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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 119, the Positive Moviegoing episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

And we are so lucky because we have our very first guest, the sort of guest who set the template for a guest on Scriptnotes would be like. Aline Brosh McKenna is here in the studio.

**Craig:** Woo!

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** Woot-woot-woot!

**John:** How are you, Aline?

**Aline:** I’m doing well. I’m doing very well. I’m happy to be here.

**John:** Now it’s almost Thanksgiving. Do you have big Thanksgiving plans for you and your family?

**Aline:** We don’t. I don’t cook. We go out to dinner.

**John:** How very nice.

**Aline:** It’s great. I really love it.

**Craig:** [Long Island accent] “I don’t cook.”

**Aline:** No, it’s too much for me to do.

**Craig:** “We go out to dinner.” Where can you even go?

**Aline:** [Long Island accent] You got to set up the order.

**Craig:** Where do you?

**Aline:** We go to a lovely place in the mountains near Malibu where they cook game and you eat game.

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t do the normal Jewish thing of just Chinese food? [laughs]

**John:** I thought that was only Christmas?

**Aline:** No, that’s Christmas. Christmas is Chinese food and a movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** What are you doing, Craig?

**Craig:** We have some friends coming over and another lovely half-Jewish, half-super not Jewish family in La Cañada. And we are going to have an excellent Thanksgiving. We’re going to be making all of our own food. I’m cooking multiple desserts and side dishes. And the, actually, you should know this guy, John. I mean, you don’t know him, but you should meet him. He’s great. His name is Josh and he does lighting design for operas and musical theater. He’s worked down at La Jolla and up at Santa Barbara Opera House and Minnesota. And he’s a cool guy.

So, anyway, we’re having a combined Thanksgiving and —

**Aline:** I love that Craig, who lost a titanic amount of weight, is the expert pie and cake maker.

**Craig:** Ain’t that the way it goes?

**John:** I, too, am having a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving. I’ll be making pies. I’ll be making the turkey. It’s the one day a year that I sort of go back to the full Martha Stewart mode. My former assistant Dana Fox and I, she and I every day would watch Martha Stewart Living, back when it was the filmed show, not that horrible live before an audience thing. Back when it was the true Martha Stewart. We would watch it. And that’s the day that my inner Martha Stewart comes out and I cook hard.

**Craig:** Mmm. I know. I love cooking hard. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Today, on the podcast, we are going to be talking about a lot of topics. Aline brought two. I brought one. Craig brought one. But first we have to talk about the Live holiday show. We are recording this on the Wednesday that the tickets went on sale and I think we’re kind of sold out. We’re not fully sold out, but a lot of people are coming, which is great.

The live show is December 19. It is at the LA Film School. It is a benefit for the Writers Guild Foundation. There’s a few tickets that have been held back. So there’s a chance that even if we are completely sold out on paper we will be releasing some more tickets. So, do follow us on Twitter and we may announce that there’s still some more tickets left.

But out lineup for the show is incredible, including Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** McKenna!

**John:** Derek Haas.

**Craig:** Haas!

**John:** Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Marcel!

**John:** Richard Kelly.

**Craig:** Richard Kelly!

**John:** Rawson Thurber.

**Craig:** Thurber!

**John:** Franklin Leonard and Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Leonard and Doran! Leonard and Doran, I think, was a great boxing match. Wasn’t that — ?

**John:** Yes, it’s a classic —

**Craig:** Was it Doran? Well, it was Durán, but anyway, I’d like to see the two of them fight. Money is on Doran.

**John:** I think the fight is going to be epic. So, that will be a fun show.

But, today on the show we’re going to talk about four topics. Aline suggested we talk about outline failure and why it’s important to befriend other writers.

I want to talk about this article about going broke in your 50s.

**Aline:** Oh, you sent it to me. I should have read it. I didn’t read it. You’ll tell me what it is.

**Craig:** We’ll summarize.

**John:** We’ll fill you in on the details.

**Craig:** “I don’t cook. I don’t read.”

**Aline:** [Long Island accent] I order. I order.

**Craig:** “I order.”

**John:** And Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?

**Craig:** Well, it’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called “good” movies come out. And a lot of them are actually good movies. But I noticed that there’s — I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. And I think people go to movies and they’re already — they’re demanding to hate them. And they’re prejudging them. And you could do it for — you name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.

And so what I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it. And accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. So, I don’t care what happens in the first twenty minutes. I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie.

And then at some point, okay, you know, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much. And that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. But I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.

So, I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And I went in, just gave myself to the movie. And I loved it. And I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them?

Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.

**John:** So, what you’re describing is almost like — I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. And take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. Sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there. So be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot, you know. I just get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.

**Aline:** Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. And it’s harder — it takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” But going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds?’

**Craig:** Yeah. And it will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds. And we will pick them to shreds. And if you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it. But there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away.

And frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. Yeah! [laughs] How often does that happen? You know?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant, you know.

I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just, you know, no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.

**Aline:** And I also think it’s very Christmas-y.

**John:** It’s very Christmas-y.

Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? Because I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. And that’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it.

Because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. And I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.

**Aline:** Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it.

**Craig:** Right!

**Aline:** My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park, we used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. And they would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure which, you know, pleasantly surprised us. We laughed. Fell out of our chairs laughing.

We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good one.

**Aline:** And just you don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.

**John:** Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. So, I was a kid dropped off at the theater and the theater we were supposed to go to — they dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially. So, we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot, and having sex, and all these things.

**Aline:** Stringing people up.

**John:** I also remember in college going to see, we ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. And that’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds.

You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —

**Aline:** And you haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s giving you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up. Or whatever, anything. Or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time.

It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I saw, I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? But, you know, I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, ride all over me and let’s see where this goes.

**John:** Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then like the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you’re supposed to — you have to check the ticket to see what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets! But it is very exciting.

Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters, is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experience. What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?

**Craig:** Well, I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. All movies — well, originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, you know, where there are logos and rosters of people. But then the standard opening credit sequences, that became out of fashion. And for a long time all the credits went in the back of the movie. So, you just started the movie.

I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. And I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood. So, I’ve been doing that lately.

**John:** I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident. Like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay.

And I mean that shows up in sort of your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. Making sure that there is — if it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start,” 20 minutes into the movie. Because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy.

And I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. But I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think that’s a great segue to a talk that you proposed, which is outline failure, because what we’re really talking is the structure of the story and when things are happening. And structure is really when stuff happens. So, talk to me about outline failure and what you mean by outlines failing.

**Aline:** Well, you guys I know have talked about outlining a lot on the show, and it’s always very interesting, and it’s something that people will always ask on panels and such is about outlining. And I think we all outline in different ways. But I think — I don’t really know any writers who don’t outline at all, or few.

And some outline after the fact. Some write a draft and then outline. But what I think is interesting is I do do outlines. I try not to do written outlines, submit written outlines, because I find that people get bogged down in the details of a written outline. But I do spoken — I will pitch an outline and I will pitch an outline to everybody. And before I start writing I tend to try and pitch an outline to as many people as I can, the producer, the studio, anybody who will listen to the outline so that I can tell it like I’m telling a story.

And often when you’re telling it you realize, oh, that’s not good, or that’s boring, or this patch needs to go here or there, or that doesn’t make sense.

But what never ceases to amaze me is, you know, it’s one of those phenomena when you’re writing which is you want to try and break it down into math. And you want to break it down into cards. And we all want to feel like we have control over it. And it never ceases to amaze me that you’ll outline something, you’ll go see six people and pitch to them, you’ll put it on cards, you’ll sit down and start writing, and it’s usually page 65 is where it happens, where you start looking at your outline and you’re thinking, “This is crazy. Like why did everyone let me do this? Why didn’t everyone know that this is riddled with flaws and the character has just changed on a dime for no reason.”

I’ve always contended that 70 to 90 are the rocky shoals, the rapids, where your movie either comes together and moves out into the next plane, or you start to realize that you’ve got some inherent flaws. But what is really fascinating is you can’t really tell until you write it. And as long as I’ve been doing this, I have found some outlines I’m going through, congratulating myself, and just thinking, “Wow, I really planned this out.” And some I’m thinking like, “Oh, I don’t know.”

But, at some point you always get to a point of thinking like, “Who are these people who I work with who allowed me to think that these were good ideas?” You actually get angry. And I don’t really know, I don’t know what the cure for this is besides writing through there. And I think it’s funny, because I just moved, and it’s kind of a similar process. You think, you know, we’re going to put the couch there. We’re going to put this ottoman here, we’re going to put this here. And then you show up and you put it there and you’re like, “This is hideous. This is ten times too large. Why did anyone think this was going to fit here?”

And I guess it just shows planning is — it’s just plans. And so you really do feel like you go into a war, you top off your canteen, you take as many weapons as you can, and then you get there and the enemy has gone on the run and gone into the bush. They had flying robots you didn’t know about. And all of a sudden you have to change your game plan. That’s one of those things that kind of separates the way I write now from the way I did in the beginning which was in the beginning I would really get very disheartened and think, “Why has this happened? What is the critical flaw in my process?”

And now I just accept, you know, okay, we’re experiencing some problem with the hydraulics in the outline. And need to make adjustments on the fly. And sometimes that process of trying to figure out why your outline has crumbled beneath you, often those are the critical — that’s the critical passage where you find out what your movie is really about, because 70 to 90 is where you’re sort of on the upslope to figuring out what problem is this person really solving. What problem is this character really solving? And you may have the wrong problem. And you may have the wrong thematic. And sort of that’s where you figure it out.

So, I’ve learned somewhat to try not to beat myself up about it, but for those out there who are staring out their outline, ripping their hair out, it happens.

**John:** I’m outlining something right now, and I do find that as I go through previous episodes of trying to outline these movies I will have so many beats figured out so precisely in that sort of first half of the movie, and then there’s a stage in which I’m just sort of like waving my hands and saying, “And then we get to this last thing.” And it’s that hand-waving section that you’re like, there’s really no connective tissue that’s getting me from that point to that point. And if characters are having to make these big jump transitions that don’t really make sense — you find characters who are doing things because I need them to do that, not because it’s the natural thing for them to do.

**Aline:** That’s a really good point. And I think Craig has talked about this, too. When you pitch a movie, let’s say you pitch for 15 minutes, you probably spend nine minutes on the first 35 pages. And one of the other rookie mistakes I would make is you end up, the first part of your script is like a finely scrimshawed piece of bone that you have added all these details to. And then when you get to 50 it’s like, “Yeah, and then some stuff happens, and then some other stuff happens.” And that’s endemic to the storytelling most of the time is spent on the setup.

**Craig:** Well, this is why I outline actually. I don’t outline for the beginning of the movie, or the first half of the movie, because you’re right — I think we have an innate sense of the world we want to build and the person we want to put in it. And what the problem is. And that big wrecking ball that comes through the wall that changes everything.

I outline specifically to avoid the hand-waving section. Really, I will spend most of my outlining energy on page 60 to page 90 because I won’t start if I don’t know how the movie ends. I can’t start if I don’t know how the movie begins. But, that are right in there, that’s where you’re absolutely right, Aline. That is where all the gunk, the sub-textual character gunk starts to burble out. And the character as we understood them is breaking down dramatically and violently and then being put back together again by themselves.

It’s a scary area in every movie. And if you do it well it’s the best part of every movie. So, that’s why I outline.

Now, that said, of course — you know, we write a screenplay and then somebody has to go make it a movie. Well, that experience of turning a screenplay into a movie is a bit like the experience of turning an outline into a screenplay. And somewhere along the way the experience of doing it starts to change how you feel about it and what you understand about it. You have to remain flexible. And you can’t afford to let your outline become your boss.

The fact that other people don’t see these pitfalls and can’t warn you about them is not shocking is it? I mean, if you didn’t see it, what were the odds they were going to see it?

**Aline:** So, let me ask you a question — oh, sorry.

**John:** What Aline describes though in that process of pitching things, that is the natural way you pitch things. And you pitch very much like the setups of everything, and then you sort of rush through the other things. And that’s just the natural way you pitch things. So, that’s what you’ve been doing as you’ve been describing these projects to people is that stuff. And it’s natural to sort of rush over to the other things. But the mistake we often make for ourselves is not realizing like, “Oh, you know, I did rush over all those things. I really haven’t figured out what some of those moments are.”

And so while there’s technically an outline for what those beats are that happen here, they’re not nearly as fleshed out and nearly as focused as the rest of it is.

Also, I think what you said at the start that’s really key is that sometimes the only way to know how to write something is to write something is to write it. And it’s like you’re trying to write the screenplay before you’ve written it, and it can only be a rough approximation of the journey you’re going to take. It’s like you have this map that’s showing you how to get from point A to point B, but you really don’t know where all the mountains and all the hills are and where the rivers are that you’re going to have to get yourself around.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, you have to allow yourself the luxury of saying, “This is not what I thought it was. Given where I am at, what is the most interesting way to get to the places that I need to get to next?”

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, to me an outline is really good for a couple of things. It helps you organize your work, which matters, because you’re not going to get done otherwise. And the other thing that it does is keep you from being absurdly self-indulgent. We all have a tendency to be absurdly self-indulgent. We’ll just wander on. And when people say, “Well, I don’t really write my scripts. My characters write them for me.” Shut up! You write them. Don’t blame it on your characters when you’ve just spent 40 pages blithering.

That’s you blithering. And outlines help keep us —

**Aline:** Well, one thing, sorry.

**Craig:** Go ahead.

**Aline:** You guys don’t interrupt each other. I’ve noticed that.

**John:** We’ve gotten much better about being able to do that not interrupting thing. But, no, go.

**Aline:** Now you have two-thirds Jew, so.

**Craig:** So much Jew. We’re at peak Jew.

**Aline:** One thing that I’ve learned to do to avoid the scrimshaw, the first act scrimshaw, and I know Craig doesn’t do this, but after I have the outline I will write the whole script very quickly. And I will write like an 85, 90-page draft as quickly as I humanly can, to test. And what I’ll do is hop into scenes and I’ll see how I feel hopping into those scenes. And that’s the best way for me to test the outline is to hop into scenes and think, “Oh, there’s nothing happening here. No one is speaking in here. Oh, I’ve walked into a room and everyone is silent.”

So, I go really fast and I test the whole outline by building a very kind of provisional popsicle version of the script. And then I go back and I add my sheet rock and my paint and my ottomans. I do it that way. I build it in layers. And I know some people don’t do that. Some people build it good all the way through. But for me, to test the outline, I have to get all the way through the story.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve always wanted to do what James Cameron would do with the scriptments, which essentially is a very long outline that’s basically all the scenes but without the dialogue. I’ve always wanted to be able to be the person who did that. But the dialogue is by far the most fun thing to write, so therefore I always want to write that. I feel like I don’t really know the characters until I hear them talking to each other.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Aline:** I don’t know if the story is going to work until I know if the characters will talk. And that’s what I think, for me, is the difference between an outline and a screenplay. You know, you think this is going to be a good scene, and then you get into the scene and you realize, like this has happened to me where I had an outline where there were two characters who were in opposition to each other for a good amount of the story. And that stuff was easy to write because they had a lot of conflict and countervailing points of view. And then there got to a point where I had them align their interest, and man, every time that happened that was like stabbing the inflatable.

I would just get to those scenes where they were supposed to both be pursuing something, and you know, the air, you just audibly hear the air go out of the movie because these characters didn’t have any interpersonal conflict. So, I ended up reconfiguring the outlines so that their interest continued to be at odds until 105 or something, so that I would maintain that conflict. But in the outline phase it seemed like, “Why not? They team up, they become a team here. That makes sense.” And I really didn’t know until I got into those scenes and they could not speak to each other. They had nothing to say. They were saying like, “This looks good. Yeah. This looks good.”

**Craig:** That sounds like great work.

**Aline:** Great scene.

**John:** There’s nothing less dramatic than agreement.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just like, “Sure. That’s great.” They might as well be sitting back, reading the paper together.

**Aline:** “We should get the bad guy.”

**Craig:** “We should. Let’s do it.”

**Aline:** “Good. Let’s do it.” [laughs]

**Craig:** “Let’s do it. You want lunch?” Yeah, I want lunch” “Let’s have lunch first and then we’ll do…”

By the way, I do these —

**Aline:** “Pizza?”

**Craig:** I am the scriptment guy. I write scriptments. Because I love writing dialogue, so again, I feel like if I know exactly what the circumstance is, and I feel comfortable in it, then I get to have the fun of writing dialogue towards something that I think is correct. You know —

**Aline:** That’s the other great thing when you’re writing comedy, about comedy, is the test of your outline is whether people start saying funny things. If they’re not saying funny things, something is wrong with your scene.

**Craig:** Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong!

**Aline:** Mm-hmm!

**Craig:** Flying robots. I’ve been counting all of your metaphors. We’ve got furniture, flying robots, hydraulics.

**John:** Scrimshaw.

**Craig:** Scrimshaw.

**Aline:** That’s a big one.

**Craig:** Bone. Layers of construction.

**Aline:** Inflatable.

**Craig:** Inflatable. But my favorite is flying robot.

**John:** So, this project I’m working on right now, because I’m working on a spec, and Aline, you just finished a spec. I’m actually at the stage where I’ve written some scenes and I’ve paused for a second because I’ve realized like, oh no, there’s going to be trouble ahead.

Where I fundamentally — I have some mission creep happening, where the story was getting bigger than it should sort of — than it wants to get. When Richard Kelly was on the show last week, he talked about that with his movies, Donnie Darko, and you could definitely see mission creep happening in those things.

I’m trying to make something lean and it just keeps getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. So, I’m trying to sort of whittle back at the outline stage right now.

So, for the thing that you wrote for a spec, did you pitch to a bunch of people first and describe it, or was this an entirely internally-generated process? Did you outline on paper first?

**Aline:** Well, what I’ve done is I’ve written something that I want to direct. And it’s pretty specific to me. And so it was something that I mulled for a really long time. And there was a lot of freedom in not, you know, because I don’t often write just for myself. So, there was a lot of freedom in not having to be accountable to — making the process whatever I wanted the process to be.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** So, I probably outlined it a little bit more loosely. But I did find a producer to work with after I had sort of an idea of what it was and what the basic structure was. Because I worked with a director once who said, we were having a meeting and he said, “You know, I think with my mouth open,” meaning he knows what he thinks as he’s saying it. And I’m very much like that. And so for me I needed and I like to have collaborators that I can talk to.

So, I found a producer who would work with me on spec, because I need to do that process of telling a story. But that said, it was really great to be able to just make adjustments, attack, and move however I wanted to without feeling like I was accountable to — as accountable to an outline. It’s good.

**John:** Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. Because my recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers, but I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What is your history going —

**Aline:** Well, I feel really strongly about that. I mean, and I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.

And I have, you know, a couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work, and we don’t have work places in the way that, you know, my husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We just, we don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project.

My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with. And we’re kind of —

**John:** Aline, you talk on the phone?

**Aline:** I talk on the phone.

**Craig:** Who talks on the phone?

**Aline:** I do.

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** And so we can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. And you will grow with these people.

So, it’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. And Gatins refers to it as lab partners, you know, finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important. And then —

**John:** I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’ notebook is one of those folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.

**Aline:** But it’s so —

**Craig:** Gatins’ notebook is like — it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.

**Aline:** But it’s brilliant. It’s so brilliant.

**Craig:** It’s all in his head.

**Aline:** And it’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner.

And also something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. And I said, “Who do you go to for that?” And he said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”

**Craig:** Perfect. He’s exactly right.

**Aline:** And I don’t know. It was like something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.

**Craig:** You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say. Which I think is real, by the way.

Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it. Same thing about the positive moviegoing, you know.

**Aline:** I have the opposite of that which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Aline:** And it gives me more names to drop. But, sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. Like I remember when I was — there was a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. And so that’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?”

So, it’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** And we generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. But finding people who can be your — and I have lots of friends who are producers, and executives, and agents, but your writer friends — and actors too — but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. And, you know, I think if you look around you can find people to kind of link arms with. And you will all come up together.

**John:** My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist and composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. So, as a group they have to perform the thing and like they talk about it, which just seems amazing. And there are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. And there’s a trust element that kicks in.

You were talking about you might have directors, or producers, or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. Like they’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.

While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.

**Aline:** Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers and —

**John:** We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. So, let me try my recollection of it, because I’m really kind of curious to hear your version of it.

So, Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?

**Aline:** No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. And then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” And I said, sure. And then John did a draft of it, never to be heard from again that thing.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** John, you killed her movie.

**Aline:** [laughs]

**John:** I probably killed her movie. So, the backstory —

**Aline:** But that was definitely, John was like, you know, they were bringing in the big guns and I got pushed down the stairs. And John was the first person — I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing.

And I remember, I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”

**John:** And I remember you also saying like, “Well, somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of the situations. The answer is not going to that they’re going to go back to you, the original writer.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So, those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. And so I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”

**Aline:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** And so it was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. And suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch — this crazy lunch — with Dustin Hoffman. And suddenly like, well, this is a movie, and then it just…disappeared.

**Aline:** Yeah, it got complicated in that way. Those things do. But, we — you meet at different. Wait, so we already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. But the strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. And I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. And all of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where, you know, people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before.

And I really think it’s for the good. And I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent, or an executive, or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” And they’re like, “How do you know that?” And it’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.

**Craig:** We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other… — You know, I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers and it’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from.

And we share and talk about everything. And I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other. That over time we haven’t screwed each other over. That the narrative that we just kind of feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit. And that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do.

So, when we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. I have found — there have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.

**Aline:** I’ll tell you a good story. I had, on this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to, who I really respected. So, I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I mean, I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. And I sent him the script and then I didn’t hear from him for awhile which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.”

And then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. And so I’m just about to read the script.” And I was like, oh no. And then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes —

**John:** Wow.

**Aline:** That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt —

**Craig:** You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

**Aline:** [laughs] Well thought out. Just, you know, including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” And written in this way that was like, you know, sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. And this was just a writer understanding like, “Oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.”

And I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office that I like — tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. And that he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. And it’s professional camaraderie. And, man, the more of that you can find the better. And it doesn’t have to be somebody famous or — it can be, you now, if you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.

**John:** Well, it’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. And so when I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make kind of movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.

And so seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. But really only a writer could do that. Because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could sort of get to that place.

**Craig:** You know, I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.

**Aline:** Right. That’s interesting.

**Craig:** I had a very nice experience. You know, I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. And, honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good. And I’m no good. And, blah, blah, bah, rotten tomatoes.

**John:** Dennis Palumbo?

**Craig:** No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. It’s actually, I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. And she’s a really good writer. And she loved it. And, you know, I have to believe that. I can’t — it’s not the same thing…

When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting. But you always wonder.

Or you give it to somebody, you know, some producer, or agents, or coverage. Well, who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. But if a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. And we can’t get that from anybody else.

**John:** Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”

**Craig:** You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said?

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” And then, see, but now I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, you know, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody, we need a lab partner.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We need a lab partner.

**John:** And as we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline because during the strike, I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are. You organized these events that would happen during the strike, or like these drink events where we would all get together and sort of mingle. And it was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.

During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. And because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30am till 8:30am. So, it would be dark and I wouldn’t get sunburned. And I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. But everyone else was at different studios.

And so the events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you and you’re talking about and a lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.

**Aline:** But it came at a critical point. People were really, you know, if you try to do those mixers sometimes it’s hard to get people to go. But people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on, and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.

And so that really, and you were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. And so there were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. And we all kind of really got to know each other during that experience. And it was a really tough… — And people had really varying opinions was the other thing. And a thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to, the camaraderie of being screenwriters kind of overcame people’s different point of views.

**John:** I would say there were different point of views on the strike and sort of what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. But a common point of focus in terms of like what our profession is, and sort of what our job is and what our craft is, and so by focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bring thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group. Because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and sort of know each other.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.

**Craig:** We also, there’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. And I love it. And it is a very talky, chatty, low tech, low fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that sort of love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. And that’s fun.

It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside. And if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and there we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine and we just — we’re able to be real with each other.

**Aline:** And I will tackle people. I mean, it’s funny, because I won’t do this with any other, you know, I won’t do this with actors, or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire, I mean, I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006 and I was so excited he was going to be there. And the video of me is like, you know, a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him.

And I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” And that moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” And there’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.

**Craig:** Well that’s, I mean, John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?

**John:** Oh, it was Breaking Bad, it was Vince Gilligan.

**Aline:** Vince.

**Craig:** Vince Gilligan. I mean —

**Aline:** That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.

**Craig:** It’s everything. It’s everything.

**Aline:** It’s so amazing. And I will tackle people. And Kelly Marcel just moved to town —

**Craig:** Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?

**Aline:** I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. And she’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. And I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.

**John:** There’s a mixer in your future.

**Aline:** Right. Yeah. And she went to Austin which is a really good way and, you know, one thing I would say is go to an event like Austin. If you’re somebody who is starting out, and again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out and I would have been there tackling people. But, you know, go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on.

You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.

**John:** Yes. Everyone grows up together. So there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. And you will find your people, but you have to sort of look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.

**Craig:** And don’t be judgy. Don’t be judgy. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. You — when you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help you and you can help them.

There is no better feeling — the only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?

**John:** So, our last thing I want to talk about today is an article that Nima had sent me, but I actually people linking to it, too.

**Craig:** Here comes the downer!

**John:** It’s a downer, but there’s a bright side at the end of it, too, kind of, or a brighter side.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit. So, this is a site called priceonomics. It’s about David Raether who is a WGA writer who was a writer on Roseanne. And so he started Roseanne when he was already in his 40s or 50s, so he’d moved from the coast and got a job writing on Roseanne. And wrote on Roseanne for several years and was doing pretty well. He moved up through the ranks of Roseanne.

During the time he was writing for Roseanne he had a wife and eight kids. And eight kids is a lot of kids.

**Aline:** Mm.

**John:** And at a certain point his marriage was starting to fall apart, so after Roseanne he took a two-year hiatus and sort of got his marriage back together and got his family situations settled. Moved to a more affordable school district so the kids could stay in that. And then started to go back to writing and to go back to try to find a television job and had a very difficult time finding a television job, which is a common thing you hear all the time which is that gap that happens between, you know, when you’re a writer in your 50s it’s harder and harder to be employed, especially if you weren’t the top showrunner person. It gets harder and harder for that middleclass person.

So, David Raether had, you know, a $500,000 nest egg, which sounds like a lot of money, but that very quickly disappeared. He ended up losing his home. In the article he talks about sort of the process by which the sheriffs come and sort of evict you from your home. And his marriage fell apart. His kids ended up moving in with other families. He ended up homeless in a van. And sort of like what it is to hit the bottom there.

And not bottom that we’re used to. We’re used to like drugs and alcohol, or some other sort of internal crazy that pushed you to the bottom. This was just like the floor just fell out from underneath him. And so the article continues on with sort of how he started working again and sort of getting jobs off Craigslist and ghostwriting things for people who couldn’t write stuff. And eventually sort of building his way up so he’s in a more stable place right now.

But it’s really, I think, a useful thing for us to talk about, especially going into the spirit of Thanksgiving, which is to be not only thankful for the things we have in front of us, but also to be mindful that when things get bad it’s maybe not quite as bad as it seems. That even this guy will say that as bad as things got, once you recognize that you can be homeless and you’ll be okay out of it, he’s like much less fearful about sort of the things that can happen.

So, a couple things I think we can talk about with this article is, first off, that gap year, what he describes as the gap years, that time when you’re no longer sort of employable, but your pension hasn’t kicked in. Because this is a guy who has a WGA pension. So, when he turns 65 he’s got that pension and he’ll be fine. But the problem is he’s not 65 yet.

**Aline:** Can’t you take it earlier?

**Craig:** Yeah, a little bit earlier, but at some point they start hitting you with a lot of penalties and things.

**Aline:** Okay.

**John:** I think you essentially lose it if you start drawing down too early.

**Craig:** There’s a specific minimum age you need to hit, but it’s a really bad idea to dip into it.

**Aline:** Oh, I see. Got it.

**John:** In the beginning of your career, in the middle of your career, as you start to recognize that you’re sort of at the tail end of your career, what are sort of the financial decisions you make? Because I see a lot of people who sell a spec and think like, “I have a million dollars. I’m a millionaire. I’m going to start living like a millionaire.” And don’t seem to recognize, no, you’re not a millionaire. There’s no such thing as a millionaire, really, and you need to buy a more sensible car.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, let me, [laughs], let me do what I do. Just for a moment. I promise I won’t be too mean. There’s a lesson that I drew from this that I have internalized anyway. Which is, you ain’t your job. You’re you. Your job doesn’t make you qualified. Your job doesn’t make you deserving or entitled of anything.

I want to point out something interesting about this guy, and I don’t mean this in the spirit of kicking somebody when they’re down. I’m very happy that he’s pulled himself out of this circumstance. But, he was not in the entertainment business. He was not a television writer. He was not a screenwriter. He had paid none of the dues that people pay for many years in this town to earn those jobs.

He was a casual friend of Tom Arnold’s. And he decided to write a spec script for Roseanne, once it was a hit, and send it to Tom Arnold. And Tom Arnold, who is apparently a very gracious man and likes his friends, said, “Awesome. I’m getting you a job and you’re going to work here.” And when I read that all I could think was, oh, how the people in the room at Roseanne must have felt about that. Like who is this? Are you kidding me?

My point is not to say that he doesn’t deserve to be in that room. He may very well have been the best writer in that room. My point is that just because you have a job as a writer doesn’t mean that you have now broken through some magical thing where you’re a professional writer for life. You’re not. You’re a professional writer right now. And it can go away for me, for you, for any of us, for any number of reasons.

So, you have to protect and save against that. You certainly can’t be so proud and so delusional to think that you can disappear from the one single job you’ve had as a writer, you can disappear for two years and then come back and everybody would just want to give you a job. Even if the market were great, nobody other than Tom Arnold has ever hired you to write before. It just seems so delusional to me.

Please, important lesson here. When you get your big break, it’s not a break. There’s no breaks. You’re going to have to re-break, and re-break, and re-break. It never ends. It never ends.

The other thing is I feel like the story is missing information. I really do.

**John:** It’s apparently a shortened version of like the book. So there’s actually a much more elaborate book that sort of talks through everything that happened. So, what information did you want to know, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, I feel like when you are a married person with a wife and eight kids and a job, and then your life is dismantled to the extent that you are separated from your wife, separated from your children, some of whom go to live in another country and you end up in a minivan, that there are additional circumstance beyond, “Huh, can’t find a gig.”

Whether it is substance abuse, or mental health issues, it seems to me like we’re missing some information here, because things just seemed to happen in this story and I’m not quite sure why. And there are also a lot of things that are available for people that he doesn’t seem to be taking advantage of. So, I don’t know. I was just a little suspicious about the whole thing. And a little concerned when I read it. there was a whiff of flimflam about it.

I may just be a terrible person.

**Aline:** “A whiff of flimflam.”

**John:** Oh, it’s a very good whiff, though. Well, let’s talk about sort of the, I don’t know, the safety net of it all, because one of the challenges of being a screenwriter is that your income is inherently unstable. And so you cannot predict how much money you’re going to earn the next year, which is a challenging thing.

Now, Aline, your husband has a normal job. And so is that comforting in any way, where like there’s a steady income regardless?

**Aline:** Yeah, well he doesn’t just have a normal job. He works for a mutual fund, so he’s very conservative. So, we plan very conservatively. But, you know, there are two things that when I can see them in a writer I get a little uncomfortable. One is writers who really love to write. When you run into people who just love to write, and just I love it, I look forward to it, it’s so enjoyable. That always sends up red flags for me.

My people are the ones who are like, “Ugh, it was hard.” You know, of course you have moments where it’s wonderful, but it’s work. It’s really hard work. And I think people who don’t complain about writing concern me. And then also people who just if you have that attitude of like, “I got one gig. I’m set,” it’s not that, man. It’s getting — everybody has to go out and get a job —

**Craig:** Look at the Jews fighting the Christmas spirit. We just can’t deal with it.

**Aline:** You’ve got to go get a job. A couple times a year, you’ve got to go back out there. No one is set. So, sometimes you do meet people who get some kind of foot hold, some kind of toe hold, and they seem to feel like they’ve made it through some sort of pearly gates, and it’s just not like that. It’s a hustle.

And I really look at it in a lot of ways as being an entrepreneur. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you know you’re going to have good times and not so good times. And you better take — here’s another metaphor for your — you better take your acorns and put them in your tree trunk.

**Craig:** And your flying robot.

**Aline:** And your flying robot. You better take that flying robot and get it some acorns, because this —

**Craig:** When did you become Dan Rather? I don’t understand what happened?

**Aline:** It’s a very cyclical business. And I just think you’ve got to keep your head down and do your work, but you’re not owed anything. There’s so many people who want to do this. So, I say all of this having not read the article because I did not do my homework.

**John:** When I first got paid, my first scale assignment, which was for How to Eat Fried Worms, and then the second thing was A Wrinkle in Time, I would have a spreadsheet. And on that spreadsheet I would track how much money I had and then I would month by month figure out this is what my rent costs. This is what I pay for these different things. And I would sort of watch the money trickle down. So, I could plan ahead, I could see ahead eight months to see like how much money I would actually have.

And that’s a very sobering exercise that’s so useful, because I could see like I cannot be buying anything beyond the bare essentials I need to live, because otherwise I could just run out of money.

**Aline:** I’m just picturing John in his 20s, which everybody else like lying around on dirty sofas, and John somewhere looking at his spreadsheet.

**Craig:** With like that little visor? [laughs]

**Aline:** [laughs] Yeah. And the armband.

**Craig:** With glasses. Right, the armband. And that adding machine that you have to go Ka-chunk to.

**Aline:** Sleeves rolled up. His friends are all like, “John will buy us the beer guys, seriously.”

**John:** I did not buy a bed the first two years I lived in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Two? I think my first bed was my fifth year.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s the thing. We’re basically saying don’t buy a bed. And don’t put your money underneath.

**Craig:** Don’t buy anything. Don’t buy anything!

**Aline:** My friend, Jeff, always had this thing which is your evolution as an adult is how far your bed gets off the floor.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s absolutely true. It’s true.

**Aline:** You basically start off sleeping on the floor. And then you get a futon, which is like five inches from the floor. And then you get a futon frame.

**John:** A frame. Nice. Classy.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**Aline:** Which is 11 inches off the ground. And then at some point you buy a bed frame, but it’s not upholstered or anything. It’s just one of those —

**Craig:** It’s that metal thing.

**Aline:** It’s that metal thing with the feet.

**Craig:** That they give away. Yeah.

**Aline:** And the next thing is you actually get a mattress into a bed. But you’ve got to be — really think like an entrepreneur. And just to go on a side topic for a second, I know you guys have talked with bewilderment many times about why there aren’t more women who do this. And it is easier to understand with directing because the raising of children is not very compatible with being on movie sets. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why there aren’t more female screenwriters and I think it’s this aspect of being an entrepreneur.

You are really running a small business which is you. And you have to put yourself out there every day and wear your sandwich board of like, “I’m interesting. You’re going to listen to me.” And I think that women are attracted to things where they can demonstrate excellence in a somewhat prescribed fashion. That’s why women are killing men in colleges and graduate schools.

But screenwriting is not like that. Screenwriting is a lot like you’re starting a business of making flavored pistachios.

**Craig:** Here we go. Ice cream. Here we go.

**Aline:** [laughs] Flavored pistachios, I don’t even know where that came from.

**Craig:** Flavored pistachios.

**John:** Well, I can see the movements. I thought you were going to go for some Etsy kind of thing. I thought you were going for some crochet —

**Aline:** Or like, yeah, macrame, squirrel hats. I went back to squirrels.

**Craig:** Macrame squirrel hats. And you girls with your flavored pistachios.

**Aline:** [laughs] But you got to go out there and like be an entrepreneur and save your money and really put yourself out there. And I think that it’s not a thing that we encourage women to do from childhood is to really say like, “I’m interesting…”

**John:** Well, I wonder if culturally we have a different expectation about men in their 20s, it’s expected that you are broke, and you are sleeping on couches, and that your life is a disaster, but you’re doing all that stuff and so eventually you’re going to break through. And we perceive a woman who is doing that as being a failure. Because that’s not a viable way for her to proceed.

We are more worried for that woman than we are worried for the equivalent man in the 20s who is living that sort of marginal lifestyle. Is that true?

**Aline:** I don’t know if it’s that. I really think it’s about when you’re coming up as a writer, like I remember I ran into a friend from high school and I had just started being a writer, and I had maybe sold one thing.

And we were at a party and somebody said to me, “What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a writer.” And he looked at me and he said, “Do you really tell people that?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Cool guy.

**Aline:** And I thought, you know, I really — it takes a leap of faith and a confidence in yourself to say, yeah, I’m a writer, I have something to say. Because essentially what you do as a writer is you say, “Listen to me. That’s the very first thing you do.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s, and I wonder if this is something in terms of the gender thing that women are trained by the world around them, if not by their parents, to not aggressively go after what they want because they themselves have an inherent desirability. That they are instructed to essentially play hard to get and to let things come to them.

**Aline:** I don’t know. Maybe in a — I really think it’s an adjustment on that which is to go out there and say what you have to do at the beginning of your career which is I have nothing to prove to you that what I have to say is valuable except this: what I believe, my voice, my sensibility, my humor, my intelligence. And it’s just as good as anyone else’s. Probably better than someone else’s. You’re going to listen to me. I’m going to sit in a rom. I’m going to command your attention for 20 minutes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** I’m going to go outside the box. There’s no format for this. You know, it’s a very unscripted kind of unplanned thing.

And what I want to say to women who are listening, and I was talking at a thing at UCSB and what I didn’t know, what I didn’t understand, when I started I thought you had to know people and you had to network, and you had to do all these things which I was really — how was I going to do that? My parents were first generation immigrants. They don’t know anybody. There was no uncle I could call. There was none of that.

**Craig:** “Aline. I don’t know anybody who can help you.”

**Aline:** Right So, I had to really take that. And what I didn’t know is you’ve got to have the goods, be good at what you do, serve that apprenticeship of becoming good at what you do, but you also have to say, “My point of view is valuable. Listen to me. I have something to say.”

And I do find young women, younger women, they just do it. They just, you know, I’m working with this young comedian. She makes these YouTube videos on her own. She pays for them on her own. She’s a great DP and she writes songs and she just does it.

And I think that it really is changing and that young women have now unmitigated access to media. They don’t have to audition for anyone. They can just write their blog, or do their video, or put it out there.

**Craig:** Sisters are doing it for themselves.

**Aline:** They really are. But what I would say is if you’re trying to get into Hollywood screenwriting, which is a more Mandarin, closed system, you have to bet on yourself. And part of betting on yourself is saving money.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Aline:** It is. Because every penny you save is money you can spend giving yourself time to write that great script. And that’s why I was really cheap when I started was just, you know, I know that if I get paid, if I can hold onto this check, if I can stretch this check as long as I can, that’s more time that I can spend working.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And if you get your first check and you blow it, you’re going to have to go and get that job which is going to be distracting and exhausting.

**John:** I hear you.

So, let us get to our final thing tonight which is our One Cool Things. So, who wants to start? Craig, do you want to start?

**Craig:** Yes. Because mine is incredibly short. Scroobius Pip. My One Cool Thing is Scroobius Pip. Look ’em up on YouTube. Awesome.

**Aline:** Okay. Wow.

**Craig:** Scroobius Pip.

**Aline:** Wow. Never heard of that.

**Craig:** Look ’em up.

**John:** Actually, I do know what this is because you had linked this on Twitter and Kelly Marcel had pointed it to you. And it is perhaps the angriest song I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Ever! It is this song called You Will See Me. It’s the angriest song I think that has ever been written.

**John:** So, what’s great about the song is the first half is so inspiring and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah!,” and then it just goes too far in that way that’s just wonderful.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Most despotic people were probably like really great and driven and you wanted them to succeed until they went just way too far.

**Aline:** Oh, that sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s sort of like, you know, I Will Survive turns into I Will Kill All of You. Everyone I see is going to die.

It’s remarkable. And it’s so smart. It’s so smart. It really does make You Oughta Know look like a love poem.

**Aline:** Oh, I can’t wait.

**John:** So, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. My One Cool Thing is a book by Keith Houston called Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. I’m reading it right now. It’s great.

And so it talks about a lot of things like, you know, the paragraph symbol, like where did that come from? And like the crosshairs, and daggers, and asterisks, and all those little strange things. Well, who made that stuff up? And there’s actually a history behind all of those things.

Sometimes the word is made up, but an example is like we think about the paragraph symbol as like, oh, it’s like a P, it’s like a special P. But it’s actually not a P at all. It just sort of ended up looking kind of like that. And actually it’s a crossed C with another line beside it. it’s all different than sort of how you would think.

**Aline:** Between this and the spreadsheet, you’re really not James —

**Craig:** Sexy!

**Aline:** Yeah, I was going to say.

**Craig:** Sexy!

**John:** As a type nerd, I was very excited that this book —

**Aline:** Or just a nerd.

**Craig:** Actually, I did think of you. And I’ll try and find the link to this, because it was such a you thing. I can’t believe I didn’t send it to you. I read an article. For a long time people have been struggling to try to denote irony in text.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And, I don’t know, maybe you saw this article where there was a guy hundreds of years ago who invented an irony mark.

**John:** And that is covered in this book.

**Craig:** Oh, it is?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** And it just never caught on. Nobody wanted it.

**John:** Nobody wanted it. There’s also a whole chapter on the interrobang, which is the question mark and exclamation point at the same time.

**Craig:** Oh, interrobang.

**John:** Which ultimately is just not that necessary? You put the two things together, we got it.

**Aline:** In emails.

**John:** Emails. Yeah.

**Aline:** Have you guys talked about treadmill desks?

**John:** No, so let’s talk about treadmill desks.

**Aline:** Oh, okay, well that would definitely be One Cool Thing. So, I had a GeekDesk, which I think I got the nod from you on, the GeekDesk, which is you can adjust the height. So, I was writing standing up for awhile. And that was sort of okay, but you get into a lot of slouchy, uncomfortable positions when you’re standing.

And so my friends, Susannah Grant, took the leap. She had also bought the GeekDesk at my recommendation, so we both had those. And then she took the leap and got the TreadDesk which goes under the GeekDesk. And then you’re walking and you’re writing.

And it’s really embarrassing and stupid to look at, but what I really like about it is that I’m a kind of gregarious, like to be busy person, and so a writing for me, a long day of writing, I will eventually feel like — ooh, analogy — I will eventually feel like a raccoon with its foot in the trap.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We got to have somebody, please somebody out there illustrate every single one of these that she’s done in this episode.

**Aline:** Oh, that’s good. So, I would feel so trapped by the end of the day. And there’s something about being on the treadmill where you feel like even if I’m — on those days where you feel like I’m not crushing it, at least you feel like I went for a walk today. I did something reasonably healthy. So, I’ve enjoyed it.

And then I emailed Susannah the other day and said, “I’ve taken it to a terrible place,” which is I’ve taken it to dancing.

**John:** You’re dancing on your treadmill desk?

**Aline:** A little bit. So, I think this is going to lead to traction.

**John:** Yeah. It’s could be dangerous. So, your treadmill desk, essentially you’re using your normal standing desk, but then there’s a very flat treadmill that goes underneath it.

**Aline:** Right. They make this thing now. And it’s TreadDesk. You can find it if you Google TreadDesk, you can find it. Because that was the thing. I couldn’t find one that didn’t have the big —

**Craig:** But you can’t write like that?

**Aline:** I do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** You go very slowly.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a nightmare.

**Aline:** Yeah, you go slowly. And you know what it’s really particularly good for? It’s not great for fine point editing, proofing, where you want to really find, but what it’s really good for is after you’ve gone through a script and you’ve written a bunch of notes to yourself and you’ve written a lot of notes in the margin, that’s what it’s really great for, when you’re implementing stuff that you’ve written by hand. It’s really — like if I have something due, there was a week where I had something due on a Friday and I walked 18 miles that week.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** That’s a good week. I do the same thing with my iPad and the normal treadmill, iPad with the keyboard. And so I can do things like first passes on blog posts. Just doing triage on emails. It’s great for that kind of stuff.

Then when you actually sit down to really focus, then you’re really in writing mode, which is good, too. So, it’s a change in state.

**Craig:** I just like to walk around, outside, and enjoy God’s splendor.

**John:** Yeah, we don’t believe you at all, Craig Mazin. We know you far too well.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You have more to say?

**Aline:** What?

**Craig:** Nah. [laughs]

**John:** All right. If you would like to send a question about vocabulary choices or analogies for Aline Brosh McKenna can make for us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** That Aline.

**Aline:** I covered a lot of animals today.

**Craig:** Yeah, Aline. Like two squirrels fighting over a flavored pistachio raccoon.

**John:** What I really want is a Christmas Tree. I know you’re Jewish, but I really want a Christmas Tree with all these ornaments of the metaphors you used.

**Craig:** And Aline Tree. That would be cool.

**Aline:** I love it.

**John:** Aline, are you on Twitter?

**Aline:** No.

**John:** No. Aline is not on Twitter. But I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our podcast that you’re listening to right now is available on iTunes. And so if you’re listening to this on iTunes and have not left a comment, it’s great if you do that because that helps people find the show. So, you can subscribe there.

We enjoyed having Aline Brosh McKenna on our show today.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** Aline, thank you so much for coming by.

**Aline:** You’re most welcome.

**John:** And we will get to see you again on December 19th.

**Aline:** Woot-woot! Oh yeah!

**Craig:** Woo!

**Aline:** And that’s when we’re going to have our drink and a half.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes! We will have a drink and a half. And, no, I’m not drinking that foul eggnog.

**Aline:** We’ll see.

**John:** So, I’m not really clear based on this new facility we went to, I’m not clear that there’s going to be a bar bar. But if nothing else we’ll have a flask.

**Aline:** I’ve got a purse.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And I’ve got a purse.

**Aline:** All right, guys. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you guys. Happy Thanksgiving.

**Craig:** Happy Thanksgiving.

LINKS:

* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on IMDb, and her [first](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [second](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [third](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), and [third-and-a-half](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show) appearances on Scriptnotes
* The [Scriptnotes Holiday Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday/) is sold out, but follow [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) to be the first to know if more tickets are released
* [John Gatins](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/) on IMDb
* [What It’s Like to Fail](http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/) on priceonomics
* [Scroobius Pip](http://scroobiuspip.co.uk/) and [You Will See Me](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OS4W3OCESY)
* [Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393064425/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Keith Houston
* [Irony punctuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation) on Wikipedia
* The [TreadDesk](http://asoft11239.accrisoft.com/treaddesk/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Kris Gotthelf

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/ugly-children-and-cigarettes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 88 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, we have a very big show today and we’re already getting a late start, so I thought we’d just dive right in. Is that okay?

**Craig:** Boom. Dive. Go.

**John:** Boom. Three things I want to do today. I want to talk about this New York Times article that everybody tweeted me this morning, because I think it was just designed to provoke outrage…

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** …umbrage from screenwriters. We will answer some questions that have been stacking up in the mailbox. And we will look at three Three Page Challenge entries from our listeners.

**Craig:** Great. Oh my god, so much. Let’s go.

**John:** So much.

The only bit of housekeeping I need to do is that on May 15 of this year I will be hosting a panel for the Academy with some nice screenwriters and other film professionals including Damon Lindelof and Mark Boal. We’re going to be talking about the impact of technology on filmmaking. And it is a $5 panel, so come see us at the Academy Theater if you want to. That is on May 15.

And there will be a link in our show notes for how to come see that panel if you’d like to come see it. So, please come.

**Craig:** Nifty. Good group.

**John:** Yay. Let us start with this article that everybody tweeted me this morning. It’s an article by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times and it is about a man…

**Craig:** Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** Vinny Bruzzese, who is, “‘The reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,’ in the words of one studio customer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Yes. What Mr. Bruzzese does is he provides notes for filmmakers — really studios — on screenplays they are considering going into production. And he’s looking at them from the perspective of here is the data of a whole bunch of other movies and these are concerns about the script based on genre, based on specifics in the actual script and giving them suggestions on how to improve the screenplay based on the data that he has. So, for this knowledge he may charge $20,000 for this consultation which results in, I think, a meeting and also 20 or 30 pages of notes.

The article ran this morning and I think it’s interesting to talk about both from the perspective of what this guy is doing, but also to talk about from the perspective of entertainment journalism, because I think there are concerns I have about both areas.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where should we start? Should we start with the article or start with what this guy is doing?

**Craig:** I mean, why don’t we start with the article because that will probably go faster and then we can did into Mr. Bruzzese.

**John:** Great. So, this article is written by Brooks Barnes, and I met Brooks when he first started working for the New York Times and he does a lot of these kinds of articles which is talking about the nature of the film industry.

And I was about halfway through the article when I scrolled back to the top thinking, “I bet Brooks Barnes wrote this,” and I was right.

Here’s what tipped me off that I thought it was a Brooks Barnes article, because he used the word “script doctors” in a way that’s actually not the way you use the word script doctors. He meant script doctors in the way talking about like a script consultant, which is what Vinny Bruzzese is.

But Vinny Bruzzese is not a script doctor. A script doctor is a screenwriter who comes in to fix a problem in a script. So, at times in my career I am a script doctor. That’s not what this guy actually is or what he’s doing.

The other concern I had sort of overall was that no one was on the record. Other than this guy, Vinny Bruzzese, and one screenwriter who was horrified, nobody was actually named by name in the article, which I think was really telling.

Now, at the end of the article Brooks Barnes talks about his theory on why people don’t want to go on the record, they don’t want to offend people. But I think it’s just really telling that nobody wants to actually talk about this by name because it doesn’t seem like a good useful thing that’s going to track well into the future. And nobody wants to be able to be Googled that they contributed to this practice or behavior in the industry.

**Craig:** Brooks Barnes…you know, I teed off on this guy years ago because he wrote an article — I think it was about residuals and he simply did not understand how they work.

Brooks Barnes tends to approach Hollywood the way that an anthropologist sometimes approaches some local tribe that they’re just encountering, describing it as if they’re alien life forms. This guy needs to just stop writing about Hollywood because he doesn’t really understand it. He doesn’t really get it. And the people he’s talking to, frankly, it’s like, you know, some of these people that he’s quoting, you know…Scott Steindorff? Okay.

I mean, is Scott Steindorff really representative of people that are actually holding Hollywood up with their hands? Not really.

**John:** I will actually amend my earlier statement, because Mark Gill is also mentioned by name, and Mark Gill is a person whose name you will see in actual trades and is actually making movies. Mark Gills is president of Millennium Films.

**Craig:** Yeah, but he’s president of Millennium which is just… — I’m sorry, I guess this will disqualify me from working for Millennium. They stink! That’s a bad company.

**John:** Millennium is a genre filmmaker that does a very specific kind of movie.

**Craig:** Well, they also do a very specific kind of thing where they treat writers poorly, I have to say, in my opinion. I think they treat writers poorly. We’ve seen this before from there where, you know, there was a whole thing recently where they had been asking writers to write stuff on spec for them in order to get a job, at least that’s how I recall it.

I just think that…I’m going to get sued now by Millennium films. Oh, whatever. What am I going to do? This is my opinion. My opinion is that they stink!

**John:** Yes. Now, let’s bridge a little bit into the actual work that Mr. Bruzzese is doing. So, basically they are providing this advice and in the article says, “But you can ignore the advice at your peril, according to one production executive. In analyzing the script for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer…Vampire Hunter…”

So, this is the example they’re actual citing. It’s the only movie that I think they’re actually talking about by name. “The company worked on behalf of the film and the production company supplied 20th Century Fox with notes. The movie flopped. Mr. Bruzzese declined to comment.”

So, the one movie you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is the movie we worked on,” was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer? Hunter. God, I keep saying Slayer.

**Craig:** I know. I like it.

**John:** Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This is the movie that you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is one we did notes for, and they didn’t take all our notes, and that’s why it flopped.” Really? Really? That’s why it flopped?

**Craig:** Well, now let’s get into this dude. So, can I just say first of all I kind of love some parts of him. So, first of all, I love that he’s Vinny Bruzzese because, you know, I’m from Staten Island and there’s a lot of Vinny Bruzzeses. And he seems like a cool guy actually in that regard.

I love that he drinks Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper and smokes Camels all at the same time. I mean, the guy is cool. And I will also say this much about this guy: I love how totally upfront he is about how he’s trying to make money. And I have to say one of the things that drives me nuts about the cottage industry of these awful so-called script consultants — or people that Brooks Barnes bizarrely calls script doctors incorrectly — is that they’re always couching what they do in some sort of altruistic, artistic form.

And this guy is the opposite. And I love that he’s literally like, “Yeah, you know, basically I got into this to make money. And I really like making money. And I also am providing the service to studio executives so that they can cover their ass in case of a failure.” He literally says that.

**John:** He does actually say that. I do totally respect that.

**Craig:** I think that’s so great.

**John:** And so I will also defend him to some degree in the sense of using data to look at which movies should get made, because there is some value to that. And if you step back, studios have been doing this for a long time because there is actual Data-data that you can look at. You can look at what movies you’ve made. You can look at what movies have grossed. You can look at what dates you release them. You can look at what actors were in those movies and what other actors were in those movies with them.

There is a whole big giant set of data that you could look at that can be invaluable for determining, like, do I green light this movie? Do I not green light this movie? That is valid. And that is especially valid when you’re looking at, like, how will you be able to market this movie?

The challenge is that’s actually objective data. When you’re looking at a screenplay there’s almost nothing objective you can say in there. And one of the examples they cite quite early on in the article which I found just the best, and worst, and most telling was he talks about movies about demons and horror movies.

So, it says, “‘Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,’ Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. ‘If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.'”

What is that? So, you’ve created a distinction between summoned demons and targeting demons, which I’ve never even considered. I don’t think any writer has really ever considered. You’re saying, “Well that’s the difference between why this movie does a certain amount of box office, and this one does a different kind of amount of box office.”

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah. So, with data, when you have enough data you can look for correlations and you don’t necessary need to say that that’s the cause of why this thing was what it was, but if you’re just making arbitrary distinctions you’re just cherry-picking little things in whatever movies were hits and whatever movies were not hits. And you’re using that to defend what really your decisions are. And that’s not actually using data. That’s just manipulating things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s take the demon example, because it’s so bizarre. First of all, it’s pretty rare for marketing to specify whether someone has been targeted by a demon or has summoned a demon. So, right off the bat people don’t read the script for opening weekend. I’m not sure how anybody would know that for opening weekend.

But, let me give a counter example, and this is where this guy kind of, you know, look, you made your bed, let’s sleep in it. There’s a Ouija Board in The Exorcist. She uses a Ouija Board to talk to Captain Howdy. I’m pretty sure that’s in there. I’ll have to check and make sure, but either way there’s some kind of implication that she has summoned Captain Howdy. It’s just dumb.

Look, the thing about this guy is he’s not the villain here. What he’s really doing is basically hustling and giving notes on stuff. If his theory is that people like some things more than others…duh. Right? Okay?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If his theory is that, I don’t know, let’s go out on a limb here. I’m going to crunch some quick data here using my statistics program. In romantic comedies, people like it when the couple ends up together. Duh! Okay. We all know. We get it. We got it, okay? That’s called giving notes and that’s what studios always do. They’ve always done that. And we as writers have always tried to write towards an audience, but also sometimes challenge an audience, maybe turn things on their head a little bit.

The villain here are the people hiring this guy! Because it used to be — it used to be — that people in Hollywood who gave notes, while maybe not the smartest people all the time, had the courage of their convictions. That’s why they had a job. What the hell is their job if they’re hiring this guy to do exactly what they’re supposed to do? And the data doesn’t mean a damn thing. We all know that. The data…Fight Club.

Let me back up for a second. One thing that this kind of stuff will never account for are the Black Swans. You’re familiar with the whole Black Swan theory?

**John:** Absolutely. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think, is his name.

**Craig:** I believe that’s correct.

**John:** And so his theory is that — a gross simplification of his theory — that there are going to be events or things that happen that are so outside of your expectation that you can consider them Black Swans. And those events you can’t fully prepare for but in a weird way you have to be ready for the fact that because you can’t prepare for them you have to prepare for them.

**Craig:** And also that when Black Swans occur they tend to have very large impacts, because the world is set up in such a way that we expect things. And when the unexpected happens it is either very, very good, or very, very bad.

In Hollywood, I think what we find is that there are a lot of Black Swans that in retrospect we look back as White Swans because so many White Swans follow them.

So, Star Wars is a Black Swan. Nobody thought Star Wars was going to work. Nobody. Fox literally let Lucas put his own money into it and gave him merchandising, because they didn’t — I mean, everybody thought the thing was going to be a disaster. And, frankly, based on the early screenplays and ideas it probably was going to be a disaster.

And, by the way, it may even be a Black Swan within the world of George Lucas. It may have been that Lucas just fluked himself into Star Wars and really Lucas is far more Howard the Duck than he is… — I don’t know. I mean, he did a good job on American Graffiti. But I guess the point is those are the things that make Hollywood Hollywood.

If you want to be in a business that follows various predictable patterns in order to grind out predictable income, what the hell are you doing in Hollywood anyway? The whole point is to chase things that are surprises. Isn’t that the point?

I mean, yeah, of course, you want to make Avengers, go for it, make Avengers. And when that works you can point to how it basically fit everybody’s expected pattern. Except take three steps back and then say, well then why didn’t the Hulk make all that money? And why didn’t the Bryan Singer Superman make all that money? And why didn’t, you know, they’re on their 12th iteration of Iron Man, it’s still working great, but when they hit the fourth Batman back in the ’90s it didn’t work great.

Nobody knows. And you can come up with all this nonsense, but the truth of the matter is what this guy is peddling is nothing special at all except comfort.

**John:** Yeah. He’s peddling comfort. I mean, he’s doing that retroactive pattern fitting to say, “This is the reason why these were successful, therefore we’re going to take this pattern and template and apply it to these future things. Oh, but never mind the things that don’t fit that template because those were flukes or we’re going to find somebody to explain why they do fit the pattern magically.”

What I will say is especially telling is that nowhere in this whole article does it talk about the quality of the actual product. And in a weird way I’d argue that the quality of the product is largely irrelevant to sort of how well it does. It’s not completely relevant, but it’s not the most important factor in how well it does. So, his notes and his opinion on what movies you make and how you make those movies is about the screenplay and it’s about sort of the actual movie you’re going to make.

But, the movie you made has very little impact on the actual opening weekend. The opening weekend is the biggest predictor of how much a movie is going to make. And nothing that they’re doing here is going to bump that needle for what that opening weekend is.

**Craig:** It’s right.

**John:** Your opening weekend is determined on somewhat the movie that you made, somewhat to a large degree the stars you have in it, to a huge degree the weekend that you’re choosing to open, the competition around that weekend.

So, all of these factors have nothing to do with this 20-page report that you pay $20,000 for. And it’s maddening to think that it’s going to all come down to these formulas.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And I have to say that his whole, that Brooks kind of skews this article and Bruzzese feeds into it, to suggest that the only people — the ONLY people that don’t like this are the writers. We’re the only ones.

I don’t care. Let me tell you something. If I’m working for somebody and they want to give this guy $20,000 to write up a bunch of notes, great. I’ll read them. If they’re good, I’ll do them. I have no problem with that. I mean, the fact that Mr. Bruzzese bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein, notwithstanding, if he writes good notes, terrific.

It’s just that what he’s trying to do is this game that I’ve been watching. He’s formalizing a game that I’ve been watching and experiencing for nearly twenty years now. And that is the game of, “My opinion is not an opinion; my opinion is a fact.” That’s the game people play.

When I’m sitting in a room with people and they’re like, “I think it should be like this.” Really? Because I think it should be like this. “No, no, no, it can’t be like this. It has to be like this because of this, this, and this. It’s a fact.”

No it’s not. Your opinion is not a fact. Nobody’s opinion about any screenplay is a fact. Ever. I can’t take it! That’s got to stop.

And all this guy is doing is dressing up opinion as fact so that these executives who don’t have either the courage of their convictions or convictions at all can present them to the writers as fact. But, look, if you can come up with all the pieces, do it! Go, spend another ten grand, maybe he can actually give you the demon movie that will do the best. But, until you can do that you have to acknowledge that there is an enormous ghost in the machine over which you have no control.

And, frankly, that’s what we do. So, I don’t mind that this guy is doing this. I applaud any hustler. I am so sad that people are lining up to play his three-card monte though. That is…oh god.

**John:** I wonder how many people are actually lining up to play his three-card monte, though. Because if you look at it, like no one else went on the record. No one else said that they were actually talking to him. So, my concern sort of from the journalistic perspective is it feels like a terrific press release for this guy. And in some ways selling the controversy is a way to sort of get more people talking about him and talking about this idea and this service that he’s providing when there may actually be nothing to it. There may not have even been sizzle before this article ran yesterday.

I don’t know. I mean, there’s a photo of them in a nice-looking office where he’s talking to some young woman who is a development executive there. Great, but I don’t know that there is anything to this at all.

**Craig:** We don’t even know that that’s his office.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t know where he is. But I just think, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not plugged in enough, but for instance it says, “Major film financiers and advisers like Houlihan Lokey confirm…,” who?

**John:** Who is Houlihan Lokey?

**Craig:** Houlihan Lokey doesn’t even sound like a real name. Is that a person or…?

**John:** It’s an amazing name, though. I love it.

**Craig:** It is a pretty good name, like Houlihan Lokey. Houlihan Lokey is like the old drunk in the saloon who ends up killing everyone because he’s still really, really good with a six-shooter.

**John:** Yeah. He’s notorious.

**Craig:** “Who did this? Houlihan Lokey! Ugh.”

I don’t know how that would be analyzed by Mr. Bruzzese’s spreadsheets, but all I can say is my reaction is not… — In the end he tries to, I love it when people do this, they try and basically pre-but you, you know, so in a rebuttal but a prebuttal he says, “All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful. I’m here to tell it like it is. Some babies are ugly.”

No shit. I mean, like do you really think that we’re all so stupid and narcissistic that we think that all of our scripts are beautiful? No. No!

Go ahead, ask how many screenwriters after their first draft, okay, you have a choice: you can get notes and we can work on this, or we will turn around and shoot this exactly the way it is and put you name on it and we can’t change a word. How many screenwriters are going to go, “Um, uh…”

**John:** Yeah. You want that chance.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. Of course. So, no, we don’t think that all of our babies are beautiful. And, no, we don’t have a problem with notes and we don’t have a problem with anyone’s notes.

Compare this, by the way, to Lindsay Doran’s terrific talk about joy where she says, “Look, movies that end on joy really please audiences.” That’s a very dramatic statement. It is not specific. It doesn’t say, “You cannot summon demons.” You know why, because it is talking about an audience experience. It’s not talking about a story point.

She, unlike Mr. Bruzzese has made movies. She has actually sat and worked with writers. She understands how to talk to us. This guy understands how to talk to executives, who don’t make movies.

**John:** So, let’s talk about that specific example and Lindsay Doran’s perspective on it, and his perspective on it. He would come to saying like, “Well, the data says that moviegoers don’t like movies with summoned demons, they prefer the other kind of demon.” But he might have ten points of data. That’s not actually meaningful data.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So he’s only looking at correlation. Lindsay Doran can come to it with that same note, but she could say, “Here is why I think that’s not going to work, because in this situation it’s going to track through this way, and we as the audience feel this way about the characters at the end because of the nature of what happened with that demon situation.”

That is a meaningful note that you can actually think about and use and implement throughout your script. His saying like, “Don’t summon the demon, don’t use a Ouija Board,” that’s not…

**Craig:** Because it’s a fact. And by the way, all we’re doing now is just waiting for the movies that contradict those facts because that’s the business we’re in. We’re in the business of surprises and subversions of expectations. It’s constantly changing. There are movies that come out that don’t do any business in the theater at all and then in home video become phenomenon.

Look at Austin Powers. I think made $40 million in theaters and then was just enormous at home. Office Space. Nothing. Enormous at home.

Who knows? I have a movie coming out where we decapitate a giraffe, how does that work out on a spreadsheet?

And I’ve watch this with comedy testing all the time. Inevitably the highest testing joke is also the worst testing joke. But, you know, this is the same old snake oil as always, and shame on anyone who is so bad at their job — it’s your job. And you have to hire somebody else to do it for you? That’s embarrassing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why don’t you just quit at that point. Why don’t the people who employ you just fire you and hire this guy instead? What do we need you for, to write a check to this guy? Oh my god. This guy is fine. I love this guy. Good for him. Way to go, Vinny.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** So, Jill writes in to ask, “A friend of mine wrote a pilot for a web series and decided to get some of our smarter writer friends together to punch it up. That’s when I realized I have no idea how to run a punch-up session. Can you give us some tips and tricks?”

So, Jill is talking about an informal punch-up session. Sometimes on a big movie, you and I have both been in these situations where it’s a WGA movie, and so therefore there are kind of rules about how you do it. So, you are bringing in people for a day, you’re paying them for a day, and you’re sitting around a table. We all sign these contracts saying that we know what we’re doing. And eventually we have to sign another form saying we’re not going to try and get credit on it.

That’s not what we’re talking about here. She’s just doing a little web series. So, let’s give some suggestions on the smaller version of what she should do.

**Craig:** Well, I have done these before. And the basic rule of thumb is if you’re running the session you should try and participate very little. Your job really is to kind of move people through the script. So, you’re sort of saying, “Okay, let’s just start,” usually you’ll say, “Here are some general areas where we’d love to punch up. Here is our kind of thing we’re looking for, some specific questions, but really more than anything, let’s just go through the script page-by-page and pitch out some thoughts as you have them. So, let’s just start. Let’s just start with page one. Anybody have any thoughts on page one?”

So, you can do a little preliminary “let’s just talk about the big issues,” if anybody has any big story issues, if you want. But then just go, page one, and then people start pitching and you’re like, great, great. And just be encouraging and you’ll find that some people are really good at it. Some people are terrible at it.

As the person running the session you have to kind of rescue and be kind to the people who are floundering because you don’t want to be mean. You don’t want the room to turn on somebody because they may have one joke that works, and it may be the best joke ever. So, you just don’t want to kill them. And just keep things going and keep things light. And just keep moving through pages.

You will find, inevitably, that most of what people have to pitch are on the first 30 pages or so. The last 20 pages everybody gets really quiet because they either stopped reading or it’s action and climax and it’s not joke time.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you have the opportunity to do a reading of it right beforehand, that’s helpful, so it’s fresh in everyone’s head. Just read through what’s actually on the page so everyone agrees that they read the same thing together, that’s really helpful before you start flipping pages. You won’t always have that chance, but it’s great if you can do that.

I’d say provide plenty of food, a lot of carbs, to keep people going.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Pizza is always good. Be genuinely thankful for everyone who is there.

Inevitably in any group situation someone will probably kind of dominate the conversation, and maybe that’s a really good smart person who is actually really funny and that’s great, but if it’s the wrong person then you have to sort of do some judo to sort of get the other people talking a little bit more.

If you can get Nick Kroll to come to your punch-up session, he’s really good.

**Craig:** Nick’s funny, yeah.

**John:** So, that’s a good, funny thing, too. But have fun with it. And always ask the questions, like the what-if questions, and try and never shut down an idea because like, “Oh, that’s going to be impossible based on what everything else is.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t shut down now. Just sort of improve rules of like, “Yes, and?” And just keep rolling because even if it is not an idea that is implementable right then, right there, you may find a way the next day, like, “Oh, I know how to do that kind of thing,” or that sparks something that’s really good.

So, take notes for yourself about not even what they’re talking about right there but what it inspires for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you have a producing partner or somebody that’s there with you, don’t worry and think that they’re going to somehow think that you can do something you can’t do, and vice versa. For those of you who produce don’t think that this is the time to jump in and say that’s not possible.

The two of you, knowing the script and the situation better than anybody, will have the exact same reactions afterwards. “Okay, well, we can’t do that, we can’t do that, we can do this, we can do this. What about this? What about this?”

So, just keep it light. Keep it moving. Don’t freak out. And, also, just be aware that when there’s a ton of stuff that people are going to be like, “That is so funny,” and in your mind you’re like, “And will never be in this movie because it’s totally off-tone or it’s going to stop the movie dead.” That’s okay. Just keep that to yourself. That is, 95% of stuff that gets a room laugh in these things — unusable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can think of one guy in particular who is awesome at these things and I never once have gotten anything usable from him. [laughs] But he’s fun to have. And he keeps the room laughing which in and of itself has great value.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But, you will find some… — And you know, the fact is there will be all these little dramas that occur, usually little soap operas that happen at these things. People get jealous, they get weird, they get quiet, they get too talky. Sometimes they go after each other as part of like the comedy sport. Just, you know, you be mommy or daddy and just gently encourage everybody to stay on target.

**John:** Yeah. Next question. Matt in Orlando, Florida asks, “When you look at the pilot script for Modern Family you’ll notice the character introductions are done in list form directly under the title page before the actual script begins. It seems like a great way to save space, especially in a sitcom script where you have a lot of characters to introduce and a limited amount of time to do so. Is this common?”

The answer is, yes, it is common. That is a very standard sitcom format. And so I encourage all writers no matter what genres you’d like to work in to take a look at the different formats for how things are done. And in sitcoms, yes, it’s common to do that kind of character introduction, a page of these are the characters who are the regulars and these are characters who are unique to this show. And that’s a standard way of showing stuff in sitcom land.

Even a single camera comedy like Modern Family will often do this.

**Craig:** I take your word for it.

**John:** Yeah. But don’t do it in a screenplay.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** No one ever wants to see that in a screenplay. Don’t ever…don’t do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a sitcom thing. And that’s why it’s important that if you’re writing a spec episode of Modern Family, which is probably not the right one to do because that’s an older show, but if you’re writing a spec episode of whatever great new sitcom, find an episode that’s a common — actually just mimic their formatting exactly because that’s what people want to see, that you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, I just have to interrupt because I just remembered one thing also that makes me angry about Brooks Barnes. [laughs]

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Can I say it? God, so, in the beginning of his article he makes this really weird analogy to what Vinny Bruzzese is doing to what Facebook and Netflix do by analyzing the way people use their websites. They’re so not analogous…

**John:** [laughs] Not even remotely.

**Craig:** …in any way, shape, or form. They have nothing to do with each other. It’s just a totally different business, purpose, and point. Brooks needs to stop writing about Hollywood. Okay, sorry. Back to the questions.

I get nuts. I get nuts!

**John:** I know. I mean, it could have been the whole episode but it came up very late and so I thought we’d…

**Craig:** I know. We have so much to today. It’s a very busy show.

**John:** Heather in Dahlonega, Georgia writes, “Can you tell me why so many movies starting big names are going straight to DVD? I recently watched one on Netflix streaming called Fire with Fire starring Bruce Willis, Rosario Dawson, Josh Duhamel, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Julian McMahon, and Red Lights with Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and Robert De Niro.

“In the past a cast like this would garner a theatrical release, or if the movie just wasn’t good enough the actors wouldn’t have signed onto it in the first place. What’s going on with these movies?”

**Craig:** Ah-ha! Typically when a movie ends up going direct to video like that, and Netflix, however you want to describe direct-to-video these days, it is because the movie just didn’t turn out very well. Actors sign up for movies because they think the movie will be good. Sometimes, though, that just doesn’t happen. You know? Sometimes the movie doesn’t come out well.

And basically if it’s an independent movie — and these are almost always the case — if there is independent financing the idea is “let’s find a distributor.” And nobody wants to distribute it because distribution comes with great costs. There’s typically the cost of marketing, the number one, plus also making the prints, putting it in theaters and so forth.

And if they can’t find enough theaters interested and they can’t justify the marketing budget based on what they perceive to be the interest in the film based on test screenings and so forth, they have no choice. They have to cut their losses while they can.

**John:** Absolutely. So, back in the day when Variety was a print publication I would get, I always loved once or twice a year AFM would come up, and AFM — American Film Market — and, I guess, maybe it was twice a year. I always got confused about it. But, there would be this thing out in Santa Monica where these foreign distributors and foreign filmmakers would come in and they’d show the packages of movies that they were going to get made.

And so in Variety they would have these mockup one sheets of all these movies. And it was like you’d never heard of these movies. And sometimes they were movies that were going to go into production, sometimes they were movies that were already done. You’re like, “Really? This movie exists in some way?”

And that’s sort of what some of these things are. Like I suspect Fire with Fire was that situation where someone raised the money to make this movie, foreign financing/other financing, they were able to make this movie with the hopes of selling it to a major distributor because it was going to be so good and everyone was going to love it. And often that just didn’t happen.

I’ll also say that, you look at Nicholas Cage as sort of the classic example of this, like who’s in a lot of movies, and you can’t believe he’s in so many movies. Some of those actors, they’re meaningful overseas in ways that they’re not meaningful here. And so even if it doesn’t have a theatrical release in the US, it may have a theatrical release overseas.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Or home video may be enough overseas that it is worth it to make the movie with them.

**Craig:** I think that’s what — I remember the same thing at the same time, flipping through Variety as a twenty-something and going, “What is this AFM and what are these movies?” I remember the one that made me laugh the most was, it was shortly after RoboCop, somebody made a movie called Cyborg Cop. This is obviously just RoboCop. But it was like a flea market of movies, and that’s exactly what was going on.

Basically they were selling them to foreign distributors and then here in the US they would either get no distribution or direct-to-video. So, that’s what’s going on there.

**John:** That’s fine. And, you could say like, “Well, why would anybody be in these movies?” Well, they got paid to be in the movie. It may be the kind of role that they really wanted to try to do. And sometimes those movies are giant, great, big hits.

And so things like the Jason Statham movies, like The Transporter, that was probably that kind of movie and it actually took off well enough that it sort of established him as a bit of a star. So, sometimes those movies that seem like they come from a major distributor, they really were pickups and they were bought by some distributor here and it always seemed like they were a Columbia movie but they weren’t.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s look at some Three Page Challenges. So, while we open these up I will give you sort of the backstory on these. If you are new to the podcast, every couple weeks we invite listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay and Craig and I will read it, and take a look at it, and share it on the podcast so people can listen to our critiques but also read the pages themselves and see if they agree with what we said.

If you have a screenplay that you want us to take a look at the first three pages, and only the first three pages, you can send it to us at the website. The link for it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will maybe take a look at it.

Stuart reads through all of them, all the ones who come in with the proper boilerplate language on it. And Craig and I get a small sampling of them. And Stuart sent us three today. Which of the three should we start with?

**Craig:** You know, I’m just ready to do any of them. And if you want me to summarize one, let me know. You know, I’m back to being your apprentice. Dad’s back.

**John:** [laughs] Let’s start with Sue Morris’s script. We don’t have a title for this. I can do the summary on this one if you want to do the next one.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, we start, we fade in on the nib of a quill pen, it’s moving in small, neat strokes on the paper. And there’s a super with text over it. We are in England, Christmas, 1126. So, we see a young woman giving birth. She has given birth to a baby girl. Next, we see at the Palace of Westminster we see two, we see Sir Thomas and Sir John, both knights, talking about the fact that she’s just given birth to a daughter and that daughters can still be useful.

Next scene we meet King Henry in his late 50s. He says that, “It has been six years since the death of our beloved son and heir, William, in that great tragedy which took the lives of so many sons and daughters.” He says that the next heir will be his daughter, Matilda, will be his successor.

Actually, no, “My daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, will be my successor, to rule over the lands on both sides of the sea.”

Some raised eyebrows but no one questions it. So, there’s obviously some sort of court intrigue happening there. More discussion, as we wrap up page three, more discussion about sort of what this means, and then we jump forward at the end of page three to a hunting lodge near Normandy and the king has died. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin, talk to me about these pages.

**Craig:** I feel like I’ve read this kind of thing many, many times. I’ve seen a lot of spec scripts that are medieval dramas. More than you would imagine, actually. There’s quite a few of them out there.

This scene where the child is born I feel literally like it just gets repeated over, and over, and over. There is always the woman on the straw mattress and there is always the screaming and the blood and there’s always the midwife. I guess that’s how children were born back then. And no one ever wants a daughter; everybody always wants a son.

I got a little confused by the fact that King Henry is the king, but there was a boy who was the Holy Roman Emperor. Maybe I just don’t know the difference between the two, but I thought that once Charlemagne became the Holy Roman Emperor he was the king? I don’t know. I guess it’s two different things.

I didn’t really love the fact that we cut away from this to show the drowning. It just seemed a little strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To have a flashback there on page two of a character we’ve never met. It felt very TV. And maybe this is TV. I don’t know. It feels very TV to me.

And then there’s just like sort of generally generic court murmuring. “So the King’s nephew precedes the King’s bastard.”

“You should know our man by now. Always determined to be the first.” You know, like political intrigue and stuff. It’s all fine, I mean, it’s written fine. I have no problem with the writing. I just feel like hopefully something crazy happens after this because otherwise, you know, been there.

**John:** Yeah. I was lacking point of view on this. I didn’t see what was going to be special about this versus The Tudors or sort of every other kind of big medieval drama. And, so, let’s start from the very top.

We see this quill pen writing. Okay, that’s a little cliché, but fine; quill pens can write, that’s great. But then there is a super. It’s listed as a super, but I can’t believe anyone would read this much onscreen. Here’s the text of the super: ‘If on the death of a baron or other of my men a surviving daughter is the heir, I will give her [in marriage] with her land following the advice of my barons.’ Clause in the coronation charter of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, 1100 AD.

That’s a lot to throw at me to read. And it’s not especially clear writing. That’s a hard, hard sentence to pierce. So, that’s throwing up a bit of a wall to me at the start.

Then we get to the actual birth stuff, and while it’s a kind of cliché scene I thought it was actually nicely written. Those are nice short lines breaking the action down.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree.

**John:** Two paragraph little chunks. I get it. I love it.

When we get to the Palace of Westminster we meet Sir Thomas and Sir John. Sir Thomas I’m told is in his early 20s. Sir John I get no information about. And if you’re just going to call them Sir Thomas and Sir John I have no way of really keeping them apart or separate. So, why am I watching these two people and what’s really going on?

I also got confused because, here’s the description of Sir Thomas and sort of what he’s doing:

Bright, cold sunlight. Leather boots crunch on frosted grass as SIR THOMAS (early 20s) strides across to meet the newly arrived MESSENGER dismounting from his horse. They confer briefly, breath condensing in the chill air.

Sir Thomas spins on his heel and strides back, towards a fellow knight, SIR JOHN. Sir Thomas says, “Another daughter.”

What was weird to me is like I think we were supposed to be in a really wide shot so therefore we weren’t hearing what the messenger was saying, but if you’re going to have people confer and we don’t hear it, kind of say that we don’t hear it, because otherwise that dialogue we’re going to assume is somehow between the people who — I just confused where we were at in the scene and whether that messenger was still there.

**Craig:** Let me also mention: a knight doesn’t walk across the lawn to go talk to a messenger; the messenger walks across the lawn to him. Much more interesting. I mean, these things are all about power, and rank, and privilege, and all the rest of it, so much more interesting to follow some exhausted courier to walk over to a guy and whisper something in his ear.

**John:** Exactly. So, if you’re going to have a similar situation, if you keep Sir Thomas on his horse or whatever, the messenger comes over with him, and then they pull back to reveal that Sir John is watching this from a distance and not able to hear what’s going on. That may be more interesting. That, again, suggests some cinematography here that’s happening.

With King Henry on page two, “King Henry may not be the largest man there, but by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles, all feel it.” Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of clauses to throw at me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, “He’s not the largest man there,” but he is the King. It was just a weird sentence to me. It didn’t help me understand the power dynamic of that moment as much as it probably could.

**Craig:** And it is, I mean, “But by God, he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS,” so he owns them too. “The great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel it.” Oh, I see what’s she’s saying. You know, that’s that kind of tortured writing, the tortured sentence structure.

Also, his first line, I don’t, “My lords, it is time.” Eh.

**John:** Eh. Yeah. It’s cliché.

So, here’s a problem with those clauses there. “But by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel lit.” The “and the assembled barons,” does he own the barons? He owns this place and the barons? What? Huh?

So, it could read either way. It’s actually sort of interesting both ways. It’s actually probably more interesting if he believes he owns the barons.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I agree with you, there’s a flashback on page two which is like, oh my god, I don’t know who anybody is and we’re already getting a flashback to somebody who dies and therefore is not going to be part of our show. So, that’s…

**Craig:** We just don’t care.

**John:** These are all issues. And then we jump again at the end of page three and at that point we may be ready to actually start the story and so that jump may feel great if we hadn’t jumped around in time on page two.

**Craig:** And if the idea here is that these two guys, Stephen, late 20s, the golden boy of Henry’s court, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a decade older than Stephen, are going to be competing with each other for the favor of this newly minted widowed queen, I’m suspecting as much.

Then, that’s the perspective we want to play here. That’s what we want to do. And it certainly can’t be manifested by a weird shoulder scuffle fight. “A few moments of shoulder-barging and scuffling between the two men. They glare at each other.” That just seems comedic. And I don’t think that this is supposed to be comedic. I mean, that’s just funny to me in a bad way.

**John:** Yeah. I would say I hadn’t guessed that Stephen and Robert would be the focus of things. If they are the focus of things I want to see them on page one or page two, rather than page three. And, honestly, we could get them there just by cutting out some stuff that I didn’t think we needed in page one or page two.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Agreed. Not bad, Sue. Not bad.

**John:** Not bad at all. And, you know, everything on there was nicely written. I didn’t have any sort of issues with sort of how you were describing things on the page. It felt professional. It just felt like something I had seen before too much.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Next let’s do Robin Peters. The Gaffer. Do you want to do the summary here?

**Craig:** Sure. Okay, so we begin at a fancy restaurant, and we’re in England, where Simon page, in his 20s, is proposing to his girlfriend, Trudy, and he’s given her a small diamond ring. And she doesn’t feel that it’s big enough and basically says I can’t, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a market trader.” So, she’s unhappy with his status in life.

Next, we’re in Simon’s office, sort of, and someone is congratulating him and they don’t even know his name.

Now we’re in a park and she’s very happy because I guess she’s heard that he’s gotten a promotion but he tells her the catch is it’s in Texas. So, he’s been promoted but he has to go to Texas. And she basically says, “I’m leaving you because that’s not good enough.” She hands him his ring back. He begs for her to come back. She does not. And he chucks the ring away, hitting a duck.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, my first concern here is specificity. And that’s a word we use too much on the podcast, but I think it’s actually really important for here.

We start, “EXT. NORTHERN ENGLISH CITY — NIGHT.” Uh, just tell us the city.

**Craig:** Right. Manchester takes fewer letters than Northern English City.

**John:** “Lights flicker against the night sky.” Yeah, but maybe you could think of something more specific. Maybe you could just paint our world a little bit more specifically because I have a hard time clicking in because I just don’t feel like you know what these things are. And I lack confidence because you don’t seem confident in your choices here so far.

We’re “INT. FANCY RESTAURANT.” Okay. I mean, if you don’t want to give the name of the restaurant, that’s great, but just paint our world a little bit in that first line here.

Simon and Trudy, okay, proposals are an interesting thing, or diamond rings are a thing we’ve seen a lot at the start of things, but it’s a natural way to start something, but that scene never really quite clicked. I wasn’t sure at the end of that first scene how I was supposed to feel about things.

Then we jump to the next “OPEN PLAN OFFICE,” again, really generic, before we start this next thing. Every place we go to is just the most basic description of what it could possibly be. And I just don’t feel — I never click in because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is a comedy. And I don’t know if Robin is English or not, but it certainly reads English. The problem is that it’s not very funny. And it’s not very funny, I think, in part because the characters are so broadly and thinly drawn.

You’re absolutely right about all the specificity. And there’s also a kind of TV-ish quality to it, for instance, starting with the first line of dialogue on an establishing shot that’s rather boring, and then coming inside and moving through diners. You might as well have a waiter carrying a tray through. It’s all very kind of cliché and generic.

Bu the biggest issue is, if I can summarize, Simon is basically a schmo and Trudy is a gold-digger, mean lady. I don’t know why these two are together at all. I don’t believe, frankly, that they are together. I don’t believe that anybody talks like Simon. When she finally breaks up with him, because she doesn’t want to go to Texas, he keeps begging after her and I hate him for it. And she’s acting in a way that’s just sort of broadly sociopathic in a mean girl way which I kind of just don’t believe.

I’ll give Robin credit for getting the plot out on page two. Englishman is going to be a fish out of water in Texas, I presume. That’s fine, but I don’t know anything about his job. I don’t really know why market trader is better or worse than “junior” — “They could use a junior in Texas.” I’m not sure what that means.

His office was very odd. Talk about generic: INT. OPEN PLAN OFFICE — DAY. Simon exits a room into a gleaming corporate open plan office, reeking of wealth. A SUIT comes up to him.

Well, let’s count the genericisms here: Open plan office. Room. Reeking of Wealth — gold? A suit. I don’t understand what’s happening. Frankly, this would be a much more interesting scene if it were one scene and it started with a guy proposing to a woman and she was super happy because he was giving her everything she wanted and he’s telling her that he knows that she was waiting for this promotion because she knows, I mean, explain it in terms that women — so women watching this don’t feel like you hate women. She really wanted to make sure that she was supported and secure in her life because of how she grew up, whatever it is. And he says, “But the only thing is we’re…” And as part of the surprise, because he knows this is the big pitch. It’s not the ring is the big pitch. The big pitch is, “Texas.”

And off of her face the next shot you see is him at the airport alone. And, you know, the airport lady is like, “And you are traveling alone?” “Yup.”

Just there’s so much… — Be more interesting about this. This is just not interesting to me.

**John:** Well, also what you described in that take of a scene is you were giving a moment where he could actually be funny.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Because none of these scenes that he’s actually funny now does he have the capability of really being funny, because he’s just reacting to other people.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so in either his trying to sell this idea to her, what’s his motivation? What is he attempting to do? And you need to give him something to attempt to do. So, either he’s attempting to get her on board with this idea of moving to Texas, or, alternately, we can see that whatever that room he came out of, well what happened in that room? Was he like making a pitch for himself and trying to stand up for himself about why he should get a promotion, and then he gets Texas out of it, which is not what he wanted, but it’s something new — that’s a moment where you can see him actually driving something.

I would also back up one step, because when I talk about sort of Northern English City, you know, working on a musical for the last 10 weeks I’m very keenly aware of you kind of need the “This is our world” song before you get to the “I want” song. And I didn’t get either of those so far.

And it’s fine, if the first three pages were really just like a “This is our world” song, that’s great. And you can setup this is the nature of the universe that we’re in. That can be wonderful.

And then by letting us see that guy in his world, then we can see the decision of what is it he wants. What is it he’s trying to do? And I wasn’t — none of those gears were sort of clicking in on these first three pages for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. If it is, in fact, going to turn into a fish out of water comedy, we do need to see the fish in water. And we need to know what that means. And it can’t just be simply one shot of him at a park, which we describe as “Park,” kicking a stone around like a football, and then mentioning a local fast food joint. It’s just not enough.

Yeah. I think that this needs a little bit more remedial work and study to make… — And you’ve got to be careful about these jokes like, she says, “I don’t mean to be heartless, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with a market trader, can I?”

“Yeah, of course. Sorry, which bit of that wasn’t heartless?”

Well, okay, if you know it’s heartless, why are you still there? She’s heartless. What is going on here? And the issue with this, yes, we know people in real life who are pathetic doormats, but we don’t root for them in movies. We need to see some spark of something with this guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s why so typically people will find if the movie starts with a breakup they find their mate in bed with someone else because we understand that they were deceived. But this guy — she is such an open book, I really hate this guy for not getting it.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right, our final Three Page Challenge of the day comes from Kevin Pinkerton.

**Craig:** Pinkerton.

**John:** It’s called The Morning Briefing. And I will attempt to give a summary here.

So, we start on the Pentagon Basement Corridor.

**Craig:** Wait, did you say Pentag-AN.

**John:** Pentag-ON.

**Craig:** Pentagon. You said Pentigan.

**John:** I did say Pentagan. That doesn’t make any sense at all. I rhymed it with Alyson Hannigan and Bennigan’s.

**Craig:** [laughs] Bennigan’s. Exactly. Or it’s like Houlihan O’Reilly, or that guy, one of the biggest financiers in Hollywood? What was his name? Houlihan Lokey or something?

**John:** Yeah, something like that.

**Craig:** That’s great. Pentagan!

**John:** So, we’re at the Pentagon Basement Corridor, and the president is walking next to a Special Forces Sergeant. They’re appearing and disappearing into pools of light. The president wipes his forehead with a red, white, and blue handkerchief.

They come to an unmarked door. The president says, “Let’s get this over with.”

Inside is a chamber. It’s sort of dark and ominous inside. And, in fact, on a low circular dais is a creature, a giant creature — looks like it’s made of rotted meat in over-muscled humanoid form. There are also children on bleachers who are chained there watching, and terrified.

The president expects this creature to be there, and the president says, “Begin.” The creature gives the president advice about what’s happening in the future. And so tells him to, “Deploy the ships to Bosporus. Acquiescence is certain.”

The president asks about press reaction. So, basically this monstrous creature is an advisor who has some ability to see into the future. And so at the end the president thanks him to some degree, but also says, the creature is hungry, and the president agrees, okay, well, you can eat the children. And then the president leaves and we hear in the background the sounds of the children being eaten by this monstrous creature.

**Craig:** I love this.

**John:** I loved it, too.

**Craig:** I loved it.

**John:** And let’s talk about reasons why we love this.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, just from a craft point of view, it’s really well written. At first I was nervous because on the first page it seems like, oh no, this is just a bad version of a Roland Emmerich movie, because they’re doing that thing where they walk down the hall, “lit overhead by a row of dim bulbs.” And I’m like, dim bulbs?

He’s got a red, white, and blue handkerchief which feels like…

**John:** Yeah. I flagged that, too. I was like, oh, no, no, no, that’s cheesy, but then I was like, no, it’s deliberately cheesy.

**Craig:** Deliberate, exactly. It’s deliberate, which is great, because it’s a choice, and it’s a smart choice given what we’re about to see. And then we go into this room, and again, I’ve seen this room in the basement of the White House before, so everything just feels like, oh god, I’ve seen it…and then there’s like an alien there. Oh no, but then there’s these kids. And I’m like, well, what the hell is that about?

A dozen children, and I love how unapologetic Kevin is here — he doesn’t pull a punch at all. “a DOZEN CHILDREN, ages five to seven,” [laughs], the cutest age, “wide-eyed and weeping in horror at the thing before them, as they sit gagged and chained to their seats.” Brilliant. I love how audacious this guy is.

And then the president snaps his finger at the creature and one word, “Begin.” So, you know, here’s just so you guys playing at home, the home game, what I love about this line, it’s the first line of dialogue, or rather the second line, and it is, “Begin.” And what that line tells us is this has happened before. In fact, this is so frequent that the president is actually annoyed. It’s like, “I don’t have time, let’s go, begin.”

That is such a great tonal shift, because we’ve been set up to believe that this is like so horrifying, like the way in Independence Day they visit that alien that they’ve captured and it’s like so super serious. This guy is like, “Begin, let’s go.”

And the creature delivers these predictions. And the funny thing about the predictions, even though it’s not done funny funny, is that they’re so mundane. “Press reaction?”

“Acceptable.” [laughs] It made me laugh. “On the crux of the Senate standoff, the weak vote…” The creature is like a Beltway insider at this point, which is so great. He even gives a weather prediction.

**John:** Yeah, so the creature says, “Thunderstorms in the D.C. Metro area. Hail.”

**Craig:** Hail!

**John:** “But I’ve scheduled a speech.”

“I have seen the storm. It is already cut on the lathe of time. What more? Enough.”

**Craig:** On the lathe of time! I know. The creature is like, “Get out, I’ve given you…stop questioning me.” And the president is trying to figure out exactly, like his concern isn’t about the world, or any of that stuff, his issue is he’s got a speech and it’s supposed to hail. [laughs] It’s like, “Are you telling me? I just want to be clear.” And then he’s like, “Back to the Russians.”

Creature: Tired.

“I just want to be clue, the carriers, the Russians won’t be –”

Creature: Hungry.

And the president is like, “Eh.”

**John:** So, let’s talk, I do have a little bit of some criticisms here. On page one, “THE PRESIDENT walks beside a SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT.” Well, how are we going to know he’s the president? We’re not necessarily going to know he’s the president. So, you’re telling us he’s the president. I’m not sure we’re going to necessarily get that originally. And it’s very important that we know that he’s the president.

So, you may want to throw in a, “Mr. President,” like he comes out of the elevator, “Mr. President,” just let us know. Because it’s much funnier if we know from the first frame that he’s the president.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The overall more general concern: this was a tremendous little sketch, a little moment. There’s nothing there that leads me to believe that this is a good sustainable idea over the course of a full-length movie, but I kind of don’t care, because I’ve enjoyed reading these three pages so much that I want to read the next pages.

And that’s, there’s a lot to be said for that. Kevin had a perspective, and a voice, and it was enjoyable to read. And these are — it felt confident. And, god, just give me some confidence…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …and I will just keep reading.

**Craig:** Such a great point. I mean, he is totally in control of this. And he is unapologetic, and specific, and frankly, there’s just a lot of craft. I really like the way the dialogue flows. There’s a great rhythm to it. And we cannot teach that to anybody. There’s just a really smart rhythm to it. I can tell you that Kevin is a funny guy. He’s a very funny writer. I thought it was really good.

And I think, if I were to predict what this kind of movie is, it feels a little bit like those early — you ever see the early Peter Jackson.

**John:** Oh yeah, early Peter Jackson.

**Craig:** Just like over-the-top comedy/horror/grotesque/funny, obviously satirical. I think it’s really cool. And I think Kevin did a great job.

**John:** I think so, too. It reminds me of sort of mid-era Whedon or sort of like the Buffy and Angel sort of at their peak. This would be like the cold teaser opening to something and you’d meet, like the new villain of the season would be the president and he would have this monster. And that would be the villain for the season, or half the season.

It felt great and solid that way.

**Craig:** Yeah, very cool.

**John:** Nicely done, Kevin. And nicely done, Stuart, for picking that sample for us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s so nice to leave on a high note.

**Craig:** On a high note. Left on a high note. Well, well done Kevin Pinkerton.

**John:** I have a Cool Thing this week. My Cool Thing is actually, this is going to sound really self-indulgent, but it’s a book that I’m featured in. It’s a book called The FilmCraft Book of Screenwriting. And, as we’ve talked about on the show, I don’t like most books on screenwriting. And what’s nice about this book is it’s just a bunch of interviews with a bunch of screenwriters. And so there’s me, there’s Billy Ray, there’s Whit Stillman, there’s Mark Baumbach, Guillermo Arriaga.

It’s a really nicely put together, really pretty, pretty book that this British publisher put together. It’s $20 and it’s actually kind of great. And so I have an interview in there where I’m talking about sort of different movies I’ve worked on and sort of process, but everyone else is really fascinating and great, too.

And so if you’re looking for a book on screenwriting, or want to give a gift of a book on screenwriting, I think it’s actually a really well put together book. So, edited and written together by Tim Grierson. And there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Oh, I also have to say, it also has the most misleading cover in the history of any book you’ve ever seen. So, the cover is Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Bed from Benjamin Button. And it’s this incredibly sexy shot. And it says Screenwriting over the top of it. [laughs] It’s like there is nothing sexy at all about screenwriting.

And so this was waiting for me when I got back from Chicago. I opened the envelope and I’m like, what the hell is this? And I had no idea that I was featured in it. Then I found it inside and it was good.

**Craig:** Nice. I’m cool-less this week. But it’s such a big podcast.

**John:** It was a big podcast.

**Craig:** Maybe my Cool Thing this week is Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** Vinny. I love…Vinny is like, “You know what? I’m busy. I’m smoking. I love Diet Dr. Pepper, but sometimes I also like Diet Coke.”

**John:** Yeah. Mix them together it’s good.

**Craig:** Boom. “Open, hey, genie, I want both. Give me both. Open them both! And Camels.”

I don’t know why I imagine Vinny yelling at genie.

**John:** Because he probably does.

**Craig:** He might.

**John:** He might.

**Craig:** But he may be a very soft-spoken guy. The point is, I love him. I love this guy.

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

**Craig:** He’s cool.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. If you have questions about anything we’ve talked about, including how to submit Three Page Challenge samples, or this book I just hyped, or any of the Three Page entries that we talked about today, you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcast.

This was Episode 88, but there’s 87 episodes before this if you want to go back through and look at them.

If you are not subscribing to us in iTunes you probably should, because that way we know that you’re subscribing in iTunes and other people can find us. So, look us up on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

And we will be back next week. And next week I think we’re going to have exciting news about our 100th episode live show.

**Craig:** Very excited.

**John:** Which could be very exciting, because we got a great email today. So, I think that could work out nicely.

**Craig:** It could. Could!

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And welcome home.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Turning the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/05/turning-page.html) at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater
* [Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-equation-of-a-hit-film-script-with-data.html?hp&_r=0) by Brooks Barnes
* Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s [Black swan theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script format](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* Three Pages by [Sue Morris](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SueMorris.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Robin Peters](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RobinPeters.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Kevin Pinkerton](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KevinPinkerton.pdf)
* [FilmCraft Screenwriting](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0240824865/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Tim Grierson on Amazon
* OUTRO: Thompson Twins’ [Doctor Doctor covered by Danny McEvoy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpHAgyUKn-0)