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Scriptnotes, Ep 58: Writing your very first screenplay — Transcript

October 11, 2012 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writing-your-very-first-screenplay).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 58 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, you may be familiar with the sort of classic technique in dramatic writing where you create tension by letting the audience know something that the characters on screen don’t know.

So, an example: you’d have like a spy who places a bomb underneath the table, and then when the hero is eating dinner at that table, some of that dinner is filled with tension, because you as the audience know there’s a bomb under the table and the hero does not know there’s a bomb under the table.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A good, classic technique. And that’s sort of what I’m feeling right now, because the audience, our listeners, have information that I don’t have.

**Craig:** Right. About Halloweenie.

**John:** Yes. It’s called Frankenweenie, but thank you so much.

**Craig:** I know. [laughs] I’ve been calling it Halloweenie lately. I just like that; I don’t know why.

**John:** I like it, too. So, we’re recording this on a Friday, a Friday afternoon, which is the day that Frankenweenie comes out. But most of our audience will be listening to this on Tuesday at the earliest.

— Maybe we should have, like, people could pay money to hear it early. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, like a Scriptnotes Premium?

**John:** Premium. Yeah, like — we would charge extra money rather than nothing.

**Craig:** Double nothing.

**John:** Double nothing. Yes, exactly. You could pay zero dollars rather than free.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, anyway, our audience is hearing this on Tuesday. So, they are knowing how well the movie did. So, we got great reviews, and that’s all great, but in terms of how we did at the box office, they have information that I don’t have.

They are living in one of three possible futures: the future where we did outstandingly well, the future where we did fine, and the future in which we didn’t do as well as we might have hoped.

And I would love to know which future our audience is living in, but I really have no good sense of that, because the tracking on the movie has been just bizarre. And so, like, the people who you usually go to ask, “How much do you think the movie will make?” they have said like, “Oh, it will make between $10 million and $30 million this weekend.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very, very difficult to track children’s movies. I mean, first of all congratulations; the reviews were outstanding, so it’s always good to see.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** The way tracking works is they call people up at home and they say, “What race are you? What gender are you? How old are you? Here are a bunch of movies. First of all, what are movies you’ve heard of — we’re not going to say any names.” That’s called unaided awareness. “Now, here’s a bunch of movies, have you heard of those?” That’s called aided awareness.

Then, “Which of these movies would you definitely recommend to friends,” or, I’m sorry, “which of these movies are you definitely interested in seeing?” And then, “Can you tell us which of these movies would be your first choice to see?” And then, “Which of the movies that are actually available for you to see — which one of these would be your first choice to see?”

The problem with kids’ movies is that kids’ movie-viewing is driven by moms, mostly, and kids. And a lot of times moms aren’t aware of what their kids want to see until it’s Saturday at noon, so very difficult to get a sense ahead of time what kids’ movies are going to do. They often surprise people. Typically they surprise you in a good way. Sometimes they Oogielove all over you, and then you’re just crying.

**John:** I don’t think anyone was surprised by Oogielove. That was not a surprise to anyone. But, like, the surprise last weekend was the Hotel Transylvania which did much better than people were expecting. And so the second weekend of whatever that movie will be, even if it drops a tremendous amount of money, will be a lot of money. So, people will go see that movie because it’s out there in theaters as well.

Anyway, it shouldn’t really matter that much. I’m delighted the movie did so well. It’s not going to help me or hurt sort of how much it does, but you want people to come see the movie. You want it to be successful.

So, I’ve been trying not to… — I know that the reviews are good because I sort of the scan the page of Rotten Tomatoes. This time I’m trying not to actually read the reviews because I find I can just sort of get sucked into a K-hole of reading all the reviews, which is just not helpful or productive to anyone.

But, my new time suck has been going on Twitter and just doing a Twitter search for Frankenweenie.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** And so you see all the people who are just seeing the movie right then. And so at midnight on the east coast, or two in the morning on the east coast before I went to bed, I could see all the people who were just coming out of Frankenweenie and crying and talking about how much they liked it, which was really nice.

**Craig:** That is terrific. I totally know where you’re coming from. I used to be obsessed with reviews, and obsessed with this, and obsessed with that. But Twitter has not only supplanted the importance of all that in my mind, I think frankly it’s just eliminating the actual practical value of critics. I’m not talking about their theoretical value, or their intellectual value, or cultural value, just their practical value of “Should I go see a movie or not? Let me check a particular critic. Let me check Metacritic. Let me check Rotten Tomatoes.”

It seems entirely driven by Twitter. So, even when the Identity Thief teaser hit, I went and searched and was getting — just kind of rolling through the reactions. And people are super honest, which is great. And it was a good reaction, so it’s always good to see.

But, you should be — eyes glued to Twitter, all weekend. But, you also know — I don’t know if people know this — but I mean, I guess most people by now know by Saturday morning or even frankly by tonight you’ll have a pretty decent idea of what the movie is going to do.

**John:** Absolutely. By tonight we’ll know whether sort of grownups, how many grownups went to see it. And based off of that they can do their little metrics and figure out with this kind of movie what they could expect for a Saturday, which would be a much bigger day for families, and Sunday, which is also a big day for a family movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, exactly. So, they just sort of compare it to a similar film and use the same multiplier and you should… — But, I would be shocked if it were on the low end of that. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were on the high end. So, good luck.

**John:** Yeah. Fingers crossed. But, I thought we might escape from this stress by reverting to a simpler time in the podcast today and really think back to what it was like when we were writing our very first scripts. Because before you have a movie that you have to worry about NRG tracking, you have this first screenplay that you’re trying to write. And so I thought today would be a walk down the hallways of history back to the time when we were not screenwriters yet, and we had not finished a script, and we were just getting started.

And so I don’t think I know — what was the first screenplay you ever read?

**Craig:** Screenplay I ever read? It was probably, oh, that’s a really good question.

**John:** As a related question, when were you aware that there was such a thing as screenwriting?

**Craig:** Pretty early on.

**John:** You grew up in a neighborhood with writers.

**Craig:** I knew in high school that there were screenwriters. I don’t know if I knew in middle school.

**John:** So, what do you think was the first time you started thinking about the script behind a movie? Because to me, I’ll give you my example first, is my brother and I had rented War of the Roses on VHS. And so we watched it and I was like, “I love this movie.” And then we rewound it and my brother went upstairs and I, like, I started just playing the movie again and started writing down everything people said.

And, I realized, “Oh, you know what? Someone must have written the things they’re saying. Like, there’s a whole plan for this.” Which sounds incredibly naïve, but I guess I just didn’t really realize that movies were sort of like plays. I’d read plays, but I didn’t realize that movies must have worked the same way. And so, just on a sheet of legal paper I was like trying to figure out what scenes were and what — I was trying to reverse engineer War of the Roses.

**Craig:** Huh. I actually remember before ever reading anything, I actually remember writing a script in — I wrote a script in eighth grade. So, I must have been aware of it. I didn’t write a script with proper FADE IN, and INT./EXT., or anything like that, but we were supposed to do a skit in our drama class and I wrote the whole thing.

**John:** Yeah, but that was a play, though. Because you’d experienced plays before. So was it more like a play, or was it really meant to be a script for filming something?

**Craig:** No, it was definitely more like a play, because we could not film anything.

— Hold on, I have to pee. If I don’t pee now it’s going to be a disaster.

**John:** Okay, go pee.

**Craig:** I can feel it. I’ll be right back.

**John:** So, Craig thinks we’re going to cut this part out of the podcast, but no; I’m actually going to just leave it in. So, this is a chance for us to talk about Craig while he’s not around.

Yup.

Just talking.

**Craig:** Uh! So much better.

**John:** Good. I talked a lot while you were gone. So, Stuart may leave that in, or may cut it out.

**Craig:** I think it’s great.

**John:** Yeah. Honesty in the podcast at this point.

**Craig:** I had to pee.

**John:** Yeah. We’re at episode 58. We’re not going to hide anything here.

**Craig:** No. Because if I try to pee in a bottle or something like that — I mean, if they can hear an electronic cigarette, they’re going to hear pee.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true. You shouldn’t try to pee in a bottle.

So, you were saying that you wrote this little skit, or sketchy kind of thing. So you had a sense of what a play was like. But to me it was a weird change, because I had a read a lot of plays. I’d read Shakespeare and I read sort of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I just hadn’t associated that movies were written the same way.

So, the first script I was able to find — this is Boulder, Colorado; this is early ’90s — the only script I could find was Steven Soderbergh’s script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, because that was published in a book. It was his production diary and his script. And so I bought that, I read it, and then I read it like while the movie was playing. And I was like, “Oh my god, everything they’re saying is in there, and this is what a scene is. And this EXT must be exterior and INT must be interior,” which sounds so hopelessly naïve now, but this was a time before the internet was everywhere, and before you could sort of find that information.

I had maybe, like, Premiere Magazine as my only source of film information. And that was just a revelation. So, first off, thank you Steven Soderbergh for making that movie and publishing your script. But it actually was one of the reasons why on my own website I do publish as many of the scripts as I can, because I feel like I want people to be able to see what the scripts were like behind the movies.

**Craig:** I think probably the first screenplay-type material I ever read — I guess it was more teleplay material — was in 1991, the summer of 1991, I had gotten an internship through the Television Academy. And I came out to LA that summer between my junior and senior year, and I worked in the current programming department. And that was the first time I was exposed to teleplays. So, I was reading scripts for The Simpsons.

**John:** How lucky are you?

**Craig:** — And I was reading scripts for their other sitcoms and their not-sitcoms. And I distinctly remember being surprised at how dead it all seemed on the page. That was interesting to me. Learning how to fill that in, just from text to images in your mind. It’s weird; you almost have to learn how to read before you can learn how to write, because screenplays are such a strange animal. That was probably the beginning, yeah.

**John:** It was also a strange situation reading Simpsons scripts because the scripts for an established TV series tend to be much less detailed in terms of scene description, because you don’t have to introduce who Homer Simpson is. And so you were reading a very dry version of what a script would be.

What was the first script you tried to write?

**Craig:** Well, I started — the very first things I tried to write were television scripts. I thought I would break into sitcoms. So, the very first script I ever wrote was a spec script for Frasier I believe. And I did that with my partner at the time.

**John:** The very first thing I tried to write was, well, I sort of transcribed an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, literally, I recorded it and then I wrote it all down. And then I tried to sort of reverse engineer what the script was like. And, so, all the dialogue I used from the dialogue that I saw in the show, but I tried to make the scene description feel like what the actual scene description probably was for it. It was a good exercise. I would recommend it to any high school student who’s listening who wants to sort of figure it out.

So, I was obsessed with, like, “Oh, I’m going to write a spec episode of Star Trek and…” you know, because sometimes Star Trek at that era would take a spec episode and actually produce it. That was my first obsession. And then I decided I was going to adapt Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not at all ambitious.

**John:** No, not at all. And so I got through about two and a half pages of that, because it’s a simple little story of the American south when told with multiple narrators and many flashbacks. Easy.

**Craig:** Yeah. No problem.

**John:** No problems. But, when I finally came out to Los Angeles I had the opportunity to read a ton of screenplays and realize sort of all the things I didn’t know. And one of the great luxuries of the Stark Program that I was in is that we had at USC a great film library. So, you could check out all these scripts, you know, James Cameron’s Aliens, but like everything you could possibly ever want.

And Laura Ziskin, who taught our very first development class, she had her own library, so everybody could check out two scripts from her. I learned how to write up coverage. You could even go and compare two different drafts. So, you could see, like, an early draft of Hero and the shooting draft. You’d see sort of all the changes that happened along the way. And that was fascinating. And that got me over some of my fear of it. Because when you first encounter the screenplay form, it’s just alien. It’s not like any other kind of writing you’re going to experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So in addition to these great scripts we had to read at USC, I also started interning. And so I wan interning at a little production company called Prelude Pictures that was based at Paramount. So I would read scripts for them and write up coverage. And at first it was free, and then I got a different job where I got paid for it. But I was reading a bunch of honestly terrible screenplays. And that was really useful to me, too, because I was reading these great screenplays in class of these like produced movies, and I was reading these bad screenplays. And to be able to compare and contrast the two of those was fantastic.

And at the same time, I was starting to write my own screenplays. And it taught me a lot of what I didn’t want to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, the thing about comedy — and I remember at the time, this is when I started thinking about writing comedy screenplays. It was 1994/1995, in that zone, and PG comedy was sort of ruling the day. Family comedy was ruling the day at the time; at least it seemed that way to me.

And I just sort of thought, “Well, you know, I’ll try my hand at that.” And so many of those scripts were bad. And, so, in a weird way I had the kind of opposite instruction. I was reading scripts that I thought were goofy but they were successful. And I kind of [laughs] wandered down a weird path there for awhile because I thought, “You know, in that kind middle class-ish, sort of 24-year old way I should probably just write what they’re buying, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t know any better.

**John:** Yeah. Very much the high concept PG comedy was the sweet spot at that time, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** So, I want to talk about some of the common characteristics I’ve noticed in people’s first screenplays. Over the years I’ve read a lot of people’s first scripts. And they’re often like, you know, friends of colleagues. Classically sort of like your gardener’s sister wrote a script and would you read it? And I try not to read those, but I do sometimes need to read them. Or, just other people who I think are smart overall, but they’re just new to the format.

So, some characteristics I’ve noticed of first screenplays, and in listing these hopefully people will recognize them and try to move past them. And you can add to these as you hear.

If I see a scene that’s three pages long, it’s probably a first script, or a very early script. Produced screenplays tend to have short scenes. They don’t tend to go on for a very long time. Three pages of, you know, a speech. If a speech goes on for more than a page, that’s unusual.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have a general rhythm where scenes should — the typical scene, not big ones, but typical scenes should fit in a day of work. And a day of work on a major motion picture film is 2.5 pages. And any time I get past 2.5 pages I start getting a little itchy.

**John:** Well, and the experience of watching a movie, if you actually were to pull out your stop watch and as you were clocking a movie, you would recognize that very few scenes are more than three minutes long. There will occasionally be some scenes that are more than three minutes long, but three minutes in one place and one time with two people talking feels like an eternity in most movies.

**Craig:** For sure. And I just want to point out that there’s a distinction between scenes and sequences. So, when you’re thinking about the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s one big sequence that begins with a shot of a mountain and ends with Indy flying away on a plane. But there are a lot of little scenes within it.

**John:** Yes.

Another characteristic of first screenplays: shot-gunning characters. So, if I see, if you introduce eight characters in the first page or two pages, that’s not going to be a happy outcome most likely. If you’re trying to overload us with a bunch of people all at once and tell us everything about them we’re not going to be able to keep them straight. More sophisticated screenplays tend to sort of understand the readers and recognize, “I’m going to highlight these people who are important and save other people for later on in the story.”

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Same token: when you over-describe a minor character. So, that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be Security Guard #2, but if you’re giving a lot of description to a minor character who’s never going to appear again, that’s not a good idea. Because we as the audience and the reader are going to think, “Well, this person must be really important so I’m going to ascribe a lot of mental energy to remembering this person,” when they’re never going to come back again.

**Craig:** Another good one.

**John:** Weird formatting is always a standout for me, because people tend to freak out about formatting, but if it is wrong it feels wrong.

When did you feel like you understood the formatting of scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I think I started basically by just mimicking the formatting that I saw in actual screenplays. I picked up a copy of Syd Field’s…it wasn’t the Syd Field book that people normally read. It was a book called Syd Field’s Workbook, or something like that. And it was very technical and really just about where-do-you-put-the-margins and interior and exterior. And so I just sort of copied that faithfully. So, I don’t think I ever went down a weird formatting hole.

**John:** What were you writing in originally?

**Craig:** Believe it or not, Final Draft.

**John:** Oh, you started on Final Draft?

**Craig:** I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing all the work of writing in Microsoft Word like that, and it was — I want to say it was 1993. And I was working at an ad agency and a guy who was working there was friends with this dude named Mark Madnick who had invented this really cool program called Final Draft. And it was on floppy disks. And I drove to Santa Monica and they had a little bungalow there. And I bought it right from them. I bought it from Mark Madnick. [laughs] I wrote him a check and he gave me two floppies for Final Draft 2.0.

**John:** That’s fantastic. How much was the check?

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Was it like $200?

**Craig:** I mean, my guess would be something like $40. I’m just guessing.

**John:** All right. Because it’s now up to like $199.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was nowhere near that. I couldn’t have afforded it.

**John:** I started in Microsoft Word. And so in preparation for this podcast I was looking at early script and it is in like an ancient version of Microsoft Word. It’s very easy to sort of slam on Final Draft for some of the things that have gotten frustrating over the years, but if you try to write a screenplay in just Microsoft Word and do all the formatting yourself it is really maddening. Like when you have to do a page break, that becomes just a brutal, brutal exercise. So, it was a good innovation.

But my first, up through Go, I never had Final Draft. And so that was all Microsoft Word.

**Craig:** Awful.

**John:** Awful. Awful stuff

A common feature of many first scripts is what I call D&D descriptions: “There are,” “there is.” You’re talking about a room as if you were the dungeon master describing the room in which the player characters have come into. And so it’s very much like, you know, “15 feet to the left there is this,” as if characters need to figure out how to avoid traps on the floor. They’re not sort of painting the scene the way a screenwriter does.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another thing I sometimes see is a weird over-appreciation for one’s own dialogue. The characters get very florid and a little too over-literate as they speak. And you get these long — I think first time screenwriters love speeches. They all think that the movie is going to be chock full of those great monologue moments. And, if you have one monologue in a movie that’s a lot. Most movies have none.

**John:** I also notice first time screenwriters have a hard time getting a character into a scene. There is a lot of like walking through doors.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shoe leather.

**John:** Yeah, they’re shoe leather. Characters will say hello and goodbye and do all of this stuff that people do in the real world, but there’s ways you find how to do in screenplays where you don’t need those intros and outros and you can just, you know, get to the meat of the scene much quicker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** By the same token, a lot of times these movies will spend 20 pages setting stuff up, and you will have no sense of where this is going. And in most movies, quite early on you get a sense at least that you’re on a path to some place. You don’t need to know all the details, but if you’re just spinning your wheels, you have no idea what the next, what the characters are trying to do after 20 pages, there’s a real issue.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also a thing I’ll see a lot in first scripts or relatively early scripts in someone’s path is an abundance of plot and almost no character at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the movie becomes about exciting sequences, and I couldn’t care less about any of the people involved.

**John:** Sometimes you will often see the flip, where it’s just exceedingly low ambition for a script, where it’s just a bunch of characters hanging out, talking about marital problems…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but not in a fascinating or interesting way. So it’s like: put a little more story in there, like actually have your characters do something rather than just sit around and kind of complain.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the whole idea is that the story should be matched to the character, and the character should be matched to the story in an interesting oppositional way. A lot of times you just get, like you said, people talking, or frankly what’s even worse to me, people acting but not actually being people.

**John:** Ideally you want to match the character to a story in a way that is answering both questions. Who is the most appropriate character for this story? And who is the sort of least appropriate character for this story? Who would this story impact the most? Who would this idea have the biggest impact on and thus, you know, that character would be a fascinating person to see in this world and in this universe. And too often they’re kind of matched too perfectly.

Like, “He’s a schlub who wants to impress his wife.” It’s like, eh, I don’t care.

Another, sort of like the walking through doors problem, is when one character tells another character something we as the audience already know.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, I see that. “As you know, to review…” I was just going through these the other day with somebody. There’s “As you know, to review,” and then there’s one of my favorites: “Wait, wait, wait. Tell me that again?”

**John:** Oh my, yeah. So, those are all things, like, trying to summarize stuff. It’s easy to understand the instinct. The screenwriter needs the audience to know that the other characters are also aware of this fact or information, but the actual scene in which you’re doing it is terrible, and you will try to find a way to cut it out when you actually make the movie. So, don’t write this scene. And find some way that we’re running up and we’re getting ahead of that, because those things are deathly.

And weirdly I find I don’t encounter that nearly as much now as I used to. I think subconsciously I’m already avoiding those scenes way ahead of time. I’m doing the judo so that those scenes can never have to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, to me it’s just a sign that your story is all wrong anyway. I mean, if you find yourself in a spot where suddenly one character has to explain a bunch of stuff to another one, something is just in your story. If it’s important for one character to know it’s important for me to watch it happen or see it. So, figure out a way to illustrate it dramatically to me, whether it’s a flashback… There are always creative ways to get this information across.

**John:** Agreed. Although you say flashback; unnecessary flashbacks are also pretty much the pinnacle of first screenplay-ness. It’s just like, you know, “Here’s a big flashback to tell you about how bad my dad was.” It’s like, that’s not important.

**Craig:** Well, unnecessary flashback, unnecessary narration.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** These are the crutches we use when we’re not quite sure how to tell the story that we have, because maybe it’s not the right story to be telling.

**John:** Yup.

So, Craig, are you ready for this now?

**Craig:** Dude, I was born ready!

**John:** Ah! So the reason why we’re talking about this: it’s been so nice that so many of our listeners, more than 200 of our listeners have written in with their three page samples. And so Craig and I are actually going to give you three page samples from our very first screenplays.

**Craig:** Very, very first. And so, you know, I had such a… — When you suggested this I thought, “That’s a great idea/that’s a terrible idea.” [laughs] Because it’s so embarrassing and it’s so awful.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. It is. It is so awful. So, it was my idea, so I’ll start first just to rip the Band-Aid off.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, my sample is from my very first script. I wrote it while I was in grad school. And I’ll give some back story on when I wrote this. Between my first and second years of grad school I was interning at Universal. And I had a job for the head of physical production. And I was the intern below three assistants. Like, there was nothing that they actually needed me to do. It was very nice of them to give me a little job, but there was nothing for me to do. So, I would file a couple of papers a day.

So, I would come home from work and I had not used any brain cells, and so I would just write at night. And so I hand wrote at night, and then during my lunch break I would type up the pages. And actually wrote most of the screenplay during that summer at Universal.

The script I wrote is called Here and Now. It was originally called Now and Then, but then there was a movie with Demi Moore that was called Now and Then while I was writing this, so I had to change it to Here and Now. So, these are the three pages from Here and Now which you will find on the website, along with all the other three page samples.

A summary of what happens in these three pages: We open in a crowded parking lot of a shopping mall. It’s snowy, Christmastime. Two passing women talk about someone’s sudden death. We meat Karen Miller, a young woman. She’s in her car. She’s trying to back out. Another car slams into her. Her airbag blows. She’s not badly hurt, but as she looks into the window’s reflection she sees someone behind her, someone who is not actually there.

We cut to one year earlier, and we’re at the University of Colorado. We see some background action describing the student body. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a pretty good summary, and if you had written that summary I think you’d be in good shape. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha-ha. So…

**Craig:** Do you want me to go after you because you get to… — I mean, I want to go after myself, too. So, maybe you want to go after yourself first?

**John:** Yeah, I’ll go after myself first. So, a lot of the stuff I talked about in the criteria of like first scripts, you see some of that here. There’s a lot of over-description of things. And our protagonist, our Karen Miller, first off we say her name but we don’t’ actually give her any description whatsoever. So, there’s nothing to sort of signal that she’s actually who she is as a person. She’s just a young woman in a car. And so we don’t know anything special about her. She’s not driving this introductory scene. She’s not doing anything interesting. She’s just a passenger in the scene.

And she’s a passenger who gets hit in the scene. And that’s not a terrible opening, but it’s not a great opening. It’s setting up that there’s some mystery there. And it may be a bit of a misdirect in terms of sort of what the tone of this is going to be. It feels just sort of wintery and snowy. And then by the end we get to the University of Colorado a year earlier and it’s just, you know, a picture postcard. It’s just painting, “this is what a campus looks like.” And it’s like, “Oh, but that is probably what a campus looks like.” But we haven’t really gotten any story started and we’re three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look: the truth is I like your pages better, your first pages better, than I like my first pages. That’s the awful thing about comedy is when they’re not funny, that’s just — that’s the headline…

**John:** I wasn’t aiming for funny.

**Craig:** You don’t have that sort of objecting, “ugh.” However, there’s just nothing really happening here. I mean, she gets hit by another woman, and there’s a lot of description of what’s happening with the cars and the geography of the space and how she actually gets hit, although it’s really just a fender bender so the car crash itself isn’t that interesting.

There is one interesting thing buried in there, which is that she sees somebody that isn’t there. So, you sort of like made a real meal out of all these mundane things that frankly just aren’t that interesting and then kind of, like, da-da-da, passed the one thing that really is interesting. And so the scene has this lack of focus. And I always like to say — and this is a classic new writer thing: You are not directing my attention to where it’s supposed to be. You’re directing my attention to where it’s not.

So, there is a paragraph, or descriptions of what the engine sounds like as the car stops. [laughs] But, then, you know, very little thing — I mean, you underline “Someone is standing directly behind her.” There’s no one there. But then we’re back and then there’s just more discussion of the woman. And then, yeah, some of the description is awesome. I mean, I got to hand it you. “Brown mutant icicles hunched behind the wheels,” is spectacular.

**John:** But it’s novelistic. I mean, I think you can get away with some of it. And I think “brown mutant icicles” could last if there wasn’t so much other stuff around it.

I don’t like these five sentence blocks of scene description. They’re intimidating to read, and so people skip them.

**Craig:** Thank god I didn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Thank god you didn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. But we’re getting there.

**John:** On page two, midway, actually near the bottom of page two, I actually finally do give a description of Karen. So, “She’s really very pretty, a page torn from a J. Crew catalog, fresh-faced and a little delicate.” That’s actually not bad description. But that should have come when we first met Karen Miller, and not, you know, two pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also feel like we have this — we’re concentrating on what these two women that we will never see again — I presume, because they’re Woman 1 and Woman 2 — are saying, when really what I wanted desperately is a moment before Karen Miller gets in her car and starts to pull out and gets hit. I just want to be contextualized with my protagonist, not with weather and extras.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** But, here’s what’s good. I want to sort of say, “Okay, but here’s the sign that the guy who wrote this would one day write Halloweenie.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I just love saying Halloweenie.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine.

**Craig:** There is a specificity to the way you’re writing this. And, more importantly, it is visual. It’s not always interesting in terms of what you’re visualizing, but you’re being visual. And you’re also being very sparse with the dialogue. The dialogue felt real to me.

And, you know, these are things like pitch that you can’t teach. Either you can or can’t sing. Either you can or can’t feel rhythm. And so I see that there is somebody writing this who has an ear, and somebody who has a rhythm. And, you know, this was — can I say what year this was?

**John:** Oh yeah. This is 1994.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this was February of 1994. And that’s 18 years ago, actually. And you can see there is something going on here. There is an intelligence behind this. And there is a voice. And also little things, like for instance, just to show that you understand the language of cinema — as the sequence ends, Karen looks up at the Donna Karan woman, gives a half a laugh, smiles a little to herself, which I like the sense of mystery. “In the distance, CARILLON BELLS ring, continuing as we cut to:
TITLE OVER BLACK
One year earlier.”

And there are the Carillon bells. That’s how I pronounce it, right? Carol-on?

**John:** Yeah. Carillon bells.

**Craig:** And so you got already that there was a language where sound could sort of play oppositional to time stream. And these are things that are precise.

**John:** It was my very first pre-lap. And lord knows I pre-lap the hell out of things these days.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m not embarrassed by these three pages. It’s just that they’re not the way I would have written them right now.

So, reading these three pages, what kind of story do you think this is?

**Craig:** I would suspect it’s some kind of supernatural — what I got was a supernatural love story.

**John:** It is a love story, but it’s actually not supernatural. It is a weepy. And it was my first weepy. So, it’s actually good that it’s on a Frankenweenie release date. Because it was the first time that I made people cry. And that was actually the thing about this script is I could kind of consistently make people cry. And that got me an agent. It got me sort of started, because people weren’t used to actually reading a script and crying.

So, it’s a tiny romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, which is my hometown. Again, a very sort of first script thing where it’s like you write things that you know so well that they might not be interesting to other people. And it suffered from another first script problem, which is that I tried to cram everything I knew about everything into it. Because, like, “Well maybe I’ll never write another script, so I should shove everything I know about everything into it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. A lot of speeches.

Well, great. Thank you for looking at that. I’m not horrifically embarrassed. Let’s take a look at Craig’s script. The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** Yes. The Stunt Family. Just a year later, February of 1995. And the background on this is I was working at Disney in the marketing department. And my boss was Oren Aviv, who would later go on to actually run Disney and now is the head of marketing at Fox.

And Oren took a shine to me and suggested that I try my hand at writing a movie and then he could produce it. And he had an idea for a movie. And his idea was called The Stunt Family. And it was going to be a big, broad, physical comedy for kids about a family of stunt men who live their lives as if every day and every moment were a stunt. And they would go on a grand adventure and kind of use their fearlessness. But one of the family members, of course, just didn’t really feel like he fit in.

And so I wrote it with my then partner, Greg Erb, and it was the first screenplay I’d ever written. These were the first screen pages I’d ever written. And so, I mean…God.

**John:** [laughs] Well, for people who are just listening who aren’t on the page in front of them, do you want to give the summary?

**Craig:** Sure. So the summary is: We are on a backlot of Maxwell Studios, which is essentially like Universal Studios if any of you have visited Universal Studios where you take the tour of the actual backlot of the studio in the little tram. And they’ve kind of combined the actual working backlot with attractions. Like at Universal there’s a fake earthquake and then Jaws comes out of the lake and stuff like that.

And so you’re sort of on a tour with a tour guide who apparently is on his first day and isn’t very well prepared. And they pass by the stunt house and we start meeting members of the Stunt Family who are waking up to their morning routine. And their morning routine is sort of a very Addams Family combination of living in the middle of a working attraction. And it seems like they are living in a rather dangerous life, and yet they seem kind of curiously okay with it.

**John:** Yeah. And we get to the bottom of page three, we’ve met — have we met all the family by that point?

**Craig:** No. You meet sort of the [laughs], this is probably not a great idea. But you meet the protagonist on page 4 who is the one who doesn’t feel like he fits in.

**John:** Okay, cool. So, Craig, do you want to pull the Band-Aid first? I mean, how are you feeling?

**Craig:** Well, I feel pretty bad.

**John:** [laugh]

**Craig:** And this is when I talk to some of the people who send pages in who are writing comedy, and I say, “Listen, I’ve been there. I’ve done these mistakes.” I really have. And you can see it here, even though this was 17 years ago, it hurts to read. First of all, you have these huge chunks of description. And even though they’re not particularly prosy, it’s just a ton of unimportant detail.

We have a run, a page and a half run of back and forth dialogue between the tour guide and some people on the tour that is really broad, poorly written, not at all funny, illogical. Just bad. Really forced and awful.

**John:** And I would assume, just as the movie starts, that Zeke is actually our hero because he’s the guy who’s given a name and give, you know, he seems to be the center of the story but he’s not.

**Craig:** No. You sure would think that. And he’s not. And nothing is grounded. Not even the name of the studio and their mascot is grounded. It’s Zeke’s first day and yet apparently they don’t train people there, so he’s overly stupid and doesn’t know what anything is and makes ridiculous mistakes in order to set up bad punch lines.

So, the first page and a half is an unmitigated disaster. It gets a little bit more interesting when we actually get inside the stunt house, because you do have this kind, I guess I would describe, as sort of Addams Family setting. And even though, again, way too much description, there’s some interesting things happening.

This old man wakes up, and as the clock goes from 7:59 to 8:00 his eyes open up and this huge rot iron spiky chandelier plummets from the ceiling, puncturing the bed, and he rolls out the way and looks at his wristwatch and says, “I’m getting slower.” So, that’s kind of interesting, like, okay, they’ve rigged the house like Cato and Inspector Clouseau. A kind of constant test for them.

And on the third page you can see that their house is actually — and this is of course unfilmable; I mean, this comedy would have cost $400 million to do — the house literally is besieged by a fake flash flood. The people inside kind of amusingly know how to work with it. They’re using the flood waters to clean dishes. More terrible lines. It’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. I do like, at the start of page three, the idea of the bus tram tour and the inept tour guide is funny. And there’s reason why, like, Kenneth the page works on 30 Rock. There’s a way that can work; where things go a little bit wrong, he’s saying the wrong stuff.

So, I did like at the top of page three it’s like, “‘Rumor has it that Wilford and his family still live in the old house, but I sure hope not, because I smell SMOKE!’

A simulated FLASH FLOOD is unleashed.

‘I mean…water.'”

That’s a good joke. The scene description line didn’t really help us there. But it is a nice idea. You set the wrong expectation and suddenly a flood comes by. You get a joke for that, the unexpected.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t call that a joke. [laughs] I just think it’s awful. I mean, I hate it. And I think it’s really just juvenile and even more juvenile than for me. It’s really juvenile.

I mean, I don’t know. The only thing I look at this, I mean, I would have said had I read these pages, “This guy is never going to make it,” personally.

**John:** I see competence in there. I see, you know, I see you setting up sort of — trying to setup a world, trying to get into something. I see the instinct behind t”his is how we would set up a studio by giving a studio tour.” So, you had a sense of what the Universal thing would be. And once you get to Wilford’s room, and since you said Addams Family, I get that more now. I just didn’t get it on the page. But I can see where that would be.

But partly why I want to talk about first scripts is you kind of have to get one out of your system. You kind of have to get through it, just so you can get familiar with the format and just finish a document that’s 120 pages long, which is going to be the longest thing that most human beings will ever write. So, it’s just that process is an important part of getting started.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right. I think doing this script, one of the things it drove home for me, if I can remember that accurately that far back, is that there was a lot — it was really important to take care of the fundamentals that weren’t related to comedy. To make sure that the story was well told and the characters were real and relatable and that the plot moved in an interesting way.

And even though the next script I wrote with Greg was also very ridiculous, and broad, and family-oriented, it was a movie. And they made it. And that was the second thing I ever wrote. So, I surely needed to do this.

**John:** Yeah. And I couldn’t have written Go as my first script. Go was too complicated. I needed to be confident with the format. Although I will say I wrote the first section of Go at about the same time I wrote Here and Now. The first section of Go was X, which was a short film which became the whole movie, but it’s really just that first act of Go. And if people are thinking about trying the format, writing something short might be a really good idea, because at least it will get you familiar with the format and you’re not juggling all of the complexities of how-do-you-tell-a-story-over-two-hours. You’re just trying to tell a story over a shorter period of time.

That’s a small bit of advice. But, eventually you do have to write a full lengthy script and there are going to be all of the challenges that come with writing a full length script. And it won’t be perfect, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

**Craig:** No. It will likely be absolute garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But people don’t remember the first time they wrote a school report. People don’t remember the first time they wrote a paragraph. This is such a bigger step that it’s hard to expect that it’s going to be great the first time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think I want to actually wrap it up today because this was actually sort of meaningful and touching. And we’ll save other Three Page Challenges for a future time.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I’m glad you find it meaningful and touching. I just find it awful and depressing.

**John:** Well, see, we’ve come full circle then. Because I started the podcast sort of stressed out because of Halloweenie, and now I feel actually kind of better about myself, because in a slightly Schadenfreude way my pages were better than yours. So…

**Craig:** Well, I mean, honestly, you could have wiped your butt with three pages and roughly assembled the fecal smears into Courier shape and they would have been better than that. I mean, that’s just the worst. When I look at that stuff and I just think, “Good lord, what was I thinking?”

**John:** Yeah. Clearly your co-writer is the problem.

**Craig:** No. I can’t really blame him at all. [laughs] I can’t.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** No. I mean, the one thing when we talked about doing this, I did think, “Well, you know, it might not be fair because I did write it with somebody, and maybe the better way of approaching this would be for me to submit the first three pages of the first thing I wrote on my own.”

**John:** That’s not fair at all.

**Craig:** But that was kind of a cheat, because frankly that was a really good script. And, even though it didn’t get made, it’s probably why it didn’t get made because it was good. And I really love those first three pages of that thing. And I thought, “Well, this is just cheating. I’ve got to actually go back and just pull up The Stunt Family, for the love of god.”

But, I was 24 and foolish. You apparently were 24 and wise.

**John:** Yeah. Wise beyond my years. I decided to write, like while everyone was writing the high concept comedy I was writing the weepy, which didn’t get made either, but it got me started. So, god bless those first scripts.

**Craig:** I guess that’s the way you’ve got to look at it. This one got me going, too.

**John:** Every once and awhile a producer will ask for, or a development executive, will call my agent and say, “Hey, do we have any of John’s old scripts? Can we read some of his early things?” Or they will ask for the script specifically. And I had to say no. I don’t want that out anymore because it’s just not me anymore. There’s a reason why it’s not part of my active file.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I would say that the one script I just brought up that was sort of the first one that I wrote on my own I would love to see made. I think it still is an interesting one that works. Scott Frank is prepping a movie right now to direct that he wrote called The Walk Among the Tombstones, which he adapted from a Larry Block novel. I think. And he actually wrote that in ’97, I think, or ’98. And sort of it’s always been there and he’s kind of dusted it off and polished it up and gotten it ready to go.

**John:** That can work. Often there are bad examples, but there are also good examples. Unforgiven was an old script that sat around for a long time and someone said, “Hey, let’s make that script.”

**Craig:** Well, actually, Clint Eastwood bought when — David Peoples wrote that script. Clint Eastwood bought it, I think it was in the late ’70s or early ’80s I want to say. And put it in a drawer on purpose because he knew he wasn’t old enough to play the part. So, he bought it and just aged it like wine until he was ready.

**John:** I’m sure David Peoples was delighted.

**Craig:** You know what? He should be, because it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. But at the time, I mean, do you think for those 30 years David Peoples was like, “I’m so lucky that Clint Eastwood hasn’t made my movie.”

**Craig:** It wasn’t 30. It was like 12.

**John:** Everything feels like more time.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** So, Craig, our last piece of housekeeping. Scriptnotes Live in Austin, at the Austin Film Festival, is October 20 at 9am. So, people have written on Twitter to ask, “Hey, can I just get a ticket for that one event?” And I don’t think you can. I think it’s actually part of the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Austin Film Festival would be silly if they started to do things like that. I mean, the whole point is that they break even. And I don’t think it’s a profit organization, so they do need people to buy their passes to actually put on these things and support these events. So, no, you can’t just go see it. You have to buy a pass to the event. They are still available online. And there are a lot of other wonderful things to go see there.

**John:** Great writers there.

**Craig:** I mean, we will be, spectacular, no question. But…

**John:** And we have Aline Brosh McKenna is really our secret weapon.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think I’m our secret weapon.

**John:** Well, yeah, you’re right. That too. And if you want to talk to our secret weapon, Craig Mazin, on Twitter, you are @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I am @johnaugust. That’s a good way if you have like small questions for us. If you have bigger questions, or if things you need to send in or ask us about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. There is a whole form on the website, johnaugust.com, about how to write stuff in.

And, thank you very much for listening to our podcast. Subscribe in iTunes if you don’t.

**Craig:** Wait! I have a Cool Thing, finally, and you’re just blowing right through it.

**John:** Oh, I blew right past it. Tell us your Cool Thing, Craig.

**Craig:** I’ll be really fast. It’s an App. It’s a game. It’s called The Room. The Room. It is for the iPad. It’s spectacular. I like these puzzle games. I like games that are sort of Myst-like if you remember that one.

**John:** I love Myst.

**Craig:** This one is gorgeously done. It’s beautiful. It’s in the perfect space of not too hard, not too easy. A really good hint system if you need it. Incredibly simple. You don’t know who you are. You’re in an attic and there is a box in front of you. And you proceed to examine the box, and open the box up, and then open the box inside the box, and a house inside the box, inside the house. It is spectacular. It’s so well-done. Download it.

**John:** Hooray. If you’re doing yours, I’m going to do mine. Mine rhymes with yours. Mine is called Moom. And it is an app for the Macintosh. And what Moom does is a very simple thing. It resizes windows in a very specific grid-like way. And so if you’re trying to have multiple windows open, like I am right now while we’re recording this podcast, that little green dot in the title bar of every window, which is mostly kind of useless, now when you hover over that with Moom it pops up a little gird and you can sort of draw how big you want that window to be.

And it just stacks your windows really nicely. So, it’s very helpful on a big monitor, but it’s also really helpful on smaller monitors as well, when you need to have two windows side by side. So, Moom for the Macintosh. It’s in the Mac App Store.

**Craig:** Room and Boom.

**John:** Moom.

**Craig:** Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Done. Podcast.

**Craig:** Podcast. Boom. [laughs]

**John:** Mic drop. Now.

**Craig:** Good luck, John, with Halloweenie and I’ll talk to you next week.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Scriptnotes, Ep 54: Eight Reasonable Questions about Screenwriting — Transcript

September 14, 2012 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/eight-reasonable-questions-about-screenwriting).

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

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

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

So, Craig, we’re pretty busy, aren’t we?

**Craig:** We’re pretty busy guys. I’m making a movie. You’re making a Broadway show. I saw that your… — Well, I mean, it’s going to be a Broadway show but right now it’s a Chicago show.

**John:** It’s a Chicago show. We announced finally — for Big Fish — we announced our out of town dates. So we are going to be going to Chicago in April for a five week run at the Oriental Theater. It’s just so exciting, because originally when we started the podcast I was sort of allowed to talk about Big Fish: The Musical; I wasn’t really allowed but I didn’t really ask permission. And then they sort of said, “Hey, could you stop talking about it?” So I stopped talking about it.

But now I can talk about it because it’s real. And we’re going to be in Chicago in April. And singing and dancing and making a musical.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And it’s really great. So, tickets are on sale for like big group sales now. But eventually individual tickets will be on sale. And there will be a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Very exciting. Yeah, I can’t say much at all about anything to do with Hangover 3 other than that we’re making Hangover 3. That’s the sum total of what I’m allowed to say. [laughs] And then I will say no more.

**John:** It’s interesting with Big Fish because I can now say like, “Hey, we’re going to Chicago and these are the dates.” And there’s so much more information…

Oh, I can also say that Norbert Leo Butz is starring as Edward Bloom.

**Craig:** I saw that. Very talented guy.

**John:** He’s phenomenally talented and so we’re so excited to have him as part of the show. But of course there are like a thousand other things I know that I’m not allowed to say. So, I can basically say anything that was already in the press release. And the press release — it’s so fascinating when you’ve read and approved the press release and then you see it with the news stories that come out from the press release, because they are sometimes more graceful, sometimes less graceful rewritings of what was already in the press release. And figuring out sort of how to prioritize the information for a given audience’s interest in what was in the press release.

**Craig:** I find that “entertainment journalism” is the shoddiest, least fact-checked form of what has already become a very shoddy un-fact-checked medium of journalism.

Journalism has suffered over the years, but entertainment journalism is horrendous. Like you say, you put a press release out on the world, and you would think, okay, there really is no need for a game of telephone here. There’s a press release. Just say what is in the press release or don’t. Or say some of it, or say none of it. But then they’ll just get it wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. They’ll spell names wrong. They’ll just make stuff up. And then, because of the internet, if one mistake is made it is perpetuated a million times.

**John:** So not specific to this case really, although there is one sort of questionable case, but I hate when they do sort of lazy Googling. And so they find something and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to throw this in so it feels a little bit more original.” And so they’ll throw in some random thing about the show which is not actually correct, or about a movie I worked on that is not actually correct at all. And that will be part of the official story from then on.

Or like they’ll throw in a credit for me and I’m like, “That was not mine. Why are you doing that?”

**Craig:** It’s so weird. I remember when we made Scary Movie 3, and this is back in 2003, sort of before the internet really went cuckoo nuts. And when Bob Weinstein announced that he was going to make Scary Movie 3, he said David Zucker is going to be directing it, Craig Mazin and Pat Proft and Kevin Smith are going to be writing it, because he had this idea that Kevin Smith would somehow be involved. But really I think Kevin Smith had said, “I’m actually doing something else — it would be fun to sort of, I don’t know, read the script at some point or talk to those guys.”

And it was smart for him to kind of use a name that people are interested in. But Kevin Smith actually never worked on the movie. And when I say never worked on it, I mean, I’ve never spoken to Kevin Smith in my life. He literally never did anything with it. And that was the last time his name was mentioned was the very first press release to announce that the movie was even being made.

He was still being cited as a writer in reviews of the film, just because they Google.

**John:** They Google.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s remarkable.

**John:** They do Google.

**Craig:** Remarkable.

**John:** But, you know what? On our podcast I think we can do better than lazy entertainment journalism and we can do proper fact checking sometimes. And we can do follow up. And so I thought we would start with two little bits of follow up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, first, a personal follow up. Because you had in a previous podcast recommended a really — well, I’m spoiling here, but you recommended a really good documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which I saw last week. And you know what? It was really, really good.

**Craig:** I didn’t lie.

**John:** No. So I’m endorsing your endorsement. The one thing I wanted to follow up with you about though is when you were talking about it you were talking about Jiro’s pursuit of perfection, which is so true about the documentary. You see this guy, and he’s obsessing about absolutely everything about how he is making his sushi, and how he is seating everybody at the counter, and how he is making certain sushi smaller for the women than for the men because he’s just figured it all out because he’s been doing this for 75 years, which is crazy.

And you were trying to relate it to screenwriting, which is natural because we’re a podcast about screenwriting. But it struck me as I was watching, because you put that idea in my head, like perfection in screenwriting: You really couldn’t do a Jiro of Screenwriting, because everything that we do as a screenwriter, or really in most of the creative arts, every sentence we write is a brand new sentence.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Every project we tackle is a whole new set of challenges. So, Jiro has the luxury, or sort of the curse — he chose to make it a luxury — of doing the exact same thing every day. And because he could do the exact same thing every day he could optimize it and perfect it in a way that may not be a realistic goal for a screenwriter or any writer.

**Craig:** True. In fact, it sort of underscores why the search for perfection in screenwriting is so fruitless, because here’s a man who actually has controlled out every other variable other than make tuna sushi. And yet he still can’t perfect it.

We are constantly being asked to make sushi that doesn’t exist. And, also, other people are involved. And, also, we actually can’t do it because other people are doing it, because it’s screenwriting. So, inevitably — you know as they say a movie is written four times. It’s written, it’s cast, it’s shot, and it’s edited. The ultimate authorship of a movie is collaborative no matter what you do.

So, we are that much further removed from the possibility of perfection just by the nature of our process. It was instructive for me to watch somebody who you think almost maybe could achieve it because of the specificity of what he does, and he, too, was saying no, not possible.

**John:** But I do endorse the movie. And it was terrifically well made. And fun to see someone who could devote their life to a specific thing and not have it feel like a tragedy. Because as I first sat down to it, I was like, “Oh no, this is going to be a sad story about a man who wasted his life making sushi.” And that’s not how you leave the movie, which is nice to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good. I’m glad you saw it.

**John:** A second follow up thing is we had a question maybe two weeks ago on a writer who wrote in from Iran who had written in with a very specific sort of copyright question.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And basically saying that Iran doesn’t sort of respect or doesn’t protect the same copyrights, so what is he supposed to do? And so we had a reader writer in, which is what I hoped would happen. Alexia wrote in and she said, “For sure you do not have to be a US citizen to enjoy copyright on your work via the US Copyright Office any more so than you have to be a US citizen to register a trademark at the Trademark Office.”

And then she says, “I can speak to this from personal experience.” So she’s done this. I think she’s a European writer who’s registered at the US Copyright Office. She also goes on to say, “The idea of transferring copyright to a US-friendly person is iffy.” It’s one thing we sort of brought up, if you have a friend in the US, do you have them register it for you? “US Copyright Law actually has clauses in place to stop this from happening as a guard against exploitation. Generally speaking, copyright can only be transferred under a contract of employment.”

**Craig:** Right. I actually did do some offline research into Iranian copyright law. It is…it’s a little funky. I mean, law in general in Iran is a little funky because it is a theocracy bordering on totalitarian state. And so the way laws are implemented is a touch whimsical, as we all know.

They are not signatory I believe to the Berne Convention. So, while they may be members of WIPO which is a — I can’t quite remember the details. Their copyright protections are not as strong as those in other countries, nor are they as strong as those in the United States in terms of their treaty arrangements with other nations. Part of the issue with Iran is they don’t respect other people’s copyrights as well as they ought to.

**John:** Exactly. So, for the writer, who wrote in a couple weeks ago with that question, it seems like one solution would be to just get it registered in the US Copyright Office. You’re going to have protections under the Berne Convention for every place other than your home country, which seems crazy, but is probably helpful if you’re that writer.

**Craig:** Yes, I agree. For sure.

**John:** So, today, Craig, I thought we would answer eight questions. Some of them are big questions. Some of them are small questions, but it’s sort of a sampler platter of questions that a screenwriter might have about the craft, the profession, the words on the page. So, shall we try?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m excited.

**John:** Great. So Sarah writes in. She’s a writer who lives in Los Angeles. “Recently a friend/assistant at a studio passed a video pitch onto me of this guy briefly describing a premise for a sci-fi film.” And actually in the show notes I’m going to send a link to this pitch, because it’s on YouTube or Vimeo or one of those.

“The pitch itself isn’t overly specific, but I was told from his video pitch that he was able to get a few meetings. Is pitching an idea via the web a good idea? Isn’t the probability of the idea being stolen much higher?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I knew you’d laugh here.

**Craig:** Here we go again.

**John:** Lastly, “Could this be the evolution of pitching? If so, I may be screwed because I don’t know if I could even sit in front of a camera.”

So, I watched his video and I’ll send it through to you to watch, Craig.

Essentially it’s a guy sitting at his computer or laptop describing this sci-fi project. Sometimes there are little popup windows to show specific images that he wants to talk about. But it feels very much like if you were in the room with this guy and he was like pitching you a project, that’s kind of what it feels like. And I was actually kind of impressed by it in that he was straightforward, it was direct. It felt like, okay, I can see what this guy is describing in his movie.

So, could you envision a scenario in which people are pitching movies via YouTube?

**Craig:** Absolutely. I think it’s inevitable. First of all, look at the generation that’s coming. They are the most exhibitionist generation in human history, and not because they are innately more exhibitionist, but because they have a channel for exhibition. And I see nothing wrong with it.

I’m not at all surprised that you liked it. The people who shouldn’t do this are people who frankly are not good in any room. For instance, Sarah is already uncomfortable at the thought of sitting in front of a camera. I suspect that she may be just as uncomfortable sitting across from three jaded executives who are hungry and just want to go to lunch.

But if you are good at pitching, why not? It makes total sense to me. Inevitably somebody will talk about the thing that makes me the craziest, which is the unfounded paranoia that somebody is going to steal your idea. It is less likely, frankly, that somebody is going to steal your — and let’s stop saying “steal your idea” because it’s not steal-able, it’s not property — but it is less likely to me that somebody is going to steal your unique expression if in fact you’ve put it on the web and dated it. Now there is blatant proof of your primacy of authorship. But please understand: Your idea is not something you own — I’m so sorry — so it cannot be stolen. There isn’t an idea that’s going to make your career. It’s not about ideas. It is about your ability to write.

**John:** I agree.

A few points I would make here. First off, the idea of a video pitch: Yes you could make a video pitch and put it on YouTube for the whole world to see. Where I think it might be a more likely scenario for a lot of these people is that you make this video and you send it so somebody but as a private video, so you’re not putting it out there for the world to see. Or you’re sending it to a specific person to describe what it is you’re trying to do.

And really it is an extension of what we’ve already seen happening for the last 10 years, which are these sort of rip reels or rip movies where you are trying to describe what a movie feels like and what a sequence feels like, and you go through and you pull sections from other movies to sort of give you the sense of feel for what the movie is going to be like. Directors have been doing this for a long time.

Joe Carnahan quite famously this last month or two did one for Daredevil and it leaked out online, or he put it out online, so everyone could see that this was the Daredevil movie that he was going to make. This is really the earlier version of that. This is saying what the idea of the movie is. If I were in the room describing it to you, this is what it would be like.

A second point: The reason why pitches are usually done in person is so the person can ask you questions. So, this same kind of thing could happen via Skype and that would be the same kind of thing. What I saw I saw in this YouTube video really could have happened in a Skype situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That I think is going to be incredibly much more common.

The third thing I would remind you of is there is this idea that Hollywood is sort of one way, and that you are always going to be — that a new generation is going to come in and have to pitch to people who are in their 40s, and 50s, and 60s. No, you’re going to be pitching to people who are your same age. So, if you are comfortable with being on a camera and talking to a camera or looking at things in a YouTube video, if that is something you’re comfortable with in your generation, the executives you’re going to be pitching to are going to be comfortable in the same way.

Everyone sort of enters into the industry at sort of the same age. So if it’s a generational thing that you do make YouTube videos then that is going to become the thing.

**Craig:** Sure. And finally I will point out that, as I’ve said many times, what we are selling primarily is comfort. We are trying to inspire confidence. And if you can do that through your video, they are going to look at you and say, “Not only is that an interesting story, but this person makes me feel comfortable. They seem like they’re in control of their story and they seem like somebody I could talk to in a room, and not a weirdo.”

Please understand: When you are out there and you are new, you are not simply competing against me or John; you are also competing against the thousands of people out there who have broken through the gates and been really weird. And so they’re just scared of weirdos. It’s a nice way to inoculate yourself against that.

**John:** And in a strange way, even if they are hiring a writer, they’re hiring you to write this thing so they should be concerned about the words on the page, a video is telling them a little bit more about like who you are actually are as a person.

So if they had a writing sample and they could see you pitching this thing, they could put them together and say like, “Oh, that’s a person I could probably work with.” And that could be really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I like it. It’s a good idea.

**John:** Next question. Chris asks, “What do you and Craig think of HSX.com? If you haven’t heard of it before it’s a stock market esque game based on the film and television industry. If a film is green-lit its IPO is on the market, or it becomes an IPO on the market. The price of the stock is based on a one dollar to $1 million in domestic box office gross in the first four weeks. Additional options become available when the movie opens in theaters. I’d be interested to hear you guys discuss it.”

So, Craig, have you ever played HSX.com, or gone to the site?

**Craig:** I was a very early kind of high stakes player…

**John:** I kind of guessed that.

**Craig:** …way, way back when it first began.

**John:** I think I was still in film school when it started out, or an early version of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It goes back to the ’90s. I don’t know if you remember, for awhile they were in the old Ritz Furniture Building in West Hollywood.

**John:** I do. And they used to have a stock ticker that would go past.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Yeah. They’ve been around for a long time. It’s a fun concept. I find that their stock prices are rarely accurate to what I know, because in part, you know, the market for instance, the real stock market will build into prices things like, “Maybe this new car company’s car won’t actually happen and they’ll go out of business, so we have to kind of price that in.”

You and I will know for instance, “Okay, this movie that they’re not sure is happening is really, really happening.” So, sometimes the early stock prices tend to be too low, too depressed. They get things wrong all the time.

However, it is an interesting bellweather. I like to go on — for instance, Identity Thief, one thing I like is I went on to look at Identity Thief, and I don’t know what the price is right now, but they can also show you how many players are holding the stock long, that is to say they believe the stock will outperform the number that’s listed there, and how many are holding it short — they believe that the stock will underperform. And it was like 95% to 5% holding it long. That’s encouraging to me. It means that people are actually — that the people who play are optimistic about the movie.

I like stuff like that. In the end, nobody in Hollywood looks at HSX for anything. It is just a game. It is highly inaccurate. But, the people who play it are into movies and love movies. And I have no problem with that; I think it’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. I have not looked at it in a decade, so I wasn’t even sure it still existed until this question came through. It’s interesting if you’re interested in it. I don’t go to visit it. No one makes their decisions based upon it. All these kind of things like that, or Box Office Mojo, they’re interesting in those moments where that data could actually be helpful to you, or where you’re just thinking, like, “Well what is everyone else thinking about this thing?”

I have a movie coming out, Frankenweenie, October 5th. And like I’m curious what people think it’s going to do. But I’m not going to like — hopefully — stay awake at night worried about it, because it is just kind of guessing at a certain level.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now there was very briefly, I think Cantor Fitzgerald which is an investment house floated a real version of HSX where people actually could purchase real futures based on movies. And very wisely the legislature killed that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, because talk about insider trading. We know so much about that stuff.

**Craig:** Exactly. It just would have been insane. I mean, just insane. Anybody that wasn’t in the business playing that would have been such a sucker and had such a kick me sign on their back, I can’t even believe they entertained it for a minute.

**John:** Yeah. Just deliberately tank a weekly rewrite to bring something down.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We would never do that…

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** We have too much integrity.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** Never!

**John:** Next question will be so short. Sam in Los Angeles writes, “Is there anything that can be done about cell phones in movie theaters? Are the people in the industry aware or is there any sense of what to do about it? I imagine it is of great concern to the movie industry as it’s ruining the exhibition of the movies they create. I had an unpleasant experience at ArcLight last night. There were cell phones all around me. Even though I tried politely to ask them to stop it didn’t help.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sorry, Grandpa. No. There’s nothing we can do about it. I mean, look — go to a movie theater where people don’t do that, I guess. I mean, I’ve never…

**John:** But that’s the ArcLight! That should be the ArcLight?

**Craig:** Are they respectful? I mean, people are respectful, generally. I’ve never been in a theater where people were going crazy with cell phones.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve been to those, but that wasn’t the ArcLight.

When I was working on Big Fish: The Musical — which I can talk about now — a lot of times I just go right from work to see a movie in Times Square. And that’s not the ideal audience to see a movie with in that they tend to be a heavily tourist crowd. There’s a lot of cell phones going on and you just sort of roll with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But the ArcLight should be better than that. I don’t know, I would say, yes, ask with sort of authority saying, “Hey, can you get off your cell phone?”

**Craig:** You can ask. I mean, look — the bottom line is if somebody, [laughs] everybody knows they run a thing in front of the movie saying shut your cell phone off. So, if they’re not shutting it off and there’s a bunch of people not shutting it off, they’ve already decided they don’t give a damn. You’re in the wrong theater or you are at a move that’s for teenagers who just don’t care. It’s part of their experience, and I’m super sorry dude, but that’s life.

I remember going to see Commando when I was in high school. I went with my buddies. We went to go see Commando. And half the audience was drunk, the other half was high or stupid or all three. People were going nuts, and that was the point, it was Commando for god’s sake.

**John:** Totally. It’s Commando.

**Craig:** I mean, I can’t imagine people are going to see…like The Words is opening this weekend. I don’t think people are going to be on their cell phone in the middle of The Words. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** [laughs] “Yo! He stole that book!”

**Craig:** [laughs] By the way, well, maybe I’ll save it for my — I’m going to save it for my Cool Thing.

**John:** All right. Next question comes from Peter in Prague. I love that we have people in Prague. I kind of always pick the person who is writing from overseas because it’s just awesome.

**Craig:** It’s cool.

**John:** “In your podcast you often refer to a studio. How many studio execs are usually involved in the decision-making process and give you, or have permission, or are saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to move a project forward? How formal or informal are these sessions? Do you have to persuade them and fight for every word? Are you given a list of do’s and don’ts? What is that process like working with studio executives?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a good question.

**John:** It’s a very good question, Peter from Prague. And it shows some insight into how the US film industry works which is not how the overseas film industries work.

**Craig:** Right. Well, obviously it changes from studio to studio. Some studios are very committee like and other studios are a little more autocratic. There are levels at each studio, and roughly the level is you have a creative executive, there is a vice president, there is a senior vice president, there is the president of production, there is the chairman of the studio. And then floating above them is some sort of corporate master.

And depending on who you are and where the development stage is, you may be dealing with somebody low on the totem pole, in the middle or at the very top. It all depends on who you are, what the project is, and at what point in the development process it is.

The meetings themselves aren’t formal, per se; it’s not like you go in and defend your thesis in academia. All meetings ultimately are informal. It’s people sitting around a table talking through what they think. You rarely are given any kind of — a list of do’s and don’ts. There are notes which are the studio’s opinions and suggestions of what to change and what to keep.

Generally development is a very informal process. I find it to be an informal process.

**John:** Usually with a project you’ll have one person who’s your point person on the project. And if you are a newer, less expensive writer that person might be a creative executive, so a junior-ish person whose responsibility is to work with you, and the two of you will work together a lot. And then they’ll read the script and then it will go up to the next person who will give more notes. And the next person will weigh in with stuff. And I should also say there is often a producer involved who should be doing some of that work, too, and that can be convoluted, too. So you’re dealing with a producer, then you’re dealing with the creative executive.

But from the creative side, there is generally a junior person. There is a senior person, and that senior person doesn’t have green light power, but it is his or her movie. Like that person will get some credit for making that movie. At a certain point the decision goes up to a studio president who is going to be the green light person who will say, “Yes we are making this movie,” or, “We are not making this movie.” Decisions about big actors will go to that person.

And sometimes they will get involved in very specific story things on a movie. With the Charlie’s Angels movie, I’ve told this story before so I apologize, but we were at like a Friday 5pm meeting with Amy Pascal who was the President of Sony at that point. And she said, “Okay, we are going to cut $5 million out of this budget and we are not leaving until we do it.”

And so she sort of flipped through the pages and she ripped out five. And she’s like, “Okay, these are gone. Write around them.” And it was frustrating, but that was also sort of her job. She’s like, “I can tell this is an expensive sequence. We don’t need it. Take this out and that is the decision to make.”

A person at that level would get involved in a project that had challenges, that had some filmmakers who needed to be dealt with by a person at that level.

You often won’t get involved with the chairman of a studio or some really giant person who is sort of a corporate person until a first test screening, and then that person shows up. And that’s when, like, for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “Oh, there’s Alan Horn.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that person is showing up there. This is a movie we’ve made. He is here because the president of marketing is there, too. We have to figure out how we are going to sell this movie and that becomes an important process for him as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good rule of thumb: The more you are being paid, and the more the movie costs, the higher level you’ll be dealing with, because naturally there’s simply more accountability to it. The one thing I would add also is that nowadays it is increasingly common — I think essentially it is the rule now that the head of marketing is part of that green light committee.

In some cases, in some studios, the head of marketing is part of the “should we even develop this at all” committee, because — as we’ve mentioned before — the cost of selling movies actually outweighs the cost of making a lot of them. And so marketing becomes enormously important.

**John:** Agreed. Next question is from Charles. It’s about sharing credit. So, Charles writes, “I decided to team with two individual screenwriters I met on a filmmaker’s social networking site with the idea of collaborating on something together. I came with the initial premise and through subsequent online meetings the premise morphed and the writing began. They each wrote a scene and then flaked out, so I kept writing. One of them read the first draft and gave me some notes. The other one never even read it. So, I’ve registered the script with the WGA under my name only because other than a block of description, a sentence or two of dialogue, and some ideas tossed around in the online meetings, they really didn’t write anything. If I was lucky enough and a company wanted to option or buy this spec do I mention the other two collaborators? Do I…”

**Craig:** You have to.

**John:** “Should I include them with any potential buyers?”

**Craig:** Look, this is a disaster, okay?

**John:** Yes. This is why you don’t do this.

**Craig:** Yeah. You really, really, you just don’t do this. It’s a disaster because the truth is you’re right, you’ve written 99% of this thing. And any of the discussions and the sort of pie-in-the-sky things, those are — that falls under producing, sort of. You know, writing is writing, it’s creating literary material. The fact that they have even a word in this script causes you a huge headache.

You may think, “Well, I don’t even have to mention it.” When you sign an employment contract you warrant in that employment contract under penalty of near death that every word in that script is yours.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And if they come after you, and they come after the studio, the studio will turn to you and say, “You screwed us. And we’re not covering your butt.” See, normally, when the cuckoo army shows up, when they hear that a movie is being made to say, “Oh, you stole my script!” You know, like in Hangover 2 some nut job said you stole my life, whatever that nonsense was. The studio — they pay for everything. You’re indemnified. They cover it. They’re like, “These are our guys, we’ll take care of them; we’ll deal with these lawsuits; it’s nothing — it’s silly.”

But if you actually did use somebody else’s stuff and put your name on it, brother, you got a world of hurt coming.

**John:** You do. So, I don’t have the right solution for this guy right now other than sort of like build a time machine, go back, and don’t do that again. If you really wrote every word — if you wrote 99% of this, go back and rewrite the 1% that they did write. Make sure that they don’t have any — that there’s nothing that’s theirs that is in there.

Now, you did talk with them originally about this idea and this movie, and I think you need to go back to them. I would go back and sort of retroactively say some sort of shared story, “This is how we’re going to collaborate on the story of this,” and make it clear that you wrote this whole thing, but you want them to be acknowledged somehow.

**Craig:** Listen. If I’m your lawyer I know exactly what I would say.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** You have to go back to these guys and offer them some amount of money, $500, $1, $1,000, whatever it takes ultimately to purchase them out as works-for-hire for you. And now you’re covered.

**John:** That’s a good… — See, listen to Craig.

**Craig:** But, it’s a negotiation all of a sudden. And, you know, any time people feel like they have leverage on you they’re going to squeeze. So, now all of a sudden you’re into a lawyer, plus you’re into them. It’s a disaster. You can’t — you guys: Never do these things. Never do this sort of thing. It’s just a disaster.

**John:** Yeah. And this would have been easier if he hadn’t already said that he wrote the whole script. But they now know that he wrote the whole script, so they know that they have leverage.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. If you do it before that, you say, “Listen, guys…”

**John:** “Listen, do you guys really want to do this? Let me just buy you out of this because I think I really want to write this whole script and you don’t seem that into it.”

**Craig:** “I’ll give you each a couple hundred bucks and some Starbucks cards and get out of my life.”

**John:** Yup. That would have been great. It’s not going to happen that way.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Here’s a happier story. This is a tweet from Kelly Gibler. She writes, “My script made semifinals for both Austin and Sundance. I want to get some representation. What should I do?”

**Craig:** Oh, didn’t we do the “how do I get an agent” thing?

**John:** No, but this is a… — I phrase this, put this under “capitalizing on some heat.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Because here’s the thing: It’s great that your script made semifinals. That’s useful. So, it’s a somewhat different situation than like, “I just wrote a script…”

So, here you wrote a script that’s actually pretty good. That’s a distinction between I think the general case scenario of like “I want to get an agent,” because maybe you’re no good. Well, she’s actually probably pretty good because she made semifinals. So, that’s great.

So, what does she do with this little bit of heat that she got off of making semifinals? Suggestions, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, hold on a second: We don’t know that she’s any good from semifinals. I’m talking now as a perspective agent. All we know is that she’s not super duper bad.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** You have to win one of those things for me to think that you have actual heat. I mean, there are a billion people in semifinals all day long. To me that doesn’t mean anything yet. I don’t think there’s real heat yet.

**John:** I would advise Kelly Gibler, me being the sunshine and rainbow part of this podcast, I would advise her go to Austin. Go to Austin because you’re a semifinalist. And go in Austin and see what Austin Film Festival is. And as you meet people there and as you meet agency managers, because there will be some there, be like, “Hey, I have a script that is a semifinalist.”

Talk to them about it. Don’t be overwhelming with it. Just happily give it to them. Get business cards. Send them your thing. Just try to schmooze it up as much as you can.

You can also do that online. I would say you are not going to get real agents probably to read your thing, but there are going to be some agents’ assistants at some of the agencies who are, like, they’re looking for somebody. They’ll read your script because you’re not just nobody. You’re somebody who has a little bit of validation because you made some level there.

If only it gives you enough incentive to feel like you can introduce yourself to somebody, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll be meaner about it, or just glummer I guess. I think you have to win. I don’t think semifinal means anything. I think you have to win. And even when you win, there is questionable heat. That’s how grumpy I am about the state of affairs of getting an agent.

**John:** I feel like I need to mention the Nerdist Writers Podcast every podcast that we do. But I was listening to one that had a panel of people, and unfortunately it’s very hard to tell their voices apart, so it could have been Kyle Killen or it could have been somebody else on the panel. But he was crediting his wife or his girlfriend saying, “She made me go to this party and she made me talk to the agent, and I was so nervous about doing it, but then he read it and he really liked it, and that got me started.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** And so sometimes you have to just be awkward and uncomfortable and make that first conversation and you never know.

**Craig:** It’s a funny thing. Actually I love that story because it proves, frankly, that actually just standing next to somebody telling them something interesting is worth so much more than finalist Austin Film Festival. And I say that as somebody that’s judging [laughs] the finals of the Austin Film Festival this year for screenwriting.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** But it’s not about — I mean, I think if you win it is important. But there is no replacement for eye-to-eye contact.

**John:** The other reason she should go to the Austin Film Festival, of course, is that we are going to be doing the first ever Scriptnotes Live at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** We have absolutely no details because we really don’t know anything about what’s happening with the Austin schedule. But, we’re going to be there and we’re going to be doing this kind of podcast, this kind of conversation, but with a giant room full of people.

**Craig:** Huge room. Sick.

**John:** It’s going to be exciting. I’m not going to be nervous. I’m just giddy about it. It’s going to be really fun. And I think we’re going to have an awesome guest.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re giddy!

**John:** I’m giddy.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s great. I’m glad. One of us should be giddy about it.

**John:** Our next question is from Erin in Chicago. She says, “I recently completed an Associate Degree of Nursing. Near the end of my program I realized my passion is screenwriting rather than nursing. Coincidentally, also began to make arrangements to move to Los Angeles prior to finishing nursing school. I’ve heard you say that if you want to learn the industry your best bet is to get some sort of job in the industry. While you and Craig have been clear on your views on the necessity of film school, or lack thereof, the advice always presupposes that a person has an undergraduate degree, which I do not. Is it possible for me to find an industry job without a BA? Or should I start looking at colleges again?”

**Craig:** Oh god. Argh. This is where I want to be super supportive and give you the answer I’m supposed to give you per the manual of being supportive. But really what I want to tell you is: be a nurse, because it’s so hard. I get so scared at the thought of somebody who’s in nursing school — we need nurses. God knows we need them.

**John:** America needs nurses.

**Craig:** And they’re going to move to LA and they don’t have a college degree. And they don’t…

John, am I just too down?

**John:** No. You’re not too down. But I think we can take your frown and turn it upside down.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** And make it good. Here’s the thing, Erin: You have an Associate Degree in Nursing, and that’s awesome, and that’s very relevant to nursing. I think you’re going to have a hard time getting one of those classic industry kind of jobs with an Associate Degree in Nursing. Because it’s not like people have, “Oh, you have to have an Ivy League degree,” or something, but everyone you’re going to be competing with for those jobs is going to have, like, an Ivy League degree, or at least like a pretty good university degree there.

And so it’s not like people are looking at resumes that carefully, but they’re going to notice that you don’t have that. But, here’s what you do have with a Nursing Degree and the move to Los Angeles. You have a job. And a job is a really good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I would say: Move to Los Angeles, be a nurse, take extension classes at UCLA where you’ll actually learn screenwriting, and just learn screenwriting. And learn if screenwriting is what you actually really want to do. And if it is what you really want to do, no one is ever going to care whether you’ve got a Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree or whatever.

I have an MFA. No one has ever cared.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** The degree itself matters nothing.

**Craig:** Exactly, like Diablo Cody.

**John:** Diablo Cody.

**Craig:** I don’t know if she has a degree. Who cares if she has a degree?

**John:** No, she’s awesome.

**Craig:** She’s awesome. And she wrote a great script.

Listen, this is really important. People will write into us and they’ll say, “I realize that my passion is screenwriting.” You don’t know what screenwriting is, okay? Because it’s a job and you’ve never done it. Your passion is writing. And you like the idea of writing screenplays, but that’s not what screenwriting is. Screenwriting is a job where you write and also get punched in the head a lot. And also are on set. And also are in meetings. And also kind of produce and handhold, and cajole, and hustle.

There are moving parts to this you can’t imagine yet. And so the thought that you’re now — not only is the pyramid…the pyramid preexists you, but you’re now digging down and putting another layer in which is, “Well, but before I can really start the incredible uphill climb becoming a screenwriter I first have to go to college now so I can start the uphill climb.”

And I’m like, oh god, I just want you to be a nurse and write. And John’s answer is perfect. I hope you take his advice. Move to LA. Be a nurse. Put money in your pocket. Pay your rent. Not freak out and worry. God knows you don’t want to pile on tuition loans at this point in your life — it’s crazy and pointless. And take extension classes. And read screenplays, and watch movies, and write scripts.

And if it happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, you’re helping people and you’re earning money, thank god.

**John:** Those are good things. Has there been a great movie about a nurse? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So write that great nurse movie.

**Craig:** Right. Or TV show. I mean, there is a Nurse Jackie, but that’s one kind of nurse show.

**John:** Well, yeah, I mean, ER is kind of a nurse show, too. But, yeah, come on. I would say be an awesome nurse. Keep your eyes open. Figure out what the story is about nursing. Write that movie and win an Oscar. Done.

**Craig:** Please. For everyone: Do not take on debt to be a screenwriter. That is a super stupid thing to do.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think if you were getting a Bachelor’s Degree, that’s awesome, and making you a fully actualized citizen, I’m okay with some debt there. I will say like as an alumni of USC Film School, which is kind of very expensive, I shouldn’t say that you shouldn’t take on debt for it, but it’s questionable, I’ll give you that.

**Craig:** My point is don’t take on debt to be a screenwriter. There are degrees — some people are wealthy, and a liberal arts education for them is a luxury that they indulge in, and that’s great. Some people are not, but they do it because they foresee an improvement in their potential for salary. And so there is an investment. And it’s not simply debt; it’s an investment. I understand — it should pay itself off and then some.

But, there is no educational investment that’s worth making that requires debt to be a screenwriter, because the odds of you being a working screenwriter are very, very small. And also the thing that you’re going into debt for will not help you be a screenwriter, okay? But being a nurse…it’s wonderful.

**John:** Being a nurse is wonderful. So, being a nurse is wonderful. The only thing, my defense of film school, even for screenwriters but less so for screenwriters than other crafts, is that you are paying that money to enter into a cohort of incredibly motivated film people who will be your peers and allies for the next 20 years, which was very much my experience coming out of the Stark Program. The only people I knew in Long Angeles were my 25 classmates. And they have been incredibly helpful to me my entire career. And I would not be here without them.

**Craig:** But to me, I call that the two school exception. If you get accepted to NYU Film or USC Stark or Film, go. Because you’re right — there is a real potential for value there. If you are not, don’t.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Last question is from Kenneth. He writes, “I want to write a screenplay based on a foreign novella that was written in the 1930s. I contacted the translator of the translation I love and he said that it hasn’t been optioned, but he recommended I also find out if the original foreign text has been. I plan on doing that, but there’s a further complication. It was already adapted to the screen in the ’70s.

“So, in order to write a fresh adaptation do I simply arrange an option with the original text publisher, or will it be an arrangement with the company that owns the ’70s adaptation of the film? Since the book has already been adapted what do I do?”

So, I can start and you can correct me when I get something wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When in the ’70s they made that movie, they bought the film rights to that book. And so in buying the film rights to that book, they probably still have the only rights to make the movie version of that book. So you will not be able to make a new movie version of that book without negotiating with the people who made that film. You disagree?

**Craig:** Not necessarily true, especially if it was made in the ’70s. A lot of times the rights cycles were not in perpetuity. These days corporations are way too smart. They license everything… — Well, the way they license things, there are usually cycles to the licensing, but once they actually exploit the license by making the property, they get an exclusive right to adapt that property for that medium for in for eternity throughout the universe…

**John:** “All known or unknown…”

**Craig:** But in the ’70s it may have been that there was a limited rights cycle, even if you were to make the movie your rights to make a movie based on that property expired after a certain amount of time. So actually the first step: you would go back to the original text — the translations are essentially irrelevant — go back to the original text, original author, that publisher; find out what the situation is with the rights, if they are available for adaptation. Sometimes films are adapted in one country but the worldwide rights or the US rights are still available.

It can be complicated.

**John:** Yeah. I would amend this to say that you do need to go back to whoever owns the foreign rights. You want the foreign book rights, whatever that is, that’s the core rights there. I would not take them at their word that they have all the rights to something. There could be other encumbrances that you’re not aware of.

You don’t want to spend years of your life trying to do this thing and then have it be shut down for something that you can’t understand or control. And I say this as a person who just very recently went through a strange situation.

**Craig:** There are companies that do these title searches, right?

**John:** Yeah. So they can do a copyright search that would be helpful. But as much digging as you can do the better you’re going to be in the long run.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I say this from personal experience, two things that happened to me very recently were just like, “Whoa?! These are giant corporations; they should have figured that out and they didn’t.” So…

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** So Craig, it’s time for One Cool Thing. Do you want to go first? Should I go first?

**Craig:** I’ll go first because One Cool Thing did come to mind. And it’s The Words. It’s this movie opening, and by the time you hear this podcast it will be out in theaters near you. It’s called The Words. And I saw an early cut of the film and I loved it.

**John:** This film stars Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana.

**Craig:** Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, and Jeremy Irons. And so I really loved the movie. And it’s about writing. It’s about writers.

**John:** Isn’t it about stealing an idea? It’s about copyright?

**Craig:** And I sort of thought the whole thing is a really interesting meditation on how all writers feel, even in moments of inspiration, a bit like a fraud, because did they write it? Or where did it come from? And should I take pride in what I do? Is it mine? Did it just happen? It’s an interesting movie for writers.

Now, I have to say: Today I saw that it was coming out and I went, “Oh yeah, that movie — I really liked that movie.” And I checked to see what kind of reviews it was getting, and it was getting ripped apart by critics, and I was shocked. Shocked.

And I felt really bad for the filmmakers because I actually thought they did a spectacular job. Maybe I’m the only one. Maybe people out there will see this movie and say, “No, the critics were right.” I just think the critics were off base. I really, really enjoyed the movie.

And, yes, I’m friends with Bradley, and it’s not about, “Oh, Bradley Cooper needs more people to go see Bradley Cooper movies.” It’s a very small movie. I think it was made for like $4 million. I really loved the story. And I loved the way the story was structured. So, I don’t know, I thought it was a Cool Thing. I stand in defiance of the critics. I say it’s a Cool Thing.

**John:** So here’s the thing about the words for me is it stars Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, who are beautiful people. So as long as it’s relatively well shot you get to look at beautiful people for 100 minutes.

**Craig:** Having sex at one point.

**John:** See? Come on. You sold a ticket right there.

**Craig:** She is…

**John:** She is stunning.

**Craig:** And I’ll circle back to Bradley, but she is stunning. I met her once, very briefly. I was standing outside with Todd Phillips at Warner Bros. We had a little spot where we would stand. He used to smoke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but he would go outside to smoke and I would stand with him. And she came by because it’s this alleyway — it’s famous people alleyway. They’re coming and going all the time. And he knows everybody. I don’t know that many people, but I get to sort of secondarily enjoy meeting these people.

And sometimes you meet famous people and they are so beautiful on screen and then you meet them in life and you think, “Oh, you’re somehow diminished by reality.” She’s actually more beautiful in real life. She is unbelievable. I just thought she was gorgeous.

Bradley, [laughs], is also really, really good-looking. And it just makes me angry sometimes. I just look at this guy and I’m like, “What is the deal?” Like, “How did you get that hair? How did you get that face? This sucks. Why do I look like me?”

**John:** And then he breaks out his fluent French and you just want to kill yourself.

**Craig:** Oh, and then it’s just, “Come on, bro.”

**John:** So I shared a mat with Zoe Saldana because she used to workout at the same gym as I used to workout at. At first I wasn’t sure it was her because I agree with you that she is incredibly pretty and she’s one of these people who is actually noticeably pretty even outside of all the glam and all that stuff. But when you see people in workout mode, they’re smaller and they’re just doing their thing. And so they’re not able to carry themselves in their sort of beautiful mode.

So, I noticed her, but I was like, “Ah, she’s really interesting.” But it took me half an hour to sort of go, “Oh, …and that’s Zoe Saldana.”

**Craig:** I think this is your might be gay moment, like you might be gay if…

**John:** You don’t notice her…

**Craig:** You’re working out next to Zoe Saldana sweating…

**John:** No, I noticed she was pretty…

**Craig:** …and it takes you a half an hour. I mean, dude. She’s so…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, look, the truth is I’m 40% gay for Bradley. I really am. He was on the cover of, I don’t know if you saw this, he was on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter this week.

**John:** No. I don’t get that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I saw a copy of it on the newsstand. And the picture of him, oh my god — it’s just not fair.

**John:** I remember Bradley Cooper from Alias, and he was always the one, like, “Why are you not being highlighted more?” He was comparatively the nice chubby guy on that show, which was absurd.

**Craig:** I know, but now…

**John:** Because he was the best friend. He had sort of no real function.

**Craig:** And he really is one of the… — There is something about male stars in Hollywood, the real iconic Hollywood faces, as they get older they just get better looking. It’s fascinating. It really is.

**John:** One of my theories with that is that we just become so accustomed to looking at their faces and knowing, like, “That’s a handsome person,” that our idea of what handsome is becomes that thing that they are at the moment.

**Craig:** I understand. Yeah. There is another thing though that happens with men. See, to me, masculinity is obviously — a part of being handsome is masculine features. And I think as men get older they tend to lose more facial fat…

**John:** They get harder.

**Craig:** …and there’s a certain weathered, masculine rugged thing that begins to happen and sort of accentuates the masculinity. And they just look manlier and manlier as they get older. Like, I see a picture of Brad Pitt and there is gray in his beard and suddenly he’s cooler looking all of a sudden. Whereas unfortunately for women it seems like the world perceives the opposite — as they get older somehow because I guess femininity is so closely linked to youth or something.

**John:** Yeah. You had brought this up in an earlier podcast, and I thought of it after we recorded it, my counter example, because you were complaining everyone was like, “Oh, for a woman in her 70s she’s so beautiful.” And you were like, “No she’s not.”

Helen Mirren I will say is actually the exception to me. And I know everyone sort of brings up Helen Mirren, but I think she’s genuinely sexy at her age.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re right. Helen Mirren, yes.

**John:** Because you see her in a swimsuit and you’re like, “Wow, she actually has an amazing body.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t mean to come off as a sexist. It’s just one of those biological things. The male brain — I tend to find younger female faces more attractive. Oh boy, here I go. Here comes the mail box. But, what am I gonna do? But, you’re right: Helen Mirren is beautiful. And there are older women that are beautiful, don’t get me wrong.

But in general, you look at these male stars like Clooney. Look at Clint Eastwood. I mean, Clint Eastwood is 80-something years old. And he looks almost skull-like at this point, and somehow that makes him really good-looking. That’s bizarre.

**John:** Prior to a few weeks ago I would have more gone with you there. How much do you not want to be Trouble with the Curve right now? The Clint Eastwood movie coming out.

**Craig:** You know what? I don’t think it impacts it at all. I really don’t. I’m serious. I don’t think that that — I mean, you’re referring to his strange speech to a chair.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I don’t think that people do or don’t go to movies because Clint Eastwood spoke. I mean, you think it’s going to impact the box office?

**John:** Here’s why I think it could impact the box office is because the moment that there’s another narrative, another narrative overtakes the narrative of the movie, it really I think hurts a movie. And my example for this is Charlie’s Angels 2.

So Charlie’s Angels 2, we have the three angels coming back, and, like, they’re bigger stars than ever, and Demi Moore who I — I fought for Demi Moore. I love Demi Moore; I think she’s awesome. But, the only thing we could actually get people to talk about in the two weeks before the movie came up was her relationship with Ashton Kutcher and her showing up at the premiere with Ashton Kutcher and Bruce Willis.

And so like we’re throwing this $2 million premiere for the movie and all the cameras are tuned out to these people who aren’t the stars of the movie. And that’s all the press we got was that.

**Craig:** And I get that. But here’s the thing: That story overlaps with the general movie-going interests than Oval. Because people who are interested in Charlie’s Angels 2 are also really interested in who Demi Moore is sleeping with or not sleeping with or whatever. But I don’t think it overlaps movie-wise.

And, also, don’t forget that there are a lot of Republicans out there and I think they tend to do — you know, the Republicans…

**John:** It honestly may be fine for it.

**Craig:** And the conservative movement tends to do well at putting people on busses to go to things because they’re in support of it. Don’t be surprised if churches show up to Trouble with the Curve.

**John:** We’ll see how it turns out. So, Craig, my One Cool Thing is a thing that I just can’t believe is real. So let me describe it to you. As we talked about at the head of the podcast, you are a very busy guy. Like, you’re making a movie, I have a movie coming out, and you’re going to be busy throughout the fall and into the winter, right?

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** I also know that you’re really big on deadlines. So, if you were out sick for a week that would be a really bad thing, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** It would be disastrous.

**John:** Yup. And so it’s a weird thing because I feel like because we work for ourselves there’s this assumption, like, “Oh, you can be sick and it would be fine.” It’s like, no, it’s actually kind of even worse to be sick by ourselves because we don’t really have sick days. And I guess if we’re not in a busy period of time it’s not so bad, but if we’re in a busy period of time it’s kind of awful. And especially if you’re on a weekly, I mean, I don’t want to ask you what your weekly quote is, but it could cost you a lot of money.

**Craig:** A lot.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** I’m not saying for me, [laughs], I didn’t mean to be bragging, like, “Yup, a lot.” I’m saying in general, yes, weekly…

**John:** Yes, it would be a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s a lot of money — for the average screenwriter it’s a lot of money.

**John:** So, this is pretty amazing, and I don’t know why people aren’t talking about it more. It’s this insurance you can buy, so you can only buy it once a year, but here’s what the insurance does: If you get sick they will send somebody out to do your job for you.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** No. Listen to me here. They will do your job for you. So you will still get paid, but you also won’t fall behind.

**Craig:** That doesn’t work for us.

**John:** It actually works for us. That’s the most remarkable thing. Like you think, “Oh okay, that would make sense if you were a data entry clerk,” but it works for everybody. It doesn’t matter what your profession is. It works for everybody.

**Craig:** But how would it work? We’re hired for our unique ability. How could somebody…

**John:** You want to think that you are irreplaceable.

**Craig:** …AETNA to come work on your pages?

**John:** So you’re basically irreplaceable is what you’re saying?

**Craig:** Well I’m not saying I’m irreplaceable. I’m replaceable by you. But I’m not replaceable by a guy from State Farm.

**John:** Yeah, okay. But, I mean, it’s very hard to find somebody else to do your job. And so you really don’t want to be out sick for a week.

**Craig:** I mean, I definitely do not want to be out sick for a week.

**John:** So, here is what you do. So you go to this place and you pay them $30, $20 to $30, it takes five minutes, you fill out a little form, and then you won’t get sick.

**Craig:** I don’t understand. [laughs] Oh, because they come and do your job for you?

**John:** No, it’s even better than that. You don’t even get sick because they give you a flu shot. All you do is you go in, you get your flu shot…

**Craig:** Ah, I see what you’re doing.

**John:** Ah-ha! So you go in, you get your flu shot, and it’s basically not getting sick insurance.

**Craig:** You scamp!

**John:** I’m a scamp. So, this is really me pitching the flu shot, because people don’t get their flu shots and I don’t understand why people don’t get their flu shots. Do you like being sick? No, you don’t like being sick. So, pay your $20, go to Target. I went to Target this week and I got my flu shot. It was $28. It took me five minutes to do. They do this new special little needle thing so it doesn’t even go into your muscle, it’s just like in the surface of your skin. It is the easiest thing in the world.

And why don’t people get their flu shots? So, here’s the thing about the flu: Look, you’re probably not going to die of the flu. If you’re a grownup it is very unlikely that you’re going to die of the flu. But you could be out of work for a week. Being out of work for a week is terrible. You don’t want to be sick for a week. So don’t be sick for a week. Spend your $28 and get the flu shot.

**Craig:** You know, I’ve got to congratulate you. You suckered me in completely. I actually did believe that there was a service that would come and do your job for you for a week. I feel really stupid. I feel even stupider for arguing with you about it, but I’m glad that you did this. I’m glad you fooled me. I’m glad you exploited my gullibility, because you are absolutely right. Get your flu shot for sure. Get all shots, by the way. Please get everything.

**John:** Yeah. I know. And so I don’t want to — we talked before. You and I both believe in vaccinations and childhood vaccinations, and that can be a whole separate topic. And I’m not on a soap box. I’m not saying you have to get it. I’m just saying like why wouldn’t you get it? If there’s a 10% chance that you’re going to be out sick for a week, why take that 10% chance? That’s terrible. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, there’s one reason you don’t get it, and that’s that it is part of a government sponsored conspiracy in conjunction with big pharma to inject you with mind-controlling substances.

**John:** Yes. So if that is your belief, don’t get the flu shot. Just don’t do it. And don’t write in with your conspiracy theories. But I would also say like on a movie like Hangover 3, do you think they’re going to get flu shots?

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** But they should, shouldn’t they?

**Craig:** I mean, well, the only issue is sometimes there is a reaction. Like you may have one grumpy day. So I could see where they might consider sponsoring a flu shot tent if it were on a Friday.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** Not in the middle of the week. But, yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s actually a pretty great thing. It’s pretty smart. And by the way, I’m getting my flu shot this weekend because of you.

**John:** Good. See? I’ve kept one person working in the industry. I’m a job creator. I am.

**Craig:** You are. We built this podcast. We built this. And you are a job creator.

**John:** If nothing else I increased productivity one iota in Hollywood just for my recommendation.

**Craig:** Somebody has to.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** This is an excellent one. I love the way it ended. I get to call you a scamp. Great podcast.

**John:** I’m a scamp. All right. So thank you and have a great week. And good luck with shooting.

**Craig:** Thanks, good luck with the…well, it’s not happening yet. But in April I’ll wish you luck.

**John:** All right. Thanks, sir. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Scriptnotes, Ep. 33: Professional screenwriting, and why no one really breaks in — Transcript

April 19, 2012 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/professional-screenwriting-and-why-no-one-really-breaks-in).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I am Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. This is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. How are you doing, John?

**John:** I’m doing really well. It’s a beautiful spring day in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** It’s a beautiful spring day here. Wherever Joe Eszterhas is it’s probably not such a great spot to be. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, okay, so we’ve got to link to this. This is crazy.

**Craig:** Crazy-balls!

**John:** So the back story on this, Joe Eszterhas is/was, really kind of put him in the past tense, he was a very prominent screenwriter for a period of time. He wrote things like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. Movies I quite enjoy actually, Fatal Attraction especially. And was known for selling big spec scripts and being like a big oversized personality and a sort of a blowhard. Is that fair to say?

**Craig:** Yeah. He was, when you and I broke into the business, Joe Eszterhas was the superstar screenwriter. He was kind of the most famous screenwriter I would say.

**John:** He’s the only screenwriter that a person of popular culture might have heard of who was not famous for being a director, or famous for being an actor as well.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He also wrote Showgirls, which is just a monumental achievement.

**Craig:** Heh.

**John:** Showgirls, which was so great that even as a spec script, a friend of mine got it and we held a staged reading of Showgirls — like before it was even in production, because it was just so amazing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty spectacular. But at the top, I mean, he did write some…Jagged Edge, I think, was Joe Eszterhas.

**John:** Oh, Jagged Edge, come on. Jagged Edge is great.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a time when Joe Eszterhas was writing really good, interesting thrillers. And then they started sort of diving more towards like Sliver, and then suddenly… — Well, he very famously wrote a movie called, I think it was Burn Hollywood Burn, about a director who takes his name off a movie that then became called An Alan Smithee Film. And then the actual director took his name off the movie, so it was An Alan Smithee Film actually directed by Alan Smithee.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of a crazy story. And sort of dropped off the face of the planet, and left town, and left the business.

**John:** I think he moved up north, and then he moved out of the state, and he did other stuff. And that’s fine. People’s careers go through ups and downs and flows, and whatever.

So, the interesting new development was that a year ago, or more than a year ago, he signed on to write a movie for Mel Gibson about a famous historical event, the Maccabees. Am I pronouncing it right?

**Craig:** You are. The Maccabees. Yes.

**John:** Which was a famous Jewish event of the — I’m going to completely mess up what it actually was about, because I don’t really know what it’s about.

**Craig:** The Maccabees were, it is sort of connected to the Hanukkah story which is a fairly minor story in the Jewish tradition, but the reason Jewish people like to talk about the Maccabees is because they were warriors, and we don’t have many of those. So, it’s like famous Jewish sports legends and famous Jewish soldiers, but the Maccabees were tough guys and were Jewish warriors. It was sort of like a Jewish Braveheart king of story. So it would make sense that Mel Gibson would take that on.

And, obviously, Mel has had some issues [laughs] where he had said some anti-Semitic things, and some racist things, and some homophobic things, and, you know, pick ’em.

**John:** So it was an interesting combination of…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …screenwriter and director-actor. And you could sort of anticipate that things would not go well. Either it was going to be brilliant, and it was going to be the coming back of both of these talents, or it was going to end in tears.

And it ended in tears. It ended in like angry accusations…

**Craig:** Super angry.

**John:** And long letters. And so we will link to the letters that, I think, The Wrap published yesterday…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …about what actually transpired. And so Joe Eszterhas wrote this long letter to Mel Gibson or his production company saying, “These are all the ways you did me wrong. And these were all the crazy incidents that happened while I was writing this script for you.”

And Mel Gibson replied back in a shorter way, in a calmer way, saying, “Well, you fabricated most of these. And the script was terrible. And we would never make that movie.”

**Craig:** Here’s my question. I mean, people will read this and see for themselves, but just from a screenwriter point of view, what’s the upside for Joe Eszterhas? I don’t get it. I mean, here are it seems like the facts that both Joe Eszterhas and Mel Gibson agree on: Joe Eszterhas went off, wrote a script, turned it in, and no one liked it at all.

So, what’s the upside? I mean, he writes this letter, and it is fascinating that it includes things that you would expect from a first-time writer, not from somebody of Joe Eszterhas’ stature or former stature. Things like, “Well I should it to my friends and they loved it.” What?! [laughs] Really dude?! I mean, come on.

**John:** “They all told me it was a movie that had to be made.”

**Craig:** Right. I mean, are you really that delusional? You have now put yourself in the same category as the weirdo who is rejected on American Idol and insists that their friends and their moms say that they sing beautifully. I mean, come one. Listen, there’s no shame in whiffing.

I mean, and also, in addition to the alleged whiff, and we don’t know; maybe it’s a great script. Who knows? But in addition to the alleged whiff, he apparently turned in the script like two years later, something like that, which is obviously a no-no. I mean, I like at these guys where it says things like, “Well you went away for 15 months,” according to Mel Gibson, “you went away for 15 months, you came back, and you didn’t have a script written.”

And I think, 15 months? For my entire career, it’s always been an argument to get to ten weeks. They want it in six weeks, I end up doing it in eight weeks. Where are these people that get 15 months? Have you ever gotten 15 months to write a script?

**John:** No. I have taken 15 months, but that was a weird situation, sort of like the same studio put other work in front of it. Like Big Fish took me two years, but they kept putting stuff in front of it, so I couldn’t really get started on it.

**Craig:** Then Big Fish didn’t take you two years.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It took you the time it took you, and then they made you work on other things. And that’s different. But each of those things took an appropriate amount of time and, listen, people work at different paces. I get that. And I don’t think of myself as fast or slow. I’m probably very average. But, 15 months is kind of astonishing.

And then to show up, and to also.. — If I were on month nine and I didn’t have anything yet, I would probably call someone and say, “I’m going to need a little extra time.” I’m not going to show up after a year and a half or whatever and go, “Uh, sorry, I don’t have it…”

**John:** And also to look at it, like Joe Eszterhas, he clearly is fairly prolific because he was able to write this, I don’t know, it was a 12-page letter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And by the way, the 12 most entertaining pages I have read in a very long time. I want to option the letter and make the movie of the events that supposedly transpired. I don’t necessarily believe these events actually happened, but if they did happen, it’s crazy.

**Craig:** I’m with you, by the way. Look, you and I are both members of groups, identity groups, that Mel Gibson has publicly besmirched. And yet I read this and I think: There is no, absolutely no way that Mel Gibson called Jews “Oven Dodgers.” I don’t buy it for a second. I just don’t believe it. Why would he do…I mean, I understand why somebody would do that initially, but if you have already been caught and humiliated publicly in this huge horrifying way, would you really keep doing that?

Something doesn’t add up.

**John:** Yeah. What also doesn’t add up is that basically every paragraph… — The two paragraphs will describe some horrible incident that took place. And then the next paragraph starts with like, “But then I came to visit you in Malibu and we stayed the night there.

**Craig:** Right! [laughs]

**John:** And so like, what, you are the abused wife that keeps coming back to the husband?

**Craig:** And that was Mel Gibson’s point. “If I really were the person that you purport me to be, why were you on this project for two years? Why didn’t you just immediately leave?” I mean, and that is a great point. I wouldn’t sit in a room with somebody who called Jews “Oven Dodgers.” [laughs]

By the way, “Oven Dodger,” I have to say as a collector of racist slurs, that’s a new one on me. It doesn’t even really make sense.

**John:** It doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Oven Magnets” is what I would call Jews.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean, “Oven Dodgers?” Which oven did we dodge? I think we hit them all.

**John:** Didn’t Eszterhas… — Well he’s not old enough to have gone through the Holocaust. Or maybe his family did.

**Craig:** Well, he himself is Christian. I think the deal is maybe that his wife is Jewish and he got really into Judaism or something, which is nice, but…

**John:** Fair and lovely.

**Craig:** Yeah, but… — And listen, everyone has a right to be offended by hateful speech. You don’t have to be a member of the particular group that is being slurred, but “Oven Dodgers,” I’m just questioning the logic of the slur, [laughs] because as far as I could tell, Jews didn’t miss many ovens from 1941 to 1945.

**John:** The other thing which I adored about this letter is that it is actually clearly typed in like Word and then just printed on a normal printer. And, like, who prints letters anymore? So he actually had to write this thing, print it, fold it up, put it in an envelope, and send it to somebody. Because what was published wasn’t a fax; it was a scan of an actual real thing.

**Craig:** I think you have uncovered yet one more piece of evidence that Joe Eszterhas is stuck in the ’90s. But, I mean…

**John:** I was reading this last night and thinking, “When was the last time I physically wrote a letter, like typed up a letter in word, and printed it and mailed it?” You just don’t do that anymore.

**Craig:** Only if a governmental agency requires it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is bizarre. But I guess underneath all of the drama and stupidity of it all, I’m just sort of questioning the screenwriter sense of it. I just don’t get…What were you hoping to achieve with this letter? That he would read it and go, “Oh, your friends love it? Hmm, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Warner Brothers is wrong. Maybe this is a great script and I just didn’t realize. And I’m going to shoot it.”

What’s the strategy? I don’t get it.

**John:** I don’t get it either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It does also point out what we frequently talk about on the program, that screenwriting is the craft of pushing words around on the papers, and that is a crucial part of it. But a lot of career screenwriting is the ability to get along with other people. And this seems like a classic example of two people who could not possibly get along with each other. Trying and failing to get along with each other. And that is the doom. That’s where it goes awry; it’s the combination of ingredients.

**Craig:** Well, they have worked together before, I think, right?

**John:** Did they? I don’t remember.

**Craig:** In the back of my head I seem to think that they had worked together on something. In fact, in a weird way I thought, okay, I understand if Mel Gibson feels like, “Alright. I’m kind of a persona non grata right now in Hollywood because of the things I said, and maybe what I should do is find somebody I had a relationship with that preexisted all of this brouhaha, because it is a little weird for me to sit in a room with a new person who brings the baggage of all these events, and doesn’t have any pretext. So maybe I will go find Joe Eszterhas.”

I mean, in theory it’s an interesting idea, but it’s kind of… — The whole thing is ugly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And makes me sympathetic to Mel Gibson.

**John:** Yeah. And it is a weird upshot of it all is that by releasing a short statement saying, “That’s crazy, Joe,” he actually seems like the more sane person.

**Craig:** He is the more sane person. [laughs] There’s no question.

**John:** So, you should work with people who are visibly more crazy than you are, and therefore you will seem like, “Oh, he’s reasonable at least.” It’s actually very much a Survivor strategy; you keep around the people who are like so off the wall nuts that no one is ever going to vote for them, and therefore you look better by comparison.

**Craig:** So, it’s sort of the “stand next to the bigger girl to look thin.” It’s the mean girls’ strategy.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let’s follow up a little bit on Amazon because on our last podcast we spoke about the new Amazon deal which is essentially they have revamped how Amazon Studios is going to be working for their screenwriting — it’s much less of a competition than it used to be before. But basically Amazon Studios is going to try to make movies, and they are now going to be — they cut a deal with the WGA so that WGA writers can be employed by Amazon.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And in talking with other screenwriters in follow up after we had our podcast, some people have come back and said, “Well, I think you are overstating what a success this is, or even if it is a success,” because other studios have done similar kinds of things, where like Dimension, for example, which is a division of Miramax, or whoever owns Dimension now.

**Craig:** Weinstein Company.

**John:** Yeah, bought and sold many times. They classically have a non-WGA signatory branch.

**Craig:** All studios do.

**John:** All studios do. So basically it is a way for them to buy things outside of WGA auspices when they have the opportunity to.

**Craig:** Well, kind of. The deal is that when studios, when entities sign these agreements they are essentially saying, “We acknowledge that if somebody is going to do the work — if we are going to employ somebody to do the work of a screenwriter, if they are a professional screenwriter then we have to it through the WGA.”

There is this weird thing about being a professional. And how you define professional — it’s in the MBA. There is some actual definition. So, Warner Brothers can hire somebody non-union to write a script if they are not a “professional” screenwriter. Now, in practice, that rarely happens. For instance, when I wrote my first screenplay, I had to join the Guild. It’s actually a fuzzy thing. I should really ask them and figure out how this all works, like what the deal is with that.

**John:** What I think the Amazon deal, and sort of the blowback about what the deal actually encompasses, and who gets covered and who doesn’t get covered, it comes down to from my point of view the difference between literary material and professional screenwriting. And Amazon Studios, as it was classically set up was really designed to just filter and find literary material. So, it wasn’t so much set up for, like, “We are going to employ these writers to do this work.” It was, “If someone wrote a great screenplay, we could find that great screenplay. And we are going to bypass the whole system by finding these great screenplays that no one else has found.”

That didn’t really work out very well for them. So now they may have some scripts that are kind of good ideas, or kind of interesting, but they actually need to do the work of giving those scripts to a place where they could shoot them. And that is going to involve professional writing. And that professional writing is now going to be largely covered by the WGA.

**Craig:** It seems like it, yeah. But I think that there is a reasonable question to ask; for people who are new, who are not professional screenwriters, who have written a screenplay in their home in Wichita, if they send it to Amazon, my understanding is that if Amazon buys it, it would be a WGA deal?

**John:** Yeah. I haven’t seen confirmation on that. So, I think it is going to be interesting to figure out how that is actually going to work in practice. If it is a spec script that somebody wrote who is not WGA covered, Amazon buys it, is that the kind of thing that is going to kick that person into the Guild?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be, because Amazon could theoretically be buying it through their non-signatory arm, but at the moment that they try to employ a WGA writer on it, that script becomes a WGA property. A WGA-covered property.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is not necessarily going to pull that original writer in.

**Craig:** Right. That is the deal. It’s like, okay, the first screenplay I ever wrote, I wasn’t a professional screenwriter. I was a guy. But the studio that bought it, in that case Disney, understood that at some point they might want a WGA writer writing on it, therefore they had to buy it under the WGA deal. Therefore, I had to join the Guild.

And I suppose that that is sort of the idea at Amazon. It’s like, you can hire a guy to write the script, but if you ever want to hire a WGA writer to rewrite it, you need to do the whole thing under the Guild. I think.

**John:** We’ll see how it works out.

**Craig:** We’ll dig into this and report back.

**John:** So, our first question of the day actually is a follow up on this. “Craig’s comment during the discussion on the new Amazon Studio deal was just utterly stupid.”

**Craig:** Hm.

**John:** And this is from Jock. Jock can say you are utterly stupid.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Should I cut that part out?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’ll just leave that there.

**Craig:** John, I’m so used to it. [laughs] By the way, utterly stupid is one of the most mild things anyone on the Internet has said about me. So, I haven’t even been touched…

**John:** That’s fair. Stupid? Fine.

**Craig:** What’s his name?

**John:** Jock.

**Craig:** Jock.

**John:** I think that’s his real name. This really is his first name.

**Craig:** Not a chance. Jock? His parents didn’t name him Jock.

**John:** Yeah, but maybe he goes by Jock. I think your name is whatever you choose to call yourself.

**Craig:** That’s utterly stupid. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you for pointing that out, my belief in self-naming rights. [laughs] I’m like a stadium and I choose to name myself.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “Of course there is something between being a full-on professional and nothing.” So he is criticizing your point about either you are professional screenwriter or you are not.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** “In the same way that lots of people have one novel in them and no more, either because they are out of ideas, or because the process no longer interests them after all that, lots of people have one screenplay in them. The number one should not be taken literally. Maybe it’s two, maybe it’s four. Regardless, it is a smallish number. Maybe they have exactly no interest in dealing with the insane Byzantine world of the Hollywood system? You two live…” “you two” being you and me.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** “…live inside a world in which the studio system makes sense, where people are either screenwriters, or they aren’t. But the simple truth is, that isn’t how the world really works. It’s just how your world works.”

**Craig:** Oh! It’s not? [laughs] Oh my god. My mind is blown. Keep going.

**John:** That’s the end of the edited question.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s it? That’s not how the world works. Dot. Dot. Dot. It’s like a Flash Gordon episode. Will he survive?

**John:** [laughs] Craig just made a TV reference, so I think people have to finish their drink.

**Craig:** Well, but it’s a TV reference from 1952.

**John:** I thought you were referring to the new TV Flash Gordon.

**Craig:** No. No, no, no. God no. I didn’t even know there was one. [laughs]. Is there really one?

**John:** Yeah, Flash Gordon. David Goyer.

**Craig:** No, not Flash Forward. Flash Gordon.

**John:** Oh, Flash Gordon. Yeah.

**Craig:** See, Flash Gordon, my dad would go to the movies in the ’50s, and in front of movies — we will get to Jock’s moronic comment in a second. I promise. But he would go to movies, and before the movie they would show a serial, and it was usually a Flash Gordon. And it always ended in a cliffhanger. So it was like a 10-minute short and he was kid, and he believed everything he saw, of course, he was really into it. And he said they would always do this thing where like two guards would lead Flash Gordon down this cave/tunnel/hallway into this big room with a lava pit. And they would take him and throw him. And he would be mid-air, falling into the lava, and then they would freeze.

And then the announcer would say, “How will Flash get out of this? Come back to the movie theater next week to find out.” Such a great cliffhanger. And then he would go back the next week excited to see how could Flash Gordon possibly escape from this. He is literally falling into lava.

And they would start up, except in starting up with him hovering over the lava, he would be walking down the hallway again, and this time they wouldn’t throw him in; he would beat them up and escape. [laughs] It was such a rip-off!

**John:** Such wonderful cheating. It’s sort of also like comic book covers where they show some scene that is supposedly from the story but has nothing really to do with the story.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s just a total lie. But it’s a false cliffhanger. And in this case, I think Jock has provided us with a false cliffhanger.

“That’s not the way the world works.” But he is not going to tell us how the world works, presumably because he doesn’t know either. I don’t know what he is talking about. Look, you can have one script and you can have 1,000 scripts in you. I’m not talking about how many scripts you have. I’m talking about this simple question. Are you a professional screenwriter or not?

The word professional means it is your job, it’s your profession. It’s what you do to make a living. Either you is or you isn’t. It’s not that hard. I mean, I don’t get it. It’s like, if you write a screenplay, one screenplay, and you sell it, then yes, you are a professional screenwriter. If you never write a screenplay again, you have ceased to be a professional screenwriter.

It’s not like there is this magical thing that happens. It’s a little bit like Schrodinger’s cat. I mean, at some point you are kind of both, I guess, in a weird way. But there is no such thing as a half a screenwriter, or a hobbyist screenwriter. You are or you are not. That’s that.

**John:** I would say Jock is arguing that there is such a thing as a hobbyist screenwriter, as a person who loves to write screenplays, and wants to sell screenplays but doesn’t want to become a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** That’s nonsense. [laughs]. That’s crazy.

**John:** That can be nonsense, but it doesn’t mean that Jock isn’t that person who is doing that.

**Craig:** But Jock is wasting his time, because why would you write screenplays to not sell or be employed as a screenwriter? I mean, if you are literally writing… — Screenplays are designed to be turned into movies. We are not talking about novels. You can write novels as a “hobbyist” because the point is that a novel should be read. And novels aren’t defined by any other process. You read them.

Same thing with short stories. I’m a short story hobbyist. I get that. I don’t sell my short stories. I would never try to sell my short stories. But I put one on the Internet because I thought it would be interesting for people to read. And then some of them did.

But screenplays are not to be read. They are to be turned into movies. They can’t be turned into movies if they are not bought and sold. [laughs] It’s a simple thing. I mean, is this guy for real?

**John:** I wonder if there is such a thing as like a hobbyist architect who like…

**Craig:** Right?! Exactly.

**John:** You draw…you build these amazing blueprints for things that you will never actually build. I’m sure there are those people.

**Craig:** But they are not architects. They are not.

**John:** They are not. They are pretend designers.

**Craig:** The building is the evidence of architecture. The plans are not the evidence of architecture. It’s…I am beside myself. And I’m not beside myself because he said I was “utterly stupid,” or my comment was “utterly stupid,” because I have been utterly stupid at times. I’m upset because when people say things like this, I think we are wasting our time. [laughs] That’s what I think.

How do we…that is an impossibly thick amount of granite to push through. I don’t know what to do.

**John:** And see I have been the nice guy who has agreed to speak sometimes to like a small town screenwriting society, and so you go in and you visit these people. And they are so nice. And they just love movies and they are working on their scripts. But it’s clear that many of them have no intention of every actually trying to sell the things, or how they would sell the things. They just love to write screenplays.

And I guess it’s fine. I guess if you are enjoying it, it’s like, if it is their form of poetry I don’t want to judge them in a negative way. But, it’s not…I don’t know. It’s not really screenwriting.

**Craig:** Well, we can say this for sure. If you truly want to just write screenplays for yourself for personal fulfillment for a sense of expression or achievement, I have no problem with that whatsoever. And I don’t judge you. However, you are not a professional screenwriter.

So, the whole point of his premise is that there is something in between professional and non-professional. And he is wrong. He is just a non-professional screenwriter. [laughs]

I think that there is this other thing of like, “Well you guys are from the studio system and we’re not; we have these other things that we are doing, like I’m writing screenplays for YouTube or something like that.” And then my feeling is, okay, well then if you are writing screenplays and making them into movies on YouTube, I guess in a sense you are a professional screenwriter. You are kind of, I guess. I mean, you are…are you? I don’t know. What the hell? Yeah.

**John:** Here’s what I…I think professional versus non-professional, that’s a fairly clear binary thing. Are you getting paid for it or not getting paid for it?

**Craig:** John, that’s utterly stupid. [laughs]

**John:** That’s one of the delimiting factors. And I have a whole other rant about professionalism and I feel like professionalism kind of really isn’t about being paid for it. Professionalism is about doing your best work as if you were getting paid for it; as if people are — people are going to judge you on your professionalism regardless of whether you are getting paid for it. So, professional is sort of a weird, loaded term that way.

And, yes, there are all sorts of new kinds of writing-based filmed entertainment things you could be doing. But if what we are talking about is you write 120-page screenplays and you do not attempt to sell them, or that is not your goal or aim at writing a 120-page screenplay, that’s just kind of weird, and that’s not really what we are talking about.

And so, the longer parts of what I edited out of Jock’s questions was he had been defending the original Amazon Studios deal saying it was a way in for us people who are outside of the system. And it’s like, well, I think it was a really horrible way for people outside of the system, and this is a slightly better way for people outside of the system. But, you shouldn’t be submitting it to this thing if you have no desire to ever be in the system, because it is meant to be another way into the process of making actual feature films.

**Craig:** It’s basically, and I don’t mean to get personal here, but it is a loser attitude to say, “I can’t get into the system, therefore I am going to celebrate this other thing that is a way in that has nothing to do with the system.” I wasn’t in the system. You weren’t in the system. Neither of us were born in Hollywood. Our parents didn’t do this. We wrote and then we got in the “system.”

More to the point, I don’t even like that terminology because it implies that there is some building we walked into that is bigger than us. We are the system. You and I are the screenwriting system. They go to us and say, “We need screenplays.” You know what I mean?

I feel like this guy has this kind of… — It’s this prevalent, “I can’t make it. I’m never going to make it. So how dare you people who have made it assail something that affords me a chance to make it.” It’s not making it. What they have afforded you isn’t making it. It’s a rip. Or it was a rip. And that is so important. There’s that great moment…

There’s this movie, The Late Shift, that was about the late night wars between Letterman and Leno. And there was this point where they had decided that Jay Leno would get The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired, and Letterman was just beside himself because he felt like it should have gone to him. And Leno is on the air, and it is not going well, and NBC comes back to Letterman quietly and says, “Hey, we screwed up. You want it?”

And he calls, I think it is Tom Lassally who was Johnny Carson’s guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he says, “Should I do it?” And Tom Lassally says, “Don’t you get it? They are not offering you The Late Show? They are offering you The Late Show with Jay Leno. It’s not the same. It’s damaged goods.”

And that’s the point. They are not offering you a way in. A way into what?

**John:** This is a great segue to what I what to main topic for today which is that idea of breaking in. There is this idea out there that, and we use the term, like, “How did you break into Hollywood?” And the break-in, I think that is just completely the wrong term for what it really is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it implies that there is some sort of like great heist movie that is going to be carried out. Like we have to break into the studio, and once you are on the inside then everything is different. And it’s not that way at all. And I wonder if the breaking in idea came from the fact that the actual studios sort of look like, they are little fortresses in the sense that they have walls all around them. And you are either inside of the studio or you are outside the studio.

But, in actual practice it is not like that at all. And as I have had other screenwriters write about on the blog about their first experiences, everyone is different, but the commonalities are no one ever talks about having made it. There is never that sense of like, “Now I’m inside. Now I’m really working.”

It’s like suddenly you are getting paid to write some stuff, but it is all blurry and nebulous. And there is not one moment that you are in and one moment that you are out. Joe Eszterhas didn’t realize he had fallen out of the system.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just, he did. People stopped calling him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think we may have already sort of talked about our first how we got started, but it may be worth recapping here just as a sense of how you get your first job, what your first job is like.

**Craig:** Well everybody’s story is different. I have never met any two screenwriters that had the same “how I got my first job story.” So, anytime people ask, “Well how did you break in?” I always say, “It’s kind of irrelevant to you. I will tell you if you are interested.” But the truth is everybody has a different way in. And, by the way, I totally agree with you that the language is a trap, because I will say this: You get your first job, and you start writing, if you aren’t immediately worrying about the next one, you’re nuts.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because all that is really happening, there is no on/off switch for in or out, right? There is you are being paid to write for now, and hopefully you will be paid to write quickly again. And it is essentially like anything else; it is a business of relationships, and success and failure in intervals. And so there is no in or out. People have sold scripts for huge amounts of money and then disappear. There are people who have been nominated for Academy Awards and disappear.

There are people who kind of churn away under the radar for 30 years, making a check every month. Everybody is different. It’s a very diverse business, with a lot of different ways to do this, and frankly what shocks me so much about this kind of strange resentment that has occurred, almost like a weird 99%/1% sort of resentment thing going on lately… — There was an interesting thread on Deadline where there were allegations of trust fund screenwriters or something.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I forgot. You came from a very wealthy family and that is why you are so successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was lumped in. It was the strangest thing. They were like, “Look at all these writers who have trust funds whose parents were rich.” And then they listed me, and I’m like, “My parents were public school teachers!” I grew up in… — My hometown in New Jersey is where Bruce Springsteen grew up. That song, My Hometown, that’s my hometown. It’s Main Street, white-washed windows, and vacant stores. That’s where I grew up.

It’s very strange. So, no, I wasn’t a trust fund baby. But, what was I saying? I can’t even remember.

**John:** A couple points, I think, were all relevant, and I think we should get back to trust fund babies.

**Craig:** Trust fund babies. Yeah.

**John:** Everyone’s story about how they got started — I like to say get started rather than breaking in — everyone’s story about how they got started as a working screenwriter is different, but the commonality I found in every story is that they wrote something that someone read and said, “This is amazing. This is great. This is better than anything I have read this week, this year. I want to make this movie, or I want to see this happen.”

So, it all started with you wrote something amazing. It wasn’t that you had a good idea for a movie. No, you wrote something that people loved. And that thing that people loved often never got made, but it was so good that people said, “Hey,” not only did they pay attention but they said, “I want to work with you on this.”

And so in my case it was the script that should never see the light of day called Here and Now. And one of my professors read it, and classmates read it, and it got me to a producer. And the producer got me to an agent, and we got it sent out. And it never sold but it got me started. And everyone has some story of something that they wrote that someone said, “This is great. I want to see this happen.”

And it wasn’t that they wrote something that was like, “That’s pretty good. That’s about like an average screenplay I’ve read.” No. Someone said, “This is better than the other stuff.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so it all started with like, “You wrote something that was better than everything else there and ideally something that feels like we could make this into a movie, like I can see a way to make this into a movie.”

**Craig:** That’s key. I mean, I remember the phrase somebody used when I first started was “You can do this,” which is a big thing for them because they are constantly reading scripts where they think, “Well, there’s some interesting things here and there, but in the end I know what it’s like to write a screenplay from the outside, you know, as an employer, or producer, or studio executive. I know what my side of this is. I know the journey that the screenwriter is going to have to go through to some extent. And I don’t think they can do it. I don’t think this person can do this.”

Then you read a script and you meet the person and you think, “I do think the person can do this, and that is a big deal.” And it’s this weird kind of blink style judgment that they make that is based on the person, on the material itself. There is just kind of a vibe, like this guy gets it and this person doesn’t.

But what I was going to say before is, and it goes to your point about the material. Really, we don’t break in; we get noticed. And contrary to the current griping climate, there are more ways to get noticed now than ever before. That is why I am so astonished. It’s like, Amazon?!

The notion that you need Amazon to get you noticed is absurd. You can put a screenplay right now on the Internet. If somebody picks up… — Look at the guy who is on Reddit. The guy on Reddit who just started writing a story about marines who fell through time and landed in the Roman era — he was noticed in a way that would have never happened 20 years ago. Ever. And he is a screenwriter, and he is a professional screenwriter right now.

So, the notion that the walls are… — They are lower than they have ever been. So I don’t know what all the complaining is about.

**John:** Some people just need to complain.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s talk about the trust fund baby or the nepotism, because I was aware of this when we were doing rehearsals. I brought my daughter to see rehearsals for just like a half an hour two different days. And in the back of my head I’m thinking, “Oh, wait, is this some sort of like weird, special advantage for her? Does this make her more likely to be able to have a career in the arts because she saw it?”

And, like, well yeah, kind of.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because she got to see not the finished product, but she got to see the hard work. And I feel like a lot of times when you see people who are successful, and they come from either parents who are wealthy or parents or parents who were artists… — Like Lena Dunham whose show Girls I have to plug every podcast, her parents are both artists. And so I look at her, who at 25 is writing, directing, and starting in her own TV show, and working her butt off, I’ve got to think that is partly because she saw her parents working their butts off every day and achieving success by having worked really, really hard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I remember when I first met Steven Spielberg and I was really intimidated by him, and he was considering directing Big Fish. And so I guess I visited him on set. And I thought, “Well, he must just be magic, because he makes these amazing movies, and so he must have some sort of magic power.” And then I saw him and realized, “Oh, no, he is actually just working really hard.” Well, I can work really hard. Oh, it’s not magic.

And, I don’t know, that’s…

**Craig:** Well, I think that for kids of… — If your parents are in the business, and I know some people who are in the business whose parents were in the business, then I can see, well, you did have the benefit of a great private tutor. My parents don’t know anything about screenwriting and certainly could not have encouraged me or helped me as I was beginning.

**John:** The Gyllenhaals, their mother is an award-winning screenwriter. Their father is a director.

**Craig:** Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. But in the end, of course, they also, they’re Gyllenhaals, they have to be really good-looking to be onscreen, and they have to actually deliver the goods, which they have.

And so the point is, it’s not enough to… — I mean, sure, you could maybe get one or two, but the notion that, and now let’s turn to screenwriters and this absurd nonsense that there is this rash of trust fund screenwriters who have the luxury of writing all day the way that no one else does, because they are sitting on mounds of family money, is insane.

I came out here, I came to Los Angeles with my Toyota Corolla SR5 Red, you can link to that. It’s a gorgeous little car, [laughs] and $1,400 that I had saved up from working. That’s it. By the time I had rented my apartment and put first, last, and security down, I was basically down to about three or four weeks of money to sort of eat and live or whatever. And I immediately started calling up temp agencies and got work as a temp employee. And then got work — my first actual salary was $20,000. And there was no cushion. There was no anything. But I was writing.

Writing is free. It’s the freest thing in the world, assuming you have… — You know what? Forget the assumption. You don’t have a computer. You don’t even have electricity. You have a pad and a pen. [laughs]

**John:** I write a first draft by hand, with a pad and a pen.

**Craig:** It’s the freest thing in the world. It’s the last thing you need luxury for. This absurd notion that writing is so tragically difficult for the fragile human state that you must spend all day, you know, I don’t know, like Byron, languishing in your tuberculosis and scrawling on a pad for minutes at a time, and then taking breaks. It’s like, what?! No! No. It’s the last job you need a trust fund for.

**John:** You know, things you need trust funds for. I think we could probably make a list. Polo. I think Polo is a kind of sport that requires some trust funds.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s hard to become a professional polo player if you have no access to horses.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** Or like somebody to clean your little white chaps.

**Craig:** I think yachting probably.

**John:** Yachting. Yeah. That’s pretty much that. There are very few other things.

**Craig:** I mean, no, I don’t want to come off like a guy that doesn’t acknowledge that some people are born on third base and think they hit a triple. Because, that’s true; some people are like that. They are out there. But, there is a tendency for those who are on the bench to take swipes at everyone who is at the plate. Everyone is there for the wrong reason because, obviously, if there is no unjust reason for people’s success, then there is no unjust reason for their failure.

And they need an unjust reason for their failure.

**John:** To you point about being born on third base. I would argue that every American is born on third base.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so the difference between like me being born in middle class Boulder, Colorado versus someone being born in Alabama is pretty much meaningless in terms of a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. High class problems.

**Craig:** High class problems. Look, we can look at the various inequalities that exist in the screenwriting community and debate why they are there.

**John:** And there are inequalities.

**Craig:** There are. There are inequalities.

**John:** Under-representation of women. Minority representation isn’t where it needs to be. TV has made inroads, but features — hasn’t made the same kind of inroads. Those are all meaningful things that should be looked at and should be addressed.

But to say that it is because of what people’s families were before this I don’t think is accurate.

**Craig:** Well, and then it is also unfair to start listing off writers who are white men and succeeding and accuse them of being the beneficiaries of some trust fund. That’s bizarre to me. It’s not fair. I mean, I personally don’t — if you want to take a shot at me, it’s just patently absurd because obviously I’m not from a trust fund. Everybody knows what public school teachers make.

But then there are people, like poor Jamie Vanderbilt whose name is — he’s a Vanderbilt. He’s from the Vanderbilt family. And so it is easy to go, “Oh, well that guy…”

But here’s a couple of things to point out. One, Jamie is an excellent screenwriter. Excellent, regardless of what his last name is. And, two, there are like 1,000 Vanderbilts. I mean, I know Jamie. We have talked about this Vanderbilt thing. He is like, “Yeah, I was like to the big mansion in North Carolina once, but there are a lot of Vanderbilts. I don’t really have the Vanderbilt fortune. I’m not that kind of…”

It’s just not fair. It’s not fair to diminish what he’s accomplished. It is so hard to be a screenwriter. And it disgusts me, frankly, to see people tear down screenwriters on the basis of anything other than their work. And even then I wish they would stop tearing them down on the basis of work and just be nice.

It’s a hard job. Just be nice.

**John:** Just be nice.

**Craig:** Come on!

**John:** Three quick questions that we can wrap up with.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** First question is from Tucker. “Could you talk about the quote system for getting paid for assignments? Is it negotiable? Is it written in stone? Is it different for pitches you have sold? I’m up for a job but my quote is low. I don’t know how much wiggle room I have.”

**Craig:** Hmm. That’s a good question.

**John:** So, a quote is something that gets asked, like, “Oh, so what’s his quote?” And it is generally like what is the last you got paid for a similar job.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. I mean, the quote system is sort of pegged to what you are or would be paid for an original screenplay. That’s kind of how they back everything out. So you have a number. Like let’s say you sold an original screenplay for $300,000. Your agent will argue that that is your quote. Therefore your rewrite quote will be, I think, $200,000.

And it is a way of sort of benchmarking what your market value is for business affairs, because business affairs essentially goes by formulas. And their job… — These studios all understand that it is tragic when one of them increase someone’s salary, because that ripples across to all of them. And just as if I increase your salary at Fox, then Sony is going to have to pay that new number. If Sony does, it’s back to me, then I have to pay an even bigger number. They don’t like to do it.

**John:** We should say, though, it is not that Sony has to pay that big number. It is that Sony is going to feel pressure to pay that bigger number. They can choose not to pay that bigger number, and then they are just not going to hire you, or you can stand your ground. Your quote could drop because no one is willing to pay what you say you need to pay.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s true. Although when they start — when they get as far as, okay, let’s negotiate the deal, they understand already what your quote is. They don’t get into that, they don’t get to the “let’s negotiate a deal” phase in ignorance of your quote.

So, they are already aware of what they are going to roughly kind of pay. And they are dealing with fairly powerful agencies usually — CAA, UTA, WME — who leverage not only your quote and your worth as a client, but just the agency in general. So, that is roughly the quote system.

And then the deal is you get bumps, that’s the industry parlance for increases, when you get a movie green lit, if you get a movie mad, if the movie’s a hit. Stuff like that moves you up. Whiffing, not delivering the goods, that will move you down.

**John:** But we should say it is not like a D&D bonus where it is like, “Oh, your movie got this much, so your quote automatically bumps to a certain amount.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that since the last time you were paid something, the agency can say all of these things happened, so we think he is at this level now. And we think that is the bump? You can do it as a bump for this.

**Craig:** That’s right. And that’s the art of negotiating as an agent. You kind of are playing this sort of vaporous game about what these things are worth. And there are other factors that come into play. How in demand are you? Who wants you there? Does everybody want you, including the very important director and actor? Are you a studio that tends to pay what they call Full Freight?

Some studios are sort of notorious for being discount, where they say, “Look, we are not a big studio. We make smaller budgets, but then we try and compensate you additionally when the movie comes out and succeeds.” Other studios are full freight studios; they have tons of money and they are not catching a break.

So, it’s all… — This is why agents, theoretically, get 10%. [laughs]

**John:** A question from Mario. Mario says, “I am a Canadian currently working and living in California as a game developer.” But he’s also a screenwriter. “If a studio likes your work and wants to work with you, will they sponsor a work visa to allow you to live in the US? Otherwise it seems the only solution for me if I want to work in Hollywood would be to go back to Canada which seems a bit ridiculous considering I live so close to where the action is right now.”

So I actually know something about work visas. I know some international screenwriters. You can sometimes get sponsored by a work visa. More likely what is going to happen is once they start paying you enough money, like if you sell a spec script for a certain amount of money, or you are getting paid a certain amount of money for a job, you are going to find the Hollywood immigration attorney, like the guy in Los Angeles who does this. And he is going to figure it out for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s one of those things that money actually does sort of solve. And it will be some weird thing where as you form a loan out corporation, that loan out corporation is going to hire you. There is going to be some magic way to do it, because it is not uncommon at all.

**Craig:** It’s not. Although it has become a little more difficult since 9/11. Immigration got a little weirder. And bizarrely it is difficult for Canadians. I remember going through this with someone that we wanted to bring in from Vancouver to LA to work on a production for us. It’s difficult. And it’s annoying actually.

But, yeah, when there’s a will there’s a way.

**John:** Yeah. And money makes it easier.

**Craig:** Money seems to make things easier.

**John:** So, if you do sell that spec script, and you want to work here, then you get started on it, and it is going to take awhile, but you will make it all work out. And it has worked out for many people, many times before.

And the fact that you are a screenwriter, it’s different than if you are a costume designer. That feels like one of those jobs where you can fairly argue that there are many costume designers here; screenwriting is a specialty career.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s a good point. I mean, the concept behind the immigration blocking is “There are fifty unemployed costumers that are here that are citizens; we would rather that they be up for this job and not an import.” And you have to sort of justify that the imported employee is special and unique. And that is much easier to do when you are talking about art.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say if your agent or whoever is getting you this deal, someone who works at that agency will know how to do this. And will know who the first person is that you need to call.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Last question is about animation. “Since you are both working on animated projects right now…” I forgot, are you working on something right now?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m involved — I wrote a bit on this movie called Turkeys. And now I am involved sort of as a consulting producer.

**John:** Okay. And I’m working on Frankenweenie. So, this person is writing to ask, “I’m curious about how your deals for these projects were structured. Does the WGA have jurisdiction or is I.A.T.S.E. involved? When a WGA takes on an animation project, by whose rules are they playing? If a new writer breaks in with an animation project, can he negotiate a WGA deal?”

So, what was the deal on Turkeys? Is it I.A.T.S.E.?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. It’s I.A.T.S.E. Animation Guild 839. I don’t believe there has ever been a feature animated film that has been WGA, in part because I.A.T.S.E. Animation 839 has jurisdiction. The only WGA deals I’m aware of for animation are primetime Fox. That’s it. [laughs] I don’t know of any other ones.

**John:** The mocap, the Zemeckis mocap things are WGA-covered, and it is up in that weird gray area, are those animation or are those live action? And so far they have been counted as live action which s great.

**Craig:** Yes. And so that is the kind of gray area where the WGA has prevailed, and SAG and AFTRA and everybody has kind of tried to say, “Look, this is really, let’s call this live action, even if you are…”

It’s sort of like, “Okay, if I shoot you truly in live action, and then rotoscope you, it’s not like that is animation guild all of a sudden.” Animation is traditional. All images are drawn. Or, all images are entirely computer generated. So, if you are rolling film, or you are rolling video…

**John:** On Frankenweenie, they are shooting frames, but it’s one frame at a time.

**Craig:** Oh, they are doing stop motion?

**John:** Stop motion.

**Craig:** And is stop motion WGA or animation guild?

**John:** It ends up being moot because they have all been British productions. So I think, maybe I am covered by I.A.T.S.E., but I am pretty sure that it is just some bizarre British thing and I get a check every once and awhile.

**Craig:** I suspect that stop motion would be considered animation out here and not WGA.

**John:** I’m sure it’s considered animation.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I mean, the real question when you sign a deal for animated work, let’s talk about feature animation because that is what I am most familiar with, it’s not a question of WGA or not. It’s a question of union or not. Because they have every option of saying, “We are doing this non-union.” And your great interest is in making sure that at the very least it is covered by Animation 839 because, and 839 is the – I.A.T.S.E. is this really big union, and then they have all of these locals which are divisions. And Animation Guild is Division 839.

Because, you will get at least pension and healthcare at a certain level. And you may not ever vest in the pension system; I doubt I will because I don’t work that frequently in animation, but there is healthcare for those of you who don’t have healthcare. And that alone — that and some minimum protections. There’s not much else, frankly, that that contract provides. There are no residuals. There’s no credit protection. Certainly no separated rights. But it’s better than nothing.

**John:** Better than a kick in the butt. So, the lack of residuals you definitely feel when you write an animated movie. Because, like Corpse Bride, that sold a lot of video copies and I don’t get a penny for video copies on that.

**Craig:** Yeah,

**John:** And that does really hurt.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. The guys I always think of are Elliott and Rossio because Ted and Terry wrote Aladdin. Ted and Terry wrote Shrek. Not a penny in residuals from those movies. And we are talking about, god, billions in revenue.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s too bad about Pirates of the Caribbean being such a disaster and not making a cent for them. So…

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I can still feel a little bad.

**John:** You can feel a little bad for them.

**Craig:** Sure. You know me. Well, as a fellow trust fund baby, I feel bad for the ultra rich.

**John:** So this writer who’s writing in saying like, “If I broke in with an animation project, will I be able to join the WGA?” No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope. So, on your next project, which is written for live action, yes, maybe so. And I don’t know of any examples, but I’m sure there are. Oh, wait, no, no, no. One of my first movies…this got complicated.

Titan A.E., at some point in its genesis, I think they talked about doing it live action, so there was one… — There was a window at which it became a WGA-covered project, and it wasn’t. That does happen sometimes where it is like it is not clear whether you are going to do this animation or live action.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So that can happen. I don’t know of other examples like that.

**Craig:** The one I can think of is Curious George which I think started as an animated project and then moved towards a hybrid. And they had to move it out of.. — They tried, I think they fought, as I recall; I think there was a fight to try and keep it non-union. But the Guild successfully argued no. No, the second you put somebody in there…

Interestingly, they put in, there is a little bit of live action in WALL-E. It’s the only incident of that in any Pixar movie. And it is Fred Willard as the president. He actually filmed. And I’m kind of curious…I guess if it is just for that small amount they just got around it.

**John:** Yeah. Happy Feet has a few moments that I’m pretty sure are real people as well.

**Craig:** Hmm. I didn’t see those films.

**John:** You are not missing much. If you like penguins dancing? If that’s your thing, penguins dancing…

**Craig:** I love penguins dancing!

**John:** Well then I don’t know why you have missed it so far.

**Craig:** What’s wrong with me?!

**John:** Well, there are a lot of things that are wrong with you, but unfortunately we are out of time and we can’t talk anymore.

**Craig:** I think it’s fortunate. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So thank you, Craig. So, this was a podcast about, let’s see, luck.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Trust funds.

**Craig:** Yup. The Holocaust.

**John:** The Holocaust. Joe Eszterhas. And that really…

**Craig:** It’s a classic. And being utterly stupid.

**John:** Yeah. All these things, and more in this episode.

**Craig:** And more. [laughs] This was a good one. I like this one.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Anytime I get angry I think it’s a good one.

**John:** Okay. We will call you stupid. I like it like…

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best.

**John:** All right, thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Scriptnotes, Ep. 15: On screenwriting gurus — Transcript

December 13, 2011 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/screenwriting-gurus-and-so-called-experts).

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, a weird thing happened this last week. I thought I would share this anecdote, this story about a thing that happened this past week. It’s dinner time and we’re sitting down to eat some good dinner and we hear a helicopter overhead, which is not that unusual in Los Angeles. We have a lot of helicopters in Los Angeles because we have a lot of news copters, we have police helicopters. It’s pretty common to hear some helicopters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then I noticed this helicopter is persisting. It’s like, “Oh, well that’s kind of unusual.” While this is my most favorite time of year because of all the great stuff that happens this time of year, I don’t like that it gets dark so early, so it’s quite dark out. I notice that the helicopter’s light is going on. So they’re looking for something or someone in this area, so it’s a police helicopter, not a news helicopter.

We go out front and there’s two police cars out in front of our house. Well that’s not great news. If you’re a single person, you have the option of freaking out because you can just freak out that there’s a police helicopters overhead and there’s police cars out front. But when you have a young child, you’ve given up the right to freak out about things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re going to mirror your anxiety.

**John:** Yeah. You have to just completely play it off like, “Oh, hey, how neat. There’s those policemen. Aren’t policemen great? Let’s talk about how wonderful policemen are while we’re locking the windows and locking the doors. Oh, you know what, I think I’m going to turn on the alarm now instead of late at night. Hey, that’s great. By the way, did we shut the gate? Yeah, everything seems to be pretty good.”

We’re trying to watch the police officers out front to see what’s going on and then I notice the helicopter overhead is circling around. The light just keeps going over the back of our house. They’re looking for something right here. This isn’t one of those things where they’re following somebody down the street. Literally something is happening right next to our house. It’s probably the house that’s under construction next door because houses that are under construction tend to invite problems because no one’s actually living there.

All this time I’m trying to keep really calm and not freak out the kid. Then I saw something that was actually kind of amazing. Police helicopters, the light is incredibly bright. It’s sort of like a second sun in the sky. Because it’s pretty low overhead, it’s casting these really cool shadows across the driveway. The silhouette of the trees is really cool. You see every little branch projected onto the driveway.

But what’s even cooler is helicopters, they have to circle a little bit and so the shadows of the tree branches keep sweeping across the driveway in this really, really cool way. It’s like one of those stop motion Vimeo things where they do those long exposure landscape things where you see all the stars going in circles across the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that but it’s happening right in front of you.

**Craig:** It’s Koyaanisqatsi in your front yard.

**John:** It’s basically that word I can’t say in my front yard.

**Craig:** [laughing] Right.

**John:** I bring my daughter over to see it. “Hey, this is really cool.” I can genuinely say this is a very cool moment that is happening despite the fact that there could be murders next door. By the way, I’m completely holding onto this idea. If you see the next movie I direct has helicopters that are projecting branches onto the ground, you’ll know where it came from. This was my Alan Ball plastic-bag-blowing-in-the-wind moment because it was just really, really beautiful.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is the moment you’ll bore thousands and thousands of people with.

**John:** Oh, completely.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** People will be talking about it, reverentially at first and then they’ll just hate the moment.

**Craig:** Then they’ll realize, wait a second, [laughing] it was a plastic bag. That’s great.

Alright, so the helicopter is circling. What happened, murder?

**John:** That’s the thing about all police activity that happens in a city like Los Angeles is you never really know what happens. The next day we find out that it probably was a break-in, somebody trying to steal power tools next door. No one was hurt, nothing bad happened. It’s just one of those things where someone saw that there was a construction site, waited until it was shut down and then broke in to try to steal all the power tools.

**Craig:** You know, I used to live not too far from where you live so we would get the helicopters all the time. In fact, I was probably a mile or two away from where most of the bad things happened, which meant that the helicopter often was right over my house because they’re shining the light at the center point of their circle. I’m on the edge, I’m on the circumference of their circle.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes they start talking to the people once they find them. Have you heard the helicopter guys talking?

**John:** I have yet to hear the helicopter people talking. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, they’ve got this massive loudspeaker on those helicopters. You just hear them giving very specific instructions. It’s so odd to just be sitting in your house and then you just hear this chopper noise and then, “The people on the roof, move to the ladder. No, the other way,” [laughing] this very casual conversation with the people on the roof.

I live in La Canada now, which is up against the mountains northwest of Pasadena. Our interesting thing was last night there was this amazing windstorm that brutalized Los Angeles. For whatever reason or function of geography, Pasadena and La Canada always get the worst of it. Last night was no exception. We had winds up to 95 miles an hour. My little thing for a movie is, I always like it when mundane things are slightly out of place because it’s more shocking, I think, than, I don’t know, just the sweeping shots of CGI devastation.

I’m driving back from my office — because we lost our power, I had to go to my office to work. I’m driving back on the highway and there’s a large oak tree in the highway just sitting there. Yeah, you don’t see that every day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of cool.

**John:** When I was in Boy Scouts, there was one time we had a winter campout. It was really windy while we were up in the mountains but we drove back into Boulder and the traffic lights were down. The traffic lights had been knocked down or bent around themselves by this huge windstorm that happened while we were gone. It was very much like coming back into a post-apocalyptic scene.

We got home and there was no power at home. I’d come from a weekend of cooking over a campfire to building a campfire in the fireplace so we could actually have heat.

**Craig:** It doesn’t take much to remind how fragile our little grasp on civilization is.

**John:** It is. One thing I should say in reference to my earlier story about the police helicopter is there’s a danger that in telling that story I’m contributing to the fallacy of misleading vividness, which is that by telling you this story of this police action that happened next door, a listener in Topeka might thing, “Oh my god, I could never move to Los Angeles because it’s so dangerous because I just heard this story of this police thing that happened right next door to this guy whose podcast you’re listening to.”

That would be a mistake because if you actually stop and think about that story, it’s that the police you could say overreacted a bit to sending two police cars and a helicopter to potentially someone stealing power tools next door. It was really a very minor thing that I just had a very big reaction to and it felt very cinematic but it was really not that big of a deal.

**Craig:** That’s right, you don’t know. Maybe it was a murderer next door or maybe it’s just that the Los Angeles Police Department has this enormous arsenal of tools, so they bring the sledgehammer out for everything.

**John:** Yeah. While we were talking I actually looked up — Wolfram|Alpha is a really good place to go if you want to look up crime rates for places. The crime rate for Los Angeles I know had fallen a lot. The crime rate for Los Angeles is actually lower than the national average. It is lower than the California average. It is lower than Pasadena.

**Craig:** I believe that. You’d have to figure out which parts of Pasadena you’re talking about because there are parts of Pasadena that are pretty rough. But in general, one of the strange things about our culture is that — there was an interesting study I read a couple years ago: The violent crime rate in the United States has been dropping precipitously, I think, since the early ’90s and we are now back to levels that we haven’t seen since, I think, the ’50s or early ’60s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yet at the same time the reportage of violent crime has skyrocketed. While we live in this relatively un-violent period of time, we tend to think we’re living in the most violent period of time.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But in fact, we don’t.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No, it’s pretty good out there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop complaining.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought we might start today by doing some follow-up on previous episodes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Our last episode was on residuals and there was one question which came up in the comments section which I thought was pretty good. Residuals: do they count towards maintaining your health insurance?

**Craig:** They do not, not for the Writers Guild. They do for the Directors Guild, and I think we mentioned this last time. The Directors Guild automatically lops off, I think, half of the residuals. It may be a little more complicated than that but let’s just say for the sake of argument roughly half. And they steer those residuals into the health fund. Thus, as a result of that, your residuals count as earned income towards qualification for health care.

The Writers Guild does not lop any of your residuals off for health care. The exchange that we make, however, is that our earned residuals do not qualify us towards health care, only writing income.

**John:** Yeah. If you write a movie which is produced and you are earning residuals for it but you don’t continue to write other movies, your health plan will run out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You will stop being qualified for health insurance.

**Craig:** Yes, whereas in the Directors Guild — actually I directed a movie and all of my income was within one calendar year, so obviously I qualified for health insurance for the following year, but then I qualified again because the residuals the following year were enough to get me another year.

**John:** A weird loophole that happened for me was I’m not a member of the Directors Guild, but for a year I had Directors Guild health insurance which happened because maybe you remember a couple of years ago, Heroes was a TV show on NBC that was a huge success originally. After the first season of Heroes they decided they were going to do obviously a second season but they were also going to do these origin episodes.

They went to a couple filmmakers to say, “Hey, would you direct these one-off episodes of Heroes Origins that are creating new characters that could be folded into the universe?” A couple of us said yes, and so Kevin Smith was supposed to do an episode. I was supposed to do an episode. And they made a deal for us to do this.

Then the air went out of the Heroes balloon and they decided not to do it, but the money they paid me, for whatever reason, counted towards DGA. I ended up having Directors Guild health insurance for a year.

**Craig:** When you do, what no one tells you is that obviously you qualify for Writers Guild health insurance. Then this other health insurance becomes your secondary insurance.

What they don’t tell you, and you have to kind of figure out yourself is, that secondary insurance works, but every time you get something back from the Writers Guild, you have to then send that form to the Directors’ Guild so that they can process it. It’s the worst. It’s a full-time job. I was actually happy to not have secondary insurance. It was killing me.

**John:** Yeah, it was kind of a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mess.

**John:** Yeah, we should talk about health insurance sometime. That’d be a good thing to talk about.

**Craig:** The Writers Guild health insurance, like every health insurance system, is absurdly complicated and it’s not their fault. Frankly, the more complicated it is, it’s usually because the better it is.

We have an excellent health care system, but there are a lot of weird little ins and outs and things that people don’t know. You’re right, it would be — I mean, listen: god knows we risk boring everyone to death every time we delve really deeply into this stuff. But, why not?

**John:** I’ve actually had mostly good experiences with the WGA health insurance people. But I had one very bad experience where we were adding my daughter to our health insurance. The woman on the other end of the phone said, “No, I need the adoption papers.”

“Well, you don’t understand, I didn’t adopt my daughter.”

It was like, “No, you have to adopt your daughter.”

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It was this bizarre thing where she just couldn’t quite process what our family situation was. I was like, “I really need to talk to your supervisor right now.” It got all resolved.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the question for you is, does the Writers Guild handle your specific situation relatively better or worse than, say, if you were with Aetna or an even more faceless massive bureaucracy. Because you obviously have a twist.

The other thing is that the same-sex couple rules are changing constantly, it seems to me, at least. They seem to be in flux, whereas, the traditional man/woman/kid situation is in stasis.

**John:** Yeah, I would say, overall, the WGA seems to be handling it as well as any place handles that stuff, so, I’m not particularly worried about it.

Another note follow up question here. We were talking about video games and getting union representation, WGA representation for video game writing. One of the readers wrote in and said, “Nobody in game development gives a rat’s ass about the writer. If anything, we’re viewed as an inconvenience to most game developers, a necessary evil, if you will. I predict you have something to say about that.”

**Craig:** I don’t really care if people in video game companies look down on writers. They can look down on anyone they want. The question is: Are those writers serving a role that makes it such that it’s hard to replace them if they all walk? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter.

Unions aren’t about making people like you. They’re about protecting your job, setting some basic parameters for what you ought to be paid, and how you should be acknowledged for the work you do.

**John:** Yeah. Where would you start with the video game people? Would you try to go after everyone who works at the video game company, or just people who are doing, who are putting words on paper, or on a screen?

**Craig:** Well, this is one area where I tend to veer a little bit off from a lot of the more hard-line organizing folks at the Writers Guild. There is a tendency to want to overreach with these things and suggest that we should represent everybody that is, quote unquote, “contributing to story.”

The problem with that is, producers contribute to story, actors contribute to story, directors certainly contribute to story. Story isn’t the functional aspect when we’re talking about employment contracts.

The functional aspect is literary material. Who is putting their fingers on the keyboard, typing in words and printing them out? That is writing that we can represent, as far as I’m concerned. It’s provable, it creates literary material. Literary material is something you can take a look at and credit and assign authorship to.

I would say, if, let’s say, we were talking about organizing Bethesda, who are the people that are writing stuff down? Those are the writers.

**John:** I want to get on to our main topic today. Now, Craig, a question I get a lot, and sometimes at panels or forums or other things is: What books should I read if I want to become a good screenwriter? Are there any really good manuals or how-to guides for screenwriters?

I never have a good answer, because the short answer is that I don’t have one that I should say you should absolutely read. The longer answer sort of make me sounds like a jerk, because I end up sort of espousing too much opinion about other people who write books about screenwriting.

What do you say when people ask you that?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look: Obviously, a big difference between you and me is I don’t care about sounding like a jerk. I just do it. I immediately go to answer number two.

I mean, okay, short answer number one. What book should I read? You can read any book you want. None of them will be as useful as reading screenplays and watching movies and thinking about story and then writing the script. That is the only basic instruction set that you need. And that works. The books are useless, I do believe.

**John:** Useless, though? I mean, I would — okay…

**Craig:** Useless. Because, look, we live in a time now where we have the Internet. Okay? If I need to know how long a script should be, if I need to know how it should be formatted, if I need to know what it’s supposed to look like, if I need to know how much description I should use and all. That stuff is out there, it’s on your website, it’s all over the place. There’s no need to buy anything.

**John:** But some stuff that you learn in books is not about…it’s not the simple answers to a question; it’s more — it gets you thinking a certain way about how to do stuff. If a book provides… I’m genuinely playing devil’s advocate here, because I do share a lot of opinions with you on this.

But I feel like there could be useful information in these books, and useful ways of thinking in these books for people who have never thought about story in a way before. It gets them really thinking about story, or thinking about how puzzle pieces might go together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. I still don’t know if that is as instructive as reading the screenplay to a movie you thought you knew well and seeing, in a kind of reverse engineering way, how it came from a script. Because that’s all we’re really doing, is kind of pre-engineering a movie when we write a script.

Look: There are some basic instructional guides that aren’t harmful to you. Syd Field isn’t harmful, I don’t think, unless you somehow view it as a religious choice. I don’t think that Chris Vogler’s book is harmful.

**John:** You think it’s not harmful.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s only harmful if people actually think that that’s the book that’s going to teach them how to be a screenwriter. It’s not. There is no such thing.

**John:** Okay. In research for this podcast, I looked up, and there are 2,123 books about screenwriting on Amazon. —

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** — It’s really a small subset of them are the ones that I think we often hear or talk about here. Certainly Syd Field is the one we have to talk about first. Syd Field, his famous book is called Screenplay. I didn’t, I had to look it up, because we don’t, we just call it the Syd Field.

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember when I was a kid in math class, that there were kids who wanted to understand basically why multiplication worked a certain way and grasp the concept behind it, and then there were kids that just wanted the 12-step algorithm, and just push it in one side and it comes out the other. It’s like a dumb box in between.

You can’t approach screenwriting that way. People who use these books to sort of try and reduce the process to something easy and controllable are failing. The only value, really, is what you’re saying, maybe plug into some common vocabulary and get a basic sense of the fundamental, most common shape of a screenplay.

Frankly, I would much prefer to see people go online and read a free public domain copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, which I think has more actual philosophical meat behind it about what the point and purpose of drama is, both good and bad.

**John:** I have to think about why there are so many people who aspire to be screenwriters and why there’s a market, apparently, for books about screenwriting. I think it’s because the form looks so different from everything else. The format scares people. Yet, it seems approachable in the way that everyone has seen a bunch of movies. Therefore — like, I get so frustrated when I hear people say, like, “Oh, I could never write a novel, but I think I could write a screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As if it’s like, “Oh well, it’s just people talking.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly why they do this, because everybody thinks, “I can write a screenplay, I have a great idea for a screenplay. I just need a book to tell me how to do it, and then I’ll do it. But I’ve already done it in my head. I’ve already done this hard part, which is to come up with this great idea for a movie. Now, I just need to shove it through this process and the Screenwriting for Dummies will tell me about that. That’s just window dressing.”

No, that is the screenwriting. Your idea is useless. Useless. The screenwriting is everything. The process is the job.

That’s why I find these books to be, essentially… They are sold in bad faith by people who, quite frankly, were they better at screenwriting, would be screenwriting.

**John:** That is a source of frustration for me as I look through the people who are selling these books, is that most of them have no significant, or, really, any screenwriting credits whatsoever. They are aspiring screenwriters who probably have written some screenplays but have never actually made movies from their screenplays.

An exception: Blake Snyder, who has the Save the Cat books, which I’ve not read, but people seem to like a lot, has done. He unfortunately passed away. But he has two genuine credits to his name — just really makes him an exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Everyone else has zero.

**Craig:** That’s right. We used to just have the plague of wannabes and pompous professors who insisted that they would give us the key to all this stuff. Now, we have this new scourge, which are underemployed readers.

For those who don’t know, because there’s so many scripts in contention at studios and production companies, the executives and gatekeepers hire people to read them, evaluate them, and score them. There’s a whole shadow industry of people that read and rate scripts.

Many of those people, I think, quite a few of whom don’t even want to be screenwriters, they want to be executives. Many of those people, faced with underemployment or lack of employment, begin to sell that service to others as a screenwriting consultant. Now they’re leveraging thousands of dollars out of people by reading their scripts and giving them so-called expert coverage. It’s atrocious.

**John:** And frustrating. I guess I come back to a question of, you know, I went to a university, I went to a film school. I went there to learn how to make movies. I had screenwriting classes. They were genuinely helpful. I’ve been a guest lecturer at screenwriting classes. I’m trying to in my head differentiate what that is versus what my frustration is with the guys and experts.

**Craig:** John, I have it. It’s — look, I just did, yesterday or two days ago, I guest spoke at Howard Rodman’s class at USC. I came there in good faith. You go to these things in good faith. And I think that for well-credentialed, respected academic programs, they’re offered in good faith.

So much of this is not. So much of this is simply a scam. You can smell it from a mile away. The truth of the matter is, there’s not much value in me reading some random person’s script, then giving them advice, because, almost always, they just don’t have it.

I want to be clear, and so, by the way, that would be in bad faith, especially if I took money, obviously. It’s about me.

I want to be clear, because a lot of times, people who are aspiring to be screenwriters feel that people like you or me are saying this stuff because we’re trying to keep them out, or hide the truth from them. Quite the opposite. I want more and better screenwriters. I want many, many screenwriters, better than I am, to come and make better movies than I make. Books aren’t going to make that happen. Talent is going to make that happen.

I really, more than anything, I’m actually trying to be very prosocial about this and say, “Please, save your money.” Screenwriting is free. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that by spending $3,000 you’re going to exercise a control that you so desperately want to have. I want that control, too. I don’t have it either. None of us do. Sorry.

**John:** One thing that occurs to me as we’re talking: While I didn’t honestly read a lot of the screenwriting books growing up, I have read a ton of programming books, because I love making apps, I enjoyed programming since I was a kid. I’m not especially great at it. I can do it, if push comes to shove. But I have real blind spots towards it. It’s not something that comes very naturally to me.

I’ll teach myself a language. I’ll teach myself Perl or Ruby or try to teach myself Objective-C, which just doesn’t fit my head very well. I can buy as many books as I want to buy, but I am searching for that book that says, like, “Oh, this is the magic formula for how you make any app.” And it’s like I said, I guess I’m guilty of that, too, is that I want there to be an easy way that just makes it all simple and possible. And it’s not.

You look at actual real programmers, Nima Yousefi, who does the programming for our stuff now, it’s just — it’s good and it’s natural for him. It’s just the work. He didn’t get to be good at it by reading a bunch of books about it. He got good at it by doing a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, the fabled 10,000 hours of doing something, it really does. I empathize with anybody who, faced with writing their 1st screenplay, or their 3rd or their 12th, who is seeking to be recognized for their work. I empathize with the pain and the fear that they have. Certainly, I empathize with their psychological craving for some kind of secret trick, control, leverage point, anything. It is a terrible drowning feeling when you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You desperately want to do it right.

It is discouraging to say to people, “There is no lifeguard on duty. The only way you will survive this drowning is by swimming through it.” But, unfortunately, there is no lifeguard on duty. These books will not help you. These people who charge you money will bleed you dry.

Think about this for a second. You are, let’s say, somebody who has a modicum of talent. But you’re raw. You are craving some assistance, some help. You spend money on a professional script consultant. They read your script.

They have a choice, they can say to you, “This is very far off the mark, you need to go write two or three more scripts and really figure out what this is about. Then, spend your money with me.” Or, they may say, “You have no talent, stop.”

Or they may say, “Wow, there’s great potential here. Here’s a bunch of notes,” that by the way, anybody could have given you. “They’ll make your script better. You go work on that, then come back, I’ll read it again, or I’ll read your other script, or I’ll read your third script. You’re the one. If only you, three or four more of my amazing sessions at $1,000 a pop and you’ll make it.”

They’re always going to do that, because it’s a scam. It’s a scam. Don’t do it.

**John:** We should probably differentiate between a couple things we’re talking about, here. I would come down on the side of, if somebody wants to read a book, it’s a small cost to reading a book. It’s going to cost you, now, $10, $15, and it’s going to cost several hours of your time. There’s the danger that it’s going to lead you in a very bad direction. But everything is a danger that’s going to lead you in a bad direction. It’s not a bigger gamble than anything else.

I would come down on the side of, “Hey, if the book seems interesting, go ahead and read it.” That’s basically what I’ve done with Stuart now, is that, Stuart is, you know, a young aspiring writer. As people ask questions, like, “Hey, is this a good screenwriting book?”

I would say, “Hey, Stuart, read this book and write a review for the site.” That’s what we’re doing with that.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Seminars, I am opposed to seminars. I am opposed to seminars where the masterful instructor comes in and teaches you how to write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, me, too, yeah.

**John:** Linda Seger’s known for them, Robert McKee is known for them.

**Craig:** Linda Seger. Linda Seger. Derek Haas was at some event and Linda Seeger was there speaking. She was peppering her speech with authoritative comments about how she assisted somebody who once wrote a Cagney and Lacey.

Good Lord. People are spending money? Why? Why? It’s crazy to me.

Listen, I completely agree with you on this. If all you lose is 80 bucks on six books, whoop-de-do. Go for it.

By the way, when it comes to… Look, there are books that I actually, I like recommending to people, because I don’t want to be a total jerk about it. I think, actually, rather than reading the Chris Vogler books, which are sort of a screenwriting view of Joseph Campbell’s work, just read Joseph Campbell.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re wonderful books to read anyway, just to understand the commonalities of human narrative. But I would certainly say, before you start spending even money on books, you should read John’s site, you should check out, god, there’s just a whole bunch of sites out there.

**John:** You should also read screenplays.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing you keep coming back to, is that, you need to read as many screenplays as you possibly can read. You need to read the great screenplays. You need to read the screenplays to the movies that you love to see how those movies were made.

But you also really need to read bad screenplays. People don’t take my word for this, but I was a reader for TriStar for a year, and for other places for six months before that. I read, and had to write coverage on 150 terrible screenplays. You learn so much about what never works by reading bad writing.

**Craig:** So true. Not just what doesn’t work, but also where it could have worked, but the writer wrote himself out of something good, because they overwrote or they underwrote. You know, good advice, read bad scripts.

I have a few, if people want to read them. [laughter]

**John:** I’m saying, fine on books if you find that helpful. Just make sure that you’re also reading scripts. No on seminars. No on paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just — if people can write in with comments if they’ve actually had a good experience where it has completely changed their…

**Craig:** They will. By the way, John, they will. They get so defensive. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who are so defensive, but in the end.

**John:** I want to see one produced writer —

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** — who can show me where they paid a script consultant and that’s what got them where they are.

**Craig:** Thank you, thank you. It’s very dispiriting to have to argue with somebody about why they’re wasting their money. It’s a little bit like, arguing with people who spend money on psychics. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead, spend your money. I don’t care. it’s not my problem.”

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I think that’s it. I mean, is there anymore to say about gurus or experts?

**Craig:** Ptheh.

**John:** Ptheh. Ptheh basically summarizes Craig Mazin’s position on that.

Well, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Very good.

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