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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/where-movies-come-from).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 359 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be looking at where movies come from with a focus on feature rooms, IP deals from Wattpad and DMG, and a story of someone impersonating film producers. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about accents, agents, and Lovecraft.

**Craig:** I don’t know how we can possibly do better than last week. I just want to remind you last week’s episode was perfect, correct?

**John:** It was, in fact, a perfect episode. So we’re not going to try to duplicate the perfection of a two-person episode, but because we have so much on our plate we have an extra guest. That is Liz Hannah who is joining us. She’s a screenwriter with all sorts of nominations for The Post. She’s also writing so many movies at the moment and literally just came from a pitch. Liz Hannah, welcome to the show.

**Liz Hannah:** Hi, thanks for having me. This is super exciting.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** Yay! So I first met Liz up at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and I was just impressed by how smart and devoted you were as a first-time adviser up there. You seemed to just get it in a way that was so exciting.

**Liz:** It’s all an illusion. It was all a trick so I could just be on this podcast. I was just auditioning the whole time.

No, I mean, I think I was really impressed. I didn’t really know what to expect about the Sundance Lab. And I was so impressed obviously by the scripts I read and by the people there, but also just the dedication of the advisers. I mean, it’s sort of contagious how much you talk about the fellows and how much you – and it’s also really – it’s so educational to go back to brass tacks of screenwriting and talk about structure, and character, and exposition, and it’s very helpful then when I was writing a pilot that day. I was like, “Oh, these are the things I should think about.”

**John:** Absolutely. So our last episodes have been brass tacks. They’ve all been about craft. None of that today.

**Liz:** Great. Love it.

**John:** Today is just the industry.

**Liz:** Super exciting.

**John:** Today is just how movies get sort of put together.

Before we get to that though we have follow up. So, two episodes ago, or maybe last episode, a listener wrote in with a question about the Jackman shot. And so a Jackman shot was something he had found in an old screenplay and wondered what is a Jackman shot. And we had no idea. Luckily, a listener did.

Simon in San Francisco says, “I did a little web sleuthing and I think I found the source of the term Jackman shot. Fred Jackman was a director, cinematographer, and special effects guru in the ‘20s and ‘30s. He had a remarkable 88 credits as a cinematographer from the mid ‘10s through the late ‘20s, as well as 11 credits as a director including the 1923 production of The Call of the Wild, which he also wrote.” So a screenwriter.

“From 1930 to ’41 he worked in special effects, winning an Academy Award in 1934 for ‘the development and effective use of the translucent cellulose screen in composite photography.’”

**Craig:** Obviously. Yeah, I mean, now that you say that, of course that’s what the Jackman shot is.

**Liz:** By the way, this is why you needed me on the show last week, because I obviously knew the answer to that off the top of my head.

**John:** There’s nothing like primitive visual effects. That’s your wheelhouse.

**Liz:** Absolutely.

**John:** So what they’re describing though, it sounds very reasonable. If it was written in a script as a Jackman shot because it was a brand new idea to have sort of like, OK, we’re superimposing a translucent thing in front of the screen to sort of build a matte shot kind of thing. That was new.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting is that all those years ago, decades and decades ago, screenwriters were still writing camera shots into their screenplays. Isn’t that nice to know, world of dumbass modern gurus?

**Liz:** I mean, the thing also that I think is cool is like he was a multi-hyphenate in many different things. It’s always encouraging when you talk to young writers or you talk to anybody who wants to write is like, well, whatever you past experience is just bring that into your writing. Whatever you’ve been influenced by. Whatever makes you different, you can bring that into your writing. So that’s how we got the Jackman shot.

**Craig:** And then you might get a shot named after you.

**Liz:** I’m going to be real honest. I’m a little disappointed it has nothing to do with Hugh. I was really hoping for that. But, I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Just as a phrase it’s a little porny.

**Liz:** It’s very porny. I was very nervous about what we were discussing. I was like, wow, hot take.

**Craig:** Yeah, starting off with the Jackman shot. You normally end with that. OK. Moving on.

**John:** Well, what I thought was cool about looking at this guy’s bio, so he’s working in like 1910, 1920, like literally the start of the film industry. So Liz saying he’s a hyphenate, well, I guess everyone at the start of an industry is sort of a hyphenate because what are these jobs. It’s not obvious that you need a screenwriter and a director to be separate people.

**Liz:** Is it still obvious that that’s a thing–

**John:** Well that’s a thing we can talk about. The idea of a screenplay was sort of invented sort of in these early stages because like we have to figure out what we’re actually shooting. And so the idea of like I’m going to do visual effects, like is that a thing that we need?

So you look around today, we have new media stuff happening. So we have VR stuff. It’s like well what are those jobs? Obviously people are going to be moving back and forth between a lot of things because new stuff is being invented every day. And so you look back early as film and it feels a lot like where we are right now with some of the new technologies.

**Liz:** I mean, even think about sort of what I spent most of my morning talking about is like what is the movie industry going to look like in five years depending on say the Disney acquisition, depending on what happens with studios. And then you’re reinventing sort of what a Chairman looks like, what a CEO looks like, what the President of Production looks like because you’re going to be cross-boarding these things with different people that have been doing that job and now they’re going to work at the same place.

I mean, and I think just in the process of how the industry has developed really over the last I’d say five years, I mean, who knows kind of what is going to be profitable and also keep people in jobs in the next two years.

**Craig:** I’ll be honest. Not me. I have no idea. I am just – I have never felt less confident about what the future was going to hold for our business. If you are some kind of Hollywood or film and television industry prognosticator I actually feel bad for you. Because I don’t think there’s any way any of us can foresee what’s going to happen. Just based on the track record of the last 12 years, almost foolishness to try and predict at this point.

**Liz:** Well, I mean, the fact that the Mister Rogers documentary and RBG were two of the most successful movies so far of 2018, like obviously in comparison to what their budget was. That’s insane. Who would have said that a year ago? Well, maybe a year ago we would have said it. But who would have said that three years ago?

**Craig:** I can think of one person. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Definitely.

**Liz:** Oh, well, also Ruth be doing those planks, girl. Please, right now, be planking.

**John:** We need you.

**Liz:** We need you. Do you need a liver? Do you need a heart? What do you need? We got you.

**Craig:** We got some Heparin for you over here. What can I do? Can I massage your shins?

**Liz:** Anything.

**Craig:** Let’s keep the blood moving.

**John:** So what Liz brings up is this question of as studios are merging and possibly the Fox/Disney merger, I was in a meeting yesterday and we were talking about going out with these things. Like, well, do we go out to Fox because is Fox a thing? And we just don’t know whether six months from now whether Fox still exists as a brand, as an entity. Do you go out with this project to them or is it just not worth your time because ultimately you’re dealing with Disney down the road.

**Liz:** Well, and it has to do also with control. Right? If you are going to say sell it to Fox, or I think Fox is sort of test case of what’s going to happen in the next two or three years for every studio. I mean, if it goes well then who knows what happens? If it doesn’t go well, who knows what happens? But it’s also at the end of the day is if you sell something to one of these studios that may not be what it is now right now then is it going to go and disappear into the hands of somebody you’ve never met before because of the chain of command of how that goes?

So I think as creators right now the biggest decision, it’s always been a big decision, but it has never been more important than it is now of who you’re selling your material to.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that material. So our feature topic today is where movies come from. And so as we all know when a mommy movie and a daddy movie love each other very, very much sometimes they make another movie.

**Liz:** I thought it was a stork movie.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. I forget.

**Liz:** Come on. We’ve got kids listening.

**Craig:** Women. Daddy loves a stork very, very much.

**John:** But I think so often on this podcast we talk about the script is where, a screenplay is where a movie begins. It’s the first iteration of the movie. It’s the genesis of the movie. It’s the plan for the movie. And while that’s true, it is the first time that we have a vision for what the final movie is going to be, this is what it’s going to feel like to sit in a theater and watch it. The screenplay captures of that experience. So much of what we work on isn’t the original idea behind it, the original sort of like this is a movie behind it started before there was a screenplay.

So, let’s talk about some of our recent projects. Like The Post, where did The Post come from? What is the genesis of The Post?

**Liz:** The genesis of The Post was really my reading of Katharine Graham’s memoir Personal History. It’s an original screenplay. It was not adapted from the book. It was the first time I had ever heard of this woman more than in a casual mention. And I read this book which she won the Pulitzer Prize for. It’s one of the most incredible – excuse me – one of the most incredible memoirs I’ve read. The audiobook she reads herself, which is truly amazing. But I just thought she had such an amazing perspective on her life. And she was a different version of a woman that I had seen depicted in cinema.

And I was I think in my early 20s when I first read the book, and I was like this should be a movie. So, you know, all of these overnight successes, it takes ten years or longer. But I didn’t sit down to write it really until March of 2016 when I kind of had really lost my way with writing a little bit. I felt very discouraged. I hadn’t sold something. I was kind of thinking maybe I’m going to give this up. And then my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time and then I married purely because of this advice, was like “You should probably write that Katharine Graham movie that you’ve been talking about for six years or whatever.”

And so I sat down to write it. And, you know, it was I think for me very much about a woman finding her voice. Very much about a woman standing on her own two feet. It was extraordinarily universal in terms of you don’t have to be a 55-year-old woman in 1971 to feel excluded. You also don’t, I think, have to be a woman to feel like the underdog. That was something that was really interesting about the making of the movie was sort of transcending even just the gender discussion of it.

But, yeah, I mean, it came really from my love of Katharine Graham. And then it just proceeded from there.

**John:** So your project, you got the inspiration, you got the vision for it from reading this book and sort of the life of Katharine Graham, it’s not based on anything. There was no preexisting piece of intellectual property where they bought this book and they hired a writer to do it?

**Liz:** Correct.

**John:** Craig that sounds similar to you and your situation with Chernobyl where you had a vision for telling the story of Chernobyl but it wasn’t based on any one piece of source material. Fair?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And I love Liz’s story here because it is a little bit of a beacon for people at home who are in the same position that she was in. Because we are I think falsely told that Hollywood only makes things that are based on IP. The fact that we all just casually use the word IP or those initials IP is so embarrassing to me. It’s a little bit like the way we were saying last week that fans now use the word franchise which is just this awful corporate word, but the truth is if you are fascinated by a story that Hollywood wouldn’t necessarily kneejerk their way into making, well, you’ve discovered something special. And you don’t need to buy anything.

So, the really simple rules are if it’s a fact it’s not anybody’d property. Facts are not property. If you read someone’s autobiography they have put the facts of their life into the public domain. The book isn’t in the public domain. You have to purchase the book. That’s a fixed copy of something. But the facts are representable. And so in this case Liz came across this memoir. She read it. And that it sounds like inspired her to gather lots and lots of research and that’s exactly what happened to me with Chernobyl.

I read just a random article and then I started looking at Wikipedia. And then suddenly I was just buying books. And one book in particular moved me and made me need to write this show.

If what you’re writing is based on truth you have this wonderful opportunity to research and write it.

**Liz:** And I also always think truth, you know, when people start to fictionalize things of the past it can get really dicey. And I have sort of a kneejerk nauseating reaction to that. And the thing I always tell people is you obviously have to dramatize things to make it a piece of narrative work. It’s not a documentary. Tom Hanks is not actually Ben Bradley. But if you’re condensing storylines you’re dramatizing things or you’re amalgamating characters because of whatever, there’s too many. That’s fine. But truth often is much more entertaining than fiction. And that’s the thing that I’ve often learned in working in the nonfiction space is any time I felt that I’m being sort of pigeonholed or something because of the truth or because of the facts of the history it’s like you go read one more book, and you go read one more article, or you go watch a documentary and like, “Oh no, that is way more interesting than anything else I could come up with.”

**Craig:** That is so true. It’s such a good point. You know, I think that if you fall in love with a topic the way you fell in love with yours and the way I fell in love with mine, you begin to have a sense of loyalty to the facts. You do feel a bit queasy about changing them up. To the point for me where part of my deal with HBO is that when we finally do air this miniseries at the conclusion of each airing, initial airing, we’ll have a little separate podcast that will be me talking about what changes were necessary to be made and what the true-true truth was because–

**Liz:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I’m obsessed with just the accuracy of it. Like you said, you have to do some things, but you’re so right. The more you can just stick with what’s real I think people can feel it. And if you stray they can smell the cheating, you know.

**Liz:** Totally, and I think it’s already hard to commit people to watch I think – I guess it’s not hard to commit them to watch true stories, but it’s hard to commit them to watch biopics, or period pieces, or things like that. And if there is something false or inaccurate, you’re right, they’ll sniff it out. And it’s immediately a punching bag. And you don’t need to give somebody a target like that.

**John:** Now, most of the movies that we’re making these days are not biopics. They’re not based on true events. The big movies are big movies and increasingly they are based on previous material. So, I’m about to start working on a project that is not a remake but is sort of related to an existing big studio property. And it’s fascinating because it’s a movie I very much wanted to do for a long time but I couldn’t do it any other place. They have a hold of this thing. So it’s the one place I could do it.

We had Kelly Marcel on before who talked about Saving Mr. Banks which was a movie that she could sort of only do at Disney.

**Craig:** It’s a big swing to take, right?

**John:** That’s a rare case where it is based on true events but it could only be made at Disney.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** So getting back to the discussion of Fox and Disney, some of these big moves are really about underlying properties that they want to control. They would need to have a big enough catalog of things to do. There are three different articles I wanted to take a look at in this segment. The first was this thing that broke this last week. Chris Lee was writing for Vulture about Wattpad. And I knew of Wattpad only through my daughter who started to read these things and it was one of her first sort of social media kind of things. We let her read stories on Wattpad. But if you don’t know it, it is a site. It’s mostly through an app. It has 65 million unique visitors per month. And it’s all digital literature. So, there’s a lot of fan fiction but it’s also other original literature.

This article though was talking about how some of the projects that began on that thing have become real Hollywood properties. So, Kissing Booth was a 2011 story book series that got turned into a movie that aired on Netflix and was a big sensation on Netflix. Hulu made a 10-episode straight to series order for Light as a Feather based on a Wattpad story. And what the Wattpad creators are describing and they say is their unique advantage is that all the stories that are read on the platform have all these eyeballs and comments about what people love about it. And so there’s free – there’s engagement for it before it ever becomes a movie or a TV series in ways that most of the projects that we make, you know, or people have read it before there’s a greenlight for it to go into production.

So, it reminded me a little bit of we talked years ago about Amazon Studios which was trying to do this thing where they—

**Liz:** The pilot movie.

**John:** The crowd-sourcing. And maybe perhaps a difference is that the crowd-sourcing that’s happening on this literature on Wattpad, they’re actually reading the real thing. They’re not trying to read a script. They’re reading an actual story and responding to the story. They’re not responding to this theoretical movie down the road.

But, Liz, if someone came to you with a Wattpad story and said it has this big sensation behind it, what would be your first instinct? Would you look at it just as the thing itself? Or do you feel the weight of all the eyes behind it?

**Liz:** No, I think you have to just look at it as yourself. I knew absolutely nothing about Wattpad until I read this article this morning and I was like both traumatized and horrified and intrigued. I can’t imagine having anyone vote on scenes. Like we have to deal with notes from so many people. If I had to get notes, I mean, poor Rian Johnson was like all I could think about while reading this. He’s living the Wattpad life on a constant basis.

But that was really I think for me – that’s what my reaction is to that. I got looped into one tweet that Rian did about Star Wars and all of a sudden it was this cacophony of opinions and negative things. Like telling me what I was supposed to do about it. I was like I’m not involved in Star Wars. You know, hey, give me a call, but like I’m not involved. I’m not doing that. So, you know, I think for me in this Wattpad world, sure, if there’s an original story then I would just treat it as any original story. I mean, I’ve adapted books before. I’m about to adapt another book. And I think you take what works. You streamline the story to convert it into a two-hour visual piece. And you make sure that the emotions and the integrity of the story is still present.

But we live in a visual medium. We don’t live on the page. So, I think you have to make choices and sacrifices that way.

But, yeah, I also think I would be extraordinarily wary knowing that 65 million people had voted on like two sentences. And whether or not X and Y were going to hook up in the next chapter. Like that’s not that enticing.

**John:** It’s great that you bring up Star Wars because we talk about that on the show quite a lot. That sense of ownership over the course of things and how stuff goes next. And Fifty Shades of Grey was, you know, it was not Wattpad. It was the same kind of thing where there was a tremendous sense of excitement about it before it was really even a book series and then before it was a movie. And so that author had a tremendous amount of control.

I do wonder if sort of from Wattpad’s point of view, because they don’t own anything, and so I guess they have a relationship with these authors and they can help facilitate some stuff, or they could maybe help surface some things that could be promising to Hollywood. But I don’t see how Wattpad sort of grows to the next step.

Craig, what was your feeling reading through this?

**Craig:** It does feel a little bit like one of these Internet stories, and I’m doing the thing I said I wouldn’t do, which is try and predict the future, but a lot of these Internet entities grow rapidly, build up, and then collapse under their own weight. There’s some sort of change happens. A lot of times it’s related to the company attempting at long-last to make money off of it. Which ends up ruining it.

My daughter is also a Wattpad user. I personally, I think this is about as double-edged as a sword can get. On the one hand, I think it’s fascinating to see how people that otherwise wouldn’t even be looked at by the traditional publishing industry, and I’m not even going into the usual list of marginalized identities. How about let’s just talk about age?

**Liz:** Yeah, for sure.

**Craig:** The girl who wrote, what’s the big one that they – Kissing Booth? 15 years old. It was 15 years old. It was a book series. And it was read 19 million times. Now that’s amazing. That just is simply something that until three years ago not only didn’t happen, couldn’t happen. Not possible to happen. So I love that.

Here’s the part that’s terrifying to me. My daughter and your daughter, John, are being raised in a world where this is not new. The total integration of reader and writer, there is now this complete loop. And it is not new to them. It’s normal. And I’m terrified by this because I am concerned that something is going to happen to our ability to create things if all of the artists ultimately become marketers before they’re able to mature as artists. Because that’s what something like this does to you. When our kids learn from apps and things like Wattpad that their worth and the worth of their creativity and thought and output is defined by likes and views, well, they become marketers.

And I personally think that it’s nice to have a little bit of separation between the people who are attempting to pry my money out of my wallet and people who are trying to create art. And I don’t mean high art. I mean any art. Even if it’s Funny Guy Falls Down art.

So, this is concerning. And I…that’s my general vibe is “Ugh.”

**Liz:** Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, because I think we’ve been seeing the sort of disintegration of the relationship between the storyteller and the audience over the past few years, specifically with Twitter I think. The veil has been lifted. You can speak to almost anybody. And I think that’s a really important relationship. And I think there are also really important roles. And the role of the storyteller is one thing and the role of the audience is another thing. That does not mean that one is greater than the other. They’re actually in my mind both equal in what they’re trying to do.

But to people who are commenting on Wattpad about what should change in a story, my question to them is are you trying to be a storyteller and then in that way go write your own story and we’ll read that and read it. Or, are you an audience that is trying to engage in a different way and in a Choose Your Own Adventure way, because that’s what’s been taught to us now through social media that can happen.

And so I think that’s really what’s confusing/concerning with me about this. Like we can’t just create something and have it go into the ether and have it be challenged or accepted or questioned or any of these things that happen without tearing it apart. You know?

**John:** Yeah. I think the praise for Wattpad is that unlike a lot of online systems it does seem to be surprisingly positive. That there’s a community of not ripping each other apart and bringing each other down. And so if they can maintain that that’s fantastic.

And I can think of myself as the 14-year-old version of me who would have written and probably would have written on one of these platforms and it would have been great to have that experience and that exposure. But I’m not sure I would want my same name, my same pen name, I don’t know that I want to be for the rest of my life my 14-year-old self.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I do wonder and worry about the degree that like Beth Reekles who is the 15-year-old who did this and another girl was a 14-year-old who wrote Death to my BFF. And so now they’re doing a TV series based on it. And you can’t escape from some of that stuff. The choices you made when you were 14, I just feel like you should be able to—

**Liz:** Be a kid.

**John:** Yeah. And you should be able to like wipe that stuff clean and start again. And so what has been so nice about us growing up where our lives professionally sort of started after college is you could sort of go through all that rocky stuff and get on the other side and announce yourself as the person you are. You could sort of debut. And these people are sort of debuting so early, so young, and maybe that’s just the time we live in. Maybe that’s the time of Parkland shootings and stuff that you are who you are at an earlier age.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** But I do wonder and worry for these kids.

**Liz:** I don’t know. I mean, I think, A, these two girls, 14, 15 year olds, like when I was 14 and 15 I was trying to figure out how to like sleep over at somebody’s house and not cry I’m sure. I was not in a place that I was writing a book series.

**Craig:** I feel like we’re the same person.

**Liz:** I know. It’s really weird. No, but I can’t not like give them so many props and it’s such an accomplishment. They should be super proud. But I do agree. I mean, I think – the anonymity of being an adolescent and a teenager and being able to mess up and being able to make choices I think is really important. I also think it’s really important as a writer to develop your own voice. And I think choosing one criticism, be it positive or negative, coming into shape that voice is really important. And I mean I know you guys have talked about this a lot and I’ve talked about it before is choosing who the people are that read your drafts. Choosing the people that you get. And it’s not looking for necessarily I’m going to the people who are going to always give me positive reinforcement, but I know that they are respectful. And they’re going to be honest. And they also know what I’m trying to do.

And it’s not them trying to make what they want to make. It’s what I’m trying to make. And when you don’t have access those five people when you have access to 65 million people, I think that is really scary. I don’t want to watch a movie and not know that the filmmaker has a voice and opinion that is wholly their own behind it. I want to go see something that is very definitively done by a person.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Liz:** Not by a crowd source.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes! Amen.

**John:** The second article I put here to discuss. This is an article by Scott Johnson writing for the Hollywood Reporter. It is nuts. And so this was—

**Liz:** Oh, bananas. This one, bananas.

**Craig:** The best.

**John:** So this one could have also been a How Would This Be a Movie. But because it was about the movies I thought it was good to talk about it here. So what’s happened is for several years now, but increasingly in this last year, some of the most powerful women in entertainment, so producers, studio executives, have been contacting men generally or other rich folks and getting them excited about a project they’re developing. They tend to go off to Indonesia. They do some research stuff. They end up paying local guides. And only after months in some cases and thousands of dollars spent do they realize the people that they were talking with were not at all the people they were talking with, especially this one woman who somebody impersonates Amy Pascal who produced your movie, Sherry Lansing, Stacy Snyder, Gigi Pritzker.

So this article we will link to has audio recordings of some of these calls as well. It’s just nuts. And I think it speaks to both the classic sort of like con men and sort of like you believe what you want to believe, but sort of uniquely that these people believe like, “Oh, there might be a movie underneath all this.” The dream of like I’m going to be involved with the movies I think is partly what’s getting these people to go to these lengths.

So, I’ll encourage you all to read the story, but I’m just curious what you thought of – first off, you know Amy Pascal. You and I both know Amy Pascal so well. I can’t – she is in my head inimitable. And so—

**Liz:** I don’t know how you make that up.

**John:** But to somebody else who is getting an email from her—

**Liz:** Sure. Of course.

**John:** And talking on a phone call.

**Liz:** You know, it’s funny. I was talking to my husband about this article this morning because I said I was like, you know, particularly about the photographer who is mentioned, and again, this is a horrible thing that happened to him and I’m not faulting him in any way, but I was like why wouldn’t you just call Amy’s office? That was sort of my first question. And then my husband was like, “Well, those numbers are really hard to find. And if you called the Sony switchboard they’re not necessarily going to do…”

There were a number of things that I understood the process of why you wouldn’t do that and how that could be difficult. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know, it just sounded so shady to me. The whole thing. Like you’re getting on a plane to go to Indonesia paid for by somebody that you’ve never met before? Like I’m not going to get on the phone with a lot of people I’ve never met before. I think that – but I do think it is a dream scenario. And I do think it is a lot of times the ability to jump start your dreams in a really quick way because somebody is offering the path to do it. And it can blind you to a lot of things. But I don’t know. It’s scary.

**John:** Yeah, it’s the con man who flatters you and then also makes you think that you sort of are ahead of them in a way. So you’re thinking like, “Oh well, I’m going to get points on this project. It’s going to be a big thing.” They’re envisioning an outcome that is unlikely at all. Man, I felt so bad for them.

**Liz:** I felt so bad.

**John:** And my instinct was also your instinct which is just like you do sort of – Sydney Bristow in the pilot of Alias where like you walk into the CIA so you can actually see that this is the real place.

**Liz:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re talking to an actual person.

**Craig:** I mean, this is going to sound like victim-blaming, but here’s my thing. You have to have the world’s healthiest ego to believe that any of the people that this particular woman is imitating, that any of these people is calling you, person, and specifically zeroing in on you and needing you to go to Indonesia. That’s not right. I mean, I don’t believe anybody will ever want anything from me. I continue to believe that. Anybody that calls me and says, “Oh, I want you to do something,” my first thought is, ooh, that’s unexpected. Not, yeah, of course.

**Liz:** My first thought is how many people said no. How many people did you call before you called me? I’m very happy you made the call, but I definitely know I was not the first person.

**Craig:** Exactly. You will work forever. So this is the point that, you know, if you have not been operating on an A level in Hollywood, and an A+ level producer or executive or billionaire calls you and offers – directly – and for some reason needs you to do something that also you will have outlay cash for. Are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind? That part is…

Now—

**Liz:** The laying down your own money part is the part that really like bumps me.

**Craig:** Crazy.

**Liz:** If I’m going to give notes on this story, that bumps me.

**Craig:** So that’s a huge one right there. Now, in their defense did you guys listen to the recording? There’s two recordings in–

**John:** I listened to them, yeah. And I thought they were pretty good. I think, you know, her TH on there is a D and that felt weird to me. But what would be your instincts on it?

**Craig:** It’s not so much the accent that I thought was super impressive or the specific impression of Amy Pascal that was super impressive, although this woman is skilled. I mean, she’s way better at this sort of thing than I would be.

**John:** Very skilled.

**Craig:** What blew my mind was how good she was at double speak and confusion talk. It’s that thing that Kellyanne Conway became famous for of I ask you a very simple, very direct question like this: where is my money. That’s four words and it is unambiguous. And her response was so confusing as to almost seem reasonable. But it wasn’t even an excuse. It was just word salad. And those sociopaths can by breaking all of the contractual bonds of conversation they can sometimes really mess your head up.

But I have to believe that part of this also is just I don’t think this would happen to women. I don’t know if this scam works with a guy calling women up because I just think there’s something about men that believe that this woman calls them up, offers them a bunch of money, and is sexually attracted to them.

**Liz:** I think that’s a really good point. I also think what you said about sociopathy, like that is another aspect of this is like this is not just a con man scheme. This woman then spoke to this photographer for what seemed months after the entire money scheme was over. I mean, that is a whole other level of control that has nothing to do with the $30,000 that he gave her.

**Craig:** Yeah. She just likes it. She enjoys it.

**Liz:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, if you listen to the Dirty John podcast, clearly there’s people who can do it in real life, too. Like who don’t even have to have the distermination of the phone. And to be able to do this kind of thing.

But I think about situations in my own life where I’ve reached out to strangers. And I’ve emailed strangers, but I feel like I’m publicly accessible enough that people can find me. And it’s one of the reasons why reaching out through Twitter is so helpful. And you follow somebody and they follow you back and then you exchange a DM. You can at least say like this is the real person. So unless my account was hacked or something like I am the real person. You’re talking to the actual me.

**Liz:** Well, I mean the blue check mark, it does verify to a certain extent where you know that this person is who they’re saying they are to the extent that it’s the most provable thing. I mean, they make you give a lot of stuff to get that, you know, personal information. So, I mean, the other thing I think is like I’ve done the same thing. I’ve reached out to people that I don’t know and I’ve reached out to people that have no idea who I am for research or for projects and things like that. And the thing that I almost often try and do is find someone that is, even if it’s like a ten degree separation, that we know in common so that there’s some verifiable way. Because I don’t want someone to feel like they’re getting conned or they’re getting schemed.

And that’s always my first question if someone reaches out to me and I’ve never heard of them is like, “OK, well I’m going to do a little research and figure out if you are who you say you are.”

**John:** Yeah. Or you’ll ask somebody like could you CC me in on an email to somebody.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** That’s a very common business practice. Now that I’ve said this on this podcast people will use that scheme to sort of like, you know, a fake Franklin Leonard will do – oh, that’s Franklin.

**Liz:** Exactly. Sorry, Franklin.

**John:** Sorry Franklin. But those are common practices. But I would say it’s not a common practice for Amy Pascal to reach out to a stranger herself.

**Liz:** Yes. I mean, obviously we both know Amy. We all know Amy really well. I don’t think it’s common practice for Amy to reach out unless it is for very specific reasons and there is a point to it. I mean, she is one of the most busy people I have ever met in my life. There’s not a lot of extraneous time she has to call up somebody and be like I want to do this random art project.

**Craig:** Why would she anyway? I mean, the point is like people call her. I mean, you get to a place where you just have to be aware of the way power works in the world. If somebody far more powerful than you is calling you, they better be damn convincing and they certainly cannot be asking you for money in any way, shape, or form.

**Liz:** That’s the thing that’s so weird. The money thing is like why would you ever believe that like, “Oh, just pay your way and I’ll pay you back.” No.

**Craig:** What? What?

**Liz:** Absolutely not.

**Craig:** Ever. Never, ever, ever, in any circumstance, I have never outlaid a dime in my career for anything. Ever. We don’t need to.

**Liz:** I mean, it’s like the reddest flag. It is the tallest, reddest flag.

**Craig:** It is. Agreed. You know, just general rule for all of you. Don’t spend your own money in Hollywood. It’s the classic rule. Never spend your own money. And the second rule is never spend your own money. It’s from The Producers, folks. Mel Brooks wouldn’t lie to you.

**John:** The last article I wanted to single out here is a piece Borys Kit did for the Hollywood Reporter about DMG and Valiant. So DMG is a company that represents intellectual property on various things including Valiant comics. And I think what seemed to make it valuable is because Disney has Marvel Comics. Warner Brothers has DC. There are a limited number of existing comics out there and so Valiant is one of them. And so they set up a bunch of deals. Harbinger and Bloodshot are at Sony. Bloodshot is about to shoot.

I get that comics are a big deal. I just found it strange that these comics I’ve never heard of are worth spending all this time and money to try to make into a thing when they don’t have a history behind them.

Like if the comic has a brilliant idea, great, and you want to make that into a movie, fantastic. But I get frustrated when like that exact same idea if it started as a script rather than a comic book would not be worth anything. We wouldn’t be talking about it.

**Liz:** Well, it would have to be a spec and then it would have to be made either into like a cartoon. You know, I think the thing that makes me frustrated by all of this, goes back to what we were talking about before of IP, is how people overvalue IP. And that does not mean that certain IP is not extraordinarily important. But there are sort of tastemaker, if we’re going to use that term, pieces of IP that exist because of how well they’ve been cared for. How well they’ve been done. How well they’ve been produced in the past, and written, and directed. And all of these things that come up into whatever it is.

But just trying to manufacture that out of thin air for me is infuriating as somebody who is a content creator. Like as people who sit here and come up with original ideas, it’s just another way to be replaceable. And that’s not saying there’s not any value in their comics. I mean, I haven’t read them so I can’t speak to that in any way. There could be a lot of value in it, but it’s exactly what you said. It’s like if any of us just wrote this as an original script it would be nowhere near as interesting to these people.

**John:** So a true story from my own life. This is 15 years ago. But I wrote a spec to sell and so we went out on the town and I got an offer from a studio. And they said like, “Oh, we think this could be the blank movie.” Basically, it would become the comic book adaptation. And basically, it was close enough to the general conceit that they felt like, “Oh, we could tweak this around and it could become that movie.” And ultimately I said no and I held on to the rights to it because I didn’t spend six months writing this spec to have it become a comic book adaptation and not sort of be my thing. It was really frustrating. But that was 15 years ago, so I think it’s only accelerated from that point forward.

**Craig:** And you also have this problem of copy loss that it’s the same thing that happened – I remember when they were making a big deal about trying to adapt Halo into a movie. The videogame Halo. And when I read that I thought but Halo is so obviously just an adaptation in and of itself, albeit an official one, of Aliens. It’s space marines shooting aliens that look like the alien sort of from Aliens that infest bodies and then pop out.

It’s Aliens. And when you look at a lot of the third tier, so once you get past Marvel and DC, a lot of these comic labels are sort of mimicking. They’re copying a little bit. Or they’re copying movies. So they’re taking movies, whether it’s some ninja movie or something, or an action movie, and then they’re doing a comic version of that. And then somebody else repackages it and resells it so that you can make a new movie out of thing that’s already a copy of a copy. And it’s a bit like that thing in The Big Short where you suddenly realize that banks are just repackaging their own debt and selling it back and forth to each other.

It can’t hold up. It won’t last. A lot of these assets I think ultimately become junk. And do you need to buy an entire company for this? I don’t think so. I mean, Men in Black was a tiny little comic book that no one read. And they found it. They didn’t buy a company. They bought a story. And then they made a movie out of it.

These people now, I mean, some of the stuff when I read it – this is a quote. It says, “For Mintz, Valiant occupies a valuable position in the IP field. Not only is it something with a global awareness, but it is also something that people pay for, month in and month out, and is in a ‘tipping point’ place, making it ready for a next-level jump. ‘This is something that is validated already and is on a road that has already been traveled by Marvel and DC.’”

What does any of that mean?

**John:** Yeah. It’s trying to play it safe. It’s the sense of like, well, making movies is a gamble but this is a safer gamble because look at how many people already love this thing, so therefore—

**Liz:** I mean, my thing is like, OK, take Men in Black which was an original piece of material that, again, you didn’t need to buy the company for, but was an original piece of material. It wasn’t like it blew the roof off of anything. It worked. It was great. It was super entertaining.

A, that is hard to find because original material is difficult to create and have it be articulate and creative and universal and global. I’m not discounting that. But, if you look at things like The Last of Us, for instance, which I think is a videogame that is absolutely incredible.

**Craig:** The best.

**Liz:** It is super unique. It is a wholly original story. And I know they are going to adapt it or they want to adapt it and I’m happy to see that because I just want more of that. But that is The Last of Us. That’s not every videogame. And just because The Last of Us is original and can be adapted, or should or shouldn’t, whatever it is, doesn’t mean that every single thing that is somewhat in the realm of The Last of Us is something that should be made.

**Craig:** But, Liz, you don’t understand. All of those other videogames are traveling – they’re on a road that has already been traveled by The Last of Us. This is what garbage language sounds like.

So, get this back a little bit to the con-artistry, you know, and the way people use words, because it becomes – everything that is a comic book, literally every comic book, is on the road that has been traveled by Marvel and DC. And this is sort of what happens. They begin to try and sell things by association.

Well, they have a comic book company. And they have a comic book company. Shouldn’t you have a comic book company? No. No. Frankly, only one of those comic book companies is doing really well anyway. The other one is in trouble and that’s literally the second biggest one in the world.

So, I just don’t understand these things. And I am also – I am so frustrated because it is evidence, pure and simple starkly in front of us. Evidence that a lot of the people who make decisions about how to spend money in Hollywood are utterly lost. It’s not that they’re stupid. And I’m not even sure if they’re afraid. They used to be afraid. Now I think they’re just lost. Because there’s just, I mean, why?

**Liz:** Well I think there’s so much content now. It’s grasping at straws to make somebody watch something. But like original material is hard. It should be hard. Finding an original idea that you as either the writer or whomever, the comic book artist, whatever, video gamers, something that you want to spend a year and a half of your life on, bare minimum, that is a hard thing to find. It should be. And it is hard to make it good. It is hard to make it all of these things that I’m saying. That doesn’t mean that it is a useless amount of time to be spent on something. It just means it’s slightly more difficult. But let me tell you, as somebody who made an original film that I never thought was going to get made, like to everyone out there who thinks they have to go find a piece of IP, it can happen. It can.

**John:** Well let’s talk about sort of take home advice for people here as we wrap up this segment.

So we are not recommending folks go out and find that piece of IP. And really I don’t think we’re recommending that if they have an idea for a big giant movie that they need to write it as a comic book first because trust me people have been trying to do that for five to ten years. And it doesn’t seem like that really works either. Sometimes those properties get picked up, but more often they don’t.

**Craig:** And should they buy their own comic book company, John?

**John:** Everyone should buy their comic book company. Start a fake comic book company and then do it.

So, I can definitely see a future season of South Park where they create a comic book company to sell the comic book company.

**Liz:** This is Westworld Season Three. That’s what’s happening.

**John:** That is clearly Westworld Season Three.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But I think what we can say is as you are writing your scripts and as people are getting noticed, and like if The Post hadn’t been picked up to – if Spielberg hadn’t shot The Post, it still would have been a script that people loved and you’d still be going out for all those meetings and be staffed on things.

**Liz:** 100%.

**John:** And so just be aware that part of the nature of feature writing at this point is that you’re going to write something original that people are going to love and it’s challenging to get that made. And you will be going in for things that are coming in from some other medium, be it Wattpad, be it a crazy story in the news, or be it a comic book movie adaptation. Those are the jobs you’re more likely to get hired to do. And that is sort of the reality.

And one of the reasons why writers who can try to work in television or streaming is because more original stuff is happening there. And so just to be aware that, you know, I don’t think this IP fever is going to go away. It’s just going to probably move on to something after comic books.

**Craig:** And probably also as a result of my rant here today, at least three of the movies from this comic book company will become massive hits, along the lines of Star Wars. And I will just be an idiot for the rest of the time. I will be like one of those people that says things historically like no one will ever want to use a calculator or a computer.

**John:** Because you bring up Star Wars, Star Wars was an original project. It wasn’t a piece of IP. Raiders of the Lost Ark is original project. It was a call back to a kind of movie that people loved but we hadn’t seen for a while.

**Liz:** Well, I think the other thing is, if you’re adapting IP, this is sort of my feeling about it and if I get approached for it it’s always my conversation that I want to have which is “Well why should I be the one writing it?” I think there are plenty of writers who can adapt something and make it – and I don’t mean this in a negative way – but make it serviceable. Make it exactly what the movie can be and make it make $400 million because that’s what all these movies are going to make no matter what. But why would I do it?

And I think the greatest example for me and I think we’ve talked about this was Black Panther. Like here’s Black Panther. Black Panther is a comic book. It exists. It is a piece of IP. And Ryan Coogler went out and made his version of Black Panther that is wholly original in his voice. And so there are ways within the studio system, the IP system, to make it unique. I don’t think it happens all the time. And I think it’s very difficult to do. But that should be the goal. That should be your goal if you’re going up against that.

**John:** Cool. We have a couple listener questions. Let’s try to plow through these. Craig, do you want to take Ray from Melbourne?

**Craig:** Yeah, Ray from Melbourne, Australia writes, “This may be a silly question, but what are your thoughts on the use of accents in movies. Recently I watched Valkyrie and they do this thing at the beginning where Tom Cruise is thinking in German but his thoughts gradually change to English and then for the rest of the film the characters, although German, are speaking in their own American or English accent.

“On the flip side, in Schindler’s List, the Germans, Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Göth, et cetera, speak with a German accent. Do Craig’s characters in Chernobyl have Russian accents? Do they speak in American accents? Or is it subtitled?”

John, do my characters have Russian accents? Do they speak in American accents? Or are they subtitled?

**John:** We actually I think had this conversation maybe I think it was on the podcast, but maybe we had the conversation between you and me. My recollection is that you decided that they are speaking a kind of British English that everyone is in the same universe of a British English accent. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s basically right. And this is not a silly question at all, Ray. In fact, this topic of accent became somewhat of an obsession for everybody for quite some time. Extending all the way really into early casting. And it was actually the casting experience that made it clear to us what we did and did not want to do.

The truth is that when movies, I think, try to explain the accent thing away they end up hurting themselves more than helping themselves. We know that those people aren’t German. We know Tom Cruise is not a German, nor does he exist in 1943. We don’t therefore need the movie to excuse his not German-ness, any more than we needed Hunt for Red October to excuse the fact that Sean Connery is Scottish and not in fact Russian. For us, we were thinking, “Well, maybe we’ll have just kind of a vagueness Eastern European accent.” But then we realized with well over a hundred speaking parts and also actors from the UK, from Ireland, from different parts of the UK, from Sweden, from Denmark, that they weren’t going to do the same accent at all.

And, we also found that when you ask actors to do accents they get extremely excited. They get extremely specific. And they start mostly thinking about the accent. And we had all these wonderful actors that we wanted to cast and mostly we just thought, “Oh, enough with this.” So all we ever asked, we just said, “Just speak in your own accent. And if you have a very strong Scottish accent or strong Geordie accent, or strong Irish or strong Swedish, just maybe take the edges off a little bit.” But even then I kind of don’t care. Nor do I think will anyone at home care.

We all know that they’re speaking English and therefore that choice was made. There is a world where you can make something very true to life. You’re making a movie let’s say that’s set in the Soviet Union. All of your actors speak Russian. You can do that. But now your pool of available actors is dramatically limited. And we didn’t want to do that.

**Liz:** I also just want to say Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Liz:** That’s all I’m going to say.

**Craig:** Yeah, the accent that comes and goes. Oh boy.

**Liz:** It like sort of disappears, and then you can tell when they shot at the beginning because two hours into the movie all of a sudden it’s back. It’s just tough. It’s a tough one.

**Craig:** By the way, it’s also like in Star Wars Princess Leia briefly is British.

**John:** Every once and a while.

**Craig:** And then the more you squeeze your grasp, it will slip through your fingers. And then later she’s like, “Hey buddy.”

**Liz:** I’m from California, guys. What’s up?

**John:** California.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’m from LA. Let’s do this.

**John:** In terms of accents I highly recommend taking a look at Death of Stalin. So, you know, in an interview with the director he said they talked about Russian accents and ultimately decided no accents whatsoever. Everyone just use your own accent. So Americans speak with an American accent. And his argument was that the Soviet Union was actually a giant place and has a whole bunch of different accents. And if they were speaking Russian we couldn’t tell them apart, but by letting people use their own accents you get a sense of just how big the place is.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s a great point. We thought about that, too, because also the Soviet Union wasn’t just geographically big. It also encompassed I think 13 different republics and inside of those were mini-republics where people literally were vastly different from each other. And the other thing about the Soviet Union was that they were essentially a classless society, so you didn’t have those structures that you often see in UK, the Brits are extremely conscious of accent. I have discovered this. Because to them, accent is an indicator of class. Less so for us in the United States where class, economic class, isn’t such a huge thing to us because we don’t have that tradition of nobility and Upstairs/Downstairs, and all that stuff.

So, they were very much about making sure that it didn’t feel like, “Oh, all of the people that are miners sound like they’re Cockney and all the people who are scientists sound like they’re posh.” So, it’s a whole big thing, but I think generally speaking the less is more theory is a good theory.

**John:** Next question comes from Jack. He said, “I had two paid assignments and sold one script this year. They’re all nonunion, sub $1 million, family-friendly holiday films. All three were produced and will air this fall or winter. What exactly should I do now? I don’t have a manager or agent. Are there specific agents or managers who are dedicated to these kind of films? It would be nice to work on these projects under WGA jurisdiction and rates if that even exists.

“This is the first semblance of success I’ve had as a writer so I’d like to figure out a way to keep the momentum going. I’m not entirely sure where to turn next.”

So, I can answer some of this. There are rates for these things and these could be WGA movies. And these should be WGA movies down the road. So, this space, sounds like TV movies, could be like a Hallmark or those kind of things, there is patterns for these where people are WGA writers and you can be doing that. It’s awesome you had three things made. You should have an agent and you should have a manager and be working on the next thing after this.

It’s awesome you’ve had these things done, but yes, you should be thinking about the next stuff. You have stuff made and shot. That’s awesome.

**Liz:** Yeah, I mean, I think I would talk to the people who bought your material or produced your material and ask them if they know managers or agents that they would recommend you for. And then you don’t have to cold call. You’ll get like a meeting from them. But if you’ve sold material, I mean, congratulations, and that’s a great step into this. But, yeah, also WGA it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a weird one. I’m not really sure what these gigs are in the sense that the budget is under a million dollars but they’re produced and aired. On what? I mean, a budget under a million dollars is really, really small.

**John:** Yeah. So the patterns for these things, I’ve seen some of these things come through in WGA discussions, so there’s a whole subset of companies that do these kind of things. It’s I guess a 17-day schedule or shorter than 17-day schedule and you’re really plowing through to get these movies made. It’s great that they’re all like holiday family films.

**Craig:** Is this like a churchy kind of thing?

**John:** Sometimes they’re churchy, but oftentimes they’re not. It’s based sometimes on some greeting card. They’re really simple, but you know—

**Liz:** I mean, after 17 days we are all going to church because, woof.

**Craig:** I’ve done it. I’ve done that. That is no fun.

**John:** So what I would say to Jack is that Liz’s advice is usually right to go to the producer or the company and get that, but if they’re all kind of for the same people they’re not going – they have an advantage of keeping you and getting you not paid, or not moving up the food chain. So I would say look in the trades. Figure out who is representing writers like you. And then I think you can reach out directly to them saying like, look, I have these three movies made. I’m not some person off the street. But I want an agent and a manager.

**Craig:** Yeah. All you have to do is go to Indonesia. Front a little bit of money.

**Liz:** Well, yeah, I’m going to have some friends call you and they will meet you in Indonesia.

**Craig:** For a small fee.

**Liz:** The bank wire will not work, but it will be great.

**Craig:** It will not work. One other thing you might want to try, Jack, is your shows are airing on something. I don’t know what it is because you don’t say. Reach out to the people who are airing the shows. There’s got to be somebody at this entity that you can talk to because they probably don’t have a vested interest in keeping the man down. They’re just airing your stuff, so they’re familiar with you. And if they like you they might just do that favor of at least an introductory email. It doesn’t cost them anything because they’re not budgeting these things. They’re just airing them.

**John:** Tiny last bit of advice for Jack is that someone else is writing your kind of movie. So figure out who the other writers are who are writing your kind of movie and just reach out to them. Find a way to reach out to them and see sort of what their deal is.

**Liz:** Or go to Twitter like we talked about.

**John:** Yeah, go to Twitter.

**Craig:** Tweet it up.

**John:** Last one. Do you want to take Tyler?

**Craig:** Last one. Yeah. Tyler. All right, last question, Tyler in Bellingham, Washington writes, “My writing partner and I are writing a screenplay based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.” Very cool. “Although it isn’t a straight adaptation of a specific work by Lovecraft, it draws heavily from his many stories, references, characters, and locals from those stories and explores the Cthulhu Mythos Lovecraft created. Here’s the thing. Lovecraft was horribly racist.” As opposed to, you know, amusingly racist.

“I feel like we should somehow address the racism issue head on. At the very least, I think we should specify characters as minorities in the script. But then this is a horror movie and literally no major character makes it out alive. I’m concerned that if we portray a minority’s character in a negative light, as either victim or villain, we only make matters worse. Or perhaps we should make an integral part of the plot. Should we undermine Lovecraft’s toxic philosophy in a movie based on his works? Or am I overthinking it?”

What do you guys think?

**John:** Liz, is Tyler overthinking it?

**Liz:** I don’t think you are necessarily overthinking it, but I think you are – I think you should consider what representation means in the world right now. I don’t necessarily think you have to talk about Lovecraft’s racism, but I do think you should consider articulating in your characters of the race and gender of them.

I would not worry if everybody dies about the crises that have happened in television and film from certain characters being killed, because you know, if it’s all equal and everybody dies then nobody can be mad about singling anybody out. But I do think it is really important right now for representation of every gender and every race and everybody. And, I mean, what better way to do it in a situation where everybody dies. So we’re not weighing the importance of one or the other. We’re all in it together. That would be my advice.

**John:** When I read this, two things came to mind. First off, I wrote a Lovecraft movie. I wrote a Lovecraft movie for Imagine which is based on a comic book, so bringing things full circle. And that actually used Lovecraft as a character in the story, but it was a fictionalized alternate universe kind of story. So I didn’t have to sort of go into his racism.

But the other thing I was thinking about is I knew that Jordan Peele and Misha Green have a series called Lovecraft Country which I think involves sort of the black experience and Lovecrafty things. So, they’re looking at that, too. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it for your own thing.

One of the things I love about Lovecraft’s work overall is that he encouraged people to tinker with it and use it right from the start. It was always meant to be a mix your own Cthulhu. And so there’s no underlying IP really to own for Lovecraft. Weirdly there was a comic book that my thing was based on, but really Lovecraft is sort of IP-less in a way that’s kind of lovely.

**Liz:** It’s the Wattpad. We’re just bringing it all back to Wattpad.

**Craig:** It’s the Wattpad of giant squid monsters. I’m pretty sure Lovecraft is in the public domain anyway, so even if there were some part of it that he had kind of let you use specifically, oh OK, so I guess it’s half and half. There’s some before and some after.

But I think Tyler you’re not overthinking it, but I think you thought it. And now you should just stop thinking it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, yes, Lovecraft was horribly racist. True. I’m pretty sure every white person from 1900 and before was racist. People were racist. Racism wasn’t this thing that we think of it as now. Racism was just what people were. That’s how people operated. Racists. Even people who were abolitionists were also racist.

So, it’s like the Founding Fathers of our country, some of them were really cool, but none of them wanted to give women the right to vote.

**Liz:** They still don’t, so it’s fine. We’re still living there.

**Craig:** Some of them still…

So, you’re going to have to just, OK, just bite the bullet on that because that’s what culture is for a long portion of our history. And if you’re using characters from somebody’s work, those are the characters. It’s not the person. Should you shove Lovecraft into your story if you weren’t planning on otherwise? Well, no, that’s a massively different thing. Now, that’s a very intentional thing to do. You don’t want to do that simply to try and get off the hook of something.

Basically it sounds like you’re writing out of fear. So stop doing that. Don’t write because you’re afraid. Write towards something because you love it.

I completely agree with Liz. I think now is the time when we do want to avoid the default white syndrome. Call out how you want your people in your movie to be. Give suggestions. Think about who lives in the places where your show is set. Be true to life. Don’t fall into the trap of just checking boxes, because that can also become incredibly awkward. But just be true and write towards something that you love.

The last thing you want to do is write a character who is a character and then also is black. Right? It’s just like why. Give me a choice for everything, including white. Why are they white? Why are they black? Why does it matter? Why do you care? And if you don’t care at all, then you just say this person could be any race, it doesn’t matter. The thing that’s most important about them is that they are autistic. And then you can do these things, right? Make your choices. But write towards something. Don’t write because you’re worried that people on Twitter are going to beat you up. They will anyway.

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book. It is called Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. It’s by David Reich. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book. I just love it. So, Craig and I have previously talked about 23andMe. This is not actually so much about looking at people’s modern DNA. It’s about going through and finding old bones of early humans and figuring out sort of who they were and how – obviously all humans came out of Africa, but we came out in different waves.

We now know that we mixed in with Neanderthals at different times. We now know that people crossed over the Bering Sea and in ways we didn’t anticipate before. This guy is a genetic researcher who has sort of done all this lab work. It can be kind of heavy in the lab work and sort of how you connect all the dots. And you may skim through some things. But I just thought it was great and was just a really good look at overall our evolving understanding of how human beings came to be human beings and the many different weird ways it happened.

One of the things I found actually most fascinating, Craig and I have talked a lot about English on the show and sort of Indo-European, and sort of how the language has split apart, there’s a compelling case to be made that it was really just one migration of humans, early humans, that sort of were essentially this ghost tribe of the Indo-Europeans and sort of like when they crossed. And they can really see the markers of that in genetic evidence.

So, really cool book.

**Liz:** Did you do 23andMe?

**John:** We did 23andMe. Craig and I are not related it turns out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m human. And John is a machine.

**Liz:** Understood.

**John:** I’m fully robot.

**Craig:** I am as Jewish as Jewish gets. I found somebody slightly more Jewish than me. Actually, you know who is a little more Jewish than me? Benj Pasek of Pasek and Paul.

**Liz:** Oh yeah. You know I went to high school with Justin Paul?

**Craig:** Did you really?

**Liz:** I did.

**Craig:** He’s the nicest.

**Liz:** I know. They’re the best.

**Craig:** Well, Benj may be. I mean, they’re tied.

**Liz:** Yes. They’re very tied. But they’re both just truly wonderful.

**Craig:** I’ve been in this endless, you know, beat me at being Jewish game with 23andMe because I’m 98% Jewish. And I edged out Megan Amram by like a half a percent. But Benj Pasek comes over the top with a fully 99% Jewish.

**Liz:** Wow. That’s pretty impressive.

**Craig:** Amazing, right?

**Liz:** But do you have an Emmy nomination for your own web series about getting nominated for an Emmy like Megan has?

**Craig:** I mean, it’s just like—

**Liz:** I just can’t.

**Craig:** What she has done, so by the way you know that she’s my cousin because of 23andMe. Did you know this?

**Liz:** I did not know this.

**Craig:** We talk about this all the time. Yeah, we found out through 23andMe that we’re cousins, which I love.

**Liz:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** And we kind of knew it weirdly before it even happened. We’ve just always been like I know your mind. What Megan has done is the most amazing thing. And I believe she’s going to win, by the way.

**Liz:** I do, too.

**John:** Yeah, she will.

**Liz:** I totally think she’s going to win.

**Craig:** And she should win, by the way.

**Liz:** She should.

**Craig:** She should.

**Liz:** I love it. I think it’s so – I mean, honestly it started as a joke. I know it started as a joke. But it is like really inspiring in a weird way. Something really uplifting about it that’s really pure of like this is how you can do it. I kind of loved it.

**Craig:** She’s the greatest. Well, that’s the thing, it’s uplifting on the one hand. This is how you can do it.

**Liz:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Craig:** On the other hand it’s not uplifting because you have to be Megan Amram to think of that in the first place. That’s the problem. That’s the problem for most people who aren’t that level of genius. My daughter loves Megan Amram so much it’s hard to put it into – she would trade me, my wife, her brother, the dog, everything to just go move in with Megan. In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.

**Liz:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Let’s see, my One Cool Thing this week, real easy one. It’s something called GamePigeon. John, do you have GamePigeon on your phone?

**John:** I recognize the name but I never saw it.

**Liz:** No I do not.

**John:** Tell me about it.

**Craig:** So my poor son had some surgery a couple of weeks ago and he’s been recuperating at the house. And so we sit there and I’ve had to do this – I’ve learned how to do – I don’t stick the IV needle in. It’s already in. But then I can hook up the IV thing which is pretty cool. But then we have to wait for this stupid antibiotic thing to drain out into his veins. So we would play this thing and it’s basically – it’s free. It’s a free app for iOS. And you use iMessage and essentially texting to back and forth a very simple game app. So we played Eight Ball, basically pool, about a hundred times. And it’s extremely fun. And it’s super easy to do. And you do it by text so you can be in another state and you can have a little chess game. It’s like a lot of that sort of thing. Little simple games that you can play via text. It’s fun to do with your kids.

GamePigeon. Available freely at the app store.

**John:** Very nice. Liz, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Liz:** I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is something the New York Times has been doing called Overlooked, which is since 1851 obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people. So, every week they write and add a new obituary for someone who passed away and that was remarkable and left a mark on the world but had not for whatever reason been given their due in the newspaper.

And so they actually have this great quote on the site which says, “Obituary writing is about more life than death, the last word. Yet who gets remembered and how inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can therefore be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.”

And so I saw one yesterday, the one that made me think about it, is they had one yesterday about this woman who invented White Out.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Liz:** Which I had no idea about it.

**Craig:** Wait. Isn’t that the mom of—?

**Liz:** A Monkee.

**Craig:** One of the guys in The Monkees.

**Liz:** Yep. Had no idea. And I was just on Twitter and I had been sort of casually reading this. But because it’s an obituary so it covers her entire life. You know, this woman was a single mother and she wanted to be I think a pianist or something. Oh no, excuse me, she was a painter. That was how the whole White Out came out. She was a painter. She was a very good painter but she had to become a secretary because she was a single mom. And she was a very bad secretary. And so kept making mistakes and so she used her painterly ways to create White Out, which it’s the different word for White Out. Whatever it is.

**Craig:** Liquid Paper I think.

**Liz:** Liquid Paper, yes. Liquid Paper. It was amazing. And it was so inspiring to read this. I mean, I think it’s weird to suggest obituaries, but to be honest a lot of these people have been dead for a very long time so it’s not like, you know. But it is also just so inspiring to read these stories that nobody ever heard about and haven’t been covered. And I think it’s a really wonderful thing that the New York Times is doing.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you what I wish I had known when I was young and dreamed of glory. You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

**Liz:** What if I came on here and was like my One Cool Thing is Hamilton. I don’t know if you guys have talked about it.

**Craig:** We’d be like “Get off.”

**John:** It’s a little show. You may have heard of it. That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Short things are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Do you want to put your Twitter handle here?

**Liz:** Sure. I’m @itslizhannah.

**John:** @itslizhannah. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to the articles we talked about and some other things as well. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

We also have albums of the first seven seasons of Scriptnotes available in 50-block chunks at store.johnaugust.com.

And a bunch of people have been buying those, so that’s great.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** If you’d like those, that’s cool. So they’re $5 apiece and it’s all 50 episodes plus the bonus episodes that would have fallen in that season.

**Craig:** So excited for my cut. Can’t wait.

**John:** So helpful. Liz Hannah, it was fantastic having you on the show.

**Liz:** Thank you. Thanks guys. This was great.

**Craig:** Thank you, Liz.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Liz Hannah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Hannah)! Liz’s film, [The Post](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)), was a Best Picture nominee.
* [Fred Jackman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Jackman), [cinematographer/writer/director/special effects hero](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0413164/), is the apparent namesake of the Jackman shot.
* [How Wattpad is Rewriting the Rules of Hollywood](http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/how-wattpad-is-rewriting-the-rules-of-hollywood.html), by Chris Lee writing for Vulture
* [Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood: Who’s the “Crazy Evil Genius” Behind a Global Racket?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/hunting-con-queen-hollywood-1125932), by Scott Johnson writing for the Hollywood Reporter
* [Comic Book Shake-Up: DMG Entertainment Acquires Valiant ](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/valiant-acquired-by-dmg-entertainment-comic-book-shake-up-1078980), by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Valkyrie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6n3hRZmgxU), [Schindler’s List](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdRGC-w9syA) and [The Death of Stalin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukJ5dMYx2no) are examples of how one can handle the indication of foreign language.
* [Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X) by David Reich
* [GamePigeon](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gamepigeon/id1124197642?mt=8)
* [Overlooked](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked.html) by the New York Times adds obituaries for remarkable people that were overlooked in their time, like Bette Nesmith Graham who invented liquid paper.
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Liz Hannah](https://twitter.com/itslizhannah) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Larry Douziech ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_359_v2.mp3).

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 358 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be looking at point of view in scripts and how the choice of which characters have storytelling power changes how we experience a movie. We’ll also take a stab at answering some listener questions.

**Craig:** That sounds like a pretty classic show. I don’t want to put pressure on us, but it sounds classic.

**John:** It sounds very classic. It’s another crafty episode. We’re going back-to-back crafty, but you know what? You got to do that sometimes.

**Craig:** Got to. Got to. And you know why? We got to put these film school teachers out of business.

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Speaking of business, people have written in to say, “Hey, would it be possible to download back episodes rather than having to buy the USB drive?” And we said sure. So, I can report that as of today you can now download seasons of Scriptnotes. Basically 50 episode chunks of Scriptnotes, which is handy. Particularly international listeners would buy the USB drives and they’d have to pay like an import tax on it.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Which is crazy. That’s no good. So we’ve broken all the first seven seasons of Scriptnotes into 50-episode chunks. Seven seasons. That’s essentially a year per season. So 50 episodes, plus the bonus episodes that went with that year. And they are available now. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and download them. They are $5 per block of 50. So, in some ways the $2 a month you can get through Scriptnotes.net is a better deal. But if you want to own a bunch of episodes that’s a way you can do it.

**Craig:** You know what? I think the point is we’re giving people choices. And in this way they can determine amongst themselves what’s the golden age of Scriptnotes. You know, like The Simpsons had a golden age.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Lisa, I chew-chew-choose-you.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. I think our golden age is always right now, today.

**John:** This moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is it. We’re always in the golden age, John, because you and I push things forward steadily and inexorably toward perfection.

**John:** That is completely the goal. So let’s make this a perfect episode.

**Craig:** It’s already done. I mean, it is perfect.

**John:** Done. All right, let’s start with follow up. Because perfect episodes have follow up. Listeners wrote in–

**Craig:** That wasn’t that great. That was decent Segue Man. But I think you may have slightly pushed us down a little bit below perfect there.

**John:** All right. We’ll try to dig our way back out of this hole I’ve created. Listeners wrote in with their favorite examples of exposition based on last week’s episode about exposition.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** Dylan wrote about The Matrix. “When Morpheus is explaining Neo’s potential powers and comparing it to the agent’s abilities in the street crowd simulation Neo says, ‘What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?’ And Morpheus brilliantly returns, ‘No, Neo, I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready you won’t have to.’ This is a very simple info dump of you will be able to control the code of the Matrix and get super powers, but it does more than simply state it. It sparks the viewer’s imagination about what Neo could do to fulfill that promise of power. It’s more than information. It’s an invitation to dream up what Neo will come to be able to do and wait in anticipation to see through it.”

Nice. That’s true.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I loved Matrix. I love me some Matrix. And it is a tour de force of screenwriting. It is brilliantly efficient and compact even in its length. It feels to me like there’s five movies of stuff inside of The Matrix. I’m always amazed. When you think back to The Matrix you forget like, “Wait, oh my god, there was that whole thing in the beginning where he’s at a club dancing around.” And then, “Oh yeah, he’s in his office and he’s dodging those guys.” And then, “Oh yeah, there’s that bit where he’s in that room and he has no mouth.” And then, “Oh yeah, they have to get that bug out of his –“ that all happens before he even shows up in the stupid room to hear about the pills.

There’s just movies after movies after movies in one movie. I love The Matrix. It does it so well. And this is a great point by Dylan that exposition can be made fun if you essentially say I’m going to give you a bunch of information and then I’m going to give you mystery to follow. The screenwriter’s favorite friend, mystery.

**John:** Not confusion, but mystery.

**Craig:** But mystery. Exactly. So that you know that you’ve gotten some information. But you haven’t gotten it all. The boring, sad exposition tends to give you a feeling of completion. Oh, I’ve just learned everything. Bored.

**John:** Several other listeners wrote in to recommend the first Terminator, which I agree does just a fantastic job of exposition because it doesn’t tell you anything more than you need to know. It’s basically just the information that’s going to be relevant to this movie. Not a bit more than that.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Jim Cameron is also master – master of that sort of thing. No question.

**John:** So Lars from Cologne wrote in, and I love it when people send in examples of things that actually have audio, so we’re going to be able to play this for you. He writes that, “Margin Call cleverly plays with the ‘explain it to me as if I was a five-year-old’ trope. One of the recurring jokes of the film is that the higher a person’s rank the less likely he is able to understand what is actually going on. The lead is repeatedly asked to explain in English what he discovered.” Let’s take a listen.

[Clip of Margin Call plays]

So Craig, talk to me about that scene in Margin Call. Why is that more helpful than just the guy giving information?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got a challenge as a screenwriter. You have to be responsible to your story and to your characters, but you are also aware that there’s a room full of people. This was a problem that you could see, Adam McKay for instance, working over pretty successfully I think when he did The Big Short. The fact that you have characters who understand information doesn’t help the people in the audience that don’t. And so inevitably it is helpful to have a character on screen that can convincingly represent the audience or at least be consistent with the audience so that when they say just explain it to me like a lay person the expert has a chance to speak in a way that the audience can then understand. This is something that I had to deal with quite a bit with Chernobyl, obviously.

So, the trick then is to make sure that you have the right kind of character for that. Here it’s a little bit wobbly in the sense that it appears that this man runs a firm that is a financial firm but there’s a bit of a screenwriting trick here. It’s not necessarily the most elegant sleight of hand, where Jeremy Irons’ character says, “I assure you it wasn’t brains that got me here.” It’s clever. So, my character is that I’m kind of an alpha male that kind of bossed my way to the top, but maybe not the most believable thing in the world. Generally speaking if you run a financial company you don’t need to be spoken to like you’re a five-year-old or a golden retriever.

But that said, that’s what’s going on here. They’re trying to come up with a way to solve this problem that this screenwriter has.

**John:** Yeah, so if you take a look at the YouTube clip and don’t just listen to the audio, what becomes clear is that this is all happening in front of a room of other analysts. And so this guy is being put on the stand. So he, basically the stakes are will he be able to explain this thing in a way that Jeremy Irons’ character will accept. So there’s consequence and stakes and there’s a conflict happening there that wouldn’t naturally be there if it was just a straight information dump. So that’s one of the things I really liked about J.C. Chandor’s movie here is that it’s able to quickly explain some of the big things happening and let you see it from their point of view. And so as stuff is going south you understand enough about what the characters are facing that you can follow along on the trip. And so that’s a thing I really like about this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also J.C. does a really good job of making the info dump subordinate to character feeling. And this is going to tie in nicely when we get around to point of view. You do get a sense that this is not simply a scene where people are going to talk about stuff that is technical. This is a scene about power and position and ambition and risk. So, that’s all good character stuff. And that’s why it’s an interesting scene as opposed to just blah-blah-blah.

**John:** Yep. Here’s our lesson about this financial instrument.

Well, let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So, this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically that they can be a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV. So only the hero can drive a scene.

Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories you could follow anybody in them. So classically an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story.

Most films are going to have a mix of POV. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always thing about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire.

The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and frankly a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow.

We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie and every scene is going to have a point of view as well.

And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately and we’ve seen them have separate scenes they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice. Or, the writer may have made that choice but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge.

And so that’s a thing, even up at this last Sundance Labs I saw, I’ll describe this project in broad terms because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet, but it was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know because we’ve seen movies before that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact they do meet. But the question is when they meet who is driving that scene. And interestingly as the story was structured as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene.

And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene?

**Craig:** Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth.

But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. And so, you know, Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments where things, like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view.

A lot of times the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.”

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences Harry is going to be around for all of those things.

So, if you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump because he is our way into this world.

**Craig:** Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes if you decide that this – I always start by like, “OK, emotionally whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound.

So, for instance, if you – a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Well clearly the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face and you hear sounds and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view/point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs.

There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. So the question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why?

**John:** Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens, and if people watched the scene you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. That it’s really favoring her and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So, it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening and they weren’t even in the scene but it was their point of view retrospectively.

Also point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh.

Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen.

Also, that scene, maybe the answer to that scene is, well, nine times out of ten it’s from the point of view of the kid because the kid is getting yelled at and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work? And then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after.

And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and like what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story it would be really interesting and unexpected because like, “Oh, we expect it from the kid’s point of view and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s.” But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, “Oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes.”

There’s maybe like five or ten seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “OK, there’s something bigger there. There’s some expectation you’re setting.”

Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. And the movie is – this is not a movie review – the movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly like 20 minutes into the movie we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like what is this movie. And then I remember that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who can suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully.

But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me kind of who was in control of the story at that point. Because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great point you’re making that point of view more than line count or screen time determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together then you do have a problem because, again, I’ll just say it’s my rule, we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things or we see a combination of things, but that’s it.

And it’s just our one view. So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth.

So, sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is before you get to that conglomeration scene kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes and then he dies. Because who needs him later?

**John:** There’s, and this again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have point of view. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate to a place so late in the movie.

When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So, Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told – it’s alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. And we’ve changed our sort of fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well it is as exhilarating as any car chase because you are creating a kind of emotional freefall in people. And one of the thrills we get I think from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively it can be – because it’s surprising, it’s awesome. And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing or you start to say to yourself I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why. These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically.

It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view and therefore they exist to serve a function. OK, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view.

But, then you got to make space.

**John:** Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. It’s tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally if you’re limiting your point of view to one character like in a Harry Potter situation you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything. And particularly if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences it can be great to limit POV because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that.

It really focuses your storytelling because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know, too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters.

On the other hand, if you broaden POV suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive. Because suddenly you can cut to Egypt. You can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful, too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another.

**Craig:** Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think.

And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But, some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge because then there’s more to learn. And there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic.

We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe for instance in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump we are in his perspective because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go.

**John:** Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice. We are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes.

Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. So like the first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out.

The second book for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it it actually makes sense that we break POV and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly it also creates a complex reading experience because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “OK, I just learned something and saw something but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally the story at the end will link it together and then they will learn it and in the learning of it we’ll learn something else and so on and so forth.

But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. You can’t – that’s the thing, we always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why it should work.

**John:** It should work. And exactly the scenario you described where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beginning of Scream for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So, don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established.

**Craig:** Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school.

**John:** Done. Or at least one season of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** One $5 season of Scriptnotes. Agreed.

**John:** All right. Let’s try to answer some questions. And full disclosure, we’ve not read any of these questions. We did no prep work. So Megan has read these questions but–

**Craig:** I have news for you. Full disclosure. I have never read any of the questions. So, you will not notice any difference from me but John may seem very off his game. We’ll find out.

**John:** All right. We’re going to start with Preston in Salt Lake. Preston writes, “I am currently writing a script where the main character decides to change his name about a third of the way into the movie. This coincides with a huge decision to forego his family title and take a completely different path than he’s been presented with before. I want to call him by his new name after he makes the decision so it’s clear that he fundamentally sees himself as a different character, but I’m worried it will be jarring for the reader if I suddenly change the main character’s name on page 40. I definitely don’t want them to get confused and think I’m talking about a completely different person.

“So what do you think the best way is to alert the reader of the name change? Should I just write character X will now be referred to as character Y in bold? Should I warn the reader this character’s name will change when I first introduce them on page one of the script?”

Craig, what would you do in this situation?

**Craig:** We get this question all the time. People get so worried about this sort of thing. Well, first of all, it rarely works to be honest with you. It rarely works, but it can. And it’s the kind of thing that’s actually more of a problem in the read than it is in a watch if that makes sense. But, you definitely don’t want to start the movie off by saying someone’s name is going to change. No. Just go ahead and just say so-and-so will now be referred to as so-and-so and put that in bold is fine.

I also think it would be fair, at least a couple times, for one or another person to mistakenly refer to them by their old name and have them be corrected. It helps the reader. But, yeah, generally I’m not sure what else you can do other than in the moment make it quite clear this is what’s happened.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not a huge fan of changing a character’s name in terms of the title tag, so like the little – I guess they call it call character cue. It’s so weird that it’s a thing that exists in every screenplay you’ve ever read but the character’s name over the dialogue, is it character cue? Whatever you want to call that. I’m not a huge fan of changing that just because if you’re flipping back and forth in a script you can get confused about who you’re actually talking about. If they have a first name that’s not going to change, keep that. If there’s some way to keep them the same person. Because think about it like that little character cue is like the actor’s face. You’re seeing the actor’s face and they’re saying this thing. That’s the same person the whole time through. So, I wouldn’t go too nuts about changing that if you can help changing that. Let the story do it, but think about that little character cue as being the actor’s face. And the actor’s face as an audience we’re still going to know it’s the same person.

So, if we’re going to know it’s the same person I would try to keep the character cue the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you. If you can, to avoid it, it’s helpful. OK, so our next question is from Derek in LA. He writes, “I work in the script department of one of the studios in a job that involves not only processing screenplays for recent releases or titles still in development, but also occasionally converting a very old script into a digital file. We had one of these archive scripts this week that dated all the way back to 1935. And while I always expect some differences in formatting and terminology, this one had a term I’d never seen before and can’t seem to find anywhere else. The term is Jackman Shot. That’s Jackman Shot.

“From the context, it seems to refer to any composite shots used in a scene, for example footage of a plane superimposed over a map or miniature ships to create the background of a scene at a dock. But when I tried to find some definition or other use of the term I came up with nothing. As you might expect, it’s impossible to Google the phrase and find much of anything other than pictures of Hugh Jackman. When I asked around our office no one else here was familiar with the term either.”

So he’s turning to us. John, have you ever heard of the term Jackman Shot?

**John:** I have never heard of the term Jackman Shot. But I suspect what he’s describing it as is probably true. That it’s some sort of composite shot. It’s some sort of process shot. And it makes me think back to another James Cameron script. I think it was the script for Aliens where it says like in uppercase it’s like Panaglide through something. So like panaglide as a thing, which is a name for like a Steadicam kind of shot. And so Jackman Shot is probably the same kind of thing. Whatever the state of the art thing is they were doing at that time that the screenwriter put in there to describe this type of visual effect.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe there was like a guy named Jackman that came up with that thing. You know, like that early composite shot. Or there was some machine they used called the Jackman that would make the composites. Beats me, man. Jackman Shot.

**John:** So I love special film terminology and I’ll always hear these great terms and then forget them because I don’t have the chance to use them in any meaningful way. So, some terms I will describe which I will not remember the actual name for because I’m not going to Google them while I’m saying them is so you know the shot, Craig, which is from the top of the actor’s head to a little bit above his kneecaps which should show the holster, like if he’s wearing a gun. What is the name of that?

**Craig:** Cowboy.

**John:** The Cowboy. The Cowboy Shot. What is the name of the kind of not really visual effects shot but where two actors are having a brawl and then they pass behind a window and you clearly swapped out stunt actors.

**Craig:** That’s a Texas Switch.

**John:** Texas Switch. See, they’re all Western kind of terms. I love these kind of special things. But you can also use them in your script without necessarily knowing – I wouldn’t necessarily call it out as a Texas Switch in a script if I were using it.

**Craig:** No, you just – that’s something that you just know. Yeah, because if you call it out as a Texas Switch what you’re saying is it’s fake. And you don’t want to do that in your script. You just want to be able to do that on the day on the set. Yeah, and similarly a Cowboy is something you only hear on set. And less and less. Two Teas is another one. I don’t know if you ever heard that one.

**John:** I don’t know Two Ts.

**Craig:** Two Ts is basically two breasts. Two breasts and up. So, it’s that shot that’s not quite a close-up but it’s not thigh high.

**John:** Like a medium essentially?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a medium. Haircut, you know. People don’t notice this. A lot of times when you’re looking at close-ups the frame gives the actor a haircut. There’s something about having a little bit of space above the hair that seems weird. You want to be close enough that you feel like if you start to give them a haircut then you feel like you’re intimately with them. It’s a strange thing. But I’m going to start walking around saying Jackman Shot. You know what, maybe we should Jackman this one.

**John:** I want to say back to the top of Derek’s question, so I think it’s great that he’s in the script processing department that’s actually processing these really old scripts because that is a real worry is that some of these things will kind of get lost to history because they only existed as printed things that can fall apart. So in processing them and getting them as digital files they can stick around forever which is a very good thing. So, I don’t know what you’re using to do it. If you’re using Highland to melt them that’s fantastic. But whatever you’re using to get them into a format that people can enjoy them in the future that is ideal.

**Craig:** Well done, Derek.

**John:** Jared writes, “My daughter just graduated from elementary school and received two academic achievement awards for the grade six education ceremony. One for French as a second language. The other for creative writing.” Congratulations Jared. “Her teacher described her saying I believe this student was born writing. She writes in her spare time. She writes in class. She writes at home. I know from listening to the Scriptnotes podcast that you excelled in writing from an early age.” Is that true for you, Craig? It was true for me. Was it true for you?

**Craig:** It is. Yes.

**John:** It’s true. “I was wondering if you might be able to suggest a bit of direction as she moves onto high school. I’d really like to help her foster her growth in this area before life bogs her down with stress and squelches that creative spark.”

Craig, what would you do to continue to stoke her love of writing?

**Craig:** Just let her know that you love that she loves writing. And there’s no reason that life should bog her down in stress and squelch her creative spark. The people that tend to bog teenagers down in stress and squelch their creative spark are adults who are demanding that those children be something the adults want them to be. It sounds like you’re the sort of dad that doesn’t do that. Sounds like you’re the sort of dad that wants her to be what she wants to be.

Now, fair warning here, Jared. You may be getting more excited about this than she is. Children, I can tell you from my experience, change dramatically as they go through puberty. Their interests change. Sometimes – and very frustrating for parents – sometimes they just lose interest in something they’re really good at.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it can make you panic a little bit. Don’t. Because they’ll either come back around to it or they won’t. The important thing is your job ultimately isn’t really to foster her growth. Your job is to support her as she reaches for things. It sounds like she’s fairly well self-directed in this regard. If she loves writing she will keep writing. And as long as you tell her that that’s a lovely and wonderful thing she’ll keep doing it to her heart’s content. And we’ll see how her heart develops. It’s as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I will say that sometimes there’s that fine line between supporting your child and then you’re expressing interest in what a kid likes and what a kid does can sort of backfire to a degree. Like as they hit puberty, like the fact that you like that they like this thing makes them not like the thing. There’s weird stuff that can happen.

So, I would just say be present for it. If there’s opportunities you see for her that she can do stuff, support those. As you go into junior high and to high school there are all sorts of opportunities to be in sports, or be in band, and be in all these other things. There are very few opportunities for like being in creative writing. But if there are like creative writing classes, clubs, whatever, stuff like that that she’s interested in, go for that. Go support that. Because that’s going to be helpful. But I would just say read whatever she wants you to read.

So my mom, to her credit, like I could write anything and my mom would happily stop whatever she was doing and read it and proofread it. And that’s good. Sometimes one of the most frustrating things about writing obviously is that you don’t know if it’s any good and you don’t know if it actually makes any sense. And so to be that set of eyes, to say like, “Oh yeah, this was good, I see what you were doing here, thank you for sharing it with me.” That can be a lot.

**Craig:** Yep. And avoid the temptation to become her instructor, her teacher, her coach. Don’t do that. If she’s really into it and wants to get some outside help or development then just say, great, let’s find you an interesting class to take or perhaps there’s somebody that actually does discuss creative writing one-on-one with kids. Probably not. That’s all good. Try and have other people do that. You just got to be aware of the syndrome John is discussing which is very real. At any point if she begins to suss out that you are deriving some sort of benefit from it it becomes tainted. So let it be her thing.

**John:** The other thing I would sort of caution you towards but also make sure you’re aware of is things like Wattpad or sort of the online communities where people write and people share their writing and get feedback on their writing and stuff like that, there can be good things to that. I mean, fan fiction really springs out of that. It can be a source of joy and positivity. But it can also be a source of great negativity. And so just the same way that you’d be mindful of any social media she might be starting or any other things in which strangers can be influencing her self-esteem I’d watch out for that as well. Because they’re so fragile at this point.

**Craig:** They are. And those things can be crab barrels where nobody wants to let anybody out of the barrel. I mean, I see it on the Reddit screenwriting thing. I’ll go on there and every now and again I’ll just see people giving each other advice and I just think why. Why are you asking these people for advice? And why are these people giving you advice? Because you’re all kind of in the same boat here. And I’m not sure there’s value there.

There’s a precious few amount of professional screenwriters that I look at and go you know what I would like their advice on this. It’s such a dangerous thing. And everybody wants to give advice because it makes them feel good. And sometimes they like to tear things down because it makes them feel good. So, another excellent point from John here. Just, you know, there’s something you could do. Maybe protect her from the angry world of online crabs.

**John:** Yeah. Crabs.

**Craig:** No one wants to get crabs.

**John:** Do you want to take this last question from Larry?

**Craig:** Yeah. Larry asks, “I’ve recently had an offer from an indie producer that liked one of my scripts. First-time director. Micro-budget. We haven’t gotten into brass tacks, but I have the feeling the offer to me will be something like, well, we can maybe give you some backend points if you hold our feet over the coals. And the size of the budget requires a number of script compromises. But, they want to shoot it so there’s that. The script itself has been pretty well-received by everyone that’s read it, including a reader for a decent sized indie studio, but no offers from anyone else.

“And personally I’d call it a good script not a great script. My question is how much value do I place on getting a script of mine shot? Do I throw caution to the winds? First-time director. No/little money for me. Shooting compromises and all. Or do I hold it back and wait for something better? I hate the idea of taking the wrong step forward but I also find I generally regret inaction more than action.” Oh, Larry does sound like a writer, doesn’t he, John?

**John:** He does sound like a writer. So, I would say, Larry, is this is a moment where you need to trust your Spidey sense. And your Spidey sense is “Will this person, this director in particular, make at least a good movie?” So you think great is fine. Let’s leave out great. Do you think this director has a vision for making this movie and having this movie turn out well? And really wants to make the movie for the right reasons which is to make a good film.

If not, then I don’t think it’s worth your time to have this movie be made if you don’t think this movie could be made at least to a good level. Because you might say even it’s not a lot of money, it’s going to be a tremendous amount of your time. It’s going to be your first thing produced. You want it to be a good experience even if it’s not a good amount of money. And if your Spidey sense is telling you that it’s not going to be a good experience I’d walk away.

If you really do spark to this director and think he or she has a real vision for doing your movie despite the low budget, then I’d say go for it. Craig, what’s your feeling?

**Craig:** I’m going to be a little more crazy than you. You know, because I don’t like to get too much more crazy than you. You’re my benchmark for crazy.

**John:** Benchmark of sanity, all right.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re my benchmark for sanity. John is right. You have to kind of weigh your Spidey sense here, but maybe put your thumb a little bit on the scale toward doing it and here’s why. This isn’t, from the way you describe it, your life’s work. This is not the thing that you’ve pulled from your heart that represents who you are. It is not your magnum opus. It’s a script that you think is pretty good. It’s not a script that has lit the world on fire, but somebody wants to make it. And you haven’t had anything else made it seems like to me.

So, there is an enormous educational value to having any of your work produced. Not just because you see how your words and your scenarios translate into moving images and sound, but also you get an experience of what it means to have somebody else direct your work, produce your work, edit it, release it, all that stuff.

It doesn’t sound based on what you’re describing like this is going to be a high profile thing that will embarrass you until the end of time if it does kind of fall on its face, because it’s micro-budget and it’s indie. But you never know. Sometimes it’s catch a falling star kind of thing. It might work.

But more than anything I think it would be really educational. I think you would learn a lot. My guess is that the amount of money between not much and what you want isn’t a great gulf. And really the only financial value to these things are if they become one of those lottery ticket one-in-a-million things like My Big Fat Greek Wedding or something, so in that case backend points would be wonderful.

So, I would say if it feels bad, if it feels abusive, if it feels like they’re going to wreck things, don’t do it. If it feels like you’re not really sure then maybe err on the side of adventure.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a good way to think about it. That’s probably a good split in terms of how much recklessness Larry should approach this with. And I’ll also remind you that just because it’s not the big breakout thing doesn’t mean it’s not useful. And so Quentin Tarantino had a movie before Reservoir Dogs. Doug Liman had a movie before Swingers. And we don’t think about those. We think about those other movies being their first movies, but they did other things before that. And so this could be that thing before that thing.

Or, it could be Reservoir Dogs. You don’t know. So, maybe be bold as long as you have some belief in these people.

**Craig:** Yeah. That makes sense.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is Bubble. It is a podcast written and created by Jordan Morris. And so it is a scripted podcast. I’m generally not a big fan of fiction podcasts. I’ve just never really gotten them because sometimes they feel like radio plays. I’m just never quite sure where I’m supposed to sit in these things. I guess it’s sort of a question of POV. I’m not quite sure what these things are.

This one I just loved. And so Bubble tells a story, this kind of post-apocalyptic place. It’s this protected space. But there are monsters that run around. There’s a service you can hire to kill the monsters that sort of works like Uber or Lyft. It is really, really funny. And the feeling of the show, it has a bunch of actors who are all great and really, really funny. But it also has a narration that kind of feels like if you were at a script reading, a table-reading of your script. And the scene description was like really, really funny and sort of self-aware. And so the narrator for all that is fantastic, too.

So, I just really recommend it. There’s four episodes out right now. It’s delightful and it feels like kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a podcast. I just adored it. So I recommend Bubble.

**Craig:** Wow. Bubble by Jordan Morris. OK. I’ve got a fun game that I’ve been playing and it was sort of a surprise. It was like surprise game. Because the iPhone games or iOS games – I don’t talk about Android – they’ve kind of moved toward that console game structure where they have what they call AAA games, you know. It’s like The Room is a AAA game. It’s an indie game but everybody stops and goes oh The Room 3 is out, let’s buy it. As well you should.

Then there are a lot of like also-ran games that kind of live in that space. They oftentimes stink. You give them shots but a lot of times they’re just blah. And so, you know, bored, I found one. I was like, well, it’s probably not going to be great. And it’s kind of awesome. It’s called Alleys. It’s a game mechanic I haven’t quite seen before. You are exploring this abandoned city. Fair warning: the graphics are not up to The Room snuff. It’s not that level.

The way you move around is a bit clunky. The controls aren’t clunky. It’s tap. That’s it. But the actual animation of you moving through the space is a bit clunky. But the space is quite vast. And the mechanics are you’re basically finding three kinds of things. You’re finding keys. You’re finding check-in points. And then you’re finding resource cards. And you will run into obstacles that require either the right kind of resource card or a certain amount of keys which keys you burn. So they’re kind of like a – there’s two kinds of resources. There’s the kind that keeps building up and then the kind that you burn through. So keys when you use them they’re gone. So, OK, this door takes eight keys.

Then there are the check-in things where you need to have this many check-ins and that doesn’t go down, but the bar you have to jump in terms of number check-ins goes up. It’s really interesting. I like it. It’s kind of cool.

And there’s some interesting meta games clearly put in there that are kind of deeper involving some code language stuff I have to figure out. It’s kind of – it’s way more than I thought it would be. So it’s a big surprise. I mean, I’ve been playing it for a while and I don’t feel like I’m even halfway done. So, Alleys.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** On iOS.

**John:** Very nice. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. But we are always around to answer your questions on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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

All the back episodes for the show are at Scriptnotes.net. You can subscribe there for $2 a month and get all those back episodes. But you can also now get the albums. So the individual seasons of Scriptnotes in 50-episode blocks are available at store.johnaugust.com.

We also have a few of the USB drives left that have the first 300 episodes of the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. Those go up about a week after the episode drops. And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. That was, in fact, perfection.

**John:** It was amazing.

**Craig:** See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are now available!
* [Margin Call](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHl7hKlVj4) uses the ”plain English” trope a little differently.
* Justin Dise walks through the [basic shot types](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/video/tips-and-solutions/filmmaking-101-camera-shot-types) in a blog post for B&H.
* [Bubble](http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/bubble), a podcast by Jordan Morris
* [Alleys](https://www.alleys.tw/), an immersive escape mobile game
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_358.mp3).