• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

John August

  • Arlo Finch
  • Scriptnotes
  • Library
  • Store
  • About

Search Results for: subplots

Scriptnotes, Bonus Episode: Die Hard Deep-Dive, Transcript

January 10, 2020 News, Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/bonus-die-hard).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin, ho-ho-ho.

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

On this very special episode we are going to be looking at the 1988 film Die Hard, how it works on a story level. We’re going to focus on what screenwriters can learn from it and some of the mistaken lessons people have tried to learn from it. This is not going to be a detailed look at the history of the film or its place in cinematic canons, because we’re not that interested in that kind of stuff, are we?

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t really care. I just want to know what about this works so well. You and I both started in the early ‘90s. And in the early ‘90s there were a few movies that you were lectured about over and over. And Die Hard was definitely one of them.

**John:** So, Craig, what is your first exposure to Die Hard? Do you remember seeing it the first time? What was it for you?

**Craig:** Yes I do. I was a perfect age for it. I was 17 years old. I saw it in the movie theaters. I don’t remember when it came out.

**John:** Summer of 1988.

**Craig:** Yeah, so it was a Christmas movie in Summer. Summer of 1988 I was 17. What a great time. And I remember thinking it was a blast. I mean, it was fun, and you got the sense that you had shown up for a dumb movie and gotten something that wasn’t dumb at all.

**John:** Yeah. So weirdly I don’t remember seeing Die Hard the first time, but I do remember the first exposure I ever had to Die Hard as a concept which was summer of 1988. I was over at my friend Ethan Diamond’s house. His older brother, Andrew, came back from seeing Die Hard in the theaters. And we were standing in Ethan’s kitchen and Andrew said like, “I saw the future of movies and it is Die Hard.”

**Craig:** That’s kind of crazy. I mean, I remember thinking that when I saw The Matrix. I don’t know if I thought that when I saw Die Hard. In fact, I remember thinking this is just a really good version of for instance I think around that time I remember going to see Commando in the theaters with Arnold Schwarzenegger who gets weirdly name-checked in Die Hard. And I thought like, oh my god, this is like the best version of Commando ever. Yeah.

**John:** So we just did a special live show and Kevin Feige actually mentioned Die Hard as being the first time he saw a “normal” movie that he really liked, so a thing that didn’t involve super heroes, or fantasy, or elves, or gnomes, or dwarves. It was just a really great action movie. And so I think it has had an influence on even things beyond the normal action movies. And I think you can’t look at a lot of modern action movies without having some sense of what Die Hard did.

**Craig:** I agree. Die Hard gave us a sense of action pacing that I don’t think we were used to. And it also had a very odd modernity. Now, when we look at it we’re going to look at it also through the lens of its time. It is one of the most Reagan era movies possible.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But the fact that it said we’re not going to be in space. We’re not going to be out in the open field. We’re not going to be doing car chases, running around. We’re going to dump all the things we normally do in a big cops and robbers movie and we’re just going to stick it inside a building and let the confined space and the weird specifics of that building work to our benefit. That was pretty revolutionary.

**John:** I would also say the comedy that’s consistent throughout the movie, and characters who show up very late but are given very specific character comedy bits, has had an influence on sort of how we think about all these kind of movies. There’s that sense that you kind of don’t make an action movie without some sense of what the comedy is going to be owes a debt to Die Hard.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could say that all Ryan Reynolds movies should pay a little bit of money to Die Hard every time they happen, because Ryan Reynolds’ character is kind of the best evolution of the wise-cracking tough guy. So he’s in great shape, he can run, he can shoot, he can kill if he needs to. When it is time to punch and get serious he can. When he needs to be heartfelt and care about a person and a relationship he can. But a lot of the times while he’s doing it he’s just tossing out these sardonic one liners. And Bruce Willis kind of invented that.

**John:** I think so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So today on the episode I want to talk through a couple different areas. We should talk about characters. How we set up characters. How we know who is who. The characters have arcs. They’re shallow but they’re there. And I want to talk through arcs. How you find the beats in those arcs, the motivation behind characters. And how we signal to the audience what the characters want, both in the very near term and long term. Sort of what their overall goals are. This is a great movie in talking about hero weakness and villain strength, because the relationship between hero and villain is very different in this movie than we might expect.

And it’s also a great example of something we want to show to other action stars about like this is how you can be an action star and not be perfect in every moment. And it’s his weakness that I think makes the John McClane character so endearing to the audience.

**Craig:** Absolutely. He repeatedly shows fear, which I think we generally like. Maybe some actors don’t understand that. But we in the audience really, really appreciate it.

**John:** Now, rewatching this movie for this segment I was really impressed by sort of how well-structured and plotted it is. It is a jeopardy machine. And we have come to expect that out of movies, but I was surprised that there were very few scenes where you say like, oh, you could cut that scene and it wouldn’t have any impact. Everything that is there is there and very necessary. And it is setting up and paying off stuff constantly. So as we go through the movie from top to bottom we’ll try to point out situations where they are setting this up really well and they are going to pay it off and they have a whole plan. I feel like if you were to put this movie up on the whiteboard you would see like, OK, this is a really tight film just on an outline level.

**Craig:** No question. It does a brilliant job of setting things up and paying them off. And I’d actually forgotten how some of these little tiny things – I mean, the movie begins with one of the strangest conversations ever. And that conversation actually becomes incredibly important.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It has repercussions throughout the film. You just don’t realize it then. But it kind of works. It’s pretty remarkable in that regard. They’re really good at that.

**John:** We won’t get a chance to single out every joke, but what we were saying about the comedy of the movie and the specificity of the characters is really important. These aren’t just types of characters going through roles. They are very specifically drawn, which is nice.

But, Craig, you did in your How to Write a Movie podcast, you talked about theme and central dramatic question. And my rewatching of this I didn’t feel like that was a primary unifying element behind how Die Hard holds itself together. Did you in rewatching it do you feel like there’s a central dramatic question it’s trying to ask and answer?

**Craig:** Barely.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Barely. And it turns on the relationship and it’s very simply encapsulated by the beginning and end of John McClane’s interaction with his wife, or maybe ex-wife, separated wife Holly. He comes to visit her, but they’ve been separated. And he essentially says in so many words, “I’m more important than you are.” And by the end he understands, no, actually we together are more important than just me. My needs don’t matter. I want to be a good husband to you. Very simple. Very, very, very simple.

But, essential. If you don’t have it, it really just is a guy running around a building and you don’t care.

**John:** Yep. And I think that’s a lesson that was mislearned by a bunch of people who tried to be Die Hard in a blank is that they didn’t do that work of what is the emotional journey he’s trying to go through.

**Craig:** Yeah. I remember at the time somebody made the joke that they were going in and pitching Die Hard in a building. It was really funny. So we had a spade of Die Hard – Die Hard did Die Hard on a plane, and Die Hard in an airport. There was a Die Hard in an everything. And Die Hard in a spaceship. And it got really, really frustrating.

Well, I mean, look, the gender politics are incredibly regressive. I mean, we have to talk about for a second how brilliantly this movie encapsulates the Reagan era. So very briefly you have a story about a woman who dares to have her own career. And her husband doesn’t want to follow her to Los Angeles because he’s a New York cop. And bizarrely has a backlog of cases? That’s not how policing works. He can just go ahead and be a cop in LA if he wants to. He can join that police department, I’m sure.

So this is the root of their marriage problems. She has dropped his name and is using her own. At the end, the way he saves her ultimately is by getting rid of this token of her success, which is the Rolex watch.

**John:** The Rolex watch.

**Craig:** She earned because she’s really good at her job. That has to go. And also she takes his name again because she must resume being his property, fully more. And this is really where I love Die Hard for being so Reagan era and honestly Trumpian in this regard, too. The ethos of the movie is that the people in charge of stuff like the bureaucrats in charge of law enforcement and the FBI, they don’t know anything. They’re stupid and incompetent. The media elites are terrible, unethical liars who don’t care about anything. The only people that can save you in the end – oh, and Europeans are trash.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The only people who can save you in the end are just good old American men.

**John:** Working class men.

**Craig:** Working class men who are constantly rolling their eyes at the stupidity of those pencil neck “experts.” The insanity of the way that these police go about their job, not the police man we’re rooting for, but the police in charge. So like we’re procedure junkies now. We were not in 1988. So we watch this movie and we’re like, huh, I guess that’s how the police might. So there’s a cop car that’s been riddled with bullets, and a body also riddled with bullets has fallen out of a building onto the cop car. But the deputy chief of police is like, meh, I’m sure it’s nothing. OK, I buy it. No.

**John:** No. All right, but let’s talk about the gender politics for one second before we get into this, because looking at Bruce Willis’s character arc which is shallow but it is there, McClane does say, “Tell my wife I’ve been a jerk. I should have been more supportive.” He does have that epiphany as it comes through it. So I would say that they’ve drawn that relationship in a way that is meaningful within the course of the movie as presented. And I did like that it didn’t go out of its way to punish Holly’s character for being successful and being ambitious. They try to acknowledge that she should be able to do these things. The movie as a whole, everything gets destroyed, but I didn’t feel like they were trying to single her out.

And even though she is the woman who is being rescued, it didn’t have the very classic rescue princess tropes. She didn’t feel helpless through a lot of it. She was never screaming or panicked.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** She was incredibly competent.

**Craig:** But in the end they damseled her.

**John:** They did damsel her.

**Craig:** And it’s definitely a movie about a man rescuing a woman. She’s perfect. She has no flaws.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Except for her weird insistence on being successful. [laughs] And a good mom. The Rolex thing is sort of startling. And the fact that at the end she’s like, “I am – no, my name is Holly McClane.” Look, it was 1988. I mean, she actually was a terrific character up until the kind of inevitable damseling. But I love the scene, and we’ll get to it, where she confronts Hans Gruber just in terms of you put me in charge. It was very well done. And Bonnie Bedelia.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** A spectacular job. And this is a great place for us to stop and mention the writers that we’re talking about.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the background of all of this. This is a 1988 movie released by Fox. Directed by John McTiernan. Screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDFs we have of it. Also we’ll have it up in Weekend Read. The script that we’re going to be talking about is a pretty close approximation of what the final movie is. So as we’re talking through this today we’re going to be talking in terms of like minutes in the movie, but the screenplay actually matches up pretty closely. The script I looked at was 127 pages and that feels about right to what the movie is.

**Craig:** It’s about a two-hour, ten-minute movie or so.

**John:** It’s based on a book by Roderick Thorp called Nothing Lasts Forever. I have not read the book, but I have read up some background on the book and I was surprised to see that the book actually has a lot more of the movie Die Hard in it than I would have guessed. Some of the stuff that’s in the 1979 book, so a retired NYC police detective, Joe Leland, is visiting the 40-story office tower headquarters of the Klaxon Oil Corporation, that changed, on Christmas Eve, where his daughter, Stephani Gennaro works. While he’s waiting for his daughter’s Christmas party to end a group of German Autumn terrorists take over the skyscraper, led by the brutal Anton Gruber.

**Craig:** Their gang name is Autumn-Era? So cool.

**John:** Joe had known about Gruber through a counterterrorism he attended years before. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the giant office complex. Aided only by Los Angeles police sergeant Al Powell and armed only with his police issue pistol Leland fights off the terrorists one-by-one in an attempt to save 74 hostages and grandchildren. So that’s a Wikipedia summary, but there’s a lot of Die Hard in that summary. And so some of the things that are apparently in the book is McClane going through the air ducts, which is also a big pet peeve of mine.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** The C-4 bomb down the elevator shaft. Jumping off the exploding roof with a fire hose attached to his waist and then shooting through a window to gain reentry, which still feels like such a movie moment, but apparently was in the book. Taping his gun to his back in the climax. The book was apparently inspired by The Towering Inferno, which is obviously a clear prior to all of this.

Interesting piece of trivia. So Frank Sinatra starred in the first book in this series called The Detective and so he was offered the role of John McClane, but he would have been 70 when this–

**Craig:** I would love to see that.

**John:** It would be amazing.

**Craig:** Hey Hans–

**John:** You can really see him going through all the physical activity.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Well, I mean, the fact that the character of John McClane is running around. He’s a smoker. Looks like he’s, you know, getting close to 40. He’s a smoker. And he has incredible cardiovascular fitness.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, this is back when you could smoke in a car, smoke in an airport, and you could bring a gun on a plane.

**John:** A gun on a plane.

**Craig:** Gun on a plane. Yeah, no big deal.

**John:** All right. Let’s talk about the movie. Let’s start at the top and we’ll be going through it. From the very start we need to setup John McClane. We need to know that he’s a cop. That he’s from NYC. That his wife works here now. We need to establish that he’s still interested in women, so we see him making eyes at another woman on a plane.

**Craig:** Classic. Yeah, so his character is family man, trying to get his wife back, but still, you know, he’s hot-blooded American. And he makes eyes with the, well, they were stewardesses then. It was 1988. But before all of that he has the weirdest exchange with this guy.

**John:** Tell me about it.

**Craig:** So like normally speaking you don’t want to start a movie with a long conversation about nonsense with a day player. But that’s exactly what Die Hard does. It begins with John McClane having a conversation on the plane with his seatmate. John McClane is clearly scared to fly. It’s a great opening shot. He’s white-knuckling, literally. And the guy next to him is like, uh, you’re not a good flyer. And he says something that literally makes no sense. It’s a non-sequitur. He goes from “You’re not a good flyer” to “I’ve figured out how to – what you do when you land.” Which doesn’t make any sense. “To get accustomed after you travel you take your shoes and your socks off and you walk around on the carpet in your bare feet and you make little fists with your feet.”

And I’m thinking what cocaine-fueled nonsense is this? But it makes sense later.

**John:** It is incredibly useful later on. And I feel like as the movie starts you’re kind of free to do anything. So you can put in that nonsense business at the very top of the movie because no one has any expectation about what’s supposed to happen.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So you can just do it. Yes, it is sort of nonsense-y, but it totally works. And of course it’s setting up that he’s going to be barefoot through a lot of the movie. And so his barefoot-ness becomes a huge crucial plot point.

**Craig:** A huge crucial plot point.

**John:** All right. So we’ve established that John McClane is arriving in Los Angeles. Now we need to setup his not quite ex-wife, Holly. We need to see her at her office. We need to establish that they have kids. The kids are with the nanny.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s talk about race in this movie for a second. Let’s get the tough stuff out of the way. This movie has some very strange racial stuff going on, not surprising for 1988. Holly has a housekeeper/nanny. She is meant to be Latin-American of some kind. She is Latina. Her accent is bizarre. I get the feeling that that actor may not actually have had that accent. Also, they did a thing that movies used to do with people like that. Characters who were from another country would insist on speaking back – they can understand English clearly. So Holly speaks to her in English. And the nanny answers back in half-English/half-Spanish pointlessly. Like for instance she’ll use the word Si instead of Yes. Just pointlessly as if to say, see, I’m from another country, but I’m nice.

It’s bizarre.

**John:** But let’s talk about why that character exists. It’s because they want to establish that they have kids, but the kids are not going to be in the movie. Until they kind of very late in the story are in the movie. But that they’re not going to be a crucial factor in this. They’re not in jeopardy.

**Craig:** Correct. And if that character and those kids never came back again it would feel a bit cheap, like fake stakes. But they do interestingly enough in kind of a key scene later. So, again, the screenwriters here are doing an excellent job of making sure that they’re setting up pins. And I like it when movies setup pins and I don’t understand that they’re pins. I just think that they’re things. And then later I go, ooh, OK. I get it. I get it now.

**John:** So once we’ve established that Holly and John McClane have kids, that they’re with the nanny, we meet Argyle, who is to me a very problematic character in this story.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He was a good idea who has like three or four beats. None of the beats where Argyle is by himself work especially well. This initial scene where he’s sort of welcoming John McClane to Los Angeles is probably the best of his beats.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s the only one really where he gets to be kind of vaguely human. I mean, look, Argyle is a regressive racial stereotype. And that’s not any offense to the actor playing him. That guy did his job, right. He was paid to do a job. He was an actor. And this is reality. This is why Robert Townsend made Hollywood Shuffle. I mean, this was the deal back then.

But it is kind of this kind of over smiley stereotype. And in fact when John McClane realizes that Argyle, even the name alone feels regressive, when Argyle is going to be his chauffeur he looks at him like, uh, really. They sent me a black guy as a driver? You feel like he’s a racist in that moment. Like all right I’ll give you a chance, kid. I mean, it’s weird. It’s weird. Argyle’s insistence on being super friendly to John McClane is weird. It doesn’t…ugh.

**John:** Yeah. So I think of all the subplots this is a subplot you could entirely take out and the movie would survive well. Because Argyle does nothing especially important throughout the rest of it.

So John McClane could take a taxi to the building and the same conversation could have been happening with the taxi driver.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, honestly Argyle weirdly seems like he’s there to close one of the strangest plot loops ever, which is the two black guys in the movie have to like – one black guy has to knock the other one out. You can only defeat a black man with another black man. It’s the weirdest – it’s 1988. It’s, oof. Yeah. Not great in that regard.

**John:** So here’s a moment that I really enjoyed as I watched it again was that once John McClane gets to the iconic–

**Craig:** Nakatomi Building.

**John:** Nakatomi Plaza Tower. So if you are coming to Los Angeles you will see the Nakatomi Plaza Tower because it is still kind of by itself. It is at the edge of the Fox Studio lot. If you’re parking there you will often park in this parking structure where Argyle parks.

**Craig:** It is not actually the Nakatomi Building. It is the Fox Building.

**John:** It is the Fox Building. And it is nearly as empty now as it was during the time of this because everyone has moved out of Fox.

**Craig:** I have never been in that building.

**John:** Oh I’ve been there.

**Craig:** Who is in that building?

**John:** Well, different stuff is in there at different times. And it’s not entirely Fox stuff that’s in there. I think it was business affairs-y kinds of things would be in the Fox Building.

**Craig:** Business affairs-y kind of things.

**John:** Yeah. So he arrives at this building and in singing in he has to use a computer screen which felt like very impressive for sort of the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s just there to establish that his wife is not using his last name. And that is both a character moment but it becomes a very crucial plot moment because it’s why Gruber does not recognize that Holly is McClane’s wife.

**Craig:** And this is something this movie does really well over and over and over. It’s not content with a very simple linear I’m going to show you a thing because it means one thing. They’re really good at multi-purpose use of things. And we love that as an audience. When we think we know why something is in a movie and then the audience says, oh no, no, no, no, there’s another reason why. It gets us very excited.

**John:** And so that front desk will also become a recurring set because they will be putting in their own fake person at that front desk who Al will be interfacing with. So that becomes useful later on.

**Craig:** At this point in the movie I think we’ve met Hart Bochner playing Harry Ellis.

**John:** We have met Hart Bochner. So this is another like only in the ‘80s kind of character we could find.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So Hart Bochner as an actor, great, whatever, loving it. But like as a character I would say a smart choice to make somebody that you actually hate more than the terrorists, who you really want to see die.

**Craig:** Yeah, he was an incredibly broad comic character. I mean, someone said we want you to play – so again, 1988 politics. America was obsessed with Yuppies. So children, gather around. A Yuppie was a young, urban professional. Back in those days people were angry that there were people who were young, urban professionals. They hated them. They hated them for things like eating quiche. Quiche is delicious.

**John:** Delicious.

**Craig:** It’s eggs and cheese. If you have scrambled eggs and cheese, then you’re a perfectly fine He-Man trucker. If you eat cheese, then you’re no good. You’re Yuppie scum. And so they said to Hart Bochner we want you to play the scummiest, skeeviest Yuppie ever. And he probably showed them a version of it and they said, no, bigger. And then he’s like, OK. And then they were like, no, bigger. Snort coke. Say bubby. Be a total jerk. Bigger. Bigger!

And he did it. He hit the mark.

**John:** That’s what an actor does.

**Craig:** Listen, he followed his direction. Hat’s off. It’s not his fault.

**John:** So when he ultimately meets his fate we’re not that sad.

**Craig:** No. But I don’t remember necessarily feeling like thrilled either, because he just didn’t seem like a human being.

**John:** That is true.

**Craig:** He seemed so ridiculous. Whereas Bill Atherton, who made a wonderful career in the ‘80s of playing dickheads – “Yes, it’s true, this man has no dick” – from Ghostbusters. He’s playing the exact same character from Ghostbusters. A vicious prick. And he manages to seem real.

**John:** Yeah. A fine line. All right, so John McClane reaches the party. So to me it feels a little bit weird that you go to the party and not go to see your kids, but anyway he goes to the party.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But I buy it. At the start of this movie where I’m just learning the rules I bought that he’s going there first. And I do like that he’s seeing his wife. And it also feels like they might be getting – things might be going OK. And then they fall into their old patterns. And I thought those scenes were well handled.

**Craig:** I mean, there really is a scene. I mean, they have a scene. So he’s in her office which is more like a hotel room than an office. It just makes no sense.

**John:** Well, an executive bathroom.

**Craig:** Right. But then she says she’s really envious of Hart Bochner’s executive bathroom, which makes no sense because she’s technically his boss. I don’t understand any of it. And also she has a bathroom. It looks really nice. By the way, this is one of those movies that is simply impossible in the age of cell phones. But let’s put that aside.

They have one scene. And in that once scene you get the sense that she still loves him, which is important for us in the audience to know. That there’s hope. And then he has to be a dick about it because of the name thing. And when she marches out of there angry – oh, and I should say he’s washing up and in doing so he has removed his shirt to have his wife beater tee underneath. Did that cause any feelings for you as a young man?

**John:** Oh yeah. I think there’s a whole conversation to be had about sort of the wardrobe, but really Bruce Willis’s body which is sort of a central thing that changes so much over the course of the movie. He keeps stripping down to less, and less, and less.

**Craig:** But I didn’t remember that – in my mind I think he just flew out to Los Angeles in his wife beater tee-shirt. I forgot that he was wearing clothes and he just happened to have taken them off when things go down. So that’s such a – as a kid watching it I must have just thought, OK, he’s running around. Now I watch it and go, oh my god, there must have been so many meetings. And Bruce Willis was like, no, this is the one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This one makes me look great.

**John:** And also if you look at sort of the wardrobe department and also makeup, having to figure out like how dirty he is at every moment.

**Craig:** Continuity. Good lord.

**John:** The continuity of that would be so tough. Because his tee-shirt goes through at least 17 shades of brown and gray.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ll say this much at least. For a movie that costs, I think it was like $25 million which was quite a bit back then, it couldn’t have been all blown on his wardrobe. You can get 1,000 of those tee-shirts to have 1,000 different stages of distress and you’ll be fine.

**John:** Yep. He arrives at the party. A guy kisses him. He freaks out about that.

**Craig:** He goes, “California.” But what he’s really is like, “Gay.” I mean, the whole thing, it’s so clear he’s just like, “New York is straight and California is gay. Argh.” Yeah.

**John:** And then suddenly we are in plot. We’re in a heist plot. And so this is 20 minutes in. We have the first hero shot of Rickman. We’ve taken out the security guard. And we’re starting to establish this misdirect that they are some kind of idealistic terrorists and quickly we’ll learn that they are just actually thieves.

**Craig:** No in today’s era because of our – in a weird way Die Hard is one of the movies that starts to accelerate first acts. Because the first act is rather short here. If you want to call it acts. I mean, one of the nice things about watching Die Hard is you never feel an act ever. It just sort of proceeds. Today people might say to you, “We need to start with these terrorists doing something terrible so we know who they are before we meet our guy.” No. This is a much better way. And in so many ways this movie is special and works because of an actor that we were introduced to, the late, great Alan Rickman, who seems like he has parachuted in from an entirely other genre.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He’s like a Bond villain almost. He’s brilliant. He’s so well spoken. And fascinating. And small in his behaviors. And we’d never had villains like that. Traditionally in these movies we have psychos or we have steroid freaks.

**John:** Yeah. And so if he were the Bond villain then we would have a James Bond opposite him. So to have like an ordinary guy opposite him is fascinating. The other thing I think works so well about Alan Rickman’s character is from his perspective he’s Danny Ocean and this is Ocean’s 11.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, yes, he’s willing to kill some people to do it, but like killing people and doing evil is not his goal at all. His goal is the $640 million of bearers bonds. He has a plan for how he’s going to do that. And he is methodical. He has assembled a team. You could have a whole other movie which is just about him putting the script together and planning this heist.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what’s really interesting about his whole the villain is the hero of his own movie essence is that while we have a very simple motivation which we need, we’re certainly clear about what he wants. He makes it clear to Takagi, “Who said we were terrorists?” So that’s the first big twist. Like, oh, they’re not terrorists, they’re thieves, which was great. But later you also learn that he was a terrorist. He was part of a terrorist movement. And they kicked him out theoretically because he actually was just more interested in being a thief. That’s a fascinating guy.

I’m not as interested in zealots as I am in calculating people who are just one millimeter away from the reality of what our hero is like. A man of purpose, as it were.

**John:** So thinking about him as the Danny Ocean of this movie, he has a plan and a timeline and they lay out the timeline very clearly. So, it’s going to take two hours to break this code, then 2.5 hours to break through these different locks. So, you know, we very explicitly put out the exposition of this is what’s going to need to happen. You’re giving the audience a road map for these are the things that are going to have to happen for this to progress so we know that, OK, the movie cannot be over until all these things have happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s perfect. Of all the mechanisms to provide an audience with a sense of structure. When we talk about structure we’re saying something is holding all of this up. There’s a spine. And to say here’s this big ass vault and it has seven locks. And it’s going to take me a few hours to get through one through six. But I’ve already told you I don’t know how to get through seven. And Alan Rickman says, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle number seven.” We know that there is a countdown of locks. Literally a number. And we can watch them as they go. It’s not a ticking clock at the end. The whole thing has a clock to it and that’s gorgeous.

**John:** Yeah. Once they start shooting up the party and once things start going down, John McClane has escaped from there. He’s running through the hallways. He’s going up the stairs. And he starts to do what I think is appropriate. What is the best thing for me to do right now? And he doesn’t just charge in to try to save everybody. He’s like I need to get help and he works on trying to get help, which is a good, natural response, and not a movie hero response, but is actually what a real person would try to do. How do I get somebody to show up here?

**Craig:** Right. And there’s a line that Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza have in here. He is present but hiding when he sees Mr. Takagi murdered by Alan Rickman. And he runs away. They hear him. They chase after him. But they don’t see him. He escapes. And when we see him next he is by himself and he is saying, “Why didn’t you do something, you idiot?” And then he goes, “Because you would have been as dead as he is.” So in his mind he’s talking it through so that we know – and this is important – you can feel the note on this. So is he a coward? No, he’s not a coward. He literally says out loud, “I’m not a coward. I’m smart.”

**John:** His plan is to contact the police and get police out there and get this handled. He tries to do it and this is the first of many classic examples of just like he has a plan and it falls apart because of this obstacle, things he couldn’t anticipate.

The police just don’t take him seriously.

**Craig:** Right. This is the beginning of incompetent police work. But before we get to the police we have another relationship that we learn about, for a very fleeting moment, but it is perfectly efficient. It is the relationship between Karl and his brother. These are two German brothers, although one of them is a Russian in real life. A ballet dancer at that. And they are both criminals, obviously as part of this gang. Karl seems to be a bit of a hot head. His brother is a bit more methodical and careful. And that’s all we know. That’s all we need to know. Because what’s going to happen is Karl’s brother will be the first terrorist that dies, not because McClane murders him, importantly because they fight. He doesn’t murder him. They fight and they fall down the stairs and Karl’s brother breaks his neck.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Smart choice. And now we know that Karl, hot head that he is, has become essentially the nemesis here, which is really smart. Hans Gruber is the brain. He’s the real villain. But Karl is like nature. And you can’t stop Karl. Wonderful. We do have gratuitous nudity as well, very classic 1980s. Classic.

**John:** Yes. Hard to fit into a modern movie than before.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t do it.

**John:** We’re fast forwarding through the movie as we look at this. One of the things I will say is that I was impressed by the photography overall in Die Hard. A thing you definitely notice about 1980 that was hard to do is big wide night shots. We just didn’t have the technology to make those look great. And so there are moments where the helicopter gunships are coming and it’s OK as long as they’re in the city space. But there’s just not enough light to sort of light the city of Los Angeles. And some of the big nighttime shots are really dark.

**Craig:** Yeah. They do a great job here. They also use so many different environments in this building. You feel like they devoured this building and used every possible piece. You have cinderblock environments. You have construction areas. And they even set up the fact that the building is not complete. Takagi says, “It’s still a work in progress.” And you can see that. So that’s explained.

You’re in elevator shafts. You’re in ducts. You’re in these beautiful offices. You’re in an atrium. They really do use everything, every part of this building. And then that great roof. I never – and I still don’t – understand exactly how a building like this is put together. It seems like it has been put together for the purposes of a movie. There’s all these cool railings and grills and fans and things. But it never crosses the line into what I would call Michael Bay-ville where everything seems art directed. It doesn’t. It actually seems real even though it’s not.

**John:** In terms of talking about the physical spaces, watching this again I noticed that there’s a pinup poster on one wall. And we come back to it a second time. He notices it the first time and he comes back to it again. And it’s a very useful way of reestablishing, OK, we’re back on that same floor. Because things would otherwise be very confusing.

**Craig:** Again, using gratuitous nudity.

**John:** But it helps you remember that you’ve seen that thing before and we’re back in that same place.

**Craig:** I remembered it.

**John:** Otherwise rooms could look the same.

**Craig:** No, exactly. And this was another way that they could answer these questions. And these are the kinds of questions that you and I get all the time. I remember when I turned the first script in for the first Chernobyl. One of the questions was, “How are we going to tell all these people apart? We don’t know the actors. We don’t know their names. And they’re all wearing the exact same thing.” And we were like I guess we’re going to have to cast carefully. But the truth is these are the things you’ve got to worry about.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** I could see in Die Hard like how are we going to know what floor we’re on. Well, most of the times you don’t. But some of the times – there was a computer room. That was its own thing.

**John:** I had no sense of where that computer room was in the building. It does not matter at all.

**Craig:** Doesn’t matter.

**John:** I know the lobby is on the ground floor. I know the party is up high. The reason why we needed that pinup is because the fact that we’ve been there before means he has a knowledge of how to get out of that floor, which is very important.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. So finally he gets up to the roof. He uses the radio. He calls the police. They don’t believe him. But ultimately they say, “OK, we’ll send a car to do a drive by.”

**Craig:** It’s insane. So in this world the Los Angeles police department their special thing that they monitor, they’re all in some kind of weird Death Star environment. It’s this dark room with blinking lights. And they don’t believe anybody who calls them about anything.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There’s even gunshots in the radio. They don’t care. And John McClane bizarrely – oh, well, he doesn’t identify himself as a police officer in part because he knows that they’re listening. And then you get this other relationship in the movie which frankly for me as a kid was the relationship I felt, more than his relationship with Holly.

**John:** Well let’s talk about Al Powell. So Al Powell is the guy who shows up. When we first meet Al Powell he is buying Twinkies at a convenient store. It’s not an amazing scene. It establishes him as an ordinary Joe. Again, a working class man.

**Craig:** You know–

**John:** He’s not eating the fancy pastries. He’s eating Twinkies.

**Craig:** If you watch this movie one thing you will notice is that everything that happens that’s funny happens when Alan Rickman is doing it, or when Bruce Willis is doing it. If those guys aren’t in the scene and funny things are happening they are not funny.

**John:** They’re meant to be funny, but they don’t really work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think John McTiernan was necessarily the funniest director. So, your choice there is he’s an overweight cop and he’s buying Twinkies, but he has him buying like 12? Who can eat 12 Twinkie boxes?

**John:** They’re talking about his wife being pregnant. It didn’t make sense.

**Craig:** None of it works. None of it works. Similarly when Hart Bochner is giving his whole, “Hey, bubby, I’m going to…” Doesn’t work. It’s just not funny. Rickman is funny and Willis is funny. But, Al Powell is instantly likeable.

**John:** That’s what you needed.

**Craig:** He is a sweetheart. He lets the 7-11 guy kind of push him around even, you know. And he’s smart, clearly. And we’re immediately on his side. We feel good about this. We’re just a little worried that maybe he doesn’t fit the action hero vibe. So if this is the only friend that our action hero has, what does that mean for our story?

**John:** The other crucial thing about the Al Powell/John McClane relationship is that McClane can’t be honest with him about certain things because other people are listening in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s that challenge of how you establish a relationship with somebody you don’t know and who cannot be fully honest with you. And so that starts the whole cowboy discussion. And call me Roy. All the stuff that they’re doing, they can talk about some things, but there’s a limit to it. And that’s a great obstacle to put in front of your characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Al Powell literally says to his awful boss, who was the awful teacher from Breakfast Club, “I think he’s a cop, because I basically have a hunch.” Meaning we’re talking guy talk to each other. Like we’re men. We’re having a man conversation. Again, you pencil neck twerps would never understand. But that is the bond they have. They’re two regular guys.

And that eventually will blossom into something really meaningful when they have this kind of – one of the more famous “my brother fell into a lake” stories in any movie ever. Which is the story of what happened to Al Powell.

**John:** Yeah. So when we get to one hour, one minute into the film we introduce a brand new obstacle, brand new character, which is the news reporter who wants the scoop. And so this conversation that has been happening on the radio, they get word of it. They get word that there’s an incident happening at this tower. The news reporter is obsessed with getting the scoop and getting there. It’s late to establish new characters, but one of the things I love about this movie is that this movie is not afraid to introduce new characters late and just create new problems and new obstacles. So this is a character who has a three or four beat arc and it mostly works.

**Craig:** It mostly works. Look, one of the beautiful things about casting is sometimes that solves your screenwriting problem. If you cast William Atherton in 1988 and you put him in that suit and that tie you know he’s a problem. He’s a jerk who cares only about himself. He’s going to be arrogant. And he’s going to screw things up in a way that makes the audience go, “No, you idiot!” That’s what he does. You don’t need a lot of explanation.

But all these pins have been lined up. We know that this marriage is in trouble. We know that Holly knows that John’s running around the building because only John can make people that upset.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We know that Karl is a hot head who now has a reason to hate John McClane irrationally. We know that Hans Gruber is a cold, calculating man. We know that there’s a guy out there who understands what’s going on but he himself is limited. He seems scared and timid. All these things are all set up and the pins will fall.

**John:** Yes. And consider the studio note saying like, “Oh, can we set up the news reporter earlier?” The answer is no. Because if we set up the news reporter earlier we would expect to have an arc or more important stuff and you would need to be checking in with that character again. And we’d really have the same problem that we have with Argyle in the limo which is like there’s not enough for him to do, and so we have to sort of keep checking in and giving him BS stuff to sort of remind you that he exists.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would be cut. You don’t need – I’m sure that they looked at Ghostbusters and said, yeah, they didn’t need to set up the EPA guy either. Just being him in. Announce that he’s EPA and have him start being a dick.

**John:** That’s all you need.

**Craig:** That’s all you need.

**John:** All right. So then we get to another big action sequence. Send in the tank. Which is the first idea – send in the car which is really this tank which is going to charge up. It’s the first time we see that – this is also very 1980s. Very sort of like bring in the military, like bring in the big power stuff. And we also see that the bad guys have [unintelligible] grenades and they were prepared for this.

**Craig:** Just like John McClane warned them. But because they are elitists, probably globalists, they don’t care. They are too self-assured. And through one of the strangest exercises of chain and command ever they make one of the dumbest possible decisions that no police department – I mean, police must have been so frustrated watching these things back then. But regardless, it goes poorly for them.

And this is important because what the movie continually reinforces for us is that the only way this is going to be fixed is by one guy in that building. Not only is the cavalry not going to help. They’re going to make things worse over and over and over. And they’re going to make things worse in a beautiful way.

When the cops finally do arrive Hans Gruber says to his men, “OK, calm down, it’s a little earlier than we thought. But it was inevitable. It was going to happen no matter what. And in some ways it needed to happen.” Well that’s an interesting bit. And I definitely didn’t pick up on that as a kid as being somehow foreshadowing in any way, shape, or form. But you got the sense that that wasn’t normal. Like this guy really is in remarkable control.

One more screenwriting note that I love. John McClane makes his presence known to the terrorists by after he kills Karl’s brother he duct tapes him to a chair. He writes, “Now I have a machine gun, Ho-Ho-Ho,” on his shirt, which is the greatest thing of all time.

**John:** Writes it on a [crosstalk].

**Craig:** And he sends him down the elevator. Alan Rickman is explaining to the hostages that there’s nothing they can do. They have thought of everything. Nothing has been left to chance. And then the elevator door opens and there’s one of their guys murdered. It’s really funny. And it makes us appreciate the whole thing. That little bit of kind of counterpoint was I thought really well done. And again Alan Rickman makes it funny.

**John:** Yes. All right. So the tank did not go well. Basically we see the police fail again and again, because they are not doing what John McClane would have them do. John McClane has limited ability to influence what they can do and he doesn’t want to reveal who he actually is.

**Craig:** Obstacles.

**John:** Yes. These are obstacles. These are all good things. Now, Ellis, who is another person we know is going to be a problem, because we set him up from the start that–

**Craig:** He loves cocaine and he wants to sleep with Holly.

**John:** And he wants to intervene. He wants to prove that he’s the person who can solve the situation. He goes in to negotiate.

**Craig:** More great Alan Rickman stuff. Because Hart Bochner is like, “You know, the way I see it you guys are…” And Alan Rickman just goes, “Amazing. You figured it all out.” He’s just so great. He’s so funny. And as that’s happening you’re like, oh man, Hart Bochner. You’re going to die. I can’t even get excited about you dying. You’re so definitely going to die.

**John:** But what surprised me watching this again is I assumed that the Ellis character was going to give up Holly. And instead he tries to play this thing that they’re old friends. And for a moment you’re like, oh, you’re not as dumb as I thought you were. This could work out. And you have little moments of hope. And then it doesn’t go well and McClane says like don’t believe this guy.

**Craig:** He’s trying to save him. And this is a classic hero moment. Great thing for screenwriters to do. When your hero attempts – is such a good person, despite the many killings that they are doing, that they’re even trying to help somebody that’s trying to betray and hurt them.

**John:** Yes. Ellis does not survive this discussion.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. And a good escalation. After Ellis has been killed, Rickman takes the radio, holds it out to the crowd so that McClane can hear everyone screaming. Making it clear to McClane and to the police outside this has ratchet up a notch.

**Craig:** And now you get the sense that Hans Gruber is punching back. Also incredibly important. So one of the things that I talked about in How to Make a Movie is when your character is kind of doing well, you have to punish them for it. Because you need to feel that what they eventually have to do has to be really hard. You just don’t want to give them too many wins. You want to make it hurt as much as you can. So in the theory that you’re an angry god punishing your hero, Die Hard does a great job.

**John:** Absolutely. Rickman asks for some prisoner releases. He wants these terrorists released from prison. Again, it’s a misdirection. And at this point we fully know that it’s not real. But it starts things scrambling. And it’s also going to be a way to involve the FBI because it goes beyond what the local police could do. And we realize that Gruber actually wanted a certain plan to be put into place.

**Craig:** It’s a great plot twist. The FBI is even stupider than the Los Angeles Police Department, which again – note, again, when Rickman or Willis are not on screen the jokes are not great jokes. The whole like we’re two FBI agents with the same names, it just–

**John:** Actually I kind of liked that.

**Craig:** It’s fine, but it’s not ha-ha funny.

**John:** Here’s what it was. I liked that they showed up and they were given some line and some bit of business to let me know – some sense that they did exist before they walked onto that screen.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** There’s also a moment in the helicopter where they say, you know, “It reminds me of Saigon.” I was in Junior High. There is a tension there before this all happens.

**Craig:** Sure. Yeah. It’s just broad.

**John:** It’s broad.

**Craig:** It’s broad. I mean, that’s the thing. When you look at what – I mean, Alan Rickman, who I didn’t know Alan Rickman before Die Hard. He walks over and he looks at that shirt and he says in his accent, which is barely German-tinged, but mostly just Alan Rickman, “Now I have a machine gun.” And they were so smart to smush up the shirt so he has to push it down. “Ho-Ho-Ho.” It’s so great. He’s so funny. Ah, the best. I miss him.

**John:** So an hour and 28 in. We go back to the newsroom and this is a scene that no one remembers, but they have an expert on terrorism there who has written a book about terrorism. And they’re interviewing him and they say like Helsinki, and then he goes Sweden, no Finland, just to show that they’re buffoons.

**Craig:** Experts are stupid and bad. And only the average Joe on the street can solve a problem.

**John:** Looking at this I was trying to decide why it stayed in the movie and I think it’s actually just to provide a little space between some other beats. I feel like this scene could be dropped, but you look at what’s before and after they needed just a tiny breath and this little scene with this terrorism guy gives you a tiny breath. And reminds you that the news people are going to be in this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does. It may also be the result of personal ax-grinding. I mean, sometimes when things stay in movies it’s because somebody goes, “Yeah.” Like maybe Joel Silver was like, “Yeah, screw you experts. I love it. It’s staying in.” You never know with these things.

**John:** Now, one hour, 31 minutes into the film a surprising moment happens which is a face-to-face meeting between Gruber and McClane, which is completely unexpected and it’s not set up. It’s suddenly just happening. Gruber is for some reason looking at the detonators that are on the ceiling. We don’t know what they’re there for. Is it a bit of a stretch that he’s doing this himself? Sure. But most of his men are dead, so OK. But it’s one of the sort of signature moments that happens in this film which is that you have the two characters together. They don’t know who each other is. And we see that Gruber is really smart in the moment and is playing himself as a hostage who escaped.

**Craig:** It is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a movie because until it happens you don’t even realize it was possible. You’re so surprised by it. It’s not like you’re sitting around going, you know, they haven’t seen each other’s faces. He doesn’t know what Hans Gruber looks like. What if he runs into Hans Gruber? Will he know? Because they’re in a building. I mean, Nakatomi Corporation apparently is a business corporation that does business. We don’t know what they do.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But they’re all in suits and ties. And so is Hans Gruber.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In fact, he makes a point of saying that he’s dressed like them. That he has suits just like Mr. Takagi. Ah, it’s gorgeous. When that happens it is so shocking, it is so delightful, and it’s also terrifying. Because your hero that you root for has never been more vulnerable. The movie actually becomes a horror film at that point. And it is awesome.

**John:** So let’s talk about who has access to what information, because that becomes a crucial thing throughout all of Die Hard is that as the audience we tend to have more information than any of the characters do. We’re largely omniscient. We get to see everyone’s point of view. So, we know a lot of things that McClane doesn’t know. We know things that Gruber doesn’t know. That’s all really helpful.

In this one small tiny moment the delicious agony is that we know that McClane is in great danger and McClane does not know that he’s in great danger. And we are terrified that something bad is going to happen to him. And the movie has to make the decision about are we going to show to the audience that McClane has caught on or not. And I bet they went back and forth 100 times over that.

**Craig:** It also does this incredible service to the ending, because what you don’t want is for them to come face-to-face at the end and go, oh, that’s what you look like. And now let us have our final. This creates an additional level of relationship between the two of them. There is a formidability to this back and forth. And if you are looking at Die Hard as a celebration of the common man against the snobby thinkers of the world, the so-called smart people, this is what you would do. This is where the common man may take a step back because that smart guy is plotting and scheming the way that smart people do. They can manipulate. They can fool you. But in the end you’ll beat them with your heart and muscle.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s a great moment. And I think that there’s a moment where he realizes that Hans Gruber is not–

**John:** Watching it again, it doesn’t telegraph itself too big or too loud that he really is ahead of him. It’s not until you actually hear the click-click that the gun is empty that you realize that McClane was onto him or at least was suspicious.

**Craig:** Right. There’s apparently a scene that was cut, or a moment that was cut where, a bunch of moments, where every time McClane would kill one of these guys, when he first kills Karl’s brother he–

**John:** Takes off the watch.

**Craig:** Yeah. He checks his shirt and goes, OK, they’re dressed in fancy Euro clothes. But, yes, he looks at the watch and apparently he was supposed to look, and there’s footage of him, looking at all their watches. Because they all sync their watches in a scene that was also cut. So when he notices Hans Gruber’s watch that’s when he apparently in the cut version, the cut scene, that’s when he actually put it all together on screen.

**John:** Following this moment is another iconic Shoot the Glass.

**Craig:** Shoot the Glass.

**John:** Basically there’s a lot of automatic weapon fire happening. Somehow desks are able to withstand a tremendous amount of bullets.

**Craig:** Yep. [Unintelligible] armor.

**John:** But by shooting at the glass he sees that McClane is barefoot. We’ve established that Gruber knows that McClane is barefoot and he tells them shoot at that glass because it will hurt him.

**Craig:** One of the best and strangest moments in film history. A German man says to another German man, “Shoot the glass,” in German. And the other German man just looks at him like, what?

**John:** [Speaks in German].

**Craig:** And he repeats it in English and that’s what the German guy understands. Shoot the glass. It is so odd. I have been laughing about this since 1988. But I love it. What can I say?

**John:** So if this wasn’t bad enough, at one hour and 38 minutes the news reporters have discovered John McClane’s home address. And so we know that’s a thing that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Oh, William Atherton. So this accelerates the ending. So this is what’s pouring fuel on the ending. And now we know that there’s a real ticking clock. So we have the ticking clock of the vault being opened. But the ticking clock for John McClane isn’t enough like we’ll kill you. The real ticking clock is we know who you are, so we know who Holly is, so now she’s in jeopardy.

**John:** Yep. She’s in individual jeopardy.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** As he’s picking glass out of his feet we have this scene which I think you referred to earlier on which is the Al scene of “I shot a kid.” Talk to me about that.

**Craig:** Correct. So we sometimes talk about this about “my brother drowned” scene. A character will tell a sob story about their past. It usually involves somebody dying that they couldn’t save but wanted to. And in this case it’s a variation of that. Al Powell shot a kid and it was a mistake. It was justified. They craft the story very carefully so that you understand he wasn’t like some hot head jerk cop. He really did think his life was in danger. He just was wrong. And he’s been beating himself up over it ever since. And therefore can’t get back on the horse. He’s not suitable really to be a real cop because as we know from these movies real cops shoot people.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** That’s what they do. They’re constantly plugging people and they don’t hesitate. So that’s his damage is that he actually feels bad about murdering someone, which is amazing. But, it is the kind of hetero male bonding that was allowable in 1988.

**John:** Absolutely. I think it’s an important moment. It gives Bruce Willis something to do other than just pick the glass out of his feet. Bruce Willis is doing a great job of acting the pain of that. And it’s a gruesome moment. But if he hadn’t had a conversation during that time you would never have been able to stay in that scene as long as you did.

**Craig:** This is the last break you get. And it’s important to give people a break. Actually it prepares them. Because what’s going to happen from this point forward is a relentless race to an explosive end, and then another explosive end. It’s going to be exciting. They need a breather. And they need some context. And they need to feel something, especially because this is going to set up the ending for Al Powell.

**John:** So once the news report happens Gruber realizes that Holly is McClane’s wife. A great line I loved here, she says that, “He’s a common thief.” “I’m an exceptional thief. And since I’m moving up to kidnapping you should be more polite.”

**Craig:** Right. And the way he says these things is just so great.

**John:** And the FBI of course is going to accelerate things in stupid, dumb ways. So first off they want to cut the power. That was always part of the plan because the electromagnetic locks–

**Craig:** He says in the beginning, their hacker safe cracker says, “The problem with the seven is it’s an electromagnetic lock. And the power cannot be turned off locally. It has to be the whole grid.”

**John:** Does that make any sense? No. But it doesn’t have to.

**Craig:** Doesn’t have to. Makes no sense. But Hans Gruber, he knows that the FBI as a matter of protocol will shut the power off on the grid. Which again, OK, fine, not sure about that either. And he says something that has been rattling around in my brain for all these many 32 years. And that is, “You ask for a miracle, I give you the F. B. I.” And now musically, there’s been little hints of Ode to Joy throughout this whole thing, and weirdly usually presented with Hans Gruber in a kind of weird creepy style. And now the full Ode to Joy begins. And, again, this is a smart again.

**John:** Yeah. Again, this is the Ocean’s 11 part of it. He’s Danny Ocean. He had a secret special plan. This is also around the time where a van backs out of this truck, or an ambulance backs out of the truck which is meant to be their getaway thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It doesn’t really pay off right. And in reading about that it looks like there was a different thing that sort of got cut and moved about that. But we’re seeing their whole plan and it does look like their plan is going to work out properly.

**Craig:** Precisely. And you want that. You want to believe that they have many more tricks up their sleeves. You want to feel like your hero is behind the eight ball here because the only way they’re going to succeed, the only way that John McClane is going to save his wife and defeat Hans Gruber and these kidnappers and save all these hostages is by doing something we can’t foresee. Something that is going to require him to do things he didn’t even know he could do.

**John:** Yep. Including defeat the giant Russian guy in a fist fight.

**Craig:** Correct. And that is something that we’ve been waiting for the whole movie. We’ve been waiting for this beast, this uncontrollable irrational beast that even Hans Gruber can’t control to face off with John McClane because, well, he feels like death is coming for you. He’s huge and he’s angry. But, you know, the good guy always wins.

**John:** The good guy is going to win.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. He chokes him with a chain.

**John:** With a chain. So by being smarter and more wily he’s going to beat him. Because he’s not going to beat him through–

**Craig:** You can’t punch that guy out.

**John:** So the plan was to blow up the roof when the helicopters land because it will create such chaos. It won’t be clear who lived and who died. The roof does blow up. John McClane does jump off the building with the hose. It really is an amazing–

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** Amazing idea. Amazing moment. Really well shot. It works great.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** And I loved that the second beat of like shooting through the window, getting in, and getting dragged back out by the weight of things. Just remembering that gravity exists. Terrific.

**Craig:** The physics of it are great. It was beautifully directed. I mean, John McTiernan did an incredible job there. Yeah, no, love it.

**John:** Cool. Finally, we get the final showdown. So Holly is now a full damsel hostage. We have Gruber and one guy who is still left alive.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And we get to the moment of John McClane only has two bullets. There’s no way he’s going to be able to make this thing happen. We don’t know exactly what he’s going to do, but we see him looking at some wrapping people and such.

**Craig:** Because it’s a Christmas movie.

**John:** Because it’s a Christmas movie. It’s fundamentally a Christmas movie. He ends up when told to drop his weapon he drops his weapon. Of course he has the gun taped to his back.

**Craig:** His police gun.

**John:** His police gun. His real gun.

**Craig:** The only gun you really need as a cop.

**John:** Absolutely. Because only terrorists use–

**Craig:** Only terrorists. That stuff, it’s like poison. No, a man uses a gun that fits in his hand.

**John:** And then with two amazing perfect shots, because he’s apparently an amazing shot.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Even though no one tends to get hit by actual bullets in this movie, he is able to hit two people in precisely a single shot.

**Craig:** Storm Trooper rules at work.

**John:** Absolutely. Gruber goes through the window, still holding on to Holly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The watch has to be removed.

**Craig:** The watch needs to be removed because honestly, you know, she needs to come back home. It’s regressive. But regardless at least it was set up. And Hans Gruber falls to his death with this great look on his face of like how did this happen. Like this is not how this is supposed to end. He seemed so confused.

I also like the fact that honestly, so 1988 green screen was still kind of, you know, it had been used for about a decade or more, but it was still a little funky. And I kind of like that it’s funky. It made things special back then. Now I just feel like, oh yeah, it looks so real that it’s fake.

**John:** So the legend is that they actually dropped Rickman before they said they were going to drop him and that’s why he has that expression that he has. They said we’ll drop you on three and they dropped him on two.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that. That’s cool. I mean, he definitely looks scared.

**John:** He does look scared. Let’s do the Lindsay Doran, making sure that we’re talking about what the real victory is in the movie versus the fake victory. Because Alan Rickman’s death is not the victory of the movie. The victory of the movie is getting back with Holly. And it is walking out of the building with the wife. You’re both wearing your first responder jackets over your ruined clothes.

**Craig:** As you should in these movies. You always have to wear a blanket or a jacket because saving the world makes you cold. We know this for a fact. But in the end there are two relationships we care about. John McClane and Holly. And John McClane and Al Powell. And both of those relationships are how this movie ends. That’s how a movie should end. Karl rises from the near dead–

**John:** Classic Fatal Attraction. You have to.

**Craig:** Classic Fatal Attraction. But who kills him? Al Powell, who has regained the courage to murder people. [laughs] I assume he gets a promotion because of that.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like a Christmas Carol in a very messed up way.

**Craig:** I can kill people. [laughs]

**John:** The miracle of Christmas.

**Craig:** Yes, Merry Christmas everyone.

**John:** Oh, and then Argyle drives them home.

**Craig:** And then Argyle.

**John:** And gets the last line of the movie.

**Craig:** What is the last line of the movie?

**John:** Last line of the movie is, “If this is their idea of Christmas, I got to be there for New Year’s.”

**Craig:** Well there you go. There’s your sequel setup. That also feels like Joel Silver.

**John:** It does. And so watching the movie I was like, oh my god, like the last line of Go is almost the same line.

**Craig:** What is it?

**John:** I had no idea. “So, what are we doing for New Year’s?”

**Craig:** It’s also the last line of Chernobyl. [laughs]

**John:** It’s a great last line. It makes sense. To me the going home with Argyle in the limo, fine, whatever.

**Craig:** It’s full circle.

**John:** It’s full circle. It is full circle.

**Craig:** They’re together. They’ve solved all their problems. And they’ll never have another problem again. Now, of course, Bruce Willis does have many more problems. There’s been a Die Hard 2, 3, 4, possibly 5?

**John:** I think there’s only four.

**Craig:** Four. One of the problems, sequels are really, really, really hard. And one of the problems is that the movie that happens in 1988 is of its time. As the years go on this guy isn’t really of his time. So, you know, it was harder and harder. I mean, I didn’t mind the sequels. Just, you know, this was special.

**John:** Well, also coincidences can happen once. And so–

**Craig:** It’s a little Murder She Wrote. Like maybe you’re the terrorist.

**John:** Yeah, maybe you’re the problem.

**Craig:** Maybe just stay home.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what lessons we should be taking from Die Hard and which lessons we should not be taking from Die Hard. My lessons are that it is important to really be thinking about who is the central character in this story and not it’s this genre in a blank. And sort of like don’t just create the environment. You actually have to create who is the fascinating character in this environment who you want to follow through it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say that the big screenwriting lesson that I draw from Die Hard is if you want something to happen that solves a problem in a cool way in your script, that’s great, now go back and set it up. And don’t set it up in a way that’s obvious. Set it up in a way that will make the eventual emergence of this thing surprising and fun. Gives the audience a sense that there was an intelligence working behind the scenes that they weren’t aware of.

**John:** Yeah. The bad versions of this movie that I’ve seen since then, they do things in the setup that feel like, oh god, that’s so clearly a setup that’s going to payoff later on. And so when you can hide the setup that is so smart. So like the computer system with Holly’s name. That is a hide the setup kind of thing. And that’s what works.

**Craig:** Correct. One of the great terrible setups of all time is in a movie I love. Real Genius. I love Real Genius. William Atherton is in Real Genius.

**John:** Again.

**Craig:** Playing a dick. And early on in the movie he says to Val Kilmer, “I hate the smell of popcorn.” [laughs] Val Kilmer is eating popcorn. He goes, “What is that? I hate that smell. I hate the smell of popcorn. It’s disgusting.” Which is weird. And then at the end of the movie the big comeuppance is that they fill his house with popcorn. It’s just – when you see it you’re like there’s literally no reason for this to be here except to set something up later. So, yeah, don’t be obvious with the setups. They’re really good about this. And I also think there’s no wasted energy in this movie. Everything feels like it’s needed and necessary. And every scene propels to the next one.

**John:** Which is very crucial. Craig, thank you for this deep dive Die Hard. Merry Christmas.

**Craig:** Merry Christmas, John. And you know what?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** If this is your idea of Christmas, I can’t wait to see what you do on New Year’s.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* Read the DIE HARD script on [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/).
* [Feminist Analysis of Die Hard](https://anotherangrywoman.com/2016/12/18/making-fists-with-your-toes-towards-a-feminist-analysis-of-die-hard/)
* Sign up for [premium here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Andy Roninson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

Scriptnotes, Episode 383: Splitting the Party, Transcript

January 23, 2019 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party).

**John August:** Head’s up, this episode will absolutely have some bad language. Not apologizing, just stating the facts.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 383 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about the trope of never split the party, and why in fact as a writer you often want to and need to divide the party up. We’ll talk about how to do that and what you gain, plus we’ll be answering listener questions on sequences, working with an author, screenwriter websites, and we have some umbrage fodder to kick off the new year.

Craig, Happy New Year.

**Craig:** Happy New Year, John. We did it again, by the way. We made it through another loop around the sun.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I feel super good about it.

**John:** The longest loop around the sun in my memory.

**Craig:** It was in many ways the most challenging and yet also rewarding year of my life. It was quite a thing. But there is something nice about arriving at the end because the flat disk that is the earth has managed to kind of do this circle around what I presume is also a flat disk of the sun. And it just gives you a nice feeling of accomplishment even if you specifically haven’t really done anything except stand still on the flat disk that is the earth.

**John:** Yeah. You made a TV show. That was fantastic. Hurrah.

**Craig:** I made a TV show. Feels great. We’re trucking along there, getting close to showing it to people which will be fun. Although you know it’s funny, I was talking to – I won’t say who, but a famous filmmaker friend of ours – and we were saying how the dream, the real dream, is to make a television show or a movie and when it’s finally done and it is perfect and you’ve got everything the way you want it, you show it to no one. You just put it away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s like, ugh, it’s the showing of it.

**John:** I’ll tell you, with The Nines, that movie I made with Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy, I kind of feel like I did that, because I’m really happy with the movie and no one saw it. So, it wasn’t a deliberate choice to have no one see the movie, it just sort of worked out that way.

**Craig:** Well that can happy, too. I suppose it’s sort of involuntary lock-away-ness.

**John:** I’ll tell you that the project I’m thinking about directing next, I originally had envisioned it as sort of an indie feature, sort of more on the Destroyer model, and now I’m just like, you know what, maybe I’ll just make it for Netflix, because Netflix at least it’s out there in the world all at once. Everyone can see it and then you’re done. And that will be Chernobyl. Everyone will see it all at once. Well, they’ll see episode by episode, but the whole world can see it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole world within some reasonable limitation, yeah, can see it. But at least, I don’t know, there’s something about television I suppose that’s, I don’t know why, that’s a little more acceptable to me in this regard. Because it’s like opening weekend. There’s a thing in movies, it’s like you feel like there’s a blade that’s swinging towards your neck.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s all make or break. And then in television it’s like, you know, Cheers and Seinfeld, I think, were both like the lowest rated television shows of their debut season. And then, you know, then you kind of come around. But in movie terms, it just feels like you’re always under the gun. So I like this new kind of relaxed TV deal. It’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. So there will be ratings for your program, and so if people want to support you in 2019 they can support you by watching your show. That would be fantastic. So it’s not like you get extra dollars if people watch your show, but people notice when shows have high ratings, which is great. If people want to support me in 2019 they can pre-order the second Arlo Finch. That’s actually the single biggest thing you could do for me this year would be to pre-order the second Arlo Finch because if all the people who bought Arlo Finch the first go around by pre-ordering the second book it would be on the top of the charts. It would do fantastically well.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** Yeah. So that would be great. If people wanted to do that–

**Craig:** I’m going to do that because my daughter is a big fan. She loved the first book.

**John:** That’s right. And I didn’t give you the second book. I’ll get you the second book. She’ll like the second book.

**Craig:** Well, you just cost yourself a sale.

**John:** No, no, no, you should still buy the book.

**Craig:** Well, eh, I mean, you know, you’re giving it to me. I don’t know. I don’t get this.

**John:** How’s this – I will give you a copy of the audio edition which she can listen to, because the same guy did the audio edition, James Patrick Cronin.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** I just approved the artwork minutes before we started recording.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting. I always love it when things like that are happening behind the scenes.

**John:** Behind the scenes. Some news, so people know about our Princess Bride screening that’s taking place on January 27 at 5pm at the WGA Theater. Some details on how you get into the screening. So this is apparently how it’s going to work. The doors open at 4:30pm. WGA members get in first. They get first choice of seats. And then at 4:45pm it’s open seating for everyone else who wants to come in and see The Princess Bride and then stay for our discussion of the terrific movie that we are going to be looking at that night and celebrating.

**Craig:** And, John, correct me if I’m wrong but the idea is that we’re going to record our discussion as one of our deep dive podcasts essentially?

**John:** That is exactly it. And so if this goes well I’d like to do this several times more even this year.

**Craig:** Great. That’s fun. It’s a way to get me to see movies.

**John:** Yeah. But also sometimes like some classic movies, too, would a great thing for us to see. I think that’s another goal I would like for us to do this is like we do the Three Page Challenge but we never really look at whole screenplays, and so maybe we’ll pick a screenplay, sort of like a book club thing where you and I will both read the screenplay and we’ll assume that our listeners have read the screenplay, maybe even for a movie that hasn’t been shot. So we can actually look at what it looks like on the page, from a really good screenplay.

**Craig:** All right. I’m down with that.

**John:** Cool. We also have another live show to announce. This is breaking news. So, we’ve been trying to do a Seattle show for about as long as the podcast has existed. We are finally doing a live show in Seattle, February 6. Details will be coming soon, but assume that it will be in the evening. We are going to do it someplace at a venue that will be appropriately sized for the people who come in Seattle. We don’t know how many that’s going to be. But I’m doing my Arlo Finch book tour. Craig, you’re flying up just for this. So it should be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah, come on Seattle. Don’t make us look stupid, you know, because I love you. I love Seattle.

**John:** I love Seattle, too.

**Craig:** We have family in Seattle.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s great. I have friends there.

**Craig:** So come on. I’m just saying to Seattle like, hey, guys, you have a reputation for being super cool, but you don’t want that to tilt over into we don’t care ism, right? You still want to care, like you want to show up. So my goal is 40,000 people.

**John:** Yep. And while we’re doing our tour of the United States, back when we were at the Austin Film Festival I recorded a special episode of Studio 360, which is a Slate Podcast, and that episode aired this last week and it’s actually pretty nice. It’s sort of a recap of how I got into being a screenwriter. So if you don’t know that history there’s a link in the show notes to an episode of Studio 360 I recorded about my history as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s get into some 2019 with something that can really get us going. You’ve been gone for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** So let’s get into this. We got a letter from a listener named Mark, and so I’ll read Mark’s letter and then we can discuss what Mark brings up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Mark writes, “I’m baffled as to why you are not railing against the Golden Globe awards. Did you not hear Lady Gaga whining about how hard it is to be a female musician while fondling her $5 million necklace? Did you miss the entire article that the writer may make $218 for a song that makes the artist $34 million? By your silence you are supporting a platform that denigrates writers while promoting the self-indulgent delusions of those who believe they are entitled by the measure of their gender, race, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs.

“I really thought your podcast was about earning your way and working to get the skill set necessary to make it happen. Wow. You really had me fooled.”

Craig, I mean–

**Craig:** It appears we had him fooled.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, you fooled Mark. I mean, so let’s get into Mark and let’s really take a look at ourselves about–

**Craig:** What an idiot? I mean, it’s so stupid that I can’t even feel umbrage. I’m almost happy. It’s almost made me happy because I’d forgotten that there can be people this stupid. And, yeah, I’m OK calling Mark stupid. Mark, you’re probably not a stupid person but this is a stupid thing you’ve done. It’s a stupid thing you’ve written.

And the reason I guess primarily that I would say so is because you’ve made this insane logical leap that because you didn’t hear us talking about the Golden Globe awards we therefore support it. By the way, I have no opinion about the Golden Globe awards. I didn’t watch them. But why would anyone presume that if you don’t say something about a topic that, I mean, it’s not like either one of us were at the Golden Globe awards. Neither one of us are a member of the Foreign Hollywood Press Association.

I also didn’t mention something about Yazidi Christians being slaughtered yesterday. That doesn’t mean I support that. That is the dumbest premise for any stupid letter I’ve ever encountered. That’s crazy. Why would anyone think that?

**John:** Yeah, what I liked about it is it sort of reinvigorated a spirit that I’m trying to sort of feel for 2019 which is that in 2019 I’m sort of done being outraged. I’m not going to let myself get provoked or baited into sort of arguments. That includes Twitter, but also in the real world. I think I kind of felt sort of your calm. I also sort of felt nothing other than sort of a vague like sort of frustration. But I’m just not going to take Mark’s bullshit. I’m not going to be outraged enough to be outraged by it.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**John:** And I think this also extends to politics overall. Because I was having lunch with Tess Morris today, who is obviously fantastic and a big friend of the show, and we were talking about politics and upcoming democratic stuff. And I said that I’m not going to sort of sit around and listen to like, “Oh that person is too progressive, or that person is too liberal, or that person is too whatever.” No, no, you can have your own opinion but you don’t get to tell me what my opinion is anymore. And you don’t get to tell me when I should be outraged or should not be outraged.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t seen something quite this stupid since like 15 minutes ago on Twitter. This is a very kind of Twittery way of talking.

**John:** Yeah. He did long Twitter. He did long Twitter.

**Craig:** He did long Twitter. And listen, everybody knows the difference right? The funny thing is it used to be that a guy like Mark would write something like this, you would go oh my god, like I have to combat this point by point. And there are so many Marks out there who do this that you realize like you know what actually I couldn’t possibly rebut all their stupidity, so nah, go ahead. You know what? Mute.

The Twitter mute function has been such a joy for me.

**John:** Oh, isn’t it so nice.

**Craig:** Yes. So like in my mind I read this and I’m just like mute.

**John:** Yep. So you and I both used to have comments on our blogs and I remember when I turned comments off people were like how can you possibly silence the conversation. It was like because I just don’t care anymore. I literally don’t care what your response is to this. This was my opinion and you can have your opinion. But you don’t get to come into my living room and sort of tell me your opinion. And so getting back to the Golden Globes of it all, it’s like I think – oh, I didn’t watch the Golden Globes because I was at your house playing D&D.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We didn’t discuss the Golden Globes once. At the very end of the night we said like, oh my god, Phil Lord won for Spider Verse.

**Craig:** Spider Man. Yeah, Spider Verse.

**John:** Fantastic. You know what? I did not email him to congratulate him because I had already congratulated him on making a great movie and that’s all that mattered. I am a voting member of the Academy. I don’t give a shit about the Academy Awards. I genuinely don’t. I don’t care who hosts them. I don’t care who wins the awards. I’ve gone to the Academy Awards because it’s nice to get dressed up and go to a big fancy party. And that’s what I wish awards really were is like a big fancy party to celebrate the cool movies over the course of 2018. And then we’d sort of like put down our drinks and go back and make movies for 2019.

But this whole long season of award stuff is just such bullshit. And I’ve been through it before and I’m just not having it this year.

**Craig:** Good for you. I mean, obviously my position on awards is a fairly consistent position all this time. The notion of awards for art has always been troubling to me. And, of course, look, Mark isn’t making points that haven’t been made before. These aren’t fresh points. Yes, shocker of all shocks, a lot of actors will talk about poor people while they themselves are making a lot of money and wearing expensive things. And also people that sometimes make a lot of money and wear expensive things donate more to charity than Mark could ever imagine donating in his lifetime.

There is always an easy kind of – you could just sort of easily go look at this hypocrisy of the whole thing and I get that. it is easy and it’s sort of fun to punch up I guess at incredibly beautiful rich people who are going on about their beautiful art and so on and so forth. But it’s also a bit boring now I think. Everybody gets it. Like we all understand. If Lady Gaga weren’t also kind of a nice – she seems like a very nice person. I’ve never heard her say or do anything where I felt like, ugh, yuck. She’s not R. Kelly for god’s sake. Shut up Mark, you idiot. [laughs]

Oh, and you know, please stop listening to the podcast. This is also this new thing of like people who have a complaint about the podcast and I’m like well let me get your address so I can send you your refund. You jerk.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Fun. Fun. I couldn’t even get umbrage over that. I feel robbed.

**John:** No you couldn’t. I felt a little more umbrage than you did on this. But it’s my own special thing. I need to figure out what that word is, but it’s just that little snap of something. It’s like, you know what, I’m not dealing with that. I’m not having it.

**Craig:** I ain’t having it.

**John:** I’m feeling the clap emoji kind of. I’m underlining my words with claps.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m trying to hit mental mute as much as I can these days. Just mental mute. That’s the thing. They don’t even know you muted them. That’s the best part.

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** God, I love it. All right, moving on.

**John:** Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

**Craig:** Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

**John:** That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

**Craig:** Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

**John:** Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

**Craig:** Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

**John:** Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

**Craig:** Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

**John:** Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

**John:** You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

**John:** Absolutely true. All right, should we get onto some follow up?

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** All right, do you want to take Daniel in Nashville?

**Craig:** I do. Daniel writes, “Guys, I know screenwriting scams are all over the place, but I would appreciate some public shaming,” oh, here we go, “directed at this particular one that just popped up here in Nashville. It’s especially disgusting because it’s hosted by something calling itself The Nashville Filmmakers Guild. Breakthrough screenplay competition where the winning screenplay becomes a major motion picture.” Well that’s a promising slogan. Let’s see where this goes.

“They take your money, have a robot read your screenplay,” oh, John, there’s a job in this for you, “real life producers evaluate the algorithm and make the winning screenplay into a ‘real movie.’ There are zero details for how the movie gets made. Worst of all, they will send you a Save the Cat book. Please help me make this go away.”

Oh my god, it’s like someone invented the thing that would make me the most nauseated.

**John:** So let’s try to do some backstory here. We’ve not done extensive research. We don’t know who is really behind all this. There’s some names on the website. I don’t know how much they’re really involved in it. Craig, you and I have both been to the Nashville Screenwriters–

**Craig:** Conference.

**John:** It was a zillion years ago. I think that organization is not around anymore.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I had a good time at that Nashville Screenwriters Conference. But this is not that. I think Nashville is great, but my blanket recommendation of don’t enter screenwriting competitions, don’t enter these things that like “we’re going to make your movie” because they don’t. There’s just not a track record of any of these things happening.

And the things that feel more legitimate would be because they’ve been around for a long time or they are with producers who have made real movies. And I’m not saying that the folks involved in this haven’t made movies, but I don’t understand why they would be involved in this project.

**Craig:** Looking at their website, this is absolutely horse shit in my opinion because of specifically, oh my god, first of all they say, “The hype, the false promises, the gate keepers. The Breakthrough Screenplay Competition is the only competition where you have a chance to turn your script into a fully funded motion picture.” Shut up.

You want to talk about hype and false promises, they love talking about gate keepers. This is what they do. They say “those people are keeping your genius out because they’re stupid or bad or mean or just Hollywood-y, we’re the way in.” No they’re not. No they’re not.

And here’s what happens. When you send your script in, he’s right, it’s a robot. “The American Film Lab Software scores and ranks 78 script elements with an algorithm that analyzes over 3,500 points of data to reach an overall script score.”

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** You die in a fireplace, you go to hell. You go to hell and you die. It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. Dumb. The regular deadline fee is $99. That is $99 too much. And, yeah, they’re not in a guild. This isn’t a union. What a dope. God, it makes me puke.

**John:** So American Film Lab if you click through their website it’s the same, really beautiful design, but the same folks are behind it. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, this is all – it has the look, appearance, and whiff of horse shit.

**John:** Yeah. Nicely designed horse shit.

**Craig:** Yeah. The website is really quite good.

**John:** It’s really nice. I don’t want to slack on the website because the website is really well done.

**Craig:** The website itself is fine, but yeah, I mean, what does this mean? The executive director, so this is the guy in charge, is a guy named Bobby Marko. And please don’t write to these people or tweet at them. Don’t be a jerk. It says, “As a producer, director and cinematographer, Bobby has been fortunate to work on many types of productions with many in the film community.” I think he means with many people in the film community. But, I’ve never heard of Bobby Marko. Have you?

**John:** I have not. I looked up Derek Purvis. He has some credits, but certainly not things I’ve heard of. So.

**Craig:** Bobby Marko. I’m looking up Bobby Marko right now. Let’s just do a live look up on Bobby Marko.

**John:** Because really quality podcasting is about Googling things while you’re recording.

**Craig:** It’s not good. And listen, I’m not judging people on their credits. My credits are a whole big fascinating pastiche. But it’s not about quality it’s really about access and size. If I’m sending something to a film competition and paying money then I want to know that the people running it are able to provide the access that they promise. Based on the credits that I’m looking at here, we’re looking at essentially shorts that I’ve never heard of.

**John:** They’re shorts.

**Craig:** They’re shorts. And so, no. No. It doesn’t cut it. And, listen, I don’t mean to insult. Everybody should be doing what they’re doing. And it may be that the people that are running this thing next week will sell something, write something, create something that is the biggest thing of all time. And I would salute them. But until they do they shouldn’t be taking other people’s money as if they can do stuff for them.

**John:** Also, I feel like when they do make that thing that is absolutely amazing they won’t want to be taking other people’s money to be doing stuff because they’ll have a career making the thing.

**Craig:** [laughs] They’ll be a little busy. So, yeah, once again my recommendation is do not spend your money on this.

**John:** Great. Dave from Los Cruces, New Mexico writes, “Thanks for bringing us the interview with the double ampersand team of Walsh and Jackson and Boyens.” So that was my interview with them after Mortal Engines. “Such an impressive collection of talent. Do you have any comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film? My wife and I enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got and sad to see it’s a commercial failure. John saw the film prior to the interview and I was wondering if he had any feeling from the audience’s response that it was going to be poorly received.”

So, we ran this over the break as sort of a little extra episode. I think it was Christmas Day this came out. And so I had agreed to do Q&A with them after the WGA screening of it. And so I had not seen it until the WGA screening of it and I kind of didn’t know very much about it other than it was about cities that moved around and ate other cities. And so I watched it and I was like, oh, I don’t really full – I could never fully get onboard with the premise. But, I could also sort of say, OK, you know what, but let’s say I did buy the premise, is this a good version of that movie? And I think the answer is yeah. It’s a pretty good version of that premise of a movie.

And it’s the kind of thing that felt like it was adapted from a YA novel which it was. And it had sort of big epic themes. But as I was watching it and as I sat down with them to ask questions about their process and the thing I had a sense that it was going to get the reception that it got, which was not a big glowing reception.

If you listen to that interview I talk with them about why they got started on it and the long process it took to get it to the screen. And there’s an interesting moment where I ask Peter Jackson about why a big screen versus doing it for streaming. And he’s like, and I think they were all saying like there’s just a thing you can do in a big theater with the sound and sort of the size and spectacle of it all which is amazing, yet Peter Jackson also said like, “But the things I love most right now are streaming, or they’re Game of Thrones kinds of things on HBO.”

And I do genuinely in my heart of hearts believe that this product would have been much better served as a made for Netflix, made for HBO, that kind of big epic scale thing than as it was done as a movie.

But, they made the movie. And I think it’s worth seeing because it actually has some really cool pieces. And I think it’s also worth noting the story challenges they set for themselves. Talk about like a big cast of characters. They’re having to split the party a lot just to get storytelling done. And I hope people will go to it now that it shows up on Netflix and other places and appreciate some of the things that they were able to do, because some of it was really cool.

**Craig:** I always feel like when you’re talking about people that are incredibly talented, and I’m a huge Peter Jackson fan, and thus by extension a Walsh and Boyens fan as well, that there is a certain inherent – it’s like a fingerprint, right? And it will express itself very frequently in ways that you appreciate, but it is inevitably going to express itself in a way that you don’t.

I can’t think of anybody where I go, “Oh, I’ve liked everything they’ve done.” Because it’s just not going to work that way. So, sometimes I think people get hung up on this stuff and they go, well, oh my god, how could they make something that everyone thinks stinks? Well, A, they obviously don’t think it stinks, and B, it’s the way things work. You know? It’s just part and parcel. You don’t get all of these things if you don’t get that.

**John:** Yep. You know, I always applaud sort of like the big wild swings of things. And it felt like a big wild swing. And it didn’t connect with audiences and I don’t think it was quite what the project ultimately wanted to be when it was released in 2018. But, I love them and I actually really loved talking with them because they are literally the only double ampersand team I can think of that has stayed together through so many different projects. I know I think at least Philippa listens to the show, so hi. And I thought it deserved better because there’s some really good stuff there.

**Craig:** I just, you know, you know my whole critics thing. Here’s the thing, Dave from Las Cruces. The real thing is what does it matter? I understand why you’re asking. You’re asking John do you have comments about the incredibly negative critical response to the film. But I kind of want to get underneath your question and sort of explore why you’re asking it in the first place. Because I think sometimes there’s this car crash on the highway thing that goes on where people want to rubberneck at bad reviews, except that they are not car crashes. No one has been hurt or died. It’s just a bunch of critics that didn’t like a thing and it in and of itself doesn’t mean anything.

And even now when you say, well, the movie did not work commercially, it didn’t work commercially yet. It may never work commercially. But then again there have been movies that didn’t work commercially initially and then they just kept making money.

**John:** Yeah. Kept chugging along. Austin Powers.

**Craig:** Austin Powers is a great example. Just, you know, it was a video hit. It was a hit after it was not a hit and then it became a hit. So, I just feel like it’s just not a question that’s worth asking in a weird way.

**John:** Well, I want to get back to he does say that like my wife and I saw it and enjoyed it and were surprised by the roasting it got. And so I know what that’s like, too, because there’s definitely been movies that I saw and then it’s like, oh, I really liked that. Like I’ll see it on a plane and then when I can turn on my phone and I pull up Rotten Tomatoes I’ll see it got like an 18%. I’m like, wait, was I wrong to think that? And so the message I want to give Dave in 2019 is that you are not wrong to love something, or like something, or think it’s better than what everyone else says.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Don’t let other people’s opinions sway your opinions on what is good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s not like you’re looking at an X-ray of a tooth and thinking it looks OK and then a whole bunch of dentists are say no that is not a good tooth. You are no more or less valid than anybody else watching a movie or a television show regardless of whether or not they have some column on a website.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** All right, let’s answer some questions. Do you want to take Kevin?

**Craig:** Yeah. Kevin writes, “I saw a copy of John’s Big Fish sequence outline. And I wanted to know two things. One, how do you determine how many sequences to put into a script and how do you know how many pages they would take to write? Is this learned over time or do you have an intuition of how much page space they would take? And, two, what is the significance of the rectangular border around certain sequences?”

**John:** I can answer these questions. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it’s also just at johnaugust.com/library. You can see most of my old scripts and supporting documents. So this Big Fish sequence outline was something I did early on in the process for Big Fish. Like after I sort of set up the book at Columbia but before I started writing it, because there was like what is this movie going to be because the book is really slender. And I had to sort of describe what things were going to be.

So, in terms of the number of sequences, I don’t know how many sequences there are in a movie. I don’t know how many scenes there are in a movie. A hundred? A hundred scenes maybe? But I will say that you just get a kind of sense of like is this enough story, is this enough things that are going to happen. And so you might guess at sort of how many pages it’s going to be, but what’s more important is like these are the moments I need to tell this story.

So for this Big Fish outline you’ll see that certain sequences have a box around them. Those are for like the fantastical things. So I was just trying to give the people reading this document a sense of like, OK, this is the real world, this is the big fantasy world, so people could see what the mix was between the fantasy world and the real world. So that was that kind of document.

I don’t always do those. I would say it’s actually pretty rare. This project I just did that’s not announced yet I did something kind of like that but that’s because there were very specific sequences that were going to involve a lot of other people, and so I needed to warn people ahead of time that these are some big things we’re going to have to do in addition to the script.

**Craig:** Finally I think after Chernobyl airs I’ll be able to put all the scripts and outline material and bible stuff up on your website.

**John:** That would be great. That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I was thinking to myself like why is that something that I can easily handover as opposed to all the other stuff and I realized it’s because it was mine. So, I was able to control that process and outlining and scripting the entire way through. I am the only person that was writing it. And in everything else there was always something else. I was rewriting somebody, or production changes and all that crap. So, it just became this like very messy archive of 12 different movies.

So, it’s in a neat package. I’ll drop it off on your doorstep digitally when it’s time. When it’s time.

**John:** Susannah writes, “I am a writer/producer and I have been approached by the author of two fascinating books to develop and produce into a TV series. I’m going to write the bible and pilot and I’m looking for a writer with TV credits interested in joining me as I have no experience in television, although I have experience in film. The author would fund the development. The question is how should we split the ownership of the IP and what are the rights credits for each one? Should we sign a collaboration agreement or a coproduction agreement? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you so much.”

Craig, where should Susannah even start? So she has this project that exists as books. She’s going to come in and do a bible. I feel some sort of agreement between her and the author is going to be very important to do right now. Because if the author is funding development, so it’s not like Susannah is optioning it from the author. They’re going to have to have some sort of working agreement on how this is all going to go.

**Craig:** Where she should start is in a lawyer’s office because this is a complicated arrangement. I mean, the author is funding the development, so Susannah is the author commissioning the script as a work-for-hire? In other words will the author control the copyright of the screenplay? Or are you writing a screenplay based on the author’s IP and they have granted you permission to do so and are also paying you to do so, to do so so that you have the copyright on it until such time as you sell it to a studio?

As far as the other writer, it sounds like what you’re talking about is a partnership in which case you would be both have 50/50 ownership of the screenplay, unless you don’t own any of the screenplay at all because the author does. And then I don’t know what to say. This is a complicated one because you’re not doing it the way anybody does things, which should be a red flag in and of itself. So, I definitely recommend that you talk to an entertainment lawyer about this. It will save you a lot of – it’ll cost a little bit of money now and save you a lot of money later.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say if this author is successful enough that she can fund development on stuff then it’s entirely possible that she has a lawyer who is going to be preparing these kind of contracts now. It does sort of sound like she’s hiring you to do this and therefore it is a work-for-hire. There’s going to be some control over the rights of something, but you’ve got to figure that out. So, good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck!

**John:** Good luck.

**Craig:** Good luck, Susannah. That’s the way we should end all questions. Shia – Shia? Shia?

**John:** I’d say Shia.

**Craig:** Shia, because of Shia LaBeouf. But I feel like it could be Shia. I’m going to go with Shia. Shia writes, “As an experienced but not yet professional screenwriter of eight feature scripts, a dozen short scripts, one feature rewrite, and one produced short, I was told by an accomplished friend that my greatest challenge is that people don’t know I’m here. As I contemplate ways to up my networking game I am strongly considering a website. In the day age of Twitter, Facebook, and IMDb listings do you think they’re helpful?” What do you say?

**John:** Yeah, so as a person who has a website, I don’t think they’re super helpful. I do think you need – I think some sort of landing page that can have your stuff is probably a good idea, just so that you’re Googleable and if there are things you wanted to show, you have your short. You can have that on there, like the YouTube or the Vimeo clip of that. You can have samples. So some sort of landing page with your name on it is fantastic. As far as a real full on website, I don’t know that it’s going to serve you.

What Craig and I will both tell you is that actually running a website, like a blog where you’re writing regular things and posting, is a tremendous amount of work and time. And so if you’re going to do that just know that it’s a tremendous amount of work and time that you’re not going to be doing other stuff.

Tomi Adeyemi who is the author of Children of Blood and Bone, she had a great website that built a big following before her book came out, and so I think it did help sort of her exposure and as that book became – I mean that book became a giant blockbuster. But it did sort of help her get notice and get traction early on. So, there is some history of that, but not so much for screenwriters I would say. I think it’s more of a book kind of thing.

Craig, what do you think? Beyond a simple website does she need anything?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got an accomplished friend telling you about your greatest challenges. Maybe your accomplished friend could, I don’t know, hook you up with somebody here or there. I mean, the truth is that I’m a little nervous because, yes, there are times when you are limited by your inability to get out there I guess you’d say or talk to people or know people, but you’ve written a lot. And the writing should be the thing that opens the doors. And if the writing is not opening the doors I just don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that your limitation is networking.

You’ve written a lot. So, at this point you should feel free to question how to network and how to self-promote, but you should also be questioning whether or not you need to refresh some of the material. Write perhaps in a slightly different way. Take a look at what’s kind of inspiring you right now and keep it fresh. So, just don’t forget about the writing part because I actually feel like that’s the part that matters the most.

**John:** Yeah. There certainly is a moment that happens where if you’re a funny writer Twitter is a great place for being funny and getting noticed for being funny and Megan Amram obviously did that. I don’t think Facebook matches writing especially well. I don’t think Instagram matches writing especially well. IMDb listings, if they’re just showing your shorts, OK, I mean, if they’ve actually been produced. Remember, IMDb is for produced things that people could theoretically see somewhere out there in the world.

So, I don’t know that just digital online networking is going to be your next thing. I think it’s trying to make sure that people who actually are in position to do something with your script get your script and that may be sort of more old fashioned leg work. Or if you’re in a position to be in Los Angeles working in the trenches and meeting folks, you know, handing them the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. Completely agree.

**John:** So, one last question. A Gal in LA writes, “I was at a holiday party the other night and met a nice lady who wants to introduce me to a friend who makes made-for-TV movies. They’re looking for female writers to do horror, which is me. The thing is their movies are awful, but I need cash. Do I: 1, pursue the job and hope that people will understand that sometimes we do bad things for money? 2, write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again? Or 3, just say no to Hallmark Horror.” Which is probably not the real brand but I get what she’s talking about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Craig, should someone take a job working for people who make schlock?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And here’s the deal. First of all, the list of great filmmakers who started in schlock is long and remarkable. Roger Corman has given quite a few filmmakers their start. James Cameron’s first film was Piranha 3 I think, or Piranha 2. And a lot of great–

**John:** Ron Howard.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of great writers started doing that stuff. So, the point is no one really – look, I’ve worked on a bunch of junkie things and nobody looks at me and says, “You’re a bad person. You’ve done something immoral.” You know what’s immoral? Being able to make money and be a productive member of the economy, generate some tax for the community, and just not doing it because you think you’re above it all.

Until you’re above it all you’re not above it all. And furthermore I would say any time you work with a company and you get paid you learn something. You learn a little bit about how the meatloaf is made. You get a little bit of experience with politics. A little experience with notes. And also, Gal in LA, if you’re good, well, your movie might not be so awful, right? I mean, the writing is kind of important.

**John:** It is important.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, did I ever tell you about my experience writing for porn?

**Craig:** Uh, no. Hold on. We’re at Episode 383 and…?

**John:** I don’t talk about it a lot.

**Craig:** You’ve just now decided that you’re going to tell me you wrote for porn. Hold on. Let me get my popcorn and proceed.

**John:** So, this is early on, so I’m guessing this is probably ‘96/’97. So I had not been hired to write for anything. I probably had done the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was the thing that got me free of my assistant job.

I had an agent. And the agent was sending me on normal meetings, but he also sent me to this meeting with this company that was doing porn essentially. It was like CD-ROM porn. And so they would have preexisting scenes from other porn things, but it would be sort of a choose your own adventure thing which you would navigate yourself through a maze. You could make different choices that would you lead you to different porn scenes.

**Craig:** Was it called Bandersnatch?

**John:** It was not Bandersnatch, but that would be a great title for it.

**Craig:** Would be.

**John:** That Bandersnatch was great, by the way. So we’re going to try to have Charlie Brooker on the show to talk about it, because it’s–

**Craig:** Yeah, but don’t get derailed from the porn story. So…so you’re writing porn?

**John:** So, anyway, so I go in and I talk with them and I’m just like – I needed a job. I was looking for things. So they sent me home with a bunch of these CD-ROMs to look at and this wasn’t my kind of porn at all. So I’m watching these things and thinking like, OK, so basically they needed someone to write the scenarios for how you get from place to place. And there would be some filmed bits between the things, sort of green screen stuff to get you through things. And I had one follow up phone conversation with them, but then it ultimately went nowhere.

But I bring up the writing for porn because I did meet with porn producers to write porn segues because I wasn’t above that. That was a thing. And so that would be like writing for videogames or writing for E! True Hollywood Story. Whatever. If someone was going to pay me to write I was not above that. And so A Gal in LA, don’t be above writing for schlocky horror place if you are a person who wants to do great horror because you’ve got to start somewhere.

**Craig:** You got to start somewhere, man. I mean, I was young, I needed the work. It’s a great phrase. You say, “I need cash,” well shit, do it. You say write under a pseudonym and never speak of it again. Ugh, good luck. It doesn’t matter. The truth is it doesn’t matter. If you’re destined to be a really, really good writer then what’s going to happen is people are going to go on your IMDb page one day and go, “Wait, did you realize that her first movie was Blood Sausage. Nobody even saw it. It was made by some weird company.” No one will even see it, so it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Think about that as like, you know, you get an interesting starting place in your career life. Oh, the journey becomes more clear. Because if you just come out of the gate with a brilliant thing no one knows anything about you. But if you have credits like, oh that.

Sandra Bullock has really questionable early credits. Look at her now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly what I’m saying.

**John:** Hollywood loves that. Hollywood loves an underdog. So, write that great horror movie for the schlocky place and you’re golden.

**Craig:** I mean, I do think that Blood Sausage is a pretty decent title.

**John:** I think it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah, as far as titles go. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

**John:** For sure. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a little video that Entertainment Weekly posted. Sarah Silverman doing her recording for Slaughter Race from the amazing Ralph Breaks the Internet. I love this movie. I love this song. Craig, I put a link there. Actually, there’s a link in your folder. Why don’t you take a listen to it? We’ll listen to it together. We’ll play a little under here.

So this is a song, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall.

[Clip plays]

So I find that just delightful. And I love seeing Sarah Silverman actually do the voice, because it sounds kind of like her, but then when you actually see her singing in character it is just a tremendous joy. So I loved the movie but you should also check out this video of how they recorded it.

**Craig:** That’s great. I’m going to look at that movie. God, she’s good.

**John:** She’s so good.

**Craig:** She’s just good. Good people are good at stuff.

**John:** Good people are good. And obviously a very well-written movie. We have Pam Ribon on to talk about it. But I loved the movie, but her performance is just spectacular.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And I’m sure Pamela Ribon actually probably played that character in all the rehearsals. So a little Pamela Ribon in that moment as well.

**Craig:** Yes. Well I always said Sarah Silverman is the perfected Pamela Ribon. Yes, always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have Two Cool Things, because you know what, I’ve been gone for a while.

**John:** Absolutely. Save them up.

**Craig:** And the people have been clamoring for my Cool Things. So I have two. The first one is sort of an educational thing only. It’s called This is Your Brain on Pot. This is a website. It is something that the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, put out. It’s not about pro-marijuana or anti-marijuana. It’s purely scientific. It is the first and only really good thorough explanation I’ve ever seen about what neurologically happens when you get high and how THC actually works in the brain. It’s fascinating.

And they did a gorgeous job showing how it works. Take a moment, whether you smoke pot or not, it’s just interesting I think to see how these things work. It’s like you get to step away from the whole oh-ah of drugs and just look at how medicine of a sort works. Fascinating.

**John:** So, I would say I think it’s also totally worth checking out. I would say that it makes it feel like it’s the definitive answer on what’s actually happening and the actual research on how marijuana affects you is not great because there haven’t been enough studies. So I think it’s a good conjecture about what they think is happening in terms of uptake and receptors, but I don’t think it’s the full picture. And obviously it doesn’t account for CBD and the other compounds that are in there which are probably doing their own thing.

**Craig:** That is true. It is not definitive by any stretch. But it’s certainly more information than I’ve ever seen. So I was pretty impressed.

The second thing, this is pretty cool. It’s called TripIt. TripIt.com. TripIt. And there is an app called TripIt. And here’s what they do. You sign up, it’s free. There’s a subscription possibility. Personally I haven’t seen much of a value in it, so I’m happy to use the free version.

And what you do is you register your email address and you could register two or three of your email addresses with them. So now they know if you send them an email who you are. When you book a trip somewhere, for instance John I’m going to Seattle. So I booked a flight I believe on Alaska Airlines and I booked a room at the same hotel you are in. When you book things online like an airfare, what happens next? You get something in your email box, right? You get those little confirmation reservation blah-blah-blah. And then I never know what to do with it.

Well, dig it. Just forward it from one of your email addresses to I think it’s plan or something like that at TripIt.com. That’s it. Just forward. You don’t have to do anything else. Just forward the stupid email that you get. They get it. They see it’s from you. They know it’s your trip. They suck the information out of it and then pipe it in nice beautiful itinerary form into the app on your phone, including reservation numbers, that stupid six letter thing that airlines use.

**John:** Confirmation code, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great. It works like magic.

**John:** It’s great. So my husband Mike has been using it for six or seven years I want to say.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Because he’s ahead of all things travel.

**Craig:** Are you serious?

**John:** I’m serious.

**Craig:** Seven years?

**John:** It’s been around for a very long time.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And so I will say that you don’t have to use the app on your phone for all that information. It will also generate a calendar feed so it’ll just show up in your normal calendar as well. And so we have a feed called TripIt which is basically anything that is a travel thing just automatically shows up there.

**Craig:** I’m not coming back to this show.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** I don’t know, I’m not doing anymore cool things.

**John:** No, no, it’s good. I never used it as a cool thing before, so it wasn’t like one of those games where like a year later you’re like, “Oh, this is a great game.” It’s like, yeah, I played that game.

**Craig:** You know what? Maybe what I’ve done is I’ve rekindled a certain spark in your marriage.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** You appreciate something now that he was doing that you realize now is cool.

**John:** Now it’s cool. It’s quite cool. Going back to the marijuana thing, I’m just going to put in a tiny little rant here. So people who don’t live in Los Angeles or a place with legalized marijuana may not be aware of this, but in Los Angeles all the billboards in Los Angeles that are not for Netflix programs are marijuana/legalize pot billboards. And it’s really annoying.

And so I just want someone, State of California, somebody to sort of say whatever the restrictions are for tobacco have to be the same restrictions for pot because it’s ridiculous how many pot billboards there are right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, technically cigarettes are – they kill you. You know, marijuana doesn’t appear to kill you. By the way, I sound like a big pot head. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t smoke pot. I’m just sort of like–

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. While I would say that marijuana is not a dangerous substance to the degree that other things can be, we have restrictions on alcohol and on tobacco. I think similar restrictions are – obviously there are restrictions on who you can sell it to. So, you shouldn’t be able to – here’s what I’ll say. I don’t think you should be able to buy a giant billboard for this product if a kid who is walking by it couldn’t buy it. It just feels dumb and stupid to me. And it feels like a weird mismatch of rules and laws.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s dumber and stupider than that letter that Mark wrote us about the Golden Globe awards?

**John:** I don’t know. It’s a whole different category of bad.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. I don’t think so. No. No chance.

**John:** Anyway, that is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell, it is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. People, you have been sending us amazing outros. We’ve got just some great ones. And Craig you’ve listened to a couple of those.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. There’s some really good ones coming up.

**John:** There’s some good ones coming up. But we always need more, so send those in. Ask@johnaugust.com is also the address for when you’re sending these longer questions or follow up things like we addressed today. But on Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re happy to answer your questions.

I feel bad about the guy I kind of put on shout about sort of the pre-roll language warning thing. That wasn’t my intention. It’s just sometimes I will do the quote-reply to things just so that everyone sees the answer, so I can answer the question once rather than a bunch. But I do kind of apologize. Eh, I kind of apologize for that.

**Craig:** Kind of.

**John:** Kind of.

**Craig:** If you call that an apology.

**John:** I apologize for putting him on blast when that was not my intention. I was just trying to answer the question once.

**Craig:** I hear you. I hear you.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. If you’re there, leave us a review. It’ll be a new thing for 2019 is to leave us a little review. Tell people how much you like the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll see in that links to preordering my book. Our Seattle show when we have details about that. The live show for The Princess Bride. You’ll see all that stuff there.

You’ll also see transcripts. They go up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all of the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, or you can buy seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. Yes!

**John:** It’s good to be back in our zone.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yeah. So we had great temporary hosts, but Craig you are the only Craig.

**Craig:** I mean, you know what I mean? You feel me?

**John:** You’re Craig.

**Craig:** I’m Craig. See you next week John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* You can catch John on [Studio 360](https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/john-august-the-host-of-scriptnotes-explains-his-approach-to-screenwriting.html).
* [“Let’s Split Up the Gang”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LetsSplitUpGang) and [“Never Split the Party”](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeverSplitTheParty) are topical TV tropes.
* Watch Patton Oswalt when he’s not being utilized in a [big scene](https://www.mediaite.com/tv/hilarious-patton-oswalt-reveals-strange-prank-he-pulled-in-old-king-of-queens-episode/).
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 381: Double Ampersand](http://johnaugust.com/2018/double-ampersand) with Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens
* [Big Fish sequence outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-outline.pdf)
* [Sarah Silverman recording Slaughter Race](https://ew.com/movies/2019/01/07/slaughter-race-ralph-breaks-the-internet-sarah-silverman-song/), music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall
* [TripIt](https://www.tripit.com)
* [This Is Your Brain On Pot](https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/thc/)
* You can now [preorder the next Arlo Finch](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_383.mp3).

Diary of a First-Time Director

Episode - 212

Go to Archive

October 3, 2017 Scriptnotes, Transcribed

John and Craig sit down with Marielle Heller, the writer and director of the acclaimed feature The Diary of a Teenage Girl, to talk about the journey of getting her movie made, from optioning the novel to the Sundance Labs through production.

We discuss sex scenes and ’70s wallpaper, anamorphic lenses and leaving subplots on the cutting room floor. Plus there’s a lot of MacGruber.

This episode originally aired August 25, 2015.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes and a live Three Page Challenge will be at the 2017 Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [Submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) for the Three Page Challenge
* [Marielle Heller](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1716636/) on IMDb
* [The Diary of a Teenage Girl official site](http://sonyclassics.com/thediaryofateenagegirl/) and [the trailer](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/sony/thediaryofateenagegirl/)
* [The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Revised Edition](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1623170346/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Phoebe Gloeckner
* Scriptnotes, 121: [My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter), with Mike Birbiglia
* [Sundance Institute Feature Film Program](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film)
* [Director of Photography Brandon Trost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Trost) on Wikipedia
* [Rotoscoping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping) on Wikipedia
* Mari Heller on [NPR’s Fresh Air](http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/431997207/a-diary-unlocked-a-teenage-coming-of-age-story-put-on-film)
* [VHS Camcorder](http://rarevision.com/vhscam/)
* [I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago](https://medium.com/keep-learning-keep-growing/i-m-sorry-i-didn-t-respond-to-your-email-my-husband-coughed-to-death-two-years-ago-9e12c93c92fa) by Rachel Ward
* [The Wonder Weeks App](http://www.thewonderweeks.com/about-the-wonder-week-app/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive) are available!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jack Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_212_rebroadcast.mp3).

**UPDATE 10-13-17:** The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/scriptnotes-ep-212-rebroadcast-diary-of-a-first-time-director-transcript).

Diary of a First-Time Director

August 25, 2015 Directors, Film Industry, Follow Up, Scriptnotes, Story and Plot, Sundance, Transcribed, Writing Process

John and Craig sit down with Marielle Heller, the writer and director of the acclaimed feature The Diary of a Teenage Girl, to talk about the journey of getting her movie made, from optioning the novel to the Sundance Labs through production.

We discuss sex scenes and ’70s wallpaper, anamorphic lenses and leaving subplots on the cutting room floor. Plus there’s a lot of MacGruber.

Heller’s film is in US theaters now, and expanding week-by-week. Don’t miss it.

Links:

  • Later this week, Scriptnotes shirts will be available for pre-order in the John August Store
  • Scriptnotes and a live Three Page Challenge will be at the 2015 Austin Film Festival
  • Marielle Heller on IMDb
  • The Diary of a Teenage Girl official site and the trailer
  • Scriptnotes, 121: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter, with Mike Birbiglia
  • Sundance Institute Feature Film Program
  • Director of Photography Brandon Trost on Wikipedia
  • Rotoscoping on Wikipedia
  • Mari Heller on NPR’s Fresh Air
  • VHS Camcorder
  • I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago by Rachel Ward
  • The Wonder Weeks App
  • Outro by Jack Mazin (send us yours!)

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 8-28-15: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

« Previous Page
Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Newsletter

Inneresting Logo A Quote-Unquote Newsletter about Writing
Read Now

Explore

Projects

  • Aladdin (1)
  • Arlo Finch (27)
  • Big Fish (88)
  • Birdigo (2)
  • Charlie (39)
  • Charlie's Angels (16)
  • Chosen (2)
  • Corpse Bride (9)
  • Dead Projects (18)
  • Frankenweenie (10)
  • Go (30)
  • Karateka (4)
  • Monsterpocalypse (3)
  • One Hit Kill (6)
  • Ops (6)
  • Preacher (2)
  • Prince of Persia (13)
  • Shazam (6)
  • Snake People (6)
  • Tarzan (5)
  • The Nines (118)
  • The Remnants (12)
  • The Variant (22)

Apps

  • Bronson (14)
  • FDX Reader (11)
  • Fountain (32)
  • Highland (73)
  • Less IMDb (4)
  • Weekend Read (64)

Recommended Reading

  • First Person (88)
  • Geek Alert (151)
  • WGA (162)
  • Workspace (19)

Screenwriting Q&A

  • Adaptation (66)
  • Directors (90)
  • Education (49)
  • Film Industry (492)
  • Formatting (130)
  • Genres (90)
  • Glossary (6)
  • Pitches (29)
  • Producers (59)
  • Psych 101 (119)
  • Rights and Copyright (96)
  • So-Called Experts (47)
  • Story and Plot (170)
  • Television (165)
  • Treatments (21)
  • Words on the page (238)
  • Writing Process (178)

More screenwriting Q&A at screenwriting.io

© 2025 John August — All Rights Reserved.