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The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Now we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you will find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

Some folks have also started doing recaps and discussion on the screenwriting sub-Reddit. If that continues, terrific. You can check there.

And you can also find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

And I get none of the money.

You may want to check out the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide at johnaugust.com/guide to find out which episodes our listeners recommend most.

And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets here!
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• José Fernández
• Lava, Pixar Short
• Finding Nemo
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• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/craig-hates-dummies).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 365 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be doing one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie, with new stories looking at McDonald’s millions, a rest home for ventriloquist dummies, and the Tinder hunger games. Plus we’ll be answering listener questions and other bits of stuff that’s left over from Craig being gone for so long.

But, Craig, you’re back.

**Craig:** I’m back. Feels good to be back in here. We are on our one year of podcasts podcast, which is exciting. I have to say I’m not cut out to be a world traveler. I’m just going to put it out there. I have gone back and forth between Los Angeles and Eastern Europe, which is not an insignificant trip, about – I don’t know, back and forth seven, eight, nine times over the last four or five months. I don’t know how people that routinely do this do this.

**John:** I have a friend who has a business in Eastern Europe and he just goes back all the time. He just loves being on planes.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Doesn’t mind – he’s a citizen of the world. Doesn’t mind jetlag. And that’s just not me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The planes thing you can kind of make your peace with. The jetlag is just, blech. You don’t get used to it as much as you just no longer fear the unknown. Now you know exactly what to be concerned about. So I know now, OK, fly on Saturday, land on Sunday. Go to work on Monday. Monday will be surprisingly fine. Don’t be fooled. Tuesday you begin to feel a bit sick. Wednesday you want to die. And then Thursday you kind of get back to normal.

**John:** That’s often how it goes. Plus you’re working very long hours doing your show because you’re there on set.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s not natural light sometimes. It’s all crazy.

**Craig:** The last week of shooting we managed to fit in some splits, which is when you shoot half-day/half-night, and then full nights.

**John:** Oh, brutal.

**Craig:** Including an hour-long drive to and from location to our hotel in Latvia, so we managed to go over the border for that. But I have to say I’m thrilled. 90 days of shooting. An incredible cast. A wonderful crew. Best creative experience of my life. I surely hope that the show turns out as well as we all think it will. And it’s very exciting. Very meaningful and exciting for everybody involved. So, a lovely thing.

**John:** I’m so excited for you. Cannot wait to see it.

All right. We have so much follow up. So let’s get into our follow up. Two weeks ago you and I talked about the Department of Justice was looking into the Paramount Consent Decree, the decades-old ruling which said that studios could not own exhibitors and vice versa and set a whole bunch of special conditions on those relationships.

Jim in North Carolina wrote in to say, “The flaw in Craig’s support for studios owning theaters doesn’t scale downward. Many smaller communities don’t necessarily have multiple physical theaters. Concentrating ownership isn’t going to support rich ecosystem of films.”

Craig, what do you think of that?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if that’s quite right. I mean, you are always going to have a place for independent cinema and theater houses that run non-studio films and non-studio fare, just as you always have. I mean, right now what we have are very large corporations that primarily show major motion picture releases from big studios, and then we have little ones that show other things. So that doesn’t change. Frankly, when he says – Jim says, “Many smaller communities don’t necessarily have multiple physical theaters,” what do they have? That’s what I would ask him.

If they have something like an AMC kind of chain, or a Regal, or one of these big ones, well then maybe the ownership changes, but the place itself doesn’t. Hopefully it gets better.

**John:** Well, but I do wonder in that situation, let’s say Disney buys AMC as a whole chain, so that theater now in his small town is owned by Disney. Is that going to limit his ability to see movies from Warners, to see movies from Paramount? There could be some concern there’s just actually some movies may not come to his town because Disney has that theater.

**Craig:** Well, what I would suggest is that if this ever does change, and the federal government allows studios to own theaters, it can only happen if there is some kind of regulation that requires the carrying of other people’s products, otherwise you are essentially engaging in bundling and monopolistic practices. So, I would think that it’s a bit of a – look, it could happen that we go from all of the regulation that we have to none. But that seems highly unlikely. I think what would happen is a relaxation but not a complete elimination. I can’t imagine a world where the government says we’re going to go from Disney not being able to own a single screen to Disney can own all the screens at once and only show Disney product. That just seems like a rather broad leap. So.

**John:** Another case came out of Texas this week, so I’ll put a link into this. Dominic Patten wrote it up for Deadline. So this was a case between AMC, the big theater company, and Viva, which was a smaller chain that showed Spanish language versions of big screen releases. And so this was a lawsuit, it was the next round in that lawsuit, between the two. Viva has now gone out of business, but the lawsuit continues.

And I thought it was really interesting. Basically Viva is arguing that there is a significant Spanish-speaking contingency that was not being served by AMC’s screens and that essentially AMC had a stranglehold on the market and was not allowing Viva to compete for the ability to show these movies. And so it’s the kind of thing that the government gets involved with, looking at is this a restraint of trade. Is this something that’s in violation of the consent decrees, I assume.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really interesting situation. AMC is this big theater chain. And they said, look, we make these deals with studios where we show their movies and then they don’t show that movie maybe next door to us in our competitor. And then the studios say, yeah, this other exhibitor, Viva, they only show movies in Spanish, so that’s not really competition to you. That’s a different thing. And AMC said, no, no, no, it’s the same thing. We’re not showing any of your movies unless you agree to not show them over across the street at a Viva theater.

And their argument was, look, very few – I think they said 7% of the local population doesn’t speak any English at all. In other words, 7% only speak Spanish, therefore really only 7% is what Viva is claiming is the reason they should be showing these things. And the other 93% sitting in the crowd at Viva, so they would argue with bad statistics, could just as easily see the movie over there at AMC in English.

And the judge basically said, no, even if–

**John:** No!

**Craig:** No! Even if we suggest that the only people that go to see the films at Viva are the Spanish-speaking people, he said AMC does not explain why 7% of Houston’s population is not a sufficient submarket. I mean, Houston is a big city. 7% of Houston is a lot of people.

So this, frankly, this stinks. I think what AMC is doing here stinks. And we’ll see what happens. These things have a way of eventually settling out, but I don’t like it.

**John:** Yeah. As a person who was living in France for a year, when I would see US movies or British movies in France I could choose to see them version originale, which would be it’s all in English, I could a version originale sous-titre, which means subtitles, or version originale French basically. So basically I could see it dubbed, I could see it subtitled, or occasionally I’d see it without either the dubbing or subtitles.

Some movies you could see whenever you wanted to see, you could see it with subtitles on. But some movies, like especially Pixar movies or Disney movies, they were only in that first week and only in big markets could you see them not dubbed into French.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it became this complicated thing of like well we have to see Moana first weekend, or actually Vaiana there, because if we don’t see it that first weekend we won’t be able to see it in English. And so languages are a complicated thing. And to say that 7% of a market speaking that language isn’t significant is crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is just overreaching greed.

**John:** So, in last week’s episode that you weren’t here for Kate Hagen came in and she was fantastic talking about video stores. A thing she brought up which I think got sort of a little bit lost in the edit is this idea that, as MoviePass seems to be going away, there’s this idea that arthouse theaters in a market could all ban together and essentially make an arthouse pass. And so with it you could see as many movies at these independent theaters as you wanted to over the course of a month. That seems like a great idea.

So, I would just – if someone is working on that for Los Angeles, please let us know because that seems like a terrific idea.

**Craig:** I mean, but is it a great idea for the exhibitors?

**John:** I think it’s a great idea for those one-screen houses, for them to get together and be able to make it all work. That would be great. Obviously there’s concerns about the degree to which independent businesses can work together to do stuff like that, but it does feel like it would be a win for people who want to go see these films.

**Craig:** I mean, one thing we know for sure is that we were right about MoviePass. Holy cajole is that thing just collapsing. It turns out that offering people something that costs X for X divided by five is not a good business model. Wow. Wow, did that blow up fast.

**John:** But, you know what? I want to thank all the VC money that went into making films cheaper for people who want to see movies for a year.

**Craig:** One year.

**John:** So, one year. But for one year they bought a bunch of people movie tickets.

**Craig:** That’s right. They subsidized the movie business for a year. It was amazing.

**John:** Thank you VC money. Keep doing it.

Second bit of follow up, just as my personal follow up, Highland 2.1 came out this week. It’s a pretty major update. One of the things we ended up doing in this most recent build is we have a bunch of international users and, you and I think of screenplays starting with INT and EXT and Cut to and we just have all of these English assumptions about how scripts should work, but those aren’t the natural assumptions.

So we’ve added the ability to customize all of those things for whatever language you want to do. You can set whatever you’d like for those things. And it seems to be very great and helpful. And it’s been really heartening to see like we have a lot more sort of Chinese users and Korean users than we had sort of expected. And they have special needs and the nice thing about being plain text is we can sort of meet those needs. So if you are a person writing in a language that is not English, I would say check it out because it is useful for those things.

**Craig:** Meanwhile Final Draft still does not have Unicode support. Amazing.

**John:** Yes. Yep. So, I mean, part of the reason why Chinese users write in to us, and thank god that Megan speaks Chinese and she can answer those support emails, is they’ve been – sometimes they’ve been desperate for a screenwriting app and because we support real Unicode and real sort of Chinese entry on stuff you can use it to write real screenplays in Chinese which is a difficult thing otherwise.

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed. Fade In I know supports Unicode. I’m going to guess WriterDuet does because it’s–

**John:** It’s web-based.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, honestly there’s really no excuse for Final Draft at this point other than the fact that their empire is built on a crumbing foundation of nonsense.

**John:** Yeah. That tends to be a barrier.

**Craig:** You know what? New marketing slogan for them.

**John:** Crumbling foundation of nightmare. Can I use that as a blurb for selling?

**Craig:** Of course you can. You can do whatever you want, John. You know I can’t stop you.

**John:** Oh, the other one thing we added in this new version which I think people will find very helpful, because it’s a thing I needed for Arlo Finch is there will be times where you need to number stuff sequentially and stuff may move around but you need the numbers to keep updating to whatever it is, so like chapters it was for me and so I didn’t want to have to number the chapters and then go back through and renumber the chapters. So we added a variable called chapter, or series, or panel, or page, and you can put this in and then whatever the next number is it will just keep incrementing. And it’s incredibly useful for books, obviously, but especially people who are using Highland for graphic novels and comic books, because there you tend to say like this is the page, this is panel one, panel two, panel three. And to have those auto increment is useful. So, another reason to check it out if you have not checked it out.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** All right. We talked about the Editors Guild. So we got some feedback about the Editors Guild. We got a lot of great emails. I don’t know if we want to read through all of them, but I thought we might take a sampling of some of what people have wrote in about the Editors Guild. Do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. Ann writes in, “Thank you for the excellent discussion of the IA contract in Scriptnotes Episode 363, for which a link was posted on the 2018 IATSE contract forum on Facebook.” Ho-ho-ho. Interesting. “In response to your very astute comment, ‘There’s something rotten at the core of this union,’ I can explain. From its very beginning the real purpose of the IA has not been to represent the interests of its varied members, but instead to guarantee a docile below-the-line workforce to the employers. Please read Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930 to 1950, Moguls, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne.”

So we should probably throw a link to that up on here. Sounds like Ann’s got a pretty decent handle on the history here, which I admittedly don’t. She goes on to talk a little bit about something called the Industry Experience Roster. I had no idea this existed. Did you?

**John:** I didn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s basically who you can hire.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like a list of who you’re allowed to hire. This is a – this a roster that’s controlled by a nonprofit that is in turn controlled and funded by the companies, the AMPTP. And it’s a preferential hiring list. It came out of the Red Scare and the Hollywood Blacklist era and HUAC and all that nonsense. And it still exists. That’s insane. And, god, IA is – they got to clean up their house. Somebody has to start a little revolution over there I think.

**John:** Well, it might be Nicholas. So Nicholas writes in to say that he’s a member of the Art Directors Guild and “personally stand with the IA 700 and their refusal to support the new contract. I’m also appalled at Matt Loeb’s and the other BA’s responses to it. Craig is right that the IA is out of scale. That it can demand better. But that might require some initial sacrifice and few are up for it, least of all the leadership. Capitulation is easy, especially when it can be dressed up as winning.”

“So, Eugene Debs recognized the division of workers in the separate trade craft unions was a divide and conquer strategy and said as much in 1905.” So, again, it is old divisions and old systems in place that sort of keep people from getting to a better place.

**Craig:** It’s sort of fundamental to the purpose and function of the union, right? The whole idea is that you bring together people who individually do not have much bargaining power and you collectivize them in a way that they do. And it makes sense therefore that if you’re dealing with a bunch of unions that could move as one and coagulate all of their power into a larger fist then you should. And the tricky thing here is what it sounds like we’re hearing is that IATSE did that but kind of as part of a feint to almost take away that power from the unions that they were combining.

You know, the Writers Guild, we have our own little strange thing where we are oddly bifurcated into East and West. I don’t think I can find any reasonable person on either the East or West that isn’t a staff member of the Writers Guild of America East who says, “Yeah, this is a good arrangement. This makes sense.” It’s insane.

**John:** It is insane. Now, Craig, you may not have read the actual history of sort of why there are two unions. You’ve read that packet?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So there is an explanation for how it all happened.

**Craig:** There is.

**John:** And so TV was on one side of the coast. It’s the same kind of reasons that are stupid reasons for why we are not representing animation. We’re making assumptions that we were different kinds of writers and therefore didn’t need the same kind of protections. But we are separate unions. We get along very, very well. We have common interests. We do things together.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes. And sometimes we don’t. And the double nature of our administration is costly, it’s unnecessarily costly, and silly. And we would be better off if we just stopped and made one. Just as I think all of the unions of IA would be better off if they, I don’t know, looked out for each other and actually acted like a one total union instead of a bunch of unions that are literally being kept apart from each other by the people that run the union itself.

So, this is my once a year plea to get rid of the Writers Guild East and Writers Guild West and just make one Writers Guild. It’s absurd.

**John:** Yeah. And yet you know how incredibly difficult that would be.

**Craig:** It’s not that difficult. It’s not.

**John:** I think it’s more difficult. But we won’t solve that problem today.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Instead I think it’s time we break out our theme music because we’ve not heard it for so long.

I’m actually going to let Craig start with this because this is really a Craig announcement and I’m so excited to be able to share this with the world. Tell us about it, Craig.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. So you know I’ve been working as part of the credits committee, the screen credits committee for many, many, many, many years. We went through two elections, or I guess we call them referenda. Both of which were successful that made significant changes to the way we administer our credits. Now we have another one coming up and this one is a bit different. What we’ve done now is we’ve essentially rewritten the screen credits manual.

The screen credits manual rewrite has not changed any of our guidelines. It hasn’t changed the rules. Nothing is different in terms of how we administer and distribute credit. The reason we did this is because a lot of the policies that were in place weren’t necessarily listed in that manual and we wanted to list them. There were also some new things that had emerged that simply didn’t apply when the manual was first written, god knows how many years ago, that we wanted to add to acknowledge. And then we also wanted to make certain things more clear. Things for instance like the definition of story and the definition of screenplay and how you assign credit for one or the other. We know, just from practice, that a lot of writers don’t understand it. A lot of participating writers don’t get it. And even a lot of arbiters don’t quite get it.

So we’ve done a really careful job of expanding those areas to help both people that are heading into an arbitration as a writer or people who are heading into an arbitration as an arbiter understand best how they’re supposed to apply contributions to which credit.

So, again, I just want to repeat: this manual that everyone is going to vote on doesn’t change any rules. It doesn’t change any guidelines. It simply makes things more clear. And because one of the requirements of our union is that the membership vote on any change to the manual, even if it’s a punctuation pass, we do have to come to everybody for a vote.

Sometimes the danger of votes like this is that they’re so boring nobody shows up except the cranks, and then suddenly you lose. So, I’m going to be banging the drum to make sure that everybody does take the four seconds to vote online. That will be happening in October.

**John:** Yeah. I’m very excited. Everyone needs to read it. I’ve read the whole thing. It’s really good. It is just more clear. Craig, I can’t believe you got rid of the language about telegrams. I mean, if I can’t send a telegram then I just don’t know what I’m going to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there was a thing that said basically if you want to get the notice of tentative writing credits by fax or telegram you have to – this is what we’ve been dealing with. So, yeah, we did do a little bit of a cleanup on the telegram situation. There were a bunch of things like that. And, you know, took out some stuff that frankly was just confusing. I mean, there were some things that were kind of explanatory in the old manual that we know we’ve been wrestling with for years because the explanation actually made things less explained. So, stuff like that.

**John:** It’s also fair to say that this more closely resembles the structure of the TV credits manual?

**Craig:** I honestly don’t know. I have never read the TV credits manual.

**John:** So as it was presented to us at the board part of the logic behind it is that it more closely resembles the structure of what people do in the TV credits manual so that you can track through them the same way. Because as a person who has gone through many arbitrations and served as an arbiter many times I did find the credits manual confusing and sometimes redundant. I do think the new document is much better. So thank you for your work there.

**Craig:** My pleasure. I do know what you mean now. We did do some reordering of things. Again, the substance doesn’t necessarily get any closer to the substance of the TV credits, but the order in which we describe things and talk about things and the nomenclature we use for certain things we did conform so that it didn’t seem like they were two different documents entirely.

**John:** Very nice. My WGA news is nothing that you actually have to vote on but something you should go attend. So this past Saturday I attended the pilot version of the WGA sexual harassment seminar. It’s run by an outside consultant named Sunitha Menon. She is terrific. But the purpose of the seminar is to talk through what TV and film writers deal with both in terms of sexual harassment in their own workplace, but also what we’re writing as we’re writing for film and for TV. And so it’s sort of a broad discussion of those things, but also some really practical suggestions for what to do when you’re encountering sexual harassment, what to do when you’re a bystander for sexual harassment, and sort of how we can change the culture for writers and sort of beyond writing through awareness and really taking some concrete action.

I thought it was great. There are going to be nine of these presentations all throughout the city, so there will be a listing of when those are coming up. But I really strongly encourage you to go to them because I thought it was great. It’s an hour and a half. It’s fun. So please do go to attend those workshops.

**Craig:** Are they going to be videoed and perhaps representable to people who can’t make them?

**John:** There will be some version of that. They did film some of this. But I would say that watching it is good, being there is very helpful because some of what you’re trying to do there is actually have a discussion about what things you would do in a room in these situations, or encountering this thing how would you react. And there is a space for just real – like I asked a question in the room about a very specific and odd thing which had happened to me a couple of times and I just had no idea where I should report this. Like what do I do with this thing? This was a really uncomfortably sexually charged moment, but I’m the only person in it. And it wasn’t really directed at me. So it was great to be actually in that room to be able to ask her, but also just to get the feeling of the room about what is the right thing to do in those situations.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the reason I ask, I completely agree. It’s always best to be there in person. The reason I ask is that there’s always the danger that you get a self-selected crowd.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And the people that need to hear the message the most are the least likely to show up, but they might watch something. So it just occurred to me that, you know, I’m just always thinking like a Cassandra about the worst case scenario and then backing out from there. It’s my nature.

**John:** It’s your nature. And the thing I should also stress is that the WGA doing these workshops does not at all diminish the actual requirement for our employers to be the ones responsible for our protection in these situations. And so the WGA is not the employer. The WGA is just someone there standing on the writer’s behalf. So this is just hopefully giving people some guidance in terms of what their rights are and sort of what they should think about their responsibilities as they see these things happening around them.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our main feature topic, How Would This Be a Movie. There were so many great choices that were presented to us that I picked three of them, but there were – Megan had a list of like 12 more that were all really good. So, I’m going to pick these three. There’s a little bit of a recency bias. There are things that came across my feed more recently, but they’re all just terrific.

So this first one, here is the setup basically. It’s a Twitter thread I’m reading. A guy, BVD Hai, I don’t really know what his actual name is, he talks about this girl he was talking with on Tinder. They’re just chatting. They’re just texting back and forth. And she’s really busy now, but hey, later this week I’m going to – my friend is DJing this thing. Why don’t you meet up with me at the stage afterwards and we’ll go out? He’s like, great. So he shows up and there are a bunch of other guys at this stage. And it’s really unclear what’s going on. And luckily we have audio of it that we can play.

So he goes there and this is what he hears.

**Natasha:** Hi everyone. As you may or may not know, my name is Natasha. And I have everyone here today to be on a date with me. Dating apps are very difficult and I said maybe I can bring everyone here in person and see how that goes. So, do you have what it takes to win a date with me? So, we’re going to start the elimination. Half of you people here are in relationships, so those people should leave now. Anyone under 5’10”, please leave as well. No beer bellies. No long beards. No bald guys. No khakis. Or is any less than six inches. You know, you got to go. You got to go. Also, anyone named Jimmy. I don’t enjoy the name Jimmy.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So, Craig, she does not enjoy the name Jimmy.

**Craig:** Mm, yeah.

**John:** This is a two-part How Would This Be a Movie, but let’s pause here and let’s say that this is the whole story. So let’s take Natasha as who she is and she’s done this thing where she’s getting all these people together and she’s going to pick them in person. What kind of movie is this? Where is a movie in this situation?

**Craig:** God. I mean, I presume that this is some sort of – I mean, she’s making a commentary right on the way men treat women, I guess. I don’t understand what’s happening, so I’m a little confused just in general. I mean, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she’s not actually a total sociopath. There’s a reason for all this. There’s a point behind it.

Those tend to be terrible bases for movies, right? We want actually somebody to do something that is sincere, or if it’s insincere it’s on a bet or a dare and then it blows up in their face. I guess any time you’re talking about a date you immediately start thinking romantic comedy. So I suppose there is a version where somebody, a guy or a girl, does this and then realizes that actually there was somebody in the crowd that they kind of had a thing with. Like before they go on stage they have a weird moment with somebody where they’re like, oh wow, you’re actually amazing. Then they get up on stage and that person hates them and they have to go get them back. But I’m just already exhausted and annoyed. I don’t want to see it.

Did you ever see, was it called Dogfight? Do you remember that movie?

**John:** I never saw the movie, but I think I know the premise, which is basically guys pick the ugliest women to go out with. Is that the situation?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bet. They make a bet. It was an early – River Phoenix and Lily Taylor, who is an amazing actor. And the idea is that there’s a party where a bunch of guys who are on leave from I guess the Korean War or something like that, or Vietnam War, they get into a bet of who can bring the ugliest girl to a party. And you just feel terrible. You feel terrible watching it.

And there is a comment about it, but the person that you immediately identify with and feel for and want to be victorious is Lily Taylor. And there is a certain casual dismissive kind of a bunch of idiot who are drinking go “Here’s an idea,” and then only do they realize – or at least one of them realizes it was a terrible and cruel idea. Here this is so – this is so 2018. It’s so synthetically viral. It’s so purposeful and calculated and cynical. And who am I supposed to identify with here, I don’t know.

**John:** All right. I want to make the case that there is a movie here, this clean version, this sort of first half of it. So, yes, you could have our heroine be the one who decided to actually do all these things and she goes through the arc and she actually ends up meeting the right guy, or the right guy was the guy who helped her put up this whole thing. I can also really envision the best friend character is the one who was actually messaging all these guys. Like my best friend is fantastic. You need to come meet her for this thing. Basically she’s pretending to be this one and look at all these men who could be right for you. And so somebody is trying to fix up her best friend or her sister. And this is what they’ve come to. And then if you’re those guys in the crowd, if you are interested, how do you start a real relationship when it’s begun under such horrible false pretenses.

There’s a Chris O’Donnell movie, I’m trying to remember the title, The Bachelor or something like that. It was a remake of an older film where there are like 100 women in wedding dresses–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I remember the ad for it.

**John:** I don’t know the full premise for that. But living in a culture of The Bachelor/The Bachelorette, this does feel like a natural kind of thing you could see happen in the same way that we do these elaborate wedding proposals, it feels that sense of like it’s not real love unless it’s sort of this big, giant event love.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you might be onto something that maybe the person to follow is not the person who has come up with this thing or is on stage. There’s a tradition in mass market storytelling where you take a man, a boy, a man, whatever age he is, usually basically a boy in his head, and you propose that this man is an idiot and he is immature and stupid and cruel and thus behaves in a boorish, childish way until the right woman comes along, at which point he must redeem himself in her eyes in order to be an acceptable human being.

This is not a particularly good use of women as they tend to just be these weird angelic props for men-children to aspire to. But the one thing no one has ever had a problem with with those narratives is the premise, which is that men tend to be infantile idiots.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** We don’t necessarily have the same instinctive understanding of a female premise in that way. We don’t necessarily presume women are infantile idiots. It’s just part of our, again, this is the gendered culture we live in, right? We tend to view young women as somehow, I don’t know, more mature, just by dint of their gender. And there have been movies that have played around with that and confronted that. And I like those movies. Though you get trapped a little bit sometimes in a, oh how do I put it, it’s a trap of realism, right? Because you want to be able to challenge things, but you also want to make sure that as you’re challenging them you don’t leave the bounds of recognizability. Because, for instance, Trainwreck, the Amy Schumer movie, that lived – to me – that lived inside of the bounds of familiarity.

We all know women like that. And they do need to grow up and they do. Just like humans, right? Women are humans. This one, however, I don’t know if there is the familiarity there. So I would be concerned that an audience of women would be watching this going, “Nope, I don’t know her.” This is where we cue the Mariah gif. I don’t know her.

**John:** I think your point about our gendered expectations of what these kind of characters can do is so true and it reminds me of I saw Eighth Grade, the Bo Burnham movie, and a scene that made me so uncomfortable but as I was uncomfortable I also realized like, wait, I would not be uncomfortable if the teenage boy character was doing this. There is a sequence in which she’s sort of having her sexual awakening and she’s about to experiment with a piece of fruit. And her dad walks in. And it’s a great, really funny button on that scene. But the moments leading up to it were really uncomfortable and it’s because we’re uncomfortable with teenage girl sexuality being a joke.

We’re used to sort of like horny boys, but the idea of a 13-year-old girl being horny was just really uncomfortable to see. And that’s, again, just our gendered expectations of things.

**Craig:** Was the fruit an apple?

**John:** It was not an apple.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. Was it a pear?

**John:** It was not a pear.

**Craig:** Not a pear. OK. I’ll keep thinking.

**John:** You’ll keep thinking of what fruit could possibly be involved. So, let’s get to the second part of the story which I think is actually genuinely fascinating and troubling in its own right. So, there’s two New York Post stories about the even that happened, but the third New York Post story reveals that the whole thing was a viral video set up by a guy named Rob Bliss. And so Rob Bliss explains sort of what the impetus was behind this and also how challenging it was. So let’s take a listen to a piece of audio. So this audio from Rob Bliss explaining the setup for all this.

**Rob Bliss:** So I’ve quickly realized holding conversations with all these guys just isn’t going to work. It’s too many of them. So I’ve developed a system. Step one, we message with a guy on Tinder and give him a Twilio phone number. Step two, this programmable phone number is routed through an online database. This central hub can send and receive texts and be logged into from anywhere in the world. Leading us to step three, farming out this texting operation to overseas workers. Over 50 fulltime workers help us to text with guys converting a Tinder match into a Tinder date. And if you were to call any of our numbers they forward to this phone with a voicemail of “Hi, this is Natasha. I’m not available at the moment.“

So I need a meeting location for Natasha and all these guys. That’s why I’ve created a fake EDM event, complete with stage, sound, and our friend, Nick AM. Guys will be told to stand next to the stage and after she says hi to her DJ friend, they’ll go off on their date. They’ll never expect a thing.

**John:** So we’ll post a link to the video that explains a little bit more, too. But essentially, this Rob Bliss, the whole thing was designed to be sort of a viral stunt. And so Natasha is not really Natasha. She’s not really the person texting them. Basically there’s a fake Tinder profile and when people are messaging him, messaging her, they’re actually messaging 50 fulltime employees around the globe who are carrying on these conversations and then finally inviting them to come to this event.

So, there really is no – while there was a person who showed up there, it’s all a creation. She’s not a real person in a meaningful way. These men have been interacting with strangers who are not the stranger they think they were interacting with.

**Craig:** What is the point of all this?

**John:** Well, he’s a viral marketing person. He wasn’t selling any specific thing, he was just selling an event, a thing.

**Craig:** OK, so hold on a second. Viral marketing means something is being marketed. There’s nothing marketed here. He’s just an attention whore.

**John:** Sure. Well, I think all viral marketing is attention whoredom.

**Craig:** Well, for a purpose.

**John:** He wasn’t selling any specific service. I think he’s basically promoting himself.

**Craig:** Wow. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I hate all of this. I don’t like what he did to that – I mean, does the woman that he employed to pose as this, she probably had no idea what was coming her way is my guess.

**John:** Yeah. So she was involved to some degree and she agreed to be this person here, so she knew some things about it, but she’s taking a lot of flak. And in the moment she’s taking a lot of flak. You can see even in this video that they’re cutting that these guys are really pissed and feel betrayed. There’s a reason why they have big body guards around her because they don’t know what’s going to happen. There’s so many ways this could have gone really, really south.

So this is where it becomes a Black Mirror episode where it’s like you think you’re talking to a real person, but there’s no real person there. And then you show up and it’s this weird Hunger Games situation where basically how desperate are you going to be to be on this. What happens if you show up at one of these things and you’re married? And like there’s now video of you showing up at this thing. It’s really interesting and disturbing. I think there’s a fascinating movie in that. Or there’s a fascinating idea in that of this event gone wrong and sort of what the ramifications of it are.

**Craig:** I would say all I’d be willing to take from this story is, if I’m writing a movie about something that takes place in New York, I include this character based on this guy to be the scum bucket that you laugh at because he’s so gross. Because this is just gross. This is like the most gross version. Blech. I hate it. I hate him. I hate him.

**John:** OK. So let me argue on his behalf. I’m just going to pretend to be him right now.

This is what you’re doing every day on Tinder. Every day on Tinder you are swiping on people and sorting them out in two buckets of yes or no. This is meant to demonstrate, it’s basically an art project to show this is what you’re really doing. These are the actual human beings who are getting discarded because of the systems that we’ve set up for dating.

**Craig:** Yeah. It fails on its face. The argument fails on its face. When you say no to somebody you say no. And when you say yes you say yes. Everybody understands the contract. I go on there, I show you my picture. You don’t it because I’m too fat, too bald, too short, whatever, OK, you say no. But if you say yes there’s also a contract there. Now I’m showing up and I have a feeling. You’ve created a feeling in a man or a woman that somebody is interested in them. That is a very powerful feeling. And then you say not really, I’m rejecting you. Also, I’m doing it simply to create a story that the media will look at so I get attention. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t even sell soap.

It does nothing except hurt you to make me feel good. Ergo, Rob Bliss is a dick.

**John:** All right. And so I think the interesting version of this is what if it is to sell soap. What if it is to sell that next movie? Because that’s coming. You know that’s coming.

**Craig:** It’s also bad. But this is like next level bad. This is pointless. This is like, “Well, it’s bad when people kill somebody because they get angry at them. That’s very bad. It’s worse when someone just randomly walks up to another person and calmly kills them because they enjoy killing people.” Ugh. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. What’s next? God. Something will make me happy now.

**John:** This will make you happy or creeped out. So this is about Vent Haven. It’s a retirement home for ventriloquist dummies. So this came from a Twitter thread by Monterey Jack. That’s a pretty great Twitter handle.

**Craig:** Great name.

**John:** So you definitely want to click through the links in the show notes for these because you will see all of these images of all these ventriloquist dummies that are all together like they’re in a grade school assembly staring directly at you with their dead lifeless eyes. And it’s just a real place. So here’s a situation where there’s not a lot of story threads. This is just a remarkable environment. And so looking through the behind the scenes, the abouts on this museum, you get some sense of what might be there. But I just thought it was a really interesting environment.

So the Vent Haven museum was founded by a Cincinnati native guy named William Shakespeare Berger who is known to his friends as WS. He was not a professional ventriloquist, he just really dug ventriloquist dummies. And so he purchased his first figure in 1910, and he just kept buying more and more ventriloquist dummies.

And so it became sort of a place where ventriloquists, or vents as they are known–

**Craig:** Vents. Ugh.

**John:** A lot of times they were, as ventriloquists died their dummies would go to this place and so it’s most of these ventriloquist dummies are the lifeless children of former ventriloquists who are now staring at you from here.

I think WS might be a fascinating character. He outlived his wife, his son, and grandson. Had no other heirs. So, fearing his collection would be divided and lost he set up this foundation to keep this open as a museum you can visit.

**Craig:** Thank god. Thank god. Thank god that organization is there so you can keep visiting what is as far as I can tell a house full of absolute crap. I don’t understand ventriloquism. Let me just – this is my – I get don’t get this. Ventriloquism has always been an art form that has completely failed to – I don’t even understand why anybody is interested in it. I can say, look, I don’t particularly love a certain kind of music but I could see where other people do. Why would anybody like ventriloquism? What is going on??

**John:** Oh, see that surprises me, Craig. Because ventriloquism is a kind of magic.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**John:** It is. It is.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It has many characteristics of magic. There’s a manipulation. There’s a slight of hand. The ability to make you believe that something has happening that’s not clearly happening. It’s anticipation–

**Craig:** Oh please. When I was a kid and people would say you can throw your voice. Remember on cartoons somebody could throw their voice and that meant that their voice would actually come out of a different part of the room. That to me was awesome. But that doesn’t actually exist. Ventriloquism is just I just talk like this and then I use a certain thing so instead of saying muh I say neh, so if I want to say like hey man how you doing, I go hey man, how you doing, and then that way – anyone can do it. Literally I think anyone could do it. Anyone. It’s not hard. And then you just do a funny voice. You do a funny voice and you have a little guy and he talks like this.

I’m serious. It should be banned. It should be banned. It’s a rip off. It’s all a rip off. I mean, I’ve seen these guys make all this money. Every time we go to Vegas you see these guys with their stupid puppets making money.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s actually quite a difficult skill and I’m going to stand up for ventriloquists here.

**Craig:** You do that. The vent community is coming for me.

**John:** I had a ventriloquist dummy.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** I had a Lester dummy.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** so I had Lester, the only notable African American ventriloquist dummy at the time. He was my little guy. So I really tried to learn how to do it, I just couldn’t do it. So if anyone could do it, I certainly couldn’t do it. He wasn’t a great puppet. He just had a string.

But I held onto him through high school, and so sat on the shelf and it was just terrifying the way all ventriloquist dummies are terrifying.

**Craig:** Terrifying. That’s the other thing is that they’re ugly. There’s like a ventriloquist dummy face, and if you look at this horrifying collection so many of them have it. This weird thing of arched, really high arched eyebrows, eye shadow for some reason on everybody, men, women, boys, girls, doesn’t matter. Weird pointy rosy cheekbones. And then a very long upper lip that doesn’t have a philtrum. So it’s one of the signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. I kid you not. Is to have no philtrum and a long upper lip. So they all have fetal alcohol syndrome. They’re terrifying. And then god forbid you have one of the black ones that was built, I don’t know, in like a time when Jim Crow was considered liberal. They’re so racist. There’s like – even like the ones that are about Irish people are racist. They’re all racist towards everyone. They’re terrible.

And the most you get out of them is a silly voice where somebody does bad jokes. So, anyway–

**John:** That’s a pretty good ventriloquist voice. So I will say you’re also not acknowledging that many of them are clown-based or clown-derived.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And so it has the most terrifying aspects of clowns and zombies. Clowns and robots maybe. They’re like little robot clowns.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Who want to kill you.

**Craig:** Robot clowns. Look, the problem with making it a movie is naturally we want to make a horror movie out of these monstrosities but they’ve done it. Right? They’ve done the dummy horror movie. Great dummy horror movie with Anthony Hopkins. So, it feels a little cliché to make the dummy horror movie. Then you kind of start drifting towards Lars and the Real Girl, where you just want to tell a very sad story about a man who loved ventriloquism and ventriloquism dummies even though he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do the thing that I’m arguing literally anyone could do.

And so he begins to surround himself with these things and love them. I’m not suggesting anything untoward, but there is some sad Charlie Kaufman universe movie here that could be done.

**John:** Well, there’s also a version of Pinocchio. So look at Geppetto as a guy who creates a wooden boy who is very much like a ventriloquist dummy. And wishes for it to become real. So that is maybe the thing that can get to a non-creepy movie out of this is that you do bring these things to life, or there’s some reason why these things come to life and save the town or do something. That’s the start of a premise. It’s certainly not a whole movie. And really asks who are the characters. Is it a Toy Story situation where those are your characters and they have very specific roles and they can do specific things? Maybe.

And so what is it like to talk in their own voices? I put this on here as a disturbing image and sort of a movie world but I don’t think there’s a movie here right now.

**Craig:** Now. Another great Twilight Zone episode as well about this. I just find them horrifying and pointless. I don’t understand ventriloquism. I’m the worst possible person – no one should hire me to write this. That’s for sure. I dispute the premise of ventriloquism as a thing. People go and they sit in a crowd and listen to people tell horrendous jokes. And the problem with the dummies is they force you to make bad jokes. And they just watch somebody sit there and talk through a puppet in front of them. How is that a–?

**John:** I think it’s a skill. All right, let’s get to the motherlode of all this because when this first came across my Twitter feed I’m like, oh well, yes of course we’re going to save that for How Would This Be a Movie, but Craig is away in Eastern Europe so we’ll wait till it comes up. But then of course then it sells really quickly and then there’s a follow up on it. So this is the Moby Dick of How Would This Be a Movie. So, do you want to talk us through the premise?

**Craig:** Really simply there was this incredible article that came out in the Daily Beast about a true story and it’s one of those wonderful true stories that happened under our noses and we just didn’t notice. And there’s an amazing reason why.

But basically every year McDonald’s will run this Monopoly contest where you get these little Monopoly game pieces attached to your drink cups or your French fry packs. And my wife I can assure you has played this religiously and was really, really serious about it even though I’d make so much fun of her. And anyone who has played it even in a cursory fashion understands that the big prize comes if you get Boardwalk and Park Place. And you can get Park Place, but you just can’t get Boardwalk, right?

So there are just a few pieces that we understand are being printed that would give you the million dollar prize. That’s the big one. So the question is where is that one piece going to turn up? And what this story basically is about is a guy who was working at this tiny little company that was in charge of security for these pieces who was making I think $75,000 a year who just started pocketing them and then handing them out and then selling them and this turned into this massive conspiracy where literally for years no one could win unless this guy gave them the piece, one way or the other. The mob became involved at some point. And the FBI finally got wise and brought the whole thing down.

And the best part, I think, is that the day the trial began was 9/10/2001. So, the very next day that thing was completely wiped off the front page and no one really spoke about it until this incredible article came out, written by Jeff Maysh, who deserves all the money that has just been shoved in his pocket. Full disclosure. I made a bid for this myself–

**John:** Nice!

**Craig:** When this was – so I read this thing the day it came out and then I called up HBO and said, “OK, we’ve been looking for another thing, why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do a five-part on this sucker?” Because to me this thing was – what this is about is America. This is the most American story I can think of. It’s got McDonald’s. This company that sells you crap and you buy the crap, but there’s this little chance, the little piece of the American dream that as you go through your crap you have a little bit of a hope that you could become one of the rich people. Except you can’t. You can’t. The entire thing is rigged. You can never win. And yet you still try, and try, and try, and try, and try.

And I just loved how pathetic it all was. And how the people who won were so greedy and stupid. It’s the most wonderfully American story.

So, I called up CAA and I was like, “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on with this, but you know, HBO.” And they’re like, “Well, we should tell you Robert Downey, Jr. is trying to get it. And there’s 100 people that are trying to get it.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” So, in my mind I went, nope, not going to get that. And then the next day it turned out that it went to the Good Will Hunting boys, to Affleck and Damon. And wonderful writers, Paul Wernick, and Rhett Reese doing the script. I love those guys.

**John:** This is I think the third project that some combination of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon has bought of our How Would This Be a Movie. So I know they bought the FIFA scandal, but I think there was one other one that they bought.

So, let’s talk a little bit. The article is great. And it’s certainly worth going through. And I think one of the things I responded to, which I’m sure would have been part of your pitch, is that it’s also just great that it was based around Monopoly because Monopoly is this game of rags to riches.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This could be your chance for fortune. Of course, the history of Monopoly is exactly the opposite of that. It’s meant to be an anti-capitalism game. So, it’s crazy how it all fits together.

But, really want we want to talk about right now is the backstory on how the story got to be written. So Jeff Maysh is the guy who wrote the piece for the Daily Beast. But he had actually been contracted – the story had been brought to him by a person specifically looking for him to write the story that could be sold for a movie, which was a new thing to me. We’re used to these articles selling and they sell for up to $100,000 and someone goes off and tries to make a movie out of this. This was specifically written for the movie and it was brought to him by a producer whose job is taken upon himself to find these interesting things, hire writers to sort of go off, research them, and set them up in major publications. And that’s what he did. And that’s the reason why this really old story surfaced and sold.

So, so often on the podcast we talk about do you need to buy the article, do you need the life rights to these folks, what do you actually need? In this case I think what’s valuable about – and what’s maybe worth the $1 million is that Maysh did months and months of research to put all this stuff together. He not only broke the story in terms of the kind of three-act structure of it, but gave all the details that a person – you or I just going out to work on this as screenwriters would have had a hard time finding.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a brilliant idea. This speaks to one of the great benefits we all have now, and I’m now speaking to everybody that wants to be a professional screenwriter. You have the Internet. And I think so often people are terrified to put their work on the Internet because they think it’s going to be stolen. Put it on and stick your name on it. And there’s a billion places to publish these things. And you get attention and you get noticed. And nobody just rolls over you. They come to you. They want the article. It’s very common.

I personally don’t want it. And the truth is I don’t need it. In other words, if I wanted to race Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, I could. I don’t need Jeff Maysh’s article. I can do my own research. This is a matter of public record. And I could do my own McDonald’s story.

The problem is I just don’t want to race those guys. I don’t want to be in that situation. And I think frankly a lot of other places will say we don’t want to be in that situation either unless you have some way of really going fast and getting out there.

Also, I wouldn’t want to do that to Paul and Rhett because those guys are awesome dudes.

Now, it’s also fascinating to see what they come up with because just the fact that they want to do a movie whereas I was thinking about a series, because I was just thinking about more of a slow burn. You know, over the course of a few episodes kind of thing. It’ll be fascinating to see. But, yeah, put your stuff out there and you’d be amazed.

**John:** Yeah. So this was written as a long feature for the Daily Beast. You could also envision a version of this which was a podcast where he went off and interviewed all those folks and those things are now selling for good money, too, and those become the IP that becomes bigger properties down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When this gets made – I think there’s a good chance it’ll get made. We’ll have Rhett and Paul on to talk about the process and sort of what they found. I think there’s still going to be some significant obstacles ahead. So, the McDonald’s of it all is complicated. McDonald’s, if you’re portraying it on screen you can. It’s totally fair, just like you can make the Facebook movie, just like our friend John Lee Hancock made the story about early McDonald’s. But it’s complicated. And they are a giant corporation and there’s going to be some giant corporation concerns about how they’re portrayed in this whole situation.

There are other real people in there and some of those people if you’re just reporting on stuff that happened that is public record that’s great, but there’s going to be some people in there who are not going to be considered public figures and you’re going to have long conversations with legal teams about how much you can put them in there, how much they need to be fictionalized.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** What the boundaries are of what you can say about them.

**Craig:** Yep. There will be long conversations in that regard. But, on the other side of the balance sheet, Fox, and thereby extension Disney is backing Affleck and Damon and Wernick and Reese and they, too, are an incredibly large corporation with a lot of resources. So I think that they will have probably quite a bit of latitude, more than you would think.

Mostly because facts are facts. It’s a really hard thing for McDonald’s to sue over certain things when they’re facts. If they decide they want to create a potential storyline where somebody working for McDonald’s creates some sort of relationship with the Uncle Jerry, the guy that was handling these tickets, then yeah, that’s actionable. But I don’t think they would want to do that. I think they’re going to want to stick to the story as it is, because it’s good.

**John:** Yep. I agree. The story is good.

All right, so wrapping this segment up, please keep sending us the stories that you find in the news that you think might be a movie and we’ll talk about them on the air sometimes. Three of the ones we didn’t get to today but I thought were worth reading through. A New York Times story by Jacqueline Williams talks about a town of 11 where a mysterious disappearance turned neighbor against neighbor. Definitely worth reading.

This story, which was just heartbreaking and maddening. This is the story of a terrific clarinetist who turned down this great offer to study with this other clarinet master. It turned out his girlfriend had actually turned it down and had sort of basically broken into his email and done it. It will send Craig to 30 on the umbrage scale.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it. It’s so heartbreaking. Heartbreaking.

**John:** And lastly we’ll point you to a story about a US judge orders 30-year-old man to move out of his parents’ house. I don’t know that there’s actually a great story there, but as a premise I think is actually kind of fascinating in the sense of the kid who just won’t leave home so you end up having to sue him to get him to leave.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m already preparing those papers. My kids are teenagers, but I just want to be prepared.

**John:** Absolutely. You know, got to have them in there so you can deliver them. Is it like subpoenas or something where you have to have a person deliver it to them in person?

**Craig:** Oh, I’ll deliver it to them. That’s easy enough. Goes right under the door. Yep. There you go.

**John:** Our show ran long, so let’s try to do two questions so we get a little bit answered here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** First question comes from Adam. He says, “Throughout the life of the podcast, most recently in Episode 363, Craig has joked about how he will never become a member of the Academy. Every time he does—“

**Craig:** Not a joke. That’s real.

**John:** “I wonder how does one become a member of the Academy? Are there certain criteria? Do you have to be nominated by a member or chosen by a panel?”

I can answer this question. The answer is both. And so you are nominated by members of that branch. So Craig will be nominated by members of the writers’ branch.

**Craig:** No I won’t.

**John:** And then a big committee comes together and looks through all those nominations. In some cases there’s cards that get filled out and recommendations. Other cases it’s just like a name on the list. That is a terrifically accomplished writer. It is crazy that that person is not a member of the Academy so we will invite them in.

I will predict on this podcast that within the next ten years Craig will be invited. Whether he’ll actually accept the invitation to the Academy. I predict he will [crosstalk].

**Craig:** I will accept the invitation. But I say that with full understanding that it’s never going to happen.

**John:** So this is the trajectory that I think is going to happen. I think Chernobyl is going to be fantastic.

**Craig:** I hope so.

**John:** And that will give you some credibility. Now, that’s not Academy stuff, that’s Emmy stuff. And so I don’t want to jinx it, but if Emmys love it that is great.

Off of that, one or two more things happen that are in feature land and that’s it. Because you have a tremendous number of credits and they are movies of – they are–

**Craig:** Oh, this is fun to listen to.

**John:** They are movies of professional merit. But they are not necessarily–

**Craig:** Academy movies. They’re not Academy movies.

**John:** They’re not Academy movies.

**Craig:** No, no they’re not. Well, you know my opinion. Only comedies should win Academy Awards. I still stand by this. Only comedies.

**John:** But when you have a movie that is critically acclaimed and does great they can say like, “Look at this great movie he wrote and all these other movies he wrote that show that he is an accomplished professional writer.” I think that will be the year that you get invited to the Academy.

**Craig:** Then finally I’ll feel whole as a human.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s really no validation unless there’s a committee and a procedure to validate you.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oh, now I feel good about myself. Well, we’ll see. We’ll see about that. I still maintain, Adam, it’s never going to happen.

We have a question from Victor from Maryland. He writes, “I’m an aspiring screenwriter and I was planning on getting my MFA as soon as I’m financially stable enough to avoid as many student loans as I can. I want to focus on screenwriting in my eventual career, but I wanted to get my MFA in Film rather than screenwriting because I would like some experience in every aspect of Filmmaking. I was wondering what you guys feel the value is of this course of action. What things of any could I learn from other aspects of filmmaking that could help me be a more successful screenwriter?”

John?

**John:** I can answer this. So I did not get my masters in screenwriting. I got it in producing at the Peter Stark Program which is sort of a broad MBA program in film. Victor, I think you’re making a good choice overall. If you’re going to get an MFA, I think it should be broader than just screenwriting. And so while I know folks who teach at MFA screenwriting programs, the folks I’ve talked to who’ve graduated from them over the last ten years, many of them have told me they don’t feel like it was the best use of their time and their money. Because, yeah, they got some scripts written but they didn’t learn a lot about the rest of the industry. They didn’t learn a lot about shooting stuff. They didn’t make contacts with other folks who are making movies. And I think that is going to be crucial for you if you’re going to be spending the tens of thousands of dollars it’s going to take to get an MFA.

So, if you’re going to go to graduate school for it, I would think beyond just screenwriting and think about sort of the nature of the business so that you get to know not just other screenwriters but directors and editors and really get a whole view of how movies and TV are made.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could also just not do it, right? You’re not in a position financially to do it right now, as you say. You want to avoid student loans. I completely concur. You should avoid those strenuously. You should assiduously avoid those.

I don’t know if you need to do this. I think that there are all sorts of ways to get the experience that you’re looking for. There are individual classes that you can pick up that are much more cost-effective than entire graduate programs. I don’t know what’s going on, for instance, if you live near Baltimore, but I would imagine there’s probably some decent technical schools that teach simple things like editing, which is an incredibly important skill to have–

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** If you want to be anything. Understanding editing helps you write, helps you direct, helps you act.

Taking an acting class is a brilliant idea, because then you understand how the text actually converts into action and speech. And then reading. Just reading scripts that you like. Watching movies you like. Thinking about them. Listening to our podcast is certainly helpful.

I’m not sure you need the MFA. I got to say, if you are hell bent on it, don’t get it in Maryland. See if you can go to NYU or to USC or UCLA where you might get what I think is probably the lion share of the value of these programs which is connections to other people who are your cohort entering the business, or people that already work in the business. I just don’t know if you’re going to get any value beyond just, I don’t know, feeling like you’re purchasing certainty if you’re taking these classes in Baltimore.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you wholeheartedly.

All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something I did for the first time about two weeks ago. I went to my first flat track roller derby meet/match/game/competition. It was great. And so I went in knowing very little about roller derby other than having seen the movie Whip It.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this was like Whip It, but this is flat track so it’s not the bank tracks. You really can just see everything that’s happening. I loved it. I went with my daughter who is 13 and a friend, friend Nima who programs for us, and it was just great. And I just encourage people to go see it because it’s a very cool sport. You pick it up very quickly. Sort of like what the rules are. Everyone who is doing it, like it’s not a big cash money thing. So everyone who is doing that is doing it because they love it. It’s mostly a volunteer organization.

It’s really kid-friendly. So I just really loved it. I also loved that it was all kind of run by women. It was just a very great vibe. So October is the next one here in LA for Angel City Derby. But I just really dug it. So, check it out if it’s happening anywhere near you.

**Craig:** I think that my daughter would love that.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** She likes a good bruising, you know. I think she would dig it. I think she would dig it. I’m going to take her.

**John:** And what was great about it is the women who are doing it are so aggressive doing the thing and yet they’re so cooperative in all of the moments where they’re not slamming into each other. And so the sportswomanship you see there, you just don’t see in other sports. And it was great.

Because the team that I was seeing them compete against traveled from Denver. And like there’s no money to travel from Denver. They’re probably staying on other people’s couches. And they’re doing it because they love it and so it’s just a cool sport and a cool thing to witness. It made me feel better about America.

**Craig:** Anything that makes you feel better about America right now grab onto. Grab ahold of. Because, boy.

**John:** Boy.

**Craig:** Oof. Not pleasing these days. My One Cool Thing is a follow up game to a game that you originally had as your One Cool Thing, and then I had as my One Cool Thing, because I don’t listen to your One Cool Things as you know. Human Resource Machine. Remember that game?

**John:** It was fantastic. And so I’m going to click through this. I didn’t know there was a sequel. I’m so excited.

**Craig:** Sequel. It’s called 7 Billion Humans. So it just became available for release on Steam. OK, so there’s the angry part. Steam, what the–? Oh god, I hate Steam. Just let me download the freaking game onto my computer. Why do I have to? Anyway. Anyway, putting that aside, it appears to be essentially a proper sequel to Human Resource Machine, except instead of dealing with one little man that you’re moving around with things you have lots of little people that you’re doing lots of little things with, so they’re sort of stepping up the programming aspect of it.

But they make sure to tell you we’ll teach you everything and they will. So if you dig programming or you want to learn coding, simple coding, starting from scratch like how to just add two numbers together all the way up to figuring out, I don’t know, what the prime factors of any number is, this is a cool game. Well, the first one was cool. I presume this one will be cool. So, 7 Billion Humans.

**John:** 7 Billion Humans. All right, that’s our show for the week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is back from Japan. So, Matthew welcome back from Japan.

**Craig:** Oh great. Welcome back.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions and follow up like what we did today.

For short questions though I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Also now on Spotify. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. So if you want to read any of the articles we talked about that’s where you’ll find them.

You can find the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We also sell seasons of 50 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Transcripts for this episode and all episodes go up about four days after the episode drops, so that’s basically the only way I can sort of Google to find things we talked about. So, transcripts are really helpful for our listeners and our readers. But mostly they’re there so I can Google and see what I said five years ago.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. Fair enough.

**John:** Very nice. Craig, thank you so much. It’s so good to have you back in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Good to be back, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Studios Back In Antitrust Spotlight As AMC Chain Loses Key Court Ruling](https://deadline.com/2018/08/amc-entertainment-antitrust-lawsuit-disney-paramount-sony-universal-warner-bros-spanish-language-theater-1202449780/) by Dominic Patten for Deadline
* [Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists](https://www.amazon.com/Class-Struggle-Hollywood-1930-1950-Unionists/dp/0292731388) by Gerald Horne
* [@bvdhai’s Twitter thread about the mass Tinder date](https://mobile.twitter.com/bvdhai/status/1031327009564225536)
* [Woman dupes dozens of dudes into weirdest Tinder date ever](https://nypost.com/2018/08/20/woman-dupes-dozens-of-dudes-into-weirdest-tinder-date-ever/) and [Tinder hottie dupes dozens of dopes, but it’s all a marketing stunt](https://nypost.com/2018/08/20/mass-tinder-date-was-actually-a-marketing-stunt/) by Ruth Brown for the NY Post
* [‘Tinder Trap’ model claims she’s the victim after duping guys](https://nypost.com/2018/08/23/tinder-trap-model-claims-shes-the-victim-after-duping-guys/) by Tamar Lapin and Ruth Brown
* [Monterey Jack’s Twitter thread about Vent Haven](https://mobile.twitter.com/Chan315/status/1030007153451511812)
* Vent Haven’s [official website](https://www.venthaven.org/history)
* [How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions) Jeff Maysh for the Daily Beast
* [Behind Hollywood’s A-List Bidding War for a McDonald’s Monopoly Article](http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/behind-hollywoods-mcdonalds-monopoly-article-bidding-war.html) by Chris Lee for Vulture
* [In a Town of 11 People, Mysterious Disappearance Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/world/australia/larrimah-mystery.html) by Jacqueline Williams for the New York Times
* [McGill music student awarded $350,000 after girlfriend stalls career](https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/mcgill-music-student-awarded-350000-after-girlfriend-stalls-career) by René Bruemmer for the Montreal Gazette
* [US judge orders 30-year-old man to move out of his parents’ house](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/judge-orders-30-year-old-man-to-move-out-of-his-parents27-house/9790312)
* Flat track roller derby, like [Angel City Derby](http://angelcityderby.com)
* [7 Billion Humans](https://tomorrowcorporation.com/7billionhumans)
* [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/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([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_365.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/relationships).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 360 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about relationships and how writers let the reader know what’s going on between two or three or more characters in a scene. Then we’ll be looking at three new Three Page Challenges to see how these suggestions might help.

**Craig:** You said this is Episode 360?

**John:** Yep. Gone full circle.

**Craig:** Wow. We have gone full circle. And in five days we will also have a year, five days, five weeks. We will have a year of podcasts.

**John:** Yeah. The math doesn’t really kind of work the same way. Well, I guess, I think if you count the bonus episodes you could listen to an episode a day and fill a full year.

**Craig:** Right. Except the leap year.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t really count those.

**Craig:** No, we don’t count those.

**John:** But looking at calendars, I do have some things to put on your calendar for listeners.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Yes. I have a couple of Arlo Finch things coming up. August 25 I’ll be at the San Diego Festival of Books, talking about Arlo Finch and signing some Arlo Finches. September 22 I will be at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con. So there’s Comic-Cons in other places. So this is the City of Orange. And then the start of October I am headed to Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen for the German and Scandinavian releases of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So if you are in any of those cities or countries you can track me down.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I kept meaning to get up to Stockholm at the very least because Lithuania, we’re right up there, you know. We’re right there.

**John:** Stockholm is amazing.

**Craig:** So like our director Johan Renck and our DP, Jakob Ihre, and then Stellan Skarsgård, they just zip back and forth as they need to. It’s easy for them to go home. It’s not so easy for me to go home when I’m there. But, yeah, so I want to go to Stockholm and Oslo would be pretty great, too. And Copenhagen. I mean, actually they all would be pretty great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll have a great time doing that. And just out of curiosity when you are on tour promoting Arlo Finch do you try and shorthand it to ArFi? Do you do ArFi? ArFi?

**John:** Sorry about that loud bang.

**Craig:** Did you just shoot yourself?

**John:** I did. I shot myself.

**Craig:** That question was so horrifying to you that you just – that would have been the most amazing way to end this podcast.

**John:** Boom!

**Craig:** Yeah. John? John? John?

**John:** Episode 360.

**Craig:** John?

**John:** I never shorten it down to ArFi. He’s Arlo Finch in every market. That’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. So in France they changed the subtitle of the book to Le Mystere des Longs Bois. But otherwise it’s just Arlo Finch, something about Valley of Fire.

**Craig:** That French cover for the new book is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s cool.

**Craig:** Love that cover.

**John:** And you and I will be together doing live shows in the Austin Film Festival. So that is October 25 that that starts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And while I’m there that’s actually coincidentally the Texas Book Festival, so I’ll be doing events both for Texas Book Festival and Austin Film Festival at the same time.

**Craig:** Can we call the Austin Film Festival AuFi?

**John:** Yes. We can. We will officially change it to AuFi.

**Craig:** We are going to have a great Austin show this year. Some awesome people are going to be coming. We’re going to pack the stage as we usually do. And we’ve been talking to the Austin folks and I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. And I did not realize this but apparently the live show, they had to turn people away. So, we’re working on maybe a way that we don’t have to turn people away.

**John:** A bigger venue would be a great thing. So we’ll see if we can get that to happen.

**Craig:** Correct. Oh, and I should mention to those of you who are thinking about going to Austin Film Festival to participate in the pitch competition.

Apparently there was a little bit of I guess some feedback that the judges last year may have been altogether a little too easy on the contestants. And apparently the request came in that I return to provide a little bit of, I don’t know, a little more of that Simon Cowell je ne sais quoi. So I believe I will be judging the final pitch competition at Austin this year. So, you know, you want to do that, right? You want to be in that. So be in it.

**John:** Be in it.

**Craig:** Be in it.

**John:** Do it. Do it.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do it. Our episode this week is about relationships and Lawant on Twitter actually asked, “I started going through the podcast from episode number one. Do you guys happen to know if there’s an episode going into how you two met?”

And so I was thinking back and in Episode 100 we do talk about the emails that led to the creation of the podcast, but I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed on the show sort of how you and I met, sort of that backstory thing. And I think I have one memory of it, but you may have a different memory of it. So, my memory of it is that you were starting Artful Writer, your blog, and you reached out through David Kramer, my agent, who was also your agent at the time to see if we could get on the phone to talk about setting up the blog. Is that your first instinct of how we met?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I remember thinking that there were certain technical things. I noticed, I believe, that you were using – were you using Word Press for your site or were you using Movable Type? Remember Movable Type?

**John:** Yeah. I remember Movable Type. Movable Type is I think entirely Pearl-based, and it generated static pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. It roamed the earth once, like the dinosaurs. And has gone the way of the dinosaurs as far as I can tell.

**John:** I’m still on Word Press now, but I think I might have been on Movable Type at that point. I remember you asking a very specific question about my little brad logo and how it floated over–

**Craig:** Yes! You know what it was? I remember, so I had started up this Movable Type blog and I had just a general design, but then there were certain things I was doing to customize it. And I looked at your site and like how the hell – there’s got to be some simple, easy plug-in or something he’s done to make this logo like this. I remember talking to you and you were like, “No, that took hours,” somehow like trimming around the brad and coding it in to float and all the rest. And then I realized that I just didn’t want to spend hours.

But I think that was the first time I ever spoke with you about anything. It was just computer stuff. It wasn’t writing stuff.

**John:** No, it wasn’t at all. And then I think the first time I remember actually meeting you was at Huntington Gardens. You were there with your family. I was there with my family.

**Craig:** That was the first time?

**John:** I think. We may have met in person one time before then, but I just remember it was really weird and random that we were at the same gardens in Pasadena at the same time. And I’d only been there like twice or three times in my life, so it was a rare overlap.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember bumping into you there. So that was a long time. But we were just, you know, not friends or anything, we just knew each other and so forth. But then we got involved in this little boondoggle we invented for Fox, but how did that start?

**John:** I think you probably called me about that, because you’d already started talking with other writers. So, for folks who don’t remember, no one would remember this history, Craig had this idea of trying to make a deal at one of the studios for a small group of writers to get real meaningful backend on their projects. And so he pitched it to me. I said it sounded like a great idea. We brought in a bunch of other writers. Craig and I went and pitched it to a bunch of studios. Fox bought into the idea. And very little actually became of it ultimately.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was an interesting thing. I remember specifically the genesis of it was I read about what they had done at Warner Bros. John Wells had put a group together at Warner Bros. And so I called John up and said, “Hey, describe this whole thing.” And he did. And it sounded like a pretty good deal. So then I was like well why don’t we do this. And the problem is I think they all went the same way. They all, every version of this has never gone well, whether it was through Sony or Warner Bros. or Fox. I think those are the three places that have done them. It just ultimately never really works. McQuarrie did one like this as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nothing ever comes of them.

**John:** And I don’t know if we can say definitively why. But I will say one of the challenges is that studio leadership keeps changing, and so it becomes hard to sort of kind of not really even force the deal but sort of like keep the deal active and going when leadership keeps changing.

**Craig:** It does. And it was I think problematic in part because it required the material to come from the writer. And as we were putting these deals in place the studios’ interest in material they didn’t control kept plummeting. So ultimately you couldn’t really apply a deal like this to any project that relied on underlying property. And, well, that turned out to be essentially all they ever wanted to make.

So that was – there were a bunch of reasons why it began. I think another factor in that is just simply that the writers who qualified for consideration for these kinds of things were so freaking busy and never had a day off, ever. And somebody had always lined up some other thing with them that there was very little time for them to do the sort of work that would lead to success with one of these things.

So, all sorts of reasons why that didn’t work. But you and I went around. I think that was really when we got to know each other. Because we were kind of rowing together in a little canoe. And we made a great little team, I thought.

**John:** Yeah. I thought so, too. And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

**Craig:** Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

**John:** You do have feelings.

**Craig:** I guess I do.

**John:** But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

**Craig:** No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

**John:** Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

**John:** Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

**Craig:** Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

**Craig:** You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

**John:** I haven’t.

**Craig:** Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

**John:** Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

**Craig:** Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

**John:** Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

**Craig:** That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

**John:** So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

**Craig:** It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

**John:** Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

**Craig:** Or an animal.

**John:** Or an animal.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

**John:** Yeah. Who is he talking to?

**Craig:** Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

**John:** Yep. You do.

All right. Let’s take a look at the relationships in our Three Page Challenges. So, for folks who are knew to the podcast, every once and a while Craig and I take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes features, sometimes pilots. We’ve invited them to send these things in. These are not things we found online. These are not random things we’re criticizing. People have submitted these first three pages for us to look at.

So, Megan, the Scriptnotes producer, looks through them all and picks some that she thinks are going to be interesting for us to discuss. So if you want to read along with us the PDFs are going to be attached to the show notes, so go to johnaugust.com/shownotes. Look for this episode. And you can read along with us.

If you would like to submit your own Three Page Challenge you go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there’s rules for how you sort of put stuff in. So, again, not a competition. Not a contest. No one wins anything except hopefully listeners gain something from us talking about these brave people who have sent in their three pages.

**Craig:** Everybody wins.

**John:** Everybody wins. So, producer Megan McDonnell is actually going to read a summary of the things this time, so we will listen to a summary of the first script and then discuss. So the first script is Convenience by Jonathan Brown.

**Megan McDonnell:** Dee Brown and Sasha Thomas, both early 20s, avoid speaking as they shop in a convenience store. Sasha insists on undressing the unspoken issue. She’s your best friend. She can’t be so mad over some guy. Dee warns her that they’re being watched, but the cashier just reads a magazine. Sasha asks him to pick a side in their argument, but he stays out of it. Dee makes her purchase and exits. Sasha trails her out.

Sasha scolds Dee for being rude and immature saying it isn’t fair. Dee challenges her. What, that she’s not entertaining Sasha’s pity party or that she always has to be the one that pays at the register? Sasha admits that she didn’t notice whether or not there was someone else in the store. Of course she didn’t. She has a focus problem. They put on hoodies. Dee confirms that they are not friends anymore and she doesn’t care. She pulls out a gun. They put on masks and run back into the store.

**John:** Craig, talk me through Convenience.

**Craig:** OK. So, good summary by Megan. We have I think an interesting sort of scenario going on here. I understand that these – I assume that Dee is female. I believe Dee is female. So we have two women, two youngish women in their 20s, and they are both casing a joint. They’re shopping, arguing, and casing a joint and preparing to rob it, which feels like a very sort of Tarantino-y kind of thing. This reminds me of the opening of Pulp Fiction where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are having a chit chat in a diner and talking about hopes and dreams and then it ends with them announcing that they’re robbing the place. So that part is kind of cool.

The trouble I had with this ultimately is that it felt a bit rambly. There was a point in here. I think the point is that Sasha has done something to betray Dee. I think maybe stole a boyfriend or something, whose name is John.

**John:** John.

**Craig:** That’s a whole lot of words for what is somewhat mundane. And the relationship as we went through didn’t really change. In other words, it stayed on one level which is Sasha keeps yammering to try and get Dee to be OK with things. And Dee keeps pushing back and saying no. But it doesn’t get physical. It doesn’t get quiet. It doesn’t get stony. There’s no change in tactics which I always find troubling. I think in general people are very, very good at changing tactics when they’re trying to get something from somebody. There’s certainly plenty of conflict on display here which I think is a good thing.

Just technical things. There’s a few just odd bits in here. For instance, Sasha says, “You can’t seriously still be mad about it.” And then Dee says, “Seriously? We’re being watched.” So they’re using seriously twice but in different ways. They’re not necessarily echoing “seriously.”

Sasha says, “I’m your best friend. You can’t stop talking to me over some guy.” Nobody says that really like that. It’s a bit cliché. And I’m your best friend is just a weird thing. When we talked earlier about how to get across the specifics of a relationship, there are cooler ways to do that information than just somebody announcing it. We’re missing an apostrophe on “friend’s feelings.”

There’s a bit where they involve Bill who is the clerk in this convenience store. I assume he’s going to be important because he gets a name. The names are really generic. I don’t know quite what to do with these. Dee Brown. Sasha Thomas. Bill Frank. So I’m not sure where we are. I’d love to know also where are we in the world.

And lastly it appears that there’s some duplicated dialogue on page three where Dee says, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” And then in the next line she starts, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” I assume that’s not intentional. But a lot of this felt on the nose and exclamatory. And I think there’s a version of this where two people are whispering/arguing with each other in an aisle and we’re trying to suss out what they’re talking about but we can do a better job of uncorking that this is what they mean. And then one of them pulls out a gun and says “Just shut up until we’re done,” and then they rob the store.

I don’t know. It just felt very – this did not feel like an efficient use of the first three pages. What did you think, John?

**John:** I would agree with you there. So, talking about the relationship here, I think the reason why I didn’t understand the relationship well or didn’t click into the relationship is I don’t have any sense of who these two women are. I don’t – they’re just names. So, “Dee Brown, early 20s, and Sasha Thomas, early 20s, are walking through the convenient store aisles shopping.” That’s all we get for who these two women are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I don’t have any sense of who they are individually. I’m not given any bits of flavor to help me tell them apart. And so as I’m reading through the dialogue I had a really hard time remembering like, wait, no, who had the affair with who? I couldn’t tell them apart. And their voices are the same. So, there was really no way for me to click in on sort of what I should be looking for.

So, we talk about expectation. I didn’t really have any expectations for them because you’ve given me nothing to sort of grasp onto at the start here. Same with Bill Frank. “BILL FRANK, 20s, the cashier is flipping through his magazine.” Well, there’s a lot of cashiers and I don’t know what kind of person this is. So give me some flavor here so I have some sense of who this person is and what the nature of it is.

Specificity overall – I don’t know what kind of convenience store this is. I don’t know where we are. I don’t have a sense of the season. I don’t have a sense – just visually I’m given very little to grasp onto, so I’m just trying to listen to the dialogue and I can’t actually pull anything useful out of this other than Sasha did something bad. But I don’t know why we’re talking about it now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And what is the inciting incident that got us to talk about this moment?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, it’s that the writer wanted to. And this is what I mean. Like, you got to come up with better reasons than this. By the way, I love what you just said about seasons. There is this fricking thing – am I aloud to say fricking without violating?

**John:** Absolutely. 100%.

**Craig:** Fricking thing where writers just – we talk about default white in screenplays. How about this? Default spring. Writers will write default spring. Because the second you actually get involved in production, somebody somewhere who has to dress these people will say when – what part of year is it? And most writers go, “Oh, uh, May.” No. May is boring. Give me the heat of summer. Give me the chill of winter. Come up with some cool stuff. And maybe if it is May it’s May, but then it’s hay fever. Whatever. Do something so that the weather matters. So that clothes are interesting. So every time the door opens there’s a wind that blows in and knocks a thing over. Use the world.

**John:** Use the world.

**Craig:** Use the world.

**John:** Other things that were just frustratingly unspecific to me, midway through page one, “Fiddles with items on the shelves. Dee continues to look around the convenience store and picks up an item to buy. Sasha follows her.” Picks up an item to buy. Got to pick up something. It’s no more words to actually say what that is that you’re buying. And anything would be more interesting than something to buy.

**Craig:** Anything. Anything. Like, somebody is stock piling the weirdest item. You know, like just ChapSticks. Just one after another after another after another. But whatever they’re doing everything has to be a choice. You’re absolutely right. And I think so much about what happened to these two girls with each other and their relationship could be helped along by just – is one tall and is one short?

**John:** Yeah. Give me something.

**Craig:** Punky haircut? Regular haircut? Give me something. It all felt incredibly bland and generic.

**John:** I had real geography problems when they left the store. And so I think what’s supposed to be happening is they’re basically doing a loop around the entire outside of the store and they’re coming back in front. But I had no real sense of where I was. So I couldn’t tell if they were still out front, where they were in terms of this. It makes sense to do the loop, but just give me the loop because I didn’t process it.

And I wasn’t ahead of the writer in terms of knowing this was going to be a stick up really. I mean, I assume they were shoplifting or something. So, I was a little excited by the, OK, now they’re going to rob and that’s the bottom of page three. But, I didn’t feel it.

And here’s the thing. If you’re going to do the reversal like, oh, they’re going to actually rob the place, the conversation leading up to that still has to be interesting. So, the thing we talked about with Pulp Fiction is like that conversation in the diner was fascinating.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Before they pulled the gun.

**Craig:** That’s why pulling the gun was such a shock. It’s not a shock here that they pull a gun because really what I get is two fairly bland, generic people are also doing a fairly bland, generic movie thing which is robbing a convenience with a bland weapon. It’s not even an interesting weapon. They haven’t even bought a can of bug spray and a lighter to use that as a flame torch. You know what I mean? It’s just, oh, here’s the usual gun. And I don’t know, it’s all just so…

One last little bit on that geography. I think sometimes if you want to do something that might be confusing to a reader then just use it to your advantage and say we’re not really sure where they’re going now and then, surprise, they’ve ended up right back at the front. Except this time they pull their heads down and pull out their – you know what I mean? Be impressionistic about it I guess.

**John:** Last little thing I will say is at the bottom of page three you commented how there’s dialogue that’s repeated. So it could be intentional. But if you’re going to repeat dialogue that way, because sometimes people do say the same thing again, give us something different in how you’re presenting it so that we know that it wasn’t a mistake.

So, the second time, like, “Listen, I don’t care about John.” Underline something. Uppercase some things to make it clear that this is not a mistake. She really is saying the same thing again, just with different emphasis, or really nailing it home.

**Craig:** Or even a parenthetical. Again. Just so that you’re letting the reader know, yeah, this is purposeful. I didn’t just screw up.

**John:** Final thing I will say is sometimes a character speaks and then there’s a line of action and the character speaks again with a continued. That can be a powerful thing, but I got confused a couple times here where I thought like we should have switched to the other character. If you’re going to do that, there has to be a real reason for why you interjected there. That there’s more happening after it. There were a lot of cases here where I felt like you should have just kept all that dialogue together and then done the action line, or put stuff in as a parenthetical because there’s a lot of cases of CONT’Ds and stuff that just confused me.

**Craig:** Yep. All right, well why don’t we move onto our second Three Page Challenge for this episode. It’s Plunder Cove by Paul Acampora and Erin Dionne. So let’s have Megan tell us a little bit about Plunder Cover.

**Megan:** A beat up car parks near a warn Plunder Cove amusement park billboard. Elliot Marker, 17, and Lilly, 9, gather their belongings from the car, her horse-shaped backpack and his hockey stick. He points out a small snake on the ground and warns Lilly to watch her step. Watching her step is the biggest part of staying safe.

Elliot pries open a hole in the chain link fence and props the gap for he and Lilly to climb through. He calls this their special family pass. They joyfully run through the amusement park and get caught by a guard just inside the wall. Elliot claims that they were just looking for a bathroom for Lilly. She asks why she always has to be the one who needs the bathroom. It’s because she always does.

They plan to meet when she’s done and go to the Merry-Go-Round. She gives him a big hug. He is an excellent big brother.

**Craig:** OK, John, what did you think of Plunder Cove? This is a pilot for a TV series.

**John:** So this is one of the most interesting Three Page Challenges I think I’ve encountered in this whole thing, because some of the writing in this was actually really nicely done and really thoughtful and the nature of the relationship between the brother and sister was interesting. The visual world of it was interesting. And yet these writers, it feels like they have not seen any other screenplays. Like they’re coming in from just some completely other universe of writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because they just didn’t seem to have any sense of the standard ways that things are formatted. So maybe we’ll talk about the relationships first and then we’ll go into like OK this is how things actually need to look on the page, because the actual – some of the writing was good and would have been so much stronger with proper formatting.

So, I want to talk about our expectations of these two characters and what’s working and what could work better. What I liked about, so Elliot, age 17, and his nine-year-old sister, Lilly Marker, exit sedan. “ELLIOT, solid and tall, is a little too serious for his age. LILLY is high-energy, no patience, wild hair and untied shoes.” Great. Those are good descriptions of those people. Like I get what those people are. I get what the dynamic is. With that description I’m eager to see what is actually happening.

Then what’s actually happening, they’re sneaking into the park. He uses a hockey stick to pull open the chain link fence. Cool. I got it. I get all this stuff. I get a little sense that the home life is messed up. The mom is always in a box of wine. That the brother is a little annoyed by the little sister, but also very protective of the little sister. I basically got and believed their relationship in these three pages which is an accomplishment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked the wardrobe, hair, and makeup of the character introductions. I mean, look, the – and I’ll ignore the formatting, because truthfully I was thrilled. To be honest with you, thrilled to see something that people had typed that had absolutely no concern whatsoever for normal formatting. Because I just thought, oh good, finally a test of this thing I keep saying which is it doesn’t matter. Well, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter to me. I’m sure that for other people they might look at this and go, nah, these people don’t know what they’re doing. But for me, they were an enjoyable three pages, so I stopped caring about that other stuff because in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I mean, if they could keep consistent within their own mad system that would be great. So, for instance, “park guy” is a character and he’s not capitalized, but everybody else is capitalized. So there are things like that. But by and large, you know, I got – here’s the truth, after the second page I stopped caring about that stuff and I was just inside of the scene.

So, let me talk about how that works, Paul and Erin. Pretty well. I think, relationship wise, again going back to the let’s not give away stuff that we don’t have to give away, they do this all the time. Right? We have an understanding that this is not the first time they’ve done this. Correct?

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Lilly is sort of talking like she’s never done this before. That a lot of these things are new. “The biggest part of staying safe is just keeping your eyes open” is what he’s saying to her. Why is he saying this to her now after they’ve done this a bunch of times? You know? And then why is she asking what’s the other part, and “How come we never use the main gate?” That was the line that implied that they do this a lot.

**John:** Yeah. And so that exchange actually worked pretty well for me. I would cut out Lilly’s talk back line at the end. So, “How come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” He uses the hockey stick to pry it open. I didn’t need her line that says, “Our family pass looks a lot like a hockey stick.”

**Craig:** Precisely. Because you’ve seen the hockey stick many, many, many, many times. And then when she says, “Why do you always say I need to use the bathroom?” that makes sense, right?

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Frankly, the first exchange, too, “Watch your step. The biggest part of staying safe…What’s the other part? Dumb luck.” I’d cut that, too. I would just have him pull out the hockey stick and she’s like, “Can’t we – how come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” Then I get that.

She’s a little precocious for nine and we’ve seen that character many, many, many, many, many times. But, you know, it’s not the worst of it. And I liked their whole chitchat about the carousel and demoiselle and all that stuff. It felt nice.

I mean, look, there’s absolutely nothing in this teaser that qualifies as a teaser.

**John:** No. This isn’t a teaser for a TV show at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s kind of a scene. Here’s what we should say about a teaser. A teaser sets up a question. Sets up a mystery. Sets up this is the start of a journey and it was just the end of three pages. It wasn’t anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. For this to be a teaser you do this scene and then at the end of the scene you realize they’re ghosts. That’s a teaser. There’s nothing here that goes, whoa, it’s just a lovely, nice little moment and then off they go. It feels like the first scene of an independent film, not a teaser to start you off and make you gripped by a television show.

So, look, in terms of formatting and stuff, honestly Paul and Erin, here’s the truth. You guys write well enough that you probably should give yourself the advantage of writing things in the “normal” format. And you can do that for free. You can do that for free using, well, Highland, there’s a free version of Highland but that’s only–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. So there’s free Highland. WriterDuet. There’s a free version of that. Just start there. At least you’ll get a sense of how the format works. But this was pretty well done.

**John:** Yeah. So a couple things, you know, using the write application will solve most of these problems, the weird way that dialogue was centered rather than blocked properly. If you’re going to do a pilot, that’s fine. Plunder Cove is the title of the series. You put the Episode on the title page. So, Episode One, Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. Teaser would generally be centered over the top of page one of the actual script. And then the application can take care of the rest of the stuff for you.

But here’s why I think it does matter. Here’s why standard formatting, or at least a semblance of standard formatting is if Megan hadn’t picked this as a Three Page Challenge and I was just like skimming through a bunch of them, I would have immediately passed over this because it didn’t look like a screenplay at all. It looked like some person who typed a play once and had never actually looked at it. And people are going to dismiss something that just looks so weird. And it’s not even consistent in how it is done. It’s not like they came up with some other system for how it was all going to be done. It just felt kind of random. And so you want everything to feel deliberate and you’ve made really good choices with words. Make really good choices in how you’re presenting those words so we actually will read your story.

**Craig:** I would have gravitated toward it. I’m just so bored of like, oh here it comes, INT…

You know, but that’s me. That’s me. I’m nuts.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our third Three Page Challenge. It’s Savorless Salt by Mathieu Ghekiere. He’s from Belgium. I looked him up.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** Megan, take it away.

**Megan:** Months are ripped from a calendar. Lucas, 10, sleeps. Hannah, 42, looks over a shelf of canned food with homemade labels. She selects a can and as she prepares a meal she’s careful to wipe down the containers. Jeff, 43, rides a stationary bike furiously, earning credits. Dylan, 5, wakes Lucas with excitement. It’s Christmas. Lucas looks at his wall covered in tick marks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.

Over their modest feast, Lucas challenges his mother’s assertion that it is Christmas. It’s been 412 days since last Christmas. Surprised that he’s been counting the days, she counters with an explanation that time is relative and leaves the table in a huff. Jeff encourages Lucas to keep counting and stay curious.

**John:** And we’re back. Craig, talk me through your experience with Savorless Salt.

**Craig:** What a strange and interesting title. Well I knew that Mathieu was not a native English speaker pretty quickly in. There’s something very lovely – in a lovely way it’s very backwards, the way that German is often backwards. Where he says, “Every month ends in the trash until December.” He’s talking about a calendar on a wall. “With a black marker every day before December 24th gets crossed.” Meaning every day before December 24th gets crossed off with a black marker. So it took me like three times on that sentence, but I was like, OK, I get it. And this is kind of actually awesome. I love the crazy syntax.

So generally speaking I thought this was pretty fantastic. I was gripped by the description. And I could see the space I was in. I understood, even if it said INT. BUNKER I understood that it was definitely bunker-y. That there was no need for me in the audience as it were to see the word bunker. I felt the bunkerness. I really loved that when we met Hannah she’s doing this interesting kind of ritualistic preparation of canned food. And then we get to Jeff who we, I guess are going to assume is her husband, and he’s biking. And you just infer that he’s generating energy and that the energy is measured in credits. So they have these obligations. And she throws powered bleach in the pot before putting in the vegetables. Lovely little details. I’m fascinated by what’s going on here. Fascinated.

Then I meet the brothers. I don’t know how old Lucas is. I know that his little brother Dylan is five. I’d love to know–

**John:** Lucas is 10.

**Craig:** Oh, where is that?

**John:** At the start there’s a weird scene that is underwritten. So, “INT. BEDROOM KIDS,” again.

**Craig:** Oh, there it is. Yeah.

**John:** “LUCAS, 10 years old, is sleeping”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that was a situation where like we had no framing around that at all, so Bedroom Kids is reversed but also I don’t – what does that look like? That was an opportunity to show how this space is different than our expectations of what a bunker space should be, or the degree to which it matches those expectations.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably, Mathieu what you’d want to do is just cut that out. You can see the calendar on a concrete wall if you want. And then if you want to give us little glimpses of the space without drawing attention to people, and then go with Hannah, go with Jeff on the bike, back to Hannah, and then if you want to do the kids again. So just help us out there because I couldn’t remember from that little bloop. It didn’t even register in my brain.

So, his brother jumps on him because it’s Christmas. And in a very small bathroom, “Jeff washes himself with powder and the tiniest amount of water.” Another great little – I feel like I’m learning how whatever post-Apocalyptic nightmare these people live in, or if it’s not, regardless, I’m learning about bunker life. It’s kind of cool.

And then there’s this conversation that happens and Lucas is complaining a little bit that even though it’s Christmas the last Christmas happened 412 days ago. And this disturbs Hannah for some reason. I love the little mystery of this. Why is she upset that he’s been counting the days? She doesn’t like that, but Jeff does like that. Jeff, who is the dad-ish, kind of is pleased about this. And Hannah kind of loses her appetite. She’s having this emotional response to what seemingly is this just happy little family conversation. And smashes her elbows on the table. I’m pretty sure we want hands there. It’s very hard to smash your elbows on the table. Marches off and Jeff basically says to Lucas, you know, promise me you won’t stop counting.

Well, what I love here is I know so much. In three pages I know these people live in a bunker. I know roughly how bunker life works. I know that there’s something really creepy going on with Hannah. I know that the amount of days that they’ve been done there is at issue and that lies have been told. And I know that Jeff likes it and wants his kid to keep doing that because there’s conflict between him and Hannah. To me, that’s great.

So, you know, I say great job Mathieu. I really enjoyed these three pages.

**John:** Yeah. I was confused in the wrong way about Hannah. So I did up underlining on page three, “Her appetite is gone.” It’s like, well why I write. Because I didn’t see enough stuff there to give me a clue whether I was supposed to know that or not know that. And so, again, it’s being aware of what the reader is going to infer or not infer. I felt like Mathieu suspected I was a little more caught up than I actually was at that moment. So, that moment didn’t quite work for me. But I did like that you’re establishing these characters with a conflict already there.

It wasn’t spending a lot of time like everything is happy and now everything is fraught. This is a family that’s already in crisis even within this bunker context which is good. And that the nature of counting the days is important. I think the problem was, as a reader, I couldn’t imagine any scenario for why Hannah was acting the way she was. And so that left me a little bit frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. And I get that. I stopped a little bit when – when she lost her appetite I was a little confused by why it happened in that moment and not a little earlier. I think maybe when he makes the counting thing, maybe that’s when she puts her fork down. The losing your appetite also is a little funky one just because Mathieu makes a big deal about how this is a feast and yet it’s not a lot of food, which makes me think that they’re on rations and are hungry a lot. So, but there’s something also a bit scary about Hannah, which I like. The unpredictable emotionality was putting me on edge, and I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So in our previous episode we talked about point of view and I think one of the things, especially this last scene, could benefit from is a little bit more clear point of view. Because we established all of these characters, but whose point of view are we seeing this dinner scene through? Is it from Hannah’s point of view? Is it from Jeff’s? Is it from one of the boys? And I think making that choice will inform how the scene plays and how we as an audience are reading this moment.

If we’re supposed to be seeing this from Hannah’s point of view, that’s frustrating because we don’t understand Hannah’s point of view. If we’re seeing it from Jeff’s point of view, which seems a little bit more likely, that feels a little bit more grounded. And the boys’ point of view could be equally valid. But I think we need to give the boys a little bit more screen time and weight beforehand and see everything kind of from their POV, which might mean cutting out the Jeff in the shower and stuff like that. Just so we’re really seeing it from the boys’ point of view.

**Craig:** That’s fair. I think there’s a little bit of confusion in there about who we’re with. But I was impressed by the amount of information that I got without being smacked in the face with it. So, it was interesting.

**John:** Let’s talk about Mathieu’s English. Because his English is pretty good, but there’s things that he messes up that you’re going to mess up as a non-native speaker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so if he’s really writing this in English rather than French or another language, I think it would serve him well to have a native speaker just do a quick run through and just flip some of the words around so it reads a little bit better as standard English. Because sometimes we stop and we trip on things like, wait, what did he actually mean there? And if it was smooth and effortless it would serve him better.

**Craig:** No question. I mean I can go through this and practically every single paragraph there is some kind of mistake in English and they are somewhat subtle. We generally call – it’s canned food. We don’t refer to them as metal food cans. We don’t say big pearls of sweat. We would say big beads or droplets of sweat. He’s eyes instead of his eyes. There’s a lot of things like this. She wipes the plastic with a paper cloth. I think in English we would say paper towel.

So there’s all these little idiomatic things. And, by the way, this is something that I had to do, even though I was writing in English for English people, for Chernobyl because it’s essentially a British production and actors and crew were sort of used to reading a certain thing. We just decided we’re just going to go with British spellings and we were going to go with British words to not confuse people. So, for instance, no more flash lights but they have–

**John:** Torches. Yep.

**Craig:** So Jane Featherstone read through the whole script and sort of went, no, no, yes, yes, change that. Colour. You know. It was all – and it doesn’t change anything, Mathieu. I mean, that’s the point, is that it’s still your writing, you’re just making it what you actually intended it to be.

**John:** Yep. All right, thank you again to our three brave entrants to the Three Page Challenge. I guess it was actually four because there was one writing team.

If you would like to read these pages, they’re at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode and you can find the PDFs to download. Or if you want to submit your own it’s johnaugust.com/threepage.

It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Things are these books which you’ve seen in a bookstore, I assure you, if you live in the United States. They’re these sepia toned books that are about local history. So, the first one of these I read was on Larchmont which is the little shopping street in my neighborhood by Patricia Lombard. It was a great history of this weird little shopping street in Los Angeles. But doing research for this new project I’ve been pulling up a lot of LA history. And some of these books are fantastic. Another one I’d recommend is African-Americans in Los Angeles by Karin L. Stanford.

So these books, there’s a company that makes them called Images of America. There’s really a very set template. There’s a ton of photos. Some are really well written, some are not well written. But they’re so fascinating in their very, very, very local history of a place that I’d really encourage you to check them out for wherever you are living right now or wherever you grew up. But if you need to do research on a place, historical research on a place, they are great because they just have a ton of photos of a place that, yes, you could probably find online but you couldn’t find in context. So, I’m going to recommend these Images of America books.

**Craig:** I picked up one of those for La Cañada, the town where I live in. You know, La Cañada in many ways is an incredibly boring little town. That’s kind of why we like it. But when you read the history of La Cañada you realize it’s always been a boring a little town.

**John:** Nothing’s changed.

**Craig:** No. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. I apologize if it’s been my One Cool Thing before but I don’t care. It’s that good. It’s an evergreen. You should absolutely listen to this. It’s brilliant. It’s not long. It’s 18 minutes and 25 seconds. And in that 18 minutes and 25 seconds Lindsay Doran, who is a brilliant, brilliant producer, legendary producer, manages to convey precisely what it is about movies and relationships that draw us in. And it is such a refreshing antidote to a lot of the garbage advice that I think is handed out, particularly about endings to people, in which endings become loud, stakes-building crescendos of explosions and nonsense cacophony. And miss out on what an ending really is.

And she does this wonderful job of explaining to you through movies you’ve already seen whose endings you may have forgotten what the endings are really about. So Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. Link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. So that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer on the show.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a good place to go for little small questions about things.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment. That helps people find the show. But you can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

We have now seven seasons of Scriptnotes available to download. If you go to store.johnaugust.com you can download them as big files that have all the mp3s. All the related materials. And the bonus episodes. So they are $5 per season if you want to go back through those.

We also have Scriptnotes.net which is $2 a month and lets you load and download any of those episodes of the first 359 that we’ve done, plus the bonus episodes.

So, Craig, thank you again for a fun show about relationships.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. My relationship with you is better than ever.

**John:** Better than ever. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch covers](http://johnaugust.com/2018/youd-hardly-recognize-arlo-finch-overseas) look different around the world. You can catch John at the San Diego Festival of Books on August 25, at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con on September 22, at the Texas Book Festival on October 25th, or in Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen in early October.
* The [Austin Film Festival](https://austinfilmfestival.com) is also coming up on October 25th.
* In a musical, the relationship can be with the audience, like in Shrek: The Musical’s [“Big Bright Beautiful World”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sqopU4V60w) or Fiddler on the Roof’s [“If I Were a Rich Man”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_XeHLrkwTY) — as opposed to [the movie version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc).
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CONVENIENCE.pdf) by Jonathan Brown
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PLUNDER_COVE.pdf) by Paul Acampora & Erin Dionne
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SAVORLESS_SALT.pdf) by Mathieu Ghekiere
* You can submit for the three page challenge [here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage).
* [Images of America Book Series](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/series/images-of-america-books?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5Izfyqis3AIVjeNkCh1gSANLEAAYASAAEgLEB_D_BwE&ef_id=W1EenwAABGOU1CD9:20180719232831:s)
* [Larchmont](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467134118) by Patricia Lombard
* [African-Americans in Los Angeles](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9780738580944) by Karin L. Stanford
* Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk – [Saving the World vs. Kissing the Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752INSLlyf0)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://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/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([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_360.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hola y bienvenido. Soy John August.

Craig Mazin: Soy Craig Mazin.

John: Y esto es Scriptnotes, un podcast sobre la escritura de guiones y cosas que son interesantes para los guionistas.

Today we have the grab-baggiest of episodes with topics ranging from screenwriting competitions to toxic fandom to the new Apple deal, plus we’ll be answering questions about capitalizing on heat after a sale, Bad Robot, and NDAs.

Craig: Ohh. But can I do the entire episode in my telenovela voice? Soy.

John: Oh please.

Craig: Craig Mazin.

John: You absolutely should. So, I should say that I’m doing the Spanish because I am here in Spain. I’m in Barcelona at the moment, and it is great. Craig, you’ve been to Barcelona, right?

Craig: I have not.

John: Oh, put it higher on your list of places to go.

Craig: It’s pretty high up there. Just in the midst of all the work travel we sort of put other travel vacations on hold just, because I’m starting to hate planes and time zones. But, yeah, it’s definitely high up there. My daughter is quite demanding about it.

John: It is fantastic. I recommend everything that everybody always recommends about Barcelona. I was here in high school and did not like it, because it was sort of the first big city I’d been to and it was overwhelming. But it’s a really good, approachable big city. I was a little bit nervous about the Catalan of it all, but everyone here speaks Spanish and English. And it’s fun to watch what language they default to you in.

So, if they kind of recognize that you probably are a native, then they’ll speak Catalan. Otherwise they’ll speak Spanish. Unless you’re Asian, and then they’ll speak English.

Craig: Well, what’s going to happen with Melissa is they’re probably going to speak English to her because she looks so not Spanish. And then she will speak Spanish back to them. And then they’ll be surprised, which is one of the most fun things to watch for me.

John: Yes.

Craig: Watching native Spanish speakers listening to Melissa speak Spanish for the first time, they all make the same face. And the first face they make is what’s going on here? What is this? Is this one of those hidden camera shows? What is this?

And they start getting very curious because they want to know where she’s from. Because they’re quite sure she’s not American. Because her accent is too good. But it’s not their accent, so they start thinking are you like one of those German people that ended up in Chile? Or what are you? And thus–

John: She could have escaped–

Craig: The Nazis.

John: Who hid off in Argentina, yes.

Craig: Yeah, no, she looks like the great-granddaughter of some sort of Nazi escapee. Yeah.

John: But she’s a lovely woman and a great wife I take it.

Craig: Yeah. She’s none of those things.

John: She’s none of those things. Let’s get into this because there’s so much stuff on the agenda for today. So, we’ll start with what was going to be our feature marquee topic. We thought it was going to be a whole special episode and it is not a whole special episode. But to sort of give a little recap, this started on Twitter. Someone tweeted at you and me saying like, “Hey guys. You should be aware that there’s a giant scam going on. It’s about Coverfly.” I didn’t know what Coverfly was.

Craig: Me neither.

John: There’s a long blog post. You and I read the blog post. And it looked like, wow, there’s actually a lot here. And then it has all sort of dissipated.

Craig, can you talk us through what you’ve discovered so far, at least what this was?

Craig: I mean, vaguely. I mean, this is the same – so somebody was complaining about this group Coverfly. Coverfly apparently is a service that provides coverage for payment, I guess. And then also offers as part of its conglomeration with 12 other business names offers paid consulting – you know, the sort of thing that you and I don’t like very much.

However, Coverfly also provides a service to other screenwriting contests. They have their own contest, I guess. And then there are other screenwriting contests that become overwhelmed with submissions and need readers to evaluate these scripts. And so they essentially – I guess they outsource that to Coverfly.

Coverfly in turn has its own sort of like script hosting service I guess you’d call it. Right? It’s sort of like a Dropbox for screenplays. And I guess what happened was they started signing people up or migrating accounts to their service without people knowing and then people thought that essentially, “Look, I’ve entered the Austin Screenwriting Festival Competition for instance and suddenly I’m getting an email from these Coverfly people telling me that I can create an account for free if I want, which I didn’t want. And who are they? And why are they sending me ads?” And all the rest of that.

And so it seemed a little stinky and smelly. And interestingly enough it was the same guy that we had our last and final Scriptnotes Investigates episode on which was that former service where the whole thing went kablooey and people lost some scripts.

Anyway, it turns out it’s sort of not really any of that. It’s just kind of actually very mundane, boring, reality of the way businesses work. And it didn’t seem like there was anything particularly unethical going on any more than there usually is in this area of the world.

So, I don’t know, what did you think?

John: I felt we ended up in a place where there were sort of counter-balancing unethical things that were happening. So the initial blog post that we were tipped off to was taken down afterwards, but the Coverfly people had responded to it. I actually tweeted at the Coverfly guys saying like I know you’re going to do a blog post response to this, so I’ll just wait until you do the blog post response to this.

It was not clear who this anonymous person was who was putting up this thing. Whether it was a rival? Whether it was a former client? So the person we were talking to before was John Rhodes. This was back in Episode 191. And the service was called Scripped.com. They’d bought it out, some people lost their material that was on that. It was a special Saturday episode that we put out. Like I think it’s the only time we’ve put out a Saturday episode.

And so we talked with him about that way back when. This seemed like a situation where both sides were doing a lot of Googling of each other to figure out who the other person was and all these Coverfly businesses were related. But also the same guy had taken screenshots from a certain thing. It all got very forensic and kind of dull and boring.

Where I came out of this, and a question I asked on Twitter as it all sort of blew up, was I asked to Twitter at large, “Hey, can anyone tell me whether winning a screenwriting competition actually had a meaningful impact on your career. Like did it actually start your career?” And I said specifically I’m curious who out there has produced credits that they believe only came to be because they won a screenwriting competition.

And if so, which competition? And I think not surprisingly at all Nicholls Fellowship is meaningful. If you win the Nicholls Fellowship, great. That’s fantastic. It’s run by the Academy. Everyone knows what that is.

Some success out of Austin Film Festival. Very little success out of anything else.

Craig: Of course.

John: And that’s what we’ve always kind of said.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it’s not surprising at all. And one thing that did come out of this which was a bit surprising to me is, look, the guy that made all these charges seemed like an Internet crank honestly to me. One of those people that just goes way, way deep in a Zapruder film-like examination of something. But they did make one point that I thought was kind of remarkable that this company – so the parent company that owns Coverfly and a bunch of other things is called Red Ampersand. And Red Ampersand owns ScreenCraft. ScreenCraft operates at least 15 different screenplay contests. OK?

So, the Coverfly Company is involved with 15 different screenplay contests that are run by itself, meaning its parent company. Also, they are supplying coverage for other people’s competitions. Meaning you’re kind of ultimately paying twice to submit to the same people. Now, what they say is, “Oh, we have different juries and judges for those different kinds of things. And so it doesn’t work like that.”

But here’s the truth. None of this is worth a damn thing and nobody should be using it. Apologies to everybody involved, because some of these people are nice people, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. I don’t know how else we can say it and how many times we can say it. It doesn’t work.

There are so many people out there charging you money to enter contests, charging you money for notes, charging you money for consulting. It doesn’t work. And more to the point, not doing it has worked. In fact, not doing it has worked for literally everyone you and I know who works as a professional screenwriters. So at some point I think we’re asking people to take a leap of faith here and stop doing this. We know that the Nicholls Fellowship matters. It doesn’t always work, but it can work. We know that Austin to a lesser extent can work. Beyond that, stop.

John: Yeah. I do feel like screenwriting competitions are the astrology of our business.

Craig: It’s the homeopathy, right?

John: It is. It is. Just maybe entering one more competition is really what’s going to do it for you. It’s not.

Craig: It’s not. It’s not. And people are losing money and I have to also just point out that there is something at some point when you do look at the fact that the parent company owns 15 different companies, they each run – there’s 15 different screenplay competitions. It’s all promotional so that you’ll end up spending money. They are businesses to make a profit. And it starts to get byzantine and more to the point literally they’re charging you money for a lottery ticket and the thing that you can win is not money or prize but rather a brief moment of pride.

And perhaps even a brief moment of not feeling bad. Maybe that’s the best it can be, right? That’s all they’re selling you is false comfort. That is what that industry is. And I don’t begrudge people a right to make money doing a legal thing, but it is our, I think, obligation to tell all of you at home the truth, which is that they don’t matter and they don’t work.

John: So, when I talked with writers who did succeed off of Nicholls or Austin, like Stephen Falk of You’re the Worst was a person who wrote in saying like, yes, winning at Austin was incredibly helpful. And I asked him why and he said, “It helped me get my managers,” and that was important to him. Basically it provided some legitimacy so as he went in to talk with managers he could get over that next little step. That I could totally see and that’s why the prestige of Austin and the prestige of Nicholls Fellowship helps people start careers.

But these things you’ve never heard of, well, Craig and I have never heard of them. Managers have never heard of them. Winning it is not going to do anything for you and that’s what it comes down to.

Craig: Everybody at some point is going to say I was a semifinalist/finalist/winner of some blank fill-in competition named here. Nobody cares. No one cares. No one knows what those competitions are. You know what else they don’t care about in Hollywood? They don’t care about your college degree. They don’t care about your work experience. They don’t care about how many languages you speak. They don’t care about your skills, your volunteerism. You know what they care about? The document they just got handed. That’s it. Period. The end.

They read the script. They don’t care about anything else. So, stop.

John: Yep. Another group of people we’d like to stop are some fans of the Star Wars franchise who seem intent on destroying it, in a way. So, this has been sort of bubbling up for a while, but this is the most recent example was the stuff that happened to Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose in Rian Johnson’s film, The Last Jedi. She left Instagram. We’re recording this about a week before the episode comes out, so who knows what will happen in the meantime.

But I wanted to just take a moment to talk about fandom and sort of this most recent wave of destructive fandom that you see out there. And see if we have any recommendations for creators dealing with it, or an industry dealing with it, because it just sucks. And it’s just so dispiriting to see every day.

Craig: I cannot explain this beyond the obvious explanation. It’s so bizarre to me. You and I – I look at a lot of these people out there that are complaining about Star Wars because they don’t like, I don’t know, the cast or something, or what happened to a character. These people certainly must be younger than you and I.

You and I grew up in the age of Star Wars. We were each about six or seven when the first movie came out, right? And then the second movie came out nine/ten. So, we are prime Star Wars generation. We are the Star Wars Generation. And nobody ever, ever, ever when we were young talked about these movies this way ever. Ever. Never. In any way, shape, or form. And part of the reason was we felt no ownership of it whatsoever. None. It was a gift that we went to go see.

We all saw them. And, yeah, you know what? I remember thinking the Ewoks were stupid. I didn’t care. Whatever. You know what? So then the Ewoks were stupid. What am I going to get angry? That’s not how it works.

I have no ownership over these movies. They’re movies. My ticket back then cost the same price to go see Max Dugan Returns. A pretty good movie, by the way. It didn’t matter what the movie is. You paid your ticket, you went down, you saw it. And now what has happened is, and I can’t put all of the blame on the fans. I put part of the blame on the companies. The companies have managed to monetize and exploit this fandom, this experience. I mean, you can’t say convention without con. It’s all a con to take your money. They are religiousifying their products in such a way that people begin to feel religious about it. What a shock.

And then they are surprised when it sort of bites them in the butt. I blame the butt-biters for it. However, I do think that the fact that we have kind of built these mythological and engaging worlds around these movies has engendered a certain problem with what I’ll call a problematic segment of our society, specifically young men, young white men, I’ll say between the ages of 15 and 30.

It’s interesting from an anthropological point of view, or a sociological point of view, they didn’t seem to have a problem with a black man in Star Wars. Well, they did, but they didn’t lose their minds. But when you start putting women in Star Wars then they start getting crazy. And my god, you put an Asian woman in Star Wars and they lose their S.

John: Yeah. There wasn’t backlash against older Leia because Leia was already established. She was cannon. People love Leia. She’s seen as a princess. Everyone sort of got that. It was the other women being added to the franchise that hurt it.

I think you’re picking at two very interesting aspects of this, which is that you have the religious fervor quality and whenever people become true believers in things that belief in things can be transformative and it can become dangerous. It can become sort of fanaticism. It can become this kind of zeal that is destructive. You see that happening again.

And also this sort of that 15 to 30-year-old white male culture, which is really the heart of the sort of troll culture. It’s the people who have grown up in the system of like always snapping back against the things they don’t like and feeling that they need to exert control over things because they feel out of control over things.

Craig: Yeah.

John: A related thing which I listened to this last week was a great piece on the shippers of Sherlock. So basically the people who watch the BBC Sherlock and believe that they are absolutely, 100% a couple and that the creators of the show are lying to them when they claim that they are not a couple. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a really great podcast that sort of explores, called Decoder, that explores how that fandom sort of came to be and how it became a giant schism within the community of the fan fiction writers for Sherlock and their fervent beliefs in the nature of that relationship and the degree to which the creators of the show are lying when they say that they are not a couple.

Craig: Yeah. Including the gay co-creator, Mark Gatiss. It just, ugh, I don’t get it. First of all, I have trouble with just anyone talking about shipping or ship instead of relationship, because it makes me itch. Just like I have a huge problem with people using the word stan for fandom, because it feels so blech.

John: And some of it is generational. Sometimes it’s us old men shaking our canes at things.

Craig: Some of it. Some it also is just like I think you guys are just making up words to make yourselves feel like you’re part of a secret group of people with inside knowledge or coolness. It’s not cool. It’s inherently not cool to explain to creators of a show why they’re lying to you about what their two characters should be doing. That’s it. That’s what they showed you is it. That’s it.

John: So do we have any theories about why some properties seem to be a little bit better protected from that sort of toxic backlash than others? Because when you look at the Marvel universe, it seems to have done actually pretty well at sort of keeping the main through line of the movies moving ahead fine. And all the shipping can happen over at the margins, but it’s not affecting the main product and you don’t see a backlash against the main product from the fans.

Same with Harry Potter I’d say. Like there’s always been a lot of shipping happening in Harry Potter. There’s always people who believe that Harry and Hermione belong together, but it never seems to come back to J.K. Rowling that she has done something wrong.

And I wonder what it is. I wonder what is the difference between those kinds of properties. Is it that Star Wars is perceived as being more adult and therefore adults are sort of more engaged with it? There’s something different happening there. If you could figure what that is it would be so useful for us as people creating these giant properties that go out into the world.

Craig: I have a theory. It’s going to be disheartening, but that’s what I do. I think that had Harry Potter begun to come out say two years ago it would be a nightmare for J.K. Rowling. Every single new book would be a nightmare of how could you do this, why would you do this, what happened to so-and-so, why aren’t they together, how could you lie. When she finally reveals seven years from now that actually Hermione and Ron get together, people go bananas. It’s just going to be – and every single who is or is not white, black, Asian, why are there no transgender characters? Why are there no openly gay characters? It would just be an endless thing. And it would be a very different experience. And the reason I would say it would be horrible for her is because every decision she would make would be terribly questioned.

As opposed to what used to happen where a creator would do something and that person’s creations would be considered “cannon.” In other words you would receive them. You wouldn’t question them or feel entitled to have a conversation with them. You would receive them the way we received Lord of the Rings or the way we received George R. R. Martin’s books, or the way we received the original Star Wars.

Now as things on go, it is no longer considered a receiving. It is considered a conversation. So when something new comes along, like the new Star Wars, it’s considered a conversation. Marvel movies are all based on old characters that have thousands of comics behind them. They don’t give us new ones. They just keep giving us old ones. And so they stay within the cannon that exists. These new movies are tellings of stories that have been around for a long time. Infinity War, that whole storyline has been around for a while.

So they’re weirdly not breaking new ground. The only times that they get in trouble is when they try and cast away from what the comics were, which created a huge problem with Doctor Strange.

In the case of what we’re seeing I think with Sherlock, again, they sort of remade a thing. They made it new. So it’s modern day London Sherlock and therefore people were entitled to have a conversation with it. And I think more than anything it is about the time you start something. And unfortunately if you start something now, that’s the world you live in.

John: Probably so. On the sixth or seventh episode of Launch, I guess it’s the seventh episode, we had Tomi Adeyemi on. And her new book, Children of Blood and Bone, is a bestseller. And so it’s the first of a three-book series. And I am fascinated to follow up with her to see now that the book has done so well and the second book comes out what the nature of her fan relationship becomes. Because right now people love the books. They love her. She’s fantastic. She’s exactly the right vessel for this book, but what’s going to happen when she makes tough choices in book two and things don’t go the way that people had expected. What happens in book three? What is the pressure as a movie comes out? It’s going to be fascinating to see what it’s like because your proposition that essentially any piece of popular culture you make right now that has a fan base behind it is going to face these pressures, she’s ground zero for that.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s terrifying because you cannot actually function as an artist if you are responding to the conversation. It’s just not possible. Well, you can, but you won’t do a very good job. The people out there will destroy that which they love. If you ignore the conversation entirely you just have to be ready to know that you’re going to get beaten around the head and face for a bit from now time to time.

A good example is Dan and Dave who do Game of Thrones got an enormous amount of grief in season, I guess we’ve just seen season seven, so season six I think – maybe season five – somewhere in there Sansa ends up getting married to, what was that guy’s name? He’s so bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: We’re practically – it’s so terrible that I can’t remember his name. Anyway, that guy. She’s married to that awful, awful guy. And then they had a scene where it was just this very hard to watch, drawn out, difficult rape scene. And the show had already dallied in rape scenes a number of times. This one really sent people into a very bad place because it wasn’t in the books. This was something that they had invented. They didn’t take it from George R. R. Martin. And everyone felt it was just gratuitous and brutal to do to this character that they loved.

And then by extension Dan and Dave were misogynists. They were sick. They were A-holes. They didn’t understand – they were part of rape culture. Etc.

The next season they get the revenge and Sansa watches as Ramsay is ripped apart by his own dogs and everybody loved it, including I think all the people that had complained. And one of the reasons they loved it so much is because his brutal death had been earned by his brutal acts.

Sometimes we just have to be patient. Sometimes characters must suffer. Sometimes in really challenging art they suffer and do not survive. And people seem to not be accepting of this when they are engaged in conversation with the author.

John: Yeah. So to wrap this up, let’s go back and imagine The Empire Strikes Back, and let’s imagine that the Empire Strikes Back comes out now, so there already was a Star Wars. Now Empire Strikes Back comes out. It’s the same movie. Same incredibly great quality movie. But you end that movie with Han Solo frozen in carbonite. What is the fan reaction? How dare you take away my Han Solo? How dare you imprison him? Basically that sense of you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re getting rid of the best character of it all. You’ve made this fundamental change in the nature of Luke and Leia’s relationship. And you’re going to make us wait years to find out what happens next.

Craig: I think that people probably would have approached that the way that many people are approaching the end of the current Avengers movie which is to say, “Not really dead,” and in both instances I suspect, certainly in one different correct, and the other one almost certainly correct. But I think they would have had a huge problem with Luke being weak. They would have had a problem with Yoda. I’m sorry, a Jedi master is a stupid puppet, so now for kids we’re just doing dumb hand puppets. That would have been a meme within four seconds. They would have just absolutely trashed Yoda today.

John: Well, also he has Grover’s voice.

Craig: Exactly. So it’s Grover or it’s Miss Piggy. So, I’m sorry, the most powerful Jedi in the world is Miss Piggy? They would have made fun of that. They would have gone after that. And I think, let’s see what else, Lando, who is this guy? Social justice warriors obviously are demanding that the Colt 45 guy being in Empire Strikes – there just would have been racist stuff. It’s all the things that are just predictable. It’s the same thing every time.

And then for the third movie on the far left people would have been accusing it of being imperialist because it’s talking about white saviors and exploiting the native people of a jungle climate for themselves. You know. It would have been the thing. And we can all write that script. And it’s dispiriting because that’s how you know we can’t go on like this because it can all just be written ahead of time. Nothing will survive the crucible of these extremes on either side. Nothing. There is not art that can survive it except bland art.

John: We don’t want bland art.

Craig: No.

John: No, we want great, vital art.

Craig: Yeah. And you know what? I don’t mind mistakes. I also don’t mind bad movies. Just do them honestly. And so with the case of Rian’s Star Wars movie, I really like that movie a lot and it’s just so bizarre that it is a discussion involving politics. It’s Star Wars for god’s sakes. It takes place in a galaxy far, far away a long, long time ago. What the hell?

John: Frustrating. OK, last bit of new news. This past week the WGA announced a new deal with Apple. So Apple is moving into creating original programs. They have not announced the name of this service or sort of how the service is going to work, but they’ve started making shows and so they need to make a deal with the WGA to cover the writers on those shows. Some shows that Apple is doing are through a studio, like a Paramount, or a Disney, or some other place. Some of the shows they are doing are directly for Apple. And the so the WGA made a deal for those shows which Apple is doing directly. And the deal is better than it could have been.

There’s basically two ways these kind of deals work these days. There’s the deal we have with places like Netflix which are subscription based. And there’s places like Crackle, was the example, things that are free to people to watch those shows, and those deals tend to be terrible.

So, the good news is that the deal with Apple if Apple ends up making a free service, free to consumer service, it will be better than that deal which is a good sign because there will be things like minimums for writers to be paid, residuals, other good stuff along the way.

Craig: Credit protections I presume?

John: Credit protections, yes. So it’s a decent WGA deal by most measures.

Craig: And I think that in time these will become the deals. It seems all inevitable. I don’t know what the specific numbers are on these deals. But I don’t know if any of us have any clue what our contracts or our compensation would be on our initial self-negotiated compensation will be in, I don’t know, ten years. I don’t think we have any clue whatsoever. I mean, ten years ago it was 2008 and the iPhone came out in–

John: 2006 I believe. We’re past the tenth anniversary.

Craig: We’re just past it, right? So that’s how much has changed in ten years. So ten years from now, good lord, right? I mean, it’s going to be unrecognizable.

So, yeah, first generation iPhone was 2007. So, we have to keep doing what we’re doing here I think which is just sort of piecemeal-ing these things and going along. But there will be a reckoning.

John: For sure.

Craig: The reckoning will come. And here’s what’s interesting: when that reckoning does come, it will not come against our usual foes. You know, to strike a company that does nothing but exploit the work that we do is an interesting probability. It’s self-destructive but also other-destructive. To strike Apple, uh, OK.

John: Nope.

Craig: Good luck.

John: It is a challenging thing. So, I mean, the programming that Apple makes will be a very small percentage of the income for Apple overall, or maybe actually it will make no income for Apple, but they’ll be used – if it’s a free service – perhaps they will use the programming they make to sell Apple TVs, or iPads, and other things. So, you know, if we say, no, we’re not going to write your stuff, it’s like, well, it doesn’t sort of matter so much for them.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t think they’re actually running any of these shows in a sense to get people excited about a show. I honestly think they’re doing this just to hurt each other at this point. I don’t even know if Apple knows why they’re doing this beyond, “Well, why let Netflix be the only people that does a thing. That just sounds dangerous to us. And we literally have $80 billion sitting around. So let’s spend a little bit of it just to make it competitive. We’re not even sure why.”

Well, that’s a tough employer to negotiate with.

John: Yeah, but right now if they’re going to spend that money on us, as writers, that’s fantastic.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And what we should stipulate is that it’s not like people who are writing these shows these people weren’t getting paid or individually they might be able to get some good things in their contracts. The challenge is that that showrunner might get a really good contract, but it’s very hard to get a good contract for that staff writer on that show because there are no minimums. And so a union has to negotiate the minimums that any writer is going to get paid. And without that it’s just all the way to the bottom. And that’s what happened with Crackle.

Craig: Is there pension and health involved?

John: I believe there’s pension and health. I have not seen the final deal. I just know that there was a push to get good coverage on the whole shebang.

Craig: I mean, that’s really important.

John: Oh my god, pension and health is so crucial.

Craig: That’s kind of the reason we’re here.

John: If you talk to folks who work in animation, who write for animation, pension and health can be a huge deal, because there’s coverage sometimes through the animation guild, but if you’re working on some WGA projects, some non-WGA projects, it will be hard to keep your health together. So, it’s tough.

Craig: Yep.

John: All right, let’s get to some questions.

Craig: All right.

John: We’ll start with Evan in Philadelphia who writes, “I’m a former comic book author and in comics we call the space between the panels the gutters. The gutters are almost as important as what you see in the panels because your brain is actively filling in all those blanks as you move from panel to panel. Scott McCloud has a book called Understanding Comics for an excellent explanation. Do you ever think about the time that passes in between scenes of a script and what your characters are learning, changing, what’s happening to them, etc., in these interstitial spaces and cuts?” Craig?

Craig: Evan, that’s a fantastic question and a great observation. It’s a really interesting analogy. Absolutely. It’s not just something that I – do I ever think about it – I always think about it. The design of scenes from one scene to another, we talk about a lot of times when we’re reading scripts we want to feel compelled through. We want it to seem seamless. And so much of that is about designing the end of a scene and the beginning of another to acknowledge something is happening. And that’s how you can figure out what you don’t need to show.

A lot of times you’ll hear very broad-based advice like “Start your scene later than you thought you needed to, and end it sooner than you thought you needed to.” Well, that’s really referring to this interstitial phenomenon where we can fill things in. But you have to know what those things are. That’s the most important thing. And therefore you have to be thinking about what they are. And then rather than sort of saying, oh you know, hmm, I wonder what could go in this space, figure out what should be there first before you start thinking about what comes after. So I’m constantly thinking about all this. And for actors, one of the classic bits of acting instruction is the moment before. A scene begins, but what were you doing before it? Otherwise it just seems like you’re one of the hosts in Westworld that gets switched on, you know?

John: Yeah. Exactly. So that common advice, like starting a scene as late as possible, ending a scene, I always think about it as a scene ends and it needs to have a little bit of forward momentum. That’s why it’s sort of slanting into the next scene. You’re tipping that energy across the cut into the next scene.

But you’re also always mindful of what had to happen beforehand. And it’s really not you as the author who is filling in those details. It is the audience. So you have to think about expectation. What is the audience expecting to happen next? Or when they see that first shot of the new scene, what are they doing to expect happened that go them there? And if you can do that math in your head you can very often skip over a lot of things that people will just see what it is that they’re doing next.

When it comes time for direction, really literally like moving left to right across the frame versus right to left across the frame, our brains do stuff to fill in the things that we missed based on the way the camera is moving, the way the characters are moving through the scene. You do that work to figure out sort of what must have happened right before this moment and what’s going to happen next.

So, yes. And I think gutters is actually a really interesting way of thinking about those missing scenes, those missing connection pieces that we use all the time in screenwriting.

Craig: Yeah. That’s a great question. I love that. And we talked about this sort of from a different angle when we discussed transitions. We talk about it a lot when we do our Three Page Challenges because sometimes those things feel like they’re not there.

You know, it occurs to me that when people ask what do you need to become a professional screenwriter and work steadily we always say, look, talent, hard work. But talent in what? Vocabulary? Sentence structure? We’ll talk a lot about dialogue, so an ear for dialogue. Things like that. But I suspect that one of the most important talents that we don’t really talk about is what psychologists call mind reading. There’s this aspect of social communication that’s essentially mind reading where we’re trying to figure out what the other person is thinking. And then we shape our comments or thoughts to achieve a change in their thinking state.

The game of charades is just mind reading in that sense writ large, because you’re trying to figure out what someone is thinking. And when we’re writing we’re always trying to think about what our characters are thinking, how they can change what the other person is thinking. How much they’ve picked up on what the other person is thinking. And then in a meta sense, we are in a relationship with the audience where we’re trying to figure out what the audience will be thinking. So that’s predictive mind reading.

These things if you were bad at are going to limit you as a screenwriter. And possibly disqualify you as a screenwriter. It’s a talent that I don’t think anybody really talks about in film school, but it’s a huge part of this.

John: Yeah. And so when you’re getting feedback from somebody and they say like I was confused by this moment, I didn’t understand what this character was trying to do, really you’re discussing a breakdown in that mind-reading. You had not read their mind properly and they couldn’t figure out what was happening next, or where you were trying to lead them. When they talk about like “I kind of lost faith in it, I lost faith in where the story was going,” that’s again a breakdown of this mind-reading about what you’re trying to do and what those characters are trying to do next.

We can’t see inside their heads. We just don’t know what we’re watching.

Craig: Yeah. And none of us are 100% at it. Of course. We all make mistakes. But generally speaking you want to be more right than wrong with that sort of thing.

All right, well we’ve got another question for Miranda in LA. And she asks, “I have a question that NDAs, that’s non-disclosure agreements, and parting ways with an employer with whom you are working on an idea.” And I really like that you said with whom. “Here’s my scenario. For a while I worked as a writer’s assistant to an established screenwriter.” John, I’m already telling you my butt is clenching. OK. My butt is clenching.

“I had developed a concept for a show that needed a plot. Through the course of my work my employer said something that gave me an idea for the story and I ended up with a cool pitch for a show. I wrote up an outline, we talked about it once, and then I was let go a couple of weeks later.

“I’d like to pursue the project, but not with my former employer. I signed an NDA that grants ownership to everything I came up with to my former employer.” That’s not what an NDA does. “Does that mean I can’t work on this project without them or their permission? Or can I use my original concept and take out anything that relates to my former employer’s idea”

Oh. Good. Lord.

John: Oh. Good. Lord. So, first off, we will say that an NDA does not strictly mean that there’s ownership of ideas, but you could have signed something that including NDA language and included that all things discussed as part of work belong to your employer. Without seeing your contract I don’t know. So we cannot give you great legal advice here. And we’re not lawyers anyway, so we wouldn’t be able to give you great legal advice.

What I will say is as a person who has had a number of assistants who have gone on to have great careers, I’ve always had those kind of discussions about the things they were writing and I’ve offered them advice and they’ve gone off and they’ve done stuff. That kind of discussion should be encouraged and is part of the process. So, I hope your boss is not listening to this podcast saying like, “Oh, I know exactly who Miranda is and I’m going to get that idea back because that is a terrible person.” That is not what a screenwriter should be doing.

Craig: Yeah. We would destroy that person.

John: We would absolutely destroy this person. So that sense of like I have this story world, I’m working on this plot, I had those same conversations with assistants over games of pool and, you know, watching Martha Stewart, and all sorts of other discussions I have now with Megan all the time. And so this is not a thing that is unusual.

I would say it’s a little bit unusual that you signed this contract going in. I don’t know many writers who are having their assistants do that. But my instinct is you should feel free to pursue your idea that is your idea. But I would say just look through that thing you singed to make sure it doesn’t say that anything you ever brought up in the office is theirs.

Craig: Yeah. Certainly have somebody review that and have the discussion with them and just say, look, I’d love to do this and is it OK if I just go off and do that please?

Just a little tip. If you do review your agreement and it is – so non-disclosure agreement basically says you can’t talk about any of the stuff that we do here with other people. Right? So it’s pretty normal. If John and I are working on a screenplay that’s something that’s confidential in almost every case. So, we don’t want our assistant tweeting about it, right? Standard NDA sort of thing.

But then there’s this other agreement where you’re essentially saying anything that you think or say belongs to me. It’s my property. It’s considered a work-for-hire. Therefore the copyright is mine. If anyone asks you to sign something like that it has to be basically a company. And I don’t mean like just some random company. I mean like a studio-type company.

So, if say I wanted to talk to some scientist for Chernobyl, just interview him and get some information, he said, “You know what, I’ll write down some things for you and send them,” and I go, oh, if you’re going to write anything down and send it to me you need to sign this thing that basically says HBO now owns what you just said in this piece of paper because we’re not saying, “Oh, we’re looking for people to write a scene or anything. That’s not what we do. We’re just looking for some research or advice.” And as long as then they’re OK with that that’s the document they would sign with a company like HBO or a studio like Paramount, or Warner Bros., or anything. That’s pretty normal.

But if some person asks you to sign that, that’s an alarm bell. It’s a massive alarm bell. So, I think Miranda what you need to do is find yourself an attorney. Talk to them. And then assuming that that person gives you the thumbs up, reach out to your former employer and say I’d like to do this. Would that be OK with you?

John: Yeah. And hopefully it should be OK. And if the guy says no–

Craig: We’ll destroy him.

John: That was a bad guy. Yes, tell us what his name was and we’ll go after him.

The last thing I want to say is I think there’s understandable concern about NDAs overall and NDAs that are used to protect people from being called out on bad behavior.

Craig: Crime.

John: Crime. And creepiness. And so NDAs cannot and should not be used to protect people from doing terrible – certainly criminal things but also just bad things. And so I want us to always shine a spotlight on NDA abuse.

Craig: I agree. And so eventually there will be some sort of legislation with a different congress that will attempt to address this. And I think it could also be a state-by-state thing.

John: Yeah. California could totally do this.

Craig: California could do this. There is a weird thing that also happens where NDAs start to protect what I would call reluctant whistle-blowers. So people will say I have a whistle I could blow but I can’t because of my NDA. Well, I think you can. I think you can. I think you don’t want to. So, it’s a weird – it’s a whole weird thing. Anyway.

John: It’s a whole weird thing. All right, Dan has a question. He asks, “How do big production companies like Bad Robot work? They get a deal from a studio and that funds the company and the development of shows and movies? What’s the corporate structure like? When JJ is paid does it go to the production company and he just takes a salary? Speaking as a company owner, why would JJ want to deal with the business-running stuff? Wouldn’t he just work as a freelancer? What happens to the company if he’s off directing for six months? It would seem that the revenue that people like JJ would make as a company is insanely profitable. So, anyway, I don’t mean to pick on JJ, but I was just thinking of him as an example.”

So, Bad Robot is a company that makes Mission: Impossible movies, they make Westworld, they make other JJ Abrams movies. Like they make Star Trek. And so I’ve gone into meeting with them. I’ve never written anything for them. But they have really nice offices out in Santa Monica. They have a lot of people who work there and they’re really smart, great people. So they are busy doing stuff. Their deal is with Paramount, but they’re always doing other things. They just started a videogame company as well.

So, Craig, why do you not have a Bad Robot?

Craig: Well, no one has asked me to have a Bad Robot. I think that the prerequisite for these things is television. So, people think of JJ as a movie guy. He’s actually a TV guy. He came out of TV. And when you come out of TV and you’re making a few hit shows then there’s a massive revenue stream.

So earlier this week, Dan, there was a news story about Greg Berlanti who is an incredibly prolific television producer with Warner Bros. And they just made him I think it’s a 10-year deal for $400 million. That’s guaranteed $400 million. And then it goes up from there. And the reason why is he has 14 shows on the air apparently, which is insane. And so this is really a television empire business. And this has always been around.

There have always been these little mini studios that were mini studios making television. So, Chuck Lorre has a little mini studio. Back in the day Stephen J. Cannell who would make a lot of the action programs that John and I grew up watching, he had a little mini studio.

John: You had MTM.

Craig: MTM. And John Wells had a mini studio. So these have always been around. And now we have this crossover where they’re making television and also big movie franchises. So how does it work? Basically, yes, the studio will make a large deal with that business. They will guarantee them a certain amount of money. That money is used to cover overhead and employees. There’s almost always somebody other than the principal creative, which in this case is JJ, who is helping to run the business, like a principal business runner.

And then sub-business runners underneath. JJ and the company are paid as producers. JJ is then also paid individually as a writer. JJ is also paid individually as a director. So he has three different streams of income. And typically the production company is making a fee off of everything it produces and then that fee is either applied against, or in really great cases not applied against a backend percentage of profits or gross, depending on how good your deal is.

So the question is why would JJ want to deal with all the business-running stuff? Well, he’s not sitting there signing certificates for office insurance and handling human resources. There are people that do that for him. But he’s of the mindset of that. That’s what he likes to do. Same with Simon Kinberg. They like this kind of I make things but I also overlord things.

Our friend Chris Morgan has a – I mean, it’s smaller than JJ’s thing, but it is a similar kind of thing. I don’t have an interest in it. I like doing what I do. I mean, I suppose maybe one day, but I don’t want a building with a lot of people in it. I don’t want human resources. I don’t want development people. I don’t want it. I like my office. It’s me and then it’s Jacqueline Lesco who is my associate, who is sort of my editor, and it’s the two of us. And it’s wonderfully quiet. And I love it. So, I think maybe it’s a question of ambition. It’s basically is there a desire for you to do this and do you have the ambition to do it.

John: Yep. That’s really what it is. A talent, and a vision, and an ambition to do all those things. And I would hope that I have talent and that I have vision, but I do not have the ambition to have this massive company. And the overhead, the emotional overhead, of having all of those employees.

So I’ve got four. And four is plenty. Four is a lot for me. And so I’ve got Megan. I’ve got Nima. And I’ve got Dustin. And we make stuff. And that’s great, but really mostly my software company. Megan helps me out with my writing stuff — I am working as a freelance writer. I’m not working as some big production company entity.

I don’t want to have to go to some other office every day. I don’t want all that feeling. And so even though JJ Abrams would have really smart people to do all that stuff, and even though he gets to participate in lots of other projects because his company is making 30 things, that’s exciting. But he also has to participate in some of those projects. And I’m sure it is challenging when he goes off and directs a Star Wars movie in London for all the other stuff to get done. And that’s going to be the same challenge with Greg Berlanti running 14 shows, or Chris Morgan with Fast and the Furious, plus other franchises. But that’s a choice they’ve chosen to make and that’s great. But it’s just not a choice that I would want to make.

Craig: No. Not at all. And Spielberg has been doing this sort of thing forever. So he has his own at Amblin and then DreamWorks and then back to Amblin again. But then he does his own movies. And so, yeah, it’s really just a question of desire and scope.

Yeah, and by the way, even for Greg Berlanti. So he does most of the television shows, but then he does Love, Simon. Right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think that’s part of it also is that you like doing different things and you don’t mind never being at home. That must be a part of it. It seems like a very busy life.

Let’s get this last one in here. Alex in LA. Who knows, maybe we’ll get more than one more in. Alex in LA – I get all the LA people. He writes, “Recently,” or it could be she, writes, “Recently after years of struggle I finally made my first big spec sale.” Yay.

“While the sale is great, what I really want is to have a long and sustained career and not just be a one-hit-wonder. So my question is what can I expect to happen next and how can I maximize my opportunities when I’m in that rare moment where I actually have a nice Deadline write up and a little career heat? What are the traps to look out for?

“For context, I’ve had some minor successes before and I’ve even been on the bottle water tour when a previous script of mine got a lot of attention, but sadly no sale. So I’m not a complete newbie at this, but I’d like to know what happens when you move past the level of general meetings at random production companies and into higher levels of the industry.”

All right, John, we’ve got a new kid. What do you tell ‘em?

John: All right, so first Alex congratulations. I would say here are some priorities for you. Priority number one: let’s get that script made. So having sold a script is fantastic. Having a script actually produced and a movie is out is much, much better. So if there’s anything you can do to get this movie made, I say do those things to get that movie made.

So that is taking the notes, trying to make those notes actually work. Always asking about the next step. Always asking how are we going to get a director. What are the things that are happening next? Try to make that thing actually become a movie and not just one thing that you sold. So, great that you sold it, let’s make that a movie would be my first thing.

Second priority I would say let’s get you another job. Let’s get you writing something else. So, that could be a pitch that you’ve gone out with, that you’ve set up, that you’re going to be writing. It could be an assignment for something to write, a preexisting piece of material. It probably won’t be a rewrite if it’s so early in your career, but it could be a rewrite. But getting you as a person who gets hired and not just a person who has sold something is great.

Third I would say maybe you need to staff on a TV show. That’s not advice I would have given ten years ago, but I think most writers are working in television right now. And so if there’s a TV show that you could be staffed on I would look at staffing on that TV show, especially if your script is a perfect example of something out there. Maybe try to staff on a show, even like a short-run show for Apple. An eight-episode Apple show would be great experience for you and get you more scripts under your belt.

Craig: All fantastic. I’m not sure what I could possibly add to that other than you should continue to be concerned that this will end tomorrow, because that’s kind of the way it works. The trend is to get rid of you. You are a new infection in the body of Hollywood. It will try and get rid of you. The good news is eventually it will stop trying to get rid of you and then you will start to try and get rid of it and you won’t be able to. But that’s a long way to go.

So, get the next job. Get. The. Next. Job. Go out there swinging at as many things as you can to get that next job, to keep working. Nothing is sexier than a writer who is unavailable. And it’s a shame, because it has nothing to do with our abilities, but being unavailable is the thing that makes people excited about you because that means somebody else likes you, which means you’re likeable. That’s the mess of it all.

So, yeah, stay ambitious man.

John: Alex, you’re going to be very busy because you’re going to be rewriting your script that you sold. You’re going to be going out and pitching on a bunch of things which means you’re really going to be doing the internal writing of all these different projects. You’re going to be figuring out how you’re going to tackle these projects.

Plus, you’re going to be writing new stuff for yourself because where I do see writers who have sold that one thing who never sell another thing it’s because they never really wrote another thing. They just went out and tried to get that first movie made or try to get a deal and they never wrote something else new.

So, you’ve got to do all three things, which seems crazy because you worked so hard to get to this point, but you’re now going to be probably working a lot harder.

Craig: Yeah. And you’re going to have to assume that there are going to be some swings and misses along the way.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: You may also work on something that doesn’t work out and you get fired off of it and then, you know, OK, well you’re going to have to deal with that fallout or whatever. But it won’t be your problem because you’ve already got the next thing lined up. So actually now is when you have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. And you should enjoy and be proud of the moment, but I think honestly Alex your questions are implying the right mindset.

John: 100% agree. All right, let’s save that last question for next week and instead go to our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is an article by Avi Selk for the Washington Post called The Worst Sex in the World is Anglerfish Sex, and Now There’s Finally Video.

So, anglerfish are those things you’ve seen in cartoons. They’re these monstrous sort of Precambrian Jurassic fish that have the little lantern dangling over their heads. They live deep, deep in the water. They’ve never seen sunlight. But there’s video now of this anglerfish and it’s a female anglerfish you find out because female anglerfish are the giant ones and male anglerfish are tiny, tiny little fish. And when males mate they bite into the female fish. Their teeth hold on basically forever and they basically become subsumed into the bigger fish.

The video is fantastic and disturbing. It looks alien. So I just encourage you to see it. I’ll actually put two different video links in there. One which simulates what it would look like if humans did this, which is so disturbing.

Craig: It’s the best. I’ve seen this, too. It’s awesome.

John: Yeah. So I love that we live in a world that has such incredibly freaky creatures out there. And while it seems like, “Oh, that poor male fish is dying to procreate,” it’s also very kind of smart mechanism. Because literally all of his DNA gets in there because he becomes part of the other fish. So he’s both a parasite and he’s eaten by it. It’s all interesting and it feels alien in a wonderful way.

Craig: Yeah. I got to say once you get past the mammal situation and you get into insects and reptiles and fish, women – I think they generally win the whole battle of the sexes. They seem to be winning. And violently in all sorts of fun ways, like biting the heads off their mate. You know, I always love those things. But, you know, I’m a praying mantis fan.

John: Well, if you think about it there’s a reason why women should win because essentially if the goal of reproduction is to pass along your genes, ultimately the women are going to be the ones who are going to give birth and raise the children in many cases. So there’s a reason why you’d want them to be stronger and survive.

Craig: Yeah. It really comes down to math from what I understand. It’s a question of how many eggs, you know, so mammals are basically we’re pregnant with one offspring at a time. And then when you’re in reptiles, fish, and insects they’re pregnant with a million offspring at times. So, like the math has a huge impact on whose head gets chopped off basically. It’s a real mess out there. Biology is brutal and doesn’t care about our feelings. Isn’t that terrible?

Well, I got all geeked out yesterday and watched two of the E3 press conferences. The one was the X-Box press conference and then the other one was the Bethesda press conference. And really I was just watching the Bethesda press conference to see if they would finally just say, OK, yes, there will be an Elder Scrolls 6. And they did. There’s going to be an Elder Scrolls 6. But not for like four years probably.

And one of the reasons why is because it’s going to be the game they work on after the next game they’re working on. And the next game that they’re working on is their first original franchise in 20 years or something. Because Fallout was actually based on something they had purchased from another company. And then they made it what it is.

But in any case Bethesda, my favorite game studio, has a new game that they are going to be putting out I think probably for the next generation platform, so my guess is 2020. And it’s called Starfield. And what we know about it is it’s in space. That’s it.

But I have a feeling if it is remotely like what we have all come to love from Bethesda games then even if it’s just Fallout in space, I’ll be thrilled.

John: That will be great.

Craig: So, anyway, Starfield is hopefully heading towards us in 2020. And then I’m thinking Elder Scrolls 6 in 2022? Then at that point if I get hit by the bus I’m OK.

John: Yeah. Hopefully there will still be a planet in 2022.

Craig: Well–

John: No guarantees in this world.

Craig: There’ll be something.

John: There’ll be something. Will there be humans? Yeah. There will still be a planet.

Craig: I’m optimistic.

John: All right, good. I like the optimism.

Craig: I don’t why. Because I’m stupid.

John: You’re not stupid, Craig. You’re smart and you’re wise and you have umbrage for only the right things.

Craig: Thank you.

John: That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Mooney. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But Craig and I are always delighted to answer your questions on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes, plus links and such at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts. They go up the week after the episode goes out.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. Last episode I proposed that we may end up doing a digital version of the USB drives down the road. We’re thinking through that. We still have a few of the existing USB drives if you’d like one of those. But they may be the last of their kind. So, we may end up going to a fully digital version. And let people download them in chunks or maybe batches of 100 so they can live on with–

Craig: I think that’s smart.

John: Yeah. It’s really the international users are really facing – sometimes the import fees on the USB drive which is hard to value.

Craig: Yeah, you know what, and then they have to pay those taxes that end up coming back to us as foreign levy fees.

John: Yep. Crazy.

Craig: That part’s nice. I finally get–

John: Actually that’s true. Craig is referring to writers get paid these foreign levy fees that are not residuals. They’re kind of like residuals but they’re not residuals. The WGA handles it which is controversial. But it’s nice extra free found money because of Europe and other countries.

Craig: Thank you Europe and other countries.

John: It’s nice. Craig, thank you for this discussion which happened in Europe for me, Los Angeles for you. Lord knows where you’ll be next time we try to talk, but–

Craig: I know where I’ll be next time. In Europe. When you’ll be in the United States.

John: That’s what it is. We’re always – someone is always safe and out of the country when we’re doing this.

Craig: Yep.

John: Cool. Craig, thanks so much. Bye.

Craig: Thanks John. See you next time.

Links:

• Coverfly’s response to accusations in a now-deleted blog post. Here’s a conversation on the Screenwriting Reddit page about it.
• In 2015’s Episode 191 The Deal with Scripped.com, we invited John Rhodes from ScreenCraft and Guy Goldstein from WriterDuet to investigate a data management crisis with Scripped.com.
• Toxic Fandom Is Killing ‘Star Wars’ by Marc Bernardin for the Hollywood Reporter
• Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast covers the Johnlock Conspiracy.
• Apple has made a deal with the WGA
• Evan in Philadephia recommends Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art for a great explanation of “gutters.”
• JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot is an example of a big production company led by a creative.
• The worst sex in the world is anglerfish sex, and now there’s finally video by Avi Selk for the Washington Post. This video’s upsetting animation shows what the process would look like for humans.
• Bethesda’s Starfield has been announced
• The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!
• The USB drives!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Jeff Mooney (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.