The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/474-the-calm-one).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 474 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This episode is coming out Tuesday, November 3, 2020. So if you’re listening to this while standing in line to vote, thank you.

**Craig:** And if you’ve already voted, thank you also.

**John:** And that’s the last we’re going to talk about the election in this episode. Instead, we’re going to try to lessen any anxiety you may be feeling today.

**Craig:** Think of this episode as a much of hot chocolate with the little mini marshmallows.

**John:** Or a dog sleeping in a sun beam.

**Craig:** Or that song you hear that takes you back to a fun night in college.

**John:** Let this episode be a half a Xanax and a glass of red wine. Not that you should ever do that. But people have.

**Craig:** Or if you’re more risk adverse a fuzzy blanket and a good book.

**John:** It’s Bob Ross painting fluffy little clouds for an hour.

**Craig:** It’s the Monday New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s just so easy to fill out.

**John:** It’s McDonald’s French fries that you don’t have to share.

**Craig:** It’s a lost episode Ted Lasso where he goes grocery shopping with Nate.

**John:** It’s Elmo from Sesame Street giving you a hug.

**Craig:** It’s your high school coach saying he’s proud of you.

**John:** It’s a marshmallow roasted over a campfire to just the right shade.

**Craig:** AKA completely burnt. It’s a hot shower you can stay in for an hour.

**John:** It’s hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock and then realizing it’s Sunday and you can just sleep in.

**Craig:** It’s an episode where we answer some listener questions. We help a writer figure out how to his agent. We discuss the quiet moments before the big set pieces. And we just keep things calm.

**John:** Yeah. And, in our bonus episode for Premium members, we’ll talk about dogs.

**Craig:** I mean, dogs.

**John:** Dogs.

**Craig:** Dogs.

**John:** In the spirit of keeping things calm and quiet the only bit of news is that I’m going to be doing a panel for YALL Fest. So, if you’re a person who is interested in middle grade writing or YA writing, either reading those books or writing those books, I’m doing a panel on November 13. YALL Fest is great. And it’s all organized by middle grade and YA authors. And so it’s a national thing. It’s all online. It’s all free. My panel is on November 13 at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, with a bunch of other middle grade authors. But if you’re interested in writing in that space at all you should sign up for it because it looks to be a great, great program this year.

So there will be a link in the show notes to that.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** Now, Craig, why don’t you start us off? You suggested this topic of the calm before the storm.

**Craig:** I wonder why. I wonder why this came to mind. So, in movies and television shows we have all experienced this moment and it’s something that I think we write a lot without being even conscious that we’re writing specifically this moment. It comes before the end. Pretty much right before the end. Something big is about to happen. The final movement of the story. And right before the final movement of the story whereas the normal order of business is to propel things constantly forward everything just stops. The whole thing stops. It’s like everyone takes a break. Which theoretically is anti-dramatic and disrupts flow.

But in fact the calm before the storm moment, and I’m talking about right before the verdict of a big case, or right before the big battle in the war movie, or right before the performance in the singing movie, or right before the big final game in a sports movie, in the moment before that everybody has this quiet night before/moment before moment. And I wanted to talk about why we have those moments and what’s supposed to happen in them and what the value is.

**John:** Yeah. What is the dramatic purpose of these moments? Because as you describe them, yeah, I see them in all of these stories. In all of these movies. And I feel like it’s true because in real life there is a buildup and a buildup in anticipation, but there is also a moment before the thing that I know is going to happen is going to happen. And it can be a moment of anxiety but it can also be a moment of coming together. It can be a moment of synthesis of sort of what I’ve learned so far. So talk to me about this moment. What do you see there?

**Craig:** Well, it’s usually at a point in your story where all of the things the characters needed to do, all the things they were capable of doing, they have done. So, there’s a sense of you’ve earned a break. We need to know as the audience that you have done all the preparations. And then you have this moment that we right now as people are listening to this are probably experiencing. Because we are in it right now. On Tuesday we wait to see how this all turns out. We’ve done it. We voted. We did what we could do. And all of the phone-banking and all that stuff is over and now you have a moment of reflection. And before the big final action typically there is a shared moment.

It is shared between our main characters. There is some sense of a relationship that is completing. Oftentimes these moments are a drink or a celebration. In the last season of Game of Thrones, before the big huge crazy battel began there was an episode that was basically a long party. And in the party people were drinking and celebrating. They were essentially reconciled. All of the “family business” had been completed. What happens in those sequences? People give each other advice. People consummate relationships that maybe were meant to go to a higher level. And they have a moment where they can help define for us watching who they actually are. Because in those moments – I think when I watch those moments at least – what I’m seeing is something that most closely approximates those moments in real life where things feel slowed down.

Where everything just slows down to a stop.

**John:** Classically in a story we’re looking at a protagonist/antagonist relationship. And so there’s still going to be a battle, a final moment to come. There’s going to be that big showdown is going to happen. But then a lot of smaller protagonist/antagonist relationships along the way. And so talk about those family relationships, how the team has come together, those other smaller tensions are hopefully resolved in this moment so we can basically concentrate all of our energy and all our force on this last thing.

So it is that backstage moment where the two rivals finally sort of come together to do this thing. Or the two people on the team who were always fighting and bickering are now united in a common cause. This is the moment where that happens so it doesn’t have to happen in that final set piece.

**Craig:** Right. In fact, it needs to happen here because it can’t happen in the final set piece. The problem with those things happening in the final set piece is that they feel circumstantial. When you make an alliance in a moment where if you don’t make the alliance your head is going to come off that’s not a dramatically fulfilling alliance. That’s just an alliance of convenience. But in these moments before what happens is we do take a minute to quietly talk to each other about where we went wrong and how it can be better and right and how we are now unbreakable.

So our alliances are secure. There’s no more question of where we stand with each other. We solidify our position no only vis-à-vis each other but with the community around us, whether that’s a baseball team, a small town, a city. Or an entire country. Thinking, OK, another classic example, the rah-rah speech is a version of this. The “we will not go gently into the night” speech before you fight the aliens. Everybody is now on the same page finally. All on the same page.

And why? Because symbolically these moments are about preparing for death. We are getting our affairs in order. It’s remarkable how similar these scenes are to pre-death scenes. What do you do? You get your affairs in order. You say your goodbyes. You tell people you love them. You bury the hatchet and squash all beefs. You write your final messages. You complete the circle. And we need this in our drama because if we don’t sense the characters are prepared to die then victory just seems sort of inevitable.

**John:** Yeah. Now we’re talking about this from the point of view of the characters. We’re talking about it from our point of view as the writer. But let’s think about this from the point of view of the audience. Why does the audience need this moment of calm? Think about your experience watching a movie and if it’s just relentless, you’re on a constant forward march to this finale, you never get to catch your breath yourself. You never sort of get to resettle in the seat and enjoy the movie that you’re watching. It’s just relentlessly pushing at you.

And so it gives you a moment of a tonal break. A moment to pick up the popcorn that you sat down on the floor and get back into it. It’s just changes the dynamic for you so that you have some different textures in your movie, otherwise it can just be the same thing the whole time through.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it also decouples your feeling about the hero from their potential success. Because I don’t want to love someone simply because they win. I want to love them for who they are in a moment. And when they have finally struggled past their flaws and patched up the conflict between themselves and the people that they should love or protect, or be an ally for, you feel like they’ve earned your love. Before they go into that battle I go, “They get it. They’re good. If they die now they die. But if they win they win. But either way I love them now.”

As opposed to just sort of like, well, let’s see. Because if he wins, then hooray, but if not, screw him. He just didn’t have it. And we don’t like that. We want to know before the big swing happens that they’re good. We want to know they’re good.

**John:** It’s crazy that you bring this up right now because this is actually the scenes I’m working on this week are in this space of the script. And it is so fascinating that you need to give the story permission to sort of go either way. So that the central characters, we want them to succeed, but we also know that if they don’t succeed, if this thing that we hope happens doesn’t happen that’s also OK. And obviously we’re talking about in general movies where there’s a final set piece, a final sort of thing that needs to happen. But even the thing I’m writing right now which is not so set piece driven there’s a fundamental dramatic question that’s being asked at the start of the story and changes along the way. But it’s a binary choice. What’s going to happen?

And to have this moment of quiet at this place 85% of the way through the story it makes it OK with either answer, which is important.

**Craig:** It is. It doesn’t have to be right before something large. My own example when I was working on Chernobyl was our big battle is a courtroom case which isn’t even a courtroom case. It’s a show trial. So the verdict has been predetermined. There’s nothing less dramatic than that. But there is a break in the trial and two of our three main characters go outside and they sit on a bench. And essentially what happens is one of them says, “I’m dying. And I didn’t matter. But you did and I’m happy I was with you.” And the other one says, very convincingly, “No, no, no, you mattered the most.” And in that quiet moment where there are no stakes, nothing changes other than that, their feelings about each other, there is a conclusion. And we need it. We just need it so that we understand when they go back into the courtroom whether they both die quickly or slowly. It doesn’t matter. They have settled their affairs with each other. And they have essentially said to each other that they love each other.

If you don’t have it, then what are the symptoms of the story without these moments? A sense of rushing. And it’s so weird because you will feel people complaining about a sense of dragging everywhere except this one spot. This one spot they will accuse you of rushing if you don’t take a pause.

**John:** Now, a thing that you will sometimes notice as you’re looking through a script that’s not working in its last section is you may be trying to do this either during that last set piece or after the last set piece. We’ve talked before about how in a football movie it’s not really about winning the game. It’s about the quarterback’s wife being proud of him. Then that’s the emotional moment. But don’t mistake that for this quiet before the storm moment where you see important relationships resolve. Important things being solidified and anchored before that last set piece.

And so if you’re having problems in your third act this may be one of the issues is that you’re not getting into that last beat right, or you’re trying to pay off a thing after the movie kind of wants to be over. After the story of the movie kind of wants to be over. So you may need to pull something up earlier on.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because once it’s over it’s just a confirmation of what happened in this moment we’re talking about, the moment before. Where typically you look at somebody like across the field you’ll see the person that you had the night before with, that whole discussion. You’ll see them. They’ll smile at you. You’ll smile at them. Because, yup, what we said last night, that was true. That’s all you need.

**John:** Yeah. You’re establishing the emotional stakes for this last set piece as well. You’re reminding the audience of where the characters started, where they’ve come from, and what literally just happened right before this moment is that they are unified as they’re going into this last thing.

And so you see this on every episode of Glee for example. It’s all the tensions that happen during the course of the episode and then in the final performance there’s a look between two characters and it’s cheesy and you just know it’s going to happen. But if it didn’t happen it would be very frustrating.

**Craig:** You’d be like where’s my look?

**John:** There’s your look. So, what lessons do we want people to take away from this quiet before the storm? I think it’s just a reminder not to rush. A reminder that you need to actually plan for this. Because if you didn’t anticipate you need to do this it could just be – if you’re just doing sort of like the note cards of set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece you won’t think about how important it is to have these transitional moments. Because it’s not flashy. It’s not exciting. There’s no big giant fireworks happening in this moment. And yet the movies you love most probably have this moment and you’re just not paying attention to it.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Just imagine your characters when they have nothing being asked of them. The movie essentially says, oh, normally there’s an event after an event after an event. But unfortunately because of a scheduling problem there’s no event right now. The event will be in one hour. The event will be tomorrow morning. What do you do? What you’re doing is you’re giving them time off. And in their time off they can reflect on what has happened and how it made them feel. And what they think is going to happen tomorrow.

And they can be honest with each other and they can express that they’re afraid. And they can express why it matters more than it might otherwise. All of that stuff is the most important stuff. If you don’t have it your climax will be active. But it may not be meaningful.

**John:** Agreed. Great. Now in previous episodes we’ve discussed when it makes sense to write something as a spec versus pitching it, but it’s not always a binary choice. In many cases you’re pitching these nascent ideas to your reps, your agent, or your manager who are going to weigh in on what they think they can sell or help get you into rooms to meet.

So my personal experience with this, my first agent was a good guy, a good friend, and I liked him a lot, but he just did not seem to share my taste. I had a hard time expressing to him what it was that I was trying to write. So I wrote this horror western and he just had no idea what to do with it. And I wrote the first part of Go and he’s like, “I don’t get this at all.” And that was a sign that, oh, then maybe you just don’t really get me as a writer and I ended up moving to another agency.

But then I started to realize that in some cases I was having a hard time describing these ideas and sort of why I should write these ideas. And it wasn’t really just the other person’s fault. I was having a hard time communicating what this was just because I was new at this.

And Craig what was your experience as a newer writer? Did you have a hard time describing what it was you were trying to do?

**Craig:** No. But it took a lot of work. Because I was working exclusively in feature comedy, and this was the ‘90s where everything was generally high concept feature comedy, you had to actually have this really clear concept. You needed to be able to explain out how the movie was actually a movie and not just a comedy sketch. And you needed to give them a sense of set pieces. So there was a lot of rigging and moving parts that needed to be there. And somehow you had to do all of that without boring them to tears. And it’s really hard to pitch comedy – I’m sure Drew can get into that as well – because pitching is not funny. It’s a comedy-killing medium. So it can get sweaty and it’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s bring on a guest because he wrote in on Twitter saying that he was running into this exact problem where he’s having a hard time connecting with his agent about the things he was trying to write. Drew Champion is a writer whose animated show Archibald’s Next Big Thing has its first two seasons on Netflix and a third season coming on Peacock soon. Drew, welcome to the program.

Drew Champion: Hi. Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Drew Champion is such a good name. I want you to be like one of those huge robots in Pacific Rim. Like Gypsy Danger. Drew Champion.

Drew: It’s a great last name that unfortunately growing up you had a lot of pressure. Like, oh, let’s get him on our team. He’s going to be great.

**John:** Good omen.

**Craig:** And then what happened?

Drew: Exactly. Exactly.

**Craig:** Blew a draft? Take on Champion. Oh god.

**John:** Now, Drew, talk to us about what you’re writing right now because you have a writing partner but you also write by yourself. So what’s your current situation?

Drew: Right now my writing partner and I we did this show, Archibald’s Next Big Thing, at DreamWorks and we’re kind of between shows right now. We’re doing a little bit of development for DreamWorks Animation. And at the same time together with my partner we are also doing non-animated stuff together. And trying to work that out. And then also I’m doing some solo stuff, non-animated, as well.

**John:** Great. And so in animation, so it’s DreamWorks Animation, the stuff that you’ve been doing so far is not WGA work. It’s Animation Guild?

Drew: Yeah. It’s all Animation Guild. Yeah.

**John:** And you have an agent and a manager? What’s your representation situation?

Drew: Just an agent. No manager right now.

**John:** Great. So what stuff are you having a hard time with right now. Is it stuff you’re working on with your partner? Or stuff you’re trying to pitch that’s just you? Or figure out if it’s just you.

Drew: The stuff that I mentioned when I messaged you on Twitter was just my personal stuff. It’s like this fine balance of writing a pilot and sending it to my agent and having it not really connect very well. And then thinking, OK, maybe writing the full pilot was too much work. Maybe I’ll just write an outline. So I wrote an outline, a comedy, and sent it to him and didn’t really connect. And so it’s like, OK, what’s even less work than an outline? Let’s just try a logline. And so my loglines haven’t been landing as well. I feel kind of like I want to – I need my agent to be on my side. It’s the gatekeeper. And I need to write something that he’s excited about so that he would be able to take it around and do those things. But at the same time I feel like it’s kind of wearing down some of my enthusiasm on some of my projects.

So it’s like this push and pull of where should I put the effort into and should I just write it anyway? At most one of these outlines could be a sample. So, yeah, that’s kind of where my situation is at.

**Craig:** That’s a situation. Well, a lot of times there is some sort of systematic best practices answer. In the case like this, and I don’t mean your specific case, but just the experience of trying to convince a partner of yours, whether it’s a writing partner or an agent that what you’re doing is worth pursuing, I think the best practice is what fills your sail with wind. And if someone is not filling your sail with wind then it’s just no good.

Now that’s not to say that agents should just read things and go, “Great!” Because then that’s patronizing and it’s not real wind. But it does seem like maybe what’s happening is the dynamic has become I show up and I’m like here, what do you think about this, and he goes, “Yeah, it’s OK. I don’t know.” All right, well what about this? “Meh, I don’t know.”

As opposed to sitting down and saying, “I’m not going to pitch you anything. I’m going to tell you how I see things going. And what I want. And how I want to get there. I want to tell you about why I’m passionate about certain things and how I think it would connect to other people and why.” And rather than serve up some food, explain the theory and the desire. And also explain the context of what you want from them. Because, I mean, just as a side note, agents don’t know what good is. I mean, apologies to all of them, but that’s not their job.

Their job is to get you as much money as possible or as much work as possible. They generally figure out what good is based on what everybody else says good is. Generally. I mean, some of them really do have excellent taste. But that’s not their primary function.

Think about maybe like a tête-à-tête I guess is what I’m suggesting.

**John:** Yeah. I think Craig’s suggestion in terms of having a general discussion about where you want to be working in the next two years is a good way to sort of start this rather than focusing on this one thing that’s going to go out as a pitch versus that thing that you’re going to try to write as a spec. Talk about the kinds of things you want to be doing so that he gets the sense of what you’re looking at with your partner and what you want to be looking at doing yourself.

One thing to think about in terms of agents and managers is it’s cleaner when we think about like a real estate agent, because that real estate agent you don’t go to them for advice on what color should I paint this wall. They’re just there to help you sell your house or to help you buy a house. That’s their function. And our literary agents are really good at that and they have a good sense of what the market is and all that. But you’re not necessarily paying them for their taste or their ability to predict this is the thing that’s going to be the one that’s going to set you on artistic success. Based on their experience this is the kind of thing that’s going to make it pretty easy for me to get you in rooms to talk about stuff.

And so in addition to having a general sit down with your reps I would say imagine those hypothetical general meetings you’re going into and what are the projects that you want to be able to pitch to those executives you’re meeting with rather than thinking about what it is – how you’re going to pitch it to your agent.

Drew: Right.

**John:** Do you want to pitch any of the stuff that you’re thinking about to us? Is there anything that you’re working on that feels like–?

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Well is there any sort of general spaces, like talk to me about – imagine that we are the agent where you’re having the sort of general conversation. What kind of stuff do you want to be writing?

Drew: Well part of my situation is that I come from kid’s animation. And this is the first show I’ve ever worked on. So I feel like I have a good foundation and then breaking out of animation might be – it’ll be a struggle. It might be a little difficult. But with conversations with my agent it sounds like that doing half hour comedies is probably the most adjacent thing to animated TV, especially in the kids space, rather than trying to do a broody period piece drama feature. That might be a little bit more difficult to get me on. But to do something in comedy.

So that’s where I’ve been kind of focusing right now is half hour comedies.

**Craig:** Let’s put aside what maybe structurally seems like the business appropriate move. What do you actually want to do?

Drew: I want to do those brooding—

**Craig:** Great. We just got somewhere.

Drew: That’s what I want to do.

**Craig:** Do you think going from Archibald’s Next Big Thing to a brooding drama, do you think that that is impossible? Ask the guy who went from Hangover 3 to Chernobyl.

Drew: No. I mean, it doesn’t sound impossible. It just feels, well, it doesn’t sound impossible, but then it does sound impossible. Because then it’s like well who the hell is this guy? He was just writing about a talking Chicken for Tony Hale. Why is he doing such-and-such?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I’ll just say that there are a lot of examples of this. Sometimes we miss them. Or we forget that Walter White was the silly dad on Malcolm in the Middle. There is a lot of this. In acting and in writing and in directing. And the beautiful part of doing what you truly want to do as opposed to trying to fit into some scaffolding is that it’s actually much easier. Believe it or not it’s easy.

It’s really hard to wake up in the morning and write what you’re supposed to write. It is incredibly easy to wake up in the morning and write what you want to write.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** And it will open doors in a way that – look, if it’s good. Right? It will open doors in remarkable ways for you. What happens is they tell you you can’t go through any of those doors. You have to go through this one door. You write something else, you come in, and all those other doors fling open. Fling open. It’s like they just didn’t believe it until they saw it.

**John:** So, Craig, a very specific example that I can offer Drew from my own experience. My first paid jobs as a writer were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. They’re both kid’s books adaptations. And the only things I was getting sent at my old agent was movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was very, very typecast as the guy who writes those kinds of things. I was typecast and I was pigeonholed. That’s what I was getting sent.

And so I wrote Go largely as a kind of middle finger to I can write other things. Don’t just think of me as this one kind of writer. And I ended up using that as the script that got me a new agent and sort of got me started on a new thing.

What was great about Go is it was the movie I most wanted to see. It’s the movie that didn’t exist that I really wanted to see. And happily people could read that script and apply it to whatever they wanted to be. Some people said like, “Oh, he can write an action movie. He can write a comedy. He can write serious stuff.” It was a very useful script for me on that level, even if it hadn’t ever gotten made. It would have gotten me plenty of work.

And so I would say be thinking about what is the movie that you, Drew, specifically could write that best shows the kind of movie that you could deliver to the world. You also do have a fallback plan. You do have a writing partner and you have a deal at DreamWorks Animation so you can keep doing that stuff. That’s the kind of great situation you find yourself in is you can always just do another animated kids show. Take this opportunity to write the thing that you really wish could exist. And I don’t think it is about pitching it, honestly. I think it is just going to be a brand new thing that you write that shows that you are a different kind of writer. And a writer who can do this by himself without the partner.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** It’s scary.

**John:** It is scary. But exciting.

Drew: I’m terrified.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good. I mean, you’d be kind of sociopathic if you weren’t. I mean, I was scared. But also there’s a freedom to it. I was talking to Alec Berg the other day about how as you go on in your career you get better at writing. It’s inevitable. You get way better at writing. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I started. But he did point out something that was absolutely true that when you look back at the stuff you wrote way, way back in the beginning you were probably – you meaning all of us – were freer. We were freer in our writing. We were less constrained by our fears or what we were trying to do. Ambitions. The market. Other movies. Insecurities. Whatever the hell it was, we were too stupid to know that you shouldn’t write some things. And in that we were wonderful.

And, after all, it’s that writer that got into Hollywood, right? So, they were doing something right. So in something like this the nice thing is you get to be completely free. There are no notes. There’s no rubric. There’s no syllabus. There’s nothing. You do whatever you want. It’s amazing. It’s free. And stick it in at the end of the day if you want. It could be a little side job for you.

Drew: Right.

**Craig:** And if it goes nowhere it goes nowhere. But what I would say is, and this is the meeting that I had with my agent way, way back. We sat down and I said, OK, so here’s the situation. I think that I’m a better writer than the opportunities I’m getting. And so I want to concentrate on that now. And we don’t have to worry about, if it’s OK with you, I don’t want to worry about money. I don’t want to worry about this or that.

Now, we can’t always not worry about money. But in that instance I said I just want to work with better material. I want to work on better material. Because I want to use what I have. I had been stuck in the same – working the same aisle in the same store for too long. I wanted a new position.

So it’s fair to sit down with that person and say, “I’m still doing the comedy. I’m still doing this. Let’s make some money. But also I want you to know I’m doing this and this is exciting because we can go out and make some fresh kills.” You know what I mean? We can open up a new front in this war.

**John:** Drew, how are you feeling right now?

Drew: I mean, my mind is just racing. This has all just been really interesting, really good stuff. I think this is really helpful and I feel energized to kind of open my mind to a different level of just being open and free to just explore some of this other stuff. That’s really exciting.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Listening to you say that, it does strike me, because I’ve had the same feeling, that this business convinces you that you’re not free.

**John:** There’s a Stockholm syndrome that sort of kicks in.

**Craig:** Yeah. But we are. That’s the crazy part. We are. They just put blinders on us. And they’re very effective blinders. And of course, you know, we have obligations that we have to meet, and so we do have to work on things that we get paid for. But I guess what I’m saying is we’re giving you permission. And you don’t have to worry that you’re being self-indulgent. Because I’m guessing that you’re a lot like me in that you’ve always been the far opposite of self-indulgent. You’ve always been terrified as coming off as self-indulgent.

Drew: Bingo. Bingo.

**Craig:** Well then you know what? Indulge a little. You’ve earned it.

**John:** Cool. Drew, we are going to be looking for your credits. We’re going to be looking for the announcement of the project that you set up that you’re going to write now. And check back in with us and let us know what you do next, OK?

Drew: Yeah. You guys, this has been so helpful. Thank you so very much.

**Craig:** Our pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Drew: Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Thank you, Drew. Suddenly we’re in a call-in advice show.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Putting people’s lives back together. It’s lovely.

**John:** These call-in advice shows, they also sometimes have producers who come on who are reading questions. So let’s bring our producer on, Megana Rao.

Megana Rao: Hey guys.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** We are so excited to have you here with us. And you, how many questions do you get in at ask@johnaugust.com per week?

Megana: Oh lord. Probably like 20 to 30.

**John:** All right. And what is your criteria for sorting through the questions? And which ones make it on to the Workflowy?

Megana: So I think about questions that we have answered recently. Things that I think are unique and interesting and personally curious about. Yeah, and then I think things that are broadly applicable or if there’s a specific situation that seems, I don’t know, like you guys would have an interesting take on it. I kind of send all of that to you guys, get your feedback, and then the winners are in the Workflowy.

**Craig:** I mean, you know I don’t actually give any feedback. I accept what you guys do completely. Openly. Happily. I try and be as happy as I can. You do a great job.

Megana: But like cryptic puzzles from last week was definitely a Craig question.

**Craig:** I know. I know. And I was so – thank you for this.

**John:** Yeah, we kind of wedged that in at the end there.

**Craig:** I really appreciated it.

**John:** What do we have this week?

Megana: So Lisa wrote in about misdirection. And she asked, “I’ve noticed that mystery writers, particularly Agatha Christie, use confirmation bias to trick the reader into ignoring what’s actually happening. The reader gets a couple of clues that lead to a red herring, then happily ignores or downplays contrary evidence until the big denouement.

“Similarly, one of the meta clues in a mystery is the unnecessary-necessary character. The villain is introduced early on as a minor character who the reader ignores because their appearance seems normal to the plot. Then, when they are revealed, the audience doesn’t feel cheated that the villain came from left field. It feels fair.

“Any thoughts on how screenwriters can best use these techniques of misdirection?”

**John:** What a good question from Lisa.

**Craig:** An excellent question from Lisa.

**John:** Yeah, so what you’re doing with a misdirection is very classically like a magic trick. And magic tricks rely on expectation. What you expect is going to happen next and then defeating that expectation. Surpassing that expectation.

So in any misdirection, in a mystery, or whatever you’re trying to do, you’re leading the audience into making reasonable assumptions about what’s going to happen. So assuming that the protagonist isn’t actually the villain, that the movie is a reliable narrator, that the story is taking place on earth or in a specific decade. Basically that you’re not doing an M. Night Shyamalan on them. That things you are assuming are true are actually true. And I like that phrase the unnecessary-necessary character. Because that’s a thing I see a lot, Craig, is that the character who well naturally is going to be there because of sort of the situation and then they have a role beyond what you expect them to be doing in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like the Shyamalaning – I mean, there’s a difference between a joke and a prank. Practical jokes, which are not jokes, are just things that rely on someone’s ignorance of something that they shouldn’t know anyway. And that’s Shyamalaning. Whereas a proper joke or a proper trick or misdirection it’s legitimately fooling you. Because you could see it if you were able to. It’s right there.

So what Agatha Christie does, and I study her so carefully, is she is in fact using things like confirmation bias. She is allowing you to make conclusions that you don’t even realize you’re making. And she uses all of the tricks that we’ve talked about before. The ways that we are irrational. And the study of Kahneman and Tversky who sort of established the science of human irrationality. Agatha Christie before the scientists ever got ahold of this concept was preying upon all of those things. Anchoring, for instance. We tend to be influenced by the first thing that we see. But we shouldn’t. It’s just the first. It doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most important. But she’ll use things like that all the time.

So, part of the trickery of it, Lisa, is actually studying how humans think wrongly about things. It is fair game to take advantage of that. Because whose fault is it for overemphasizing the first thing you read? Or for presuming that if a coin spins three heads in a row that it’s more likely that the next spin will be tails as opposed to heads. Well, it’s our fault. It’s not the writer’s fault.

So the writer is allowed to take advantage of that. It’s not just about our skill in being sneaky. It’s about our awareness of how our audience is broken.

**John:** And I would say there’s a difference between what writers can get away with in prose fiction versus screenwriting. And the central difference is that in a book characters can disappear. Basically unless the writer actually puts that character in front of your face they can disappear back into the woodwork. So a character can be mentioned and then sort of not mentioned for a while. And because you’re just getting information from the writer you don’t have a sense of like, oh, this character is important or not important. Versus in a screenplay and therefore in a movie there’s going to be a physical actor there in the frame, in the shot. And if you’re trying to do a misdirect where that person who doesn’t seem important is actually very important, or that waiter is actually secretly complicit in the whole thing, that person is going to physically be there.

So as a screenwriter you may have to put in a substitute reason for why that character is showing up there so much. So you might be thinking about this is the guy who won’t stop freaking out during the robbery. And so he’s panicked. And so we think that he’s just a guy who is in the bank during the robbery but he’s actually part of the villains. Or the hacker who can get you through into that secure zone. So the reason why that guy is always sitting there at the computer is because he’s on our side. He’s one of our hackers, but he’s actually that guy.

You’re going to need to think of some reason for why that character is around so much and it’s a bigger issue for a screenwriter than it would be for the novelist.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a great example. Are you guys Agatha Christie fans?

**John:** In high school I read through all the books and I’ve seen some of the movies but not in a while. So not nearly the fan you are.

**Craig:** What about you, Megana?

Megana: Yeah, I’d say so. I was like very much so a Nancy Drew person growing up. So I feel like that followed a similar sort of format.

**Craig:** No question. The example I like to cite is Agatha Christie’s, I think it’s her first novel, her first full mystery. It’s called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And so this is super early. I think we’re talking like 1915 or something like that. And here’s how it works. It’s a first person narrator, which is odd. It’s not typical for a murder mystery.

But this guy lives in a small town and Poirot rents a summer house next to him. And so he becomes sort of fascinated by Poirot, because Poirot is such an oddball. And lo and behold what happens? A murder. There’s like a big super rich family in town. And the rich guy is murdered. And so our narrator basically accompanies Poirot and sort of tails along as Poirot begins to take the mystery part and solve it.

And there was at the time a mystery writers club, I think, in London. And I believe either they did or almost kicked Agatha Christie out because of this. Because, sorry for spoilers for a book that’s about a hundred years old. What happens you find out is that the murderer is the narrator.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she’s brilliant. He never really lies. He just leaves a few things out. And it’s astonishing. In fact, and what’s so astonishing is that he was not unreliable as a narrator. He was reliable. He told you everything. But that’s the kind of thing that takes advantage of a natural bias that we are not even aware of. So as we’re reading and trying to figure out, or as we’re watching a movie like Knives Out, which is obviously a little different because you kind of know technically who did it early. But we know the audience is trying to figure it out. We know they’re doing the math. So, how do you beat them?

Well, somebody has got to be innocent. That’s probably the one who is not.

**John:** The only other thing I’d urge Lisa to think about is obviously misdirection in mystery is crucial to it, but misdirection is important for other genres of films as well. As an audience we are always approaching a movie with a set of expectations about the genre, about the world, the kinds of things we expect to happen in this movie. And most of the times as writers our goal is to meet and exceed those expectations. And so the audience feels smart. The audience is with you. I thought this was going to happen and it did happen and so I trust this movie.

But if you can build enough trust you can then also surprise people. And surprise relies on misdirects. This thing that you didn’t think could happen in this movie did happen. And it shakes you and it gets you really excited because you’re suddenly on a ride you didn’t expect.

So it’s the romantic comedy where they actually do break up and they never get back together again. That’s exciting. But you would need to lay in the possibilities for those misdirections early on.

Megana, another question for us, please.

Megana: OK, awesome. So I feel like this one is a great follow up. Brian asks, “How much should you reveal during a pitch meeting? If your script has a unique twist that you’ve never seen done would you reveal that twist or try to entice your audience by mentioning all the other things that make this script great without revealing the one thing that no one has ever done before? Because to do this would be giving away an idea for free. And I know how adamant you are about leaving no writing behind without payment. It seems there’s a tightrope you must walk by selling your script or idea without giving away ever single detail.”

**John:** Craig, do you reveal it all?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not writing. You’re talking about it. And these theoretically are professionals. So, they’re like, look, I’m going to read it before the audience sees it. I’m going to read it before we cast it, we shoot it, all that stuff. So what exactly are we waiting for? Because if I don’t like how it ends I’m not buying it. I need to know. And if the twist is unique and exciting and kind of mind-wobbling like, oh my god, he was a ghost the whole time. Well, that’s what they’re going to buy. They’re not buying set up, pretty much. I don’t think they are. Unless what makes your movie or your pitch unique the set up itself. In that case, sure.

But otherwise, no, go for it.

**John:** Yeah. Let me try to rephrase Brian’s question thusly. Hey, John and Craig, so I have a really unique idea but in the pitch meeting should I not actually make it sound unique or cool but make it sound like other things and hide what makes it unique and cool? Is that a good strategy?

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** The answer would be no. You should actually do what makes it unique and coo. And here’s the challenge is that obviously how you reveal that twist in the screenplay is going to be different than how you’d probably do it in a pitch. But you figure that out. And that’s the excitement of doing a pitch is figuring out where the listeners are at and how you get them to that moment. But, yes, you absolutely need to do it and so they have something to hang on. So they can really feel what’s going to be special about the project.

So, yes, leave it all on the field. You’ve got to give them what is special and unique about this, because otherwise you’re not going to sell it.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks, Megana.

**John:** Now, when people write in to ask@johnaugust.com with their questions what are some helpful things you’d like them to do in terms of question length? Do you like the audio questions? Help us out?

Megana: Ooh, I love audio questions and I know you do, too. So audio, like if you can record and send me a transcript of the question that’s the ideal. Yeah, otherwise I think keeping it short and sweet and sort of getting to the point. Just like Brian is afraid to reveal too much, I feel like in a lot of questions the person asking is also afraid that I’m going to steal their story idea or that someone would if we read it on air.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

Megana: But that ends up making for a worse question if it’s really vague because you’re not telling me any details about your situation. So feel free to let me know you don’t want me to use your real name. But otherwise please send some more context and information. That’s always really helpful.

**John:** And we also love when you include your location because it’s just more fun to say Brian in Massachusetts than just Brian.

Megana: Totally.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Brian from Massachusetts.

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

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is actually three books that are all about money and I think I may have mentioned one of them before, which is Debt – The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. It’s a great look at sort of how money came into existence based on just people owing each other stuff and it ultimately becomes money.

Two books I read recently, Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood are both really good and very different looks at sort of what it is that we’re doing when we think about money and economies and sort of how stuff works.

Craig, did you have economics in high school or college? When did you first learn about how the “economy” works?

**Craig:** I actually had a class in eighth grade. I went to an odd school. I was at Hunter College High School in Manhattan until we moved away. And so they kind of did their own funky curriculum. And in eighth grade I remember our social studies class did have a long section on how the economy worked, how the stock market worked, how money worked, loans, interest, compound interest, inflation, all that stuff. It was interesting. I mean, I never had any desire to take Econ in college or anything like that.

But, you know, I think everybody should understand the basics of how corporations function, for instance.

**John:** Absolutely. How corporations function. Just the idea of supply and demand. And it’s weird because I had micro and macroeconomics in college. And as a journalism major we were required to take both macro and micro and they were really illuminating, but they’re also basically like this is capitalism and it’s almost like a Darwinian theory of how stuff works. But it just happens to work but it’s not kind of the only way things could work. And so it’s fascinating to look at other ideas about sort of how money and economies function together.

We talked in a previous episode, actually one of our first bonus episodes, was about the gold standard and why the gold standard is stupid.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just so, so dumb.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** But it’s hard to explain why it’s dumb unless you have some background in sort of how money comes to be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If people are looking for any sort of starter books I think all three of these – actually the one that’s not about the origin capitalism which is just a little too obscure to start with, but either of these other two books are great ways to be thinking about what money is and how money actually functions in society. Because it never grew out of barter. This myth that people started trading, like I’ll give you two deer for a bushel of corn. That never happened. And it was always just IOUs for things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is America, maybe. [laughs] That’s all I’m going to say. It may be America.

**John:** It would be great if America were very, very cool.

**Craig:** I will do a follow up One Cool Thing next week to confirm or deny that America is cool.

**John:** Yes. All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net were you get all the back episodes and bonus segments and a segment like this where we’re going to talk about dogs. So, stick around if you’re a Premium member because we are going to talk about dogs. Craig, thank you for a very calm episode.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, do screenwriters need to have dogs, or is it just highly recommended?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with need to. I’m going to actually make it mandatory. Of course, everyone needs to have a dog. Everyone.

**John:** I mean, basically you join the WGA and they give you the little card and they give you a dog. That’s just how it works. You got to have a dog.

**Craig:** Got to have a dog.

**John:** Talk to us about your dog situation right now.

**Craig:** Right now we have Cookie. She is a Labrador who we keep trying to sort of pretty up. We’ll put little ribbons in her hair sometimes when she gets groomed and then she keeps trying to make herself disgusting.

**John:** You said she’s a Labrador, but she’s a Labradoodle, right?

**Craig:** Labradoodle. Yes. Oh, did I say Labrador? Labradoodle. She’s a Labradoodle which is a wonderful breed of dog. Poodles are not my favorite. Labradors are wonderful. Labradors shed all over the place, Poodles don’t. Labradoodle, it’s like a Labrador that doesn’t shed. And they’re adorable. And very sweet and friendly. She’s very, very beta. She’s the most beta dog I think I’ve ever encountered in my life. And we’re actually going to be getting another puppy soon, pretty sure.

**John:** Oh, very exciting.

**Craig:** In part because as Cookie gets older I just keep in mind the line of succession.

**John:** Yes. You have to. You always need a dog. My first dog that was my own dog was my dog Jake who was a Pug who was fantastic and he was very classically a screenwriter’s first dog. I invested in him all of my paternal caring and it was an absolutely ideal dog for me to have. We had another Pug later who looked like a dog but actually had nothing in his brain. It was actually just some sort of weird alien. Who I still loved, but was just really a challenging dog.

But my current dog–

**Craig:** Ah, Lambert.

**John:** Lambert is just an absolute dream. You’ve met Lambert several times. And is some sort of Terrier-Poodle kind of mix thing. And has just been an absolute delight and a source of warmth and comfort at all moments.

**Craig:** Lambert and Cookie have met each other. They get along famously.

**John:** They have. And Megana brought them up to your house at some point. So I’ve never seen them meet, but I’m sure they were best friends.

**Craig:** It was too gentle dogs sort of looking at each other and seemingly fine with each other and then they both sort of went their separate ways. It was like, OK, yeah, you’re here, I’m here, great. And then Lambert sat down in his funny way where he just spreads his legs and puts his balls directly on the floor. Or where his balls would be.

**John:** Yeah. Now, what is – you’re a person who is interested in science and the evolution of things, what is your belief in terms of how dogs came to be and to what degree is it just us wishful thinking that they are so empathetic and they seem to understand us so well? What is your belief about dog evolution?

**Craig:** I mean, I’m just guessing, because I haven’t studied it or anything, but it seems to me like along the way certain wolves were taken in by groups of people and over time gentler wolves were bred with other gentler wolves and you started to get breeds of dogs that descended from wolves but were like the nice ones. And then it just kept happening. And obviously around the world there are different kinds of wolves that become different kinds of dogs. And then you crossbreed them.

And I think that initially was because they were incredibly useful. Because they domesticate so well. They were helpful for protection back in the day when there was no conceal carry. Your dog was your conceal carry. They protected the family. They helped you hunt. And they obviously also were there for comfort. They were loyal. So they have all of these properties that make them incredibly suitable to live with humans. And I think that is probably why we imprint our own beliefs on what’s happening in their minds.

My dog, for instance, she has a little routine. When I come home from wherever she runs frantically to me, sits down in front of me, gets kind of low, and then starts whimpering as if to say where have you been. She’s crying. And I could think, oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything. In fact, if I put my hand right on her chest I can feel her heart pounding. Like oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything.

But I know actually what she wants is one of those dried chicken strips. And she knows that when I get home and she does this and she starts whining and doing that she gets one. And the second she gets that chicken strip she’s gone. So, it’s mostly chicken, but it’s easy to see – of course, they do love us. I mean, there’s no question about that.

**John:** Yeah. I always find it fascinating when I look at my dog’s behavior and then I take a step back and look at, OK, in what ways am I behaving like a dog who is really just stimulus and response driven? I think I want a thing but it’s really that I want this other more basic thing. I really am just hungry. Or I really just need to be around somebody but it’s not – I’m creating these elaborate reasons for why I do certain things when really it’s just sort of stimulus-driven behavior.

And yet I look into my dog’s eyes and I see like, oh, well this dog clearly loves me. A strange thing about Lambert I’ve noticed is that Lambert, his favorite thing in the world is a visitor. And anybody who comes to the house he is so obsessed. And I think people come to the house and think like, oh, this dog must not like it here because this dog just seems to desperately like me very much, or want to get away from this house. And, no, it’s any new person who comes to the house, it’s just like come on in. Do you want to take the TV? Take the TV. It’s fine. It’s good.

He’s just so obsessed with that and it’s been one of the hardest things about the pandemic and the lockdown is that Lambert just doesn’t get to see new people. New people don’t get to come to the house. And so he’s stuck with the three of us.

**Craig:** Same with Cookie. She loves new people. She likes to bark when a new person arrives to let everybody know that a new person is here. And then she just melts.

**John:** Yeah. Aw, that’s nice. Melty dogs are nice.

**Craig:** It’s the greatest. Melty dogs.

**John:** And they’re very calming which is the reason why I thought we’d talk about them here.

**Craig:** Yes. If you have a dog definitely take moment now to just sit with your dog, turn off everything, sit with your dog and think to yourself how nice it is in their mind because they don’t know any of this.

**John:** They know nothing. And like when a water bowl gets filled with water, like you did magic. You were able to touch something and water came out of it and you put it there. You were able to do all of these things that a dog can’t do. They live in a world of magic and we are the magicians.

**Craig:** Right. So you might as well get a little something back and try to get your mind right in the same frequency as your dog’s mind where the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me. Eye contact. Scratches.

**John:** Great. We’ll end it there. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

 

Links:

* [YALL Write](https://www.yallwrite.org) John’s panel is on Friday, November 13th at 3pm ET/12pm PT
* [Drew Champion](https://twitter.com/drewchamps) and [Archibald’s Next Big Thing](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9165404/)
* [Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein](https://bookshop.org/books/money-the-true-story-of-a-made-up-thing/9780316417198)
* [The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood](https://bookshop.org/books/the-origin-of-capitalism-a-longer-view/9781786630681)
* [Debt – The First 5,000 years by David Graeber](https://bookshop.org/books/debt-updated-and-expanded-the-first-5-000-years-revised/9781612194196)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Peter Hoopes ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/474standard.mp3).

 

 

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/austin-2017-three-page-challenge).

**John August:** Hey, this is John.

**Craig Mazin:** And this is Craig.

**John:** So we are both traveling this week, but today’s episode is one we recorded at the Austin Film Festival. It is a Three Page Challenge live with the people who actually wrote the scripts, who come up on stage and talk with us.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we had some pretty good guests as well helping us out.

**John:** We had an agent and a manager, so we’ll introduce them as the episode goes along. But we should be back next week with a normal episode which will be our Thanksgiving Week episode, so join us then.

So today’s episode of Scriptnotes has a few bad words. So if you’re driving in the car with your kids, this is the warning.

We’re also going to be doing a live show in Hollywood on December 7. So by the time this episode airs, we’ll hopefully have details up, so check the show notes for this episode and come see us live in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Enjoy.

**John:** Yes. On with the show.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** We host a podcast called Scriptnotes. What is Scriptnotes about, Craig?

**Craig:** Oh, it’s…

**Audience:** A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s really well done.

**Craig:** I don’t ever listen to that part so it’s the first time I’ve ever – I haven’t really heard that before.

**John:** So one of our favorite little segments we do on the show is called the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at three pages that our listeners send in. And we talk about what we see, what we notice, what’s fantastic, what could use some work, and try to offer some useful suggestions.

So one of the nice things about being here at the Austin Film Festival is we get to sometimes talk to those actual writers and bring them up and ask all the questions that we can’t ask when they’re just PDFs.

**Craig:** Right. Plus we get to see their faces. You know?

**John:** It’s nice to see that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the other things we’ve been doing when we have these live Three Page Challenges is to invite up some special guests to read through these pages with us. And so today we’re very excited to welcome two really amazing people. Daniela Garcia Brcek – I did it – is a literally manager at Circle of Confusion. Come on up here.

**Daniela Garcia-Brcek:** Hi everyone.

**John:** Hello. Welcome Daniela. And Cullen Conly is an agent at ICM, but I actually knew him from Sundance Labs. And so he worked at Sundance Labs and was instrumental in their feature film program working with really talented filmmakers on their screenplays. He was fantastic at that. I’m sure he’s a fantastic agent. Cullen Conly, please come on up.

So we put out the call on the show for people who were going to be coming to the Austin Film Festival who had three pages for us to look at. And we got 73 entries, which was great. Of those, 38 were written by women. So that’s also great. That’s the highest percentage we’ve ever gotten. So I don’t know why it happened that way, but fantastic that it happened.

**Craig:** The world is changing.

**John:** The world is lovely.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t say that.

**John:** No, but the world could be lovelier. We’ve all read these pages, but if you out there want to read these pages with us you can. Go to johnaugust.com/aff2017 on your phone and they’re there. So you can find the PDFs, but also we made it so you can just scroll through and read along with us if you want to. So, the PDFs are always the best sort of way to read them. But that’s available to you. They’ll also be in Weekend Read, either now or by the time this show posts. And we’ll give a recap for folks who have no idea what we’re talking about so you have some sense of what this is.

But first I want to talk to you guys about what you guys – how many scripts you’re reading and sort of what you’re finding in scripts. So, tell me, how many screenplays are you reading in a week?

**Daniela:** I’d like to think that I read 15 a week, at least. That’s the goal. But it’s usually between five and ten, like full scripts.

**John:** So five and ten full scripts, and are there other scripts that you’re not finishing?

**Daniela:** Oh yeah. That’s what I mean by the – the other five to ten–

**Craig:** You gauge five to 15.

**Daniela:** Yeah. So.

**John:** And so when you say you’re reading these scripts, are they from represented writers, unrepresented writers? Are they clients?

**Daniela:** It’s all across the board. So there will be scripts people are talking about that I’m like “I need to know what these scripts are.’ Potential clients. And then actual clients. And then some projects that I’m just like, ooh, this is – I’m a fan of this writer, or I’m a fan of this genre, and I just want to know what it’s about.

**John:** Cullen, how many scripts are you reading in a week these days?

**Cullen Conly:** I would say I look at 15 to 20. And, again, for different purposes, if it’s a client’s script I will read it cover to cover. I tend to work more with writer-directors and specifically writer-directors and then some playwrights that are transitioning. So I also have to read a lot of open directing assignments. And with those, you know, I can sometimes read the first 20 and the last 20, fully get what it is, and figure out who the clients that should read it are.

**John:** Wow. So, OK, first off I want to go back to “look at,” which is such a fascinating euphemism for like not really reading, but you’re sort of like – so how much do you need to look at a script to say that you’ve looked at it? How many pages does that mean?

**Cullen:** I would say like 15 pages I can get a good sense – especially for potential clients. Like is this a voice? Is this something that’s gripping me? And do I want to read more? I can get a good sense from 15.

**John:** Daniela, do you look at scripts the same way?

**Daniela:** I do “look at” them. Yeah, I would say if I’m being generous, 15. But sometimes even first 10, depending on what it is, as an assessment of can this person write, can this person engage, and also does this not feel too familiar.

**Craig:** That’s pretty much why we started doing this. I mean, the purpose was to, I guess, hold writers accountable but also inform them that this is how the world works. I mean, the amount of screenplays that you guys have to read, or just are obligated to read, is massive. And therefore the only ones that are going to be read-read, right, are the ones that actually, I don’t know, keep you going.

I mean, there is this thing you can do where you can – do you ever do the skimmy thing? Like the skim through?

**Daniela:** No, not the skimmy. But I heard about this thing that I don’t particularly like where it’s just you read the first 15, the middle 20, and then the last 15 for features.

**Craig:** Well at that point you’re reading the damn script. Just finish it.

**Daniela:** And why would you enter a movie like halfway through and be like I know exactly what’s happening because there are some characters that are there and the conflict and all that stuff. So I don’t subscribe to that. Because if it doesn’t engage me in the first 15 then that exercise is just futile.

**Craig:** Pointless. Yeah.

**John:** Is there such a thing as coverage for what you guys are doing? Like are you reading coverage on scripts ever? So, Cullen, you’re nodding.

**Cullen:** yeah, especially at an agency, our policy is usually if it’s set up at a studio, get it covered, because agents do have a lot to read. We have the reputation for being lazy when it comes to reading. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say most scripts at the studio are covered. And it is helpful. My taste isn’t massive tent pole films, so if I’m covering that project I probably don’t want to sit and read the whole thing, so I’ll read a little bit, read the coverage, have a good sense of what the movie is, and be able to do what I need to do for it.

**John:** A question we get often on the podcast is “How important are loglines?” Do loglines matter for you guys? Does a well-written logline intrigue you and make you read the script or not read the script? Do you see loglines?

**Daniela:** I mean, loglines are helpful to be like, OK, how is this person framing their story, but I’m still going to want to read how they’re setting it up. Because loglines can be deceiving. It’s like, “Girl gets kidnapped. Father seeks out revenge.” And, you know, I’m describing Taken. And so I love Liam Neeson and I love Taken as sort of a popcorn fare thing, but the logline would be really disinteresting to me. So, I think loglines are important, but it’s really about what’s on the page. Don’t spend too much time on the logline.

**John:** Cullen?

**Cullen:** Yeah, I mean, I think just being able to describe your movie in a way that feels fresh and original is important at an agency. I think, management companies are a little bit different, but in terms of blind queries I’m not really supposed to look at them anyway, so I just hit delete for better or worse.

**Daniela:** We look at them all the time. Yes. Circle of Confusion was essentially started off of a query letter. A letter written by two house painters in Chicago to our company saying we love the name of your company and those people were the Wachowskis. So, as a company policy we accept queries and in that sense loglines are important, but it’s also about personalizing the letter to the company and personalizing the letter to the person you’re sending it to to make sure that it’s not just, “I’m just sending this to the void hoping I get discovered.” It’s like, “This is why I want to be represented by this company and by this person at that company.”

**Cullen:** Yeah. I do actually enjoy when I get a query that’s addressed to a different name. I’m like this is – I love this.

**John:** Last sort of question about framing here. So let’s say there’s a script that either came through a query or someone recommended it and it’s about maybe a client you want to represent. What are you looking for as you start to read that says like, “Oh, this is a person I want to meet. This is a person I want to continue on a discussion with.” What is it that gets you to a place where you’re excited about a script or a writer?

**Daniela:** I think it’s like oftentimes style and having fun on the page, regardless of what the genre is. There was recently a script that I was like let’s do a con-tage. And I was like, yes, this is a movie about being a con artist and we’re going to do a montage and it’s called a con-tage. And I was having a fun experience reading the script. And so I think that the voice and the style and feeling personality on the page and not being bogged down by details and just, you know, having fun with the story.

**John:** Cullen, what are you looking for as you’re starting to read for a client?

**Cullen:** I mean, as I read scripts, what I’m so craving and I think what most of us are craving is please god surprise me and please god – like god forbid – move me. Whether that’s making me laugh, making me cry. Some sort of sensory experience as I’m reading something.

You know, and then otherwise it’s just a very subjective experience. I mean, there are scripts where the whole town seems obsessed with and I read it and I’m like, uh, I don’t really respond to this. So, a lot of it is you can’t really quite put your finger on it, but you know it when you see it.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get into our four Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Let’s begin.

**John:** I’ll read the first synopsis, but maybe Craig can take another one. We’ll start with Baptiste by Jenny Deiker. Jenny, am I saying your name right?

**Jenny Deiker:** Yes sir.

**John:** Fantastic. Jenny right there. Thank you. A synopsis. A Minnesota business man, Jonathan Parks, ambles with his fishing rod to the edge of a lush Louisiana bayou. He is followed at a distance by Richard Devilliers, 50s, who speaks with the soft accent of an important Louisiana family. Richard encourages Jonathan to catch a catfish and Jonathan admires the landscape.

As Jonathan casts his line, Richard draws a circle on the dock with powder from a small pouch. When Jonathan asks about it, Richard describes that it’s a voodoo ritual for the union of predator and prey. Jonathan is impressed by the Louisiana touch. Richard’s wife, Marie, 50s, approaches and shares a knowing glance with her husband.

Richard draws a slash through the circle before kicking Jonathan into the swamp. Jonathan struggles. Marie watches dispassionately. Jonathan is promptly sucked under water, gone. Richard and Marie’s son, Kevin, 29, joins them, sweeps the powder away with his foot, and tells them they’ll be late for mass. And that’s the end of our three pages.

Daniela, will you start. So if you just read these three pages, what is your first impression? What are you taking from these?

**Daniela:** I have to say like by the very end of those three pages I was like “what is this about?” which is a great question to have. But at the same time I did feel that there were a lot of characters for the three page sequences that I was like maybe there needed to be a little bit of mystery. Like the son coming and delivering that line, while it’s a little bit of a mic drop, I felt that I wanted to breathe in the moment of this guy just got sucked into the space and let that breathe a little bit more. So, that’s how I felt.

**John:** Cullen, you’re very first impressions?

**Cullen:** Yeah, I mean, I have to say – I’m assuming – is this a pilot? given that it’s a teaser. Absolutely wanted to read more. I’m from Louisiana, too, so I loved the setting of it. My biggest question mark was about the powder and what is the significance. That was the one thing that I was like is this a total red herring. Does that actually have significance? But I loved it. I was pretty hooked.

I think my critique of it is probably in the first paragraph. It felt very adjective-heavy and, you know, I sort of circled what is a “stagnant, breathy morning.” It felt like slightly writing for writing sake.

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** Yes. So, by and large I did enjoy this. I liked where it went and I liked what’s happening. And I think substantively we’re in a good place. But let’s talk about how this begins. Have you ever heard of purple prose? Right? So this is green purple prose. “Spanish moss melts from bald cypresses in the sweaty, sickly sweet soup of Louisiana air. Live oaks and palmettos line a wide, dead-calm river, dotted with fallen branches and blankets of algae.” That’s a lot of – just a biome. That’s a biome full of adjectives. There’s some alliteration going on in there which weirdly – the thing about alliteration is even though it’s not intentional, I know, these are the kinds of things that start to literally lull people. Which I know in a sense is not so bad, but I think you could actually get a lot of the sense quicker and easier.

I also think that it’s important, when you get to “Camera PANS to find a sturdy, wooden DOCK,” camera pans to me implies that we’re sort of static and then we move. But this all feels like it should be in motion anyway, like whatever eats Jonathan, maybe we’re that. Right? Just moving through. So there’s a sense of discovery.

Your first line is Exposition Theater. “I think you’ll find the biggest catfish in Bayou Baptiste right here off our dock.” Oh, do you? Right? So I think we don’t need that, right? I think that’s a line that can just go. I think you can start with, “It really is beautiful here. You’re a lucky man.”

And so there’s a little bit of – you can see you’re trying to get some of this information in. I wouldn’t panic about it. The thing about the opening of a pilot like this is it’s all about surprise and mood. We will find out who that dude was, where he was from. Don’t care. He’s got eaten. I assume he’s dead. Gone. So, I don’t care if he’s from Wisconsin. I really don’t.

And I think there’s a question of perspective. I want to know that the perspective here is with Richard. I would love for this to be a little bit more from his point of view because he is the one in charge here. I mean, the powder to me was good mystery. I assume the powder is either meaningful or just a side bit that he does, because the great catfish monster doesn’t need – whatever it is, I was fine with the mystery of it. It’s really just about I think writing less and creating perspective. Before anyone talks, the perspective as you move through. And then trying to root out some of the unnecessary exposition. But it was very – I like that he got eaten by an invisible fish. I assume it’s an invisible fish. It might be something else.

**John:** So, I’m going to disagree with Craig and so I think–

**Craig:** But I’m right though. I mean, you know that, right?

**John:** So, what I wrote here was that this is the upper limit of scenery setting, but I think it hadn’t crossed too far. And so it was skating right there at the very edge, but I though the alliteration helps. It helps put me into a place and to a certain mood. And so the sweaty, sickly sweet swamp of Louisiana air. Great. I had the same note about I don’t know what a breathy morning is. So it pushed a little too far. But I dug what you were going for and I could feel it, I could see it. There was a tactile quality to it which is great.

I’m also going to disagree with Craig a little bit about Jonathan. So, Jonathan, the Wisconsinite, I sort of knew he was chum from the start because I was only given the Wisconsin thing. And so some bit of specificity or something that gives Richard something to play off of, or something – a response that’s not just about “let’s push him into the lake.” There could be something more there so it’s a little bit more of a misdirect. Because I felt I was a little ahead of you because I could see what the setup is. Once there was a glance to the wife I’m like, OK, he’s going to die for some reason.

Daniela, often we talk about the difference between mystery and confusion. And you work for a company called Circle of Confusion. How often—

**Daniela:** It’s a cinematography term.

**John:** Yeah. Is this a thing – were you confused in these pages or were you intrigued? What was the line for you?

**Daniela:** I was intrigued more than I was confused. I think the beginning with names like Jonathan and Richard, at times I felt I had to revisit who was who. And that might be a byproduct of me not being from the States, so those names are foreign to me. And so, yeah–

**John:** Daniela, you’re from Venezuela?

**Daniela:** I’m from Venezuela. And I grew up in Southeast Asia. So, you know, names like Yosuke and Mohammed were very much my Jonathan and Richards, or Jorge and Fabian. So, yeah, and I think that creating a little bit more of distinction between the two of them and also using terminology like having an “upper class accent of someone from a very old and very important Louisiana family,” I don’t know what that sounds like.

**Craig:** I’m from the United States and I also don’t know what that sounds like.

**Cullen:** I did.

**Craig:** Well, yeah.

**John:** So Cullen, talk to us. What does that sound like?

**Cullen:** I think it’s a sort of self-important, heightened southern accent.

**Craig:** But you do acknowledge that unless we’re from Louisiana like you, we would not know that.

**Cullen:** I guess I would have replaced – you could replace the word Louisiana with southern is how I kind of read it.

**Craig:** Like a gentile, aristocratic southern accent? I would know what that is.

**Cullen:** Like I grew up in Lafayette which is a sort of Coonass/Cajun accent. There’s a different New Orleans yachty accent. So maybe you do have to be a little more specific.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know what any of those things are.

**John:** I want to talk to you about on page two, so midway down the page Jonathan turns and watches Richard. Bewildered. And then Richard says, “Voodoo ritual. For the union of predator and prey.” Those were moments where I felt like it was just too leading. Like I just knew something terrible was about to happen here. And so to back off from that, or to at least keep us in a little bit of a question could really help us out there. Because by that point I sort of knew like, OK, a dark thing is about to happen. And especially because it said teaser from the very start. Like, OK, someone is going in the lake. I was a little ahead of you there.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, the other thing about Richard, because he survives this teaser and Jonathan does not. I really can’t tell you anything about Richard. It would be good if there were something intriguing about Richard beyond simply the actions of what he is doing here. If I got a sense of something. A history to him. A sadness. An excitement. Is he nuts? Is he murderous? Is this really depressing to him?

I just need something there to fascinate me with the human beyond the ritual itself.

**Daniela:** Yeah. And just to add onto that, especially since this is a pilot, like we need to be very invested in the character. And the narrative engine isn’t just plot. So having an opportunity to be really invested in this person. Is he an anti-hero or a hero? And creating that central dilemma within even the teaser itself.

**John:** Cool. Can we have you come up and so we will ask you these questions in person. So let’s all give a round of applause. Jenny, where are you from and what else have you written? Talk to us about–

**Craig:** Louisiana.

**Jenny:** Pretty sure you could have guessed that. Yeah.

**John:** And have you written the full pilot? Or just the teaser?

**Jenny:** Yes. This is written.

**John:** Tell us about Kevin who appears on page three and doesn’t do anything.

**Jenny:** Well, the funny thing about, you know, y’all were saying make sure Richard has some distinguishing things and some more character development stuff. The funny thing is on the next page that you don’t have, all those folks die.

**Craig:** You mean Richard and–?

**Jenny:** Richard and his wife and his son.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a lot of death in four pages.

**Jenny:** All die. Yeah. It’s to set up, our hero is going to be the grown daughter of that family, who is going to come back to Louisiana to take over the family business. The family business is a very quaint, beautiful bed and breakfast, but the real family business is doing this.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Jenny:** So, yeah, it’s about the daughter. But I wanted to set up that this is a normal thing for this family. They all know about it. This happens on the somewhat regular.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Great. And so good about the bed and breakfast, because that was one of my questions for you, too, is I thought your landscape was beautiful but I didn’t know what it was connected to.

**Jenny:** Right, OK.

**John:** And so I guess that this guy was probably a guest at something like a bed and breakfast, but it was a little too disconnected. And I think if I had felt something about something to indicate that this guy was a guest here or that there was something in the distance, the plantation house in the distance. Something there that would connect this to a place.

**Jenny:** OK, yeah, totally. I understand that.

**Cullen:** Yeah, I thought it was maybe a work conference of some kind.

**Daniela:** A film festival.

**John:** So, talk to us about this pilot. So it’s a one-hour pilot. Is it written with act breaks or as a straight-through like a cable?

**Jenny:** It has act breaks.

**John:** Great. Tell us what your first act break is.

**Jenny:** Let me think. Let me think. My first act break. Holy cow. I’m completely blanking. You guys make me nervous.

**Craig:** I know. This is the worst feeling, isn’t it?

**Jenny:** It’s so terrifying.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because your mind goes blank.

**Jenny:** My mind is blank. And it’s really good, you guys. It’s a super good act break.

**Craig:** It happens to me all the time. It’s the worst feeling. I assume that when your first act break happens there’s probably some revelation about what’s happening in the water. Or maybe the daughter kills somebody. I’m just guessing. I’m trying to help you now.

**John:** Let’s all speculate. It’s OK.

**Jenny:** Holy cow.

**Daniela:** Is it the daughter like taking on the responsibility of like this is me now entering this world, like accepting her fate?

**Jenny:** She’s the last in a very old bloodline and, because everybody else has died, this is now her responsibility.

**Craig:** But she knows what they do, right?

**Jenny:** She knows what they do but she has had the luxury of like moving away and forgetting about it.

**Craig:** She doesn’t necessarily like that they do it?

**Jenny:** No. She doesn’t like it and she doesn’t think she wants to be a part of it.

**Craig:** Can I just ask you a question? Because I’m so fascinated by the fact that she comes back to do this. It’s really, really interesting. I’m not saying do this, but from the perspective of a girl coming home and like doesn’t want to see her parents. We think it’s just this regular grown woman coming home for her parents and the whole thing. And there’s the dad out in the – where’s your father? Oh, he’s taken somebody fishing. And she’s like, “Oh, god.” And she goes out there and she walks out. And then we see him with this guy, chit-chatting. And he kicks him in the water and she’s like, “Ugh, I’ll be inside.”

You know what I mean? Like “whoaaaaaaaa.” Anyway, I just love the idea of this woman knowing this and having this creepy family and then – now I’ve just changed everything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. But that would be exciting to me because there would be a relationship that I cared about that lasted.

**Jenny:** Right. OK. I could do that.

**John:** I think you raise an interesting point though. What is the tone of this overall? And so from this, this could be a dark comedy, or it could be Breaking Bad. There’s a whole range. It could be True Blood. What does it feel like to you? Is there an analogous thing out there?

**Jenny:** It’s a southern gothic horror story. So it’s very much like Fall of the House of Usher. We’re going to go into some deep family shit.

**Craig:** Fall of the House of Usher certainly has that.

**Jenny:** And I just listened to Craig’s talk, so I’m fully prepared to talk about theme.

**Craig:** Oh, good good. Good.

**Jenny:** But it’s sort of the theme of the sins of the father visited upon the children. So this is an old Louisiana family, named after my family, who–

**Craig:** Did they do this?

**Jenny:** This is their curse. I am a swamp monster. This is their curse for the legacy of slavery in the south is having to do this.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Great. Jenny, thank you so much for these three pages.

**Jenny:** Thank you guys. Thank you.

**Craig:** All right. Are we moving on to the next one? All right. So our next Three Page Challenge comes from Andrew Cosdon Messer, and it is entitled Seaworthy.

A derelict sailboat floats in the open ocean. A catamaran carrying dad, 50, and the girl, 14, approaches. Dad jumps into the sailboat and when he confirms that it is safe to board he beckons the girl. Upon seeing the starved bodies of a family in there, the girl points out these people did not eat the others when dead. I guess it means didn’t eat each other when dead.

The girl removes the corpse boy’s clothes. Corpse boy.

**John:** Yeah, corpse boy. The unpopular sequel to Corpse Bride, yeah.

**Craig:** Sequels are hard. The girl removes the corpse boy’s clothes and thanks him. Dad and the girl bury him at sea. The girl, holding the family’s bible, wonders if they should say something. Dad says, no, it clearly didn’t help them. A storm is approaching and the girl asks if they can outrun it. Dad thinks not. When the girl notices a spot of blood on her seat, she reaches into her shorts to check for more. Panicked, she calls to her dad. He finds a rag, but he is not equipped for this. Probably not.

And so that is Seaworthy. So, maybe we’ll start with Cullen. What did you think about this and how did it strike you?

**Cullen:** I was intrigued. I sort of – I liked the world. I had, you know, to John’s point, I think it was slightly over the line of mystery versus confusion. On a personal level, and to be hard on you, I felt like the writing was very self-conscious. And I had some questions about, you know, for instance what is a “faded man” and what does “an extension of the boat mean.”

There’s a line, “Names will come later; they have little use for them now.” As a reader, it’s like, well tell me their names. I get that – it felt sort of effort-heavy in that regard. And yet at the end of the three pages I wanted to know are we – I guess my questions, which were good questions, are we going to be at sea the whole time? What is this sort of ritual and this world? Who are these people? That was sort of my initial reaction.

**Craig:** All right. Daniela?

**Daniela:** Yeah, just to echo that, I felt that there were a lot of interesting like movements in this, but there were too many details, or too many – I was like, OK, did this girl just get her period? And now we have this relationship with her dad. OK. And then there are corpses. And then there’s also this biblical element. And I just felt like taking a step back and being like “Let’s explore these characters within this scene, but not have these elements weigh down it.” Because I kept trying to like sift through everything to be like what am I sinking my teeth into? The fact that there are dead bodies in this boat? The fact that this girl has this relationship with her father? Or where they are?

So there were more questions, but they weren’t story questions. They were more just about the world itself.

**Craig:** John?

**John:** So, we’ve seen a version of this scene a lot, which is basically it’s scavengers in a post-apocalyptic world. So oftentimes they’re in the desert. I think I’ve seen boat versions of this before. But it’s a good version of that. And so I was happy to see these are people who are going through their ordinary life even though it’s a really hellish, something terrible has happened.

And I was curious for the natural reasons of like, well, what happened to this family out here. Something terrible has happened.

There were moments where — I don’t know that there was too much detail, but I had a hard time locking into some of the details. An example would be they find these bodies. And so the girl ducks inside to see the abandoned interior and the starved bodies, a family. But what does that look like? And I was trying to figure out whether that means are they bloated, are they mummified, are they skeletons? Where are we at? How much time has passed?

And that feels important for this kind of story. It describes the visual world we’re in and sort of what this is going to feel like. So that texture felt really important to me.

I shared Cullen’s frustration of these characters not having names. Because even if they’re going to be dead on page four, you know, like Jenny would do, I want to know their names because that makes me invested in them, even just for these three pages. And because they have enough lines of dialogue, I felt like they needed some names.

There’s also, in a slug line we have – or sort of intermediary slug line – “The girl, 14, she can drive better than that.” I like that as an idea. But then we go to, “The lanky teenager stands at the stern of the catamaran, wearing a SHELL PENDANT and a bemused smile.” I just got confused of like – we have a reaction about her before we’ve ever seen her or sort of know what she’s like. So, just the order of events and the order of descriptions I think could be optimized a little bit better here.

Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that there’s a really interesting scenario and I think you are probably – I agree with Cullen, you’re one notch a little too far on the mannered side of things. You don’t have to actually impress anybody with action. And you never need to be clever. The weirdest thing about screenplays, you never actually need to be clever. We sometimes find clever things in screenplays and that have turned into wonderful movies and we think that’s why. But I assure you by the time those pages were being handed around to grips and electricians, nobody gave a shit about the clever. It’s really what’s underneath. It’s the performances, the actions, and the intention.

So, “Faded man, steady on the deck, extension of the boat,” is clever. I’m not really sure what it means. And also I just think it’s ultimately bric-a-brac here.

I think you may have a dramatic ordering issue. There’s something fascinating about seeing a father and a daughter on a boat. I would describe maybe a little bit more about them. Have they been out there for a long time? Are they weathered, sun-beaten? Did they look hungry? Chapped lips? Like what’s going on? Right?

And then I would start with her getting – if you want to do a girl getting her period and not knowing what a period is, which is really informative about the world we’re in, I would do that first. And like deal with that weirdness. And then they bump into a boat and they’re like, oh, let’s check it out. Now that we’ve handled the trauma of the period that she didn’t know was a period, then when she goes into a boat and finds a dead family and she doesn’t really react strongly to that, we go, oh, well that’s interesting. We’re starting to get more of a sense – there’s a dramatic ordering I think that would help you there.

I have no idea what starving bodies look like. All bodies are starving. Because they can’t eat. Right? I mean, all bodies. Starved people look exactly like well-fed dead people after a week. They are all sort of the same. So I kind of got caught on that as well.

And I agree with John completely – some of the ordering – I think you have a lot of ordering issues. So when you say, “The girl, she can drive better than that,” I liked that concept.

Take a look at the way – you’re doing a lot of that kind of break up stuff. Normally I love lots of white space and everything. But, “ANGLE ON a healthy boat, bobbing alongside. THE CATAMARAN.” That’s all in caps. Then, “A faded name is engraved on the once-futuristic twin hulls.” By the way, I have no idea what once-futuristic twin hulls means at all. And then it says, “Seaworthy.” But I thought it was named the Catamaran because it was all in caps there. So I’m starting to get a little – and all those things are – so I think just weeding out some of the stuff, ordering it a little bit better.

I really did like these moments where you’re indicating attitudes in sparse ways. She sees a family of dead people and she says, “They didn’t eat him.” And he says, “No, they didn’t.” So I really like that. And I was interested in their relationship. The most important thing I think that can come out of three pages is a sense of a relationship that matters, even if it’s between one person and an environment. And here you have two people.

And so I think there’s really promising stuff here. I just think you’ve got some ordering and some reduction to work on.

**Cullen:** Their dialogue together helped sort of establish this relationship that I was very intrigued by. For me, the very end of the three pages went to a very basic thing with writing, at least for me personally. I’d be curious what you guys thought. But show don’t tell us. So, dad doesn’t know what to use. They’re not equipped for this. He’s not equipped for this. I would rather see that in his actions than be told that.

**Daniela:** Yeah, I agree. Like what is that frantic father looking for something and that realization—

**Cullen:** It’s a really interesting moment and dynamic, but you’re just telling me that as opposed to—

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think in a moment like that I would probably just write, “He stares for a moment, blankly. Then turns, goes inside, rummages for a rag.” We’ll get it. You know, like we understand. There’s some things you do need to tell people because the circumstance doesn’t clearly lead to a certain kind of reaction, but in this case I think we would be able to do the math. And it’s always more fun to do the math.

**John:** I want to look at a moment on page two. So there’s a new slugline for “EXT. THE DERELICT. LATER.” Later can be anything. And so I don’t know if later if five minutes later or if it’s three hours later. So I would just call out a specific amount of time because it feels like the kind of story where the time is important.

Then it cuts to “EXT. SEAWORTHY – DAY THUNDER echoes. Dad scans the clouds.” So that’s a time cut. Like time has sort of passed. That felt like a good moment for a transition to or something else to cue us into we’ve moved on, we are no longer dealing with the abandoned derelict.

Lastly, I would like to – I actually really liked the period being the last thing we saw in these three pages.

**Craig:** I’m so right about that.

**John:** Here’s why I think it’s good and why it’s interesting. As I said at the start, we’ve seen this kind of setup a lot of other times, and usually there’s a monster. There’s going to be a zombie. There’s going to be something else terrible that’s going to happen. And so for the surprise at the bottom of these three pages to be like a normal, natural human thing was really interesting to me. So that actually made me want to read what happening next a lot.

**Daniela:** I have to be really honest though. I had to reread it several times.

**John:** Ah.

**Daniela:** Did this girl just get her period? Because I think it’s the way it’s written. You can be – kind of make people uncomfortable with the fact that here’s a girl that just bled on the seat and now how is she checking if she doesn’t know what exactly is happening. Because otherwise I was like, did she just – like there are dead bodies in the boat, so is it something else that’s causing it? And it’s the world that can cause that confusion. And it’s only until it says he’s not equipped for this I was like, “Oh, Daniela, you’re so foolish.”

So, you can make it very clear.

**John:** A question for the two of you guys. This is on your desk. You’ve read these three pages. How many more pages do you think you would have kept reading?

**Craig:** He’s right there.

**John:** I know. He’s right there.

**Daniela:** This is an honest exercise.

**John:** Just based on what you read, how intrigued were you to read page four, page five, page six?

**Cullen:** To your credit, I was. If I wasn’t gripped by their relationship and also had answers to the questions I had by 15 I would have put it down.

**Daniela:** Yeah. I would say I would want to know what’s going to be the inciting incident of like this is the world that they’re in, so what’s their call to action. I’m sure when you come up to the stage we’ll know more about it. But if I don’t get to that, even by page 10 of that, “OK, what’s the story going to be,” I’d put it down.

**John:** Cool. Andrew, come on up here. Andrew, thank you for sending this in.

**Andrew Cosdon Messer:** Thank you for helping me out.

**John:** So tell us what this is. First off, is this a feature or a pilot?

**Andrew:** It’s a feature. Feature drama.

**John:** And our dad and daughter the main characters?

**Andrew:** Yes.

**John:** Great. At what point do you give them names? Or do they never get names?

**Andrew:** She gets a name right around the first act turn. And he gets a name right in the middle of the second act.

**John:** And why that choice?

**Andrew:** I wanted to leave them as their relationship, which was dad and his daughter. And they don’t have anybody for the first act. It’s just them. And then they have to sort of rejoin civilization and society. And that’s where names come into play was how do we identify you. And I ran into trouble – the reason that line is in there is because so many readers said just give them names. Well, they don’t have the names because when he’s referring to her as her name, it sounds clunky when they’re talking to each other.

**Craig:** But he could call out to her.

**Andrew:** Which is exactly how it happens. He does call out to her.

**Craig:** But in the middle of the movie?

**Andrew:** At about 27 pages in.

**John:** He could do it on page one there when he says, “Jenny—“

**Daniela:** “Jenny, you just got your period.”

**Craig:** He could do it when he does it and you could just tell us what their names are. Because the thing is it doesn’t actually impact the movie. It only impacts the read.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Andrew:** And now I understand, that’s what I’m doing. It’s impacting the reading as opposed to what’s onscreen.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** What is the nature of this world? Obviously you’re saying they’re not meeting other people, at least for this first act, what has happened? Basically you’ve answered my question. How long are the people that we see in the derelict boat, how long have they been dead? And will we know what killed them in the course of this movie?

**Andrew:** We won’t know what killed them. Just the starvation was the idea. They ran out of food. But mummified was the answer. They sort of dissected and dried out.

I like to think in my mind when I wrote it this is what happens when the world ends out of food and people have to sort of get – the land can’t support life anymore. So that’s what has driven people to survive wherever they can. Our story happens to be on a boat, which is the easiest way to survive.

**Cullen:** Which I feel like it’s going to be food wars, next, depressingly enough.

**Andrew:** And also water wars, eventually, sort of in this.

**John:** More questions?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Andrew, thank you so much. This was awesome. Thank you. All right. Our next one is called Finding Mason. It is by Amy Leland.

**Craig:** Mason.

**John:** Finding Mazin. That would be a tragic comedy.

**Craig:** You found me.

**John:** Yes. A woman in her 30s, Mary Richards, hangs up her wall phone, takes a deep breath, and goes to wake a young girl, Sam, 10, who is asleep next to her dog. She tells Sam that they will have to go pick up Mason. Sam resists saying she’ll just take the bus to school. It sounds like this happens a lot.

Mary insists that they go. At the police station, an angry Mary leads Mason, 14 and innocent-looking, out to the car. Sam and the dog scramble to catch up.

As they drive, Mary seethes. Mason takes a sip from his mom’s travel mug, but the coffee is cold. He pours it out the window, but then accidentally drops the mug. He timidly alerts his mom, who throws the car in reverse to make Mason pick it up. But he can’t, because she has run over it.

Mary and Mason reluctantly burst into laughter, but Sam remains annoyed in the backseat. And that is how far we’ve gotten at the bottom of page three.

Craig, why don’t you start us off? What was your first impression reading these pages?

**Craig:** They were very nice. You know, they were nice. These are hard to evaluate in terms of projecting out where this goes. I think this is probably a movie, right? Thank you, oh, there you are. Because there are some movies that are very much a family study and the first three pages aren’t going to have killer swamps and boats of corpses and stuff.

And so what I’m then looking for on pages like this is a sense of verisimilitude and reality and a consistent tone and that was all there. I’m just going to give you one little thought that’s sort of a general creative, and then I want to talk just about how you’re writing this stuff out, which is a little bit of a problem.

We find Mason, her son, right, and he’s 14. And we’re sort of fascinated because this kid apparently has been arrested. Again. And what happens after didn’t make me feel what I think you would want me to feel. I’m not sure what you wanted me to feel. But certainly there’s this interesting turn that you’re intending where this kid is a juvenile delinquent and a recidivist criminal and her son. And but what he does is kind of cutesy – there’s nothing really interesting about it to me. Where I kind of fell down on these was the mug bit. Because on that page what I wanted – if this mother is going to start laughing, then I want something else that’s just fascinating to happen there. And it wasn’t quite fascinating. It was just sort of mundane. And I’m OK to live with mundane for page one and page two as long as this moment of getting out of jail gives me a little bit something more. Or, there is no laughing, it’s just drive home.

The other thing to just take a look at is your formatting. I’m not a formatting Nazi by any stretch of the imagination, but you’re costing yourself a lot of page space here. There are these big gaps between the end of your scene and the beginning of a next scene. I don’t know how to count paragraph breaks here, but I like a nice double space before INT. something. But you’ve got like a triple space going on.

**Amy Leland:** I swear to god Scrivener just did that.

**Craig:** Scrivener.

**John:** Oh Scrivener.

**Craig:** Oh Scrivener.

**John:** All right. Are they sponsors or something?

**Craig:** It wouldn’t stop me, as you know. When we’re in parentheticals we don’t capitalize. It’s a little jarring to see that. And you really never want to end a dialogue break with a parenthetical under it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a thing you do in animation but you never do in live action.

**Craig:** Correct. And again we’ve got some random capitalizations sticking up in there. So, stuff like that – you’re kind of going a little crazy on the parentheticals, which I don’t think you need. But, you know, by and large I was with you here until that third page when I wanted more. I wanted to care more.

**John:** Daniela, what was your first read on these?

**Daniela:** So, I really like the intimacy of the characters and the story and sort of this mom’s struggle. But it was kind of unclear to me whose perspective I need to sympathize with until the very end of the three pages, where it’s like this is Sam’s perspective on her family dynamic. And so looking back and like is it then from her perspective whether it’s a phone call that interrupts her sleep, and then her mother waking her up. And I don’t want to put words in your mouth of just whose perspective are we following throughout the story.

I would agree that there’s a lot of heavy detail that I don’t think is necessary, because it sort of distracts me as to – I don’t really care where Cinco’s head is when they’re sleeping, or when they’re in the car. I think that that can all be condensed and made more precise. I think I wanted more from Mason coming out of jail and just, you know, like their attitude. Once his character is introduced, I felt then that every character had the same like dimension to them until Sam’s reaction to their laughter. So just adding a little bit more of a dimension I guess is the word that I’m going to use again.

**John:** Cullen, your first impressions?

**Cullen:** I will probably be a little repetitive. I think similarly I had a point of view question in terms of is this Sam’s movie. And, like Daniela, had the thought, OK, then we probably shouldn’t start on the mom and see her enter the bedroom. It should be either like the first moment is her being woken up.

I was really compelled and intrigued by that dynamic of clearly this has happened before. She’s waking her daughter up in the middle of the night to go pick up her son. The daughter is saying I need to go to school tomorrow and the mom is like, “Well, so what, you’re coming with me.” Like that to me is a really sort of fresh interesting dynamic, so I was intrigued by that. And then like Craig, it was sort of – I was really confused and baffled by that last scene. And it also felt a little clunky of like so we dropped a mug, she rolls in reverse. Like was it a paper mug? Was it a glass mug? Like it just didn’t feel real to me, whereas up until this point it had a pretty – to your point – intimate, real family dynamic. And that scene left me really confused.

**John:** Cullen, I thought of you as I was reading these pages because it reminded of some Sundance scripts that we’ve read in that sometimes their story space is small, and intimate, and sort of like stories that get overlooked. And yet sometimes when we read these Sundance scripts, these writers are newer at the craft and so I would see things – I would see craft issues that I wouldn’t see in other writers’ scripts. And so I’d have to blur my eyes to not see those things and really see what was underneath that.

And that’s kind of what I felt like here. Another example would be like you have headers on your pages and you don’t need those headers. You just need page numbers. It felt like your screenwriting software, Scrivener we can single out, was doing some things that were sort of fighting you on some stuff. And I think just through writing more and through reading a lot more scripts, you sort of get a sense of vibe of what works on the page and what you don’t need to put on the page.

There’s a lot of very specific direction for actors in terms of looking this way, you know, basically where everybody is in a space. And you find an economy where you don’t need to do so much of that. So when you do call it out we really pay attention. Because sometimes when there’s longer blocks where it’s just where everyone is looking we don’t pay as much attention.

I thought the coffee mug moment could work. What I liked is that bump where he drops the coffee mug. It’s just unexpected. And so I think there’s a version of that scene that I think could be really effective. But I wonder if it’s really going to work if we don’t know anything about Mason’s voice or know anything about Mason. It feels like if it had come after a fight or an argument, and like then it happens, then if I’m invested in him as a character that coffee mug moment could play better.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s something just missing in the purpose of that moment, I think. Because if I have a mother who is dragging her daughter out of bed to drive to jail, once again, to get the kid out. And she puts him in the car and I’m sort of marveling at her patience, and her emotional restraint. And then the kid drops this coffee mug and she flips out about the coffee mug I think, OK, I understand. The coffee mug is there really just to sort of show that she was hanging on by a thread and anything could kind of make her go. But that’s not what happens here.

And so I’m not quite sure – in the end it sort of just feels like a little bit of a contrived moment to have a family laugh in a strange situation. So I think it’s probably not the right choice there to pay off what you want to pay off. I completely agree that if we’re talking about this from Sam’s point of view we want to start on a sleeping face of a kid being jostled by a hand – like when the Peanuts teacher is sort of like into frame. Just to let us know. And then I would try and keep it all within her perspective.

Like the mom is going into the jail. She’s sitting in the car. Is she looking out the window? Or is she in the waiting room? Everything should be from her point of view. Her noticing – all of it – it will be so much more interesting I think.

**Cullen:** Yeah. To add on to what you’re saying, I think if you showed at the jail a little bit more specificity of the dynamic between Mason and the mom from her point of view, then maybe that coffee mug moment could work.

**Craig:** Right.

**Cullen:** But we don’t get anything. It’s sort of like they sort of march out all silently and you don’t know – I think you could hint at what the mother’s head space there is pretty subtly and effectively that then would allow that next moment to work more effectively.

**John:** Yeah. You can envision the scenario where you’re setting up the coffee mug as an important prop from the start. Basically they’re getting in the car and she leaves the coffee mug up on top and as an audience we’re thinking, OK, she’s going to drive off with the coffee mug up top. And she remembers and she brings it in. Then you’ve shined a spotlight on that coffee mug so we’re looking for it down the road. That may help you.

And getting back to Sam’s POV, it comes down to even sort of scene geography. So on page one, she hangs up the phone, she walks down a hallway, she opens the bedroom door. We cut to inside the children’s bedroom. Really practically that can be just inside the children’s bedroom looking out, and that tells us that it’s Sam is the important one and the mom is looking in. And so it’s a simplification on the page but also helps us focus on what’s going to be most important here.

**Daniela:** Did you guys crave description of the bedroom for the child’s bedroom? Because that was something that I was like what kind of family is this. Because then when it’s this phone call of “My kid is in jail,” I’m like “OK where are they socioeconomically.” And you can get that from description of the bedroom, or even of the car. Because otherwise I’m projecting a lot of things onto this, and I don’t think that as the writer you want that, because then you’re going to get different kinds of reads from other people.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. I completely agree. You know, like my whole obsession about hair and makeup and wardrobe. But it really does help people to see – in this case also set dec. I mean, we’re really talking about the department heads who will eventually be asking these questions if they don’t know the answers from the page. And so you’re always balancing too much versus not enough, but certainly it seems purposeful that they have a certain socioeconomic status.

This is I assume a single mom in 1981. The boy is dirty, right? He’s like physically dirty. He’s bedraggled, I believe. And he’s in jail, again. This feels lower socioeconomic. And so you do want to kind of just set it. You want to feel it, you know.

**Cullen:** Even as much like do they share a room? Is this her own room?

**Craig:** Correct.

**Cullen:** There’s a bed on the other side of the room that’s completely made up, so you know the kid snuck out. There’s just little details that I think would add so much.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Cullen:** And even I had a question for you guys, because I wrote it down “Where are we?” And then you tease out like Texas Oklahoma drives by, which was helpful, but I did have the question like should we know that sooner. And maybe the bedroom would even hint at that’s where we are.

**Craig:** A good old license plate will tell you a lot. And also because you’re a period piece, showing these little things, you know, what does a poor kid in 1981, a little girl in 1981, have on her bed stand? What is that 1981 thing? My sister, because we didn’t have money, and so my sister had like stickers. Definitely had stickers. You know, the rainbow unicorn stickers, the puffy ones. And then posters from like Scholastic Book stuff, you know, because they would give you those for free.

So there are just things that you can do to help give us a sense of time and place and make us feel – you actually, it’s so weird how you begin to feel more for a human being when you believe them and they’re not just as a prop for a moment of action. You know?

**John:** Last little sort of craft thing. On page three, we use the word seething or seethes three times. And so seethe is like a special word. Any word that sort of stands out you don’t get to use it very often. So, use – one seethe is plenty.

Also, multiple punctuation can be useful when you really, really, have to single out something as being a giant question or a giant exclamation. But it happens twice here, so I think dialing back on that will help you out as well.

But let’s bring you up here, because we want to hear the rest of this.

**Craig:** All right. Amy Leland.

**John:** Amy, thank you so much for submitting these pages.

**Amy:** Thank you.

**John:** So tell us about – is the whole script written?

**Amy:** It is a feature. The whole script is written. I actually submitted the first draft to this conference two years ago, because I use this conference as my deadline, so I submitted a first draft I knew would never go anywhere, but I made myself do it.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Amy:** And it did not get to the second round and I got some feedback that really helped me understand why. And I’ve gone through several rewrites and a reading with some wonderful actors in New York. And you all have actually also answered a huge question for me that nobody has ever had before. I now really get the three page thing. He wasn’t in jail. He was at a police station. He’s a runaway, not a criminal. And so now I’m like, “Oh, I need to make that more clear.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, because I was thinking about like the police station has the jail in it, like the rural police station always has the jail. Oh, he’s a runaway.

**Amy:** The first six pages of this screenplay are autobiographical and then I completely fictionalize it from there. But the coffee mug moment was actually an ashtray and in one of our first readings somebody said, “Your lead mother is letting her 14-year-old smoke and isn’t making him stop and now we hate her.” And I was like, “OK, great, it’s a coffee mug then.”

**Craig:** No, actually, that is so cool. And I would go back to it. I swear to god. It’s really interesting. Because that’s real. It’s 1981. So my first year of high school was 1984. And in New Jersey in 1984 in like shitty – well, I grew up in Bruce Springsteen’s home town, which if you’ve heard the song you know how shitty it is. And I went to the high school he went to. And we – I mean, I didn’t start smoking until I was 17 I think, which is still a dirt-baggy age to start smoking. But 14 year olds, 15 year olds would stand outside underneath this overhang and that was the smoking area.

People – kids smoked in 1981.

**Amy:** Yeah, my brother gave me my first cigarette.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s real.

**Cullen:** Also, how telling of that relationship, too.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Cullen:** The fact that she is letting him and the daughter feels like the outsider. Go back to that for sure.

**Craig:** There’s so many ways to actually make her sympathetic. If he’s like, “Can I have a cigarette?” And she’s like, “Yeah, but you got to quit, man.” And he’s like, “Well you got to quit.” Or Samantha is like, “You both got to quit,” and they’re like, “Shut up.” Whatever. There’s so many interesting ways to see they’re tortured and they’re struggling. That’s so much more interesting. And now it’s just a coffee mug. No, you find that person—

**Daniela:** Yeah, find that person. And I also think too often writers are so fixated on, “Oh, my character needs to be likeable.” Your character needs to be relatable.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Daniela:** So, a mother who is a single mom who is sort of exhausted by having the same conversation over and over again, we can all relate to that. And so having that moment, you know, that’s totally fine.

**Amy:** Thank you.

**Daniela:** And just adding—

**Amy:** No, my mother actually like reminded me of that story when I told her I was writing this. She’s like, “Oh my god, you have to put that story in. I love that story.”

**Cullen:** You guys must talk about that frequently, about the word likeable.

**Craig:** The worst note in the world.

**John:** Tell us your thoughts.

**Cullen:** I just loathe it so much, because what does that even mean? And I don’t want to like someone. I want to understand them and be interested in them. And for me, and maybe it’s a taste thing, but I would so much rather someone who is dark and twisted and deplorable because I understand where their actions are coming from than someone who is likeable. Like it drives me insane.

**Craig:** I believe that we on our show have called it the worst note in Hollywood. Because it is. It’s not only wrong, it’s damaging. And, in fact, if you take even a moment to look at movies and television that not only a lot of us individually like, but have been incredibly successful. Just factually financially successful. They have characters, they feature characters that are loathsome, and then you kind of like them and it’s fascinating to see your relationship with them.

It’s the stupidest note. So never. No, never. Never I say.

**John:** Amy, thank you so much for submitting these. Thank you so much.

**Amy:** Thank you.

**Craig:** All right. Well, we’ve got one more. So, our last Three Page Challenge comes from writer Jess Burkle. And it is entitled American Fruit.

In Costa Rica 1904, Charles Keston poses in an explorer outfit for a portrait. He insists that it look dignified and the fresh-faced photographer gives direction. Satisfied with the photos, Keston suggests that they stop there. He conspicuously name drops his girl back home. When asked about her, he quickly asks the photographer to forget he’s heard that. Heaven forbid that rumors start swirling.

The photographer points out that they should see Keston’s railroad in the photos. He’s right. Maybe Keston hasn’t been doing enough pointing. Keston spots a bunch of bananas and runs to collect it for a prop, but he doesn’t see the snake that gets shaken out of it.

While posing again, Keston spots the snake approaching the photographer but is unable to speak. He points furiously, but the photographer mistakes it for posing. The snake bites the photographer, who collapses. It seems that he is dead and that Keston is now alone in the jungle. And that is American Fruit by Jess Burkle. John, kick it off.

**John:** So, I understand that you actually have a history with Jess Burkle. So this is not a stranger to you.

**Craig:** We lived together for four years. Where is Jess Burkle? Hey! How are you doing? I was a judge, I was a judge in the final pitch contest here last year. And I remember your pitch for this. I remember you were hysterical. And you got a pretty good placement in there, right?

**Jess Burkle:** Second.

**Craig:** Second. And I remember, I may have been – anyway, you did a really, really, really good job. It was a very funny pitch and you had terrific energy. And so now here we have some evidence.

**John:** Yeah. And to be clear, Megan was the one who picked it, so you had no idea that this was–

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I did not have my–

**John:** And now everyone knows where Jess Burkle lives because his address is on the cover page. Brave choice. I thought these were delightful. Here’s what I thought was so delightful about it. It had a very clear voice. I completely heard who this character was, what this universe was, what this world was. And I was very curious to see more. I mean, it felt like The Office but sort of in a banana republic. And that is a delightful idea. And it worked really well for me.

I have a bunch of little exclamation points down my pages where it’s like, “Oh, that is a delightful line and a really nice choice.”

There were some awkward moments on page two, where the photographer tries to set up like shouldn’t we see the railroad from here. I had a hard time getting between those lines. It felt like there was kind of a time cut that you’re slicing over in the top of page two where the photographer starts packing up.

In general I felt like the photographer is just there to set up the volleyball for the other guy to spike. And I get that, but I just wanted to have a little sense of who he was. Is he a BJ Novak character who is like really smarter than all of this but is just putting up with it? Some sense of who that guy was, even though he’s going to die at the end of page three, which seems to be a recurring theme among our guests here.

But I was delighted to read them.

**Daniela:** Yeah, I mean, I thought that this was a really fun and there’s a clear juxtaposition between the photograph and the reality. And kind of getting into those thematics of projection versus reality.

I agree with the note of making the photographer like an essential character, because at the very end you end on a note of Keston is all alone and it’s only because the photographer is dead, but I was like the photographer has just been taking photos, so that feeling of doom should have always existed there because that guy didn’t really serve a purpose. So if it’s beyond that of the photographer knows more than everyone else, or the photographer is essentially the guide for Keston and now has died, then the question of now what, we’re invested in it.

So, trying to weave in those details in the teaser would make it much more stronger and then make that note land of the hilarity of like, “Oh shit.”

**Cullen:** Probably just on a personal taste thing, it didn’t give me as much glee, although I did get a very specific voice which I appreciated. I guess on a macro level, if I’m reading this and thinking, “Oh my god, I can’t wait for the rest of the pilot,” I didn’t have that gut feeling. And maybe because it’s a period piece, it did have that sort of Buster Keaton quality which I liked. And almost silly. But that also made me have more of a tonal question at the very end, because now he’s all alone in the jungle, and is this supposed to be comical or is it actually kind of dangerous?

That was my personal question. And then I also had the note what is a “rancid tire” and how does that look like when it deflates.

**Craig:** Well, we’re going to discuss tone in a second for sure. But I have a question for you. Keston is American or British?

**Jess:** American.

**Craig:** American. I’d love to know that, because unless you’ve told me here – I don’t think you have. No. Because this first page is kind of – I love the first page. I love everything about the first page. I love the way it’s laid out. I love Keston’s dialogue. I love the photographer. I love the photographer’s reaction to him. All this dialogue is fun. It’s funny. You’re intelligent. People don’t necessarily need to know what a fauteuil is to understand that this is funny. Because the photographer is like, “Like that rock.” “Ah, yes. More Antony, less Cleopatra.” What the fuck is this guy talking about?

You get it. You get that banter and that back and forth. You get that this guy is pompous and pretentious and is trying really, really hard. So page one, wonderful.

But at the bottom, he slips and falls backward with very little grace, landing as if he’s never touched soil before. So a physical gag like that I don’t want to be interrupted with a photo. It’s going to be tough to pull that off. If he’s, “Thusly?” and then he slips and falls and smashes his face on the rock, that’s funny. You know, I mean, connect it to his attitude. The interruption of it was a little—

Now, page two, he has this thing where he drops this bit about his girl on purpose and then says, “Oh, I don’t want rumors to start.” What is his intention there? You don’t have to answer it now. You can answer it when you get up. But my point is I wasn’t quite sure. I wasn’t sure if Keston knew this photographer, or if Keston was trying to – maybe there are rumors that Keston is gay and he’s trying to puncture that balloon. What is he exactly up to in that bit? I was kind of confused about what you wanted me to feel.

“Shouldn’t we see your railroad from here, Mr. Keston?” It surprised me that this goof has a railroad. I was actually kind of shocked by that. Then the snakes.

Now, here’s the thing. If you’re going to go broad, and this is suddenly very, very broad, then I think it’s funny to have Keston get bit by the snake himself. That’s funny. The photographer gets bit. I don’t know that guy, so it’s not that funny. Plus he is dying, which is super not funny. And the foaming from his mouth and the convulsions, and then the urine, is super not funny. Right?

And at that point I’m so confused about what movie I’m in. I want to be in the movie on page one. I mean, to me, I read page one, I’m like, oh, Paul Rudnick wrote a movie about a banana tycoon and I’m having such a great time.

If you want to do page three movie, then I think page one and two have to be different. So those were all the things that were running through my mind.

Now, all that said, I just want to say great job. Everything was just nice and crisp, clean. I liked the descriptions. I liked the way things were laid out. I felt safe. Except for the moments where I didn’t feel safe. It was axiomatic, wasn’t it?

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about Keston’s character and sort of the foppish, dandy kind of quality. Because on page three is the first time we say effeminate, so “Terrified and effeminate, Keston URGENTLY POINTS to the ground.” In a period piece, to single out somebody as being effeminate reads a little bit differently, but we’re also reading it in 2017. So I would just be mindful that it doesn’t come off as homophobic, which it can come off a little bit homophobic when you single the thing out.

So watch the words you’re using to describe him, because let his actions sort of do that work for you. Be careful not to put too much of a label on him, because it’s going to read a certain way reading this right now in 2017.

One other thing I wanted to single out is it alternates between what the photographer sees and sort of the black and white and the color. And so the black and white could either be the finished image or it could be literally what the photographer is seeing through the lens. If it’s what the photographer sees through the lens, that’s not black and white because it’s still color. But it might be upside down, it might be flipped in an interesting way. So, if it’s meant to be his point of view I think you’re going to need to make a different choice for what that actually looks like from his side.

Anything more before we bring him up? Come on up here. Let’s talk more.

**Craig:** All right, come on up.

**Jess:** Thank you. And I recently moved, so it’s OK. Different address.

**John:** So don’t hunt him down at the address that’s listed here, which was 104 8th Avenue.

**Jess:** 8th Avenue. Six years there. It was great.

**John:** All right. So this is a pilot. It’s a half-hour or an hour?

**Jess:** It started as a half-hour, but it ended up being an hour. Yeah.

**John:** And where are you out with it now? Have you done any readings? Have you done any stuff like that?

**Jess:** I’ve taken it around. And I’ve gotten management and an agent from it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

**Jess:** And so now it’s starting to–

**Craig:** Is it them? Is it these two?

**Jess:** You know, open these doors, because – not yet. Nothing’s signed yet, so.

**Cullen:** Just the client we want.

**Jess:** Yeah, exactly. And so it’s getting some good feedback because people say they haven’t seen something about Oscar Wilde running the banana industry in Central America which is what it’s about.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oscar Wilde running the banana industry.

**John:** I suspect this is all really quite good. But I’m curious what else you’re writing right now based – what else are you trying to do and what are you aiming to do?

**Jess:** What I’m aiming to do is be a TV writer that I recently learned more does drama with funny moments. Like a Fargo level comedy inside of really tight stories. So I recently finished a project actually about Johnny Russo who was a recent How Would This Be a Movie. I just wrote a pilot about that and two other French women who are double agents in different time periods. That one is very serious. And now I’m writing a comedy about a lesbian couple having a known donor IVF in Park Slope.

So, I like going after kind of these human stories, but trying to make funny things happen out of them.

**Craig:** Tell me, what was going on with the name drop here?

**Jess:** So, the backstory, or what we come to learn later on is Charles is on the run after he’s been discovered as a homosexual at Harvard University. And so his family essentially says why don’t you go down to Costa Rica and run our railroad, which normally they never have anything to do with, that’s why the railroad isn’t there. And what he finds out at the end of act one is that the company was actually an elaborate Ponzi scheme. There is no money. And now he is alone in the jungle with no money. But he has to still pretend to society and to Boston that he is a winner. And he came here to start an empire and all these kind of things. So that new world hubris that we had at the top of the century.

**Craig:** Great. That works.

**John:** That works.

**Craig:** That totally works.

**John:** Jess, thank you so much for submitting your three pages.

**Craig:** Awesome. Thanks.

**Jess:** Thank you.

**John:** So, to wrap up here, I want to thank our four very brave people for not only submitting their pages but coming up and talking to us.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Thank you guys.

**John:** I also need to thank our producer, Megan McDonnell, who is over there.

**Craig:** Megan!

**John:** I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us, especially our room manager, Katie. Katie, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Katie.

**John:** And a reminder that there is a live show tonight, so come to that if you want to come to that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we will be pretty lit up for that one.

**John:** Uh, Craig will be.

**Craig:** Definitely show up.

**John:** But I especially want to thank Daniela and Cullen for joining us up here. You guys were so, so helpful and generous.

**Daniela:** Thanks for having us.

**John:** Thank you guys very much.

**Craig:** Thanks everyone.

Links:

* Tickets available for the [Holiday Live Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-john-august-craig-mazin/) now!
* 2017 Austin Live Three Page Challenge — you can check out the pages [here](http://johnaugust.com/aff2017) or on [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/).
* Want to [submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) a Three Page Challenge?
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_326.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/descending-into-darkness).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Uh….my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 169 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s been far too long.

**Craig:** Been far too long.

**John:** You were not around last week. You were doing something else, so I had to do a podcast without you. I survived, but it’s good to have you back.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. I was at the wedding of excellent screenwriter Ted Griffin and remarkable Broadway performer and film and television performer, Sutton Foster. It was a beautiful wedding. Had a great time. But I did miss you. I missed Austin. I mean, I haven’t missed Austin in years. So, that was a bummer.

And then I wasn’t there to do the show. And that was a bummer. But I did listen to it. The first podcast I’ve ever listened to in my life. And it was good. Everybody did a really good job.

**John:** Yeah. We had Susannah Grant stepped in and was the co-host in your absence. One thing that may not be completely clear to people who are listening to that episode is so we’re in this church, but the actual layout of where we were was incredibly awkward. So, a church has pews, which is lovely, and then there’s like two steps up and it gets to where actual services happen. And the steps are very important because that’s why you can actually see what’s happening.

But they had us set up in front of those steps, down at the same level as the pews, so sight lines were actually awful. In many ways listening to the podcast would be a lot like attending the podcast because it was very hard to see anything while you were there.

**Craig:** I did notice on the schedule that they had you in that church. And I confess that I thought to myself, oh, John is going to throw a fit. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because why did they put you in a church? Why weren’t you in the regular room?

**John:** Because it was one of the biggest available rooms. The biggest room at the Driskill was actually bigger than this would have been, but this was what was big and available at the time. So, once again, I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us there at all. It was a great experience. We had great guests. It was super fun.

We also did a Three Page Challenge with people who were in the second round of scripts for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Oh, terrific.

**John:** And that was really cool, too.. So, a few weeks from now we’ll have the audio up for that. We had Franklin Leonard and Ilyse McKimmie as the guests for that. And they were so insightful, because these are people who read scripts all the time. They’re sort of gatekeepers. And their perspective on stuff was just terrific. And to be able to have the actual writers of those three pages in the room to explain sort of this is what the actual full movie is like is so useful, because we could talk about — that movie you’re describing sounds great, here’s the movie I thought I was reading based on these three pages. Let’s try to get these things a little closer together.

**Craig:** And that right there is the core of what a good relationship between a writer and a development person should be.

**John:** Absolutely. So, today we’re going to be doing a new batch of Three Page Challenges. We have three new scripts to look at, so that will be cool. And they’re actually really interesting scripts, so I’m eager to get into them.

But we have so much follow up. We could do a whole episode with just the follow up stuff. So, let’s burn through this stuff first.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I’ve set it up in two previous podcasts, there’s this thing we’re working on called Writer Emergency, and it is a deck of cards for when you are writing something and your story just gets stuck. And it’s the kind of thing where — Aline mentioned this on an earlier episode — where sometimes just someone needs to give you a nudge, an idea, saying like what if this. And sometimes everything just breaks open, like oh, I suddenly get how to do that.

You don’t always have that person to give you that idea. And these cards are just full of those ideas. So, you saw these. I sent you a deck of these cards.

**Craig:** Yes. I saw an early version and they’re adorable.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** And they’re full of very cool little exercises and exercises are good things. I mean, they get you — it’s kind of like the text version of writing in a different place. It just jostles you out of your normal which is always a good thing.

It’s funny. On Twitter when you had mentioned that you were going to be bringing something like this but you were being intentionally vague, a whole bunch of people thought that you were about to launch some sort of pay me for notes service. And I just thought that was hysterical.

**John:** That will never happen.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** Ever.

**Craig:** Ever! No, but this is a great little deck of cards. And it seems like if I made a list of gifts you could get for your writer friend, it would be — I don’t know, what do you get writers?

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard to get things for a writer. So you get them like pens or backpacks.

**Craig:** Or Advil. I mean, we don’t need anything. But this is a fun stocking stuffer. I think you’ve timed it well for Christmas.

**John:** Yes. So, we cannot actually guarantee Christmas delivery. It’s something we would love to be able to do, but we are working with suppliers who have to print these things, and we have to ship these things, so that could be complicated. But it could be possible.

The most fascinating thing I’ve learned over the past six weeks as we’ve been trying to put this thing together is that shipping physical goods is really challenging. I always make apps and things, podcasts, things you can ship out digitally. When you have to ship physical things to far away countries, it gets to be challenging.

And so we’re dealing with these suppliers that are sort of all over the world. But it’s turned out really cool.

One of the most interesting things about this whole process, and the thing that made me most nervous about my conversation with you, is how we’re actually launching these into the world. We’re using Craig’s favorite thing in the entire world. Craig, what is your favorite thing in the entire world?

**Craig:** Uh, well, my number one favorite thing is death by anthrax. And then my second favorite thing is Kickstarter.

**John:** Yes. And we had a whole episode about your love of Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Love it!

**John:** You love it to death. And so I was really nervous when I sent these to you and said, and Craig, we actually went through a lot of different ways, and the best way for us to make these is actually to do a Kickstarter campaign. And you said…?

**Craig:** What was the lie I told you? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That it was okay? Did I say it was okay? It’s okay.

**John:** I think you said it was okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay because you are essentially using them like a store. You’re saying, look, you buy this and we’ll give it to you. You’re making them. It’s not like you’re saying we might one day make these.

**John:** It’s not like you’re investing in something that we are getting all the profits from. The goal behind this is, so, every deck of these cards that we give away through Kickstarter, we’re also giving a deck to a kid’s writing program. Because these things are actually really great for learning about story and how you would talk about story. And so we’ve been doing exercises with kids to figure out what actually works and these cards work really well.

But Kickstarter is a good way for us to be able to make a bunch of these at once. And when you make physical goods, the more you can print at once, the cheaper each unit becomes. That whole like curve of economics thing, it actually kind of works when you’re dealing with physical goods. So, we have to make enough so we can actually print enough so that it’s actually worthwhile to do. So, that’s the goal behind doing the Kickstarter of it all.

**Craig:** Look, I make an exception for you. What can I say?

**John:** Ah, thank you. It means a lot that Craig is not angry at this Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Can I just say as an aside…?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is kind of sad that my podcast character, I mean, Mike Birbiglia called me the antagonist of Scriptnotes and it made me laugh. But, you know, Lindsay Doran, she’s been doing this independent producers thing lately where she goes and talks to independent producers about, I don’t know, producing stuff. I guess it’s like Sundance Labs for independent film producers.

And somebody brought up that she was working with me and they had heard this on the podcast. And they’re like, is he okay? Is he mean? [laughs] Do I yell? And she just started laughing because I’m actually — I’m very nice.

**John:** You’re actually very, very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t yell. I’m not a jerk.

**John:** No. Maybe three times in our entire relationship have you been sort of really, really angry. And they’ve never been directed at me, because I would never want to be the focus of that rage. But I was actually genuinely concerned, because I know you have deeply held feelings about Kickstarter, and so I actually approached this Kickstarter thinking like how would I build something that Craig wouldn’t hate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s really how I go through my life is how do I do things that Craig can possible stand. So, we designed the pledge tiers at levels where like no matter what you’re doing, you’re getting the thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I mean, look, you’re delivering the product, so you’re not asking people to give you a bunch of money so you can go buy a bunch of lunches for yourself for a year and then not deliver. And, also, you’re donating these to charity. I mean, it’s just — it’s the best possible version of this. So, how could I — by the way, it’s the same thing that Franklin Leonard said when he called me about the Black List.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** He was like, I really was just thinking how can I get you to not hate this. [laughs]

**John:** I was asking myself what would Franklin do, and how can I get Craig not to hate this?

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** You were the two standard bearers for me. Aline factors in there, too, so I actually showed these to Aline right away. And significant changes were made based on Aline’s feedback.

**Craig:** She’s tough. She’s tough.

**John:** She’s tough. So, if you are interested in seeing these decks of cards and perhaps getting one, the Kickstarter campaign will probably be up the morning that this podcast comes out. If I don’t have the URL tweeted, you can just go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to the Kickstarter campaign. It’s a super short campaign. It’s like two weeks or so. So, you don’t have a lot of time to dilly and dally, but the people who listen to this podcast, they’re on it, they’re buying t-shirts during limited windows.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re good.

**John:** It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** We have the best listeners.

**John:** Well, we do have the best listeners. And I met so many of them at Austin. It was really nice.

**Craig:** What a lovely thing.

**John:** At Austin I always see Scriptnotes t-shirts, which is great. And now that there’s multiple generations of Scriptnotes t-shirts, I see the different eras, the different colors, the different everything. But I saw one of the very few shirts we ended up selling that was sort of Frankenweenie inspired. It was a quote from my Frankenweenie script. And they want what science gives them, but not the questions science asks.

And someone was wearing that shirt. And it was just so nice to see, like, aw. That one shirt.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know. Is that a Scriptnotes shirt?

**John:** We sold it through the same store. We sold it through the same johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Well, I will, for all of our listeners who do attend Austin and those who are thinking about attending, I will absolutely be back next year for sure. No one else is getting married that I care about.

**John:** Absolutely. And you will be at our next live show. And on the next podcast we will be able to announce the dates and possibly even the guests for that. And that’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Good one. It’s going to be a big one.

**John:** Cool. Further follow up. Last episode that you and I were talking, I got a new computer and it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s the 5K Retina iMac.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I would encourage — if people are on the fence like, oh, will it really make a difference, it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been reading some reviews. People are just tripping all over how awesome it looks. I’m waiting now for the Retina Cinema display, because it doesn’t exist yet, but I have to assume it’s on the way, right?

**John:** We talked about this last week. It’s actually incredibly hard to build that because there’s not a cable fast enough to get the —

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. We did.

**John:** So you may be waiting awhile.

**Craig:** I’m like your grandpa that just now he’s repeating stuff. [laughs] That’s just sad.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s just sad. Someone tuck me in. Tuck me in and give me soup.

**John:** The podcast, we’ll forgive you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m old.

**John:** Last podcast we also talked about the Marvel superheroes. We talked about all the superheroes and that there were 31 superhero movies coming out.

**Craig:** And now we know who they all are, right?

**John:** We do. So, the published the list with actual names for those dates. Because I had kind of mocked Marvel for like saying, oh, these are Untitled Marvel movie in this slot. And it’s like well that’s cheating. But they decided to stop — because of me — they decided they had to actually decide what movies they were going to make.

**Craig:** You are at the hub of our industry. You are the beating heart.

**John:** The same way that I look to you and Franklin Leonard, Kevin Feige says, “What does John August think?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He probably wakes up in the middle of the night going, oh my god, what does John August think?

**Craig:** They call you the Eye. The Great Eye.

**John:** We’ve talked about Kevin Feige a lot and I realized that I actually met him a zillion years ago because on the very first Iron Man I came in and did just this tiny, tiny bit of work on it. And even back then I predicted success.

**Craig:** I also met him many, many years ago. He was super nice. I remember he was super duper nice. It was a general meeting and I remember he gave me his card. It was like a Marvel card.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now look at him. Now look, our boy is all grown up. Yeah.

**John:** Exactly. So, the movies are Captain America: Civil War, which was predicted. Doctor Strange, which was sort of predicted, but it had been un-slated. Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther. Okay, sure. Captain Marvel, which just makes things incredibly complicated.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Idea wise, because Captain Marvel is the original name of Shazam and they’re also making a Shazam movie, but Shazam is DC and it’s confusing. But Captain Marvel is a female superhero with sort of — she does superhero-y things. So, that could be good.

**Craig:** You struggled through that a little bit, I think. You were like, “Who does…” You wanted to say female superhero-y things, didn’t you?

**John:** No, no, I was trying to say that she did Superman kind of things, but I perceive her as having flight and strength and stuff, but I don’t actually know the details and limits of her powers. I will confess my ignorance to that.

**Craig:** I’m right there with you. Honestly. Like for instance, I know that Black Panther is black. I don’t actually know what his — I’m kind of reaching the edge of my comics knowledge. So, I don’t know actually what his powers are, or Captain Marvel. I mean, I know Doctor Strange. Who else? Oh, yeah, Thor.

**John:** Thor.

**Craig:** I know Thor. He’s got a hammer.

**John:** He’s got a hammer. And we know that his evil brother is —

**Craig:** Loki. And his dad is Odin.

**John:** Yeah. But his dad is dead.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, yeah, forgot.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers is a two-part thing, which of course, why wouldn’t it be a two-part thing?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the Infinity War. And so that deals with a lot of stuff that’s been set up in the universe so far. All those infinity stones and it’s been through all the different —

**Craig:** I don’t know, the infinity stones, I don’t know about those. I’ve never followed that story. I know that they’re there and they have something to do from Guardians of the Galaxy, but I feel like I’m totally — like obviously I didn’t know anybody from Guardians of the Galaxy. I honestly didn’t know about Hawkeye. [laughs] I just didn’t. There’s so many of them. I just don’t know.

**John:** But I think your life was pretty fulfilling even not knowing that. So, when you do know it, it’ll just be an extra plus.

**Craig:** I think there should be a team, like Guardians of the Galaxy was a team of people that theoretically most people didn’t know. But I think Marvel should make a movie of characters that most people do know, I just don’t. So, it would have Hawkeye and Captain Marvel. Like Ant Man? I don’t’ know.

**John:** No idea.

**Craig:** Does he get small? I assume he gets small?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to say small.

**Craig:** Small.

**John:** And, finally, Inhumans, which is November 2, 2018, and almost nobody knows the Inhumans since they’re a completely different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know them. [laughs]

**John:** The best description I heard of what they will represent likely in the Marvel universe is because the Marvel universe for Disney does not have X-Men, and they actually apparently can’t even say the word “mutant.” Inhumans apparently do — may serve a similar function in that universe.

**Craig:** I see. Okay. Well, they can be in the movie of characters that other people know that I don’t know. Which, as we can see, is going to be an enormous movie because I’m grandpa. This is a Craig as grandpa day.

**John:** Yeah. We divide the universe into two things —

**Craig:** What I know.

**John:** Things Craig knows. Things Craig doesn’t know.

**Craig:** It could be a great movie. Everybody knows who we are, except for Craig.

**John:** Final bit of follow up, last podcast I was talking about — the podcast we did together — I was talking about how I had had this phone pitch and then I had to go in and do the real pitch and sort of what the difference was between that first impression, everything happening on the phone, and having to really dig in and figure out story.

And so that digging in and figuring out story, that went really, really well. But, I listened to a podcast that actually had a guy having to give a pitch that was so smart. It’s such a good version of this that I want to share it with people. It’s a podcast called the StartUp. And it’s Alex Bloomberg, who was a reporter from This American Life and Planet Money, and he’s attempting to start his own podcasting company. And so he’s trying to raise money for it.

And so he’s going to investors and pitching his podcast company. And pitching a company, a startup, and pitching a movie, they’re different skills. They have different terms of art and sort of ways you do things, but what was so insightful in this first episode he’s trying to pitch Chris Sacca, who is a big investor guy, on his company. And to hear it go horribly, and then hear Chris Sacca pitch that same idea back to him in ways that actually mean something to him.

And it was just a great episode to listen to. The differences between how you perceive your own idea and how someone on the other end perceives your idea and what that idea could be. It was just a fascinating version and that happens all the time in Hollywood, which is where you are describing the story you think you see, and they will sometimes describe back the story that is actually meaningful to them. And you have to decide is that even a movie I would want to write.

**Craig:** Do you watch Shark Tank at all?

**John:** I don’t. But I know what that is. That’s the thing where people have these inventions and things?

**Craig:** Yeah. They have ideas for businesses, basically. Sometimes it’s an invention. Sometimes it’s a service. And they come in and there are five people there who have a lot of money, like Mark Cuban, who is a billionaire. And the individual investors make decisions about how much they are willing to invest, if anything at all, and how much of the company they want in exchange for their investment.

And it’s based on, there was an English show that my wife and I used to watch years ago called Dragon’s Den. And it looks like they just ported it over and called it Shark Tank for the United States. Same idea. And we’ve always loved it because it is people pitching and it is them telling a story. Everything comes down to some sort of narrative.

But there is that remarkable thing that happens where somebody comes in and they are inherently likeable. They are — it’s a single mom who has fought really hard. Sometimes they’re kids. It’s a 16-year-old who’s got this brilliant idea. It’s a man who has been downsized and he’s getting back on his feet with his own thing. And there are these very likeable stories, but there’s always that moment where they hear the story, they really appreciate the story, and they show this guy some empathy and love, or this woman some empathy and love, and then the wall just drops. And it becomes business.

And they couldn’t care about that at all. It’s amazing to watch it happen. Like you see it literally flick, like a switch. And I think the same thing happens in Hollywood. We come in and we have these great opening moments and I love you, and you love me, and everything is wonderful, wouldn’t this be wonderful. And then you pitch. And then they just flip a switch. And now it’s business.

**John:** So, what’s so interesting about that situation and what happens in the room when you’re pitching a movie is you start by talking why the story is meaningful to you, but at the same time you have to be able to describe it in terms that are going to be meaningful for them in terms of what their actual decision-making process is. And so you have to be able to talk about how it’s resonating with you, your personal connection to it, who you are, why they should trust you. But at the same time you have to be able to then flip it and say like this is why this is going to be a thing that needs to happen in the world. This is why this is going to be a movie you’re going to want to make and green light and spend all your money and all your time doing.

And it’s easy to figure out why something is meaningful to you. It’s hard to figure out sometimes why it’s meaningful to them. And it’s practice is what does it. You start to hear these investors talking about sort of what’s meaningful. You start to hear the words they use. Things like what’s your unfair advantage, which I’d never actually heard before until Chris Sacca said it. And then I was an investor pitch earlier this week and a guy slipped that in. I’m like, oh my god, that felt kind douche-baggy, but also wonderful.

The same way that we would use “end of the second act.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or at the midpoint. The way we would use those kind of terms or tent pole, they use these kind of terms and you have to be able to understand why they’re looking for those things because those are meaningful parts of their decision process.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you are pitching something, it’s great to start with that question you raised. Why should this movie exist? And you need to have a good reason for it. Not a good intellectual reason, but a good passionate reason. You have to actually believe your answer, because that’s what’s going to power you through writing the script. Only through believing your answer and having faith in your answer do you have a prayer of having them agree with you.

**John:** And one of the toughest matches though is sometimes you can pitch a movie that you actually have no interest in writing. And I’ve encountered this a couple times where I’ve gone in on a project and I can sort of see like, oh, there’s a movie there. I can see what that is. I can see what they’re going for. Or, sometimes I’ll be sent some adaptation and I’ll be like I see why there is a movie there, I just know I don’t want to write it. And I know that it’s the process of trying to write this thing is going to be terrible. And that same kind of thing happens in this StartUp podcast, where there’s a version of what an investor is looking for that is not at all what Alex Bloomberg is trying to create.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And he has to question himself, like, I see why they want this thing, I’m just not interested in doing that thing. I don’t think I’d be good at doing that thing. I think everyone is going to be miserable if I try to make that thing.

**Craig:** And then you have a choice.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Because, it’s funny, when Lindsay and I went around pitching the thing that I’m writing now, we had terrific success. A lot of people said, yes, we would like this. After about three, I think our first three meetings were big successes. And then the fourth one was just terrible. Terrible meeting. Not because they were being mean, it just was awkward from the start. It was a rough one. And we knew it wasn’t going to be a yes. It was going to be a no.

And in thinking about it later, I was just so grateful that that hadn’t happened to have been the first one.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because you just don’t, sometimes it’s just that’s the one person, or even if it’s the two people, and you have to ask yourself, okay, is it me or is them? And, of course, when you’re looking for a big investor, or in our case, when you’re looking for that one investor, all it takes is one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You just need one person to love it. You don’t need everybody to kind of like it.

**John:** Exactly. And sometimes that decision process of who do you go to first can be so important because, you know, sometimes it’s good to go to sort of the softer place that you’re not that invested in them saying yes or saying no, just so you can practice what it feels like to you telling it to somebody else.

And so in times where I’ve done TV pitches, I’ve noticed that I often do schedule the most unlikely place first, or the least exciting place first, because that way you sort of get all the butterflies out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit like you’re scheduling your movie, you always try and pick something that’s kind of a layup for day one. You know, oh yeah, we’re just going to shoot two people talking in a restaurant. That’s easy. Easy first day.

**John:** I was out a dinner with Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber who wrote 500 Days of Summer.

**Craig:** Great guys.

**John:** Great guys. Love them to death. And I had met Scott before, but this was the first time meeting Michael.

**Craig:** He’s the best, isn’t he?

**John:** They’re wonderful.

**Craig:** And he’s like, and Michael is like, he’s 12 as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So young. Yeah.

**John:** So young. So, one of them lives in Los Angeles. One of them lives in New York. And so they often have to do pitches or meetings on the phone with people. And they talked about how difficult it was to plan for it. And they had to actually sort of be really meticulous about who is going to say what, because otherwise they’re just talking over each other. And they need to make sure that all the points get made. It’s really, really difficult to do in person and then to try to it on the phone, too, it’s a challenging world we live in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had lunch with — or coffee or something with Michael in New York and I was fascinated by this, how they managed to do it that way. But they do. I’ve spent time with both of them now, but never in the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So, this was my first time ever — they’re rarely together, so it was nice to have them both there at Austin.

**Craig:** I mean, but then again, look at us.

**John:** Look at us. We’re never in the same room. It works out fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re the Elton John and Bernie Taupin of podcasts.

**John:** Oh my god. I think that’s a much better comparison that the Van Halen of podcasts.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question. Which one of us is Elton John and which one is Bernie Taupin?

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin —

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** You’re the flamboyant showman.

**Craig:** I’m the one in the boa and duck glasses. Yeah.

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin because I have no idea what he looks like, but I sense he’s really the power behind the whole relationship.

**Craig:** He’s certainly the serious one. Yeah. He’s the one who’s like, okay —

**John:** He’s like, “Elton, no, got to get this done. We’ve got to finish this.” That’s completely my function. In Big Fish with Andrew Lippa, and I adore Andrew Lippa, but I always the one who had to say like, okay no, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to finish this song. We’ve got to get this thing happening because we promised these people. I’m always — that’s my job.

**Craig:** Yup. And I’m the guy in the Mozart wig and sailor outfit.

**John:** Yes. You put something on the show notes which I think is potentially fascinating, because it’s something that you’re writing right now. On the show notes you write, “Descending into darkness. When you have to write terrible, tragic moments.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually did it this morning. And I’m just going to be incredibly honest because this is the place where I’ve learned how to be honest, I think, on the podcast. I wrote this sequence this morning, and then I — honestly, I bawled. I bawled. I cried my little eyes out, because it was so sad. And it just made me so, so sad.

And if that sounds like something that you find laughable, maybe this isn’t for you. Because I do feel like this is part of what we have to do. It’s not something that’s come up frequently for me, because most of the movies that I’ve written over my career have been lighter fare. And while there are sweet moments or dramatic moments in lighter fare, it’s never quite so gut-wrenching. I mean, you just don’t want to kill — you don’t want to deflate the soufflé of lighter movies.

But when you’re writing a movie that has room for tragedy, sooner or later you’re going to come to that point where you have to go to a bad place, because you have to write something that is terrible. The sort of thing that if it happened to a friend, you’d feel it in the pit of your stomach and you would be horrified.

And it’s not easy. And I’m not sure, I sort of wanted to ask you if there’s anything you do particularly to prepare for those moments and how you go into those moments because for me it seemed like the only way to prepare was to not prepare and to just let myself experience bad things.

**John:** So, yes, I’ve had to do this actually quite a lot. And so Big Fish was sort of the most notable example, where that last sequence where you’re sort of taking Edward Bloom to the river and he passes away, that’s opening a bunch of veins. And writing that sequence, I’ve talked about this before and sort of not secret knowledge, what I would do is in my bathroom at my old house there was this big mirror and I would sit in front of the mirror and I’d bring myself to tears. And then I would start writing the scene. I would write it all by hand.

And it sounds very, very method, but in a weird way your brain switches to a different place when you’re in that kind of heightened emotion. And you can sort of capture that emotion when you are writing, sometimes when you’re feeling that same way.

And so I didn’t have to necessarily bring up horrible memories of my past. I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. But I let that moment be really real in my head to the point where it would bring me to tears, and then I would write through it.

The danger and difficulty of doing that is that same sense memory will come back every time you see or reencounter that scene. And so as I had to sort of go through the script again, and again, and again, I couldn’t get through that stuff, reading it sometimes, without evoking that same memory and those same tears.

Then, of course, I went off and did the Broadway version and to write that sequence with Andrew Lippa I had to bring us both to tears, and then we had to write the song, and then figure out the scene that goes around it and stage it and perform it ourselves like 100 times. So, that whole moment is deeply, deeply wired in to sort of how I experience the show, how I experience the movie.

And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the reality. You have to remember that you are the first performer of this moment that you are creating. And so if it doesn’t have an emotional impact for you as you’re writing it, it’s not going to have an emotional impact for someone who is watching it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in many ways while it is uncomfortable to feel these emotions as you’re writing these things and to cry over what you’re writing, it is the reward of a lot of good work that you’ve done before that. A lot of logical non-emotional work you’ve done. Because the only way you’re going to get to that place — tragedy ultimately while felt irrationally is constructed of rational things. Circumstances make things tragic. Not emotions.

And when the circumstances align in such a way, then they allow the emotion to occur. So, this is your reward. You’ve done your job. If you are crying when this happens, it means you have carefully constructed the proper recipe for tragedy. But then going through it, it’s interesting — I didn’t start crying before I did it. I just started doing it and then started feeling those moments where I would begin. And that’s how you know it’s true.

I mean, this is where I have to say drama is easier than comedy. Because when you write something funny, I don’t know anybody that sits there writing — any comic writer who sits there writing and then suddenly starts laughing as they type. I’ve never seen such a thing. It’s because it is so, I don’t know how to, I want to say intellectual.

**John:** But comedy is ultimately a function of surprise. Comedy relies on that sense of like something that you didn’t see happening happens, or someone says something that you didn’t expect, and it takes you by surprise.

**Craig:** And you know the surprise.

**John:** And once you know the surprise, it’s not going to be funny the same way. Same reason why you watch any movie that you love as a comedy, you may still love it, but it’s not going to be as funny the second time.

**Craig:** That’s right. And so you have to — the only way to write a funny moment is to know the surprise at the end and then it build it backwards like a magician designing a trick. But that’s dangerous work because there is no instinctive moment where you say my lizard brain has just informed me that this is impactful.

You know, when you cry, that’s not you. You’re not crying. The sense of who we are as people is all about our consciousness and our frontal lobe. This is the animal underneath. So, not only are you the first person performing this part, but then your limbic system is the first audience member listening to it, in a true sense different than you. And so you have to listen to that and you have to be on top of that.

And if you get to a place where you’re descending into the darkness, and none of this is happening, then you have to ask yourself if you’ve constructed all the circumstances necessary to make this moment tragic, or if you were just leaning on the moment itself. It’s not enough to watch somebody die. We have seen people die in movies 14 billion times. Why are they dying? What did they do to die? Who is watching them die? What does that person mean to them?

All of those questions are what makes something tragic as opposed to just henchman number four falling to his death.

**John:** It is your emotional investment in those characters that it makes those moments have stakes, have meaning. And so it’s not necessarily your emotional investment in a character who is dying, but it could your emotional investment in the characters who are witnessing that death who are affected by that death. That is what’s meaningful.

You’re absolutely right in that if in a movie you see a character die in a car crash, that’s not necessarily going to bring tears. It’s not necessarily going to have an emotional impact. Only to the degree that we love that character or relate to that character or see ourselves in that character, or someone else who we can identify with who we can feel that connection to the character. Then we can feel it. Otherwise, we don’t feel it.

And your point about construction of a joke is absolutely true with drama as well. And I often describe Big Fish as one very long joke and the punch line is tears. In that it really is very carefully constructed to set up this expectation of we know from the start that Edward Bloom is not going to live at the end. The question of the film and the question of the musical is what is going to happen with this relationship between Edward and his son, Will. And we are paying that off right at the very end and the surprise of the movie — I’m going to spoil everything for you — but the surprise of the movie is that Will actually finally does get there and is able to deliver that last moment.

And so it’s that happy tears thing can happen because you’ve spent so much time and so much energy making it possible to have meaning in that moment.

**Craig:** Right. Now, there is a danger hidden behind all of this. And the danger is this. You will write this and you will care deeply about it. It will be emotional for you. And sometimes it’s emotional for you because it has a resonance to you personally, separate from the story. However, you must remember that the audience, either the people in the theater or someone reading your screenplay owes you nothing.

**John:** Zero.

**Craig:** Nothing. And it is absolutely within their right to say this didn’t move me, or I think it would be better if this, or I think it would better — you don’t have to agree with them, but what you can’t do is hold them responsible for your emotions. Either you have managed to welcome them in to your limbic theater, or you haven’t. And so just be careful not to force people to be accountable for what you feel, just because you felt it.

**John:** Absolutely. And so sometimes you will encounter a script where there’s clearly supposed to be this emotional payoff and we’re not feeling it. We’re not feeling those moments. And something along the way did not click fully. And someone got off the ride. And if someone got off the ride, they’re going to see this moment and say like I should feel something, but I don’t feel something, and therefore I don’t like it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that is really going to happen. And obviously the same thing happens in comedy, too. When you feel joke-oids or things that should be funny but aren’t funny, there’s something that’s just fundamentally not working there. And it’s your job to put aside your experience of that moment to really be the scientist to figure out why is this not working the way I thought it was going to be working.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at these Three Page Challenges and see if we can get them working the way they want to be working. So, as always, if you want to read along with us, we have the PDFs for this Three Page Challenge are attached to the show notes at johnaugust.com. So, go to johnaugust.com and click on this episode and you’ll see the PDFs for these things so you can read along with us.

So, Craig, which of these Three Page Challenges should we look at first?

**Craig:** Well, the first on my pile, because I like to print these out, is —

**John:** Oh that’s right, old school.

**Craig:** Old school. It’s the signal by Cody Pearce.

**John:** Let’s go for it. Do you want to do it or should I do the summary?

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it.

**John:** Summarize!

**Craig:** Okay. So, opens with a pair of gloved hands. One of them is holding on to a leather satchel. The other is grabbing a large knife and hiding it within the folds of an animal skin coat.

We see the hermit, this is our hero that we’re following, moving out of a rustic cabin in the pines and then wearing a pair of earplugs. They put the earplugs in the ears. We don’t see a face.

The hermit moves through the woods, moving past some hidden bear traps. And then eventually arrives in a town, a small town called Pine Brush. And it looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, kind of post-apocalyptic.

As the hermit walks down a street we see a family coming. They avoid the hermit. Interesting. And then the hermit enters a general store which is run by Bob. Just this average guy. And he offers to help the hermit with something. And then the phone rings and a high pitched noise comes out of the phone and Bob suddenly stops being Bob and becomes controlled by something. He’s channeling some other voice and he attacks the hermit who is now revealed to be Michelle, a 30-year-old woman.

And the voice says, “Oh, Michelle,” through Bob says, “oh Michelle, you look terrible.” They have a fight. Bob is trying to pull out her earplugs and saying please let me help you. And eventually the fight ends when Michelle rams the knife in between Bob’s ribs. And that is our three pages from Cody Pearce. John, take it away.

**John:** So, I was intrigued by this overall. I was excited to read pages four through ten at least and see what this whole situation was going to be. Clearly The Signal is this thing that can take over people and the hermit, this character Michelle, has good reason to be isolating herself in the woods to do something.

I liked a lot of this. I was a little ahead of Cody. For whatever reason I tipped that the hermit is probably a woman dressed up under all this other stuff. But on the whole I dug it.

It was interesting to hear your summary where you say, so this is the bottom of page one. “The buildings of Pine Brush haven’t been updated in decades. Most are abandoned, businesses closed and boarded up. A few old, beaten-up cars scattered about.” Now, you read that and said post-apocalyptic. I don’t think that’s the intention. I think the intention is it’s just like a rundown town.

But, it was ambiguous, and that ambiguity hurts because those are two different universes. And I think a little bit more — I’m going to say that word — specificity could help us here. Because I need to know what kind of universe we’re in. Because I think I’m probably more right because Bob’s general store is running.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it wouldn’t be running otherwise. But it was a reasonable choice and I read it both ways the first time.

**Craig:** I agree. Many, many promising things here. I always like to say, hey, you can do this to somebody. I think, hey Cody, you can do this.

Let’s talk about what works. The style here is right for the material. There’s a lot of whitespace on the page. Very short descriptions. I’m not hearing these overdone elaborations of what the pine trees look like and how the footsteps sound in my ear, all this stuff. It’s nice and punchy and good. I was completely with you that I was ahead that something was up with the hermit. Either it was going to be a child or a woman. And the reason why is because when you write something like, “Out steps…THE HERMIT, age unknown, wearing the animal skin overcoat, his face hidden beneath a large hood.” And then, again, “We do not see his face.”

Well, then it’s not a him. You’re kind of cheating on your misdirect. If it’s a big deal that this is a woman and that we can’t see her face and that we’re supposed to be misled, I would just underplay it here in your description. Finally we see this person’s face. And not make a big deal of holy gosh it’s a lady.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At first I was a little surprised by “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” because that seemed so corny. You know, nobody really talks like that anymore. But then I thought, okay, once the little squeal-y sound happens, maybe that’s sort of Bob, that’s all that’s left of Bob’s personality. I don’t know.

**John:** See, I took this as Bob really was Bob from the start. And that was genuinely him. And then that Signal took over and he became a different person. So, I would want to take this as, and I don’t know Cody’s intention, but everything actually is fine and normal until The Signal takes over.

So, The Signal is specifically looking for her.

**Craig:** I see. Well, in that case “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” is —

**John:** Howdy is a dangerous word.

**Craig:** Just bad dialogue. The action I thought was very well written. I understood what was going on. Personally, so okay, Cody has an issue here. There is a cinematic concept whereby characters that we see onscreen are occasionally going to be possessed by some unseen intelligence that will speak through those characters.

And what Cody says, what he writes for us is in brackets: “[NOTE: from here on out, whenever a character is under the control of the Signal his dialogue will be show ” — instead of shown, that’s a typo — “(tapped)]” And then in parenthesis tapped. And so as a parenthetical every time Bob speaks with the Signal voice it says, “(tapped) Oh Michele, You look terrible.” Again, another typo Y is capitalized. And then again, “(tapped) Please…Let me help you.”

I’m not sure that’s going to work here. We’ve got, I assume, at least 90 pages of this. A lot of people are going to be talking this way. Tapped is a very strange word for this. I understand that it may make sense later, but to see it over and over and over. Plus, you’re stealing your ability as a screenwriter to put a different parenthetical in if you need to. What if the Signal voice is sarcastic or angry? Or whispering? How are you supposed to do that?

So, my argument would be that instead maybe everything that is a Signal should be in italics.

**John:** That’s exactly my suggestion.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would just make more —

**John:** Yeah, I think it makes more sense. So, keep the same note, just say that when under the control of the Signal, everything will be in italics. We’ll get it. It’ll be fine. And I agree with you. Tapped, I think, is a weird choice of that word anyway because tapped implies a physical reaction, like something is actually physically happening and that’s not what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right. My last comment for Cody is this. As screenwriters, sometimes we get trapped by convention. One of the conventions of screenplays is that when we meet characters for the first time we present their name in capital letters, we give you the age, and then we give you some brief description. Devastatingly handsome. Plan girl next door with a light in her eyes.

Well, that’s what he’s done here. “MICHELLE, 30, cute but very tired. Bangs cover her forehead.” Here’s the problem: when we see her it’s because Bob, under the influence of the evil Signal, has ripped her hood off revealing her face. That’s the last point in a movie where you want your character to be described as tired. [laughs]

**John:** Well, it’s also the last point when you want to have her described as cute.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** Cute is not very helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, find some words that will tell us, might give us a sense of her size, but also her tenacity, whatever. Give us a little bit that’s going to cue us into the action sequence that’s about to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, and plus, it’s perfectly fine to say Michelle, 30 frightened, you know, blurry-eyed, scared, whatever. Something that’s appropriate for the moment. Unless her forehead is marked with some fascinating information, I definitely don’t need to know about her bangs at this point.

And even if it is a tattoo on her forehead of something brilliant, I still don’t need to know about the bangs right now.

**John:** Exactly. You can save some of these character descriptions till a moment after this bite has happened. And make it a story point. There’s a reason why she brushes back her bangs to reveal that thing if that’s an important story — because if something about her forehead is important, put a light on it. And you can do that after this.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, she’s still going to have bangs in both places, even if you don’t say it.

**Craig:** Yup. But all around, I would say very good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So, a couple things on the page that I want to talk about. Page one, middle of the page, “The hermit moves swift and silent through the dense forest.” So, classically that’s swiftly and silently because it’s an adverb, but this swift and silent works for this. Grammatically those should be adverbs, but we tend to sort of use swift and silent. I was fine with it. But I wanted to point out that it’s the kind of thing that you can do it right or you can do what sort of works on the page. And I felt it worked on the page really well.

**Craig:** I actually prefer this incorrect method.

**John:** Yeah. And then, top of page three, first line of real action, “Michelle hits Bob’s arm, causing him to let go of her coat. She pulls out the KNIFE she had hidden in her coat.” So, awkwardness here. Causing him to let go of her coat. That is really weak. Michelle hit’s Bob’s arm, breaking free of his grasp. Causing him to let go of her coat is just really weak and passive and it’s not indicative of sort of the action that you’re describing.

**Craig:** Right. He pulls away in pain. Something other than a very clinical description.

**John:** Exactly. And both sentences are ending with her coat which is just not ideal

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t want to do that.

**John:** So, always look for repetitions between two sentences and there’s going to be reasons while you’ll want those repetitions, but most of the times you don’t want those repetitions. And this is a case where that was getting in his way.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next, John?

**John:** Next let’s do Eric Webb’s script and I will attempt to summarize this. Immortal Coil.

We’re starting in Seattle, Washington, sunset. Winter scenes of the scene transition into night, intercut with the sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. We’re seeing sort of details of the city, Pike Place market, college students, the sun dips, we hear a jingle, jingle, jingle off-screen. In the central district of town, we’re at dusk, there’s a pockmarked street with shabby apartment buildings.

Inside the bedroom of one of these apartments a form is shifting under heavy covers. The only other light in the room is a temperature controller for an electric blanket. So, there’s somebody in here asleep. Moments later, the person gets out of the bed, opens the drapes.

We’re going to meet Kaleb and Kaleb is covered in blood. Let’s see what the actual description is. “He is half undressed, his crumpled clothes twisted at awkward angles around his frame from having been slept in. He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

He’s going to be taking a shower in the bathroom and we notice after the shower there’s a faint glimmer of reflectivity can be seen in the pupils of his eyes.

More details of his apartment. Getting dressed. He tells himself you forgot something. He puts on a charming smile and drops the smile and say a word that we’re not going to say on this podcast because it’s PG-13. And then he goes out into the street. It’s night. And as he’s walking through the snow he seems to be enjoying and sort of soaking up the energy of the people around him.

He seems like he’s potentially a dangerous person. And that is the bottom of our three pages.

**Craig:** So, I can’t say that I was in love with these. Most of the issues have to do with the content as opposed to the style, but there are some style issues as well that we need to discuss. So, I guess I’ll start in with those.

We’ve got the first half of page one, for all intents and purposes reads like the introduction to a Christmas movie. We’ve got a sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. Businesses in Pike Place Market being shuttered. College students building snowmen.

And then a cell phone alarm that says Jingle Jangle Jingle, which in my mind means Christmas. [laughs] It’s just Jingle Bells. Jingle Jangle Jingle. I just think like, oh, we’re on our way to a Christmas party or something. And now we’re into this — then he reestablishes, he goes from sunset to dusk which is — I know that DPs know the difference, but the average reader doesn’t.

And actually we went from sunset to dusk to dusk. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

Obviously the sun setting is the important part because we’re dealing with a vampire. And I know this because Jingle Jangle Jingle, which I know realize, okay, yeah, for sure, this is not a Christmas movie anymore, there’s a guy who’s hiding from the sun under this bed.

Now, at the bottom of page one we have a five line action block which in my mind becomes mush.

**John:** It’s five lines, but actually almost nothing happens.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I think that’s really the tragedy of the five lines. It’s not describing this amazing moment from a war. It’s basically like there’s somebody under the blanket for five lines.

**Craig:** Right. He’s under the blanket and he’s turning his alarm off, which we’ve seen a billion times. So, now he wakes up and, I’m just going to read this because it just doesn’t work. “From behind, we see the occupant of the bed throw open a set of black-out drapes revealing make out a man’s silhouette against the battered blinds that cover the windows.”

Guys, this needs to be like sewn onto a pillow as what to not do. Obviously there’s a mistake in there, but it’s a run-on sentence. You’re missing commas. We see the occupant of the — you never want to say something like we see the occupant of the bed throw open, because people just see bed throw. The words don’t go together. It just — what’s wrong with just saying the man throws open the set of drapes. We see a silhouette.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s just so over-written. And now he’s parting the flaps of the blinds close on his eye. You want to capitalize CLOSE for me, otherwise people are going to read it as close on his eye. As he peers out at the last embers of daylight in the west. This is just — you and I talk about purple. This is purple.

Okay. But the point being at this point I’m for sure I know we’re dealing with a vampire. And I’m already a little annoyed because his name is Kaleb with a K. And this is starting to just feel very YA and very well-trodden ground. He is described as “in his early twenties with pale skin, a slender build, and long jet-black hair.” AKA, every YA vampire ever.

And, this is really where — ugh — I started to get a little squirmy. “He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

First of all, don’t tell me no wounds are apparent. He has just woken up. If he’s covered in blood, he’s okay. It’s not his blood. He’s been sleeping all night. He’s not screaming. It’s not dripping. He looks at himself in a mirror and we see “there are channels cut into the crusted mask of blood that covers part of his face, carved by tears when the blood was fresh. New tears now trace those same paths.”

Forgive me, but at this point I’m starting to feel like I should be laughing. Because that’s so over-the-top, I’m not sure what to do. And then he takes a shower and we are told, all capital letters, “THE BLOOD WAS NOT HIS.” We know. We know. We get it. This is making so much more of something that frankly we’ve seen.

**John:** My biggest challenge overall with these pages is it is totally valid here is a vampire in Seattle, great. But this introduction — benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s not a vampire movie. There’s some special details about this that it’s a different kind of supernatural thing we’re going to go into, so it’s taking the vampire tropes and it’s going to push against them. But from these three pages it feels like a vampire wakes up. And that’s sort of all we got. A vampire wakes up and takes a shower.

And I wasn’t seeing special things that let me know what kind of movie I’m in. Well, I sort of knew what kind of movie I was in, and I was not excited to be in that movie because I’ve seen this movie before.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It felt like too familiar of a setup and everything to begin with. And the writing felt like book writing rather than screenwriting. It felt like the kind of sentences that are trying to very painterly, you kind of over-describe everything because you’re trying to paint these whole scenes that you don’t really need to do in screenwriting because screenwriting is about this happens, and this happens, and this happens. It was too much at all times.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to remember that we, Eric, we control time as screenwriters. We can present things in a remarkably compressed manner, or we can drag them out so that they are painfully slow. And there are times when you want to do one or the other. And there are times when you want to just move at a general neutral speed.

What you’ve done here is you’ve dragged time out to the point now where you’re describing the color of the wallpaper and the color of the carpet and how the carpet smells, none of which is relevant here whatsoever.

The only information that I get from this is that there’s a vampire in Seattle and it makes him sad that he has to kill people to eat stuff. And that’s fine. It’s not new. And I’m certainly not — look, if it were me, god, I would much rather prefer this thing open in a bar and a woman is there and this guy comes along and starts talking to her and they’re actually getting along great. And he really likes her. And we can tell he really likes her. And then he kills her. And then he cries.

I mean, just get me into this somehow other than vampire wakes up looking just like a vampire doing vampire stuff like hiding from the sun. And then he’s got vampire blood on him. And, bummer.

**John:** Well, honestly, it’s the two kind of tropes that happen so often in these movies which is sort of like here’s the vampire and he’s being a vampire. And here’s a character waking up, here’s a character’s alarm clock going off the first thing in the morning and that’s how the movie starts. And so it’s weird that you’re sort of doing both things at once, but not weird in a fantastic way.

And Seattle is an interesting place to set, and maybe this can be some kind of artisanal vampire thing happening. That there can be something very specific about it that could be great. But Twilight is also set in the Seattle area, so that’s not even…

So, the only thing I want to say that I think is really useful for talking about craft is on page two, we’re in the bathroom, and there’s these stacked scenes where it’s like moments later, angle behind mirror, this type of thing. And it’s an example of making things much more difficult than they need to be.

And in real scripts that shoot, you’re going to find this stuff is simplified greatly. Each of these little moments, you could slug them individually, but you could also just sort of just talk through them in paragraphs. Because if it’s just a time cut within one little space and it’s just a montage of things that happen, you can call that a scene and everyone will figure out what’s supposed to happen in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the good news is clearly you guys, you, Eric, sorry, saw this scene in your head. You saw all of it. You did what you’re supposed to do. You imagined every detail of the moment, down to the colors and smells and angles. But you can’t actually then just go and dictate all of that out. You have to decide where and what to let other people in on. It’s important for you to know everything. It’s not as important for the reader to know everything.

**John:** Much more important than sort of this geography stuff, and so the color of the walls is what it feel like. And I didn’t get a great sense of what it actually felt like and what this is supposed to feel like to a person. So, like, does this apartment feel like an old grandmother’s apartment that someone inherited? Does it feel like the most seedy rock club you’ve ever been in? What does it feel like? Just give me that one line of description. Would have done a lot more good for telling the story than all the stuff that I got there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tweaker pad. Flop house. Unfurnished corporate apartment. There’s so many ways to just get this out there and I get it. By the way, hipster vampire is not a bad idea. Like if you just did a movie about just like bearded flannel-wearing, mutton chop, handle bar mustache vampires who sort of quibble over like who they drink blood from. Like are they on antibiotics. Like I don’t drink blood from anybody that’s been vaccinated. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. The anti-vaccination vampire.

**Craig:** The anti-vaccination vampire is awesome.

**John:** The last thing I want to point out, so this script is called Immortal Coil, and it’s written by Eric Webb, story by Eric Webb with Casey Ligon. And the “with” is just a really weird thing. And it’s not an actual thing that exists in the world. And would be what that would look like.

**Craig:** And.

**John:** With doesn’t exist as a credit in film land.

**Craig:** All right. Our last three pages is called Nexus and it’s written by Carlos Aldana. And I put the hard stop there because I really want to say Carlo Saldana. Carlos Saldanha is the director of the Rio movies. But this is Carlos Aldana. And it’s called Nexus.

I shall summarize thusly. SUPER: “November, 2014” We’re in darkness and then the sound of metal screeching. A big door opens up revealing Lucy. She’s 35 years old. And she’s telling some people to hurry and four people running after her, just silhouetted. She guides the group up an emergency stairwell in a building. They all carry guns. They’re all dirty and tired.

Ryan, who is 39, Ashley, 17, Earl, 44, and Eddie Jeong, 23. And they’re asking how much longer. And Earl is saying you better haul ass if you don’t want to get caught by one of those things.

**John:** We’ll come back to that line.

**Craig:** We’re going to come back to a lot of these lines. So, then we get in to the office. Something is growling. And it turns out, oh, it’s not a monster. It’s just a dog. This is an abandoned office. Lucy opens up a safe. Rather, she tells Jeong to open up a safe. And Ashley says mom. So, that turns out to be Lucy’s daughter, Ashley. And she’s looking at the Los Angeles skyline, except the buildings are destroyed and abandoned. I think I’m now safe to say this is post-apocalyptic.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s fair. I think there’s been a recession. There are issues. But I think we’re now safely post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** Right. So, Lucy is reminiscing about a Los Angeles that once was. And Jeong opens up a safe.

Now, here’s what’s in the safe. A disk the size of a quarter, a key card, and six high tech pucks called either DITs or D-I-Ts. It’s hard to tell. And they are futuristic objects that stick together and also do not stick together and also stick to concrete. And she throws them at a wall. There are some geography issues. The point being that they create a portal. That these things open a portal up. And the portal appears to reveal another place that’s just like the place they’re in. It’s like a mirror, but a mirror into another place.

You know, if I’m running out of juice on the summary, you know there’s some trouble. [laughs] I’m not really sure what happened. That’s the god’s honest truth, John. I’m not exactly sure what happened.

**John:** So, I thought the idea of you throw this thing at the wall and it opens up and forms a portal, yeah, I’ve played the game Portal. I like the game Portal. So, maybe there’s something really great to do there. So, I wasn’t nuts about the description of it, but I was intrigued enough to say like, well, what kind of movie is this.

The thing that obviously intrigues me right from the start is it says November 2014. And it’s like, well, that’s now. That’s actually today. But it’s a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. So, something has changed. Either the timeline has changed, or Carlos actually wrote this a couple of years ago and made some bad predictions.

**Craig:** Well, but on his front page he writes May, 2014. And also copyright 2014, which by the way, Carlos, not necessary to write.

**John:** Not necessary. Also not necessary to have the comma after May, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, something has happened. I think it’s a deliberate choice to say this is an alternate timeline. There’s something else going on. And given that we’re able to bend the laws of physics in order to create these portals, maybe the time has moved, too.

Unfortunately, while it’s generally great to start in the middle of action, that’s usually a really good thing to try to do, I don’t think it’s helping us so much here because I don’t know who these characters are in a useful way. And I’m not particularly intrigued, just based on the little bits of dialogue that I’m getting.

And so, “How much longer? Almost there.” Okay. Fine. “You better haul ass if you don’t wanna get caught by one of those things.” I don’t know what this world is, but these people seem to know what they’re doing, and no one would say that if they’d been through this before.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why would you say that about the most important and dangerous thing. Like if you were working in the Ebola zone, and you saw somebody, like one of your fellow doctors without a surgical mask on, would you say, “You better put your surgical mask on, or you’ll catch Ebola.” That’s the equivalent. I mean, it’s just crazy.

**John:** It is truly the equivalent. And so that felt weird and it just took me out of the movie because it so made it clear we’re in a movie.

**Craig:** Well, if that didn’t make it clear that you’re in a movie, how about these descriptions. And talk about these descriptions for me, please, these character descriptions.

**John:** Okay. Let’s read through them. So, Lucy is 35, petite and brunette. That’s all we get.

**Craig:** Petite and brunette. I think you’ve got to just stop there. We cannot — I get that we have lived in a world where men have reduced women in movies frequently to the girl. We can’t do this anymore. You cannot define a human being by their physical height and then their hair color.

**John:** Well, to be fair, Lucy is 35, petite, and brunette, while Ashley is 17, petite but tough.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay. She’s tough. Okay. Fair enough. She’s also petite, though.

**John:** So, women in this movie so far we’ve learned can be brunette and they can be tough.

**Craig:** You certainly can’t be both.

**John:** And it’s possible they can be both. So, what we’re really saying is that Lucy is the first person we’re introduced to. We need some description of her that tells us what she’s like, not what she looks like.

**Craig:** Correct. Unless Lucy dies on page four as a big shocker and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, we need more from Lucy, because right now she feels like the hero. And it it’s true that Lucy dies suddenly and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, then we need more about Ashley. Either way, nobody — the script has given us no information about who we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

**John:** So, two things about this. First off, is the misdirect is that Lucy’s going to die on page four, the misdirect has to happen on the page, too. So, give us a little bit of stuff about her so we have sense of who she is, because then it’s actually going to be rewarding for us that she got killed off. So, give us a description that sort of lands for us and anchors us.

But, the bigger issue here I think, in addition to the specific choices of the words we’re using to describe these characters is you’re shooting us, all four of them at once. There’s that shotgun approach. Here’s four characters and they’re running and doing things. That’s really hard to be great in any circumstance, because we don’t know what we’re supposed to pay attention to. And we’re desperately looking for things, but you have them running and doing all this other stuff. It makes it just very hard for us to relate to any one of your characters because you’re giving us four all at once.

**Craig:** I mean, this is what you’re suggesting. Screenplays are proposing to an unseen, unknown director, what to shoot. What you are proposing here that the director shoots is Lucy guiding people up stairs. And as they walk our camera just sees each one of them. And none of them say anything until the last one. So, we’re just literally watching this lineup of four people.

This is ultimately what we know. Lucy is petite and brunette. Ryan moves and carries his gun like a pro. Definitely military or police. Ah, okay. We won’t know that in any way, shape, or form. Ashley, petite, but tough, looks a bit old for her age. We won’t know her age, so none of that matters. And then, Earl, 44, big muscular black guy in mechanic overalls. Lastly, Eddie Jeong, pale and skinny Asian, clearly tired going up the stairs.

Not only does this read like the kind of group you see in B-level zombie videogames, but it’s a bad version. It’s kind of racist. It feels like — like what race is Ryan? What race is Lucy? What race is Ashley?

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Craig:** I guess they’re white, because you don’t mention it.

**John:** The default is white.

**Craig:** The default is white and that’s just not cool. Like, especially if you’re going to end in big black guy and skinny Asian dude land. Eh…

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about, let’s say that you needed to introduce these characters in the stairwell. A way you might want to do that is if Lucy’s in front, we meet Lucy, and she’s like, “Hold up.” And she’s looking for something. We’re on her for a moment and she’s talking to unseen people. And then she finally gives the go ahead for them to follow her up. And so then we have a moment with her. Okay. Here’s a spotlight on her. And then she’s going to move up. And then we can meet one or maybe two more people and see what their dynamic is. And then we’re finally going to meet those last two people.

But right now getting all of these people on screen at once, it helps nobody.

**Craig:** It’s impossible to do well. The truth is you kind of need somebody to say something before you give a damn about who they are. Or, they have to do something before you give a damn about who they are.

So, if it were me, I would probably have Lucy and Ashley together, talking quietly with each other. Nobody else. And then when they make sure the coast is clear, they open up another — like they’ve wriggled through a window and now they open up a door and there’s a guy saying, “What took you so long?” Some terrible movie line, but the point being, okay, and now we can see who that is.

**John:** Or, they split up in two groups. So, two of them are searching one place and two of them are searching another place. And then they’re going to cross paths again and they’re looking for something. Obviously they are looking for something, so separate them and then bring them together. And establish stakes that way. So, we don’t even know what the relationship is between these people. Are they on the same side or opposite sides? Just create some tension there by not giving us all these team together at once.

**Craig:** And you know you have a problem when already on the top of page two, just page two, you’ve now shorthanded the most important human beings in your movie to “our group.” That’s bad. That’s a bad sign.

**John:** So, I want to talk a little bit about some of the word choices on page one. “A gap opens and light shines at the camera.” Okay. So, we’re talking about the camera, but did we need to? A gap opened. A light shines through. Ah, I got rid of the camera. “The door finally gives in, the light floods in and we see the silhouette of LUCY.” I’m not opposed to we sees, but there’s a lot of we sees here. And we don’t need this we see. The door finally gives in, light floods in. The silhouette of Lucy. Better description for Lucy.

“They rush up a set of emergency stairs in an unnamed building.” [laughs] In an unnamed building? It’s unnamed because you haven’t given it a name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can’t say that you’re not telling us something because you’re not telling us something. Rush up a flight of stairs in an office building. In a something building. Give us something.

Next paragraph. “We can barely see them in the dark. But we can tell they’re tired and dirty.”

**Craig:** What? What? How?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How? If we can barely see them, how are we supposed to tell they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And dirty.

**John:** But we don’t need those two we cans. There’s ways to write around that so you can save those we’s for when they’re actually really important.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s my stumping for — I hate the script rule say you can never talk about the camera and you can never say “we see” or “we hear.” You can do all those things, but you have to be really judicious about when you’re going to pull out those tools, because sometimes there’s no better way to do it. So, you use those things. But in all these cases there were ways to just describe things and not have to say we-s.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, in general, if I’m going to use we see, it’s because we are seeing something shocking, or I want the screenplay to let the reader know that we in the audience are seeing something that the character on screen is not.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But you’re right, this is just sort of peppered in there. If the other stuff were working I wouldn’t mind that stuff so much. The building that has no name is described later as, again, as a generic office building. And, again, sunlight floods and blinds — we’ve got a sunlight flooding in at people. Not sure why. It’s kind of unmotivated sunlight.

The bigger issue is what the heck is going on on page three. I mean, let’s just jump ahead. [laughs] Because, you know, first of all, let’s talk about this description. You’re introducing new technology to us. We’re in a zombie movie, presumably, or something like a zombie movie. But, also, you have a twist which is portals. Okay. Fine.

So, what comes out of the safe is some mysterious disk which we’re not going to address at this point, a key card which is a key card and we won’t have to deal with it at this point, and “six high tech pucks called DITs.” What the hell am I supposed to think from that? Like, all right, I’m the prop guy. What’s a high tech puck? What is that? You’ve got to give me more.

**John:** Because I don’t know. I saw pucks and I didn’t think about the high tech of it all. I bet they’re glowing LED pucks.

**Craig:** Are they? Are they?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Are they glowing? Do they have buttons? They have grooves? Are they metallic? Are they intricate? I mean, these things are central to the movie. You’ve got to describe.

**John:** Yeah. Do they look like human technology or some sort of alien artifact thing? Yeah. I agree with you there, Craig. And it’s obviously going to be central to our story, so it’s worth a little bit of time right here to do. This just wasn’t the best way to do it.

The only other thing I was to point out on, halfway through page three. “The 4 pieces spread until the light rectangle is about the size of a door.” He used the number four rather than the spelled out four. Just follow general kind of AP rules. Numbers that are less than ten, spell out. Numbers that are in dialogue, kind of always spell out. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get people to pronounce things properly, the way you expect them to be pronounced. But there was no reason to use the numeral here. It slows you down.

**Craig:** Yeah. No reason at all. Take some time to make us love the DIT. I think you’ve got to — help me out here. Is it a DIT or is it a D-I-T? Also, don’t tell me what it’s called if these people aren’t going to say anything. If someone is going to talk about it later, that’s when I find out what it’s called. I don’t need this information now because it’s not being used by me or the people in the scene, the name of it. See?

**John:** Yeah. And it would be a simple thing that I would actually buy if the character opens the safe and is like, “Got ’em. Six DITs.” And it’s like I see there are six things. They must be called DITs. I know what to call those things now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, it’s very doable. This is always a fun process because people send in these pages and they are being incredibly brave to show the work that they’ve done and let us talk about. In the case of two of these scripts, we dug in and we didn’t like sort of what we were seeing on the page, but it’s still incredibly useful I hope for other writers to look at their own work and see, oh, these are the kinds of things I’m doing that work or don’t work. And maybe I can make some different choices.

**Craig:** That’s right. And for those of you today, the two of you who kind of got a little bit of a beating, and even our other guy who got a little bit of a beating, just take comfort in this: these are the beatings that we give each other. And these are the beatings we get ourselves.

Lindsay Doran and I spent, I don’t know, an hour the other day talking about two paragraphs, two small paragraph descriptions. And if it were clear, or how to make it clear where somebody was standing. This is the kind of OCD level of detail that you need. And you need to love it. And this is part of the game.

**John:** Well, it’s that crucial ability to see this is what my intention was and this is how it’s coming out on the other side. So, for these people who sent in these pages, they clearly had an intention. There was a reason they wrote these pages. And they didn’t land with us the way I think they thought they would land. And so that is hopefully a valuable experience. So, that’s why we do Three Page Challenges. That’s why we did it in Austin and why we’re doing this one.

But I need to thank these writers for sending them in and all the writers who send in Three Page Challenges. We have like a 250 script backlog of these samples. And, honestly, Stuart picks the ones that are pretty good. So, that’s a sign that people are, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re struggling out there.

**John:** They’re struggling and they’re also making choices that can hopefully be improved by just having someone take a look at them and really look at them critically.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you are playing the home game, take a look at your first three pages and ask yourself how would this go with John and Craig? [laughs] You know? Because, honestly, we are not particularly hard on this stuff. I really do believe that. I know it feels that way, but this is the name of the game out here. It’s the way it goes.

**John:** So, if you have three pages of your own script that you want to send in to have us take a look at, the proper URL to send them to is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And there’s a form you fill out and you check some boxes and you attach your file and you send them through.

We still call it the Three Page Challenge, it’s really meant to be like the first sequence of a movie. But three pages ends up being about the mountain we can actually talk about usefully in a show. So, for now we’ll stick with Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got a big long show, so I’ll be quick about my One Cool Thing this week. Yosemite, the new operating system for Macintosh, has an excellent new feature that works in concert with their new version of iOS and it’s called Family Sharing. And I find this incredibly useful because I used to give my kids an allowance of, I think I gave them $10 a month to spend on apps. And then they would do that, but I didn’t really know exactly what they were getting.

And then, inevitably, if they wanted something that was more expensive or two things, and they were worth it, they’d have to come to be, and it was annoying. So, Family Sharing is great because now every time they want to buy anything, if it’s an app, or a song, or anything, they request it. And the request comes to me on both my MacBook and also on my phone and on my iPad and on Melissa’s phone, and on her iPad, and her computer.

So, either one of us can hit approve or deny. And therefore we’re in charge of all of it which I find very satisfying.

**John:** That is a really good thing. Mine is also short. It’s this collection of Aesop’s Fables that have been rendered as web pages using Google Fonts collection. So, Google Font’s, like Typekit, has all these amazing typefaces. And so these designers took the Google Fonts and told the stories using these amazing typefaces. And it’s a great example of sort of how expressive type can be on the internet now. And this is all real type. This is isn’t just picture graphics. This is actually — you can select every word there and it’s just done programmatically with fonts. It looks great.

And so it’s a good inspiration for anybody who is designing something on the web in 2014/2015, to really look at the expressive power of typefaces.

**Craig:** Mm, good show.

**John:** Good show. Good long show.

**Craig:** Good to be back. Feels good to be back.

**John:** Back at my place.

**Craig:** You know, I can smell all these people, John. They’re aiming for my job. They’re gunning for me. I know Birbiglia wants this gig.

**John:** Oh, he absolutely wants this gig. And Susannah Grant was great. She put in a great audition.

**Craig:** Yeah, Susannah, actually, I think would be better than I am.

**John:** Susannah is pretty great.

**Craig:** She’s awesome. But Birbiglia. Huh.

**John:** He’s got that comedian thing. It’s dangerous.

**Craig:** It’s Steal-giglia.

**John:** Yeah. I confessed to Mike that I actually wrote him in as a part in this one thing I’m hoping to do. And so I’ll get to work with him regularly if that were to happen.

**Craig:** That’s very clever.

**John:** See? You should do that, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I’m not going to do it. He deserves nothing. [laughs] Nothing.

**John:** He deserves nothing. He’s a job poacher.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** As always, you can find some links to things we talked about in today’s show at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you go to scriptnotes.net, that’s where you can subscribe to all the back episodes and all the bonus episodes. We’ll have two bonus episodes coming up really soon. We have an interview I did with Simon Kinberg for the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And we’ll have the Three Page Challenge we did at Austin. So, both of those will be going up as bonus episodes, so if you want to listen to those. We are so super close to having a thousand subscribers at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** For the premium feed. And, Craig, off recording I will tell you the best inspiration I had for a guest for the dirty show. So, people, sign up.

If you want to subscribe to our normal feed, that’s in iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. It’s because people left so many great comments that iTunes featured us as one of the best podcasts, which was just so nice of them to do.

I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can send to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are interested in Writer Emergency, those decks of cards we are starting to do in Kickstarter, go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to our Kickstarter campaign for that.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** Stuart Friedel produced the podcast. Matthew Chilelli edited it. Thank you, Matthew. And he has a Kickstarter campaign, too. So, there will be a link up in the show notes for Matthew’s Kickstarter campaign for —

**Craig:** Ugh, god.

**John:** A movie he’s doing. Craig, you’re going to be the last person with a Kickstarter campaign.

**Craig:** Uh, yeah.

**John:** You are going to start a Kickstarter campaign to shut down Kickstarter.

**Craig:** [laughs] I might. I just might.

**John:** Yeah, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** That’s dividing by zero.

**John:** [laughs] Good stuff. Thank you. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye.

Links:

* [Writer Emergency](http://writeremergency.com) is live [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [Marvel announces its superhero slate](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Marvel-Just-Announced-All-Movies-With-Release-Dates-Title-Art-67919.html)
* StartUp, Episode 1: [How Not to Pitch a Billionaire](http://hearstartup.com/episodes/1-how-not-to-pitch-a-billionaire)
* Three Pages by [Cody Pearce](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CodyPearce.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Eric Webb](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/EricWebb.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Carlos Aldana](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CarlosAldana.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Family Sharing](https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/family-sharing/) on iOS 8
* [Aesop’s Fables in Google Fonts](http://femmebot.github.io/google-type/)
* Support Matthew’s film [Escape the Dark](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1379703609/escape-the-dark-a-horror-feature) on Kickstarter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))