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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/to-chase-or-to-spec).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 147 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is the last episode of Scriptnotes we’re recording…

…before the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple will release all the brand new stuff on Monday but this is before Monday, so we don’t know what that stuff will be.

**Craig:** When you say they’re going to release all the brand new stuff, is this when they’re going to announce the next iPhone and such?

**John:** Well, they’re going to announce the new operating system, so for Macintosh and for iOS. And so it’s where all, you see, it’s sort of the future. And so our listeners who are listening to this on Tuesday or sometime after Tuesday, they are living in a future in which all these things are known. But we are living in a place of uncertainty. It’s like — it’s a quantum flux — flux is really the word but there’s — the decisions have not yet been made about what the future’s going to hold but they are made in the future that they’re living in.

**Craig:** You know what happened is the power of movies just happened there, because you saw Back to the Future.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And in your mind, flux capacitor is permanently lodged. It’s neurologically lodged right next to time travel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I mean quantum and quantum flux, I think they sort of feel like they belong together but I’m not sure they really do in a scientific way. But I do know that I envy the people in the future who know what the future’s going to be and, yet, I don’t want my time to move any faster.

**Craig:** It’s getting a little sad.

**John:** No, no, it’s getting exciting because exciting things are brewing. So, you know, it’s exciting for me as a developer because we are always so excited to see what the next things are going to be and what the next shiny bits of goodness are going to be. And so the very first Mac app we ever created was called Bronson Watermarker. I don’t know if you remember Bronson Watermarker.

**Craig:** I do, I do.

**John:** So Bronson’s really useful for watermarking scripts or any PDF that you need to send out. And it does a good job with that. But it looked just so awful and it actually sort of caused me pain every time I looked at it, so we decided a couple of weeks ago like you know what, we’re just going to dust it off and make a new version. The challenge is you would have to figure out like, well, do you make it look like the apps look right now or how you think the apps are going to look like after they announce all the shiny new goodness.

So we just kind of took a guess about where we thought the apps were going to look like. And so we just released it today, the new version today. And we think we got it right, but the people who are listening to this podcast will know whether we got it right or didn’t get it right because we made choices that could be completely wrong.

**Craig:** Let me get this straight. You guys a couple of weeks ago decided to significantly update your software.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And even though you only have 40 people working for you, [laughs], you managed to do it in two weeks?

**John:** We did manage to do it in a very, very —

**Craig:** That is right. You have 40 people working for you, right?

**John:** No, we actually — that’s not quite correct. If you count me, and you count Stuart who you can sort of only kind of half count because he’s really, you know —

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s Stuart. Stuart’s wonderful but he’s not a programmer.

**Craig:** No, he’s not a full human being, right.

**John:** Stuart’s a wonderful human being with many other qualities, but coding and design are not his forte.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s really a team of like two and a half, counting me as a half person that could do it in two weeks.

**Craig:** Two and a half — but that’s — what?

**John:** No, I know it does seem impossible. Granted, it is a simpler app then, you know, a mega-giant screenwriting app. But it does a lot of stuff and so it does sort of the watermarking stuff it always did, and does it better. But we also added in password protection, so we now create encrypted PDFs with passwords that are going to be individually generated and it’s stronger. A couple of weeks — not couple weeks — probably months ago we talked about the Tarantino script that leaked.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there are all these people who were saying like, “Oh, if they just like watermarked it, it would have been safe and protected.” It’s like, yeah, stuff can always get out.

**Craig:** Ish. Yeah.

**John:** Ish. It would have been a little bit more protected. I think a watermark is useful for saying like, “Hey, you know what? Don’t copy this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like a socially engineered protection. You don’t want to be blamed.

**John:** So for this new build we did a couple of things that are sort of also social engineering and a little bit more hidden engineering. So password protection is really obvious. So like if you’re sending someone a password protected PDF and separately sending them like this is the password to unlock it, you’re really sending a message like, hey, you know what, we really don’t want this going any place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We also had this thing called finger printing which is it creates a bunch of invisible watermarks on the file itself, so you don’t necessarily know that it’s invisibly watermarked but if that file gets out some place, other people can see that, ah, this was who the file actually came from.

**Craig:** That’s cool. You know, when you say developers, you know what I think of because I mean —

**John:** Who do you think of?

**Craig:** I’m not in the business, but whenever I hear the word developers, I think of —

**John:** Silicon Valley?

**Craig:** No. No, I mean, I love Silicon Valley. No, I think of Steve Ballmer.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers

**John:** Steve Ballmer is so excited.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! And you could hear — you could hear his heart, whatever is inside of his heart, congealing, and his cardiac arteries are struggling and he’s just — it seems like he’s killing himself by talking that much.

**John:** You know what? I think for Halloween you could go as Steve Ballmer and I could go as Tim Cook and we would be like the CEOs.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers! And the other thing that’s so great about Steve Ballmer is he’s got this really high voice. So, you know, because, I don’t know, when I think of the man that runs Microsoft, they go, “Developers, develop…”

You know, and he looks like a — he’s like a linebacker, you know. But he has this really high… — It’s funny, both he and Bill Gates have very I guess you’d call them tenory voices, you know.

**John:** Maybe that’s the quality of being a great Microsoft CEO is that you have to have that voice. The new guy, Satya, I’ve never actually heard him speak. I’ve seen photos of him. I have no idea what his speaking voice is.

**Craig:** I do. You ready for it?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

**John:** It’s going to be a great voice.

So last bit on Bronson, so we put that out in the world today, so it’s out and through next Sunday… — So if you are listening to this on Tuesday, through Sunday it’s half off, so it’s $15 rather than $30. And we cut the price on all of our apps just to celebrate that, so Highland is half off. Even Weekend Read, if you want to unlock the full library, Weekend Read is only $4.99 through Sunday, so enjoy that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a show today to talk about. We’re going to talk about whether to chase projects or whether you should spec scripts. And this was a listener question that we thought was great and applicable to many of our listeners and sort of at many stages of your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to talk about Edgar Wright’s style of comedy and a video that says that more directors should take lessons from Edgar Wright.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And we will talk about Shawshank Redemption which is 20 years old and was not a success in its time and it has done really, really well for itself in the 20 years that have passed since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s do it.

**Craig:** All right. If you would —

**John:** First, we have a bit of follow up because several episodes ago we did The Angeles Crest Fiasco where you and me and Kelly Marcel played Fiasco. And we played a specific scenario in Fiasco called Hollywood Wives and I know that we mentioned the guy’s name who created it but somehow it got dropped out of the edit. So Hollywood Wives was created by a guy named Jobe Bittman and he did a great job, so.

**Craig:** Thank you, Jobe. Yeah, we did for sure because I remember when we were there we had a very brief sidebar about how to pronounce Jobe because it could be Hobe or Hobé or Jobé, but we ended up on Jobe which I hope is correct.

**John:** Yeah, we hope it’s all correct.

**Craig:** Yeah. So thank you, Jobe, and we do apologize for the initial omission.

**John:** Our question today comes from Jason. And we actually know Jason because I talked to him at the live Scriptnotes we did. So I remember who he was and in the email he singled out like, “I’m the guy you talked to.” It’s like, I remember that guy.

Here’s what he writes. “I’m a writer with an agent trying to get my first assignment. I’ve been on almost 50 general meetings. And the advice from productions and execs seems to be the same: spend time to write more specs because they usually find buyers and chasing assignments never works out. But my agents and managers think the chase is good and puts me in rooms with people who remember me. But so far, I’ve lost a bunch and aside from the feeling of defeat, I’m actually more upset about the amount of time I spend coming up with fixes or building worlds for projects that don’t choose me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “The last one was over a month back and forth to the pitch and the same idea three times. And in between I was tweaking my pitch and world base stuff, each person’s notes to have it ready for the next meeting. Now I’m faced with a conundrum of the summer. I’m house-sitting for the next three months with no rent to pay and a small stipend, so I quit my job just to write fulltime. I can get my job back if I need it back.

“I have the whole summer before me and I want to write a spec but several assignments have been put in front of me and my team wants me to go and try to snag them. I don’t want to waste this golden opportunity for writing, but come September I would like to not have to go back to my day job. If you were starting out in a similar situation would you go all in on yourself or chase some ideas that aren’t bad but you’d have to beat out seven to 10 writers possibly to get the gig?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What I love so much about this question is like it so encapsulates the experience of being a starting writer presently in Hollywood. And honestly, kind of at every stage in your career you kind of face the same questions, whether you should try to land that job or you should just write your own thing.

**Craig:** Right. And of course, things have changed somewhat over time. There was a time when chasing down jobs as a strategy, putting aside whether it was creatively fulfilling for you as a human being but just as an economic strategy of somebody trying to pay bills, it wasn’t a bad strategy. They were making a lot of movies and they would have to hire a lot of people. They were making a lot of movies and their ratio of movies developed to movies made was greater. So overall, it just seemed like there was a — there were many, many more jobs in features.

Today, no longer the case. They really, as an industry you can see them moving towards this theoretical one-to-one development ratio where they only pay for scripts for projects that they want to make and they make many, many fewer movies.

So it’s absolutely true that when you’re chasing those movies, you are in fact competing with many, many other writers. Many of those other writers are more experienced. Many of those other writers will be more comforting as hires to the people who are spending all the money. And most disturbingly, because of that pressure, because there’s so much more leverage on the employer side now, they will make you jump through endless hoops. It becomes Kafkaesque really quickly.

And it does require a lot of work. I mean, listen, they, on their side, think that screenwriting is, you know, when you start typing Fade In and putting things in a format. And we, on our side, know that so much of the work, perhaps the most important work is what happens before that. But that’s the stuff that they’re sort of expecting from you speculatively just to see if maybe they’ll hire you, maybe.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing we should stress is that a change from when you and I first started to what we see happening now is it’s not just that like we’re going to develop, you know, these movies — the ones we’re going to produce. It’s like a lot of them won’t, they’ll never hire anybody, o they’ll never actually proceed. And so I think so many more movies like never actually pick any of the writers. Like seven people will go in on a pitch, they’ll pick the best of the pitches to go up to the highest level and then they’ll say, “Nah.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “We don’t really want to do that.” And so then all seven of those writers have wasted a month trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. People lose jobs to no one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That we, the writer we prefer is no writer. And, you know, what’s going on also is that just as we have pressure on us now because of the way that the world has changed in terms of film production, so too is there great pressure on the executives. They now are almost acting entrepreneurially because they need to justify their jobs. So what’s happening is back in the day when you and I started, some executive picks up the phone and says, “I have this thing and we love it internally and we want to make it and we want to hear from a writer.” You would at least know it was real. Not anymore.

Now they call sometimes and like, “There’s something and I love it and I know that, you know, whoever the boss on high is is really into it and I want to bring this pitch.” They’re actually trying to make something happen which may not happen with anyone.

**John:** It may not happen with anyone. So Jason is talking about the very first wrung, when you’re trying to land that first job. But from my personal experience, I can talk about two projects in the last six months that a similar kind of thing has happened. So both of them I think I obliquely referred to in an earlier podcast where we talked about like well what should I do next.

And one of them was an adaptation of a book. And it was a YA book that was a hot sale, a studio bought it, they were looking for a take and so I went in and I met with them and I pitched a take to the producer. And I met him and pitched the take to the studio boss and that went really well. And so as we started to make a deal things just slowed down and things slowed down. And sometimes it’s like, well, maybe I’m just too expensive for this property and this book and this whole world and that can happen.

But really what had overall happened is like the book came out and it wasn’t a huge bestseller. It wasn’t The Hunger Games. It was more just like a mid tier. And so suddenly they were looking at the book and it’s just like this book, this plot, this story. And while there was something promising there, it wasn’t — it had no extra juice to it. And basically, I think they hired nobody. And that’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** They just kill it. Practically speaking, it does seem to me where we’re both going with this is that this — Jason should in fact spend his summer writing something original.

**John:** I think he should.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And probably in retrospect, should I have spent that time writing something original? It’s very easy to say that hindsight. The other example I wanted to give was I think I’d also kind of obliquely referred to this in the podcast was there was a property that was based on a piece of IP that was very linked to a studio. So no one else could do it.

And the real question was like, is there a movie here? And that’s a really dangerous thing because when you go in on a property that is exclusively at one place either because they own the book or because it’s already part of the studio general package, you’re really competing against nothing. You’re competing against the alternate choice of just like let’s just do nothing.

And so this is the process over like many, many months of like this meeting and that meeting and this meeting and that meeting, going up through the ranks to see whether everyone sort of agreed like this is a way to approach the movie. And so when I pitched it they all said like, “That’s a really good pitch. I totally get what that movie is, it’s not what we see ourselves doing with this property.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was a lot of time wasted.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s going to happen. So from a beginning writer’s perspective, Jason’s representatives are saying, you know what, it’s good for you to be in those rooms, it’s good for you to have exposure to those executives, to know who they are, know who you like, know, you know, sort of all that stuff. To some degree, that’s true. But after, you know, 50 projects, you’re wasting a lot of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s come at this from a couple of angles. The first angle is from the agency side. Why are his representatives advising him this way? Because it’s what makes sense for them. As an agent, the amount of work that is required to put your client in a room with somebody and who’s willing to meet with a certain tier of writer is de minimis. And you are also aware that those jobs are jobs. I mean, listen, maybe it turns out that they’re not really jobs, whatever. But the point is they’re there. Someone’s going to get hired. That’s at least your theory, maybe it’ll be my guy.

And while he goes through, even if he’s not hired on this particular one, they’ll know him, they’ll like him, he’ll impress them and they will think of him. And in this way, it’s a very simple way for them to have their client do the work for them. All they have to do is pick up a phone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On the flip side, specs are a lot of work for agents. You write a spec, you give it to your agents and you say, “I want to sell this.” The first thing that has to happen is they need to agree, right? And they don’t — not all of them, but many of them frankly don’t really have very strong or reliable opinions anyway. So if they’re going to go out with a spec, they feel like, well, first I have to find other people that like this. Can I find an actor that goes along with it? Can I find a director that goes along with it? So that’s work. And it also requires them to go out on a limb which they hate.

**John:** They do. It’s requiring them to take a risk saying that I like this thing, I believe in this thing and then if they aren’t people to sell it you’re going to blame them to some degree for not selling it versus you not getting the job, yeah, you didn’t get the job.

**Craig:** Everybody will blame them even if they never — even if it’s stillborn. You hand them a script and they say, okay, and you — and well, we should go to the studio and give them a movie here. Let’s give them a director, an actor, and a script. Fine, well, this is the actor I want for sure. And they work up the courage to go to that agent down the hallway and he says, “Why would you give me this crap? I hate you. You’ve lost credibility with me.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s all — that’s how they see the world. It’s just a lot of risk. Doing nothing, no risk; doing something, lots of risks. Specs require them to do a lot of somethings. And so this is not — I don’t mean to imply that they are being aggressively manipulative and self-serving. I think they’re just simply being human.

**John:** They’re being rational to some degree. They’re taking the path that is least likely to end up in tears for them.

**Craig:** They’re being rational.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, yeah, what they are doing is they’re following a risk minimization strategy. The problem is that risk minimization strategies aren’t very useful for new writers. In fact, the opposite is useful. Risk maximization strategies seem to be what works for a new writer because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They’ve got to make big rolls of the dice. Because if you really want to get to the kind of land of milk and honey where somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, would you be interested in getting paid a lot of money to work on this thing,” and all you’ll have to do is basically say, yes, I would be interested in that because here’s what I would do with it. And after that 20 minutes, they go, “Great, here’s $2 million.”

You’re never getting there unless you can establish a beachhead as a writer with an original voice who can take a script from start to finish, guide the readers through it well and write something that could be a movie.

**John:** Write something that actually was a movie. I think that’s a crucial thing too is that you could have written the most brilliant screenplays that mankind has ever known, but if they’ve not been produced as movies and turned out as really, really good movies, you’re not going to get to that mythical land of milk and honey that Craig just described where they pick up the phone and just sort of offer you the job.

**Craig:** I don’t like milk or honey, by the way.

**John:** Really? Both of those things?

**Craig:** I don’t like — well, I’m Jewish —

**John:** You don’t like any substance that like comes out of a creature.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s excreted from insects or mammals. I mean I don’t — I’m Jewish and Jewish people are notoriously poor at processing milk. I’m definitely in that subset of Jewish people. I’m not — I don’t do well with milk. And honey, I don’t know, it’s like — it’s too much. It’s just too much.

**John:** It can be overwhelming at times, yeah.

**Craig:** You know, like if somebody said, “Congratulations, you made it to the land of milk and honey,” I’d be like, “Oh…”

**John:** Oh, but come on, you get a good buttery buttermilk biscuit and a little honey on top of it, that’s a delicious thing.

**Craig:** You are so Goyishe it’s unbelievable.

**John:** Or if you ended up at Casa Bonita in Denver and you had the sopapillas and you poured the honey in there, come on, it’d be great. You raise your little flag again and again for more sopapillas.

**Craig:** Yucky.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t like it.

**John:** You don’t like it.

**Craig:** No. I just want — can I just have dry toast? I just want dry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, that’s — I think that Jason should spend his summer writing something original. You’re not going to lose out on some wonderful opportunity by taking a break for two months from the water tour of Los Angeles. Go ahead. Take the two months. Write something wonderful because I’ll tell you, when you do resume your water bottle tour of Los Angeles, you’re going to have something to talk about because they love to hear, “Oh, you have a script? Oh, well now there’s an action item. We can do something. We can read a thing.”

**John:** You can read a thing. Here’s the other reasons I wanted to talk through Jason’s decision process. So the reason why you take those general meetings is to meet people but I think it’s also very good practice of figuring out like how would I write all these different kinds of movies. And so that sort of quick scramble of like, you know, figuring out like how to do this movie or that movie or this movie or that movie, I did a lot of that.

And that was incredibly helpful for me thinking about story overall. So someone would said like, “Hey, would you want to do a Highlander movie?” And so I’m like, well, how would I do a Highlander movie? And so it’s a project I never got but it was really valuable learning experience.

Here’s why you only do so many of them. It’s because you could spend six months doing that and never have actually written something new. And suddenly then you’re not actually a writer, you’re a person who pitches things. And that’s not what you came out to Hollywood to do. Writing something give you something new, it gives you leverage with your agent to some degree. They’re going to try to sell this.

But also if you’re not really all that happy with your agent, that new script is a great way to transition to another agent or to another manager. That’s what I did as I left my first off agent and came over to my current agent was I had written a new script. I really doubted that the first guy could sell it and so I wanted to pick a new agent who I thought was going to be the right person to sell the script and this was a great entrée to introduce myself as, you know, a writer who can write this kind of script. That was Go, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listen, there’s no question that the screenplays are the commodity, not the people. And you need to have some work that they can review. And if it’s not a prior job, it needs to be a screenplay. Fresh material keeps you fresh. I think you’re making a great point that the practice that you get from very quickly breaking down something and coming up with a story is excellent experience for the new writer.

Like you, I did that deal. You know, I can remember my former writing partner and I spending a couple of weeks coming up with a whole scene-by-scene story to rewrite a project that was a modern day Noah’s Ark.

It was like a comedy where — you know, and god, there was probably a thousand of those, you know. And it just doesn’t work, you know, it just doesn’t happen. But you do learn from those. There is a point, however, where you have to stop batting practice and actually go out onto the field and face live pitching. And that’s the deal. Write your spec . I mean, I started with an original, with something that was original and you started with something that was original. Most people start with something that’s original. I don’t know of anybody that didn’t. I mean, I don’t know how that would happen in any other way.

So in a weird way, if you haven’t sold anything original yet, that’s what you got to do first. The Black List is not a substitute for selling a screenplay.

**John:** So to clarify, I did actually get hired to write something before I had sold something. So I wrote a script that got me an agent and I was able to actually land a paid job without ever having —

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Sold something before that. But I would say that’s unusual and it was one of the things where I think I just ultimately got lucky. I was the right person to hire for that job and it was also in a day when it was like a five-step deal and they paid me through all five steps which is just crazy now, but that’s how it used to be back in the day.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, and also to be fair, I didn’t actually — the first thing that my writing partner and I sold was original but it was a pitch. So we hadn’t actually sold a script ourselves either. But my point being we sold something, you know.

**John:** You sold something, yeah.

**Craig:** One way or another, it seems to me that Jason could certainly do much worse than spending a couple of months this summer writing some fresh interesting material so that when his current agent or his new agent calls and says, “Listen, we’ve got a Black List writer, he’s got his new thing, you got to jump on this.” It’s a selling tool. And sometimes we as writers have to, in a weird way, excite our agents. It doesn’t seem like we should have to do that, but sometimes we do.

**John:** Sometimes you do. Great.

Let’s move on to our next thing which was this video that Tony Zhou did about Edgar Wright and Edgar Wright’s directing choices for comedy and Zhou’s call to action for comedy directors to take lessons from Edgar Wright and use some of his filmmaking techniques in their own movies. Basically, really it was, you know, it was a celebration of Edgar Wright but in some ways at the same time kind of a condemnation of what he perceives as kind of laziness or lack of filmmaking finesse among comedy directors. And I have a feeling this provoked a little umbrage out of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** It provoked quite a bit of umbrage. And it bummed me out more than anything but I think the umbrage was certainly there but the stronger note in the bouquet of my reaction was sadness because this — it was so unnecessary to have been done this way. I think that Edgar Wright is extraordinarily good at what he does. And I loved how much passion this fan had for the work and how carefully he had studied it and how careful he had placed it in the context of other movies that he really liked. And particularly zeroing in on something that Edgar Wright is known for which is, I guess I would call it a visual bravura in the storytelling that he does.

And his movies are comedies. They aren’t traditional comedies. Frankly, even all parts of Edgar Wright’s movies are distinct. They are not genre films. He’s one of those guys that’s sort of his own genre which you will find here and there across many different kinds of movies. And so I love that and I thought how wonderful. And then it all succumbed to that thing, that disease of needing to justify and define that which we love by placing it in the context of that which we do not love.

And in doing so, I think, frankly, the creator of the video was just wrong. He was just wrong on so many levels.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about Edgar Wright’s style and sort of what makes it so successful for an Edgar Wright film. And is that some of the eight things that Tony Zhou highlights are things entering frames in funny ways, people leaving the frame in funny ways. There and back again where a character walks over something and then walks back to where he was after having encountered something. Matching scene transitions. The perfectly timed sound effect. Action synchronized to music. Super dramatic lighting cues. And then sort of two gimmes of like falling fences and fake guns, or really like repetitions of visual gags.

What I noticed in all of the things he’s clarifying is that they’re all very planned, very meticulously chosen beats that aren’t just sort of discovered. They were very much like you can sort of feel the storyboards in them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And all of Edgar Wright’s movies really exist in a kind constructed universe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Sort of like how I feel about Wes Anderson movies. And Wes Anderson movies kind of used to drive me crazy and then just — I crossed over into a place of just loving them. But they’re not natural, normal worlds. And I was frustrated that he was — Tony Zhou was comparing the Edgar Wright movies to movies that aren’t supposed to take place in a special artificial, unnatural world. They’re supposed to take place in a really real world. And real worlds don’t necessarily have this kind of visual flair for really good reasons.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think Tony understands how the music works. I mean, listen, there’s nothing particularly visually arresting or again, I’ll use that word bravura in Groundhog Day, which we went into at length on the podcast a few weeks ago. But Groundhog Day is brilliant. Most of the filming in Groundhog Day is consistent with Harold Ramis’s oeuvre and that is shot extraordinarily traditionally with extraordinarily traditional coverage and a naturalistic camera that isn’t structuring reality-bending moments because tonally that’s not the kind of story he’s telling.

Why would we beat that up? Similarly, he makes strange straw dummy comparisons. At one point, he goes after Todd Phillips. And, you know, granted, I’ve worked with Todd Phillips, I’ve made movies with him, so naturally I’m a little biased here. But I thought that was really off base because Todd actually is and has been visually arresting at times when he chooses to in his movies, when he feels it’s tonally appropriate. In The Hangover there’s that great car crash moment where that’s been aped by many other directors since, by the way I’ve seen, where they’re talking in a car and we see headlights in the distance and they keep coming and all it’s one take and the car crashes, it t-bones them, all in one shot.

And it’s really creative and not at all the way you normally would shoot something like that. There are many other examples I could cite, but it seems like he just ignored those and instead just cherry-picked a moment where people were just talking, which by the way, works great. He picks a moment in Old School that sets up a joke that works really well. And then he also does something else that I don’t understand. He compares some things that Edgar Wright does to other visual jokes that he does like and appreciate but they’re very different kinds of moments.

For instance, one of my favorite visual jokes he cites in this compilation which is the soldier running in Holy Grail

**John:** The Holy Grail. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is great. And it’s a wonderful visual trick and it worked and it’s hysterical. But then he shows this bit with the pouring of the beers and the pouring of the water which he’s citing as visual comedy. And frankly, I just don’t think that that’s funny.

**John:** I don’t think that’s funny either.

**Craig:** I think it’s really interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s visually engaging and fascinating, but I don’t think it’s funny. Similarly, the transition of a policeman going from one town to another, which I have to say, kind of was cribbed from Guy Ritchie who did it I think in Snatch with Dennis Farina. But regardless, that’s a really cool moment. That’s not funny. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. I just don’t think this guy gets the — how the music of this all works.

**John:** It’s also your relationship with your audience. And if you’re in an Edgar Wright film, and again, none of this is like criticisms of Edgar Wright’s films. They’re very specifically and very planned.

**Craig:** They’re awesome. They’re great.

**John:** They’re great. And they’re very well planned for being in that universe. And they establish an expectation that you’re going to have these kind of quick cuts at times. You’re going to have this again visual bravura that’s not part of your universe.

If you try to apply that same kind of speed and time and tempo to something like The Heat, you’re not going to have a good outcome.

**Craig:** It will break it. It will just break it.

**John:** It will break it because you have to believe that those two women are existing in a moment together and that this is the fatigue. And the most alarming thing in the frame has to be Melissa McCarthy’s actions, not how you’re cutting.

**Craig:** Well look, I engage with the characters in Edgar Wright’s movies. I believe that they’re real. But I also understand that the entire thing is pushed in an interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s part of his style. It’s part of his deal. That’s why I don’t need every movie to be a Tarantino film. I don’t need every comedy to be an Edgar Wright movie. I’m happy that Edgar Wright makes Edgar Wright movies. I just found that there was this bizarre chauvinism that other movies were lesser because they weren’t doing this.

And I have to say, maybe I’m totally off base, but if Edgar Wright were with us right now I have to presume he would agree, because I’ve always found that the people who make comedies and who have been bloodied in the war of making comedies are so much more charitable and understanding of their fellow filmmakers then is often the case with some of the more — some of the more attentive viewers out there.

**John:** Yeah. So a few things I do want to give him credit for which is I think it’s reasonable to have a call to action, really, a call to awareness for all filmmakers, comedy and otherwise, to certainly think about making some of these choices, and think about like, can you service a joke better by moving the camera in certain ways.

Can you service a joke better by holding in a shot and not trying to, you know —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Revert to standard coverage. These are all really laudable things. And I think if this video had been framed around the idea of like, look at some of the great things that Edgar Wright does, let’s point some of these things out —

**Craig:** I would be so much happier, yeah.

**John:** Other filmmakers can learn from this thing rather than sort of, you know, crapping on other people who don’t —

**Craig:** Calling people out… — Yeah, like, I love Bridesmaids. I understand that Bridesmaids isn’t visually arresting. I understand that it absolutely broke zero ground visually or cinematically if you want to use the term. But I also loved it. It made me laugh and I cared about the people in it. And I have to think that some of these things would have broken that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now where I think Edgar Wright has terrific lessons for all comedy filmmakers is in his complete rejection of the very overdone visual tropes to move people around. There is, no question, there is a certain malaise in a lot of comedy filmmaking where everybody goes, “Nobody is here for that stuff. Let’s just get to the parts that are funny.” And he’s right about that.

One thing that’s interesting is that in studio comedy making, and I’ve often come up against this distressingly: the budgeting process is such that it becomes very hard actually to do the kind of things that Edgar Wright does. His movies are not inexpensive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we were making Identity Thief, at one point there is a car chase and, you know, we were down to like how can we make a car chase when they’ll only give us two cars?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Suddenly, you run into these budget issues where believe me, you have all these interesting ideas for how to make these transitions and then they say, “Nope, it’s the second unit and they’re going to be doing the thing with the car goes from left to right and we’ll just play music.” And you get jammed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Part of the situation in studio comedies is that they will budget the movie. They’ll just say, look, here’s what we’re going to give you for this comedy. Most of the money will go to comic stars who deservedly get a bunch of money. So then what you have left is enough money to make a kind of a dingy looking movie. [laughs]

I see this happening all the time where, you know, Hot Fuzz, that’s not an inexpensive movie. I think it was into the $40 million in terms of budget. And because of the way he works with his collaborators, I suspect that they — it wasn’t a case where they have to pay, you know, each actor $5 or $6 million, but rather everyone is kind of working together and sharing in the pool, but I’m just guessing.

Similarly, Scott Pilgrim was $70 or $80, possibly $100 million.

**John:** It was a pricy movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, Bridesmaids I’m guessing was about $25 million.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So when you look at the shots that he is doing, for instance, the montage of Simon Pegg moving from one city to another, that’s many, many multiple shots and it’s set-ups, and it’s time, and it’s money.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I would love comedies to get that money.

**John:** But they’re not getting that money right now. The last thing I’ll say is that he does highlight a little bit like, you know, oh, Pixar will still do these things. And yes, animated films will do sometimes much more visually sophisticated things because they have that time and it’s honestly generally no more expensive to build that as a really fascinating shot because you’re building everything from scratch anyway.

So those visual gags are very natural there because you’re not trying to — again, it’s completely constructed reality. So within that constructed reality, the choices you’re making for angles and shots and how you’re telling your joke, you can do whatever you want and you have so much time to think of what those shots are.

So if you don’t like what that one was, throw it out and put a new thing in there and you’ve got that time.

**Craig:** And I’ll just say in conclusion, I could go through a bunch of movies that this guy is implying are visually inept or mediocre and find moments that comedically are entirely about how the shot was composed and how the editing was composed.

I learned a lot, you know, David Zucker made wonderful comedies and none of them were visually stunning, on purpose by the way. And yet, there was an enormous attention to detail when he made those movies.

One thing, one wonderful lesson that he taught me early on was, in physical comedy, if you can see the result of an action within the same continuous cut as the cause of it, it will be funnier. There was a lot of attention to these things. And camera placement and how to shoot things was a constant discussion.

But it was not visually shocking or bravura or in your face or innovative. It was rather just quietly constructed. And I think that’s okay. I guess what I want to say to the guy making this is you should love Edgar Wright movies. They’re wonderful. Please don’t beat up other movies because they’re not doing that. That’s just unnecessary. And frankly, it’s just misguided.

**John:** I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about these concepts in relation to actually writing the words on the page, because a lot of what he’s describing here you would never see manifest on the page. It becomes very annoying to read about sort of like, you know, a spoon enters frame from off-screen.

Sometimes you can do that and sometimes it works. But it’s very hard to picture what that’s going to be. So like trying to sell a visual joke on the page can be really, really tough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes you can do it, though. And techniques for like the there and back again. It can be very hard to describe like in a continuous shot the guy goes, you know, says something, goes to the window, look out the window, comes back. But sometimes the way to do that is to sort stay in the dialogue block and like put all that action in parenthetical, which is sort of cheating. But sometimes it’s worth cheating so people can actually follow what it is that’s funny that you’re doing there.

**Craig:** Well there’s — I don’t know how those guys go through their process. But if I had to guess, there’s a certain kind of casual, visual experience that I suspect is either figured out in the storyboarding process or on the day when they’re staging the scene in the morning and figuring how they’re going to do it. And they find these moments like, you know what, let’s follow with him and then let’s follow back.

But then there are other things that must be scripted. Simon Pegg’s traveling montage has to be scripted because it has to be shot. The pouring of the beers in the water must be scripted. There’s no way that they just decided on the day to do that. Or if they got it into storyboards, it probably then had to be written into the script so that you understood, okay, we’re going to need some macro shots and we have to shoot through the bottom of the glass. There’s a whole — there’s 10 meetings about that shot, so that it comes off, you know.

**John:** In the script I wouldn’t be surprised if it says, you know, in uppercase “SERIES OF SHOTS,” And either bullets them out or like in that action block talks about what happens in there and that they did have to have three production meetings to talk through what was going to be in that, what the steins looked like. And is going to be shot as a primary unit or is that something that is secondary unit? Are you going to pre-shoot that, is it all, is it happening weeks after you’ve wrapped your thing to get those extra shots? That is how it’s going to go.

So you don’t know what that’s going to look like. To the idea of storyboarding stuff, The Coen Brothers are very — who often have very visually sophisticated movies. Apparently, when you show up on the day of shooting, they’ve present your sides and they show like the storyboards, like they’ve storyboarded everything so you know like this is where — this is what the shots are going to be for the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So everyone can actually really have a plan for this is how it is. So you look at a movie like Raising Arizona that they do, the visual guides in there were really planned. They knew they were going to be using those wide lenses and how stuff was going to be going through the frame. But you wouldn’t necessarily see that in the script.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, if they’re presenting the storyboards to the actors on the day, it means that they haven’t seen those things because they do have the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those things are — I mean you can’t — basically, you shouldn’t put anything in a script that as you’re doing it makes you think, oh, I’m just ruining it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one’s going to think that this is any good if I spell it all out in the script. I have to again give Edgar Wright a lot of credit for having the patience and the faith to carry through on these plans because, you know, what happens is you do end up in your seventh meeting about how to shoot the glasses and the close-ups and everyone’s asking these questions. And inevitably people start to think, why am I doing this? This is an enormous —

**John:** Do you really need this? It’s not that special.

**Craig:** I’ll give you an example from something I did with Todd Phillips which I thought was very visually interesting. In the second Hangover movie, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, has a flashback where he remembers some of the incidents of the night before but in a kind of a dreamy state. But in Alan’s point of view he remembers himself and his friends as 12-year-old boys because that’s how he sees the world.

**John:** Which I love that moment in the movie. And I remember commenting, I think even on the podcast, like that must have been so hard to shoot —

**Craig:** It was so hard.

**John:** And convince people to shoot that.

**Craig:** It was so hard because on paper, it takes up a half a page and all you say is, “Alan and Stu and Phil as 12-year-olds.” But then you realize, oh my god, we’ve got to cast 12 year olds to be like them. We’ve got to put them in these clothes, and then we have to shoot a second movie, because all the stuff where these guys have been, we’ve got to then redo, so we have a riot scene where Ed Helms is freaking out and there’s this enormous riot and police and mall to have cocktails, then we have to shoot it again with children.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have to do it over and over and over. But, you know, it kind of came together but many, many times Todd and I looked and each other and thought why would we have ever done this. Just like, you know, very famously Parker and Stone decided early on that they were going to make Team America with marionettes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And about, you know, a month in of misery they just thought, we have killed ourselves on this, killed ourselves. But, you know —

**John:** They already committed.

**Craig:** They already committed. And frankly, in the end it’s not the audience’s problem. If you can provide them with something that is visually fascinating, it doesn’t matter how long it took, it doesn’t matter how meetings you went through. It’s really cool.

So I think — look, I think he’s great and I think that what he does is spectacular. I would be shocked if Edgar Wright were ever to stop and think, boy, I wish all comedies look like my comedies. I just think he would say, oh my god, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would I want that? I like my comedies looking like my comedies.

**John:** You want to be distinctive. That’s absolutely true. And same with Tarantino and same with Wes Anderson. I mean, the fact that you can parody a Tarantino film or you can parody a Wes Anderson film means that they’re doing something very special. They have a unique voice and unique eye and celebrate that rather than sort of, you know, crapping on everybody else.

**Craig:** Yeah and at least acknowledge that while there are lazy tropey moves in comedies that I would love to see eliminated, budgetary concerns aside, there are also incredible classic, great, great comedies that invent not one new bit of cinematic language.

**John:** Yeah, it is true…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last topic today is The Shawshank Redemption which is rated on IMDb as the best movie ever made. But a lot of people could agree with that. There’s an article that Russell Adams wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption and I had to remember sort of like what it was up against, but it came out the same year Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump.

So in its time, Shawshank Redemption wasn’t a big success. It only made $16 million in the box office. It got seven Oscar nominations, but no Oscars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now it’s kind of a classic. So this article is specifically talking about how, you know, the residual value of a well regarded movie and literally the residuals that happen. So, you know, minor actors in there are still getting residuals and they’re still getting like a tremendous amount of residuals because that thing airs all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie aired 151 hours of air time for Shawshank Redemption just in 2013.

**Craig:** Did I ever tell you the story of sitting in a car with Bob Weinstein and he was talking about the movie business and he said to me, “Hey, Mazin, you want to know how to make money in the movie business?”

**John:** And you said, no sir. I don’t want to know. I want to make art.

**Craig:** I said, let me out of this car. I said, yeah, sure, how do you make money in the movie business? He said, “It’s really simple, man. Have a library of movies and don’t make movies.” And he’s right, I mean —

**John:** He is right.

**Craig:** That’s, the library costs nothing to maintain and generates profit forever whereas making movies – oh, here they come, here come the alarms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Bob Weinstein.

**John:** It was your terrible impersonation.

**Craig:** Oh man, it’s actually dead on.

So yeah, a library sits there and unlike most warehouse products, it costs nothing to keep and yet it generates money forever. And a movie like Shawshank Redemption which crosses into that I’m going to say a land of potato chips and ice cream, a movie like that doesn’t just generate a lot of money, it generates a massive amount of money forever and increases the value of other movies, because if you want to show Shawshank Redemption, you can’t get it unless you also agree to take a bunch of other movies that maybe aren’t, you know, quite as exciting to the audience.

**John:** And that’s something I don’t think people appreciate is that when you see a movie on television, you think like, oh, okay, so ABC bought the rights to that movie so they could show it. And yes, they bought the rights to that, but they had to buy a package.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so what the studio did is they package together this one movie that everybody really wanted along with a bunch of movies that you really didn’t want. And they would only sell them as the package. And the frustration as a filmmaker is the studio wants to divide that money equally between those films just because and pretend that it’s not like the one movie is actually the one that’s worth doing, so they’ll spread it on all the different movies that they’re selling. And that is incredibly frustrating.

And sometimes it’s the subject of lawsuits. And I don’t know that it ever actually went to trial, but the first Charlie’s Angels was a big success. And we ended up selling it to I think ABC, selling rights to ABC, but it was packaged with these other movies.

And I remember producers being not especially happy about the way that it was packaged and the way the money sort of being divided it up because obviously we were the movie that was the goldmine there.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, what they do is they divide it up. They’re not looking to screw over any individual writer, director or actor. What they’re trying to do is avoid any movie showing a profit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, so they’re just sliding this stuff around so that, you know, the waterline never hits a certain thing. But when we talk about this thing, and this is all under the heading of distribution.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the answer to the question, why are there the same five big movie studios that were around for decades and decades and decades? Why if we live in a world now where Tesla can show up and actually be a viable new car company, why can’t there be a viable new movie studio? And the answer is distribution. Distribution impacts everything.

That is why these studios have a strangle hold on films and television, because to get a movie into a theater, all those screens is an art of negotiation where you are trading on a very desirable title. And thus, getting in maybe ones that are more speculative because theater owners lose money when nobody’s in the theater to see the movie.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** They don’t want bad movies. They want the good movies. Well, you’re not getting the next say, you know, they’re making new Harry Potter movies. Warner Brothers is making —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’re not getting one of those unless you take a bunch of these things, too. And it works that way for television and pay cable and all the rest. I have a question for you.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Of all your movies, can you tell from your residuals which one has had the most after theatrical success?

**John:** Yes, that was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by like a landslide. And just because it sold a tremendous amount of DVDs right at that moment where like they were still selling a bunch of DVDs.

**Craig:** They were still big.

**John:** Yeah. And Go does fine and Big Fish certainly generates a fair amount. But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was definitely the winner.

How about you? I mean you’ve got The Hangover movies. Those have to be the number ones.

**Craig:** They’re not. They’ve both done very well in video but by far, Identity Thief.

**John:** That’s not because it’s the sole credit — ?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I kind of did the math. I kind of did the math. Identity Thief has just been after market-wise, after theatrical I think the most popular movie I’ve ever done.

**John:** Well, that’s great.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** That’s wonderful. And again, this is a good lesson in why residuals matter so much. So the short version of what residuals are for people who are sort of new to this discussion is writers as part of this sort of grand charade we do legally about the work we do and copyright all this stuff, we don’t have royalties on movies, we have what’s called residuals.

And as movies are displayed on things after theatrical, so after they’ve left the movie theaters and after they’ve left airplanes, but as they sell on iTunes, as they go through Netflix streaming, as they show up on broadcast TV, we get a certain percentage of what that money is that comes back to the distributor or the studio to the film. We get that percentage. And that percentage can add up and be a very meaningful part of a writer’s career.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup, it’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so is Shawshank Redemption which I don’t think I’ve actually seen since it came out, so it’s one of those things where it’s always on. If you flip the channels, it’s always on somewhere. Yet, it’s a great movie and it was Frank Darabont’s sort of first big success. He bought the rights to it for $5,000.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? And I love that Stephen King didn’t cash the check.

**John:** Ooh, Stephen King.

**Craig:** Shawshank Redemption is a fantastic movie. It’s one of those movies, I’ve never met anybody that didn’t like it.

**John:** No, how could you not like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s just a terrific movie. It’s also a movie that while very cinematic in moments, plays wonderfully on TV. It’s like The Godfather. I very happily have seen The Godfather a number of times in the theater, which is obviously it’s not something that happens frequently because, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when I see The Godfather on TV, I’m like, yeah, this works on TV, too. It actually works everywhere. I can watch this in my shower.

**John:** Yeah, I think maybe the reason why it does, both of those films would work well on TV is because they’re sagas and they definitely kind of feel like there’s act breaks in them. You feel like, there’s moments like, okay, this is a moment where we can go away and we go to commercial and come back and regain the energy. And like it’s not going to be shattered.

**Craig:** The only thing that bugs me about Godfather is that sometimes when people are going from one place to another, Coppola will just show a car driving by.

**John:** That’s so incredibly lazy. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** Like when Michael Corleone goes to Vegas, there’s a plane landing and we hear a waa, waa, waa, waa. That’s not cool.

**John:** That’s not cool at all. But, you know, what is cool? One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for that. So my One Cool Thing is also on the topic of filmmaking. It’s this thing called A Guerilla Filmmakers Guide to After Effects. And it’s this course — I think it’s like $99, with a whole bunch of videos that you get access to, about how to use After Effects to develop visual effects for Indie projects.

It’s really well done. The sample video they have up there is Gareth Edwards who did Godzilla and Monsters and is now doing the new Gary Whitta Star Wars movie.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** Gary Whitta.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** It’s Gareth Edwards talking through doing the visual effects for this Attila the Hun movie he made and he did all the visual effects himself. And you’re literally seen his screen, you’re seeing After Effects and he’s narrating as he’s, you know, like a 40-minute lesson on sort of how he’s dealing with the timeline, the spreadsheet he’s built for himself for the work, how he’s composing these things.

And it’s just the little lesson I watched, it was basically he had to put I guess Constantinople on a hill, and so he had two shots that where handheld shots, a wide shot and the closer shot and like Constantinople had to be over there.

And so he’s doing motion tracking and figuring out like to get this city to land right in the distance. And it was just really, really cool. And so I think if you are a person who is looking to make films or honestly just kind would want to learn more of about how that stuff works, I thought it was just fascinating and really well done. So there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a updated app for the New York Times crossword puzzle. I am a —

**John:** Now, you hate crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** [laughs] How dare you. I am an avid crossword puzzler. I’ve gotten my times down to a place where I promised my friend and New York Times crossword creator, David Kwong, that I will compete this fall in the crossword tournament here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** I’m not going to even come close to winning. I mean the scary thing is like the guys who have really, really good times, I just — I don’t even know how they fill the grid in that quickly. But they’re actually — I think they could beat me if I were just writing answers in that I had, you know.

**John:** You had the keys beside and you’re like filling it in.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I’m getting pretty good. Like I can now routinely do a Saturday, you know, around 20 minutes which —

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Which is respectable. I mean, in the crossword puzzle world, maybe not so much. But I’m obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. And they have a new app that actually is very nice. It’s very clean. The apps powering crossword puzzles have always been a little clunky and oldish. And the New York Times stepped it up. I mean, for instance, you couldn’t sync your puzzle across devices until today. And now you can.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s an app for iPad and for iPhone?

**Craig:** It is, yes. It is in iOS app that syncs between your iOS devices and also syncs with the desktop New York Times crossword site so that you can pick it up and do it wherever and it’ll keep track of your time and your answers. It is a subscription. I want to say it’s $30 for the year.

**John:** If you like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course it’s worth it. I mean, my god. Even, let me just say, even if you don’t like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it because you should start liking crossword puzzles, because if you’re a writer, it keeps your mind sharp. It’s words. It’s good for you. It’s just good brain stuff. I’ve got Missy Mazin working on crossword puzzles now. I’m very excited about that. You know that my wife used to be Missy.

**John:** I had no idea. But it makes sense, her name is Melissa, so yeah.

**Craig:** Right, so she was Missy and then after we started dating, like maybe a year before we got married, she’s like, you know what, I don’t want to be Missy anymore. I want to be Melissa now. It’s too juvenile. I want to be Melissa. And I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to actually change what I call my girlfriend. And I did. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to bring Missy back.

**John:** Missy Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s just adorable.

**John:** Missy Mazin has pigtails though. She’s the not the woman I perceive.

**Craig:** She’s never had pigtails.

**John:** I just perceive her as being a Melissa. That happens.

**Craig:** All right. Well, let’s see what, maybe — let’s see if I can get this to catch on.

**John:** That is our show this week. So if you would like to learn more about the things we talked about on the show, there are show notes for every episode. They’re at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We are on iTunes. You may be listening to us through iTunes. If you are listening to us on the website, we would really love it if you’d actually subscribe in iTunes because that’s how more people find us and then we move up the charts. And, honestly, we’re a little competitive that way.

If you’re on iTunes anyway and want to listen —

**Craig:** You’re a little competitive.[laughs] I don’t. Let me just be clear to everybody out there. I actually don’t, I never look at the charts. Where are we on the charts?

**John:** We’re pretty good.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah, we are good in that film and TV category. But we can be better. We’ve been better at other times.

**Craig:** Oh really.

**John:** That’s sort of why I’m bringing it up. And so it’s not that we have fewer listeners. We actually have a lot more listeners. Those stats are really, really good. It’s that when people don’t interact with us on iTunes, we drop. And so it’s people adding us on iTunes is what moves you up the charts.

**Craig:** All right, well then everybody you’ve got to add us on iTunes.

**John:** Just add us on iTunes. It’ll take three clicks.

**Craig:** I suddenly got competitive.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. You were the person who wants like to be below 20 minutes on a Saturday crossword puzzle. This matters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

**John:** It matters so much. [laughs]

**Craig:** I get it. I get it now.

**John:** And if you’re there and you want to leave us a comment, we love comments, that’s all really nice and good. We also have a Scriptnotes app for your iPhone and for your Android device. With that app you can access all our back episodes back to episode one is you want to. Subscriptions for the back episode are $1.99 a month. Pennies, for you. Less than — a year of that would less than a year of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** But not necessarily more valuable. Not to run us down. But boy, those crosswords are good.

**John:** Those crosswords are good. We have transcripts for every episode. So about got five days after an episode airs, we have transcripts for it. So if you need to go back and refer to something we said, you can always look for that, so just look for the original episode and there’s always a link to the transcript for that. It’s also how I Google to see what the hell we said. It’s been incredibly useful part of that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Mathew Chilelli who this week also did the outro and it’s lovely. It uses a brand new woodwind sample library which is great.

**Craig:** Ooh, woodwinds.

**John:** And last reminder, if you would like Bronson Watermarker or Highland or Weekend Read, they’re all half off this week. So go for it. This is your week of bargains.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!

**John:** Nicely done, Craig. Have a great week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WWDC14](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/)
* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/) is available now! (And is half-off thru June 8th)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [Weekend Read Unlimited](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) are also half off thru June 8th
* [Steve Ballmer on developers (developers, developers…)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE)
* [Tony Zhou on Edgar Wright’s visual style](https://vimeo.com/96558506)
* [Russell Adams on The Shawshank Redemption](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304536104579560021265554240?mod=trending_now_1) from The Wall Street Journal
* IMDb’s [Top 250](http://www.imdb.com/chart/top)
* [A Guerilla Filmmaker’s Guide to After Effects](http://www.fxphd.com/store/fast-forward-a-guerrilla-filmmakers-guide-to-after-effects/)
* [The New York Times Crossword](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-new-york-times-crossword/id307569751?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/falling-back-in-love-with-your-script).

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

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

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

Craig, I’m going to try to speak a little bit more slowly and distinctly this week because I don’t know if you listened to the live show, the Crossover Episode we did, but I was speaking about 10 billion miles per hour. I could barely understand myself speaking and I’m not sure what it was. I think that someone may have put speed in my water. It was crazy. I was a crazy person.

**Craig:** Well, there was one point where you said something and you’ll hear me say, “What?” And then you repeated it and it still took me a second to figure out what you were saying. I think you get amped up when you’re in front of a live crowd.

**John:** It’s the live crowd that does it and we’re going to have another chance to see me in front of a live crowd on May 15th. We’re selling tickets for our big live show, our Summer Superhero Spectacular with amazing guests. So those tickets went on sale last Thursday. And as we’re recording this there are still tickets available. There’s also tickets for a cocktail party. So please come join us for that if you’d like to. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** And we saw an email from our friend Christopher at the Writers Guild Foundation. He said that we sold, I think, something like nearly half of our tickets in the first hour.

**John:** Which is pretty darn good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just reiterating that you and I, what are we, John?

**John:** Are we like a big deal? Are we…?

**Craig:** We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Oh, okay. I can’t believe I forgot our tagline. Well, here is why I always forget the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts is because it’s something you believe. It’s a thing I don’t really understand, but maybe that’s what makes this all work.

The other thing we’re going to be doing at the live show is a Three Page Challenge live with people who’ve sent in their scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, we’re going to do it differently and we’re not quite sure how we’re going to do it but I know it’s not going to be a thing where you email Stuart your script and then he has to read them all and picks them. It’s going to be something more like there’s going to be a page you can go to. You’re going to click submit. You’re going to attach your script and hopefully even people will vote on which projects are going to be part of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Okay. So a question for you then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let me play the role of listener.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have submitted a Three Page Challenge to the big festering Stuart pile. Should I resubmit to this new thing to get a chance at being picked for the live event?

**John:** Yes. So I will say that you should not send again to Stuart. You shouldn’t send to that normal address because that is not for the live show. For the live show there will be a special application process only for people who are going to come to the live show themselves.

**Craig:** Ah-ha, there’s the qualifier.

**John:** So if you have submitted previously and you’re coming to the live show, by all means you would submit again. But if you are not coming to the live show, then you should not submit to this thing because it’s a different thing.

**Craig:** Right. And we need you to be there. The whole point is that you sit in a chair, an actual hot seat. It won’t be hot until you sit in it.

**John:** Well, we are going to do our live guests first so they could be warmed up. You could be sitting in the chair that David Goyer sat in or that Christopher Markus or Stephen McFeely.

**Craig:** Have you spent any time with any of those gentlemen?

**John:** [laughs] I spend time with all those gentlemen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I like them.

**Craig:** I like them, too. But they’re not going to put out any kind serious heat, not the kind of heat that comes from being the focus of the Three Page Challenge.

**John:** I would take that headline to be “David Goyer will not bring the heat.” That’s I think your prediction.

**Craig:** David Goyer, cold butt.

**John:** [laughs] I think David Goyer’s ass is the least of your concerns. If you are going to come to a Three Page Challenge on Scriptnotes you are going to submit by some process. We will announce next week on the show about how that’s going to be because we’re still figuring this out. But I think it’s going to be a good fun time.

**Craig:** You know the coolest thing about Goyer is that he’s all tatted up. He’s all sleeved up. So the funny thing is David is like — he’s like a mythological creature, like a griffin or something, the body of this and the head of that. He’s got the head of an accountant and the arms of a guy that works in a carnival.

**John:** Yeah. You would think that David Goyer wrote Sons of Anarchy. I mean, when you see his arms, you’re like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, he clearly writes on Sons of Anarchy. But no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He writes superhero movies.

**Craig:** He’s got Sons of Anarchy arms and 1980s sitcom writing staff head.

**John:** It’s the male equivalent of like a head for business and a body for sin.

**Craig:** That’s right. Party in the back and business, whatever.

**John:** Speaking of ‘of.’

**Craig:** Of ‘of.’

**John:** Of, speaking of ‘of,’ speaking of prepositions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I’m going to transition to talking about the other thing I just did in that WGA Theatre which was a live panel with Kelly Marcel, Linda Woolverton and Scott Neustadter which was great. So we did that on Saturday. And if you want to listen to that, it’s not really a Scriptnotes episode. So when we have these kind of bonus things that sort of they’re like a Scriptnotes but they’re not really a Scriptnotes. We put them up on the app. So if you have the Scriptnotes app or if you go to Scriptnotes.net, you can listen to that episode. So that’s for people who are the premium subscribers who want to listen to all the back episodes.

Every once in a while there is some bonus content. This is one of those every once in a while bonus content things.

**Craig:** That right there is reason that people — how much does it cost for the premium thing?

**John:** $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** Okay, I mean, so for 2 bucks a month, you get access to something like that. I mean, that’s a great line up of writers. Kind of a no brainer.

**John:** So if you want to listen to that, you can find it on the Scriptnotes app. You can find it in your app store for both the iOS and for Android. So, Craig, today, you’ve brought a topic and I’m so excited about your topic because I think it’s a perfect thing for us to talk about on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this idea and sort of keyed off of something that you were suggesting that we’re also going to get to later, a little bit of the conundrum of how you get started on things. But as I was thinking about that I thought, you know, it’s so common that when we do finally figure out what it is that we want to write, it’s so exciting because it’s new. And we are full of this passion and energy to tackle something new. The sky is the limit. The possibilities are endless. It’s all quite fresh and compelling.

But at some point along the way, whether it’s in the middle of writing the script or as you’re beginning to actually create your draft, or if you’re on your 12th rewrite you’re going to lose that spark. A little bit like being married. You got to kind of tend to it or else these things can fade.

So I wanted to talk a little bit today about some practical tips for staying in love with the thing you’re writing.

**John:** That’s an amazing topic because actually Kelly Marcel and I were talking about that in front of the live panel, because there was literally a dinner I was at with Kelly where just in the process of describing this rewrite I was doing, I did kind of fall back in love with it. And it wasn’t until I actually spoke aloud what I was hoping to do and sort of saw her enthusiasm that suddenly like I wanted to get back to it. So let’s talk through some strategies there or do you want to start with sort of why you fall out of love with things.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s natural. It’s only human. We can’t stay at some sort of pitched level of passion with something. We’ll burn out. Our brains are, you know, it’s literally neurological. For instance, if somebody plays a tone, a pure tone at a set frequency, it will start to fade in volume to you because our brains are designed to pick up changes in things. Steady, fixed, unchanging input starts to become noise.

It begins to disappear to us. And similarly, the passion that we have is a result of something changing in our minds, we found a new thing. But eventually, because it’s kind of in a fixed state, all that adrenalin will go away and the passion will go away and the excitement will go away because it’s just like a pure tone in our head and we’re kind of attenuating.

**John:** Well, as you started a project, that project was new and exciting and all those notes were new. Like, it was the first time you were hearing it. It’s like, this is so exciting. But then as you keep going, you’re working. You’re just doing work. And it’s changed from being that pure tone to being — you recognize all the flaws in it and it’s just not new to you anymore.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s fundamentally, of course, it’s that way because you’re looking at the same thing on the page again. So it becomes very hard to, you know, if you’re going back for a rewrite, well, I have what’s there. It’s there. And sometimes you’re going to mess with it because you’re going to mess with it because you want to change things. But also, it’s not new or exciting. It’s not that shining white in the distance.

**Craig:** Which, again, analogizes quite well to a marriage because over time anybody, any two people that could somehow live in this vibrant state of new love or infatuation or something, if they were to stay like that after 20 years, we would have to lock them up. Something would be seriously wrong with them. They would be inhuman. It is only natural to start to become accustomed to certain things, but there is a great reward in looking past a kind of superficial, you know, “I’m used to this,” and reconnect with the thing that mattered.

And what you just described when you were talking to Kelly and she was reflecting back this kind of excitement to you that you maybe had lost is exactly my first tip which is to bring in a third party. Not to extend that to marriage but, I mean, I guess for some people that works. I’ve certainly asked and got nowhere. I don’t know if you’ve ever bothered asking. I’ve asked. It’s amazing how fast the no comes on that one.

So bring in a third party. Of course you’re bored with the thing, with the story you’ve told yourself a billion times silently. But when you start to tell it to somebody else a couple of magical things happen. One, you start to see them getting excited and that re-excites you. And the other thing is that simply by saying it out loud you will start to fire all those nerves again in your head that made you excited about it the first time. You’ll start to feel the drama inherent to it. It won’t feel old. It will feel new again.

So if you started to fall out of love with what you’re doing, sit down with a friend and by the way I would recommend a good positive friend. Like Kelly is great because she has, I think, a natural enthusiasm for narrative. There are writers who are frankly a little bitter or a little judgy. And if you start to talk to them, what you might get reflected back is all of their weirdness. Now, granted sometimes people just don’t like it, but then there are other times when people are just weird. And so you want to find somebody that you trust and who’s enthusiastic and passionate and talk to them about your idea, just start telling the story. Just say, “I want five minutes to just tell you something.” And see if that doesn’t kind of relight your fire.

**John:** Two things that come to mind with this. First off we’ve talked about how when you’re making a comedy and you’re editing a comedy, so often you’re like, “I have no idea what’s funny anymore because I’ve seen the same joke in the editor about 50 times.” But then you show it to an audience and people start laughing, you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually funny.” And this is really the small version of that, by stating your idea out loud, by talking about your thing, you’re actually getting this engagement going and realizing, oh, that thing, it actually does have some worth. People like it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what you’re describing, that syndrome of rediscovering that a joke works because you’re showing it to people that haven’t heard it 20 times but have never heard it, I’m kind of putting that under the tip of save your babies. We’ve all heard kill your babies and we understand that it’s important to guard against self-indulgence and not to presume that just because you imbue significance into a piece of your story that the audience will. But it’s just as important to safeguard against the opposite which is to just get tired of the things that you once loved and thus just start mutating them or eliminating them without giving other people a chance to experience them for the first time.

**John:** Yeah, this is the criticism we often make of development executives is they’re reading the same kinds of drafts again and again and they get bored with things because they saw before so they’re always looking for, like, “Well, we don’t need that anymore,” because like they’re used to it. To their eyes, we can cut that. You can kill that because we don’t need it.

Well, you actually did need it. You just don’t remember why you needed it. You don’t remember what it felt like that first time you read the script. And so , yeah, again, fresh eyes are so helpful.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A thing I wanted to say about sort of bringing in a friend, a positive friend to see it is often you’re probably going to take, hopefully, you have good writer friends and we all know that there are some writers who are positive and cheerleading and there are some writers who can be super negative. But there’s that middle ground where you need to sometimes just say upfront to the writer, “Look, can you read this for me and like I don’t want sort of all the notes and criticisms. I sort of just mostly want to talk about the things I’m excited to do next.”

Because people can do that. I know I can do that and I can ask a lot of times if somebody is giving me a script to read, “Hey, do you want like the typos and the things that are logic errors and all this or do you want me to tell you that it’s awesome and why it’s awesome?” And that’s fine. That’s absolutely a valid way to approach reading a script just saying like, I’m excited to tell this person why their script is great.

**Craig:** Yeah, when you give something to someone, it’s fair to give them the context. Say, “Okay, well, look, I’m looking for help on this. I’m looking actually for you to tell me, okay, what’s working and what’s not working,” or “I’m giving this just so that you can see what I’m doing now.” And it also good to say to somebody, “Look, I kind of need a boost. Can you read this and sort of pick me up?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all great. I think that when someone is telling me something that they’re doing, not showing me a screenplay but just telling me, my default is to be encouraging.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** My default is that I just don’t see the point frankly in saying, “Well, I don’t think that’s going to be very good.” Based on what? Based on your weird, negative suspicion that they are either going to muff it or that what they’re describing isn’t really as good as they think or anything like that. I just feel like, you know, my attitude is anything can be done well by someone. And so if somebody tells me something and it’s yet to be in fixed form, I want to just love it and I want to kind of encourage them because that’s what we need.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Another tip. It’s sort of an obvious one, and again, we have to be a little careful about not overdosing on our medication, but taking a break can do wonders. Sometimes when you fall out of love or lose that spark or that passion, you just need a break. You need a couple of days. Maybe you need a week. It’s okay.

**John:** Yeah, my husband and I, we take vacations away from each other once a year and it’s a very good idea, because if you’re just with the same people having the same conversations every day, you take them for granted. And so then, if he’s gone for a week, all those conversations stack up and it’s actually really nice to have those conversations again.

So the same with your script, sometimes you need to take, just set it aside, come back to it. Usually, we say that in the context of you set your script aside so you can see all the flaws. But maybe you’ll set the script aside and come back and like remember, “Oh, these are the things that are actually terrific about it.”

**Craig:** Exactly true. My wife and I have always had a good balance of together/apart. That we can find ways to give each other a ton of space and independence. But then when you do come together and you have those moments or sometimes for us it’s the break is just being together but in a different place alone. You’re just recontextualizing things.

And sometimes when you’ve lost the spark, just go write somewhere else and I will tell you there is nothing wrong with indulging in the romantic fantasy of the writer in the cafe if you’re not normally that person. There’s nothing wrong with going to write on the beach. There’s nothing wrong with going to write in your backyard or on the front lawn or anywhere that makes you feel like a writer and gets you excited again. It’s totally cool. Think of that as the equivalent of porn. [laughs]

**John:** Well, I think what you’re bringing up though is it may not be that you have fallen out of love with the script, but you’re just actually sick of writing. You’re sick of your process of getting the words down on the page. And so it may not have anything to do with this particular project, it may just be because it’s actually a drudge to sit down at your desk and write your thing. So maybe working somewhere else for awhile will get you excited again.

**Craig:** Yeah, the process itself can make everything seem drab and humdrum, so see if you can shake it up either with a break or a recontextualization. Another tip is if you’re working on something and you’ve lost your passion and connection with it, watch something or read something that is related, either related thematically or in terms of the setting of the movie or the kind of movie. And allow yourself to admire what they did right, but also notice what you think you’re doing better.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you realize, hey, this girl I brought to the dance, she ain’t that bad kind of thing. She’s okay.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. On this podcast we talk about the plus-one problem, or sort of crap-plus-one, which is like it’s a dangerous habit of watching something terrible and saying, like, “Well, I’m not as bad as that thing is.” And so we’re not saying to do that all the time but it’s a useful practice when you start to doubt yourself is to look around you and see like, well, what else is out there. And sometimes you’ll be inspired because, like, “Ah, I can do what that thing did and I can be that great kind of movie,” or “I know I’m doing better than this. And I’m going to just keep pushing the bar forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it also gives you a sense of where your movie will exist in a continuum of movies like it or stories like it and you can go, “You know what? What I’m doing is interesting and unique. It is like these things but different than these things. I can see where it will fit.” It starts to make it realer for you again and it gets you off your butt.

**John:** So a related suggestion which is something that I often bring up when I talk to writers at the Sundance Labs because they’ve usually been working on their project for a long time, and sometimes they’re brains are just frozen, especially if they’ve had like three days of detailed meetings with other writers. They just can’t think anymore.

So an exercise I’ll do is I’ll say, “Okay, I know you’ve written this charming, quirky comedy, but let’s imagine this is a thriller. What would this be like as a thriller? And what would this feel like if it were a thriller?” And we just walk through, like, the kinds of things that would happen if this movie were a thriller rather than comedy. And they’re like, “Okay, now it is a historic tragedy. Let’s talk through that.” And just by not forcing yourself to think of your movie in the way it exists now but like under wildly different things, it can sometimes just un-stick you a little bit and get you thinking about it in a different way. And even if it doesn’t give you an actual actionable idea, it can just sort of free you up a little bit and it gets you more excited about digging back in on the thing you actually wrote.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly true. And there’s another thing that I think concentrating on that early spark can do for you even if it has faded. We may lose a little bit of the heat and maybe you’ll never recapture that first exciting bit of like, “Oh, my god, I’ve got this great idea and suddenly I’m flooded with ideas and flooded with characters and dialogue bits,” and it’s not yet real so you’re not beholden to anything that’s kind of like boring and every day like how to make a structure and what scene comes now, right? We may never get back that, but don’t forget that early stuff because in those early bursts you will see the things that matter the most at the end.

When you’re done with the process, it’s the stuff that got you excited in the first place that is the core of why you’re doing this and the core of what must be protected and expressed in your screenplay and dollars to doughnuts it’ll be the thing that the audience responds to as well. And it all happens in that first big bang explosion.

**John:** Yeah. One of the things I sometimes do early on in the process but I think it’s also great for sort of falling back in love with it is to write the trailer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s really, just imagine like what is that trailer for the movie I have made and what is the coolest version of that? And how are you going to market this movie? And if the answer is like, no, there’s no way to do it, then maybe that’s a problem. But more likely there are some really cool moments that you have in your script that could make the cool trailer. Imagine that trailer because that is ultimately what someone else is going to be intrigued by.

And so, it’s kind of dressing up your movie to be sort of unrealistically attractive at a distance. And so, what does that look like? What does that trailer look like? That can be a useful way of sort of getting back into it.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, I do the same thing. I think that when we have an initial burst of passion about a movie, at least I do the same thing you do. I start to imagine what the trailer will be like. I mean, I don’t see it clearly but I can see things happening in bits of stuff exploding and so on and so forth. And that is not unlike what happens when we first meet somebody and we start to like fantasize where it all goes, and now we’re old and our grandchildren gather around us. It’s all a normal part of kind of falling in love with the idea.

And so, on the one hand, you could sort of write it off as this irrational exuberance, to cite Alan Greenspan, but on the other hand there is something of great value in that that you shouldn’t forget even if it detaches itself from the emotional rush and all the things that it does to your limbic system. There is intellectual value in there too. There is stuff that dramatically, I think, you’re going to want to keep sight of.

And lastly, I would say for people that have fallen into a little bit of a loveless rut with the idea that they once loved, just understand it’s normal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It happens to everybody. And it doesn’t mean you don’t love it anymore. It just means that you’re going through this sort of a natural maturation of feeling for this thing and don’t freak out.

**John:** Yeah, I think we all know couples who are so intensely like crazy Romeo and Juliet in love with each other. And then they, but of course they don’t die, and so they stay together for awhile. But then like when it’s not Romeo and Juliet and everything is not turned to 11, they break up because, like we just lost the passion. It’s like, well, yeah, or maybe you just actually kind of matured a little bit or maybe, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stay together but I’m also saying like you kind of bailed on it because it wasn’t like it was in the first week and, well, of course, it wasn’t like it was in the first week.

**Craig:** Right, what could stay that way?

**John:** Exactly, like, you would self-destruct, spin apart like a centrifuge. So I agree, it’s a natural part of the process and I think on the show we’ve talked about there are a lot of things that are just truths that you kind of only can really understand when you’ve lived them, which is that the first cut of your movie you will want to kill yourself because it will be awful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Every set of notes will have one thing that’s just crazy, and like a crazy idea that will destroy your entire movie. Those are just givens. Those are going to happen. And this is another given is that like you’re going to hit a part of the process where you just don’t love it anymore and you don’t love this thing that you’ve made and that’s natural. And you’ve just got to push through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that you actually still do love it, it’s just that you’re not obsessed with it. You’re not infatuated with it. You’re not overwhelmed by all the things that ping around in our heads when we first conceive of something and we get like a real head of steam. But you want to really love your idea, write it well with discipline and, you know what I mean, and care and all the rest.

**John:** So while we’re talking about creative marriages breaking up, the other thing that breaks up creative marriages is the outside force. And so in real life marriages it’s the other woman, but in creative marriages between you and your script, it’s that other idea.

**Craig:** It’s kind of heteronormative of you by the way.

**John:** I know. It is. It’s that other, I don’t that I used any girl terms in that, did I?

**Craig:** Yeah, you said the other woman.

**John:** I did say the other woman, yeah.

**Craig:** You are being heteronormative.

**John:** I’m sorry I —

**Craig:** And on behalf of the LGBTQ community —

**John:** [laughs] I’m so apologetic to have used it. Actually, I have a lesbian relationship with my script so that is the other woman out there.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just everything about that, I just want to do a podcast about that, about your lesbian relationship with your script.

**John:** Oh, by the way, I played Gone Home which is —

**Craig:** Oh, so great, right?

**John:** So great. And it’s so related to that topic for reasons we won’t spoil.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** That other idea that’s out there seems so provocative for the same reason that a fling/cheating on your spouse seems so great because you’re only seeing what the possibilities are there. You’re only seeing the great stuff and you’re not seeing all the bad stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you’re so familiar with your spouse or you script that you know all their flaws, you know all the ways that they’re not perfect, and you know sort of, ah, the things that drive you crazy about them. That other thing out there is bright and shiny and new and flawless as far as you know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, of course, there’s a natural instinct to pursue that. And there are times where, yes, you know what, maybe you have done everything you can to make this one thing work and you’re going to move on. I guess, that does sort of fall apart here because we are sort of serial monogamists, I guess, when it comes to writing screenplays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s times where, like, yes, you should be done writing that script and you should go pursue that other great idea. But a lot of times that great idea, take a note of it, remember it, but stay working on your main project.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean, listen, there are bad marriages. There are some marriages that just deserve to stop. And there are times when you’re not simply falling out of excitement with your screenplay. You’re looking at it and you’re thinking, I don’t like you at all. I’m getting nothing from you. I don’t want you to be in my life anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ideally, that doesn’t happen too often. Ideally, you develop your instincts to a point where you don’t begin the marriage of yourself to a script until you know it’s going to be okay. But you’re right. When these other things pop up, go ahead and look all you want and really noodle on some index cards and put it off to the side and just understand that when, yeah, like our screenplays are basically like spouses that keep dying on us.

But like you stay married until they croak and then you turn to the next one. But there are people who I think flip from project to project because… — We had somebody ask us a question at the Nerdist crossover that sort of keyed this for me. You know, like I have seven different things going on and I think a lot of that has to do with being distracted by the new man or woman or transgender or a gender non-specific —

**John:** Just say person.

**Craig:** Non-specific gender.

**John:** Person.

**Craig:** I’m really trying man.

**John:** You’re trying.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m trying. Look, I think, at least one of us is trying. That’s for sure.

**John:** Ah-ha, yes. Well, yeah, I guess it is essentially a fear of commitment. The reason why he’s not able to lock down and pick one of these things to write is because of the fear of commitment. And at the first big 100th live show I remember somebody asked the question , like, “Well, which of these things should I write?” and I said, “It’s the one with the best ending,” which was really another way of saying, “Write the project you think you are actually going to finish that you can see through to the end.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And that’s ultimately what a commitment is, is you’re going to commit to finishing the script and making it the best it can possibly be.

**Craig:** Yeah, because there are rewards for commitment. I mean, commitment isn’t a sexy thing. Sex is sexy. But the commitment gives you rewards that are, I think, they’re more substantive in a sense because you get to finish and you get to follow it through and then deliver it to other people. And it becomes meaningful to other people. No one will ever find any meaning or entertainment in the thing that you loved and then abandoned. No one.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s talk, let’s shift gears and talk about, that was sort of the middle of a relationship that we’re talking through. Let’s talk about the early part of a relationship, because there were two videos I saw recently that I thought were really great about capturing how you find your way into a script, which is really that beginning of that relationship, like how do I know how to even really begin here.

And the two videos are, one is by Tony Gilroy and one is by Michael Arndt. And they’re both on johnaugust.com and they’ll also be in the show notes. And they’re both great. And what I loved about them is they had very different approaches to how you get started on a script.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I want to start with Tony Gilroy, because Tony Gilroy who did the Bourne movies, he did Michael Clayton.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He’s just the best. I think he’s fantastic. So he was giving a talk for BAFTA and their little BAFTA screenwriter series. And on the two examples he gave, one was from Bourne and one was from Michael Clayton, he didn’t kind of know what the movies were but he wrote a scene. And he wrote a scene that essentially was the kind of scene he wanted to be in the movie. And it wasn’t until he wrote that scene that he had sense of like what it was that he was trying to write.

And so the case of Michael Clayton, it was a scene that I remembered but I don’t think of being the showcase number of the scene, of the movie, which was where George Clooney’s character goes to Denis O’Hare’s house and Denis O’Hare has just run over somebody. And Denis O’Hare is talking about what he wants Michael Clayton to do for him. And it’s a great scene but I wouldn’t necessarily know that it was the show stopper for me, but for Gilroy it set up what that movie was going to feel like to him.

**Craig:** Right. And similarly, he wrote a scene in Bourne where Jason Bourne expresses that he does not know who he is but he knows what he can do. And the things that he can do and the circumstances that are evident to him suggest that who he is is a dangerous person and possibly a bad person which I think is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a scene in a cafe where he talks through like, “I know where all the exits are.” And she goes, “Of course, you know where the exits are.” He’s like, “I know the numbers on all the license plates in the parking lot. I know the easiest ways to kill somebody.” Like he knows all these specific skills.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that to me really is the Bourne movie. It’s such a great encapsulation of who that character is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s hard for me to imagine that whole Bourne franchise existing without some version of that scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And what I loved about what Tony was saying was that where he starts, the kernel, the thing that kicks off the explosion could be something that he observes or reads or sees or thinks. But how he knows it’s a movie and how he understands that he can write the movie is by thinking about character and what is fascinating about this character in a way that is resonant to anyone who understands or is interested in human behavior.

And for Bourne, it makes complete sense. The movie will be on one level about a guy who has amnesia and is being hunted and has to fight and kill his way with his secret skills to survive and figure out how this happened to him.

But on another level, the reason that we like those movies and that we go to any movie is because it connects with something inherent in all of us, something universal. None of us have woken up one day not knowing who we are but being able to beat up two guys and shoot somebody dead from 500 yards.

What we identify with there is somebody who’s trying to figure out who they are in a world that’s only giving them circumstances, but not substance. That’s universal. So I loved what he had to say here because I thought that that’s something I try and do now more than ever is to key in on something at the heart of this character that is universal and has nothing in sense to do with the specifics of the story but has to do with their inquisition into their own lives or into the lives of others.

**John:** In both cases you have a lead character who is establishing who they are in their specific world and what they want. Because if you actually looked at the very start of Michael Clayton as a script, it actually doesn’t start with George Clooney’s character at all. It establishes sort of the plot franchise of basically what’s happening, the premise of what’s happening in the story. But that scene that he wrote is the first description of sort of what a fixer is. And so it’s basically telling whose character it is and what their job is. So this is Michael Clayton. This is what his job is. This is Jason Bourne and this is what his job is or at least what his skill set is.

And so it’s not necessarily establishing what the plot of the movie is going to be. It’s not the A plot of it but it’s the trajectory of this character in their world. So with George Clooney we have a character who is a fixer. He fixes people’s problems and very naturally he finds himself in problems that he can’t himself fix or has to find a fix for himself.

**Craig:** And therein is the movie, because in both circumstances Gilroy is giving us two superheroes, one of whom is legendary for being able to fix anything, and as the movie Michael Clayton bears out, does. And the other movie is about a guy who is perhaps the best assassin on the face of the planet. And yet, they are both deeply troubled and in these scenes where we find out who they are, all we’re hearing really is about their limitation.

What Bourne is saying is I know all these things but I don’t know who I am or why I am or what I’m supposed to be doing or even if I’m a good person or a bad person. And in the scene that Gilroy shows for Michael Clayton, what we’re seeing is Michael Clayton frankly being at a loss not sure what to do, being screamed at and showing us, revealing to us with a lack of dialogue how tormented he is frankly by his position.

**John:** Yeah, I think weirdly the video that we’re going to link to, they cut that little scene with Michael Clayton a little too short, because if I remember that scene correctly, I think after Denis O’Hare goes off on his long rant about what actually happens, I think Michael Clayton does sort of come back and say like, “This is what we’re going to do.” I think he is the one who had to say like, you know, you’re going to grow up and you’re going to do this and really talks him through. We see his competence.

I want to try and make this actionable though for other writers who aren’t Tony Gilroy, because if you’re Tony Gilroy, you already know how to do this. What I think the general take home from the Tony Gilroy advice here is you have your character. Your lead character start talking and is talking about their life. And you basically try to find that character’s voice and a way to articulate who that character is in a scene and doing that before, for Tony Gilroy, before anything else actually happens.

And I will say my own personal experience this has helped tremendously. So Go, my first movie, there were lots of little scenes that I wrote for that that had no movie around them. I basically wrote these little scenes and I sort of wanted a movie that could hold these scenes. That was useful. This thing I just turned in, I knew in general what kind of happened but 11:30 at night I got out of bed and just wrote, hand wrote a scene that is the first scene of this project because it was exactly a character talking through what her situation was —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And trying to figure something out. And in retrospect it was very Michael Claytony because she was talking about who she was and how things were changing and she wasn’t sure what she should do. So basically she was asking for advice, but in asking for advice she was telling us where she was and what her capabilities were.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you’re zeroing in on the advantages that this character holds because they are a hero and they will prevail so they must be there. In evidence this is not, we don’t learn these things somewhere down the line. Even The Karate Kid, he learns moves but he doesn’t learn courage. It’s there. But then we also connect that early on with what they’re missing.

**John:** Well, one thing I want to say about sort of in arguing for the Gilroy approach is that trying to write the scene before you’ve written anything else is I think it may be a good way to fall in love with your project. I think it may also be a good way to know, can I even write this? Like if you don’t have a clear enough idea of who the characters are that you could just write a scene where they’re talking about themselves, then maybe it’s not really the idea you’re going to be able to finish.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I can imagine there’s going to be lots of things that you’ve done all your cards and then you actually start to try to write a scene, you have no idea what these character sound like.

**Craig:** Right, you don’t have to — look, you have to write a scene with your character, but what you do have to love is your character. I think a lot of new screenwriters and some even screenwriters that I know, what they think about are the things that happen. And what I liked about Tony’s approach and I try and mirror it myself now more than ever is to think about the character because that’s all I care about. I think that’s all people care about in the end is the character.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he does such a good job of getting inside that and frankly he offers a warning, a fair warning to anyone out there considering being a screenwriter. If you do not feel that you are insightful, not just generally insightful, but particularly insightful about human behavior, this is not for you. It’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah. He actually very specifically is saying that he doesn’t think you can teach anyone to be imaginative.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** We can teach, we can kill it and you can magnify it, but you can’t sort of teach it. And so if you are not inherently imaginative, there’s not a class for that. There’s not a way to sort of get there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so if you weren’t a person who dreamed up stories beforehand, I don’t think anyone is going to get you there as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Well, there are various ways to be imaginative and to express your imagination. Visual artists are remarkably imaginative in ways that I’m not. I know I’m not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But to be a screenwriter and to tell stories in television or movies about human beings or even about animals that are acting like human beings, you need to understand human behavior. It’s not enough to be able to paint a gorgeous pallet or to be an aesthete. You need to understand what makes people tick, and then you need to be able to create somebody that is as flawed as the people we meet every day, and fascinatingly so.

**John:** Well, speaking of flaws, I think it’s a great way to get to the second video which is by Michael Arndt. So this was something that was originally a bonus feature on a Blu-ray for Toy Story 3 and someone put it on YouTube. I found it. I asked Michael Arndt like, “Is it okay that I link to it?” He said, “Sure, go for it.”

It’s this video he did talking about how to set the story of Toy Story 3 in motion and sort of the struggles they had. And to me this very much felt like a case where maybe because it’s the Pixar way, they sort of had to figure out everything first before he was allowed to write it. And so it ended up being a very agonizing process to figure out what could happen to sort of get the story kicked into gear. Ultimately, it’s really about flaws and it’s finding what the nature of the flaws were in the relationships between these characters, what the fears were that could get them started.

So again, it is character-based but it wasn’t where he wrote one scene and that became the launching pad for the whole story. It was all very carefully considered on an outline level before he got to go off and write stuff.

**Craig:** I’ll be honest, I appreciated the video and I thought that everything he said was accurate but I didn’t love it because I thought it was missing a fundamental part that I also see in the Pixar movies, and that fundamental piece was theme. It was the sense of an individual’s personal philosophy. That seemed to be missing. He focused quite a bit on the idea of what an individual’s passion was.

But, Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars he’s not sort of joyously living each day through passion. Frankly, he’s sort of an aimless wanderer who just wonders if there’s something better out there. And while that story is fundamental, almost to the point of mythologically so, it’s still — there is a good theme resonating through it. So, for instance, he talks about Toy Story and doesn’t really get into what I think those movies are about and he expresses quite well that, listen, he wrote Toy Story 2. I don’t mean to say he doesn’t understand those movies. He clearly does. But when I watch Toy Story, I do see a character who, as Michael says, is his passion is being Andy’s favorite toy and that that passion is also connected to his flaw which is jealously guarding that position.

But what he’s not talking about is that the movie on a level beneath that is about an individual whose function is to serve as a friend and he does not know what it means to be a good friend.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that stuff, so I wanted more of that and it wasn’t there. I liked the video and again I thought there were a lot of great signposts along the way. But it did veer a little bit too much into the “here’s how you tell a story, do this, do this, do this.” Not all stories work that way.

**John:** Yeah, and he actually says at the end of the video like not all stories work this way. And in his email to me he did stress that like he was fairly happy with the video and yet it was created for this Blu-ray thing for sort of a very general-purpose audience. So it wasn’t as screenwritery as he would love it to be.

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

**John:** Yeah. So I think he understood those same flaws. What I think is a nice contrast though with Gilroy is that it wasn’t a case of, I write one brilliant scene and then I figure out the rest of the movie around it. Here, pretty much the Pixar process is you figure out the whole movie and then you start writing it. And some writers that works great for and other writers not so much.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some people can really see the whole movie before that dialogue is written. We’ve all talked many times about James Cameron’s things which are scriptments and they’re very detailed outlines that don’t really have your dialogue in there and yet they really work. And so it’s entirely possible to do that. In my experience though, it’s not until I have those characters talking that I really genuinely believe that they can exist. And honestly, once I hear them talking, I may make some fundamentally different story decisions —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Because I now know who those characters are.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, first of all, you can write a scriptment and you could be incredibly well prepared before you start writing a screenplay but you still need that moment, that genesis moment before you can do the scriptment, which is very much my, I mean, I don’t really do scriptments much.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I need a genesis moment. I mean this Cowboy Ninja Viking movie, so the graphic novel is about a man who is like a Jason Bourne kind of guy except he actually doesn’t do anything. He essentially has multiple personality disorder and these three characters in his head are the ones that do everything. And for me in just thinking about the idea when I went in to meet on it in the first place I said, “Here’s what I think the movie is. It’s not — this is a scene. It’s the beginning. It’s one scene but it informs what I want to talk about.”

And it’s a kid who’s a very scared little kid who gets beaten up and these friends come to his aid and they just destroy the people that hurt him. They hurt them very badly, in fact, one of them has to get pulled off this kid because he’s going to kill him. And then our little hero boy realizes he did it, but he doesn’t remember doing it. He just sees that there’s a knife in his hand and his knuckles are bloody. And he’s terrified.

And to me, I go, okay, I understand the movie now. I understand that this is a story about a guy whose heroes are his villains. And he’s not in control of the things he does and in fact there is something terrible in him that he simply fragmented away from himself and put in to other people and that needs to be resolved. The movie of course is an action movie where there’s villains and our heroes have to beat them up and stuff. But then I go, okay, I understand why I’m doing this.

**John:** Yeah. Now, so the Gilroy approach though, Gilroy would write a scene where the character, where your boy was saying that, saying some version, the best version of the boy saying that.

**Craig:** I don’t, to me, I’m not as reliant on dialogue specifically as Tony puts forth in his BAFTA speech because I think sometimes there are these incredibly evocative scenes that don’t have a word in them, but what I was able to do when I came in and met on that project the first time is describe that scene in detail because I had seen it in my head and if I felt like writing it, I could have written it. I just don’t like to write things and hand them before I have the job. But yes, I had it. I had that scene and then I wrote it and it’s there. It’s still there. We have these little scenes that somehow survive the thrasher and that’s always been there.

**John:** Yeah. Well, great. So we’ve talked about finding your way into a script, how to stay in love with your script, how to keep that, how to rekindle that spark and keep your passion for a script alive.

But let’s talk through our passion for things that we thought were One Cool Things and see if they are still One Cool Things.

**Craig:** To see if we’re still married to those One Cool Things.

**John:** Yes. So starting with Episode 35. Do you have the page open right now, Craig?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Do you have the page open?

**Craig:** [laughs] I didn’t realize there was going to be homework.

**John:** There’s homework.

**Craig:** I’m going to it. It’s johnaugust.com. And then I click on One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay

**John:** If you go to that page along with Craig and do the work. If you scroll at the very bottom, we’ll go from the bottom to the top. So we started at Episode 35 with One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And Craig’s first One Cool Thing was the Franklin Ace 1000.

**Craig:** I’m staring at it right now.

**John:** Still cool?

**Craig:** The coolest.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing was the Musicnotes version of Jar of Hearts, basically, that you can — Musicnotes is a great service for downloading sheet music. I still use it probably once a week.

**Craig:** Fantastic. So far we’re good.

**John:** We’re good. You just want to quickly bang our way up the list?

**Craig:** We’ll just go yes or no.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for me iScore, totally.

**John:** Old Jews Telling Jokes, no, I’m sick of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. 1Password, use it every day.

**John:** Ski Safari, not playing it anymore but it was a good game first time.

**Craig:** Will read your script fund raiser from Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang, I believe we might have save lives. Super cool.

**John:** Key Ring thing I still use. Basically, it puts all your bar codes under one little thing. It’s great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I had nothing for the next one?

**John:** You didn’t. I had the UC Verde Buffalo Grass which I’m looking at right now. It is great. It is a pain in the ass to get it growing but then it’s so low maintenance it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** My next was the trailer for the movie Flight which is awesome and John Gatins was nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Yes. Stencyl, I’m not using it anymore but I think it’s still good. I know it’s still under active development. It is a game development tool for Mac and iOS devices.

**Craig:** My next one was MacBook Pro with Retina Display and that is my main ax.

**John:** New York City Subway by Embark, I still think it’s a terrific subway app.

**Craig:** The Baseball Codes, I’m still reading this book. It’s like I snack on this book all this time later. So, yeah, I guess, I still think it’s great.

**John:** Mine was ScanCafe which is the place where we sent off all our photos to get scanned. It’s fantastic. I strongly recommend ScanCafe or another service. Just, if you have a bunch of negatives, send them some place, get them scanned so you’ll actually have them and be able to look at them.

**Craig:** PB2 Peanut Butter Powder, I haven’t eaten that crap in a long time. [laughs]

**John:** The Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook, it’s still good. It’s not my — I’m not using them daily though.

**Craig:** Audio Essentials, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Hooktheory was this book on how cord changes work and it’s actually still been incredibly useful and I’m doing a lot more stuff with key changes and it’s just been terrific.

**Craig:** E-cigarettes, boy, I was ahead of the curve on that one, huh?

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not smoking them anymore, are you?

**Craig:** Eh, occasionally.

**John:** Oh, there’s ambiguity in there.

**Craig:** Occasionally.

**John:** Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, this thing was a piece of crap. So it worked for about like two months, but then it eventually ran out of charge and a couple of months later I tried to charge it and it would just refuse to charge. And so it’s now in the recycling.

**Craig:** Oh, Nexus 7. Jiro Dreams of Sushi will forever be the coolest thing about sushi.

**John:** It’s a great, great documentary.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The World in Words podcast, I’m not listening to. I’m sorry I’m not listening to it. I’m not.

**Craig:** Inrix Traffic App, use it every day.

**John:** AquaNotes are the little things you can write on notes in the shower. I used it for a little while and then I’ve stopped using it. So I’m not sure it’s worth it.

**Craig:** We both did Jambox somehow, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Oh, Jambox was the speaker system, the little Bluetooth speaker system.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, okay.

**John:** So I use them a lot. We use them all the time for just audio around the house. It’s great like you just take into the kitchen, plot it, listen to some podcasts, listen to some music. It’s great.

**Craig:** What do we do like a couple more so that we don’t — this will take hours.

**John:** This will take hours, so we’re going to stop at 60.

**Craig:** Okay, great. Okay.

**John:** So mine, well, the easiest one ever, the Los Angeles Public Library.

**Craig:** Is that still cool?

**John:** It’s still relatively cool, though my daughter has gotten through the stage where she reads like a thousand books. Instead she reads like thousand-page books. She just finished Harry Potter Five.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we don’t go there as often anymore.

**Craig:** Does she like Fablehaven books or that’s a little younger, I think, than your daughter.

**John:** That’s young for her.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see. My next one was the simplex algorithm which I still don’t understand. People have tried to explain to me. I’m useless.

**John:** Mine was the trailer for Derek Haas’s The Right Hand and the book itself. I remember the trailer. I didn’t read the book. I’m really sorry, Derek. I don’t know why I haven’t read the book.

**Craig:** Wow. You made it your cool thing and you didn’t even read it.

**John:** Mine for Episode 53 was Sleepwalk With Me which he end up being a guest on the podcast.

**Craig:** How prescient was that?

**John:** We’re smart.

**Craig:** Very smart. My next thing was The Words. I love that movie. I really do.

**John:** So I still haven’t seen the movie but I ran into the filmmaker and it turned out that that was actually one of the projects that was at Sundance a gazillion years ago.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so I knew him from there.

**Craig:** Which filmmaker was it? There’s two.

**John:** Really boisterous guy.

**Craig:** Was he short or was he tall?

**John:** Tall. Tall and thin.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s Klugman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, it was Jack Klugman’s nephew I think or something.

**John:** That’s great. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah, a good guy.

**John:** Mine was the HealthMap Vaccine Finder. I have no idea what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry.

**John:** Then I had Tejava ice tea which I drink every day.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I had a three-episode run where I didn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah, three episodes you did nothing.

**Craig:** I just gave up.

**John:** Fifty-six was the Voyager Q Quad Interface Dock and hard drives.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** These are the little, it looks like a toaster and you shove a hard drive in it.

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

**John:** I still use those every day. I think they’re great.

**Craig:** Okay, that’s cool.

**John:** Oh, my god, you still didn’t have a one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jordan Mechner’s the Last Express for iOS. I will be honest, I did not finish the game on iOS but I thought it was a really nice.

**Craig:** You thought it was cool. Well, my next one was The Room which was super cool and The Room 2 was super cool and I love it.

**John:** Absolutely right. Moom is a utility for the Mac that I use every day for resizing windows.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. My next one was Nogales, Arizona, and I still think fondly about how great the people of Nogales were when we were shooting Hangover Part 3.

**John:** Mine was the Kindle Paperwhite which I still use a lot. I love it.

**Craig:** And then on 60 mine was the Austin Film Festival which I attended last year and I will attend this year and I will attend every year until they tell me, “You’re no longer relevant. Go away.”

**John:** Mine was Screenwriting.io which we still keep up to date.

So Screenwriting.io answers all the really very simple basic questions and it’s designed for like, if you’re type something into Google about a screenwriting question like how do I format this kind of thing, very likely the first answer will be something on Screenwriting.io. So Stuart keeps that up to date so people can ask questions if they have a basic screenwriting question. Stuart.

And Aline’s was The Man Repeller Blog. That was, Aline was on the show that time and she had The Man Repeller Blog. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s still out there. I’m clicking.

**John:** We’ll ask. We’ll ask.

**Craig:** I’m clicking. It’s still going. It’s still going. Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. All right. That was 15 or 25 of the choices from One Cool Things. We’ll do some more on a different week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We have a question that comes from Kate Powers. And she says, “I am the same Kate Powers who asked at the Holiday Writers Guild Foundation Scriptnotes for guides about taking meetings with folks who dismiss my experience as a bad fit for their projects.” And so, do you remember her? So I think she was going for staffing season and she’s been staffed on these, I think it was she was on these like murdery shows and she’s going for something light or something like this —

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And she was kind of paranoid about like how people would perceive her, but she said we gave her awesome advice, as always.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “Not long after taping, I co-wrote an episode of the now filming the second season of Rectify and now I’m in the thick of getting to know you coffees and drinks of agents and my god I’d be freaking out so much worse if I didn’t have the calming influence of your podcast.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Should I make a ringtone that’s just Craig saying, ‘Your agent works for you,’ okay?”

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** That’s actually, it would be nice.

**Craig:** It would be nice.

**John:** She says, “On the subject of specing, have you or any writers you know encountered a spec project based on your own work? That is, a fan writes you and says, ‘I loved what you did in blank so much, I took all the names and places and events and turned them into a graphic novel, an opera, something else. Would you like to see it?’ Whether you have first-hand experience with this or not, I would love to know your thoughts and Craig if he has them on how to best respond to this information. It seems heartless not to respond at all and to take it as purely naughty, you shouldn’t do that, legal approach with someone who identifies as a fan seems wrongheaded. Is there a way to walk that line so the original author doesn’t get into trouble.”

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** So do you get what she’s saying here?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** So she’s made something —

**Craig:** I’ve had stuff like this. I mean, particularly —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, oddly around the spoof movies I did with David Zucker. People loved it, sort of do their own fan spoof movies and use the characters from, they love this, the Anna Faris character and the Regina Hall character and they would send me things sometimes and while they are fans, I’m very respectful, and I would say thank you and that’s so nice, but I would just sort of stick by the general I’m not allowed to read stuff rule because the truth is people could be writing things with your characters and then one day you might be writing something else with those characters and then they’re going to go, “Hey, you stole my thing.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, unfortunately, I do counsel it as sort of wall yourself off from reading that stuff because it’s a rough world out there.

**John:** We’re in a very strange time where obviously fans want to feel ownership of the things that they love and so if they’re doing like a super cut of your movie intercut with another movie, that I’m not so nervous about. It’s when they’re taking and creating a new original content with my characters that I start to get a little bit — I feel a little bit weird about it. Of course, we’re a time now we’re like that becomes its own art itself. Fifty Shades of Grey is of course Twilight fan fiction that became its own thing. And so it feels weird like if Stephanie Meyers had read it and then —

**Craig:** Not, that’s not, oh, you mean Stephanie Meyers who wrote Twilight.

**John:** Twilight, if she had read that and said like, “You know, you can’t take my characters and do this,” and yet who knows. Or if J.K. Rowling reads any of the sort of fan fiction about the stuff. I would say, I think there’s a way to respond to it saying like, “It’s so great that you love that, it feels weird for me to be looking at stuff with my characters, my situations. Once again, I love that you love it,” and not sort of commit yourself to that you’re going to watch it or that you support it. It’s just saying that like, “Thanks for thinking of me.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fair for us to protect the space in our heads from that stuff. I just read an interview with Vince Gilligan where he said essentially that he doesn’t look at any of the forums or many, many discussion groups that popped up around Breaking Bad, not while he was writing them, not now, because he just, in a sense, human thought is viral and it can kind of get in your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the point is just ideally your expression would be limited to what you want it to be and not be infected by other people’s positions or points of view particularly when sometimes the very fact that you’re hearing it is less reflective of the quality of what you’re hearing but rather more reflective of the volume of what you’re hearing if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely makes sense. One last thing about this question is, we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, a fan whose name I’m not going to be able to find quickly enough but he made a video of me and Craig talking about a previous One Cool Thing —

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** Which was this little stove I made.

**Craig:** Why did he make me so fat?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m like so fat.

**John:** Well, because you have to caricature something and I guess he did your eyebrows too. You have giant eyebrows and you got a big gut.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, like my eyebrows are like Brezhnev eyebrows and like I’m just obese.

**John:** But I’m sort of like I’m a very tall-headed weirdo who then becomes a zombie. So I get off a little better than you but not crazy better.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah, but he’s got like toilet paper trailing from my butt. I mean, I really was like a huge goofy monkey to this guy. I don’t know why. [laughs]

**John:** What’s so strange is I assume he’s never been to my office, but like he actually, like the door where you would have come out of the bathroom is exactly where the door actually is.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** So maybe he actually has been here and that’s a little terrifying to think about.

**Craig:** He may be in there right now. Mm-hmm. That was very nice that he did it, though.

**John:** It was really cool. I liked that people —

**Craig:** It was cute.

**John:** Want to spend, like, that took hours to do.

**Craig:** I know. That’s the thing, like, I actually do appreciate that. I mean, I have to look past the fact that he just, [laughs]. I remember I did a movie once with Jeffrey Tambor and I had the — I’ve done three movies with Jeffrey Tambor but I had the story boards up for this scene and the story art, storyboard artist, for whatever reason had kind of drawn Jeffrey Tambor really chunky and he’s not. He’s not an overweight man at all. And so he was sort of walking by and then he stopped and he saw these storyboards and he went, “Excuse me!” [laughs]

**John:** A final question comes from Gary in Orlando Florida. He writes, “Can you do a mini podcast talking about your journey into getting the t-shirts made. I’m currently looking at doing some screen printing at home of some of my art and putting it on Etsy. I know you’ve obviously had a higher production budget but I would love to hear about it. Thanks.” Because I can give this in a 30-second version.

All the t-shirts we’ve done, the Scriptnotes t-shirts, the other special Fountain t-shirts, all that stuff, we’ve basically been doing through the same place. And so, Ryan Nelson makes our art. We have a t-shirt printer here in Los Angeles and we’ll put a link in the show next to that. We take it down there. We talk to them what we want. We sort of already have our colors picked. They can buy any colored t-shirt we want so we can be very specific about color tones, but you really do need to see stuff in person.

So I would just say anything you buy online you’re never going to be quite sure. Ryan goes down there in person and makes sure he works with them. We’d like our printer. Basically, we order all the t-shirts at once. That’s the thing, it’s like it’s so much cheaper to figure out how many you need and get them all at once because if you try to do a piecemeal and add like 10 at a time, it will cost you so much more.

And so the secret to our t-shirt business which has been relatively successful and relatively sane is know your quantities ahead of time. Do it like production is one phase. Shipping is one phase and then be done with it. If you’re trying to ship and print all the time, you will do nothing but print and ship.

**Craig:** My secret is to have you guys do it.

**John:** Yes. Craig did lend us his assistant one day to help fold t-shirts when we had too many t-shirts.

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

**John:** Oh, do people want more t-shirts? This is just a general question. I guess, you can’t actually answer because it’s not a two-way podcast. We could make more t-shirts but I’m not sure we’re going to make more t-shirts. So if you really, really want more t-shirts, that’d be a great thing to tweet to me or to Craig or to send in.

**Craig:** I wish we could have a hoodie like with a little logo on it or something.

**John:** That’d be kind of nice. So tell us what you’d love to see, because I honestly think we sold fewer t-shirts the second time than the first time even though our listenership is up so much. I think it’s because the people who really wanted a Scriptnotes t-shirt were satisfied with the Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good.

**John:** They don’t need 15 of them.

**Craig:** What about intimate apparel?

**John:** Ha! Perfect.

**Craig:** I love that phrase.

**John:** That’s what everybody wants.

**Craig:** Yeah, intimate apparel.

**John:** Mm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Gym shorts.

**Craig:** That’s what Intimate apparel is to you apparently.

**John:** Yeah, it is. When you’ve been married as long as I have, that’s intimate apparel.

**Craig:** I know, gym shorts.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that Craig will love when he actually gets to playing it. It’s called Monument Valley. It’s a game for the iPad. It’s just terrifically well done. So Craig had mentioned before The Room which was a puzzle game for the iPad. This is a puzzle game too but it’s really more of a —

**Craig:** Like a platformer, right? Kind of?

**John:** It sort of looks like a platform originally. What’s so brilliant about it though is you’re this little girl character who really needs to walk from one place to another place but the world itself, it’s sort of M.C. Escherish and so like you’re walking and suddenly you’re walking on the side of a building and things are sort of crazy. Actually, if you think back to The Room, you know sometimes you get towards the end of one of the boxes, one of the levels and it’s sort of like that shape, the glowing shape will appear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you have to rotate it so it all lines up right.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s like that. So sometimes like a walkway will connect based on how you’re rotating it. And then she can walk across that walkway.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s smart. Yeah, somebody sent that link to me, and visually it was very reminiscent, almost disturbingly close to Journey which was the independent game that came out for the PlayStation. I was a little put off by that to be honest like, it looks like they kind of ripped off Journey, I mean, the character, at least the character basis. But if the game play is great then I’m in.

**John:** The game play is really smartly done, great music, just enough text so that there’s some sense of story. It was really cleverly done.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** And you can actually finish it. It’s not like one of those infinite platformers. There really is an end. It’ll take you three hours or so but you’ll get to the end of it.

**Craig:** Oh, I like finishing things.

Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a little gadget that you can stick on your key chain. It’s called Charge Key by a company called Nomad. It’s quite brilliant. It’s this little flexible sort of rubbery, plasticky thing. And on one end is this very slender USB thing that you can stick into any standard USB port. And on the other end is a charger for the iPhone, not the old-school iPhone but I guess everything from iPhone 5 on or something.

**John:** What is it called? Lightning connector?

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess that’s what’s called, the lightning connector, right. So it’s called Charge Key and boy does it work. And so the thing is sometimes you’re somewhere and you want to charge your phone. You just don’t have a charging cable but there are USB things everywhere like in every office.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes in your car, and now you don’t need a cable because it’s just sitting right there in your key chain, at a place, flexible, slim profile. I think it cost like 25 bucks or something and I got one for myself and my wife.

**John:** That sounds like a great idea.

**Craig:** She will not use it and her phone will run out of batteries. Every time.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question, John.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because now I’m starting, it’s been a long time since I felt umbrage but I… — When you call Mike, does he answer the phone?

**John:** Very rarely do we call each other. We’re more of texting kind of situation.

**Craig:** Okay. Somehow, he responds? [laughs]

**John:** He does respond.

**Craig:** I cannot tell you how many times I call my wife or I text her and there’s nothing for like two hours. And then I’ll come home and there she is just sitting there. And I’m like, “What did — did you not get the text or the…?”

“Oh, my phone is at the bottom of my bag and it’s on vibrate and…oh well.” Or, “No, it’s out of batteries because I turned the camera on and let it run for…” I mean, I swear, I swear, what do I do? What do I do?

**John:** I don’t know how to deal with those kind of women problems. The first thing is it never occurred to me, but of course there’s a difference because like we’re always going to feel our phone on vibrate because it’s in our pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s in our pocket. But here is the thing, women have pockets too!

**John:** Well, not all of her clothes have pockets.

**Craig:** Well, yes.

**John:** I’m going to defend her here.

**Craig:** Decent point.

**John:** But I’m also going to put a link in the show notes for a really great article about sort of preserving battery life on the iPhone because it is weird how some people like, “My phone will die halfway through the day.” And other people are like, “I very rarely have issues with that.”

**Craig:** I never had problems with it.

**John:** And so it turns out that one of the biggest culprits is Facebook’s location feature. And so if you turn that off, you’re going to be at a happier situation. People have that instinct to like close out apps, that doesn’t save you any power and actually causes you to use more power because every time you relaunch the app it’s having to do a lot more work. So let the phone do its thing about sort of putting those apps to sleep. But basically location services are a huge drain which I already sort of sensed like if you try to use the Find My Friends feature, that drains your battery quickly.

**Craig:** I’m going to grab my wife’s phone which will be easy to do because I know where it is, it’s at the bottom of her bag, on vibrate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m going to turn that thing off so that the phone will have battery for days so that she can also not answer it.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Gym shorts. I should get her gym shorts.

**John:** [laughs] That’s what you should get her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have so many solutions for real-life marriages and for creative marriages —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Between you and your script.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So you can find links to the charger thing, to how to conserve your battery life, to Monument Valley, and many of the other things we talked about today in the show notes. You can find them at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for this episode and for all the back episodes of our show. If you want to listen to those back episodes, you can find those at scriptnotes.net or through the app. So the Scriptnotes app, you can look for it in iTunes or through the App Store for the iOS and also for Android at all the places where you would find that.

We have a couple of the USB drives left if you still want those. Those are at store.johnaugust.com in addition the few last bizarre sizes of t-shirts. I shouldn’t say bizarre sizes.

**Craig:** Yeah, now you’re just a body fascist.

**John:** I’m a body fascist. I would say there is a few select sizes of t-shirts left.

**Craig:** Oh, man, I hope people write letters.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Mathew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Chris Belle who is a.k.a Mr. Stone Bender. We have some great outros but if you’d like to send us an outro we would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can figure it out. Basically, as long as it includes [hums theme] in some version, you’re great, you’re set.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** If people have a question for you, Craig, how should they reach you?

**Craig:** Well, they can reach me on Twitter. I am @clmazin.

**John:** I’m @johnaugust. For longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Good show. Solid.

**John:** That’s was, I think it was a solid show.

**Craig:** Tight.

**John:** It was nice to be back doing it at our normal space, not a creepy basement underneath a comic bookstore.

**Craig:** Boy, that was scary down there.

**John:** And it really, I mean, someone’s died back there. I don’t know how recently but someone’s died.

**Craig:** Someone’s dying there right now. Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Thanks, Craig. Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye-bye.

**John:** All right, bye.

LINKS:

* [Get your tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* The bonus panel is available to premium subscribers at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-rewriting-and-refocusing) or through the Scriptnotes app for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes)
* Tony Gilroy’s [BAFTA/BFI screenwriters lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kv3DcXIUaRw)
* Michael Arndt [on setting a story in motion](http://johnaugust.com/2014/michael-arndt-on-setting-a-story-in-motion)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 124: [Q&A from the Holiday Spectacular](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Scriptnotes listener Tom LaBaff [draws Scriptnotes](https://twitter.com/TLaBaff/status/454819091669594114)
* [Imprint Revolution](http://www.imprintrevolution.com/) prints our shirts
* There are still select shirt sizes (and a few USBs) left at the [John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Monument Valley](http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/) is available now for iOS, and soon for Android
* [Nomad](http://www.hellonomad.com/), makers of Charge Key (and Charge Card)
* [The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain](http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Chris Henry ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))