Search Results for: subplots

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 194 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, on the last episode we promised that this would be a really big show this week. And we will not fulfill that promise.

**Craig:** No. Well, it is a big show because we have a lot to talk about and it’s all good stuff, but the big thing that we were really excited about we’re kind of pushing down and episode or two. Look, here’s the best news of all: I think people are going to listen to this episode. They’re going to go, whoa, you mean that’s a B for these guys? That’s an A plus for everybody else.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re going to raise the bar even higher for that episode that we pitched and promised but didn’t actually deliver this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We will.

**John:** Yeah, we will, eventually. Last week on the show I told you about a special screening of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder that’s happening this week and it’s happening this Saturday, the 25th, at 5pm. If you are a WGA member you can RSVP for it. And if you do, you will get to see me speak with Bruce Joel Rubin, the writer of both of those movies, at a Q&A between those two films. So, if you want to come see that and you’re a WGA member, there is a special link in the show notes you can follow for that and RSVP.

There’s a pretty good chance that they may open up some seats for everybody else who is not a WGA member, so if you follow me on Twitter, @johnaugust, I will let you know if it becomes available for everybody else. And that’s it for the news.

**Craig:** Nice viewing experience there at the Writers Guild Theater. And Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, just not only two good movies, but just entertaining movies.

**John:** Absolutely. We didn’t do a special episode about Jacob’s Ladder, but we could do one.

**Craig:** We could.

**John:** And, of course, we have the episode about Ghost. You can go back to and listen if you want to get up to speed with your Ghost experience.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Craig, did you see in the news that the Writers Guild East added some new members?

**Craig:** I did. They went and organized, that’s our union term for bringing people in an employment situation under the fold of the union and under the fold of the union agreement. They organized writers at Gawker, the website notable for gawkery. Whatever they do over there.

**John:** Or for commenting on things in culture, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re kind of a gossip — they’re a gossip website. I mean, let’s face it.

**John:** Gossipy, yeah.

**Craig:** Sort of a junkie gossip website. But that’s okay. Sometimes you’re in a junkie gossip mood.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And occasionally Gawker — in that Internet way they defy their own brand. Sometimes they do remarkable stuff actually. So, they kind of —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** They hit extremes of god, and wow, very cool, as do we all. What’s interesting about this is that this is not audio visual and I think this may be the first time that anyone who does not do an audio visual job has been organized into the guild. I could be wrong, but I think this may be it.

**John:** So let’s talk about this, because we think of the Writers Guild representing film and TV writers and sort of people who make fiction stuff for screens is what I sort of think about. But we do have some journalists who are part of the Writers Guild. There’s a few little bits of things that are not what we think about as being Hollywood in the Writers Guild. And this is a new direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, the Writers Guild does represent some writers for news broadcasts in Los Angeles and back east, mostly back east. Some radio news as well. But it’s always been audio/visual. And whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

This is new. Now, on the one hand, you know, I’m fine. Look, the East — the East is the East. One day I’ll do a whole thing about the East and how they drive me crazy. But there’s nothing to complain about here. I mean, I think anybody that works a writing job that can be afforded union protections, salary, minimums, credit protections, pension and health, those are good things. I hope they get all of those things. And since they are working as work-for-hire, it makes sense.

Is there a downside? No. It’s just that there’s no larger upside for the union. You know, when the union talks about organizing, the idea ultimately is that you should be organizing, there are two basic strategies. One strategy is organize massive quantities of workers so that you can use your total strength as leverage for individual contract negotiations. Like, SCIU.

**John:** Yeah, that service workers union is incredibly powerful and huge.

**Craig:** Enormous. And they have — if you said well what’s a service worker? Anybody from a janitor to a nurse. I mean, they’ve got — it’s just an enormous range of types of employees and types of work situations with god knows how many contracts. I mean, I can’t even imagine how many contracts they negotiate on a rolling basis.

The Writers Guild has always been the other kind which is to organize a specialized group of people who do something rare and because you essentially control the rare employees that people want, you have leverage to bargain on their behalf. And that’s SAG essential, the SAG/AFTRA version, definitely the DGA version, definitely the Writers Guild version.

The East seems to be kind of dabbling with this other version, which is fine. I don’t think they’ll ever accrue massive quantities in such a way that it would kind of sway industries, but it’s good for those writers. So, I guess the winners are those writers.

**John:** I would hope so. I definitely see what you’re saying though in terms of there’s the model of going really big and sort of getting as many people into the fold as possible, but you risk losing focus. And in the times where I’ve had conversations with Writers Guild members who are working in TV journalism, it is just such a different world that I worry sometimes that we’re not able to adequately represent their special needs and concerns. You know, on a daily basis they’re not facing the same kinds of things we’re facing.

So, the useful thing about having a guild be so focused on one specific thing is we can keep our eye on that ball and nothing gets sort of dropped. and I worry that in trying to get more people involved with the guild, you’re going to lose that kind of focus.

**Craig:** You’re right to be worried about that. The way that the West and East break things out, as you know, because you’re on the negotiating committee frequently, the West takes negotiation point on the big contract for film and television writers — the film and television writers making primetime TV shows, writing movies, and so on and so forth. Cable shows, too.

The East takes point on news contract negotiations primarily. They do have a culture of this on their end of things. It’s preferable, if you’re choice is I work at Gawker and my choice is no union or the Writers Guild East, no question. The Writers Guild East will — should be at least better for you.

But what would be better still would be joining a union that actually represents a lot of shops like Gawker. And that is not the WGAe. Nor, will it ever be.

**John:** Yeah. Being naïve, I don’t know that there is any union organization that really is representing these kinds of writers right now. And I think there’s a case to be made for — right now it’s Gawker, but there’s certainly companies that are making things that are more like what we normally do. So you look at BuzzFeed with the video stuff they’re doing. You look at Maker Studios or any of these places that are doing video design for the Internet, some of those places are in this murky middle where it’s very much more like our TV kind of model.

And when we do the big negotiations for the big contract, whenever we’re dealing with our major studio partners, the web stuff that they’re doing, that’s always a concern for sort of we want to be covered when we’re doing that. But these little indie shops, maybe you start covering more of those writers and getting them the pension, health, welfare, everything else they should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. The tricky part is you would probably need to create a separate contract. So, here in this case, they don’t even have a contract. What they’ve gotten essentially is approval from those writers to represent them. And now they’re going to negotiate a contract with the company. By the way, that may not work. I mean, that’s the other thing. But hopefully it does. I would be surprised if it didn’t.

For us on our end, when you look at something like BuzzFeed, it is a non-union shop. It’s a massive non-union shop. Most of this stuff out there now is non-union. Everybody’s been trained to work non-union. So, it’s harder and harder to organize those places. If we do organize them, we will need to create a new contract.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what the Writers Guild is particularly good at is enforcing one contract that blankets one industry. What the Internet is really good at is defying that. So, you can’t find a contract that both BuzzFeed and Gawker and HuffPo, and some other major provider, that they’re all going to agree to the way that Fox, Sony… — Frankly, the situation that we have almost can’t ever happen again.

The situation we have with the studios, which is why I’m always keen to preserve it, I think, for as long as it’s preservable. But, you know, for the Gawker writers, I think this is a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing. And I hope that the Writers Guild East does a good job on their behalf.

**John:** Sounds good. So, for the bulk of our podcast today, we are going to be talking some follow up about the previous episode and the credits situation. So, we did a long podcast last week about how credit is determined for writing feature films. And so we had a bunch of questions from listeners who wanted to know more stuff, or had specific situations, so we’ll try to address those questions and concerns. We’re going to talk about Writer X, who is a mysterious figure who showed up on the scene to annoy Craig mostly.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s true.

**John:** And we’ll talk about sort of the role of anonymity and sort of authority in that space. We’re going to look at this sort of weird email we got from somebody about this iFilm group and what appears to be sort of a really shady situation. And we don’t know anything too specific about his one company, but sort of general patterns to watch out for if someone says they are interested in your script. Well, let’s make sure they really are a real person. And, finally, we’re going to take a look at the GLAAD inclusion report, which is basically the gay and lesbian group that looks at media portrayals of gays, lesbians, and transgender people in movies and how they felt we did this year, or this past year in 2014, and how we could do better. So, we’ve got plenty of show this week.

**Craig:** So much show. Let’s dive in.

**John:** All right. So, let’s start with follow up on our credits episode. So, we’ll start with a really simple one. Somebody on Twitter wrote me to ask, “Being an arbiter seems like a lot of work. Do arbiters get paid?”

**Craig:** Yes. We get paid $400,000 per arbitration. [laughs]

**John:** Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

**Craig:** It would be so wonderful.

**John:** Everyone would line up to do it.

**Craig:** I know. No, in fact, we get zero dollars.

**John:** Yes, we get zero dollars. So that’s another reason why it’s a huge commitment, because that’s money you’re not making doing your writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There has been discussion about should we have professional paid arbiters, and there’s logic for that and logic against that, and we won’t get into it, but it’s a source of great controversy.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re basically — it’s the jury system. Essentially you’re a citizen of the United States, that comes with a bunch of benefits. One of the costs is you got to show up every now and then and do your part.

**John:** But jurors do get paid. Not much.

**Craig:** Well, in that case it’s not at all like the jury system. Scratch that. It’s so much worse. Not like the jury system was great anyway.

**John:** It’s the worst thing ever. And also like being a juror is not that much work. It’s tedious, but it’s not that much work. Being an arbiter is a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of reading involved and thinking.

**Craig:** I’ve clearly never been a juror.

Joe from — I just like saying Rancho Cucamonga — Rancho Cucamonga writes, “A script I co-wrote is tentatively going into production this summer and I fear the issue of credit is going to be a problem. This is a non-union, privately-funded indie movie, so I know I’m completely at the mercy of how the co-writer, who is also the movie’s director and executive producer, will assign credit. But I’m curious to know where I would stand if I were in the guild.” Good use of subjunctive.

“The script originated with the co-writer/director/executive producer as a simple log line and an extremely vague outline, about a dozen general plot points with virtually no details to any of them. I took it from there and fleshed out a more detailed outline. Then I came up with character names, their jobs, the settings, the subplots, all the supporting characters, and changed the ending. We worked off of that outline and we’re each happily sharing screenplay credit, but he made it pretty clear to me that he doesn’t think I should share story credit.

“He came up with the original idea and the structure, but I really came up with everything else. Should I share credit or is he right to claim that for himself?”

**John:** So, first, Joe, congratulations on your movie hopefully going into production. I hope it turns out really, really well. Your situation is sort of why you would love to have a Writers Guild contract for your movie, so that these things could be determined correctly and fairly. You have very little leverage in this situation, so you’re going to probably take the credit that you receive, which will be the shared screenplay credit and that’s how it’s going to be. And unfortunately that’s how it is for most of the film producing world.

Most of the film producing world doesn’t have the equivalent of our Writers Guild to figure out who the credited writer should be. And it is that sort of horse trading kind of nonsense that you’re experiencing right now. Craig, do you have any advice for Joe?

**Craig:** Well, no, because you’re right, and he’s acknowledging there’s really nothing he can do. I guess his question is “but is this right?” And, frankly, unless we read the material, we have no way of telling you if it’s right or not. I mean, what you’re saying is that you contributed to story. That in and of itself does not automatically qualify you for story credit. You would need to show per the Writers Guild arbitration a significant contribution to story.

And that, of course, is a term of art and interpretation.

**John:** So, let’s pretend that we are two of the three arbiters who receive this. Let’s pretend it goes to WGA arbitration. The kinds of things we’d be looking at when we’re determining story credit is we would be looking at written material. So, probably first piece of written material we’d get was this original sort of beat — whatever this co-writer/director came up with. And if it really is as vague as he says, and it’s 12 bullet points and a vague sort of premise of things.

You would look at this thing and if there really were no character names and there were no sort of details about who these people were and what was going on and sort of how the story progressed, maybe Joe could make a good case for sharing story credit. What would you be looking for for figuring out story credit?

**Craig:** Well, right off the bat he says he has a fleshed out outline that he did. So, now he has an outline. And outlines are by definition story material. They do not contribute to screenplay. They contribute solely to story. Sometimes I think to myself one of the ways you can determine what’s what is could this go in an outline, or would it need to be part of a screenplay. The fact that he invented a bunch of characters and a bunch of subplots, the fact that he changed the narrative, the basic narrative of the ending, these are all things that do contribute significantly to story.

From what he’s describing, if I believe everything he says, then of course, yes, he should share story credit. If he’s a little delusional, and it happens to the best of us, maybe not. But, given the situation that he’s in, I think there’s really no purpose in fighting over it. There are no residuals. It is at this point it’s essentially a question of vanity and fairness. Right? It’s both things.

Well, let’s discard vanity and let’s unfortunately just acknowledge that this is what happens. When you take the money to write a non-union project, you are in part taking money to absorb a certain systemic unfairness and this may be one of those.

**John:** So, our friend Howard Rodman would be upset with us if we didn’t mention the fact that there is an indie contract for the WGA. And in the future, if in this kind of scenario, you might look into whether that indie contract would be useful for you in the situation.

I cannot recall the details, whether arbitration is a thing you get with that indie contract or not, but it does give you certain protections down the road. It does give you the ability to have a little bit more control over your work than you might otherwise have. So, it would be something for a writer like Joe to look at in the future.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** Will Eisner’s Ghost writes, “The opening title sequence for Netflix’s Daredevil reads ‘Created by Drew Goddard.’ It seems strange for Goddard to take this credit when he’s simply adapting preexisting characters and preexisting plots. I’ve noticed very little in terms of actual content creation, but direct plot and character adaptation.

“Frank Darabont took a ‘Developed by’ credit when he put together The Walking Dead. And Dexter’s opening credits are ‘Developed for television by James Manos, Jr.,’ then ‘Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.’ My question is that if enough of the creation of the plot and characters was done for Marvel comics as a work-for-hire, and then directly adapted by Netflix, might these comic book writers protest the WGA credits for Daredevil TV show? Even if they are not WGA writers and the work was done for another medium?”

Craig, what’s your take on this kind of credit situation?

**Craig:** Well, to be fair, I consider myself a feature film credits expert. I do not know much about television credits, so I can’t tell you exactly what the rules are that govern the created by credit versus the developed by credit, and how they do source material credits. What I can tell you is that the comic book writers of Daredevil have absolutely no standing to protest any WGA credits. They are not WGA members. They did not contribute material under a WGA contract to this television show.

The copyright for Daredevil is owned by Marvel. Marvel obviously made an agreement with Netflix. That agreement included a licensing of the material. And I presume a provision that the source material be acknowledged. But beyond that, no, the comic book writers unfortunately have no say. Just as, by the way, you and I have no say if they take — you know, we have some separated rights as part of our deal, which comic book writers don’t. But generally speaking when we write a movie for a studio, they get to do with it whatever they want, and we don’t really have much of a say at all.

**John:** Yeah. So, it is important, that distinction that all the rights to Daredevil, that is a copyright controlled by Marvel. And so when those writers who were writing stuff for Daredevil, everything they did, 100 percent of that gets owned by Marvel. And so when it comes time to make it into a TV show, that whole bundle of rights, it’s as if the author is Marvel, not that the author is the individual writers underneath that. And so Marvel gets to say what the source material is.

In terms of whether it should be created by or developed by, there are specific rules in the WGA contract about what that language is supposed to be, but it’s also a negotiated thing as well. And I’ve seen developed by on certain properties, and created by on other properties. And I cannot honestly tell you why some are one thing, and some are another thing.

I remember the old Lois & Clark TV show was the first time I saw the Developed by credit, but there’s been other cases where a similar kind of situation would have a Created by credit. So, I don’t know the specifics of Drew Goddard’s case.

**Craig:** All right. Well we did as best as we could with that, Will Eisner’s Ghost. We had something here from Jake. He says, “I began working on a project several years ago with a friend of mine. We did not get very far in the writing stage, just had a few of the basic plot points worked out, and some character notes. Since then, that friend and I had some problems and do not speak anymore.” Ooh, this is getting good.

**John:** I actually cut out one sentence here.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** I cut out one sentence that talked about sort of like how the friend was really lazy.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I guess it’s back in, isn’t it? Cause the problem was laziness. Jake continues, “Recently, I’ve picked that project we were working on back up. I’ve made great progress.” Boy, do we get this all the time. “I’ve made great progress and I am currently past the outline and now actually on a first draft. I’m worried, though, that if this script gets produced he will have problems with not being involved anymore. I’m willing to negotiate some credit, I suppose, but don’t really know what those credits should be. Neither of us are WGA members yet, so this question isn’t so much about arbitration yet as it is about ethics. So, what do you think?”

Well, John, what do you think?

**John:** I think this is an incredibly common situation. And you are best served by having the conversation now if possible. You might be even better served by writing something else, because it could just be a really uncomfortable thing down the road.

I think it would be amazing if Jake actually ended up being the co-writer and director from the previous — the Joe from Rancho Cucamonga example. At one time I want to have like both sides of this conversation of the same thing.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** Like this guy says he should get story credit and he’s completely insane. This happens a lot where you’re sort of sitting around and you’re spitballing something and you’re like, yeah, let’s write this together, and then you kind of start, and you kind of stop.

I can think of at least a dozen examples of this happening among my friends. And in every circumstance the best situation would be to have the conversation right at the very start about how you’re going to do it and just write up an agreement between the two of you. No one ever does that, and so the next best solution I think would be to have the conversation now. The third best solution is to write something else or write something so different that it’s not recognizably the same idea. Craig, what’s your thought?

**Craig:** Well, I think that Jake is correct that it is about ethics, but what he’s leaving out is that it’s also about the law. Because he did in fact work on material with somebody else. They co-authored stuff. He may say that it’s some basic plot points and some character notes, but it’s stuff. That person owns the share of copyright on that stuff.

What Jake is doing now is creating a derivative work based on somebody else’s stuff. That is no bueno. If you go and you sell it, then what’s going to happen is your friend that you don’t talk with is going to get a lawyer and the lawyer is going to say, no, you actually can’t sell anything without us and we could scotch the whole thing, or hold you up for a bunch of money. Either way, you’ve wandered down a fairly treacherous path here, Jake.

And John is absolutely right. You must talk to him now and you must set an agreement now. And he should be included in some compensatory manner if you do sell it. But he also needs to kind of waive other interests in it. In other words, you want to be free and clear.

**John:** You do. And I’ve been in other situations where writing teams have broken up and what they’ll do is they’ll just sort of pick the projects and like each of them gets one of the two projects, or they’ll divide everything in half so that they don’t get weirdly entangled this way. Like the things that they were thinking about writing but they never really got started, they’ll make a list and actually divide those things up just to make things clear and safe and not crazy.

Since this was apparently the only thing you worked on with this person, you don’t have that ability to say like, hey, why don’t you take this idea and let me take this idea, and we’ll all call it even and be happy. You probably don’t have that, so you have that conversation and you say, hey look, do you remember that thing we were talking about writing? I think I have some really good ideas for it and I want to be able to do that. Are you cool with that? And if you are cool with that, can we just write something down agreeing on that? And the minute you say write something down, your friend’s barriers will go up. But, maybe you get through it.

**Craig:** Well I think then if I were Jake’s attorney I would say, listen, what we’re going for here is to get him to release all claims on this material. In order to release all claims on the material and to assign full and complete copyright to you, he’s going to need something in return, otherwise he’s a goof. So, what you promise in return is some percentage of any money that you make off of the project. And you can limit it in various ways, up to a certain amount, or so on and so forth, but that’s what a negotiation is.

Essentially what we’re talking about, Jake, is buying him out. And you don’t have to buy him out with money upfront. You can buy him out with a promise of some piece of money should you get anything. But you really can’t go forward without handling this now, because you are doing something that is both ethically wrong and legally untenable.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know that he’s doing anything ethically wrong yet. I mean, I think thinking through and figuring out what something could be is a natural function of a writer. It’s trying to sell it or trying to represent it as your own would be ethically wrong.

**Craig:** Well yeah. Precisely. I mean, I guess that that’s — I’m presuming. Yeah, if he writes it and puts in a drawer, sure, no harm/no foul.

**John:** Danny writes, “I have a question regarding where ghostwriting fits within the credits system. Obviously the term implies that no credit will be given, but who makes that decision? Is the WGA cool with that practice? And I guess more broadly, how prevalent is ghostwriting within the industry?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s an interesting question. There isn’t a lot of ghostwriting the way we think of it in terms of novels and so forth where Pete Rose writes a book about playing for the Reds, but we know that he didn’t write it. [laughs] Some guy wrote it and took a bunch of money and just let Pete Rose say I wrote it.

Far more common in our industry is a bunch of people openly work on something and then one of them is assigned credit. There are times when individuals don’t want credit. I’ve worked on things where part of the deal was I don’t want credit for this. I’m not doing it for credit, it’s not the kind of movie that I think I should have my name on, or I deserve to have my name on. Or, I’ve done a job where I knew the people who I was rewriting briefly and I frankly just didn’t want to get into a thing with them, because I like them. So, in those cases you can say as a writer I’m requesting that I don’t receive credit, and the Writers Guild and the arbiters tend to honor this, unless it seems extraordinarily fishy, no problem.

There are pseudonyms where you can write something under a name that isn’t your own. Those are subject to some rules. For starters, you have the right to use a pseudonym if you make under I think it’s $250,000 for the project. If you make over that amount, you don’t have the right to use one. You have to ask. You have to ask the studio for permission. And we can understand why that exists, because sometimes they want to say “From the writer of so-and-so,” or they want to say award season voters, look, we got this guy to write this thing.

There are times, I have heard of situations where writers are paid to write something and then they do what we call farm it out. They turn around, they hand the job to somebody else who truly works in the ghostwriting way, writes the material. Then the writer who has been hired kind of does it a once over, or blesses it, and then sends it in as his or her own work.

I’ve heard of this. I’ve never actually seen it happen. There’s no concrete examples I’ve ever been shown of it happening. Personally, I find that notion to be odious, to the extreme. But I guess that would be the breadth of ghostwriting in our business.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to initially sort of dismiss this question altogether saying like ghostwriting doesn’t really exist. And it’s not a term you actually hear. Like ghostwriting is something you think about with books. It’s not a thing you think about with movies, partly because we have a whole credit system and there’s a reason why people are credited as writers.

But that last scenario you described is a real thing and whenever you hear about it happening you’re like, whoa, that’s crazy. And I actually haven’t heard about it for quite some time. But there was sort of a legend of an A-list screenwriter who apparently did have a team of people who wrote with him or all together and they would do a first pass and he would clean it up. And it always felt really, really weird and gross and fishy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not a secret. It’s Ron Bass and he talked about it at length. Ron was a lawyer prior to becoming a screenwriter. And when he became screenwriter, he hired a lot of people as essentially interns, writing assistants, writing — I don’t know what you’d call them. And he would give them assignments and he would give them assignments on things that he was writing, but the idea being and now I’ll collect it and now I will run it through my typewriter and so when it comes out it’s my work.

And he was open about it and I think that in part was why it wasn’t unethical. Nobody that paid Ron Bass money didn’t know that this was part of how he worked. And for the time that he was working constantly in the business, people appreciated the work, so everything was fine.

It’s — I’ve heard of a couple of people though that do this quietly. And the idea is, okay, as writers we know it’s a little bit of feast or famine. Sometimes it’s frustrating when you hit one of those feast patches and you take a job and then somebody calls you up five days later and says I’ll give you twice as much for this. And you think, oh well, I would sort of — I could see myself writing that, but I can’t because I’m writing this. Oh, I know, I’ll take the money, [laughs], and I’ll turn around and I’ll pay some tiny pittance of it to desperate writers who want a shot. And they’ll understand it’s a ghostwriting situation. And then I’ll get all that money.

Well, great, except boo. That’s not cool. I mean, what we have is our name. We are representing that this is our work. And, frankly, if you do that, you’re going to sink your own ship pretty quickly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s your reputation.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a different thing than I know writers who are sort of in that feast period who will be approached with something and say like I cannot do it, but I will oversee another writer doing something, and where they’re not coming in as — or basically they’ll team up with somebody to do it, like somebody who has a little bit more time on their plate. That I totally get. But what you’re describing, that sort of shady like someone else is actually doing it feels not only kind of unethical, but is actually probably in violation of the contract that they signed.

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** Because the contract that they signed with whatever studio said that you will actually do this work. And for them to farm it out to somebody else is not going to be kosher.

**Craig:** 100 percent. It is a violation of your contract, both your legal contract, and your personal contract that you are going to do the work. When writers are supervising other writers, those writers are hired as the writers. They are participating writers. They are the ones who are up for credit. They’re acknowledged. Everything is above board. Essentially the screenwriter acts like a producer in that circumstance and that’s absolutely fine.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** All right. We got one more here. Stephen Lancellotti writes, “I just listened to the credits podcast a week after IFC Midnight released a poster for my movie, The Harvest. I’m now curious, is my name supposed to be on the poster in the same font size as the director? Probably won’t make a stink about it, but just wanted to know for the future.” And we’ll include a link to the poster which makes a very big deal of — it says The Harvest, and then underneath a Film by John McNaughton. And then tiny type for everybody else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If this is a Writers Guild movie, I don’t think that’s okay.

**John:** I don’t think it’s okay either. I think if you’re crediting the director in that larger type size, I think you have to credit the writer in the same size type. I think it’s a problem.

**Craig:** I think you do. I think you do. So, but the rules are arcane. There are all sorts of little twisty bitsies. You know, maybe if it’s a promotional thing, or if it’s prior to credits being fixed, or maybe if it’s home video as opposed — I don’t know all the ins and outs. But —

**John:** That’s what I was thinking, too. I think there might be a special case for home video versus theatrical.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think Stephen has a valid point. But he also has a movie, so congratulations on your movie existing in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. You know, you can call up the guild and just ask them the question and they’ll walk you through it. I mean, I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t a guild gig, then all bets are off. They can do whatever they want.

**John:** Yeah. But you know, Craig, someone who might have the answer to this question because this person knows a lot about sort of how writing works is, well, I say it’s a he but it could be a woman. Because it’s Writer X. Writer X is a brand new person who has just shown up on the scene thanks to a blog post on the Final Draft website.

And this got tweeted at us on Thursday or Friday, and it’s just delightful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I’m going to read just a little bit of it because we’ll read the sort of preamble and then we can get into a discussion about what Writer X is saying. So, this is me as Writer X. Okay?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “Hi, I’m Writer X. I’m a working screenwriter in Hollywood. Within the past five years I’ve been represented by two of the top talent agencies in town. I broke into the business with a spec. It got on the Black List and eventually became one of those elusive million dollar spec sales. Afterwards, I sold another spec, but that one only for half a million.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Still, it’s not a bad quote for someone just starting out. In addition to my spec sales, I’ve made successful pitches to two major studios. One of those pitches I did with an A-list director. We pitched it to the president of Universal Pictures. I’ve also nabbed several writing assignments with pretty much all the major studios and a number of A-list production companies. And I sold two TV pilots to two different networks.

“A-list actors and directors have been attached to my work. I’m collaborated with them.” It really does say I’m collaborated with them.

**Craig:** And I’m collaborated with them. [laughs] Wow.

**John:** “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff. Guess what I was doing before I became a professional screenwriter? I was a dishwasher.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, I mean, I think we should maybe just stop doing the podcast because we’ve just been knocked off our perch.

**Craig:** We’ve been knocked off our perch. I mean, this person, what a life they lead. [laughs] It just sounds so awesome. I mean, they’re —

**John:** It does sound awesome.

**Craig:** They are collaborated with them. I love that “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff.” This is so exciting. Who put this forth? Oh, Final Draft. Okay.

So, how did this get received on Twitter, John? [laughs]

**John:** I think people loved it. I think among all the screenwriters I talked with, everyone loved every bit of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. The —

**John:** But maybe for the wrong reason.

**Craig:** Right. There was I think a 100 percent consistent reaction of absolute disgust for so many reasons. I mean, to start with, the boasting tone of this is kind of excruciating. There is this kind of writing that people do when they’re talking to people who want to break into something where they really casually rattle off this long list of wonderful things that have happened to them, just incredible things, and then they end up by saying, “And by the way, I was just like you.” Ooh, good sales pitch.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, if we could have gotten Tom Cruise and his Magnolia character to do this introduction, that would have been fantastic. Because you can sort of see him with a little mic and just like talking a little bit hyper and energized and the boom, like I was a dishwasher. I was just like you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty obnoxious. Well, it’s BS.

So, the first question is: is this person real? Or is this the marketing department? I honestly hope it’s just the marketing department inventing someone as a come on sales pitch because if it’s a real person, I’m embarrassed for that person. I’m embarrassed for them. And, frankly, I’m not angry at them because if they’re real, I feel like they’ve been hornswoggled and bamboozled. I blame Final Draft, because they must be getting compensated for this.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand the angle from anyone’s point of view.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was looking at this from Final Draft’s point of view, and like well is this all a marketing department thing? But if it is the marketing department, it’s just so odd because it’s not on their front page at all. And I guess people only know about it because it was in some release that Final Draft put out, or some email that Final Draft put out. But even the URL for it is really strange.

So, the actual URL to get you there, it’s FinalDraft/ —

**Craig:** Discover/Videos. Yeah, it’s under a videos thing, even though it’s not a video. Like they’ve really buried it.

**John:** It’s buried. And it’s in a folder for Final Draft Writer App for the iPad/meet Writer X.

**Craig:** It’s almost like they were like, you know what, we’re going to be viral man. I

**John:** Yeah, maybe they wanted people to discover this.

**Craig:** It’s a hidden thing. Yeah. Well, we discovered it. That’s the bad news.

**John:** We discovered it.

**Craig:** So, putting aside Writer X, if Writer X exists, I would urge you, Madam or Sir, to reconsider this. This isn’t what you should be doing with your time. It’s not, frankly, what professionals do. We really don’t talk that way, for good reason. It’s obnoxious. And if you’re taking money from Final Draft, I don’t understand why since you’ve sold a script for a million and then sold another thing for half a million, and you’ve nabbed several writing assignments with all of the major studios, and a number of A-list production companies. You seem to be doing great, so you don’t need this money.

So then the question is well what’s in this for Final Draft, why are they doing this? And it really comes down to the nature of this kind of pitch, which is very common and you’ll see it in real estate a lot where somebody who is just soaking in prosperity comes on your television set and says to you, you poor retch at home, “I used to be just like you, but then I discovered the secret. And If you share my secrets, you too will be rags to riches.”

And what’s so insidious about this is that they’re going to give you some baloney secrets. I mean, in this case one of them is apparently Writer X is going to tell us what screenwriters are supposed to wear.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That there’s these secret, what is it? The secret dress code?

**John:** The secret wardrobe?

**Craig:** A secret dress code of writers, which is insane.

**John:** I’ve written about the secret dress code and what I’ve always said before is the writer should be the worst dressed person in the room, but that’s one sentence. That’s not —

**Craig:** It’s also, it’s not a secret. [laughs] It’s just you’ve already put it out there for free.

So, they’ll give you all the — yeah, it’s the unspoken dress code. Guess what? It’s been spoken. And then how to decipher the Labyrinthine language in Hollywood. For example, “If a studio exec just reads your first draft and tells you the writing is great, you think that’s good, well it’s not.” Uh, sometimes it is. Sometimes they say the writing is great and then they make the movie because the writing is great.

“Are you familiar with the phrases too broad or character’s arc? Well, you will be.” Oh, lord.

So, they’re dolling out these things that are either stuff everybody already knows, or just things that aren’t true. But what’s behind all of it, of course, is, oh, and naturally you’ll want to write on Final Draft. I mean, you’ll want to spend the whatever it costs now, $150 or $200.

**John:** Yeah. So, there’s no sales pitch in any of this so far. And so it’s the promise of like this is the first of like a regular series of columns. I would be surprised if there’s a second column, but it’s mean to be that this is going to be a bunch of columns coming through. And maybe eventually there’s supposed to be like some sort of Final Draft sales message, or it’s just supposed to be content that’s getting you to the Final Draft site. Or lend some authority to the Final Draft site.

But it’s a weird, gross kind of authority, or it’s not even authority. It’s trying to trade anonymity for secret or sort of like, you know, insider knowledge that no one wants you to have. But we want you to have the information. There’s nothing — there’s no secret information to have.

**Craig:** There is no secret information to have, but that ruins the promise. That ruins the hook.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** There’s this sect of evangelical Christianity called Prosperity Theology, which is all about preachers telling their congregation if you follow the bible the way I explain it, you’ll get rich. But not rich in spirit. [laughs] You’ll actually have money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On TV, I’m a big infomercial nut, so I’m sure some people out there remember Tom Vu. Tom Vu was a bus boy, see, same thing, who made millions.

**John:** A bus boy!

**Craig:** He made millions starting from nothing in real estate. Went on to be sued by his former investors. And then there was Don Lapre, the high school dropout. “I’m a high school dropout who learned the secrets of making money and now I want to share them with you.” And he was arrested, charged with fraud, and committed suicide in jail, which I hope doesn’t happen to Writer X or Final Draft, but you know, when you’re kind of playing in the same field as those guys, you got to stop and ask what are you doing here. For those of you who come across this stuff, just continually ask why.

Why is this here? Why does any company that’s looking for money out of my wallet, why do they need me to believe that for instance there are places that screenwriters should hang out. No, there ain’t. Not one. There is no one special secret place where screenwriters go and money falls from the sky and your scripts get better. No. It’s all baloney, right?

So, rags to riches stories are scam bait, 100 percent of the time. Secrets I’ve learned and will now share with you, scam bait, 100 percent of the time.

**John:** Yeah. I bet you could just sort of build a regular expression matching pattern and sort of search the Internet for that and you would find that invariably that is a scammy sort of come on and proposition. Like any time that you see that phraseology used together, there’s something bad and dangerous around there.

I was thinking about this from the perspective of this guy/this woman who is writing this and sort of what made them say yes, because I don’t get it. Like if we’re taking this at his or her word, that all this true, this guy has a million and a half in his pocket and has these writing assignments, I mean, unless there’s an extra punch line is like “and then I lost it all to drugs,” then I’m interested. Then I’m intrigued. But that doesn’t seem to be the situation here. So, what is the appeal of writing this column? And why not write it under your own name or write it some place that’s not on the Final Draft website?

I just fundamentally don’t get it. And that’s a strange thing to me.

**Craig:** Well, it’s so safe to do this. You know, you and I have used our own name forever and we are really among the very few. Most writers just don’t want the unwanted attention of jerks and there are jerks out there.

**John:** Yeah, there are.

**Craig:** And a lot of writers are nervous that if they say things under their own name that there are going to be reprisals from studios and so forth, and you and I have just never — we’ve never had that problem. And I also feel like we made calculations early on that we frankly weren’t going to be saying anything that should get us into trouble with somebody. And if it did, that’s not somebody we want to work with.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Everybody, I think, has a desire somewhere in them to want to be the sage on the mountain dolling out brilliant advice so that everybody can gather around. Okay, so here’s a rule, [laughs] baseball has the 5-10 rule. The 5-10 rule says if you’ve been with the same team for five consecutive years and you’ve been a Major League player for ten years or more, then you can’t be traded without your consent. 5-10 rule.

I like a 5-10 rule. You can be the sage on the mountain after five credits, or ten years of steady work.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Until you get the five credits, or the ten years of steady work, please do not doll out advice like the sage on the mountain. And, by the way, when you finally do get that stuff, don’t actually be the sage on the mountain. You and I, I don’t think either one of us feels like gurus or anything. It’s ridiculous. We’re just guys trying to do this gig and help people. So, you know, don’t.

**John:** You know, well what’s weird is I looked at all of Writer X’s boasting, and Writer X has not gotten a movie made. And that is a fundamental sort of flaw there in the sense of, you know, you look at the 5-10 rule, like well Writer X has zero credits. And so in many ways it’s back to sort of everyone else who is just writing about how to be a screenwriter. It’s like, well, this is where you’re at so far. And I think, you know, if you and I were to sit down with this Writer X and talk with him or her about what that journey has been so far, I bet there really is some interesting stuff to learn about what it’s like being on the Black List, what it’s like having those initial meetings. The things you’ve learned and done.

But doing it under this veil of anonymity, like you’re suddenly Julia Phillips and like you’re writing a tell-all memoir about Hollywood is just crazy-pants.

**Craig:** It’s particular crazy-pants when you’re using it to humble-brag or brag-brag, unhumble-brag. You know, you and I, we don’t talk about how much money we make. We don’t talk about who bought our pitches. We don’t talk about who we sat in a room with. And we don’t talk about that stuff because it’s gross. It’s just gross.

How will that help anyone else? You know, the people that are baiting a hook are making you jealous of them so that you want to be like them so that you can spend money towards them and something, right? Well, we don’t want your money. We just want you to be you.

You don’t need Writer X. You don’t need Final Draft, now more than ever. You don’t need the secret place, the dress code. You don’t need anything other than your talent, your hard work, a unique point of view, a passion, that’s what’s real.

Sorry, no pill for your weight loss today.

**John:** No, I’m sorry.

I just wanted to close on this topic of anonymity because I look at some of the Twitter accounts I follow, and I’ll follow like Mystery Creative Executive or Anonymous Production Assistant, and I find those things really interesting because in some ways they’re telling truth about little specific things that happen in their life. And they’re not trying to give you advice, but they’re just like articulating what it’s like to be in that place.

And there are in some cases really good reasons for their anonymity, because if they told you more about who they were, they would lose their job. And so that I totally get. And there’s a long tradition of that sort of anonymity. Like, look at the Federalist papers. Like those Fathers of the American Revolution, they didn’t sign their names to all those little pamphlets, but they were trying to sort of rally people to a cause or to explain what it’s like and what their opinion was, and that’s a great, wonderful, protected thing.

I don’t feel this at all here. I don’t feel like there’s any sort of call to action other than sort of like, hey, look at me how great I am. There’s no sort of insight here that is worth my putting up with your anonymity there. Everything that this person said in that initial column, if I knew their name I’d think, well, you sound like kind of a jerk, and kind of like a boastful jerk.

And it’s not making me feel any better about the advice you’re giving. It’s just frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s why they didn’t use their name. I mean, there’s nothing that this person said warrants anonymity. [laughs] Nothing. Right?

The only benefit that anonymity provides them, other than making them sound better than they are, is shielding them from direct vitriol. And shielding them from people calling them out directly and saying, what? For instance, I know this person and they didn’t do all that. Or, I know this person, and I don’t like their scripts. Or, I know this person, they’re cool, but what do they do — why are they telling people that there’s a dress code? There isn’t.

You know, and then it’s about you. You know, you and I are accountable for what we say. This woman or man — not so much. So, don’t listen to people that aren’t accountable. You can listen to them, but, you know, take it with a grain of salt, because they’re not accountable.

I mean, that’s why I love that Rachael Prior who used to be Mystery Brit Executive came out of the closet, so to speak, segue coming, and revealed that she was in fact Rachael Prior, an executive at Big Talk Productions, which is a very reputable British production company that’s co-run by Edgar Wright. It’s a real company and she’s a real person and they make real movies. And she finally said, you know what, I think it’s okay. I think I can actually just be me. So, I like that.

**John:** That’s been the new trend, is not anonymity, but actually like owning your words. A lovely idea.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** All right, next on the docket of things that will enrage Craig. This was an email we got from a woman named Esther who writes, “A friend reached out to be for advice after getting a real scammy looking email from someone claiming to want to buy his script. Apparently these are going around and a lot of young writers are paying to get the ‘special report’ so their script can be bought, only to realize it was a scam by a company that offers script coverage for dollars.”

And we’ll link to other people who are writing about this same situation. So, this is the email exchange that went back and forth. This writer received an email from James Cole. Do you want to be James Cole?

**Craig:** I’m be James Cole, sure. I have recently reviewed your film script and as head of development for iFilm, I am interested in acquiring your screenplay with a view to producing the film in the near future. iFilm is currently tasked to produce a number of films with our partners/investors. Please let me know if you would be interested in selling the rights and optioning your script.

**John:** So the friend got this email and said, sure, yeah maybe, I’m interested. Tell me more. And this is what the guy said.

**Craig:** Great. In that case we can escalate your script up to our investors, but we would need an independent FR script report attached to. If you get this professionally done by a script editor, we will arrange rights options which are negotiable around £25,000. If you’re unfamiliar with script editors, I can recommend some.

**John:** So, do you want to guess who he might recommend?

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to guess he’s going to recommend a company called Bentley Marks.

**John:** And so, Craig, you did some detective work on Bentley Marks. So what did you find out about Bentley Marks?

**Craig:** Well, to back up for a second, a bunch of people have gotten these letters, not just Esther’s friend. Apparently, this company iFilm sent a bunch of these letters to people whose scripts they found at various levels of success through festivals and websites that host these things. Some of the scripts were quite old. And so they all say, yeah, we want an FR script report. By the way, I guess it stands for Film Ready. There is no such thing.

But then the company says, but you know, we’re not going to give you this money and we won’t give you your lottery winnings from Nigeria unless you pay for the report. But, here, use this company Bentley Marx.

So, Bentley Marx, a company that I’ve never heard of, and for good reason, seems to be located in Dubai. But if you take a look at the registry information for their domain name, they are registered to a James Hore who is at 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London.

If you look at iFilmGroup.com, their domain is registered to James Colby, 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair London. Huh. What is 43 Berkeley Square? Is it some massive complex that could possibly hold two different companies? No, it’s a virtual office service. That address is sold by a company called West One business in the UK and the idea is you pay them a monthly fee and they host this address that looks like it’s a real place and then they just forward it to your personal home, this way your company looks real as opposed to something you’re doing out of your basement, or whatever they call a basement in London. I don’t know what they call it.

**John:** Or a basement in Dubai. Or wherever this is actually.

**Craig:** Precisely. And the funny thing is like Bentley Marks, they have an address in Dubai. It’s not really — they’re not — they’re registered to the same — they’re the same people! The point is this scam is obvious. Right? I mean, as far as I can tell, unless I’m missing something here, they troll the Internet for screenplays. They send an email to that person saying we might make this, but you got to pay this other company some money. I don’t know what it would be, $150 or so for notes. And that money goes right into their pocket. And if 20 people bite on this a month, and they’re charging even $100 a pop, well all right. Now we’ve got, what is that, $2,000 a month? Not bad.

**John:** Yeah, some money.

**Craig:** It’s some money. Point being, this is not at all cool. And I have no problem, if I’ve gotten wrong, iFilm, come on the show and explain yourselves. But this certainly sounds like baloney to me.

The actual iFilm Group website does feature some movies that they have either produced or going to produce. They are not what you would think of as mainstream releases. They do look very much like direct to video, B2C kind of movies. Let’s see if we can find some titles of what iFilm Group is working on these days. They’ve got Fatal Insomnia.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the worst kind of insomnia.

**Craig:** The worst kind. They have Dark Rage 2. I don’t know if they have Dark Rage 1. And they have Exorcism. And then one of the strangest titles of movies ever, Internal. It’s just called Internal. Uh, I don’t think that too many of you have caught Fatal Insomnia.

So this is rough. I hate seeing stuff like this. It’s just really, really lame and —

**John:** We often knock against people who are trying to scam young writers saying like I’ll teach you the secrets of writing or, you know, buy my book and stuff. But this is like you are representing yourself as somebody who is going to buy their script, which is sort of the fantasy for a lot of first time writers. Like someone wants to buy and produce my screenplay and make it into a movie. And then it ends up being one of these sort of scammy not really real companies.

That’s just a shame. And even the name iFilm, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. So, there was a company called iFilm, but it’s been defunct for quite a long time. So, they’re trading on sort of like half memory of like I kind of think I remember iFilm, sort of. And, yeah, there kind of was a company that became, it was like an MTV Network that became Spike. There was a history to that name, so it sounds kind of legit and kind of real, but this is not legit or real. And it feels bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s also ridiculous on its face. A company is calling you and saying we’re interested in giving you £25,000 for the rights to your screenplay, but we need somebody else to tell us if it’s any good. What? How does that make any sense at all?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I honestly would be surprised, no, I take that back. I would not be surprised if somebody fell for this, because every year somebody falls for the Nigerian lottery scam. Every year.

**John:** Every year.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it seems. This just feels like a scam. And if we’ve gotten the facts wrong, happy to hear from the people at iFilm Group. But certainly on the face of it, it does feel like they’re doing something scammy and unethical and for shame.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, have you ever been scammed or has someone tried to do like a physical scam on you? Because last time I was in Paris for the first time, someone actually tried to do the gypsy ring scam/trick.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** It was actually fascinating. And so it happened and it’s like, oh, that must be a thing. And so I went back to the hotel and Google and was like, oh, that’s a whole thing. And that guy did exactly that act. And so this is sort of what happened. I was jet lagged, so I was just walking around Paris early in the morning. And this guy said like, oh excuse me, sir, you dropped something. And I was like, no, I didn’t.

He’s like, no, here is a ring. And he had this little gold ring he’d found. And he’s like, oh here, just take it. I don’t want it. Like, no, no, you take it, it’s fine. And I was like I don’t want it, goodbye, thank you. Because I just sensed that something was wrong. But so on the Internet, I read sort of what the rest of that story goes, and essentially there’s a whole plot that sort of happens where they get you to take the ring and it’s like, oh, but we’ll split the money, or this — and it becomes this long conversation. And you essentially have to pay this person to go away.

And so the only solution to it is just to never touch the ring and to go away. And the ring itself, sometimes it starts as a pretty good ring that you can tell it’s actually pretty good, and then it’s sleight of handed to like a cheaper brass ring. Most of the time it’s just a brass ring and it’s a way to start them talking to you.

Other times it can result in pick-pocketing and other things, but it was fascinating to see this thing happening right in front of my face. And in some ways this email had the same kind of markers of this scammy thing about to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I’ve never — that’s not happened to me. I think I just look mean. I look like a real problem. You know, [laughs] like —

**John:** Yeah, you do look like trouble. People cut a wide berth around you.

**Craig:** I kind of do. I look like trouble. I look like the kind of person whose not only going to not take the ring, but lose his mind and do something crazy. I’m just not worth it. I’m the kind of guy that’s not worth it. I just have that look. I have resty angry face.

**John:** [laughs] Our final big topic today, GLAAD released a report about the 2014 movies. And so GLAAD is the organization in the US that takes a look at media portrays of gay, lesbian, transgender people in films and in TV programs and tries to advocate for better inclusion and awareness of those issues.

And so for 2014 they looked at all of the releases by the major studios. There were 114 movies they looked at. And they do statistics year after year showing sort of like how many gay men are portrayed, how many lesbians, how many bisexuals. Sort of what the nature of those portrayals were. And in no year is it especially good. In some years there’s better portrayals versus worse portrayals.

This is the first year I sort of looked closer at it and they actually break it down by studio and they sort of articulate what exactly they are seeing and what the trends are that they are noticing.

So, I will send you to the report. I’m not going to sort of summarize it for you. But they had this interesting thing called the Vito Russo test, which was based on the Bechdel test which we talked about before on the podcast. So, the Bechdel test is a way of looking at how women are portrayed in films. And so it’s asking like three simple questions about sort of how a given movie is portraying its women and then you either pass or fail the Bechdel test.

The Vito Russo test is a similar kind of structure. And it’s pretty straightforward. So the film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. So, does it do that? If so, that character must not be solely or predominately defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity — i.e., they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight and non-transgender characters from one another.

So, it’s like if it’s a gay character, they can’t only be gay. They have to be some other function.

The LGBT character must be tied to the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they’re not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authentic, or perhaps most commonly set up a punch line. The character should matter, which is an interesting way of looking at inclusion and sort of inclusion that counts for something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we’ll send you to this report. They break it down by studio, which is kind of interesting, and within the studios, the sort of indie arms of some of those studios as well. So, Craig, what did you take from looking at this?

**Craig:** Well, the numbers are seemingly better than they used to be, I guess. I didn’t love the way they arranged the — I wish that the studio content had been broken out better, because you had to click on each individual studio and I just got tired of doing that.

But in general it seems like things are getting a bit better, not for transgender characters, but for gay men in particular seem to be — most of the inclusive films, let’s see, 17.5% of the big studio releases contain characters identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s not a bad number.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You know, I mean if you’re sort of going by general population, I mean, the percentage of the population that’s gay is a very hard thing to pin down because of lying, [laughs] but 17.5% doesn’t seem terrible.

**John:** It doesn’t seem terrible. But if you actually look through the individual reports, you realize that they’re being very inclusive about who they’re sort of folding into that. So, like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie counts as being gay because Ian McKellen is gay.

**Craig:** What? But that’s not — he’s not gay. We don’t know that. He never said anything about men or women in that movie.

**John:** Yeah. So honestly very minor gayness is enough sort of to count for this. So that’s a thing to keep in mind when you look at that number.

**Craig:** That’s strange.

**John:** It’s inflated.

**Craig:** It’s odd that they would inflate that number. You would think that it would be in their interest to be as accurate and parsimonious as possible with handing out that. Well, regardless, what’s interesting to me as a writer is maybe less the numbers than in the way the portrayals have occurred and how they have changed over time. Because it doesn’t help anybody if 80% of movies feature gay characters and it’s pejorative or negative portrayals.

There has been a remarkable evolution I think over the last ten years, some in the last three years. I just think the evolution of the portrayal of gay people in popular culture has just been moving so rapidly and in a very good way. In drama, traditionally being gay was associated with tragedy, being ill-fated or twisted somehow, or the fake lesbians to just make men happy, or the gay guy who was the girl’s best friend.

And interesting that the Vito Russo test sort of calls this point out that often homosexuality was considered remarkable and determinative in and of itself. That if you’re a gay character in a movie, that’s your character. Gay character. [laughs] Rather, meaning that has so much more significance than straight character. There’s no character that’s defined by their straightness. That I feel has been changing pretty dramatically, no pun intended. What do you think?

**John:** I think so, too. You know, you look at both in the dramas and the comedies, you see more characters who you can identify as being gay or lesbian, and it’s not being made a big deal of it, which is great. I think there’s a lag in feature films versus television. And I think television was faster because television moves faster. And television is usually much more reflective of the current state of culture and films by their long development process tend to be lagging a few years behind.

One of the real challenges though is that on television you’re seeing characters over a long period of time, so if a character is gay, you have more time to actually experience that and sort of see the richness of their life. In a film, you know, that third lieutenant could be gay, but if there’s no reason to actually know that, there’s no scene that’s going to get that to you, that information may never come out.

And so you’re going to be — gays sometimes are going to be less visible in feature films just because there’s no opportunity to actually see that they’re gay or to sort of identify them as being gay because there’s not a point to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Versus other minority portrayals, where you can visibly see like, oh, well there is a Pacific Islander and that person exists in the world. You can just spot that. And so sometimes it’s harder to spot gays in feature films because there is no scene in which they have the ability to identify as gay.

**Craig:** Yeah. If a gay character doesn’t have a love story in a movie, then you might not know, but I think an awareness now that there are certain non-romantic signifiers that we have all the time. Characters leave their home and there’s a wife who is a day player, has no line, waving goodbye.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a woman at work who has a photo on her desk of her and her husband. You know, these things I think are well worth considering as we kind of go through. And in a way it helps make the movie realer, because that’s the way life is now. It wasn’t that way ten years ago. It simply wasn’t. Now it’s different.

And movies should keep up with the world around them. So, that’s something that’s worth considering as we go through as writers. Comedy is a whole other area, because in comedy for so long, and really up to I would say just a couple of years ago even, gay was considered in and of itself funny. And I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Anybody that works in comedy, anybody, including gay comedians would find this inherent comedy in being gay, even if they were gay-friendly or gay positive.

The thing is, it’s not funny anymore. It’s just not. Now, there’s a question. Should it ever have been funny? That’s a hard question, because the thing about comedy is funny is what people laugh at. Funny doesn’t really have a morality to it. What has a morality is morality. Comedy kind of follows social mores.

So, you can watch the Friar Roasts from the ’70s, they’re on YouTube. And there will be race and gay humor in those that just make you wince. Forget not funny, you actually go, “Ooh, god.” All the people on the dais are going bananas. People in the audience going bananas. Roasts today, there is still a ton of race and gay humor, but it turns on bravery and defiance. In a weird way the joke of the race and the gay humor is, oh my god, look, they’re being bad on purpose, in front of each other, and in a way that sort of signifies how confident they are as people of color, as gay people, or as straight people around people of color, or gay people.

But I guarantee you in — I don’t know how long it’s going to be — maybe five years, maybe two, maybe 20, I don’t know, that too will one day make us all wince. I think that comedy basically echoes the world and it always will, which is one of the reason why comedies often don’t hold up, but comedians have to kind of go where the funny is.

**John:** Yeah, comedy so often it’s finding those moments of friction in the real world, like those things that are sort of you dare not really quite talk about, and like finding a way to talk about those things, but then the conversation moves on. And if you’re still trying to talk about that, like oh no, that’s not funny anymore, that’s just really uncomfortable and weird.

And so I agree with you. You look at some movies that were genuinely funny back in the day and there are moments that make you wince because it wasn’t political correctness or anything else, it’s just like that’s just not a thing that could be funny anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Now, there are really interesting cases where I think you can look at something now and laugh at it in a different way. When Airplane! came out in 1980, Stephen Stucker who played the flamboyantly gay — I don’t know what you call it, the air traffic control tower guy, I don’t know what his actual — you know, they were all up there and the air traffic controller guy. And he was hysterical and everybody loved him. And they were laughing in part because, oh my god, that guy is so gay. Look, the gayest of gays. But when you watch him now, and Stephen by the way was a member of the Kentucky Fried Theater with David, and Jerry, and Jim, and had kind of come up with them, when you watch it now it’s still really funny, but you’re not laughing at him, you’re laughing with him. He’s just remarkably witty. The fact that he’s gay is so no longer what’s funny. What’s funny is specifically what he’s doing. It’s actually — I think there is a gay comic sensibility and it is as broad as straight comic sensibility, but there is this — it’s a subset. There’s a thing there. And he does it so brilliantly.

So, there are times where these portrayals can last and actually the way we find them funny changes. But there is the idea that, oh my god, I kissed a dude. No, that’s not funny anymore.

**John:** It really isn’t funny anymore. And rape culture is not funny anymore, either. That idea like, oh, you’re going to go to prison and you’re going to get raped. It’s like, ooh, man, that’s just really uncomfortable. So, both that gay panic and sort of gay rape panic are not funny anymore.

There was a period of time that Saturday Night Live went through, and I think Janeane Garofalo talked about it when she left the show, where like every episode there was some sort of like alien anal probe rape joke. And it was really weird and uncomfortable. And thank goodness we moved past that.

And now the joke would be trying to make that joke. I mean, like it would be — it’s lucky that you sort of get to a place where like you can comment on that as a joke type.

Recently they had a commercial where it was some sort of anti-depressant for parents when your kid is acting super, super gay. And it was right at that uncomfortable level of like, ooh, but like the commercial was making it really clear that like it’s not the kid’s fault. You just have to get over it.

**Craig:** Right. That worked.

**John:** That worked, because it was understanding what the pain was underneath there, and what the uncomfortable feeling was, and sort of leaning into it in the right way. So, I would argue that you’re never trying to — you can’t stop making jokes that involve gay people. You just have to find ways to sort of use them in comedy that is appropriate for today and also hopefully for the next five years. You don’t know what ten years is going to be.

**Craig:** And this is why comedy is hard, because sometimes go out on a ledge where you need to live as a comedian, and they fail. And when they fail, especially now in our culture now, everyone goes insane. And Patton Oswalt has spoken a lot about this on Twitter and elsewhere in his lengthy protracted war of words with Salon, which Salon tends to act like the Internet’s schoolmarm.

And his point was, you know, comedy is supposed to be dangerous and occasionally when you do it you’re going to miss. You know, you’re throwing knives, you will occasionally miss and hit something you weren’t supposed to hit, or hit it the wrong way. And that’s part of the gig. That’s part of the occupational hazard of being a comedian. But we do know that you have to — as comedians, the really good ones, they’re listening all the time, really carefully.

Louis C.K. does not do some of the material that he used to do, because it’s not funny anymore. You know, there was a time when all of America loved The Honeymooners, men and women loved The Honeymooners. And the catchphrase was Bang Zoom. The catchphrase was “I’m going to beat you, Alice.” That was the joke. It’s just not funny anymore. A lot of times white people will say, “Why is it that black people get to stand up in a comedy club and make fun of white people, but if white people stand up and make fun of black people, everybody goes crazy.”

Here’s why: it’s not funny, that’s why. It’s just not funny. Just go where the funny is and be aware that it changes. So, I hope that GLAAD, I like that they concentrate on general numbers, but I also like that they’re starting to look at context, because to me that’s really where things are going to change. And I think about it now. I never thought about it. Never, never, never, never. Ten years ago, I’ll be totally honest, I never thought about it whatsoever. Wasn’t a problem. I think about it all the time now, because it’s right to. It seems like what I ought to bed doing.

**John:** Yes. I think we all ought to be doing it as well. And we should also do our One Cool Things, because it’s been a long show so far. So, I will start with my One Cool Thing. This week is Rage Quitting, and it’s this article by Chi Luu, it’s looking at this new kind of term that’s sprung up in the last few years. Words like rage quitting, ugly crying, stress cooking, humble bragging, which we used earlier this podcast, angry cleaning. It’s that construction where you take two things and jam them together. And it’s a weird construction because the first word is almost always negative and the second word is an activity.

And so you get what it means, and so like you know rage quitting is a thing. I’m storming out of this job all of a sudden. Stress cooking, ugly crying, we get what these things mean. But they’re sort of a new way of forming things. And I just love when language finds ways to sort of create new terms for things. And concepts that can exist only because we’re jamming these two words together in this sort of accepted way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hate watching, isn’t that one of them?

**John:** Hate watching, absolutely. The perfect thing. And so that first word is always negative, and you don’t talk about joy cooking. I think you could do that, but you don’t. It’s always a negative that leads into the verb. So I thought it was really fun. And the article also talks about some of the other sort of ways we create new terms, like adding holic to things, so like, you know, I’m a workaholic or whatever, adding holic as an idea.

A thon, so a podcastathon, we understand that it’s something that goes on for a long time.

Mc, as a sort of shortening down of things, or a cheap version of things, so like a McJob, not being a real thing. So, I just love when people are describing new words and especially when people are describing the way we create new words. So I will point you to this article.

**Craig:** I wish there was something called Workahol, where you could just —

**John:** I’m going to drink a fifth of Workahol.

**Craig:** Workahol. And I got so much done. I’m a workaholic, but I do get a lot done. My One Cool Thing was briefly alluded to way back in episode 150 by somebody who was writing in, but I’ve had some personal experience with it now so I thought I would mention it here on the show. It’s called Kano. And it’s for children. It’s a computer kit. And the idea is that your child can actually build their own computer. Don’t go crazy, it’s not quite your MacBook Pro, but it’s sort of like a Lego-ized version of a computer with circuit board, and a container, and connect ribbons and so forth.

And it comes with this wonderful little instructional guide that helps you put it all together. And it’s actually kind of cool. It runs on Raspberry Pi. And you can hook it up to your TV with an HDMI cable. And it’s got little games and things, but more importantly it also has the ability to instruct you on programming. You can learn to code. You can make games. It’s very cool.

And it’s a little pricey.

**John:** Did you build it or you just saw it in action?

**Craig:** I didn’t build it. My daughter built it. So, she’s ten, and she just sat down — she’s a self-starter. She just sat down and did it. She built it. She was super crazy excited. And when we hooked it up and we saw text scrolling as Raspberry Pi loaded up, she just jumped up and down for 30 seconds, which it took because this is not a fast computer. But she was so excited.

So, it’s great for kids who like building and like technology like my daughter does. And it’s a little pricey. It’s $150 at Amazon. But, I suspect maybe you might be able to find it a little cheaper if you went on eBay or something like that. It doesn’t need to necessarily be brand new.

If you have a kid who is into this sort of thing, it’s a nice place to look. So, that’s Kano. And their website is Kano.me.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So, if you would like to write to me or Craig with your thoughts on things, the place for those longer things like we read today is ask@johnaugust.com. Little short things are great on Twitter. So, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

If you follow me this week, I may be having an announcement about the Ghost special screening, if we open it up to the general public. Right now it’s only for Writers Guild people. But if you are Writers Guild and want to come, you should RSVP for that. We are on iTunes. So, you can search for us on Scriptnotes and you can leave us a review while you’re there. It’s fantastic if you would do that.

We also have an app. We have the Scriptnotes app. You can download that and listen to all the back episodes going all the way back to episode one. Scriptnotes.net is the place you sign up for all those back episodes. It’s $1.99 a month. And our show this week is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week, another great outro by Matthew Chilelli. And, Craig, I will see you next week.

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

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [RSVP here for the April 25 WGAw screenings of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, featuring a Q+A with Bruce Joel Rubin moderated by John August](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=229), and [follow John on Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) where he will let you know if tickets are released for non-WGA members
* [Gawker Media Editorial Staff Welcomed by WGAe](http://www.thewrap.com/writers-guild-of-america-east-welcomes-gawker-media-editorial-staff/)
* [Scriptnotes, 193: How writing credits work](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-writing-credits-work)
* LA Times on [Ron Bass and his in-house team](http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/10/entertainment/ca-20955)
* The poster for [The Harvest](http://www.screenrelish.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/the-harvest-poster.jpg)
* [Meet Writer X](http://www.finaldraft.com/discover/videos/final-draft-writer-app-for-the-ipad/meet-writer-x)
* [The not-so-well-dressed screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2004/the-not-so-well-dressed-screenwriter) from johnaugust.com
* [Tom Vu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vu) and [Don Lapre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lapre) on Wikipedia
* [Stage32 discussion on iFilm Group](https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/iFilm-Group-iFilm-Ltd)
* [The Paris Gold Ring Scam](http://www.everywhereist.com/the-paris-gold-ring-scam/)
* [GLAAD’s 2015 Studio Responsibility Index](http://www.glaad.org/sri/2015/overview)
* [More on Internet Neologisms: Rage Quitting is a Thing](http://daily.jstor.org/more-on-internet-neologisms-rage-quitting-is-a-thing/) by Chi Luu
* [Kano is a computer you build and code yourself](http://www.kano.me/kit)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/guardians-of-the-galaxys-nicole-perlman).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 164 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, we are here in your office for the second time ever.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, no, not second time for me. I’m here every day.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** But we, together, are here for the second time ever and it’s auspicious because the last time we were here, one of our best podcasts ever, it was so good I actually remember the number. I think it’s podcast 99.

**John:** It’s episode 99.

**Craig:** Which was Dennis Palumbo who talked to all of us and healed us all with his words of wisdom. And we’re back again with a guest here in Old Town Pasadena that I’m very, very excited about. Somebody that I learned how to kill people with.

**John:** Oh, fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She is a writer. She’s a screenwriter from a movie that did relatively well this year.

**Craig:** Middling.

**John:** Middling.

**Craig:** Middling.

**John:** Yeah, called Guardians of the Galaxy.

**Craig:** Is that right, Guardians, I thought it was Guardians of the Galaxy.

**John:** I thought it was Guardians of Ga’Hoole, but I got it all confused.

**Craig:** [laughs] That definitely was not Guardians —

**John:** That was not the one.

**Craig:** You know the —

**John:** Well, I’ll ask her about that because that’s got to be frustrating along the way.

**Craig:** I have to assume that the people that did do Guardians of Ga’Hoole are like, oh my god, it was just like two syllables, that was it.

**John:** I wonder how people will have accidentally rented Guardians of Ga’Hoole and like, come on now, it’s available.

**Craig:** They went to Guardians of the G —

**John:** Natural.

**Craig:** A.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve done enough.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Enter. Buy.

**John:** Buy, yeah.

**Craig:** Buy, purchase.

**John:** iTunes purchased.

**Craig:** So we are here with Nicole Perlman, the co-writer of Guardians of the Galaxy which was not only the big hit of the summer, it’s been basically the big hit of the entire calendar year. Nicole, welcome to our show.

**Nicole Perlman:** Thanks for having me, guys.

**Craig:** It’s our pleasure. So just to be clear again, you did not write the owl movie?

**Nicole:** I did not, no. I did not write that nor Masters of the Universe which is what my uncle calls it. And, you know, Masters of the Universe would be pretty fun. He-Man. She-Ra. That whole group.

**Craig:** I think they are doing that. I mean, you probably have a pretty good chance of writing that if you want to.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Nicole:** A friend of mine is writing that.

**Craig:** Oh, that will be fun when you stab them in the back.

**Nicole:** That’s right —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can do stuff like that now.

**Nicole:** Guardians of the Galaxy and Masters of the Universe.

**Craig:** Okay, so Nicole, you and I met in the strangest circumstances. It was a few weeks ago and another screenwriter we know named Will Staples who works in movies but also in video games has gotten to know all these military guys because he works on the Call of Duty series. And so he put together a group to go up to the Angeles firing range or whatever it’s called and we were there with a bunch of military guys, active duty military guys, the nature of which we are not allowed to discuss. [laughs] And —

**John:** Well, it’s the Coast Guard clearly.

**Nicole:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s a little bit better than the Coast Guard.

**John:** All right then.

**Craig:** A little bit better than the Coast Guard. And we got to shoot guns that you’re not supposed to shoot and it was awesome. I mean, we shot all day. We were just firing weapons from 9 mm up to a — it was a 50 caliber Barrett.

**Nicole:** Barrett, yeah, Barrett KCAL.

**John:** So what is your favorite gun to shoot that you shot that day?

**Nicole:** Oh, I really liked this Israeli gun.

**Craig:** That was the one.

**Nicole:** It was called, what was it, Toval, something like that?

**Craig:** Something like that. It was —

**Nicole:** It was pretty cool.

**Craig:** They have figured it out. I mean, the Israelis, they were like… — What was so cool about that gun was they dispensed with the conventional gun wisdom. You know, so they’re like, you know, normally you’ve got your trigger sort of back by your shoulder and then your hands up here and they’re like, nah, all the weight should be kind of like upfront. So the trigger will be upfront.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then it’s just a more natural way of doing it and it was…that gun was awesome.

**Nicole:** It was pretty awesome.

**John:** Do they teach you how to shoot sideways? That’s really the key.

**Craig:** They told you for sure to never do that [laughs].

**John:** Aw.

**Nicole:** That’s how they know that you’re faking it.

**Craig:** We learned a lot of cool things like for, and I know that we’re going to, trust me, everyone out there, we will get to Guardians of the Galaxy momentarily.

**John:** It’s not just a gun podcast.

**Craig:** It’s not just a gun show. But I learned a lot of things, I mean we both did. One of which I thought was fascinating was that movies get this wrong completely. We understand that when guys go to war, they have a machine gun, and then they go [machine gun sound]. And in fact, nobody does that. That’s a total, I mean, their weapons have a switch that enables that. They never use it because it’s basically just a way to lose all of your bullets instantly. So there’s no [machine gun sound], it’s always boom, boom.

**John:** You’re going to spray. You’re always —

**Craig:** You’re single shots, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, we learned a lot of cool stuff from these guys. They’ve lived some impressive lives.

**Nicole:** Yeah. Also the idea of shooting a shotgun inside a car, from inside a moving car. It’s like it would burst your eardrums. It’s so loud.

**Craig:** I know.

**Nicole:** And every time now I’m watching television and I see something like that, I’m like just, god, where’s their ear protection, you know. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. Like people shoot in movies and then they talk to each other and you’d actually be shouting and you’d be in a lot of pain.

**John:** Yes. Whenever we had guns on set, they always give you the little earplugs because it’s incredibly loud. I just remember in Go, the first time we had guns being shot. And like, you have to put those things in because if we’re doing take after take, those blanks are loud.

**Craig:** Well, and by the way, the blanks are usually what they call a quarter load or half load.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But regular bullets like the kinds we were firing are full loads and, that’s right, Nicole and I were firing full loads all day into the dirt. This is a —

**Nicole:** Head shots, too. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, head shots. We were firing full load head shots all day. But it was a treat to me that day not only because you’re a super nice person but because you happen to be in the middle of this incredibly exciting time and you’d achieved this incredible thing. So I know that you’ve done a lot of press and I assume there’s this — I could probably write the seven or eight questions that everybody asks, so I’m going to avoid asking any of those and then maybe John will ask some of them.

But I, of course, you know, we’re a screenwriting podcast. I’m always interested about how you go about this. And I’m going to start in the middle in a weird way. I know that you were working at Marvel and you were in their program and they basically said, “Hey, everybody, go through the library, find something.” You caught into this. And we’ll talk about that in a bit.

But I’m just fascinated by this immediate challenge because I always think about what would scare me. This is not like The Avengers where they’re bringing together a good amount of characters we know. We don’t know any of these people. There’s an enormous amount of exposition that has to occur not only for the world and the villains and the MacGuffin, but the heroes who then have to all meet each other and then you have to exposit the relationships that they all have. How did you go about getting your arms around that?

**Nicole:** Well, in a way, it was very freeing because the characters didn’t have a very established canon to them. I mean, they did, there’s plenty of comic books. But because they were such an obscure group of characters, there was a lot of freedom in terms of what to include and what not to include. We didn’t have to go too in-depth into any of the characters’ back stories. We just wanted to get the key sort of the important heart of where they were coming from without having to tell everyone’s lengthy story because there’s that sense that there’s time for that in the future.

But in terms of actually having to set up who these characters were, I saw it from the beginning as not an origin story of a single character or of all the characters. It was the origin story of a team.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** So it was less about where they had come from, except for the beginning on earth. And it was more about where they were now and how they were going to come together as a team. And that was really important and just having that freedom to do that and to try lots of different combinations.

I did so many drafts of this project where sometimes there were more expositions, sometimes there’s a little bit more on earth, sometimes there was less on earth. And in terms of Quill, like Quill’s character is completely different from how he is in the comics. That was really my, the contribution I feel proudest of was rebooting Quill completely. You know, he’s not a relic smuggler. He’s not this rakish fellow in the comics. He’s much more of a traditional leadership superhero character.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** So I thought it was important also to have him be relatable to earthlings, the toast earthlings, and have that background, that grounded background but also be fluent enough in the world of the universe that we were creating so that he could be our entry way into that.

So having to change the whole comic book background, I kind of threw all the traditional rules out the window of an origin story and I was like let’s just get into it and we’ll figure them out sort of as we go, give a little bit of heart to each character and then go from there.

**John:** So talk me through what it was like being in this Marvel writer program. So they bring you in and why did they pick you? How did you sort of get selected to be a part of this group of writers that they were working with?

**Nicole:** Sure. Well, I had sold a few projects and been doing some studio work primarily with subjects having to do with space or science or technology.

**John:** So you got a script from the Black List I saw and was that sort of what got you noticed the first time?

**Nicole:** Yes, that was part of this sort of whirlwind year that I had. I was living in New York and a script that I had written won the Sloan Grant with Tribeca Film Festival and —

**Craig:** Cool.

**Nicole:** It was the same one that got on the Black List and started getting me work. Actually, I was working before that happened but it was working non-WGA. It was very small production companies. But once that happened, I was able to start pitching studio level. I got my first agent. And that kick-started my career.

But because that was my sample and it was very technological and scientific, I was getting a lot of these sort of, you know, Sally Ride stuff and bio picks of various characters, the Neil Armstrong project at Universal, and that was fantastic, but there were — I think I did a Wright Brothers project for National Geographic Films.

**Craig:** A lot of aviation.

**Nicole:** A lot of aviation. A lot of NASA —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** A lot of aviation, tons of, actually, another one too sort of based on the X Prize. So this was my world and while I loved it, I also wanted, you know, I wanted to do fun, colorful movies, larger scale, larger scope. And I would go out and pitch on these projects that usually were giant, fun projects with a little bit of science or technology. And they said, sure, let’s bring in this anomaly and see what she has to say. And a lot of times they would love my pitch but it was kind of like I didn’t have the sample, I didn’t have the experience.

So I was going to write a spec in this world and while I was working on that, I had a meeting with Marvel, a general meeting, and they said we’re going to do this random experiment and it’s going to be different from the Disney writing program and different from all the other ones that are out there, and would you like to join it.

**John:** So when you’re in this program, are you showing up to an office everyday and are you pitching what the things you want to do? Is there a person who’s in charge that you’re reporting to? What was it like?

**Nicole:** Well, it was interesting. First, I did it for two years. So the concept was you joined for one year and if they liked you and you liked them, you could come back for a second year. But it was a little unclear, unchartered territory for the first, I don’t know, seven or eight months that I was there because they didn’t really have anyone in charge of that program. It was just the producers on all the projects would choose a writer. And that would be sort of their pet, [laughs], you know, their pet writer who was on campus. We each had an office and we each had our project that we had chosen. And that was it. Like we were off on our own.

**John:** And are you being paid a weekly salary?

**Nicole:** Weekly salary, yeah.

**Craig:** And these arrangements fascinate me because, on the one hand, I think a lot of us get nervous when we feel like studios are doing things that are slightly throwbacky to the old days of the studio system where you have buildings full of writers and essentially everybody is working almost on a glorified salary but then something might emerge, something might not. But in this case, I have to say, your success has benefited you and them in such an extraordinary way. I assume that they are grateful.

I hope that they’re grateful. I mean —

**Nicole:** They’ve been incredibly nice and excited about the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** I think it was a bit of a gamble because there were four or five other writers in the program who are all excellent writers. Everyone there had sold things, set things up. I hadn’t had anything produced at that point, although several of them have by now. The question is, it’s a bit of a Faustian deal because they own you. For two years I was off the radar. I wasn’t allowed to take meetings. I wasn’t allowed to pitch on anything.

**Craig:** Wow, really?

**Nicole:** And I also wasn’t allowed to spec anything. So I couldn’t work on my own spec without there being a little bit of a question of who owns it, you know. And so this was the —

**Craig:** Wow.

**Nicole:** This was sort of the deal.

**Craig:** That’s a little restrictive, I have to say. I mean, I get 9 to 5, you want to own me 9 to 5, but to say that I can’t have a general meeting with somebody or I can’t spec something, that’s pretty —

**Nicole:** I mean they were, if you met somebody for lunch or for coffee, it’s not like they’re going to come after you. But I think it was just you couldn’t… — What was the point of meeting with people if you were off the table?

**Craig:** True, yeah, true.

**Nicole:** You know, you couldn’t really do it. You couldn’t talk about what you were working on. I couldn’t even tell people what I was working on for the first, you know, couple of years.

**Craig:** Even if you wanted to, if you said, look, on the weekends or in the evenings I’d like to spec this romance between two men in the 1840s France, you know. It’s not really a Marvel movie. They would still be like, “Eh, it could be.” [laughs]

**Nicole:** Yeah. That’s the thing. There was an aspect to that where they had a first look deal. They had a first look at whatever you wrote for a year after Marvel. They would have the right to buy it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Nicole:** And that was funny to me, if you’re not writing a superhero, then what is the point, you know.

**Craig:** Right, yeah.

**Nicole:** So I just sort of assumed, better to play it safe. And I’m glad that it all worked out because you can’t show the people who’ve worked on things there, it’s not really legal for them to show the scripts that they wrote for Marvel during that time period. I mean, maybe they can slip it to somebody but, so, you know, it’s a gamble. But I thought that for what I wanted from the program which was to get a bit of a pedigree in that regard and also go through what ended up being kind of like boot camp because they could have you do a million drafts if they wanted to.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** They had a special deal worked out with the WGA. But it was really not too oppressive. It wasn’t what people thought in terms of like the old MGM system. They just sort of said, you know, write your drafts and when they’re done, send them in and we’ll give you notes and then, you know, write some more drafts, sort of play around, send us some ideas. It wasn’t weekly meetings. It wasn’t like everybody sitting around and brainstorming together. It was very much —

**Craig:** You got to write your script. It wasn’t like when we first read about Amazon Studios and we both freaked out because like some guy in Kansas can suddenly start changing your script or something. It wasn’t like that. It was —

**Nicole:** No.

**Craig:** So you got your own —

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** So you pitched Guardians of the Galaxy, the title which I wasn’t familiar with and probably wasn’t one of the marquee titles at Marvel at the time. What is your pitch as you’re describing it to your executive? How are you describing the movie that you think could be there? What were your words? What were your images? What were your references?

**Nicole:** And part of it was that I had a little bit of a — it was already pre-approved. They showed us, I mean, I could’ve made a real argument for Squirrel Girl if I wanted to do, if I wanted to drag some random project out of the vault. So it was a little bit of a pre-approved. So they already, I didn’t have to pitch them the idea of Guardians. They said Guardians was on the list of a bunch of different properties.

**Craig:** Ones that we would accept if you —

**Nicole:** That we would accept. And there was a little question of which version of Guardians because there was — it started in the late ’60s, early ’70s and it was very different. It was much more earnest and, you know, as it was back then. And so, you know, there were some cool elements of that. So I did pitch a version of that but I very quickly and with their blessing jettisoned that and went to the more modern group, which is tons of characters, by the way, and very little to do with the actual comic, from the 2008 comics were the ones —

**John:** So in pitching them, was something like the structure of the movie we ultimately see in which you’re meeting [Quinn] and then you’re introduced sort of one by one to the other people who are going to be, the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who come together to —

**Nicole:** I’m trying to remember what my original pitch was because there were so many, so many versions. I mean, so many versions of this project. I believe it was a two-hander at the very beginning between Quill and another character who I don’t know if they want me to say who that other character was. I did email them to ask and they haven’t responded. [laughs]

So I think the very earliest versions from like 2009, there was a two-hander element and then they meet up with everybody at the jail, at the prison. And that’s where they interact with everyone for the first time, except Gamora. Gamora was always, I believe, if I can remember correctly, Gamora was always somebody they interacted with on the planet where he tries to sell the Orb.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** So that is, I believe —

**Craig:** One of the four billion versions —

**Nicole:** One of the four billion versions.

**Craig:** Now, I’m always fascinated by it because there are movies where they necessarily go through the four billion versions. There are some where it’s kind of a straighter line, depending on the genre. But one thing that I always like to ask people is, what was the thing that you kind of had for a long time, at least that was there early on, that made it through? Because the process is such a churn, but there’s always something that makes it through that you love —

**Nicole:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah, that really is like all about you and what you did and —

**Nicole:** Let’s see. So something that made it through a process of two and a half years, that list is small.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** There were things that made it through to the movie. There were things that almost made it through, that made it to the second to last draft —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Nicole:** Of mine and then didn’t make it through. I loved the, and I’m really glad they included it with Groot releasing the phosphorescent spores, I think that was in all of my drafts. I’m pretty sure it was in all of my drafts. And then Groot protecting the group and sacrificing himself as a cocoon that —

**Craig:** Which is kind of the heart of the movie. I mean, in a way, like I always feel like at some point with these movies, something comes along that goes beyond entertaining people. And very often, it is some new version of the Jesus story. I talk of Jesus all the time on this podcast and that is, you know, so there’s the Groot Jesus moment. But that is kind of where the movie sort of transcends and is about more than, you know, wacky space pirates.

**Nicole:** The animators did such an amazing job for that, too. I was really moved when I saw that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Just the combining of the leaves. Something about the leaves because I didn’t write the leaves into the script, the actual like making it soft and like a little nest. That little moment I thought just made it so much more thoughtful and beautiful. So anyway, I was happy with that.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Lindsay Doran, who’s a huge friend of the show, will often comment that, as an audience you’re rooting not really for the quarterback to throw the winning touchdown but for the quarterback to kiss his wife at the end. And that’s the emotional payoff that you have here in terms of Groot actually being sort of, making a sacrifice for this group is actually much more important than sort of the villain plot of the story ultimately ends up being.

**Nicole:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** So it was a really [joyous] moment.

**Craig:** The villain plot, let’s talk about the villain plot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I just still honestly have no idea what happened. But that’s very common with me. But at some point it seems like that’s almost part of the deal with Marvel. As I’ve been watching their movies is that they say, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to present to you a certain kind of soap opera. And it is soap opera to me at least, the way that their villains interact and, you know, infinity gems and people and planets and who’s some stepdaughter and so forth and all the rest.

And their ideas, they go, you know what, we’re going to present this to you and we’re taking it super seriously and either you’ve read a lot of these comics and you know exactly what we’re talking about or you don’t. Either way, you’ll get it. Like, you get what you need. I mean, was there ever a sense of that or did you struggle a little bit to go, well, hold on, there’s a certain amount of complexity here that might be zipping over people’s heads?

**Nicole:** Yes. You know, mine was a little more simple and streamlined in terms of how many subplots there were. The whole thing with Ronan, in my version, it was always Thanos. And they told as I was handing in my last draft, they said, listen, for the feature, we’ve decided to hold off on Thanos.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** Hold him for later because he’s such a great cosmic villain. I mean, he’s the best cosmic villain. So, just so you know, we’re going to find some other character to swap in basically for —

**Craig:** We’ll do a sub-Thanos.

**Nicole:** Right.

**Craig:** To kind of stand in, to hold Thanos. And this is something that you deal with at Marvel in a way that I don’t think you deal with anywhere else.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they have an orchestration to these movies. I mean, you know it’s funny, like remember when synergy became a word and it was like 1996 or something?

**John:** Yeah, I do.

**Craig:** And some idiot in a corporate building came up with this word synergy and everybody rolled their eyes. But Marvel is the only company that actually I think has true synergy between their movies. That’s an interesting constraint for you as a screenwriter to be beholden not only to what works for your movie but apparently for future movies yet untold by other people.

**Nicole:** Absolutely. And in a sense, I was really relieved that… — I think it was considered a bit of a long shot from the beginning that Guardians would even get made. And so there was none of this like, oh, let me, read all the scripts for the movies that are coming out so you can make sure that yours fits in in a very specific timeframe the way that, you know, Agents of Shield has to —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** Has to work with it. They said, write whatever you want, write, write it like —

**John:** [laughs]

**Nicole:** In its own bubble, have it be a standalone movie. Don’t worry about what Iron Man is doing. Don’t worry about the earth being blown up or, you know, aliens or whatever. They’re like, just —

**Craig:** Wing it.

**Nicole:** Wing it, do your own version far off and, you know, just be on earth for a little bit at the beginning and then go into space, which was very freeing for me. Of course, I also felt like there is no way this movie is ever getting made [laughs] if they told me that, you know.

**Craig:** I always feel like when you start on a movie and you go, there’s no way this movie is getting made, your chance of that movie getting made just skyrocketed. I believe that because it’s, again, you’re like well they have to make this movie. That’s when everybody goes, “Are we making this because we have to?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I mean, this feels like one of those.” And this movie obviously took everybody by surprise. When you looked at that list, what caught your eye? Why this fair maiden as opposed to the others?

**Nicole:** I think part of it is that I knew that there had been so many superhero films. And I love superhero films but I was attracted to the science fiction element of Guardians. It felt different from everything else in that you could take it to some really fun sci-fi places because you’re given a lot of leeway because these characters are not earth-based. And I wanted to play with the fun of that. I mean, having a talking tree and a talking raccoon and having this very wacky group is something that was different than the rest of the characters which were mostly, I think with a couple exceptions, they were mostly not groups that were offered. It was standalone characters.

**Craig:** Standalone characters. And there’s something about the standalone character in the Marvel universe that forces you into a repetition. Even in this movie, there’s a mom dying in the beginning. I mean, it seems like there’s always a jettisoning, an orphanage involved somehow. But for the individual, they struggle, they feel isolated from the world around them. And you see bits and pieces of that. You know, so you have a raccoon wondering why am I not like all the other raccoons or the other people. And you can see those bits and pieces but you’re right.

Like I love what you’re saying about science fiction is kind of a, I mean, as I met you and come to know you that there is — it’s a very Nicole-ish kind of thing. It’s like the infusion of the sci-fi aspect and the science-y aspect into it as opposed to what we’ve come to expect I think from Marvel generally which is it’s always like the science happens to somebody and then it’s forgotten. Like I got hit by gamma rays and, bump, grr.

People are going to yell at me again.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Any time I talk about the Hulk, I get in so much trouble but, you know, I liked that this was like everybody was living in a science world, you know. I thought that was great.

**Nicole:** Yeah. I mean it is definitely elevated and fun. And I think that one of the things that I was thinking while I was working on it was that this is not anything like The Dark Knight trilogy. Like this is never going, it’s not what’s hip right now. It’s not what’s stylish. Like what’s stylish is really dark, grounded, very gritty stories. And this is not any of those things. There’s no way you could ever make Guardians like really dark. I mean, I guess you could but then it would be very —

**Craig:** I mean, it would be bad.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It would just be bad. I mean, I always feel like Nolan has found the exact right spirit of what makes Batman great and what makes DC great. And Whedon really found this like heart of something in Marvel that kind of — it’s just a little more chaotic and a little more anarchic and fun. You know, it’s lighter. I mean I like that that was the approach that you took. I mean, that’s why it works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Well, that’s one thing actually, come to think of it, that did make it through from the beginning through the end was all the ’80s references. That was something that was in all of my drafts.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, let’s talk about that because that really is, again, like when I think of Groot dying and then I think about the fact that this is a movie set in space with space creatures. Like many space creature movies we’ve seen, flying ships and battles and all the rest of it. But then, there’s this nostalgia for American ’80s —

**Nicole:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And earth ’80s. Why did you? Where did you come up with that to fuse that in there?

**Nicole:** Well, I think part of it was that I wanted Quill for all of his bluster to be homesick. I wanted him to be in a place where he’s on the other side of the universe. It’s something we’ve all felt, that feeling of missing home. And for him, the last items that he had were his childhood items. And we all have that nostalgia as well. But that was like where his experience with earth stopped.

So I just love the idea of being in this crazy other world and then having, you know, like a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robot and things like that. My toys were a little different. I also had Star Wars toys. And Star Wars toys were big.

**Craig:** Oh man, that would have been awesome.

**John:** Now they could have done it, yeah.

**Craig:** That would have been so cool.

**John:** Oh, but that deal closed earlier. They could have gotten —

**Craig:** Oh my god, it would have been so cool if like — I can just see him, you know, in his ship —

**John:** Now there’s synergy, yeah

**Craig:** And he’s floating and like a little Yoda goes flying by. It would be so great.

**Nicole:** [laughs] Yeah, and I had a Darth Vader figurine.

**Craig:** Okay, well you got to get them to do that. You got to get them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know how now but —

**John:** I keep wanting to go back to sort of how you originally pitched it because you look at Star Wars and obviously you can’t make Guardians of the Galaxy without being aware of Star Wars. But rather than a Luke Skywalker character, you put a Han Solo character at the very center of the story.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point.

**John:** And so he feels like, or also Indiana Jones, he feels like he’s a Harrison Ford character rather than sort of the square All-American, you know, underdog good guy which is I think a really, you know, smart choice and not an obvious choice. I mean, it seems obvious now that the movie has made a bazillion dollars, but that couldn’t have been the easy obvious choice.

**Nicole:** Well, I remember having a conversation. I think it was with Nate Moore who was, after the first few months of the program he came on to be the shepherd of the program. And so things started running more on time once he got involved. But I remember having a conversation with him about the whole idea of a two-hander. I was like it’s just not as much fun to write the Luke Skywalker character. It’s a lot more fun to write the Han Solo character. And I was like, this is the freedom that the program did give, which was, all right, do a version with just Quill as the lead. And I was like, sweet, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** So that was great. And there were versions that didn’t have Rocket because there was a fear that Rocket, early on, before, the very, very first few drafts, I wanted to put Rocket in and there was also a little bit of a fear that he would come across cartoony.

**Craig:** It’s too broad.

**Nicole:** It’s very broad.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** And so Kevin Feige fortunately was like, go ahead, do Rocket, like Rocket’s awesome. He was a big fan of Rocket. So it worked out and —

**Craig:** What’s interesting that what you’re describing about the program, it’s a double-edged sword because in the one hand, I could say, look, it’s tough for professional writers to be in a situation where essentially it’s open-ended and you can just write and write and write and never stop writing and you’re getting paid some amount, but it doesn’t expand or contract.

**Nicole:** Right.

**Craig:** On the other hand, it does provide a certain freedom. You know, when you are being paid per draft and you say I want to do one now that’s just like this. They’re going to be like, “Uh, we can’t really afford to fund your experiments,” you know.

**Nicole:** Yeah, exactly, exactly.

**Craig:** So there is a certain, I mean I like that the… — I mean, look, it sounds to me like that program is spectacular if you’re Nicole Perlman and you write Guardians of the Galaxy.

**Nicole:** That’s right.

**Craig:** It’s a great, great program.

**Nicole:** It worked out really well.

**Craig:** If you’re not, I’m not sure it is a great program.

**Nicole:** Yes, yes.

**Craig:** But it sounds great for Nicole Perlman. That’s for sure.

**Nicole:** Well, the program was short-lived. The thing is it was only around for three-and-a-half years I think.

**Craig:** You’re kidding? It’s not there anymore?

**John:** Done.

**Nicole:** Not there anymore. And the reason is that Marvel only makes two movies a year, maybe three.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** And there’s a very good reason for that. I think that’s why their movies are high quality is because everything goes through a very specific bottleneck of Kevin Feige and the creative committee and everything gets approved by various levels. And if they were doing more movies, they would not have that much control over them.

So basically, with all the success of Avengers and Cap and all these properties that hadn’t — when they first came up with the idea for the program, they only had a couple of movies out.

**Craig:** I see.

**Nicole:** They didn’t know how successful their movies were going to be and how there were going to be all of these sequels.

**Craig:** There’s no room.

**Nicole:** There’s no room.

**Craig:** Because they have sequels now.

**John:** Yeah

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They have, every one of these movies, there needs to be like — I mean how many Guardians are…? I assume —

**Nicole:** Tons.

**Craig:** Tons.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not like it’s —

**Nicole:** Endless amounts of Guardians.

**Craig:** It should go on and on. And then there’s going to be side Guardians. Well, it’s like X-Men. I mean look how Fox has done it with.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Marvel is really just such an extensible universe more so than DC.

**John:** Yeah, it is crazy when you think about, you know, Marvel obviously has Marvel which is the Disney property now. But of course, they have the X-Men at Fox. They have Fantastic Four now at Fox.

**Craig:** At Fox.

**John:** They have the Spider-Man franchise —

**Craig:** At Sony.

**John:** At Sony.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Punisher I think is still, I don’t know if it got —

**Craig:** Poor Punisher. No one can make Punisher.

**John:** I think that got pulled back. I don’t know if it got pulled back —

**Craig:** You know why?

**John:** I don’t know if it got pulled back. Dare Devil got pulled back.

**Craig:** Because Punisher is a dick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Again, I don’t know why we’re talking about comics because it just ends up blowing up in my face. But really what it comes down to is Punisher is not a good guy. It’s hard to root for Punisher. I mean I remember —

**Nicole:** Tragic.

**Craig:** Well, when I read… — Yes, he is tragic.

**Craig:** All I know Punisher is what I read when I was in like 1983 and the idea was that if you killed somebody, Punisher would kill you. But also if you like threw your garbage out on not garbage day, he would kill you. And I just thought like —

**John:** Yeah, his binary sort of sense of like —

**Craig:** Right. Like that’s not cool.

**John:** They’re not dead. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not cool at all, man. You’re violating what we understand about the basic tenets of justice.

**John:** And Nicole on this podcast we often answer questions that readers would send in. And I’m wondering if you could answer some questions that they sent in. But we will all take a crack at some of these questions.

**Nicole:** Okay.

**John:** Are you ready to go, Craig?

**Craig:** No, but you should do it.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what was the, this is a question from Michael. What’s the worst movie idea you’ve ever been pitched by a producer or an executive?

**Craig:** I know exactly what it is.

**John:** Michael says, “I’m sure you’re going to hem and haw about not wanting to say. But come on, have some fun for once in your life.”

**Craig:** Hold on. I have fun all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s this guy’s name?

**John:** Michael. Michael thinks we don’t have enough fun.

**Craig:** Michael, how dare you.

**John:** We started about how much it was to shoot guns.

**Craig:** I was literally shooting. We were firing 50 caliber rifles at watermelons.

**Nicole:** You don’t want to say Craig is no fun because he’s really good with guns.

**Craig:** Thank you. Exactly. I’m deadly. She saw me.

**John:** He’s a Punisher.

**Nicole:** He’s so much fun.

**Craig:** I got Punisher skills. All right, this was the worst I ever got pitched. I won’t say who pitched it, but I will say who it was for. And this person didn’t know. It was an idea an executive or a producer pitched me many, many years ago and he said, “This is going to be a great Adam Sandler movie.”

And I said, okay, and Adam Sandler had nothing to do with this. I just want to be clear. I don’t think he’s ever heard this probably. This was the idea. Adam Sandler plays a guy who works at a magazine. It’s kind of like a magazine that men read. And his boss is this legendary publisher. And he’s married to a woman who is in a building across the street. And she runs a magazine that’s for women.

So you have a magazine for men and magazine for women. Now, whoa, but if that were it? No. Sandler works for the guy, okay, and Sandler is a sexual harasser. That’s his thing. He’s constantly harassing women and he’s constantly being brought into the office like, Jimmy, how many times have I told you? “Well, I can’t help it. I got to grope ladies.”

Well, the husband who runs the magazine and the wife who runs the magazine, they’re going through a bad divorce.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** And the husband wants to ruin the wife’s magazine. And he has a great idea. I know what I’ll do. I’ll send over Adam Sandler to work for her and he’ll just be sexually harassing all those people and that will somehow cause lawsuits and…

Okay, so Adam Sandler goes over there and sure enough, he starts to do his thing, but then what happens, and this is why this would be a great movie guys —

**John:** Body switch?

**Craig:** No. It’s, but there is a switch.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The women start to harass him.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** The women starts, the tables are turned. The women start all harassing him and he learns.

**Nicole:** What a life lesson.

**Craig:** Yes, he learns. And I’m just sitting there, like my meter of things that are wrong with this has broken. It stops at 999. It doesn’t go to a thousand. But I ran into 999 problems with that terrible idea.

**John:** And a pitch ain’t one.

**Craig:** Well done, John, a pitch ain’t one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I got 999 problems and a pitch ain’t one. You just got your title for the podcast. That was the worst idea I’ve ever been pitched. I was aghast. Aghast.

**John:** My idea worst idea ever pitched to me, it’s sort of like a whole class of ideas because in my early career I was adapting a lot of kids’ books. And so people would come to me with kids’ books, like, hey adapt this kids’ book.

And I remember one of them one was a movie that’s come out like this week or something like that, Alexander and the Terrible, Not Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Horrible, Very Bad Day.

**John:** And so the movie that I actually see as a trailer, well, that’s how you would make that movie.

But they would just send me the book, and I was like but there’s nothing here. It’s just a kid that has a crappy day. And there was no movie there. But also things like, you know, it’s a friendship between like a mouse and a toad and it’s like five pages long. I’m like well, there’s not a movie here. I mean these are charming illustrations, but there’s actually no movie here.

And so it was, unlike Craig’s thing, which was a like a fully developed terrible idea, I would get sort of the like, well, here’s kind of a poster and —

**Craig:** Here’s an animal and another animal.

**John:** Exactly. And they could do something.

**Craig:** Right, but you fill it in.

**John:** Fill it in. It basically writes itself.

**Craig:** What about you? What’s —

**Nicole:** That is very, that is so common. I try to tell people that I’m always getting pitched stories with a straight face that aren’t stories.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** They’re just, so for example, my husband is an aquatic designer. So he designs water parks and swimming pools, like complex —

**Craig:** Your husband is so cool.

**Nicole:** He’s super cool.

**Craig:** That’s a real job?

**Nicole:** It’s a real job.

**John:** Oh man.

**Craig:** I thought that that was like a movie job that people have.

**John:** That’s a great movie job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** So what I am always getting when I tell people that is, that’s a movie. And I said, what is the movie?

**Craig:** Yeah, where is the movie?

**Nicole:** They’re like, no, that’s a movie. That’s a movie. That’s Slip and Slide the movie.

**Craig:** Slip and Slide. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Water Parks, the movie. I’m like, you guys are just saying words now.

**Craig:** Those are nouns.

**Nicole:** Those were just nouns. Well, this is the other thing. The other one I was going to say wasn’t my story, but it’s a friend of mine who’s a TV writer. Told me that he was given a list of nouns that a producer sent him and just like random nouns that he thought would make a good movie.

**Craig:** Wow, yeah.

**Nicole:** And he said this isn’t a story. This isn’t a property. It’s a just a list of words. And his agent is like, “Look I’m sorry, but…”

And I actually talked to his agent and —

**Craig:** These words are hot right now.

**Nicole:** And she confirmed that this is a real story that, so it’s —

**Craig:** Wow.

**Nicole:** It was a list of nouns.

**Craig:** I once sat with a producer. I will not say who, but he is a legendary producer in many regards. And he, you know, you register titles with the MPAA. And one of the things that he would do is just come up with ideas for titles and register them, not to ever make the movie, but rather on the presumption that sooner or later, somebody would make a movie with that title and then have to pay him money, which had words.

And I remember one of things, and he goes, “You can do this if you want if you come up with an idea. One of the titles I own is Body Bag.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I just, oh my god, that you sat there one day and went I know what to do. I’m going to fill out paperwork now to own the title Body Bag.

**Nicole:** Wow.

**John:** The second Charlie’s Angels was called Charlie’s Angels Forever, but that didn’t test well. And so TriStar, Sony TriStar had a list of names that they had either pre-cleared or basically had and said like we always wanted to make a movie called Full Throttle. So now it’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Great. It’s better than Charlie’s Angels: Body Bag.

**Nicole:** [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or Charlie’s Angels: Slip and Slide. No, Slip and Slide —

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** That would be cool.

**Craig:** Hold on. My interest just went up.

**John:** Brandon in Houston wrote a question. His was, “You had an episode about the end of world a few weeks back. And that got me thinking. Everyone in the planet knows that Hollywood is the capital of the film industry, not just in the US, but worldwide. But what city is number two? Or put it another way, after the big one hits and the entire Greater LA area falls into the sea, where would the film industry rebuild?”

**Craig:** Where would I like it to be or where would it naturally be?

**John:** Where it would naturally fall?

**Craig:** New York, I would imagine, right?

**John:** Probably New York. I mean New York does a lot of TV. But you can’t shoot everything in New York.

**Craig:** Well, they do shoot a lot there. You need space. You need sound stages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** You need tax breaks, too.

**Craig:** You need tax… — Well, we don’t have them here.

**John:** We don’t have them here. I wonder, Florida, maybe.

**Craig:** Oh god, please no.

**Nicole:** Florida has a good film program/film school down there. I know they do a lot of shooting.

**Craig:** It’s so hot.

**John:** It’s so hot.

**Nicole:** Detroit maybe because there’s all that empty space.

**John:** They have a lot of empty space in Detroit.

**Craig:** A lot of gun play though.

**Nicole:** That’s true. They need —

**John:** That’s a good plot. Like Detroit like conspires to cause an earthquake so they can take over the film industry.

**Nicole:** They need a new industry.

**Craig:** Here’s the truth, if Hollywood, and this is sad. It’s 2014, this is the way the economy works. If Hollywood were wiped off the map, the center of film production would likely be the Zengcheng Province of China.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where they’d do it.

**Craig:** That’s where the iPhones are built and that’s where you’d go.

**John:** Yeah, Australia maybe, too. I mean, Australia has some good film facilities. It’s too remote, though. It’s too remote from the American market.

**Craig:** I’d go there. I’d live there. It seems very nice. It’s basically Middle Earth as far I’m — that’s what I’ve been told.

**John:** That’s New Zealand, not Australia. They get really upset about that.

**Craig:** Oh no, I want to go to New Zealand. That’s right.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Actually, I want to go to New Zealand. I want to live in Middle Earth.

**Nicole:** So the Shire is the new Hollywood.

**Craig:** The Shire. Every time someone says shire, I always think of —

**John:** Talia Shire?

**Craig:** No. I think of the Shire, I think of the actual shire, but then I think of one of the Ringwraiths. One of the nine, the Nazgul saying, [snarling sounds].

**John:** Kent writes, “You both mentioned that you feel like your IMDb page is a complete misrepresentation of you. And I have to say, I completely agree. For example, getting to know you both over 100 plus episodes, I can say that my impression is very different than what I would draw based on your credits. I’ve been so happy — ”

**Craig:** Craig is not an idiot at all.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** He’s not a blithering moron.

**John:** And Kent actually said some really nice things about both of us. But I’m going elide those from the podcast today.

**Craig:** Sure, sure.

**John:** Because you’ve already —

**Craig:** I pretty much, yeah.

**John:** “I’ve been so happy and ready to dismiss or pigeonhole a person once I’ve seen their IMDb page, which is pretty crappy for reasons I know. I wonder who’s behind my favorite or least favorite movies. I wonder if some folks are a little clever or more capable than I once thought. I’m in a tailspin here.”

So my question, and a question for you, Nicole, is you have Guardians of Galaxy as a producer credit. Do you have other producer credits?

**Nicole:** This is my first producer credit.

**John:** So it seems, so someone who would just like look you up, it’s like, well, she’s pretty lucky. She’s done exactly one thing. But you haven’t done one thing. And your IMDb credits page doesn’t really represent you. So if you could present yourself the way you would like to be seen, what would you say that you did?

**Nicole:** I could have the list of all my projects that didn’t get made, but that were sold or —

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Or that I was assigned to. You know, most of them are, again, space and science related. I had —

**Craig:** Aeronautical.

**Nicole:** Aeronautical.

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Nicole:** Yeah, Challenger was my first script. Just go re-optioned, so maybe we’ll see what happens with that, which was a story about the Richard Feynman, his role in the investigation of The Challenger disaster and then I did a Neil Armstrong biopic for Universal. So I actually got to meet him and spend some time with him before he died. And have a project at Disney which is a sort of secret project, which I don’t think is going to get made, but that’s a science fiction project called Care Incognita. And a…oh, I’m like thinking for the list of dead projects. Oh, so painful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** I totally ran an outlier called Kiss and Tango that was the first studio job I ever had. And I did work on Thor. I didn’t try for credit, but I did a lot of the geekery of that movie.

**Craig:** Which Thor?

**Nicole:** The first Thor.

**Craig:** First Thor.

**Nicole:** Yeah, first Thor. So that was one of the other sort of plus sides of the Marvel writing program is they can snatch you out of your office.

**Craig:** Do a little Thor work.

**Nicole:** Do some Thor work, which was cool. Oh god, what else? We did a whole bunch of stuff on there. But again, it’s sort of like do you want that stuff on there? Do you want it to — it’s the story that is most people who are at my beginning sort of stage are they have a lot of projects that don’t make it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Nicole:** Before they do.

**Craig:** That never goes away. You know, I understand that people will look at an IMDb page particularly if there are bunch of credits on it and say, okay, well, I understand who this person is. You don’t. I mean, what you understand is what projects they wrote that other people were willing to make.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. You don’t know what the projects were that they cared the most about. You don’t know what the projects were that they did the best work on. A lot of times, we of course do work on movies that are made but we’re not credited for it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But regardless I guess I would say to, who asked this, Josh?

**John:** This was Kent.

**Craig:** Kent. I’d say, Kent, don’t judge anybody based on a stupid IMDb page anyway. It’s just that’s not who people are. That’s a facet of who they are and you just simply don’t know. And God, how many lessons do we have where we think we know what a kind of person is and then they eventually turn out to be this entirely different person artistically or creatively. We just see this other side of them.

I mean , you know, one my favorite example is George Takei. And we only think of George Takei now in a certain way. He’s this fascinating guy who’s full of life. He’s obviously a huge supporter of marriage equality, but more importantly he’s like the best example of what it means to be a cool, old man.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Right? But when I was a kid, he was just the fourth banana on Star Trek, you know, who had that one time he got to fence with his shirt off. But most of the time, it was just, you know, Sulu was the other guy, he was the guy. He didn’t matter, you know.

**Nicole:** Right.

**Craig:** And who would have thought anything? You just don’t know people from their credits. That’s not who we are as people, so stop it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve been hiring a new person to work for me. And when you look at real resumes, they actually fill in like sort of all the different jobs they have and you sort of see like the years and you sort of see where gaps are. But IMDb is sort of, it’s only showing these little bits that are sticking above the surface. You know, all the gaps sort of feel like, well, he wasn’t working at all during these times.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What Kent probably doesn’t know is that in the industry you actually do know what people were doing during all that other times. The agencies have all that information. And producers who are trying to hire you, they know what else you’ve been working on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So there’s all that stuff is sort of silent and buried. Everyone else in the industry kind of does know what that stuff is. And so people will know that like, oh, he had a kick ass draft of that thing over there and didn’t get credit on it. But he’s good for that reason.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or she has been super busy doing this thing. Or, you know, Nicole dropped off the radar for two years because she’s been in the Marvel writing program, but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

**Nicole:** Right.

**Craig:** They also know the future. And those of you who just look at the IMDb don’t. So they’ll know, okay, there’s four things this person has done that are all going.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they are all of a certain kind of thing. So we know who this person is becoming.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we know, okay, nobody at home knows who Nicole Perlman is and nobody at home has ever heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. But we know who she is and we know what Guardians of the Galaxy is and we know it’s going to be a big hit, so let’s start talking to her as soon as Marvel let’s her out of her indentured servitude.

**Nicole:** My basement —

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Our last thing is actually someone had some really good news. And so Craig asked, if he could read it on the air. So this —

**Craig:** Oh yeah, this was very nice.

**John:** This is from Josh.

**Craig:** This is from Josh. Okay, so Josh wrote John and me and here is what he said. “Young writer here, I’ve been listening to the podcast for years since its inception probably. Even as I was going through film school listening to Scriptnotes was like the bonus course that I never had to pay for.”

Side note, we will always lose money.

“I had tremendous caring professors. The debt I owe them cannot be measured. But you guys provide an insight into the industry that aspiring writers can’t get anywhere else. I eagerly await the Tuesday mornings when your podcast is posted.

“I made the official move to LA from Chicago about a year ago. I got part time job working in an elementary school.” That’s nice. “Which gave me the hours and flexibility to write and just barely survive. Long story short, these past few months have been a whirlwind. I found representation, made it to the Nicholls finalist round and just sold my first project.”

**John:** Aw.

**Nicole:** Aw.

**Craig:** “So I just wanted to say, thanks, John and Craig.”

Well, thank you, Josh, for writing in. I mean it’s kind of cliché, but this is why we do it.

**John:** Yeah, it really is.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I mean we’re not… — I think that sometimes we’re talking to each other and sometimes we’re talking to our friends and people like you who’ve made it and have hit movies, but there’s still things we’re trying to figure out and always will be.

But obviously a lot of time we’re talking to people that are coming and we are well aware that the great majority of them will be washed away by the tides. But the ones who get through, you know, like those fish that manage to get on land and sprout little legs, I think it’s just great that they’ve been sort of following along with us all this time. And I love that this is how this works and I hope that Josh keeps going, you know. It’s exciting.

**John:** You had a script, your first script or the first script that people got to know you for showed up on the Black List. And that was the Black List which is the list of like the best live scripts, so not the site that you paid in, but people read your script, they loved your script. What was it like to get word that your script showed up on the Black List?

**Nicole:** Well, I was so new. I was, you know, I was only out of school for a little while. I thought it was a bad thing.

**John:** Oh no!

**Nicole:** So I was like, oh no.

**Craig:** You thought you were blacklisted.

**Nicole:** I’ve been blacklisted! I’m just starting. What did I do? Who did I piss off, you know?

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Nicole:** And my immediate thought was because there were some things in there that were slightly critical of NASA. I was like, oh god, NASA blacklisted me.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Nicole:** And then I was assured, no, no, this was a good thing.

**John:** And what was the transition from sort of getting that notice to starting to get an agent and starting to get meetings, starting to get people talking about hiring you because you said you had done some non-WGA writing before then.

**Nicole:** Yeah. I had my first job before I had an agent. That was something that I had won some contests when I was in school and had a little blurb written up about me in Script Magazine, like a paragraph, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** It was something very small and a company reached out to me and said, oh, you like science-y things and space things? Well, we have a space project. And I remember, I was working some like crap job and I got the call. And I came and I pitched on it and I got the call and they’re like, “We will pay you $11,000.” I’m like, oh my god!

**Craig:** So much money.

**Nicole:** So much money. I was like doing a silent dance at my desk, you know. And I was just —

**Craig:** Don’t forget that feeling by the way.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Craig:** You don’t forget that.

**John:** I know that feeling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** I was so thrilled. And so then after I sent my paperwork. They’re like, so just so you know, we totally screwed you. So you should probably get an agent.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s like —

**Nicole:** They didn’t say it in that many words.

**Craig:** That’s like…thank you?

**Nicole:** But that was definitely the under current. And so they were actually very helpful. The director of development there knew an agent and set me up.

**Craig:** That’s sort of nice of them.

**Nicole:** Yeah, it was.

**Craig:** It was the second nicest thing they could have done.

**Nicole:** [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

**John:** It was the right thing to say and really bad timing.

**Nicole:** Right. Exactly.

**Craig:** Perfectly bad timing.

**John:** So one of the traditions on the podcast is we do a One Cool Thing and we’re talking about something that we really like this week. So I’m going to cheat and sort of do two but they’re kind of very closely related two things.

**Craig:** He’s a show up.

**John:** Such a show up. Well, they’re both examples of taking an existing movie or a couple of movies and looking at them in a complete different way. So the first is, and a bunch of people tweeted me this, Steven Soderbergh took Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** I’m so glad you’re doing this so that they can stop sending the tweets.

**John:** So Soderbergh took Raiders of the Lost Ark and he took away all the color, made it black and white, took away all the sound and then put a Trent Reznor music underneath it. So you can actually look at it just as the compositions and the frame compositions. And it really is stunning and beautiful. It’s an incredibly well-made movie.

And you don’t think of it as being — all of what we think about the Raiders of the Lost Ark is sort of Indiana Jones and the character and the story and we had a whole podcast where we talked about Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it’s fascinating to watch it just as a pure visual experience. So I highly recommend that.

The second is this recut of Star Wars by the script called Auralnauts. I’m not even sure who they are. So what they did is they took the first three movies. So the bad three movies and —

**Craig:** You mean the prequels.

**John:** The prequels.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So they took the prequels and they revoiced them in sort of like a bad lips reading kind of way. They have new voices in them. But they actually just recut them completely for content. So this is about young Anakin Skywalker and his mentor who are just like these drunken frat boys who are getting in all sorts of trouble. And Jedis are sort of like, they’re like the idiots. They’re the frat boy idiots. And the Empire is actually just like they’re reasonable sort of like, you know, reasonable sort of middle management and it’s just hilariously done.

And so it’s an example of sort of taking —

**Craig:** I’m going to watch that.

**Nicole:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** Yeah, it’s great. So there’s three episodes so far. The same people did a video, you may have seen this last week, which is the final scene in what we think as Star War Episode IV.

**Craig:** Oh the ones who took the —

**John:** They took the John Williams music out the award scene.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Yeah.

**John:** So the final scene in Star Wars where Leia is giving them their medals. So they walk down and the crowds part and she gives them all these things. Well, they took that same thing, but they just took the John Williams score out of it, so it’s just silent and then you hear creaks and —

**Craig:** And bad Foley of just like —

**John:** And you realize that it’s bizarre that no one is talking. I mean like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why is no one talking?

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s really uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Because it was designed for music. And actually is in a weird way it was very comforting because I felt like, this is what happens when you shoot movies because you have this plan like and then we’re going to do this and it’s going to be this big thing with music and fanfare. And then you get in the editing room and you’re like, what have I done? This is the worst…what is this?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, put some music on it, it’ll be okay. It will be okay. It will be okay.

**John:** John is working on something.

**Craig:** Yeah, John has nailed it. [hums] And you know, okay, we’re good again. But my god, it’s… — By the way, you also realize how long it is.

**John:** Yeah, it’s incredibly long.

**Craig:** It’s so long.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The Spielberg thing is great. He has just a genetic level ability to know where to put the camera and to know how to move people through it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The frame. I mean just the very first shot, where the camera is is kind of odd, just this weird low angle, but it’s like perfect. And then the way he has bodies crossing through and then how he has people turning and looking back, like when what’s his face. Is it, throw me that, I’ll give you the whip…

**John:** Yeah, yeah, that first guy, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, when he looks back, he looks scared.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then the next guy who eventually is revealed to be a rat, looks back, he’s angry. I’ve actually already learned everything. It’s a oner. It’s perfect. Oh, so good. So good. Who wants to go next? You want to go next?

**Nicole:** Sure.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Nicole:** So should I something that I think is awesome, just random thing that’s awesome or should I say something that’s cool and sort of helpful and on task?

**Craig:** It’s your choice.

**John:** It’s your choice.

**Craig:** You could do whatever you want.

**John:** It’s your Cool Thing.

**Craig:** This is your moment.

**Nicole:** This is my moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** Okay. Oh well, something cool and at the risk of sounding like I’m shilling for an organization that I’m involved with. There’s this thing called The Science & Entertainment Exchange which —

**Craig:** I just took advantage of them.

**Nicole:** Which is super cool and they love being taken advantage of repeatedly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** They are an organization that’s related to The National Academy of Sciences. And they basically exist primarily just to be a free service to connect filmmakers to scientists or 1-800-DIAL-A-SCIENTIST basically.

And so anybody who is making a movie or a television show or a web series and wants to have some expert help, it’s free. And they live to serve, so they will put you in touch with an expert in your branch of science. And it could be FBI profiling. It could be psychological. It doesn’t have to be straight up chemistry, you know, microbiology. But they will. And it’s volunteer. The scientists have contacted them because they want to help with their expertise.

So it doesn’t have to be a straight up, you know, obvious call. Man of Steel used the exchange for some of their consulting. So it’s a very, very great service. And the guy who runs it is a good friend of mine.

**Craig:** Very good. Good stuff. Well, my One Cool Thing is really more of a one scoldy thing this week. It’s a one nanny thing this week. My One Cool Thing this week two-step verification.

**Nicole:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Which I know, it’s sort of like we’re in the ’70s and everyone is like, seatbelts? What? This is the seatbelt of today.

Two-step verification. I know it’s annoying. If you don’t what it is. Very simply, when you’re changing passwords or doing anything that involves the password of any sort of secure account, you can’t actually change it until you respond with a code that’s sent to another device that you’ve linked to your account like a phone. And that’s how they know it’s really you and not just some person testing passwords.

And as we saw in the last few weeks, people just went bananas hacking phones. That’s not going to stop if anything. It will just stop going. So every major email service, iCloud service and eCloud or rather cloud service has two-step verification. Turn it on and use it. It’s good for you and maybe also think carefully about what you have on your phone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, but two-step verification. Put your seatbelts on, guys.

**John:** I agree.

**Nicole:** Yeah.

**John:** Nicole Perlman, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. It was a tremendous delight.

**Nicole:** My pleasure. Thank you. It was fun to do it.

**John:** If you want to know more about Nicole and the things she talked about and all the other stuff that came up in the show today, you can go to the show notes, they are at johnaugust.com/podcast. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. Craig, people left us new comments and they’re very nice.

**Craig:** Oh fantastic. I’ll check them out. I like to read nice things about myself.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. Because it doesn’t happen in other places.

**Craig:** Oh, no. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Not even in my house, usually. Yeah. Every now and then, one of the kids will come up and give me a random hug. I like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Nicole:** It’s like the Deadline comments in my house.

**Craig:** Never read Deadline comments.

**John:** Never. No, never read below the fold.

**Craig:** Never read the comments.

**John:** You can listen to all the back episodes. This Episode 164. We have many, many back episodes through scriptnotes.net. You can find them all there. There’s also apps for iPhone and for Android so that you can listen to them.

The show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yay. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo, woo, woo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth who —

**Craig:** I don’t think you’re pronouncing that right. Where is that? Rajesh Naroth.

**John:** All right. Listen to what Craig said.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it could be Naroth. Rajesh Naroth.

**John:** Rajesh, thank you very much for a very cool outro. If you would like to send us an outro for the show, you can just send it to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s also the great place to send long questions like some of the questions we read here today on the show. If they’re short things for me or for Craig, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Nicole, do you want people to tweet at you?

**Nicole:** Sure. I’m @uncannygirl.

**John:** @uncannygirl. And that’s our show this week.

**Craig:** Good Twitter handle.

**John:** Well done.

**Craig:** She is uncanny.

**Nicole:** But I don’t tweet that often. But I need to do more. There’s so much pressure.

**Craig:** You’re fine the way you are. You’re beautiful as God made you. Thanks for coming, Nicole.

**John:** Thank you so much.

**Nicole:** Thank you. I appreciate it.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Today is the last day to [order shirts and hoodies from the John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* Nicole Perlman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2270979/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Uncannygirl)
* [Guardians of the Galaxy](http://marvel.com/guardians)
* Steven Soderbergh’s [silent, black and white Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders)
* Star Wars Episodes [1: Jedi Party](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSCm8yAxBr8), [2: The Friend Zone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI8aSJBC9u0) and [3: Revenge of Middle Management](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itkl7cHcX_E) recut and re-voiced by Auralnauts
* Their cut of [The Throne Room minus Williams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-GZJhfBmI)
* [The Science and Entertainment Exchange](http://www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/) connects scientists with entertainment industry professionals
* [Two-step verification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-step_verification) is the seatbelt of the digital world
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/blockbusters).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 114, the Blockbuster episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Ka-boom!

**John:** Craig, the most important question of all is how far are you into Grand Theft Auto V?

**Craig:** I finished the solo story and then I started doing a bunch of little sidey things that we’re left over, like for instance there’s this thing where you can go and find all of these little scattered pieces of a letter that lead you to solve a murder mystery.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** And I ended up somewhere around 80%, so the other 20% are things that I, I mean, some of them I can do. Some of them just never, ever, ever are going to happen. And then I was like, eh, I think I’m going to start over. And so I’ve started over playing the solo thing again.

**John:** Nice. Great.

**Craig:** How about you? Where are you?

**John:** I’ve just barely started. So, I’m still with Franklin. I have a dog now that I can take —

**Craig:** Chop. You’ve got Chop.

**John:** So I can take the dog for some walks. But I don’t feel like I’ve really started any serious missions because the truth is it’s hard to say whether I’m worse at shooting or worse at driving. But those are two crucial skills that I have yet to really master in this game.

**Craig:** You’ll get there. You’ll get there. I believe in you.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve never actually finished Grand Theft Auto 4. And I liked it a lot, but I actually just got done with it. And I don’t know that I’ll ever finish this game, but I really am impressed by the version of Los Angeles that it creates.

**Craig:** Well, when we get to One Cool Thing, my One Cool Thing today is Grand Theft Auto V related. And when you watch that you will be even more impressed.

**John:** Well, Grand Theft Auto V is a blockbuster by any definition of the term blockbuster. It made $800 million since opening salvo. Today we’re going to be talking about blockbusters in general and the topics specifically are this new book that came out that talks about Hollywood’s obsession with blockbusters and how it may actually be a reasonable choice for Hollywood.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re going to talk about big name actors who don’t like to be directed.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait!

**John:** And finally we’re going to answer a reader question about following up after a general meeting which is, I thought, very timely and important for people to talk about.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**John:** Lovely. First off some housekeeping. This is our last Skype episode for awhile because next week you and I are both in Austin for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, you and I are on various panels there, most of which will not be recorded and will not be part of Scriptnotes. So, people have asked, “Hey, that Alien panel you’re going to be on, John, are you going to put that on a podcast?” Nope, that’s an Austin Film Festival thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I think it will be a great session, but you’ll actually have to be there to see the session.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m getting the same thing. I’m doing a seminar on structure and character and theme and a lot of people have been asking is it going to be recorded, is there going to be a transcript. Even if we could — I think they actually record everything at Austin, but the whole point is you got to actually support the festival by showing up.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, this is for people who paid for their badge. So, no, you get nothing.

**John:** Yeah, that badge. You get nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** But what you will get is a live episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That will be Saturday — we’re recording it live Saturday at 12:45pm at the Intercontinental Stephen F. Austin Ballroom.

Now, Craig, when we first talked to Austin about going back and doing another live Scriptnotes, because that was our first live Scriptnotes last year with Aline Brosh McKenna, it was a very fun time. We said, “Hey, you know what? Last time you stuck us at a really early timeslot. It was hard for people to like wake up and be there.” So, we said, let’s get a really great timeslot.

So, we’re now at 12:45 in the afternoon. But have you actually looked at the schedule, Craig, to see what we’re up against?

**Craig:** No, god. What are we — who is our competition?

**John:** So, our competition is Rob Thomas talking about making the Veronica Mars movie.

**Craig:** All right. Okay.

**John:** And our friend Franklin Leonard talking to Jenji Kohan about Orange is the New Black.

**Craig:** Well, look, those are steep, but it’s not like they put us up against Vince Gilligan.

**John:** Yes, Vince Gilligan is early in the day. So, you can come for Vince Gilligan and then come to see us. I just feel like, you know, when we had these initial conversations we talked in a very general sense like how about we do an early evening so people could maybe drink a little, that kind of thing. That didn’t end up happening. So, I feel like we may need to step up our game a little bit for the live show is really what I’m saying.

So, I would urge people to come to our show because while we will be recording it, I’m going to plan some things that you kind of have to be there in person to experience. I’m not quite entirely sure what those are going to be yet. We’ll discuss them probably on the flight to Austin.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But there will be some special live things there.

**Craig:** Are we on the same flight?

**John:** I don’t know. I think I’m flying in on Thursday.

**Craig:** So am I. Are you flying Thursday on American?

**John:** No, I’m flying on Southwest.

**Craig:** Well, we’re not on the same plane. So, we’ve got real problems.

**John:** You got an upgrade on that whole flight thing. So, that is one of the things we will be doing in Austin. The second thing we’ll be doing is the Three Page Challenge. And like the Writers Guild Foundation Three Page Challenge we did, the people who wrote those three pages will be in the room with us. And so we will be talking with them about their three pages, which is usually great and fun. So, we’ll record that.

People write in saying, “Hey, do my pages.” We’ve actually already picked all the people who we’re going to do in that session. They already know they’re the people that are picked, so you don’t need to send in special things for Austin. It’s awesome you’re going to be in Austin and have three pages, but we will not be covering them there in Austin unless you’ve already heard from us.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I do want to add that there is a consistent thing happening now that makes me super happy. And that is that we do the Three Page Challenges and the people who are featured on it tweet us and are really appreciative, even if we were critical of the pages and kind of got into a deep analysis of some things that maybe we’ve both thought weren’t right. Everybody has been really appreciative and really — it’s a good sign that they’re taking this stuff the right way because the truth is that you and I in our daily lives as writers are getting this kind of feedback constantly. So, it’s a good sign. Very good sign.

**John:** I would agree. And we should stress that the whole Three Page Challenge, the initial step of that is Stuart reading everything, so Stuart really does read everything. And he makes decisions about what things to send on to us based on what he thinks are really good things that he’s read and liked that would be useful for our listeners.

So, if you send something through and Stuart hasn’t picked it, it’s either because Stuart has a bunch of stuff that’s kind of like it, that makes him think that maybe it’s not the right thing for us to talk about right now.

So never feel bad if we don’t talk about your thing. If we do talk about your thing, know we’re talking about it because it was one of the most interesting things that crossed our virtual transom.

**Craig:** Correct. And as always, blame Stuart.

**John:** Yes. Blame Stuart.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, a couple episodes ago we talked about what’s next, because basically I had finished up Big Fish, I was trying to figure out what the next thing is I was going to write. And so that’s somewhat coalesced over this past week. And this afternoon I was at lunch with the producer of — I can’t remember if it is the first thing or the second thing I described, but the thing that was based on some preexisting IP that was going to be really complicated and you’d talked me out of it to some degree, like this sounds like it’s going to be a mess.

And so we had a really good lunch and we talked through sort of how it could be kind of a mess and I think it’s a good segue into our conversation of blockbusters because this is going to be an expensive movie to make. And so easily half of our conversation was not about the story itself, but about the process of how we would get from this idea to a finished movie and how we would get this idea to this studio that owns the IP through the studio and how you conceive it as a big movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things we don’t — I don’t think we’ve necessarily talked enough about on the show is what does it mean to be a big movie and at what point do you start talking about story and what point do you start talking about the movie. And so this conversation was largely about the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and it’s changed, hasn’t it, because when we started it seemed like basically development was really — they were okay with shots in the dark. “All right, well, we like that idea, we like that thought. Go ahead. Write the script. Here’s some money and let’s read the script and then we’ll see.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And now I think everybody feels that they kind of have to build the ship while they’re on the ship.

**John:** Yes. Or even before you’re kind of deciding to board the ship, because a lot of my decision process right now is is this actually a movie that the studio will make.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** An so are we going to invest a tremendous amount of time coming up with the perfect pitch for this movie if it’s ultimately not a movie that this studio can make.

**Craig:** Correct. So true. Great.

**John:** And so part of this is prefaced on a conversation I had with another producer about another project and said, “Oh, it’s great news. The studio actually already owns the rights to this book. They bought it five years ago. And I don’t think they even know that they have the rights to this book. It’s going to be perfect.” And so I read it and I’m like, “I don’t think they’re going to make this movie.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “But they already own the book!” It’s like I don’t think it was this regime that bought the book. I’m happy to talk about doing this movie, but I first want you to go to President of Production/Studio Head, whoever you want to talk to and ask candidly are they ever going to make this project.

And so they did — came back a week later and said, “Nope, we’re not.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that was a lot of time saved.

**Craig:** It was. And typically if they have a book that they haven’t done anything with and someone says, “They don’t even know they have the rights,” there’s a reason for that. It’s because they don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. If they wanted to make a movie out of it, they would have made a movie out of it.

**John:** Yeah. So, studios largely want to make blockbusters. And that’s a thing that we’ve talked about on the podcast before. And you had sent me this article by Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. And it was an interview with him and Anita Elberse, who is the author of this new book called Blockbusters. She’s a professor at the Harvard Business School.

And it was an interesting article and I haven’t read the full book, so again we’re doing that thing where we’re basing a discussion on an article about a book rather than the book itself. But some of the points I thought were interesting.

And so the basic theory of blockbusters and sort of spending money on blockbusters is that — it’s a question of is it better to spend more money on fewer titles. And is dollar spent a blockbuster worth more or worth less than a dollar spent on a non- blockbuster.

**Craig:** And what the author, Anita Elberse, has found — and in an academic way, so she’s not a stakeholder in the business. She’s not somebody that’s trying to promote a certain kind of movie or promote writers, or actors, or directors, or anything like that. She’s not a movie critic. She’s I guess an economist or, yeah, something like that, or just a business — yeah, she is actually an economist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What she seems to have found is in general from a business strategy what she says is, “A blockbuster strategy means making fewer investments that are larger investments, but that strategy turns out to be economically safer than making more smaller bets.”

**John:** Yes. Now, some of that seems nonsensical at first, because we look at big giant movies that tanked that cost a tremendous amount of money and cost a tremendous amount of money to advertise and we say, “Okay, well that’s an example of why it was foolish to spend that much money on that particular movie.”

What she’s arguing is that there’s essentially silent evidence that we’re ignoring all the smaller movies that didn’t make back their money, and their marketing money, and if you added up all those they would actually cost more than the big movies that are tanking.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, there is a cost, there is a risk involved in everything. And so you have to account for the risk involved in making any movie, including the smaller movies, but she also found that there are these side benefits to the success of large movies that go beyond just the success of that large movie. For instance, the notion is that if you make the large movies, for your next movies you will attract better people. You’ll attract bigger actors, bigger authors, bigger IP, bigger writers and directors.

If you stop doing that, if you sort of go for a Men’s Warehouse model where you’re trying to go lower priced/higher volume, people that make quality entertainment start to stop thinking about you.

**John:** And I see there’s some logic there, but I also see some faults in that logic. So, let’s talk through this point. The idea that creators are attracted to places that are making big things is to some degree true. If you’re a person who wants to make giant movies and you have two places you can go with this giant movie, you’re going to feel more comfortable with a place that actually has experience making and marketing big movies. Likely. That seems reasonable.

But quality and bigness are not necessarily the same thing. And so you look at the HBO model or even A&E to some degree, like the places that are making really quality television shows, they’re not spending more money than other places. They’re just making better stuff. And so to some degree this halo effect that she’s describing, that people want to come there because of the reputation of the brand, it may have more to do with the kinds of movies you’re making, the kinds of movies you’re releasing.

So, there’s a reason why you may want to have this Fox Searchlight be releasing your film rather than MGM because Fox Searchlight has a brand to it.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And, in fact, when I read this article, it seemed to me that this book and her research seems less valuable in service of an argument that you should make more blockbusters and maybe not make as many medium priced films. It’s more valuable in starting to at least defend and understand why this blockbuster mania happens at all.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because the truth is the movie studios will continue to make medium-priced movies and smaller-priced movies. They’ll do it, I mean, every comedy essentially is that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They won’t stop. But it was — sometimes when I talk to people I feel like it becomes this lazy intellectual crutch that studios are stupid and that they’re run by kind of Adderall/cracked-out dips who are 40-something 12 year olds. And they don’t care about a damn thing and they just want explosions and noise. And that’s not quite right. There is real success here in a lot of these things. We tend to look at… — It’s funny, this is sort of selection bias. When a movie like The Avengers comes out and a lot of people like it and it’s a huge blockbuster, we’ll say, “Great job, Joss Whedon.”

When a movie like The Lone Ranger comes out and a lot of people don’t like it and it costs a huge amount of money and is a big flop, people will say, “Oh, Hollywood, you’re stupid.”

Well, Hollywood is also The Avengers. [laughs] You know?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I mean, it gets credit and it gets punished for all things. So, a lot of these blockbusters — I mean, she points out something that’s so obvious it’s odd that it needs to be pointed out, and yet it does. Blockbusters are blockbusters because they bust blocks. People are showing up. What are we supposed to do? And then you start to run into this weird question of, well, so who should we be angry at? And the interviewer asked the question directly. So, consumers are to blame?

And her response is characteristically blunt. “As consumers we are at fault. These are the choices that we’re making.” [laughs] I thought that was a fair point.

**John:** Yeah. Of course the corollary argument with that is if you essentially have no choice because you’ve stopped making the other kinds of movies, there may be an audience who wants to see that other film and didn’t have a chance to see that other film because it didn’t exist. So, that becomes the supply and demand question is a reasonable question to ask, but audiences are ultimately responsible for I think the kinds of movies we make.

**Craig:** We are.

**John:** I think she didn’t understand some aspects of the film industry that were a little bit frustrating to me. Her point about trailers is like, “Well, if you have a big movie then you get to put five trailers on that and that’s how it works.” Well, that’s not how trailers work at all.

And in a general way, if Warner Bros. has The Hangover III coming out, Warner Bros. can attach one trailer to that. They know they can lock on one trailer to that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Everything else is horse trading. And it’s trying to get your film’s trailer attached to this next thing that’s going.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** And you’re negotiating both with the other studios. You’re negotiating with exhibitors. It’s an incredibly complicated thing. So, just having a big hit film doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be able to market your next film more easily because of that.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s something that’s far more functional in television where you’re using big event television to platform promotions for new shows. However, what she didn’t mention that she ought to have, and maybe she does in her book, one great benefit of blockbusters is that they increase our exhibition power. As a studio, if you know you’ve got, all right, so Warner Bros. announced that they have more Harry Potter universe films coming out. Very big deal for them.

Well, when they have a smaller movie that they are pushing, it’s very easy for them to lean on exhibitors and say, “Run this movie or you’re not getting Harry Potter.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s a big deal. That’s a huge deal.

**John:** I think we’ve talked about on the podcast before is international results and a larger portion of studio’s take. And having more movies coming down the pipeline is very helpful in terms of getting money to come out of those countries. And so you’re able to sort of go to Kraplachia and say like, “Hey, you still owe us for this movie that came out six months ago. You’re not getting this next movie until you pay us that money.” And that is a useful thing, too.

And so any movie is helpful for that coming down the pipe, but a giant blockbuster, like the next Avengers, they really want that. And that will become an important tool for getting that money back out of exhibitors, especially overseas.

**Craig:** Yeah. My take away from this is not to say big, stupid, awful blockbusters are worth defending. They’re not. No big, stupid, awful movie is worth defending, or are small, awful, stupid movies worth defending. I’ve been involved in a couple myself. [laughs]

It’s more that it’s not just willy-nilly stupidity. It is actually a strategy that is economically working, even — we discussed this already — even in a summer where the media narrative seemed to be, “Hollywood is falling apart,” Hollywood made a ton. In fact, I believe this summer is bigger than last summer.

**John:** It is in fact bigger than last summer. Because we’re conveniently forgetting things like Iron Man 3, which made a gazillion dollars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the movies that weren’t tiny but were not giant that also did really, really well. You have The Heat. You have We’re the Millers, the things that did great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you can say, like those two are original films, but Hangover III, it still brought in a ton of money.

**Craig:** 300-and-some-odd million bucks. I mean, there were plenty of movies that worked really well. I mean, Gravity right now is obviously killing it. And that will continue to happen. It’s more that the chattering class hates sequel-itis, and I understand why.

And they resent the audience for ignoring movies that they love. And I understand. It’s dispiriting to see some movie that’s a beautiful piece of work come out and be totally ignored while a big, huge, crap fest rakes money in, except it’s not a crap fest to a lot of the people going to it. It’s like, so you just have to let that go.

Look, we’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it: I want movie studios to make more medium-sized and smaller movies. I want it. I want them to make more movies in general. And we’ve often said you can’t get to sequels if you haven’t had the first one.

But, it would be just as much of a mistake to pretend that blockbusters were some kind of weird blink or failure strategy. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not. So, the topic of conversation I suspect happening at every movie studio this week, the past couple weeks, has to be Gravity. And it’s a movie that Craig has not seen yet, which is —

**Craig:** My kids won’t…my kids…it’s my kids.

**John:** Kids! I know, oh, those kids! So, two threads I want to talk about here. Generally as a screenwriter it is important to see the movies that everyone else is talking about so you can have a point of conversation about those.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** And so obviously, Craig, it’s on your short list of things you need to see really quickly.

**Craig:** Next movie I see.

**John:** The reason why I think, you know, obviously the year is not finished yet, but I think Gravity will become the most important movie for Hollywood this year for a couple of reasons. It was expensive, but it wasn’t crazy expensive. It wasn’t a sequel. It was a director who everyone knew was incredibly talented and had made some other sort of big hits but hadn’t made the one that was sort of all his. It was risky, even though it had giant stars, it was risky.

But most importantly to me, it’s a movie that’s just entirely a movie. It’s a movie that’s 90 minutes long. It is focused on one person’s survival story. You have a character who doesn’t need to save the world. She needs to save herself. And it’s a thing that exists, that wants to be made for a big screen.

So, I see this movie and I look at some of the other big movies we’re making that are just huge, and sprawling, and 2.5 hours, and involve myriad subplots. I think what was refreshing, I think the conversation a lot of people are going to be having is how to make a movie that’s more like Gravity.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** There’s terrible lessons you can learn from it, like we should make more movies in space. No. That’s not the lesson.

**Craig:** They will! [laughs]

**John:** They will. There will be lot more movies set in space.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But the lesson, and what got me excited about it, which I think is going to get other people excited about it, too, is that it was a reminder that you don’t need to save the world. And this is a thing that we talked about before in the Damon Lindelof conversation is do you need to — how big do the stakes need to be?

Well the stakes, it turns out, can be about one person if the story is tightly constructed around that one person’s journey. And that, I think, is the biggest game changer of all.

So, whether it’s in space, or whether it’s taking place on the ocean or anywhere else, the small straightforward story can be a winner.

**Craig:** And it’s putting the lie to these things that we’re constantly hearing that the only movies that are hits are movies with presold audiences, or movies with recognizable IP or titles, and movies that aren’t about adults and adult situations. That’s’ all just not true.

And as many times as it’s happened this year, I would think it has to be sinking in. People have to be looking and going, well, wait a second, what were the profit margins on the Melissa McCarthy movies that came out this year? What was the profit margin on Gravity?

And let’s also remember that in these really big blockbusters, you know, the Titanics, the $200+ million movies, the expense is greater than what it appears because almost inevitably in order to support a structure that large you need the kind of talent that demands first dollar gross, big portions of the profits. That doesn’t necessarily happen when you’re making these smaller movies. The hits are much hittier.

I think that Hollywood certainly, certainly, has had an interesting positive wakeup call. The failure of a couple of blockbusters this summer, there’s no lesson to take from that because we’ve had just as many blockbusters do great. It’s actually a positive lesson this time around, that the success of some of the smaller movies has been really eye opening.

And I hope that that sets a trend.

**John:** A thing we talked about quite early on in the podcast is if we could run Hollywood what would we do differently. And one of the things we both came back to is like look for filmmakers who genuinely have a voice and a vision and make their movies. And Alfonso Cuarón is a great example of a filmmaker who has that. I think Rian Johnson, who’s going to be our guest in Austin, is a filmmaker who has that. And it was very smart money to spend that on Alfonso Cuarón and on that movie.

You have two giant stars in the movie who help make it safe to make the movie, but if you actually look at the film, if you had actors as good as Clooney and Sandra Bullock in your film, they didn’t need to be stars at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You could have made it with anybody who was as good as they are.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, the stars basically get you to show up opening weekend. The movie keeps you in your seat and the movie is what gets you to come back over and over.

**John:** I honestly think you could have made that with somebody who wasn’t Sandra Bullock and it would have turned out just —

**Craig:** You think it would have opened just the same?

**John:** I think it would have because I think you have that vision that —

**Craig:** That trailer was pretty remarkable.

**John:** That trailer is great. I mean, it was incredibly smartly marketed.

**Craig:** And she’s in a mask anyway, right? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, she is! She’s phenomenal in it, but I honestly think you could have put Noomi Rapace in it and it would have worked.

**Craig:** Look, he made Children of Men with — there were known actors like Clive Owen, but not necessarily what you’d call big movie stars. And people showed up for sure. He’s extraordinarily good at what he does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s special. He really is.

**John:** I think he’s got a future there.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know, it would be nice if he made more movies. But you know what that’s like? I don’t want the guy making the Cronuts to speed up production. You know, go ahead, make one every five years. If that’s what makes… — It’s like John Lee Hancock. Go ahead, make one every five years. If that’s what keeps the quality up, I’m happy.

**John:** I’m happy, too. Now, two other big actors who were recently doing press for a film are Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** Do you have your copy handy that we can read this together?

**Craig:** You want to be Morgan or you want me to be — ?

**John:** I think I need to be Morgan Freeman.

**Craig:** All right. You be Morgan and I’ll be Kline.

**John:** So, this is an interview about Last Vegas which is a film that they are out promoting. I think this is from Entertainment Weekly. And they’re talking about directors and the challenge of working with directors. So, I am Morgan Freeman.

**Craig:** And I am Kevin Kline.

**John:** [affects an accent] “Too many of them get in the way. You get the title of ‘director’ and you start directing actors rather than directing the movie.”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, why — this is a minstrel show. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] You think I’m trying to talk too Morgan Freeman?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like you’re getting black. Like “too many of them get in the way.”

**John:** I’m trying to do my serious narration voice.

**Craig:** You’re trying to do the Tittie Sprinkles Morgan Freeman.

**John:** Ha!

“I don’t like to be directed. The worst culprits are writers who direct their own material. Oh God.”

**Craig:** “When you arrive on set and the director goes, ‘Here’s my idea for this character,’ I go, ‘I’ll be right back!’ Or — and this was told to me by a really good director — he said, ‘Okay, here’s what I think your character is thinking at this moment.'”

**John:** “Ooh…”

**Craig:** “You tell me what I’m thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. You figure out where to put the camera and the light.”

**John:** “If you want me to go faster or to go slower, you can say that.”

**Craig:** [sighs]

**John:** Well, thank you Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline for making it super clear how you feel about the relationship between the writer and the director.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So I’m reading this and I’m thinking like, I quickly IMDb’d who directed Last Vegas.

**Craig:** I know! I know! Well, I mean —

**John:** It’s Jon Turteltaub. And like if you’re the director of this movie you’re going, “Oh my god!” Or if you’re a person who directed any movie with these people.

**Craig:** Well, let me give you a couple names of people whose jaws must have dropped. Morgan Freeman says, “The worst culprits are writers who direct their own material. Oh God.”

So, here are a couple of movies he’s been in where the writer directed the movie. The Batman movies, Chris Nolan.

**John:** Oh, that’s true.

**Craig:** And The Shawshank Redemption.

**John:** Oh yeah!

**Craig:** Frank Darabont.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess that was the worst.

**John:** That was clearly just the worst. It’s remarkable that that turned out okay considering that Frank Darabont…

**Craig:** It went okay. And then, of course, Kevin Kline makes a great point. “If a director says, ‘Here’s what I think your character is thinking at his moment,'” it is appropriate to just walk away because the director’s job is to figure out where to put the camera and the light. [laughs] What?!

**John:** Yes. How dare that director…

**Craig:** Direct!

**John:** …focus on. Yes. On this.

**Craig:** It’s unbelievable!

**John:** It really is just remarkable. So, I have this tiny little sliver of sympathy is that there are some terrible directors who will try to micromanage actors in ways that is maddening.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But to generalize it out to this degree is absolute madness. And so I found this just bewildering.

**Craig:** Look, no question that there are bad directors. And I can understand that it must be very frustrating if you are an actor of exceptional talent with enormous amount of experience, far more than say the director directing you. It must be very frustrating to have them interfere with the process in a way that is counterproductive.

However, when Morgan Freeman says, “You get the title of ‘director’ and you start directing actors rather than directing the movie,” all I can say is that’s their job. They’re responsible —

**John:** It is their job.

**Craig:** They’re responsible for your performance. Directing a movie isn’t like directing a documentary. You are creating performances with the actors.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, why can’t we — just like I’m… — You know, this reminds of those whiny writers, “The director, blah, blah, blah,” yeah, because he changed a thing? Because he had to. It happens sometimes. And it reminds me of those directors who are like, “Stupid writers. Making me shoot what’s on the page!” It’s just — this is clichéd goofy navel-gazing solipsism. I’m shocked by this.

**John:** Yeah. I’m surprised, too. And a little saddened, honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Because I like both of them and I think they’ve both done really good work. They’ve also done stuff that’s not been so awesome, but now I wonder what that process was like to get to the stuff that wasn’t so awesome.

**Craig:** Well…oh, and by the way, here’s one writer-director that Kevin Kline has worked with a couple times: Lawrence Kasdan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What a hack.

**John:** Lawrence Kasdan. God, that guy. Man. It’s remarkable that he’s…yeah.

**Craig:** You know, this is the kind of thing. Here’s my attempt to apologize for Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, who are terrific actors, and I assume that aside from this blip are fine gentlemen. Doing press for movies is awful and my guess is they were tired.

And then they started doing this thing that, look, as writers I’ll have conversations in this tone privately with other writers. You know, when you’re bucking yourself up and bitching and moaning. But to do it publicly like this is just bizarre. And certainly this example of here’s what I… — Even Kevin Kline’s example of this egregious behavior sounds like a very polite thing. “Here’s what I think your character is thinking at this moment.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is what I think. I’m directing the movie. I’m cutting it! When you’re gone, [laughs] I’m cutting it! Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re here for the middle part of this process. I was here before you. And I’ll be here after you. So, isn’t it fair that I express what I think your character is thinking? And if you disagree, let’s have a conversation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Geez, man. Bummer.

**John:** Yeah, but your job is to put the camera and the light in place.

**Craig:** The light. By the way, it’s not even the director’s job to put the light. It’s like how many movies has Kevin Kline been in? So, the DP puts the lights up. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Yeah. So that was dispiriting. And what’s frustrating is that it’s in a mainstream publication, so here are well respected actors who are quite talented who are saying that this is the way it should be. And so a general population — or god help us — a young aspiring actor thinks like, “That’s how you should be.”

**Craig:** Uh-uh. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No, no, no. And you know what?

**John:** You want to take full responsibility for your performance, but you also need to understand that your performance is part of a greater thing. A greater whole.

**Craig:** Of course. And I actually would bet money that neither Morgan Freeman nor Kevin Kline actually behave that way on sets. I think this is just kind of locker room boasting. I really do. I don’t believe because why? Why would you not be interested in what the director… — Look, if the director thinks that your character is thinking something else, they’re going to edit it that way. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know? I don’t know. It was pretty wild. It was pretty wild.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to assume also that these guys are probably also largely wonderful to have on the set. But the thing is even if you have a nightmare actor, in a film that nightmare actor is only there for while you’re shooting the film.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they can be a pain in the ass, but eventually you’ll be done. Where I have the greatest sympathy of all is for TV showrunners who are faced with a nightmare actor.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you and I both know people who are in those situations and that is a completely different beast.

**Craig:** Both, by the way, we know the other way, too, where a wonderful actor is jammed with a showrunner that is absolutely nuts. Bad marriages are bad.

**John:** It’s a conversation worth having the next time we have a guest on who does both TV and film, because it’s a completely different relationship when you are making one film versus a potentially five-year marriage on a TV show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very different dynamic and different way of thinking about things. Because you are stuck with these people.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And sometimes that’s great and sometimes it’s just really, really not great.

**Craig:** One thing that stuff like this brings to mind is that when you see a movie and you see things in it that are puzzling to you, it is natural to succumb to the illusion of intentionality, that everything is on screen because it was specifically intended to be that way and not, say, because the actor just had a completely different point of view and kind of just did something crazy. Or not because, say, the director blew it that day or there was a storm, or a set fell down, or they ran out of money, or a hundred things that can go wrong.

And, by the way, the opposite is true. Sometimes there are these wonderful moments in movies that were totally unplanned. They just happened.

**John:** Yes. And it’s lovely when those happen. Maybe a movie will get one of those and everything else will be fighting against the thing that happened that was not so awesome.

And you and I both, you know, not telling tales out of school, like Blade III was a classic example.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Wesley Snipes just refused to actually do what was in the script and a lawsuit —

**Craig:** He wouldn’t even talked to Goyer. He would not talk to him.

**John:** Yes. So, that is basically a nightmare situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there have been other big recent movies where you look at the movies like, whoa, how did that happen? And you talk to the people behind the scenes and they’re like, “He refused to say any words.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** Not just like he wouldn’t say the words on the page. He didn’t want to talk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, well, that makes it completely challenging to cut together a coherent story when that guy won’t talk.

**Craig:** Years ago I was on a set and the actor who was essentially the focus point of the scene, and was just there for a day, a cameo essentially, was drunk.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Not a little drunk. DRUNK.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there was nothing you could do. You just sort of did what you could, you know?

**John:** I was at the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab two years ago. I usually go there for the screenwriter’s portion of it in the summer, but I went for the director’s lab portion of it, which was great, and so much easier because basically as a director’s lab advisor you just show up on these little sets and you sort of see what they’re doing and if you have a good suggestion you say something. If you don’t, you just stand back and watch. As opposed to the screenwriter’s section where you actually had to read the scripts and talk through all the stuff. It’s exhausting.

So, the director’s section, I was up there and it was this little campfire scene. And the director clearly had a good plan for how he was going to shoot it. And there was this conversation. And I got there and I realized, I watched a take and I’m like, huh, that doesn’t really probably seem like what is supposed to be on the page. And then I realized that the older actor was completely drunk. And this was like eleven in the morning. Completely drunk.

And so as the advisor I had to pull the director fellow aside and say, “Look, I know you’re trying to cover this in a one-shot, and all this stuff. It’s just not going to happen. So, you’re going to have to really be smart about what you’re going to do and plan for what it is it going to be like when I’m in the editing room and I have to make sense of this thing and deal with the cards that you’re given.”

**Craig:** [pretending to slur] “You tell me what I’m thinking, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking! You figure out where to put the camera and the light. Action!” [laughs]

**John:** Uh-huh. Action!

**Craig:** Oy, thanks for calling their own action. The best part is at the very end Morgan Freeman says, “If you want me to go faster or to go slower, you can say that.” Thank you!

**John:** Thank you! That’s really nice. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Slower?

**John:** So, basically whatever Morgan Freeman’s first instinct is is exactly the right instinct.

**Craig:** It’s just the speed.

**John:** It could be just be go a little faster, or a little slower.

**Craig:** Right. Just the speed.

**John:** So, basically he’s a knob and you’re allowed to turn Morgan Freeman’s knob a little bit. Not a lot.

**Craig:** Turning Morgan Freeman up. There’s a story — I assume it’s true — that George Lucas when he was directing the first Star Wars movie, the only direction he would ever give to any of them was either louder or faster. And Harrison Ford, who was a carpenter, made a board, a wooden board, and he put two lights and switch. And one thing said louder and one thing said faster. And so he said, “Here, you can just turn it.” And apparently Lucas didn’t laugh.

**John:** Yeah. And then in the prequels, he just decided to hold up a board and that was the acting style.

**Craig:** Right! The board was bored.

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** Geez Louise.

**John:** Geez. Yeah, I felt bad. I know Ewan. Ewan is fantastic. But that, ugh.

**Craig:** Argh. What are you gonna do?

**John:** What are you gonna do? We’re not going to talk about the prequels anymore.

**Craig:** Natalie Portman is a great actor.

**John:** She is.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve seen Natalie Portman literally blow me away and then it’s like, um, boy, boy, nobody was helping her out.

**John:** No one is fantastic in those.

**Craig:** You can’t be.

**John:** No one is.

**Craig:** Because I got the feeling that they were in empty green rooms and there was no connection to anything. They didn’t understand what they were saying. The dialogue wasn’t particularly good. So, they were just sort of like, “What about this?”

And by the way, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, you know, that’s when you get when the director is not helping you at all. [laughs] They’re like, “Go ahead. Yeah, no, you’re right. Just do it.”

**John:** “Just do that.”

**Craig:** “Nope, you know what? You tell me when you’re done.”

**John:** I think George Lucas —

**Craig:** “Yeah. And then we’ll move on.”

**John:** George Lucas knew where to put the lights. He put the camera. And look: success.

**Craig:** “Yeah, I’m done. I’m going to go have lunch. And somebody just send a PA to my trailer when you guys have decided that you got it.”

**John:** What is fascinating is that the director is in some ways the person who is the least — you could make it without the director to some certain degree. Like the AD could sort of like look at a shot list and tell everyone what to do. And someone could call action. That’s fine. And the actors could do their stuff. And you could do it all without that.

But without the director actually saying like, “Yes, this is what I want, no, this is not what I want, we’re going again, change this thing,” you don’t get anything done. And there’s no progress.

**Craig:** Well, of course. And let me also point out. You wouldn’t even be there at that point without a director anyway, because who has decided what everyone’s wearing, who’s decided what the sets look like, who’s decided that that’s what you’re even shooting that day? Everything is about the vision, the combined vision of the screenwriter and the director, who is oftentimes the same individual, much to Morgan Freeman’s chagrin, working with the actors to create a performance and a moment.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Anyway. So, you know what? They’re great actors. I’m sure they’re great people. Hopefully this was just a weird moment for them. Maybe not. [laughs] We’ll find out.

**John:** [laughs] All right. We had a reader write in with a question that I thought was interesting. So, he says, “I am a semi-finalist in this year’s Nicholl Fellowship.”

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** “And because of that my name is being circulated around town with other semi-finalists.” Congratulations. “Several managers and production companies have contacted me requesting the Nicholl script,” which is natural.

“One manager read the script right away. Loved it. Requested more scripts. Loved them. And set up a meeting. We met in his office and he did most of the talking, telling me his background, how he works, what he does.

“Of my scripts he liked a TV pilot, but they can’t do anything with it until TV season,” TV pilot season. “He also liked the semi-finalist feature but said it stood a better chance if I cut 15 pages. Both made sense to me. I pitched him the script I’m currently working on as well as log lines for two others on my writing to do list. He offered some feedback like he did for the pilot and the Nicholl feature, feedback about how I can best shave the project to increase its chances with the connections he has.

“At the end of the meeting, which lasted two hours, he asked if any other managers had contacted me. I said yes, but didn’t go into detail. He said, ‘Let’s keep in touch,’ and then we parted ways.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “This is the first manager I’ve ever met. So my questions are: What happened? Was this a good meeting or bad? He’s a young guy and seems like a good guy, but I don’t have anyone to compare him to. What’s the next step?”

**Craig:** Hmm. That is a good question. Well, you’re approaching this from a natural point of view of the young ingénue in the bar who’s just been hit on by a man. And you’re wondering, well geez, what does all that mean, and so on and so forth. I would argue to you that you flip the situation in your head and think of yourself as in charge and think of what you want as the thing that’s going to drive what happens next.

So, what happens next ideally is what you want to have happen next. If you like this manager and you think that he — is it a he or she?

**John:** I think it’s a he.

**Craig:** If you like this guy and you think that he is a good fit for you and that his position in the industry will help you, then you call up and say, “I want you to be my manager. Let’s sit down and talk about it. Let’s talk about what the arrangement will be and how it works, but I’m interested in you being my manager instead of these other people that want to be my manager.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Real simple.

**John:** I agree with you. So, hopefully by the time we’re actually giving him this advice he’s met with some other people so he has a better sense of like who other personalities are and stuff. But it sounded like a good meeting to me.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Two hours is a long meeting. And if you like what his comments were about your scripts and the things you were talking about for log lines, that’s a good thing.

So, yes, generally that manager guy would follow up more, but if he hasn’t followed up more you can totally take the reins and call him back and say, “Yes.”

The true story is I hired my attorney, Ken Richman, and my agent, Kramer, had sent me out to meet a bunch of attorneys, but Richman was the first person I met. It was like, well, you’re perfect. So done. And I just said yes right there in the room and that was the guy and he’s been my attorney ever since.

So, sometimes it just clicks and it’s just right and that can be good and proper.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Now, I would say this guy is young and that’s not a bad thing. And I think sometimes you get nervous about like, “Well, this person is really young and doesn’t know what they’re doing.” Well, but you’re also young and you don’t really know what you’re doing. So, sometimes it’s good to get somebody who is at that same place in life as you are and hopefully you’ll grow up together.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And if you like his taste, because he obviously has good taste if he likes your script, if you like his notes, if you like his general style, if you don’t think you’re going to dread getting phone calls and emails from him, it might be the right fit.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And I also kind of like the deal where he said, “Yeah, we had a meeting and I really enjoyed meeting with you,” and he’s not chasing you. He’s not being desperate. Nobody meets with anybody for two hours if it’s a bad meeting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No such thing. If you’re in a room with somebody and you’re, “Oh, god, this guy is just a zero, he’s a dud. I can’t sell him, I can’t sell his work. He doesn’t have anything else, he’s strange,” they just end it. And they give you some sort of shine on and off you go. But, no, two hours, obviously he’s interested. But he also knows that you’re out there meeting other managers and he’s sort of properly saying, “Great. All right. Well, let’s keep in touch meaning you tell me if you want to work with me. I’m not going to beg you. But I’m aware that you have to go do your due diligence.”

So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** I think that’s simple advice.

Craig, it’s come time for One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is actually in the blockbuster theme. I started wondering like well what happened to all the old Blockbuster stores. Have they all been rebuilt as other things? The truth is, no. And so I found this website that had a great collection of photos of abandoned video stores which I think is such a terrific time capsule of sort of where we are right now.

Because it was a specifically built kind of place to hold a specific thing that we don’t need any more. And so Blockbusters themselves were pretty big and they had all those shelves. And they had a thing — it’s not all that straight forward to convert them to something else. It’s not like those giant Walmarts which are sort of a nightmare to convert to something else, but they’re just this sort of sad thing that exists.

And so I’ll put a link in the show notes for abandoned video stores.

**Craig:** Cool. Eerie. It’s like those photo essays of Detroit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** Sorry, Detroit listeners, but —

**John:** Blockbuster video is sort of like the city of Detroit.

**Craig:** It’s like Detroit.

So, my One Cool Thing today is, as promised, Grand Theft Auto based. So, lots of fan-made videos because Grand Theft Auto V is such an enormous world. And there’s lots of fun things to do and most of the videos are generally mayhem. There’s some cool videos that a guy has done of five-star police chases. So, in Grand Theft Auto V, if you commit a minor crime like say punching someone or running someone over with a car and killing them, you get one star.

But as you continue to evade the police, or shoot at police, or things like that, your stars escalate. And the more stars you have, the more police are coming after you in helicopters. Five star, to even get five stars you’ve just got to go nuts. It’s hard to even get to it. And then there’s a cop literally every 12 feet. And so people have done these crazy five-star chase videos and videos where they pile up a bunch of cars and blow them all up. It’s fun.

But there’s one series that I think is amazing because it shows just how detailed and brilliant the game is. And it’s called GTA V Mythbusters. And there’s, I think, five of them. And basically they collect these myths that people put out there like, for instance, if you light a car on fire in Grand Theft Auto V, which you can do by pouring gasoline on it and then lighting it on fire, and then drive it into water. The water will extinguish the fire and you can save the car. And then they test it and they say, “Oh, yup, that’s true.”

**John:** Nice. This engine actually does — yeah, that’s great.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Or like if you lure police helicopters into the turbine wind farms in the Mohave Desert area, the wind turbines will destroy the helicopter. True. [laughs]

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** But there are some amazing ones that like never would have even occurred to me. For instance, I didn’t even realize, okay, so if you take a car and you light it on fire with some gasoline. Pour some gasoline on it, light it on fire, stand back. Eventually it will explode. I did not know that if you shot a car in the hood, then you could see gasoline spurting out of it. And you can actually drive the car until you run out of gas.

I did not know that. Then the question was myth. A car without gas in it will not explode. [laughs] So, they do this. They drive the car. It runs out of gas. It stops. They get out. They pour gasoline on top of the car. Light the car on fire and sit back. It does not explode.

**John:** Now, Craig, the crucial question which every listener is asking right now is are there Teslas in the game?

**Craig:** There are!

**John:** And I’m so happy to hear that.

**Craig:** Okay, now the deal with the Grand Theft Auto universe is that they don’t license real auto manufacturer names. They just fake them. They come up with copies. And I was kind of bummed because I was really hoping for a Tesla in the game and I couldn’t find one.

And then the other day I just randomly yanked some woman out of her car, as I typically do to drive somewhere, [laughs], and I got in —

**John:** You’re going to go home so you can play the game.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I was here in Old Town. And what I true and do in the game is if I have to go somewhere and I don’t have a car, I wait until a really cool car comes and then I steal that one, because it’s faster and it’s more fun.

So, this sporty car comes up and it looks like one I’ve maybe been in before. I yank a lady out. I get in. I start driving. I’m going super fast and I realize it’s not making any noise. And I’m like, wait a second. And so I stop the car and adjusted the camera so I could see the back of the car and it was a Coil. That was the brand name. Coil.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** And it was clearly a Tesla Roadster. So, when they were developing the game I assume they developed it before the Model S was a big deal, but the Tesla Roadster was still out there. So, the Tesla Roadster is in the game. It’s called a Coil. And it’s my favorite. And so I put it in a garage. It’s nice and safe.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** It’s such a good… — But anyway, GTA V Mythbusters, it’s so entertaining to watch it because some of that stuff is just — some of it, like, oh, there’s a strange glitch. Like if you land a helicopter on top of a jumbo jet you can get inside the jumbo jet and pilot it which is just ridiculous and glitchy. But some of it is just about the detail, the specificity of the details is just remarkable.

**John:** Yeah, it really is a remarkable universe. And so I deliberately — I don’t want my daughter to know that we actually have the game, so I keep it out there, but I do know parents who will like go out deep sea diving with their kids. Like the kid has no idea what the game actually is.

**Craig:** Oh cute.

**John:** You will drive carefully to the beach and then you will go deep sea diving. It’s like, oh, how nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I won’t let my son anywhere near it. No way. Yeah.

**John:** Good parenting with Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. Real easy, obvious parenting with Craig Mazin.

**John:** Great. So, standard boilerplate ending here. If you would like to send a message to me or Craig, Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions can be sent to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you would like a USB drive with the first 100 episodes of the show, we have a few more of those left so you can go to store.johnaugust.com and we are selling those there.

Craig and I will both be at the Austin Film Festival next week, so the next episode you hear will be one of our live shows, which will be fun.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And if you’re listening to us in iTunes or if you’re connected to iTunes, leave us a comment there because that helps other people find us and enjoy our show.

**Craig:** Thanks everybody.

**John:** Thanks everybody. Have a great week, Craig. And I’ll see you in Austin.

**Craig:** See you in Texas. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Come see Scriptnotes live at the 2013 [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/the-big-business-of-big-hits-how-blockbusters-conquered-movies-tv-and-music/280298/) on Anita Elberse’s new book, Blockbusters, and the book [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805094334/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Gravity](http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/) is in theaters now
* The relevant [Last Vegas interview excerpt](http://instagram.com/p/faO_XwGZ1W/)
* KnowYourMeme on [Morgan Freeman, Titty sprinkles](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/morgan-freeman)
* IndieWire on [the Blade: Trinity lawsuit](http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/details-of-chaos-on-the-set-of-blade-trinity-indicate-production-was-troubled-from-the-start)
* Sundance Institute’s [feature film programs](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film/)
* [Internet killed the Video Store: An Abandoned Industry](http://www.messynessychic.com/2012/09/06/internet-killed-the-video-store-an-abandoned-industry/) is John’s [One Cool Thing](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* And [GTA V Mythbusters](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVSZoKmDBr8UdW2MjaDo5uZ8ESO68Bdrk) is Craig’s [One Cool Thing](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Ashley Kotzur