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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/the-magic-word-is-in-this-episode).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 312 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be tackling listener questions and follow up on previous discussions. And, if we have time, we may dig into the Steven Soderbergh new venture where he’s back with a new movie and a whole new way to release movies.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Well, we’ll see if we do have time. We have a lot of questions. And I’m just going to be honest with you. I cheated. I looked ahead. Normally I don’t. Normally I just, you know me. I like to get hit in the face with these things fresh. But I cheated and I looked ahead. Really good questions today.

**John:** Really good questions. What I’m so excited about is we can finally talk about some things that you and I have both known about each other’s work that is now public knowledge. So, I want to start with congratulating you on your HBO series which is about Chernobyl.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So this has been going on in my life for years. I don’t know, about three years or more now. And this was a project that I pitched a bit ago to HBO. It was the only place I went. I went with Carolyn Strauss, who is one of the executive producers of Game of Thrones. A fantastic person. And former guest of our podcast.

**John:** Very true.

**Craig:** And HBO said, yup, go ahead, write yourself a pilot there buddy. And I did that. And then we brought on another fantastic producer from the UK named — or as they say in England, called — Jane Featherstone, who executive produced Broadchurch among other excellent programs over there. And so we have our little team here. HBO went ahead and gave us the greenlight to make the series. We have a terrific director who is going to be doing all five episodes of this miniseries. There are five of them. I’m writing all the scripts. He’s going to direct all the episodes. His name is Johan Renck. Johan Renck, I don’t know if I mentioned him by name on the podcast, but remember back when I was extolling the virtues of Jack Thorne?

**John:** That’s right. The British writer whose work you loved so much.

**Craig:** Correct. So one of the things that he wrote that I loved so much was a miniseries in the UK called The Last Panthers. And that was directed entirely by Johan Renck. He also has directed Breaking Bad episodes and Walking Dead episodes. Terrific guy. Really, really good filmmaker, so we’re really excited about that. And Jared Harris has signed on to be our — we have basically three leads of the show. He has signed on to be the main — I don’t know, they’re all main because they’re leads, right? He’s signed on to be one of them, which is fantastic because he’s an amazing actor. Did you see The Crown?

**John:** I loved The Crown. And he was fantastic in it.

**Craig:** He was. He was so fantastic that when he died — spoiler alert, the king dies — I was like, oh, I guess I’ll keep watching. But I wish that mostly he was a ghost now and could walk around a lot and talk a lot more. Just make it about him. So, he was amazing in that and he’s always been great. And, of course, he is the son of the late, great Richard Harris, the original Dumbledore.

**John:** Yeah. So you have some quality people involved in your project. And when do you start shooting this thing?

**Craig:** We start shooting it next spring. We need a pretty long run up of prep, because there’s a lot of work to do. But also it’s just the way the calendar worked out. We’re going to be shooting this series in Lithuania and the explosion at Chernobyl took place toward the end of April, April 26, 1986. And the weather in Eastern Europe is sort of rough, rough, rough, rough, rough, hot, rough, rough, rough, rough, rough. So, we kind of need to get to that summertime weather that starts happening in April around there.

There’s a few colder scenes, but it’s really a weather thing. So, that’s when we’ll be starting. The other two leads, I think we are well on the way to casting those. Very exciting names, but I cannot say anything until it is all wrapped up and done.

**John:** And so, Craig, you’re going to be filming in Europe just like I was gone in Europe for the whole year. So you’re going to be there for months making the show and we’re going to have to do this thing with like a nine-hour time delay.

**Craig:** We’re going to have to do the dance again. But I’d like to point out that I have to be there. You whimsically chose to be there. So —

**John:** Yeah, I guess it’s a difference.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit of a difference. By the way, did you see that Jack Thorne has just been hired to rewrite the screenplay for Star Wars Episode VIIII, the one that’s coming after Rian Johnson’s Star Wars?

**John:** Holy Cow. So everything fits together. You’re basically the nexus of all things happening in Hollywood, or really worldwide at this point.

**Craig:** Well, don’t you think it’s a little odd that I just happened to make him my One Cool Thing, and I don’t know, three months later or less, fewer, someone goes, “Hey, you know who we should have to write the next Star Wars movie is Jack Thorne.” I’d like to think that Jack owes me quite a bit. Quite a bit. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So it really wasn’t his talent that got you to notice —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, it was actually your singling him out that brought him to this acclaim.

**Craig:** Let me put a finer point on it. It was his talent that brought him to my notice. However, no one else appreciates talent. They simply appreciate my appreciation of talent. That’s what I’m saying.

**John:** Yeah I think in Aline Brosh McKenna’s script for Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep’s character makes a similar kind of observation. Like things are already out there, but it’s your shining a light on them that makes them valuable.

**Craig:** It’s my imprimatur. So, Jack, if you’re listening, half. I think that’s fair.

**John:** That’s totally fair. 100%.

**Craig:** Half. Yup. 50% of 100%.

**John:** 50% of 100% is what you’re asking for.

**Craig:** That’s correct. 100% of 50%. And there’s only a 20% chance of that. So, anyway, that is exciting and I’m glad I could finally tell people about it. And for anyone who is wondering, it is going to be historical drama, so it is a dramatization of what actually happened there. It’s not a documentary. It is an as true to history recounting of the events surrounding what led up to Chernobyl, the actual acts in and of itself, and then the terrible things that happened after.

It’s going to be a while before you get to see that on TV, but that’s what we’re heading into. And then you have this wonderful thing happening in London with a fantastic actor.

**John:** That’s right. So, for the last couple months we’ve been trying to put this together. Now we’re finally able to announce it. We are doing Big Fish in London. And so we’re doing a new version of Big Fish that is not what we did on Broadway. It’s not what we did in Boston. It is a third new version of Big Fish. Starting in November in London with Kelsey Grammer starring.

**Craig:** Fantastic. And now Kelsey Grammer is also starring in Billy Ray and Chris Keyser’s show The Last Tycoon. So, I guess Amazon shows they get hiatuses like everybody, so he’s doing this sort of in a hiatus. Is that the idea?

**John:** That’s the idea. So, I’ve talked to Billy and Chris about Kelsey, and they just could not be more enthusiastic about what a great person he is, but the way schedules worked out he’s able to do that, he’s able to do a movie. So, in his break he is doing our show and we are so excited to have him. So we start rehearsals in September. And first performances are in November. So I will be back and forth to London a lot. So, we get to do the time change dance as well.

**Craig:** Oh my god. The good news is that you’ll be back from London right around when I’m going to head out there to Lithuania. So the important thing is that we maintain half a planet between each other at all times.

**John:** 100%. So, in the show notes you’ll see links to the announcement of Craig’s new series, and also where you can buy tickets if you’re in London to see Big Fish with Kelsey Grammer.

**Craig:** And before people write in asking, no, I have not left movies for TV. This is the only TV thing I’ve ever done. And I’m writing movies. Movies are happening, folks. But, you know, figured why not. You know? You can’t do this story — you can’t do it in a movie. It’s too big.

**John:** All right. We’ve got some follow up from previous discussions. First off, Tim writes in with follow up on our discussion with Chris Keyser about the WGA deal. Tim writes, “You guys were talking about the possibility of moving to a weekly rate for screenwriters. We all realize this is tricky for the first draft, but maybe there’s a way to combine the two models. If studios are resistant to returning to two steps as a minimum, we should push for one step plus three weeks with some minimum per week fee. That way it helps solve the problem of producers demanding eight drafts before the studio even sees it. And it’s something the studios are familiar with, as in weeklies.

“Essentially two steps just means rewriting, so it might be worth it to try at least some sort of minimum weeklies after step one.”

Craig, what do you think of this idea?

**Craig:** Well, it certainly has its heart in the heart place, Tim. The idea of providing some sort of relief valve is exactly the kind of solution we need to find here. Now, we always have to run these things through the unintended consequences filter as well as the reality filter. So on the unintended consequences side, what we don’t want to do is get into a rut where people who are perhaps making a bit more than minimum, and that accounts for I think probably most screenwriters, would then just see that amount of this extra relief valve carved out of their quote so that it remains zero sum. And, in fact, nothing really changes.

The other issue is that we don’t also want to suggest that if you have one step and then a three-week, I guess it would be an optional relief valve, or maybe it would be a required relief valve, that the producers would then say, “I got a relief valve and weeks don’t matter. We can just do this now for three, four, or five months.” We know that that’s essentially what they want to do all the time. So, what we’re trying to figure out here really is how to get the producers out of the mindset that this is their one bite at the apple.

This would help, I think, screenwriters somewhat. I don’t know if it would address that core issue. On the reality side of things, there’s a problem here that would make it a tough hill to climb. And it’s this. Studios are very protective about what they call weeklies. In general, they have policies. They don’t hire people on weeklies for development. It is a disastrous precedent for them because all of the big shot writers make more per minute on a weekly than they do on any other kind of structured deal. So the studios limit weeklies essentially to projects that are in production that have been green lit. And those are production rewrites, production weeklies.

If something is in development, and that means to say it’s right on the edge of production where you’ll sometimes also see weeklies being given — they just want to call things polishes, or rewrites, drafts of some kind. They want to get away from that weekly because they find it horrifying and dangerous to spend that much money on something they don’t know if they’re going to make.

Now, what Tim is suggesting here isn’t that people get paid $250,000 for one of those weeks. He’s saying some minimum amount. And, sure, there is a minimum weekly. It’s very tiny, by the way. It’s about $5,800 or something. But, just violating the precedent of handing out weeklies in development will be a serious issue for them. So, couple of challenges here and I’m not sure it gets to the heart of the matter, but it’s well worth looking at as a possibility, even if it is an incremental one.

**John:** I agree it’s well worth looking at. I think what it does try to address is that sense of they keep you in this first draft forever so they can keep getting work out of you. And I think making it so that your deal said like you have a first draft and a guaranteed three weeks of rewriting, that makes it clear like we know that you’re going to be rewriting this draft and we’re going to pay you for rewriting that draft. That’s part of the process. And so studios can feel like, OK, I know I’m going to get this rewritten to my satisfaction because I have these extra three weeks tacked on.

I agree with you about the sense of weeklies as they are currently used in filmmaking are really expensive things that happen during production or right before production where expensive screenwriters are paid a lot of money to come in and fix problems in scripts. This is kind of a different thing. And it’s probably a little bit more like what happens in television right now where writers are kept on as things are going into production or like as the final episodes in a series are shot. So, there’s a precedent for it, but it’s not really a feature precedent right now. So it’s a different way of looking at stuff.

But I think it might be worthwhile, because I think it addresses something you brought up in your initial concern when we were talking with Chris was that that first draft experience is different and special. And to make that all on a time basis thing could be not great. But, the stuff that comes after that first draft, the tweaking, that really does feel kind of like weekly work and if we could get paid for that I think it could improve stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, what it comes down to really is when is that draft completed. And that is the crux of the problem. What we know is that we actually on our own can determine when a draft is delivered by delivering it. So, we’re dealing with a political and human problem here which is that, yes, individually any particular employee has the ability to draw a line in the sand. But our power generally is collective bargaining power. It’s not individual bargaining power. And individually writers are scared to do that when they’re being told that there will be repercussions.

So, we have to figure out how to get to the heart of that. And there are all sorts of solutions. Some try to be magic bullets and some try to be just slight improvements. At this point, we should be talking about all of them.

**John:** I agree. All right. Another bit of follow up. So, three episodes we talked about coincidence and we brought up the new Spider Man. Chris Ford writes in, “It was great to hear a plot point I worked on discussed on the show. I’m one of the writers of Spider Man: Homecoming and a long time listener of the show. I thought a lot about the super-link coincidence and how it could hopefully work. I think two factors helped us.

“We tried to make it absolutely as shocking as fun as possible so that as the audience settled into the idea, they were delighted with the comedy and the drama, and as a result they would accept it. But I think a deeper factor is that the surprise/coincidence like that is a genre element of Spider Man movies. There have been so many at this point that as we wrote it we were always playing against or playing with the genre of ëSpider Man movie,’ almost as clearly as if it was a Western and the audience was expecting a gun fight.”

**Craig:** Well, first of all, Chris, great to hear that you listen to the show and congratulations on the success of Spider Man: Homecoming. As John knows, I have not yet seen the film, but because of this letter I went and cheated and looked at the plot. Sorry about that. But, whatever, I’m a professional man. OK. It’s like two doctors talking to each other. Right? I think I’m allowed this one.

So, anyway, now I know what that coincidence is and I know how it works. And, yeah, it makes total sense. You know, one of the things that you can get out of a late movie coincidence is the coincidence is designed not to shock the audience, or make the movie any easier. The coincidence is designed to shock the hero. And make them realize that the way things were working isn’t in fact the way they’re working at all. And that’s fun for us to watch. We don’t mind that coincidence because it’s filtered through the characters scrambling to handle it. And it is fun.

So, that’s a kind of coincidence that I think you absolutely can get away with. And I think Chris is right that Spider Man movies generally speaking do have a lot of coincidence in them. The first Spider Man movie, the Tobey Maguire one, at least, I believe his best friend’s dad was Norman Osbourne, who became the Green Goblin, which is that’s an early baked in coincidence which is very soap operatic.

I mean, look, you want to talk about soap operatic coincidence, look at Star Wars. There’s a massive galaxy. How many planets are in a galaxy? I don’t know, a billion? Some crazy number. But everybody is basically related and two droids keep showing up everywhere. So, yeah, you know. It’s fine.

This coincidence is certainly less objectionable than any of those.

**John:** Agreed. Well, there’s always that sense, especially in Star Wars, like it’s a giant universe and a very small town. And everyone is always crossing paths with each other. And a listener named Elizabeth wrote in with another follow up about Spider Man. She says, “Number one, not only does it make the situation worse for our protagonist, it makes a dilemma. And that dilemma is deeply thematic. Peter Parker wants to be, is learning to be, and is learning to value being the friendly neighborhood Spider Man.”

They actually say that in the movie. “That means everyone cannot be and will not be anonymous strangers. In fact, it’s already been set up that the reason no one else has seized on this particular bad guy situation is because it is local. Perhaps this even makes the late-breaking coincidence not fully coincidental, or at least more likely.”

So, I think that’s a really good point. The coincidence and sort of the locality of it, like, oh, it’s in my own backyard aspect of it is really a fundamental part of this Spider Man. And so it makes more sense because thematically it all fits in all together.

**Craig:** Yeah. It certainly mitigates it. Certainly. I mean, if you’re telling a story where you have a working class hero facing off against a working class villain, it is not surprising that they are both living in the same working class neighborhood. So, yeah, that all feels perfectly legal to me. Chris, you have received the perfectly legal coincidence stamp from Scriptnotes. This is given out rarely. But, go ahead and put it on the cover of your magazine, Chris Ford Weekly. Seal of approval. It’s a ribbon. It’s a shiny ribbon. Silver. Silver?

**John:** Silver foil-ish. I mean, it’s not actual silver because actual silver would tarnish. But I think it’s definitely the kind of thing you’d want to keep up for a while. And then you’d be thinking about throwing it out, but then you feel really guilty throwing it out. Like it’s a gift you got that you never really kind of wanted. But now you have it. And so that to me is the Premiere Magazine Award that I have in my library. And it’s just this sort of square block of aluminum. So, I forget who the other director was. There was a director who got it the same year. And so Tom Cruise showed up to give it to the director. And they couldn’t find anybody notable to give it to me, so Rawson Thurber ended up giving me my Premiere Magazine award.

**Craig:** Aw. That’s so sweet.

**John:** It was so nice. And Rawson is awesome. But I have this thing, and I don’t really want this thing, but I cannot bring myself to throw it out.

**Craig:** Well, that’s hopefully how Chris feels about — I mean, that’s all we’ve ever asked from anyone who receives this, not that anyone has yet until now, but we just want it to be something that you want to throw out but feel a little weird about throwing out. Yes. A silver foil. That sounds good.

I was going to say we would use a silver-like foil because it’s just cheaper. But I think your tarnish reason also makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. So we want the gift to be made of 50% pride and 50% shame, kind of.

**Craig:** And then I get 50% of both of those. Because that’s what we’ve already established.

**John:** Shame or guilt. Either one works. It’s a fusion. We have a new question from Paul and he wrote in talking about coincidence as well. So let’s start with that. Let’s take a listen to Paul’s question.

Paul: Hi guys. My question is in regards to Episode 309’s discussion on coincidences. I’m currently working on a road trip style script where the main characters go on a journey and meet a selection of other characters along the way who are either a hurt or a hindrance or some sort of complication. Basically they all become relevant to the story, otherwise we wouldn’t meet them. So my question is how do we avoid making each one of these chance meetings feel like a coincidence?”

**John:** Craig, you’ve done a road trip movie. How do you make that not be a bunch of coincidences?

**Craig:** They’re not. By definition. You’re on a road trip. You’re going to run into people. Everybody understands that that’s the nature of a road trip. Coincidence is a problem when you’ve structured a story to be non-random. For instance, bank heist. That is a planned thing. People sit in a room. They talk to each other. They come up with a target. They come up with a plan. They execute the plan. If coincidences happen along the way that will be unsatisfying, because we know that they’ve planned so well.

When you’re on a road trip, you are saying we are embracing the unknown here. There will be things that happen. It is essentially episodic. The way you get out of it being episodic is for the people to meet random people along the way who then through their actions have some kind of thematic relevance and that is at the heart of every road trip movie. Even movies that you don’t think of as road trips, like the Wizard of Oz.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** It’s not coincidence that she meets the Scarecrow. It’s just something that happens. You tend to meet people along the way. And who do you keep talking to when you meet people along the way. You know, in Identity Thief, Jason Bateman meets the hotel clerk. He says three words to her and that’s the end of that because her character isn’t interesting or relevant. But then they meet other people who are and they become a huge part of the journey because the characters perceive something in them that is relevant.

So I don’t think that there is any issue whatsoever about coincidence there because that’s not what coincidence is.

**John:** I agree with you. So, the middle section of Go is a road trip, so the four guys are on a trip to Vegas. And what I think is crucial about it is the people they meet, they are meeting because they are taking actions that are bringing them to face these people. And that because of the things they’re doing, those people may be following up on them later on. And there’s repercussions and consequences of the things they’ve done earlier. But it’s not coincidence that they are in those places. They are deliberately going to those places. They’re meeting these people because they have chosen to enter these locations and that’s why it’s happening.

So, I can understand Paul’s worry because you know a lot of times it can just feel like a series of things, one after the other. That’s general plotting though. That’s trying to make sure that it feels like the characters are in charge of this road trip and that it’s not just a movie throwing a bunch of stuff at characters.

If a bunch of people walk through the door, that’s going to feel more coincidence. It’s going to feel more episodic. That’s the challenge you always have with movies that are sometimes set in one location. And it’s just a bunch of people walking through the door. Clerks could feel that way if it weren’t a great movie. And we’ve seen the bad version of Clerks a lot, where it’s just random wacky people just coming through the door.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then it’s a long sitcom. And sitcoms are amazing for 22 minutes on your television, but they don’t work on the big screen because you’re demanding something that’s a little more whole and completed. A narrative that moves in a circle and ends.

You’re absolutely right. If you’re going on a journey, theoretically you have some purpose for the journey. That’s what’s driving you through. It would be a coincidence if on your way you randomly ran into your own mom. That’s a weird coincidence. That’s bad. But, just meeting the people that you meet, and then choosing to continue to talk to them, that’s not coincidence at all.

**John:** No. The other situation which could occur, and this may be what Paul is bringing up, is you might have characters you meet and then you see them again later on and it feels really coincidental that they’re still on the same trajectory as you are. Yeah, be mindful of that. If there’s no reason why we would see that character again, you seem like you’re heading in different directions, there will need to be a cause and effect thing happening there for like why they’re suddenly on the same path.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So do work on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, in Identity Thief, they have a random encounter with Eric Stonestreet, the character that Eric Stonestreet plays. And that scene has relevance for Melissa McCarthy’s character and it makes her make a decision. And that impacts the course of her journey with Jason and her relationship with Jason and the choices she makes at the end. We see Eric Stonestreet one more time when bad guys are trying to find Melissa McCarthy and they basically put together clues that lead them to him. But that’s it. If he had shown up again randomly where they end up eventually it would have made no sense. It would have been a coincidence.

**John:** Absolutely. Do you want to take the next question?

**Craig:** Sure, Macaar writes, “I’ve just completed a first draft of a spec feature and I’m now preparing to write a second draft. I’ve never done a full on second draft before, so I’m not sure where to start, both logistically and artistically. Do I make a new document and start from page one, rewriting everything I’ve written before? Or I do just fine tune the material that I already have? What should be my main goals for the second draft? I’ve identified problems with the script, but I’m afraid that once I start rewriting the script I might lose sight of my original intention and the script will turn into something completely different from the story I wanted to tell. How does one maintain the integrity of their initial idea while working on a second draft? Are there any additional nuggets of wisdom you could give me before I embark on this journey?”

John, it’s nugget time.

**John:** It is nugget time. So rewriting is crucial and fundamental and the second draft is one of the hardest steps I find. Because often the second draft is where things kind of get worse, because you are trying to take this thing which was your initial idea and bend it into a new shape. And you’re reluctant to get rid of some things. You are still grappling with what you actually wrote versus what you meant to write. So, some general tips I can offer you is go in with a plan. And so I always approach a rewrite, a big rewrite after the first draft with this is what I’m trying to do. And I will type it up if I need to. Like these are the things I’m going to try to do. This is my intention with this draft. These are the characters I’m going to focus on. This is stuff I’m getting rid of.

If it’s a big rewrite, what I will tend to do is start with a new document and copy and paste in the scenes that are staying, even if I’m going to rewrite them, but if there’s stuff that’s going away all together, I won’t copy them into the new document. I will leave holes for where those are going and work on it that way. Very, very rarely I have I actually just like kind of started over where I have the script sitting off to the side and I’m typing a whole new script. That kind of rarely is necessary for me. But once or twice in my career I had to do that, where I’m really starting over from scratch.

What I would urge you not to do is just a Save As and it’s a new script and then you’re just sort of scrolling through it. Because I find you will just change the commas, and you won’t do the real hard work you need to do in really breaking apart the script and putting it back together properly.

**Craig:** That’s all excellent advice. Macaar, you’re asking great questions and they are reflective of a writer’s spirit. You’re panicking a little bit and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. And that’s completely normal. John is absolutely right. The second draft is the danger zone. Which means, therefore, that you have permission to go backwards. That is not only normal, it’s probably more likely than not to occur.

With that said, when you ask do I rewrite everything I’ve written before, or just fine tune the material I already have, there is no answer we can give you. That is your answer to provide. Because you have to figure out what the purpose of the rewrite is. You’re saying what should be my main goals for the second draft. Your main goal is to have a script that is better. That is vague.

So, you can’t just start rewriting because you’re supposed to. Nobody would know what to do with that. Nor can you just start rewriting because a bunch of people told you things to do that you don’t believe in, or understand, or feel. Before you start to write your second draft you need to absorb what is actionable, what you agree with, what you don’t, challenge all of it until you feel it. In other words, don’t start writing your second draft until you know what to write. Then suddenly it’s not so scary, because now it’s not rewriting, or writing, or any of that stuff, and the mechanics of new files or old files, that will become apparent to you because you’ll know what to write, so you’ll follow the path of least resistance there. And you’ll start writing.

You are well within your bounds to be afraid that you will lose sight of things. And, again, you have permission. I am granting you permission. You have a silver foil seal of permission from Scriptnotes. We’ve got to open up a seal factory.

**John:** Totally. 100%. So they’ll be available on the store by the end of the week.

**Craig:** And we’ve got to make sure that people know like when we do open up the seal factory, we’ve got to be really clear about what kind of seals we’re talking about here.

**John:** When we break the seal on the seal factory we have to make sure that they — we could have Seal come for the ribbon cutting when we break the seal factory.

**Craig:** That’s not a bad idea. That’s not a bad idea. So, anyway, Macaar, all these questions are great, but I guess the biggest nugget I have for you is figure out what you want to write before you start. Vis-a-vis, the script you have and the script you want to have. Don’t start writing until you generally know, otherwise you will wander. Oh boy will you wander.

**John:** I agree. Our next question comes from Samantha in Brooklyn. She writes. “Simple question. Does the fact that I’m a transgender woman in my late 30s, by the way, hurt my chances of becoming a working screenwriter? Thanks for all your honest, sometimes difficult to hear advice. I feel you guys have given me a more realistic sense of what’s probable regarding breaking in. I look forward to your candid response.”

**Craig:** Well, Samantha, no doubt you did not choose to be transgender, but if you had you couldn’t have picked a better time as far as I’m concerned. In Hollywood there is an enormous awareness of transgender issues and I think there’s also for the first time in as long as I’ve been working here a legitimate acted upon desire to start varying the kinds of people that are hired to do work and that doesn’t just extend to gender, or to race, or to age, which were the prior categories and limited to those, but also gender identity and orientation as well.

And with that in mind, I would say that the fact that you’re transgender is not at all a hindrance, nor should I add is it a state that requires you to write transgender themed movies or movies that feature transgender characters. Write whatever the hell you want. If I were your agent, I would advertise to potential employers that you are transgender because you bring a perspective that is limited in this town and you bring it at a time when there is a great appetite for it. In particular, I think you would be a very attractive candidate for television rooms, because they have just more potential for diverse hiring since they have rooms of people, whereas movies just have one.

That said, if you want to write movies, you write movies. But, no, I don’t think it hurts your chances even in the slightest. John?

**John:** I wonder if we’re painting this as too rosy of a picture as like too white guys in Hollywood saying like —

**Craig:** You’re white. You’re white, dude. David Duke tells me I am not white. And I, as you know, I listen to David Duke.

**John:** As two cis white guys, I’m gay, you’re straight, so I would say being gay in my situation has not hindered me whatsoever in my thing, but that’s not the same experience as being transgender. So, I can’t pretend that I know what the obstacles could be. And so I would agree with Craig that this probably the best time that has ever happened for transgender writers who are trying to break into Hollywood, but I don’t know what some of the obstacles could be that I’m just not seeing. So, I just want to make sure that I’m acknowledging that we don’t know sort of everything that could possibly be out there.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Oh, you do? Craig has magic knowledge.

**Craig:** I have a palantir.

**John:** Yes, he just peers into it.

**Craig:** Yes, I do. The great eye.

**John:** But, I will say please don’t use the possibility of obstacles ahead be any sort of deterrence from trying to do it. And I think that could be the biggest obstacle is your own worry that there are going to be walls put up in front of you. So, I would say go for it, do it.

You do bring up like you’re in your 30s, and in some ways I think that could be more of a factor than you being transgender, just because as we’ve talked about before a lot of sort of getting started in Hollywood is that sort of very beginning meetings and rooms and all the sort of grunt work of getting started. And it’s a little easier in your 20s than your 30s, but I don’t think it’s going to stop you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you on that for sure. If you’re looking at three factors here that Samantha is describing, one is being transgender. One is being in her late 30s. And one is living in Brooklyn. Late 30s and living in Brooklyn probably have more of a negative impact on her prospects than being transgender.

And, you’re right, I’m guessing here. I just see an enormous amount of good will and open-mindedness right now in Hollywood and I’d like to think, perhaps I am being rosy, but I would like to think that being transgender would not negatively impact Samantha’s prospects.

Samantha, here’s another thing to consider, particularly if you write features. You can write a spec script and if it’s awesome it doesn’t really matter what name you are, what your gender status is. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a human as opposed to some kind of weird sentient rock. A great script is a rare thing. And people will want it. And unlike most gigs in the world where you first have to show yourself and then work to prove yourself, in this gig you can hand somebody paper anonymously, essentially, because they don’t know who you are, even if you give them your real name it’s anonymous to them. And you are judged by the work. You could leave a name off entirely. Put a pseudonym out. You could do whatever you want. But that’s the cool thing about it.

Then, you know, look, people then have to eventually meet you and at that point your identity collides with the reality of people’s opinions and observations, but I remain optimistic and also, according to David Duke, not white.

**John:** This past week I was talking with a young writer and she was describing the script she was writing and she was super bright. I was pretty confident that she is going to succeed in the business. And she said she was applying to some diverse writer programs, which I also encourage her to do. And we were talking about the things she was going to write next. And I strongly encouraged her to write something that had a central character that felt like her. Because there’s something wonderful when you sit down with a writer and you feel — you’ve read their voice and then you meet the person and you feel like, oh, that voice really connects well with this person. And I think that’s one of the things about Lena Dunham’s work that is great, because you meet her and you read her work. It’s like, oh, I can see the match up there. And so while I think it’s great to have a range of writing that shows your diverse sides, if Samantha is working on a new script, like a third script, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a character in there that feels like Samantha, because then when they’re sitting across from you to talk about this great script that they loved, they can sort of see you in that. And it feels like they kind of know you before they’ve called you in for a meeting.

**Craig:** Yeah. That can be very useful. It is a narrower target to hit for sure to be the kind of writer who says, “Don’t worry about me. Worry about what I write, because I can write anything. Or, I can write a wide variety of things that aren’t necessarily connected to me. I can be essentially that multi-tool weapon that studios are always looking for.” And that is a much narrower target to hit. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a tough one. But, if you can hit it, then you become a very — you know, like for instance, John Lee Hancock. It’s interesting. You look at John Lee Hancock’s work, when he directs, you see him in it. Right? John Lee is kind of that, he’s sort of laconic, Midwestern/Southern spirit of America kind of guy. You feel it. When he’s writing, he writes everything. Everything. So he is that multi-pronged weapon.

It depends on who you are as a writer. But, look, at that point you’ve got a high class problem there, kid.

**John:** Yeah. Like they only want you to be one thing, while if they want you be that one thing, that’s awesome for you.

**Craig:** Yep. As long as they’re paying you, you know.

**John:** So Mark wrote in with a question. Let’s take a listen.

Mark: My question has to do with screenplay competitions. I’ve placed in about a dozen competitions now with two different scripts, ranging from a first place finish in a fairly prestigious competition to quarter finalist placings in what you could call tier two or even tier three screenwriting competitions. My question is this: how much weight do these placings carry when I go to cold query my scripts later this year? Can I leverage these placings to help me get a foot in the door, or is the industry kind of wary and jaded when you bring up screenplay competitions? Also, would it be best to be more selective and only mention the more prestigious placings, or should I just go and list every single award I’ve gotten when I go to pitch and query?

**John:** Craig, what’s your advice for Mark about his screenplay competition awards?

**Craig:** Well, before I get into the advice, I have a question for you, John. And for all of our listeners at home. I say query. Mark says query. I hear that a lot. Which pronunciation do you use?

**John:** I say query like it’s the second half of inquiry.

**Craig:** Yeah. So do I. I wonder if it’s a regional thing. Anyway, Mark, I’ve procrastinated long enough. Here’s what I think. Most competitions, and when I say most I mean essentially all of them, are useless. They will not help discriminate you from other writers, nor will they make your screenplay inherently more attractive to anybody. By and large, people do not care. There are so many of these things. They are mostly designed to take your money. You yourself say that you’ve placed in, or even won, what did he say numerous of them? So, what does that tell you? The deal with screenplay competitions is the more you mention them, the more I think frankly amateurish you seem. Certainly saying that I finished in the quarter finals of the blah-blah-blah screenplay competition only makes you sound bad, as far as I’m concerned.

You know, if you say, look, this script has won first place in every single competition I’ve entered in. Here’s a list of 20 competitions it’s won first place in, then I would be like, well, maybe this is pretty good.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, but that’s not the case. If you have performed very well in the Nicholl, I think that is well worth mentioning. If you win the Austin, that’s probably worth mentioning. But by and large, no. I think it’s far better to let the script speak for itself and not attempt to guild it with the dubious lily of screenplay competition laurels.

**John:** So, Craig and I don’t actually encounter query letters very often in our lives. And so we’re not people who would be seeing this letter that has all the awards attached to it. At some point we need to have a manager on who is like signing new clients to get a sense of whether that matters to him or to her. Because I don’t think it probably does matter. And I certainly wouldn’t list everything you’ve done. Like only hit the very, very highlights.

Like the same if you’re doing a resume, you don’t put everything on your resume, you just put the things that are applicable to the person you’re sending the resume to. And in this case, if there’s a recent award for a thing and it’s a really prestigious thing, highlight that. But otherwise I wouldn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you got to remember, Mark, that you’re sending your letter to somebody that accepts them. Everybody else that’s sending a letter to them has also entered a dozen competitions, almost certainly. So, letter after letter they’re being told look how special I am. Meaning none of us are special. These competitions are meaningless. Everybody has been a semi-finalist in four of them at this point. So, you know, they’re not looking for people that can do decently well in Single A baseball. There’s only one league here. That’s it. Majors. That’s it. No Minors. So either you are killing it out there and just crushing your competition, and hearing their lamentations, or don’t talk about it.

**John:** Mm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do you want to take the next question here?

**Craig:** Timothy McGherry, that’s a great name. That’s a good song name.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Timothy McGherry writes, “A Reddit user posted the following question.” Hang on, John. Hang on. I want you to grip your seat tightly now, because here we go. “So I was talking to my buddies about that screenwriting thing and turns out one of them tried this a while before quitting. He wrote a script and sent it to a few contests but didn’t place. He then told us we shouldn’t bother anyway. There’s a conspiracy to keep us out. I mean, why do you think some writers get paid over a million dollars and more for a screenplay while so many others struggle and have lousy day jobs. Well, there is a secret password you have to write within a script…”

By the way, this isn’t me talking, this is still the question. “…there is a secret password you have to write within a script and it automatically gets in front of people. Only a few people know it. It’s handed down within families who are extremely connected. They’re all trained to look for that password. Readers. Contest judges. And so on. And if they find it, you sell your screenplay for a million dollars. Otherwise, you’re rejected. And no matter how much you try, if you don’t know that password you’ll never break in. Anyway, that’s what my buddy said, and he’s a screenwriter. He knows what he’s talking about. Might just be a theory though. So, what do you think?”

Uh, John, this is provocative because we have been sitting on this for how many years now?

**John:** Well, it’s been 311 episodes, so even before the podcast, because you and I learned the password quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course, because your father was very well connected. What was his occupation again?

**John:** He was an engineer. But he was the engineer who actually invented movies.

**Craig:** Ah. And my parents were public school teachers, but my great-great-grandfather I think came over on a boat next to the boat that had Carl Laemmle on it.

**John:** Yeah. That would be amazing that he was that old and movies have only been around for a hundred years. But that’s how the conspiracy works.

**Craig:** Well, that’s how — Jews are all born elderly. That’s just a fact. And also we’re not white, according to David Duke.

Look, Timothy, this is the dumbest shit I have ever heard in my life. And normally I’m amused by these things. But it’s actually fascinating because it’s so perfectly stupid. All right, let’s just run it down. Your buddy tried this screenwriting thing a little while before quitting. But later you appeal to authority and say, well, you know, he must know what he’s talking about, he’s a screenwriter. No he’s not.

**John:** He knows what he’s talking about because he’s a failed screenwriter. So, yes.

**Craig:** No, he’s just some guy. Now, let’s analyze this. Let’s play the what-if-it-were-true game, because it is kind of fascinating. Let’s put aside the stupidity of the families and the secret password. Let’s just say that there is some way that you can automatically get a million dollars for a screenplay. How do you think business works? Because, see, the Hollywood I know, they will pinch pennies into powder. The last thing in the world they will ever do is give anyone a damn break with money. They’re brutal about it. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t occasional nepotism. There is. Maybe two people being roughly equal for the same job that actually has no real qualifications other than access, like internship or assistant, or PA, you know, starter positions.

But things like buying a screenplay, let me tell you something. If they grind us on every penny, I’m pretty sure they’re going to grind you, too. They’re not just going to go, oh shit, he put the word BALONEY in and he spelled it BOLOGNA, oh man, he knew the password. All right. Write a check. Brenda? Brenda, go get business affairs. Yeah, we got a bologna script. Yeah, no, he spelled it right. Yeah, a million. A million. Write it to, shit, Timothy McGherry. Who does he know? [laughs]

Now I want it to be true.

**John:** Yeah. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if it were true? The fascinating thing though is how do the studios decide who gets to write the check to Tim McGherry? I’m sorry, Tim, we know it’s not you. You were just asking the question.

**Craig:** It’s not you. No, you don’t know the password. And it’s not really bologna.

**John:** Who gets to write the McGherry check to buy the bologna script for a million dollars? You know what? I bet the all meet at the secret room. They meet at the secret room and they figure out who is going to pay the million dollars so that they can buy the script. And then make the — it makes sense. I don’t know why I was thinking — I was just thinking aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll tell you the part that actually is a little concerning to me and now I’m starting to think that maybe this isn’t true. I know obviously it is true. Of course there’s a secret password worth a million dollars. But I can’t get over this one little problem, John. He says there’s a secret password and they are all trained to look for it. Password readers: contest judges and so on.

**John:** Oh, yeah, so why aren’t they using it?

**Craig:** Thank you. If they all know the password, why aren’t they using it and getting a million dollars? So my theory is that there are other families that are just essentially through time are part of a secret order, like the Knights Templar, and they are just sworn to live a life of penury. I mean, they are contest judges. They don’t get paid that much. But that’s their lot in life. They get it. They’re like, look, my point is to live in poverty and then if I read the password, someone else gets a million dollars. Yeah. I’m not sure how else it would work.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, like there’s essentially two classes of people. Like there’s the class of people who are just the reader types, sort of like the paroles, and then there’s an upper class that actually get to sell the scripts for a million dollars. But they’re sort of probably just like trading scripts among themselves for a million dollars each because they already have all the money.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t know. I just sort of feel like this Reddit user — it’s not stated, but I think they think that the word is a Jewish word. I just feel like there’s some sort of secret thing about like these are the people who control all the purse strings. There’s something hidden back there.

**Craig:** Yeah. This thing is definitely a one-nut-hair away from being some sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Yeah. Look, it would be nice if the world functioned this way. It would certainly explain failure, wouldn’t it? Because as Tim says his buddy mentioned why do some writers get paid over a million dollars and more for a screenplay while so many others struggle and have lousy day jobs.

One answer, far-fetched and absurd, is that it’s a very hard thing to do, even though it looks easy. And so very few people are worth a million dollars or more. And most people aren’t. And so must stay in their lousy day jobs. But I grant you that’s far-fetched. Far more likely that it’s just that a few people know the magic password. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This was real.

**John:** It was real. I also feel like this Reddit user needs to meet our previous questioner, Mark, who like won all those awards and is wondering should I say that on my awards. Because like he should have gotten all the million dollars already and yet he’s not. So something about the system is broken.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like he’s been passed through. So the scribes of the Order of Scriptus say the password obviously in his material because they read it and they gave him an award for it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So where’s the million dollars?

**John:** I don’t know. I think the million dollars is behind the gate in the library in Old Town. And so at some point you’ve got to pick the lock and get in there and get the secret book that has the password in it.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Well, that may be the missing piece of the puzzle here. It’s all sliding into place.

**John:** That’s what we try to do. We try to answer questions and really reveal the secret passwords behind the secrets of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you guys were listening to this in your car and you’re contemplating driving into an abutment, don’t. I understand the impulse. But don’t. Because this will pass. Don’t worry.

**John:** We have time for one more short question. So let’s do one short question. Alan from South Carolina writes in, “Not being in LA, would you advise getting an attorney that is closer to my location, or work with one that is in Los Angeles?”

**Craig:** I would recommend that you work with one that is in Los Angeles if you have access to one. All things being equal. The entertainment attorneys in Los Angeles have generally speaking far more experience handling the kinds of transactional agreements that we get into with studios, producers, executives, and so on. And they also almost certainly will have better relationships with agencies in terms of helping you maybe get an agent. Better relationships with the business affairs people.

You know, one thing that helps you negotiate a deal is knowing what other people like you have gotten for something similar. Well, they tend to know. And probably attorneys in South Carolina, simply by dint of not having as much exposure to our business, would not.

So, I would go with LA, all things being equal.

**John:** 100%. I think you want somebody who does this every day. And so you want an entertainment attorney. The entertainment attorneys you’re going to find are going to be in Los Angeles. Sometimes in New York, but really Los Angeles. That’s the one you want.

And don’t worry that you’re not sitting down face-to-face with this person. I almost never see my attorney. It’s all done by emails and phone calls. It’s absolutely fine. So, important to check references on an attorney, but it’s going to be fine. Pick an attorney who is in Los Angeles. You’re going to be much, much happier.

**Craig:** Agreed. And — and when you do find that person, give them the password.

**John:** Yeah, yeah, it’s crucial because otherwise they won’t be able to negotiate for the million dollars.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing, actually have two, but my first one is a follow up One Cool Thing. So, Brent Warkentine writes, “I started listening to your podcast about a year ago. Love the info so much that I shot a PSA based on John’s One Cool Thing in Episode 267, How to Tell a Mother Her Child is Dead. Thank you for bringing this op-ed to our attention.

So, Brent sent in a link to this PSA he shot and it is terrific. And so if you remember the One Cool Thing, it’s this article that describes how an emergency room doctor prepares for telling a mother that her child has died. And this guy, Brent, he shot a PSA that’s all based around it. Sort of uses the words from it. And it’s so well done. So, congratulations, Brent. I think it’s a really great use of this idea and it ends up becoming a very effective gun violence message to send out there. So, really well done.

**Craig:** What kind of name do you think Warkentine is?

**John:** I don’t know. It sounds like it could be Middle Earthian?

**Craig:** Right. It’s possible that he is a Halfling.

**John:** Hmm-mm.

**Craig:** Possible. I don’t know. There’s something vaguely Finnish about it to me. It’s probably not. Warkentine. That’s an interesting one.

**John:** You know who knows? Brent Warkentine knows where it comes from. So, Brent, write in and let us know where it comes from.

**Craig:** But please do include the password or it goes to spam.

**John:** It goes to spam. My second and new One Cool Thing is Mouth Time by Reductress. So, it’s a podcast that Craig will never listen to.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** But if he did listen to it he would love it. And so the folks at Reductress, and Craig, do you read Reductress? It’s sort of like The Onion for women’s stories.

**Craig:** Like Jezebel meets The Onion?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Got it. No, I don’t.

**John:** So good. But now you will. It’s so well done. So two of the editors, Nicole Silverberg and Rachel Wenitsky, they play these characters Quenn and Dikoda and they are talking through their days and sort of the things going on in their lives and it is so pitch perfect and wonderful. And like when I say pitch perfect, it is vocally fried pitch perfect.

And so the characters that they create, they’re kind of like Romy and Michelle from Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, but they’re just great. And I just started listening to the podcast. I think it’s fantastic. So I would strongly encourage people to check it out. It is called Mouth Time with Reductress.

**Craig:** Quenn is hysterical. That name is brilliant. Quenn. Well, my One Cool Thing is for those of you who like me are avowed fans of The Room games. We are up to The Room 3. I believe Room 4 has been announced and I’m super-duper excited for that. But you know you’ve got to wait, because those games, they take a while to make. And, you know, it’s just one of those deals where at this point I mark my life in terms of time between Room games, and Bethesda games.

By the way, you realize do you know when Skyrim came out, John? Do you remember?

**John:** 2012?

**Craig:** Close. It was November 11, 2011. 11/11/11. It’s been freaking six years.

**John:** Yeah. And I’ve played the remastered version and it’s just still terrific.

**Craig:** It’s still so good. I can’t wait till they get going with Elder Scrolls 6. Anyway, while you’re waiting for The Room, there is, well, I don’t know how else to put it except there is a rip off. And generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of rip-offs. Rips-off? I’m not a huge fan of rips-off. But this is actually very well done. The knock on it is that is just straight up rip of The Room, down to the special lens that lets you see things. They add a couple of other little features, but it’s just Room-like in its sound, its design, its playability. The whole thing is just look at us, we’re The Room.

It’s called The House of Da Vinci. So, if you are a Room addict like me and you need a quick fix, something to bridge you over until you get to Room 4, you know what? House of Da Vinci, they’ve earned your four bucks. I hope they kick some of it back to I think it’s Fireproof games that makes The Room, because it really is just shameless. It’s just a shameless rip-off. But it’s very well done for shameless rip-offs.

**John:** Very nice. I shall check it out. That is our show for this week. So our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. And if you’re there, please leave us a rating or a review. That’s so lovely and it makes us happy when we read them. Craig doesn’t read them, but that’s fine.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That is also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about three, or four, or five days after the episode airs. If you read them really carefully, you can find the secret password buried in them. But you have to read through every transcript —

**Craig:** Every single one.

**John:** There’s some algorithms and like you have to print them out and draw things between them. And if you have string and pushpins that will help you triangulate what the secret password is.

**Craig:** And you’re going to try it, so don’t bother. It’s not UMBRAGE. Duh. We’re not stupid, OK? Otherwise we would be out of cash.

That said, there is a secret password buried in there. You get a million bucks. Your movie gets made. You know, just like the way John and I did. That’s how we got started.

**John:** You know, that system that was doing all the sort of deep machine learning on scripts, like the one that we sort of savagely tore apart and Franklin ended up taking down off the Black List. I bet that one I’m sure figured out the secret password and that’s how they got their VC money.

**Craig:** Oh god. It’s all making sense. It’s all making sense. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You can find that episode and all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month. We also have a few more of the USB drives. They’re at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** How much do I get from that?

**John:** You get nothing. Craig gets nothing from the John August Store. Not a bit.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Well. Hmm.

**John:** But, he got a million dollars because he knew the password, so it all worked out.

**Craig:** Boom!

**John:** Boom! See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [‘Chernobyl’ Miniseries Set By HBO & Sky](http://deadline.com/2017/07/hbo-sky-chernobyl-miniseries-starring-the-crown-jared-harris-tca-1202136735/)
* Carolyn Strauss on [Scriptnotes, 127](http://johnaugust.com/2014/women-and-pilots)
* [Big Fish The Musical starring Kelsey Grammer is on its way to London](https://www.theotherpalace.co.uk/whats-on/big-fish-the-musical)
* Scriptnotes, 310: [What’s in the WGA Deal](http://johnaugust.com/2017/whats-in-the-wga-deal)
* Scriptnotes, 309: [Logic and Gimmickry](http://johnaugust.com/2017/logic-and-gimmickry)
* A Reddit user asks: [Is there a secret password for success?](https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/6pu0px/is_there_a_secret_password_for_success/)
* [Every Three Hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X_XY-vWzKs&feature=youtu.be) on YouTube
* [Mouth Time with Reductress](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mouth-time-with-reductress/id1093619338?mt=2) on iTunes
* [The House of Da Vinci](http://www.thehouseofdavinci.com/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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 Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_312.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/logic-and-gimmickry).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 309 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we will be standing at the whiteboard to look at how story logic in our scripts may function. And then we’ll sit down to tackle some scenes and look at a few tricks to keep them interesting. And if we have time we may even answer a few more listener questions.

**Craig:** I love those.

**John:** Sound good Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think everything you just said sounded fantastic. No notes, John. No notes.

**John:** No notes. Fantastic. I love those. Before we even get started, yesterday as we were recording this the Emmy nominations came out. And I want to rant just for like maybe two minutes about Emmy nominations.

**Craig:** Go.

**John:** Not about any person who was nominated or not nominated, but the whole idea of snubs. I am so frustrated with the concept of snubs, that people who did not get nominations should feel especially bad or weird. That we need to single out the shows that did not get nominated. I find it incredibly frustrating. And I don’t know, how do you feel about that, Craig? You don’t care about awards at all, do you?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t, but you are touching a certain nerve here. And that’s — it’s not enough to say here are a bunch of people that have put their hearts and souls into making things. And when I say a bunch of people, I mean everybody that made something that year. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to pit them all together, make them compete, pick five of the best ones, then make them compete on television. And then one of them wins. It’s not enough for that. Apparently, also then you have to talk about who you said — no — you don’t get it. I’m snubbing you. No.

And now obviously no one is really actively snubbing anyone, but it’s just the media. Yuck.

**John:** Yes. So the problem I have with snubbing is like snubbing implies intention. That you deliberately did not invite someone to the party. A conscious choice was made. But, of course, a group of people all voting independently cannot make a conscious choice as one body. They can simply choose certain shows, but they cannot deliberately exclude somebody.

And so when I see intention applied to any group of voters, I find it incredibly frustrating because all people have is their own individual things. So the whole idea of snubs just drives me just really bonkers. If you’re going to make a list of other great shows that didn’t get nominations, I guess that’s fine. Because if you’re trying to single out that The Leftovers is a brilliant show, fantastic. But if you want to make us feel about The Leftovers, or feel like The Leftovers was less good because it didn’t get on that list, I’m angry with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And I think this is really just a manufactured story to sell clicks. That’s all. I mean, the whole thing, look, award shows of course exist to sell advertising. They don’t exist to actually award people. I mean, if you wanted to award people you would just do it I suppose. But primarily this is a business and they’re selling ads and they’re making money off of a show.

The secondary predatory business of making money selling ads off of things that talk about the thing that makes money from selling ads, that’s the industry that creates the snub. And people click, oh, because you know, ooh, someone in Hollywood got a snub. First of all, snub is a great word. Love that word. Just the sound of it is lovely. Snub.

**John:** It is nice.

**Craig:** Snub.

**John:** So that’s my bit of frustration. Let’s get to our actual real show. Some follow up. Our live show is coming up super, super soon and we have another guest to announce. Liz Meriwether. She is the creator and showrunner of New Girl on Fox which is entering its final season. She will be joining me, and Craig, and Megan Amram on July 25 in Hollywood. There are still some tickets left as we’re recording this. I don’t know. I need to check in with the Writers Guild Foundation to see how many are left. But if you would like to come join us, you should come join us in Hollywood for that special night.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So July 25, 8pm. Come there and see us. Talk with these two incredibly talented writers about sort of whatever. We don’t have an agenda yet.

**Craig:** No, but I will say that Liz is fantastic. Obviously I’ve already talked about Megan, my cousin. But Liz is great. You shouldn’t miss this, honestly. This is great. And it doesn’t matter if you write features or you write television. These are just two very smart people who are going to have I think tremendous insight on what’s going on. You know, I like the fact that we’re getting younger guests, also. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with bring Larry Kasdan on every now and again, but younger writers, they’re plugged in. They know what’s up.

**John:** Well, I mean, Liz Meriwether is younger than we are, but she’s also been running an incredibly popular TV show on Fox for five season now, six seasons now. So, she knows more than we do about things. And that’s my favorite kind of guest is someone who knows much more about something than I do.

**Craig:** 100%. Otherwise it’s just the two of us sitting in judgment.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s also good. But it’s not as exciting.

**Craig:** I kind of like those. Actually, those are my favorite episodes. [laughs] Yeah. I like those.

**John:** All right, so our first main topic today is about story logic. And this came up this week because so I just got back from Paris. I’ve been super jet-lagged. I’m over most of my jetlag. But this past week I went to a book signing for my friend. Julie Buxbaum has a new book out. It just came this last week, called What to Say Next. And she did a reading at the Grove, at the Barnes & Noble at the Grove. And it was my first time going to one of those events. It was cool to see how that all works.

And I was talking with another author there who was describing her new book and it’s a middle grade title. And she was wrestling with the mystery, she said. And she was talking about sort of the story logic. And we’ve been focused so much on character and motivation and other things in recent episodes, I thought we might step back a little bit and talk about the things that actually are just kind of plot. It’s the way in which pieces of information get out there and sort of how the overall shape of the plot and story work, which is sort of not always exactly driven by what the characters are doing. It’s sort of decisions that the author is making way ahead of time.

And that can be just puzzle work. It can actually a very different kind of process than sort of the writing on the page. So, today I want to talk a little bit about the mechanics and specifically one thing that I find incredibly frustrating and I think if we can focus on it you can often solve a lot of your story problems this way. Which is the difference between coincidence, correlation, and causation. The three Cs. And how you can use them to your best benefit in your stories.

**Craig:** Well this is going to be good. I mean, I will take a little something you said there and expand on it slightly. When you say it requires a slightly different way of thinking, I think it requires a completely different way of thinking. I mean, there’s this creative work that we do that’s rooted in a certain empathy. We create a human being in our minds. We must empathize with them, walk in their shoes, see the world through their eyes. Imagine how they react to the things that we throw at them.

It’s very emotional and it’s very empathetic. A lot of times we think of that as the creative meat of what we do. But then there is this other stuff that’s math. Story logic and the creation of the hardware of a plot is math. And it is a puzzle and it is a different part of your brain. I think it’s one of the reasons why so many people want to do what we do and yet so few ultimately get there. Because you can’t just be good at one of these things. You have to be good at all of them. And if you can’t quite get your hand around how to machine a plot, you end with a mess. And it is strangely the first thing that people will pick on when they walk out of a movie or they turn off a television episode. They say, “Why did that even have to happen? Couldn’t that person just have talked to the other person and then the show wouldn’t have happened?”

They notice it every time.

**John:** There’s a TV trope called Refrigerator Logic, which is as you step away from a movie and you’re getting something out of your refrigerator you’re like, wait, why did that happen? Like there’s things that sometimes will glide past you when you’re actually seeing the story up on the screen. And then later on you’re like, wait, that did not actually make sense. And so let’s talk about how those things can actually make sense.

And what you’re describing really is the different between — we talked about that metaphor about being on the train. And so as the writer, you’re responsible for like what you’re seeing out the windows, but you’re also responsible for being way up high and seeing where the train track is going. So as you’re laying out where that train track is going, you have choices about what branches and what decisions the story will make. And I was thinking back to a post I did ten years ago on the blog called the Perils of Coincidence. And that came after I watched Spider Man 3.

And Spider Man 3 is not a great movie. And there were some significant issues of coincidence where a bunch of things just had to happen in exactly a certain way. People had to be there at the same moment when this other thing was happening in ways that felt really, really unlikely. And so in that post I sort of broke through these are the coincidences. Here are some maybe ways they could have gotten out of those coincidences. Because when you see coincidences, you can always imagine at the outline phase. Like if they were turning in the treatment for that story there were a bunch of words like “at the same time, accidentally, luckily, unfortunately, meanwhile.” Those are all really signals that something is going on where it’s convenient for these things to happen but they’re not actually causing the other things to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You always get I think one coincidence in a story that can be kind of fundamental. And so a fundamental coincidence to me is like, well, in Spider Man it’s Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider. Anyone else could have been bit by that radioactive spider, but then it wouldn’t be Spider Man. So the audience will always give you that one sort of fundamental coincidence.

In Die Hard, John McClane happens to be in the tower when the bad guys take over.

**Craig:** Where his wife is. Yeah.

**John:** Where his wife is. Yes. But they’ve already established that he’s there because his wife is there, so that all makes sense. If his wife happened to be in the same building, that would be too many coincidences. But it made sense because they were all kind of bundled together in one thing. You wouldn’t have the movie if you didn’t have that kind of fundamental coincidence.

And usually that movie will spend its fundamental coincidence very early in the first act. Like page 10, page 20, page 30 at the latest. It’s interesting watching the new Spider Man, which I won’t spoil, but they use their fundamental coincidence incredibly late in the story. And it was surprising but I think actually really effective. So when you see the movie you’ll say like, oh, wow, OK. And because the rest of the movie works so well they’re able to spend that coincidence quite late in the story and that was exciting.

**Craig:** The notion of coincidence and making things convenient is correct and it is connecting to the convenience of the writer. I think this is why people find it dissatisfying. It’s cheating. I mean, we want to watch these things unfold in a way that is surprising and fascinating to us, but after we are surprised we go, oh, OK, that was — that feels good. I like that this happened. I understand why it happened. It makes sense. I just didn’t see it coming. That’s the fun part.

With straight up coincidence, what the audience feels is you wanted to do a thing, or you needed to do a thing, so you just jammed it in. We don’t mind that first big coincidence because we understand that it is necessary for us to enjoy a thing. I mean, really the first coincidence of any movie is that we have shown up to see it. That’s — you know, so we’re OK with like, OK, we showed up to see your movie. You go ahead and do a thing.

But then the joy of the story is that there aren’t these things that are happening that just cheat. Because what’s the point then? We in our lives do not recognize the drama around us and the things that concern us as deriving largely from coincidence, even though I think strangely it’s probably true that most of the crazy things that happen in our lives are the result of coincidence. But the things that we’re mostly interested in, the passionate affair, the decision to steal, falling in love — these things feel volitional to us and they feel like they are arising naturally from the circumstances around us.

So those are the dramas that we like. We’re not so interested in stories where someone is walking down the street and a piano falls on them. It’s shocking, but there’s not drama to that. It’s just like, oh, how odd.

**John:** Yeah. It is. It’s surprising. And, oh, he happened to be there at that moment when the piano fell on him. And in real life sometimes the piano does just fall on a random person. But usually when we see an unexpected event or really any event, we expect there to be a cause. We expect there to be a relationship between these two events happening that is either causal, like one caused the other. It is correlated, like some outside force caused both events to happen. Or if neither of those things make sense, then it truly is coincidence. I think in the real world we tend to ascribe causal relationships to things that often are coincidence and that’s a real problem.

But in movie logic terms, these are our universes. And so we shouldn’t have to rely on coincidence for most of the work of our stories. So, if we’re not going for coincidence, we’re looking for causality. We’re looking for A causes B. Ideally, something we’ve seen already in the story has caused this effect. And now we’re in this situation and whatever the characters are doing in the situation, ideally your lead characters, not just the villains, whatever they’re doing is causing the next thing.

We talk about actions and consequences. Causality is about consequences. It’s about what this chain of events is leading to next. And how our characters are responding to that and changing their own circumstances.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does seem to me that part of the danger of what we do, the negative impact of what we do, is that we make such a big deal about very dramatic, very extreme events being caused, being purposeful. There are no coincidences, right? In life, almost all these things I think are coincidental. And then we try and put causation — every conspiracy theory that you see out there in some way or another is attempting to make sense of what may be coincidental. Sometimes there are conspiracies. We seem to be currently in the middle of one. But largely, no.

But in movies and TV, well, hey, what can we do? This is what we crave is this sense of causation. And when you think about movies — The Godfather is an incredibly complicated movie in that it’s got dozens of characters, and a lot of moving pieces in the machinery of the plot. A lot of hardware there. But everything is caused. And it all starts with a very simple thing. Someone shows up and says, “I have a business proposition.” It’s not even a coincidence. “You’re a business man. I have a business proposition.” And the Godfather says, no, I’m not interested.

And from that begins a series of caused events. And it is so satisfying to watch. Someone makes a choice. If you don’t give me what I want, I will do this. I did it. I just saw what you did. I’m now going to do this to stop you. And so on and so on. And it builds, and builds, and builds. Everything is caused. And I think it’s important when people are laying out their plots, they at least start from a place of everything — everything that happens here will be caused. Everything.

There are ways to fudge it here and there. But I think that’s probably the best ambition you can have for the machinery of your plot.

**John:** And one of the dangers here is you can fall into a trap of thinking like, oh, this is mechanical. This is a Rube Goldberg device where like once you set this ball rolling down the ramp everything will happen. In some ways that is accurate. But you want it to feel like all the characters are making individual choices that are leading to the next thing. So you don’t want just one series of events kicks off and the characters are just, again, we go back to this metaphor of being on rails. They’re just being dragged through the movie.

It needs to feel like they have volition, that they have the chance to make their own choices. But the choices they make will cause the next set of circumstances. And that can be really tricky to do.

So let’s talk about how you do that. So if I’m standing next to this writer who is working on the mystery of her story, what is some advice that we can give her to tackling the mystery of her story? Well, I would say that if you have the luxury of having a TV writing staff, that’s largely what they’re there for. So, when you see a TV room together, you know, sometimes yes they’re pitching jokes, they’re pitching storylines, they’re pitching ways to get through a scene. But a lot of what they’re doing is figuring out how are we going to get from this, to this, to this, to this. Like what are the natural causes and effects of these things.

**Craig:** Now, if you’re on your own, as I typically am — in fact, as I have always been — I think a general best principle is to start thinking about how you want to end. Because if you don’t know how you end, the danger that you will begin creating this bizarro plot to get from point A to where you eventually end up is high. If you know where you’re going to end, you can machine your plot. And remember, the point of machining the plot is not to be obvious, but rather the opposite. To be surprising. The surprises are not random. They are not derived from coincidence. They are carefully constructed. They are paying off in a satisfying way what you’ve set up.

You can’t really do that well if you don’t know where you end. So I think if you have your ending, you can create that causal chain with interesting reversals and surprises and twists and back and forths so that everything feels sort of meaningful. It is also important if you find yourself laying out your plot and suddenly there are a lot of, well, bends in the pipe. You know, a lot of strange things where you’re going, well, I got to do this so I can do that. Stop. Always stop. You may think you can get away with it. It’s just going to get worse and worse. It’s going to become byzantine.

Sometimes what happens is we fall in love with the notion that something is going to happen. And the problem is what’s come right before that something that we want to happen isn’t leading directly to the something we want to happen. So what do we do? We jam it in. We create a coincidence. Or even worse, we put in a bunch of scenes in between those things so that it will kind of get there naturally, but now there’s bloat.

Sometimes you kind of have to cut the throat of the thing that you really, really, really wanted to do because it’s not laying in properly. It may be able to happen later, but it may be the wrong thing. Your story will want things to happen naturally and then you are going to want things. And you kind of have to get your ego out of it a little bit and let your stories’ wants take precedence over yours.

Because I’ll tell you this. This the last chance you have to be clean. Outside the gate are the barbarians. That’s a little uncharitable to the people that are trying to help us make our movies. But I will tell you, for instance, Identity Thief, after I wrote my second draft, or even my first, there was a note — and it wasn’t really a note. It was sort of an order. “We want more villains.” And I don’t know why. To this day, I’m not really sure why.

And, you know, I did my very best to say that’s not — I don’t think we should. And the response back was, “Do it.” And so I did it. And it created so many coincidenty poor plotty mechanics. That stuff just — and you know, look, happily I don’t think anybody goes to a movie like that for the exciting villain plots, and yet it hurts every movie. Every movie. When there’s obvious bends and kinks because something that doesn’t belong has been put there. And nobody quite has a sense of what does and doesn’t belong to a movie that has not yet been shot than the writer does. I wish people would listen a little more carefully when the writer says that doesn’t belong.

It’s one of our Spidey senses.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about what the actual process might be for you’re the writer working by him or herself and you’re trying to figure out these plot mechanics, the story logic, before you start doing your draft ideally. So, different writers have different approaches. Some make a simple outline. Some use index cards. Some will write out a treatment.

What I would say though is no matter what your process is, if you’re describing it to somebody — basically if someone is looking at the cards with you, or if you are sharing your outline with somebody, watch out for when you’re saying these phrases that signal, OK, there’s something convenient happening here. That it’s not necessarily natural to what should be happening in the story. So when you find yourself saying “at the same time, meanwhile,” which means that you’re cutting away to something else, or “just then,” those situations — they’re unlikely and you can’t have so many unlikely things in your script.

You’re going to be running into problems if you’re saying those kind of phrases a lot.

One of the other things to really be mindful of, and I think this is partly what happened with what you described in Identity Thief is sometimes there’s mechanics happening in the story that won’t be immediately obvious to the reader and therefore the audience. Like there’s behind the scenes stuff that’s happening. And one of the real challenges for writers is all that hidden machinery has to make sense, even though it won’t surface till later on.

So, what the villain was doing those three weeks, or like why that person showed up at that point. Maybe you have a reason for why they got there. Maybe you’ll even be able to say the reason why they got there. But the minute they sort of showed up there or something happened that was not visible to the audience, that’s going to be a surprise. And figuring out how you’re going to balance what the audience knows versus what the audience is going to find out later on can be really tricky.

And so whenever I have stories that aren’t just one main trajectory that can be a lot of my planning work is figuring out how do I make it clear to the audience. Like these people were doing these things in the background. You just didn’t see them. But here we are now and the characters are doing these things now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just continuing the Identity Thief case, there was one villain — I know, that’s crazy, right? I wrote one villain. What? Anyway, and very early on, in fact, the first time we meet Melissa McCarthy’s character, she’s on the phone with that villain and he’s upset. And she’s lying to him. And then later on when she and Jason Bateman’s character finally confronted each other and he’s kind of got her where he thinks he wants her, the bad guy shows up. It’s natural. She lied. We know she lied. He never got what she said she would send him. And he’s here. That makes sense. Meh. You know.

**John:** Well, in doing that, that initial conversation, you set the expectation that we would meet him and that he would show up. And you’re paying off that expectation. So that does not feel surprising to an audience. And it feels like, OK, this is a thing I expected to have happen. I’m happy that it’s now happening. I’m a smart person because I expected it to happen and therefore it is happening.

**Craig:** It was caused.

**John:** Yes, it was completely caused. It was not just a random fluke.

And even movies that I think are really good, like this most recent Wonder Woman movie, there will be some coincidences in there. And that’s OK. And if the movie is working really well you don’t notice it so much. A coincidence in the new Wonder Woman movie, which is not really spoiler at all, there’s a moment in the story where Diana first uses her bracers and sends off the shock wave. And like, wow, she has sort of supernatural powers.

She heads off and then like literally two minutes later while she’s standing on the cliff, Steve Trevor’s plane comes crashing down. Why did that happen at the same moment? Well, because it was convenient. There was nothing about her doing the bracers that caused his plane to fall. It just happened to happen at the same moment.

We go with it because it’s sort of the mythology and it feels OK and appropriate, but it is a big coincidence that it’s happened at the same moments. They literally coincided in ways that weren’t natural.

**Craig:** Exactly. And, look, when you’re writing, that may be where you end up. But it’s always worth in a moment like that to say am I avoiding a problem or am I avoiding a gift? Can this thing that just happened cause that thing? Wouldn’t that be satisfying? Now, it may not work. You may not be able to make sense of it. Or if you try, it may cause other problems and a ripple effect. And then you abandon it. But try. You know, I think sometimes what happens is these things happen, they emerge, and we get scared and try and run away from them when we should be running toward them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Every problem is an opportunity. So take advantage of those opportunities as they come up. All right, let’s go step away from our whiteboards and go into our actual scenes. And you had a suggestion for the topic of gimmickry and the creative little tricks you can sometimes apply to keep scenes interesting. Take it away.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a little dangerous to be talking about this, because I always worry that people are going to go wee and start throwing ketchup all over their food. But these things can be great. I was thinking about it because I’ve been watching Fargo, the television series, and I should mention that one of the things that Fargo does that’s interesting is they make a little bit of a religion of coincidence. You can get away with a lot of coincidence if your show basically says around here coincidence happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to make things worse. Sometimes it happens to make things better. But that’s kind of the world we live in. We live in coincidence world.

You know, Tarantino lives in coincidence world.

**John:** Absolutely. He just happens to be crossing the street and getting hit by the car.

**Craig:** Exactly. And we’re like, yup, that’s what happens in Pulp Fiction world. That makes sense. Totally.

So, gimmickry. Sometimes you find yourself writing a scene and the general conventional way of laying things out feels a little meh. Feels a little boring. I don’t mean to equate conventional to boring, because sometimes conventional is the absolute best way to tell a scene and it is fascinating. But there are times when you’re going to want to, I don’t know, throw a little glitter on.

So, I just thought of a few of these things that we can do and at least by codifying them we know that we have these tools in our belt. And the first one is kind of radical — I mean, I guess they’re all radical in a way. Change the arrow of time. And we generally think of time as moving forward and it is linear, but of course we have seen lots of movies and lots of TV shows where things move out of order. Sometimes they move backwards. Sometimes we see something that should have happened before the thing we just saw happening after the thing we saw. But we get it.

Do you remember how in Out of Sight he did that interesting — Soderbergh and Scott Frank did that interesting trick of editing and scene design where you had Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney falling in love but we found out about it out of its time in the movie. It was just fascinating the way it worked.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You just got to be careful when you do it. It needs to be purposeful. It needs to evoke something. You can jump time in little steps. You can also jump time in big steps. You can have, you know, a scene where two people are talking at a place and then one of them turns around and it’s 20 years earlier and now they’re children talking in that place. You can do these things. You just obviously have to have a reason why.

**John:** Absolutely. And as the screenwriter, you need to make it clear on the page what you’re doing. Because some of these effects will be really obvious in the film, but will be really hard to see on the page unless you’re upfront with the reader about like this is what’s happening. And you don’t have to explain why you’re doing it, but you have to explain like what it’s going to look like and feel like if you were watching the movie. That you’re acknowledging that you’re jumping this thing. Because when you’re just reading 12-point Courier it’s easy to sort of miss and get confused by these sort of sleights of hand.

**Craig:** Yeah. Similarly, if you change the arrow time, you can kind of change the nature of space by splitting the screen. When we think of split screens, I guess what immediately comes to mind are just bad sitcom split screen kind of jokes where one person is talking on a phone and the other one is also on the phone. And it’s a split screen. Wah wah.

But split screens I actually think can be incredibly valuable when you’re trying to create tension. So, I’ll go back to Tarantino, again. Because, by the way, Tarantino the most — he goes bananas with these gimmicks and he uses them so well. There’s a moment in Kill Bill where we see that Uma Thurman is in a coma and also we see Darryl Hannah’s character coming down the hallway with a syringe to kill her. And he splits the screen. And there’s something beautiful about watching a demon essentially stalking down a hallway. And then at the same time watching this completely helpless human being. And the tension just rises because what he’s telling us is there’s no chance she’s going to open that door and our hero won’t be in the bed. She’s going to be in the bed. You see her, right there.

You can also split the screen where you see the same thing happening from two different angles at the same time, which is a fascinating thing, because in one angle somebody is walking out of a car and they’re walking into a store and they’re quite happy. In the other angle, just because of the nature of the camera, we see that someone is watching them. And they don’t know.

It is the sort of thing that I think screenwriters should be thinking more about because when we don’t there is a danger that the director will. And I don’t mean to say that like directors are bad at it. They’re not. But if the gimmick is only directorial, it will feel more gimmicky. When it is connected to an emotion or a feeling or a purpose, which is our domain when we are writing these things, I think it can be terrific.

**John:** Yeah. You’re describing using these tricks to really enhance or underline the emotion or the story point you’re trying to get there. So it is better for the gimmick. The gimmick is just not there on top of what you’re otherwise seeing. It’s not a conventional scene with a gimmick applied to it. It is a scene that is better and unique because of the gimmick. And once you see it with a gimmick, it would be hard to imagine that scene without that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when some people watch these movies, I think critics fall into this trap a lot. I don’t mean reviewers. I mean analyzers of film. They will tend to see these things as style. They will tend to see them as visual style. But when we connect to them, it’s not because they’re visually stylistic. It’s not the aesthetics. It’s what it tells us about the people involved and how it makes us feel. It is actually again an extension of character. And an extension of the empathetic connection that we have with the people on screen.

There’s another thing that happens quite a bit and I think when we watch it we don’t realize how radical it is. And that’s just bending or even breaking reality itself. Sometimes somebody should just talk to a dead person. You can have a scene where somebody is just sitting in their bed and they say out loud to the ceiling, “Oh, Edith, I wish you were here. What should I do? I don’t know what to do. I’m lost without you.” Boring.

Or maybe Edith is just there. The beginning of The Iron Lady did this beautifully. Meryl Streep plays an aging Margaret Thatcher. And when we meet her she’s talking to her husband, played by Jim Broadbent, and the two of them are having the most mundane typical breakfast conversation. And she’s telling him, “You’re putting too much butter on your toast.” I mean, you have no idea that he’s actually dead. He’s not there. He’s not there. And then you realize, oh, he’s not there. Wonderful.

You can also bend reality by just freezing the entire world except for one person. And, of course, there’s the typical breaking the fourth wall, which is always a trickier proposition. But I guess my point is you have the ability to do things that are beyond the pale of what we experience in our everyday lives in terms of reality. And you just have to make sure that there’s an in and an out. And that once we get out of it, we know we’re out of it.

That’s the key. You can surprise people. You don’t have to tell them you’re going into it. You just have to let them know that it happened and now you’re out.

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s the kind of thing which you probably try to do relatively early in your film so you get a sense of like this is the kind of thing that happen in your movie. Because if you do it quite late, then it feels like, wait, you’ve broken the rules you’ve set. There’s a social contract you’ve signed with the audience and now you’ve broken that contract.

And always be mindful of, you know, you are defining your characters and their actions on the page, but you’re also defining the character of the movie. And so the kinds of choices you’re making in terms of the gimmickry, the stylistic choices you’re making, that’s the character of the movie. That’s what your movie feels like.

And so as long as it’s consistent with what the movie feels like, you know, the way that Tarantino movies feel consistent with a Tarantino world, it’s going to be — it’s going to feel right. It’s going to feel like something that can happen in your world.

But if you’re completely straight drama and then suddenly you try to pull this thing at page 80, I think the audience is going to rebel and quite understandably for your not following the basic rules you seem to have set for yourself.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, every time you do this, you are breaking the tone one way or another. In 500 Days of Summer, everyone slips into a musical number. That is a gimmick. And believe me, I don’t use gimmick as a pejorative. I use it as what it is. It’s an exciting, dazzling way of attracting people’s attention. We know, OK, this is the kind of movie where that can happen.

So later when they break reality, again, and show us two simultaneous evenings, expectations versus reality, we understand that can happen here. And it’s all right. Similarly when we watch Kill Bill, the fact that suddenly the movie switches into animation, acceptable. There are also moments sometimes where the break in the tone is OK because the movie is silly. There’s not a lot of gimmickry, filmic gimmicky in a movie like say Woody Allen’s Love and Death, which is one of my favorite movies. I mean, it’s broad. It’s very broad. It’s very silly. It’s wonderful. He doesn’t really mess around with reality too much. But then it does.

Then there’s a sequence that turns into a silent movie, into a silent film, which is hysterical and amazing. But you have to be aware of what John is saying here, those of you at home. Your story has to be able to survive this. And just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Gimmickry is amazing because it frees you. It gives you like these — like we used to have the box of crayons. I had the box of 16 crayons and someone showed up and they’re like, “I have the box of 64 crayons. I have seven more blues than you do.” OK. Well, gimmicks, those are the extra blues and the extra reds. It’s the big box of crayons. They tend to make us feel more creative. When you read them in scripts, they tend to make the read feel maybe more sophisticated or ambitious. But even then, that is kind of a gimmick. Because it only is ambitious and creative and advanced when it works.

So, do it if it makes something better. Don’t if it doesn’t. Just know that you can.

**John:** Absolutely. The bigger box of crayons will not make you a better artist. They will just let you do some things that you couldn’t otherwise do easily. And that’s important. That can be useful. And I think by limiting ourselves to the simplest things, sometimes you’re able to tell simple, and true, and very strong stories. There’s a reason why you may want to not use the gimmicks, not use the full set of tools that you could use.

But, there’s certainly circumstances where you want to try to do those. And I think those are great. And quite a few of my films have used some of those fancy crayons. Like my first movie Go. It restarts time twice. There’s scenes that you see from multiple perspectives. You ultimately recognize that there’s quite a bit more going on than you first thought. And that’s great.

My movie, The Nines, is sort of nothing but a bunch of crayons melting all over the screen. And it’s very deliberately playing with your expectations of what is the difference between these actors and these characters. And is there any real underlying reality behind all this. It breaks its tone. There are musical numbers. There’s reality stuff happening in there. Melissa McCarthy is playing herself. It’s a very different set of expectations than you would normally have going into a movie.

But that’s not the only way to tell a story. And I don’t try to apply as many effects as I can to every movie. Like you have to be very judicious and see what is right for the story you’re trying to tell.

**Craig:** And I think you’ll know. That’s the thing. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction. There’s a feeling, oh yes, you know, this feels so much better than just the usual way. You know, I remember Todd Phillips and I were like struggling with how to do a flashback. Like, oh, here’s a flashback scene. I was like, yeah, well, I don’t know. And then the notion that in Alan’s mind they’re all children and to do it with children, that’s a gimmick. But it made so much sense and suddenly it was a joy to write. It was exciting. You know?

And I feel like, OK, if we are chaining our hands to the keyboard and going, OK, here we go, blah, blah, blah, then it’s probably going to be a similar experience for the audience. When you get excited and it just flows, then you know you’ve got the right gimmick. But again, word of caution, most of the time it will be flowing and feeling great with no gimmicks at all.

**John:** 100% agree. All right, Craig, let’s try to answer one or two of these questions in our mailbox.

**Craig:** Let’s try, you know. Let’s try.

**John:** We have audio, so let’s first listen to Kate from Phoenix, Arizona, who wrote in with a question.

Kate: My question is about interviewing experts to create more realistic stories. The script that I’m writing deals with a crime and the legal consequences. Although I have a respectable working knowledge of these procedures for a lay person, I can tell it’s not enough. I need to find a cop and a lawyer to interview to get the details right. I found some people online who are more than willing to consult for a sizeable fee. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but my wallet does. Do you have advice for finding and interviewing experts? Once I find them, is it customary to have them read the script and point things out? Or ask about procedures piecemeal?

Also, for a Murphy’s Law type of situation, if I change story elements based on what they say, can they claim some kind of story credit? That’s sort of the point of asking in the first place, to change the story and make it better. And I’m not opposed to giving credit if it were fair, but I would prefer not to share the story credits if I can help it.

Are there measures I should take to protect the intellectual property of my own work?

**John:** Well, that’s a great question. I don’t have perfect answers for Kate, so I’m going to preface this by saying I bet some of our listeners have good resources they might point Kate towards in terms of finding the cop and a lawyer who she could talk to.

But I can offer some general guidance which is, no, you should not be paying anybody. And, no, they should not be trying to take story credit. What you’re doing is just asking people about their jobs. And you’re asking them how they do their work and asking them some theoretical questions. That’s not story credit. You’re nowhere near that. So, anybody you’re talking to who would want to try to get that from you is not the right person for you to talk to. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. There’s not going to be any payment here. I’m doing a project right now that has a lot of research involved. It’s more research than I’ve ever done for anything in my life. And I’ve talked to all sorts of people. But I specifically had to talk to a cop when I was working on Identity Thief, because I wanted to find out how does this all work, and how do you go through your job and deal with this stuff. If you call, I think if you just call, Kate, you say you’re from Phoenix. Call Phoenix PD up and just say, “Listen, I’m a writer. I’d love to sit down and interview an officer or a detective. Would you have somebody willing to talk with me for a half an hour? I just have questions for a story I’m writing.”

I would be shocked if no one said yes. Everybody wants to talk about their job. Everybody wants somebody to get it right. I think people are interested in being a part of something like that. I don’t think there’s any issue with credit because they’re not writing anything. They’re talking to you and you’re taking notes.

You certainly can give them an assurance that you’re not going to use their name. That you’re not going to use anything that’s identifiable to them. And if you are recording the conversation, that the recording will not be played back for anybody other than yourself. That it’s only for research purposes. But I think by and large if you just ask, same thing with law. If there’s an area of law. I mean, you must know somebody that knows somebody that has a lawyer. Have that person ask their lawyer. Who would be a good lawyer who might want to talk to you about this? Somebody sooner or later is just going to say, “I’ll do it,” because people generally want to help.

**John:** They do. So I think Kate’s social network is probably bigger than she realizes. So if she just goes on Facebook, throws it out there like, hey, I’m looking for any cop or any lawyer, does anybody know somebody? Somebody will know somebody who knows somebody who is going to be willing to talk with you about this.

Before I left for Paris, I was in an Uber. I was actually headed to Kelly Marcel’s house. And our Uber driver was from a country who was exactly the right person I needed to talk to about this project I was writing. And so I just started up a conversation with him and said like, hey, this is really crazy but would it be OK if I called you and asked you more questions about the country you’re from and when you came to the US. And he said, of course, that would be fine.

And so you will bump into people in your real life who are going to be helpful and will get you through that kind of thing. I was also years ago I was in upstate Maine doing research for this other project that never got made. And I was staying at this little hotel and whenever I would meet somebody new I was like, I would ask them about their job and I’d say like, hey, do you know anybody else who has lived here since 1970? Did you know any people who are old timers here? Because I’m trying to find out information. And so over the course of three or four days I was able to talk to ten different people about sort of what Maine was like in the 1970s. And it was great. It was fantastic. And it didn’t matter that I had credits or didn’t have credits. They were just like, well, somebody wants to know, I’m happy to talk to you about it.

So, you will find somebody who has the information you need. And if your listeners have other good suggestions for first places that Kate should look, we welcome them.

**Craig:** I talked to a detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department when I was doing research for Identity Thief. And he was describing how they work and how you deal with law enforcement when you catch them. And how you have to deal with it as a victim. And he was great. And when it was over, and I was leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, what happens to the thief at the end?” And I said, well, I haven’t written it yet. I’m just in the research phase here. But I think she’s going to go to jail. And he said, “She should die.” [laughs]

And I said, what? And he goes, “She should die. These people are terrible.” And I thought, you know, I guess if you deal with the consequences of identity theft every day, day in and day out, and deal with the victims of it day in and day out, that’s probably how you would feel. That makes sense. Yeah.

**John:** So, useful advice for real world, but probably not useful advice for someone writing a comedy about an identity thief.

**Craig:** By the way, also, something to keep in mind, Kate. Reality is fantastic until it is not helpful. And then it is not fantastic. Especially if you’re doing something that is essentially a fictional dramatization of things that needs to be informed by reality. You know, use what helps.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s do one more question. This is Jason from Los Angeles.

Jason: I’ve been living in LA for eight years and I just haven’t been able to break into the business the way I want to. I write consistently. I rewrite. I get notes from trusted friends. I rewrite some more. I’ve made short films. I’ve gotten into a few festivals. I recently posted a script to the Black List. And while all of these things have absolutely helped me to develop and hone my craft, they haven’t opened any industry doors for me.

I’m 33 years old. I’m married. So, jumping into something like an unpaid internship at a production company or spending five years in a mailroom doesn’t seem feasible for me. Which is why I’m considering doing something both of you have often opposed, and even more often with great umbrage. I’m considering going to a writing consultant. So, what I’m not considering doing is going to some online “guru” who has 12 tips for this and eight surefire techniques for that. No. What I’m talking about is basically a teacher. Someone who is all over YouTube. I’ve seen their ideas. I’ve seen them talk about their ideas. And they’re sound. They sound legit. It’s someone who has video testimonials on their website from current writers who are currently working in the business who are staffed on TV shows.

And I’m considering this for the same reason someone might consider hiring a tutor. This is a person outside my circle of friends who owes me nothing, knows their stuff, and best of all can give me notes face-to-face that can help me improve my script. I’ve looked into the cost and one year of meetings would run me about $3,500. Now, that’s not nothing, but it’s also not my life savings.

At this point in my life, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of money to try something new that can help me get where I want to go. Because what I’m doing right now hasn’t.

So, John, Craig, please tell me: am I crazy?

**John:** Craig, is Jason crazy?

**Craig:** No. He’s not crazy at all. He’s not crazy in the slightest. That’s why the industry of people that take money from folks like him is thriving and well, because they’re not preying on the insane. They’re preying on the sane and they’re preying on people who are scared and to some extent desperate. And I understand it. I mean, Jason has been at this for a while now it sounds like.

And he has a life. He’s created a life for himself. I assume he has a day job. Somehow he’s paying the bills. I completely agree that when you’re 33 years old and you have this life that you set up for yourself, starting in a mailroom or an unpaid internship doesn’t make any sense, and also it’s not necessary to be a writer or a director. It’s necessary if you want to be an agent or studio executive, I suppose.

So, no, Jason, you’re not crazy at all. But I’m glad that you did this — I’m glad you recorded this question because you get to listen to yourself back now. And I want to ask you — who do you sound like? Because to me, I’m concerned that you sound like the guy that’s about to lose money. And the reason why is you’re grasping at straws and I think you know you’re grasping at straws here. It’s not impossible that spending money on some outside help like this might help you improve your script. I think it’s highly unlikely it will help improve your script to the point where suddenly all those doors that have been firmly shut will fling open.

I don’t think it kind of works like that. I am concerned that after all this time it may just be that you don’t write or direct the sorts of things that the rooms you want to be in welcome. You may be a different kind of writer or director. It’s also possible that you’re not supposed to be doing this at all. I have no fear saying that. I know it is upsetting to hear and it’s particularly upsetting if next week you sign on and sell your movie and make a billion dollars and win an Oscar. Then I look like a dumb-dumb.

And I know that that’s the dream. So, I guess my advice to you would be this: think twice. $3,500 isn’t your life savings. It’s also $3,500. Think about who is asking you for that money and why they want it. Think about the nature of Hollywood. Think about predators and prey. And ask yourself if this is what’s right and best for you.

Generally speaking, as you know, I think it’s not. But, I also am aware that when I say these things, they are of no great assistance to somebody that’s trying to get one of those doors open.

John, what do you think?

**John:** Yeah. What I like about Jason, he already is thinking twice. In deciding to write into us and record his question, he is thinking twice. And he’s recognizing all of the sort of pitfalls ahead of him. So, he’s sort of done a lot of our work for us. And he’s further along in the process then somebody who says like, oh, maybe I’m going to start writing a script and I’ll hire this consultant.

So, I’m trying to step back and think about if I had $3,500 and I wanted to spend that $3,500 to improve my writing, what might I do? Well, I might take a class. I might take a UCLA Extension class. I might do something else that would sort of get me in a place where I’m around other people who are writing, who can help me focus in on what I’m doing. And so by that structure, I can’t say it’s the worst use of your money.

But I don’t know anything about this person he’s really going to. He says this person has YouTube videos, has a track record. I guess. Before I would give this person any of my money, I would want to know who has been using this person and what would they actually say. And the good thing about the Internet these days is you will find somebody who has had an experience with this person, positive or negative. Find out what that experience actually was. Because I don’t want you spending your money on just some charlatan who promises things.

I know that early in my career I was lucky to have some people who would read every draft of my stuff and would give me notes and I genuinely did get better doing that. Some of them were teachers. Others were producers who were trying to get my work on the screen. And I did get better. And so while I wasn’t paying them directly, or I was paying them indirectly through the university, it did help.

So, this could help you. I’m just concerned that it’s not the right person. I’m worried that you’re going to be writing in a year from now saying like, “Oh you know what guys? I spent that $3,500 and it was not the right choice. And I’m not any closer to what I want to be doing.”

**Craig:** Well, there is another negative outcome here. I mean, Jason mentioned that the person has testimonials on their advertising, and of course they do. The question isn’t whether or not people enjoyed working with this particular consultant. The question is whether or not this consultant got them their ultimate goal, which was to sell their screenplay or be employed to write another screenplay. And that’s not just sell it to some marginal player. There are a lot of those. But sell it to the kind of company you want to be in business with. Right Jason?

What these people do necessarily requires them to be good to you. When I say good to you, I mean, warm and fuzzy and encouraging because they want you to come back and keep paying them. They are actually less reliable, I think, then your friends in that regard. They will tell you, “Listen, this script has tremendous promise. You have tremendous promise. You can make this great. And you can get everything you want. Work with me. I will get you there.”

They will say that probably no matter what because that’s what’s going to make them the most money. And there are people who after a year or two will say, “I’m going to — I will gladly give you a testimonial because you’ve made my script better and you make me feel good in a world and business that otherwise makes me feel terrible.”

But $3,500 is a lot of money for that. And that ultimately really isn’t going to get you what you want. So, be careful of that praise. And be careful of that encouragement. They probably won’t say to you, “Hmm, I read it. This is no good. And I can’t help you with it. I don’t want your money.” You know?

The whole business is soaking in a certain kind of conflict of interest.

**John:** Yeah. It occurs to me listening to Jason’s question is that I feel like over the course of our 309 episodes we haven’t done a great job of introducing listeners to people who were sort of similarly positioned to Jason who made it. And there are some. And I’m thinking of a friend now who I can’t believe I’ve not had on the podcast who in his middle 30s, late 30, sort of finally got it started and finally got staffed on a TV show and is now running his own show.

It does happen. And because it’s rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And I want to have him on the show to talk about sort of what he did and sort of the choices he made. And what he would do differently. Because he might have better advice for Jason than you or I would because we started at such a different time.

So, in hearing Jason’s question I’m recognizing that there’s probably a group of our steady listeners who we’ve never really directly addressed with how it can work. We’ve always sort of given them negative advice in a way. Like, you know, don’t do these things rather than like these are the things that actually work for people. So, that’s going to be a goal to get my friend on the show in the next couple of weeks.

**Craig:** I think that’s really smart. Because, you know, we do want to help. Obviously we want to help, because we’re trying to help people who are writing. And we’re trying to help them write better. And happily we don’t take — well, John takes their money hand over fist. I don’t get anything. But we don’t have much in the way of saying, “And we also want to help you get that job.”

We keep hitting this thing of write a great script, you’ll get the job. But, there are some practicals. It would be great to hear from somebody who has gone through it, especially somebody who is older than the typical right out of college “here I am, I want to be a writer.”

I will say that Jason sounds incredibly nice. He just sounds like a good guy and that makes me nervous. I’m nervous because sometimes it’s the good ones that end up getting fleeced the hardest.

So, you know what, Jason, talk to your wife. She knows you better than anybody. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. You say to her — I got to think of a good name for Jason’s wife. I’m going to go with Marissa. “Marissa,” so close to my wife’s name. Anyway. “Marissa, tell me something because I don’t trust myself on this issue. Does this sound like a good idea? Should I do this? Should I not do this? Give it to me straight. I know that you love me either way.”

I hope that’s true about Marissa

**John:** Yeah, you never know. Never assume how other people’s marriages work.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right. Like he may call in next week and say, “Well, I’m divorced now. I asked her. And apparently that was the only excuse she needed to just pack her stuff up and, yeah. So…and now I have half of that $3,500.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh, community property. California state law.

**Craig:** Ruining lives one podcast listener at a time.

**John:** Let’s move on and go to our One Cool Things before we wreck anymore havoc in the world.

**Craig:** Great idea.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is the bus. Which bus? Well, really any bus. But my whole year in Paris, one of my revelations was that as a tourist I was always taking the Metro to get from place to place, because Paris has a Metro, so why are you not taking the trains.

What was so great about this last year is the busses are actually fantastic. And I was always sort of scared to take the busses because I didn’t quite know where they were going, or how to use them, or how it would all work. The huge advantage, the huge change, is that Google Maps now has all of the busses in the map directions. So if you are someplace, you want to get someplace, Google Maps will tell you get on this bus, it’ll take you to the place. And it was fantastic. And the busses in Paris were great. And so convenient. And while I was on my bus I could do my Duolingo and it was a great experience.

So, coming back to Los Angeles I vowed, you know what, I’m going to start taking the bus more often.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So this last week I took the bus to Beverly Hills. It was fantastic. And Google Maps worked just as well. And so the busses in Los Angeles are not bad at all. And people are always kind of afraid of the busses and they shouldn’t be. They were the same as the busses in Paris. It got me where I needed to go. It was easy and delightful. It was cheaper because I didn’t have to park my car in Beverly Hills. So, just try the bus. It sounds so simple and obvious because obviously I grew up taking the bus in Boulder. But a bus in the big city can be really great. And if people took the bus more often, I think they would be surprised.

**Craig:** It’s true that the thing that keeps me from the bus is just general fear of where the hell I’m going. Because these busses pull up and I just don’t know the bus system well enough. Like in New York, I’m here in New York right now, that’s why this microphone sounds weird, I take the subway all the time. I take the subway everywhere I can take it. And it’s really clear. I know exactly where it’s going. And they’ve got letters on them. And they never change. And that’s that with those.

And then the busses come and they have these letters and numbers. And I just get confused. I get confused.

**John:** You know who does know? Your phone knows. Your phones knows everything. And so Google Maps, you punch it in, it will tell you exactly when that bus is coming, when to get on it. It’s great and convenient. And also because you’re not underground you don’t lose service, so you can actually do things on your phone. It’s great.

So I would just recommend people try the bus. If you haven’t tried the bus in years, take a bus sometime this month and see what it’s like.

**Craig:** Following this podcast, bus murders, up by 30%.

**John:** Ha-ha. Always the best.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s face it: our listeners are easy marks. Well, I’ll continue with the transportation theme of One Cool Thing. Hyperloop One.

**John:** I saw that. They tested.

**Craig:** And it was successful. It worked. Now, they were testing — was essentially like a chassis, like a little sled. It wasn’t the full car where you can put people. And it wasn’t at full speed either. They talk about being able to go up to 700 miles per hour. In this case, the test I think was just 70 miles per hour. But it worked. They have a tube. It’s a vacuum. And they got maglev. And it shot down the track and it worked.

So, at least you’ve got this first theory into practice mode and I got to say the way that people are jumping on board with this thing, it feels like it’s going to happen. It legitimately does not feel like bunk.

You know, look, obviously I know that what do they call them, Super Trains? What do they call the — bullet trains? Bullet trains are real. I know they’re real. I’ve ridden on a bullet train. But when California said we’re going to spend billions of dollars to make a bullet train I thought no you’re not. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to spend billions of dollars, but we’re not going to have a bullet train. And we don’t.

We have spent billions of dollars. There’s no bullet train. This thing feels like it’s going to happen. And if they can put it together, they’re saying you can get on board in Los Angeles and be in San Francisco within I think 50 minutes.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And that’s 50 minutes without going to an airport and getting in the line. It’s just hope on a tube and you’re there.

**John:** Yeah. So we’ll hope. Yeah. I mean, we’re in a weird time when we have all these amazing things that can be happening even while the world seems to be falling apart. So, it’s going to be a real race to see which future we end up in.

**Craig:** I do believe the world is essentially separated into two tribes at this point. Builders and tearers-down. And builders, the one advantage that builders have is that they’re ingenious. And the one advantage that tearers-down have is they are indiscriminate. They’ll just tear — if it’s standing down, they’ll tear it down. They don’t care.

**John:** Yeah. Just swing that crow bar and you can just knock things down.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. They’ve certainly got inertia on their side, don’t they?

**John:** They do. Gravity works. They have all the stored energy in there. They can just make things fall.

**Craig:** Exactly. And what’s the — entropy. They have entropy. Inevitably, the tearers-down win.

**John:** Well, in the end everything becomes dust. But it’s just how cool things can be before they all become dust.

**Craig:** Before the universe ends in heat death. 100%. Yep.

**John:** As we wrap up, I will remind people that the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide is available. It’s the first 300 episodes of the show, plus all the bonus episodes. People recommend which things you should check out. So, if you’re new to the show and you want to dig into the back catalog that is a great place to start.

You can listen to those episodes on the new USB drives. So you can go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those USB drives. They are lovely and sturdy.

And that’s our show. Our show is produced by Carlton Mittagakus.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts. Look for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a review.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And next week, same time zone.

**John:** Oh, so nice.

**Craig:** So nice. See you then.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/) for the July 25th Scriptnotes Live Homecoming Show, with guests [Liz Meriwether](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Meriwether), [Megan Amram](https://twitter.com/meganamram) and more!
* [Julie Buxbaum’s What to Say Next](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553535684/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Fridge logic](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) on TV Tropes
* John on [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* The [Fargo TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(TV_series)) makes a religion of coincidence
* Gimmickry used in Kill Bill with [split screens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWI4G9PB31c) and [animation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQM0klOXck8), in (500) Days of Summer with [musical numbers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJoIaXZ0rw) and [alternate timelines](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fL94BTrFhs), when [talking to the dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7xeK76cwA0) in Iron Lady, when Love and Death [becomes a silent film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEETZTs795U&t=0m48s), and when [flashbacks become childhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLk9y0RZSGo) in The Hangover 2
* [Go](https://www.amazon.com/Go-Katie-Holmes/dp/B008Y6YKEE/) and [The Nines](https://www.amazon.com/Nines-Ryan-Reynolds/dp/B00164LTUO/) on Amazon Video
* [The LA Metro System](https://www.metro.net)
* [Hyperloop One](https://hyperloop-one.com/) and its [successful first test](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15958224/hyperloop-one-first-full-system-test-devloop)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](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 Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_309.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/chekhovs-ladder).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 308 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’ll be looking at how screenwriters signal to audiences. What kinds of things can and cannot happen in their films. And why that’s important. We’ll also be looking at suggestions for reducing sexism in screenplays and answering listener questions about writers on set and giving feedback on friends’ scripts.

Oh, it’s a big show.

**Craig:** That’s a lot. We got to motor, dude.

**John:** We got to. We got to pack a lot in, because I am packing up. I am moving back to the US in 24 hours.

**Craig:** I mean, are they going to let you back? Because, you know, it’s gotten a little weird over here.

**John:** It has gotten kind of weird over in your country. Yeah, I think so. We have our visas for living here in France. As a US citizen I believe they need to let me back in the country, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to stop other people.

**Craig:** Well, we are certainly excited to have you back. It’s going to be nice. And honestly just from a selfish point of view, we can stop doing this bizarre thing where it’s either crazy late at night for me or crazy late at night for you. We get to just go back to our normal — just our normal thing.

**John:** Yeah. Our normal thing. Where we sacrifice the small animals at the altar and then we fire up our microphones and do the normal show.

**Craig:** I know. For one year we’ve been sacrificing large animals. Ew.

**John:** Just the amount of blood that you have to go through and living in a small apartment, it’s just a mess.

**Craig:** It’s gross.

**John:** Even with the tarp down, it’s a lot.

**Craig:** I know. Well, I used to use like the disposal tarps, and then I was like bills started piling up. So now we just hose them off.

**John:** Yeah. Well it’s a good thing. You have to be environmentally conscious when you’re sacrificing animals to produce a podcast about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Damn straight. This show has gotten so weird. I love it.

**John:** It does get kind of weird. I was really happy with our last episode. It was both weird and like educational. And the right combination.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will jinx it by not being nearly as good today.

**Craig:** Nah, we’re going to be better.

**John:** Even better? All right. We’ll start with follow up. Last week we talked about the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide which is where our listeners of our podcast, the best listeners ever in the history of podcasts, put together this guide of the back episodes, the first 300 episodes, and their recommendations. A bunch of people have downloaded it, so thank you for downloading it. If you would like to download this free PDF for yourself, it’s 113 pages. You just go to johnaugust.com/guide.

And we’ve also been selling a bunch of the USB drives. So we have the first 300 episodes, plus all the bonus episodes, on a USB drive. They’re at the store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Oh man. So much money coming my way.

**John:** So, so much money coming your way.

**Craig:** Can’t wait for that check.

**John:** So I have notifications turned on on my watch, so whenever one of those ships I get a little buzz on my watch. And my watch has been buzzing, so that’s great.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice. Great.

**John:** Nice. Finally, bit of follow up, our live show on July 25, I think as we’re recording this there are still tickets. Our guest is Megan Amram, plus some other special people to be announced soon. So, if you are in Los Angeles on July 25, and you’re not at our show, I’d just like to know why. I’d just like to know why you’re not at our show on July 25.

**Craig:** Well, until we announce the other guests, who are going to be terrific, I get why people are sort of going, OK, now that sounds great so far, but is it great-great? And it’s going to be great-great. It is.

**John:** I wonder if we have set expectations askew by everyone is like, oh, there must be this fantastic, amazing, ungettable guest that makes you want to come in to see the show, when really shouldn’t they be coming to see the show for all the special live stuff with you and me?

**Craig:** Or just me.

**John:** Yeah, basically just Craig. An excuse to see Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m great. I’m amazing. People should just come to see me. In fact, we should have a live Scriptnotes that’s just me.

**John:** Yeah. It would sell tickets. I’m pretty much a drag on this whole show.

**Craig:** Yeah. I could sit there in a chair like, you know, when Hal Holbrook would do his Mark Twain show. I’ll just sit there.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** And I’ll chat.

**John:** Or Val Kilmer, when Val Kilmer did his Mark Twain show.

**Craig:** I missed that.

**John:** I missed that, too. Oh, there’s always Val Kilmer.

There’s a universe in which Val Kilmer is a bigger star or does not exist. Like, in a previous episode we talked about the Mandela Effect in which things were different in a slightly different parallel universe than sort of how that all could come to be. We talked about the movie starring Sinbad which never existed. This next link which was sent to me by Craig McDermond reminded me of that, because it is a trailer for the Netflix series for The Addams Family. And it’s a well cut together trailer for the show that does not exist at all. And yet in a different universe it definitely does exist. So I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s a well put together for The Addams Family as a presumably one-hour Netflix drama.

**Craig:** So it’s like Riverdale kind of thing where they take it seriously and it’s dramatic and emo?

**John:** I’d say it’s kind of dramatic and kind of emo. So, once again, Craig has not clicked on the links inside of the outline.

**Craig:** No, not until I get my check from those flash drives. [laughs]

**John:** Ha-ha. But it’s good. So I would recommend checking it out because it definitely feels like a thing that could exist and in a different universe does exist.

**Craig:** All right. All right. I will check that out.

**John:** So two other links in our outline, both related to something we talk about a lot on the podcast, which is writing stuff where there’s real people involved or things that are based on true stories. And our general advice has been go for it, but know that you could hit some rough waters down the road. And here’s two examples of rough water being hit down the road. Do you want to talk us through either of these?

**Craig:** Well, sure. So the first one is actually remarkable because it involves Olivia de Havilland, who is just about 101 years old. Olivia de Havilland is a classic movie star from the golden age of cinema. And the thing that’s remarkable about it is that this is not the first time that Olivia de Havilland has been involved in a fairly high profile lawsuit. She really was the person who kind of broke the old studio system, where studios would essentially own actors. And I don’t know if any of our listeners have heard the expression “an actor out on loan,” it’s a lyric that’s in a Doors song of all things.

And that’s the way it used to be. Actors were controlled by individual studios who had these long contracts with them that they couldn’t get out of. And if another studio wanted to use them, the studio would loan them to that studio in exchange for maybe borrowing one of their actors. But it was a bit like the way baseball used to — you were on a team and they controlled you. And then eventually free agency came along.

And so Olivia de Havilland was involved in that, but now a little something else. So Ryan Murphy Productions has made a show called Feud. It’s on FX. And Feud is basically about — true story of a feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And Olivia de Havilland is involved in it. And is portrayed by Catherine Zeta-Jones. And basically what Olivia de Havilland is saying is that portrayal was not true. The lawsuit argues that de Havilland has built a reputation of integrity for herself and refrains from gossip. The series however paints an opposing picture. And it’s interesting because it’s not exactly about defamatory actions. It’s more that she’s saying she has this thing — and it’s true — this right to publicity, which is something that has emerged in our laws over time. Basically if you are a public figure, your right to publicity extends towards your ability to make money off of yourself, your image. So, while I can make a movie and have somebody portray say John Wayne walking through a scene, what I can’t do is then use that person’s portrayal of John Wayne to sell a product and say, you know, as if John Wayne were supporting it. Because now I’m infringing on John Wayne’s — even though he’s passed away — his right to publicity.

So, there was a famous, semi-famous soda commercial or something a few years ago that did in fact weirdly revive John Wayne to have him sell something. Clearly there the estate had been paid for the license to use the rights of publicity. She’s saying essentially this portrayal is violating that right.

Uh — seems like a stretch.

**John:** This feels like an incredibly slippery slope, too. So when I first saw the headline, I assumed it was a standard kind of libel thing where like how dare they make say that. I never said those things. And she kind of says like how dare they in this suit. But really it is over this right of publicity. The statutory right of publicity, unjust enrichment, invasion of privacy. And it’s interesting because she’s still alive. And yet so much of what is at play here really could be from the estate of — if she even weren’t alive. And so that’s what makes me really kind of queasy about this, because does it sort of like wall off anybody who is sort of famous can never be in a movie again? And that would just be a crazy situation.

So, while I can understand why a great actress would want to protect her legacy and her image, I do worry that this is a really bad precedent to set if she were to come out victorious here.

**Craig:** I agree. And the thing that’s salient to me here is that she is suing for Common Law right of publicity, statutory right of publicity, unjust enrichment, and invasion of privacy. But what she’s not suing for is defamation. And that’s — well, it’s kind of telling the story there. It seems to me that she’s complaining about defamation, but her attorneys probably looked at the situation and said we are not going to win that. This does not rise to the level of defamation. So, let’s try these other things.

People do this. I mean, for a while it was all the rage for aggrieved almost screenwriters to sue studios for implied contract. So, instead of saying you stole my script, because they knew they couldn’t win that, they would say you implied that you would pay me if you made a movie like this. Which of course they never did. The argument being you had a meeting with me, therefore we had an implied contract. No we didn’t. That’s never won. It’s never going to win.

And in this case it feels like another sort of an end run. But, you know, as always, you and I, we’re not lawyers. It will be interesting to see what happens here. I share your squeamishness about the unintended consequences that could result if she prevails.

**John:** It’s also worth pointing out that Ryan Murphy has a whole cottage industry of taking things that are sort of real life stories and dramatizing them for these limited series. So, Feud is an example of that. I worry that if this were to be a successful lawsuit, it makes it very difficult to make those kinds of stories about real life people ever again. So, I’m hoping this goes away and that maybe it’s the last we hear of it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Actually a more fascinating thing also happened the last two weeks. So this former Vibe journalist named Kevin Powell filed a federal lawsuit against the makers of the film All Eyez on Me. And so this is the biopic of Tupac Shakur, which I’ve not seen, but the lawsuit is really interesting because it claims that the film uses a character that Kevin Powell actually created in his articles, a composite character that Kevin Powell created in his articles about Tupac Shakur. So it sort of takes away the defense of like, oh, we’re just basing things off real people because this is not a real person. So he’s basically saying that you have appropriated this artificially created character in my stories, which is a really interesting thing I haven’t seen in other lawsuits about work being appropriated for the screen.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is interesting. My question — I have not seen the movie, nor have I read Mr. Powell’s article. What I’m curious about is whether or not his article presented this character who is named Nigel — and it says in this article describing the lawsuit that Nigel is a creation of Powell. It’s meant to be a composite of a real person named Haitian Jack and presumably a few other people combined in there. And that’s something that sometimes people can do. It’s a bit of dramatic license, but Powell wasn’t writing fiction. He was writing an article.

So the question I have is would anyone reasonably expect that this person Nigel in the article wasn’t real? Because if I’m gathering resource materials together and I’m looking at articles, journalism, and there’s a report, and there’s an individual that is cited and his actions are described, it seems reasonable that I would presume that’s a real person. And so I’m not copying fiction because I don’t presume it is fiction.

**John:** This is the problem with single sourcing. So, if you think back to the episode we had with Irene Turner where she was talking about her film about Madalyn O’Hair, she pointed out that her lawyer as they were going through working on that true life story, they were like really, really concerned whenever there was only a single source for a story. So, if it wasn’t in the public record, like that you can find multiple people all reporting the same thing. If you’re basing something off of one account of things, that is a written, owned account by somebody, and apparently this Nigel character is only going to exist in this guy’s reporting, because he doesn’t really exist in real life, that is a troubling thing.

So, whether or not the article made it clear that Nigel was a composite character or not, I don’t know that gets the movie off the hook.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think that there actually is a case here where infringement may have occurred. It seems to me that this is a trickier place. Powell is asking, or his attorneys are asking that the Lion’s Gate film be pulled from theaters and is seeking an unspecified amount to be determined by a jury. I don’t think the movie is going to be pulled from theaters. I don’t think it’s done particularly well anyway. It’s done OK.

I think that this feels like a settlement kind of thing. Like, OK, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pay you some money. That’s generally what happens when there is an actual infringement. There is a settlement.

**John:** Let’s take a look at both of these stories from the perspective of you are a screenwriter working on a story that involves some true life people. And what you can learn from these two examples about best practices and what you should do. So, in the case of de Havilland, I don’t really know what to say. If you’re working on an historical account there’s going to be some real life people mixed in there, some of which could still be alive, some of which may be dead, some of which may have estates who are litigious. I would not let that stop you from writing the best possible story involving those characters you need to do. And just know that down the road it could be a problem.

In the second case, the Tupac Shakur, I’d be just extra vigilant that when you are doing the research on your stories, really make it clear who are real people and who are not real people. Look for multiple sources. Just don’t rely on one account for things. Because if you don’t control that underlying material, you’re going to be potentially in a bad spot down the road. And, again, I don’t know the specifics of what happened here. We’re basing this off of one LA Times article that we’ll put a link to in the show notes. So, this could be much more complex than what we’re seeing right here.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that if you are working on material that is based on real people — dead, or alive, or both — that the most important thing is that you are very up front with the studio for whom you’re working, and if at all possible you do an annotation of the screenplay so that they can see the sources that you’re relying on. And then allow them to make suggestions because ultimately the deal is as long as they are aware of what you’ve done, and you have not lied to them, you’re indemnified by them.

But if you do lie to them, even if there’s a sin of omission, you may be liable and you may be in breach of your contract. I mean, ultimately you can’t — in every contract we are saying this is our work. We’re not infringing on the work of anyone else. So, get that relationship going and work with your studio and be up front about it. I mean, the project that I’m working on right now is historical drama and it’s at the forefront of my mind. And we’re annotating up the wazoo, you know, because I want to make sure that we’re covered.

**John:** And when you say annotating, my suspicion is — and correct me if I’m wrong — the actual screenplay which you’re working off of is a main document. That document is not replete with annotations? It is rather that you have a separate document that refers back to your script that says like, OK, these characters and these situations are based on real life things. That’s what you’re talking about with annotating?

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s a separate document that goes page by page and says here are the sources for this, for this, for this, for this. And then also this is dramatized. So that everybody understands. I mean, it’s really important to I think be up front about where you’re taking dramatic license, as you need to from time to time, but ideally you’re doing it for dramatic license without trampling truth. And that you are covered on things because you’re not proposing something that just is — no one said has happened, or maybe one person said happened. So, yeah, that annotation is sort of a big thing. I actually have a researcher that I’ve been working with on this project and she is — once I’ve completed the final script of this series, she’s going to spend three or four weeks and annotate. That’s her job. You know, write it all up, so that we’re covered. Because these things can happen.

But, don’t freak out about this stuff. Just be open with your studio and you should be fine.

**John:** I agree. All right, let’s get to our first big topic this week. This comes from Emilia Schatz. She is one of the lead game designers at Naughty Dog, the studio that does The Last of Us, Uncharted series, really great videogames. And I found this article. Jordan Mechner had linked to it. And I thought it was just terrific. So, the article talks about how a videogame designer thinks about affordances. And affordances she defines as the objects in a story, in a videogame, that the player can interact with. And so as you go through the article you’ll see scenes from Uncharted in which it’s just the Nathan Drake character walking around on wire meshes. And they’re figuring out sort of like, OK, what does the player think he or she can do at the moment and what do you want them to be able to do or not be able to do?

And so she’s coming at this from a videogame perspective, but as I was reading it I kept thinking like, oh, you know what? We’re sort of doing the same thing as screenwriters all the time. We are sort of defining what it is in our stories that the characters are allowed to do or not allowed to do. And we have to communicate to the audience like these are possibilities and these are not possibilities. And so I thought it was a terrific article and it really applied very well to a lot of things we are doing on a daily basis as screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never thought about this concept, but I do play a ton of videogames, including The Last of Us and Uncharted. And I know what she’s talking about. And you notice it most clearly when you interact with an object that actually doesn’t impact the storyline at all. So, you know, a game that does this thoroughly is Dishonored. And Dishonored 2 in particular. You will walk through a room and there’s a globe and you spin the globe. And there’s a piano and you play the piano. And there’s a glass and you pick it up and then you drop it. None of that is required for you to advance through the game. It’s just interactable. And it does create a sense of richness and reality to the world. It’s also as a videogame player when there’s too much of it it’s frustrating. Because you think, OK, I’ve walked into a room. One of these things, one of these affordances, is necessary to me. The other ones are not. I wonder which one. Now I got to pick up and smash every little thing, right?

So there’s an interesting balance. And when we’re writing scenes, I often think like, OK, in terms of objects, props, there are going to be some that are important and then there are some that are just there for vibe. And, of course, since we have our characters moving through the space, we can’t frustrate the audience with this sense of overwhelming interactability. But we do have to make those determinations. And I think a lot of times what happens with newer writers is they start with what are the key props that I need to make this scene work, and then they stop. They never get to the second bunch of affordances which are what makes this feel real. You know, what little touches can I add here to just make this seem like it’s alive. I don’t know if you’ve ever found this, John, but sometimes those sort of tonal affordances become plot affordances. Because now that they’re in the space, you suddenly realize, oh, I can use that. You know?

**John:** 100%. So as I’m sort of doing the set dressing on a scene in my mind, I’ll find like, oh, you know, that actually is really interesting and that provides a necessary break in the conversation or a way to pivot to get through a scene because I have that thing.

I think the first time I was ever aware of the difference between sort of sets and props was weirdly watching like a Tom and Jerry cartoon growing up. And if you look at old animation, quite often if there’s a dresser with a bunch of drawers, you can always tell the one the character is going to touch because it’s a slightly different shade. Because that drawer is going to be the one that gets pulled out. And for whatever reason it’s just painted slightly different. And so ten seconds before the character touches the drawer you can tell like, oh, that’s the drawer he’s going to pull out, because it’s just painted a slightly different color. And you have a sense of like, OK, in a weird way that’s an affordance. That’s a thing the character can actually act upon, versus everything else is just background. It’s just set dressing.

And what she’s describing here is that it is useful that characters can do so many things within a scene, but if you give them too many choices they can be paralyzed, the way you’re saying. Or if they see something that they cannot interact with that they expect to be able to interact with, it breaks their reality. And so a great example she gives is ladders. And so if you show a ladder in a scene, and the character cannot climb that ladder, they will be frustrated because our rules of videogames is like ladders are meant to be climbed. So you see something that looks like it should be climbable and it’s not climbable, you’re going to have a very frustrated player and they’re going to lose faith in your videogame.

I think the same kind of thing happens in movies a lot where we see an opportunity for the character. It feels like that’s something that is being set up, but if it’s not actually used in any meaningful way, we get frustrated as an audience.

**Craig:** Well, we begin to ask this very fundamental and irksome question for the filmmaker, or the videogame maker: Why is that there? Why would a ladder be there? If I can’t go up the ladder, what’s it for? To make the room look pretty with ladders? I don’t get it. I just don’t understand. I know why windows are there. I’m very used to videogames where there’s a room full of windows and I need to escape the room. And for the love of god I can’t open a window. I can’t run through the window. And, oh well.

But I get that. I understand there’s like a basic deal there and I can retcon in some reason why I can’t go through the window. It’s bulletproof glass, or it’s leaded glass, and it just doesn’t work. Or the frame is stuck and old and rusty. Whatever, there’s some reason. I can’t go through the windows. What are you going to do?

But if you’re going to give me a ladder and I need to go somewhere and I can’t use it, then, well, now you’re just screwing with me, right? And you do get that sense sometimes when movies provide potential avenues of action that would be useful to the character, and then deny the character the ability to use them. That is a kind of a cheat. And it’s honestly an avoidable mistake. There’s really no reason to do it in a movie.

**John:** Agreed. Because movies fundamentally, as we talked about last week, they are on rails. You control the experience of going through the movie. So nothing has to be there that you don’t want to put there. The great classic example of this is Chekhov’s Gun. So, Chekhov in talking about sort of what you build into your world and what you don’t build into your world and what you don’t build into your world said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, or in the second or third chapter it is absolutely necessary that it must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

And that’s really what we’re talking about. Is that if there is something that is visible in your story that could provide a solution, that feels like it should provide a solution, you either got to use it or get rid of it, because otherwise it’s going to be frustrating to your audience and they’re going to stop believing in the journey that your characters are on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Chekhov’s Gun is one of those things that really ought to be expanded past the word gun. I think a lot of people get too hung up on gun. But there are Chekhov’s Characters. There are people that are implied are dangerous. Well, they better be dangerous at some point. They better do the thing that we were warned they can do. The best example I can think of is like — it’s like Chekhov’s Movie, you might as well call that — is Unforgiven.

Clint Eastwood is Chekhov’s Eastwood. We are told time and time again that he was once an incredibly dangerous man. And how do we meet him? He is an aging pig farmer who cannot even get back on his own horse. He’s not particularly good at shooting people anymore. He’s not really shooting that straight. He doesn’t really want to do any of it. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t seem particularly mean. He’s done nothing to warrant this reputation.

Until the end of the movie, when he becomes the devil. And there it is. The gun goes off.

So you can think about characters that way as well.

**John:** So I saw Wonder Woman for the second time yesterday and I really love the film and I think it deserves as much acclaim as it has been getting. But there is a Chekhov’s Gun moment in it. It is a guy with a rifle. And so there’s a guy who is set up as being a master sniper. And you can just feel something got cut. Something got changed along the way. And so he’s supposed to be a really good shot, and he never shoots. You never see him actually do the thing he’s supposed to be really good at. And the movie kind of tries to get through it and tries to pay him off a little bit, but it wasn’t the most important thing to sort of pay off and they never really do pay it off especially well. I think it’s just especially — egregious is too strong a word — but you notice it because it literally is a gun and because like, well, that gun should be fired at some point and it’s never fired and it’s never really addressed in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Isn’t it weird that there’s this psychological satisfaction to that? We know, in comedy there are movies like Police Academy. In Police Academy, you meet a compendium of characters. This is a very time-honored comedy tradition. A compendium of characters who each have a very special bizarre individual skill. And at some point by the end of the movie they each use that special skill to kick some butt. And it’s so satisfying. You know it’s going to happen. But you’re happy it does.

**John:** Ultimately we’re talking about expectation, which we’ve come back to time and time again on the podcast. Which is an audience approaches a movie with a certain set of expectations. There are the expectations before they even sat in the theater based on the genre, based on the trailer, based on sort of what they know about how movies work.

Then there’s also the expectations that are set up within your movie about the things the characters have said, the sequence of events, sort of like the natural flow of what they think should happen next. And most times you want to give them what they do expect is going to happen next. Just give them the best version of what’s going to happen next.

But there’s definitely some things you should be mindful of as a writer as you’re writing these sequences that if you call something out, if you shine a spotlight on it, if you give a character a name. If you make it clear that the characters within the world have a name for that character, there’s going to be an expectation that that character is going to do something meaningful. If that character doesn’t do anything meaningful, that’s going to be a problem.

If you’re shining a giant spotlight on the “McClinty device,” that McClinty device has to do something or we’re going to be very, very frustrated. You’re also always setting expectations about the nature of the universe that your characters are living in. So, the economic universe. Are we in a world where Monica from Friends has an amazing apartment that’s never really explained? Or are we in the world of Girls where Hannah lives in a realistic apartment for who she is and what she’s making?

Are we living in Bruce Wayne kind of richesse, or Richie Rich kind of rich? And those are both crazy wealthy, but they’re different kinds of crazy wealthy.

**Craig:** I loved Richie Rich. I read those —

**John:** I hate Richie Rich so much.

**Craig:** Loved them.

**John:** He’s my most despised character ever.

**Craig:** I loved him.

**John:** He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever other than —

**Craig:** No, he’s wonderful. He’s so nice.

**John:** There’s no character that’s ever been created that makes me as angry as Richie Rich.

**Craig:** His family has a waterfall of money.

**John:** Yeah. That’s good. He has McDonald’s in his house. That’s how rich he is.

**Craig:** That’s right. He has a Professor Keenbean, to make inventions.

**John:** Yeah. He’s got everybody. And you know what? He deserves it. He totally deserves all the good things that happen to him because he’s rich.

**Craig:** Every now and then someone would try and kidnap him. It never worked out.

**John:** No, no. Of course it would never work out. My daughter started to watch the Richie Rich Netflix show, and I came in the room and said, “No, you’re never watching that again. It is despicable on every level.” It was like one of the few times where I really intervened on something that wasn’t about sex or language or anything. It’s just like, no, that is a horrible, horrible message. And, no.

**Craig:** I love it. Well, you know what? Here’s the thing. My sister and I would read Richie Rich comics when we were kids and it was great for us because we were Poorie Poor. So it was like a fun fantasy of like, wow, can you imagine that mansion where you had to have a car to drive from room to room? And also your parents were really nice? And you had the money waterfall. And it was just, you know, it was very nice.

But, look, listen, your daughter will get over it in therapy at some point.

**John:** [laughs] At some point, yes. Let’s talk about the other kind of rules you set for your universe. You’re always setting expectations about how the physics works in your world. So, you know, there’s a certain kind of Charlie’s Angels physics. There is a Thor physics. Like, you know, Thor is really, really strong, but he’s not strong enough to move the world. Some Super Man movies he is strong enough to move the world, which seems impossible without a lever, but that’s fine. You’re always setting expectations about how all that works. What the magic can do in your world. That’s really important.

And so if you establish a kind of magic in Harry Potter, you have to be true to that magic throughout the rest of the series or people are going to stop believing in you.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is I guess one exception. You can create an enormous anticipation or expectation for something and then not do it, as long as you make a point of saying we’re not doing it.

**John:** 100%. You have to just acknowledge that you set it up and then call out that you’re not doing what you’ve set up.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That’s great. And that works really, really well. And in some ways my frustration with Wonder Woman is if they had one or two more lines, they probably could have done that with that character and like see him not take the shot or get over not taking the shot. But they don’t seem to do that. And, look, that happens. I mean, we’ve all been in edits where like something has got to give and that has to go away. But that was my frustration there.

Another thing you have to set up about the rules of your world is practice and mastery. So, is this going to be the movie where we see people working really hard to do the thing that we’re seeing them do? Or do they magically just do it? And so I think about the difference between — in Glee the kids can just put on this amazing show and you never actually see them having to work at it. Pitch Perfect also has that sense of like, yeah, you see them rehearse a little bit, but basically —

**Craig:** It’s a montage. They do the classic montage.

**John:** They’re montaging through it. But Glee they don’t even montage through it. They suddenly can just like sit down at the piano and do this amazing thing without any practice. Compare that to the football in The Blind Side where you see like, oh you know what, it’s a tremendous amount of work to be that good at football. And that becomes an important story point. So, think about sort of the rules you’re setting for practice in the world.

**Craig:** I love it when you say “the football.”

**John:** The football. You got to practice the football.

**Craig:** The football.

**John:** We’ve talked about hanging a lantern before. And hanging a lantern is when you sort of call out that you’re doing something in the film. And it’s a really important skill. It can be done really awkwardly and haphazardly, but it can be really useful in saying like this thing I’m doing, you see that I’m doing it and I acknowledge that you see that I’m doing it, but this becomes really important. You’re shining that spotlight on something or acknowledging that you are doing something that is different than expectation and done carefully, done with the right finesse it can be a really useful way to signal to the audience like, yeah, I get what’s happening here and that’s OK.

You see that being done a lot in the Iron Man movies where you can have Tony Stark acknowledge the sort of improbability of what’s happening and yet it just rolls off him because he has the charisma to sort of sell the idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just have to be careful to not overdo it. Because what happens is the movie will start to push towards a general irony zone. Now, you may want to be in irony zone. For instance, Deadpool is just — that’s a big irony machine. So it’s perfectly fine to do that constantly in Deadpool because people want that from that movie. They don’t want it to be the other kind of movie that takes itself seriously.

But if you are kind of in that middle zone, and you do the lampshade or the lantern thing one too many times, the movie starts to feel a little cheaty. Because here’s the thing: everybody knows it’s cheating, right? Now, you get away with it once or twice because you’re saying we know we’re cheating, so don’t be insulted. But the more you do it, I think the chintzier it all starts to feel.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like the kind of rules about coincidences. You get one coincidence, maybe two coincidences in a film. More than that and we’re like, OK, we’ve stopped believing in the movie itself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Here’s the last thing I want to say about this idea of affordances and sort of what characters can do and what they can’t do. Sometimes it’s helpful to just have a character say it. If you need to rule something out, sometimes it can be useful just like a character has to acknowledge that it’s a possibility and then explain why that cannot happen. Or, you can sort of physically set up your world in a way that that option is taken off the table. So you’ve taken away that as a possibility for the character to consider. So, you’ve like burned that bridge. You’ve forever sealed that door. There’s no way to go back to that thing. And, again, that’s a real advantage to the way that our movies do work on rails. Like very carefully disguised rails, but you can move the characters through to a place but there’s no way to get back to that option that seemed so useful before.

And that can be really useful dramatically, too, because the journey of a character should be like things get more and more desperate. So if you take away that simple solution to the problem that is a terrific thing.

**Craig:** And this is something that I think good screenwriters spend a lot of time on. Because ideally you never want anyone to stop and go, “Oh, I see, there’s a lot of explanation for why they can’t do this or that, which would make the movie not work anymore.” You’re always looking for those elegant solutions that don’t seem like solutions at all. The problem isn’t a problem because this is just clearly true and therefore this must be true and so on and so forth. It all feels seamless.

It’s more important oddly in comedy. Because comedy relies on a certain sort of effortlessness. And if anyone ever catches a whiff that you are changing the rules of the world so that you can do a joke, the joke just isn’t as funny. In dramas, I think people get away with it a little bit more. Again, this is why only comedies should get awards.

**John:** [laughs] 100% agreement there. All right, let’s get on to our next topic which is something you found. So, talk us through this.

**Craig:** Well, actually this was sent to me by Derek Haas, friend of the podcast, and co-creator of the many Chicago shows. Chicago Fire, PD, Education?

**John:** Chicago Vet. Yeah. Chicago Social Services where they deal with all of the characters and the families who are displaced by the events of Chicago PD or Chicago Fire. I think it’s a really noble show. It’s not doing as well in the ratings. I think it’s pulling about a 0.1. But, you know it’s crucial. And so I think it’s good that NBC is keeping it on the air just to sort of fill stuff out. Because I always have a lot of questions about what happens to that family after their house burned down or after their father was arrested for that crime.

**Craig:** Tell you what, it’s doing better than Chicago Permit. It’s just the office that does the permits. Yeah.

**John:** What’s so funny about the Chicago Permit show is mostly they’re pulling permits for shooting the Chicago shows in Chicago.

**Craig:** I know. It’s weird.

**John:** Again, there’s a snake eating its own tail quality, but I like that. I like that the shows have been willing to get so meta. I think the crossover with Hawaii Five-0 is fantastic. You know, it’s all feeding well. It’s a cross-network crossover, which is the best.

**Craig:** Chicago Rubber Roasts. Oh, that’s right, I said Rubber Roast. So, this is an article by Radha O’Meara who is a lecturer in screenwriting at the University of Melbourne, which I believe is the Australian Melbourne. And this is what — I believe Radha is a — I think she’s a woman. I think Radha is a female.

**John:** Radha Mitchell is an actress who is a woman. So I’m going to say all Radhas are now women.

**Craig:** All Radhas are women. So, we’ll throw a link on in the show notes, but she had some suggestions for how to avoid general sexism in screenplays. And I thought they were all very good suggestions. I had zero umbrage on these. So, I thought I would go ahead and share the bullet points here and then you at home can read further.

So the first one is a real simple one. Give female characters names. And there’s a very interesting reason that — I mean, sometimes characters don’t deserve names. And as you mentioned, sometimes if you name them, it might stop people and think, oh, that must be a very important character. And then they turn out not to be. Sometimes a character should just be named Waitress or Cop, because they have one line and it’s not particularly important.

What she says is if you give female characters names, oftentimes named characters are paid more. Now, I think that probably is a little bit of a non-causal correlation in that generally named characters are named because they are more significant, therefore they are paid more than non-named characters. But I do think that it does open things up a little bit and at least gives you a moment to think, particularly if there’s a chance for you to take this character that you think is just there as a type to say a word and maybe make a little bit more of a human being out of them. It’s certainly a good thing to keep in mind, wouldn’t you agree?

**John:** I would absolutely agree.

**Craig:** All right, so the next one is give female names to lines of dialogue/action. Meaning then when you have choices about those random bits of lines that come up — passersby, cab drivers, a barista behind the counter, whatever it is — if you make a conscious choice to assign female names to those characters you are helping to just improve the general balance of the dialogue in the movie. Because what they have found in analyses is that movies tend to be, at least the talking in movies, tends to be dominated by men. And even something as small as just as much as you can getting some of those random lines that are not necessarily tied to specific characters that you need in the movie, assigning as many of those as possible to women just generally makes the movie closer to reality where, as I will remind you, half of all people are women. So, a good idea.

This one is something that you and I have discussed. I think we did a whole show on how to intro characters. Give all characters a similar amount of description when you introduce them. In general, I don’t think these little short, tiny, nondescript lame-o descriptions are very good like “hot but doesn’t know it.” That’s the most amusing and stupid one, which we’ll refer to later when we get to Rick and Morty. But if you are describing a male character and you’re using terms that get into their motivations, their mannerisms, their desires, whatever it is, you should have the same kind of description for your female characters. You shouldn’t just default to short physical descriptions only, which is reductive.

And also — this is something that I’m just going to add this. I don’t think she included this in her article, but I’m going to add it because I think about it all the time. You have a character and you describe her as like hot. Librarian hot. Hot librarian. Whatever you want to do. It’s some dumb reductive way-too-short description that reduces a human being down to just physical appearance and one little thing. Here’s what happens. Somewhere down the line there is going to be a room full of women who are all trying to be actors who are working hard in this business who are looking for their break. And they have all shown up to this audition. They’ve come from their acting classes and trying to perfect their craft. And they’re all now sitting in a room trying to figure out how to apply all of that skill and all of what they’ve learned about sense memory, and emotion, and reactions, and internal life to “librarian hot.” And it’s demeaning. And it’s a bummer.

That’s the side of Hollywood that no one ever sees. And it all starts with us. So, we, the writers, have a responsibility to try and short circuit that before it happens.

**John:** This last week on Twitter somebody tweeted at me a question asking what do you think about when you’re reading a screenplay like “Aubrey Plaza type?” So basically using that as a character description. And my answer was you’re a writer, use your words. It’s so reductive to say that somebody is like an Aubrey Plaza because like, well, what is an Aubrey Plaza like? I can see what you’re going for. There’s a wryness. There’s a sarcasm. There’s a think. But like use your words to describe what that thing is rather than just coasting on the term Aubrey Plaza.

Because if you’re a studio executive who cannot describe people, then saying Aubrey Plaza type, I get it. But you’re supposedly a screenwriter, so like use your words to describe what that person is like. And that way you will not just reduce it to she’s like this other actress who a person may have heard of, or you’re just giving a physical description and not getting into what makes that character interesting and specific and unique.

**Craig:** I think that the Aubrey Plaza type is just creatively bankrupt. At its fundamental core, you are saying I want you to act like Aubrey Plaza. Not the characters that she plays, but her. Even Aubrey Plaza can’t play the Aubrey Plaza type, because it’s not a thing. She plays characters.

Now, every actor brings a certain essence of themselves to various characters. But I’d love you to sit down with Jack Nicholson and say, “OK, Jack, in this movie the character you play is, yeah, it’s like just do your Jack Nicholson thing.” OK, well, enjoy your last day on the set my friend. Because you ain’t coming back. That’s ridiculous. It just denies what acting is. It also denies what writing is. We are creating characters. There are actors that are better suited for certain characters than others. That’s what casting is all about. But if you say Aubrey Plaza type, what you’re essentially saying is I don’t understand what my job is. I literally don’t get it. I know that I’ve created this document, but I’m not really a screenwriter.

**John:** So, here is your task as a screenwriter is if you think Aubrey Plaza should play that role, then you need to create a character that a person reading the script says, “Oh you know who would be fantastic for this? Aubrey Plaza.” So, without you having ever said Audrey Plaza, they in their head say like, oh, you know who would be fantastic in this? Aubrey Plaza. And if you write a role that is exactly perfect for her, there’s a chance you might get her. But even if it ends up not being here, you created a character who is so specific that you will find a great actress for that part.

So, that’s my challenge to you is create a role that you want to put her in that position.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a thought. Create a human being that is unique, that we haven’t seen before, and then that will attract high quality actors. See, that’s how it goes. Now, it’s perfectly fine for you to write this part and then when you send the script off to the studio in your email you can say, listen, for these characters these were the actors I was thinking of. So you have a sense in your mind of how I would cast this movie. But you open the script and you start reading a description of the character, you’re reading a description of my character. The person. The human being I invented. Not, oh you know, just whatever, that lady.

Because all you’re doing is just drafting off of the other writers that did their jobs. Right? And wrote characters that Aubrey Plaza wanted to play. Oh, it’s — oh my god, I’m going to break something.

**John:** This last point in the article was actually the most challenging I would think to implement which is that to call out women in the crowd. And so she uses a quote from Geena Davis that says, “When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, ëA crowd gathers, which is half female.’ That may seem weird, but I promise you somehow or other on the set that day the crowed will turn out to be 17% female otherwise.” Craig, what do you feel about that?

**Craig:** Well, it hasn’t been my experience. You know, thinking of the crowd scenes that I have witnessed being shot. And they were pretty well balanced. The director usually doesn’t pick those people. Usually it’s a producer or the First AD who goes through the list of extras that is provided by the extras casting director. Then they bring the list over to show the director like look at all these photos. Does this seem roughly like the kind of crowd you want? And the director goes, oh yeah, that looks good.

But there’s usually some general instruction. The crowd should be roughly this age. Let’s say it’s a night club. Like I remember we shot a scene in Hangover 3 where Mr. Chow was singing karaoke in a night club in Mexico. That crowd, it’s a karaoke club, for dates, so it was 50/50.

Now, I think there’s got to be a better way than saying a crowd gathers which is half female. I would argue that this is probably one where Geena Davis is talking to the wrong people. This isn’t actually on screenwriters. This is one that you need to kind of get out to directors, first ADs, extras casting people to say, “Make an effort.” Unless there is a reason. If this is a scene where you’re gathering conscripts for a war, that’s probably going to be heavily male. And if this is a scene where you’re gathering members of the elementary school PTA, demographics tell us it’s going to be heavily female.

But otherwise, you guys should aim for 50/50. If we wrote in a script, “A crowd gathers which is half female,” we’re signaling that that’s really important, because that’s how screenplays work. But then it’s not important. It doesn’t actually turn out to be important and that’s going to be confusing for the reader, I think.

**John:** I agree. Where I think you may have an opportunity is if the composition of this crowd is important enough that it merits a second line, that it merits a texture line to sort of describe what the crowd is like, there may be an opportunity in there to sort of signal that like even if you say like the women — if you call out the women first in the crowd, that will sort of clue people in like, OK, the women are actually important to this thing. Or it will make people think like, oh, that’s right, I’m going to need to make sure that the women are represented in the crowd and that they are appropriate to what this crowd is. That I totally can get.

If you want to signal like, you know, if you’re calling out individual things in it. So like there’s a mom with a kid strapped to her chest. Then there’s actually a woman that you’re sort of signaling is in there. But in general, this line as Geena Davis sort of states it would feel so weird in the script that I would sort of stop if I read it right there. And maybe in some way it’s a good exercise to make people stop every once and a while and think about that, but I don’t think it’s going to help your read individually for this one script to do it.

I think you’re right to say that making sure that representation in films is diverse and inclusive is sort of everyone’s job. And so a screenwriter needs to do his or her job, but everyone down the road needs to make sure they’re doing their job as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. We just don’t pick who — we don’t pick the extras.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** We can describe roughly a group of people. You know, and it can be as simple as, you know, a crowd gathers, men and women, all ages. I’ve written things like that, to sort of say it’s a general crowd. At that point, I think I’ve done my job. And you can also say sometimes a diverse crowd gathers, men and women, all ages, all races. Whatever you feel would be the right kind of look. But to call out like half female, it’s too salient. It’s going to be misleading to the reader. They’re going to spend the next three pages wondering what’s going on with the women in the crowd. That’s just the way we read scripts.

But it is everyone’s job. This was a very good article and I thought it was just a good thing for all screenwriter to read as we go about our jobs and try and make the world a better place.

**John:** Indeed. All right, we have two questions this week. I think they’re actually fairly short answers, so let’s get to them. The first one comes from Nick in Michigan. He sent in some audio, so let’s take a listen.

Nick: My question is about being a screenwriter on set. You’ve covered that in some situations the writer is very involved day to day throughout the entire production, while other times the writer might not ever even come to set once. So my question is if you are a writer on set acting only in your capacity as a writer, are you getting paid for that time? It’s something that hasn’t really been touched on and I can see it going either way. From what I’ve heard in most situations, a writer doesn’t really have any obligation to be on set. I might be completely wrong in that. But if there’s no financial incentive or contractual obligation, it just seems like a lot of time and energy.

Adding to that, is there any difference if you’re really active with the script still even during production, working with the director, or doing a pass every morning on that day’s sides, versus just sort of being there and hanging back with the producers? Also, is there any difference if the production is local versus being on location? So, the difference of shooting Go in Los Angeles as opposed to shooting the Hangover 2 in Thailand? Thanks so much guys.

**John:** That’s a very good question. So my short answer is that in many cases I’m not being paid any extra for being there on the set. I wasn’t paid any extra for being on set for Go. Technically I was a producer on that, but as a writer I was not paid extra there. And there have been a number of shows in which I’ve been on set for some portion of filming and I don’t get paid anything extra.

But what often happens is that as the movie goes into production, you’re paid what’s called an all-services deal, which means after a certain point they say like, OK, we’re going to pay you X dollars and it’s just going to cover anything else you’re doing through the rest of production, including post-production. And that’s fairly typical I found.

So, in situations where I’m not there in a crisis mode, where I’m being paid as a weekly, an all-services deal will often kick in. Craig, what’s your experience?

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually have not ever been on set without being paid. And I don’t think I would go. To me that’s just visiting. You know, to me if you’re on a set and you don’t have a job, then you’re already in a troubled spot. If you have a purpose on the set as a writer, it is in fact to occasionally write. And if you’re going to write, you need to be paid. And so I always have an all-services deal.

The nature of all-services deals are such that generally they often don’t really cost the studio anything, because the way our deals are designed, if those things are pre-determined, that gets applied against your screenplay credit bonus. So if you’re earning, if you’re going to get sole screenplay bonus, like you did on Go or something like that, or the way that Todd and I did on Hangover 3, then you know, OK, that’s the big number that I’m getting paid here. And all these steps and things, first draft, second draft, polish, all-services deal are applied against it. So they’re paying you money they’re going to have to pay you anyway, either this way or that way. But yes, I always have an all-services deal. And this way also the writing that I do is then owned by the studio.

If you don’t have a deal, they don’t own it. So, that’s a problem for them. So, yes, all-services deal for sure. What was the other part of Nick’s question? Oh, the traveling?

**John:** Does it matter whether — yeah, travel. So, if they want you on set and you’re not in Los Angeles, they’re going to fly you out there. They’re going to put you up someplace good. And that is going to be pre-negotiated in your contract before you started working on the project.

**Craig:** That’s right. In every contract there is a travel provision and it says essentially if you’re required for a certain amount of time to go to production and it is this amount of distance away, then here’s what happens. They cover your airfare. And the question is do you get business class or first class. Business class I believe is guaranteed by our collective bargaining agreement, but you can individually negotiate up to first class, which I try and do.

They also then give you a per diem. You’re going to be in a hotel, you pay for it with your per diem. You have to go out to dinner, you pay with it your per diem. But that’s essentially a weekly allowance that they then pay you that is not applicable against bonuses or anything like that. And that amount is set to the size of the city. So the big cities of the world, New York, London, Paris, they get your highest number. And then the next tier down gets you a little bit less. And usually there’s also a guarantee of some kind of transportation while you are there.

So, it’s all pre-negotiated by your attorney. We’re not there footing our own bill.

**John:** No. So our next question is about how honest your feedback should be when giving notes on a friend’s script. Let’s take a listen.

Question: I have some friends in the business and every once and awhile they will send me their material for feedback. And generally my philosophy is it’s not about telling that person what I like and what I don’t like about the script. What’s important is to recognize what they’re trying to accomplish with the story and then point out for them the ways that they’re successful in doing that and the ways that they’re not successful in doing that.

That is what I thrive to do when giving people feedback. But every once and awhile you get a script and you read it and you’re like, oh god, this is bad. And I know you guys have talked about it on the show before. Sometimes you get writing from people and you’re like, oh god, this person will never make it. This person is just bad. So my question is as sort of raw, subjective thinking, is it ever useful to relay that back to somebody? Should I still follow my philosophy or is it best just to be honest with that person?

**John:** Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** We’ll go to just this extreme case. Someone has given you material to read. You read it. And three or four pages in you realize it’s just inept. When I have encountered those moments, I ask a couple of questions first. Who am I dealing with? What kind of person are they? Are they kind of person who has a certain amount of ego strength? Are they the kind of person that I intuit is going to be defensive? Are they a very sweet, kind person?

And then I tailor things to them, because first do no harm. I don’t want to make someone miserable. I don’t want to make someone cry. I don’t want to make somebody outraged. So a lot of times what it comes down to is I say, listen, this did not connect with me. I’m only going to talk about how it made me feel. And I actually stopped reading here. And I want to walk you through my relationship with these first 10 or 15 pages.

And then you have a choice of whether or not you want me to even — I just may be the wrong person for this. And so then there’s no presentation of objectivity. I’m not a judge saying you suck, you’re never going to make it. Give up your dreams. I just let them know how I felt. And where it was not working for me.

And I have so far — and this doesn’t happen frequently — but so far I have managed to avoid tears and lashing out. But I don’t know how you feel about this, John, but my feeling is if you read that script and it’s inept and that person is never going to be a screenwriter, they’re not going to stop because you tell them. They’ll stop when they finally realize it.

**John:** I agree. My saying something will probably not be the one thing that forms a wall that makes them sort of decide like, OK, now I’m going to take this other path. I always wanted to be a doctor, and now I’m going to go be a doctor. I don’t think my feedback is necessarily going to make that choice, that decision.

I often come back to our friend Kelly Marcel, I sent her one of my scripts to read. And she was so smart and she asked, “Do you want me to tell you that you’re brilliant, or do you want me to tell you what’s wrong?” And it was such a smart way of setting up the conversation, before she’d even opened up the script. Because then she could sit down with the thing of like, OK, am I going to read this to enjoy this and to point out the things that are working so well? Or am I actually going to look for the things that are wrong?

And that’s a thing you can do with another professional writer who you know has a certain level of competence. When you come to something where it’s like, oh man, I can’t even start here, I often go back to a thing that happens sometimes at the Sundance Labs in that up at the Sundance Labs you have these really talented filmmakers who are often coming from different backgrounds who may not be the best writers on the page sometimes. And so over the course of this long weekend as we’re looking at their scripts, different advisers are reading them and sitting down with these writers and talking about what they’re trying to do. And I found that there’s different roles people sort of naturally slot into based on who they are and sort of like where they sort of fall in the batting order in terms of talking with these writers. So, there’s that first person who is just there to suss out what was the intention behind the script.

Then there’s the one who is there to gently challenge and nudge and see where there are opportunities. Where is there flexibility? Where can we get a little bit of stuff to happen here?

There’s often a person who is just the sledgehammer. Who is just there to smash things apart and point out everything that’s wrong, everything that’s not working, and really sort of say this is not a movie yet. You have a lot of work to do here.

There is a person who sort of bats cleanup who sort of like puts the pieces back together, sort of emotionally reestablishes somebody. And then often my function is that cleanup or sort of the getting that person to think about what’s going to happen next. And so the Sundance model, like those are all probably people who kind of get it on some level. They’ve been through that creative process before. They have a sense of sort of what the work is ahead of them.

When you get that script from your drycleaner who has not read other scripts and you’re like, ugh, man, I just don’t know where to start here. That is the tough situation. And that’s where I think you go back to the Kelly Marcel of like, great, do you want me to tell you what’s fantastic, or what’s not working? If they say tell me if I suck, then I think it’s kind of on them. And if the writing is just not good, I think they do deserve your honesty. A kind honesty, but an honesty about like this is not working at all right now. And these are the kind of things I think you need to do next if you’re going to keep trying to write.

**Craig:** I don’t really believe when people like that tell me, “Oh, no, no, give it to me straight.” I’ve definitely had a few of those where I started to give — I mean, I hadn’t even gotten to third gear. I was in gear two of 100, and I could tell they were already getting defensive and bristling, and so I just backed it down to gear one.

The truth is that no one who isn’t inside of our business and has done what we’ve done for this long — no one can really understand what the true unvarnished meat grinder looks and feels like. We have experienced the meat grinder from the people paying us. And there’s nothing like paying somebody to make you feel entitled to tell them exactly what you think. So, we have been flayed and ground up and beaten to pulps.

When we talk to each other, we all have a shorthand and we also have a shared empathy and experience. We understand that these things are hard. We also understand that you’re one draft away from something much, much better all the time. There is always a hope, right? If I read something — I read something by mutual friends of ours, a writing team, and I love their work. I really do. But this one particular script they had written, they were working a spec and I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. And I had many, many, many problems. And I started off by saying, “I may be the wrong guy here.”

And they were like, “Or not, so tell us.” And I did. And they took it like champs. They took it like champs because they had the ego strength to know that I wasn’t saying you suck, stop writing. What I was saying was you, like all of the rest of us, have gone down a blind alley here. Back out, find a different path. You can do it.

That’s the difference between these things. When you’re dealing with somebody who has not succeeded yet, the implication is this is not working and nothing you ever do is going to work. Beat it. And that’s a whole level of emotional anxiety that I just — I’m really aware of. And I don’t want to be abusive about it. So, I try and put it in the context of me and my relationship to the material. And then I ask a ton of questions. Instead of saying this is stupid, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t make sense, I’ll just be very Socratic about it.

Here’s how I felt here. What did you want me to feel? And I think in a sense our obviously Canadian questioner already does that. And I would say to him keep doing it. You’re doing it right.

**John:** I agree. This last year I’ve had a chance to catch up on a lot of TV shows that I’ve missed along the way and one of those was Rick and Morty. And so this last week I was watching an episode of Rick and Morty and I feel like we cannot close this segment without doing a clip from this season two show in which Rick and Morty go to visit a lighthouse keeper on this alien planet. The lighthouse keeper agrees to help them as long as —

**Craig:** You listen to my tale.

**John:** Listen to your tale. And so it’s a screenplay reading. And so we’re going to play a little clip of that and it’s basically the worst case scenario for notes giving. And I should set up if you have kids in the car, there’s a bad word said three times. Not the very bad word, but the S-word. So kids-in-the-car warning here.

[Clip plays]

**Lighthouse Chief:**

Blane: Maybe I don’t need a new friend.

Jacey: Maybe you’re the only friend I need.

Blane: Need, or want?

Jacey: I’ve never been much for wanting.

Blane: Spoken like someone with needs.

**Morty:** Oh, geez.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Hmm?

**Morty:** Uh, sorry. K-keep going.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Jacey reaches out and touches his face. It’s clear he needs what she wants. She’s a woman. He’s a man. The city burns in the background as he takes her in his arms. Fade out. Title… The End — Question mark.

**Morty:** Wow.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Yeah?

**Morty:** It’s… G-good job. Good job.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You liked it?

**Morty:** Of course I did.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You didn’t laugh at the scene in the bar.

**Morty:** I…Thought it was funny, but I wanted to hear the rest.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Do you have any thoughts? Notes?

**Morty:** No. I-I just enjoyed it. That’s my note, you know? Please write more.

**Lighthouse Chief:** Seems a little insincere.

**Morty:** What? No.

**Lighthouse Chief:** You don’t have to mollycoddle me. I want to improve my writing. Tell me your real thoughts.

**Morty:** All right. Well, um, I’m not a huge fan, personally, of the whole “three weeks earlier” teaser thing. I feel like, you know, we should start our stories where they begin not start them where they get interest —

**Lighthouse Chief:** — Get out.

**Morty:** Um, what?

**Lighthouse Chief:** No, I’m sick of this. You bang on my door, you beg me to help you, I share something personal with you, and you take a giant shit on it.

**Morty:** Hey, man, we asked if we could put up a beacon —

**Lighthouse Chief:** Well, you can’t. I want you out of here. You’re a petty person, and you’re insecure, and you’re taking it out on me. That’s a good script.

**Morty:** What the hell?

**Lighthouse Chief:** I don’t care. I want you out.

**Rick:** What?

**Lighthouse Chief:** Take that thing down. Your grandson is a shitty person. Leave now.

**Rick:** Morty!

**Morty:** Rick, I didn’t do anything. I sat through his entire screenplay…

**Lighthouse Chief:** You sat through it?

**Morty:** Yes! Did you want me to weep with joy? It’s terrible!

**Rick:** Whoa! Morty! We’re guests here.

**Morty:** I tried to be a good guest! He dragged it out of me!

**Lighthouse Chief:** I’m taking down this beacon. No, stop! That’s not fair! Just because you hate your own writing doesn’t make me a bad person! You like that? You want me to cut to three weeks earlier when you were alive?

**Rick:** Whoa, Morty. You just purged.

[Clip ends]

**John:** I just love that they actually call out the Stuart Special in clip. It’s so fantastic.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great?

**John:** It literally is the Stuart Special we’ve read so many times.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s pitch perfect, right? I mean, not only is the terrible writing something that I’ve seen many, many times before, but that’s that phenomenon I’m talking about where someone will say, no, and they seem so believable. No, please tell me, I want to hear it. Because they can’t yet conceive of a world where somebody doesn’t like part of it. They think that they’re going to get these minor things like, you know where you said she was in a big car, maybe she should be in a little car. Oh, OK, I can see that. I can see that.

But the second there’s any kind of scratch at the surface, all of that terrible stuff just pores out of them. Pores out. And that’s the nightmare. That’s the absolute nightmare. It’s just wonderful. It’s wonderful. It’s perfect. I watch that clip probably once a day. Because it just makes me — just also just the way he’s so self-satisfied as he sits down to read his terrible — and also, because you think like, OK, he’s going to read a tale. It’s going to be some fairy tale or something. The second he says Fade In, you know, EXT., blah, blah. And the look on Morty’s face as he realizes this is a script. And he looks like he’s dying. It’s wonderful.

**John:** It’s fantastic. All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this video and physics paper that go together. It’s about toppling dominoes. And so we’ve seen a lot of dominoes be toppled and sort of like billions of dominoes all falling at once, but this is about the physics of how a smaller domino can topple a larger domino. And so the mathematics work out to be I think it’s 1.5 times the size of the first domino can knock the next one over. And it ends up scaling in a really fascinating way. So, you don’t need to read the physics paper, but the video that goes with it is actually really great because it starts with this teeny tiny little domino that you have to hit with tweezers and it can knock over bigger and bigger until there’s this giant tombstone size domino falls, but it’s only like ten dominoes in a chain to do that.

And so there’s all sorts of metaphors you can sort of obviously take for dominoes falling down. But I thought it was great. And the thing I had not understood until I watched the longer part of the video is that I always wondered — in some ways, how is that possible? And it’s because potential energy is actually stored in the larger dominoes as they’re stacked up on their end. And so that’s why this little tiny domino can knock down that bigger domino.

And that’s why when the small domino knocks down the bigger domino, there’s basically potential energy being converted into kinetic energy. So I thought it was just terrific. So, if you enjoy things falling down, which you are a screenwriter so you probably do, check out this video.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you just need enough force to move that larger domino in a position where then gravity pulls it down the rest of the way. So all you have to do is — you just need that little bit, and then gravity pulls it down the rest of the way and that then is more force because of momentum and blah, blah, blah. Physics.

**John:** Physics! Now, Craig, we haven’t done one of our special episodes where we just rip something apart for a while, but I fell down this rabbit hole, not a very deep rabbit hole because the nature of physical reality, about flat-earthers. I find flat earth truthers to be one of the most fascinating kinds of crazy. So maybe somewhere down the road we need to do a flat earth episode, because I just love it so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. Flat-earthers have to make a lot of excuses. Tons.

**John:** Tons.

**Craig:** They have to excuse away almost everything we know. Normally, the conspiracy theorists just have to excuse away a few things. Not them.

**John:** Because usually a conspiracy theory simplifies things in a way that it may try to make something simple that’s actually complex. But it actually makes everything much, much more complex than just, you know, we’re on a sphere that’s circling the sun.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s an incredibly complicated thing. So this past week I went and did one of those wonderful escape rooms. You know I’m a big fan of those. And I went with this just all-star team of geniuses, including our friend David Kwong, and another crossword genius/lawyer named Dave Shucane. And a bunch of other people, including a girl named Tiffany, I think it was a woman named Tiffany. I believe. She was very young-looking, so I don’t know if she qualifies as girl. She’s got to be at least 30, right? And she was a member of like an international escape room team at the Escape Room Olympics. I didn’t even know that this was a thing.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** I was so impressed with her.

**John:** And now Craig must compete.

**Craig:** Well, no, I’m not. I don’t think I could. Well, I don’t know. See, you don’t want to do these things to me, because I will.

**John:** You totally will.

**Craig:** So we went to this terrific escape room in LA. An Evil Genius Room. Was Evil Genius 2, I think. And it was a very hard room. Only 20% solve rate. We obliterated the record. I mean, I really was with some ringers. I mean, I helped. I wasn’t useless in there, but I was also aware that I was not the best person in that room. So it was a great bunch of people.

And so I’m a big escape room guy. There’s a ton of not great escape room apps that you can buy. A whole lot of them are just shoddy and lame. But I did find this one group of them by one guy. His name is Mateusz Skutnik. And he has created a series. I believe there’s 14 in this one sequence that all is part of this larger story called Submachine. And so you can find this online. We’ll throw a link on. But it’s at mateuszskutnik.com/submachine. Don’t worry about spelling it. We’ll give you — we’ll let you cheat on that. And start with Submachine 1, the basement. And proceed forth. They are very cool. I like them a lot.

**John:** Craig, I’ve only done one or two escape rooms. But when you are on a really good team, what is the general strategy? Should everything be focused on the same problem at once, or do you just fan out across the space and everyone tries to do as much as they can in their own little space? What is a good strategy for a team?

**Craig:** Most escape rooms are best conquered by a team that is fanning out and then communicating constantly. So, the second you find something, you announce it out loud. Because many of the puzzles are interacting across spaces. So somebody is working on something and then someone says, “I just found a puzzle piece.” And you’re like, wait, I need that. Bring that over here. Or there are levels of things, right? And sometimes it’s as simple as I’ve just found a look that was hidden under a thing.

Occasionally you will find some that you kind of need to separate off a little bit. There’s a really, really good one called The Alchemist which is part of Escape Room LA Downtown. And that one kind of requires you for a while to split up into four groups because there are sort of four isolated sections and then it all comes back together. But generally best practice is fan out, parallel problem solving, constant communication.

**John:** Sounds good. All right. That is our show for this week. As always, it’s produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, I’m on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Just search for the Scriptnotes Podcast.

You can find us on Apple Podcast at Scriptnotes. Search for us there and while you’re there leave us a review, because those are delightful.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. If you want to listen to all the back episodes, go to Scriptnotes.net and there’s also an app in which you can listen to all those.

You can get the USB drives now for sale at store.johnaugust.com. That has all the back episodes.

And we also have tickets for the live show in Los Angeles on July 25th. So you’ve not already purchased those, purchase them now. It’s a fundraiser for the Writers Guild Foundation.

And that’s it. Craig, I will see you in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** Stateside buddy. Have a safe trip.

**John:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Scriptnotes Homecoming Show](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-homecoming-show/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USBs drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Addams Family on Netflix](https://www.facebook.com/netflixgeeks/videos/197379134097035/)
* [Olivia de Havilland Sues FX](http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/olivia-de-havilland-feud-lawsuit-fx-ryan-murphy-1202484973/)
* [Creators of Tupac biopic ‘All Eyez on Me’ sued](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-tupac-biopic-lawsuit-20170623-story.html)
* [Defining Environment Language for Video Games](https://80.lv/articles/defining-environment-language-for-video-games/amp/)
* [Chekov’s Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun)
* [Hanging a Lantern, or Lampshading](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hang%20a%20lantern)
* [How To Reduce Sexism In Screenplays](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-04/how-to-reduce-sexism-in-screenplays/8675688)
* [Morty’s Screenplay Criticism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ-Z_DW0AuE)
* [Domino Toppling](https://phys.org/news/2013-01-physicist-math-maximum-incremental-domino.html)
* [Submachine Escape Room Game](http://www.mateuszskutnik.com/submachine/)
* [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 Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_308.mp3).