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

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

**Craig Mazin:** Argh! Ah! My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 130, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, last week there was some controversy and both you and I got sucked into it. So, I feel like maybe we should just start off with this and just get a clean slate here. Okay?

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** So, this happened on February 3. Justin Marks, who is a screenwriter and colleague of both of ours — a friend actually — he tweeted something. He tweeted this: Screenwriters, use two spaces after a period, unless you’re writing scripts in Times New Roman which means you’re not a screenwriter.

So, Craig, I ask you, do you use one space or two spaces after a period?

**Craig:** One space.

**John:** Yeah. And so I feel like I am complicit in this controversy that has happened because Justin actually cited that I had said two spaces after a period, which is in fact true.

**Craig:** But what year was that? [laughs]

**John:** That was in 2005.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in 2005 I made a blog post about how to change, basically saying that mono space fonts like Courier traditionally use two spaces after a period. Everything else — everything else — should be one space after the period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But mono space faces use two spaces after the period. Even back in 2005 I said it’s not a must, I’m just saying it’s a thing that you can do.

Now, if a person were really carefully observing of my behavior they would notice that if you look through the script library at johnaugust.com at a certain point I actually switched to a single space after the period. And even you and I on the podcast have discussed it. I looked it up and in 2012 on episode 65 we actually talked about the fact that I was sort of leaning more towards using a single space.

But the truth is I have to sort of come out and say this: like most American screenwriters my feelings have evolved and I have become a single-spacer.

**Craig:** Mine too. I learned how to type in high school on a Brother electric typewriter. It wasn’t even the kind of electric typewriter that stored any of the words. It was just more of a clack-clack electric typewriter.

**John:** Did it have a little tiny display before you hit the thing, or just straight to paper?

**Craig:** No, nothing. Straight to paper. It was a disaster and also, therefore, a great way to learn how to type because it really forced you to learn properly.

And in 1985 I was taught two spaces. It took me awhile to get out of the two space habit because I am a touch typer, but I did. And there is absolutely no call for it. Most screenplays I read are one space. It seems very weird now to see something with two spaces. It’s old school. It’s unnecessary. I think it look worse. And Justin Marks is just wrong. He’s wrong!

**John:** [laughs] I won’t go so far as to say that Justin Marks is wrong. Or, actually, no, I’ll say he’s wrong in the sense that to be declaratory that it should be a certain way is wrong.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he chooses to still use the two spaces, the world is not going to come crashing to an end. But, I would encourage you if you are not set one way or the other way to just use the single space, because for everything you’re doing in your life a single space will go great. It will look fine in Courier.

And here’s what actually pushed me over the edge is when we were working on Courier Prime, the type face of Courier that looks better than sort of normal Courier, we sort of put the punctuation in a place that looked really good with a single space after it.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** So, I would just encourage you to try single space and you probably won’t ever go back. And it’s sort of like when you stop smoking, I suspect, that you’ll suddenly notice other people smoking a lot. You will start to notice double spaces that annoy you to some degree.

**Craig:** You never smoked.

**John:** I never smoked. But you did.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughs]

**John:** If people go back to the early episodes of Scriptnotes you can hear Craig smoking while we are recording the show.

**Craig:** Well, I never smoked cigarettes while we were —

**John:** Oh, you did your little e-cigarettes.

**Craig:** My e-cigarettes. Yes. But that’s not smoking either.

**John:** So, one last tip, if you make your change midway through a script or if you’re going back to an old script that you’ve double spaced, the simple solution, of course, is to do a find/replace. Just do Find “period-space-space” and just swap it out for “period-space.” Run that through a couple times. You’ll get rid of all the double spacing and you’ll be happy.

**Craig:** You will, in fact, be happy.

I think it’s better looking, and you’re right, two spaces isn’t going to end the world, but certainly you can’t go on record with something as outrageous as the suggestion that two spaces is preferable and one space is verboten. Not true.

**John:** Not true. It reminds me of Animal Farm. If you remember that the animals, when they took over, they said like two legs bad, four legs good. And then, of course, they end up manipulate itself so that two legs were better because the pigs started walking on their back feet.

So, I’m just basically saying, “Justin Marks don’t be a pig.” Or, maybe I’m the pig in the example. It really wasn’t a well thought out example.

**Craig:** No. This was McKenna-like in its clumsy analogy with nature.

**John:** [laughs] I’m a squirrel in a rocket ship headed towards thieves.

Today on the show we obviously have to talk some Final Draft follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because that was just a thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s what everybody thought you were talking about when you said we got sucked into a controversy.

**John:** So, we want to talk about that. I want to talk about writing in public spaces, because it’s something I’ve had to do a lot this week. I want to talk about keeping your hero in the driver seat of your story. I had sent you this link to this blog post, this sort of regular column by Heather Havrilesky which I thought was just great because it was really talking about being in the driver’s seat but in real life.

We have a question that I haven’t even sent you yet but I’ll just read it and you’ll have a great answer for it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We have people suing Tom Cruise for a billion dollars.

**Craig:** This is a big show.

**John:** It’s a big show. I want to talk about this thing called Time Tailor which I didn’t even tell you about but you will be annoyed when I tell you what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** And so it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot to do here.

**Craig:** Big show.

Well, I guess we should start with Final Draft. We had an interview last week, or we welcomed as our guests on the show two gentlemen from Final Draft, one of whom was and is in fact the CEO of Final Draft.

**John:** That was Marc Madnick.

**Craig:** Marc Madnick.

**John:** And then Joe Jarvis who’s the Final Draft Chief, sort of, he’s the person who is the product manager of Final Draft and I think does more of the technical stuff.

**Craig:** How would you say — I’ve been looking around at Reddit and Twitter.

**John:** I haven’t actually seen you on Reddit but I heard through Stuart that you have actually been engaging with people on Reddit which is really dangerous, Craig.

**Craig:** It is? I mean, it’s in Reddit Screenwriting, not in Reddit, I don’t know, [laughs], whatever else Reddit.

**John:** Well, Reddit is nothing but timely threads. No, maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s good you’re engaging.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve only posted a few things. Everyone has been very polite. What’s the feedback that you’ve sensed from the interview that we did?

**John:** People have written to say that it was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which it was uncomfortable to be in that room. So, I’d like to sort of paint the scene and sort of what happened when we did that. We were sitting around a folding table in our little office set with like two towels on the table to sort of muffle some sound. And I was manning the board, poorly, for the four microphones, which we’d just gotten the four microphones up and working.

As it turned out me and Joe Jarvis, we didn’t really need microphones because we weren’t going to be doing very much talking.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It was mostly going to be Marc and Craig and I knew that it was mostly going to be mostly Marc and Craig which is why I sort of sensed that my role would be the let’s make sure no one flips the table over. That was my function to sort of calm things down.

And I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to challenge him on certain things that I thought were not entirely accurate because things were actually already pretty tense in that room.

**Craig:** They were a bit tense. But they were…I guess I would say they were civil-tense. In other words, everything was about Final Draft and about the product and how they conduct their business. I don’t think that Mr. Madnick did himself many favors, frankly.

You know, anyone can do what they want when they come on a show like our show and talk about what they have to talk about. I was really surprised, honestly surprised. I expected that he… — If it were me I would have come on the show and say, “Look, let me just be humble about this. Let me listen to your complaints and let me address them in that spirit,” because no company does everything right and certainly Final Draft hasn’t done everything right, and then kind of work back to a place of, “But here’s how we’re trying to get better.”

Not really the case. He was pretty defensive, I thought.

**John:** He was sort of more the Ballmer mode, the Microsoft Ballmer Chief, the “I know this is the right thing” kind of mode, versus the responsive way. Evernote, which is a product I use, the CEO or the president or whatever it was sort of very recently said like, “Listen, we know that our syncing and a lot of our services have slowed down a lot. We’re not satisfied and this is what we’re doing to fix it.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That wasn’t what I heard from him. I didn’t hear that he was responding to things. He was more sort of just defending what had happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know a lot of the feedback that I saw on the interwebs following the posting of our show commented on his reliance on a couple of talking points, one of which was they had 40 employees, which I’m not sure is particularly relevant.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of which was —

**John:** Well, I would like to parse one second for 40 employees, because does 40 employees mean that you’re a giant or you’re small? Because I think to almost everybody listening were like, “Wow, you have 40 employees?” That felt so much bigger. And to him it’s like, “We’re a small company. We’ve got 40 employees.” And so it was a weird disconnect in terms of what I think — he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of who the listenership of the show was.

**Craig:** I agree, particularly when one co-host of the show has his own software company that puts out very good apps and I believe you have three employees.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** The proprietor of Final Draft I believe has one employee, himself. I think WriterDuet is two guys. This is sort of the way things are going. So, I think you’re right. There was a disconnect there. And there’s a question of how many of those 40… — Well, part of the problem is then you start saying, “Well what are those 40 people doing?” And I think it’s probably true that the minority of them are actually coding software. And then, of course, what that means is many of them are doing other things like promotion, and marketing, and other stuff.

So, that talking point was repeated a lot. I’m not sure if it helped him, or his case. The other thing that people picked up on was that both gentlemen were essentially saying we’re old software and we’ve been out of date for a really long time, so you just have to — that’s why it took us a really long time to issue this fairly expensive upgrade that accomplished things that should have been accomplished awhile ago.

I’m not sure that’s a great defense either.

**John:** I would agree. And so Kent Tessman recently wrote a blog post talking about sort of his experience as a software developer listening to this episode and sort of working through sort of point by point. And so do you want to walk through what Kent wrote about it, because I think that might be a useful start.

**Craig:** Yeah, so he makes some really good points here. And in the moment it was kind of hard, you know, I had to sort of battle to get in there. Marc is certainly an impressive talker, you know. I mean, I think I’m an — impressive meaning volume. So, you know, we couldn’t get into anything, nor could we rebut point by point. But, also, I’m not a software developer and Kent is, and so he had some interesting comments to make about the things that the Final Draft folks were saying.

First, Retina. So, we brought up the point that Final Draft 8 was not Retina-compatible, nor did they release a Retina-compatible patch. You had to wait I think it was the four years. Was it four years?

**John:** It wasn’t four years. It was essentially 14 or 18 months after the Retina —

**Craig:** Between 8 and 9?

**John:** Yeah, but no, essentially Retina became available and it was 18 months later that they actually supported it.

**Craig:** So a year and a half.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was considered a feature of their $100 upgrade. And his point was, hey, you can’t say that Apple somehow shocked you in a way that nobody else was shocked. Every software developer is in the same boat, particularly guys that are smaller than the 40 employee shop. And what he did was he said all he did was just go into a thing called Quartz Debug and there’s a Graphics Tools folder and he turned on the “Simulate high DPI text demagnification” and, voila, he was able to… — He said he went over to Best Buy, downloaded the Fade In demo on a Retina MacBook that was there on display and it looked great.

So, why couldn’t they have done that? Well, the problem he says is not that they were somehow surprised by Retina. The problem is that they’re using not just old code but nearly ancient code.

**John:** Yes. He’s saying they’re specifically using QuickDraw techniques which were really from ancient Macintoshes to sort of do all the screen rendering. And specifically Kent is saying that likely in order to — every build they were doing, every time they opened up X code to actually build Final Draft they were getting these warnings saying, like, “You’re using things we don’t let you use anymore, you should switch to newer libraries.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they didn’t and they couldn’t because everything else was dependent upon it.

**Craig:** Yes. So, QuickDraw goes back to the ’80s. And I’m a Mac-head, so I remember QuickDraw being a thing that they were promoting in the ’80s. But I also remember that when Mac OS X rolled out around 2000, 2001, that one of the things that they were really proud of was this Quartz technology and how — it’s the thing that allows print to look better, everything, the graphics/guts of the system software had been upgraded. And this is really — this has been around for a long time.

And one thing that’s puzzling, but more frustrating than puzzling is that Final Draft sat there knowing full well for decades that they were using deprecated software and they didn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have to. And that’s just poor planning. I’m sorry, it’s poor planning.

So, then for them to say, “Oh my god, we suddenly had to rewrite everything.” Well, you didn’t suddenly have to rewrite everything. You only suddenly had to do it when finally it seemed clear that you could no longer drive your Edsel down the freeway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was an interesting point. He also makes the point that for Windows users this upgrade is even less valuable than the upgrade for the Mac people because they don’t even get the Retina stuff, or the full screen. He also points out that Unicode, which is something that they’re talking about jumping on the bandwagon with, this newfangled Unicode is something that has been available for 25 plus years.

**John:** Yes. So, let’s talk about what Unicode is. So, Unicode is a way of representing character sets, so languages, the glyphs of languages, letters that go beyond sort of a standard small roman subset of characters. And it becomes incredibly important for international support. So, if you’re going to be writing scripts in other languages, Unicode is what you need to be able to use in order to render those letters or characters in some cases on the screen. And they still don’t have it.

And it’s one of those things that essentially you get free in Macintosh right now. Like if you write any sort of text editing program that’s not a thing that you have to sort of carefully wrestle with and bake in. It comes free. The challenge is that everything you’ve done up until this point hasn’t used it. And so for Final Draft they have to sort of just do everything differently because it’s not the way they’ve been doing it. And yet it’s not that hard. And it was frustrating for me to hear Marc Madnick to hear sort of how their international users and all this stuff and how they’re doing all this stuff around the world.

And it’s like, well, how are people using your app? Are they only writing scripts in English? Because with Unicode support it’s going to be much more challenging for a writer in Greek to be using your app.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s really no excuse. The only excuse is, well, it’s not our focus. Our focus is to market our software, to market our competitions, and to make our deal with Writers Guild, and advertise. But to not feature something that’s over a quarter century old, which in computer terms means is 14 million years old is mind-boggling.

**John:** And to be fair, Unicode could be 25 years old. It doesn’t mean that everything was Unicode 25 years ago. But like the standard has been out there and now it’s standard. It’s actually genuinely standard.

**Craig:** It is genuinely standard and it has been standard for awhile. Kent makes the point that Carbon and Cocoa were meant to sort of work simultaneously but that moving to Cocoa isn’t something that people just recently decided is something they ought to do. It’s something that basically they’ve been aware they had to do, they should do, for what, ten years? I mean, that sounds —

**John:** That sounds about right. It’s essentially like the doctor says at some point you’re going to need to have this surgery. And, yeah, yeah, but I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to wait another year. And so like you’re wearing down your joints and suddenly, “Doctor, I can’t move.” Well, yeah, you needed to have this surgery ten years ago. You needed to go and do this and now this is the repercussions of this.

**Craig:** Right. So, suddenly you can’t make the easy fix to have Retina. I don’t know if this is what impacted their application of Unicode, although I doubt it since Unicode pre-dates Cocoa. I doubt it.

And lastly, I’ll just pull up this point. You should read his — he has a very thoughtful piece here — but the last thing he mentions is Fountain. And there’s an exchange that occurs where Joe says, you know, “Fountain is not something that we support but it’s something that we could easily do.” And I said, “So then do it.” [laughs]

You know? And this is something where Kent says, “Fountain is something that they could implement in an afternoon.”

**John:** Easily.

**Craig:** And why aren’t they? And answer certainly can’t be lack of manpower. And I doubt it’s lack of interest. I think they’re not doing it because they are internally, I believe, it’s my opinion, see a defensive position in the proprietary nature of their code, or their format rather, their file format. They don’t want it to be easily translatable between other software programs. But, too bad, it is. And “we have a proprietary format” — that’s a mountain that so many companies have died on. Why would you want to be another one?

**John:** Yeah. I think that really comes down to my central frustration of their defense of sort of what they do. And it comes down to early on in the exchange Marc Madnick says, “We’re the only company that does pagination right.” And that statement really reveals sort of how he perceives his company. Because he built Final Draft because he got frustrated with sort of how hard it was to do his screenwriting, but he had this vision that a page is a page is a page, and it’s a minute per page, and I think he genuinely believes — and I think the company genuinely believes — that one page of screenplay is one minute of screen time. Not just a rule of thumb. I think it’s like a fundamentalism.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think they genuinely deeply in their bones believe that that’s how it is and that therefore maintaining that one page — maintaining that page on the Mac being a page on the iPad being a page on the PC, you know, no matter which platform you’re opening on that file will still open exactly the same way — is the fundamental thing that they think they do right and do better than anyone else can. And they believe that their one way of doing it is the precise right way.

Now, like any sort of fundamentalism there are really easy ways you can sort of poke that belief which is, well, if that’s true then why are you letting people set like tight or loose spacing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Why are you letting people touch the margins at all? So, it gives lie to the idea that this rule of thumb is anything more than just the Crassus rule of thumb. And, of course, we are writers. We recognize that if I write “Atlanta burns” that’s not —

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a minute.

**John:** That’s four minutes of screen time in one sentence. So, but I genuinely think he believes that. And so I can understand from his perspective that pagination is the most important thing. And understanding that he believes that pagination is the most important thing, Fountain is an incredibly frustrating thing for them to deal with because pagination is fixed. Pagination is sort of how things are going to be when they’re printed on paper. And I think Final Draft is still fundamentally concerned about getting stuff onto paper.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so while they’ve been able to generate PDFs, they really still think about printing stuff out and they want stuff to print in the exact same page breaks and everything like that to be the same.

But, file formats and sort of the editable file formats are not fundamentally fixed that way. They’re fluid. And so FDX, which is the format that they use, is an XML format and doesn’t have any sense inherently of where the page breaks are. I know this for a fact because we deal with FDX all the time. And the only way that Final Draft is getting their page breaks to be the same way every time is by some really kludgy methods.

And so they sort of brute force it to fit onto a certain page and then if they have to do it on a PC that’s why they have Courier Final Draft which is a sort of made up font they have that is different on the PC, works differently on the PC than it does on the Mac so that all the words will end in the same place basically.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So it’s this really kludgy way of doing it. So, both Fountain and Courier Prime are big annoyances to them because it means the one thing they think they’re really good at isn’t important anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah, it struck me — it’s so funny when he said that this was their thing, that this was what set them apart and this was their obsession as a company. I was shocked because it’s not mine.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I’m a screenwriter. This is supposed to be for me. Yeah, sure, I want a document that I’m writing on my Mac to have the same page breaks if somebody else opens that same document with the same software on their PC. Absolutely. And in that case Final Draft accomplishes that and so does Fade In.

They’ve extended that fetish to their app for iOS. Now, interestingly their app for iOS, another thing Kent points out is that they initially released it as Final Draft Reader. It was read-only, not write, and cost $20. And it was buggy. And then later they dropped the price from $19.99 to zero for Reader and then created the Read-Write app which I guess has a fee connected to it. Which isn’t great business practice to basically charge $20 to your early adopters and then go, “Eh, now it’s free.”

But either way I certainly don’t need my iPad to have precise pagination like that. And I was wrong. In the thing I said, oh, the iPad app for Fade In does that. It doesn’t have any pagination. You just read it. Because, as Kent said, you can tell who’s not a screenwriter on set? It’s the guy with the iPad. Either way, for me pagination is not this holy grail of things. That’s so ’90s to me.

**John:** It is. And I think it reinforces that obsession that you see in sort of beginning screenwriting books, too, which is that like this thing needs to happen by this page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that obsession about that kind of thing — that’s not actually writing. And that’s the thing that I think I felt more than anything else is that they fundamentally believe this as a way to write a script. They believe this as a way to paginate a script. And I think they’ve sort of forgotten about the actual writing process. So, I did a video awhile back about why I like writing in Fountain. And one of the things I really stressed is that because you’re not thinking about like where the margins are you can actually just sort of focus on what the words are.

And I don’t think Final Draft has focused on the words for really quite a long time.

**Craig:** I agree. And this, I guess, I know they’re listening. This is my big advice.

**John:** I’m not sure they’re listening, but I think they’re going to read the transcript after it’s transcribed.

**Craig:** Fair enough. My big advice is to not — whatever resources you’re expending on developing your software, first of all I would increase them and maybe decrease some of the other stuff, Yeah, I guess I’m saying spend a little more on R&D. Sorry. I understand you’re not in business to go out of business — we heard that a lot. I don’t think spending more on R&D will push you out of business. I’m guessing you guys are in a low margin business, particularly because you’ve been charging premium prices for legacy software for well over a decade, nearly two decades now.

But I would say design. Concentrate on design and features and have less of an obsession over pagination. Pagination doesn’t matter. When you go into production the first AD and the line producer sit down with the screenplay and they start to break it down. And they break it down by content. They don’t care.

That’s why — they always catch you anyway, first of all. If you ever try and fiddle with kerning, or line spacing, or margins. They’re going to catch you anyway. And they read it and they’re experienced. They know how the words will translate into days and they start carving things up by day. And that is entirely about content. It is not about pagination.

That is a weird, weird hill to die on.

**John:** I agree. The last thing, you mentioned it briefly while they were there, but I think it’s worth everyone sort of taking a look at and I’ll put a link up to it, too. You mentioned QuarkXPress, which I thought was such a great example of a software that was completely disrupted by a newcomer. And I think they could be QuarkXPress. And they could essentially become marginalized by someone else just doing their thing better. And so in the case of QuarkXPress it was Adobe who came in with InDesign. It’s like, oh wow, it does all the stuff we need to do and it was just better.

And it wasn’t better at the start, but ultimately it was better and it got disrupted. And I just feel like it was fascinating to be conducting a roundtable interview thing with a company that I don’t think really understood that their whole world was being disrupted.

**Craig:** I agree. I don’t think they get it. I think part of the problem frankly is, and I’m happy to say this to Marc, and he’s invited us to go visit them. I think he’s the wrong CEO for this company.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** He’s not the guy that wrote the software. That’s Ben Cahan. So, he’s not the technical guy. And he’s not a screenwriter. And I wouldn’t expect him to be. So, then what is he? I think what he is is a very, very good promoter. A very good marketer. But that’s not enough anymore. And particularly because the CEO isn’t connected to the technological underpinnings of the product he’s selling, when he’s talking about it you can tell — first of all, how does he even keep his own guys accountable?

**John:** I don’t know. I mean, there’s a thing in software developing called “Dog Fooding” which is basically you have to eat your own dog food. And because I sense that most of them were not screenwriters, I don’t think they were using Final Draft to write screenplays and therefore had no sense of what that was. But refresh my memory. I don’t think they were actively involved in the screenwriting, sorry, in the software development world either because they’re just not making choices everyone else would have made five years ago.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s right. And I think if what he has been promoting from the top down is pagination, pagination, pagination above all, well no wonder things like, I don’t know, like the fact that their dual dialogue system is ridiculous and clumsy, or the general design of the program looks ugly, or the amount of time it takes in between updates. All that stuff falls away.

The fact that they don’t have a proper way for two people in two separate places to collaborate at the same time on a shared document, that should be — that’s what they should obsess over, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s all —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** That would — if they solved that, and legitimately solved it, I would think that they could survive.

**John:** Yeah, I agree.

**Craig:** But, you know, hey, look, he thinks that we’re nuts. Look, right now they’re like, “Eh, we own 95% of the market. Bring it on.” I remember that —

**John:** We’ll see if in two years, in five years, if they’re 95% of the market. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Well, I remember when the iPhone came out Ballmer said, “Right now Windows supports 60% of the phones that are being sold,” or something, and “Apple sold nothing.” Well, let’s see where they are in 18 months. Well, there they are.

**John:** There they are.

**Craig:** There they are.

**John:** Moving on.

**Craig:** Moving on!

**John:** Next thing. I want to talk about writing in public spaces. So, this last week we’ve had WGA contract negotiation, and while I can’t talk about the substance of what’s happened in the rooms there I can say that like you described it is sort of like jury duty in that there’s a lot of downtime. And so there’s a lot of time where I’m just sitting in rooms with a bunch of other writers. And it’s very tempting to just like trade war stories. Like Carl Gottlieb is right across the table from me.

But I’ve been actually just working. I’ve actually put in my headphones and started working. So, I want to talk a little bit about writing in public spaces because I didn’t grow up writing in coffee shops. Did you? Did you write in public spaces or did you always go someplace quiet?

**Craig:** No. No. I always just found a little, even when I had — I was sharing a tiny apartment with my then girlfriend now wife. I would just find a little corner.

**John:** So, I think we are sort of the exceptions to the rule. Most — my belief is that many aspiring screenwriters have found themselves out in public spaces and that’s where they feel naturally sort of drawn towards writing.

So, I’ve been one of those people increasingly I would say over the time, partly because of Big Fish. I’ve just been in New York so much. And that process of sticking in your headphones, staring at your screen, and just being someplace else.

What I’ve found — I mostly like it. And what’s so interesting about the process is that whether you’re alone in your office or you are in a public space, ultimately you put yourself wherever those characters are. And so you put yourself in the scene of where those people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that can be a really great thing. The challenge for me I find is I have to find exactly the right music or other sort of noise to drown out everyone else around me talking. I have to remind myself not to try to jump right into writing the scene but to sort of give myself some notes about what it is.

So, I find myself writing fragments of things. Like not even really an outline of a scene, but these are things that happen. This is ways to start. And just really sort of visualizing the different ways the scene can sort of get started and get going.

It’s really been kind of a great week. I’ve gotten much more down this week than I would have predicted because I’ve just sort of been forced to be outside of my normal environment where I have all of the distractions of my big computer. I’m just at this one table surrounded by other people. And Susannah Grant is right behind me and she’s just pounding away. So, it’s been a great week for me.

**Craig:** I think that’s the part, occasionally if I feel jammed up not creatively but jammed up motivationally I will occasionally take a road trip down the street. And I’ll sit outside the cigar shop and work or I’ll go over to the Coffee Bean. For that reason. You are now accountable to everybody that’s around you.

First of all, I love that everybody thinks I’m just some guy, [laughs], that’s wasting his whatever meager money he has chasing a stupid dream of being a screenwriter. I actually like that. It reminds me of what it was like when I was 21 and starting out. And I like the fact that I have to write. I can’t just sit there and stare at the screen. I’ll look like an idiot.

And porn is totally out of the question.

**John:** Absolutely. Public space. You can’t get away with any of that stuff.

**Craig:** Can’t get away with porn at the Coffee Been. Well, some people might be able to.

**John:** But you can’t get away with a game either. If you’re just sitting at the coffee shop and you’re playing a stupid game then you’re clearly not doing work.

**Craig:** By being in a public space you put yourself — you begin to play the role of professional screenwriter or screenwriter.

**John:** I think that that’s a crucial thing. There used to be a place and I think it’s closed now but it was called The Office.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it was just a place that basically rented workstations and you’d just go like you were going to the office. And literally it was a place for screenwriters or other writers could go and work and be in a public work environment. It just changes your perspective in terms of, like, I am in work mode. I’m not in home mode. And that can be an incredibly useful thing.

So, I was already sort of in work mode because I couldn’t wear jeans and a hoodie to the negotiations, so it was forcing me more into that zone.

**Craig:** Yeah. Any tactic that gets you to write more and write better is a worthy tactic short of hurting yourself or others.

**John:** Or addiction.

**Craig:** I include addiction as hurting yourself.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a fair thing.

So, one of the things I was working on this week, I had the revelation — which I’ve had the same revelation 15 times, but every time I have it it’s like, oh, that’s right, I forgot this thing that I remembered from before. I was really having a hard time getting the scene short enough. And I recognized that I had a minor character who was doing a lot of talking and sort of setting up the story and I remembered like, oh that’s right, you’re a minor character I don’t care about at all. You should not be driving this scene at all.

And once I sort of demoted him and said like, no, you’re not allowed to say many things because you’re not the hero of the story, the whole scene changed. So, in general I just want to — it was reminded to me and I’m reminded that we had talked about on the podcast is to keep your hero in the driver seat of the scene. And occasionally you will encounter scenes where like the hero is not in charge of the scene. But almost always the hero needs to be taking the focus of what’s happening on screen at a given moment.

**Craig:** No question. Obviously we’ve come to this story because we’re interested in how the hero is going to develop, and change, and deal with his enemies, deal with the world around her, whatever it is. But let’s also point out most of the time your hero, if your movie gets made, is your movie star. And don’t you want to see the movie… — The word we would always use, I remember when I started working on movies with David Zucker. He would always caution against giving good jokes to day players.

Day players are actors that are there for a day. So, you have a scene where somebody walks into, Harrison Ford walks into a Starbucks and asks for coffee and the woman behind the counter has a couple of lines with him. That’s a day player. Well, don’t give the good stuff to the day players. Generally speaking your movie star will be better and even if they’re not people want to watch the movie star anyway.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of — so, this last weekend we had a second session of this D&D game that we’re playing, Dungeon World, and one of the rules of Dungeon World, one of the reminders of Dungeon World is make characters take the action. The Game Master doesn’t take the action, the characters take the action. And sometimes that’s really challenging when you’re facing like a monster or something. It’s like I feel like I want to roll an attack role for the monster, but I’m not supposed to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m supposed to let you guys as the players, the heroes, do the work and if your attack fails then I hit you. But if your attack succeeds then you’re the winner. And it’s a very good reminder that the heroes, you guys, are supposed to be the ones who are in charge of the narrative and in charge of the story.

That doesn’t mean that everything should go your hero’s way. Not at all. It just means that they should be the ones who you are following. What they’re trying to do should be the focus of the scene, not them being rebuffed or what the other character is trying to do.

**Craig:** And here’s an example that comes to mind of how you can do this — sorry, I’m fighting a little cold over here.

**John:** Both of us.

**Craig:** How you can do this even when you’re in a scene where your character, your hero, isn’t saying anything. Two other people are having a conversation or one other person is imparting information, opining, philosophizing, but you want your hero to drive it.

Scene that comes to mind: in The Godfather Michael decides he’s going to go and kill Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant. And he goes into the bathroom, finds the gun that’s been stashed for him. Comes back. Sits down.

For the next probably 40 seconds or so Sollozzo rambles, rambles on in Italian about why Michael should make a deal, why this, why that, and the entire time he’s talking we’re on Michael’s face and he’s thinking to himself. Do I do this? Should I do this? Am I capable of doing this? I’m going to do this. And then he does it.

**John:** If he didn’t have the gun that scene would be a completely different scene. It wouldn’t be his scene.

**Craig:** Correct. And I like that there are always ways to contextualize stuff through your hero. There are a lot of scenes where your hero is wandering into a room and they know less than everybody around them. Great. Don’t just shower the guy with information because then the information givers are the ones driving the scene. Let him piece it together. Let him uncover it. Let him be distracted by something that’s important to him.

We’ll still get the information filtered through. But very good reminder from you, John August, to all of our listeners, to keep your hero in the driver’s seat.

**John:** This is a good segue to a piece of advice that I read on The Awl this last week which I thought was actually terrific.

So, a woman named Heather Havrilesky writes a column called Ask Polly. And it seems like very standard sort of like relationship advice questions except they’re really long questions. Because usually when you think about relationship advice questions it’s the Dear Abby length where it’s two paragraphs, it’s really brief, and then the person responds. It’s very common sense. It’s all very boilerplate.

What I love about the internet is that there’s no reason why the question has to be short. And so this woman writes in with a question that’s just endless, or a situation that’s endless. It’s not even really a question. It’s just like this is the situation I’ve gotten myself into. Please help.

And this one was particularly great. So, the one I’m going to link to in the show notes is called “I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is a good headline. But essentially this young woman describes the situation where she got into this long distance relationship with a guy who is fantastic. He was going to move to her. She ended up moving to his city. He still hadn’t broken up with his current girlfriend but eventually did, but then there was this other girl who was always still around. And it was sort of strange.

Every time she tried to confront him then it made her feel bad about things. And so she details it. And as you’re going through you’re like, “Oh my god, how can you not see what you’ve done? How can you not see what has happened to you?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And why I bring this up is she is no longer in charge of her own narrative. She has taken herself out of the story of her life. She’s given this other guy — he has the important story and she’s like a bit player in his life rather than being the hero of her own life.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** And so I thought Heather’s advice was fantastic essentially about, first of all, you’ve got to get away and you’ve got to fix yourself, but it’s useful I think to screenwriters for two reasons. First off to recognize that there’s real life people who make just terrible choices like this. And so she as a character is kind of fascinating — maddening but fascinating. But also if you were to write from one of your character’s perspective, if they were to write into an advice columnist what would they write? And what would the advice be given to them?

I thought it was just a great example of sort of how people and characters can lose control of their story.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this particular story was rough to read. The woman who answered said, “Go back and read what you just wrote.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “And then you tell me how crazy does that sound.” Delusion is — I mean, now we’re just sadly exploiting this woman’s pain for fodder, but delusion and delusional behavior is a fascinating character trait and it is one of those things that does add very realistic texture to characters.

The trick is to make the delusion connected to something that we understand. And that usually is an emotion. True delusion, like schizophrenic delusion is boring, but delusional behavior and thinking that comes about as a result of fear, self-loathing, these things — we understand fear. We understand self-loathing. So, we can start to understand the delusion.

There is a way to understand how this woman got herself into that mess. That’s the fun of the screenwriter is putting your character in a mess that’s fascinating, and relatable and believable and then watching them wriggle out of it.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like the woman in this article who wrote in this letter, she would be a challenging character to have at the center of a feature, but she’d actually be a great character to be in like a one-hour drama.

If this character was going through this situation in a one-hour drama and like it wasn’t just her story but it was sort of her and the people around her, it would be fascinating because you can see why she made each of the individual choices, and yet having made that choice she is deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where she’s essentially like an addict who keeps going back for another hit of this thing.

And everyone around her must see what she’s done and she’s driven away everyone else who was a friend or could sort of help her out of this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say, again, because she’s lost control of her narrative she’s not really the hero of a movie, but I thought she’s a great character within a bigger context.

**Craig:** I think you’re totally right about that. One of the things about delusional behavior like this is when you do read it as one long story from beginning to end the weight of the insanity and the bad choices overwhelm your connection with the person who made them. But if you watch them happen one by one then you’re with somebody as they just slowly sink into quicksand.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s understandable.

**John:** It is very much understandable. On the topic of delusional behavior, let’s talk about the $1 billion lawsuit that was recently filed against Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible 3.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so these happen all the time. And so whenever one of these things happen you and I both get tweets saying like somebody is suing about this and they stole his idea. It’s like, well first off, that’s just crazy town. No one stole his idea. And then when you actually read — we’ll put a link in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** It’s a good one. It’s a good one.

**John:** This complaint. Like he’s clearly representing himself and basically he saw the movie and he’s like, “Well that’s just like this script that I sent to William Morris eight years ago and therefore it was lifted from me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s delusional behavior. And so when you actually read through his, the plaintiff’s — what he’s arguing — it’s like, well, you have no understanding of sort of what copyright law. And I don’t want to slam on him, because I think he’s probably not entirely there.

**Craig:** All there.

**John:** The fact that no one is willing to even represent him or take his case means that there’s not a there there.

**Craig:** Generally speaking that, yeah, pro se litigants aren’t your strongest litigants. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** But the delusional behavior, it’s real to him. And that’s, I think, one of the interesting things about him as a character is to him this really is a real thing that was stolen him. And he, at the center of his whole inner narrative, this is a wrong that was done to him. This movie that had come out that he finally watched on video it’s like, “Well, wait, that’s my movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Someone stole my idea for my movie even though it’s called Mission Impossible 3 and it’s basically the third element of a franchise.

**Craig:** The thing that jumped out for me from his complaint was that he seemed to feel that producing proof that he had written what he wrote was enough. Generally speaking in a complaint you need to actually show how the defendant has infringed on your unique expression and fixed form. He doesn’t even bother with that. He just shows that he envelopes and things.

By the way, I’ve read other complaints that did list alleged examples of infraction and I wasn’t really swayed by those either, or infringement I should say.

But, you know, here’s what goes on. I talk about this a lot of times when I’m talking to writers about the credit process. Sometimes the arbitration system, the Writers Guild credit arbitration system, just blows it. Sometimes they get it wrong.

I would say a good chunk of the time when writers are infuriated by the result the arbiters have gotten it right and that what’s going on this: I write a screenplay, I live it. I see it in my head. It is not only connected to the effort that I put in, but it is vivid to me. I have felt it.

So, that’s my entry into this. And so then somebody hands me another thing and I read it and I go, “Eh, this is just words. I’m just reading this.” There’s nothing else behind it but the reading. And so, yeah, I see all of these things that are connected to my incredibly vivid thing. But they’re not. They just seem that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We are tricked by the complete asynchronous nature of our experience of what we’ve written and what we read or watch. I can come up with 20 movies that have scenes that are very similar to the scenes that you’ve seen in Mission Impossible, whichever the one he’s complaining about, because it’s an action movie with a secret agent in it.

**John:** Yeah. I often call it silent evidence. The sense that you’re seeing these two things and you see them like, well these two things are similar so therefore they must be related. One is the cause of the other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re disregarding all of the other things that are similar to those two things which would indicate like, oh, it’s actually just a very common idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so let’s take Pitch Perfect. Let’s take a movie where it’s about a singing competition or a girl joins a singing competition in college. And so let’s say I wrote a script about a girl who joins a singing competition in college and then I see Pitch Perfect. I’m like, “They stole my idea.” Well, if I’m only looking at those two examples I would say like, well, that feels kind of true. The best defense against that to me would be if someone presented 12 other scripts that were written at the same time that were about singing competitions at college.

And if were shown those other 12 scripts I would say like, “Oh, well, I guess other people had kind of similar ideas. It wasn’t stolen from all of these things. It was idea that was out there.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I would stop and think like, “Oh, you know what? I guess I did read that article in someplace about singing competitions. Or I guess I was in college and I did go in competitions. I guess there were other people who were in choirs, too.”

And you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? The whole universe does not revolve around me and my ideas.”

**Craig:** Ah-ha. Your ideas are not as unique as you thought. And, frankly, a lot of this stuff that these people are complaining about being stolen isn’t property that can be stolen anyway. For instance, there is — I can’t remember the name — but there was a movie that came out in the wake of the Karate Kid’s success. And it featured the guy who did Tae Bo. Remember Tae Bo?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So, he’s a fitness trainer and he kind of invested this fusion exercise martial arts thing called Tae Bo.

**John:** I have a hunch that Stuart Friedel, our illustrious editor of the podcast, probably has a whole bunch of like Tae Bo stuff, because that feels like the kind of thing that he’d focus on.

**Craig:** Billy Blanks I think was his name.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** And so after the Karate Kid’s success somebody went and made a movie where Billy Blanks played a janitor at a high school, just a humble janitor, and there’s this kid who’s just been — he’s a new arrival to the school and he’s getting beaten up by the bullies in the school.

**John:** Well that’s just terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he’s really into this girl but she’s dating one of the bullies and what is he going to do. And one day when he’s getting beaten up the janitor pops out of the janitor closet, whoops everyone’s ass with Tae Bo, and then says I’ll teach you Tae Bo.

Well, you know, [laughs], you could say, “Well, oh my god, they’ve stolen Karate Kid.” No. They haven’t. And people don’t understand what is protectable and what isn’t. Ideas aren’t protectable. Tropes, character archetypes, these things are not protectable. And Karate Kid didn’t invent that stuff either anyway. It’s the specifics that are protectable. And, frankly, it’s the specifics that are the value. There’s a reason that the Billy Blanks Tae Bo movie wasn’t a big hit.

And there’s a reason that Karate Kid was, because Karate Kid is a better movie. It’s way better, you know.

**John:** Craig, that’s the most controversial stand you’ve taken today.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs] So, I just feel like people don’t even understand how this stuff works. Anyway, here’s an example. A couple of women are suing the folks who created New Girl, The New Girl, the sitcom.

**John:** Oh yeah. I remember seeing that lawsuit, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I read the complaint.

**John:** A girl moves in with three guys? That’s a revolutionary idea.

**Craig:** As if that’s something you can even own. But regardless of that, one of the examples that they cite of infringement is they have a character named Cece and in The New Girl there is a character whose initials are C.C. but doesn’t go by C.C. So, it’s like Catherine Cummings. And then they’re like, “Get? C.C. Get it?”

Well, that’s just delusional. Why would somebody who — think about it. The whole premise of a lawsuit is you intentionally stole my stuff. If I’m intentionally stealing your stuff why would I be encoding references to your stuff that are unnecessary to put in, to leave a breadcrumb trail back to my crime? It’s just bizarre.

**John:** So, what caused me anger about this and why I sort of want to address it with the Tom Cruise, but especially now with The New Girl, is that it creates this pall, this shadow over an original expression. So, Mission Impossible 3, fine, it’s a sequel that made a billion dollars. But the idea that Liz Meriwether copied somebody else’s script to create The New Girl is just absurd and I don’t want to say it’s like libelous, but it’s kind of libelous, honestly. Because I know Liz, I know what she did. That was incredibly difficult. She’s an established playwright. She did this thing that was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And for someone to say like, “Well, she clearly stole it from me,” it’s like, no. And I feel like the good sound evidence thing could come into pass which basically like let’s pull up all the pilots from the three years surrounding The New Girl that have guys and girls as roommates. And you’re going to see so many similarities in general because it’s guys and girls living in a house together.

**Craig:** How many metric tons of pilot scripts exist prior to whatever those women wrote and whatever Liz wrote where a woman was living with three guys, or a guy was living with three women?

It’s a sitcom. For the love of god, I mean, it’s like —

**John:** It’s Three’s Company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Three’s Company! [laughs] You know, it’s like come on! That’s not why people watch that show. People don’t watch that show because —

**John:** It’s execution.

**Craig:** Yes! Thank you. Nobody tunes in because, oh my god, they’re doing it again this week! She’s still living with three guys! Oh my god!

That has nothing to do with the value of the show. It’s so weird to me. That the initials are the same? Just none of that makes any sense to me at all. And, you’re right, it does cast a pall. And frankly it puts studios in this awful position of constantly, constantly having to waste attorney hours knocking away these Looney Tunes lawsuits. Even in The New Girl lawsuit they cite the fact that the studio offered them ten grand to go away.

**John:** Yeah. Because ultimately and frustratingly that’s what they do because I’ve been… — It would cost them more to try to fight it.

**Craig:** It would cost them so much more to try and fight it. When they offer you $10,000 what they’re saying is, “Oh my god, you will never win, because if you turn down our $10,000 we’re willing to spend $5 million because you’re that wrong.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Ugh, so annoying.

**John:** The other annoying thing I want to point out this week which I didn’t even spring on you because I didn’t know this even existed until a friend pointed this out and said that this is something that she was facing on a show that she was working on.

So, it’s a thing called Time Tailor. Have ever heard of Time Tailor?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a TV thing that will horrify you. So, essentially what it is, it’s a service. And so if you are doing a one-hour drama or a half-hour show, after you’re done, you’re locked, color timed, everything is perfect, you think you’re ready to go to broadcast, the network takes that episode and they give it to this service called Time Tailor.

What Time Tailor does — I’m looking at their website which I’ll put a link to the show notes — “It reduces run times up to 10%, all without deleting scenes or alternating original content virtually undetectable to the viewer. Single pass repurposing makes a clean copy of your program with sophisticated digitizing to scan every single frame, then redundant fields are removed and adjacent fields are blended.”

So, essentially they’re snipping out scenes, or not scenes, they’re snipping out frames and blending frames to make everything tighter, basically to shrink it down so they can fit one extra 30 second spot into a show.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** Sometimes more than that.

**Craig:** Oh, you dicks. You know, I mean —

**John:** And the thing is, you don’t know this, but all the broadcast TV you’ve seen has had that for awhile. And a way that you could test for it is generally the iTunes version of it, if you downloaded that, it’s going to have a different runtime than what was actually broadcast on the air.

**Craig:** Time Tailor. So, in the old days when people would cut film on Moviolas, maybe I’d get this. You know, obviously the two technologies would not exist simultaneously. But now we have non-linear digital editing. We’re all capable of making the edits precisely to the frame we wish. And then you Time Tailor dicks come along.

Listen, man, what can I do? It’s like, this is the part of TV that I know everyone keeps telling me, “Oh, TV, TV…” And I’m like, yeah, yeah, but I have to say there’s some things in movies that I’m still happy I’m in movies.

**John:** So, my friend, I’m not saying, this isn’t like a basic cable kind of thing. She’s writing on a giant top-rated one-hour drama. So, she finished her cut with her director, editor, and then they’re like this going to happen. It’s going to go through this process and it’s going to be not what you turned in.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And that just would drive me crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Umbrage.

**John:** Umbrage.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Time for One Cool Things. Do you have one?

**Craig:** I do!

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** This one came from I think someone on Twitter and I love this. Do you like to cook, John?

**John:** I love to cook.

**Craig:** Okay. Then you’re going to enjoy this.

**John:** Is it an expensive gadget that I will only use once?

**Craig:** It is not, although I have those, like a nice French lemon zester. No. It’s called SuperCook.com.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** SuperCook.com. And what it is is a database site with lots of recipes, which there are many of, however this one is fun because what they offer you is the ability to just type in the ingredients you have. You type in everything you’ve got near you and they spit back a bunch of recipes that use nothing but those ingredients. Very clever.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very clever. And their database is very extensive, so you can really get specific about what you’ve got.

**John:** Cool. That sounds fun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is B.J. Novak’s book, brand new book, called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stores. So, B.J. Novak is a writer and performer from The Office. You also see him on The Mindy Project. He’s great and really, really funny.

**Craig:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** Saving Mr. Banks.

**Craig:** Excellent in Saving Mr. Banks.

**John:** He is great in Saving Mr. Banks. Unlike most of these books where it’s essentially like an autobiography with some like lists thrown in and other stuff, it’s just short stories he wrote and they’re really good and really funny. And he’s a terrific writer, so I would highly recommend that.

**Craig:** I met him, I met B.J., at a Saving Mr. Banks event.

**John:** You went to the sing-along that I didn’t get invited to.

**Craig:** To the sing-along. Oh, you weren’t invited to it?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll be invited next time.

**John:** [laughs] For Saving Mr. Banks 2?

**Craig:** Uh-huh. Yeah. For Saving Mrs. Banks.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** And he was a delight to talk to. And it’s funny, sometimes you meet writer-actors and you walk away and you think, “You’re an actor who does some writing.” Sometimes you meet them and you’re like, “No, no, no, you’re a writer who does some acting.” He’s a writer that does some acting. He’s a good actor, a very good actor, but he’s a writer. He’s got a writer’s soul.

It was very nice talking with him. He’s a very cool guy.

**John:** I’ll do one extra One Cool Thing. I tweeted about this. But he actually was on the Nerdist Podcast this last week, talking about him, about the writer, and actor/performer. They talk a lot about sort of the process of writing jokes versus writing comedy, writing characters. And it’s a great lesson in sort of how that all works. So, we’ll put that up as a little bonus One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** So, a few last bits of news. The Big Fish cast album is out. So, you can download the songs. It’s on iTunes right now. I think by the time this podcast is up the physical CDs will be shipping.

**Craig:** [sings] “Time stops, suddenly I’m….” Am I going to have to pay for this? [hums]

**John:** Yes. Andrew Lippa will get some royalties on that and that will be good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just from that little snippet.

**John:** That’s good. I think both the CD and the iTunes are excellent. So, the CD gives you a really good booklet, which I had to sort of copy edit a lot, but it’s nice and has pictures and lyrics and all that lovely stuff. So the physical copy is good.

The iTunes version, you get some bonus tracks. You get an extra bonus track of Magic and the Man, This River Between Us, so it’s hard to say. I would really recommend you buy both.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But anyway that’s out there so we’ll have links to both of those two things in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** We also have a few last t-shirts. We don’t have all sizes — for Scriptnotes t-shirts I should say. But if you go to store.johnaugust.com we have a few last Scriptnotes t-shirts, the black ones, in various sizes. So, if you are still waiting on a Scriptnotes t-shirt you are maybe in luck if you’re just the right size.

**Craig:** And what size is that?

**John:** I don’t know. But if you go there it’ll show you what sizes are left.

**Craig:** You just have XXS and XXXL.

**John:** Yeah, we have the extra-large small shirts is really all we have left.

**Craig:** Extra-large small shirts. [laughs] I love that. Are you extra-large small?

**John:** Indeed.

Standard boilerplate stuff here. If you would like to write to me or Craig something short, Twitter is your friend. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a question that somebody wrote in that we didn’t even get to this week, but we’ll get to it next week. So, that’s the place to send those longer questions.

If you are on iTunes buying the Big Fish cast album you could also go over to the Scriptnotes podcast page there and leave us a note because that’s lovely. You can subscribe to our show as well if you’re not subscribed to us right now.

In iTunes you can also find the iOS app that we have for Scriptnotes which lets you download all the back catalog. We have now 129 previous episodes. You can download those old ones and get all the show notes and stuff for them there.

Show notes for this episode and most episodes are at johnaugust.com/podcast. [motorcycle in background]

**Craig:** Motorcycle show up at the very end there.

**John:** That was very good, that motorcycle. Keeping it real.

**Craig:** Keeping it real, yo.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a nice podcast. It was nice to be back in a normal situation.

**Craig:** Whoa. I want to know what happened in that gap. There was like a really cool gap where I feel like you just went away.

**John:** Did I disappear?

**Craig:** Yeah, you went into a fugue state and then you came back. I love it when you do stuff like that.

**John:** [pause] Like that?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was it. Oh my god. That was great.

**John:** I do it. I have these little silences. I think it might be a small stroke, but it’s all okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s an extra-large small stroke.

**John:** Craig, if I see you next week then I see you next week. If not, it’s been a pleasure.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait to do this alone.

**John:** [laughs] What if it’s always been alone. The whole time through it’s all been a monologue?

**Craig:** Yeah. I believe it.

**John:** All right. Thanks Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Slate](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html) on why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
* John’s [2005 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2005/fixing-double-spaces-after-periods) on fixing double-spaces after periods
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 65](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-next-117-pages), in which John and Craig discuss their period-space preferences
* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)
* Kent Tessman’s [Notes on Scriptnotes](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/) blog post
* [How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/)
* Heather Havrilesky’s [Ask Polly: I Moved To A New City To Be With An Emotional Vampire](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/ask-polly-i-moved-to-a-new-city-to-be-with-an-emotional-vampire) on The Awl
* The AV Club on [Tom Cruise being sued for one billion dollars](http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-cruise-is-being-sued-for-allegedly-stealing-th-107570)
* THR on [The New Girl lawsuit](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-wme-peter-chernin-sued-671788)
* [Time Tailor](http://www.visualdatainc.com/time_tailor.htm)
* [SuperCook.com](http://supercook.com/) tells you recipes to cook with what you have on hand
* [One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385351836/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by B. J. Novak
* B.J. on the [Nerdist Podcast](https://www.nerdist.com/2014/02/nerdist-podcast-b-j-novak/)
* The Big Fish cast album on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/big-fish-original-broadway/id816289324?ign-mpt=uo%3D2) and [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H3UKZ6E/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* We have a few shirts left in [The John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Matthew Chilelli

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Craig, welcome back.

Craig: Yes. Here we are, face-to-face, a couple of silver spoons.

John: Now, Craig, do you have memory of what happened to you last week? What actually happened?

Craig: Uh…it was bad. I was on my way to the podcast and my car was hit from behind.

John: Ouch!

Craig: I hit my head on the dashboard.

John: That’s awful.

Craig: When I come to I’m in Aline Brosh McKenna’s basement, [laughs], Misery style. And she’s hobbled me. Yeah. She hobbled me good. She wants to take my place.

John: It’s really pretty clear that Aline wants to take your place, but she was fantastic as a guest host.

Craig: She did a great job. And Jennifer Lee was terrific to come on the show. Thank you, Jennifer. And very exciting. I’m going to get to meet her anyway because she’s going to be a neighbor of mine soon.

John: The hinterlands of Los Angeles.

Craig: We like to call it the privileged place where people like Jennifer Lee choose to live.

John: Exactly.

Today on the podcast we have two special guests. We have Marc Madnick, who is the CEO and co-founder of Final Draft. And Joe Jarvis, who is the product manager. They’re going to talk to us about Final Draft 9 and our interactions with Final Draft 9.

Craig: And we’ve had some. And we are, I have to say, I’m very excited to talk to them. And I think it’s very cool that that they came on the show knowing perfectly well that this wasn’t going to be a softball interview.

John: I have a hunch, because we already recorded it, that you will ask some pointed questions.

So, we’ll do the Final Draft segment. Then we’ll come back. We’ll talk about the Tarantino script, the WGA negotiations, we’ll answer some listener questions. It’s going to be a very big show.

So, first I need five notes.

[Scriptnotes theme music]

John: We were just talking sort of our history with Final Draft. So, my first experience with Final Draft was Final Draft 5. And I remember buying it, I think it was in 2000, and it was like $245 which was like a lot – $249.

Marc Madnick: Still is.

John: Still is. Which was a lot more money back then because of inflation.

Marc: Actually, I think versions one and two were about $349 we started out selling.

John: But I remember I think I bought it at the Writer’s Store, which is a physical place at that point.

Marc: Yup, still is.

John: Out in Westwood. And before then I’d written Go just in Microsoft Word. And you can write a script obviously in a normal word processor, but it’s a giant pain in the ass, and revisions are a giant pain in the ass. So, Final Draft was just an amazing godsend that I could do these things that were so difficult to do before. And they were strange to do, but I could actually do them then, so it was great.

Marc: Thank you.

John: So, that was my first experience with it. Then Final Draft 6 was 2002. Final Draft 7, 2004.

Marc: Boy, you know this better than I do. I have it in front of me. It wasn’t that quick probably.

Craig: Sounds about right.

Marc: It sounds close, yeah.

John: And then Final Draft 8 which was a bigger revision. The FDX format in 2008.

Marc: Right. 2009.

John: And this last year, just this month —

Marc: Three weeks ago.

John: Three weeks ago we have Final Draft 9.

Marc: Yes, doing wonderful so far. Thank you.

John: Fantastic. So, thank you very much for coming here.

So the voices you’re hearing are Marc Madnick. I’m pronouncing your name right, I hope.

Marc: That’s correct. With a C, John.

John: Yes. Marc with a C, Madnick, who is the co-founder and CEO of Final Draft.

Marc: Yes. I’ve been doing this 23 years now.

John: Holy cow.

Marc: I wanted to be you two guys and it led me to this. So, like I always say, those who can’t do make software.

Craig: Make software. John does both.

Marc: I can’t use that joke anymore.

Joe Jarvis: John can do it all.

Craig: John does it all.

John: And Joe Jarvis, what is your official title?

Joe: I’m the Product Manager at Final Draft. And you and I have talked quite a bit about all kinds of — high level, low level stuff. Just all the time. And by the way, I saw Go at a screening back then, probably when you were buying that first copy of Final Draft.

John: Yes, a good time machine back.

So, the reason why we talked this last week was because you were getting, was it phone calls or people were being jerks to you and it seemed like it was coming from stuff that had happened from the podcast. Can you tell us what was going on?

Marc: We listen to the podcast. And Craig is very passionate about his…

Craig: Everything.

Marc: …wants, desires, and likes and dislikes.

Craig: Yes.

Marc: And I guess he got riled up the other day and, you know, listen, I’m the owner of this business. So, I’m never going to have 100 percent of the people love us. So, we take the criticism and I’m used to it. Just like I know you guys write great films and there’s always 10 percent of the people.

Craig: Ooh, sometimes a little more than 10 percent.

Marc: Who are happy to think that you didn’t put your best effort or whatever, which is obviously not true. And you get a few tweets. People, employees, a Facebook thing, an email, “Craig says you guys should die.” It scares people. [laughs]

Craig: No humans should die.

Marc: We can put it behind us. You were very nice to put out a statement about it. That’s why we prompted the call. It’s perfectly fine. We invite the criticism. If I may say that we do survey, obviously, our customer base from time to time. Last time we did it, 92 percent of the people graded us an A or a B. That’s our software, company, and everything. 92 percent of the people.

I bring my office staff, 40 of us. We’re not Microsoft. We’re 40. Some people think we’re really big. We’re still a small, privately-held company. And told them, “Don’t congratulate ourselves. There’s 8 percent of the people, Craig being the number one of them, who do not like us and do not like our software.” So, that’s what keeps me up at night is the 8 percent.

So, I’m used to it.

Craig: We’ll talk a little bit about that 8 percent, and I think even that number is probably a little misleading in a sense.

Marc: Well, it’s a survey.

Craig: It’s a survey. The thing is you guys don’t exist in a vacuum anymore. I think that’s one of the things I want to talk about with you. And first of all, just to go on the record, I’m really sorry. Anybody that called you guys and was abusive or anything, that’s gross. And I was very clear about that on Twitter.

Marc: Thank you for an apology. And we have hourly employees or — “Is somebody going to throw a brick through our window or something?” [laughs]

Craig: Yeah, that’s terrible.

Marc: I had to calm them down. I said, you know, it’s not a problem. People get heated.

Craig: Nobody should be throwing anything. But the truth is there’s no — the satisfaction you can have with a product where you say, okay, it’s an A, or it’s a B, or whatever, is to that product. But if there’s another product where people are an A+, you might as well have a C or a D, if people start to leave you.

And one thing I want to talk to you guys about is what’s happened to Final Draft because as we were saying before the show started I bought Final Draft back in — I think it was 1993. And I drove to Santa Monica where you guys had your initial bungalows like on the second floor kind of thing.

Marc: There were about three or four of us then.

Craig: Yeah. There were three or four of you guys. I remember meeting you. I remember meeting Ben who was your partner. And I bought it directly from you. I wrote a check. And I didn’t have, you know, I was making $20,000 at the time. This was a lot of money. And I got two floppy disks and I guarded them with my life.

And so I was a very early adopter of Final Draft. And I stayed with Final Draft through the revisions. And along the way I got disillusioned. And I’ve become increasingly disillusioned. An particularly disillusioned with what happened with Final Draft 9.

Now, I don’t know if we’re jumping, should we be jumping into this right away? Do we have other stuff to do?

Marc: I don’t understand what happened.

Craig: Well, I’m going to tell you.

Marc: I mean…

Craig: From my point of view. And listen, I’m glad that you guys are listening, you know.

Marc: I’ve heard your point of views before on the show and, [sighs], it’s partially our fault, so I’m obviously — some critiques are warranted. And we listen. But a lot of times it’s misinformation.

John: That’s honestly why I’m so glad you’re here to talk about this.

Marc: Yes. And that’s what I want I to do, too.

Craig: Sure.

Marc: Literally, more times than not, it’s misinformation. People, person A says the software doesn’t do X, Y, and Z, but it does. Now, whose fault is this? Probably our fault. We’re not informing the people as well. But, that’s frustrating when we get comments that aren’t…

John: Accurate.

Marc: Accurate. “Final Draft doesn’t care about the writer. Final Draft doesn’t listen.” There’s 40 people in our office every day —

Craig: Yeah, they’ll listen if you pay $25 or $29 when you call. I mean, you’ve got tech support. I’ve got to pay you, right?

Marc: Actually, misinformation.

Craig: Okay, tell me.

Joe: We also have free chat support and we also have free email support. And you know nobody pays to ring my phone number. I mean, I talk to people all day long.

Craig: All right.

Marc: You’re listeners should know that Final Draft provides free support many different ways.

John: Great.

Marc: We have a knowledge space. Costs money to run a knowledge space. Every question and every question we ever got is up there and searchable. We provide email support free that you get back within an hour if you happen to email us between 8:30 and 5:30 when we’re in our offices. If you do it over the weekend, it might take a day or two.

Craig: Okay.

Marc: We have live chat from 8:30 to 5:30. If you have problems installing or getting started, we have a free telephone number. What Craig is alluding to is that we started to charge $25 per phone call. About 40 or 50 people take advantage just month. It was meant to be a deterrent and it is a deterrent to call. Let me tell you what happened.

For 10 years we provided free phone support. 10 percent of the people — remember now, I run a business; we have to make business decisions. Okay? We’re in business not to go out of business. — 10 percent of people would call up when it was free with no clock and talk and start asking about their printer not working and how do I get Microsoft Word. I mean, things that had nothing to do with us.

Joe: How to write a screenplay.

Marc: How to write a screenplay. And then when John August wanted to call that one time he couldn’t get through. Actually got worse press when we had free phone support then I do today. You don’t like it, but I’m telling you the customers do get serviced.

Craig: Okay, you’re right, I don’t like it. And part of why I don’t like it has to do with the pricing of your product which can… — Now, when Final Draft was the only game in town, I got it. And listen, I’m a capitalist. I understand the way the world works.

Marc: First of all, I was never the only game in town. I’ve always had competitors.

John: That’s — I want us to talk about that —

Joe: True.

Marc: I’ve always had competitors. I wasn’t even the first.

John: But you were always the industry standard. And you always marketed yourself as the standard.

Marc: Why are we the industry standard?

John: Well, that’s a great question, because it’s always —

Marc: Take all the bells and whistles out of everybody’s product, all the competitor’s products, okay. Take them all out. What it comes down to is pagination. Period. A minute a page. Break it down in eighths. Right, you guys are directors as well, okay. So, we are trusted because it’s the proper pagination. You get a script, it’s 120 pages, you can estimate it’s going to be approximately 120 minutes. That’s really what it comes down to. Does it paginate properly?

All the other things are bells and whistles. Okay, really, if you want to break it down.

Craig: Kinda. I mean, revisions aren’t bells and whistles. I mean, that’s a huge part of what we do.

Marc: But, I mean, I’m saying what got us started and what was really important was the pagination.

Craig: Was this many lines per page.

John: Clearly. And I will say going right back to the history of sort of Final Draft, part of the reason why you started the product originally was because you got so frustrated by trying to write a screenplay in a normal word processor.

Marc: Correct.

Joe: Right.

John: And that is honestly one of the things I appreciated about Final Draft so much is that, oh, this is actually set up to do exactly the thing I’m trying to do.

Marc: There you go. Thank you. And that’s the key for us.

John: But who are you competitors now as you see it?

Marc: There are 24 apps, competitors. Adobe has a competing product.

John: Yeah, Adobe Story.

Marc: You know, they come and go. We’re here. We’re still standing. We’re still number one, clearly. And it’s because we believe — I’ll give you a perfect example what makes us stand out.

We made an iPad app called the iPad Writer. It took, ready for this, two years. And you’ll say to me, “Marc, some of these apps that are much less expensive, by the way some of them are even free, they told me they took two, three, four months. Why does it take Final Draft two years?”

A year and a half of that two years was spent making sure that your script of 119 pages was 119 pages there. And also on your IBM, your Windows, I’m sorry, look at IBM, I’m old school.

Craig: That is old school.

Marc: And any device you have of Final Draft it’s the same. We can’t go to a reading, a rehearsal, a whatever we do and say, “Let’s turn to page 16,” and everybody has got a different page 16. Every — I’ll repeat — every — all of my competitors today do not do that. They may have great bells and whistles. They may be… — And by the way, I never talk about my —

Craig: I think Fade In does that.

Marc: No. It does not.

Craig: You’re saying that the Fade In app on the iPad doesn’t match the —

Marc: That’s correct. I took a 215 page script of Final Draft —

Craig: It worked for me.

Marc: It’s the same page count?

Craig: Yeah.

Marc: Oh, our tests showed it different.

John: Craig is lucky and he’s touched. Well, let’s talk about what’s —

Marc: Not on the iPad.

Craig: That’s what I use.

John: The iPad app took two years because it was a huge undertaking to move something that was working on the Mac and in Windows onto an iPad device.

Marc: Right.

John: Final Draft 9 is about four years after 8.

Marc: Mm-hmm.

John: What were the challenges there?

Marc: The biggest one was about 10 years ago Apple, even though we’re a developer and they love us and we have friends over there, they don’t tell you anything. 10 years ago they made you do Carbon language. And you’re familiar with this. And you had to go down there and strip it, you know, put Carbon in.

I’m not a techie, by the way. But, now they come to us three, four years ago and say, “You need to do Cocoa.” That means a page one rewrite for us. What does that mean to the customer? Well, version 8 they came out with MacBook retina displays. Guess when we found out that our font wasn’t really looking as crisp as it should? When somebody came to our office with a MacBook retina display.

It’s not like we got a call, or they mentioned it to us. We didn’t even know until it happened. So, what do we have to do? We have to spend a year and a half rewriting our software so it works on not only today’s latest Mac operating system —

Joe: With the Cocoa.

Marc: But their future ones. Okay? So, now we can take advantage of their dictation, some of the things they provide in there. It can take advantage of —

Joe: Full screen.

Marc: So, there’s a year and a half there.

John: Yeah, that’s a lot.

Marc: 36, 38, something like that, other pieces of software rely on the FDX format, from your editing programs to your casting to translation companies use the FDX format for various different things. You have to make sure it works with all of these things. It takes some time. There are new features. There are corrections. There are fixes. It goes on and on and on.

Craig: Are you honestly saying that you think the amount of time that it took to do Final Draft 9 with the amount of features you’ve added and the price you’re charging, you think that all lines up right?

Marc: Yeah, absolutely.

Craig: You don’t detect a problem?

Marc: Of course, Craig. Like I said, we’re in business not to go out of business.

Craig: I understand, but —

Marc: Absolutely. It’s a mature product. It’s a very mature product. You say the same thing about Microsoft Word and Quicken. What do they actually put in? We put a lot in here. A lot.

Craig: Not really.

Marc: Of course we did. First of all, it takes advantage of all of your latest operating systems. That’s very important.

Craig: I’m sorry. Marc, Marc —

Marc: You’re sorry?

Craig: I am. I’m sorry…to interrupt. Not sorry for what I’m about to say. Adding retina display to this product when retina display has been out for two years. And listen —

Marc: It’s not one line of code.

Craig: Just give me a moment. Just give me a moment.

Marc: Okay. Okay.

Craig: We’ve given you a lot of time. And I’m just a little incredulous. There are a lot of companies out there. In fact, 100 percent of companies that make software for Mac had to deal with the fact that suddenly there was a retina display.

John: Yeah, we had to deal with it with our two apps. So, Bronson Watermarker and our other Mac app, Highland, our other Mac app were originally not retina and so we had to make them retina. It is —

Joe: Were they originally written in Carbon libraries or Cocoa library?

John: They were written in Cocoa library.

Joe: We had to go from Carbon to Cocoa, where it’s a very low level transition. So, a lot of what you’re saying —

Marc: You’re punishing us for being around since 1992.

Craig: Not at all. What I’m saying is…

Marc: That’s the way I see it.

Craig: …if you’re going to — listen, you guys have been around a long time. You’ve been charging a lot of money for a product for a long time. This change comes along and you decide we’re going to take as much time as we need and we’re going to still charge you all this money anyway when everybody else has become used to a cycle now where products update fairly frequently and things like retina display is a free update. It’s not a charged update.

And the fact that you guys had to rewrite your software is now why I have to spent $99. Is that what it is to update?

Marc: Well, $79 if you act by the end of the day. We take credit cards.

Joe: Act now.

Craig: Listen —

Marc: I don’t understand. Do you know how much work that goes into it? We’re not, you know —

Craig: I’m a customer. I’m not here to cry for you. What I’m going to —

Joe: In order to see it all.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to see it all.

Marc: You want to make sure —

Craig: Hold on. You guys don’t need to see what we do to make a movie. And I don’t need to see what you do to make software. All I need to know is does this make sense for me or not. And what I’m saying to you is I’m a little surprised by the fact that you’re coming here and essentially acknowledging no mistakes, no problems, we did everything right.

Marc: No…

Craig: Right? Because it seems to me, you’re in a position now, John put this article on about how Quark was just — Quark ruled the world. And then one day they didn’t. And I have to tell you, you guys — and this is not person, it’s just a business, seem willfully blind to the fact that things are so much more easily disruptable now than ever before.

I mean, listen, you used to say you need Final Draft because the studio needs it to break down for budget. No they don’t. Not anymore. They’re breaking the budget down from in Universal right now off of a PDF document. They don’t need this anymore. I can get, John, oh my gosh you guys have watermarking now. One name, John has — what does Bronson cost?

John: it’s $29.

Craig: $29.

Marc: Which is why we told people if they need — we keep improving it as it goes on.

Craig: But I don’t understand. You guys are the industry leader and you seem to be just lagging behind.

Joe: Well, there is a lot, as Marc said, a lot of legacy code, so we’re — unfortunately because we’ve been around so long it’s harder to pivot quickly because right now I’m talking all day long with our chief architect about these particular libraries that if we want to pursue opportunity A, or opportunity B, or put it on the surface, or make it Unicode for other languages, there are some legacy libraries that are going to have to get removed. And so it’s like we’re going to have to go through and take a lot of engine parts out and replace a lot of under the hood stuff.

And it unfortunately takes a long time.

Marc: And the customer doesn’t see that, but it’s necessary that is has to be — it has to happen.

John: And I actually see that.

Joe: It’s a hindrance to be as old as we are.

John: I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for you, Mark, though in a sense of software pricing. Because I think what Craig is complaining about the price, $249 is not expensive software for a thing that you’re using every day and that you’re staring at every day. And yet the price of software has fallen through the floor. And Adobe feels it. And everyone sort of feels it because I think consumers start to sense that apps should be either free or they should be $0.99 like they are on the iOS App Store.

So, I’m incredibly sympathetic to you guys in that regard. No matter what you price it at someone is going to say, “Well that should have been a free update.” That’s inevitably going to happen.

Marc: Well, you know, you get that criticism. But the only income we make is from selling you Final Draft license, which is a perpetual license that you have forever, and ever, and ever, and selling you upgrades. There is no other income revenue at Final Draft. That’s what it is.

Craig: But I can now purchase an entire new software program for half the cost of what you’re charging for an update that has a few features thrown in. And that to me seems out of whack. That’s where I just say, look, I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong. The market doesn’t have right or wrong. It’s just a market.

Marc: You are in the minority. Fact.

Craig: Well, I’m in the minority now. But, I guess I’m just sort of surprised that you guys are sort of going, “And you’ll always be in the minority. We don’t see a problem. We don’t see any icebergs.”

Marc: No.

Joe: I mean, unfortunately, like Marc said, we sell one thing. Apple gives their operating system away for free. But they sell $30 billion worth of iPads every quarter.

Craig: Oh, I’m not comparing you guys to Apple.

Marc: Our sole revenue is this.

Joe: We’ve heard the comparison, “Why can I get a whole…”

Craig: There’s a difference between free and $300.

Marc: Well, first of all, many company’s upgrades are about half the price of the full copy. Ours isn’t. $79. And even when it’s $99 is about 40 percent.

Craig: If this had been… — Look, part of the thing that I was surprised by, and I think you were surprised by, too, to be fair, was that this upgrade which you sell like a full upgrade didn’t feel like a full upgrade. It felt like, frankly, an incremental thing that should have been released as a free update or a service package like retina display. I mean, I’m paying for retina display? And what else?

Joe: Had we released it for free we would go out of business, because it takes a lot of development —

Marc: And that’s your opinion. We’re getting tremendous responses.

Joe: A lot of development for us to get to that point.

Marc: That’s our problem, I think.

Craig: I know I see it as a problem.

John: I think it’s an industry problem. I think it’s a software industry problem.

Joe: It’s a challenge in software development.

John: Especially I think for people in your situation and I know Movie Magic Screenwriter has a similar thing because they’re product feels like it’s 1983. I mean, those menus feel incredibly old. And they’re going to face the same situation. You guys were smart enough to pivot and go to FDX format. That’s a classic example of making the right choice of getting rid of FDR.

Joe: Yeah. We had to bite the bullet. We knew it was going to take a long time.

Marc: Hey, we made a lot of bad decisions over the years. You live and learn. This is what running a business is. We’re 40 people. There’s not an office really in the world that has 40 people dedicated to one thing. And that’s screenwriting and screenwriting software.

And, quite frankly, we listen every day. We service our customers. We listen every day. We love the good comments and we listen to the negative ones. Believe me, we take them to heart.

Craig: Do you think I’ve had any interesting or reasonable criticism for your product, or you think it’s all just a bunch of bunk?

Joe: I read every single podcast.

Craig: I’m not asking if you read it. I’m saying do you agree with me?

Joe: I want to absolutely know. Do I, well —

Marc: Sure, yes. Yes, some of your criticism is warranted.

Joe: I can’t think off the top of my head.

Marc: I don’t remember those. I remember the ones that aren’t warranted.

Craig: I think that’s weird. I would remember the ones that are warranted.

Marc: Hold up. This is our business.

Craig: Yes.

Marc: We know exactly, top to bottom, what the customers want, what they need, and we listen. You have to make business decisions on how you do it, when you do it, how you implement it, not implement it. It’s really what it’s all about. But we know. We’re engaged. And we understand. And we hear the criticisms. And some of your criticisms are warranted. And some of them are, I feel you might be misinformed.

Craig: All right.

Marc: I can’t pick and choose that. I don’t want to pick and choose and beat a dead horse. But this is how 40 people make a living. Believe me, we listen.

Craig: All right.

John: But let’s talk about your customers, though, because do you perceive your customers being sort of the working-working-working screenwriters or the aspiring screenwriters. What do you know about your customers?

Marc: Well, I wrote something that got produced, a theater piece, at Ford Theater. Am I professional writer?

John: You and I talked about this because that was actually the template that I used for Big Fish. I was just starting Big Fish when you did that. And it was like a patriotic —

Marc: Yeah, It’s called Liberty Smith. Actually, it was very well received.

John: Great.

Marc: 10 percent of the people, by the way, didn’t like it. [laughs]

Craig: That’s better than I’ve ever done.

Marc: Thank you. Yes, it’s correct. And I don’t write the music but I was the book writer on it. And we had a ball with it. I don’t know where this is going now. I just lost my…you got me talking about myself.

Craig: Who your customer base. Who do you see as your — ?

Marc: Oh yeah. So, am I professional writer? Well, some people would say yes. I got paid a little bit of money. But I’m not. So, it’s hard to tell when you do surveys about who’s actually professional writers or not. And I would say it comes back 30, 40 percent of our users internationally are professional writers. Okay?

We are extremely popular in India. I went to Mumbai. I went all over the place. We estimated, the Mumbai Film Office estimates there are 300,000 people using Final Draft in India. They make four times the amount of TV shows and movies we do, except we sold one copy eight years ago and didn’t even get paid for that. It’s 100 percent piracy.

But we’re very popular there, so they bring me over there and they want us to do more stuff to help make it better for them. But, if you’re not going to get paid — it’s a business like anything else. But, so we take the criticism.

John: The reason why I ask who your customers are is I think between Craig and I we know almost all the working feature writers. And a lot of them have been frustrated with Final Draft over the years, some more, some less. Most people end up using it. Like it’s still the best thing. That’s honestly what you honestly.

Craig: Sure. By default.

John: It’s by default. And so like it’s good in production stuff. You bite the bullet and you use it. But I asked a lot of people and I asked like did you use a beta of Final Draft 9. Did they come to you? Did they survey you? Were these the things you wanted?

Marc: Of course.

John: But I haven’t found anybody who did of my working —

Joe: We do have professional writers on our beta. I’m not going to give their names out, but we do. And we do consult them. And we actually pursue relationships with guys like you. You guys are our customers. And the reason that aspiring writers want to use our product is because they want to use what the pros use. And we know this.

And so primarily we’re here to make you guys happy. And if we’re not then we’re not really doing our job. That’s what we really want to do.

Marc: 24 competitors yet we’re the ones who show up everywhere. I mean, we’re everywhere. We’re at the London Screenwriting Festival.

Craig: You are —

Marc: Wait, let me — we’re in Buenos Aires for the International Film & Video Association.

Craig: Yes, you’re spending money on that.

Marc: And we put ourselves right there. The list —

Craig: You’re spending money on that. I mean, part of what —

Marc: Let me finish. We’re listening to everybody.

Craig: No, no, no. You’re promoting. That’s not listening.

Marc: Ooh!

Craig: It’s promoting! You guys run contests and you go places and you show up. And, listen, promoting is part of business. But part of what I think a lot of — when I talk to screenwriters we perceive is that Final Draft has become a company that charges a lot of money to wannabes, takes that money, converts it into marketing to get more wannabes. And there’s nothing wrong — every professional writer starts as a wannabe.

But what you’re not doing, I don’t perceive, and like John said we’ve never met a single screenwriter that you guys have talked to.

Joe: Right.

Craig: That’s a little weird, since we know almost all of the ones that work.

Marc: We might have talked to 250 people just today alone. Every day.

Craig: 250 people today?

Marc: We email, every day. Every day.

Craig: No, I mean to say talk to them in other words —

Joe: Well, you have some friends that wrote on Ride Along, right?

Craig: Yes.

Joe: One of my buddies was the original writer on that. Very close relationship with him. Talk to him every day. He wants to come in and present stuff to Marc. Every other week he’s asking me for things. CollaboWriter. Huge item on his list. He won’t shut up about it. It’s something I absolutely want to build to make him happy. He’s a pro. He had a million dollar pitch at Paramount. You’ve never heard of the title of this thing, but he’s a real guy. And he’s out there.

Craig: I’m not denying that you talk —

Joe: These are real people.

Craig: Yes. I’m not denying that you talk to some people, and I don’t know if he’s got a credit on the movie or not.

Joe: Yeah.

Craig: Okay.

Joe: For sure.

Craig: And that’s good. But I’m saying that it seems odd that there isn’t quite a bit of consulting going on with professionals.

Marc: Craig, I’m sorry to say —

Craig: I know you’re saying that I’m wrong.

Marc: You’re completely, 100 percent, mistaken.

Craig: We just don’t know the ones who talk to you.

Marc: I came here to the hot seat, didn’t I?

Craig: We just don’t know the ones that you’re talking to.

Marc: Listen, the one time I would say that 30 or 40 percent of the television market, no, what am I thinking? Yeah, the television market.

Joe: The TV shows.

Marc: The TV shows was ours. Okay? So we went out and spoke to everybody and anybody, script coordinators, everybody. Today we probably have 90, 95 percent, I don’t know. But just about every studio and TV show uses Final Draft. Why? We went and talked to them, and listened, and we put the things that they wanted in there. To assume — this is how we make our living. To assume that we’re not engaging the customer is —

Craig: Well, we’re not talking about [crosstalk] —

Marc: No, it’s my fault. It’s my fault. That you have — let me finish Craig. If you have this perception, then we did not do our job.

Craig: The only perception that I have is that it’s just a little, there’s perhaps just an odd coincidence that John and I don’t happen to know any of the theatrical screenwriters that you talk to.

Joe: They call us every day. The Family Guy, Doug Ellin. I could just go on and on and on. I mean, Modern Family. We talk to everybody. We talk to everybody that we know. We would love to know the guys you were talking to and get their input.

Craig: Well, that would be good.

Marc: You’re frustrated because there’s things that you don’t like about it and you want to know why we haven’t acted on those things. And the answer to that question is that we have to prioritize. We are a business to not go out of business.

Craig: I’m —

Marc: Let me finish. There’s only so many screenwriters in the world. You talk about price points. Okay, 40 people have to eat at Final Draft. I’m not an extremely wealthy person out of this, okay? It’s still a limited vertical piece of software. You have to balance, as a business man, and this is what I do — a small business owner — you have to balance the income and revenue with the expenses. And sometimes they get tricky and some things fall through the cracks.

But we’re not in business to go out of business. And that’s a very key point.

Craig: We’re not asking you to go out of business.

John: We’re certainly not. And I think I’ve said many times I think it’s crucial that we have people at that top end of the industry, top end of apps, so there will always be a way to do that difficult production stuff, because that’s what you guys are especially good at.

Marc: Thank you.

John: As we sort of wrap this up, I want to ask both of you what’s next, or what’s officially on the timeline for the future? Because when I talked to you last I know there were products that were being discussed, but what’s officially the next kind of thing that you guys can talk about?

Marc: Well, we’re talking to a lot of, some other companies and I’m not privy to talk about, that want to do some interesting things with Final Draft. Right on the horizon is we’re releasing — what are we releasing in the next couple weeks?

Joe: Well, right now we’re following up the release of 9 with some fixes and some enhancements.

Marc: That people found.

Joe: I would love to do some more iterations on things like watermarking and make it a little more robust and things like that. Now that it’s out in the wild, we’re getting a lot of feedback and we’re cycling through a lot of that stuff. You guys are both familiar with how that works.

But, one of the big things we’d like to do in the next couple year time frame type roadmap is a better outlining experience with the navigator being a navigator and not a true outliner. I mean, I’ve always felt that. And I’ve always felt like that’s an opportunity for us to really improve this. And so if we were looking at a version 10 or something I think that would be a cornerstone of it.

John: How about Fountain? Is Fountain anything you’re going to be incorporating into future versions?

Joe: You know, Fountain is real easy. It’s text. So, we can already read it. So, we just have to make a couple of syntax adjustments probably here and there. We could import a script right now —

John: You actually do a pretty good job of importing Fountain right now.

Joe: Yeah, because we can read text and we kind of get the context and it does that with the text document. It’s done that for a long time. So, I can pretty much get 99 percent of Fountain today really without doing anything. So, if we did a little bit of a —

Craig: So then you should do that.

Joe: Well, yeah, we should. We absolutely should. I could show you a long list of things I want to do.

Craig: I’m just saying that some of these things that are easy… — In other words, what we’ve become used to is that Final Draft will say every few years, “Here’s a bunch of stuff. Pay for it,” as opposed to as we go through, these little things that obviously don’t require a lot of effort would be nice to see. The other thing I would love to see you guys do that I think everybody would pay — look, I remember buying Final Draft and there was this collaborator thing and Todd Phillips and I were like, “Oh thank god. Finally.”

Joe: It’s absolutely something that we’re dealing with, this CollaboWriter.

Craig: It didn’t even come close to work. And you guys, that was — I had a real problem with that. I felt like I was sold bad goods.

Marc: That’s justified. [Crosstalk] As barriers that people will start building your firewalls and stuff.

Craig: It wouldn’t work on anything. [laughs]

Joe: CollaboWriter was built when it was a peer-to-peer technology with no security. And it’ll still work like that. We took it out of the program.

Craig: Sure, yeah.

Joe: If there were no internet security and firewall on everything that exists today, CollaboWriter worked. It stopped working. And then we kept trying to figure out —

Craig: It never worked.

Joe: And it failed. No, it worked in the beginning.

Craig: Where, at DARPA? It didn’t work in anyone’s office. I mean, honestly, it never worked because everybody at the very least was going through just like, even a router it would —

Marc: It worked. It just had to do some things, manipulate some things.

Joe: It got defeated by internet security and things like that. And technology changed so rapidly. And when Marc says we’re a 40 person company —

Marc: Right. We’re not Microsoft or Apple here.

Craig: No one is asking you that.

Joe: 10 to 15 percent of those people are actually programmers.

Craig: I understand. All I’m saying is…

Joe: So, I have a limited amount of —

Craig: …the company sold me a product and it didn’t work as described. I would love — I think everybody frankly was a little, I think I was — I was, I don’t think, I was shocked that after this many years you guys didn’t come out and at that price say here’s a cloud solution so that you can actually collaborate. This is being mastered across platforms by everyone else.

Joe: What we’re doing is we’re integrating Dropbox on our iPad app so that you have really deep integration with Dropbox to make that a lot easier.

Craig: Oh, come on. But I’m not talking about that.

Joe: But that’s really what our customers are asking us for.

John: Honestly, I’m sort of on your side.

Joe: That’s what our customers are asking us for.

John: All my stuff is currently in Dropbox. That’s where I sort of want to see stuff.

Joe: Yeah.

Craig: No, I understand. But I have Dropbox. See, there’s two kids that have created this writing site, you know, WriterDuet, where they — now, is that solution appropriate for Final Draft, I don’t know. But they figured something out here already. And they’re just kids!

Joe: Well, so there’s CollaboWriter and there’s like the online storage and syncing the storage.

Craig: They’re not really kids. They’re grownups.

Joe: And CollaboWriter is something we want to deal with in a completely new way, so we have a hosted environment so we can do it the right way.

Craig: Right.

Joe: But as far as syncing and sharing documents, I think there are solutions out there that we just need to integrate with rather than offering you cloud storage. There’s no reason for me to offer you storage.

Craig: We don’t need storage. We need just, yeah.

Joe: We’re making adjustments as we go along and adjustments change.

Craig: Here’s a suggestion to you. Like when I talk to all of our screenwriting friends, the number one thing that we want is to be able to open our laptop here and you open your laptop in your house and we start working in the same document just like Google Docs.

Joe: Definitely. I’m with you.

Marc: We agree.

Joe: We are going to build it. I promise we’re going to build that.

Marc: Let me apologize to the listeners if we’re a little slower than you’d like us to be.

Craig: [laughs] And you have 40 people.

Marc: Like I said, there’s 36 products that work with us. There’s a lot of people that touch Final Draft. We have a lot of — sometimes you get spread a little too thin. We do realize that we are in the screenwriting business and our job is to make screenwriters happy. Hopefully we will get Craig to be a fan.

Craig: You know me. I’m all — I’m honest.

Joe: You’re much more charming in person than on paper.

John: I told you he was going to be a charming person.

Joe: He’s a sweetheart —

Craig: This is charming? Really?

John: Thank you guys so much for coming in.

Craig: Thank you. That was brave. That was brave.

John: It was brave and wonderful for you guys to come in and talk to us about Final Draft 9

Craig: Face the music.

John: And let’s keep a good dialogue going.

Joe: Let’s stay in touch and let’s get these things worked out.

Marc: We’re open to criticism. We’re open to love. And we’re open to suggestions. And just want to remind the listeners we’re not distant. We spend every day listening, talking, interacting with writers of all kinds, from playwrights, to television writers, to people in Europe. We work very hard. My team works very hard.

Craig: I believe you.

Marc: And the reason that prompted this was that the employees might have felt taken back.

Craig: That’s a shame.

Marc: And me — throw it all at me.

Craig: And we are very, I have to say just personally I respect the hell out of you guys for coming on. I think it’s fantastic. I hope that you understand that everything I have to say — the good news about me is that I’m just a little honesty machine, so when I love it I’m going to love it hard.

Joe: What you see is what you get.

Marc: But this is why we came here. We cannot get better unless we listen to the criticism. We just can’t accept the love. I do want to thank the listeners that do love us to keep loving us. And I want the ones that don’t to tell us how to make us better. That’s the only way you get better. We are sometimes a little slower because we have a big reach. We’re not a new startup. We’re not a small company. And we have what you call a legacy product. And you have a lot of things that have to work hand in hand with that. And a lot of partners and a lot of — I could go on, and on, and on.

So, it’s a balancing act and I appreciate you having me on.

Craig: It was a pleasure.

Marc: And please feel free to keep criticizing us. It makes us better.

Craig: [laughs] Fantastic.

John: Thank you guys so much.

Joe: Something tells me they will. [laughs]

John: Yeah, probably.

Marc: As always, John, good to see you.

Craig: Thank you guys, that was great.

[Scriptnotes theme music]

Craig: So, a very interesting thing happened this week. Billy Ray and Chip Johansen — Johansen, right? Johannessen or Johansen? Well, anyway, Chip, they are the co-chairs of the negotiating committee. Very well regarded, well respected writers, not only for the work that they do but their position in the guild and their demeanor, they way they conduct themselves.

And they sent an email to the membership and it said essentially that even though the AMPTP, the organization that corrals all the companies for the purposes of bargaining, even though they’ve made a deal with the DGA, and even though we have, I think we’re coming up on 70 years of precedent where if one guild gets a deal they all get it, the AMPTP opened up with a volley that they were going to offer us something that was worth $60 million less, with all these rollbacks on the table. And basically the email said, “Well, that was surprising. And we’re not going to take that.”

And I just wanted to talk about this for a minute, because what does it mean? A lot of people are a little concerned and nervous.

John: So, as we’ve talked about on the podcast before, I’m actually on the negotiating committee for this contact. So, while I can’t talk about specifics of what’s going on here right now, I would say in general in the town both on the writers’ side and the studios’ side, it didn’t feel like this was going to be a particularly contentious negotiation.

Craig: Yeah, like why? This wasn’t supposed to be this way. Why are they doing this?

The first thing I should say is that there was — what I didn’t read in the email from Billy and Chip was any sense of panic. And nor do I have a sense of panic. And the reason I don’t have a sense of panic is because I think that this is a fairly obvious but also fairly clumsy attempt by Carol Lombardini, who is the head negotiator for the companies, to get us to sort of bargain up towards the DGA as opposed to trying to get us — working hard to get us to bargain down to that number.

As a strategy I suppose it’s okay. It’s a little silly. A lot of this stuff is kabuki theater. The blunder here was that it was just way too aggressive. Way. It just feels like a huge mistake. And it feels like a mistake on their part strategically because, look, if they really do want to overturn pattern bargaining then I’m going on strike. I’ll go on strike without the WGA. [laughs] I don’t care.

John: Craig Mazin just walks around all the time with a blank picketing sign and he will just write whatever he needs to write on, because that’s Craig Mazin. That’s what Craig Mazin does.

Craig: Uh [laughs]. So, if you lose me that early you’ve really blown it because I’m a very moderate guy about this sort of thing. I hate strikes because I think that you can’t truly win a strike.

But in this case if we were to violate pattern bargaining, there’s no reason for the guild to exist anymore. If you accept that one time, then the next time you’ll have to do it again and again until eventually we just get paid McDonalds wages and what do we need a union for?

That’s why I know that this isn’t serious from them because they know that we would never take it. I just think it was a bungled first step by the companies and I hope that they un-bungle this quickly. It was sort of pointless.

John: I am told that my function as a member of the negotiating committee will be to sit in a room and make a counter offer, then sit while they mull that counter offer, and then sit some more, and then sit some more. So, I am bringing plenty of good reading material. I have plenty to write. I’m looking forward to hanging out with my fellow writers and trying to get this contract done.

Craig: It’s essentially the writer’s version of jury duty, because the negotiating committee exists per the constitution, the union constitution. In actuality it would be impossible to negotiate anything. By the way, it’s the same thing for the companies. They have all these people in the room. It’s very hard for the — ultimately it comes down to about four people in a sidebar deciding everything. So, you become quickly ceremonial.

But that said, I think everybody is looking at this going, “Oh, come on. That’s just ridiculous.” So, I guess I would say to my fellow writers don’t panic. Not over this. But, nor should you think for a second that we would ever in a million years accept something like that. We would not.

John: If Craig Mazin tells me not to panic I will not panic.

Now, another thing that happened this week, something that a reader wrote in about, this is from Erica Horton: “I know you guys have probably gotten a lot of questions about the Quentin Tarantino Hateful Eight script. However, I was wondering if you could address the difference between sharing a script the way one of the actors supposedly did and posting the screenplay online the way Gawker did. Is there a difference?

“I understand how someone producing a movie from a screenplay without the permission of the author is copyright infringement, or taking it and claiming it as their own. Is it against copyright law to share someone’s screenplay if you credit them as the author and don’t sell it?”

Craig: Absolutely against copyright law. 100 percent. What a shame. And then Quentin famously said, “Well, now I’m not making the movie.”

John: Which I would like to stipulate as a writer and director, that is entirely his right.

Craig: I love —

John: He can not make his movie. That’s fine.

Craig: If he weren’t already the coolest guy in the world he would have become the coolest guy in the world because of this. Strong move to the hoop.

John: So, in case people are listening to this podcast years after the fact, what happened this last week is Quentin Tarantino’s script, which is apparently called Hateful Eight, leaked online. So, I’m not even sure what the entire backstory of this was, but he had sent the script to certain actors and either through them or through their agents somehow it got out. And it was passed around town. But, more importantly it was put online by Gawker. And so people could read the screenplay. And that is what has happened to get us to this point.

Craig: The idea is that if you’ve written a screenplay, either you haven’t sold it or you have sold it, either way someone owns the copyright. And part of copyright — part of the right of copyright is the right to distribution. So, I don’t have the right to sell things that I haven’t authored unless I’ve gotten permission. And in this case copying and disseminating the screenplay is a violation of the copyright owner, which in this case I think is Quentin. I don’t think he’s sold it to anybody yet. Yeah.

Which is even — for those people who are kind of copy-fightists, then just know that his isn’t like a pro-corporation, “Well Mickey Mouse should be copyright forever,” kind of thing. This is a man who wrote a thing.

John: So, let’s talk about the difference between a script being passed around Hollywood and a script being posted online. I’ve taken my own sort of smaller John August umbrage at people posting script reviews online. And this is sort of the same kind of thing, but times a thousand.

I think as writers we can all sort of understand what this is like. This is something that I’ve written that I did not want to share to the world that is now suddenly up on Gawker. And how would you feel?

Craig: Violated. I mean, people have to understand we would never — if Stephen King sent a rough draft manuscript to his publisher and some assistant in the office took it and scanned it and threw it up on the web, everybody would be shocked by it. But somehow for screenplays we don’t have the same level of outrage, maybe because the internet geek community is so passionate about this stuff. And I use that term lovingly. And they want to celebrate and read these things and they’re obsessed with the insidery-ness of it all.

The problem is they don’t understand we don’t write screenplays for you to read on the internet period, anyway. We write them to be converted into movies. We want you to see a movie not having read the screenplay. What a shame to go into The Sixth Sense or Silence of the Lambs having read the screenplay.

And, look, I saw Silence of the Lambs having read the book, but I would have never read the screenplay to see the choices and to see the movie in my head. It’s just violation. The worst kind of violation is the ScriptShadow-y “I’m going to take your early draft and review it,” which is a double dose of why. Like who the hell gave you the right to do this? And why do you think it’s good for anyone?

John: Let’s step back and talk for a second about a screenwriter’s right to control the distribution of his or her script. Because there’s sort of two different phases a script goes through. There’s the stage where it’s just your script. You’ve written a script, you may have handed it to one or two people to read. You are trying to get their opinions, their feedback. You’re trying to know if this thing you’ve written is good.

Now, at a certain point you’re going to be going after directors or actors and that script is going to be in other people’s hands. At a certain point you give up your expectation that you can control every person who’s reading it. And sometimes that’s okay.

When you write a spec script at a certain point you want people to be passing it around. Each year we talk about the annual Black List of the people who have written the scripts that people love most in Hollywood. And most of those scripts were not a case of an executive calls the agent and says, “Can I read this script?” It’s more, “I read this great script and here I’m going to give you a copy of this great script.” That passing around is a natural part of Hollywood.

But that’s not what happened with this in Gawker. This was not a passing around of something that we loved. This was publishing it on the internet for the whole world to read. And that’s not okay. That’s not an acceptable sort of use of the screenwriter’s work.

Craig: It’s different in scale, obviously. But it’s also different in terms of whose intention is ruling the day. For instance, when I was writing the Hangover movies with Todd Phillips, we never printed a single page out. Nobody got copies of it except for him and me while we were writing it. It existed entirely on our two computers. That’s it. And then when we were done we made a hard copy for the head of Warner Bros. We presumed that he would safeguard and he did. And the three actors, you know, the three guys.

And everybody else had to come into the office, you know, like costume designers and production, everybody else, had to come into the office, read it, and leave, and not take it with them, no transmission, because we understood it was something that people would take and put on the internet.

So, there are screenplays that there will be interest in.

John: Yeah.

Craig: J.J. I’m sure is struggling with massive amounts of security around the Star Wars scripts.

John: And I want to talk about how you lock stuff down when you mean to lock stuff down, because right as the story broke people were tweeting or emailing me saying, “Oh, they should have used Bronson Watermarker,” which is an app I make that watermarks PDFs. Saying like, “Oh, if Tarantino had done this then this wouldn’t have happened.”

No, this could have still happened. I mean, the app that I make can put a watermark on your PDF and that is some protection, and we can do like a bigger deep burn thing where you’re creating an image of every page. That’s a little bit more protection.

But that’s still kind of locking your bike. If somebody wanted to put it up on the internet they could still put it up on the internet. They could retype it. There’s no real way to protect your script from anyone possibly looking at it unless you’re doing exactly what you did with The Hangover 3 which is have people come to your office to read it.

Craig: Well, and for instance on that project, and I suspect it’s the same case with any high profile movie that you know you’re making, and it’s a sequel, or even if you’re doing the first — like I’m sure when they did the first Hunger Games they were obsessive about security. The agents don’t get it.

One thing that I was puzzled by, frankly, was the way that Quentin went about this. I think that he — I can’t blame him for walking through a bad neighborhood wearing a tight dress, but he acted in a way that I would have at least counseled him to not do.

John: He did seem to be very casual about sending this script to these people with the expectation that it wouldn’t get out past them, which if you think about his previous scripts have leaked out. So, you would think he would approach this with, I don’t know, a little bit more caution. I mean, you’d think he would have them come to his house to read it, for example.

Craig: That’s right. And maybe it’s just that he — because he’s Quentin Tarantino, you know, he doesn’t know that he’s Quentin Tarantino. But if I were with him I would say, “Oh my god, you have to understand something: people would knife their brother or sister to get your scripts because people are that obsessed with it.”

John: That would actually be a great job for somebody, sort of like following Quentin Tarantino around saying, “No, you’re Quentin Tarantino. You shouldn’t do that.”

Craig: “Yeah, I’m sorry Quentin. You forgot again that you’re Quentin Tarantino.”

John: Right. That’s what you should do.

Craig: By the way, I would do it right now. If Quentin Tarantino said you can follow around all day long, I mean, I am so fascinated by him as a filmmaker. He’s probably my favorite filmmaker.

John: Well, I do recall that probably the first script I ever really truly loved was Quentin’s script for Natural Born Killers.

Craig: I read that script. It’s awesome.

John: Which wasn’t really the movie that they made, but it was the original script. And I was at USC at the time and I remember one night getting the script, reading the script, and getting to the last page and then just flipping back to page one and reading it all over again. It’s the first script I did that with because it was just so good.

Craig: And he gets away with stuff that we can’t all get — I mean, he just does things that we’re not allowed to do. He’s the best.

John: All right. We have a question from Paul. He writes, “I am a Brooklyn based filmmaker.”

Craig: [New York accent] Hey what’s up, Paul? How ya doin’?

John: “And I enjoy your show greatly which is why I wouldn’t have guessed that I would ever take umbrage at your remarks, but umbrage I have taken. In your show Women in Pilots you and Craig commented numerous time about the way kids can mess with your career. Craig even went so far as to say they prevented him from becoming a director.

“In past shows you’ve talked about how kids halt many writer’s careers and success in the industry. As a married filmmaker considering having kids these remarks are more than disconcerting. You and Craig provide too strong of an anti-kid argument for parents who clearly both revel in the joys of a family. This feels like a ‘do as a I say not as I do’ bit of wisdom. I know successful filmmakers who have families and who are permanently single. And while the responsibilities of family can be extremely difficult to manage, I don’t believe a filmmaker’s success is harmed by his or her obligations to children. I think it’s totally specific to the individual.”

Craig: I…where to begin.

John: I know.

Craig: I mean, well, my initial reaction is, Paul, I can absolutely do anything I want professionally and remain the father to my children. It’s just I’m not sure I’m doing the father to them that I want to do. So, it’s a choice. I’m just making a choice. I’m not saying don’t have kids.

First of all, family should be your priority anyway. [laughs] It’s more important to make human beings and love them to, I don’t know, get a job making a film. It’s a movie. I love movies, but they’re not people.

John: This reminds me of another podcast I was listening to this week, the Planet Money podcast. And they had this economist on who writes about love and sort of the choices people make in romantic relationships. And I think the specific bit of advice was about this guy who had written in who was polyamorous. And he’s saying, “I have three lovers and people never write about this stuff and so what do you think the economic consequences of this are?”

And the economist was very smart in saying you may have bountiful love. Your love may be endless. But your time is not endless. And your ability to be with people is not endless. And so no matter what you do you are making some choices about how you are spending your time and how you are spending your emotional energy.

And that, I think, is really what we get into with Paul’s question is that, yes, you can have a terrific filmmaking career. You can have a terrific family. But to try to put energy in both places equally, there’s only a certain number of hours in a day. There’s only so much you.

And so everything is choices and you’re making a choice between how you’re going to allot your time. And having kids may cause you to allot your time differently. And that’s, I think, just the nature of the beast.

Craig: That’s right. And, Paul, don’t misinterpret my snarky attitude. I don’t blame my children for the choices I make. I make my choices for my children. I love my kids. My wife and my kids come first. I have turned things down, repeatedly, because I thought that it would be bad.

And, by the way, I’ve also made mistakes. I’ve talked a lot about how when my son was two I went to Vancouver and I was there for about six months. And I would go back and forth. There was a stretch of about three months where I was gone. And I came home and he looked different. And it was terrifying to me.

I was talking to this to Alec Berg was actually talking about this the other day when he went off to make — he made EuroTrip. And his daughter had just been born. Had just been born. And he got back from Prague and even though she was a baby and babies don’t necessarily — when you say like, oh, a baby doesn’t recognize me, she didn’t recognize him. His own baby didn’t recognize him. It was like a soldier coming back, you know, it was terrible.

So, Paul, I don’t blame my kids for these things. I make my choices because of my kids. I love my children. And if you love children, too, have some.

John: I will also say that these are the kinds of choices that comes at every filmmaker at every point in his or her career. So, in an early incarnation of Big Fish, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct it. And so it was to the point where we were talking about when we would actually make the movie and Steven said, “Well, I want to do it during the summer so I can be with my kids.” And this is Steven Spielberg and these are the choices he’s making. He’s a director who can make any movie, but some of the choices he’s making are because this is when his kids are going to be out of school and can join him on a set.

So, it’s not just an aspiring screenwriter thing or an aspiring director thing. At every level in the filmmaking world you’re going to be making some of these choices.

Craig: Well answered.

John: Next question comes from Liz in Chicago. She writes, “I’m a filmmaker working on developing a script for a tech-inspired story involving the themes of network and cloud storage, digital storage and security, and big data analysis. The problem is I’m expert in none of these fields and want to understand the real technology behind some of these things so that the story holds some weight in terms of relative accuracy.

“How would you go about finding a trustworthy adviser in the technology field to run the viability of plot elements by?”

Craig: That’s a really good question. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a big research episode.

John: I love research.

Craig: Me too. Beats writing, doesn’t it? [laughs] Most of the movies I’ve done haven’t required a ton of research. Identity Thief was the first one where I had to do a lot of research. And the answer to your question, Liz, is you call up a company that does what you are talking about and you tell them you’re writing a movie and you would love to talk to them. And oh my god do they want to talk to you.

And if you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement or something about trade secrets or things, but just expertise. You know, I went over to Beverly Hills and I sat down with the detective that runs their identity fraud division and he talked to me for two hours.

I remember he said at the end, because he hates identity thieves as you can imagine. He hates them.

John: He figured out that she was the hero.

Craig: Well, he didn’t. But as he was leaving he turned and he said, “By the way, what happens to the identify thief in your movie?” And I said, “She’s going to end up in jail.” And he said, “She should die.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: And he wasn’t kidding at all. It was like I laughed and then I realized, oh my god, he wants her to die.

John: It would have been a very different movie. I’m glad you didn’t follow his advice. Now, I agree with Craig’s overall advice about reaching out to people but I would say reach out to a specific person.

And so a project that I’m working on I needed to find people who had a very specific disease, or a very specific sort of situation. And they were hard to track down. Fortunately I was able to find an organization, a charity that works with people who have this condition, and I could reach out to them. And so online I could figure out there was a group in LA that did this. I could figure out who the people were I needed to talk to. I could email them directly and say what I wanted to do. Could they get on the phone with me? And they were wonderful.

Because I was talking to an individual. I think if I just called up blindly it would have been very hard, but since I could target an individual person it worked out really, really well.

And, again, people do want to help you, especially if you’re making a movie. I guess I could have dropped some credits, but I don’t really think that was the reason they were talking to me. They just want to actually see the stuff they do portrayed correctly. And that’s more than anything they want to see is they want to be able to talk about their jobs and see their jobs reflected accurately in the movies.

Craig: People get fussy. And they don’t even need you to be a fancy screenwriter. Everybody loves to talk about what they do. Do you know how frequently somebody that is a big data management cloud storage specialist gets to talk about what he does with someone who cares? Never.

They start talking at a party and people are like, “Ugh….” You’re listening. They get very excited. So, you find that person. They’re going to be very happy to talk to you.

But also make sure you do your homework on your own. Don’t show up and ask dumb questions. Read a few books so that you’re not wasting their time and your time by not asking really good questions that only they could answer.

John: Last bit of advice for Liz. Remember that you will become a sort of expert in this because you will learn all these things about data and such, but your audience won’t be. And your audience doesn’t need to be. Your audience needs you to be the person who interprets all that expert information and gives them just enough so they can follow your story.

So, I want you to be David Koepp in Jurassic Park. I want you to create that clever moment that explains how you clone dinosaurs and let’s just get on with our story.

Craig: “What would Koepp do?” I’ve got a bracelet that says that.

John: All right. This is from Zack. “My sister and I are writing partners from Steubenville, Ohio. We’ve been repped on our first script but it was passed on by all the studios it was sent to. Since then we’ve written another script that was considered by a WME agent, giving us notes on two separate drafts. After our last draft we never heard back from him, so we sent to CAA. They liked it and gave us more notes. We completed them and they said the script was ‘unique and enthralling read, but it wasn’t strong enough to represent.’

“My question to you is this: What the hell do we do next? While the script may not be good enough for them, should we spend our time working on the query letters to hopefully get another agency to bite, or should we scrap that idea and focus our time on writing another script? My biggest fear in this industry is that we have a great script that we just weren’t successfully getting to the right person. Maybe that’s me being overconfident, but by killing myself on the page for the last four years, that idea is what gives me hope to keep writing.

“As a seasoned writer I hope you can understand the struggle we’re going through and hope you can give us no more than a few words of advice to get us through these tough times.”

Craig: Well, I always worry when agencies are giving notes to people. Agents have no — I mean, I love my agent. I love my agency. Agents are not in that job. They’re in the job of negotiating business deals. They don’t know what makes a script good, nor do they know what makes a script sell. They only know what make a script sell.

So, they’re always looking backwards at what just happened and then they get new material and say, “Well, does that fit the pattern I watched?” But that’s not how the actual business works, because the actual business is a disruptive business where suddenly Diablo Cody writes Juno and that’s not at all what came before it, but somebody falls in love with it.

So, my advice to you would be consider maybe a service like the Black List where the script would be read not by agents but by people who are more creatively minded. And, remember, all you need is the one.

John: Blcklst.com is certainly a choice. Or, Austin Film Festival, or Nicholl Fellowship, any of the really meaningful screenwriting competitions. Those could be good ways to send your script out there in the world.

But I think the more important thing I would stress to you is that you have one script and I’m sure it’s terrific, but agents are reading this and they’re trying to base their entire opinion on one script. If you had more for them to read with different kinds of scripts they would have a better sense of who you are as a writer. So, while, yes, don’t abandon this project, I think you need to sort of keep writing new stuff and sort of expand your portfolio of awesome.

Craig: Well, and particularly relevant if you are talking to agencies. Because they’re not looking for screenplays, they’re looking for clients.

John: They’re looking for writers who sell things.

Craig: Exactly. And so if you have that one script and that’s the only one you’re ever going to write, and there have been quite a few people, one-hit wonders like that, then you’re less attractive to an agency. They’re going to make 10 percent off of you one time.

John: Our last question comes from Timothy. “Assuming you have a spec script that everybody loves, and assuming you want to direct your own script, is it appropriate to attach a line on your title page that says something to the effect of ‘Writer Attached to Direct.’ If not, how do you go about selling a script as a writer-director?”

Craig: Yeah, you don’t want to say anything on the title page other than the title and who wrote it and the date.

John: Your email address.

Craig: Email address. Yeah. The idea being that if somebody is truly interested in the screenplay you now have leverage. And you tell them I want to direct this screenplay. At which point they’re all going to try and convince you not to. And here’s the fun part: There are a ton of stories where people said no, I must direct it.

John: Richard Kelly on our podcast.

Craig: Correct. And many of those stories fork off into Richard Kelly-ville where they do a great job and they become directors. Many fork off into — they forked off…[laughs].

John: Boondock Saints.

Craig: They got forked off, yeah, into movies where you think, “Oh, you probably should not have directed that and I can’t believe that you forced yourself on when look who could have directed it, this person, this person, this person.”

And, god, that’s the problem. You need a crystal ball there, don’t you.

John: Craig, this was a jam-packed full show.

Craig: This may have been the best show we’ve ever done.

John: I have a One Cool Thing. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

Craig: I do have a One Cool Thing. It’s very, very brief.

John: Mine is brief, too. So, every year the City of Los Angeles does this thing called Ciclavia. And if you don’t know what Ciclavia is, it’s kind of awesome and amazing. What LA does is they shut down certain streets on a Sunday an people can go ride their bikes or walk on these streets. And so streets that are normally only car traffic are suddenly pedestrian friendly or bicycle friendly.

Craig: “Get on your box and ride!”

John: The next Ciclavia is April 6. It’s down Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to about LACMA, and it’s just great. And so if you are in Central Los Angeles or if you are going to be able to come to Central Los Angeles, it’s just kind of amazing to be able to see the city in a very different way. So, we’ll put a link to the Ciclavia site so you can see what the roots are and stuff.

Yes, it messes up traffic a little bit, but it’s so worth it to see everyone out in the street enjoying a beautiful spring day.

Craig: That sounds awesome. Very briefly my One Cool Thing this week is @chuckpalahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, brilliant writer, and one of our listeners and Twitter followers sent me something that he had posted that somebody else wrote about writing. And I thought it was really good. And then he posted something else that somebody wrote about writing that I also thought was really good that was specifically about screenwriting.

And then he posted something he wrote about writing. And all of it, in one day Chuck Palahniuk posted three things about writing that I thought all of them were terrific. So, this is a, I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a terrific writer, that is a Twitter account well worth following if you are a listener of this podcast.

John: Now, Craig, did you click through to his Twitter bio?

Craig: No.

John: Because if you did you’d see that it’s actually not Chuck Palahniuk necessarily tweeting. It’s actually run by the guy who runs his site, a guy named Dennis Widmyer.

Craig: I don’t need the actual Chuck. Whoever that guy is, he is posting great stuff. Who runs my Twitter account?

John: [laughs]

Craig: I’ve got 40 people. I’ve got 40 people running my Twitter account.

Please, for the love of god, if you’ve listened to this episode and maybe you just disagreed completely with what those guys said or are doing, don’t be jerks. Let me be king jerk and stay under my jerk level, because I’m not even that jerky. That’s the truth. Hey, don’t go beyond me. That would just be disgusting.

Links:

• Final Draft
• Scriptnotes 126: Punching the Salty Ocean
• John’s post on Final Draft, software and people
• Deadline: WGA Claims AMPTP Wants Big Pension & Health Contribution Cuts In New Contract
• LA Times on Quentin Tarantino’s Gawker suit
• Ciclavia
• @chuckpalahniuk
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Jakob Freudenthal