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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
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/what-is-a-movie-idea).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 57 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, the one thing that’s interesting to me as a screenwriter is I just saw your trailer for Identify Thief.

**Craig:** Teaser trailer.

**John:** Teaser trailer is the short version. But it felt like a satisfying appetizer to a big meal.

**Craig:** That’s the idea, yeah. It was interesting. There’s a lot about it that’s very cool that I like. I mean, sort of selling the scope and the action of the movie. My suspicion is that the official trailer when it finally comes will have more character and interaction between Jason and Melissa, which is for me the fun part. So, I’m kind of excited to see where it evolves.

But I love the posters. I think they’re really funny and cool.

**John:** Oh, what I liked about this teaser trailer is it setup what the basic idea of the movie is. So, Jason Bateman is a person whose identity gets stolen. He has a name that could be mistaken as a woman’s name, and in fact Melissa McCarthy is the woman who has assumed his identity. And she is insane, which is crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s pretty out there. But one thing I like about the movie is that she’s out there, but not maybe as out there as you might initially think. So, there some cool surprises and some cool twists.

And this wasn’t my original idea. A guy named Jerry Eaton wrote a spec script many years ago and I essentially did a page one rewrite. I mean, I sort of just started fresh, but I used… — It’s a great idea. And I think it’s one of those ideas that’s great because it’s relevant.

And it’s also one of those ideas where you hear it and you go, “I can’t believe no one else thought of that. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Why didn’t I think of that?” So, kudos to Jerry for a spectacular idea. And I have high hopes. I think people will like it.

**John:** Great. And it occurs to me now that this will be the last podcast before Frankenweenie comes out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Frankenweenie will be in theaters this Friday, for people who are listening to this on Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday. And Frankenweenie turned out really, really well. It’s nice to have a movie that I can sort of talk freely about, because it’s been screened enough that I don’t have to keep any secrets back or away. We screened at Fantastic Fest in Austin. And we’re screening at the London Film Festival, and lots of places where people can see this movie.

And it turned out really nicely. So, I thought today we would talk about three different things, one of them being this process of putting out a movie. Topics I proposed for today:

First is, what is a movie idea? And so what is the difference between an idea that might be great for a book, or great for a play, but what is a movie idea.

Second, I want to talk about press junkets, something that I just went through, and you’ve been through a bunch of times. And it’s sort of how the sausage is made.

And, finally, David Denby has a long article in the New York — actually, I think the New Republic…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …on sort of the perceived death of not the film industry overall, but of a certain kind of movie. And I thought we might talk about that a little bit, too.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Cool. So, let’s start on, this actually came from a question that a reader wrote in. I will read you this question. John from Austin asks, “On the podcast you and Craig both say that one of the first questions a screenwriter should ask him or herself is, ‘Why should this be a movie?’ I was wondering how you guys answer that question when you set out to write your scripts. For instance, why do you think Go needed to be a movie? Or why Big Fish needed to be adapted into a movie and now a play? Is it because the material is highly visual, or action-packed? When writing myself I usually answer the ‘why should this be a movie?’ question with, ‘because I want it to be.'”

And so I want to sort of pull that apart into two threads here and really talk about one of them. When you say something “wants to be a movie,” you’re really talking about two different things. One is does the universe want this story to sort of exist? Does it feel like the kind of thing where there’s an audience for some version of this story about your blind pickle maker who inherits a rat factory? Does this want to be told in some capacity?

And if the answer to that is yes, this is really the more crucial piece that we’ll talk about right now, is that idea a movie idea or is it some other kind of idea? Is it really a better idea for a TV series, or a short film, or a short story, or a play? Does it want to be a movie? Is that the best incarnation of that idea? So, I thought we’d talk about what makes a good movie idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, we’ve talked in the past about the idea of why the sort of heart and soul of whatever the movie is. And so, I just like to ask what would an audience relate to through this story that is not specific to the plot of the story, which is a weird kind of thing to say, but we tell stories because there are universal truths. There is some kind of enlightenment inside of them that is applicable for everyone sitting in the theater. Everyone.

So few of us have been in a car chase, and yet there is something about a car chase. So few of us have had a spouse kidnapped, but there’s something about that that allows us to put ourselves in the position. And ideally there is a takeaway from the movie that isn’t about the specifics, but rather is about a larger dramatic question. “Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?” That can be put into any number of scenarios that have nothing to do plot-wise with each other.

So, that’s the first question when I ask does this need to be a movie, or should this be a movie. I want to know that there is something at the heart of it that is relevant beyond the details of the movie itself.

**John:** But when you talk about that central dramatic question, I agree that’s a crucial element to a movie. I really feel like that’s a crucial element to most kinds of literature we’re talking about though. That’s a crucial question for a novel, that’s a crucial question for many things.

**Craig:** You’re right.

**John:** So I want to sort of drill it down on sort of what makes something a movie idea. And I had a couple criteria, and maybe you can add some criteria or push back on anything you don’t agree with.

I think a movie idea tends to have, no, it needs to have a beginning, and a middle, and an end. Which is that a movie idea has to have an idea that is expressed well in, “This is how the story starts, this is the middle of the story, and this is the end of the story.”

And, if you think about a TV series, a TV series doesn’t necessarily have an end. A TV series is the kind of story, the kind of idea, that should be able to sort of keep propagating itself, and keep rolling along. So, a TV series can go on for seven seasons. Or, some British TV series may only last for eight episodes, but eight episodes is a very different feeling than a two-hour movie.

So, is the best form of this story going to be told with a beginning, a middle, and an end that’s going to fall in about a two-hour window?

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And some ideas lend themselves to that; some don’t. Second thing I would point out with movies is: movies are about characters. An essay could be about an idea. A choreographed number could have people in it, but they’re actually representing the waves, or — like — a wall. The movies are about characters. And specifically they’re about characters who have some sort of identifiable objective or goal.

It may not be classically the Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Quest, but there is something — you can point at a character in any movie that you watch on the big screen and you know what that character is trying to do, both in that moment and hopefully overall within the course of the story. Fair?

**Craig:** Yeah. That is fair, well, to an extent, because television is also about characters.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Specifically when I think of sitcoms, they’re almost solely about characters, even though they’re called “situation comedies,” the whole point is the situations themselves, they’re farcical or they’re silly, but it really is just about watching these people navigate their daily lives.

The thing about movie characters is they are in need of completion. Movies are conclusive. So, if your story seems to want to be about someone who has a specific flaw that needs to be repaired, somebody who has an injury that needs to be healed, somebody who has a fear that needs to be overcome. And all those sentences involve conclusion, and completion, then it seems like a movie story.

If you have an idea that’s really about characters who are slowly evolving, changing, falling in love, falling out of love, encountering a new way of life and it’s more of a — and the value of your story seems to be more in the journey than in a sense of conclusivity, then it may be more of a TV idea.

**John:** Absolutely. There is a reason why Friends is a TV series. And that you’re watching these characters week after week, and you’re watching them slowly grow and change. And what you can point to, “This is Rachel’s objective in this episode.” That’s not her overall life objective that we’re seeing reach some sort of conclusion in this period of time.

**Craig:** Right. In fact, she doesn’t have an overall life objective.

**John:** Which is part of her character. Yeah.

Another thing I would say as you’re looking at movie ideas: movies are set in some kind of concrete space and time. So, you can say there is central dramatic question, but behind them and behind those characters and the things they are doing, they take place in an identifiable world or universe. Now, it could be a completely made up world. It could be the Matrix, or it could be Avatar, but there’s something we’re seeing on screen behind those characters. And you compare that to some surrealist fiction, or you compare that to songs, or essays, or dance pieces, those can be really abstract and do not have to be pinned down to any one place or time.

Movies are more literal. There’s going to be something that you’re seeing on screen. And if you’re not sure of what you would actually see on screen, then that maybe is not a movie idea yet. Or you haven’t found the expression that it is a movie idea.

**Craig:** Right. Yes. If your story seems to demand a limitation of space, if you want to tell — and I hesitate to say this because there are always exceptions, you know. But if you are telling the story of three friends who meet every Friday at a diner, it may be a TV show. Now it also turned out to be a movie. [laughs]

**John:** And now it’s a musical.

**Craig:** And there have been wonderful movies that seemed to be centered around a place. There’s that terrific movie Smoke, I really like that movie, and that really takes place in a shop mostly. But by and large if your story is confined by a single space it may be better suited for either a stage play or a television show, because stage plays and television shows are also confined by space. The economics of television, for sitcoms specifically, demands kind of a set place. They try and limit your locations.

Now, if you were getting at a comedy, if you’re talking about a story that seems to require serialization, you certainly want to obviously go towards television. You never, and I hear people say things like this, they’ll say, “Well, I’m writing a movie, and it’s really the first of five movies,” or “it’s the first of a trilogy.” Don’t do that, because nobody is really buying a trilogy, ever.

They’re going to need to make your movie. It’s going to need to stand up on its own, by itself, and then they’ll decide if they want another installment.

**John:** It’s great that you have an idea for what the trilogy would be…

**Craig:** But if you need that, then you should be dealing in television

**John:** Yeah. Last sort of criteria I would say is that movies need to make sense while you’re watching them. And that sounds crazy, but if you’re reading a book you have the opportunity to stop and go back and flip through pages, like, “Oh, I forgot who that character was; I can go back and see that.” Movies have to be able to make sense the first time through.

That doesn’t mean that a person couldn’t be watching it on DVD and go back and see something, or on the third time viewing it they catch something new. But on the whole they need to actually make sense the first time through. That’s not necessarily going to apply for a short story, or an essay, or a choreographed performance.

Something that’s a movie needs to actually make sense by the time the lights come up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Television has a rhythm that demands cliffhangers. Even if you’re, aside from commercial television, cable television demands cliffhangers because people will watch their episode and that last scene needs to tease them to watch the next one. And we don’t have that in movies. We have reversals, and we have mysteries, and we have moments, but our stories don’t demand cliffhangers. If you’re writing television, any serialized television, your story needs to be able to provide you cliffhangers.

I guess we could talk about the reverse question, “Well, is this really a TV idea or is this more of a movie idea?” If your serialized television idea doesn’t inherently provide you the opportunity for cliffhangers, you might want to think about maybe a movie.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at some actual properties. Let’s take a look at Game of Thrones. So, Game of Thrones, based on a wildly popular series of giant novels, was adapted as a television series. And so why does that want to be a television series as opposed to a movie? Or, what would be different if we were looking at that as a movie idea?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, you’re dealing with scope. So, the scope of the source material is such that a movie is impossible. There is some source material that could go either way. The Watchmen very famously was sort of viewed as unadaptable for many years because it was 12 comic books, each one of them was very dense with material and it just didn’t seem possible to tell the story coherently, even though once you had read — as a movie — even though once you had read all 12 you could see that there was an enormous amount of thematic unification in the whole thing. And it would be ideal if it were a movie.

I actually think that Zack Snyder did a pretty good job. But when you look at Game of Thrones, there’s no question. You simply could not contain that world and therefore you could not deliver what is satisfying about the books if you jammed it into even a three hour movie.

It’s the same reason that Peter Jackson famously turned down the opportunity to make Lord of the Rings as one movie with the Weinsteins and instead made it as three movies with New Line.

**John:** But what I would point out with Lord of the Rings, though, is Lord of the Rings at least has a clear beginning, middle, and end. You have a quest to do something. We have to bring this ring, you know, there’s one specific thing we’re trying to do. It’s incredibly complicated all the way around it, but there is a beginning, a middle, and end to that…

**Craig:** True.

**John:** …which is there is not in Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is an ongoing saga with no clear central protagonist, very long arcs, sudden reversals. To me it feels like a TV idea.

**Craig:** For sure. Yeah, and you’re right because in fact there was an animated movie of The Lord of the Rings that was made in the ’70s and it was one movie. I mean, that is a containable — you’re right: One protagonist; one main quest line. And quite the opposite for Game of Thrones.

Also, Game of Thrones is not yet resolved, [laughs] so you don’t even know if you even wanted to try and tell the story of Game of Thrones in one movie. You couldn’t because it hasn’t been written yet.

And, so, you just have to ask: where is all the joy? Where is all the good stuff in this? And the good stuff in Game of Thrones is in the details. And if you read those books you will see even how Martin will end chapters with cliffhangers. And you realize, “Oh, well that’s where the episode should end.” You know, David Benioff and Dan Weiss do a spectacular job of corralling that material into discrete episodes, each one of which feels like it deserves to exist, and none of them feel like a filler episode just to pad out a season. I suspect that that is 50% of the agony of making that show is trying to figure out how to compress that which needs to be compressed and how to expand that which feels like it should be expanded.

But, yeah, you could never do that as a… — You could do it as a movie, it would just stink. So why?

**John:** Yeah. You’d be leaving out so much stuff that it wouldn’t be the same idea. So, let’s talk about another example. This is the Charlie’s Angels movie, the first movie, which is based on a TV series. And so I want to talk about the changes you make in taking a property that was a TV series and worked as a TV series and how we had to look at it as a movie.

Obviously the plot of the movie has to be… — We have to introduce, a TV series you don’t have to introduce the Angels each time. You introduce them in the pilot episode and then it’s just a given that these are the three Angels who work for Charlie, and they go on these cases, and there is going to be resolution with the cases every week. In a movie we have to introduce who these young women are. We have to introduce what these women want. And the characters themselves have to motivate much more of the plot and the story than they would in any given episode of Charlie’s Angels.

Charlie’s Angels as a TV series, the plot is beamed in. The plot is given to them and they work on the plot and they solve the plot. In a movie version of Charlie’s Angels, the Angels have to create a lot more of the plot, and that means in many cases it’s really the subplots, the individual things they’re trying to do. But they’re responsible themselves for much more of the plot. And it needs to be a story that can have the builds and changes over the course of a two-hour movie that a one-hour episode would never have to do.

So, you couldn’t just take, “Oh, that was a really good episode of the show,” and sort of expand it into a movie. It had to have its own engine. And the Angels themselves had to be at the wheel for the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. When you adapt for the screen you also have to account for just the size. Just the size of the screen. Television is small. They’re getting bigger, but traditionally small, certainly in the time of Charlie’s Angels they were small.

And so it’s a bit of a waste to create large cinematic set pieces because they just wouldn’t fit very well on the screen. They’d look dumb. When you’re making a movie on a big screen you want to excite the audience and you want to use the physical space you have in front of them.

When I adapted Harvey, I was adapting Mary Chase’s play. And so it was set up for stage. And I think there were two sets basically, two places. Three, sorry. There was a bar, a house, and basically a mental institution.

**John:** But I would point out that in the actual play you never go to that bar. They talk about the bar, but you never actually go to that bar.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, you’re right. You know what? The bar was actually in the movie in the first adaptation. But even the movie — when they made movies of plays they oftentimes just shot them like the play because it was cheap, and it was easy, and people were used to movies on sets.

The old movies, a lot of old movies look like filmed stage plays. Not all of them, of course. We’ll be talking about Stagecoach and The Searchers later. But, when I did my adaptation I really tried to avoid what I called “claustrophobia,” for lack of a better word. I wanted to get outside. I wanted to see New York. I wanted to put them in the park. I wanted to put them on the street. I wanted to have them get out of the city for a day and make that meaningful and make the change of space meaningful.

These are the things you have to think about, because ultimately someone’s going to have to sit down and shoot this thing. And after the twelfth day of shooting in the same room, everyone is going to look at each other and say, “Why are we still here shooting?”

**John:** Yeah. That’s not to say you can’t make My Dinner with Andre. It’s just that’s going to be challenging in ways that you’re probably not anticipating sustaining the audience’s interest, because you are not using most of the tools that you’ve been given for making a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want to also talk, one last thing occurs to me that could kind of go both ways, which is Preacher, which I adapted as a movie, and before had been adapted as a TV series, neither of which has shot. And when I got the assignment to write Preacher as a movie, there was a tremendous amount of fan boy comments, like, “Oh, that’s a terrible idea; it should be an HBO series. It should be a series for cable.”

And I think the instinct behind that was that people were looking at the comic book series and seeing like there are all of these stories and there’s all this stuff that happens. And if it’s too much for one movie, and so therefore it needs to be a series. And people were sort of figuring out, “Oh, these things together could be one season.” They basically had everything mapped out for me, so that was great — so just go ahead and do that.

And someone actually had tried to do it as a series for HBO and it hadn’t happened and it hadn’t worked. So, when I took Preacher as a movie, what I argued is that — I had sort of this road trip analogy in that the heart of Preacher to me is a road trip with these three characters. And it’s a cross-country road trip to discover what’s really going on here. And that the journey of Preacher is really about being in the car with these three people.

And so if in the comic book series they took a 50 day road trip across America and this winding path all across the 48 states, the movie version of this would be a quicker route through some different places, but the same kinds of things would happen because you have the same three people in the car, and that the same character stories could very easily happen in a movie version, and it would be a rewarding experience.

So, some things can go different ways.

**Craig:** Well, people who love material tend to want to see all of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you’re going to shoot something I love and I know every single panel of, or every single word of, I want you to shoot all of it, and I want it to be just like I saw it in my head. And I don’t want you to cut corners. And I don’t want you to leave things out. And for the love of God, I certainly don’t want you to change the story just to make it fit.

But, you have to look at what the material is. And there are times when frankly not everybody loves it quite as dearly as some of the people who are devoted to it. Now, one interesting example of this is Sandman, the absolutely mind-blowing graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. One of my favorite things — I won’t even say one of my favorite pieces of art or literature; just one of my favorite things.

And Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott were hired many years ago by Warner Brothers to try and make one movie out of it, which on its face seems just as impossible as making a movie of Game of Thrones. I mean, there were — I’m not sure how many specific volumes of Sandman there are, but it covered many years and it is — in scope it is mind-boggling, absolutely mind-boggling. You’re going across thousands of years, multiple dimensions, probably 50, 60, 70 characters. Sequences that completely remove you from the narrative and put you into side narratives.

All of which amazingly reconnect, like, two years later into the series. I mean, I don’t know how he did it. Truly, I can’t imagine how he did it. But, so Terry and Ted have this seemingly impossible task, and they made a choice, which was to pull one story out, a good one, a significant one, and tell the Sandman story just limited through the lens of that story.

And ultimately Warner Brothers didn’t make the movie. I would love to see Benioff and Weiss take a crack at that one when Game of Thrones runs its course. I think they would be — to turn that into an HBO series would just be unbelievable. Unbelievable.

**John:** Yeah. So we look at however many issues of Sandman there were, it is a drop in the bucket to how many episodes and issues there were of Batman.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you say like, “Oh, you’ve changed something in Batman.” Well, which Batman are you talking about? Are you talking about the original Bob Kane Batman? That would be really fascinating to see that as a movie, or a series, or anything else. But that’s not sort of Batman anymore.

And so in the process of time and other adaptations, Batman becomes a generalized enough character that we’ve accepted the fact that there can be multiple incarnations of it. And so we can do a Batman movie and it makes sense.

And now it seems weird to think of a Batman series, but of course you could do a Batman series.

**Craig:** And they did.

**John:** Yeah. And we have the Spiderman Musical.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, Batman is the work of collective authorship, even though Bob Kane sort of — it begins with him. There have been many people who have written for Batman. You can’t look at Batman and say this is the work of singular authorship. Frank Miller reinvented Batman. There are multiple people involved.

Sandman is Neil Gaiman. Just like Watchmen was Alan Moore. And they were contained. Nobody — I mean, they’re trying to do a new Watchmen, and I think they are doing a new Watchmen. I’m not going to look at it, I just can’t. But there shouldn’t be any other Sandman, just that one, you know. So, when it’s a standalone work of single authorship it’s harder to sort of just do another thing. Whereas Batman, Spiderman, Superman, they feel accessible and retellable. And I think that is function of the multiple author nature of that storyline.

**John:** Great. So I want to take a quick pass at two ideas and let’s talk about them as movie ideas versus other kinds of ideas. So, just random ideas.

So, an alien artifact is discovered in the Himalayas. What’s the movie version of that? Or what’s a movie version of that?

**Craig:** And actual existing movie you mean?

**John:** No. If that was the idea, like there’s this alien artifact and it’s discovered in the Himalayas. So, how does that want to tell itself as a movie.

**Craig:** I mean, my immediate instinct is that you’ve got an expedition trying to climb Everest. And probably a character that needs to climb Everest. And then they encounter this thing and the climb becomes — which was already a difficult test — becomes one of much larger survival. Man versus alien in the snowy cliffs of the Himalayas.

**John:** Exactly. So, there are characters who are doing something whose trajectory is changed by the discovery of this thing and they have to resolve what this thing has unleashed in the course of that two-hour movie.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty cool idea for a movie.

**John:** As opposed to, that could also be the inciting incident for the pilot of a TV series. But then it would be sort of like: What has this artifact changed about the world so that the nature of our world is different on a week, to week, to week basis?

**Craig:** Yeah. It can’t be a TV show because you’re stuck in the Himalayas.

**John:** You’re not necessarily stuck in the Himalayas. Maybe you’re discovering this thing in the Himalayas but you’re transporting it someplace else.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe then.

**John:** Another simpler topic. So, the idea is a family in which everyone has that disease the kids have in The Others where they can’t be in sunlight, so the whole family has that disease. So, as a TV series, you can sort of see that. That they are sort of like the night family. Their world is upside down because they’re at night.

In a movie, though… — So you could accept that as a preexisting situation in a TV series.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** In a movie there would be a new thing that happened in the movie, or something big has to happen at the start of that movie that creates a specific situation for this family that changes their situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you were doing a movie version, I could see that you would start with say a girl who moves to town and is normal and meets this guy at night. And then discovers he can’t be outside during the day. And there is some kind of romance and test. But, it seems…

**John:** It’s like a Nicholas Sparks. It’s like a really dark Nicholas Sparks movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a little bit of kind of vampire romance, even though they’re not vampires. But it’s not resolvable. And, frankly, it seems so odd; it seems like when the movie ends you think, “Yeah, but they’re still stuck in their house.” There’s something — the premise that you just laid out there implies continuation.

**John:** I agree with you. And so I think that family is only half of a movie idea. I think it’s a good underlying TV idea. It’s only really half a movie idea because that’s not actually telling you plot. Whereas that alien artifacts sort of implied a plot. We need to know what the resolvable plot is within the course of this two hours for this to be a successful movie.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Because they can’t go outside. So, if they can’t go outside there’s no completion there. It just seems a little odd.

**John:** Yeah.

All right. Next topic. I want to talk about junkets, usually press junkets, because I just went through this this last weekend for Frankenweenie. And they’re bizarre. And the only, I think, onscreen portrayal I’ve ever seen of them was in this movie America’s Sweethearts with Julia Roberts and John Cusack. And I didn’t love the movie, but it sort of felt like what a press junket feels like.

So, here’s the idea behind a press junket, is there are so many newspapers, magazines, and particularly blogs that you want to put your filmmakers in front of and your cast in front of. And if you were to try to do this individually it would take forever. And so, “Well, what if we just got all of our cast and all of our filmmakers together and we got all of these journalists together and we stuck them in rooms? And just over the course of one or two days just banged it all out?” And that was the instinct behind a press junket.

And so I just went through this this last weekend for Frankenweenie. And this was at the Grand California, the big hotel that’s next to California Adventure/Disneyland.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, it was kind of fun. It was kind of exhausting. And you’ve been through this on many movies probably, right?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. So I’ll talk through what happened with this, but it’s pretty typical and we can talk sort of pros and cons and what you learn from them.

So, in the morning they gather everybody together, they feed them with coffee, and they give them lots of sort of swag from the movie, little dolls and things. And then they break the journalists up into different rooms. And so in this case there were seven rooms. And so there were maybe 10 or 12 journalists in each room.

At the front of the room is a table, and there were two microphones, because they broke us into teams of two. So, Tim was talking to journalists I think by himself. But all the rest of us were in teams of two. So, I was partnered with Don Hahn, Executive Producer of the movie and sort of animation legend. And the cast were partnered in twos.

And so they sit you down at the front of this table and the journalists ask questions. And it goes on for about ten minutes and then a publicist says, “Time’s up.” They grab you and they pull you to the next room. And so essentially there are seven teams that are sort of rotating through all the rooms. The journalists stay put and they move the cast and talent around between the rooms.

So, people are asking similar questions, but you quickly figure out what the theme is of that room. And so like, “Oh, you are all Japanese journalists, okay. You’re going to ask me the normal questions but you’re also going to ask me about sort of Kaiju monster movies and those kind of things.”

This one room was clearly like mommy bloggers. [laughs] Another room was like, “Oh, these are the dog people.” And I remember from Big Fish one room was like — “What is this room?” And I was trying to figure out. And I was like, “Oh, it’s all the Christian press.” And there was a Christian press room for Big Fish.

So, that’s the morning. And then you break for lunch and Martin Landau tells you stories of how it was back in the day that are fascinating. And then in the afternoon what they had us do is they would put each of us in a separate room and then they would send in certain journalists who got to have one-on-one interviews with us for like ten minutes, or sometimes up to 30 minutes, and they can ask you more detailed questions about things.

So, in both cases there are a bunch of recorders sitting on the table, and I meant to take a picture of like all the different iPhones recording the conversations throughout the time. But, you do this, and then all of these interviews that happen during this time are basically banked for a day or two before the movie opens. So, the movie opens October 5, so October 3 you’ll suddenly see all this stuff as if on that day I did it.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, it’s a bit of a surreal experience. The other movie I would point people to is Notting Hill. There’s a — I don’t know if you ever saw it.

**John:** Oh, absolutely, yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a great sequence where Hugh Grant arrives at a hotel to talk to Julia Roberts, who is this big movie star, and he kind of gets mistaken as press, and he invents a magazine. I think it’s like Horse Fancy or something like that, unique, and he starts acting like a press person at one of these things. They’re very odd. I find, having gone through a few junkets, a couple of things stand out.

As the screenwriter you need to understand that you are not anyone’s first pick for an interview. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just that people like movie stars — that’s who they want to talk to. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I find sometimes that the best interviews for screenwriters at these things are with people that are slightly off the beaten path of mainstream press because they are specifically interested in the screenwriter and what the screenwriter does.

So, I tend to enjoy those more. I don’t get caught up in, “Well, why am I not on camera with ABC. Why am I here with…” you know. And then you realize, well, actually I’m doing a phone interview with Cole Abaius, who has an awesome podcast, you know, and who cares, and actually asks great questions.

So, you shouldn’t get hung up on stuff like that. It does give me an appreciation for why actors get tired of press. It’s easy to sort of say, you know, “You made millions of dollars on a movie and you’re complaining about press? Come on, man.” And yet when you’ve been asked the same question for the four millionth time something happens in your bones and violence starts to rise up. You start to feel like you’re in a dream world where you’re just answering the same question over, and over, and over, and over. And you slip into the zone.

Phil Hay, who is a friend of ours, a screenwriter, said at some point in the middle things you stop really answering questions and you start trying to just not make a mistake because you don’t want to say anything dumb, or insulting, or something that’s going to hurt the movie.

But in general they are fun to do. They are more fun to do for movies you like. They’re more fun to do for big movies. When you have a little movie that’s struggling or isn’t that great, and I’ve been there, no one wants to be there. You don’t want to be there and they don’t want to be there. [laughs] That’s awful. But, you know, for the one or two times a year that screenwriters do these things, they’re pretty fun.

**John:** I think the role a screenwriter can play in these junkets sometimes is the provider of logic or the provider of like helping people fit things together. Because in most cases they will have just seen the movie and they’re trying to formulate their opinions or how to actually talk about the disparate facts they’re getting.

And so sometimes you can be the person who is providing framework, or at least talking about one aspect of the move that no one else up there is going to be able to talk about because it’s not really their — it’s not what they did. And so Frankenweenie has a large sort of pro-science bias, which is sort of unusual for a monster movie because most monster movies are about the dangers of science and ours is about the dangers of ignorance and sort of ignoring a science. And so that sort of became part of my function to talk through that.

And a weird thing happens in a lot of these junkets and stuff that like by two-thirds of the way through the day someone will ask a question that — either the question, in this case the question — sometimes I just formulate it but never answer. And I realized like, “Oh wow, I wish I could like go back and redo all those other interviews because I now have a much better thing to say.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, one of the interviewers, and I can’t remember which one it was, said, “In the movie the teacher, Rzykruski, says that perhaps the difference between why your first science experiment turned out well is because you did it with love and your second science experiment turned out poorly because you didn’t care about it. Is that really a metaphor for the artistic process and sort of movies you care about and movies you don’t care about?” And I was like, wow, that completely is a metaphor for that, and it was not an intentional thing, but I would have completely claimed credit for that.

Because it’s true. There are the movies that you deeply love and that turn out really, really well because you were deeply 100 percent emotionally connected and invested in them. And then there are some moves that you know aren’t right and aren’t working that way, and so you do disconnect to some degree and the movie suffers for that. So, it was a really great insight that was not mine at all, but I’m gladly going to keep repeating it as if it were my insight.

So, that part of it is cool. And I like talking, but after awhile it’s not just that you’re sick of giving the same answers. You can’t remember if you just said that same thing to the same person. And that gets to be challenging.

**Craig:** It does. It gets exhausting, but you’re right that for a screenwriter press junkets are an opportunity to convey your intention. And people will often miss these things. Sometimes they’ll misconstrue them. And sometimes they’ll believe that something was done for a reason and it’s just not true. And so it’s an opportunity to get into it and talk about the whys of things and to sort of give your opinion on things. We are generally unseen and unheard. And I’m not so militant as to demand that screenwriters be on the cover of Us [Weekly], but we do have a very interesting perspective on these things, because we were there with the intention before the execution.

And, so we actually can provide a pre-context of things that no one else can. Literally no one else can. And for that reason alone these things are good for screenwriters to do.

In the past, when I first started in the ’90s, it was rare that screenwriters would even be invited to these things. And I understood why. There were so few outlets. Frankly, the people doing the interviews didn’t care about the screenwriters. And nobody bothered.

That’s really changed. The way that entertainment news is reported now, there’s 1,000 outlets. And there are people that really are interested solely in the screenwriter. So, it’s a much more interesting thing for screenwriters to do now. And I would encourage all screenwriters to be active. Frankly, if you have a big movie coming out I think it’s a good idea to get yourself a publicity person and help kind of generate opportunities for you. Not because you need to get your name out there for ego purposes, but frankly just to provide some interesting context for the movie.

We do love and care about these things — usually — so, why not help others see what we were trying to do? And then they can decide if they liked it or not.

**John:** One of the points of context I think that was really helpful in terms of the mommy bloggers of this was I was talking about I wanted to make sure that the rules of the world were clearly a little bit magical. So, even though he’s bringing it back with science, there’s something unusual about this town, about the windmill.

Very early on we set up the fact that there is something strange going on in this town, which is why kids are able to bring their dogs back and their animals back to life. That was born out of just as a parental concern that I didn’t want kids trying to plug their hamster into the wall. And so that gets a laugh, but it’s also true; I was genuinely concerned about sort of the contract we were making with parents, like, “We’re not going to encourage your kids to do dangerous things that are going to get them electrocuted.”

And so that’s a helpful thing that as a screenwriter I could do.

**Craig:** Yeah. You saved a hamster.

**John:** I hopefully save a hamster, or maybe even a small child.

Our last topic today is this very long article by David Denby, a prominent critic, who wrote this for The New Republic. And I thought it was really interesting. And he wrote a critique of how Hollywood is making its movies and really focusing mostly on our action movies, although it sort of talks about all aspects of movies, and where it’s missing the boat.

And what I liked about it is that sometimes it picked on some really easy targets, and sometimes it picked on some — like it picked on The Avengers, which is a movie that I really loved, and he was able to make points though about it that I was like, “Well, I will acknowledge that point. It doesn’t mean I necessarily agree, but I see the point you’re trying to make there.”

And I also respected that he seemed to be able to anticipate exactly the criticism that he would face with the article and was sort of ready for it. So, Craig, what did you think of this thing, because I just sent it to you this morning.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure he’s going to anticipate my criticism. Maybe he has. It wasn’t evident in this article in which he spared no words. It’s funny, I think that David Denby has a very good point; he’s just made a terrible argument in support of his point.

And I want to talk first a little bit, and people are going to have to read this thing. You’re just going to have to slog through it. It is quite long and —

**John:** Craig, I thought I might hit a few little high points in it first, so if people haven’t read it. So, one of his central theses is that, “It has come to this: A movie studio can no longer risk making good movies.” And those are his words. And the elaboration on that is, essentially: in trying to only pursue these giant tent-pole movies, they can’t worry about something that’s — they can’t even try to make something that’s execution dependent, because that’s too big a risk. So, they’re only going to try to make the safest, biggest movies they can make.

**Craig:** But in support of that he comes up with a bunch of bad reasoning. I think he misses what’s really going on here. And I’m not surprised he missed what’s going on because he is a film critic, and he is an educator, a professor of film. I don’t believe he’s spent any time doing what we do. He is examining the sausage and saying, “This is not very good sausage; it used to be much better sausage. They don’t like to make good sausage anymore because they want to see more sausage.”

They’ve always wanted to do that. Anyone who thinks that the business people running Hollywood have ever cared about anything other than money needs to get their head examined. That has been the way since celluloid was invented, since Laemmle and Edison put sprocket holes in film. That’s why the people running studios have made movies.

And he doesn’t have the benefit of seeing the killing floor the way you and I do. He makes a couple of mistakes. He makes a few mistakes, I think, of logic. One is he cherry picks. He tends to say things like, “Well, movies in the ’30s were better because look at Stagecoach and now look at the 2000s.” Well, yeah, but there were also about — I don’t know — 80 or 90 miles of film of crap in the ’30s, just as there is today. It’s a little unfair to sort of cherry pick and say “Okay, well that was going on there.”

He has certain opinions that he confounds with fact. For instance, he holds up Inception as an example of studio failure of risk when in fact I think Inception may be the riskiest movie ever made. Incredibly expensive. I loved Inception. I think he’s wrong about it. Interestingly, he’s also offbeat critically. So, he takes a movie that frankly disproves his central thesis and argues that it proves it because he just doesn’t like it, and I don’t think that that is quite logically compelling.

Similarly, The Avengers, you know, I wasn’t a huge fan of The Avengers, but again he seems out of step with critics; at some point you do have to say, “Well, if the great majority of the audience and the great majority of the critics all together like this movie, I’m not sure I can hold it up as an example that I’m right when I say it’s not very good.

He tends to do a little bit of apologizing. For instance, the deconstruction of cinema was okay in movies he liked, like Annie Hall. It’s not okay in movies he doesn’t like, like the Michael Bay films.

And, lastly, he makes a couple of factual errors. For instance, he cites The Hangover obliquely, by referring to “hangover debauchery,” I think, as an example of movies that studios make because they can’t miss, when in fact The Hangover was considered such a risk the director had to forgo his entire salary in order to get it made for $33 million. So, he’s just wrong about that.

What he’s right about is that Hollywood has changed to the extent that they are very scared of a certain kind of movie they made all the time, and that was profitable for them a lot. The one thing he doesn’t point out, and to me it’s the only reason that this is happening: It’s not that Hollywood has gotten more venal or vulgar. It has always been venal or vulgar. It is not that Hollywood has suddenly become greedy. It has always been greedy. And it is not that people have become more or less stupid or interested in nonsense. Children have always loved nonsense and always will, just as they will always love candy and always will.

The problem is one of attention. The problem with Hollywood today is that in order to get people’s attention in a world where there are more ways to divide their attention, they have to spend more, often, than they spend on the movie just to let you know the movie exists. And that is what has corrupted the process. Not stupidity. Not venality. Not giving up on quality. None of that.

He’s wrong about why things have gone wrong. But he is right that they’ve gone wrong. Unfortunately for him, and me, and people who like lots of different kinds of movies, his argument provides a way out. Mine doesn’t. [laughs] That’s the really depressing thing. If I take David Denby’s argument to heart, I can think, “Well, different people running the studio with different values and different approaches could revive a certain kind of film.”

But, given the way attention is these days to get people to see a film, I don’t know how we get there again. I don’t. And it does depress me, because I don’t just like, you know, I don’t just like big, huge, incredibly marketable spectacles. I like all sorts of movies.

**John:** I’ll step in as sort of like partial defender to Denby just because he’s not here. He has his own essay to defend himself a little bit. I would say he — I felt that he recognized that he was cherry picking to some degree and that in talking about the, citing that the movies of the ’30s were better, I felt like I actually saw him sort of acknowledging the fact that critics of this essay are going to say that “I have selective memory, too. I’m forgetting all the bad things that happened back in those days.” So, he does do a little bit of that. Maybe not enough.

And my recollection of his concern with Inception wasn’t the cowardice of the studio, that it was a safe choice. It was really a criticism of the film itself, and sort of what the film was attempting to do. His criticism of like sort of where we’ve come to in movies I thought was interesting. Not always apt, but interesting.

A couple things I highlighted from what he said: “The problem is that too many ordinary scenes in big movies are cut like car chases.” Maybe? I think it’s a valid idea to look at sort of, why has everything become so fast cutting? Maybe that’s just the style.

**Craig:** I don’t know that that’s true. Over time we have become better at processing audio visual information. Children today are better at processing audio visual information than I am. And I’m better at it than my parents are.

Naturally, the language of cinema will change to that end. I don’t know if that’s bad. I mean, if I’m moved by a movie, I’m moved by a movie.

**John:** But he would argue “that you leave the theater vibrating, but a day later you don’t feel a thing.”

**Craig:** But that’s not true, because I still think about Inception. And I’ll go back to Inception, because there were scenes that I thought were paced quite deliberately in that movie. And really what it comes down to is he’s saying, “Inception is an example of what I’m talking about because I don’t like it.” He says specifically it portrays dream states and they don’t feel like dreams at all. Well, I completely disagree. I mean, the last thing I wanted to see was a very lazy, “Ooh, we’re a surreal dreamy world,” because I’ve seen that already. And I thought it was actually a very smart choice by Nolan to not do that.

So, what I didn’t like about his citation of Inception was that he seemed to be saying, “I’m going to actively discount a movie that obviously rebuts what I’m saying.” And, frankly, the fact that he is anticipating criticism does not qualify as rebutting the criticism. It’s just simply saying that he anticipate it.

**John:** Absolutely. I was trying to use some of his anticipation as an in-the-moment rebuttal. Then let’s talk about the Michael Bay aspect of it all, because he does harp on Pearl Harbor a bit, which I think some people can say is an easy target. He would say that Annie Hall is deliberately knowing that it’s breaking these conventions in order for it to achieve a certain effect. Pearl Harbor many times I feel is just cutting to cut. And it’s just basically, “How many shots can we cram into a 30-second reel?” And there’s not intention behind it.

**Craig:** He’s right. I don’t like Michael Bay movies. I think Michael Bay — when Michael Bay shoots action sequences, often they’re spectacular. I think the car chase scene in The Island is one of the greatest car chases ever put on film; I just thought it was spectacular. I don’t like the movie. And I don’t like Michael Bay movies in general.

But, Michael Bay becomes a convenient exemplifier for what when wrong with Hollywood. There have always been movies made by people who have an aesthetic that is very fast food and very, I guess, freebase cocaine style. “I’m just going to strip away subtly and nuance and just pound you in the face.” There have always been those. Maybe they’re not quite like Michael Bay movies, but Michael Bay isn’t ruining Hollywood. He’s not.

All Michael Bay is doing is making movies for people that like Michael Bay movies.

**John:** I would take away from Denby’s argument that he wants to be able to see filmmakers get budgets to make bigger movies that are not big blockbuster action movies. And I think that’s something that I would like to see, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess. Where he’s right is that it is criminal that guys like Paul Thomas Anderson have to try and scrounge for financing. On the other hand, Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights on a shoestring and it’s sublime. It’s just perfection.

Woody Allen’s movies in the ’70s, and ’80s, and ’90s, and 2000s, and 2010s are not high budget movies, nor do they need to be high budget movies. Not everything needs to have money.

The one guy that he points out that I do think, when I go, “Oh, boy, great point, David Denby,” is the guy who did Children of Men.

**John:** Oh, yeah, Alfonso Cuarón. Alfonso Cuarón is maybe what’s like a Kubrick. Like, you wish he just always had the money to make whatever he wants to make.

**Craig:** Alfonso Cuarón is really, really, really good at what he does. And, the kinds of movies he makes actually do require a budget. And I don’t know why it is that Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t had a movie in theaters since Children of Men, which I think is amazing.

It may be that he can’t find the budgets for the movies he wants to do. It may be, frankly, that he just hasn’t found the right thing or that he hasn’t perfected it. I don’t know. But it does give me pause. I hesitate to think that Alfonso Cuarón isn’t making movies because they’re shifting that money to do a 7-day reshoot on a big popcorn spectacle that frankly could have just as easily done without that money.

You know, they’re remaking half of the zombie movie at Paramount at tremendous expense. And, sure, it would be great to see that that money go to something for $30 million or $40 million that could actually be amazing. But, again, I’ll just say: at no point in Hollywood’s history have movie studios just thrown money at artists because they wanted to see a good movie. They don’t do it. They want to make money with everything.

So, the attention thing — to me the attention thing has driven marketing budgets up and it’s reduced the amount of movies they make. That’s the problem. That’s what I think is limiting opportunities for guys like Alfonso Cuarón.

I still think that people like Paul Thomas Anderson can get their movies made for reasonable budgets. I don’t think Paul Thomas Anderson needs $40 million or $50 million. The actors often work for scale and participation at the end.

**John:** Although, if you see The Master, The Master looks really, really expensive. There’s a reason why that movie cost a lot of money.

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**John:** It’s really — I loved it.

**Craig:** I’m looking forward to it. It’s certainly not a new problem. The issue of money and art goes back to pre-Renaissance. It’s always been a problem. Art costs money and some art makes its money and some art makes less money. And this has been an age-old problem.

But, again, I’ll point to a movie like The Hangover — which he seems to think is an example of an easy give — and say: With due respect sir, absolutely not.

**John:** The second Hangover was an easy give.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. You don’t get to the second Hangover if you don’t take the risk on the first one. If Todd Phillips doesn’t say, “I’ll work for nothing; I’ll just work for backend and a gamble here because I want to make this kind of movie. I want to make a rated-R comedy when they’re not hot. I want to make a rated-R comedy with three guys that aren’t big movie stars. I want to make a rated-R comedy that at times gets pretty out there. And I’m willing to work for nothing to do it if you’ll let me do it.” And that’s what it took.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know. So, I don’t think that — sometimes what happens is people reverse engineer from the results.

**John:** Totally. All the James Cameron successes. “Well, of course that was a success.” Then if you actually look at sort of the actual process of making it, it was anything but obvious.

**Craig:** And that was also another thing that kind of surprised me is that he had this kind of interesting love for Avatar, which I didn’t like at all, and yet was beating up Inception.

And I’m not a James Cameron basher. I think the guy is a genius on a different level. And I will defend Titanic and the screenplay for Titanic with my dying breath, even though many people malign it. But I just thought, you know, at some point it just seemed like basically he looked, saw a problem, and decided the reason for the problem was that that the movies that he didn’t like were being made. And the movies that he did like weren’t being made enough.

And, frankly, that’s simply not correct.

**John:** Cool. So, anyway, we’ll have links to that and everything else we talked about in the show notes at johnaugust.com/podcast.

Craig, let’s do our One Cool Things. I know you have a One Cool Thing which is actually a repeat of an earlier thing that is still going on. So, do you want to tell us about the Heart Walk?

**Craig:** Yes. So this is your last opportunity, folks. So here is the deal. For all of you out there, I mentioned this in a prior podcast. For all of you out there who wail, “Why will no one read my script?” Somebody will read your script. In fact, Daniel Vang at Benderspink, which is a real actual legitimate production company, and he’s an actual legitimate real manager, he will read your script. He will read it!

And here’s what you have to do: You have to donate to a charity. Not put money in the pocket of some baloney screen guru who has never done anything and has absolutely no relation to Hollywood whatsoever.

If you donate $25 to the American Heart Association’s South Sound Heart Walk, then Daniel Vang of Benderspink will read the first ten pages of your screenplay. And if he really, really likes the first ten, he might even go further on his own. If you donate $50, he’s read the first 50 pages. Again, if he really, really likes it he might just keep reading.

If you donate $100 he will read your entire script. There are guys out there charging $1,000 to put in their pockets — who couldn’t help you no matter what — to read your screenplay. And here’s a guy saying, “You give $100 to the American Heart Association, I’m actually in the business, I manage screenwriters, I produce movies, I work at a real company. I’ll read your entire script.” I don’t understand why everybody isn’t take advantage of this.

You have a limited time here. Donations will be accepted up until October 6, which is, by the time the podcast airs, imminent.

**John:** Imminent. Yes. It will be the day after Frankenweenie opens.

**Craig:** It is what we like to call post-Frankenweenie.

**John:** Yes. The post-Frankenweenie era.

**Craig:** Correct. In the post-Frankenweenie era. So, this is day one of PFW. And you want to know how to do this, very simple. Go to John’s website, and he will have a link for you.

**John:** Yeah. And you’ll click it.

**Craig:** Oh, and this was all organized by Joe Nienalt, a screenwriter. So, a ton of credit to Joe for doing this. And a ton of credit to Daniel for doing this. And please, please, even if you don’t think your screenplay is any good, donate.

**John:** Cool.

My One Cool Thing this week is called The Last Express. And it is a great game from way back in time from the ’80s and ’90s that Jordan Mechner created. And he created it for the normal computers, the computers we had at the era. Well, the computers we have of this era are iPads and iPhones, and so there is a brilliant new port he’s just done of The Last Express.

So, this isn’t a remake of the game. This isn’t a reimagining of the game. This is actually the game which was, in its time, very sort of groundbreaking in the sense of it was animated and takes place on a train and is sort of for grownups. And there is adventure, and mystery, and intrigue.

So, what I love about it is it is both kind of fresh because it is this really unusual sort of cell frame animation, but it’s also vintage in a way that’s really, really fun. So, you may remember the game from its original incarnation.

**Craig:** I don’t. I don’t remember this.

**John:** You may have never seen the game before, but it’s really worth checking out. It’s $4.99 for iPad or for iPhone. It’s on the App Store. I think you will dig it. So, that is my One Cool Thing this week. And there will be a link to that in the show notes as well.

**Craig:** Is it action? What is it?

**John:** It’s an adventure game. So it’s not like, “pick up knife, poke knife in hole.” It’s not Zork like.

**Craig:** But it’s Zork-ish?

**John:** It’s an adventure game taking place on the Orient Express.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And very much has that Murder on the Orient Express kind of feel, that period-vintage feel done with sort of story animation, done with sort of beautifully drawn things which at the time were ground-breaking to be able to happen in a computer game, and now feel kind of ground-breaking to happen on an iPad.

And it weirdly feels like it should always be on this.

**Craig:** Well, you know what, I’m downloading it right now.

**John:** Craig, you should probably wait to download it until we’re actually off the podcast so it doesn’t interfere with the Skype.

**Craig:** Well, I’m doing it. It’s too late. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, you ruin everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, but thank you so much for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, too. And thank you, David Denby, for writing a very thought-provoking essay, even if I didn’t agree with all of it. I think you have identified a very real problem, sir.

**John:** Yes. So, we got some Denby, we got some junkets, we got some movie stories. It was a good week for us.

**Craig:** I think it was a pretty good week. And we are closing in on Austin. Let’s not forget. Do people know?

**John:** I think people know. So, as we’ve talked about before, we are doing our first ever live Scriptnotes. It will be at the Austin Film Festival on Saturday, October 20, I want to say.

**Craig:** Yeah, sounds right.

**John:** If I had the notes in front of me, that would be like an organized podcast. But, anyway, the Saturday of the Austin Film Festival in the morning we will be doing the first ever live Scriptnotes. It will be me and Craig and the show, and our special guest which we can announce now, Aline Brosh McKenna, who is fantastic.

**Craig:** Aline. Yes. And, frankly, having been to Austin a few times, I can tell you this will be the greatest thing that ever happened at that screenwriting conference. Period. The end.

**John:** It may be the best thing to ever happen in Austin. But I don’t want to oversell it.

**Craig:** It might be the best thing that ever happened in history.

**John:** It could be fantastic. We will be doing live questions and answers in the audience. It’s going to be longer than our usual show, so it should be fun.

If you are able to come to Austin to come to this event you should come to this event. If you’re not able to come to this event we will have audio for our week’s podcast shortly after the event.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.