three Pages by [Krista Westervelt](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KristaWestervelt.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Melody Cooper](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MelodyCooper.pdf)
* Three Pages by [David Elver](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DavidElver.pdf)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 58: [Writing your very first screenplay](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Betty Spinks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))