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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/halfway-there).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.

First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.

**Craig:** Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.

**John:** That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?

**Megana Rao:** I identify with Gen Z.

**Craig:** You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …

**Megana:** I’m old, I get it.

**Craig:** Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.

**Megana:** I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.

**Craig:** Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”

**John:** My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.

**Craig:** Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.

**Megana:** Yeah. My cold bones.

**Craig:** You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.

**Megana:** I already am.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.

**Craig:** So dumb.

**John:** We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-

**Craig:** You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.

**John:** Going to be great.

**Craig:** Just to get meta.

**John:** First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.

**Craig:** Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-

**John:** 99% of all COVID in North America is that.

**Craig:** It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.

**John:** Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.

**Craig:** The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.

The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.

**John:** Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.

**Craig:** It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.

**John:** This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.

**Craig:** Of course, that’s the rule.

**John:** That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.

I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.

**Craig:** I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.

I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.

**John:** Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?

**Craig:** It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.

**John:** We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.

**Craig:** I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.

**John:** Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?

**Megana:** Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.

I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”

**John:** I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.

**John:** Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.

**Craig:** No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.

**John:** What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?

**Craig:** That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.

**John:** Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.

**Megana:** I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.

**John:** I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.

**Craig:** That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.

**John:** Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?

**Craig:** It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.

**John:** Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.

**Craig:** It’d be a bummer.

**John:** That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.

**Craig:** I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**John:** This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Craig:** A run-in?

**John:** I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.

What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.

**Craig:** I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.

**John:** All that meta data was buried into the file system.

**Craig:** You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.

**John:** I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.

**Megana:** When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …

**Craig:** You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.

**John:** I don’t want to Command I.

**Craig:** Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.

**Megana:** Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.

“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”

**Craig:** Yes. Amen, Jules.

**John:** Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.

**Craig:** Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?

The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.

I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.

**John:** It’s a lot of money.

**Craig:** I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.

**John:** The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.

I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.

**Craig:** I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.

**John:** Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.

The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.

I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.

**Craig:** I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.

**John:** Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?

**Megana:** Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”

**Craig:** What’s up with that?

**John:** What’s up with that?

**Craig:** What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-

**John:** It’s a magic thing.

**Craig:** Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.

**John:** We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.

I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.

**Craig:** Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.

**John:** Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.

**Craig:** A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.

**John:** Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-

**Craig:** Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?

**John:** We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have questions.

**John:** First question is, what is your refund policy?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.

**John:** This is just all-

**Craig:** It’s all bad.

**John:** It’s all umbrage bait.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.

**Craig:** Aw. Come on.

**John:** Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?

**Craig:** I call it both, slug line and scene header.

**John:** It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.

**Craig:** Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?

**John:** “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”

**Craig:** It’s rare, but I’ve done it.

**John:** It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.

**Craig:** “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.

**John:** Sometimes it’s really helpful.

**Craig:** Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?

**John:** Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.

**John:** Craig is requesting his refund.

**Craig:** I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?

**John:** Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?

**Craig:** Yeah, help us out.

**Megana:** John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?

**Megana:** I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.

**Craig:** Script throwers.

**Megana:** They just have to pick that back up.

**Craig:** Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.

**John:** We do know what we’re doing.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”

If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?

**Craig:** No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.

**John:** I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.

**Craig:** No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.

**John:** This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.

**Craig:** Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.

**John:** I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.

**John:** They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.

**Craig:** At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.

**John:** We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.

**Craig:** Yeah, new stuff.

**John:** Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.

**Megana:** JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”

**John:** What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is answerable.

**John:** Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.

**Craig:** JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.

One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.

**John:** We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?

**Craig:** I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.

This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.

**John:** While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?

**Craig:** No, it’s 19-A.

**John:** That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”

**Craig:** We just call it 19 Apple Apple.

**John:** Apple Apple.

**Craig:** That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.

**John:** Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.

**John:** Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”

**Craig:** What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.

**John:** I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.

**Craig:** There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”

**John:** Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.

**Craig:** Yah.

**John:** Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.

**Megana:** Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”

**John:** Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** That’s mom of the year. Best mom.

**Craig:** Best mom.

**John:** It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.

**Craig:** Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.

There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.

I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.

**John:** I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.

**Craig:** Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.

My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.

**Craig:** I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.

**John:** I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.

**Craig:** This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”

**John:** Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-

**Craig:** “Do we have to know dates?”

**John:** … for this to work.

**Craig:** My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?

**John:** I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.

**Craig:** Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.

The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.

**John:** It feels like a perfect device for it.

**Craig:** It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.

**John:** Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. 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. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.

**Craig:** Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.

**John:** They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.

**Craig:** No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.

**John:** Ethereum.

**Craig:** China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.

**John:** I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.

One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.

**Craig:** All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Boogle?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that it, Boogle?

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** Beeple.

**John:** Beeple.

**Craig:** I like Boogle better.

**John:** He was a previous One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.

**John:** Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s different.

**John:** It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-

**Craig:** The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.

**John:** Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?

**Craig:** Copyright.

**John:** Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.

**Craig:** No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.

**John:** They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.

**Craig:** There is. There is.

**John:** What’s that?

**Craig:** The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.

**John:** Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.

**Craig:** JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?

**John:** Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.

**Craig:** Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?

**John:** Apparently not.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.

**John:** We can Google this now.

**Craig:** It’s $3 million.

**John:** $3 million.

**Craig:** They spent $3 million.

**John:** Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.

I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.

**Craig:** It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?

**John:** I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.

**Craig:** I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “

**John:** Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.

**Craig:** It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.

**John:** You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.

**Craig:** It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.

**John:** Doesn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.

**Craig:** Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s [MOTHER Script](https://twitter.com/extspace/status/1482482121335734273?)
* Script University’s [20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order](https://www.screenwritersuniversity.com/pages/20-script-rules-1)
* Read Aloud Software Suggestions [Table Read](https://www.tablereadpro.com/), [ZoomText](https://www.zoomtext.com/), [JAWS](https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/), [VoiceDream](https://www.voicedream.com/)
* DnD for kids [Level 1 Geek](https://www.level1geek.com/dnd-for-kids-guide/) and [Being a Dungeon Master for Kids](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/being-dungeon-master-kids)
* [Flee](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430054/) animated film
* [Wikipedia Timeline Game](https://kottke.org/22/01/wikipedia-history-timeline-game)
* [Papers, please](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please) by Lucas Pope
* NFT Articles [Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/) by Tim O’Reilly, [My First Impressions of Web3](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html) on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, [Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are](https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/) by Molly White
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Phillipson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/534standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/we-see-and-we-hear).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 533 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are so many screenwriters worried about the word ‘we’?

**Craig:** Why? Why?

**John:** Craig and I will hopefully drive a stake to the heart of the “we hear/we see” prohibition, as we talk through some screenplay fundamentals, before looking at some of the scripts up for awards this season.

**Craig:** We will see some of those scripts. We will see them, we.

**John:** We will see them.

**Craig:** We see.

**John:** And if we were listening in a room, we could hear them-

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** -because we can hear and we can see. We have the sensors.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then, we’ll get into some listener questions. And our bonus segment for premium members, we will discuss what is the screenwriting equivalent of bootcamp?

**Craig:** Ooh, that’s interesting.

**John:** We talk about soap operas being like actor bootcamp. Is there a boot camp for writing?

**Craig:** Oh, I see what you mean. Got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Understood. Okay.

**John:** A place where you’re doing so much work that you’re really picking up your skills, you’re developing your craft.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. All right. [crosstalk]

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** That’s only if you pay us.

**John:** If you pay us, you can listen to us talk about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you pay enough money, you could own The CW, which is apparently up for sale.

**Megana:** [chuckles]

**Craig:** [chuckles] Wait, what? [chuckles]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The CW is for sale?

**John:** It was announced this last week or the week before that a CW may be up on the auction block. CW in the US, for our international listeners, is the home to a lot of great programs, including where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend used to air. It was a joint partnership between Warner Brothers and CBS. So, there were some shows that were CBS shows which was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and some things. There are a lot of Warner Brothers shows that were there. Now that Warner is more focused on HBO Max stuff, and CBS is focused on Paramount+ stuff, it’s not quite clear how The CW fits in. So, it may end up becoming a new thing, it may change. But anyway, the head of CW said, “You know what? Yeah, we’re probably up for sale.”

**Craig:** The sentence you just said there, if we had just rolled back to when we started this podcast, would have made utterly no sense to us.

**John:** No. [crosstalk]

**Craig:** The HBO Max and– What?

**John:** Paramount+.

**Craig:** Paramount– CBS with Par– what? What? Para+. But it’s remarkable how much things have changed. I guess, similarly, it’s remarkable how oddly adaptable we are as human beings. We are terrified of change, but we’re really good at absorbing it and accepting it when it happens. We’re odd little creatures, aren’t we?

**John:** Obviously, it feels everything’s accelerating, but I think at any given moment in time, we would probably feel it’s accelerating to all these new things. It’s always strange to think back to 100 years ago, cars were new, the time between the first flight at Kitty Hawk to man landing on the moon was so much shorter than you think it would be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s right. We are witnessing the acceleration of things in our lifetime. But everything that happened before us just feels like history that took forever.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens to The CW. One of the discussion points is that CW airs on a bunch of local stations, obviously, and the local stations are part of bigger groups. And that group might just buy out The CW instead of [crosstalk].

**Craig:** Do you have any interest in it?

**John:** Honestly, I don’t. I feel at this point, I’m all in on streaming. The normal linear broadcast and stuff is just not so appealing to me.

**Craig:** I mean, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was on it, right?

**John:** It was. It was great.

**Craig:** We could own that.

**John:** Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a premium cable show.

**Craig:** Showtime. Yeah.

**John:** And then, they retooled that. You can go back and listen to the episode where we talked to Rachel and Aline about the show back when it was a Showtime show before it became The CW show. It was filthier. There used to be a handjob in it and then the handjob became a kiss.

**Craig:** Ultimately, you’ve summed up the difference between Showtime and The CW.

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** It’s just that whatever mathematical equation converts a handjob into a kiss, that’s it.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** That’s the difference between a broadcast and premium cable.

**Craig:** You’ve got it.

**John:** Do you remember Stuart Friedel?

**Craig:** Sorry, who?

**John:** Our first Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel?

**Craig:** I mean, Stuart’s a part of our lives.

**John:** He is. Stuart is the reason for a lot of how Scriptnotes used to work, and of course, the reason why Scriptnotes t-shirts are so soft is because-

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** -Stuart is so sensitive and has this Stuart’s sense of softness. Stuart talked to me last week. He said, “I just had a mentor conversation with a Nebraska kid, who is my mom’s hairdresser’s nephew,” which is classic. “This guy mentioned the movie that he wanted to write. And he described the opening as a Stuart Special. He doesn’t know why it’s called that, but that’s what it’s called on Scriptnotes,” he says.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** He has no idea that it’s called a Stuart Special because of Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** How did he miss that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a kind of amazing that there’s a generation of people who are going to call that a Stuart Special. The way in lore, the last shot of your day is the Martini. But the second to last shot is called the Abby or Abby Singer, because there was a first AD named Abby singer, who would call for the martini and he was always one shot off. And so, the second the last one became the Abby. And people will call it a Stuart Special, and then every now and then somebody, “You know why it’s called that by the way?” That’ll be a bit of trivia for people.

**John:** Yeah. And, of course, it’ll be like, it’s named after Stuart Friedel, who used to be a producer on Scriptnotes before he became a titan of children’s television.

**Craig:** Before he became the CEO of The CW.

[laughter]

**John:** Before he bought out The CW and turned it into–

**Craig:** I want to know what the Megana maneuver is?

**John:** Oh, yeah. Well, it has to be a term that Megana will coin here. But, Megana, I’m curious, do you know what the Stuart Special is? How would you define it as Stuart Special? Or, is it just all alien territory for you?

**Megana:** Stuart Special, I think, it’s something I encounter a lot when I read threepage challenges, which is flash forward in a script, and then, by the end of two or three pages, it’s like one week ago or six months ago.

**John:** Right. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the Stuart Special.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s showing the moment right before the climax. And then going back like one month earlier. Exactly.

**Megana:** Right.

**John:** Record scratch. I bet you’re wondering how this all happened, and let me talk about this.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** Flashing back to just a few weeks ago, we had Jack Thorne on the show. We had a great conversation with him. He was talking about disability and also invisible illnesses. This last week, Annie Hayes wrote in. Annie Hayes is a friend of Scriptnotes. She has helped us out at Austin Film Festival. She had such a great letter that I thought, “Oh, it’s much better as a blog post than for us to try to read it on the air.” But Annie Hayes writes about her experience. She’s a staff writer on The CW show In the Dark, and she’s had cystic fibrosis this whole time since [crosstalk] she had cystic fibrosis. And writing about sort of the challenges of living with a chronic illness and working with a chronic illness, a lot people can’t see that you’re fighting this. She started off as an assistant. I think she was assistant at Verve before she started working as a staff writer, but it’s a great overview of what her experience has been.

One of the things she really stresses is that she’s been very open about it, but she also tries to make sure she’s always presenting a solution rather than a problem, which seems good advice in general.

**Craig:** That is. It’s funny, a little bit after that show, I talked with Jack, because he was curious, because I did mention that I had been dealing with chronic pain for a long time. He was like, “What is it?” He was actually, I think, maybe the first person I’d really talked to about it, because I’m me. I’m not that guy. It’s not related to any feelings about disabilities or physical challenges as much as just my general sense that, “Just shut up, Craig,” [chuckles] is mostly what I struggle with all the time, but it is interesting that you have to make choices when you have an invisible disability or illness or challenge. Whereas you don’t have that choice when it’s visible, at all. Both things come with their own unique difficulties. So, I appreciate Annie writing in about this.

**John:** Megana, we got another question from a listener about the Jack Throne conversation.

**Megana:** Great. Alok wrote in and said, “Your recent episode with Jack Thorne was amazing. I love Jack’s Edinburgh TV festival speech. As a person with invisible disabilities, I find his advocacy work really empowering. But I’m looking for a recommendation. My disability forces me to read text documents while simultaneously listening to them using a text-to-speech software. The one I use is called Read Aloud, which is a Chrome plugin. It’s a free software with minimal options that reads documents back to me in a deathly robotic monotone.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Megana:** “It’s not at all suited for reading scripts.”

**Craig:** No.

**Megana:** “I was wondering if anyone at Scriptnotes was familiar with text-to-voice softwares that professional writers with disabilities could use to read their scripts. Again, it is text-to-voice that I’m looking for, not voice-to-text. If there is something on the market that you recommend suitable for script reading, I don’t mind shelling out some money to purchase it.”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s an interesting thought there. John, this seems like something you would probably know, if you knew you would know. Not me.

**John:** A couple things I can point you to. I do have friends who will listen to scripts in the car with some read aloud software. I think having similar experiences where it’s a little bit awkward, because it has no idea that you’re reading a script. Some things that could be helpful. In Highland 2, we have what’s called a narrated script. And what it does is, it’s looking at the same script, but it’s changing it to rather than like:

Tom: Welcome to my house, Mary.
Mary: It’s so nice to be here.

It says, “Tom says, ‘Welcome to my house,’ Mary says this.” It’s adding in the says and things, and it actually has the sense of like int and ext become interior and exterior, that may help you. It might make it a little bit easier for you to read. So, it’d just be a matter of throwing that PDF in there and exporting it as a narrated script, that could be a little bit better solution for you.

The Weekend Read beta has text-to-speech that’s actually really good, where you can actually set voices and do things so you can set the male characters to a certain male voice, female characters to a certain female voice. That’s great. It’s still in beta. So, I can’t offer that to everybody. We’ll send a copy to Alok, who can test it. And we’re also doing some new stuff in the new Highland beta that should be a little bit better for folks who need some accessibility things. We’re working with Ryan Knighton who’s our blind friend about making sure that’s fantastic for blind writers to use.

**Craig:** Well, that’s all sounds pretty useful information there. Turns out, you had all the answers right there, John.

**John:** I don’t have all the answers though, because I feel we probably have other listeners who are in similar situations. So, if you are like Alok who needs stuff read aloud, scripts read aloud, write into us and tell Megana what you’re using, and we’ll share that on a future episode.

**Craig:** It’s good idea.

**John:** Fantastic. All right. Well, let’s talk about screenplays in general and screenplay formatting, because this feels such a giant, fundamental question that we’ve addressed many times over the years. But even just this last week, Craig-

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** -you and I were both a little bit dumbfounded by someone who wrote to us and said like, “Hey, can you explain why you’re so upset against ‘we hear’ and ‘we see’?” And you replied with a GIF of–

**Craig:** [chuckles] Not sure if serious.

**John:** Not Sure If Serious. He just had fundamentally like mis–

**Craig:** Misunderstood, yeah.

**John:** -what we’re talking about here. So, just to make sure we will reiterate this a thousand times during the podcast. It’s absolutely fine to say “we hear” and “we see” on the page in screenplays. It’s also fine to not use it. You can be a writer who chooses not to use it, that’s great. But it’s an available tool for you, and you should not feel at all bad about using it. And if anyone smacks you down for using it, they’re being dumb.

**Craig:** They’re bad.

**John:** They’re bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, I use it all the time. Like John says, it’s not that we recommend using it. It’s just if you like it, great. I find it to be a useful tool. We’ve talked quite a bit about why it does something unique, that other presentations of actions do not so that it’s not simply a stylistic choice or a bit of decoration, but it has–

**John:** It’s not lazy. No.

**Craig:** No, it has purpose. I am mystified. I wish I could go find the patient zero of no one should ever write “we see” in screenplays. I don’t know who started this terrible virus, but it’s wrong. And it is metastasized throughout all of these mediocre schools. And the mediocre schools, I mean [chuckles] they’re all mediocre when it comes to this sort of thing. Waves of human beings have just keep arriving on Reddit, like teeming onto Reddit shores to explain to other people why you can’t use “we see.” And the two of us have just been standing there trying to rescue people from this nonsense because, I guess we can’t. But let’s try one more time.

**John:** We’ll try one more time. As we get into this, we’ll answer a bunch of listener simpler questions, and that’ll hopefully stack up together to a broader understanding of what we’re trying to do here on screenplay page. Megana, if you start us off with Adrian in Dublin here.

**Megana:** He asks, “I’ve been writing for years, but I’m still puzzled by the question when to use action in the quote ‘action section’ of a script and when to use it as a parenthetical.”

**John:** Adrian’s wondering, and this is a thing that every writer still makes choices, kind of every line is like, “Okay, is this going to be better as an action or scene description on the left-hand margin? Or is just the kind of thing that it’s better tucked underneath the character, the header, in parenthetical saying a small little thing that as part of that character’s direction or as a part of the overall scene direction?” You’re always making choices? for what that’s going to be. Craig, what general guidance are you thinking through when you’re making a decision about whether to use parenthetical or an action line?

**Craig:** Almost always, I’m going to use an action line for action. Parentheticals are the orthodoxies. Parentheticals are for terms that influence the way the line is read, or are there to imply that there’s a pause. However, every now and then, if there is an action that is super tiny, and is necessary to understand the dialogue properly, and the dialogue would be best served if we didn’t chop it up into two bits, then I will use the parenthetical. If I’m running a bit of dialogue and between two lines, someone lights a match, I might put that in parentheticals (lights a match).

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And then, they keep going. But it would have to be, we’re talking about an action that could easily be described in a couple of words, and more importantly, would feel really dumb and tiny if it were its own action line.

**John:** Agreed. It’s how short the action is both in screen time and in words, because parentheticals that go on for 6 or 7 or 10 words, that should have probably been an action line. In my whole writing career, I’ve probably written two parentheticals that were that long and it was for some very specific purpose that I needed to keep them together as a parenthetical, rather than moving them in as an action line. Parentheticals, if it’s affecting how that line is going to be read, it’s really affecting the tone, the tenor, the intention of that line, that’s great for a parenthetical. If it is something that a single character is doing that is breaking their dialogue block, like a sneeze, that can fit great in a parenthetical, but anything that’s between multiple characters, beyond offering a handshake, that becomes action.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the reasons why you may mix it up occasionally or decide to make something parenthetical versus a longer line is, you and I both have a preference against long columns of just two characters talking. Therefore, we’ll both look for opportunities. It’s like okay, this is a dialogue scene, but I would love to have some moments where over on the left hand margin in an action line, just to break up visually on page and not make it feel like this is just a tunnel of text.

**Craig:** Yeah, I call it ticker tape. Ticker tape screenplay page where it’s just dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, and just run out of things down the middle. If you require that you break it up, it forces you also to start thinking about, “Well, where are they? What are they doing? How are they moving in the space? Is there anything I can do to make this visually interesting?” Otherwise, it’s just going to be bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong.

**John:** Great. Another question for us, Megana.

**Megana:** Nick in LA asks, “Over the last few months, I’ve been listening through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and there was a string of episodes in 2014 where John and Craig brainstormed ideas for a top-to-bottom reimagining of the screenplay as we know it. This new format included things like embedded music, images, more clickable links, etc. In general, a more interactive and dynamic document than the current standard. My question is, now that we’re sevenish years later, do you still feel the same way about the standard screenplay format? Has any progress been made in terms of what is permissible to include in your script, and is changing anything a fool’s errand? What you described in those episodes sounds great and made a lot of sense to me, but it seems little has changed since 2014.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Very little has changed. I do see links in screenplays more often. I have seen clickable links in PDFs of screenplays that will link out to an image or something that explains something more fully. But no. I think you and I both had a little bit more utopian idea of this is what’s going to change, and it didn’t.

**Craig:** Well, I think we thought this is what we would like to change. This is what we would hope for change. But no, it hasn’t happened, and I think it’s still a great idea. It hasn’t happened at all. Part of the problem is Final Draft. It’s just this monster that sits on top of Hollywood and keeps this entire format back. I really do believe that. No one is sitting there at HBO or Universal or Disney saying, “We really love this 100-year-old method of putting screenplays down.” They don’t. Unfortunately, Final Draft, which is now owned by a payroll company, which is perfect, has essentially cornered the market on the format of screenplays as connecting into the format for budgeting and scheduling. There’s just no appetite for it, because everyone’s just stuck using it. It’s the Windows problem.

**John:** It’s the Windows problem. I’m not going to put all the blame at Final Draft’s feet, because I do think if Final Draft were to suddenly just explode and go away, it wouldn’t change quickly, because I think everyone’s just so used to scripts looking a certain way. You’re doing your show right now, and you could do your scripts a different way. You could choose to do something different. You’re not using Final Draft, you’re using Fade In, and you could do something different. But it’s easy to keep people doing the same thing they’re doing and it’s working for you. What I do think has changed since 2014 is, and this is also, I think, because the pandemic, because of Zoom, I see screenwriters doing a lot more work in Keynote or PowerPoint. A lot of early presentation stuff is now being done as slides. I think slide decking has become a more important part of describing a project early on. It’s not like I’m turning in a script and add a deck for things. But for some stuff, I might because it would at least show this is what this is meant to look like.

There’s a big world-building project that I may or may not do. I think if I were to take on that project, my script might be accompanied by, “Here are the images that go with it,” because everything I can describe on a page, so helpful. But to me being able to show it to you, it’s going to be more instructive.

**Craig:** I would do something else. I would write my show now in a different way if the tool were available. It’s not.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** There’s just no tool, and I don’t think there’s going to be a tool available until someone feels the amount of time, energy, and resources to create something like that would be rewarded, because it just takes a lot. If Final Draft disappeared tomorrow, there would be a period where people would have to use other things that would basically be the same thing. But there would also be a massive opening. I think you would see a lot of people trying to become the next Final Draft, and figure out how to fill that space, but do it better. If there were a tool while we were writing, there was a way to create a document that wasn’t a PDF– by the way, that’s the other issue is that PDF that format is just kind of useless. It’s useful, but useless.

**John:** Yeah, the good thing about PDF is it’s baked in and locked down. The bad thing about it is it’s baked in and locked down, and it’s hard to do anything else with it.

**Craig:** It’s a printed piece of paper, except it’s on your screen. That’s all it is. It’s static. If there were a software platform that created a document that people could open and view that was dynamic, that would be amazing, and I would use it all the time, but there isn’t.

**John:** I will tell you that for Late Night and Variety comedy writing, especially the daily shows, they are sometimes now using fully online writing software where you can– the monologue, it’s constantly updated by everybody all at once. It’s a better version of Google Docs.

**Craig:** Yeah. What’s that, Script 2.0? Ah, what’s the one–

**John:** It’s lot like WriterDuet.

**Craig:** WriterDuet, yes.

**John:** It’s like that, but very deliberately multiple users can really work on it. It’s not just you and your writing partner. Everyone can tag in. You can see who’s made what changes. And it works, but it’s very specifically set up for that kind of show to do. I think Colbert’s show does that. Some of those changes are working in places where they really need. They have very specific, very time-based needs. And so little of what we do is urgent in that way. But I will say, Craig, you’re working on a show right now that if you could update everyone live in terms of, these are the changes, it would be fantastic. But you’re probably doing some version of this just distribution lists of things go out.

**Craig:** Well, it’s Scenechronize. Scenechronize is the other big behemoth, and Scenechronize is the standard distribution software for things. Scenechronize could distribute anything. I think it’s just that there is the file format that I would love, the kind of method of creation of a screenplay document that I would love just doesn’t exist. Where when you’re talking about a song, there is a little note icon, you click it and it starts to play that song, and brings it up in a soft window, up to the right, that you can minimize or get rid of, or just click away if you chose to. There are little icons and things to say, “Okay, I want to see what this looks like.” We can’t do that, because there’s no document that we can release that other people can look at that works like that. That’s the biggest issue.

**John:** Okay. Yeah, as a person who builds the software for a living, I can see some of the solutions, but I can also see some of the issues. It’s what the shape of that container document is. Are you sending the document? Are you sending a link to something that lives on a server?

**Craig:** For privacy purposes and all the rest of it, whichever would be fine, whichever people would want. But the problem is, there isn’t the receiving thing on the other end. It’s going to be hard to create that because you’re asking people to download and they don’t want to [chuckles] and you’re asking them to try a new format, and it’s new. Change is hard. Tip of the hat to the screenplay format, as we’re talking about it, it has lasted longer than most human beings. In fact, it’s lasted longer than almost every human being.

**John:** Absolutely. I think we should also stress that what we’re describing in terms of changes to screenplay format is not the words on the page. We’re not talking about the “we hear”, “we see,” we’re not talking about the job of the writer. We’re talking about the container in which this is going out there so that your words can be accompanied by other useful material and be updated in real time in ways that aren’t so torturous. Because right now, how we handle screenplays, especially as we go into production, with star changes and such is so linked back to when we had to xerox pages and send them out, that it’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

**John:** Another question for us, Megana?

**Megana:** Scott asks, “I’ve been working on a spec script based on a true story that feels like it’s taken on the scope of a Godfather-esque crime epic. The question of whether to expand this into a longer miniseries-type structure has come up before. But my producer and I both agree this feels like a feature film. As we’ve gone back and forth on drafts, the length of the script has fluctuated from 140 pages at its longest down to 125. I’ve always been taught no one wants to read a spec from an unproven writer longer than 120 pages and I’ve tried to reach that magic number, but the notes we keep getting from colleagues is to dig deeper into the characters and to explore more, not less. So, my question is this. In our current climate with the line between film and TV forever blurring, is the 120-page rule the end-all and be-all, or 132 pages reasonable for a decade spanning crime saga? Follow-up question, why are gangster movies always so long?

[laughter]

**John:** They do seem longer as a rule. Let’s take this last part first. I think because we have expectations of the genre, that it’s going to be a bunch of characters and there’s going to be complicated family dynamics in addition to the A plot, that there’s just going to be a lot happening, and so we just allow them to be long, and also because the Godfather is long.

**Craig:** Yeah. It may have something to do with the fact that the directors who have made these things have come out of a school where length wasn’t a problem. There have been mobster movies forever, but the big ones were coming out in the 70s. But then again, you look at like Martin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, I think that was his first movie, it’s under two hours. So, it’s not necessarily always the case that they need to be super long, but I think John is right. If you’re telling the Godfather saga, then it is marked by an epic nature. They’re very Shakespearean in this regard. They are telling long family dramas, and they’re telling involved crime plots, and we seem to enjoy– otherwise, it becomes an action movie. Part of it is the opera. It’s opera. By the way, Godfather III is that– you’ve seen Godfather Part III, I assume.

**John:** I have seen it. I have seen all of them now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love that operatic third act. It’s just lovely. Anyway, I think that’s what it is. Scott, here’s the deal, man, if the first 10 pages are awesome, people will keep reading, they really will. Especially these days, I just think the rules are not the rules anymore. They’ll be reading it wondering, “Well, maybe I could turn this into a limited series.” You never know what they’re going to be thinking.

**John:** Craig is right. Obviously, if it’s good, they’ll keep reading and you should not worry about that much. A 125-page script is a lot different than 140-page script. 140-pages, people start to go, “Oh, okay, wow. This could be a problem because it’s going to probably be longer when that one’s actually shot.” I would say that my expectations of movies are things you can watch in one sitting and we always had a sense of like it’s a story that can only happen once.

But as we look now at limited series that also feel like they’re things that can only happen once, maybe there’s nothing wrong with thinking about, does this story really work best for me sitting in a chair for two hours watching it? Or does it have natural parts in installments that build out in ways that it could fit a limited series? If the first 50 pages or 60 pages of what you wrote has a natural cliffhanger, it can be a phenomenal writing sample for you, and a phenomenal spec to take out there in the world for people to see like, “Oh, this person can write really well.” And they’re more likely to read that one-hour thing versus a two-and-a-half-hour thing, because the one-hour thing can get made because people are hungry for the one-hour thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we’re in a weird time, you could maybe make just two-hour longs or three-hour longss. You say, “Okay, it’s at 140 at its longest.” So, you’re talking about 45 pages-ish, 43 pages-ish per episode of a three-episode thing. Well, you’re probably squeezing yourself in 140 anyway. Expand a few things here and there, write some endings so that each episode has an ending and each episode is beginning. So, there you’re filling some things out. Before you know it, you’ve got three-hour long episodes.

**John:** Yeah. My one cool thing this week is going to be a six-hour thing that feels like a movie. It is cinematic and tightly focused, but it could only work a limited series, and it works really well as that. Keep that in mind.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a look at some movie movies, like actual movies that showed up on big screens this past year.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I saw many of these but not all of these. But the good thing about 2021-2022 is you can read the scripts for all these movies online for free because they put them out there for award season. We will have links in the show notes to all the scripts that we’re talking through. I really encourage you, if you’re a person who’s interested in screenwriting, to read through these. You don’t have to finish them, but just look at what they actually look like on the page, either before or after you see the movie because you’ll get a real good sense of, this was the intention on the page and this is how it translated.

In most of these cases, these were the writers directing. In a couple of cases, there’s different screenwriters and directors. But they’re all really good and interesting in different ways. They’re all chock full of “we hears” and “we sees.” And we’ll not just cherry pick the ones that had them. Most movies, I would say probably do use “we hear” and “we see.”

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s incredibly useful.

**John:** It’s incredibly useful. I want to start with a young writer named Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** This early work, this is called Being the Ricardos. This is a story of behind the scenes of I Love Lucy. I actually really enjoyed this, I actually tweeted a little screenshot of a scene that I really liked a few weeks ago. This is all a backstage drama of an imagined week on the set of I Love Lucy and the conflict and controversies behind the scenes. The thing I tweeted about was, there’s a scene on page 5 that goes on for a long time. And it’s all OS, it’s all off screen. Basically, we are focused on a radio while Lucy is off screen and she’s listening to this thing, but having conversations with other people, and we don’t see people’s faces for a long time. It’s a deliberate choice on Sorkin’s part just to not show Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem for a long time, so we’d be invested in them as characters before we saw their faces and had to make a judgement of like, “Oh, does she look enough like Lucille Ball?”

**Craig:** Yeah. What I love about these pages, and well done, young writer Aaron Sorkin, is how much whitespace there is. Even in scenes where there’s huge blocks. For instance, on page 5, the announcers has just got this big huge– what is it nine-line bit of dialogue all because he’s reading advertisements, and he’s doing an intro to radio stuff. All fine, because then there’s just these wonderful seas of white, as Lindsay Doran would say, “Like milk.” And it’s so useful. It’s really useful. Interesting choice, by the way. This is what the Academy voters see, is that correct, John?

**John:** Mm-hmm, it is.

**Craig:** Interesting choice. When you go into production, inevitably, they’re going to be revisions that you want to do. Just as a holdover from the old days where people would have to have binders where they would insert pages into, there are A pages and B pages, and there are pages where there’s only stuff on half a page, because they get rid of the rest, but the page numbers don’t change. I would imagine that a lot of people would just do a collapsed page unlock version. But he just sent over the other one. He also does something that I don’t do, which is at the top of the page, it says “Continued:” and then the scene number, which I don’t do.

**John:** Which we don’t. This is a thing that Final Draft and Fade In can do for you. I’ve never found it especially useful. It’s never tripped me up. So, I’ve never done it. I want to get back to the scene where we have this radio announcer talking and we’re not seeing their faces. We come out of it, and the broadcast continues as we hear the front door open.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** The next minute or so, we’ll see no faces, just out of focus arms and legs and other shards of movement as they pass through the frame, which remains on the radio, the only thing in focus. We hear and we see in the same paragraph from Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who’s won many, many awards for being a good writer.

**Craig:** How else would you even do this? I’m top of page 6, “We HEAR his face being SLAPPED–” In this case, Aaron Sorkin has capitalized word ‘HEAR’ just to stick it to all of you, ding dong “professors of screenwriting,” because how else was he supposed to describe that? Someone hears his face being– the sound of a face being slapped? Like what do you say? Of course, we hear it. We hear it.

**John:** Love it. I think that Sorkin does, which another one of our writers that we’ll to talk about today, he capitalizes every character’s name, even in scene description. You can do that, that’s not common. I would say that’s maybe 5% of scripts I would see do this, but he does it. And you know what? It’s fine. But I wouldn’t leap on that as an example, but you could do it.

**Craig:** Clearly, and because the truth is I read through some of this, and I didn’t even notice it, because it just doesn’t matter.

**John:** He doesn’t use a ton of seeing description in his things. And there are ticker tape pages where it’s just all dialogue down the page. You know what? It’s really good dialogue, that helps.

**Craig:** It does help. And if you do have pages of ticker tape, for instance, page 12, the lines are short. The longest line is three lines long. Then, okay, actually, in a weird way, that’s a ticker tape conversation, snappity, snap, snap back and forth. I like it.

**John:** We were talking about A pages and B pages. An example is page 22A. At scene 24, and it’s just one line goes over the edge of this. Lucy has a single block of dialog there. It’s a good reminder that this all comes from a time when you were distributing physical pages. So, rather than having to send people a brand-new script, when there’s a tiny change, you just send in the pages that changed. But if there was too much to fit on one page, you create an A page or B page, and it would fit in between. So, his script would go page 22, 22A, a 22B if there needed to be and then there’d be a 23. That’s historically how we’ve done it. We could still do it that way. Craig, on your show, are there A, B pages, how do you do that?

**Craig:** You know what? There are. I’m starting to wonder why I’m bothering, because I have not seen anyone with a printed script on my set. Everyone used to carry binders around, but our script supervisor, the incredible Chris Roufs, he uses an iPad, as I think almost every script supervisor at this point uses an iPad or laptop. The first AD isn’t walking around with a binder with pages in it. I’m starting to wonder if I should just get rid of that. And just [crosstalk] do it anymore.

**John:** Here’s the issue. If you were to then unlock pages, you’d have to talk about what scene it is and never talk about the page numbers again, because the page numbers will keep changing.

**Craig:** But we never talk about page numbers anyway, we just talk about–

**John:** Yeah, because they’re [crosstalk] scenes.

**Craig:** And we talk scene numbers which never change. By the way, it’s so weird. It’s been a while since I’ve worked just a couple of years now on a feature script in production. Scene numbers here looks so tiny, because in television shows you start with scene 101, because that’s Episode 1, scene 1. And then, by the time you get to your 10th episode, it’s starting with scene 1001.

**John:** On these shows, do you have scripts that have more than 100 scenes?

**Craig:** No, that would be insane. I don’t even know how– [crosstalk]

**John:** Yeah. I was just thinking really complicated Game of Thrones episodes where you’re constantly cutting back and forth between a bunch of different things, but you’re not really-

**Craig:** You would just sort of–[crosstalk]

**John:** -picking those individual scenes, because they’re all a part of–[crosstalk]

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll just pull a random script here. I’ll take episode 5. Let’s see what the number is of this particular– how many scenes I hit. 56. I have a feeling that’s probably pretty standard for me.

**John:** Yeah, that makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last thing I want to say about Being the Ricardos, this is on bottom page 23. The scene description reads, “We’re going to start to go in and out of LUCY’s head as the reading goes on. She’s imagining what each beat will be like in its final form the way a chess master can see the board twelve moves ahead. She can also see and hear what the audience is going to laugh at.” Basically, so the idea is, we’re intercutting between the table reading of a script, and Lucy’s imagination of how it will actually be staged. It works really well in the movie, but it’s done very simply on the page. And Sorkin trusts that the reader is going to pay attention and follow what’s happening here, and you do.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is an area where– because sometimes people will say, [in mimicking tone] “Well, if you’re directing–” and that’s yes, to an extent, that is true. He can shorthand things somewhat, because what he doesn’t have to worry about is a director coming along and going, “I don’t know what the hell it is. I guess I’ll just make something up.” When you’re writing for other people directing, and I typically am, I will at least try and put things in there to make sure that the stuff that I need to happen or want to happen is there. That said, there’s always some amounts of confusion or things that can be cleared up. And that’s why we have 4000 meetings [chuckles] before we start shooting. So many meetings. Oh, my Lord.

**John:** [crosstalk] -obviously, there’s a tone meeting, which is really talking through what are we actually going for scene by scene? What does this need to feel like? But we have so many logistical production meetings to just figure out every department what do they need? What is the intention behind this? What does Craig want? What is the director need? All these things.

**Craig:** Yes. There are questions that are legitimately, “Can you explain this?” There are questions of, “Okay, we think you’re saying this, but are you saying that?” Then, there are questions that fall into the general category of, “I don’t want to be yelled at on the day.” It says here that he stabs him. Is that meant to be through the clothes, because if it’s not, then we have to build a prosthetic. And on the day, I don’t want you to show up and be like, “What the h–?”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They ask, and it’s reasonable. They should ask. [chuckles] Making television and movies is basically a game of how many questions can I answer today without falling apart?

**John:** Let’s move on and take a look at The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal. This script is based on the Elena Ferrante novel. Obviously, she has that to draw from. As I’m looking through this, especially this opening sequence, there’s not purple prose, she’s not painting every sunset, but it’s very effective, especially in terms of describing the house that the character is renting, the house that she’s moving into, and giving us a sense of the geography inside the space. I felt like, “Oh, I can see where things are.” I can feel how would I generally get from one place to another, and how this character specifically is approaching this space. I really liked what they did there.

There’s also a man who’s like a– I was in the movie, so I think it’s interesting, a supporting character man, but I liked his character description is just his white hair. From the initial description, I felt I could see him, but then he was doing very specific things along the way and saying specific stuff. That was helpful for grounding him but also the space, this [unintelligible [00:38:22] that we’re staying on.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is an example of a script that generally does things differently than I do, and I don’t care. I like to bold my scene headers. Maggie doesn’t. I like to keep my action description chunks really tiny. She will occasionally roll off one that’s 12 lines long. I don’t care. As long as it’s interesting and I can make it through it, then I’m fine. She uses CONT’Ds. When a character talks, then there’s an action description, then the same character talks. I don’t do that, don’t care.

**John:** I generally do that if it’s going to be unclear. So, I will do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t it. It just doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the point is you set yourself free, people, it’s all good. Everything works fine if the script is good. The other thing that Maggie will do, she puts up– getting back to our parenthetical question from earlier, she puts a lot of stuff in parentheticals. She’ll have two-line parentheticals, and that’s fine. There is nothing better than a good script. And there are no formatting issues that a good script can’t overcome.

**John:** One small thing that I would do if I’d had access to the script, is do a search and replace for double spaces and make them one space because there’s places where there’s one space and places where it’s two spaces, and it’s just a little bit off. That’s a personal little pet peeve of mine, that does not influence the quality of the writing.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. Look, the very title page, there’s a comma after the word ‘based on’ that shouldn’t be there. [chuckles] I would say, Maggie, John and I are available for basic stuff like that.

**John:** Punctuation consultants, that’s all we’re asking.

**Craig:** Mostly, we just want to hang out with Maggie Gyllenhaal. [crosstalk]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We just want to hang out. We want to be your friend.

**John:** I met Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal a zillion years ago back when they were children because they used to live down the street from me.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** It’s nice to see that they’ve made something of themselves.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right. They’re doing all right, those crazy kids.

**John:** The other thing I’ll say it’s important about, as we’re reading through the script, is right from the very start, it sets up the rules of how this movie is going to work, and that we are going to be going back and forth in time, and that is important. It’s important to do that early enough in movie, so we get a sense of like, “Oh, this is this kind of movie where the back and forth will matter.”

Mitchells vs. the Machines is a film I’d love from this past year. It’s written by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe‎. I just really adored it and I was happy to see that so much of what I adored, starts on page 1 of the script. It is one of the busiest first pages I’ve encountered. And yet, I could follow it and really get a sense of what this movie was going to feel like. It was chaotic, but ultimately with a point.

**Craig:** The script on the page feels like it’s on cocaine, which is correct.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Lord and Miller as producers have a really good record of both kinds of paces and things, but this has that kind of fantastic growing up in the 70s, we ate way too much sugar cereal in the morning, and then just sat down and watch these strobe lights of terrible cartoons, and our attention spans are shortened to nothing. Obviously, here’s just this wonderful quality that Mike and Jeff have put down on the page, but it does also have that just crazy snap to it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s almost exhausting reading these pages. You can feel yourself like, “Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.” [onomatopoeia] [chuckles]

**John:** And then the movie does really trade on that. In the end, the movie eventually does settle into some quieter moments so it’s not this frenzy all the time, but it does kick off with a tremendous amount of energy. There are so many exclamation points on this first page, but none of them feel gratuitous. The word “we” is used constantly because we’re always there with them. Basically, it’s inviting us to be a part of this journey with the characters. I really dug it.

There is a shotgun introduction of all of our main characters. In one paragraph on page 2, “The VERY stoppable “warriors” are: RICK (40, Bearded, nature-loving Dad), LINDA (38, colorful, yet nervous Mom, worn out from trying to keep everyone together), AARON (8, nerdy blonde Muppet who wears exclusively dinosaur shirts), delightfully round pug, MONCHI. And KATIE (17, exploding with creative energy- nerdy now, but will be cool in college).

Generally, shotgun intros are not my favorite, and it works really well here because they boldfaced all the character names, so you see that, “This is important, pay attention here, we’re really going to see these people. This is our movie, is these four characters, plus this pug that looks like a loaf of bread. That is who we’re going to follow in the course of the story.”

**Craig:** The introductions feel they’re part of the tone. If you stop and did standard introductions, you’d be like, “Oh, what happened? Did you guys get tired?” Because, they’re just like, “Bah,” on page one, and then page two like, “Bah,” and then they’re like, “Okay, now let’s talk about dad is a–.” It’s wonderful, because they’re going to make a point of stopping this madness on page 4, when it literally says, “We go from this manic energy to,” boop, “a quiet, boring suburban neighborhood.” And that’s where they slowed down a bit, because they can.

**John:** It’s an animation script, and writing is not different than normal writing, there’s no fundamental difference here. This could be a live action script as well. So, we just reminded that animation writing is writing. The only thing you may notice is that parentheticals, here in this case, have been tucked in to the first line of dialogue, rather than having their own separate line. You see that more often in animation. Nothing would change if we were to do normal parentheticals here, you could absolutely do normal parentheticals in this case, and nothing would break or change. We’re not seeing scene numbers here. Numbering scenes and sequences in animation is its own special, unique beast. My advice is to do whatever they tell you to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s practical. There’s no magic to that. If you find yourself as you’re writing, dwelling on these issues of formatting, just make a mental note that you are trying to avoid writing.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** [laughs]

**John:** A film I greatly enjoyed watching was Passing. This is a film by Rebecca Hall. She adapted it from a novel by Nella Larsen. Here’s what I want to point out about Passing, is that the movie and the script have this kind of hallucinatory, too bright, kind of uncomfortable, kind of stagey artificial feel to it. That really works for the film. There are moments in in it I felt like, “Wait, is this somebody’s 16-millimeter project from the 90s?” And then, you realize like, “Oh, no, it’s actually the incredibly well-made best version of that film aesthetic.” I really dug that the film, partly for just how strange it is, and it feels strange on the page too. It radiates from the page to how they actually shot it.

**Craig:** Lots of little short bursts of things, then there’s longer stuff. There’s an interesting thing that happens on the bottom of page 1 where there’s a scene header.

**John:** Yeah, I saw that too.

**Craig:** Then the same starts in the next page, which we never really do. We always combine the scene header with at least the first line of the scene itself.

**John:** And who do we have to thank for that? Final Draft. Final Draft, honestly, one of the few things Final Draft did well early on in its incarnation is, making sure that scene headers don’t flow at the bottom of pages, so they always carry through the next page. It just automatically does that, and so is Highland and so does Fade In. Everyone does that.

**Craig:** That wasn’t something about the steno pool of Warner Brothers and– [crosstalk]

**John:** Oh, the steno pool did it, but, I think-

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Final Draft turned it into an automatic–

**John:** Automated, yeah. You and I don’t think about it because you and I never have to manually do that.

**Craig:** We don’t manually do it, which made me wonder if Rebecca had written this in Microsoft Word or something, because [crosstalk] notes, which is totally fine. Again, doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

**John:** It just doesn’t matter. And she’s capitalizing all the character names like you might in a play. It works fine.

**Craig:** Also, in the second paragraph of the first page, it says, “Dissolve to Light flaring in a static frame.” She’s capitalized the word ‘light.’ Not all caps, just the L. Um, okay. [chuckles] It’s fine.

**John:** Yeah. If we’re doing a three-page challenge [crosstalk] we’d then point out that’s unusual.

**Craig:** It’s unusual. It doesn’t kill anything, and maybe it’s intentional. I can’t tell if it’s intentional or just Rebecca is one of those people– because there is a whole generation of people, they don’t care about capitalization or punctuation. That’s all fungible to them.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** We’ll see.

**John:** I’ll quickly get through Belfast. This is a script by Kenneth Branagh. He’s a person who’s done some [unintelligible 00:46:40] movies, it’s not his first here. This is labeled as “Shooting Draft.” It’s also in Gill Sans rather than Courier. I strongly suspect that this is something that some studio put out and said, “Oh, it shouldn’t be in Courier.” I’d be willing to bet $100, this was a Courier script that’s somebody down the road ultimately put it to Gill Sans for us to read, because it’s weird that it’s in Gill Sans. I don’t think it’s helpful that’s in Gill Sans.

**Craig:** It is odd, only because of all the things that people can and can’t do, Courier is the one that just about everyone does, 99.9%. So, when it’s not in Courier, there’s a little bit of a, “Oh, so I guess you don’t need to get in line like the rest of us.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** Special, feel special, do we?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a little tricky, but it also makes me yearn for a different time or a different day where we wouldn’t have to necessarily be in Courier, because actually on the page, it’s rather pretty. It’s just different.

**John:** It is. I wouldn’t have picked this typeface. I love a sans-serif typeface. This, I think it’s actually a little bit hard to read. I think Gill Sans is a great face for certain things. All uppercase doesn’t look great in Gill Sans. Some things are harder to read than they necessarily need to be. Again, character names are being uppercased through the whole thing for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a British thing. Maybe that’s why Rebecca Hall is doing this as well. A thing I really did appreciate about this though is there’s on page 3, the description, “The camera is high above and behind BUDDY as he starts to walk down the middle of the street. You can see clearly all the way down to the other end, where it meets a road going horizontally across, making a T junction.” Great. I can see that. Also, weird, we got a “you” rather than a “we?” Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m fine with it, because “you” and “we” are doing the same thing. They’re just saying in the audience, whether you feel like you’re a part of an audience, perhaps at this point in his career in life, Kenneth Branagh, when he watches movies, just buys up the entire thing. [chuckles] [crosstalk] So, he just presumes that everyone watches it alone.

**John:** Yeah. He doesn’t want to share armrest with anybody.

**Craig:** There’s no one else there, but you see the following.

**John:** It’s also important should point out that, we’re following a young boy through this, all the action is character limited to what he can see and experience until a certain point. Basically, there’s a mob that’s descending, and we’re only getting limited information from what he’s encountering until the mob is upon us. And then eventually, we break that limited POV and see everything, but that’s just good technique. It’s a technique that works on the page, that translates really well to visual medium. [crosstalk] -thinking of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s another thing that happens on page 7, which is cool. He’s doing a montage really. It’s not so much a montage, it’s just a rapid sequence of things, and he uses CUT TO: for each one of them, which he doesn’t use for other scenes. It makes everything spread out really big on that page. But in a sense, that also helps me see each one of those things. I actually quite liked it. Generally, I don’t do it even in something like this, because I’m always scrambling for paged count time, but the truth is, this is probably more accurate. Again, no problems. It’s fine.

**John:** No problems. Last one I want to look at is Tick, Tick… Boom!, a film I really enjoyed. This script is by Steven Levinson. It’s based on Jonathan Larson’s musical, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On page 1 and 2– the thing I think the film does really crucially, and you see this here on the script, is it has to set up, okay, this is who Jonathan Larson was, this is why he’s famous, and we’re not going to get to that stuff at all. This is all going to take place before then. And that’s a lot to do in two pages, and it does it really, really well. Basically, framing this is how much of the story we’re going to tell, and only this part of the story is really important. I thought they did a very effective job here, starting off with making sure you understood why you’re watching the movie, and what movie you’re going to watch.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally agree. Quality-wise, obviously, great. There’s an interesting choice here that I struggle with a little bit format-wise on a script that is only 104 pages. So, you have the time, meaning you have the space, to not put that extra line break before each scene header. It just makes everything– and to not bold, the scene headers, it’s harder to read. I just find it harder to read. I get confused a little bit as I’m going through or the transitions don’t feel quite as crackly or sharp because it’s just a smudge. For me, and this is really a pure readability thing, I think people should put that extra line break before the scene header or bold the scene header, but to do neither is rough. That said, doesn’t stop things from working.

**John:** It could work. Your choices are one or more of extra line space before the scene header, underlining scene header, which some people do–[crosstalk]

**Craig:** Yup, that works.

**John:** -are choices. There’s underlining here which I think it’s really important in top of page 3. “NOTE: Throughout the film, we move back and forth between Jon in 1992 performing at the show, and the events he is narrating as they occur in 1990.” This is something that is completely obvious when you’re watching the movie, but could be perplexing as you’re reading the script. What the script does, INT – LOCATION – DAY, and then will say either 1990 or 1992, because they’re two different timelines and we can see it when I watch the movie. But on the page, it could get confusing. So, it’s important to put that note out there for the reader.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Great. These are some pretty good scripts. So, congratulations to all of our writers here. I think you did a good job, I think you have promising careers ahead of you.

**Craig:** [chuckles]

**John:** But I really do strongly encourage our listeners to click through the links and take a look at the pages that we’re discussing and describing because that’s how you learn, is by reading scripts and reading good scripts is a great way to learn how some good writers’ work.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have time for maybe a question. I see one here from Johnny. Megana, can you ask us that one?

**Megana:** Johnny asks, “I have this question for John about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie inherited the chocolate factory from Wonka because of his good nature/personality/traits, honesty, kindness, compassion, etc. However, in the beginning, he bought the chocolate using the $10 bill on the street. He didn’t try to find the owner or turn it in. Does this behavior contradict his good nature?”

**John:** Craig, I have a question for you before we get into the actual script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If you find $10 on the street, do you have an ethical duty to find its owner?

**Craig:** How the hell are you going to find the owner?

**John:** That’s my question.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Money is fungible. I can’t tell you whose money that is. If I find a wallet, I’m going to find-

**Craig:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** -the owner of the wallet.

**Craig:** Of course. But if you find money on the street, there’s literally no way to identify who that came from. None. If somebody came rushing back around the street was like, “Oh, my God! Did you find a $10 bill on the street?” I’d say, “You know what? I did. Here it is.” Because there’s no way they would have known that it was a 10 or on the street if they weren’t there. But otherwise, no. That’s that’s a weird question.

**John:** It’s a strange question. But I wanted to point to Johnny to say, just go to the library, go to my johnaugust.com Library, and you can just read the script, that’s not actually what happens. And I realized like, “I’d never actually posted the scripts for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I posted the working scripts, and then a final script for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And just like our Aaron Sorkin script, I put in the change pages so people can see this was the white draft, here’s the blue pages, here’s the pink pages, and here’s the final script all together so you can see how this fit in. I also put in the memos that go out with those distributions so people can see like, “Oh, this is why these things are changed.” And this, again, back in the time of physical pages going out. I would put a list of, “This is the order of pages that you should see,” because sometimes it gets confusing. All those things are out there.

The reason why I point to the original script though is that doesn’t say like you won it because you were good. He says, “I invited five children to the factory, and the one who is least rotten would be the winner.” Charlie doesn’t have to be good, he just has to be the least rotten. It’s also important to share my version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory. Wonka is going through this existential crisis and self-doubt and all sorts of weird things are crashing down on him. He doesn’t really want to give up his factory. So, that’s the point of like, Wonka is protagonating over the course of this and really going through this crisis. He’s not even quite sure why he’s invited these kids in here. But it’s not because he wants to find a good-hearted kid, because that’s not even how Wonka is wired.

**Craig:** Other than getting everything wrong, Johnny’s question was great.

**John:** What Johnny’s question did, is it did motivate me to actually finally put up the scripts, which I’m not sure why I didn’t put up the scripts before, so people can read how Charlie and Chocolate Factory looked on the page. All right, I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** As promised, my One Cool Thing is a limited series that I enjoyed and really loved called Vigil. This is a British show that in the US is on Peacock. I guess this is on Peacock, you don’t even have to subscribe to Peacock. Even the free Peacock would have it. It’s created by Tom Edge. Personally, I follow him on Twitter. George Northy described it as “Mare of Easttown on a nuclear submarine.” And that’s actually probably what it is. You have a female police detective investigating a murder. It’s on this British nuclear submarine, but she has family custodial drama. There’s just a lot happening in her personal life [unintelligible 00:56:11] being a claustrophobic character on a submarine. I just really dug it. I love everything that has a submarine, but I really thought it worked especially well. The twists and turns were great. There’s that classic sense of Mare of Easttown. At a certain point, you suspect that every character you’ve seen on screen somehow was involved in these murders. That’s the show, and I really, really dug it.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My one cool thing this week, is the MIT Mystery Hunt, which you cannot– Currently, it’s a week later now when you’re hearing this or five days later, and it will surely have been solved by some group of incredibly brilliant people. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the MIT Mystery Hunt, John.

**John:** I don’t know what it is.

**Craig:** MIT Mystery Hunt has been going on for quite some time, maybe 20 years. It was always a physical hunt that took place on the MIT campus that involved solving lots and lots of puzzles, which would feed into meta puzzles. It’s like an incredibly complicated, long version of the thing that David Quang and I did at The Magic Castle that you attended.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It would take place over the course of a number of days. It would involve moving physically around the campus and finding a coin, and then you won. If you found the coin, you were the team that won. Over the years, it’s become more and more complicated. The last couple of years, it’s been virtual for obvious reasons, including this year.

One of the interesting things about the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the team that wins is responsible for creating the mystery hunt for the next year. When I tell you that this is like a full-time job, I’m not kidding. Last year, a team named Palindrome or Team Palindrome, they won, and they have won before, a couple of times, I think. Some of my friends are on it, including Dave Shukan and Mark Halpin. There’s also a guy that I’ve occasionally solved puzzles with named Eric Berlin, who I think was their captain. These folks, along with dozens of other people, this is a very large team, by all accounts created quite the hunt, and I think it legitimately took them all year to create this huge event that teams are currently working on and solving right now.

To give you a sense of how complicated it gets, the team last year, Galactic Trendsetters, they were the ones that won the year before us, they created the puzzle hunt last year, they literally created their own MMO for this event. Because you’re dealing with MIT people. They can do anything, anything. They’re coding. They created their own proprietary software for this. Anyway, it’s very exciting. I’m a decent solver. I’m just not at this level. I can solve the first tier of their puzzles, but the later tier, beyond me, definitely beyond me. It’s going on right now. I don’t think anyone’s won yet. But my guess is probably by– we’re recording on a Saturday. Probably by Sunday, there will be a winner. So, I just wanted to say one cool thing to Team Palindrome for creating all that working, so hard. It’s not a paid job. And then, congrats to everyone that solves it and participates in it. And of course, a special congratulations to the team that wins. I don’t know who they are yet.

**John:** I was going to say, I wonder why someone would do something like this when they aren’t getting paid for it, and all they could do is have some sense of satisfaction of how they made a thing, after– [crosstalk]

[laughter]

**Craig:** Well, we get to do this one hour a week. The sense I got was that this was practically a full-time job that required its own organizational structure and methods, and just review– I actually test solve quite a few puzzles for them. I think they were nice to only have me test solve the ones that I was capable of solving, but they were all really interesting. There are rafts of test solvers that are being worked on. They have this point system for evaluating. It’s incredibly com– it’s like producing a show. It’s something else. Great work on that, everyone. I’m hoping everyone’s enjoying it. I’m sure they are. Dave Shukan has told me that he will send me a collection of good ones that he thinks I [chuckles] can solve that I haven’t already solved. So, thanks, Dave. I appreciate that.

**John:** Fantastic. Also, it might be a good moment to shout out a congratulations to a friend of the show, David Kwong, who is now engaged.

**Craig:** That’s right. David Kwong is finally going to be an honest man.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** We’re incredibly happy for him.

**John:** Yeah, please don’t saw your wife in half. That’s all we’re asking.

**Craig:** Those are the people that are doing all the hard work on stage. You know that, right?

**John:** Yeah, of course. They’re the contortionists.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Brink. 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. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can also find the links to some of the scripts we talked about today. You’ll find the transcripts there. And you can sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, and they’re great. They have Stuart’s sense of softness. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. The hoodies are great. Now, Craig, did you pick up your hoodie while you’re in town or not?

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t think I did.

**John:** Okay. Well, we’ll ship it to you up in Calgary so you can keep warm.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you.

**John:** They turned out really well. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record, talking about the screenwriter equivalent of bootcamp. Until then, relax, stay chill. And we’ll see you next time on Scriptnotes. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[music]

**John:** Hey, Megana, we got a question from Andrew. Read the question that Andrew has?

**Megana:** Andrew asks, “I’ve heard many former or current soap opera actors refer to working on the soap as a bootcamp for them, mainly because of the production schedule and the need to get everything right the first time. Soap actors who find work elsewhere are praised for their ability to memorize and always get things right quickly. Is it the same for writers? Do writers who worked on soap operas have an insane work ethic and the ability to turn out content? If not, what is the writing equivalent of a writing boot camp?”

**John:** All right. That’s an interesting question. There obviously are. There are actors who started out soap opera actors who are now some of our best actors out there. Not everyone who works on a soap opera is going to be the best actor out there. But that sense of being able to show up, do the work, get it done, get it right the first time, memorize a bunch of lines, that all feels great and crucial. Craig, can you think of examples of high pressure or writing jobs where there’s so much quantity that you actually do pick up good skills?

**Craig:** Sure. I think I went through it, and it’s called advertising. Copywriting in advertising is pretty brutal. You have to do a lot of different kinds of writing, is to do a lot of idea making, which is important obviously. You have to talk a lot about how to get into something and what the purpose of something is, so you learn about purposefulness. And then you have to write a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of versions. Versions, and versions and versions. And they all have to fit to time. You’re dealing with a very limited amount of time to get your idea across, the purpose, the point, structure, beginning, middle, end. And then, you have to do it again, but for a shorter amount of time to do multiple versions of it. When you’re cutting things together for marketing like trailers and things, you need to start asking which of this stuff is emerging as important or salient or notable. And you also learn which movies are harder to market because they don’t know what they’re about either. All of that is pretty great bootcamp. You learn audio, you learn visual, you learn how to write, purpose, revisions, rewrites.

When you come out of it, you’re pretty well set up to go on to the next thing. I’m not recommending that people go seek it out as the basis for a screenwriting career, but having gone through it, I think boot camps is a pretty darn good term for it.

**John:** My freshman year of college, I was a journalism advertising major. My J54 was the basic news writing class I had to take. It was famously difficult class, it was exhausting class, because it was 8:00 in the morning, you’d show up and the professor say, “Okay, I need each of you to find a story on campus and it needs to be delivered in the next 90 minutes.” So, you’re like, “Argh.” You’re running around, trying to find something to write about. Get introduced, get notes, get back, sit down at a computer and write the story. And then, he would hover over you as you’re writing. It really made you focus in on just getting it done, getting the words out, thinking about that pyramid style, like the most important stuff at the top and being able to cut off the story at any point, and breaking some of your preciousness are the way that you can get in your own way with stuff. So, I had to learn how to write those kinds of news stories. And yeah, I did learn a lot there.

But that kind of news writing is different than longform journalism. When I would actually have the time to actually do more work and to do more than just reporting, but actually think about synthesizing and putting stuff together, those classes were much more useful in terms of my actual screenwriting, in terms of thinking about how I’m going to go from, “Here’s a bunch of ideas,” to, “Here is the way I’m going to structure and tell these ideas in a way that is interesting.” I think we have to have both. I just stayed doing news writing, it would be like when I was working at Tristar and having to write coverage on two scripts a day. It would burn a hole in your brain and limit you from doing other kind of writing.

**Craig:** That’s one of the downsides of working as a young person in something like advertising, is that the people who have remained, you can tell that they have been scarred and changed by it.

**John:** Yeah. [chuckles]

**Craig:** It’s because there is something brutal about writing that isn’t about the writing itself. That whatever you write is in service of a purpose. You learn to write with purpose, but only purpose. Whereas when you’re writing things to entertain people, there is its own intrinsic value. The point is watch this, not watch something else, or learn about something else. When are in your 20s and you’re working at these things, you often are working for people that are maybe a little roughed up. I remember meeting some wonderful people. It’s possible also that my experience and your experience was strongly informed by the year it was. The 90s, people were meaner in the 90s.

[laughter]

**Craig:** They really were. People were mean.

**John:** Well, let’s think about things that are closer to what we are actually doing for a living. People do write soap operas obviously, and soaps are covered by the WJ. There’s WJ writers who are writing soaps. I don’t see a lot of people who are moving from writing soaps into other things. It feels almost like game show writing. It’s a very unique specialty, because you’re just having to crank out so much and there’s just not time to do the kinds of other work you could be doing. But there’s obviously people write on network one-hours that are like procedural shows, and there’s a whole way procedural shows work. There’s TV sitcoms, which have a very different vibe in how it’s all geared up towards the weekly taping of the show. Those are very differing experiences, but you are on the hook for generating a lot of material each week. And it’s going to get you out of some of your preciousness about everything having to be perfect at all times.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can pick up skills in these things. Accountability is a big one. It would have been really hard as a 21- or 22-year-old to start writing a screenplay with no sense of accountability whatsoever. When you are paying your bills because of the stuff you’re writing, you learn accountability. You also learn frustration.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The frustration of being a writer, I don’t want to say it’s a good thing, but it’s a helpful thing that we get frustrated so frequently, because we get better and better at dealing with it. There are other categories of artists in our business that I don’t think have been exposed to the frustration we’ve been exposed to. It’s harder for them to deal with. We are weathered.

**John:** We’re talking about these early jobs as being you’re accountable for doing stuff, and you haven’t just turned stuff in. Schools can be accountability mechanisms, where basically you are having to turn stuff in and therefore having to get work done on a regular basis, and be able to show it to people and actually have a conversation with people, which could be great. But, Megana, I’m thinking about the writing groups that you’re a part of. A large part of that is accountability, where you’re getting better because you’re being forced to generate stuff for each week’s meeting.

**Megana:** Absolutely. I think the social pressure of it is really helpful too. I think you lose your preciousness really fast. One thing my writing group implemented, which has been helpful during the pandemic, is that you have to say what your goal is for the next session, and if you don’t meet that you have to contribute a certain amount into a pot that we use at the end of six months to take ourselves out. So, there’s a financial repercussion if you’re not meeting your goals.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**Megana:** That is helpful. It’s like, “Ah, okay, well, I’ll send something in that I feel unsure about because I don’t want to spend 20 bucks on missing this deadline.”

**Craig:** Hmm. You don’t want to give me that option of buying my way out of writing though.

[laughter]

**John:** Well, let’s talk about– Craig and I have been bought many times. I want to think about when we do weekly work, and I’m not doing as many weeklies as I used to, but for a time I was doing a fair number of weeklies, and it wasn’t very classically that pick two motto. Something could be fast or cheap, or good, and you’re going to pick two. They would pay me really good money. I was not cheap, but I was fast and I was good. It was my ability to recognize what they needed, to be able to deliver what they needed within this short period of time that they had. If I could write great pages but I couldn’t turn them in on time, that was not helpful to them. If I was fast and I wasn’t delivering what they needed, it wouldn’t have worked. So, I did learn a lot having to generate pages that could shoot tomorrow on that timeline.

**Craig:** Everybody has their own internal clock. If you find yourself in a situation where writing has to be done really quickly and really well in a short amount of time, it may not be for you. You may not have the ability to write well that quickly. You may not have the emotional ability to write that well that quickly. One of the things that happens when you’re working on a weekly, and it’s very similar to when you’re working on short term, impulse projects like advertising and so forth, is you’re also going to be getting the same amount of compressed reviewing and critiquing in the short amount of time. So, you work on something for a week, you’re readily expecting to be rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and hearing and talking and back and forth and back and forth for the week, it’s intense. And you need to be able to do all that, and have the emotional fortitude and the mental stamina, and your mind just has to work quickly. It’s not for everybody, it really isn’t.

I love doing weeklies because they actually don’t have the level of accountability that other things have. And I don’t mean to imply that I write a bunch of crap and walk away laughing. I care very much. But it’s focused, it’s so focused, I’m not responsible for the entire movie. I’m just trying to fix the first act. And then, I’m gone. I’m doing everything I can in that moment to help, but I am not raising this child. I’m just watching them like a grandparent for three days.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s more like you’re the emergency room doctor who’s keeping the patient alive and stabilized and getting them so they can walk out of the hospital, but you’re not responsible for like, “Oh, that other thing which we detected,” you’re not going to fix all those problems.

**Craig:** I did. There was one project I’m working on where I was like, “I’m not the emergency doctor trying to stabilize this patient. I am the undertaker just trying to get you into open casket funeral.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** That’s all I’m doing. This thing is dead. I just wanted the parents to be able to see it when you wheel it out there because right now, oh, my God.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve all been there. We’ve seen some of those movies and early things. I say yes, there are some bootcamp situations. Do you need to enroll or list yourself in a bootcamp situation? I would say to our friend who wrote in, Andrew, assess what you need. Is your problem that you’re just not getting stuff done? Is your problem accountability? Then, signing up for a class or getting into a writing group might be good interest in terms of getting you to generate more pages. If the problem’s that you’re just not generating a lot, that’s great. If you’re a person who’s generating a lot of stuff, it’s just not very good, maybe what you don’t need is a bootcamp. Maybe you just need some quality control. Maybe you need to slow down a little bit more and focus on refining some stuff, and getting some people to read you, who can really help talk you through what’s working, what’s not working, so you can actually polish rather than just generate the most you can generate.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

LINKS:

* [The CW is for sale!](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/the-cw-sale-nexstar-1235073465/)
* [Annie Hayes on Writing with an Invisible Illness](https://johnaugust.com/2022/writing-with-an-invisible-illness) on John’s blog
* [Being the Ricardos](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Being-The-Ricardos-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Aaron Sorkin
* [The Lost Daughter](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Lost-Daughter-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Maggie Gyllenhaal
* [The Mitchells vs. the Machines](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-Mitchells-Vs-The-Machines-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Mike Rianda And Jeff Rowe
* [Passing](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Passing-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Rebecca Hall
* [Belfast](https://focusfeaturesguilds2021.com/belfast/Belfast.pdf) by Kenneth Branagh
* [Tick, Tick, Boom](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Tick-Tick-Boom-Read-The-Screenplay.pdf) by Steven Levenson
* [Willy Wonka Script](https://johnaugust.com/library) at the johnaugust.com library!
* [Vigil](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11846996/) show
* [MIT Mystery Hunt 2022](http://puzzles.mit.edu/nexthunt.html)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by William Brink ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/533standard.mp3).

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).