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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/sometimes-you-need-a-montage).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 268 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we will be looking at montages and why they’re not the great evil they’re often made out to be. Plus, Final Draft has just released version 10.0 of their eponymous app. Will this be the one that makes Craig finally admit he’s loved them all along?

**Craig:** Yeah. What a mystery that is.

**John:** So, I think maybe like you’re the Darcy and she’s the Jane Bennet and like all this time she keeps showing up and you keep dismissing her, but maybe she’s really the one you’re meant for.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maybe you’re destined to end up with Final Draft.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m waiting for Final Draft to take off her glasses. And then I’ll realize–

**John:** Yeah, yeah. That’s it. It’s really the glasses that have been the whole problem.

**Craig:** I just never realized how beautiful your eyes were. [sings] If you leave, don’t look back. Please…

Oh boy. That’s ‘80s Craig. ‘80s Craig is coming out.

**John:** Don’t sing any more of that, or else we’re going to have to pay for lights.

**Craig:** God help us.

**John:** Last week on the program we discussed writers who lived and worked outside of Los Angeles and New York and London. And we had some great people who wrote in for that segment. We also had some people who didn’t fit into that segment, or wrote in late, so we have a bunch of those stories. They’re going to be up on the blog at johnaugust.com, so you can read those. And there’s a few audio ones, so we might cut those together as a bonus episode. We’ll sort of see how it works out. But thank you to everybody who wrote in and recorded yourself talking about your experiences working outside of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I like this new – I listened to our last podcast, by the way.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Let me sit down for a second.

**Craig:** Yeah, so that’s number one. And, you know, it’s not a bad show. I got to say. It’s just not bad. [laughs] After 260-some odd of these.

I like this new feature where people ask their questions as if they’re calling in.

**John:** Yeah, so we’re never going to be a Karina Longworth. We’re never going to be a You Must Remember This, which is like highly produced and written and just gorgeous and beautiful. But, we do our own thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, but Karina herself is highly produced and beautiful. We’re, you know, we’re just two guys.

**John:** Yeah. We’re just two slobs with Skype.

**Craig:** Just standing here asking for you to love us.

**John:** Exactly. One of the people who wrote in last week and sent stuff for us to look at was Rachael Speal. And she’s the one who sent us the pre-teen detective story. So, here’s what she wrote after she listened to the episode.

“As you mentioned, the solving the crime is not the real story. I thought of it more as a coming of age story about a girl living in the hood who is caught between two worlds: the world she lives in, where there’s little chance of success, and where she would like to be successful, etc. I’d call it a mashup of Princess and the Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, with some sharp humor.”

I don’t know either of those things, but great.

“I also thought to tie it into the unrest that’s happening with the police and the black community by giving her a brother who is readily harassed by the police. This would be another source of conflict since she wants to become one of the people who regularly harasses your community.”

That was Rachael’s take on this story that she sent in. Craig, what do you think of Rachael’s take?

**Craig:** I’ll be honest with you. I’m not a big fan of that. And here’s why. Putting aside that I also don’t know what a mashup of Princess and the Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete is. It sounds like you want there to be sharp humor. And it sounds like what you want to do is reposition this story into an inner city community and that’s fine. No problem with that.

Where I’m starting to get a little worried is you’re attempting to tack on a very serious social issue onto your teen-as-an-adult genre comedy. And those things don’t really live together very well. Either I’m meant to enjoy this as the kind of inevitably adorable child-solves-crimes type of story, or I’m meant to feel like this is a very real story about a very serious problem. I don’t know how you do both at the same time. I think one would just hurt the other.

**John:** If you look at her question though, she’s not saying comedy at any point. She’s saying coming of age story. So, I think there’s something that she’s getting at which is essentially the police basically shut her down saying, “No, no, nothing was stolen.” And she’s like, no, there really was. Basically her coming of age is basically recognizing that this system is not there to protect her and she has to take the law into her own hands.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t believe that story. That’s my problem. I don’t – there are certain things – whenever I go in and talk to a studio about something a lot of times they will have a project where they’re saying everything here except the idea is wrong. We don’t like the tone. We don’t even like the genre. We want something totally different.

The first question I ask is: what are the things that are inherent to the concept, that are baked in, that you can’t really walk away from because then you have essentially nothing? And to me if you have a 12-year-old girl solving crimes, I just don’t understand how that could possibly be serious. It could be coming of age. I could see that. But then if it’s coming of age, I don’t see how the coming of age can be intertwined in any way that takes her “job” seriously. You know, having a brother who is saying, “You’re becoming part of this institution that oppresses our people,” is not compatible with, “I’m 12 and I want to solve a crime.”

It just doesn’t – I don’t see how that connects. I just think that both things would end up undercutting each other and you’d end up with the dreaded fish with feathers.

**John:** I can definitely see that. There’s something about the 12-year-old girl that it’s not Home Alone, but there is essentially like she’s showing up the grown-ups. It always kind of feels like a comedy and it’s very hard to sort of push yourself completely away from what that is.

And so you’d have to make your world very, very, very dark in order for me to believe that this is what it is. And then I’m not sure I’m eager to sign on to seeing your movie.

**Craig:** I love a good coming of age story. I think that coming of age stories are wonderful because they treat children like the small adults that they are. The sheep movie that I’ve written, even though it’s a whodunit, is really a coming of age story. That was the thing that attracted me to it the most because sheep are grown animals, but they are childlike. So, it was interesting watching theoretical adults go through a coming of age story. And I think that this is an area that’s underserved. I’d love to see a coming of age story set in the inner city, set among child who are of color. That’s interesting.

And I don’t necessarily want to see that muddied by what is essentially a high concept hook. High concept immediately begins to take you one step away from reality. And so that’s my issue here. I just don’t know if these two flavors go together.

**John:** Yeah. When I was reading this aloud, I almost said Precious instead of Princess, and Precious is an example of an inner city movie where you have this heroine who is facing such insurmountable odds. And there’s nothing about them that is inherently comedic. It’s just grim kind of throughout. And there might be a way that Rachael could do this movie with – there’s a way Rachael could probably write this movie, but the centerpiece of that is probably not going to be this girl junior detective. I mean, there’s something about that that’s not really at the heart of that.

**Craig:** No. Because it’s trivializing. I mean, it’s hard to say. Any time children do the adult job, it’s kind of trivializing the adult job. And, you know, a movie that takes a stark blinder-less look at a serious problem can’t afford to then also present something else in a way that feels artificial. In any story in which a child does an adult job is almost certainly going to have that artifice to it.

By the way, we have to have Lee Daniels on the show, because Precious is one of my favorite movies. I’m obsessed with that movie.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Obsessed. It’s so – it is – that is such a great example. When we talk about specificity of voice, I can’t imagine anyone else in the world making that movie.

**John:** Absolutely true. Cool.

Our next topic is Austin Film Festival. So, Craig, you are headed to the Austin Film Festival, which is October 13 through 20, but there’s no Scriptnotes. Is that correct?

**Craig:** There is no live Scriptnotes. However, because you are far, far away, what I am going to do is try and pick up at least two – at least two – very cool interviews for us. Katie Dippold will certainly be one of them.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So I will get a wonderful interview with Katie Dippold, who wrote Ghostbusters and The Heat and Spy. And I’m going to also try and pick up – I might see if I can get Mike Weber and Scott Neustadter, which would be fun. I’m arguing with Scott Alexander of Alexander and Karaszewski about doing it. He’s like, no, it’s my weekend to have fun. I don’t care, Scott.

**John:** It could take an hour to do this.

**Craig:** You sit down and freaking talk to me. So, I’ll work on Scott, because he’s the greatest. And those two guys have had just the most remarkable career. They are very rare in that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything of theirs that’s bad.

**John:** They’re so good.

**Craig:** Ever. And they work in every different kind of genre. But I’ll be picking up at least a couple of good one-on-ones. So we’ll get something good out of it for sure.

**John:** Very, very good. And you’re going to be doing a couple different panels while you’re there, so people can see you at least live in person.

**Craig:** Again, I will be doing my seminar on structure, which is fun and entertaining and hopefully enlightening for you. It always seems to get positive feedback from the group there. And it’s actually one of the nice things about Austin is that they do ask people. So, I’m going to be doing that again, and that’s a good one. The current schedule seems to be incorrect. I think it was my mistake, because I misinformed them about when my flight was leaving.

So, currently it’s listed for Sunday. It won’t be Sunday. I believe it will be Saturday. I will be doing a panel with Lindsay Doran, which should be terrific. And that’s just Lindsay and I talking about what it’s like to work with a producer, what it’s like to work with a screenwriter. How things can go right, which is a rare topic for us. That will be a nice little intimate discussion which I would love for people to come see.

And lastly I will be one of the judges of the final pitch competition thing, to crown the ultimate winner of Austin’s Pitch Festival competition thing.

**John:** You are a brave, brave man, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yes. I will be the Simon Cowell of this thing. I should probably know the name of it if I’m going to be one of the final judges.

**John:** It’s the End of the Pitch Competition, basically.

**Craig:** I mean, I did – I don’t know if you ever did this at Austin. One year I judged the finals of the screenplay competition. Did you ever do that?

**John:** Okay. I think I’ve done the pitch competition. I’ve introduced the pitch competition final thing. As I recall, it was in a place that was like far too noisy and people were trying to pitch in like a crowded bar. It was basically the worst possible place for it. I’m sure it’s evolved from that point forward. But it’s a nighttime thing. You’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m actually looking forward to it, because it feels like more of a party frankly. I mean, I don’t know how many people are actually pitching to be in the finals, but I can’t imagine it’s too many. The pitches are really short. And then there’s a party. So, I’m down for the party.

**John:** Cool. If you are not able to join Craig in Austin, there’s a chance to get a little piece of the Austin experience. So, the Austin Film Festival does this PBS series called On Story where they sit down with the filmmakers and writers to talk about the movies that they’ve worked on. So, there’s a new book coming out, it’s coming out in October, so it’s out in time for the film festival. It’s screenwriters and filmmakers on their iconic films. So, basically they’ve transcribed all of the interviews from these different people, so they have Ron Howard, Callie Khouri, Jonathan Demme, Ted Tally, Jenny Lumet, Harold Ramis, and a bunch of other folks talking about it. So, there will be a link in the show notes if you want to see this book that they’ve put together of all of their interviews.

**Craig:** Those things are terrific, honestly, if you care about what we do.

**John:** Yeah. Which we do. So, let’s get to some questions from our listeners. And so once again we have audio. I’m so excited to have the audio now. First off we have Eric in Chicago. Here is what he said.

Eric in Chicago: Hi John and Craig. My wife and I are produced screenwriters with one feature released and a second one in preproduction. We’re considering what our next project should be, and we have a script that we wrote several years ago that we still love and would like to pursue producing. But, the catch is the director who asked us to write the script is also claiming ownership of the project because he asked us to write it for a professional athlete who was interested in getting into acting.

He only laid out the barest of premises and we took it from there, developing, outlining, and writing the screenplay. When the athlete lost interest, the director dropped the project and didn’t do anymore with it. We have no contract with anyone and no money ever changed hands. So, who owns the rights?

**John:** Craig, what do you think? Who owns the rights?

**Craig:** I do believe based on the circumstances Eric has laid out here that not only do he and his wife currently own the rights, I believe he and his wife always controlled the rights to this screenplay, because no money changed hands. There was no contract. Nobody ever asked Eric and his wife to sign a statement saying that this was a work-for-hire. This isn’t based on underlying material, as far as I can tell. He’s implying that this was a project that was for a professional athlete to act in, but wasn’t about that professional athlete’s life, so that professional athlete doesn’t even have a claim of life rights.

So essentially they wrote a screenplay that is original to them and they own the copyright 100% lock, stock, and two smoking barrels. The only issue for them is that, of course, the fact that you do own something doesn’t prevent somebody from coming along later and saying, “Wait, wait, wait.” I love that the director claimed ownership. I don’t think the director understands what the word claim or ownership means.

However, they may come back if you attempt to sell this and say, “Wait, wait, wait,” at which point it’s customary that they be granted some fake producing title and perhaps a little bit of money or something. But as far as I can tell, you guys own this completely.

**John:** I agree. I think in the issue of copyright, they’re pretty well set. There was no contract. Nothing changed hands. This director was asking them to write a script on spec, which is basically just like, hey, let’s take a leap of faith together. And then the director jumped off. They still own the script. So, it’s fine.

I agree with you that the reality of this gets made, that director is going to come back and he’s going to ask for something. It will end up being some sort of crazy producer credit. Whatever. You’ll deal with it when the time comes.

The only thing I would say in the general sense is it’s great that you had movies made and a second one in production, going back to your old stuff that you loved and kind of worked on a while back, it’s unlikely I think that you’re going to get that movie made. I would say don’t spend a tremendous percentage of your time trying to get that old movie made. Keep working on the next thing, and the next thing. Because trying to resurrect old, dead projects is just a giant time suck. And it’s not usually the best use of your time and resources.

**Craig:** That is a great, great point. And maybe the path of easiest and smartest resistance, if resistance can be smart, is if you’re working with somebody who is legitimate and they ask you if there’s any other things that you have. Sometimes they’ll say things like, “Do you have anything in your drawer?” And you can feel free to hand them that. And if they love it, then just say, okay, here’s the situation by the way. These are the facts. But, hey, if you want to figure out how to do this. Now it’s their problem. Now they want to make it. You’re not trying to do anything. And they will handle these other people for you.

And suddenly this problem just goes away.

**John:** I agree. Our next question from Octavia Barren Martin in Australia. And this is what she said when she wrote in.

Octavia in Australia: Hi John and Craig, as we say in Australia. I’m a screenwriting student here in Sidney, and I’m currently making my second flawed attempt at a screenplay. And I have a question about writing sex scenes. Now, I have a scene that’s not just an excuse for boobs. It’s, you know, instrumental to the plot, but I just want to know how much detail to include.

At the moment I’m kind of vacillating wildly between Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat and the deliberately glued together pages of the sexual reproduction manuals that my religious high school kept in their library. Which is best? Thank you. Big fan of the podcast. Cheers.

**John:** First off, I love Octavia’s voice. And I love the accent. And I’m not quite sure – I’m sure there are people who are actually professional specialists who can tell me what exactly it is that is so special about that Australian accent. It’s not a vocal fry, but it’s like the vocal fry that you hear Australian women particularly do. It’s just kind of great.

So, I just loved hearing that aloud. And if we read it aloud ourselves, we wouldn’t have any of that quality.

**Craig:** No. Australians manage to shove four or five vowels into the same space where Americans use one. Cry. Cryyyyyy. It’s like, Denyyyyy. Love it.

What a great question, by the way, and it took just a second for me to understand that Octavia was not asking about not five, not seven, but six scenes. No, no, no, not six scenes. Sex scenes. Sex. Sex scenes as we say here.

So, writing sex scenes should be an awkward experience for everyone involved. I mean, writing about sex is – what do they really say – it’s like, I don’t know, dancing about food or something. It’s just hard to do.

And I have written a couple. I don’t really like sex scenes to be honest with you. They take me out of movies. That’s just my personal opinion. I mean, there have been some terrific ones. But writing them is difficult and awkward. I think that the first question you have to ask, Octavia, is what is it that I want the audience to see.

If you’ve decided that nudity is important and explicit sexual activity is important, then be explicit. But then be explicit – my instinct is to be explicit in the way that the camera is explicit. That is to say not flowery. Not “erotic.” But presentational. Because I think that what you’re meaning to say is this is really happening. It is a real experience here. So, let me describe what’s happening.

So, I would probably go more for a “you are there” style and the reader understand that they’re watching a real sexual experience. If it’s meant to be sort of romantic and oh-ah, then I think you probably leave out the parts where you refer to nipples and butts and just speak a little bit more impressionistically. And then hopefully the filmmakers and the producers and everybody will ask for you to clarify, but they’ll get your intent from that.

**John:** I completely agree in terms of focusing on what we’re actually going to see on screen. That you don’t have to – this isn’t novel writing, so this isn’t where you have to create the actual feeling of what it would be like to be in that moment. This is really like what it would be like to be watching this moment happen in front of you.

The other thing I would say is that I think you and I are both thinking like this is like a 9 ½ Weeks sex scene, or there’s something where it’s a silent sex scene where it’s all about the sex. Like the first Terminator has a really great sex scene in it, and it’s just about the sex. There’s music playing, but it’s just about the sex.

But a lot of sex scenes are actually dialogue scenes. That may be really what you’re going to be focusing on here is like if there’s talking during it, if they’re moving back and forth between positions, but they’re having discussion. If it’s funny. If there’s anything that’s not just the visuals of like these two bodies intersecting, write that part, and then you don’t have to worry so much about all the scene description that’s taking up the space on the page to indicate that this is not just a one-eighth of a page quick sex scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like there’s two kinds of sex scenes fundamentally in movies where let’s call them two kinds of consensual sex scenes that you see in movies. One kind is the kind that is a realistic view of sexuality. People may be talking through it. There’s some kind of relationship point that’s occurring. Maybe character changes are happening. Revelations are occurring. It can be fumbling, awkward, adorable. I’m using all these things.

And then the other kind is two people are having sex and you could play Take My Breath Away over it and the camera could slowly drift away towards a fireplace. That second kind, that’s like 90% of sex scenes. So, the Terminator one is a really good sex scene. That definitely falls under the Take My Breath Away/cut to fireplace.

**John:** 100%. It’s the interlocking fingers. It’s all of those things that I think are now really clichés, but like it was the first time I saw it, so wow, that’s what sex looks like.

**Craig:** It’s so not at all what sex looks like.

**John:** It isn’t.

**Craig:** Sex looks like [laughs] – sex looks like the inside of my shut eyes while I’m trying to get rid of my shame.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s not true.

**John:** Maybe we won’t talk anymore about that.

**Craig:** No, my sex life is wonderful.

**John:** It’s all good. So, my advice for Octavia is just really look at what is the purpose of the sex scene, what are the – again, we’re going to say specificity, but what is it about this sex scene that is different from other sex scenes? And that may be your clue into how to make this sex scene less awkward for you to write and also more enjoyable for the reader to read.

**Craig:** Hey, Octavia.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah, Sexy Craig here. Sexy Craig. No faces. Just body parts. I don’t want to look at faces. Tell me more about that book.

**John:** [sighs] All right. Let’s get on to our big topics of the week.

**Craig:** That’s a big class sigh.

**John:** Let’s move onto our big topic of the week. So, we actually have two craft topics this week. I had the first one here. This is because, so I’m busy writing Arlo Finch, so I’m owing them my draft, so I’m cranking through pages and chapters.

So, most of Arlo Finch takes place in what we think about as scenes. So that is you have characters who are in one moment dealing with the things that are right there in front of them. And really most popular fiction that you read is written that way, where characters are in a space, they’re having conversation in that space. And then they are going to leave that space and time and move onto a new place.

When you’re writing that kind of stuff, you often have an omniscient narrator’s point of view, so you can fill in things from the past. You can sort of blur the edges of the present a little bit. But usually you’re kind of in one space in time.

But, that’s not always the way it is in prose fiction. And sometimes you’ll encounter in prose fiction things that have no relation to time or place. They’re not pinned to any one specific moment.

And so an example being Pride & Prejudice, going back to Darcy once again. Most of Pride & Prejudice takes place in scenes, where like you’re in a moment. You’re at this dance and she’s seeing these things happen in this time and place.

But here’s an example from kind of later in the book. She writes: “Nor did that day wear out her resentment. A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without scolding her, a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William or Lady Lucas without being rude, and many months were gone before she could at all forgive their daughter.”

So here in the course of two sentences, we’ve gone through months. And you’re filling in a bunch of details that happened, but there’s not like one scene. There’s not one moment that’s happening in those.

That’s prose fiction. But, I think the equivalent that we see in movies is montages, where we’re not so bound to one place and one time. So, I wanted to talk about what montages are and how we can use them effectively in screenwriting.

**Craig:** You know, there’s an interesting history to montages. The original use of the term montage was really just for editing. So, instead of showing two people in a oner talking and then one leaves the scene, the idea was that you could cut a close up of one person and then a close up of another inside of a master shot and essentially what we call coverage now. And they called this a montage.

And then an editor named Slavko Vorkapic, which may be the greatest name in film history.

**John:** That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Slavko Vorkapic came up with this other thing that they started called the Vorkapic which was what we now think of as the montage. A collage of scenes, often set to music, without dialogue, that sped through a longer amount of time in a dream-like way. And he was called upon, you know what we need here, we need a Vorkapic. Get Slavko Vorkapic to do this for us. And he would.

Over time, of course, this just became known as the montage. And unfortunately you and I, children of the ‘80s, ‘70s and ‘80s, we know that the montage became this overused cliché thing that happened in every action movie and every teen comedy where somebody had to get beautiful, get strong, get skilled. And so they did it within 45 seconds set to a terrible ‘80s song.

**John:** A power ballad usually.

**Craig:** Power ballad usually. You know, and “You’re the best, around.” I mean, that’s the ultimate, right? The Karate Kid 1. And–

**John:** But in the South Park Movie, “You Need a Montage.” I mean, it’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** “You need a montage.” And where it got absurd was that the montage became this kind of lame-o way of doing what’s supposed to be the best part of movies, which is watching the caterpillar turn into a butterfly was reduced down to some 40-second baloney song. And it was just unbelievable. But that’s just an abuse of montage. There are some terrific ways to use montage, and you still see them, it’s just they’re not quite so hammer to the face.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about sort of why montages get a knock in scripts. I think a lot of times you see a montage, if you see a montage in a movie, sometimes you can sense like, oh you know what, that really wasn’t supposed to be a montage. They were just trying to cut through a bunch of stuff. So, a bunch of little scenes got sort of chopped up into a montage that were never supposed to be a montage. So that’s one thing.

But a lot of times in a script level you’ll see the writer is just basically trying to cheat and rush through a bunch. They’re trying to get their page count down, so they’ll take a bunch of little small scenes and bullet point them as a montage when they’re not really a montage. They’re really just a bunch of small scenes.

The reason why line producers hate montages is they actually take a tremendous amount of time to shoot. Because like you’re going to this location, that location, this location, that location. Well, every time you’re going to a new location, that’s a tremendous expense of time and money for a production.

And so line producers will go through your script and they’ll see a montage and they’ll just shudder because they know that actually is a lot of work. A lot more work than it looks like in the script.

And then, of course, the real problem is they’re just such a cliché. And so so often you’ll see the training montage, the she gets beautiful montage, the whatever to get from one place to another place montage where we’ve seen it so many times that it’s painful to watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You really aren’t allowed anymore to have somebody train in a montage. That’s done. You can’t do it. It’s not that South Park killed it, but South Park simply sang the funeral song. It was already dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that you can’t do anymore. Nor can you do – and training montage isn’t just I’m getting strong, or I’m learning how to fight. It is also I’m changing my appearance. Or perhaps the worst of them all, I’m going to try on clothes.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Whilst my friend – my impotent friend – stands there nodding no, no, no at that hat. And you go, really? And she goes, “Uh-uh.”

**John:** Yeah. The curtains slide open and close.

**Craig:** Ugh. And it is lazy. And you’re right. They actually do take an enormous amount of time to do. I mean, we did a montage in – we’ve talked about this one, the one in Hangover 2, where the montage was really a representation of this kind of strange Zen dream recovered memory that Zach Galifianakis’s character was having in which he remembers in these flashy surreal glimpses the night before. Except that the way he did it, he remembered them as children.

So, we had to shoot the crazy montage twice. Once with our actors, and then once with children doing the same things. And talk about an enormous investment for about 90 seconds of movie. They are hard to do.

But that’s okay. I like it when – and we don’t think of them as montages, but when people – characters in movies are experiencing something in a way that is not quite rational. A dream. A memory. They are under the influence of some kind of substance. Then a montage actually makes sense because the montage is essentially presenting what a broken reality should look like.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, what they’re doing is they’re showing a different texture from the rest of your movie. So, if the rest of your movie is very straightforward, that montage can be really hallucinogenic and it feels different because it’s cut as a montage. That’s one of the reasons why it’s different.

Another example of going to a different texture, like you think back to The Social Network. And that’s a very talky, talky, talky movie. But there’s one real montage in that which is this Henley Regatta scene, where Fincher shoots this boat race as if it’s just some giant sporting event. And it really sticks out and really lets you sort of catch your breath because it’s just very different from the rest of that movie.

The opposite can be true in something like Witness. And so Witness, you know there’s police procedural, there’s thriller, there’s drama, but then they get to this montage where they’re building a barn and it’s happy. It’s a joyous moment. And it sticks out because, well, it’s a montage, and it’s also a very different tone.

And so when you’re shifting textures, that’s often a great use of a montage.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it follows a certain rule, I think, both of those examples, which is a good rule for you at home to apply to your own potential montage. Is there some kind of interesting information I might be losing if I don’t show this in a montage? I think the answer for both the Regatta and the barn raising is, no.

Then another question is do I feel like I am cheating reality a bit here by showing this in a montage. And, again, I think the answer is no. A race, like a regatta, shows rowers straining to push a boat in water. That will not change. Barn-raising is cutting wood, nailing it together, and raising it. That’s not going to change.

Somebody learning karate, that’s going to change. That’s a long process. It doesn’t happen in an hour. It happens over months. Or years. So, you don’t – and Karate Kid is the greatest movie. It gets a pass. I mean, it’s from the ‘80s and it’s wonderful. But you don’t feel like, ugh, you know, like in real life it takes a year to raise a barn. It doesn’t. It probably takes about a day or two. It’s fine.

So, if you can answer those questions and feel like you’re on safe ground there, then sometimes you want to do a montage. You want to give the audience a break and let music give the experience of pure emotion, which is what music does best, as opposed to a kind of deliberate instigation of emotion which is what dialogue does best.

**John:** Absolutely. The thing I want to stress about great montages is they really serve the function of scenes. And what do I mean by a scene? Well, scenes have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a reason for why they’re there and they have characters in one set of circumstances at the beginning and a different set of circumstances at the end.

And so as long as your montages are doing that process of taking characters from one place to another place, or taking the viewer from one place to another place, that’s probably going to be an effective montage. Or at least it’s a reason for trying a montage.

Look at is this the best way to tell this piece of your story? Are you trying to show a multi-step process? Are you trying to show the effects of something that would be really hard to do otherwise? And one of the things I’ve noticed about montages is that they’re a terrible place to introduce new characters, but they’re actually a great place to sort of stick in new characters who you don’t want the audience to care about.

Any character who sort of shows up in the middle of a montage, they’re sort of immediately discounted. And so we know like, you know what, I don’t have to worry about that person. That person is never going to show up again in an important way.

So, that random cop who shows up? Forget about him. You’re never going to see him again. We don’t need to know his name. It’s all going to be fine. And that’s actually a very useful thing when you’re showing the effects of something happening, so like the cyclone is tearing through the city, you can bring in a brand new character there and have them do something and we don’t care to ever see them again. That’s one of the nice things about montages is that the audience knows not to worry about people who show up while music is playing and big things are flying around.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. There’s always that – in disaster movies you’ll see some disaster hitting some city where our heroes are not. And an old lady is running scared. And we see her face and she just stands in for like everyone who lives in India is this lady. And, yes, you’re right. It’s like, okay, the montage is attempting to make this vaguely human. Something that montages are not very good at.

One thing to think about if you are on the edge of the knife of this decision, montage or not, is to ask is there one scene that could encompass a moment of change or revelation that would change someone profoundly and permanently. Because if there is, if you can do it in one fascinating moment, if it’s the kind of thing that could happen in one fascinating moment, you owe it to yourself to try that first. See if you can find that before you go to montage, because the very nature of montage is to suggest no one moment is particularly important. But rather there’s this normal progression of moments that get you from A to B.

**John:** Yup. It’s worth remembering that in the early days of cinema when a character was traveling from point A to point B, a character was traveling from New York to Paris, you would see them drive to the airport, get on a plane, and fly to Paris. You would see the Eiffel Tower. You would see them get in another Taxi and take them to the hotel.

Now we just cut to the hotel in Paris. And we sort of get past that. We sort of shorthanded the montage so we don’t see that. So always ask yourself: if this is a place where we normally would have a montage for this thing, what is the possibility of just doing the blunt cut where we just jump ahead to this new thing where we see the character already in a completely different outfit and a completely different hairstyle and everything has changed. Is there a way the audience can catch up with you that’s going to be kind of worth it to have made that really aggressive jump in time? Sometimes there is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you have in Star Wars this moment that could have easily been supplanted by a montage where Obi-Wan is training. And there’s another one actually in Empire Strikes Back, an even longer training sequence. And both of those could have been montaged, and people would have been like what the heck – there’s a montage in the middle of Star Wars? What’s going on?

No, because the truth is you can find those key moments. In Star Wars, the key moment is I’m going to cover your eyes. You have to hit this thing. I can’t do it. Well, you’re going to have to figure out how to do it. And in Empire Strikes Back, it was lifting the X-Wing fighter out of the swamp.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so instead of doing this whole long thing, there is a moment. If you can find a moment, dump the ‘tage.

**John:** Dump the ‘tage. Let’s wrap this up by talking about sort of how you portray montages actually on the page. And so you’ll see different ways of doing it. I’m not usually a big fan of the asterisk thing, because that’s just honestly cheating. Like you’re trying to cram way too much in there too quickly. Especially if you’re trying to move between different locations, just doing like little starred asterisks. That’s no Bueno for me.

But, what I will often see is short scene headers, a single line. We talked through the Ocean’s 11 montage which sort of goes through a bunch of different places as one of the heists is happening. That’s a terrifically well-formatted thing where it’s not sort of building out full scenes for those, but it’s giving you the feeling for what it’s going to be like to watch that.

No matter how you format it, just make sure it feels like it’s accurate to what it would feel like in the theater watching it on the screen. That’s the most crucial thing. That you’re not short-changing the time or the actual sort of weight of the moments in trying to get it down on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to just jam this thick list in there. But, you know, there is a middle ground, I think, between breaking out every single location. You can sort of – I think it’s fair to say, all right, I’m going to do something called INT/EXT Various Montage. But if each thing is clearly its own paragraph and you’re not shoving stuff together or overdoing it and really giving it its space so it’s clear to read, I think that that’s an acceptable middle ground.

But, you just have to do it in such a way that you don’t feel like you’re compressing your montage down on the page to – now I’m just cheating on page count. You know, anything that feels like that is that.

**John:** It is that. Also in favor of getting rid of the scene headers is that sometimes that is actually more true to how it’s really going to feel. Like you’re not really establishing a new location. You’re just in it and you’re moving through it. So, I will do the INT/EXT Various, but when it comes time for production as long as those things are individual paragraphs those will each get their own scene numbers. It will all be fine.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s talk about Craig’s most exciting news of the week, which is that Final Draft 10 has now shipped. It’s available for people to download. You can download a trial version, which is what Craig and I did this morning.

**Craig:** No, no, I paid for it.

**John:** You paid for it?

**Craig:** I’ll tell you why.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Because I’m a paying customer. So I can say whatever I damn well please.

**John:** Oh, good stuff. I just did the trial version. So, here are sort of my quick impressions. Craig’s quick impressions. If you want to know more about our history with Final Draft, you can go back and listen to The One with the Guys from Final Draft, which was one of our sort of iconic episodes where the people who run Final Draft came and talked with us about their app and sort of their frustrations with us.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** What I’ll say that I liked about it, because you should always start with what worked. If you’re giving notes on a script, you start with what worked. And here is what worked about it for me.

I think their new app icon is much, much better.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on. Let’s stop right there. That tells us a lot.

**John:** It does tell us a lot. I would say actually 80% of the icons in the app are significantly improved. And like this sounds like I’m [unintelligible] praise, but I think the icons were so horrible in the previous builds that they actually are noticeably better.

**Craig:** Well, just to point out, the upgrade costs $80. So, so far for $80 you’ve gotten better icons.

**John:** Better icons.

**Craig:** Okay. And?

**John:** I don’t have a lot else to pose in this initial thing. So, there are a lot of new features and we’ll talk through the new features. And some people might say like, oh, well that’s worth my $80. I’m not sure that it’s worth it for $80 for me.

What I found as I used it with you, and also as I used it more, is wow this thing is so cluttered. And so we’re going to talk about collaboration which was just a mess for cluttering, but I took screenshots of Final Draft on my 13-inch MacBook that I’m using here in Paris and I could see half a page of actual screenplay because there was so much on the screen. There’s all these ribbons and jewel bars and stuff. And you can hide some of them, but you can’t hide all of them.

So I took a screenshot of that, and then I took a screenshot in what I actually use, which is Highland, to show the difference between these apps and their approaches. It’s like someone in Final Draft’s family was killed by white space and they are just determined to eliminate all white space they can possibly see. Every square inch of the screen is filled with some doo-dad.

**Craig:** Hello white space. You killed my father. [laughs] Prepare to die. Yeah, this is not good. And I swear to you, I opened it up thinking to myself, well, let’s be as fair as I can. They have somewhat predictably done what they can do. Not what they should do, but what they can do. The easiest thing for them to do is keep their underlying code and just slap a bunch of crap on top of it. This is cluttered.

And most of the crap they’ve slapped on top of it is either useless or doesn’t work well. What they seemingly still cannot do is fix simple things like dual dialogue, which is still a broken implementation in Final Draft. That’s apparently rocket science to them.

Their crap that they’ve given you is all crap that swims in the same filthy water as guru books and structure baloney. Story maps. And story storms. And structure fields. And all this baloney that’s basically just useless graphical representations of slug lines. It’s absolutely useless.

**John:** So, let’s talk through the bullet points of their new features. Basically when you go to their “What’s New in Final Draft 10,” these are the things they’re singling out. So we’ll just talk through what they actually are so people know what they are.

The first is that there’s a horizontal stripe at the top of the screen which depicts page 0 to 120 of your script. And you can see sort of the scenes laid out in there. I thought this was actually a really interesting idea. I think the ability to get an overview of your whole script that way was fascinating. I thought it was a really bad implementation of it. It took me a very long time to realize you had to double click to get to a place in there. I don’t know why you double click to get to a place.

It’s called Story Map. I would call it Story Stripe, but that’s fine. That’s me. But what’s weird is that it assumes that all scripts should be about 120 pages. And so what I opened up was this TV pilot I wrote, which is 60 pages. So it showed the back half of it as being like black. Like I need to write more pages, I guess.

**Craig:** God. I mean, how dumb.

**John:** I couldn’t find a way to get rid of this stripe which was taking up an extra three-quarters of an inch of my screen. And so I just clicked things randomly. I look through the menus. View and Hide. It turns out it’s called Story Map and there’s an icon on the toolbar to do it, but it’s not toggle kind of icon. It doesn’t show you that it’s engaged or not. So, you click it once to show it, and click it again to hide it, but there’s not clear way that that’s how you do it.

So, I’m not a fan of the Story Map.

**Craig:** No. And things like not indicating whether a toggle is on or off or calling something Story Map when in fact it is a Story Stripe and of minimal value – honestly, I find minimal value. And then doing weird things like locking it to 120 pages indicates just a lack of taste. I don’t know how else to put it. There’s no taste behind this. It’s just ridiculous quasi-functions that fulfill marketing checkboxes. But there’s nothing of value, inherent substance there, that makes my life easier as a writer. Nothing.

They just wanted to be able to say, “We’re shipping something with a Story Map. Do you have a problem writing screenplays? Are you not yet making a million dollars a year as a screenwriter? Don’t worry. We have Story Map. That’s the thing that you’re missing. A stripe across the top of your screen with little gray blobs showing you were slug lines are.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** There’s also a Beat Board, which is sort of like the Index Cards.

**Craig:** [laughs] Here we go again. Beat Board.

**John:** You can draw these little boxes and put text in them and kind of arrange them. I didn’t find it especially useful. You can also split-screen to have that on one side and your text on the other side to make your screen even smaller. I really had a hard time envisioning anyone using this professionally, because almost any other tool you might pick to do that, be it paper, or be it some other application devoted to outlining – like Workflowy, what we use for our notes – would be a much better choice for really almost anything. So, I found that frustrating.

What I was most curious to try was collaboration. So that’s why I had you download it, and why we played with it. So, once upon a time, Final Draft had this thing called Collabo-Writer, which I don’t know anybody who really used, but they always billed it as a feature. It kind of went away. This is it back. It wasn’t at all what I thought I was going to be getting. Craig?

**Craig:** Well, there is a current application of this. A software called WriterDuet which is web-based but also desktop based. It allows for real-time collaboration between people over separated computers and IP and all that stuff. Very similar to the way Google Docs works.

So, if you and I both control a Google Doc, or for instance this Workflowy document online, we can both be editing at the same time. We can annotate who changed what and so on.

Final Draft appears to have caught up to everyone else’s terrible version of their good idea. I don’t know how else to put it. Collaboration works as follows: you start a document and then you invite someone to collaborate. That pulls up a code. That person then goes into Final Draft, says I want to join a collaboration, I enter the code. I am then brought, ugh, to a screen that is that document, almost completely obscured by an un-closable window. That is a chat window with my collaborator. And in that chat window, you and I can talk to each other, like the way you would with iChat or something, although oddly they don’t have word wrap in their text entry, so that’s something that I think was solved 40 years ago by UNIVAC, but somehow these guys haven’t mastered it.

**John:** Yeah. We should say that by word wrap we mean literally if I type longer than one line, the first line disappears, and so I can’t see what was up there.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s just madness. That’s not even like, oh, we have a problem with our beta. That’s freaking alpha. That’s just ridiculous. And, again, a sign of just no taste or concern.

Regardless, here’s the biggest problem of them all. And this is really where they should have just said, “You know what, everyone? We should be in the business of going out of business. Let’s just close the doors because we’re terrible at this.”

This problem of synchronous editing that everyone else has solved continues to elude Final Draft. Their solution is one of you can edit the document at a time. And then if the other one wants to make a change, their cowriter needs to press a button that relinquishes command of the document and now you get command of the document.

And when I say you have no command, I mean you can’t even put a cursor or highlight a word. You cannot impact the document if you are not the editing member of the collaboration team at that time. That is absurd.

**John:** Yeah. So, honestly, the built in tools that are on every Macintosh would do a better job of sharing a document. Of honestly sharing this Final Draft 10 document than the actual built-in tools of Final Draft 10. So, if we wanted to edit this document together, what we should do is just share screens. Just use the screen sharing thing that’s built into every Macintosh.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** And just use messages to do it, because then you could at least put the window behind the screen. It was so frustrating that this is how they chose to implement it. And so while we were doing this, I said like, oh Craig, I’m going to save the transcript of this so we could post it, but then I couldn’t save the transcript. And once I closed the window, it was gone forever.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course. Which is important for writers who are collaborating. You know, when they’re sharing ideas and stuff, it’s important that they do so in a way that cannot be saved. Because as you know, oh, whatever. You know what, if you want to save something, if it’s that important, put it in the Beat Board. The Beat Board, which literally every of these – these functions are all available, done better, by other people for free.

And so they bundled together poor implementations of other people’s work and they’re charging you $80 for it. There is literally no reason, none, to buy this upgrade, as far as I can tell. If they had – first of all, $80 for an upgrade, it should be a major upgrade. We’ve had this problem before. That’s just off of the rest of the world’s idea of what an upgrade cost should be. This should, I don’t know, it should be a $20 upgrade. It really feels like that. If.

But, there’s no reason. I mean, they didn’t change the file format, so why would anybody upgrade?

**John:** I don’t know why people would upgrade. I think the one thing that was a new feature which, like Aline uses on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I know they will write alternate dialogue, and then when they put it up on the big board and Aline is doing the final pass they will vote on the dialogue. So that’s a thing she might actually use this feature.

But you know what you can also do for alternate dialogue? In Highland you put it in brackets. In any other application, just put it in parenthesis and show the alternate dialogue right there. You’re going to make your decision. So, Final Draft lets you pick one of your alternate dialogues to actually be in the PDF or in the thing, but that’s not so useful. That’s not a big marquee feature for a major upgrade.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. And this one is the one that actually angers me the most. Because I like it, and I know I like it because it was my idea. I had the idea to give a screenwriter the ability to write alternate lines but hide them and so just put an icon next to a line that says, okay, there’s four versions of this and you can somehow scroll through them one-by-one as opposed to seeing them all on a list, just to keep the page count and the page size realistic.

And so I called up Kent Tessman who is the developer of Fade In Pro. And he went ahead and implemented that. And charged, by the way, you know what the big charge for that upgrade was? Zero dollars. And he implemented it in a very elegant way where you would select, okay, I’m going to add an alternate to this line, and then you would start typing that alternate and a little number would appear with two arrows on either side of it. 1, 2, 3, 4. And you would just click through the arrows to see the various versions.

Well guess what just should up in Final Draft? Alternate lines that work exactly the same way, even with the little number and the arrows. Wow. Wow. So that’s the one cool thing they did wasn’t even their idea and another developer did it who is an independent developer, sole proprietor, and they – I am saying that it appears to me as the layman that they ripped him off. That’s how it appears to me.

**John:** I can see that being a very probable situation. What I do want to say about – this is not really sort of full in defense of Final Draft, but in acknowledging the reality of the situation, Fade In used a lot of what Final Draft has built in terms of the structure of how the app works. Down to the point where many of the dialogue boxes are nearly identical. So, I fully want to give credit for Kent for implanting your alternate dialogue idea, but I also want to acknowledge that Fade In would not look like Fade In if Final Draft didn’t already exist.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** Is that fair?

**Craig:** It is fair. And, in fact, I have great praise – great praise – for a program called Final Draft from 15 years ago, when it seemed like they were still innovating and the code was current and they were really the best option available for the price. Those days are so long gone. So long gone.

It still appears to me to be bloatware. It still appears to be ugly. They are adding functionality that isn’t actually functionality. It’s simply poorly done support for marketing buzzwords. You can see how they continue to concentrate entirely on the market that they say they aren’t concentrating on. They claim to be the industry standard. They are concentrating entirely on suckering in people who are not in the industry by promising them useless tools that will help them get into the industry. They will not.

And, lastly, and this is the most important thing of all. When Final Draft says they are the industry standard, that is insane. The industry standard is PDF. Everyone – everyone – sends and reads screenplays of all kinds on PDF. No one gets what I would call the source word processing file, whether it is a FDX, or an FDR from Fade In Pro, or a Highland file. Nobody gets that.

So, yes, there are people that use the raw files for scheduling and so forth, which is why basically I think every major software, WriterDuet, and so on and so forth, they all import and export FDX files. They are not the industry standard of anything as far as I’m concerned, except bilking people for poorly written, poorly done, highly marketed software.

**John:** And that is our first take on Final Draft 10.

**Craig:** [laughs] I wonder if they’ll come back. I mean, I hope they do. Honestly, because I enjoyed my conversation with Marc Madnick. I don’t he was a great representative or ambassador for his own company, which is probably why I would love to talk to him again, because I would love to hear him sort of explain some of this stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s where I come down with Final Draft 10. I think if you wanted to buy Final Draft, this is the probably better version than Final Draft 9 to buy. So, for whatever reason you’re stuck in your head that you’re going to buy Final Draft, then Final Draft 10 is going to be a better bet than Final Draft 9. It looks better. Probably, I think, some of it runs better. Friends who have been beta testing say it’s less flaky. It’s certainly, you know, it doesn’t hurt my eyes to quite the same degree. It’s like I can’t see very much of the screen. So, there’s that.

**Craig:** [laughs] It doesn’t hurt my eyes as much. They should put that on the cover of the box.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. You know, they always have like J.J. Abrams or James Cameron saying like, “It’s the industry standard.” So, John August, “It doesn’t hurt my eyes as previous versions.” That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** The parts that I can see.

**John:** We left off four little bullet points. They have these things called Structure Points. They’re like little markers that show you where your act breaks are in your Story Map.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Great. Headers and footers, you can now put the file name in there, which is useful. That would take Nima, our coder, about 30 seconds to implement in any other application. But great.

Scene numbering. They now let you number – so if you’re adding a new scene between scene 8 and scene 9, that could either be scene 8A or scene A9, depending on what numbering scheme you’re using. You can choose between those two numbering schemes. Great.

**Craig:** I thought they already had that. In my end, both Final Draft and Fade In Pro both had the ability. Because one of them is more of a UK convention. I think they already had this.

**John:** The last time I had to do production revisions, and realistically every time I had to do production revisions, I end up manually numbering those things anyway because it’s always so strangely complicated. And you really want to do whatever the AD tells you to do.

Finally, the revisions dialogue box is even more complicated than before. Every time I have to do a set of revisions, and like on Big Fish, I did all of Big Fish the Musical on Final Draft because I started in there and there was just really no way to get out of it. But every time I did it, and I had to open that dialogue box, I’m like oh my god, how do you – like figuring out how you build the new draft and what you want to have revised is just such chaos.

And they added some new stuff there, so god bless you.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now you can bold some of your revisions which I urge people to never do.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not a good idea.

**Craig:** That’s just crazy. And just so you know why. I’m a believer that you should have options when it comes to how you designate what your revision – in fact, that’s another thing. I called Kent and I’m like, hey, I don’t want to just have to use an asterisk to show revisions. By revision level, I want the ability to say I want double asterisks, or I want an exclamation point. Because sometimes that does come in useful for people who are looking at multiple revisions at once to see, okay, that came first, and then that came.

But, bolding – like italics – is something that we use in the actual text of the document to imply creative information. You should never, ever use bolding or italicizing to indicate revisions. That is a terrible idea.

**John:** Yeah. You should not do that.

**Craig:** Well, but the good news is they’ve given you the chance to do it.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the one thing we know for sure is that they are not in the business of going out of business.

**John:** 100%. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I just finished reading. It’s called Invasive. It’s by Chuck Wendig who is a screenwriter and a novelist who has written a bunch of Star Wars books and other books. He’s also a really good writer about writing. And so I’ve been following his Twitter feed and looking at his blog. He always has just great advice for writers. And so I’d never actually read one of his books, so I read one of his books. Invasive. It’s quite good.

It is a thriller in sort of the Michael Crichton science thriller way where this is about a developed species of invasive ants, these sort of killer ants that break loose and cause havoc. It was well done. And it was fun to read something that feels like a movie, but done as a book. And it was fun to sort of see what that looks like on the page versus how it would be in a movie.

This is a story with a sort of Clarice Starling kind of FBI consultant protagonist and a lot of ants. It’s very squirmy. So I would recommend Invasive by Chuck Wendig.

**Craig:** That does sound cool. My One Cool Thing was really our One Cool Thing. We were just talking about it. A lot of people sent us this video on Twitter. The Marvel Symphonic Universe. This is a video done by Brian Satterwhite, Taylor Ramos, and Tony Zhou who was, I believe, also the guy that did that visual comedy video that we talked about a while ago. And this seems like this is kind of his thing to do.

Currently, 2.6 million views on the YouTube.

**John:** So they really need Scriptnotes to push it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I’m not sure this is a cool thing. I can’t quite tell. But it’s an interesting thing at the very least. Essentially, they ask people on the street in Vancouver, hey, off the top of your head can you sing the theme from Star Wars, and everyone can. Can you sing the theme from James Bond? Everyone can. Can you sing the theme from Harry Potter, and everyone can.

Then they say, “Can you sing any theme from a Marvel film?” And the answer is no. Which was interesting to me because I thought, oh, yeah, that’s something I didn’t realize I didn’t know, but I don’t know any of those. Now, the video then kind of extends this into a critique. And I’m not sure the critique is valid.

I love movie music and I love wonderful themes. I’m not sure it’s valid to just say these Marvel movies have a certain style of music and it’s not at all as good as John Williams. Well, what is? It’s also hard to argue with their choice of style for music because it seems to be working for them and their fans.

But, at least it’s interesting in the sense that I never really thought about the nature of how Marvel uses music in their movies, which is very much closer to sound design than it is to actual classic melodic score.

**John:** Yeah. I liked the questions that they were asking. I wasn’t so delighted with the answers they were trying to give. The questions were, of course, why can’t you remember a Marvel theme. And what is the role of temp music in effecting sort of the final music in a movie? So, temp music has become pervasive and to what degree are our choices in temp music really dictating what the final thing is going to sound like?

And I thought that was interesting. The final thing is like melody has kind of disappeared in our movies for better or for worse. And so we think of those great movies with John Williams themes and they’re very prominently used. And the reason why you can remember them is because they had repetition. Andrew Lippa, a friend, says you know what the key is to memorable songs? Repetition.

Repetition is the key to memorable songs. You have to repeat things again and again and people will eventually hear that melody again and they’ll expect the melody because you’re repeating it. You’ve got to keep repeating the song again, and again, and again. And that’s absolutely true.

And so the reason why we remember Star Wars, the reason why we remember the Harry Potter theme is because those are used throughout the movies consistently. And Marvel has not chosen to do that. And that’s, for better or for worse, those movies don’t have a musical signature that tells you that that’s what they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree. And I love that, Harry Potter in particular, I love the way that they did make a choice to use that wonderful John Williams theme and allow the tone of their movies to breathe, to give it room to be played over, and over, and over. That in and of itself is a choice.

When you’re making a kind of frantic, high octane action-adventure, a little harder to do. Not impossible. You know, Terminator has a very memorable theme.

**John:** [Hums]

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Which one are you thinking of?

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m just thinking of [hums].

**John:** I think they’re both themes from Terminator.

**Craig:** Oh really? I don’t know that first one. I just know the percussive one. [hums] And so that was a perfect theme for that movie because that movie was about the relentless march of action as instigated by a robot. And [hums] is not a melody per se. I don’t remember the melody. I just remember that percussive rhythm thing.

And, yeah, I can see how movies that are about that then take that to the extreme. And everything becomes very rhythmic. Sometimes when I’m writing an action sequence, in order to kind of get my blood flowing I’ll put on some Hans Zimmer from The Dark Knight. And it helps. It’s not melodic. It’s percussive. Even as melody is playing, it’s the rhythmic percussive nature of it that kind of gets me going. But, I prefer the Danny Elfman theme from the Tim Burton Batman. That’s a wonderful – and that was repeated over and over. And I think everybody can hum – you can hum that one, right?

**John:** I’m not sure I can.

**Craig:** [hums]

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** That one, right?

**John:** That one.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was wonderful. I like that. But, you see, Batman has evolved and there’s no space for that anymore. Now we need [hums]. That’s basically the theme to the Nolan Batman. [hums]

So, it’s choices right? I feel like I had the same issue last time with Tony which is that he makes these really – I know he’s working with a couple other people here. He makes really interesting observations but is coating them in a jacket of judgment that I don’t think is deserved.

**John:** Yup. I would agree.

And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. We are edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro, which is very, very much on theme is by Rajesh Naroth. I should also say that in addition to Harry Potter being a great movie to see, I went to the Universal Studios Harry Potter thing before I left for Paris. It’s really great. Craig, have you been there yet?

**Craig:** I was at the one in Orlando a number of years ago. The OG.

**John:** Similar but delicious.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s fantastic. They do a great job.

**John:** So, if you have an outro for our show, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. On Instagram I’m also @johnaugust, so you can see all of my photos from Paris if you’re curious on that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where we will have some of the bonus stuff from people who wrote in about getting work while they’re outside of Los Angeles, New York, or London.

You’ll also find our transcripts there. Transcripts are going to be delayed about two weeks now, because the guy who is doing the transcripts is taking a vacation. He deserves a vacation. So, if transcripts are delayed, that’s why. Because we are quality employers who let their people take vacations.

You can find the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. And also on the USB drives which are now back in stock at the store at johnaugust.com.

And that’s our show for this week. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Starting a Screenwriting Career Outside of LA, New York or London](http://johnaugust.com/2016/starting-a-screenwriting-career-outside-of-la-or-new-york-or-london)
* [AFF Pitch Contest](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/conference/pitch-competition/)
* [On Story Book](http://austinfilmfestival.com/product/book-on-story-screenwriters-and-filmmakers-on-their-iconic-films/)
* [The Henley Regatta in The Social Network](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QetnuKbo1XI)
* [Witness Barn Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7kLSk9-TRg)
* [Invasive by Chuck Wendig](http://amzn.to/2cpgsKn)
* [The Marvel Symphonic Universe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs)
* [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)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_268.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/sexy-but-doesnt-know-it).

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

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

**John:** And this Episode 237 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we are going to look at how you introduce characters in a screenplay and how to avoid being mocked on a Twitter feed for it.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We’ll also discuss writing two projects at once and answer a bunch of follow-up questions.

So Craig, we are a little bit late starting because you were just writing on a script and asked for five more minutes. So in those five more minutes, did you finish the scene you were working on?

**Craig:** I did. It’s such a weird feeling when you — it’s so hard to start writing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So then when you’re writing and then you’re like, “I know what to do. I’m getting there. I’m just,” you know, you’re inside of a line or whatever, and you know you’ve got three more lines and you know how it ends, and you just — you can’t stop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s all about inertia.

**John:** Yeah. It is mostly about inertia. Writing is inertia.

Yesterday, I was doing some kind of non-writing work. I was like pasting some stuff from different things, getting some documents ready, and sort of accidentally ended up writing a scene. It was just delightful. It’s like, “Oh, well, I’m kind of in this. That seems like the dialogue. I’ll just write the dialogue.” And boom, a scene is done.

**Craig:** Isn’t it amazing how much easier it is when you’re not trying?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God, our life.

**John:** Some follow-up from previous episodes. First, the most exciting piece of follow-up this week. Last week on the show, my One Cool Thing was The Katering Show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A great web series by Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney. And you put a challenge out to our listeners.

**Craig:** And the challenge was, “Go get us Kate and Kate.” [laughs] Let them know that we want them to be on our show and that we want to make them famous.

**John:** Yes. And so through Twitter and through other means, you guys reached out to them. They reached back out to us. And so we were going to try to do them on — have them on Skype and talk via Skype to Australia. But they said, “You know, it could be even easier if we did this in person.” And they are coming to the United States in April to promote the second season of their show. And so we will try to have them on while they’re in the United States.

**Craig:** Oh, we are going to have them on the show while they’re in the United States. And also make them famous. We’re going to make them famous.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, famouser.

**John:** Famouser. I do definitely detect that situation of like, well, they could be famous for Australia. But like, when we say famous, we mean famous in the United States and therefore famous in the world. And we think they should be more famous.

**Craig:** Yeah. We mean United States famous.

**John:** We want them Rebel Wilson famous.

**Craig:** We want them R-Dub famous.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** By the way, isn’t it — I mean, these are their real names, right? Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney?

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** It’s just so bizarre.

**John:** Isn’t it so weird, the Lennan, McCartney?

**Craig:** It’s so close to Lennon and McCartney.

**John:** And they’re both Kates. It is really strange.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well —

**John:** Wouldn’t it be weird if they deliberately changed their names planning for this?

**Craig:** It’d be kind of cool.

**John:** It would be kind of cool. They both also have young babies, so it’s an exciting time in life.

**Craig:** Oh, well they should bring their babies.

**John:** They should bring their babies. I would hope they would. I suspect they’ll bring their babies to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** You know what? If they bring their babies, then maybe I’ll bring my daughter, and your daughter and my daughter can babysit their babies.

**John:** Completely a plan.

**Craig:** Hey Kate and Kate, our daughters mistakenly killed your babies. [laughs] But —

**John:** The good news is — I don’t know if there’s any good news.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also, we can’t make you famouser. But thanks for being on the show.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it’ll definitely shine a spotlight on something. [laughs]

**Craig:** That, by the way, that should be the sequel to Spotlight, this next movie. [laughs]

**John:** How our daughters killed some Australian babies. [laughs]

**Craig:** And that’s — the tagline is, “This time we’re shining a spotlight on something.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Did you see Spotlight? Craig didn’t see Spotlight. You didn’t see any movies.

**Craig:** What? What? No, I did. I have. That’s not true. I have seen a bunch. I’m just still making my way through my stack.

**John:** All right.

Also in last week’s episode, we talked about the Top 100 movies and how many of them were franchises, basically — it’s basically either the start of a franchise or a member of the franchise.

George from Plymouth, UK, wrote in to say, “Given that a sequel can’t happen without the first movie, and given that the first movie has to be pretty damn good to spawn a sequel, and given that pretty damn good is a necessary characteristic of the Top 100 Movies, shouldn’t your list exclude the first movies to properly reflect the franchise phenomenon?”

So George is basically asking for a list that is just the sequels and not any origin films. And so if we do that, the answer still is 72 or 73 of the top movies in the box office worldwide in all history are sequels.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s remarkable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s still up — and you know, George from Plymouth makes a good point.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you have to — I think we talked a bit about that in the episode where, you know, you can’t — some of our frustrations as screenwriters is you’ll pitch something that is an original idea and it’s like, “Yes, but we also want to make the sequel to this thing.” It’s like, well, you don’t get to make sequels unless you make the first movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So — yeah. Now, some of those non-sequels may have been based on books.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t count those.

**John:** Many of them are.

**Craig:** Yeah. So then to me they’re not really the first of a thing, like it wasn’t a big risk to make Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

**John:** It was not.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

And actually, Maleficent is the reason why I’m saying 72 or 73. Do you consider that a sequel to Sleeping Beauty? Well, kind of. It’s based on Sleeping Beauty’s story, but like it’s not necessarily a sequel to Walt Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say no, because that movie could have been made at another studio.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, so it’s not — I don’t see it as continuous of that chain.

**John:** Yeah, right.

**Craig:** Like for instance, whatever the latest Wolfman movie was, I don’t think of that as a sequel to The Wolf Man movies with Lon Chaney Jr.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there.

Also, last week, we talked about Final Draft and the state of screenwriting software. And there were a bunch of listeners writing in with some follow-up emails about that. So we’ll try to chug through a few of them.

**Craig:** All right. Well —

**John:** So you start.

**Craig:** So we did hear a lot from people who said, “Au contraire, Write Brothers, the company that makes Movie Magic Screenwriter, they have been updating their software.” And in fact, that very day our episode came out, a lot of people said, “Hey, there’s a new update to that software. It’s now 6.2.1. It’s fixed a bunch of bugs and has a bunch of new features.”

Here’s the issue with that. That’s an incremental update. That’s not really a new version. So you know, Movie Magic 6 has been stuck on 6 for years now. And the fact that they’ve gone up to 6.2.1 is nice. So for instance, now you can import Final Draft files. But that’s kind of crazy that you couldn’t prior to that because everybody else is able — has been able to do that for a long time.

So, look, I loved Movie Magic Screenwriter. I used to be, you know, a big supporter of theirs. And I was an endorser of their product. But it just stagnated. They don’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not really still in the game. I mean, if Movie Magic Screenwriter 7 comes out and blows us all away, great. But —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like they’ve withered.

**John:** Yeah. So this new update also fixes iPartner, which I guess is their simultaneous screenwriting thing, so like, you know, two different people can be working on a script over the internet.

**Craig:** Yeah. That never worked.

**John:** And that had not been working for like two whole system software versions.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that it isn’t — it’s not great that it sat fallow for so long, but I guess I am happy that they are still updating their product and there still seems to be like someone in the office fixing bugs.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the — I guess that’s how I’d put it because when you see that they have a new update to software that hasn’t had a major revision in years, and one of the new features is new spellchecker and thesaurus, I think, “Oh, boy. There may only be one person over there.”

And I feel bad because they — you know, for a long time, I thought their software was superior to Final Draft’s. I mean, you know me. [laughs] I feel like — I feel like a bucket of rocks roughly arranged in the shape of a keyboard is better than Final Draft. But they — yeah, I don’t think 6.2.1 quite is what we meant by updated.

**John:** Yeah.

Steve wrote in to ask, “To shorten page counts, I like to format my scripts in Final Draft’s tight mode rather than normal. I don’t use very tight because it’s very hard to read. I never use loose because I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to lengthen a script. So tight it is.

“My writers’ group teases me about this saying it’s cheating. Is it cheating? Is tight format acceptable by the industry? If not, then why is it an option? I haven’t used any other screenwriting software, so I don’t know if this feature is specific to Final Draft or not.”

**Craig:** You know, this comes up a lot. It’s not specific to Final Draft. I know that Fade In has a similar thing where it’s not kerning. And I think actually both Final Draft and Fade In have kerning, which is the amount of space in between letters —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Horizontally.

**John:** Which you would never want to —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Never change that.

**Craig:** No, because that really does affect readability. This thing is about tightening up the vertical space in between successive lines. And —

**John:** So cramming more lines on the page.

**Craig:** Correct, cramming more line in the page. So your writers’ group teases you about this saying it’s cheating. Is it cheating? Yeah, it’s cheating for sure. In fact, I think a lot of — I think in Fade In they might even call it cheat. [laughs] Because that’s what it is. Of course it’s cheating.

Is it acceptable by the industry? Yeah. If you write a brilliant script with tight formatting, they’re going to make your movie and you’re going to be a millionaire. [laughs]

They’ll reformat it before they put it through the budget process. And they may come back to you and say, “Hey, per the AD and the physical production department, your 119-page script is actually 138 pages. And we need to discuss because we may have to make some cuts.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** But at that point you’ve won and you can deal with it. I know lots and lots of writers who do this. Scott Frank, I think, has not not done this, ever, you know. It’s like — because he’s always over, you know. Always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** I think what we should do is we should have to weigh the blank pieces of paper and then weigh the pages, the piece of paper with toner on them. And therefore, we can see how many actual — how much the weight of the script. That’s how we’re going to start budgeting now. It’s on — based on the weight of the toner on the page.

**Craig:** That’s the most John August solution to a problem ever.

**John:** So let’s talk about acceptable cheating.

So I don’t think you should use tight and — because I can always see tight and I can always tell that you’re cheating and therefore I say like, “Well, this script is actually long.” I just — you could — it’s very easy to see when someone is using tight.

Here is acceptable cheating in my book. As you go through your script, if there is a word, especially in dialogue that is breaking to the next line, you can sometimes cheat the little margin on that dialogue block to pull that word up. You do that enough and do it cleverly enough, you can sometimes pull a page or even two pages out of a 120-page script.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** That to me is acceptable cheating. You may even find yourself carefully rewriting a line of scene description so that it doesn’t break across a page. That is a thing that is acceptable cheating.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s not even — to me, that’s not even cheating at that point because —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, the idea is you don’t want to get penalized for a word, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The only thing about tight, I will say, is that I’ve used it once. I’m not a fan, in general. I did use it once and I used it because my producer, Lindsay Doran, said, “You know, it would be great if this script seemed a little shorter, but I don’t want you to make it shorter. And the thing about your pages is there’s more white space on your pages than any other writer I’ve ever read. It’s just like seas of milk.”

Because I like — I hit that return key all the time. I like spreading my stuff out, you know. And so she’s like, “Given that, go for tight.”

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So that was like, okay. You know, if you — if you really are writing a very kind of expanded style, then probably it’s okay. Tight in bricks of text is going to be brutal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And tight in Fade In didn’t even seem — it was hard to actually notice. I did a real careful comparison. Tight in Final Draft I think may be nastier.

**John:** Andrew wrote in to ask, “I have set Microsoft Word up with all the styles and formatting so I can choose slug line, dialogue, or parentheticals, and automatically format them as required. I have headings throughout so I can click a button and number the slugs. Or pages, I have code built in to sort out the continueds in pages. I can do any format I want and it’s free.”

It’s not really free because you already own it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I have tried various formats out there, including Final Draft, and really can’t see any advantage over my system.”

Well —

**Craig:** So, good. [laughs]

**John:** So, good.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So let me — let’s talk about that. So my very first script, Go, was written in Microsoft Word. And I think people used to use Word a lot more often to do screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The reason why they moved to Final Draft or other screenwriting applications is there are some things that a dedicated screenwriting app can actually just do better.

And here’s an example of something that’s coded into Highland, but also because it’s coded into Final Draft and all the other ones, too. Let’s say you’re approaching the bottom of a page and you have some scene description that’s going to have to break between — from one page to the next page. A screenwriting app is smart enough to detect, okay, this is what’s going to happen. Can I cheat this line up onto the previous page or can I add an extra line to the bottom of this page? Or if I can’t do that, can I break this paragraph at the period —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that it can flow better across the page? And it’s one of those things that screenwriting apps just do behind the scenes to make your pages look better, so you are never starting page three in the middle of a sentence. You’re always starting page three at the start of a sentence.

With a lot of macros, you could probably get Microsoft Word to do that. But it’s not its natural way of handling things. And when it comes time for revisions, starred revisions, or the more complicated things, you’re going to very quickly run into some obstacles in Word where it’s just not built to do that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure why Andrew wrote in. He seems to be incredibly confident and satisfied with his system. So, cool. I mean —

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** If you’re happy doing it the way you do it, just keep on doing it, you know. I don’t have any problem with that. I mean, I wouldn’t do it that way. I remember, like you, in the old, old days before I drove down to Santa Monica to buy Final Draft that I had to use Microsoft Word, and it sucked. And yeah, you can totally customize it and trick it out, but why? I mean, I don’t know. He’s happy. What am I going to do?

What am I going to do with you, Andrew? You’re happy. What do you want?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s one from — ooh, Arieto and Rowie from Wellington, New Zealand.

Wellington, New Zealand. Arieto and Rowie. “My writing partner and I use WriterDuet. The feature we like most is that it allows us to both edit the same document simultaneously.”

Yup, that is in fact what they do over there.

“We really love this way of working together. Could you talk about some other work flows for writing teams to write collaboratively?”

**John:** All right.

So I know that David Wain and his whole group on Children’s Hospital, they tend to write in Google Docs. And so they will have a Google Doc which will be the script or the ideas for the script, and they’ll start working on it. And each of them will write in a different color, I think, so they can see and they can leave notes for each other in different colors. They’re using Fountain for that, so they’re just writing it Fountain and then they bring it into Highland or another app to make it into a screenplay when it’s all finished up.

So Google docs is at least, it’s free, and everyone sort of has it, so that’s a way you can work. But I know a lot of writing teams who are even in the same room, and they will be, like they will just have two monitors hooked up to the same computer, and they’ll literally be working on the same screen so they don’t have to look at each other, but they can both be looking at what’s on the screen, which seems crazy, but people do.

**Craig:** But is one person driving on the keyboard or are they both looking at the same Google doc?

**John:** Sometimes they’re actually not even using Google docs. Sometimes they’re actually just using, it’s like, it’s literally up in Highland or Final Draft, and they are both looking on their own monitors at the exact same document at the same time.

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** Or they’re doing screen sharing so they’re looking at the same. So, either one could control it at a time.

**Craig:** Yes, there’s lots of ways to do this, I mean we have now, we live in a time now where document sharing and multiple editing, multiple simultaneous editing is doable. That is relatively new, so most of the modalities go back to the times before that. Very typically, the old school way of doing things, so for you, Arieto and Rowie, one way was Arieto would write some pages, and he would email it over to Rowie, Rowie would revise those and send them back to Arieto along with some new pages that Rowie had written. Obviously, they have an outline so they know what they’re doing, and they’re just editing back and forth and asterisking, and coloring, so they know, okay, this is the change, or that’s the change, and then kind of like the way two chambers of legislature get together in conference, then everything gets molded together and decided together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a very common way for writers to have worked in the past. I personally, I find the idea of working simultaneously with somebody where both people are on a keyboard controlling something like WriterDuet or like Google docs, I find it anxiety-ridden for me, the idea that I’m typing something and someone is changing what I’m typing while I’m typing it. Oh my god, I need a moment, you know, like I need a moment or at least a chance to get a line out so we can both look at it.

So like when Todd Phillips and I write together, we do both, we do what I just described, the write and swap, and then we also sometimes will sit together. Once we — when we’re rewriting, we’ll sit together and I’ll usually drive because I type faster, via Apple, what do they call it, AirPlay to a TV in the office over there, and we just do it like that line by line. But at least there’s like, there’s something that’s already been written. Don’t you immediately start to feel nervous about somebody writing over you while you’re writing?

**John:** Yeah, it does seem strange and difficult. So what I was describing with Children’s Hospital like that seems to make sense where you’re just like you’re spit-balling out ideas and everyone is just sort of like throwing stuff around in it and that would make more sense, but when you actually know what you’re writing, I feel like the classic technique of like you do this, and I’ll do that and then we’ll page it together is probably going to be a better solution for you.

The few times I’ve written with somebody, like I wrote a script with Jordan Mechner, we had our outline and we just like broke up the scenes and he wrote those, I wrote these, we put them all together. He did a pass through, I did a pass through, and that was the script. And when you talk to people who are in TV writing rooms, I hear a combination of systems that they’re using.

So sometimes they all have to work together and we’re not going to use that word that we used to use for working on a script together, but if they’re all working together, sometimes they’re all staring at a screen, but more often, they’re breaking off and different people are doing different things and they’re pasting it all together.

**Craig:** Absolutely true.

**John:** And your point about writing on the same document at the same time, my limited experience with it is actually how we do the show, and so we’re both looking at the same outline which is in Workflowy, and there are situations where like you’ll be adding something while I’m adding something, and it is really confusing. While it’s remarkable that we have the technology to do it, I find it really disorienting.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you have two people that are very good at typing or actually even worse if one person is really good at typing and the other one isn’t, like if Rowie is awesome at typing and Arieto is not, and then Arieto is like, come one, let me just get my sentence out. [laughs] Rowie’s like, “Sorry, sorry I’m on the next page. Your sentence is no longer applicable.” Oh, it makes me nervous.

**John:** Yeah, it makes me nervous, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, Patrick, our final question about screenwriting software, he writes, “My first question is for John. Are there any plans to port Highland or any of the Quote-Unquote Apps project to Windows or PC? I work out off a PC simply because that’s all I’ve been able to afford and would like to support the Scriptnotes/Quote-Unquote brand.” The answer is no, we’re not porting anything over to PC mostly because we don’t know how, we don’t have the expertise to do it, but also all the apps we make are using kind of very specific only Apple stuff and so it would be very hard for us to do it. So the simple answer is no, they are going to be Macintosh or iOS for the time-being because everything is sort of built on technology that only exists in the Apple universe.

**Craig:** I use Mac like you do, and I have Parallels installed because occasionally I run into a program that is Windows-only and it works gorgeously because when Apple switched over to Intel, it became sort of academic to do that. Is there something that goes in the other direction for people that are on PC where they could use an emulator?

**John:** That is a great question that I do not have the answer for. So if you are a listener who knows the answer to that question, let us know. My hunch, my guess is going to be no, because if you look at sort of how Windows works, Windows is software that you install on a computer versus Macintosh is the computer and it’s a software altogether and Apple doesn’t really sell that stuff separately, you don’t just go and buy it off the shelf and put it in whatever computer you want.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see what happens.

**John:** Someone will tell us.

**Craig:** Yeah, someone will tell us. I’m just wondering like maybe even — I bet like I’m sure it’s easy enough for things like terminal apps, you know, I mean, Unix stuff. I’m sure there’s some kind of emulator.

**John:** Yeah. The second question is for both of us. What writing software would you recommend for playwriting, would it be Fade In or something else? You’re doing some broadway kind of things. What are you using for that?

**Craig:** Well, the screenplay I’m writing now is a musical, so I actually had to think about how am I going to do this, because I’m writing these songs, but I’m describing songs and putting in sample lyrics but there is no music yet that comes, you know, I’m sort of providing this as grist for the music mill, and then we’ll go back and forth.

And so I just thought like, you know what, I think I’m just going to stick within my regular — because so much of it is regular screenplay, and then when I get to those moments, I’ll call it out, and I’m just going to put everything in italics, and that’s the song.

**John:** That’s a song.

**Craig:** And it’s just sort of in its own kind of formatted existence. If I were writing a play, particularly a non-musical play, yeah, I think I would probably just use Fade In or you know, why not?

**John:** Yeah, there’s really no reason not to and especially because you’re familiar with it. I’ve written a lot of movie musicals and before I even built Highland, I would just stick those lyrics in italics and that’s just sort of how you do it. And so, dialogue blocks but with everything in italics, you can tell it’s being sung. For Highland, we actually have a built in lyrics format, so you start a line with a tilde and it becomes lyrics. And so if you’re using a template that is designed for a screenplay, it does exactly what I described, so it looks like a dialogue, but it’s in italics. If you’re doing something that looks like a stage play, it puts the lyrics over on the left hand margin in all uppercase, just the way you would do it in a real stage play.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, some non-screen writing software questions. Matthew Cain writes in, “Given that Hollywood is notorious for its flexibility in the definition of producer, what exactly does Stuart Friedel do?”

**Craig:** What does he do?

**John:** Can you tell us what Stuart does?

**Craig:** Yes, I can.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Matthew Chilelli, our editor, our fine editor, edits the show, and then Stuart listens for errors like audio proofreading, prooflistening, he prooflistens, he builds the list of links in the show notes, he actually uploads the show to the Internet, and Interweb tubes so that you can all get them, he edits the transcripts. That’s a big one, actually.

**John:** It is a big one. It takes so much more time. I don’t — because he’s doing that down stairs I’m not sort of watching him do it, but that’s hours each week he’s going through the transcripts.

**Craig:** Because the transcripts are being done overseas, I assume.

**John:** They’re being done somewhere. We’re deliberately not asking who’s doing them.

**Craig:** It’s children, isn’t it?

**John:** It’s probably children in Nigeria.

**Craig:** Well, you know, of all the things that children are pressed into, work-wise across the world, you know, transcripts is probably one of the safer gigs. So we get these raw transcripts and then obviously there are a ton of mistakes and so Stuart goes through and edits those very carefully. And I love the fact that we have transcripts. To me it’s terrific. And Stuart also, big thing is, he reads all the emails that we get and we do get a lot of them. Obviously he goes through our Three Page Challenges and picks those, and Stuart coordinates with the outside world. For instance, oh, I didn’t even know that this happened. Craig’s audio from Adam McKay and Charles Randolph’s Big Short discussion.

**John:** Absolutely. So a few weeks ago on the podcast, you had mentioned that you had done this session for Writers Guild Foundation, and we said, “Oh, we should get the audio,” and neither of us did that, and so I just told Stuart, “Please get that audio,” and he got that audio, so we’re going to be putting that up in the premium feed.

**Craig:** Fantastic, that’s great, that was a fun night. So Stuart actually does quite a bit. It’s distressing, actually, how much he does.

**John:** Yes. So even though Stuart is actually away while we’re recording the show, he is in Toronto, I think seeing a basketball tournament, he’s somewhere else, but he will be listening to this audio probably on Monday, and generating the list of links and so therefore the show will go up Tuesday morning as always. So we record the show usually on a Friday, sometimes a Thursday, sometimes a Saturday, but it’s Stuart who does the work on Mondays so that it could actually go up on a Tuesday.

**Craig:** I like that. I like that Stuart’s week begins with our nonsense.

**John:** Yes, indeed. A guy in your Twitter feed asked, “I went for a general meeting on one of the studio lots last week. They had valet parking. Should I tip these valets?”

**Craig:** Yeah. So Paramount has valet, you’re right, Warner Bros, usually I’m there to see Todd so I park like in one of his spots, but if you’re there for a general meeting with a Warner Bros executive, they do have that little area in front of their fancy building where they have valets, and then Sony has a valet, if you’re parking on the lot as opposed to — because every lot has like a structure or like — so Paramount doesn’t have a structure, they have this just massive huge parking lot in front of this crazy big wall that serves as a giant blue screen. But most of the other places have a parking structure, and then if you get fancy enough, you go like to the cool place and there might be a valet.

Here’s the thing, like somebody said, well, why wouldn’t you — why not tip? Why would you even pause? I do tip, but the reason I pause is because I think, am I insulting them? Like do they think like, dude, this isn’t a restaurant, we’re paid well by the studio. But they’ve never been upset about the tip, so I think it’s okay.

**John:** I think it’s okay. The reason why I think I pause about it is because Sony used to have a sign saying like, gratuity is already included, basically saying like don’t tip. It was actually right by the stand. So I was like, oh, okay. So these are Sony employees, they’re not working for somebody else, like you wouldn’t tip the receptionist, but it does feel like in a general sense in Los Angeles, anyone who touches your car, you kind of give them a tip.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I guess I’m pro tip on this, but I don’t soft of, I don’t know. And if somebody from one of the studios wants to reach out and tell us like, no, no, no, you should never tip these people because they are actually paid in a way that’s not supposed to be a tipping —

**Craig:** But even then like, okay, so how much are you paying them, really? What are you paying them, $90,000 a year? I mean, they’re not — my whole thing is, I don’t care what Paramount thinks. If the valet guys aren’t like, dude, you know, then yes, I’m tipping them.

**John:** What has become more challenging is I find I don’t carry as much cash as I used to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I often will not have small bills and so then I’ll be in situations where like, I don’t have any small bills, so I’m not going to tip the guy a $20.

**Craig:** But my move is always to say, “Hey, do you have blank back?” And then they give you, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah. So then you’re actually — it’s a weird negotiation.

**Craig:** I never had a problem with that. The thing that freaks me out is, because I’m like you, like most people, cash economy is dwindling, so I pull in, I get out, and then blah, blah, blah, I come back to get my car, and it’s like, oh how much is the valet? It’s $6. And I look at my wallet and I have exactly $6.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** And then I’m like, this guy is looking at this jerk in his Tesla, who’s not tipping him. And I am always like, I’m so sorry, I only have $6. And they’re like, it’s okay. But it’s not okay, it’s not.

**John:** Okay, I think I may have hit on why it feels so different on a studio lot. All the other situations where you’re valet parking, basically, you are paying for that service already, so the tip is on top of whatever the fee was for valet, and so you’re breaking whatever that unit of money is, and money was already exchanged and so you’re giving a tip on the money exchange. Here, there wasn’t any money exchanged. And so it feels a little bit strange to suddenly be bringing money into this relationship.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s what it is, is that that’s why I feel like sometimes they might turn to me and go, “What am I, a hooker to you?”

**John:** And that’s also a sort of situation I run into with tipping in Uber because you can tip Uber. And I think actually considering how low they’ve been pushing their drivers for their rates, it’s actually a nice idea to tip Uber. But it feels weird to tip Uber because there was no cash being exchanged before that moment. So unlike a taxi where you’re paying the person cash, or like swiping your card and putting a tip on it, there wasn’t an automatic way to do that.

**Craig:** But wait, I thought the whole thing with Uber was the tip’s built in?

**John:** The tip’s not really built it, but the fare is negotiated, but the tip isn’t built in. There’s not an automatic 20%.

**Craig:** That’s not what I was told. I was told that the tip is built in, and you don’t tip them.

**John:** Well, I will tell you that over the last three months, we’ve consistently been tipping our Uber drivers and they’ve been very appreciative.

**Craig:** Of course they’ve been appreciative. What I’m saying is —

**John:** Of course the valet people at the studios have been appreciative.

**Craig:** I know, but come on, the Uber guy, when you’re like suddenly you’re getting jammed for $110 because of their whatever, hold on, I’m looking this up. I feel like, yeah, there’s no need to tip.

**John:** Okay. Should you tip Uber?

**Craig:** I’m looking at the Uber website.

**John:** Well, at the Uber website, they don’t want you to tip.

**Craig:** They don’t want you to tip because it’s priced in.

**John:** Right. Let’s see what else.

**Craig:** Should you tip your Uber driver? This is great. People are now — this podcast is a great podcast.

**John:** By the way, we’re going to pause the podcast for a little while, while we do some reading on screen, so we would welcome your thoughts on whether you should tip at studio valets, and more importantly, whether you should tip Uber and Lyft drivers. I think Lyft actually has an easy automatic way to build in that tip.

**Craig:** That’s different.

**John:** Let us know what you think. You can write to us on Twitter, or actually, this would be a great use for our Facebook feed. So just go to Facebook.com/Scriptnotes, just search for Scriptnotes there. And on this episode, let us know what you think about tipping in these situations.

**Craig:** That sounds fine, but I think I’m right.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let us go down to our next big topic which is this Twitter feed that sort of blew up this week. And when I said it blew up this week, it’s like it didn’t exist before this week. This thing is only like only like three days old, and it almost has more followers than Craig Mazin on Twitter.

**Craig:** Well you know, it’s a credit to a good idea. I mean, what this — I assume that this is a — is this a real name? Ross Putnam?

**John:** It’s a real person who Stuart knows.

**Craig:** Okay, so Ross had this idea to just start posting, tweeting the character descriptions in screenplays he was reading, and specifically character descriptions of female characters. And all he did was just replace every character’s name with the generic name, Jane. And what became clear after about seven or eight of these was just how bad these character introductions were. And, obviously — well, I don’t know how obvious — I think the point was, look, there is a kind of just a rampant clumsy sexism in the way that these, I assume, mostly male screenwriters are calling out their female characters. And that is true. Although beyond it, what was of even greater concern to me was just how crappy the writing was.

And these two things are not unrelated. The isms, and the bad writing, are not unrelated. So, I thought it might be a good idea for the two of us to take this topic on and talk about how to write a good character intro.

**John:** Let’s do it. So we’ll start with a little teaser sampler of some of the tweets that he put out. Basically, these are the character descriptions, and then we’ll look at some other things, both from our Three Page Challenges and from some of the award nominated scripts from this year, and see if we can tell one from the other.

So I’m going to start at the bottom of his feed, his very first tweet. “Jane, 28, athletic but sexy, a natural beauty. Most days, she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.”

**Craig:** [laugh] That’s just terrible. Here’s this one. “A gorgeous woman, Jane, 23, is a little tipsy dancing naked on her big bed, as adorable as she is sexy.” And then he writes, “Bonus points for being the first line.” That’s the first line of the script. I love it.

**John:** “This is Jane, she’s live, leggy, spirited, outgoing, not afraid to speak her mind, with a sense of humor as dry as the Sonoran desert.”

**Craig:** “His wife, Jane, is making dinner and watching CNN on a small TV. She was model-pretty once, but living an actual life has taken its toll.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s do one last one. “Though drop-dead beautiful, Jane, 40, has the appearance of someone whose confidence has been shaken. She’s a raw sexual force impeded.”

**Craig:** Yeah, well.

**John:** I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** You know what, listen, how many times have you sat through an acting class and done the exercise of exhibiting raw sexual force impeded? It’s a classic. It’s right up there with the you be a mirror of me. That’s crazy. There is a real problem. So it’s a problem, it’s a sexism problem, and it’s also a bad writing problem. So we should talk about — we have our own examples by the way.

**John:** Yeah, let’s go through some of our own examples because I wanted to look at some of the Three Page Challenges that we’ve actually already done on the show, and in some cases we did single out the descriptions, in other cases, we didn’t. But I went through and did the same thing with some of our Three Page Challenge samples. So should we just do a sampling of these?

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ll do a smattering, yeah. So from our Three Page Challenges, we have — and you know what, I’ll do a guy so you can hear what guys sound like and girls sound like. “Jack, 33, skinny and ferret-faced, and Joe, 21, chubby and baby-faced, sit atop two ragged-looking horses staring down a stretch of two-lane black top baking in the relentless Texas sun.”

**John:** All right. “Jane, mid 20s, sits at her desk, meticulously sketching in a notebook. Her doe eyes and cardigans would suggest she’s probably drawing a unicorn.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I kind of like that one actually. I like both of those so far. So far we’re doing pretty well. “Jane, early 20s, darts around her mildly cluttered bedroom, half-dressed in khakis and a white tank top as voice mail messages play on speaker.”

**John:** Hmm, okay. “In the last row of the plane sits Jane, 20s, redhead. Breathless and frantic, she keeps her eyes on the front of a shadowy cabin as she shoves a small digital camera into a Ziploc bag.”

**Craig:** The redhead is maybe —

**John:** Yeah, the redhead is the question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, let’s take a look at some of the Oscar-nominated scripts from this year.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I won’t tell you who they’re from and I’ve replaced everything with Jane so you won’t know.

**Craig:** Right. “Jane, an intensely smart 15-year-old, curious and strong, but not jaded, walks through the seedy sprawling park.”

**John:** “One of the front doors opens and out slips Jane, early 20s, open faced and pretty without knowing it.”

**Craig:** There’s pretty without knowing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Jane, the same age as Jenny, but large and simple-minded. Her mouth is usually open indicating her lack of comprehension at more or less any given moment.” That is so good. I love that. [laughs]

**John:** All right, do you know which — those last two are from the same movie. Do you know which movie that was?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Brooklyn.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s take a look at some men.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So these are also from nominated films. “Jack, late 30s, good looks, so-so haircut, sits at his unholy mess of a desk.”

**Craig:** “Jack, 40s, good looks, quick with a story and a smile, walks into the posh room, finds Sasha and Robbie.”

**John:** “This is Jack, dark, attractive, white teeth, muscular.”

**Craig:** “Jack, a young-looking intern, puts a green tea down in front of Diana.”

**John:** “Jack, 34, a guy with the attitude and libido of a 15-year-old, sits on the end of the couch and stares blankly at the Carol Burnett Show on the TV drinking a Schlitz beer.”

**Craig:** You know, this is perhaps evidence that the problem here may be more of just the way that people approach this task of writing these things than it is a question of isms because the males ones, and these are from nominated screenplays, the male ones are seemingly falling — I mean, how many attractives and good-lookings and, yeah, so it’s quite a bit of attractives and good-lookings there.

**John:** So as I was putting together these things from the nominated scripts, one of the patterns I did notice is like, a lot of times, the characters were not actually described, like they were not physically described at all. And so I didn’t have anything to put in here because the characters just started speaking.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a lovely choice. It doesn’t create the image for your reader, but in some cases you don’t need that because you’re going to give them a strong action to begin with. So I was struck by how many of the scripts basically did none of the standard line of sort of setting a person up.

**Craig:** Well, the standard lines are hard to do well because there are 14 billion screenplays in the world, 99.9 of which are terrible, and they all are chunked with these things, all of this detritus of character descriptions that have become so cliché and so tropey.

**John:** Let’s look at what makes a bad intro.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay. So I’ll start with a couple of the obvious ones, cliché, and what I call a cliché with a twist. So what are clichés for these things? Hot chicks, gorgeous guys, stunning, handsome, beautiful. These things show up all the time. We are aware that generally speaking the men and women in movies are better looking than the rest of us. We know. If their physical beauty is not mission critical to the story itself, then I’m not sure we need to even say it anymore. I don’t think it’s necessary.

**John:** Yeah. There could be situations where the beauty actually is important. And if you didn’t understand that this character was beautiful, you might not understand what was going on in the scene or sort of how — why characters were acting to that character in that way. So it’s not a blanket statement that you should never describe a person as being attractive, but there has to be a really good reason for why you’re saying that.

**Craig:** Precisely. And always remember, you have the option of revealing something about that character through another character’s actions and reactions and responses. So you don’t have to — any time you’re pelting somebody in the face with this fourth wall breaking comment, which we don’t do anywhere else in the screenplay, really, you’re robbing yourself of a chance for the reader to discover this on their own through the behaviors of other characters, which is a more interesting way of getting it across, I think.

The cliché with a twist which we’ve seen even in the nominated thing is hot but doesn’t know it, handsome without trying, beautiful if only she’d smile, menacing but with gentle eyes. You see this more than anything. The fake pretense of the false contradiction. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** Yeah, men are always ruggedly handsome.

**Craig:** Ruggedly handsome, but —

**John:** Yes, yes.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the thing. Women are always, yeah, just gorgeous and sexy, but…

**John:** Or, so many times, I have seen the “was once was hot, but now is a mom.”

**Craig:** Like first of all, what the F? Like, because moms are so gross?

**John:** Moms are gross.

**Craig:** Like I’m married to one, okay? I mean, what is that? And I know part of it we’re going to go, well, it’s 24 year old dudes writing about what they know and what they like, and moms are gross to them and everything, but then, don’t write mom characters if you think moms are gross. You haven’t grown up enough. You’re not allowed to write screenplays. Beat it.

I mean, there are some things you can’t — like this is one of those areas where I’m not going to say check your privilege. Check your biases, just check them. Like really think about what you’re doing here because these characters, you’re supposed to be caring for them, you’re supposed to know them, they’re supposed to be real to you.

You don’t walk up to your mom’s friend and go, “You know, you’re not hot anymore, but you once were, I bet.” You would never do. It’s a horrible thing to say, and it’s crazy, and it’s reductive, and it’s probably not even accurate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’s either still hot, or never was.

**John:** So if you’re describing the character in that situation, there could be a very good reason for like, you know, if she’s crying her mascara off, well, that’s telling you about the scene that she’s in, that’s great, but as a general blanket statement about who a person is as she likes walks into an office, that’s not going to be your good friend there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, and again, that’s the difference between this news bulletin of this character’s blah, blah, blah, and the screenplay unfolding through action. So then we touched on this a little bit, the ism crimes. So sexism, racism, ageism. Even if you take the moral component out entirely, the problem with those kinds of introductions, and we see quite a bit of them in Ross’ feed, is that they’re boring. They’re super-duper boring. The first rule of screenwriting is don’t be boring. If you write something like she’s sicko-hot with like a smoking bod and blah, blah, blah, I’m bored to tears. Yeah, you’re a sexist, that’s bad. But worse, you’re boring.

**John:** Don’t be boring.

**Craig:** Don’t be boring.

**John:** Alright, let’s take that, what makes a good intro. What are the things you look for in a character introduction that says, ah-ha, this is going to be a character that I’m eager to follow, or I get this person. What helps?

**Craig:** Well, interestingly, you brought up an important point. Sometimes, almost nothing. Sometimes, you want to let people discover this person on their own, which is a wonderful way of doing it. I look back through a lot of my scripts, and look back and I found an interesting pattern emerge. And I think I do an okay job of these things or at least I think better than some of the things I read on Ross’ feed.

So here’s what I’ve noticed, there are physical essentials that I will sometimes include if they are important for context for the reader. And those include gender, age, race, height, and body type. Body type very rarely, usually and height very rarely. It’s usually gender, age, and then I try and imply race through choice of names, but occasionally, I will call it out. Sometimes I don’t want to specify, sometimes I want it to be open.

But the thing that I have found and I did not realize this until I went back and did this. Over and over and over, and I see it in a lot of the scripts that we cite here from the nominations as well, are wardrobe, hair, and makeup. They talk about wardrobe, hair, and makeup in these character introductions, constantly. And these are three things that I think a lot of screenwriters never think about at all. So wardrobe, hair, and makeup, seems maybe superficial, but they are three key production departments. Some of your best professionals on your movie, and certainly some of your most important professionals on your movie, are going to be the people in charge of wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Costuming is critical. It tells you so much about somebody, what they’re wearing.

Not every character wears definitive clothing, but a lot of them do. It’s a great tool for you to visually get across something about somebody right away.

**John:** So what I think you’re calling out for is not to be specific about every hairstyle and every wardrobe choice, but to give a sense of who that person is so you can tee off those other departments so they can do their best possible job. And when there is a need to be very specific about something, be specific about it. If you’re going to make a joke about a guy’s mustache, give him a mustache when we first see him so we’re not visualizing the person without a mustache and suddenly we have to like re-contextualize him so that this mustache joke works.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think the idea is to call out things that are noticeable, right? If I turn on a movie and I see somebody walking down the street and they’re wearing khakis and an Oxford, and a blazer, there’s really nothing about it. I may say, you know, “Oh, they’re preppy,” but I don’t really know. But if there’s something specific, and specifics are good things, call them out. Hair, I’m not necessarily all about saying what color the hair is, or how long the hair is, but hair is, and unfortunately for you and me, hair is one of the things on the human body that indicates current physical status better than anything else.

Bedraggled, tussled, muscled, sweaty, coifed, gelled, hair is such a quick imparter of information. And so I’m always thinking about hair. And I should mention that, and a lot of people don’t know this if they haven’t gone through production. When you make a movie, the very first thing that is shot on every major motion picture is a wardrobe, hair, and makeup test. And there’s good reason for that.

Everybody else, everybody else involved in the making of the movie, is obsessed with that these people are going to look like because that is going to be in the audience’s faces for the entire run of the movie.

**John:** And in the trailers. So, people are going to make up their mind about whether to see this movie based on the trailer and based on the hairstyle that you have put that actor in.

**Craig:** And the wardrobe, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So sometimes I’m always looking for these areas where screenwriters begin to segregate themselves through lack of choice, and this is one of those areas. We should be completely on top of this and thinking about this all the time. Wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Makeup is not, “Okay, well, she has eye shadow and mascara.” No, makeup is are they tan, are they dirty, do they have a scar, are they aged, weathered, is there a bruise, all that stuff, that great, great stuff.

These things are as important to movies as sound. And so if you’re thinking about how to approach introducing a character without falling down the pit of clichéd or clichéd with a twist, just stop and think about wardrobe, hair, and makeup for men and women.

**John:** So right now, I fear that a lot of aspiring screenwriter are going, “Oh, no, I have to go back through my script and describe all their hair and makeup and wardrobe.”

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** And that’s not at all what we’re saying.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** But I think what Craig is calling for is, in your head, you need to be thinking about those things and visualizing those things. And if there are specific details that are going to help inform that character, be specific about those details so that they can be there so they can actually help ground this character in the reality of your situation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it may also give you ideas for scenes or for business within scenes that are really appropriate. So two people having a conversation can sort of happen anywhere, but two people having a conversation while they’re trying to fix their hair might be appropriate for your movie. There might be a reason why you’re going to be able to use some of the physical aspects of your character to really help sell a scene and therefore help sell your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to read you a few of these character intros from the nominated screenplays and now process it through what I’ve just talked about with wardrobe, hair, and makeup.

“Angela’s mother, Jane, 47, sits in the second row of the packed sanctuary, her petite yet chunky frame loaded with enough costume jewelry to furnish a mall kiosk.” Wardrobe. Wardrobe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then let’s do some guys. “Here is Jack, 50 but looks 70, unwashed, hair stringy, granular thickness everywhere, forehead barnacled with scars, fingers mangled in a permanent curl as if gripping a ball.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hair and makeup.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Can you tell me which movie that last description was from?

**Craig:** Why do you going to do this to me? [laughs] No.

**John:** That’s Concussion by Peter Landesman.

**Craig:** Oh, I didn’t see that one.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s why.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** You missed it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it’s specific. And that was actually an important specificity for the nature of that movie because what that guy looks like is incredibly important for your ability to understand what is happening to these football players and what’s up next.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so John’s admonition here is well taken to heart. You don’t want to now go bananas about this, right? But when you’re talking, I’m just telling you what I care about as a reader. And particularly, what I think people that direct movies and produce movies care about as readers. I don’t care how super sexy hot she is. If that comes out of a relationship or the actions of the movie, then that is sexuality expressing itself the way it does in the world. And that’s interesting to me.

But when you’re giving me the news bulletin, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to ask yourself, “Do I need to say anything? And if I do, what’s the hair like? What’s the clothes like? What’s the makeup like?”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It tells more than you think.

**John:** I think you’re right.

All right, let’s wrap that up and quickly get to our final question of the day which came from Samuel Davis who writes, “I’m currently halfway through my first screenplay. I’ve been marching along just fine until this other idea for a completely different script started creeping in. So I gave it a quick outline. I’m very excited about that new one. So should I write both at the same time? I’ve heard it is good to write two projects at once. I guess my question is, is this normal to have multiple ideas flying and stowing away for later? I feel like I’m cheating on my serious girlfriend script with this hot new idea script.”

**Craig:** Because you are. [laughs]

**John:** You are. You totally are, you bad boy.

**Craig:** That’s what you’re doing, yeah. You’re like, “Oh, who’s this?”

**John:** All right, so first off, let us say that every writer I’ve ever met has had this situation where the thing you’re writing is fine, but this new idea is so much better. And mostly that new idea you’ll find is better because you’re not stuck in the middle of it. And it’s tempting because you see all the problems with the current script you’re writing and the new idea has no problems because you haven’t started writing it yet.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That is almost always the case.

**Craig:** This is basically why marriages end, too. [laughs] I think you’re basically describing infidelity of all kinds.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s absolutely true. The other thing that happens to me, I don’t know if this happens with you John, but right now I’m on page 94, so I’m steaming towards the conclusion here. And inevitably a certain kind of depression starts to seep in. And I don’t know if it’s the result of just the end of the long journey, but sometimes I think it’s because all of the world of open possibilities is narrowing down until it disappears. Because when you type ‘The End,’ that is the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when you consider this new sexy idea, Sam, well, there’s the world of possibilities there. Anything can happen instead of all the things that are supposed to happen in this one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But you got to go through and finish, man.

**John:** So let’s address this whole writing two things at once. Should you write two things at once? No. You should not write two things at once. Whoever told you that is telling you something wrong.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You cannot put two things first. It’s actually impossible to put two things first. So right now, I’m writing something. I am in first position on this thing. It is most of my brain and time because that is the main thing I’m writing. But there are some things I have to go back and do some quick fixes on. And that is inevitably the life of a working writer is like there’s times where like I’m going to spend two hours so I can fix this thing that is about to shoot or there’s something else coming up that I’m going to need to deal with. But I’m not trying to write two first drafts at the same time because if you try to do that, you will make yourself miserable. And both drafts will be worse for it.

**Craig:** I can’t even describe what that would be like because I haven’t even considered trying to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It just sounds like madness. Like you, there are times when I have to put what I’m working on aside to go do something else. Like last week, I had to go and tweak a little bit of voiceover for The Huntsman. So, you know, I thought, “All right, this is no big deal. I’ll do this little voiceover tweak. It’ll take me an hour. Then I’ll go to the office and go back to my script.” Nope, that day was done because that was it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was like gears had shifted, they weren’t shifting back and that’s that. And so I try my best to really just work on one thing at a time.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s a lovely luxury when you can just work on one thing at a time. And so if you’re at the beginning of your career and you can really just focus in on that one thing, enjoy that. Like it be all consuming while you’re writing it. And then you can get to this other idea afterwards.

Now, there are times when that new idea is genuinely a better idea, so if you’re not very far into that first project, I would say if you’re a person who feels comfortable describing the things you’re working on, tell both ideas to a few friends, try not to color them and make them think one is better and just like ask your friends which one was more appealing to you.

Also, back on Episode 100, I gave my sort of standard advice. If you’re deciding between two projects, write the one that has the better ending because that’s going to be just the better movie overall. It’s so easy to think of good ideas for how things start, it’s very difficult to think of great ideas for how things end. So write the one with the good ending because you will actually finish that one and it’s more likely to be a good script.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Let’s do some One Cool Things. Craig, oh, I’m so excited. I see this on the document here. I don’t know what it is. But it sounds miraculous.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is. It is. So this actually comes via my son who came home from school and his science teacher had run this little experiment with the kids in his class and it involved this thing called the miracle berry. So the miracle berry is an actual berry. I don’t know its real name. It’s native to West Africa. And they’ve known about it for decades now. It contains a compound that when they isolated it, they called it miraculin because they can do stupid things like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s what miraculin does. So they take miraculin out and they mix it with little potato starch, turn it into a little tablet. You stick the tablet on your tongue, you let it dissolve, it takes about a minute. It doesn’t in and of itself taste like anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s what it does. It appears to bind to the taste receptors in your tongue for about an hour and it essentially converts sour and bitter flavors to sweet.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So what happens is anything that you eat is now suddenly sweet. Sweet things are unbearably sweet. So my daughter and I just did an experiment the other day. It’s amazing. So for instance, tomatoes taste like grapes, but they also taste like tomatoes, but they taste like grapes. It’s freaking amazing. The other thing that it worked great on were berries. Because, you know, sometimes berries can be like tart, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so people do frequently sugar them. It’s like, you know, like when you get that one magical strawberry that’s perfectly sweet, that’s the way they all taste. All of them, every last one of them, even like the weird hard green one when you use this miracle berry thing, it’s kind of amazing. And then you just go around your kitchen trying different things. Like okay, let me try an onion. Oh my god, it tastes like an apple. Let me try — like we have an orange tree in our yard that makes the sourest oranges on the planet.

**John:** Yeah, I know what that is. Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god, they were the best tasting oranges ever. In fact, they even warn you. They’re like, look, if you take lemon juice and drink it, it will taste like lemonade but don’t do that because you’ll burn your insides. I loved it. I just thought it was the most fun. You can buy it on Amazon. It’s expensive. Like a pack of these things is like $15 or $20 and maybe get like eight of them. But, you know, it’s worth it just for funsies once. I wouldn’t use it every day, but I thought it was great.

**John:** It does sort of feel like an Instagram filter for food. It’s just like, you know.

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically, yeah.

**John:** Like I want my flavors to be just like a little bit more idealized.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like airbrushing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s flavor brushing.

**John:** Yeah, indeed. My One Cool Thing is Christians Against Dinosaurs. And so it is a website. Click through, Craig, now. Because I’ll be fascinated to hear what you think about it. It is a site that is describing a Christian point of view against the belief and study in dinosaurs. And I find it fascinating, but I also genuinely don’t know.

**Craig:** It is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. [laughs]

**John:** So here’s the thing. It’s like it could be completely real or could be a really brilliant satire parody. And what I find so fascinating is the tension between those two things, it could be both sort of simultaneously. I just found it wonderful and maddening at the same time.

**Craig:** It’s got to be a parody because they’re linking to a video called “Heavy Metal and Dinosaurs – what’s the connection?”

**John:** Yeah. But look through the other stuff. It’s done so remarkably deadpan that I just found it —

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s definitely a parody. I’m looking at their sign, “Stegosaurus, not in my name.” Yeah, no, that’s a parody. But it’s really funny. This is the problem, what are they called, Poe’s Law, when you can’t tell the difference between extreme position and its own parody? Teaching others to deny the dinosaur lie and accept the Lord. That is great. [laughs]

**John:** So it’s really well done. It’s fascinating, if you click through on YouTube and to any of the videos and stuff, you’ll see all of these downloads saying like you’re stupid, you’re an idiot, like this is real. And people believe it and I sort of half believe it. Here’s the thing is: I think that there are people who are liking this who generally do believe it’s real. My suspicion is that the Christians Against Dinosaur site is a parody. And yet, it’s done so perfectly that a person who believes in sort of the biblical story of creation and that dinosaurs don’t fit into that might genuinely ascribe to a lot of these beliefs so I just found it great. And so I invite people to click through and weigh in with your own opinions on the site.

All right. And that’s our show for this week. So as always, our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel who does all the things that Craig described in the podcast above about his difficult job, so thank you Stuart. If you have a question for us like the ones we answered, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. If you have short things for me or for Craig, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. The longer things would also be great on the Facebook page. We promise we’ll actually check the Facebook page. So if you have opinions on tipping, let us know. Just leave us your opinions on the Facebook page for that.

Our outro this week comes from Adam Lastname. That’s how it shows up in the feed. But Adam wrote three brilliant things, so we’re going to be hearing three brilliant things from Adam Lastname over the weeks to come. If you have an outro you’d like to have us play on the show, write to ask@johnaugust.com and provide us a link and we will gladly listen to it. So that is our show. Craig, thank you so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/) is fantastic
* [Notes for last week’s release of Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.2.1](http://support.screenplay.com/filestore/mmsw6/docs/MMSW_6214_ReadMe.pdf?utm_source=Email_marketing&utm_campaign=Wednesday_February_10_2016&cmp=1&utm_medium=HTMLEmail)
* Ross Putman’s [@femscriptintros Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/femscriptintros)
* [mberry Miracle Fruit Tablets](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001LXYA5Q/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Christians Against Dinosaurs](http://www.christiansagainstdinosaurs.com/)
* [Poe’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law) on Wikipedia
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/franchises-and-final-draft).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 236 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, on the program, somebody buys Final Draft. But it’s not an aspiring screenwriter, rather a giant accounting software company. We’ll talk about what that means for Craig’s favorite application and the state of screenwriting software in general.

Also, today we’ll talk about franchises. We’ll do a ton of follow-up questions about previous discussions, including some “How Would This Be a Movie?” that are actually going to be movies. And we’ll answer listener questions, too, about reading your boss’ script and moving on from a draft.

**Craig:** That sounds like a lot.

**John:** It sounds like a lot. It wasn’t very much until we just added the last little thing.

**Craig:** I know —

**John:** Right before we started recording.

**Craig:** It’s way too ambitious. But you know what, I feel like we could do it.

**John:** I feel like we could do it because we’re an ambitious podcast that gets a lot of news attention. This last week we got written up in Vanity Fair because of our live show, our Hollywood Heart show with Jason Bateman and The Game of Thrones guys. There’s a whole article in Vanity Fair about that now.

**Craig:** I don’t know how Vanity Fair makes their money. I’m guessing ads on the internet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should get some of it. I mean, we did the work.

**John:** We did the work. There is reporting on something that we did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean —

**John:** Yeah. So Joanna Robinson just did a little write-up about The Game of Thrones guys talking about how the first pilot was terrible and how you said it was terrible and the things they did to fix it. And she noted that it’s not just booze and death threats that keep these two together, which really could be said for you and me as well. [laughs]

**Craig:** I’ve definitely been having a strange week in the news.

**John:** You have. Craig, you passed me in Twitter followers which is just — which is fine. Also just kind of bonkers because like I’ve been hovering above 50,000 for a long time. And if you look at the chart, you’ve rocketed it up in the last month.

**Craig:** I want people to notice. Play it, rewind if you can, and listen to John’s “Which is fine.” [laughs]

**John:** Which is fine.

So Craig, here’s a fascinating thing you’re going to find is — I don’t know if on Twitter you ever got ads before. Did you get ads in your timeline?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. You mean like a sponsored tweet or something?

**John:** Like a sponsored tweet or like you’d scroll past and there’d be an ad in there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So I don’t get them either. But apparently a lot of people do get them. And it’s because you and I crossed a certain threshold or because we have little verified checkmarks, we don’t get any of that stuff. So we live in a slightly different Twitter universe than other people do.

**Craig:** You mean it’s better?

**John:** It’s better. We sort of — we are in the express lane of Twitter, which is odd. But you are now in the center of Twitter firestorms because you keep poking the bear and the bow — the bear being your former college roommate.

**Craig:** He’s no bear.

**John:** No, he’s not a bear.

**Craig:** No. Bears are cool. [laughs] Yeah, I know I’m not going to stop.

**John:** You’re not going to stop?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And people will not stop emailing the ask account to say if I could get you to go on a national media appearance, and the answer is no. So you can stop writing in.

**Craig:** And I’m so sorry that that’s happening. For whatever it’s worth, I get bombarded constantly, every day, six or seven calls.

What’s kind of remarkable to me is news organizations will just have different people call and you start to realize that every organization is terrible in the world. So —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like, you know, so CNN will have somebody call. And then two days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then three days later somebody else from CNN will call. And then NBC calls, but then MSNBC calls. Nobody talks, and anyway, I’m not doing any of it, ever. So stop calling.

**John:** Which is good.

**Craig:** That ain’t going to work, but fine. [laughs]

**John:** So last night I had my own little media spotlight because I got to host Beyond Words 2016. So this is who I had up on stage with me. So I had Matt Charman who wrote Bridge of Spies. Drew Goddard from The Martian. I had Jon Herman and Andrea Berloff from Straight Outta Compton. John McNamara from Trumbo, Phyllis Nagy from Carol. We had Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short, Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy from Spotlight, and Aaron Sorkin from Steve Jobs.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That was a lot of people on stage. And if it sounds like that was too many people to have on stage, you are correct. That is more writers than you should ever have on stage for a Q&A.

But it ended up being really fun. And so we got a review. We got a write-up. Which I didn’t know they would ever write a review for a Q&A, but they did. So David Robb from Deadline wrote, “It was a high-spirited evening with lots of laughs and no controversy.”

**Craig:** That’s the way we like it.

**John:** That’s the way we roll.

So it was actually a really fun time. And everybody was great. No one had nearly enough time to speak. But I tried to structure it in a way that everybody got to speak pretty often so that it didn’t just go for like a half an hour without hearing from anybody. So it was a fun night.

If you were not able to attend but would like to hear it, you’re in luck because it’s going to be on the premium feed. So we’ll have that up maybe at the same time this episode goes up. So if you want to go over to scriptnotes.net, it’s $1.99 a month to get all the back episodes and premium episodes, and that will be one of them.

**Craig:** Spectacular. That must have been quite the task to wrangle — I mean, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11.

**John:** Yup. So me, plus 11 people.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** You could barely fit all those chairs on the stage because we had the sort of couchey kind of things. We’ve done a lot of events at this theater. And so we went with the couch mold and — but it was a lot of people there.

And so I tried to structure questions that there would be some speed rounds where everybody would answer one thing and it would be really short. And then we try to go in-depth and talk about relationship with characters, relationship with setting up the worlds.

It was interesting. But what was so weird about that group of movies and that group of writers is like they were almost entirely movies about real people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so we could really focus on that.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And so except for Drew Goddard who ruined everything by writing The Martian.

**Craig:** Right. Drew ruined it.

**John:** But even Carol, as I went — as we sort of got into it, Carol is, you know, based on some real experiences. And Phyllis’ relationship with Patricia Highsmith and sort of the weird way that they met and first became friendly was a huge part of that. And the sense of responsibility writers have to their subjects, be it the author or be it the real-life people you’re portraying, that was a great thing to get into. And I don’t think — people weren’t answering the same questions they answered throughout the rest of the award circuit, which is fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the idea. I mean, when I did the session with Charles and Adam for The Big Short, I tried my best to come up with questions that I didn’t think they are constantly — I mean, because you can — it’s amazing. I don’t want to use the word lazy or anything, but man, these people, a lot of them don’t even try. They just ask the same question. They’re not embarrassed to ask the same questions over and over. I would be so embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. You got to talk about new things.

**Craig:** Yeah, give it a shot.

**John:** So one of the things we did talk about was what was one of your favorite scenes that is not in the movie. Or something you wrote that didn’t make it through to the end. And except for Aaron Sorkin everyone was delighted to sort of tell us those things. And I think those are often really revealing because those things that don’t make it up there were probably very important to you in the writing of the movie, but they weren’t necessarily important to the final version of the movie because, obviously, these movies all turned out great without those scenes being in them. So that was a good look at sort of the process and the emotional journey you go through as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I’m always struck by how you can take writers who are at the top of their game and take them at a point in their career when they’re in the middle of all this glory. And they’re all writing different kinds of things completely, and they all come from different places, and the problems are all the same.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re — it just — that’s actually very comforting, I think.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a shared experience of being the person trying to make this impossible movie happen. And all these movies were incredibly unlikely movies to exist. And so the fact that they all turned out and came out this year is a great testament.

I found it weird that three of these movies take place in the ’50s. And so I kept waiting for someone to cut together these movies into like one cohesive whole.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where like Carol is in Bridge of Spies and Trumbo is suddenly walking through. Because certain people could kind of be in both places. And of course you have Jeff Daniels who is both in Steve Jobs but he’s also in The Martian, and so he could, you know, be yelling at people for different reasons.

**Craig:** Bridge of Carol Trumbo.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe not the strongest.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But we can workshop it.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] Let’s get a roundtable together.

**John:** Yeah, we can go out to one of the vendors and they can come back to us with some title treatments and some, you know, one-sheets. And we can really figure out what that’s like.

I will say, if you are an aspiring editor who likes to cut together mash-up of things, I would say, go for those three movies and cut them together and make something new out of it. Because they very much feel like they could exist in the same color-space-universe. So go for it.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m on the verge of a new character, by the way.

**John:** Uh-oh. Let’s work through this right now because I want to hear it.

**Craig:** Well, you know, we have Sexy Craig.

**John:** Yeah. And everyone knows how I feel about Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** This is — the new character is Cool Craig.

**John:** Oh, all right.

**Craig:** He’s like — Cool Craig is like this. He’s like, “Yeah, you know, it’s like, ah. Everybody’s just like all part of the same world, you know?”

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, like, I don’t know. I can’t even get worked up.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. It’s that sense of being like really connected but detached at the same time.

**Craig:** You know what, it’s not Cool Craig. It’s blasé Craig. [laughs] It’s actually — it’s the opposite of cool. But I’m going to work on blasé Craig.

**John:** I wonder if it’s maybe like a Whole Foods Craig. It’s really — yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that, Whole Foods Craig. That’s — it’s like a mixture of blasé and cool. Done.

**John:** Yeah. Done.

**Craig:** Okay. Whole Foods Craig.

**John:** This last week my daughter has been watching a fair amount of TV including Grease: Live, which I thought was fantastic. I don’t know if you saw Grease: Live.

**Craig:** Amazing. And I’m actually — the script I’m writing now is for the gentleman that produced that. And they were just — I mean, talk about going into a thing all muscle tight and, on my god, it’s going to rain, and what happens, and then poor, you know —

**John:** Vanessa Hudgens who lost her husband — who lost her dad.

**Craig:** Yeah. Her father died like six hours before. I mean, it’s just like, that’s ugh. But it was — I thought it was the best of all the versions of live productions they’ve done on network TV.

**John:** I thought it was spectacular. And look, I have some issues with the underlying material of Grease, but I thought they actually did a really smart job of just making that a huge, entertaining moment of television live in front of my eyes.

And it did definitely feel like they were like sprinting on tightropes. Like I just couldn’t believe that they were able to do this thing live in front of me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know — look, I know — I saw the tweets, you know — the point of Grease is change everything about you to get a man. You know, yeah. And also, it was made in the ’70s and so it’s like, whatever.

**John:** Yeah. It’s the ’70s version of the ’50s. And if we wanted to get our best lessons about how to live life out of stage musicals, I think we are really in trouble.

**Craig:** Well, also, it’s like, no one is coming to Grease for that. No one. You know why you’re going to Grease? For the romance and the songs. And it’s funny and they all get together at the end. They go together like ramramlam and dingidy dingidy bam.

You know what, man, it’s like, ugh. I just feel like, can’t you just like enjoy the music and not like overthink it? I don’t know, man. You know what? It’s like, whatever.

**John:** I think a Whole Foods Craig is going to work.

So before we got on to the Grease topic, my daughter has been watching a lot of things that involves sort of young adults flirting. And so she was just like, “Can you show me like how you flirt?” And so I was — we’ve been trying to demonstrate like really inept flirting, and it’s just delightful because she’s like, “No, no. You’re doing it wrong.” I’m like, “Ah, thank you, thank you. Somehow you were conceived. So I don’t know, I did something right.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I just think that I would pay anything to watch that. [laughs] To watch you teach flirting classes to your daughter. I just like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you turn towards the flirt recipient and you engage the flirting protocol, adjusting for input variables. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And she said, “No, Daddy.”

**John:** She said it was the worst, that I was doing a terrible job. But what’s fascinating is that she was comparing against a template that has been enforced by like Disney Channel shows.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so her idea of like what cool is, is really sort of like this weird manufactured adult version of what kids should think is cool.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s just — it’s all so completely synthetic.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t match up to Zack and Cody at all.

**John:** Not a bit. Now they’re the best.

**Craig:** They’re just better than you.

**John:** They are better than me.

Let’s get to some follow-up. So hey, do you remember way back in Austin? We were sitting there in that church and we were taking through How Would This Be a Movie. We had Steve Zissis up on stage. Who else did we have up on stage?

**Craig:** I believe we had Nicole Perlman.

**John:** Oh, Nicole Perlman was there, yes.

And so we were talking about Zola. And so Zola was the young woman who was a waitress, and then she was also a stripper. And she did a little of sex work connecting. She wasn’t a sex worker, but she was helping facilitate sex work for a friend, an acquaintance.

**Craig:** The word you are looking for is pimping.

**John:** I think she was pimping and —

**Craig:** She was a big pimping.

**John:** She was pimping. And she had a very wild, very dangerous weekend, which she tweeted about. It was a long stream of tweets that became sort of this sensation. It was like, well, what is real here, what is not real here.

That became an article for Rolling Stone written by David Kushner. And it is now becoming a movie. So this last week it was announced that James Franco will direct from a script by Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it.

**Craig:** Now I’m really curious to see what angle they take on this, because we kind of went through all these permutations of how you could approach it. And so actually a very interesting example of how a story can open itself up to four or five different — totally different kinds of movies based on the same thing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** I’m fascinated to see which one they choose.

**John:** I am, too. It seems a little bit strange that Franco is involved because like there’s an overlap between this and Spring Breakers, which seems — well, it could be good or it could be bad. I don’t know that he’s going to be playing a role in it. So it’s just — I’m curious to see what this will end up becoming.

**Craig:** I am, too. I am, too. I think that they will be smart to come at it from some angle that will be relevant beyond our general interest in the story, because it already seems like it’s 1,000 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And by the time the movie comes out it’ll seem like 20,000 years old. So there’s got to be more to it than just “Here’s what happened.”

**John:** Yup. We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Another bit of How Would This Be a Movie, this was from a later episode, we talked about sleep paralysis. And Matt, a listener writes in, “Jeffrey Reddick who is the creator and writer of Final Destination wrote and produced a feature called Dead Awake this past fall. It’s in post-production. The log line is a young woman must save herself and her friends from an ancient evil that stalks its victims through the real life phenomenon of sleep paralysis.”

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** Nailed it. It totally is exactly the movie I think we pitched would happen. And it apparently did happen and it is now in post. I was looking for a trailer. There’s no trailer up yet as we’re recording this, but it sounds like a movie that you will see in a theater, or on iTunes.

**Craig:** I think so. I think all these people should be paying us even though that guy did it before we ever said it.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re giving him some advanced promotion. So just like Vanity Fair should be paying us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Jeffrey Reddick, if would want us, slip us a few dollars, we’re not going to say no.

**Craig:** Or hey, if you don’t, it’s all right man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. Either way it’s great. I’m liking this Craig.

**Craig:** You just like it because it’s not Sexy Craig. [laughs]

**John:** I like — here’s the thing about this Craig. This Craig has no umbrage whatsoever.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This Craig, all umbrage has been completely pulled out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, we’re going to get to Final Draft soon enough. [laughs]

**John:** It’s like there was a Transporter accident. [laughs] And all the umbrage went to one Craig. And this is just the one that has nothing left in him. He’s just a sheep.

**Craig:** You know what, nobody would want the good Craig. They would just kill him. They would set phazers to kill.

**John:** You can’t do anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, you’re useless.

**John:** I have a bit of correction. In our discussion of dead scripts, one of us mentioned Armageddon and Deep Impact and a listener wrote in to point out that Deep Impact actually came out first. I always forget that but it is actually true.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** All right. I believe it.

**Craig:** Sure. Yup.

**John:** We talked about Matt and Matt was looking for a place to write. So David wrote in. Craig, tell us what David wrote.

**Craig:** He said, “For $19.99 a month, that’s $19.99 a month, I have a business lounge access to any Regus in the United States.” I think I’m pronouncing Regus correctly. “I’m in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida and I use them all over Jacksonville. It works great for me. I’ve moved on but still keep it. I love it and wrote my first draft there of my most recent effort. Regus rents offices mostly to sole proprietors and small businesses. Those individual offices are extremely expensive but the business lounge accounts are a steal.”

**John:** That’s absolutely great and true. And I can imagine something that sort of like an airport lounge would be great and perfect for exactly those kinds of things. It’s like it’s a clean, well-lit place that maybe has some coffee and you just go there and you do your work. That makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So our mutual friend, Dana Fox, she does a lot of writing at the Soho House in Hollywood. So that is a fancy club at the top of a building on Sunset. And that’s another great place to sort of go for meetings and coffee. But I also know writers who just sit at a table and bang out a draft there. So it’s another good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of writers go there. Every now and then Todd Phillips and I would write there. But the problem with the Soho House, I mean — and this is frankly, that’s the Soho House is for rich people. And I think even then they make a decision about whether or not you’re Soho House people.

**John:** I have applied and have not gotten in, so if SoHo House wants to accept me, they could.

**Craig:** Well, they have a no-cyborg policy. It’s pretty strict. But —

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the problem with Soho House is that inevitably people that you know are going to walk by because it is that kind of Hollywood incestuous place. And then you’re not working, you’re talking now, you know.

I love — you know, it’s so funny like, the only person near me, truly near me is John Lee Hancock because his office is just two floors below mine in the same building. But the two of us are so similar. We never ever bother each other, ever, unless he wants to use my scanner.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, he’s doing pretty well. I bet he could afford his own scanner.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing. But look —

**John:** And the other thing is I honestly don’t even use my scanner that much. I just use the app on my phone. And it’s just, it’s so much easier.

**Craig:** I use the scanner if I have to like — at tax time, it’s pretty good.

**John:** Yeah, if you have a bunch of pages, it’s —

**Craig:** Yeah, a bunch of pages. But I should just start charging him, right?

**John:** You should, absolutely. Or if he got a lounge access account to —

**Craig:** To my scanner.

**John:** To Regus, I bet they have a scanner.

**Craig:** Probably.

**John:** They probably have a copier and a scanner. It’s probably one of those combo units, but it would be be fine.

**Craig:** Hey man, whether it’s a combo or not, you know, it’s like you pay and then what happens, happens.

**John:** 100%. Craig, you’re so right.

**Craig:** Here’s another question. This one is from Mario. And he asks, regarding our dead scripts discussion, “What if there were something, anything, in one of those dead scripts that you felt could work well in a different one, maybe even one you’re working on now?”

**John:** Yes. So that’s a great question. So has there been anything in one of those dead scripts that you’ve sort of taken and repurposed for something new?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I say basically no. There was one idea that I tried twice. And essentially, there’s a split screen action sequence, which I wrote in the first Charlie’s Angles and we ended up not shooting it. And so I ended up doing a similar kind of thing in another script that has never been shot.

So it’s a similar idea where at a certain point the wide screen goes split screen and you’re following two separate threads through both sides. So it’s really the same idea, but it’s so vastly different execution because the story is different. That it’s just the same. It’s only the very general same idea. There’s no beats that are the same.

I’ve never been able to like take a scene from one thing and move it to another. It just — that just never works. Everything is sort of bespoke and custom to that one movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. And occasionally I will hear writers say, “Well, you know, I wrote this scene in this other movie and I’m trying to put it into this one.” And I just think, “Why? Just, you know, write a new scene.”

When people do that, I feel like they’re clinging not to some kind of incredibly utilitarian piece of work that could fit into one movie or another. They’re clinging to some sort of feeling they had when they wrote that scene. Like, “I nailed it.” You know, “I got it.” Or that scene represented some kind of breakthrough for them and now they’re just basically clinging to it like, you know, some sort of shining example of their goodness and trying to put it into other things. It will never ever work, ever.

**John:** So if you’re a standup comic, you’re going to have your jokes. And you’re going to have your jokes that you go back to and the things that you know work because they’ve been tested. But it doesn’t really work the same for screenwriting because everything is very much, you know, the scene in front of you. So it’s very hard to move a joke from, you know, page 19 to page 64, much less from one movie to another movie. So it’s very hard to sort of take material from one script and move into a completely different movie.

**Craig:** I also feel like if you can, something is wrong with your current script. Because even jokes, unless it’s the broadest of movies, different characters say different kinds of jokes. They don’t — it just doesn’t work.

Not only have I never done it, I’ve never actually even considered doing it. It’s just those scripts are done and that’s that, and let’s just move ahead.

**John:** At some point, we’ll have Chris Morgan on, who writes The Fast and the Furious movies. And that’s a situation where I can imagine that there were stunt sequences which were considered and designed for one movie that for whatever reason they didn’t shoot, but that were actually really good ideas as sequences, which could be repurposed for another movie. I mean, obviously you would write everything in them, like the story stuff would change. But if the idea of, “What if we did these kind of trucks doing this kind of thing?” might be valid in a different The Fast and the Furious movie. That’s the kind of thing I could imagine being moved from one movie to another movie. But in most cases, it’s just not going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re talking about shifting a sequence from one movie to its own sequel, then I think it’s fair game because, you know, they’re the same characters. It’s the same tone. So, sure, I think that’s fine.

I don’t think we actually did that when we were working on the Hangover movies. But we — I remember at some point we talked about like, “Oh you know, we wanted to do that thing in 2. Maybe we should do it in 3.” And I don’t think we ended up doing it, but I get that.

But that’s not I think what Mario is getting at, which is, you know, because if the script is dead, you’re not working on the sequel. [laughs]

**John:** So if you’re copying a sequence from one script to another script, you might be using some screenwriting software, perhaps even Final Draft.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And that was in the news this week. So it was one of the things most tweeted at me this week, was this bit of news that production management specialist Cast & Crew Entertainment Services has bought screenwriting software leader Final Draft Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Cast & Crew said the deal, announced Tuesday, continues to accelerate its investment in technology supported by its majority shareholder, Silver Lake Partners. Cast & Crew which provides payroll and residuals processing and accounting systems and software, and production incentive consulting was acquired by Silver Lake Partners in mid-2015.

Marc Madnick, CEO and Chairman of Final Draft, said the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Together, “we will accelerate our development process and further solidify our industry leadership for many years to come.”

So in the show notes, you’ll see links to the Variety article but we’ll also put in the original press release which has sort of more details, kind of, about the deal.

**Craig:** This is awesome. [laughs]

So even the strange coincidence, I’m working on this project for HBO. It’s the first — it’s a miniseries, first television thing I’ve ever done. And it had taken me forever to finish this thing that I was doing and I finally turned it in. And then they paid me.

And I had forgotten actually that I was supposed to get paid because they didn’t pay for so long but I had taken so long. And these checks came and HBO — so all these companies go through payroll services. Usually, when I get paid, like for instance, I think Universal uses Entertainment Partners.

**John:** That’s where I get most of my stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that’s a company that handles payroll for the studios. I think they handle their own in-house payroll, so their own employees are paid through their own company. But outside vendors get paid through this service because when they pay writers, actors, and directors, it’s complicated. It’s not just paying you what they owe you. They also have to then keep track of how much they paid you, when you hit the certain cap, how much fringes they have to then send to the unions for pension and for health. And then there’s the whole residuals thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But this was the first time I got one from Cast & Crew. I didn’t even know what it was when it showed up. So Cast & Crew — so at least I know they handle the payments for HBO.

**John:** And I want to make clear that the check came through properly and Cast & Crew did a good job, at least, in terms of getting you paid.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No, Cast & Crew did a brilliant job getting me paid.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** And they seemed like — this seems actually like a perfect match between a company that is the ultimate in bean counting and Cast & Crew. [laughs] So what in God’s name would these two companies have in common? It’s actually kind of a brilliant sale.

What is valuable about Final Draft? Well, let’s talk about what’s not valuable about it. The software stinks, in my humble opinion. It doesn’t work as well as a number of its competitors. It offers fewer features than a number of its competitors. It is refreshed far less often. It is way more expensive than any other option.

So why? Where’s the value in it?

The value, in a weird way, is in its format. Just because they were first, and because they were the leader for so, so long, their format, their file format is the industry standard file format. A little bit like the way VHS became the standard format for home recording even though, as many people will angrily say, Sony Betamax was a far superior format.

So FDX is the VHS format of screenwriting files. And you may say, “Well, you know, isn’t PDF — hasn’t that eliminated the value of FDX?” Almost entirely, but then there’s this little piece.

And the little piece is when you are in production and you are porting the script into breakdown software, breakdown software to schedule your movie, budget your movie, break it down for departments. All that stuff, which is very technical business, nuts and bolts, bean counting kind of stuff, the FDX file format pipes in, and that’s what is — their format kind of owns that space.

So this is actually a very smart marriage because I can easily see how a company that handles payroll can say, “Well, we can actually just take over this other nuts and bolts kind of thing. We’re really good in nuts and bolts. Let’s just buy the format that the nuts and bolts come in and we will do it.”

Now, what does this mean for the rest of us?

**John:** Well, before we get into what it means for the rest of us, I think you’re wrong sort of largely. And so I want to talk —

**Craig:** Hey man, whatever.

**John:** Yeah, hey, man. So we can have differences of opinion.

So let’s talk through what they said about it and I think they believe maybe what you believe. Here’s the quote from Cast & Crew.

So, “With a clear strategic vision and the active input of our clients, we are leveraging technology to create compelling end-to-end solutions,” said Eric Belcher, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cast & Crew.

“We are delighted to partner with the best screenwriting software company in the business. We see powerful links between its exceptional product of family and the digital payroll and production solutions we are providing. It all starts with a script.”

Wow, so many buzz words crammed into such a small space.

All right. So I do think that they perceive that there’s going to be some way that Final Draft will be able to tie better into — I don’t even know that they really do production budgeting but I think they probably want to do production budgeting and go into all their other systems.

The thing is, Final Draft is client software. It’s a thing that you use on your computer. And that’s not the people who are really using their normal accounting software. It’s a really different customer. So I think that is a real problem.

And the FDX file format, Final Draft created it but they don’t really own it. It’s just XML. So Highland, my app, writes and reads to the FDX format just fine. And so do all of the other screenwriting software.

So even though Final Draft created that format, they don’t own that format. They have no special keys or mastery to that format. So if they really tried to sort of lock it down some, but they can’t because they picked an open format that anyone can read and pick through. So there’s no magic benefit you get from it.

What I do think you get from Final Draft, though, is I think you get the name Final Draft, which is honestly, for all of our frustration, is synonymous with screenwriting software. I think if you talk to somebody who doesn’t know anything about screenwriting but if you asked like, “What program do you use to write scripts?” They’ll say, “Oh, it’s probably Final Draft,” because that’s the one they’ve heard of.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true. And actually, I don’t think we disagree, because you’re right. I mean, every good screenwriting solution offers an export to FDX because it’s academic to do. FDX isn’t a proprietary format, anybody could write through it. So you’re absolutely right about that.

I think that what they’re trying to do is go into companies where they are already providing the one part of the business service, paying people and saying, “We’d like to actually — we’ll give you a rate.” Like right now you’re paying this company to do this part of the bean counting. And you’re paying us to do this part. How about you pay us to do both parts and it will end up costing you a little bit less?

I suspect that’s what they’re going for. But here’s what I know for sure. When Marc Madnick, our friend, says the deal will lead to better software and customer experience for screenwriters and filmmakers, he is lying through his teeth. There is absolutely no way that that’s true. None.

**John:** No. I don’t think that’s — I don’t think that’s accurate at all because to lie you have to be intentionally trying to deceive. I think he may genuinely believe that.

I don’t think that’s going to be the outcome. So I agree with you that the outcome will not be better for most people. But I — he sat across from us — I do take him at his word that I think he thinks it will be better for people.

**Craig:** I don’t think he thinks that at all.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Because he knows how he spends money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And Final Draft basically is an advertising company. They have a product that they barely change and update. They have four people working on that part of it. Everybody else is in sales and promotion. And —

**John:** We should acknowledge that sales and promotion ended up becoming one of the sponsors of our live show from last week, much to our surprise.

**Craig:** Much to our surprise. Yeah, no, that’s what they’re good at. So that’s where the money will continue to go. And in fact, I think this partnership is about something that has nothing to do with the end user — the typical end user of Final Draft. This partnership has everything to do about cornering a certain part of the post-production marketplace or the — I’m sorry, the production marketplace here in Hollywood.

How in God’s name would the fact that they are now owned by a payroll company help a kid who’s 19 years old in New Jersey looking to write his first screenplay? It has nothing to do with him. And so therefore, that kid’s not going to be serviced any better. That’s ridiculous. It’s —

**John:** So I agree with you, Craig. I was just saying I don’t think — I don’t think we can necessarily say that Madnick is lying when he says it’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re right. I’m — okay. Let me amend it. I can’t say for certain that he’s lying. I can say for certain that what he’s saying will not turn out to be true. Is that fair?

**John:** I think that’s absolutely fair to say.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So my question when this happened is sort of why or why now. And I have no great insight into the finances of Final Draft to know whether they are doing great and like this was a chance to sort of buy them at the peak or if they were in trouble. And I say that honestly because while I make another screening app, my app is nowhere near the Final Draft of the world.

So I don’t know whether this was, “Uh-oh, everything is going south. We better sell the company. Maybe someone will buy the company.” And that’s — whether this was saving Final Draft or whether this was an investment firm coming in to scoop up this brand name that was available. So I don’t know what the real reasons were for why this happened.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, you don’t sell your company when it’s on the upswing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because there is really no point unless it’s going to open up some new marketplace to you that you didn’t have access to, which is not the case here. So —

**John:** If you’re Marvel and you sell to Disney and you can do amazing new things.

**Craig:** Correct, because Disney opens up a marketplace. They just have this infrastructure that’s so much larger than yours and they have theme parks that you simply don’t have and don’t have the capital to construct, and an empire of hotels and floating hotels, right? So that’s not applicable here.

So in my mind, I’m thinking — I don’t if they were in trouble, but I would imagine that our repeated theory that, you know, they had kind of reached the end of the golden era of being the only person out there was becoming true.

**John:** Yeah. So the people who bought them is Cast & Crew, but Cast & Crew was itself bought just in the middle of 2015. So it’s this big company called Silver Lake Partners, basically an investment fund, so they own a stake in a lot of different things including William Morris, WME.

What’s odd is I looked on the Silver Lake Partners thing, and they don’t even announce that they bought it, so — that they bought Final Draft. So you know, whatever Cast & Crew paid for it, it wasn’t enough that it made it to the front page of Silver Lake Partners. It wasn’t a big enough deal to have mattered to that.

**Craig:** Well, it’s actually kind of fascinating to me when they said they bought Final Draft. What did they really buy? I mean, what they bought was the code. They bought intellectual property. They’re not buying — I mean, what are the assets there beyond that?

**John:** Well, they’re buying Marc Madnick. They’re buying the team. It’s however much you want to value that team. [laughs]

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Because as we talked about, obviously there’s programmers and there’s a marketing team and there’s a support team. How much of those do you want to keep or need to keep? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m going to just predict that within five years Marc Madnick has moved on to another enterprise.

**John:** Maybe so. And maybe this is a good way for him to transition out of doing it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I don’t know whether he’s going to want to come on the show to talk to us about it, but he came on before.

So let’s talk about what this means for actual users. If you are a person who is using Final Draft right now, I guess I would preface this by saying, if you are using Final Draft and happy, well, good for you. I mean, I guess, if you like it, that’s fantastic. A lot of people don’t like it, but that’s — and then there’s many good other choices out there. And I think there are choices that weren’t available even three or four years ago. So it is better for this to be happening now than it would have been a couple of years ago.

**Craig:** Yeah, certainly. Ultimately, this won’t change anything for the typical end user. I can’t imagine that Silver Lake Partners and their subsidiary, Cast & Crew, is going to spend unnecessary cash on a product that seems to sell regardless of quality.

**John:** Yeah. I could think — my concern would be that oftentimes, especially on the Macintosh, and really — I’m going to fully reveal our Macintosh bias here because — Craig, do you know anybody who writes on a PC?

**Craig:** You know — yeah. I mean, I’ve never seen them do it but I’ve heard them say it.

**John:** Yeah. So most of the screenwriters I know are writing on Macs. And most of the TV writers I know and TV showrooms I know or writer’s rooms are writing on Macs. So that’s really my experience.

And my experience has been that when the Mac System Software gets updated, Final Draft breaks. Not always, but very often Final Draft breaks. My concern would be that if the people who now own Final Draft choose not to spend a lot of time and money on it, Final Draft could break and become irrevocably broken for even longer than it has been in the past.

**Craig:** Well, I would imagine that they — see, I actually think that maybe that’s the one thing that might get fixed because they are corporate and because they aren’t — when you — when something is just one part of your company then the costs involved aren’t so, you know, egregious. And you might think like — well, Marc Madnick, he was, “not in the business of going out of business,” which I think he translated into not in the business of doing his job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and putting out software that was robust and worked and was up-to-date. This company might actually go, “Okay. Look, we’re a real company here. We just got a memo from Apple saying that the following software has been deprecated for 18 years. Can we hire somebody to fix this now please?” I could see that possibly happening.

**John:** But here’s the thing, if Final Draft breaks on a Macintosh, they have to scramble to get it to work again. If this giant company — if this one little thing that’s not a huge priority for them breaks, then it’s not going to be a priority. And so that outside contractor they are bringing in to do this work, it’s unlikely to be awesome. It’s unlikely to sort of be — I mean, the good thing about Final Draft having exactly one product that sold is like all their eggs are in that basket and they’re going to protect that basket very carefully.

**Craig:** And they still had a bad basket.

**John:** They still had a bad basket.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s where they’re at.

So let’s talk about the state of screenwriting software just in general because it has been a little while since we’ve done that. And I’m going to break this into sort of two categories.

So there’s the screenwriting software you need if you’re doing production work, where you need to do locked pages, revision marks, AB pages. You need this if you’re going into production and there’s an AD and there’s a line producer, and you are submitting things for budgets and you are with Craig with his little cart and you are generating new pages because they’re shooting a scene in two minutes.

I think, honestly, the two choices you have at this point are Final Draft and Fade In for that level of stuff. Would you agree with me there?

**Craig:** Yes. Although I will add that WriterDuet is coming up strong.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Generally speaking, I think the problem for WriterDuet is that most of the time when you are somebody writing in production, the notion of writing on something that is cloud-based is — makes you a little nervous. But yes, I think largely speaking, correct. If you are doing big boy, big girl screenwriting, you’re going to want Final Draft or Fade In and, you know, for my money, Fade In is vastly superior.

**John:** So the other one that still exists which some people use, god bless them, is Movie Magic Screenwriter, which has not been updated for a while. But I know some actual TV shows that use that in the room and they still use that for production. So that’s sort of legacy software that still apparently works.

So those are your kind of choices. And you’re going to probably end up using one of those three things if you’re doing those lock-down pages. What I would encourage most of our listeners, though, to look for is you’re not going to be using that stuff very often. And so if you’re looking for an app to write in, you may choose to use a different app for writing.

So the app I make it’s called Highland. It is very simple and very straightforward. Slugline works very much the same way. And you know, the web-based things, WriterDuet, some of the other ones we talked about, that Amazon thing, Celtx, which I guess some people like, those are other choices.

But I write in Highland. Everything I’ve been writing has been in Highland. Justin Marks writes in Highland. There’s good choices that aren’t appropriate for final production work but are really good for the script you’re turning into the studio. So that’s my pitch for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely true. And more to the point, if you’re listening and you haven’t made a purchase yet, you need to understand that Final Draft, again, is so much more expensive than the rest of these solutions. It’s not even funny. They’re grotesquely more expensive.

I think the most expensive of the alternatives we just mentioned is Fade In which is $49, I think. Whereas you’re looking at nearly $200, I think, for Final Draft, for a new —

**John:** Yeah. Final Draft always seems to be on sale a lot. So I think Final Draft’s price has effectively dropped and is often at around like $99 when you want it to be at $99.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I think the reason I would say beyond just the expense is not just the dollars you’re spending but the amount of time you’re spending to learn an application that isn’t working the way you need it to work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I guess the best analogy for me would be like, “Hey, I want to go camping. I want to try camping.” And so you have a couple choices. You could go out and buy like the $2,000 tent and the sleeping bag that is rated down to 20 degrees below Fahrenheit, and the whisper-light stove and all this thing. And you could spend a lot of money and get a really complicated thing.

That would be great if you were scaling up Everest. But it’s not really the right choice for like, “Hey, we’re going to like to the lake and like go fishing.” And so I think there’s this temptation to buy the fanciest thing with the most bells and whistles and the most features —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Which is not necessarily going to serve you the best.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And that, to me, is really the experience with not just Final Draft but also Fade In, is that like you open up Fade In or Scrivener — I didn’t even mention Scrivener — there’s so much that you’re faced with that is, you know, it’s not about putting words on the page. It’s about sort of figuring how the app works.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those are professional tools and not everybody needs the professional tool.

**John:** I think there’s probably a fair number of screenwriters who are not screenwriters because they thought, “Well I need to use Final Draft or one of these big apps in order to write a screenplay.” And they’re like — they were trying to learn how to write screenplays and at the same time they were trying to figure out how to use this application. And these two things got conflated and that’s not necessarily the healthiest way to approach learning how to write.

**Craig:** I think WriterDuet has two modes. One is a monthly or something like that. But then one is free. And the free one actually is pretty fully-featured and a great way to kind of at least get your feet wet without spending a dime.

**John:** Yeah. And if you’re going to, you know, just get started with things, that’s a great place to go. My hesitation with the web-based stuff has always been that I’m worried that the service is going to go under. And as we talked about on the script episode, suddenly things are just gone because things magically disappear in the cloud.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s actually done a pretty good job the way he’s designed it where — from what I can tell, it’s doing both. It’s saving locally and it’s a little bit like a Dropbox kind of sync solution. So even if you don’t have access to the internet, you still have the file locally and you can still work on it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s, you know, not —

**John:** Progress, at least.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s not bad. It’s just not quite — yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about Final Draft and make our wild prognostications about what happens one year from now and five years from now. Do you think we will have Final Draft a year from now?

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Five years from now?

**Craig:** Yes, but I don’t think — it will be different management. I don’t think Mark Madnick will be around in five years.

**John:** I would guess the same way. I think there will be something like Final Draft and there will be some changes that will come out, and I bet the website will improve. I bet there will be some things that happen.

Weirdly I did look though at the Cast & Crew website, and like there’s this really abstract like woman and a bird as the photo on the lead, like, ha, that doesn’t feel like accounting software at all. Five years from now, I think someone else will be running Final Draft or there won’t be Final Draft. That’s my prediction.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to — it’s all about the intransigence of the — what do they call it? The work flow, the — you know, the departments that are processing these files into schedules and budgets and all this, they are just so entrenched in like, “I use this software, beep-a-boop-a-bop.”

**John:** Yeah. But so here’s the thing is that there are maybe 100 people in all of Hollywood who needs to use that software versus thousands of screenwriters. So there’s no reason why thousands of screenwriters need to use that software —

**Craig:** I’m with you.

**John:** To send in that script to a budget because any application can create that.

**Craig:** You and I are — have been saying this forever and I’m still just puzzled. I’m just puzzled by why — you know a lot of times people say, “Well I’m working on a show and the showrunner uses Final Draft. So I guess we’re all using Final Draft, blah, blah, blah.” You know, it’s so annoying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So annoying.

**John:** It is annoying.

All right, let’s change topics. Let’s talk about franchises. This comes from Mark Rasmussen who asks, “I was at the WGA Beyond Words panel last night and made the observation that every single one of the nominated screenplays are either an adaptation, a based-on, or a biopic. And when you throw in all the sequels, prequels and remakes.”

And this actually is — ties very well into a blog post I did this last week which is called “It’s Franchises All The Way Down.” And this was a discussion we had over lunch where I was wondering aloud how many of the top 100 grossing movies were either sequels or the first film in a franchise. So they were either, you know, Star Wars 7 or they were Star Wars. They were like an original film that created a franchise. And so around the lunch table we were speculating like, out of the top 100 movies, maybe 30 of them are part of a franchise, maybe 50.” The answer is, Craig?

**Craig:** It appears to be 86.

**John:** Yes. So 86 of the top 100 movies are either the start of a franchise or they are in fact a franchise, which seems crazy. There’s only 14 movies in the top 100 that are just single movies, that that there’s no other — they’re not based on a previous movie, they’re not — they didn’t spawn a sequel, which seems crazy.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and no. I mean —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Look, if a movie does so well that it is on this kind of list or at least getting close to this kind of list of the 100 all-time top grossing movies, of course the studio is going to demand another one even if the original people say, “No, we don’t want to do it,” they’ll find somebody to do it. There’s just, you know, nobody wants to be the people that leave that money on the table. It’s actually kind of when you look at the ones that are single, you realize why.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at the ones that are single. So we’ll start with Titanic. You can’t sink the same boat twice. And so obviously there have been many parody videos of Titanic 2 like the boat comes back.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But no.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** 2012, Interstellar and Gravity are sort of the same boat. Like they’re not literally boats but the same idea like it’s the thing that happens exactly once. You’ve destroyed everything once and you sort of can’t go back and destroy it again.

**Craig:** Correct. So you have movies like The Lion King which because they were animated at a particular time where we weren’t doing computer animation but hand animation, they decided to make the sequels to those things for home video.

**John:** Yeah. And so for this exercise, we’re only counting the things that were theatrical sequels. So obviously the Lion King had a direct-to-video sequel but if the Lion King were to come out right now and be the same hit that it was, obviously you do the real sequels.

**Craig:** Oh, no question there would be a Lion King 2, no question.

**John:** So in the same boat with Lion King, we have Ratatouille, Up, Inside Out, and Big Hero 6. And there is discussion that Big Hero 6 is going to have a sequel. There’s nothing preventing them from doing Ratatouille, Up, or Inside Out as a sequel. Up would be kind of the hardest of them, but they’re all Pixar movies and Pixar is making other movies. So, to make the sequel to that they have to not make something else that could be a great franchise.

**Craig:** Correct. And we know the Pixar doesn’t shy away from sequels. They’ve gone through three Toy Stories, they’ve gone through three Cars movies I believe, and they are currently doing or I think their next movie is the Finding Nemo sequel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they don’t have a problem with sequels but you’re absolutely right, if their choice is to do an original or do a sequel, they’re going to do an original or a sequel, but they can’t do all of the sequels so…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yeah, like how do you make a sequel to Up, I mean, how old is Ed Asner? It would be crazy. Now, the one that’s fascinating is ET.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because ET, if it were made today would almost, I mean there’s a 100% chance of multiple sequels. But at the time, you had the biggest director in the world who had just made a bunch of the biggest movies in the world, make another biggest movie in the world and I think after that, he was like, “I don’t need to do a sequel, I’m going to make another biggest movie in the world.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it just didn’t happen. In fact, I don’t know if you remember but ET, it wasn’t long, maybe it was 10 years, they did a theatrical re-release and it made a ton of money again.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a great movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s one of the situations where, you know, yes, if we were to make that movie now, we would do the sequel and you still could make the sequel if you wanted to, I mean, those people are still alive and around. So I’m not going to say we’re never going to have a sequel to ET, we may not have it with Steven Spielberg, but I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible to make a sequel to ET even now.

**Craig:** They will not make a sequel to ET without Steven Spielberg.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** It would just be dead on arrival I think.

**John:** We’ll see. They made a sequel to Star Wars without George Lucas.

**Craig:** Well, after George Lucas proved that it would be a great idea to make sequels without George Lucas. I mean that’s the thing. And, you know, you could say like Jurassic World is without Steven — but that was his — he produced it, it was with his blessing. It was many years later and Steven had also made two sequels.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this, no.

**John:** Yeah. So in the show notes, I’ll have links to the original post because there was talk of a sequel to ET, and Spielberg was going to do one at one point and then decided not to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Forrest Gump, there was a sequel written. They just decided not shoot it. Inception and The Sixth Sense, both of those movies are kind of twist movies and it would be very hard to sort of go back and do them again. Inception I think is the easier one. Inception is like, well, we’ll have another adventure sort of like another heist film.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Sixth Sense, you still have some of those people are around and alive. There’s still Haley Joel Osment. You could do a sequel to it even without Bruce Willis. There’s —

**Craig:** Sounds like a super bad idea.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Yeah, Inception I think actually could make a great sequel.

**John:** So DiCaprio has never done a sequel so do you do it without DiCaprio?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think you could absolutely do it without him because I don’t think that the brilliance of that movie — and I love Inception, I don’t think the brilliance of that movie comes down to Leo, although he, you know, delivered a fantastic performance. It comes down to the concept and the nature of the world it proposes. So I think you can absolutely do another one with an entirely different cast.

**John:** Yeah. So the question is, how crucial is Christopher Nolan to that thing? Could you make Inception without Christopher Nolan or would that already have a negative spin going into it?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t want to make it without him writing it with Jonathan or however he wrote that one. I mean it’s — the part that is unique and attractive is the part that came from his mind and that’s through the story. I think somebody else wonderful could shoot it. Yeah. But no, I think you need him.

**John:** Yeah. And the final movie of the top 100 is Hancock which was not a hit. It was not a bomb but it wasn’t kind of crying out for a sequel. I think if it had have been a bigger hit if there would have been a sequel.

**Craig:** Is this domestic?

**John:** This is all-time worldwide.

**Craig:** Worldwide? And Hancock, how much money did Hancock make?

**John:** Hancock made a tremendous amount of money. So it’s like 97 though on the list so it’s going to get knocked off by next year.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s crazy.

**John:** That’s crazy. That’s Will Smith for you.

**Craig:** I didn’t know.

**John:** So right now, a bunch of people in their car are screaming, “What about inflation?” And so in the same blog post, I do link through the same list of 100 that are inflation-adjusted. So of course Gone with the Wind is the top thing. When you look at the inflation-adjusted list, there are a lot more single movies in there but not as many as you would think. So it’s 49 of the top 100 are neither a sequel or the start of a franchise of the adjusted ones. So we’ve always been making sequels and they’ve always been making a lot of money. It’s just the trend has accelerated.

**Craig:** Oh, without a doubt. And so, you know, we can say I think with surety that we live in an era of sequel saturation unlike any other before it. And I had this discussion with — actually with Chris Morgan who writes the Fast and Furious sequels. So Chris and I have spent a lot of time on movies with numbers on them. And, you know, then we’re writing our own things and people are saying, “Great, and we’ll get around to that but we need you to write the sequel to this other thing.” And the frustration is, you just want to say, “Don’t you all realize that you got to have the first one to have the sequel? So when can we do the first one of something?”

**John:** Yup, and that is a thing that I’ve said so often in rooms and frustrated. It also weirdly gets thrown back at you. It’s because sometimes you’ll be pitching them an original idea and they really want to know, well, what — they’ll be thinking like, “What is the franchise here? Can I make four movies out of this?” because they’re not going to want to focus on that one movie. So it makes it especially hard to make. Honestly, most of the movies that we were showing or been talking about at the panel last night, like those movies were not sequelable movies. You’re not going to make The Martian 2 because you got him back and that is one of the frustrations is sometimes the best movies by their nature kind of can’t have a sequel.

**Craig:** Right. So the world is dividing — the studio world is dividing between movies that are made to win awards and movies that can be franchises. And then there’s this gone, lost practice of making movies for mass audiences that aren’t designed to be franchises and —

**John:** So we can’t make Fatal Attraction anymore because that’s a movie that can only happen once and it can’t be franchised.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that kind of stinks, you know. It’s the only genre I think that kind of gets a pass on it is comedy because even though they try and make comedy sequels a lot and they do, I mean, you know, you just saw Ride Along 2 but, you know, they wanted to do a sequel to Identity Thief and none of us wanted to do it. We just wanted to do other things, you know, but they didn’t freak out. They weren’t like, “What? You’re costing us a franchise.” They were like, “Okay, yeah, that would have made money but, okay, we understand.” Comedies can kind of come and go because comedies don’t turn into, with rare exception, don’t turn into these juggernauts that generate hundreds and hundreds of million dollars of profit every single time plus ancillary, god knows what, you know. When you’re talking about new things and you’re trying to get them to make a movie that they haven’t made before, they are asking how many more can we make?

**John:** Yup. And so part of the reason why they want those things to be adapted from other material is oftentimes that material has already lent itself to sequel. So there’s already a reason to believe that you’re going to be able to make sequels from this thing. The nature of the project, if it’s based on a toy, well, that’s a big toy line that has a whole bunch of different ways it can go or when they’re putting together a writer’s room for Transformers or for Terminator or for some other big property, it’s like, well they want to see like, “Could we make a bunch of movies out of this?” because while they would love to have one hit movie, they would also love to have five hit movies.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So take a movie like Jack Reacher. So we all know that it’s hard to make movies now that are what we would call adult movies, not porn adult movies, but movies about adults doing real adult things and it’s not explosions. It’s just that good old fashioned kind of thrillery movie, right. Normally, the discussion would go like this, “I want to make a movie based on this novel and we can get Tom Cruise. He’s awesome. What do you think?” “You know, we’re not really making in that space.” “Okay, well, what if I told you that there was like 50 of these books?” “Oh, really? Okay, yeah.”

**John:** Yeah, it helps.

**Craig:** Because here’s the deal, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does work, we’re going to make it over and over and over and over. And that’s where the real money comes.

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t have any great lessons to pull out of this other than to say that we kind of always made franchises, we both strongly believe that you can’t make a franchise until you make the first movie. So you have to make that first movie. You don’t always know what that movie is that’s going to spawn a franchise but everyone can sort of sense the thing that probably can’t be a franchise because of the nature of the movie. So it’s why it’s harder to make Gravity for example because there’s no possibility making a sequel from it, but sometimes you make really good movies that can only be made once.

**Craig:** I think sometimes people go to the movie theatre and they see some movie come out that is the first of its kind and they think, “Why did anyone make this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s because they were hoping that they could make 12 of them. That’s why.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Simple as that.

**John:** And sometimes — yeah, and sometimes people make the movie that can only be made once like Inception because that filmmaker has tremendous power and in order to make the next Dark Knight, he gets to make Inception and that’s awesome. So we need to sort of celebrate when that’s possible to happen.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. One last thing about my list, you’ll notice that I didn’t count Avatar or Frozen. The things that are very close to becoming sequels, I left off that list because I strongly believe that there will be Avatar sequels. I strongly believe there will be a Frozen sequel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m not counting those.

**Craig:** No, no, there absolutely will be. They’re working on it.

**John:** Jerry writes, “I’m a writer’s assistance to a produced writer-director in Seattle. My boss handed me a screenplay she wrote a while back. It is a ‘comedy’ but it ain’t funny. It’s very specific to a particular subculture and it feels dated. If and when she asks my thoughts, how do I give honest criticism without making her unhappy?”

**Craig:** Well, she’s going to ask your thoughts because she gave it to you. [laughs] Right. I assume that she gave it to you because she wanted — okay, Jerry. So you’ve got some choices here. So let’s talk Machiavellian. She’s your boss. I assume you like your job so one option is lie. Just say, “I read it. It’s so good. It’s really funny. I had a couple of thoughts that if you want, I was just going to mention to you just things to think about if you were still working on it but I like this, I like this, I like this. It’s just really good and really helpful to read.” Hmm, Machiavellian, good.

The other option is to say nothing but then you risk that day when she surprises you by saying, “Hey, did you ever read my script? Because you’re my employee,” right? And then the third option is to treat her the way you would treat any rational human being who has asked for your opinion about their work and that is to be — to provide dispassionate, honest criticism that is neither over the top nor a pulled punch in that is clear and shows that you’ve really thought about the material and provide some potential solutions or ways to solutions. But you really got to think about who you’re working for here because I don’t know.

**John:** Yup. The choice is almost always choice one.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s just be honest. And so, here’s what I say is, you know, it’s basically choice one which is to say like basically you love it, but I would say it’s easy to couch notes in terms of your reaction or something that makes it sound like it is you’re failing. So I often find — so I kind of fell off the ride here. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be feeling here, I didn’t quite know how these points were going to connect, and I think I was questioning this. So as long as you can talk about your subjective experience of reading it and not make it sound like it’s something that they did wrong, that can be a helpful way to sort of get your note out there without making it sound like you didn’t love it.

**Craig:** That’s a great, great way of putting it, John. I really — that’s perfect. You should do that, Jerry, what John just said.

**John:** So Jerry, do that. Our last question comes from Mark Rasmussen who asked a previous question. He asks, “How do you know when it’s time to step away or shelve a script that you feel is not working?”

**Craig:** I’m the wrong person to ask that question to because I don’t do that. First of all, I don’t think I ever have the luxury to do it. I mean, the truth is just because of the way my career started, you know, I started writing and then I was working and so with the exception of one screenplay, I’ve always had some sort of gun to my head and an expectation, a professional expectation that I’m to finish something.

**John:** I think Mark though might be asking more about the dead scripts because as we talked through those, there were a couple of things which you and I both said like I did a draft and it just wasn’t anything that was worth sort of going back to. So it may not be — I don’t think he’s saying like pull the ripcord midway through.

**Craig:** I see, I see. Okay. So after you finish, okay. You give it a little bit of time and then you kind of check your own emotions and feelings. It’s hard enough to write things when you don’t have passion and there isn’t the wind at your back. It’s nearly impossible to do it when you’re dreading it and the wind is in your face. So you just ask yourself, am I looking forward to writing this or not? And if you’re not, and you’re looking forward to writing something else, perhaps you should listen to that voice. It’s not a great voice to listen to mid-script because in mid-script, we will sometimes get the 7-year itch but after the script is done, if it hasn’t landed the way you were hoping with other people, then maybe yeah, listen to your little voice.

**John:** Craig, you’re absolutely right. And to me, what it is, is if I’m excited to do another pass because I’ve just spoken with somebody who had great thoughts and suddenly I’m engaged to do that next pass, then absolutely I should do that next pass. If I’m dreading going back into it because I’ve lost the thread, I just don’t know what it is to be doing with it, that’s a sign that I should probably be writing something else and set this thing aside. Maybe I’ll come back to it, likely I won’t, and that’s just the reality is that you’re going to be writing a lot of things in your life and that thing that you spent six months on may not be a movie and that’s okay, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like, man, just let it go, you know, and if it was meant to be, it would be.

**John:** Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. So I think you’re going to do the coolest One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I am so excited about this. I got a tweet about this and sometimes those pan out, sometimes they don’t. This time, it panned out like beyond. I cannot wait.

All right. So there is a game, I’m a little late to this, a few months late, called Pandemic Legacy. It is a board game and we’re going to provide a link in the show notes to someone’s review of it which really goes into why this game sounds so great. I haven’t played it yet, but the description of the game, I bought it. It’s on its way.

The description of the game makes me salivate. And as far as I can tell, on the one hand, it’s a very simple strategy game. It’s — the idea is there — you and — you’re playing two to four players and each player is a CDC scientist and you’re trying to stop outbreaks of viruses across the world. There’s a Risk-like map and, you know, as viruses spread, you’re taking actions and there are actions cards, you know. So it’s strategy and resource. Okay, it’s a regular game. Here’s where it gets crazy. Two things as far as I could tell. Crazy part number one, as you play the game, when you experience certain things, there are stickers, right, and you or your opponents can choose stickers that apply to your characters. And those stickers stay there permanently meaning the next time you play that game, the game is different.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s — and in fact, you can even get to a place where like your game is done, right, which is amazing. So you’re permanently changing the game every time you play the game. Awesomeness number two, there are eight sealed things in the game box and on rare occasions, it will tell you open up the secret prize in box number three and you open it up and there’s something inside and the reviewer doesn’t tell you what but he gives the example of like let’s say it’s a little motor boat and you have no idea what good is this. And then later you realize, oh my god, there’s an airborne spore that’s only, you know, on land or it has infected our planes and you need a speedboat to get from place to place. So there’s these little things and those again, those are one shots that then change the game permanently.

And then the thing that really grabbed me and this kind of gives away like how bananas this thing is and why I must play it, one of the secret boxes says, “To be opened only if you have lost four games in a row,” and no one knows what’s in there. I mean you could open it and find out but I don’t want to know. So there’s like — it’s got spoilers, it’s got meta games, it’s got permanent changes. If you — certain victories give you permanent buffs, certain failures give you scars that last permanently, so we’re going to play it. You and I are definitely playing it for sure.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** We got to think of our other two players. They’ve got to be serious, they’ve got to be people — I think they’ve got to be people that can do left and right brain because a lot of this — the way he described it is it’s a bit of like a strategy board game combined with dungeons and dragons because you are playing characters and you’re making these really difficult choices about what to do and who to save and who to kill. So, I can’t wait.

**John:** I’m excited. So I have not played Pandemic Legacy but I will tell you that in the board game community, this idea of a board game that is permanently changed by playing it is sort of a thing and so some Kickstarters now will launch where they will send you two copies of the game. So basically you will have one clean copy and one to destroy.

**Craig:** In fact, Pandemic Legacy does this as well. They have a red box and a blue box. They are identical. This way you can say, “Alright, the red box is the one I’m playing with this group, the blue box is the one I’m playing with this group.” Also, they’re referring to this game as season one.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** So they will carry on to some sequel game. I can’t wait. I’m so excited.

**John:** Very excited. My One Cool Thing is The Katering Show, With a K. It’s this Australian team. These two women, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan. They are ostensibly doing a sort of YouTube cooking show where they’re talking about cooking gluten-free or cooking with ethical ingredients but it’s really sort of about their lives and everything falling apart around them. They are incredibly funny. It is just really well done. It’s available on YouTube in the US, probably everywhere in the world. It’s just terrific and I just love Australian comedy in general but this one was just delightful. So they’re short episodes and you’ll probably burn through all of them at once.

**Craig:** They are awesome. Years ago, I saw this one — their episode 3, We Quit Sugar, and so I’m going to watch the other ones, but I recommend that you start with that one because it’s spectacular.

**John:** So Craig, I’m watching this and I’m really questioning why no one’s figured a way to use them here because you see Rebel Wilson, you see other great Australian people who’d be able to crossover. I just feel like there’s a thing you could do with these guys that could bring them to a bigger audience.

**Craig:** Well, all right. So why don’t we see how powerful we are?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, you don’t know us and we don’t know you, we don’t know if you listen to the show, we don’t know if anybody you know listens to the show, but if some magic should happen, give us an email, drop us a line, and then let’s — who knows? Let’s see what happens. Yeah.

**John:** We will see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s our show this week. So our outro this week comes from Sam Tahhan. If you have an outro you would like to have us play on the podcast, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to that. That’s also the place where you would send your emails about questions or follow-up or things we got horribly wrong in this episode.

Our episode is produced by Stuart Friedel and it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. You could just search for Scriptnotes. If you search for Scriptnotes, you’ll also see our Scriptnotes app that let’s you get you to all of our back episodes including the live shows we talked about, the Beyond Words, and other interviews we’ve done with cool, famous people.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. He’s currently ahead of me in the Twitter count followers. I am @johnaugust. And you can find the links to all the things we talked about in the show notes. That’s at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** Hey, man, whatever.

**John:** Whatever, it’s fine.

Links:

* Vanity Fair on [the original Game of Thrones pilot](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/game-of-thrones-original-pilot-bad)
* [@clmazin’s followers growth over the past two months](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/clmazin_20160208followers.png)
* Deadline on the [2016 WGA Beyond Words panel](http://deadline.com/2016/02/wga-nominated-writers-panel-beyond-words-no-controversy-1201696981/), which you can [listen to now with a premium subscription at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-beyond-words-2016/)
* [Grease Live](http://www.fox.com/grease-live) on Fox
* [Scriptnotes, 222: Live from Austin 2015](http://johnaugust.com/2015/live-from-austin-2015), and [Variety’s article on the upcoming Zola movie](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/james-franco-direct-zola-stripper-saga-1201697548/) based on [this Rolling Stone article](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/zola-tells-all-the-real-story-behind-the-greatest-stripper-saga-ever-tweeted-20151117)
* [Scriptnotes, 233: Ocean’s 77](http://johnaugust.com/2016/oceans-77), and [Dead Awake](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3778010/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_2)
* [Regus](http://www.regus.com/)
* Variety on [the acquisition of Final Draft by Cast & Crew](http://variety.com/2016/artisans/news/screenwriting-software-final-draft-cast-and-crew-1201694791/), and [the official press release](http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160202005654/en/Cast-Crew-Entertainment-Acquires-Final-Draft)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/), [Slugline](http://slugline.co/), [Writer Duet](https://writerduet.com/), [Movie Magic Screenwriter](http://www.write-bros.com/movie-magic-screenwriter.html), [Fade In](http://www.fadeinpro.com/), [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/), and [a host of other apps for writing in Fountain](http://fountain.io/apps)
* John’s blog post on [franchises all the way down](http://johnaugust.com/2016/its-franchises-all-the-way-down)
* Shut Up & Sit Down’s spoiler-free review of [Pandemic Legacy](http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/spoiler-free-review-pandemic-legacy/)
* [The Katering Show](http://thekateringshow.com/), and the Craig-recommended [third episode](http://thekateringshow.com/episodes/3-we-quit-sugar/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Tahhan ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))