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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/putting-a-price-on-it).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Here, man, my name is Craig Mazin. Right?

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

Craig, we are trying to record this episode live. It’s nearly a week before this episode will come out, so it’s probably one of the most in advance episodes we’ve ever done.

**Craig:** Well, and also we’re doing this, so we’ve got these people listening along with us on Mixlr.com. So, they’re cheating basically. They’re hearing this early. Plus, they get to hear all the nonsense that we cut out, which I should say most of which is you saying things like, “Blah, blah, blah, that was terrible.” [laughs]

**John:** You’ll see all the false starts and the do-overs. But in many ways the 25 people who are in the chat room, they’re living slightly in the future, because they get to experience the Scriptnotes episode before anyone else on the planet gets to experience it.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. This is fun. I’m reading along with the things they’re saying. This is great. I’m going to have to stop because it’s going to be distracting.

**John:** You’re going to have to stop. It’s going to be very distracting.

**Craig:** It’s going to be very distracting. So, I’m leaving the chat room, but I’m excited that people are listening along with us as we do this live and not live at the same time.

**John:** So, today we talked about our topics and it’s going to be about the price of things. It’s going to be about Amazon versus Hachette, Amazon versus Disney. They’re all wrestling over what things should cost and what price people should pay. We’re going to look at the Weinstein Brothers putting a price on a free internship.

**Craig:** Yeah, man, there’s going to be a price for it, all right?

**John:** We’re going to look at animation studios who are trying to hold down the prices that they’re paying to their workers. And finally we’re going to try to answer some questions from the people who are sitting around in the chat room very patiently waiting while we figure out how we’re actually recording this episode.

**Craig:** So much. So much.

**John:** But first off we should start with some follow up and really some corrections. I always love in newspapers when they talk about the mistakes they’ve made and regretting the error. Well, in our last podcast we got to kind of do that because there were some significant errors at the end of the podcast last week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ll blame it on jetlag, but anyway we need to sort of address them. So, you were talking about a Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the actor in that is Jefferson Mays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I said Jefferson Davis.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Who, of course, was the role played by Sherman Hemsley in Norman Lear’s comedy The Jeffersonians.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, completely confused that.

**Craig:** Great 1990s era sitcom.

**John:** And Jefferson Davis, of course, was the president of the Confederacy, or you sad that it was Jefferson, he was the president of the Confederacy. But that’s not right at all. That was Robert E. Lee Daniels who was the director of films like Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Lyle Waggoner.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, we really messed up a lot of stuff there, but we regret the error. And we try to fix our mistakes when we see those mistakes.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is that we do. I mean, we take the time to get it right. We may not get it right the first time, but the second time around we’re very good.

**John:** We’re really good. We aim for clarity and just perfection.

**Craig:** I would actually say we’re the best.

**John:** We are the best. Yet, another mistake we made is that we said that we’re going to both be at the Austin Film Festival October 23 to the 26. That’s not actually accurate, is it Craig?

**Craig:** It’s half true. I’m sorry, guys. I can’t go this time because one of my best friends in the whole world is getting married that weekend and it’s a small wedding and I and my wife will be in attendance. It’s on that Saturday.

And I thought about trying to squeeze in, like maybe if I just fly out Thursday night and I leave Friday afternoon or Friday night, but it was turning into a disaster and I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So, unfortunately this Austin — it will be the first one I’ve missed in a number of years, but I’ll be back next year for sure, no matter what.

**John:** But we already promised them a Scriptnotes episode. So, we talked about sort of who would be the perfect person to take Craig’s place if Craig could not be there.

**Craig:** But that person was not available so you got…[laughs]

**John:** We got Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so I’m so excited that Kelly Marcel will be co-hosting the live Scriptnotes that we’ll do in Austin.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s good. You guys are a great team together and it’s always good to — she’s very good at the podcasting thing. Not everybody is, by the way. Although we’ve never actually had a bad guest, I don’t think. Even Richard Kelly, it’s a little tough with Richard Kelly sometimes because he’s Richard Kelly, but that’s the way Richard Kelly is. You know when you get Richard Kelly that that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get Richard Kelly. So, that was actually great. But we’ve never had a bad guest.

But she’ll be very good and very funny and you guys will be — you’ll do well together.

**John:** While we’re talking about podcast guests, is there anything you want to tell me, Craig?

**Craig:** Okay, so listen, you’ve done this to me and I didn’t say a word. Okay, not a word. Am I proud of what I did? No. [laughs] But I think that I deserve at the very least the forgiveness that I gave you when you whored yourself out there like a trollop to The Nerdist podcast and to god knows what else. I mean, I think you’ve done 12 podcasts.

**John:** I’ve done a few podcasts.

**Craig:** So, I strayed and I happened to do one. I was in New York and I did Brian Koppelman’s podcast. By the way, so Brian Koppelman’s podcast is called The Moment. And I knew that, but I had never thought twice about it. I just thought, okay, well Brian Koppelman has a podcast called The Moment. And he asked me to come on to The Moment and I said, great, I’ll do The Moment. And I showed up for The Moment and we started talking and he was asking me questions and he kept asking questions like, “So was that the moment do you think when…”

And then I realized, “Ooh, oh The Moment is actually about a moment.” That’s the point of this whole thing is that he’s talking about a moment. But I had no idea because, of course, I don’t listen to any podcasts. So, I found out what The Moment was during The Moment.

**John:** So, I would have guessed that his podcast was six seconds long based on his Vine videos. But apparently it was 90 minutes.

**Craig:** It’s lengthy. And I don’t know how he worked this out. I think it’s because The Moment, which sounds vaguely, I don’t know, there’s something intestinal about it, but whatever, like I’m having a moment.

**John:** I was thinking it was sort of more like a moment of orgasm: a moment of just like clarity and sweat and light.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly what happens to me when I have an orgasm. First comes the clarity. Then the sweat. And then the light. The light is the weirdest part.

His podcast, The Moment — clarity, sweat, light — is associated with ESPN and Grantland. And because it’s ESPN and ESPN is part of the Disney family, we recorded this thing in a proper recording studio at the ABC building in Manhattan. So he’s got like a pretty professional setup, or so I thought. But here’s what happens. You’ll love this.

So this guy brings you in and you have to get your identification and sign in and go through the thing, and go up the stairs, and a man meets you in a lobby that’s essentially a man-trap frankly, because you can’t get down and you can’t get out.

And then an engineer meets you and he says, “Hi, how are you doing, my name is so-and-so.” Great. And he takes you into this proper control both and you go into a proper recording room and you have real microphones and headphones and all the rest. And the guy hits some buttons and then he leaves. He leaves.

So, really what they’ve done with Brian is they’re like, “Here you go buddy. We’re going to hit record and then we’re out of here. And then you just hit stop.” So, it’s kind of professional but also kind of like, “Somebody hit record for Brian, and then we go home, get a beer.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it was fun. I enjoyed it. And once I learned what The Moment was about — the moment — then I had a nice moment.

**John:** [laughs] Well, it’s very good. Brian Koppelman is a talented screenwriter and certainly a person who has the best interest of screenwriters at heart. So, if you’re going to cheat on the Scriptnotes Podcast with anyone, Brian Koppelman is the right person to do it with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we both have hall passes for Brian Koppelman.

**John:** Next bit of follow up, a couple of weeks ago I talked about Goodnight Moon and a terrific piece written about Goodnight Moon and sort of how it’s really very smartly written. Listener Randy Mack pointed me to a McSweeney’s piece by Sean Walsh which I thought was fantastic called A Sparknotes Guide to Goodnight Moon, which is one of those sort of classic study guides to Goodnight Moon, which is of course much longer than the actual book of Goodnight Moon. So, I’m going to put that in the show notes.

But this was a quote from that that I thought was terrific:

The moon in this piece acts as a traditionally feminine sign. Here, the bunny’s final “goodnight moon” demonstrates his completion of his rite of passage and his development into a full man bunny. The moon, which visually appears on every page, grows larger and more pronounced is a chanting feminine voice, haunting and disturbing his world. Just as he must overcome his sexual desire for the woman who says “hush,” the bunny must resist the impending femininity outside of his safe confines.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly what my kid said to me when I read the book to him. He’s like, “Daddy. Daddy, I have to overcome my sexual desire for the woman who says ‘hush.'”

Uh-huh.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Uh-huh. That was very funny.

**John:** What I love about that writing is it reminds me so much of those papers I wrote in college where like I got to keep filling up pages and so you try to dry a meaning out of things that are just completely meaningless.

**Craig:** I have to say, just as a side note, it just kills me to witness the death of clear writing in academia. It wasn’t always like this, but it certainly was like this when you and I were in college. And I think it’s just become calcified into something that’s permanent in a dreadful way. And I don’t know who to blame, other than academics themselves, for buying into this nonsense.

But very famously there were some guys that wrote a computer program that essentially assembled an essay that was grammatically correct in some strict sense, but full of nothing but argle-bargle nonsense academia words. And it was accepted for publication by a number of very fancy academic journals. It’s just embarrassing. It’s embarrassing. And this would be, if I were in charge, I would be a benevolent dictator, but not with this. With this there would be some kind of terrible purge by fire.

**John:** Yeah. When I was in college I was split between my English major, which was writing those argle-bargle papers, and like my post-modernism class, and I was a journalism major. So you had to write incredible clear things for journalism. And that was much better training, I thought.

**Craig:** That is far better training. Far better. There’s really no function. There’s no purpose, function, or value in that kind of over dense fruitcake writing. I don’t mean fruitcake in the la-di-da. I mean fruitcake like something that has too much mass for its shape. [laughs] It’s just — it’s just too much. It’s too much.

**John:** Yeah. It’s too much candy, fruit, and nuts and not actual substance.

**Craig:** It is. You could make a list of words, I mean, semiotic — semiotic means something. That is to say it used to mean something and now in an ironic way it is a signifier but it actually means nothing. It means nothing anymore.

**John:** Yeah. It means that you can stop paying attention.

**Craig:** That’s right. You can turn your brain off. Yup.

**John:** Our last bit of follow up is a question from Mario who writes, “In the excellent…”

**Craig:** Mario!

**John:** Mario.

**Craig:** Mario!

**John:** “In the Rocky Shoals episode during the discussion on the topic of tone, Aline brings up,” Aline Brosh McKenna, the best, “she brings up that she will sometimes write things characters might be thinking but are not saying in order to help make the tone clear.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** “How do you go about properly formatting this kind of thing? Do you put it in parenthesis? Quotation marks? Do you italicize it? Or is the fact that it’s written in a block of action and not in dialogue enough for readers to understand what it means?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I do this, too. And it depends on the moment and how I’ll do it. I won’t put it in quotation marks or italicize it, but I will choose typically between either a line of action or in parenthesis. For instance, this very day I wrote an exchange where someone says, “I’m from London.” And a woman and a man are listening. And the woman says, “Oh?” But in parenthesis it says (Ooh!). And the man says, “Huh?” And in parenthesis it says (I hate you). So, that will give the actors plenty of context. Certainly it will give the reader plenty of context as to what’s going on there. But you could also do this is action, too.

You could write something like, “John is disgusted. John, ‘Well that’s just terrific.” You know, sure, no problem.

**John:** Yeah. So a parenthetical is perfect if you’re trying to color the delivery of a line. And so if what they’re saying may not be obvious based on the word choices, because they’re trying to express them and that’s not how they’re actually feeling. But that intermediary line of action is a great place to express what’s sort of really going on.

Because if you’re watching the movie you would see that he’s disgusted. You would see that he’s like, you know, shooting eye daggers. That’s all a valid choice.

So, rarely do you have to format anything special.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, a question for you, though. This is something I just ran into in the thing that I’m writing. I needed to sort of ellipses a line of dialogue but I needed to make clear what it was that they were going to say.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Have you ever done that? Where you put that in brackets afterwards, like the part that got cut off at the end of the sentence?

**Craig:** I’ve actually never done that.

**John:** It was the first time I’d ever done it.

**Craig:** But I’ve seen it. And I can see in certain situations where it would be of value. But I always feel like, well, it’s hard to act that. You know, I always think about the actors and I can understand how to act putting in parentheses (I hate you) and then the line is “Oh, that’s interesting.” But I don’t know how to act “I’m not sure if I…” and then in brackets [can marry you].

I think in part it should be somewhat evident from the first part of it. But I can imagine a specific situation where you’re kind of jammed into where it’s like, yes, actually, this is appropriate. The actor would understand why I put that there, etc.

**John:** So, the exact situation I was in is there is a police officer, there is a woman who has come on the scene, and there is an hysterical woman. And our hero character is saying to the police officer, “Can you get rid of this woman.” And so it’s just, “Can you…” but in brackets [take care of her].

**Craig:** Get rid of this woman. My instinct, what I would do, and what you did there is absolutely fine. I think what I would probably have done is say, “Can you…” and then a line of action “He signals his partner to get rid of her.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s the same. And, frankly, you know, it’s all about just how to get things to.. — The only thing I would advise is if you’re going to do it in an action block, it’s good for it to kind of be descriptive as the third person omniscient.

If you’re doing it in parentheses or in brackets then it is good to do it as unspoken dialogue, dialogue that they’re thinking in their heads like “I hate you” as opposed to “He hates him.” That kind of thing, you know.

**John:** All right, let’s get to our topics of the day. So, Amazon is having an interesting week, or a couple weeks. They seem to be having disagreements with several of the people who are supplying them things.

First off is Hachette, a big publisher. And this has been an ongoing fight where they are disagreeing about the price of eBooks. So, Amazon has tried to price books, eBooks, at $9.99, because that’s what they want to sell things for on Kindle. And they have stopped selling certain Hachette, a big publisher’s titles, because they cannot come to an agreement on price.

And so we’ll have a couple links to different articles about this in the show notes. But, Craig, I’m curious what your first thought is when you see this dispute between Hachette and Amazon.

**Craig:** I have grown increasingly wary of Silicon Valley’s disdain for content. They are so unconcerned with anything that isn’t about an increasingly efficient capital machine, something that generates profits for them. And I don’t begrudge them that. That’s what businesses do. But they are ruthless and ruthless almost in a self-destructive way. They’re kind of devouring the very basis of the things that supply them.

And this is an example. I understand why they want to do this, but look, the fact of the matter is Hachette is also a business. They’re allowed to make money. Their authors, more importantly, are allowed to make royalties. And just because Amazon wants to sell something at a price doesn’t mean it gets to.

**John:** I agree with you. So, I generally approach this from the perspective of like, well, that’s business. And so Hachette and Amazon have probably been negotiating and arguing about this for a long time. But I get annoyed when it spills out into the public and they try to fight in public.

And I got annoyed the same way with Comcast and CBS, or was it Time Warner and CBS? Anyway, the cable company that was fighting CBS in New York City, where they tried to make it a big public battle rather than sort of the private negotiation that business actually is.

Business is about you have certain costs of making something. And you are going to look at those costs as part of your price and you are going to charge a certain price to people. That price may be a price that a retailer is willing to accept. It may be a price that a retailer is not willing to accept. Amazon totally has the right not to sell Hachette books. Hachette has the right not to sell Amazon its books for the price Amazon wants.

But this whole public campaign, Amazon went off with this Readers United website.

**Craig:** Oh please.

**John:** And they’ve quoted Orwell and sort of misquoted Orwell. And they’re trying to make the case that books, eBooks, should cost $9.99 because they have so much lower cost than a hardback book would be, or even a paperback book would be. But it’s interesting because to me you never really comment on the costs of things unless you’re saying that things should cost less.

**Craig:** That’s right. They’re not making an argument of value.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They’re looking — what they’re doing is they’re looking at books as widgets and they’re saying, listen, uh, yeah, somebody sprinkles magic fairy dust on wood pulp and glue and I suppose that’s what makes words that people are interested in. But really what we’re talking about is wood pulp and glue. And you guys have eliminated the wood, pulp, and glue, so you should charge us less to run these books on our website and retail these books.

And the answer is no. No, that’s not what gives the book value. Frankly, one could argue that books have been undervalued for a long time and that this is a way to return value to them. The value is in the content. It’s not in the card stock or any of that.

God forbid the price, the real price — not the adjusted for inflation price — but the real price of content should go up. God forbid. God forbid that creators should make more money. That’s like — that’s literally something that never enters the algorithm of these people. But it’s true.

And, you know, if Amazon feels so strongly that books should be $9.99, they should sell them for $9.99 and make no money off of them.

**John:** Well, that’s honestly what’s been happening though is Amazon has been buying them and selling them at a loss to try to establish a price in people’s heads that $9.99 is the right price for them.

**Craig:** Well, they made their bed. That’s it. They made their bed. By the way, Amazon does this all the time. There was a really interesting — I read an article about a guy that decided he was going to sell diapers online. It was actually a pretty interesting business of selling diapers online. It was just something people weren’t buying online and he figured out a way to do it. And Amazon basically offered him a bunch of money to buy his company. He said no. We really like our model and we’re doing very well.

So, then Amazon decided to compete with him and to destroy him. They began selling diapers at a loss because it was more important for them to carve out competition and create another monopolistic beachhead than it was to actually make a profit.

And, frankly, Amazon struggles with profits from what I understand because they seem more interested in just selling everything and eliminating competition than they actually are interested in making money. So, they’ll do things like this. They’ll sell books for $9.99 because they imagine some world where eventually everybody will have to sell them for less to Amazon, right. But that’s not the way it works. And I hope, honestly, that Hachette and all of the authors they represent stick it to Amazon on this one.

I’m so tired of Amazon. By the way, I buy stuff from Amazon every day. So, I’m the worst. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, I want to talk about the hypocrisy of that because —

**Craig:** The worst. I am such a hypocrite.

**John:** No, I would argue that there’s hypocrisy but there’s also reality. And so I buy stuff off of Amazon and so I had a tweet last week about my frustration with this Readers United thing and said like, you know what, I’m not going to be buying any Kindle books for awhile until this gets settled out, because that part of the business is frustrating to me.

And yet at the same time there is Amazon links on my website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I bought some composition books for my daughter on Amazon. I don’t fully disagree with all that. Lord, I had a meeting at Amazon this last week. I had a meeting at Amazon on Monday. So, I think there’s parts of the business that are fine and good.

Another blogger made the point that basically there are no good airlines either. Like no matter what you’re going to have a bad experience with an airline. So, if you sort of refuse to go on American Airlines, eventually you’re going to run out of airlines, because you’re going to have a bad problem on every airline. It’s the same kind of thing with Amazon. Eventually you are going to probably want to buy something and Amazon may be the best choice for it.

**Craig:** Amazon, I just wonder if one of these days Amazon doesn’t find itself in the situation that Microsoft found itself in. Which ironically in the prologue to the era of Microsoft’s waning, they were nabbed for antitrust. And they went through a very long, difficult antitrust litigation with the United States government, more severely with European nations.

And the whole time they were like, wait a second, you don’t understand. We’re not a monopoly. We’re doing this stuff because we have to survive and we’re going to die. And everyone was like, shut up, you’re Microsoft. And it turns out actually, yeah, they really were kind of in a little bit of trouble.

I think Amazon is going to run into the same thing. I’m not sure that this whole price thing — somewhere, something in the back of my head says that there’s something funky about this, that deciding you’re not going to — you’re going to sell some people’s products for this price but not other people’s products because you don’t like them or something. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s — we’ll have to ask some antitrust lawyer what he thinks. Or she.

**John:** Luckily because we have people in the chat room, the blogger I mentioned is actually Marco Arment. So, I knew there was someone, so the point I was making about you can run out of airlines to fly, that was Marco Arment whose post I read.

**Craig:** Good job, Marco.

**John:** Good job, Marco.

The more recent and sort of more directly affecting screenwriters aspect of this is Amazon’s disagreement with Disney about pricing of DVDs and Blu-rays. So, this comes to Captain America, a big hit movie. And Million Dollar Arm. And Muppets Most Wanted. All the Disney movies they have disagreements about what price they want to sell those movies at.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, it’s worth talking about what a list price is, because the list price is not the wholesale price. Amazon is paying a certain amount for those discs. And Amazon as a retailer can negotiate what price they’re paying for it. If they don’t like the price they’re paying for it, they can choose not to sell it. And, again, I think that’s fine. There’s no requirement that they need to sell it. But it gets frustrating when it gets public that they’re not doing it, or when they pull the buy buttons off and make it seem like a movie is not coming out, that’s a challenge.

And it’s a challenge because they’ve become so dominant in the home video industry. If you’re not selling your movies through Amazon, that’s going to be a problem. It’s going to cost you.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, again, acting like a bully and that’s part of the nature of capitalism and competition is. It’s hard to blame them for this. It’s also hard to blame Disney for taking a hard line on this. I think the trick with these situations is that the retailer giant, so in the case of say walk in and buy, that would be a Walmart, and online it’s Amazon. The retail giant is one entity. There is a group of people, publishers, or movie studios that are creating a product and they really can’t combine forces the way that Amazon can be consolidated with one policy.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Because that’s antitrust.

**John:** That was exactly what happened in the publishers with Apple. It was decided that they were colluding in making their deal with Apple and they all had to pay fines.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, what we’ll see in another topic we’re about to approach is that frankly there is a lot of squidgety dealing going on between what ought to be free and clear competitors in the entertainment business. And I suspect that that’s probably the case here, too. I mean, look, Warner Bros got into it with Amazon. Now Disney gets into it with Amazon. I would be shocked if they hadn’t shared some information. Frankly, the guy that used to run Warner Bros is now running Disney. [laughs] I imagine Alan Horn knows a little something about what happened to Warner Bros. So, anyway, it’ll be interesting to see.

Obviously I root for the studios in this case because the more they get paid for a DVD, the more that you and I get paid for residuals.

**John:** It will also be interesting to see what’s the landscape five years from now. Because if you noticed, Disney has their iPad app now. So, your kid can watch all the Disney movies through the iPad app. And that’s a way for Disney to get around having to deal with retailers. They can be their own retailer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Amazon won’t be here forever. That much I know. But things will change. Sears once roamed the earthy like the mighty dinosaur. But, you know, they’re not going to be here forever. And they certainly can’t survive forever as this kind of monopolistic pressuring giant because eventually people just get so angry. And they begin to turn to other things. And as other things become easier and easier to access, they’re going to run into trouble. Plus, they have to make money somehow, right?

I mean, you can’t just keep undercutting everybody.

**John:** Well, but there’s also the aspect that they can just keep growing. And sometimes it’s just being able to keep growing in new directions in new areas is a substitute for actual profits.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that’s exactly what they’ve done. I mean, they have been cancerous in their growth, which like cancer, cancer is a very impressive cell. You know, a cancer cell will just go and go and go. But eventually it unfortunately kills the person that it’s growing in. And I’m just kind of curious to see, at some point they’re going to run out of this growth space. These kinds of practices are going to start to alienate the people that support their pipelines of products and content.

I don’t know. I mean, look, they’re going to be around for awhile. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sitting here saying Amazon is going to be falling apart any day. But they’re starting to act like jerks in a way that companies act about five or ten years before things start getting bad.

**John:** Speaking thematically, I wonder if the truism, the dramatic question and irony that power corrupts ultimately can be played about a corporation. And so the way corporations are people, classically in literature you see someone who rises up and he’s a good noble hero and then there’s a corruption in the third act. You see that in Game of Thrones. You see that in classic mythologies.

I admire Amazon. And I admired Amazon’s arrival Jeff Bezos I think is really, really smart. I admired Google’s beginning. I admire sort of what they were able to achieve. And yet I look at both Amazon and Google and I have concerns about what happens down the road with them.

**Craig:** I think that’s a good point. I mean, when these companies begin they begin as antitheses to what is the standard. They exist in opposition to something and struggle with something. They are in defiance of something. And they grow in that principled way. And they attract people because they’re principled and because they’re saying not “we’re great,” they’re saying “we’re better.”

Right? Everything that you’re used to, these big slow-turning Titanic like giants. We’re better because we’re smarter and we’re new and we’ve figured it out. But eventually they become the big giant. It’s inevitable. And their stance becomes defensive and they’re entirely about stifling what is new because their business model is tied to the infrastructure that they have intertwined with, you know?

**John:** In the Readers United piece they cite George Orwell. And you usually think of 1984 with George Orwell. And in fact Amazon famously a couple years ago pulled 1984 off people’s Kindles because they didn’t actually have the rights to it. And that was a huge brouhaha where like they had literally reached into Kindles and pulled that book back.

But maybe the better analogy is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Because if you look at the end of Animal Farm, the animals had this revolution and they had all these great ideals and they published their ideas on the barn wall. But ultimately they end up sort of betraying their ideals. And I’ll be curious whether five years, ten years from now we are applying those same lessons to these companies, or companies that I admire like Apple right now. I wonder if we’re going to be seeing that same kind of thing happen.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. Apple for whatever reason, I mean, listen, there’s plenty about Apple to be concerned about and to not like, but there’s a certain rebellious nature to them in some way. Amazon and Google feel — this is all feeling — but they feel like the man right now. They feel like the man. And they feel like the man in part because they’re doing stuff like this.

Apple has always stood apart from all these other businesses because they have made their own software and their own hardware that are meant to work together and that’s it. Right? Microsoft was always about jamming together 4,000 companies worth of tiny bits of plastic to sell to you at a lower price. And, if it works it works. And Apple has always been kind of pure about that sort of thing. Granted, you know, I’m not saying they’re perfect. They are —

**John:** I’m not saying they’re perfect either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Another company that has strong ideals is the Weinstein Company.

**Craig:** “Yeah, oh wow man. Thank you. Here. I’m really glad to hear you say that, all right.”

**John:** So, a friend sent a link to this thing which I thought was terrific. So, Charity Buzz is a site that — I would actually encourage everyone to go to Charity Buzz. There are auctions on Charity Buzz and you can win these auctions and sometimes they’re really great experiences. Classically Tim Cook was a person you could have a 30-minute meeting with Tim Cook as a Charity Buzz auction that went for a tremendous amount of money. But even like local schools, like my daughter’s school will have Charity Buzz auctions for things.

We Charity Buzz auctioned backstage at Big Fish.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Well, the Weinstein Company for some charity did a charity auction of an internship, an internship with the Weinstein Company. And you can bid on your chance to become an intern for the Weinsteins.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig, how much would you pay to be an intern with the Weinsteins.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I suppose I would pay up to negative $100,000. [laughs] I mean, I guess down to negative $100,000.

This is unreal.

**John:** So, the estimated value according to Charity Buzz is $50,000.

**Craig:** Hold on a second.

**John:** Let me read you what actually happened.

**Craig:** Who comes up with that number, by the way?

**John:** It’s the person who is supplying it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So here is what you’re getting. “Bid now on a special three-month internship at the Weinstein Company in New York City or Los Angeles.”

**Craig:** “Either city. You can go either New York or Los Angeles. Whatever one you want, man.”

**John:** “And in the department of your choice and learn all the ins and outs of the movie business.” So, a three-month internship with them.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s it. All of them. All the ins and outs of the movie business, all of them, three months.

**John:** So, this is an unpaid internship.

**Craig:** Yeah. Unpaid.

**John:** Student must be enrolled in college. Intern can receive college credit. Travel accommodations are not included. Start date is TBD and based on a mutually agreed upon time. It’s valid for one semester for US residents only. Cannot be resold or re-auctioned, transferred, and travel accommodations are not included twice.

Troubling, I think, because we’ve talked before on the podcast I think about the challenge of internships. And that unpaid internships tend to favor the wealthy, honestly, or kids who don’t need to work because they can afford not to work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But this is sort of a rare case where like you have to pay to have this internship.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little sick. I mean, look, it goes to charity and anything something goes to charity everybody kind of goes, ah, you know, it’s for charity. So, some rich guy wants to set his kid up at the Weinstein Company for three months because he thinks that’s going to help him in the movie business or something. And he wants to pay, I mean, currently at time of recording the current bid is $13,000 after six bids. But we’ll see where it goes.

Okay, fine, you’re going to give a bunch of money to — this supports the American Repertory Theater. Fine. Where’s the harm? Where’s the harm?

Well, you know, here’s the harm. It’s not really harm, it’s just a lack of good. I wish honestly that the Weinstein Company would have said, hey, you’re not going to enjoy a three-month internship. You can enjoy a three-month, I don’t know what you’d call it, like an insider’s look where you can participate or you can sit in on — some promise of doing something other than making copies all day and getting lunches and coffees because your dad paid $40,000. You know what I mean? There has to be… — Look, I did an internship that was when I was a junior in college, that summer after my junior year I did an internship through the Television Academy.

And it was a competition. There wasn’t obviously money involved or anything. It was a competition. And to their credit, they gave you a stipend of $600 a month for two months which was enough to pay my rent. And they placed you with interesting people. And, for instance, I was placed at Fox Broadcasting at the network. And while I often did do things like copy stuff and so on and so forth, I also got to go to the big meeting with Barry Diller and Peter Chernin and Jamie Kellner and watch as these people debated and argued over how they should craft their slate and what the ratings were and all the rest of it. And that was fascinating. And access to that was kind of unimaginable for a 19-year-old kid to have.

This is not going to be that. [laughs] This is not going to be that at all. I mean, look, god bless them for giving this money, but I just think they could have offered something a little better than an internship. First of all, enjoy a three-month internship at the Weinstein Company is like, [laughs], you know, enjoy your nine-month stay here in Abu Ghraib. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, it feels wrong to me. I think internships are, and we talked about this on the show before. I think internships can be very valuable for the interns. I think they can be valuable for the companies, probably to a lesser degree, but valuable. I think they can be valuable overall for the industry because it’s a chance for people who think they may want to work in the industry to see what the industry is actually like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the people who discover that they love it, hooray, they love it. And they are going to be motivated to work in the industry and the people who discover that they don’t really want it, they can go off and do other things. So, I think it’s a really — internship overall is a really good thing for the industry and for the people involved.

But paying for access to it feels not especially great.

**Craig:** Creepy. Also, look, if you’re a studio and you really are interested in giving people — giving young people a taste of what Hollywood is like and how the business works, don’t do it for people that do this. Do it for, you know, I would have been much happier to see somebody say, hey, you know we’re going to donate money and we’re going to send some kid that doesn’t have access to this kind of thing, who isn’t, whose dad or mom isn’t wealthy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, I mean, look, the internship thing is out of control. And this leads lovely to our — lovely into our next topic. Loverly.

**John:** Yes. Which is something you had highlighted for this episode which was this revelations that in the bigger Silicon Valley wage suppression lawsuits there was actually stuff that came out about people working in animation.

**Craig:** Right. So, there’s a real problem here. We know that animation, feature animation, is not union. It’s not WGA. I don’t even know if it’s SAG to that extent. There’s a small amount of animation that’s covered by the WGA. That would be some primetime animation like The Simpsons and Family Guy and so forth.

But there’s this case now. They’re calling it the “Techtopus” — as an octopus — Techtopus wage-fixing cartel scandal. And they thought that they had come up with a settlement for this thing and the judge had kind of thrown the settlement out implying this isn’t good enough. And essentially what they’re talking about is the revelation that there has been what these businesses have called a no poaching agreement between the major animation companies. So, we’re talking about DreamWorks, Disney, Pixar, very specifically I think between DreamWorks and Pixar. That was kind of the big one.

And the idea of the no poaching thing wasn’t just, hey, don’t steal our people. It was, hey, don’t offer our people more than we’re offering them, because that’s going to start an arms race where we’re going to offer your people more than you’re offering them. And suddenly, oh my goodness, we’re paying these people according to the principles of competition which of course they love unless it applies to their workers.

And this is not cool. That is not allowable. That’s an illegal cartel. That’s why we have laws about things like that. And this wasn’t even something they were hiding, frankly. They were emailing each other back and forth quite openly and then when Sony started making animated films, and they weren’t aware of this, everybody called them up and they were like, hey Sony, did you not know how this works? We don’t do this, all right?

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, that’s a nice animation studio you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, shame if anything should happen to it. You know, Zemeckis starts up Image Movers and everybody is like, you know, he hires some guy. And pays him a little bit more. And then Ed Catmull at Pixar emails Dick Cook at Disney and goes, ooh, we got a problem with Zemeckis. He don’t get it. [laughs] And it’s just wrong. It’s wrong.

**John:** It is wrong. And so this is talking about animation and classically WGA writers aren’t covered in animation, so it’s been very hard for us to get any sort of leverage in terms of our prices being up. But when you’re talking about specialists who are doing very specific computer animation things, they are really valuable. They can do really amazing things, but their value is not — there’s no free market for them because if there’s only four shops that could pay them and they’ve all agreed not to pay any of them more, then that’s suppressing wages.

**Craig:** No question. And if you think about what we do, how terrible would it be — I mean, this was essentially the system that we as screenwriters got away from in the ’50s and ’60s with what they called the old studio system where you were owned by a studio. And some other studio wanted to hire you and there was kind of a gentleman’s agreement that you wouldn’t do that, or that you would put an actor out on loan as they said. But the idea being that you kind of capped the competition for wages by limiting the opportunity of the people that earned the wages. So, here’s an exchange in his deposition, Ed Catmull of Pixar says the following.

They’re asking him, the plaintiff’s attorneys are saying what do you mean by all these emails where you keep on talking about not hiring other people because of wages. And finally Catmull says, “Well, them hiring a lot of people at much higher salaries would have a negative effect in the long term.”

And the attorney says, “On pay structure?”

And he says, “Well, I’m just saying that if they… — I don’t know what you mean by pay structure. The, for me I just, it means the pay, all right? If the pay goes way up in an industry where the margins are practically nonexistent it will have a negative effect.”

And my favorite thing then is Ed, he finishes saying this and his attorney says the following, “This might be a good time for a break.”

And I can imagine that this woman, his counsel, drags him outside and beats him within an inch of his life for saying this, because it’s basically handing them the truth. But I really want to zero in on this: of course they’re trying to suppress wages, but what I love is this nonsense. “If the pay goes way up in an industry where the margins are practically nonexistent…”

Dude, come on! Come on! That is — why is it that Hollywood gets away with that nonsense more than any other industry. “Oh, we’re not making any money over here. Everything loses money.” Get out of her. Oh, yeah, Frozen, how much did they lose on that? Oh, yeah, Pixar, boy what a string of duds. I mean, come on!

**John:** Yeah. They can barely keep the lights on at Pixar.

**Craig:** Barely. The margins are practically nonexistent. After all of the movies, after all the Toy Stories and the Cars and the merchandising and the Bug’s Life and Up and yada yada, we’ve added it all up and what we’ve made so far here at Pixar is $5.

**John:** Yeah. Pixar apparently in their cereal bar they had to start going to like generic cereals. They can’t afford the brand names anymore.

**Craig:** Oh the humanity. [laughs] I mean, get out of here.

**John:** Craig, this is a very specialized world of the animation films, but I’m wondering to what degree the same kind of thing is happening in our world and it’s sort of the normal future in the television world. Because we are covered by the union, so we have scale. And scale is the minimum people can pay you for things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And lord knows I was on the negotiating committee. Scale is important and we want to make sure we can protect scale. But I do wonder if these same kinds of conversations are happening that are limiting over-scale opportunities for people in film and in television. It’s the way that you, in television you keep people from moving up from staff writer, to story editor, to producer. Where you just sort of have this tacit agreement like, yeah, yeah, please don’t hire them as something more than their previous thing because we don’t want to give them that bump.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. They will always, just as water will try an seep through any crack available, the companies will always try and play whatever game they can to reduce their costs, reduce the wages that they pay. They will often do so by wriggling around inside of the rules. Sometimes they bend the rules to the point of stretching them to meaninglessness.

One trick is they’ll hire two writers for television staff but tell them we’re making you a “paper team.” You’re not a writing team, even though you don’t know each other, and you’re not writing together, we’re making you a paper team so that we can pay each of you half what you should be paid, because in a writing team the team gets paid what one writer gets and they have to split it.

Well, I mean, so there’s an example of cheating. What we have to prevent this kind of thing from happening that’s apparently rampant in the animation business, we have the union, and perhaps more importantly we have agents. So, there is this other industry that the studios hate, the talent agencies. And the talent agencies are motivated entirely by creating competition for wages, an upward pressure on wages because that’s how they make their money.

If I were a very talented person working — by the way, I’ve truly put myself on the “will never be hired” list at Pixar now, but okay — if I were a talented animator, storyboard artist/animator, etc, I would start trying to figure out a way to organize and to create a union. They desperately need a union. And then from the union I think the agents would then start to swoop in. Agents need a union. The union makes it so that the writers, the creators, the artists are earning enough to be attractive to agents. Then the agents come in and push it all upward, right, upward.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So right now they’re being pushed downward without any protection. It’s terrible.

**John:** It’s a frustrating situation. Paper teaming is a real issue that happens in television. And I was just talking with a young writer who got the call saying congratulations you’ve been hired on this one-hour drama, we’re so excited. And then half an hour later he got a call saying like, oh, and we’re going to team you up with this other writer who is also a brand new writer who is great.

And he, to his credit, had the balls to say, “No. That’s not going to happen.”

**Craig:** Good for him. Good for him. And, by the way, you have to. You have to say no.

**John:** Yeah. And so on some level, well, they called his bluff and they gave him the job just for himself. That other writer didn’t get a job, but on the whole I think it’s better for everyone that he stood up and said like, “Listen, I’m not a team. You can’t do that.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. I don’t want a business where they spend the same amount of money but spread it among five times as many people. That’s not the goal.

**John:** Not good for anyone.

**Craig:** No, it’s not good for anyone. Exactly.

**John:** Because you’ve created an unsurvivable job.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** If no one can make a living doing this task, then you’ve made it worse for everyone.

**Craig:** And, boy, I’ll tell you, they are getting dangerously close to that place right now. They really are. Especially in features, it is — don’t get me started.

So, the people in the forum now that are listening to us can ask question live.

**John:** Yes. CD Donovan writes, “Hi John, hi Craig, love the podcast very much. Appreciate what you guys do every week. I just moved here to LA, the third day in Los Angeles now. Here for grad school.”

**Craig:** Welcome, great.

**John:** “Screenwriting at UCLA. Any advice for surviving in LA and making the most of these next two years?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s good. Well, you know, everyone is different. Everyone’s survival tactics and strategies are different. I can only share with you what mine were. You’re at UCLA, wonderful school, wonderful campus, great part of town in Westwood. Study, obviously study hard. See movies. Get to know people that are in your program. Gravitate towards the people that seem like they are substantive rather than the people who seem popular.

Popular people eventually go on to be like the third guy in charge of development at some company and the substantial people end up being multimillionaires. And the other thing I would recommend is to drink way less than everybody else is and get high way less than everybody else is because it’s just not going to help you.

**John:** You’re here in a graduate screenwriting program, so write. And you should look at these next two years as your writing years. And you’re never going to have another opportunity to write so much, be able to share it with the people in your little group to get feedback, to get going. So, write.

Try to take advantage of the fact that you’re around a bunch of film people to make some movies, because if you are just writing scenes you may not actually get the experience of shooting things and film school is about shooting things. You can crew on some things. You will learn so much from it.

**Craig:** That’s true. Well, we’ve got another question here from Ian Workheiser who says, “What movie or two would you say delivers the best lessons to screenwriters to read the script and watch?” So, I think he means to simultaneously read and watch or watch and then read, etc. What do you think, John?

**John:** I’ve said it many times on the podcast. The first script that I read along with the movie was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. And that was — it’s a good movie. It’s a good script. They both work well together.

But I keep coming back to Aliens which was so important and seminal to me where I really could see the movie on the page. And then you watch the movie and it’s like, wow, you did what you promised you would do on the page. So, those are two examples for me.

**Craig:** That’s great. I think I may have mentioned this before. I am a big fan of Jerry Maguire. I think it’s a great example, I think, because Cameron Crowe wrote it and then Cameron Crowe directed it. So, you know that there is a purity of intention from the page to the movie and it’s beautifully done, just beautifully done. And, also, entertaining.

There are movies that are brave, there are movies that are subversive, that shake up the traditional storytelling and they’re wonderful, but when you’re starting out sometimes going down that path is a little bit like just being the punk band in high school that only knows two chords, but hey, it’s punk. Yeah, but also you suck, you know.

But Jerry Maguire is how to do a traditional narrative brilliantly and artistically and impressively. Such a good script. Such a good read. Really well done. So, that’s the one I would recommend.

**John:** Great. Josh Ernstrom writes, “Are there still paper scripts going around, or is it all digital?” It’s almost all digital.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I would say the only times I’ve gotten paper scripts have been something that’s really locked down and so they have it printed on — you cannot photocopy this — it has watermarks. It’s on red pages. But even those are much rarer.

The most extreme example I got was a rewrite on something and they sent it over on a locked down iPad, so it was actually impossible to sort of get it off of the iPad. But it’s essentially all digital now. And I kind of miss, Craig, I don’t know if you miss this, but there used to be a number of years where you would call and say like, “Hey, send a messenger,” and then you would print your script and then inevitably you would like find a typo and you’d be scrambling to fix, get the new page in there before the messenger got there.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But there was something actually really refreshing about sort of like you have the script there, it’s sitting on your doorstep, you see the messenger come, and then you’re free. It’s no longer in your possession. And the email just isn’t the same.

**Craig:** Unfortunately the nice things about paper, they are no longer with us. You felt like you had achieved something when you printed your script out for the first time. You could hold it. It looked like a thing that other scripts looked like. There was weight.

But, yeah, the only time you’ll see physical scripts now are at roundtables, as far as I can tell, when people have to sit there and actually — you know, nobody has brought 12 iPads to a table. And for table readings when you’re about to shoot and you have your actors come in and read the script. Other than that, it’s all digital.

**John:** Yeah. Dee Mower writes, “I am close to landing an agent at UTA to rep my screenplay. Assuming he can place, how likely is it that I could get my agent to help me land an assignment based on a pitch? Are such assignments rare?”

**Craig:** An assignment based on a pitch? Or you mean sell a pitch? Oh, I see, he means like — or does he mean an assignment where you’re coming in and pitching on their assignment?

**John:** I think that’s what he means.

**Craig:** Okay. How likely is it that you can get your agent to help you do that? Well, if they’re your agent that’s kind of their job.

**John:** I wonder if he’s talking about the agent is sort of representing the script but hasn’t really agreed to represent him.

**Craig:** Oh I see.

**John:** But there’s a hip pocketing kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then probably a long shot there because you can assume that that agent has plenty of other clients who are asking the same thing. Many of whom even have credits. I mean, we’ve talked about this before, but the contraction of both the amount of movies that are made and then the tremendous contraction of the ratio of development to production, which is approaching one-to-one has made it so that there is enormous competition for these rewrite jobs. And a lot of times, frankly, there is no competition. It’s just we want to rewrite this and we want this person to do it.

**John:** But I think he’s really talking more about the open writing assignment. So, how likely is it that they would send him out on an open writing assignment?

**Craig:** It’s not likely, I don’t think.

**John:** I think it’s likely if they really — if they’re really representing you and you are the right kind of person for that job, they totally will.

**Craig:** But if it’s —

**John:** If it’s just a hip pocket, then no.

**Craig:** No. I don’t think so. Yeah. All right, so we’ve got, let’s see. “Hi John and Craig. Can you talk about various writing teachers and gurus hating on VO.”

**John:** Yeah that voiceover problem. So, here’s the thing about voiceover. Voiceover is often terrible. Here’s what it is. Terrible movies often have voiceover. And because terrible movies often have voiceover, you start to believe that, well, voiceover is what made it bad.

No, voiceover was probably a patch applied very late to try to save a bad movie. But voiceover itself is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s many great movies that have voiceover.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So, teachers do it because they don’t want to read voiceover in their student’s scripts, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of voiceover.

**Craig:** Let me be slightly less charitable, John. Writing teachers and gurus say this because they’re dumb. And they’re dumb and lazy. Okay, they’re dumb because they’re confusing — John is exactly right. Voiceover is a tool like any other. It happens to be the kind of tool that magnifies bad writing. Because there’s something about the narrator’s voice that demands a certain quality of writing. If you’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to listen to a disembodied voice, that disembodied voice better be pretty impressive. It should be good, right?

So, even a movie, like a broad comedy like Ted opens with voiceover. Patrick Stewart is doing the voiceover and it’s wonderful voiceover. It’s spectacular. And it ends with a great joke that honestly makes the movie work, right? But as a tool if you don’t write well, your voiceover will really stick out as awful.

So, on the one hand I think the writing teachers and gurus are dumb because they’re confusing voiceover with bad voiceover, but I think they’re lazy also because what they don’t want to do is then explain to you how to write good voiceover. And they can’t do that because they don’t know how. That’s the truth. They just don’t know how.

I think voiceover can be awesome — awesome! — if done awesomely. What a shock. What a shock. Eh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There I go. There I go.

**John:** If this were a podcast about cinematography and one of the things like teachers said like you should never use lenses below a 15 because it’s distorting, well that’s just crazy talk.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** Because obviously there are times where you want to use a really wide lens.

**Craig:** Right. You want a fish shot. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very long lens.

**Craig:** You want to do a fisheye lens. They’re instruments. And, yes, it’s true that there are things that people know can be overdone, of course. And if you overuse slow-mo you’re going to look silly. And if you overuse dialogue, long speeches of dialogue. But, you know, voiceover is such a — here’s the deal. These people are always looking for rules to give you because that’s what gives them the aura of knowledge. They are able to deliver something to you in exchange for money. That’s the real problem here. You’re paying them and they need to give you something.

If you pay me, here’s what I’m going to give you. You shouldn’t have paid me, because the truth is you can do this or you can’t do this. I can give you some help here or there, right? But really you don’t need to pay me. But they need to give you something, right, because they’re ripping you off. So, what do they do? They give you nonsense rules. “Never use voiceover. Never say we see. Don’t put things in parentheses. Never tell the reader where the camera goes.” Blah, blah, blah.

It’s all nonsense. Nonsense. Oh my god! [laughs]

**John:** The people who joined us for the live chat were mostly joining for that umbrage. So thank you for giving it to them Craig.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a podcast called Crew Call by Anonymous Production Assistant. And the reason I found out about this podcast is because Stuart Friedel, my assistant, the producer of this podcast, was actually a guest on this podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] Wait, I’m sorry, what?

**John:** Stuart was a guest.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** One of the Stuarts was a guest.

**Craig:** The world is changing so rapidly. I can’t keep up with the world anymore. Unbelievable. Good for Stuart.

**John:** Unbelievable.

**Craig:** God, amazing.

**John:** So, honestly what I like about the podcast is we talk about people who work in other parts of the industry, this is about people who work in other crew positions and who are so incredibly vital. So, to have a podcast for people who are interested in all of the other crafts and trades that go into making film and television I think is incredibly important.

**Craig:** It’s spectacular.

**John:** So, I salute this podcast. And Stuart’s episode is terrific, too. So, you can listen to that. He talks about making Scriptnotes and what he does on the show and running out and getting me coffee. And he only embarrasses me two or three times, so it’s pretty cool.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, only two or three? Was I embarrassed at all? Because you know I don’t listen to podcast so I would never —

**John:** No, you weren’t embarrassed at all. He doesn’t say anything about you.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I prefer to be ignored.

Well, how could my One Cool Thing this week not be Robin Williams, the great Robin Williams who tragically took his own life. And this one — this was a hard one because it not only was tragic in and of itself because any suicide is tragic and because the suicide of a terrific artist sort of robs us all of something.

But he was really the first comedian in my life, you know. For those of us who are in our early 40s, Mork & Mindy came along and Mork from Ork came along and I wore the rainbow suspenders and he was that first, I know — [laughs]

**John:** I’m just picturing Craig with his rainbow suspenders. It’s great.

**Craig:** it’s adorable. It’s adorable. What I did not know were my gay pride rainbow suspenders. But he was the first standup comedian in my life and he was amazing and wonderful. And what I also — personally what I always appreciated about Robin Williams was the very thing that he often got criticized for, which was his sentimentality.

You could tell that he was very aware of his own pain and the pain of the world. He had an almost direct access to it, an emotional access to it. And he was able to convey that. And, yes, if sometimes some of the movies felt overtly sentimental or mawkish, it’s because sometimes life is a bit sentimental and mawkish.

Go to a funeral and see if you’re not sentimental and mawkish, but that’s part of life. And if it’s honest, I think it can be beautiful. And he sort of ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the gorgeous to the subtle to the dramatic. He could do anything.

Personally, my favorite Robin Williams movie is Awakenings. Maybe because I was a premed kid on his way to being a neurologist and I loved Oliver Sacks and all that. But I just though how amazing that this guy who could be Mork from Ork and who could do those incredible live performances where he would just go and go and never stop. And his mind would move a thousand miles a minute, to go from that to holding his own completely with Robert De Niro and delivering this beautiful portrait. And, a kind of character I always appreciate. A character in a movie who is the hero even though you don’t know he’s the hero.

You know, you think you’re watching a movie about a man overcoming this affliction, but you’re watching a movie about a human being figuring out how to be human. And he was just unbelievable. And, folks, go hug a funny person, you know.

This is — it’s sad. What funny people often do carry around this terrible hurt. And he will be terribly, terribly missed. A great, great, great performer and artist, the late Robin Williams.

**John:** I completely agree. So, by the time this podcast comes out it’ll be nearly a week that the news has past. And I hope that one of the things we take with us out of his passing is not just his legacy of great work and all that stuff we have there, but the real lesson of what depression is and that it’s a rough thing to struggle with. And if people can be more appreciative of what it is and the challenges people face when they are dealing with depression, hopefully we can help the people around us.

**Craig:** No question. No question. I had a friend recently who went through a really rough patch and, you know, got a little close to this situation. And suicidality and suicidal ideation is a very, very serious thing. And I think, frankly, people are starting to get it. I really do.

I think people are starting to get, the stigma is going away. I think the casual dismissal of depression is something that weak whiners do is going away. I think people are starting to get it. I can’t imagine, in a weird way, anything you could do that’s braver or stronger than harming yourself. Think about just what it would take to harm yourself. What you’re really saying is I’m in so much pain I’m willing to do this extraordinary thing to make the pain go away.

But, of course, there is a wonderful way to make the pain go away that has nothing to do with suicide and that gives you your life back. And I suppose that is really the strongest thing you could do, which is to fight. And to fight through it. And there are terrific medications that do work and there is therapy that does work and there are people that care for you that do very much understand this and who have been through it.

So, if you are depressed, do not be ashamed. Talk about it. You are not weak.

**John:** Yeah, if anything, if the shame of depression can be diminished through the acknowledgment that it really is out there and it’s a real thing that people are wrestling with on a daily basis, that would be progress.

**Craig:** It would. And it’s sad that it would take something like this to bring people’s awareness to it, but this is a problem that so many people are suffering with. They’re suffering with it silently. You don’t even know what’s going on. This is why we get surprised by these things. But I defy anybody — anybody in the United States — to say, no, there’s nobody in my extended family that has either been depressed or committed suicide. I don’t have a friend or anybody.

No.

**John:** No, not true.

**Craig:** No. It’s everywhere and it can be fought and it can be overcome. And I think at long last people are taking it very seriously. And, frankly, honoring what it means to be depressed. It deserves a certain amount of honor and respect as something very serious the way you honor and respect heart disease, or cancer, or anything like that.

**John:** That’s our show this week. The things we talked about on the episode, there will be show notes at johnaugust.com, so links to many of the things we talked about. We’ll include some links about depression and people who’ve written brilliant things about their own depression over the course of this last week. But also the Weinsteins Charity Buzz.

**Craig:** [laughs] Talk about depression.

**John:** An Amazon and everything else in this epic episode we did this week.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Thank you to everybody who listened in live on Mixlr. That was fun.

**Craig:** That was fun.

**John:** We’ll try to do this occasionally.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you are a new listener and want to catch up on back episodes, we have a whole zillion of them. We have 156 prior episodes at scriptnotes.net. You can get to all of those back episodes for $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** That’s a bargain at any price. You can spend $13,000 on a Weinstein Charity Buzz auction, or $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** Pennies a day.

**Craig:** Pennies!

**John:** If you are a subscriber to those premium episodes, you can also listen to those on the iPhone app and the Android app. Look for those in your app store.

If you are on iTunes, please click subscribe and also leave us a comment because that helps people find our show. There is potential that we are going to be doing a live show later this fall.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So nothing official yet, but maybe stay in Los Angeles is all I’m saying. Maybe stay in Los Angeles from now until the end of the year.

**Craig:** Yeah, just don’t go anywhere, at any time.

**John:** There’s a possibility, just in case.

**Craig:** Don’t go anywhere.

**John:** No. I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you have a longer question for us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And, Craig, I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week, buddy.

Links:

* This episode was broadcast live [on Mixlr](http://mixlr.com/scriptnotes/)
* Come see Scriptnotes live with John and Kelly at the [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Brian Koppelman’s The Moment Podcast [with guest Craig Mazin](http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-moment-podcast-brian-koppelman-and-craig-mazin/)
* [Sparknotes: Goodnight Moon](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/sparknotes-goodnight-moon) on McSweeney’s
* Slate on [How Gobbledygook Ended Up in Respected Scientific Journals](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/27/how_nonsense_papers_ended_up_in_respected_scientific_journals.html)
* Christopher Wright [on Amazon vs Hachette](https://www.eviscerati.org/articles/2014/08/Amazon-v-Hatchette-Everyone-Wrong-Me), and Dave Bryant’s follow up [on the true costs of publishing a book](http://dave-bryant.livejournal.com/21544.html)
* John’s blog post on how [no one cares about manufacturing costs](http://johnaugust.com/2014/no-one-cares-about-manufacturing-costs)
* LA Times on [Amazon vs Disney](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-amazon-disney-20140811-story.html)
* The Weinstein Company is [auctioning off an internship for charity](https://www.charitybuzz.com/catalog_items/597305)
* [Court docs show role of Pixar and Dreamworks Animation in Silicon Valley wage-fixing cartel](http://pando.com/2014/07/07/revealed-court-docs-show-role-of-pixar-and-dreamworks-animation-in-silicon-valley-wage-fixing-cartel/)
* The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Crew Call Podcast [with guest Stuart Friedel](http://www.anonymousproductionassistant.com/2014/07/31/personal-assistant-stuart-friedel/)
* Robin Williams’s obituary from [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/movies/robin-williams-oscar-winning-comedian-dies-at-63.html?_r=0)
* The [National Suicide Prevention Lifeline](http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/) and [National Alliance on Mental Illness](http://www.nami.org/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Brian Shane ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/yes-screenwriting-is-actually-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 150 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m back from vacation. I’m ready, I’m rested. I feel like I’m ready to do a big show because we’ve got a lot of stuff to get through today.

**Craig:** Normally when people say they’re ready and rested, you also expect them to say, I’m ready, tanned, and rested, but there was no chance you were going to be tanned.

**John:** I’m paler than I began.

**Craig:** Wow. How does that even work?

**John:** It’s difficult but it’s a process of heavy sunscreen application. So we went down to visit Southern Colorado. We went to the Great Sand Dunes. We went to Mesa Verde. We went to Four Corners which is probably the most useless sort of monument you could possibly imagine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An arbitrary place where four states come together.

**Craig:** Yeah, the four states with the — yeah, because they’re drawn on longitude and latitude, those borders.

**John:** Those borders.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes. But arbitrary really.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course, but you did the thing where you’re like I’m in one state, I’m in another state, I’m in —

**John:** Yeah. My daughter did a backbend, so she was in all four states at once.

**Craig:** That was featured in a Breaking Bad episode.

**John:** Oh, how nice.

Speaking of Breaking Bad, a friend of ours who directed two of the best episodes of Breaking Bad apparently is going to direct these movies. So he finally got some work. I think it’s really good news.

**Craig:** Yeah. He is — there’s a… — God, I cannot remember the name of it. It’s a science fiction thing like a trilogy or something and then there was another trilogy. There are just too many of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But for whatever reason, you know how it is, they just can’t stop making derivative sequels, crappy derivative sequels, so they’re making more of them. And he’s —

**John:** And they had to go to a foreign director to do it now. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. They had to go to a Swedish guy as well. He’s not even doing the first of the next bunch of them.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** He’s only doing the second of the next bunch.

**John:** Yeah, he’s doing the sequels to the knock offs.

**Craig:** I mean, god, his name is Rian Johnson.

**John:** He was a guest on the show. I remember him. He was really nice.

**Craig:** And this franchise that he’s doing is Star Wars. Star Wars.

**John:** With an S at the end, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Star Wars, not Star War, Star Wars.

**Craig:** Well, maybe a Z, I don’t know.

**John:** Oh, I like that a lot.

**Craig:** Star Warz.

**John:** But I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of toys and things like that.

**Craig:** Oh, garbage. Hollywood garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But, you know, all the same, I’m just really delighted for Rian because this is a kid who he’s put in the hours. He’s made some television, he’s made some short films. He did some videos.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s great that they’re taking a chance on this newbie —

**Craig:** Give him a shot. And you know what, look, everybody has to start somewhere. So if you start doing the second of a series of Star Wars films, ideally you’ll learn and, you know, I’d love to see what comes next. I guess that’s what you can take —

**John:** Absolutely. I think in a few years he may be ready to make some real movies. So congratulations, Rian Johnson. And I think it’s going to be — I’m looking forward to seeing what you make.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That actually segues really well to our first bit of follow up, which is Rob Norman wrote in about remakes and reboots which we talked about two episodes ago. And Rob writes, “I wonder if a remake uses the same laws of storytelling, whereas a reboot changes how the story is told drastically. For example, 21 Jump Street not only changed formats, it also changed genres from police procedural to meta-comedy.

“At the core of Star Trek, there were always this chin-scratching philosophical quandaries, lots of standing around debating issues. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek feels a lot more like Indiana Jones than anything Gene Roddenberry every built. But from Robocop to Robocop, what changed? A few details in the narrative were updated. The actors are different but the tone is the same. Spider-Man to Amazing Spider-Man seems very familiar. It wasn’t really rebooted. A few what’s are different, but the how is the same.

“A remake might be the story and the world stays the same, details change, an old movie is updated. A reboot is going back to the original premise and doing a page one rewrite of the franchise. The story mechanisms are replaced with something completely different.”

That’s Rob’s description of remake versus reboot.

**Craig:** I’ll buy that too. I mean the last definition was a pretty good one. This definition is a pretty good one. I’m not sure there’s that much value in determining what these nonsense words mean anyway. They’re mostly for bloggers and entertainment journalists to bandy about as they attempt to draw clicks to their website. But, yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. I think rebooting, basically you’re going in a new direction. This is like, all that stuff existed and that’s over there. And this is a new way that we are forging forward. I thought 21 Jump Street was actually an interesting example to bring up because I saw 22 Jump Street over the weekend. I really enjoyed it. Have you seen it yet, Craig?

**Craig:** I haven’t.

**John:** Oh, you should see it.

**Craig:** I know. It’s on my list.

**John:** Yeah, it’s quite good and quite interesting in the way that they, he describes it as a meta-comedy. They go really meta in it in ways that you think are going to be dangerous. Because usually when a movie tries to be too self-aware that it’s a movie, you’re sort of like navel-gazing and yet it does it just geniusly.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’m looking forward to that.

**John:** Cool. A second bit of follow-up. We talked about something like this on the show before, but Charles Forman is a developer who’s been working with stuff in the Fountain. And he came up with this new product for Mac called Storyboard Fountain. And it’s a lot like kind of what Craig had always wanted or described, which is the ability to sort of shift back and forth between your script and the storyboards for your script. And his, in fact, is a drawing tool. So you work on it with a tablet and you’re drawing with the script, you know, right there in the same frame.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It seems really, really cool. So that was a great product demo. So I’m going to steer people there —

**Craig:** I wish, I wish, like I’m so bad at drawing that I can’t even draw stick figures properly. I remember I would work with storyboard artists and I would say, well, this is kind of what I’m thinking about and they would get it. You know, they’d understand, okay, I see. You want behind him, you want over his shoulder with him sort of blown out in frame and then this stuff is in the deep background. But when they looked at my stick figure drawings, they honestly looked at me like I was sick. There was something wrong with me.

**John:** So the last couple of weeks, I’ve been storyboarding this really complicated project. And so I’ve had a guy, Simone, who’s been in the office a lot doing this stuff. And so we’ve been talking through things. It’s always interesting talking with somebody who’s so much better at something than you are. And so you shouldn’t even try to — I just don’t pick up a pencil when I talk to him about it anymore.

But what I found is really useful is to use real things around me to sort of describe what the shot is and sort of use my fingers as the camera. So like, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here. And he can draw that beautifully. But if I try to do it, it’s just, it’s disastrous.

**Craig:** It’s funny, John, that your instinct when talking to somebody who is better at something than you is to defer to some extent to them. Whereas, if say the thing that you were really good at was screenwriting, the people that talk to us so frequently fail —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** — to defer. In fact, they don’t see any mystery in what we do at all.

**John:** Uh-uh. A monkey could do that.

**Craig:** A monkey could do it. Anyway, the only reason they don’t do it is just because they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just too hard to — it’s so much typing. But I know what to say.

**John:** Oh, you do, absolutely. It’s just a matter of putting particular words down on the page and sort of like, you know, making it all work right there. Basically, it’s how to use Final Draft is really 90% of screenwriting.

**Craig:** 90% of it. My favorite phrase that idiots use is it just needs to be put into writing. [laughs] I love that. Like I have the story, I know what it is, it just, somebody just needs to put it into writing. What does that mean? It just needs to be put into writing. It’s like a doctor. Like, listen, I know that you’re sick. I just need to put you into health and you’ll be fine. That’s all. I don’t have to do it. Somebody could do it. Anybody can be a doctor. You just have to put somebody into health. I know what the problem is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Could you just put me into health? You —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** D’oh! Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy. Well, you may want to hold on to some of that anger because you have an important Halloween task which is that you need to play Steve Ballmer for Halloween.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And one of our listeners, Cynthia Closkey sent me a link to a comedian impressionist named Jim Meskimen who I had seen on other shows before but I’ve never seen this YouTube video where he talks through like how to do an impression and basically how he breaks things down.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And this is very important to me because I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to do my Tim Cook so I can be Tim Cook to your Steve Ballmer. And it’s a very clever video because it was not about sort of the technical details, it’s about sort of looking at the world from their perspective and figuring out how they sort of move their mouths and sort of how they project things much more so than trying to match that sound with that sound.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very clever —

**Craig:** It was. I mean, when you listen to Tim Cook, I mean the first thing you’ll notice probably is the drawl because he has a Southern drawl. But he drags his words. It’s really amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It really looks beautiful in your hand. He’s got that long thing on certain vowels, you know. Like those things… — But I really liked what this guy said about the forceful nature, the plosives, as it were, of speech. And, you know, a good — being able to be an impressionist is a helpful thing I would think as a screenwriter because we are doing impressions of other human beings when we’re writing. We’re doing impressions of multiple other human beings talking to each other.

It’s kind of high level mimicry. And so where does the specificity come from? And I think a lot of new screenwriters will go to things that are very textual: long words, complete sentences as opposed to short words, and slang or whatever have you. But even thinking about the forcefulness of the way a sentence emerges will bleed into the dialogue in a way that people will pick up on. They just will. And it’s not so heavy-handed.

**John:** Yeah. Your example of plosiveness, like the example he gives is like if you have popcorn in your mouth, how far would the popcorn fly when you do it. And he distinguishes between Kevin Spacey, who keeps everything very close to himself, versus a Paul Giamatti who we think of as being this bursting, bursting, bursting out.

That’s why as you’re writing characters, you know, you shouldn’t get stuck on one actor for a role. But if you have an actor in your head as you’re writing a role, it can be very helpful to see like, would this actually make sense coming out of his lips? Like can I believe an actor, one actor would say all these things this way and that can be really helpful to get the voice consistent even if it’s not the actor you end up casting in the end.

**Craig:** I don’t really know what the point is in writing a character if you don’t have an actor in mind. I really don’t, because you’re just cheating yourself. Have somebody. It doesn’t have to be anybody that you would ever even cast. Maybe it’s an actor that wouldn’t attract a single ticket buyer. But the specificity, I think, is just so critical.

**John:** Yeah. If we say specificity three more times in this podcast we’ll get some sort of special prize.

**Craig:** Specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity.

**John:** All right, nicely done. I will say that one of my great joys in my writing career is I got to do three days’ work on a movie that starred Christopher Walken. And so I got to write dialogue that Christopher Walken would say.

**Craig:** Walken dialogue.

**John:** And it’s just such a unique joy to have somebody whose voice you can already hear in your head so clearly and specifically as you’re putting those words down. You pick words that you would never pick for any other actor because it’ll just be so amazing when he says them.

**Craig:** And Walken’s thing also is there’s either , you know, it’s not that there’s no punctuation. It’s that the punctuation is random. So commas and periods will appear randomly in a brick of dialogue without any actual relation to syntax.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which I think is —

**John:** Well, he’ll put them in. He will take the dialogue and he will pencil them in where he’s going to do them. It’s planned.

**Craig:** It’s planned but it just , you know, he’ll —

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** [Walken impersonation] He’ll pencil them in where he’s planning to do them. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. And like question marks instead of periods and it just… — But, look, at some point, it’s, I don’t know. I don’t want to, it’s just so weird like he’s — Christopher Walken has almost become like Al Pacino, a guy that seems to be doing impressions of people that do impressions of him.

**John:** Yeah. And so I know there are movies that he doesn’t do the Christopher Walken of it all and I just haven’t seen them because people want him to do Christopher Walken I guess.

**Craig:** The early ones. If you go way back —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** — to the early days you’ll see —

**John:** Totally different person.

**Craig:** You’ll see , yeah, smooth Christopher Walken. Yeah.

**John:** A final bit of follow-up. Giovanni wrote in. Giovanni from Turin, Italy writes, “In episode 146, you talked about Hopscotch and how it would be awesome to have something similar that works with Minecraft. I’m just writing in to say there actually is. It’s called Kano. And it’s basically a computer that kids can build and they program in it with code blocks for a number of applications and games. Minecraft is one of them. Craig would be happy to know it was funded mainly through Kickstarter.”

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** “Since I’m writing in, I will also say that as an aspiring videogame writer, I find it very interesting when you talk about games and their narratives. Would you ever consider having a videogame screenwriter or somebody who worked in videogames like Gary Whitta or such on the show?”

No. Absolutely no. Gary Whitta? Never.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, not Whitta.

**John:** Oh yeah, anybody but Whitta.

**Craig:** Anybody but Whitta. That’s actually a great name for the podcast. I mean if we ever want to change it, it could just be called anybody but Whitta.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a guy I met recently. I believe his name is Jesse Stern and he’s written a number of the Call of Duty games. Goyer has worked on some of those as well. But Jesse Stern I think is primarily a videogame writer. And I actually think that it would be great to speak to somebody like that. And we love Gary Whitta, but Gary’s a screenwriter who also writes some videogames. But this guy is like way deeper and more about that world and it would be — I would love to talk to them. I mean, it’s a fascinating area.

The Writers Guild, you know, continues to make fluttering whimpery noises about trying to organize videogame writers. I don’t see any coherent strategy.

**John:** So you actually, if you’re a WGA member, you could actually get a WGA contract writing on a videogame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re not eager to give it to you but you can possibly get it. And it establishes some things, some minimums, some benefits that you would not otherwise get if you were not doing that, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you were being paid, you know, enough you could qualify for pension and health. The problem is that the payment for many of the positions is very low. So many of the large companies are either located overseas where we have no jurisdiction or they are Walmart-ian in their anti —

I mean, look, the whole, we’ve discussed this before, the entire Silicon Valley world is just brutally anti-union. And, or I’ll call it the technology world because I know that some of these places aren’t just, you know, but yeah, it’s a massive uphill climb.

**John:** Yeah, it is. But, Gary, what I should say is actually a very, very nice person. So, I’m slagging on him just because we adore him. And Gary Whitta’s actually writing one of the Star Wars movies. That’s one of the things that’s actually announced, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s doing one of those spinoff movies. So there’s going to be the three, I guess you’d call them canonical sequels. J. J. Abrams is doing the first of them, then Rian and then an unknown third director. And Gary is doing one of these standalone movies. I think there’s going to be another one as well. There may even be two. You know, it’s funny —

**John:** It’s an exciting time.

**Craig:** I was talking to a producer today about it and he’s like, “Is there, how many Star Wars movies are going to come out?” And I said, you know what man, they can’t make enough. I honestly believe that Disney can’t lose money on them. It doesn’t matter because if the third prequel, by that point we’d had enough evidence. [laughs] If the third prequel made a ton of money and it did —

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Every single one of these things is going to be massive and of course there’s the dragon’s tail of merchandising and theme parks and all the rest. We are going to find out just how big a movie can be when this first Star Wars comes out.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Exciting.

**Craig:** It’s going to redefine big.

**John:** All right. Topics for today. Three big topics that we have marked out. First is Trinity Syndrome. Second is sitcoms at conflict. And the third is the question of is screenwriting actually writing. So let’s spin the big wheel and start with Trinity Syndrome.

**Craig:** [Mimics the Price is Right wheel spin]

**John:** Oh, you went over a dollar.

Tasha Robinson writing for The Dissolve is writing about what she calls Trinity Syndrome which is that your strong female characters in many of these movies, it’s like, great you have this “strong female character” who actually doesn’t do anything significant in the plot and she points out How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example of this, Lego Movie as an example of this, and the most recent Lord Of The Rings movies as an example of that. Where you have a woman who is incredibly competent and can do a lot of great things, and then she doesn’t do anything.

Craig, what did you think of Tasha’s article and her points?

**Craig:** I thought, I was almost all the way there with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that she’s pointing out something that’s absolutely true that making a female character “strong” oftentimes is a weak-sauce substitute for making them actually human and fleshed out. Of her examples, the one that I thought was probably the weakest was The Lego Movie because she was basically, she was parodying the strong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, the hero of that movie is called The One. You know, The Chosen One. And so obviously they’re kind of parodying The Matrix there as they were parodying a billion things.

But the only thing I wanted to point out I guess to nuance really is that when you ask the question, why is this happening, to some extent I think you can say it’s because the people that are making these movies are sort of casually sexist. But I also want to point out that many times in these sorts of movies the male characters who aren’t The One or The Hero are also just as thin and pointless.

**John:** I think that’s a really good point because essentially the way movies tend to work, the way sort of action movies tend to work is you have your hero protagonist and then you have everybody else. And in that everybody else, those are hopefully good entertaining funny characters or dramatic characters, but none of them are going to be as integral as the hero is or if there’s a villain, the villain is going to be. So any person, any character in the movie who’s not the hero or the principal villain is going to feel a little bit secondary and can feel a little bit sort of weak-sauce. If they’re just there to sort of give advice or to help the hero out for a bit but don’t have an integral story function in their own right.

**Craig:** Right. So there are movies that have relationships. And Lindsay Doran has a really good talk that she does about this. There are movies where characters have a task to do: save the world, blow up a building, become the one, whatever. And they do it. And along the way they experience a relationship with another person. And in the end they get that relationship together almost as a reward for having done the task of the movie.

Then there are other movies where really the relationship is the reward, rather the relationship is the purpose. It’s the journey, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you have movies that kind of hybridize it where you can feel that there’s equal weight to these things. So for instance, Tasha mentions Edge of Tomorrow where the goal, which is to save the world, seems basically on par with this other goal which is to figure out this relationship with this woman that is the key to understanding how to save the world. In a lot of the movies that she talks about, for instance The Matrix, which I think is brilliant and I actually want, I think that The Matrix is a movie that we should do an episode on.

**John:** Oh, we absolutely should.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s just gorgeously structured. What is the — where’s the dimension to Morpheus? He might as well have a flowy beard and be sitting on a mountain. He is just the wise old man. And absolutely Trinity is the trinity. [laughs] And the villain’s the villain. He’s the rat. The rat’s the rat. The only character in The Matrix that is an actual human who has anything interesting to say that isn’t the one is the oracle —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Who is a woman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I agree that strong female character syndrome isn’t ideal in one sense, but I would argue that really what we’re kind of talking about is broad weak character syndrome.

**John:** Yeah. Tasha offers a couple of points and basically a checklist of things to ask yourself when you’re looking at the characters in a movie. So some of them include: “After being introduced to your strong female character, they fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot or anything at all.” And that’s a thing you do see where this woman is established as being incredibly competent. I think back to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and I think it’s Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, she’s like in disguise at the start she says she’s a great sword fighter and then she never does sword fighting —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Is that right?

**Craig:** She mostly just gets threatened to be raped which is number two.

**John:** Exactly. “If she does something to significantly affect the plot, is it mostly getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate the male hero, or deciding to have sex or not have sex with, agreeing to date, deciding to break up with the male hero, or nagging the male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic. Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development or motivations?”

But this gets into what we’ve just talked about is that if in a lot of these movies there’s one main person and if that main person is the dude and she is the female character, you have to look for what else it is that she can do, what other functions she can have.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** If it’s a movie that has like essentially one person driving the story, it doesn’t matter if that secondary character is male or female. It’s going to feel extra.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because the protagonist is the protagonist. Therefore, every other character exists to service their needs, development and motivation, all of them. I mean, listen, I think that I did a good job in Identity Thief of having a female character who was not a typical female character and who didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls that I think are listed here. And yet she does help the protagonist’s needs, development, and motivation like any other character must in a movie because that’s what the non-protagonists must do or else they don’t belong in a movie.

**John:** Well, but fundamentally Identity Thief is a dual protagonist movie where they’re causing each other to change.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s true. I always felt that he was the primary protagonist because I think he had the most — I think he had the most central problem.

**John:** Yeah, and she was the obstacle to overcome.

**Craig:** In many ways, yes. In many ways, yeah.

**John:** And I would say back to my movies, you know, Go certainly doesn’t have a strong female character problem. You have, you know, Ronna is incredibly competent but she’s the protagonist also. Things are changing because of her. But Charlie’s Angels, we had a luxury of, we have the three women, so there’s not — they’re driving the story. They’re doing those kinds of things themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think I want to go back to your defense of Lego Movie and sort of the parody of Trinity Syndrome in that because my recollection of The Lego Movie is the Wyldstyle character, the Elizabeth Banks character, she really wants to be the one and she’s really frustrated that she’s not the one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so I think she vocalizes the frustration that I think Tasha Robinson is describing. It’s like, why am I the secondary person? Look how competent I am. Why am I not the person being put in charge here?

**Craig:** That’s how, you know, it’s a natural thing to want to spoof when you see The Matrix because The Matrix begins with Trinity. The story begins with Trinity doing things that we cannot believe. I mean we know that she’s in a building somewhere and the cops show up and an agent says, you know, what’s going on and they say, oh we sent our cops in there. They probably already arrested her. And the agent turns around and says, they’re already dead. And then we watch her just be awesome.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So a natural thing you want to spoof is why is that guy the one? He is just a guy, like why? And that’s a great thing to — I guess my point of being that I thought it was unfair for Tasha to pick on that character because that character is kind of on her side, I think, is the point.

**John:** So what solutions can we offer or what sort of recommendations can we offer someone who is worried that they have a character who is just basically strong female character syndrome? What hope do we offer them?

**Craig:** Well, I think that there’s a list here of some trope-y things that people do with women that are starting to become really annoying because, you know, what happens… — When we look at characters, there are certain things that we see immediately and then there’s all the stuff on the inside. But if you look at race, gender, and sexuality, I can come up with a whole bunch of trope-y things for race and sexuality that just don’t work anymore because they’re kind of insulting. They’re getting in the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s time to start doing that for, it’s long past time to start doing that for gender. So for instance, Tasha points out some very good tropes that you don’t want to do. “Could your strong female character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?” Is — I love this one — “Is a fundamental point of your plot that your strong female character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest or most experienced character in the story until the protagonist arrives?” And that, by the way, is something you see in Raiders of the Lost Ark which we both love.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** But Marion is like awesome. She owns a bar. She out-drinks some huge, you know, Himalayan man and then immediately she’s into screamy-me-me, you know, damsel in distress, but just like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because Indy’s there. “Does the male character enter the story as a bumbling screw-up but then spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her while she stays entirely static and even cheers him on. We’ll call that Rene Russo in Tin Cup. It’s nice if she’s hyper cool but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?”

We see that all the time. I mean, she’s making real — these are really good tropes you just want to avoid because we’ve seen them forever and they’re frankly starting to accumulate into a morass of fairly insulting points of view on women. We can just calm down about the gender roles quite a bit, you know.

**John:** The challenge though is like this is a list of don’t do’s. And so what are some proactive steps you can take to make sure that the female characters in your story are going to have, I don’t know, that they’re not going to fall into this syndrome? And I would say that it’s making sure that, track the story from that character’s point of view, the female character’s point of view, and what would the story be like if the hero hadn’t shown up there.

And so ask yourself the question I think they ask in The Lego Movie which is, well, why isn’t she the hero, and find interesting answers for that. Find interesting things for her to do that don’t fall into these tropes, like find interesting reasons for her to make the plot move forward. Have her take assertive actions that change the nature of the plot. And create conflict with the protagonist that’s not just sort of bumbling romantic tension or whatever you want to do or just like, you know, I’m more competent than you are. Have some real stakes there.

One of my frustrations is that women in movies never seem to make ethical choices. They sort of seem beyond it and —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So have that be a fact and have some flaws, have some real issues there so that it’s a three-dimensional character regardless. It can also be really helpful to just look the character irrespective of gender and what is that character’s motivation and how would you write this character if you were writing it as a man and look at all the choices and decisions that the male characters would make and then ask yourself, are you making those same of kinds of choices with the character as a woman.

**Craig:** Yeah. For me from a practical positive standpoint, I think that when you write a character who is a woman, you need to consider that she is a woman. You have to understand women as you understand men. I don’t think, by the way, that men have any better understanding of men than they do of women. I think people have understandings of themselves and barely at that. We misunderstand members of our own gender aplenty.

But you want to write a woman and you want to consider that gender as part of her identity. But the thing that I would suggest avoiding at least in the beginning, unless it’s integral to the story, is an immediate dose of sexual politics, sexual interplay, romance. Hold off. Hold off. Make this character alive and full and complete without that. Because what happens all too often is the romance substitutes for substance. And in The Matrix, you see it. In the end, Trinity’s character is a soldier who is defined by her blind faith love in Keanu Reeves —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who does not deserve it until the very end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that I think is where things — I mean, by the way, in that movie, it works. But that movie’s already —

**John:** In a lot of movies it works. I mean —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the reason why these tropes are there is because it’s been successful and —

**Craig:** That’s right. But I think that we’ve moved on is the point. And we’re starting to see different kinds of relationships occurring. You know, thinking about a brother… — It’s funny, Aline McKenna when she saw Identity Thief, she said, “One thing I really enjoyed about the movie was that it was a man and woman together and it wasn’t about romance or sex, and it was just watching a man and a woman become friends and you never get to see that in a movie.” And it’s true. You never get to see that in a movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s why it’s funny. In Edge of Tomorrow, I didn’t want them to — have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t seen it yet. Sorry.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I was going to do a spoiler.

**John:** Right. Don’t spoil it for me. I do want to see it.

**Craig:** I’m not going to spoil it.

**John:** Doug Liman directed it.

**Craig:** Doug Liman did direct it, absolutely, the director of Go. I’ll just say that for much of it, for most of it, for the great bulk of it I was watching two people become friends. And I really enjoyed that.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right, speaking of friends, we’re going to talk about an article by Todd VanDerWerff in the AV Club where he says that friendship is killing sitcoms.

**Craig:** God, you are on fire with the segues today, by the way.

**John:** Thank you very much. Sometimes I’m just in a segue mode. I hop on my little two-wheeled scooter and I just go.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** On top of the segue, I may have brought this up on the show before, it’s a word that I was using and never really knew how it was written. It’s the most disturbingly written word. S-E-G-U-E.

**Craig:** That’s right. Seg. It looks like “Seague.”

**John:** Yeah, I assumed that that word was a short version of the longer word that actually was segue. I thought it was just supposed to be segue, but it’s really segue.

**Craig:** Segue. Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** Todd’s point is that modern sitcoms, and by sitcoms he doesn’t mean just three cameras, but basically half hour comedies on television, have been hurt by the nature of just people hanging out. And so the kinds of shows he’s talking about include Happy Endings, Cougar Town, How I Met Your Mother, even Modern Family. I think Modern Family is a bit of a stretch. New Girl, recent seasons of New Girl, in that essentially the show can be sometimes paralyzed by the characters getting along too well, by the characters hanging out. And when they just hang out the tension in the scenes naturally just sort of dissipates and your motivation for staying engaged and for really watching falls apart.

Craig, what did you think of the article?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s a pretty good observation. I generally agree with his assessment that comedy requires conflict and that the best sitcoms were built around conflict. Although the one that I kind of picked out was Cheers, because while Sam and Diane had a will they/won’t they, that conflict was kind of confined to them. That sitcom to me sort of defined the hang out.

In fact, I’ll go one step backwards. Taxi really for me was the first great hang out show. Yes, Louie is in conflict with them, but really they’re not all in conflict with each other. The point of that show was that they were all in the same boat and desperate to help each other through their misery. And so now that I’m thinking about it, [laughs], I’m not really sure I agree with what he’s saying.

**John:** I will say that you look at Cheers, and so even after Sam and Diane, when Diane left, they brought in the Kirstie Alley to basically be that central conflict again. Fundamentally these two characters will not get along. And she wouldn’t get along with Carla. She wouldn’t get along with sort of everyone else in the show. To a large degree Frasier I think was brought in to — when Frasier Crane was on Cheers, he was brought in to be sort of a force to be angry against or to be frustrated with.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Then when we segue that off to Frasier, that whole show is built on conflict, about basically the one-upmanship between Frasier and his brother, the dad looking to have both of them.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So, that’s a great show, and it’s a great show partly because of its conflict.

The reason why I didn’t find Modern Family to be the best example of that is I feel like they do find clever conflicts in there sort of constantly. So, most of the plots are conflicts between two of that extended family members.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, he kind of lays this all at the feet of Friends. But, Friends has all the same kind of conflict that he’s talking about. Rachel and Ross, and who loves who, and the love kept switching around and there was a baby, and people were going to get married, and then they weren’t going to get married. There was lots of conflict there. Tons of it.

**John:** One of my favorite episodes of Friends is the one where Ross — it’s a bottle episode where Ross is trying to get everyone to come to this event and basically like the clock is ticking and he’s trying to get everyone actually dressed so they will actually leave so they can leave the apartment on time. And everyone just sort of like gangs up against him in fun ways.

And that’s the nature of what conflict is. And so often if you’re looking at why a scene doesn’t work it’s because the central conflict of the scene is not clear. It’s not clear — you may understand what the two characters want, but they’re not being put against each other in ways that are going to create some sparks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, every sitcom, I mean the “sit” part is conflict.

**John:** Yes. Situational.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, every episode will have conflict. In terms of the DNA of the show, the idea of baking conflict in between the characters is a good one. And I think, for instance, Friends did that. I mean, we knew from the start that Ross was pining away for Rachel and she wasn’t into him. The will they/won’t they just went on, and on, and on.

And, I don’t know, it says “the show ran Ross and Rachel into the ground.” I guess, yeah, I don’t know.

**John:** [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I don’t know. I’m not really sure. I’ve got to be honest with you. I think Todd VanDerWerff wrote a very — he wrote this well, it’s well thought out. I’m not sure if this topic, frankly, deserves this much thought. It doesn’t seem —

**John:** I think it’s worth pointing out that sitcoms, comedy thrives on conflict. And that when conflict dissipates it can be more challenging to actually find the conflict. So, two of the shows he singles out are New Girl and — I took of the “The” this time. I said New Girl the way the show actually is.

**Craig:** That’s right. New Girl.

**John:** New Girl. And Parks and Rec. And I think you can make valid cases for both of these shows in that New Girl I think the writing is terrific, I love the actors, but this last season there’s not been a lot of conflict between the individual characters. You know, Schmidt is — do you watch New Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So, the Schmidt character can be horrible, and yet you still like him. But with the central couple actually becoming a couple and then falling apart, it has had less inherent conflict then it could otherwise be. And so they do just tend to hang out a lot.

Parks and Rec is another great show with a fantastic cast, but Ron Swanson who was sort of the Alec Baldwin 30 Rock character who was always like the stern person you couldn’t convince to get onto your side has become more lovable and because of that it’s harder to find the real conflict between the different characters. They brought on Billy Eichner who is just sort of a firecracker who sort of sets everybody off, but it’s more loud than actual conflict.

**Craig:** You know what I think is missing from sitcoms?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** And if I were to write a sitcom today, which I’m not gonna —

**John:** What would you do?

**Craig:** I am a huge fan of Laverne and Shirley. I love Laverne and Shirley. And one thing that Laverne and Shirley did so well was physical comedy. They managed to do incredible physical comedy within the confining format of a sitcom. And it’s really hard to do because, I mean, physical comedy can be dangerous. And being funny doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re physically capable of doing a lot of these things. Plus, you can’t use stunt people. Plus, you’re doing it on a locked down set like a living room. And they managed to do the most incredible — and I just love how physical they were. And you never see that on sitcoms anymore.

I would love to see a sitcom with adults being physical. I love physical comedy. I’ve always loved physical comedy.

**John:** I would say Modern Family does that some. I mean, granted it’s not a three-camera.

**Craig:** It’s single-camera. Right.

**John:** It’s single-camera, so they can do more sophisticated things sometimes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But there have been some really good physical comedy moments where they’ve —

**Craig:** I’ll give you that one. I’ll give you that one. That’s true.

**John:** Modern Family is a great show. So, I think we’re going to leave it at good to point out that conflict is central to shows. I don’t know that we agree with some of his specific examples or points, but yay conflict. And I think it’s a useful thing as people are writing — if you’re writing a comedy pilot, your fundamental question should be what is the conflict. What is the conflict of these scenes? And not only are my characters saying funny things, but are they saying funny things that is exploring the conflict within those scenes.

**Craig:** Correctamundo. Silicon Valley does it very well, by the way.

**John:** It does it very, very well. You have great empathy almost all the characters, and yet they are pretty much always in conflict with each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This will be a quick one, I’m sure. This was Richard Brody writing for The New Yorker. The headline wasn’t provocative at all. It says Screenwriting Isn’t Writing.

**Craig:** Eh. Meh.

**John:** Yeah, nothing hyperbolic about that at all. So, the article is talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner to some degree and their Hollywood careers. And it’s based on an article that Ken LaZebnik did in Written By, which is an excerpt from his longer book, where they’re talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s frustrations writing for Hollywood and that he was really trying to write as if screenwriting was an art form and Brody’s point is that it isn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, where to begin with this? First of all, let’s just — I just love — the article falls under the heading “The Front Row: Notes on the Cinema,” by Richard Brody. And then there is his bearded, bespectacled cartoon face and above it, of course, the sneering, [laughs] 1800s monocle hoisting New Yorker icon. They both seem so similar to me.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, which is saying something. Because it’s obvious that Richard Brody is very intelligent. He knows how to put sentences together. I think that he strikes me as one of these people that’s been raised in a pod inside of an academy and has never actually seen the world or tasted or touched things. He’s just read about it in The New Yorker.

This is dumb. Where to begin with how dumb it is? First of all, if you’re going to discuss whether or not screenwriting is writing, let’s not maybe limit it to F. Scott Fitzgerald, [laughs], which is just like — so, yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a brilliant novelist. He was a brilliant novelist of a time that was 80 or so years ago. And he attempted because he was unfortunately not great with money and not great with alcohol and not great with lots of things attempted to make some money in Hollywood writing screenplays the way that many great authors like Clifford Odets did.

And he just didn’t get it. And it wasn’t that screenwriting wasn’t writing, it was that he just wasn’t giving these people what they wanted. And I think of Barton Fink. “It’s a Wallace Beery picture. Write a Wallace Beery picture.”That doesn’t mean that writing a Wallace Beery picture isn’t writing, nor does it mean that everything is a Wallace Beery picture.

Interestingly, in his article about how screenwriting isn’t writing and F. Scott Fitzgerald is proof of it, he has this quote from a book about how Fitzgerald embraced screenwriting as a new art form.

**John:** This is the quote. “Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the ‘merchants’ more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience.”

**Craig:** Right. So, there it is. That’s my point. I agree with Fitzgerald one hundred percent. And I don’t agree with Richard Brody. And I have to say, and again, Faulkner — this guy apparently has, I don’t know, maybe he was hermetically sealed in some sort of cryogenic crypt back in 1958 because it seems like the most recent reference he has is Faulkner’s 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, because it’s more easy to then go backwards to discuss popular touchstones like Tiger Shark from 1933, ’32.

This is my real problem with this. It is absurd prima facie, forget — putting aside the fact that somebody who doesn’t do a thing is deciding whether or not it’s another thing. I don’t — I don’t like reading How To sex guides from eunuchs. But really I think what upsets me about this is that it’s dishonest. This entire essay is dishonest. It’s a lie. Richard Brody knows it’s a lie. He came up with a title that he thought would get a lot of clicks because he was feeling lonely or something. There is no way this man is dumb enough to believe the argument he’s put here.

**John:** So, I’m not going to stand up for a huge defense of him, but when I clicked through that headline I was like well that’s just absurd, that’s ridiculous. And then I remembered the fact that often the writer of an article does not choose his headline. And so it’s very possible that someone else put that headline on.

And so I’m trying to push past the headline to look at this as what was the point of the essay. And I think if you look at the point of the essay as Fitzgerald, he was really trying to be a screenwriter. He was really trying to do art in screenwriting, and failed at it. Brody’s point seems to be like, well, it was a foolish game anyway because you can’t look at screenwriting as being real writing.

**Craig:** I’ve got to push back here because in his essay, not the headline, in his essay he writes, “In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting is writing mistake.”

**John:** Yes. I think I said that. I think I got to the point that the headline may seem much more categorical than that one sentence does. He’s, yes, saying that Fitzgerald, this was this one situation. Without that Fitzgerald framing he has no point whatsoever. I’m stating this badly.

But where I think this still falls apart is that I think there’s an implicit idea that there is real writing, sort of like “real writing,” and the question is what is real writing. Obviously this article from The New Yorker isn’t real writing. Is a short story real writing? What is real writing.

And I think his definition of what writing is basically a novel of a certain size. And that’s absurd.

**Craig:** I guess. I can’t even tell. I mean, this is so sloppily done. If you’re going to drop a bomb like screenwriting isn’t writing, you’d better sit down and do your homework here. And you better be able to explain to me why Paddy Chayefsky didn’t write Network, and you better explain to me why The Godfather wasn’t written, and Groundhog Day wasn’t written. And, I don’t know, I mean, it’s just insane.

**John:** Well, later in the article he talks about the collaboration. And collaboration in a sense of like a sort of pejorative sense. Like, well, you were working with a director on the project, so you can’t really say that you wrote it, basically saying there is no sense of authorship.

And if collaboration is his definition of what makes something not writing, then the theater can’t be writing either. Shakespeare can’t be writing because he was writing for people. He was writing with people, with theater troupes in mind to try to make this thing happen.

**Craig:** And editors — book editors are omnipresent.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it makes it — basically if screenwriting isn’t writing, then almost nothing really could be writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, look, it is true that screenwriting is unique in the world of writing in that it is not meant to be read by the audience. It is rather meant to be translated into another art form. However —

**John:** Well, playwriting is the same thing, too.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. Playwriting is the same thing. You’re right. I’ve always said that doesn’t mean it’s not writing. It’s absolute — in fact, when you think about what is required to make a movie and you realize how much is leaning on the screenplay, it becomes almost super writing. It becomes über writing. And I’m not talking about quality here, because listen, if writing a novel of a certain length is writing to Richard Brody, there are good novels and bad novels, there are good movies and bad movies, good scripts, bad scripts. But, of course it’s writing.

I can’t even believe we’re talking about it. It’s dishonest, John. This is dishonest. He can’t believe this. It’s such a poorly written article that cites a bunch of things cherry picked from the first half of the 20th Century. It makes no sense. It’s sloppy. It’s sloppy. Richard Brody, you are sloppy.

**John:** If we were Richard Brody’s editor and we needed to rewrite this piece, I think I would start with a different headline, “Movies aren’t novels.”

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And I would focus on the fact that Fitzgerald had frustrations trying to adapt, you know, he had frustrations moving from a career as a novelist to a career as a screenwriter, a transition which would seem kind of natural, but it’s not natural because not only is the form different, but the profession which we talk about on the show, the profession is vastly different.

The profession is about pitching and meeting with people and incorporating ideas and notes and getting along with folks in ways that is so different from what a novelist has to do.

**Craig:** Yes. And maybe Richard Brody loves F. Scott Fitzgerald so much that he has to rationalize his failure, Fitzgerald’s failure, by blaming it on screenwriting itself. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. But listen, there are amazing novelists who can’t write screenplays at all. That’s why so many great novelists don’t adapt their own pieces into screenplays. And there’s so many incredible screenwriters who couldn’t write a novel to save their lives.

They are two different things. It is possible that one of the great novelists in history simply wasn’t very good at writing screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. It’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** But that doesn’t mean that screenwriting therefore needs to be indicted as non-writing. Oh my god, he cannot believe this.

**John:** Shakespeare, by the way, was a terrible novelist. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Shakespeare’s novels, but they’re awful. They’re so awful that they’ve been buried and no one has ever read them.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** Ah-ha! We have some questions in the mail bag, so let’s get to them. Michael writes in. “Now that I’ve been working for a few years on about a half dozen projects,” first off, Michael, congratulations. You’ve been working on a half dozen projects.

**Craig:** Yes, well done.

**John:** “I’ve experienced something strange about the process of making deals and starting to work on a project. Here is what happens. I sell a pitch or get hired for an open writing assignment and my lawyer negotiates with the studio’s business affairs about the headline deal points, how many steps, how much per step, etc. Everyone agrees, and then the studios and producers start moving forward. We have the commencement meeting and I’m expected to start writing. All good, except I don’t have a signed contract as my lawyer and studio’s business affairs will probably be working on the nitty gritty details for about three or four months.

“Multiple times I’ve finished a first draft before receiving a contract. Now, this has never really been a big problem because it all works out in the end, but is this normal? Despite my team’s assurances that everything is good, it’s hard not to have fears about everything falling apart. What do you guys do? Do you start writing when the deal is ‘closed,’ or when you actually sign a contract?”

**Craig:** Great question.

**John:** It’s a great question.

**Craig:** Excellent question.

**John:** Craig, what do you actually do in practice, because I’m curious.

**Craig:** In practice, I start — assuming that I have all the information I need, that there isn’t a particular meeting that I need to have to sort of figure out what we’re all going to do, when the deal is closed and my availability is —

**John:** That’s a phone call that says it’s closed.

**Craig:** Yeah. A phone call says it’s closed and my availability is appropriate, so I’m not finishing up another thing, I start working. There are two levels to contracts. The first is a deal memo, which often goes along with a certificate of authorship. And that is a way, if the lawyers feel like it’s going to take quite some time to work up a long form contract with all the little annoying details like how much you get paid per week if you’re in a medium sized city on location, they’ll come up with this certificate of authorship that basically says this is what you’re going to get paid.

And you’re basically saying, yes, I’m going to write this and, yes, you guys will have the copyright on what I write, because it’s a work for hire, yada yada.

And that oftentimes is enough to release commencement payment. However, there have been times where the contract has taken forever. Now, you should be paid, by the way. You don’t want to not be paid.

**John:** That’s a fundamental aspect.

**Craig:** Yes. The very first movie that I ever was hired to do, this is exactly what happened. So, we were told to start writing. We had a deal. The deal closed. And then — it was Disney at the time took months and months to get the paperwork done. And we called up our lawyer, my writing partner and I, and we said we’re done, what do we do? We haven’t been paid, and they haven’t finished this contract. And he said do not turn it in. That’s the most important thing. The day you turn it in you’ve lost your leverage to get the contract done.

So, he called them and said, they’re done, so, A, how embarrassing for you. B, they’re not turning it in until this is signed. And I think two days later it was done.

**John:** Yeah, so that standard advice is how I’ve worked through most of my situations. Really honesty, and I think the official WGA policy is that you’re not supposed to start writing until you have papers signed. But in practice that rarely happens.

**Craig:** That’s right. And papers signed — or you’ve been paid.

**John:** And that’s the thing. Being paid tends to be the proxy for having the contracts done because being paid means that the person employing you believes that the contracts will get done and believes that there will actually — the deal will close. And so there’s the danger, I guess, the possibility that you’re paid to start writing, you start writing, and the contract never closes and you’re in this weird limbo about do you have to get the money back, do you give them the script, sort of what is all that stuff. But, you still have the leverage of having the script and they still hopefully want the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard of a situation where the long form wasn’t worked out.

**John:** Yeah. I have heard of some things, and occasionally if you’re adapting anything you need to be very specific and very pointed about the underlying rights. Because I have been in situations where, oh, this is great, this is swell, and we’re going to do stuff. And then it became clear that the underlying rights were actually much more complicated.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, even if I started writing, there’s a possibility that they weren’t going to really close those underlying rights and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** They should have been paying me, but they did pay me, and then it became clear like I’m writing this thing that we may never be able to make.

**Craig:** Be able to make. And so the one area of the big document that you’re looking at, one important one to concentrate on is what they call conditions precedent. So, there are certain conditions that have to be met in order for the contract to be valid. Some of them are obvious like you have to be who you say you are and a citizen and a Writers Guild member and la-da-da.

Some of them are things specific to your deal. We have to have the rights to this project and there has to be creative approval before commencement from this particular person. And you need to know what those terms are so that you know where you stand.

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should really go through a whole contract, but the frustrating thing I often find — and this is worse when I started and it’s become a little bit better, at least for me, but they’ll ask you to have things notarized or have some sort of like certification that you are a US citizen, all this stuff, and it just feels like stalling.

I don’t believe they actually really need it. I think they’re basically just, you know, burning some time so they can not finish closing the deal.

**Craig:** There’s some quote somewhere that says something like never ascribe malice to that which can be explained by incompetence.

**John:** Yes. I get that.

**Craig:** I think that a lot of times it’s simply by the time it gets down to that stuff there’s a person in a cubicle who has a stack of these things and a job. And the job is get W2, I-9, C forms from these employees and they go and dutifully execute those orders.

**John:** Yeah. But that same person or the person in the cubicle next to them also has the checks that are going out, and some reason like those checks won’t go out until pointed phone calls are made and suddenly those checks start flowing.

**Craig:** I find that the departments of all corporations that involve incoming and out-coming checks are just the worst. [laughs] And you could say, yeah, because they don’t want to spend money. But they don’t even seem to want to take money either. That whole world, you know, as bad as screenwriting can be sometimes, I’m glad I don’t work in the incoming/out-going check business. I’m not cut out for it.

**John:** So, my very first job, How to Eat Fried Worms, was over at Universal. And for a time I was dating a guy who was an assistant at Universal. I’m not even sure who he worked for. But he said like, “Oh, your check crossed my desk today.” I’m like, oh, that is just really, really awkward that you know that I have a check for X thousand dollars crossing your desk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It just feels kind of odd. And I guess I had to buy dinner that night.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, I mean, your check crossed… — What does that even mean, by the way?

**John:** Well, it basically means that like his boss had to sign the check or something and so —

**Craig:** Oh, I see, I see. So, it’s on his desk, he sees it. Listen, people know everything. That’s the truth. Everything. They know everything.

**John:** Everything.

**Craig:** There’s no secrets.

**John:** There are no secrets. Thomas in London writes —

**Craig:** [British accent] Hello!

**John:** [British accent] Hello! “I’m an aspiring writer and I’ve been given a little bit of attention for a script on the Black List, the paid site, the year-end hit list. I received this email from someone a few days ago. The email is, ‘My name is blank, and I’ve been an executive producer in feature films in Los Angeles for the last eight years or so working at this studio and this production company. Anyway, I read your script, the title of the script, and I was curious if you had an agent in the states. To be totally transparent, I’m always looking for unrepresented talent to recommend to high level agents so they keep me at the top of their callback lists. Please let me know.'”

So, Thomas writes —

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

**John:** “As a total newbie to Hollywood dealings, I don’t know if this is normal. Do producers recommend un-repped writers to agents purely as a back-scratching tactic? I don’t see anything dodgy in what he’s offering and it’s very kind of him to want to help me, even if he does get something out of it. Craig, what do you think of this situation?”

**Craig:** I don’t think that is normal. I’m kind of stumped by this. I mean, first of all, it’s such a Willy Loman thing to say, you know. Like, “Listen, I’ve done a lot of things, I’m not doing anything now. But, oh golly gee, I’d love to take your script to somebody so that he might call me back one day about something else.” What?

I mean, yeah, I guess, look Thomas, I don’t see how it would hurt.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t see how it would hurt, either. I guess I’m trying to look at it from this producer’s point of view is that he’s trying to establish some sort of relationship with you vaguely, kind of establish with you. He doesn’t feel like he can get your movie made, but he thinks you’re a good writer, so this is a way of him saying that I think you’re a really good writer. He could say that and say like, hey, we should have a meeting next time you’re in town. That might be a good way to do it.

I guess he’s genuinely asking whether you have an agent because he doesn’t want to recommend the script to a certain agent unless that person is already represented because then he looks kind of foolish.

But I’ll say it’s weird that this guy is an executive producer because this kind of reaching out would happen much more at like a very junior level. And so basically says like, “Hey, I read your script. I want to give it to my boss. Do you have — tell me what the deal is with the script. Do you have an agent? Is there a manager? I want to know that it’s actually available.”

That kind of thing I think would happen all the time.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look. Everything is in past tense here, so I’m not sure if this individual still is working anywhere, but what I just found surprising was the transparency was completely unnecessary. I mean, you just say, “Listen, I really liked your script. I’m not really in the marketplace to buy or produce things, but I do know a ton of agents. If you don’t have an agent I’d be happy to pass this along to some of the ones that I know.”

**John:** Yeah. That would be a better way to phrase what he was doing right there.

**Craig:** “To keep me at the top of their callback lists?” What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** What?! That’s cray. That’s cray.

**John:** That’s cray.

**Craig:** Thomas, that means crazy.

**John:** Yeah. That may not have crossed the pond.

**Craig:** It hasn’t.

**John:** I will say in general that sense of like recommending a script to somebody else to prove that you have good taste is a thing that happens a lot and so you want to sort of establish like, listen, I found this person, this person has good — this is a good writer. I’m the person who brought them to you, therefore I have good taste. The reason that I got my first agent was because a friend had read my script, gave it to his boss who liked it, who recommended me to his agent.

So, that happens a lot. So, that can be a good thing. You should accept those offers when they come. It just — the nature of his email was a little bit weird.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know, I don’t see anything terribly awful about it. No.

**John:** And it’s why Franklin has the Black List site so that random people who can be helpful to you can read your script. So, I guess it’s a success in that way.

**Craig:** I think maybe just if you write back just be clear that you have no problem with this person forwarding your script to any agent that you think would be good. As long as you guys are clear that there is not — this doesn’t imply anything, any relationship, any professional relationship between you and this person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s all. You just don’t want to suddenly have this guy on your movie.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Julie writes,”There is a YA novel that I would like to adapt. I am an acquaintance of the author and contacted her to see if her book has been optioned. She expressed interest in my idea of writing a TV pilot, however, she contacted her literary agent and was told that the film rep has been pitching the book for TV the last two years. From that information it doesn’t seem the book has been optioned or has a screenwriter attached.

“How do I continue to express interest in the project to her and the film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany the pitch?”

So, in this situation it’s a little bit weird, like you’re saying it doesn’t appear that it’s been options. Like, either — it’s a binary condition. Either it’s been optioned or it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like no one has bit on this property yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, if you have a good take on it and you want to basically spec the TV pilot, that’s a thing you and your friend can figure out. It doesn’t have to be especially complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, listen. You say how do I continue to express interest in the project to her and her film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany their pitch — you just do it. You just say, “I’m interested in writing the pilot to accompany this pitch and you should option it to me.” And option it for a buck or whatever and give me a shot here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they can decide if they want to do that or not. But it doesn’t — I mean, I don’t know why they wouldn’t because nobody wants this thing as just in the form that they’ve been offering it.

**John:** Totally true.

All right, let’s get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is a movie that is out this weekend and this past weekend it debuted in Los Angeles and New York. It’s called Coherence. It’s written and directed by — I don’t even remember his name now — James Ward Byrkit, with a story by Byrkit and Alex Manugian, who is an actor in the movie as well. Another actor in the movie is our friend Lorene Scafaria who is awesome. She’s the writer and director of cool movies. And she’s an actress in this movie. She was also an actress in my movie The Nines.

And if you liked my movie, The Nines, you will probably like Coherence because it’s one of those mind trip movies like The Nines or like Primer where everything is not quite what it seems. And it gets very paranoid because of what’s really going on. So, I really enjoyed. I saw it at a screening about three weeks ago and highly recommend it to people who like that kind of movie.

**Craig:** Excellent. Is it available in theatres only, or…?

**John:** Right now it’s only in theaters. I’m sure that it will have a Video On Demand soon, so I think the rest of the world will see it soon, so I’ll give a follow up when it’s available for everyone else in the world.

**Craig:** I’ve been hearing a lot about it actually. A lot of buzz.

**John:** A lot of buzz.

**Craig:** A lot of buzz. My One Cool Thing is a website that I go to all the time to check on things and it’s called Quackwatch.

**John:** Ooh, I’m excited about Quackwatch. I hope I know what it is.

**Craig:** “Quackwatch.com, your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions operated by Stephen Barrett, M.D.”

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** They are also associated with the National Council Against Health Fraud and with Bioethics Watch. And they are spectacular. They — listen, you know me, I am a scientist. I am a medical scientist in my mind. And I really, really, really get crazy about the nonsense that’s put out there. Anti-intellectual nonsense. And Quackwatch is just incredible.

They’re kind of the Snopes for terrible —

**John:** I was going to bring up Snopes. That sounds right.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re the Snopes of bad health advice and they also — they will chase down individuals, they are fearless. They chase down websites. Laboratories that are notorious for fraudulent results that are telling you what you want to hear. Obviously they’ve always been on the forefront of the nonsense anti-vaccination.

Can I just say, if you’re anti-vaccine, just stop listening to the podcast.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We don’t want you. I don’t want you. I don’t know about John. I don’t want you. Unsubscribe. Get out of here. There’s now a Pertussis epidemic in California —

**John:** I know. I know. It’s ridiculous. A disease that should have been completely wiped out.

**Craig:** Wiped out. Wiped out. Well, because Pertussis is unique. See, there is no true herd immunity for Pertussis because we actually all carry it around. What the vaccine does is prevent us from getting symptoms. But we carry it around. And you can’t vaccinate newborn infants until they’re a certain age. So, in that time we’re just getting babies sick. And you know who’s getting them sick? Their parents.

**John:** Parents.

**Craig:** Their parents. Because they haven’t been vaccinated!

**John:** Or they were vaccinated as kids and the vaccine wears off and —

**Craig:** And it wears off and you need to get booster shots. Or they haven’t vaccinated their other children in the house. The whole idea is since there’s no herd immunity, the key with Pertussis is what they call cocooning because the baby mostly stays in the house for the first six months. That’s why they tell you, hey, don’t really take the baby to Chuck-E-Cheese when he’s three months old.

So, you’re in the house with people who have been vaccinated and therefore have much less viral load. And particularly aren’t coughing and spewing it out at you. But if your five-year-old snot-nosed unvaccinated kid is sneezing Pertussis at your three-month-old baby, oh, that is. The umbrage level right now. I got red alert. [laughs] I’m at red alert.

**John:** So, but it’s not just babies. That’s the thing. It’s clearly incredibly dangerous for babies, but like I have an adult friend, you know, a friend in his late forties who got Pertussis. I was like, well, he — who gets whooping cough these days?

He got it because the vaccine wears off and it’s out there in the world now. It’s becoming more common in the ways that should never have been more common. And he was knocked on his ass for weeks.

**Craig:** That’s right. And by the way, he gets knocked on his ass for weeks and that’s bad. But I’m angry at him for not getting a booster. And, on top of that, if he comes in contact with anybody who is immune-compromised, like somebody who has AIDS symptoms, or if he comes in contact with the elderly who have compromised immunity. He’s going to get them sick. And they could die. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, it’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** That’s maddening, but the things like measles which really were supposed to be done.

**Craig:** Ugh, measles.

**John:** That’s just, ugh.

**Craig:** It’s mindboggling. And, really, I want somebody to tweet angrily to me about this one. This ain’t She-Hulk. I will come out, [laughs], I will come out guns blazing. I will go monkey. I will go insane.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** God, this was a good show.

**John:** It was a good show. We got through a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** I umbraged out. It’s been a long time, and I went crazy I think three times. [laughs]

**John:** Totally reasonable choices every time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** If you would like to leave a comment for me or for Craig, you can reach us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. He is @clmazin. You can also leave a comment on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. That’s a perfect place to subscribe to Scriptnotes, but you can also leave a comment there. And when you leave a comment or subscribe it actually boosts us up in the ratings there and more people can find us, so that’s always lovely when that happens.

The most recent 20 episodes of Scriptnotes you will always find on iTunes. The back episodes, the whole back catalog the first 130 episodes you can find at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the iPhone at the iOS app and the Android app. Just search for Scriptnotes in the App Store and you will find that there. And through there you can get the back episodes, it’s called the premium subscription, that gives you all the back episodes, and every once and awhile we’ll have like a bonus episode that is sort of like Scriptnotes but not really Scriptnotes, things like interviews with people or stuff like that.

So, if you want to support us that way, you’re welcome to do that. It’s only $1.99 a month, so it’s not like vaccine money or anything like that.

**Craig:** No, no! And it doesn’t have Thimerosal in it. “Oh god! Ooh, I don’t understand science or chemistry. Argh! I believe in ghosts.”

**John:** If you have a longer question like some of the ones we read today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we try to get through as many questions as we can. It’s also a good place to write if you have follow up on things we talked about that is bigger than what we can talk about in a tweet, but tweets are sort of preferred because we can get to them right away.

And I think that is our show this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the end of what I think is the number one podcast for the non-writing art form of screenwriting.

**John:** Perfect. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

Links:

* Vulture with [Everything You Need to Know About Episode VIII Director, Rian Johnson](http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/who-is-new-star-wars-viii-director-rian-johnson.html)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 115: [Back to Austin with Rian Johnson and Kelly Marcel](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Storyboard Fountain](http://storyboardfountain.com/) from Charles Forman and Chris Smoak
* The [first](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoJggcl3M7M), [second](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8EVGl2KEgk), [third](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAqbZCOIK0) and [fourth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snoDfhUObhA) videos in Jim Meskimen’s How To Do Impressions series
* This is [Kano](http://kano.me/)
* [We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome](http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/) by Tasha Robinson
* [Sitcoms are being strangled by a lack of conflict](http://www.avclub.com/article/sitcoms-are-being-strangled-lack-conflict-204453) by Todd VanDerWerff
* [Screenwriting isn’t writing](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/screenwriting-isnt-writing.html) by Richard Brody
* Ken LaZebnik’s [The Red Light at the End of the Dock](http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=211039#{“page”:20,”issue_id”:211039}) from WrittenBy
* James Ward Byrkit’s [Coherence](http://coherencethemovie.com/) is in theaters now
* [Quackwatch](http://www.quackwatch.com/) is your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))