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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]
[applause]

Craig Mazin: Look at this beautiful crowd.

John: It’s lovely.

Craig: Beautiful.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Scriptnotes, a podcast and now a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

John: For folks listening at home, we are at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. It is our book launch party. Craig, how are you feeling?

Craig: I feel very grateful because I believe everyone here is here because they bought a book.

John: They got a book.

Craig: Thank you.

John: This is the most books you’ll ever see in one place for Scriptnotes. Everyone has an orange book in their hands.

Craig: Yes. Cut to 400 years from now-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: -and our book is The Constitution of the New Country.

[laughter]

John: It’s the new Bible.

Craig: Yes. It’s Little Red Book.

John: Little Red Book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We have an amazing show for you today. We have Julia Turner here. She’s going to interrogate us about the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We’re also going to talk about Craig’s favorite topic, which is criticism.

Craig: Yes, I love it.

John: Love it.

Craig: Love it.

[laughter]

Craig: Can’t wait to talk with her about that.

John: Ashley Nicole Black will help us make a meal of leftovers.

[applause]

John: We’ll have audience questions. Craig, just this morning, you worked out a whole new game.

Craig: Yes. I love a little Christmas quiz. It’s a brief one. We’ll do it in between Julia and Ashley Nicole, I think. Just a little trivia quiz. I believe we’re going to need three contestants.

John: We’re going to need three contestants. You are already contestants. You just don’t know it yet. If you have a book in your hands, open it to where we signed it. If you have a star on that page, you are a contestant. Raise your hand if you have one of the starred books.

Craig: There’s a starred book.

John: There’s one. We have one.

Craig: Oh, there’s two.

John: There’s two. First, Craig, let’s have a seat.

Craig: Great.

John: The Scriptnotes book is finally out in bookstores. As people are hearing this episode, they will have gotten their preorders. They’ll be able to buy it at their local bookstore. We often talk on the podcast about starting a new project, but we don’t often talk about finishing, and just being done with a thing, and saying goodbye to a thing, because the Scriptnotes book is now done, it’s out.

Craig: It’s out.

John: We’re finished.

Craig: Yes.

John: Talk to us about how you feel about finishing a project, finishing a movie, saying goodbye to something.

Craig: It’s always sad. I get sad. We throw the term postpartum around, which I think is a bit insulting to people that actually go through postpartum depression. That’s a very serious thing. There is a postscriptum depression. There’s a thing that happens when it’s over because it’s been in your mind for so long, and when it’s done, and I mean done done, not necessarily like, “Oh, we’re on our third revision,” or something, you do feel like you’ve sent your kid off, and now it belongs to everyone. You just have to let it go, and it’s not yours anymore.

John: Yes. With movies, once you go to a premiere and it’s like, “Oh, it’s so exciting.” You’re seeing all this stuff. You’re doing press. Then at a certain point, it’s just its opening weekend, and it’s there. It’s no longer your movie, it’s the world’s movie. Their reaction to it is what’s going to keep it going or not going. I’ve had a bit of this experience with the three Arlo Finch books because I had the launch of the first one, great, but there was always a second one, and then the third one, and eventually, like, “Oh, wow, I’m no longer the person writing Arlo Finch books.”

It’s a weird thing to be done with it. It’s nice that it’s actually physically a book, that it’s actually a thing that sits on a shelf. So often we talk about scripts we write, and they get pretty fantastic, but if they don’t, all that energy, all that effort is just trapped in 12 Point Courier.

Craig: Yes. In a way, I think psychologically, I prefer that. There’s a world where the best outcome is you write a script, you perfect it, and then you encase it in Lucite,-

[laughter]

Craig: -and it is never read by anyone.

John: No.

Craig: It will never be tainted by their dirty eyes.

[laughter]

Craig: I love that, but the postscriptum that I’m really fearing is when I eventually get to the end of The Last of Us because we’re talking about years and years at that point. Now it’s like, “Hey, that’s a chunk of your life, and that’s going to be interesting.” I will either be terribly, terribly sad or wonderfully, wonderfully happy.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m rooting for the second, almost certainly the first.

John: A question people ask, like, “Oh, do you go back and read your Arlo Finch books?” Like, “Oh, God, no, I’m not going to read that.” People ask, “Do you watch your movies?” The answer is I really don’t. Unless I’m doing a special event for something, I don’t go back and watch old movies. I can understand why people would think you would because, “Oh, aren’t you so proud of it?” It’s not like your kid is going out to college or something.

[laughter]

John: It’s just like, “No, it’s there. It’s for other people. It’s not for me anymore.”

Craig: I can now watch clips online that occasionally go viral for the weirdest reasons from Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

[laughter]

Craig: We’re talking about whatever, 20 years. A couple of decades go by. Yes, I’m watching it like anyone else now. It’s gone. I can do that. I’m going to have to wait about 20 years per thing, and then I feel, yes, I could look at that.

John: The Scriptnotes book isn’t quite cold yet. Because it’s so awkward for us to talk about a book, we thought we’d bring on somebody incredibly smart to ask us questions about that. Our first guest is a longtime co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest. She’s also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. She’s also plotting some new media thing we’re not supposed to talk about.

Craig: Yes. Apparently, she’s got a scheme.

John: She’s got a scheme.

Craig: -to launch some sort of new digital journalism thing. It’s going to be based here in LA.

John: There was a Vanity Fair article about it, though.

Craig: I think a squib.

John: A squib.

Craig: A squib in Vanity Fair. I’m curious. We asked her backstage what it was called, and she said, “Fuck you, I’m not telling you.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Which I think is a brave title.

Craig: Amazing title.

John: I think it’s really good.

[laughter]

John: I’m going to have dinner for that.

Craig: Very catchy.

John: Welcome back to the program, Julia Turner.

[applause]

Julia Turner: Hello.

Craig: Hello.

John: Julia Turner.

Julia: Hi.

John: Oh.

Julia: Hello, everyone.

John: Hi. Before we fully hand over the reins to you, people may remember you because you hosted a conversation with us for our 10th anniversary of the Scriptnotes Podcast, which is excerpted in the appendix of the book. This is very meta to have you back here to talk about us.

Julia: Very full circle. I’m going to ask you mostly about that appendix.

[laughter]

Julia: How’d I do? Can we just stipulate that I’m the official journalist of Scriptnotes, I’m your official interrogator?

Craig: I have no problem with that.

Julia: All right.

John: 100% endorsed.

Craig: Your competition is literally no one else.

[laughter]

Julia: It would have been really embarrassing if you said no-

Craig: Yes, it would have been rough. [laughs]

Julia: -you need to think about it. [laughs]

Craig: Yes. Oh. Yes, we’ll take that under management. All right, official journalist of Scriptnotes, lay it on us.

John: We cede our control to you.

Julia: Okay. Let’s see where I can take this. I have listened to your show for more than a decade. I have spent so many hours in both of your company, mostly nodding in agreement, marveling at your stage wisdom, deeply amused, occasionally shaking my fist at you.

Craig: That’s me, right?

[laughter]

Julia: Both of you.

Craig: Okay.

Julia: More you. We’ll get to the part that I shake-

Craig: Yay.

Julia: -my fist at later. I have also heard you say many, many, many times that script-writing books are a crock and no one should buy or read them.

Craig: Correct.

[laughter]

Craig: I am consistent with that.

Julia: How did we get here? [chuckles] What made you want to write this book?

John: Yes, let’s talk about that.

[laughter]

John: Craig, have we changed our opinion on books about how to be a screenwriter?

Craig: No. I have not changed my opinion at all because, as far as I can tell, the only book that exists about how to write screenplays or write for movies and television that is written by two people or a person that has repeatedly done that job for decades is this orange book. It is unique. I don’t know of any other book like that. Most of the books are by people that did it once, or never did it, or were more analysts. I don’t think of this as inconsistent with my belief that screenwriting books are a crock. I think this book is a refutation of other screenwriting [chuckles] books.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: I hope that people do find it useful. That said, if they don’t, then we’ve just added one more pile of the crock.

Julia: [laughs]

John: Another thing I’ll say is that the subtitle in the book is A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters. It’s a book about screenwriting. It’s not a how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It’s about the craft and profession of screenwriting. It was a chance for us to share everything we talked about on the show, but also for the 25 interviews with other screenwriters in there talking about how they do their work. That, to me, felt like a valuable addition to the literature on screenwriting.

Julia: Yes. There’s a lot of expertise besides just the two of yours in there, but there’s a lot of the two of yours as well. I’m curious, when you first came up with the idea to do this book, were there particular moments from the show that you remembered that you thought, “That has to go in? I don’t care what else is in, but we’ve got to make sure this part is in there.”

John: Craig has a standalone episode called How to Write a Movie, which is such a pretentious title for an episode.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s him giving his lecture on what writing a movie is like to him. It’s so specific to his point of view that it became pretty clear that’s just a chapter in and of itself. Literally, it’s the text of that episode. Very lightly edited, it becomes that one chapter. To me, it was talking through pushing back against the idea of what structure is, and that structure is something you impose upon a story. The structure is really instead something natural that evolves out of story. The structure is characters doing things.

Those conversations we kept coming back to about specificity, about pitching, about notes, and trying to make sure that the book was full of the kinds of things we talked about on the episode, but most of the chapters are not the one episode we did about that topic.

Craig: Right. I think that as, honestly, John and our excellent team did the vast majority of curation here, there’s, I think, a really good job of gleaning out those very practical moments from the podcast over the years where we’re like, “Okay, here’s something just about transitions from scene to scene. Here’s what conflict, different kinds of–” those things are very useful to people, I think, particularly useful to people who are good enough to be screenwriters.

Ultimately, you’re writing a book for people that are interested in screenwriting and screenwriters from a objective point of view, or who want to be and will be. It hopefully would help them along, but I also love the choices of the interviews with the guests that we’ve had over the years because it’s quite a startling group of people when you look at it in the aggregate.

Julia: When you guys read the early drafts, I think you’ve spoken about this, Craig, that one of the joys of podcasting is you can just talk and talk and talk, and it’s not quite the same as writing something down. It doesn’t have quite the same weight. You can be more exploratory. You can be more conversational. Also, at least in my experience as a long-time podcaster, sometimes you just forget what you said. You’re talking into the ether.

Craig: I forgot what we said when we got out here.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: Yes, you remember nothing.

Julia: Was there anything that surprised you when the corpus of your work was brought back to you with the help of your assistants? Were there any things that you had said or that each other had said that you were like, “What the hell? I don’t believe that at all.”?

Craig: No, I don’t think there was anything where I was like, “Oh, no, John,-

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: -I never said this about the Holocaust.” It was nothing like that.

[laughter]

Craig: It was amazing to go through it and read it and think, “These guys sound pretty good.”

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: It’s impossible to remember those moments. There’s so many of them. We’ve done a game where Matthew reads us quotes of things we’ve said. I think we did it at Austin, and he’s like, “Which one said it?” We don’t know.

John: [chuckles]

Craig: It’s how many years?

John: Yes, about 15 years.

Craig: 15 years of talking.

John: One of the real decisions we had to make with the book was, clearly, it’s not going to just be the transcripts, but are John and Craig going to speak with individual voices in it, or is it going to be one collective voice? We tried it with some breaking into John says a thing and Craig says a thing. It just did not work at all. We had to go through and strip all that out and make it just one consistent us voice throughout it.

What was good about it is that even though Craig and I will disagree some on the show, mostly it’s a conversation, and mostly we’re rowing in the same direction. There’s a lot of times where it’s a paraphrase of something Craig said or I said, but it makes sense as one’s collective voice in the book. It was challenging to make it read right, but it wasn’t challenging to make all the opinions fit together the right way because,-

Craig: We tend to agree.

John: -yes, 90% of things about the process of writing, we agree on.

Julia: It is interesting because it does feel new. As someone who’s listened to all these episodes, it’s fun to encounter this synthesized voice. I’m curious. I’ve heard you say that before, that the back and forth didn’t work. What didn’t work? What was bad about it?

John: It was jarring to get halfway through a page, and then Craig says a thing, and then John says a thing, and then we’re back. Whose voice are we in when we’re back? It just felt really, really strange, and so it didn’t work. It was nice visually on the page to break stuff up, but it never worked quite right. We had to either do a lot of it or do none of it. We just took it all out.

Craig: It’s also transcript-y and we provide transcripts. In a way, you’d feel like you just are selling me the transcripts.

John: The only section in the book that’s still transcripts is the section with you at the end.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: It’s the appendix.

Craig: And the index.

John: Then, when we did the interview chapters with our guests, we basically cut ourselves out of it, so it was just their words and did that light passage. It feels like it’s just them talking. Occasionally, you might see me or Craig pop in there to pull a point out, but it’s not really that feel.

Julia: Do you guys think that if you had read this book at the beginning of your careers, it would have changed how you approached anything, saved you from any mistakes or follies?

Craig: Absolutely.

Julia: Which ones? How so?

[laughter]

Craig: This is all I had when I started. Really, the answer is all of it because all I had was a line graph from Sid Field that was 30 pages, first act, 60 pages, second act, 30 pages, and then midpoint. What the fuck good is that? I remember sitting there. There’s 21-year-old Craig sitting there, wherever, on a park bench, making lines for these ideas I had. It’s useless. I didn’t have anything like, “Okay, let’s talk about dialogue, let’s talk about conflict, let’s talk about scene work, let’s talk about transitions, let’s talk about structure as a function of relationship, dramatic argument,” any of that. All of that just had to be instinctive and then learned. I do think it would have helped me dramatically.

John: Craig and I both came up as solo screenwriters, essentially. Craig had a writing partner for a while, but essentially, we were just doing all the work by ourselves. We weren’t in a TV writer’s room where we had other people to bounce ideas off of and see, “Oh, this person tried this thing, this didn’t work. How do we make this?” We didn’t have that back and forth to see how it feels to grow a story.

We just had these bad books to start with, and screenplays to read, but there weren’t as many available screenplays for us to read. It was harder to get up to speed. Hopefully, this gets people up to speed and makes people think, “Oh, okay. Now I get what it would be like to be a screenwriter.” Hopefully, a lot of them will say, “I don’t want to be one,” and then they can move on to something else.

Craig: Perfectly fine.

John: Absolutely fine. If it scares you away–

Craig: That’s actually an incredible outcome.

John: It’s a gift.

Craig: Saved you a lot of time and misery, and you can proceed forth to cure cancer, which is what you’re supposed to do.

John: [laughs]

Craig: If you are only interested as a student of film, then I just think it’s interesting without being practical.

Julia: Speaking of all the people who should not become screenwriters and go cure cancer, I’d be curious to hear you guys talk about the moment that we’re at in Hollywood right now. I feel like the vibe in this town,-

[laughter]

Julia: It’s a little like, “Are we Detroit?”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Julia: Is this going to still happen?

Craig: Detroit’s doing better, I think, currently.

Julia: Detroit has a long and beautiful trajectory. I spent a lot of great time in Detroit, but I think you know what I mean.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: I’d be curious to hear you guys– I have this, too, in journalism. Sometimes young people come to me and say, “Oh, how do I become a journalist?” I wonder, is the only responsible answer to give them run for the hills?

I’d be curious to hear you guys both talk about how the industry feels to you right now as compared with your previous decades working, and what it means to publish a book that’s inviting people into this trade at a moment like this.

Craig: What an insinuation.

[laughter]

John: We were very mindful of the fact that this book, we want it to feel eternal. Even though it’s capturing this moment, it’s not really so specific about the US film and TV industry as it stands right now. That it should hopefully feel like if you’re writing scripted entertainment, if you’re writing narrative with characters who are doing things, this should still apply. A lot of these lessons would apply for theater and for other kinds of writing.

I do think that we’re probably at a transition point where this next generation that’s rising up is going to make a new, different thing that is as different from the existing film and television as what the ’70s were in terms of how they upended our film culture, just because the gatekeepers are not letting them make the things in their system, so they’re going to make stuff outside of their system.

That new generation will find a new way to do stuff. Hopefully, some of the stuff that we’re talking about here in terms of thinking about how characters are driving the story, thinking about how theme emerges from conflict, those should hopefully be universal ideas that will continue.

Craig: Goes back to the Greeks. So far, so good for that. Yes, Hollywood has its ups and downs, and it also has chaos, and it has always been hard to break in as a writer. If it is twice as hard now, you’ve gone from a 0.02 chance to a 0.01 chance, it doesn’t impact you. I guess this is the message that I would give to people is don’t be disheartened by the chaos of Hollywood. No one knows who will own Warner Brothers next year. No one. It’s madness out there. Also, continue to make an enormous amount of television, they continue to spend a lot of money on content, billions of dollars every year. The chaos of them is theirs.

We don’t run Hollywood. We don’t own it. Not my problem. My problem is to do the thing that people like us have been doing forever for audiences, which is to entertain them. That’s what we do. The people who run this business, whether they are hair on fire, falling down, selling to each other, falling apart, and yet the audience will still need to watch stuff and to experience things. I guess the answer is it doesn’t matter. As long as people want to continue to watch things, then the people who write them are fine. It’s the people sitting in the boardrooms that, “Hmm, that must be fun these days.”

Julia: I think one broader question out of that that I also would love to hear you guys on is, why should people be screenwriters? Why should people do this thing that people have been doing since the Greeks, and probably before?

Craig: Don’t think should is the right. The problem is you need to. People who end up doing what we do do it because they have to do it. It’s a compulsion. It can’t possibly be a choice. If you have to choose every time, you’re actually going to choose no every time in a row because it’s hard at all phases. I don’t know why people become stand-up comedians, but clearly they must be compelled to do it because it is brutal. Brutal. That’s the best answer I can give.

John: I’d say that there’s–

[laughter]

Craig: You’re trying to figure out why you do this?

John: I’m trying to think why I should try it.

Craig: Quit.

[laughter]

John: I’m allowed to stop?

Craig: [laughs]

John: I think there’s a compelling– Craig and I often talk about how we were the kids who just sat around in our rooms and just imagined things all the time. I get paid just to imagine stuff and write those words down. That happens. It’s exciting that that’s my job, just to imagine whole worlds of things. There’s always going to be folks who are skilled at writing, who are skilled at sitting down and creating something new that wasn’t there before.

What’s different about screenwriting is that you’re doing it as the first step in a plan that is going to involve hundreds of other people to make a thing. The mechanics behind that will probably change, and they have changed a lot over the years, but I think that’s still a very universal idea. I think if you’re a listener to the show or someone who’s reading the book who says, “Yes, I want to do that thing because I have that drive,” there’s still going to be a way to do that no matter what happens in this crazy structure we have.

Julia: I have a question for you about AI.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: This book does not encompass AI. Makes sense.

Craig: Written by AI.

[laughter]

John: It was not written by AI.

[laughter]

John: Wait. I was very mindful as we were finishing up this book, like, “Oh, shit, a year from now, could an AI take all of our transcripts and generate something that’s–”

Craig: A year from now? Oh, that shit’s happened already. That boat sailed, yes.

Julia: Yes. I was going to ask, actually, if you had AI alongside your assistants scrape the corpus and see what it thought was important.

Craig: No.

John: Really, the scraping of the transcripts happened three years ago. If it were happening now, of course, you would throw it all into Gemini or something and say, “When did John and Craig talk about this topic?” It could pull up all those references. Instead, it was Drew and Chris and our amazing interns just googling our transcripts to find out when we talk about those things.

Julia: You guys, I think of you both as being technophiles and tech curious, not being Luddites, not being avoidant. Also, I feel like I’ve observed you both, even Robot John, being repulsed by some of what AI is bringing us. I feel like in my own life, I’ve seen, I don’t know, two different paths. I feel like there are people in my life who are like, “I’m never going to try it. I’m not using it.” Then I feel like the people who start to play with it. “What feels right? What’s the right way to play with it? What’s the wrong way?”

I’m curious, if this book is the staple of screenwriting schools that you hope, I assume it will be, and you’ve got to re-release it in four or five years with a second edition, what would the chapter about AI say? Are you guys AI curious, AI loathsome?

John: I don’t think a second edition would ever have an AI chapter because it would be automatically out of date. There’s no way to keep up to that level.

Craig: That’s just an apology to our AI masters.

John: Absolutely.

[laughter]

John: Will an AI ingest this book? Absolutely. It already has ingested this book, I’m sure, because the e-book will be out there someplace. You’ll ask questions. It’ll have some of our answers in there mixed into it. That’s also just culture. It’s just everything does get recycled and repurposed and put back at you. It doesn’t happen at the speed that we’re used to with it now.

Craig: I just find it gross. I don’t turn away from AI because I’m a technophobe. I love technology. I just find it to be crap. I think it’s crap technology. I think it’s boring. When I look at what people will show me that AI has done, I find it boring and flat and dead. That’s not surprising because it’s entirely built on the bits and pieces we’ve put out there, or in the case of language, just language. Not the stuff that language emerges out of, just the language.

I think I’ve shied away from it because it’s like, “Okay, I’m a carpenter. I like working with my hands and building something that’s beautiful,” and own the road, there’s a factory that just goes stamp, stamp, stamp, smash, smash, IKEA table, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with IKEA tables. God knows I’ve attempted to build so many of them.

[laughter]

Craig: My prior fear about AI, which is that it was just going to swamp our humanity and take over everything, new fear about AI is that it sucks, and our economy is about to take a huge dump because it has been built around the idea that it doesn’t, except I think it does. We’re going to find out, everyone.

[laughter]

Craig: Either way, we’re fucked.

John: Coming back to you,-

[laughter]

John: -the word we say way too often on the show is specificity, and specificity as in how is something unique to the writer’s own experience. That’s a thing that an AI just is never going to have. AI doesn’t have a point of view on anything because it doesn’t have any internal logic. It’s never in a space. It’s never in a body. It’s never that stuff. That’s why Craig and I were talking about doing a New York Times editorial and stuff, and we decided against it.

The thesis would have been screenwriting will survive AI, if anything. It survives AI because our job, weirdly, is to imagine a place, put ourselves in it, describe what we’re seeing, what it feels like, what’s actually driving, to be inside those characters, and that’s a uniquely human experience. Will there be AI-generated screenplays? Of course. Will there be good art made out of this? I don’t think so. I do feel some safety just because of the things that these systems are designed to do. I wanted to turn back a little bit towards you. Now, I do want to have a little discussion about cultural conversation and criticism.

Julia: Who will say in the future if the art is good? Segue man?

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, she stole the segue from me.

[laughter]

Craig: Dude, listen to the show.

John: Absolutely, as critics, on Slate Cultural Gapfest, which everyone should listen to. It’s phenomenal. By the way, Scriptnotes is completely ripped off from the Slate formula where they have–

Craig: We are?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I gave you so much credit for this.

Julia: [laughs]

John: They have endorsements. We have One Cool Thing. The idea.

Craig: Oh my God. We stole it all?

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: It’s really very similar.

Craig: The credits work the same.

John: The setup of what we’re going to talk about on the episode.

Craig: My innocence.

[laughter]

John: The fact that we have some structure and it’s all not just one rambling conversation, that comes from Slate.

Craig: Thank you, Slate.

Julia: Slate invented it. No one else had ever done it before.

John: Every week, though, you have three topics. You’re picking what things in culture you want to talk about. Is it harder now? In the age of this infinitely generated artificial stuff, has it changed?

Julia: I don’t think we are yet beset by actual AI content. The content, the art that we’re talking about, the movies, the television shows, is written by humans for humans. I feel like one of the things that is a perverse possible upside of the rise of AI is that it forces us to really think about and understand what it is to be human, and what the point [chuckles] of it is, and what’s amazing about it, and to seek out and value the best part of it.

That’s what I love about art. I feel like most art is grappling with the question on some level of what is it like to be human, and some aspect of that, and some subset of that. The opportunity to consume it every week and talk about it with smart critics and try to understand what it means, and whether it’s good, and if so, why, and if not, why not, it feels like a real privilege and really fun.

John: Craig, you classically are not such a fan of-

Craig: Criticism.

John: -criticism. Talk to me about when Julia says that they’re grappling with, is this good? Is it resonating? What does it mean?

Craig: It means they’re figuring out if they like it or not. Who cares?

John: Isn’t there some meaning in how this fits into the larger picture of the art form?

Craig: Yes, there is. What you said that made my heart sing was, in a world where there’s a bunch of AI crap, maybe it’s going to make us appreciate the fact that all these things that are made by humans, there are things about it that are good or striving for something. It’s essentially looking for the positive impulse. I think a lot of times people presume that the only impulse behind certain things would be make money. People are like, “Cash grab.”

Somebody, the writer, almost certainly was really trying, even when other people were like, “Hey, we’re offering you a job, and you got to pay your bills.” That person tried to do something good. I think following that is a wonderful thing. My issue with criticism really does come down to the notion that some people have a privileged opinion. Really, it just means if you like something or not. If you do, you do.

I like watching critics fight with each other because I’m like, “There. There it is. There. They don’t agree.” In short, what is the purpose of it? Now, the purpose may be to find people that if you articulate a point that I agree with, that’s fun. Especially if I don’t like something, it’s disturbingly fun to watch somebody else beat up someone you hate, but it certainly doesn’t help the artists, I know that much. It has created a culture where everyone is now Roger Ebert. Everyone is looking for that fun thing to put on Letterboxd, and usually it’s a dunk. I don’t think that’s good for us.

Julia: Okay, wait.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: I have been having this argument with you at home by myself for a decade, Craig.

[laughter]

Craig: Here’s your chance.

Julia: I have to say, I really value your opinion so much. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I used to take homeopathic medicine when I thought I was getting a cold, and I don’t anymore-

Craig: Yes.

Julia: -because of how laceratingly, how viscerally, how trouncingly you demolished the idiocy of homeopathy.

Craig: I am okay with criticism now.

[laughter]

Craig: Honestly, that’s a huge win for me.

Julia: Generally, I find you so persuasive and right. Then, on this, I find you so wrong. Obviously, I have a stake in it because I am a critic, or at least I play one on a podcast. I think the thing that strikes me about your take on it is that you seem much more focused on the verdict.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: The idea that the point of criticism is a verdict, good, bad, up, down. To me, the point of criticism and the value of it, both as a practitioner and as a reader and follower of criticism, is the dialogue, is the conversation, the interpretation, the search for meaning. I think criticism is important because art is important. It would be weird if there was Congress and no one covered it, or said what was happening, or said if it was good, or bad, or surprising, or new, or breaking a norm.

Craig: We have too much of that, I think, as well.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: I understand what you’re saying, and you’re right, I do focus on the verdict, but the reason I do that– First of all, there are critics who are smart and thoughtful, and you are one of them, whether I agree with you or not.

Julia: Have you ever listened to my podcast?

Craig: Not your podcast.

[laughter]

Julia: You just presume it because I seem like I’m going to be in conversations. That’s fine.

Craig: I’m a little bit of a transcript reader.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: The listening takes too long. I can read so fast. There are critics that I respect in terms of their analysis and stuff because I think they’re really thoughtful, whether I agree with them or not. Walter Cha, for instance, has written things about movies I’ve done where I’m like, “That’s amazing,” and he loves it, and also, “That’s amazing,” and he hates it.” That’s an interesting thing.

The reason I focus on the verdict is because that’s what the rest of the world focuses on. I think critics can say to themselves, “Oh, it’s all about everything right up to thumbs up, thumbs down,” but no one else is really listening. They’re going for thumb up, thumb down, and then they’re combining that into a huge tomato.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s the only thing anyone looks at. That’s what’s happened.

Julia: You are judging criticism by the worst commercial output of it and not what the critic is doing, which is engaging with the work.

Craig: That’s how gun manufacturers talk a little bit.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I’m serious.

[laughter]

Julia: God damn it.

Craig: You can’t ignore how the product is used.

[laughter]

Julia: It’s interesting, though. We are living in a world with less and less criticism. Alan Sepinwall isn’t at Rolling Stone anymore. There will be fewer paid television critics reviewing season three than season two, and season two than season one.

Craig: I’ll miss Alan, whether he liked season one better than he liked season two.

Julia: He’s a great critic.

Craig: He’s a thoughtful guy. I read all of that because I was interested in his–

John: Wait, Craig, you read it?

Craig: Yes. There are a couple of people I read. I’m very specific about it. There isn’t less criticism. There’s less paid criticism. The critic industry almost orchestrated its own demise by propagating and popularizing the verdict. Now everyone’s a critic.

Julia: That’s just opinions. That’s not criticism.

Craig: Oh, well, tell that to all the people that are opinionating.

Julia: Don’t pay attention to them. I have no desire to be a screenwriter, thank God.

[laughter]

Julia: If I were making art in the way that you guys make art, the good critics would be important to me. I feel like not following them or reading them would be like making a phone call and having no one pick up on the other end of the line, which is not to devalue the experience of the audience, which is they’re moved by your thing, and they take the ride of your thing, and they have feelings about your thing. What the good critic does is assess why it moved you and how it did that.

Craig: Or why they hate it, and why it’s stupid, and why it shouldn’t have been made.

Julia: You’re just not reading the right critics. It’s so beautiful.

Craig: That’s not beautiful, I assure you.

[laughter]

Craig: The experience of reading, sometimes it is so personal, and so mean, and such an exercise, and, “Hey, let’s just be a dick.” It really is. I understand that you practice a different sort.

Julia: Or advocate for, at least. I wouldn’t put myself up with the truly great critics of our age.

Craig: Some of what we call the truly great critics of our age, I can do a nice tight 40 on why Pauline Kael’s most overrated voice in cinema history and should have never been listened to by anyone.

[laughter]

Julia: [unintelligible 00:35:51] 40 minutes of the show.

Craig: [crosstalk] That’s the tightest 40 minutes I could do.

[laughter]

John: My natural instinct is to be the peacemaker who makes everyone happy at the end, but I’m not going to do that now because I’ve learned in this book that conflict is good.

[laughter]

John: I thought we don’t have to.

[applause]

Craig: So good.

John: Yes, we don’t need to resolve this thing-

Craig: Damn, this is good.

John: -because this is an open, ongoing fight between love-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:36:14]

John: -and is a perfect time to segue to something that Craig likes much more than rallying on critics, which is a game.

Craig: A game.

John: Craig has a game.

Craig: I have a game.

[applause]

John: We have at least two people out there who have starred books. Raise the house lights if we can. Did the third person find their star?

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: We’ll have the three people with stars come up these stairs.

Craig: Come on up these stairs here or those stairs there-
John: Is there a stair there? Yes, any stairs.

Craig: -and join us on stage.

John: [unintelligible 00:36:39] over here. Drew has a stool.

Craig: Ah. [crosstalk]

John: Hello. What’s your name?

Kayla: I’m Kayla.

John: Hi, Kayla. Hi.

Kayla: Hi.

John: Kayla, take a step by the stool. Hi, Kayla. And?

Valeska: Valeska.

John: Valeska. Valeska, very nice to meet you and hi. Sita. Oh my gosh, we have an amazing– All right.

Craig: Right.

John: Craig, you guys are going to be gathered around this one stool.

Craig: Gather around the stool.

John: This stool.

Craig: You’re going to want to be close to that bell.

John: If you have the answer, you are going to hit that bell.

Craig: Let me ask you a question, guys. How are we with Christmas movies? Okay.

[laughter]

John: As a reminder to our audience, don’t shout out the answer if you know it. Craig will tell you the answer at the end.

Craig: Yes. If you guys don’t have it, we can open it up to the audience. It’s no big deal. I’m just going to read. There are five quotes from Christmas movies. Each quote is from a real Christmas movie. It is exact. They’re a little odd in their own way. They’ll go from not so odd to odder and odder. If you know the name of the movie that this quote is from, you hit the ding dong. All right? Do you want to practice?

[bell dings]

Craig: So gentle.

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Craig: Even gentler.

John: Yes, absolutely.

[laughter]

John: You can hit it hard. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: Yes. Find the inner winner, the person that wants to take the other two down.

[laughter]

Craig: First quote from a movie. “Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: Polar Express.

Craig: That is correct.

John: Nicely done.

Craig: Way to go.

[applause]

Craig: We won’t have an 0 for 5 situation. This is great.

John: They got it.

Craig: Here we go. Next one. “If this is their idea of Christmas, I got to be here for New Year’s.” We’ve got some people who know out there.

John: I’m going to give you a hint. This was the subject of a Deep Dive episode.

Participant: 500 episodes. [chuckles]

John: [chuckles] Absolutely.

Craig: Fair point.

John: It’s in the book as well.

Craig: I’m going to turn to the audience.

John: It’s in the book.

Craig: You want to guess one? Then I’m going to go to the audience.

[bell dings]

Valeska: Die Hard.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, Die Hard.

[applause]

John: One and one.

Craig: This one’s really weird. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Craig: No.

John: Ah, [unintelligible 00:38:52].

[laughter]

Craig: No.

[laughter]

Craig: No. It’s a hard one. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Valeska: The Grinch.

Craig: No.

Kayla: Nightmare Before Christmas.

Craig: No. Now we’re just saying titles.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m going to turn it over to the audience.

Participant: Miracle on 34th.

Craig: That is correct. Miracle on 34th Street.

[applause]

John: We’re still tied one and one.

Craig: Yes. I love this one. Ready? “Come here, little one. Papa wants to see you.”

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Kayla: Elf.

Craig: Yes, it is Elf. Last one. Longest one. My favorite one. Many of you are going to know it. Don’t say it. “Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue steel beauty, the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received–“ I’m registering that. You can ring it, and I’ll finish it. Yes.

Valeska: Christmas Story.

Craig: It is Christmas Story.

John: Christmas Story.

Craig: “Gradually, I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots. Hip shots-“

John: “Hip shots.”

Craig: -are the last two words of Christmas Story. Now–

John: We’re going to tie two and two, so we’re going to do a tiebreaker.

Craig: Okay. Well, the tiebreaker question is, what interesting fact unites all of these quotes? They all share one thing in common. It’s not that they’re in Christmas movies. Yes?

Audience Member: The writer’s Jewish?

[laughter]

Craig: It’s a good guess. It’s a callback, and I like that a lot. That’s a very good guess. I wasn’t going to do that two years in a row. That said, probably yes. No, I don’t believe the writers were all Jewish.

John: Did you have a guess?

Audience Member: Were they all men?

Craig: Oh, hey. Maybe, but that’s not what I was looking for. We’ll go past white, male, Jew. No, something about their connection to the movies themselves, the context within the movies themselves. They’re all doing something similar in their movie. Yes?

Audience Member: They’re all said by the protagonists?

Craig: No.

John: Oh, I think I know the answer.

Craig: Okay, don’t say it. I’m going to give you three one last chance. One last chance. Yes.

Audience Member: The last lines?

Craig: The last lines of the movies. Each one of those was the last line of their movie. You know what? Good job, you guys. I think they did great. John, tell them what they won.

[laughter]

John: All right. Often when you’re putting out a book, you are creating extra merch for the book. For the Scriptnotes book, we have Scriptnotes stickers, but the stickers were there on the table as you came in. I have done three books before this. I did Arlo Finch merch, which I still have sitting on a shelf. You guys get Arlo Finch merch. As the winner, you get to pick your pick of these three things. Tell me what you get.

Craig: I got to tell you, you can’t miss on these. Each one of them, life-changing. First, we have an Arlo Finch neckerchief. Yes. Everyone’s Christmas dream. An Arlo Finch towel. By the way, I wish people could see their faces. They are either crying with joy or deep disappointment. Finally, an Arlo Finch water bottle because you can never have too many big, dumb water bottles.

John: Which would you like?

Audience Member: I’ll do the water bottle.

Craig: Yes, there you go. Congrats.

Audience Member: I want the towel.

Craig: Hey, that’s good news. You got the neckerchief, the one you wanted. Thank you, guys. Thank you for playing. I was really surprised by the writers were all Jewish, and I don’t know why. I should have seen that coming. All weird last lines. Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all as the last line of Miracle on 34th Street. It is the subject of debate to this day. You’ll see a lot of threads on Reddit. Why does he say this? What does this mean?

John: What does it mean?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: I thought they were all voiceovers. They’re not voiceovers?

Craig: No, they are not all voiceovers. Our next guest I’m so excited for, she’s a writer, comedian, performer whose credits include Ted Lasso, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Bad Monkey, and Shrinking. Welcome back to the program, Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

Craig: Hey. I hope you enjoyed watching Julia and I beat the fuck out of each other for about 10 minutes there.

Ashley Nicole Black: It literally took everything in me not to run out on stage and join the fight.

Julia: On which side?

John: Whose side did you fight on?

Ashley: Mostly Craig’s.

Craig: Oh, wow. All right. I’m so happy about that, but I would have been okay if you had gone– I mean, I like fighting.

John: Ashley, we’re in the Thanksgiving weekend. This episode will come out later on, but this is the Thanksgiving weekend, and often there are people gathering together, but there are discussions, debates around the dinner table. It can get a little bit heated. It’s not uncommon to have some heated words there.

Craig: Thanksgiving drama.

John: Did you have a good Thanksgiving, most crucially?

Ashley: I had a great Thanksgiving. I’m from here, so my whole family’s here. It’s really the best. I lived in Chicago and New York for a long time, then I would see my family once a year. It’s such a treat to be like, I can just see them whenever I want. Me and my uncle can get tacos. It’s pretty cool.

Craig: I love that you love your family, and you became a writer even though you–

Ashley: Well, my family is Black, and I do think that it’s a different thing. I think there is the stereotype of a writer as like, I was so sad and my parents didn’t talk to me. I just wrote in my room. I think Black people are just like, yes, I had cool shit to say. I wrote it down.

[laughter]

Ashley: Our problems are external for the most part.

John: Ashley’s book is going to be so much better than ours. It’s like, you have funny shit to say, write it down. It’s a simple book. She sold it.

Craig: I’m just terrified at how accurately you summed up my childhood with that mean voice.

Ashley: I work with a lot of writers.

Craig: You were tortured. Uh-huh. Well, all right. Congrats.
John: Ashley, you have your own chapter in the book. Thank you again for coming on the show. We are now a chapter in the book where we talk through your stuff. When you first came on the show, I remember dropping off with Mike at your apartment. Meeting your great dog, Gordy. Now you have a house. You’re a homeowner yourself. You’ve kept chugging along, series after series.

I’d love to talk to you about being that middle-of-your-career writer because so often we have the writers who are just starting out. You are consistently working on show after show. What is your life like? As you’re on a show, do you always know what the next thing is? What is it like?

Ashley: It’s so weird because when you’re young– and I was cute. I was so cute.

Craig: You were so cute?

Ashley: I was so cute.

Craig: You were cuter?

Ashley: You’re on set, and you’re a baby producer, and you’re like, oh, my God. This wallpaper, it’s not right. Oh, my God. The showrunner’s going to kill me. Do you mind changing it? They’re like, “Oh, you’re so cute. We’ll change it.” Then you get to a certain point, and you just have to be like, so this doesn’t work, and it does need to change.

I can’t blame it on anyone else because I’m a VP, and no one would believe that my boss was going to kill me at this point in my life. It’s just such a weird thing to be like, I have the answer to the question, and I am going to have to say it. People don’t like it when that happens to women, but I have to say it. It’s just such a weird position to be in.

Craig: The boss.

Ashley: But not, right?

Craig: Right. Sort of the boss.

Ashley: Yes. Sometimes you’re in meetings, and you’re like, oh, it should look like this. Then, “Oh, well, we’ll see what Bill says.” It’s like, I said it.

Craig: We don’t need Bill.

Ashley: I did it.

John: Since we’re coming out of Thanksgiving, we’ve been answering a lot of questions for the book, and we have a lot of leftovers. I thought that because we’re in leftoverville, you could help us answer some questions that came from our Reddit AMA and from other times where people were asking us questions online. Your answers are just better than ours.

Ashley: Do I answer as if I were a woman, correct?

John: No, we want your real answer here.

Craig: Wait, that’s an option? Kind of.

John: This is a question from Jeff A. When was there a time that has held you back from writing, from sitting in a script, going to a meeting? How did you get over or not get over that fear?

Ashley: Wait, say that again?

John: What was a time that a fear held you back? And what worked for you?

Ashley: I would say not a meeting or writing, but as an actor. A lot of times you come onto set. We were talking about Vince. The first scene that I shot on Bad Monkey, I literally had flown, arrived, put my things in a hotel room. Then we shot that scene at two o’clock in the morning, and it’s me and Vince.

You’re a very low-level actor who hasn’t slept in 48 hours, and you’ve never been on this set before. You’ve never met any of these people. The first thing you have to do is try to be funny next to Vince Vaughn. I would love to meet the sociopath who’s not fearful in that moment. I think the way you get past it is just to act as if it’s already happened.

A weird thing about being an actor is you can get fired at any time. It’s not like, oh, I got the job. I deserve to be here. No, you can get yanked literally at any point. It’s like, “Your manager’s on the phone.” Oh, did she want to congratulate me? “No.” You just have to go in and be like, we are in this scene together in this moment, so I’m going to act as if we are both top-level actors, and this is what’s supposed to happen.

I will say the great thing is that most of the really crazy high-level actors I’ve worked with will do the same thing. Just be like, “Yes, we’re supposed to be in this scene together. Let’s go.” You just do that until you get past that initial moment, and then do it.

John: That’s great advice for anybody going into a room to pitch, or you feel like you’re not supposed to be in this place. This is beyond where you’re supposed to be at. You just say, no, of course I’m supposed to be here. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

Ashley: Yes, I am here.

John: You are here, so change the fucking wallpaper because I’m in charge.

Ashley: Wallpaper was the worst example. It was the hardest thing to change.

Craig: It really is hard. Yes.

Ashley: He’ll say curtains.

Craig: Easier.

John: Haley Huang had a question. What is your favorite genre to watch, and what is your favorite genre to write? I’m curious if they match up for you or not.

Ashley: No, my favorite genre to write is comedy, hands down. I really got into this to make people laugh. I’m really curious about how drama writers work because what is the point of a scene if not to get a laugh? I will say that I watch a lot of drama and crime, and I probably watch a lot more of that than comedy.

Craig: I think I’m probably the flip. I like writing drama because it means I don’t have to worry about the punchline, the button, any of that misery. Did it. Don’t want to do it anymore. Watching comedy to me is– that’s what’s fun.

John: I love watching comedy. We’ll do our third rewatch of 30 Rock, and it’s just so amazing, but I just could never do that. I just don’t have the stamina or the brain that creates that level of joke density. I just can’t do it.

Craig: Kind of why we enjoy it, right?

John: It feels like magic.

Craig: Probably is why all the Oscars should go to comedies.

Ashley: Also, by the way, no one does. In a room of 10 people who are creating that joke density, no one person does that.

John: Again, I feel like I should be able to do it. I feel like Tina Fey could do that. I’m, of course, comparing myself to a team of experts who spent years doing it. Noah L. asks, when you were first learning how to screenwrite– Screenwrite as a verb is just weird. No, don’t like it.

Craig: Do not like it.

John: Who were the writers you looked up to and whose voices really inspired you? Ashley, any screenwriters inspire you as you were coming up?

Ashley: Yes, Shonda Rhimes, for sure. I think Grey’s Anatomy came out when I was in college, and it was the first show that looked like the world that I lived in. When I was younger, Kevin Williamson, I loved Scream and Dawson’s Creek, and those just highly verbal, Aaron Sorkin, very writerly writers, and I still have the issue of overwriting to this day, thanks to my love of those writers.

John: Craig, did you have any screenwriters you looked up to?

Craig: I definitely remember seeing Ocean’s Eleven and saying, okay, I need to know who this Ted Griffin guy is. I remember seeing Out of Sight and thinking, I need to know who this Scott Frank guy is. I read the script for Jerry Maguire, and Cameron Crowe blew my mind, even more so than he had already blown my mind prior with Fast Times, and then also Sorkin. I think a lot of people giggle a little bit because he’s so prolific, and because there’s that super cut of him reusing dialogue and stuff, but it’s great dialogue.

Ashley: Our legs went all the way up to here.

Craig: Yes, exactly, but it’s great dialogue, and he’s written– that whole A Few Good Men thing, I just– Oh, my God. Yes, so good.

Ashley: I think it’s also– maybe because you said A Few Good Men, it’s very theatrical in the sense that as someone who started as an actor, I like it when characters are trying to get a response from the other one. It’s so weird to me in comedies where the actors don’t laugh at the jokes. In real life, like I’m in a room here with you, I would like to make you laugh, and you know that that’s my goal. It’s weird to pretend that characters aren’t trying to get something from each other.

I feel like Aaron Sorkin’s characters are always directly pursuing tactics in a way that–

Craig: The whole opening of Social Network, just watching that ping-pong. Apparently, I think it’s true that scene was, I don’t know, 14 pages long. Fincher was like, “Aaron, I can’t open a movie with 14 minutes of two people talking.” Sorkin was like, “No, it’s four minutes. You’re reading it too slow.”

[laughter]

Craig: Fincher was like, “Okay, record it for me at the pace you want it to be.” He did, and Fincher, apparently on the day, was with the script supervisor, like, “Are we on pace?” Then when you watch it back, the clip is insane. Oh, so good.

John: In answering this question, I would say there’s always movies I admired, and eventually at some point I realized, oh, people wrote those movies. I didn’t know that people had wrote those movies.

Craig: They screen wrote them.

[laughter]

John: Once you actually start reading screenplays, which are so much more available now. I remember reading Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers and going to the last page and like, holy shit, and going back to page one and re-reading it again. You realize like, oh, that’s what you can actually do on the page.

Reading James Cameron’s script for Aliens. It’s like, oh, that’s what a movie looks like when it’s in courier. It was just so revelatory. That thing, I think, is so much better now is that because of the internet, you can just read all the scripts, and you need to read the scripts and not just watch the movies. Let’s do one more little side dish of a question here. What do you got, Craig?

Craig: This is a multi-parter from Clara A. “I’m an extremely long-time listener who, by happenstance, has found herself in a weekly writing group with local sweetie Megana Rao for the past couple of years.”

John: Megana’s the best.

Craig: “My question, what is your favorite thing about Megana?”

John: She’s not even here to defend herself. She’d be so embarrassed.

Craig: “Alternatively, Craig, do you still love millennials?” I don’t remember professing that.

John: Yes, I think you’ve said it on certain transcripts.

Craig: I do. Well, let’s talk about it. I’ll do another question because I don’t know if you have a favorite thing about Megana. That seems unfair.

Ashley: I feel like she’s got great hair.

Craig: She does have great hair.

John: Great. Absolutely true. Yes, we’re incredibly thankful for Megana, but it’s a very specific–

Craig: Yes, the kindest and most positive person around. Just such a great person. Yes, I still love millennials. I like zillennials. I think that’s my groove. There you go.

John: We got a few of those.

Craig: If you’re 28, 29, 30, 31, that’s a good crew. Nitzen has a good question.

John: Nitzen has a good question. Do you want to try Nitzen’s?

Craig: Yes, sure.

John: Nitzen asks, “As a beginner, is a credit for a bad movie better than no credit at all? What if that movie involves problematic people? Ashley, what’s your opinion on this? Julia, I’m going to open this to you as well. Do you think it’s better to have no credits or a bad credit?”

Ashley: I’m curious what you guys will say. I really don’t know. I think I would lean towards it’s better to have a bad credit because the people who care about credits are the other people who work in the industry, and people who work in the industry know that the way the movie turned out is not the writer’s fault, particularly when it’s an early career writer.
I think having had the credit and the experience is a good thing. No one’s looking at that going, “Oh, he must be a terrible writer because the movie turned out bad.”

John: Absolutely correct. Julia, do you think about credits? As you’re talking about something on, say, [unintelligible 00:56:32] are you always mindful of the things they’ve written around it or are you just looking at that one piece of work, generally?

Julia: Well, a professional critic with some expertise would look at what the person has made in the past and think about how this fits into the history of their career and the genre and the actors. There’s different levels of comprehensiveness in that. Yes, I don’t think you would look at an early credit and be like, and thus everything they make from there on must also be bad. You take the work on its own terms, but I think the rest of the surrounding history is context.

Craig: What about this idea, what if the movie involves problematic people? That doesn’t seem like something that I would– It feels like writers really don’t get– We get blamed for things in reviews that weren’t our fault all the time. Of course. These actors did the best they could with a bad script. I’m like, oh my God. No, they didn’t.

It doesn’t feel instinctively like when you see movies that come out and there’s hints of some problematic people involved, does it taint the whole thing or–

Julia: We’re going to do art from the artist, the whole thing, right now?

Craig: Sure.

Julia: Yes, I don’t know. Yes, I think problematic is a word that can do a lot and go a lot of directions there for this question, but yes, I think you take the work as the work.

Craig: The work as the work.

Julia: I think also people know that writers don’t get to choose who’s in the movie. It’s really interesting because we do get blamed for things that we didn’t do or don’t have any control over, and then we also don’t get credit for the things that we do.

Craig: Unerringly.

Julia: The number of people asking a director, when did you guys decide when the character would do this in this episode? It’s like, he wasn’t hired yet. What are you talking about? We never met that guy when we made that choice.

Craig: There’s a whole booklet that tells him what to do. It is amazing.

John: He followed the instructions well.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right. Those are some questions that were leftovers. Thank you so much for helping us out with the leftovers. It is time for our one cool thing. All right. Julia Turner, do you have one cool thing to share with us? I will say this is completely stolen from the Slate Culture Gabfest because they do their endorsements.

Julia: I do and I’m going to say it on this show instead of on my show. Okay. I hosted Thanksgiving this week. I had some beloved family over. We made some pies. They brought some cakes because there were also some Thanksgiving week birthdays. One of the cakes they brought was the Tom Cruise coconut cake.

Craig: How does everyone know what this is?

Julia You don’t know about the cake? Has anybody here eaten?

Ashley: I’ve tasted it.

John: I remember hearing about this, but I don’t know what–

Craig: I feel so alone right now.

Julia: My knowledge of this comes from Matt Belloni, who to your point about specificity, he has such a good eye for the detail that makes you feel like he was inside a room that you weren’t. Although he’s very clear that he also is not on the list of people to whom Tom Cruise sends a particular white chocolate coconut bundt cake for Christmas every year. Has anybody in this room actually from Tom Cruise received this cake?

Craig: Yes, there’s not going to be a big chance of that.

John: For [unintelligible 00:59:53] it’s just in case.

Julia: I’ve gone down to Rabbit Hole. They send it to the whole staff of–

Craig: I think they’re still raising more lights like I know there’s one person. No, weirdly none of us got the–

Ashley: Tom Cruise repels in.

Julia: I’d heard about this. I never tried the cake. It’s from a bakery called Dones in Woodland Hills. Apparently, legend has it– This anecdote does not meet my journalistic standards of rigor. It comes from a light Google. According to a light Google, apparently, at one point, Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton proposed a contest where they would each present Tom Cruise with a cake, and then he would pick which one he liked better.
Diane Keaton brought him this cake from Dones in Woodland Hills, and he chose Diane Keaton’s cake. Now he sends it to everybody for Christmas, and you can get it on Goldbelly. Ashley Nicole, you’ve had it. What do you think of it?

Ashley: It’s really good. It was so good. Everybody says it is, and you’re like, oh, yes, well, you got a cake from Tom Cruise. No, it actually is really good.

Julia: Also, white chocolate is a big no-no for me. You tell me white chocolate is in something, and I’m like, forget it, I’m not a bunch.

Craig: You liked it.

Julia: This cake is delicious.

Craig: Wait. It’s not called Tom Cruise Coconut Cake, I assume.

Julia: It is called White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake, and you can either go get it at Dones in Woodland Hills, or you can order it on Goldbelly. It’s excellent. We were talking about things with problematic auspices, but I just can’t lie, this cake was excellent.

John: D&D next week, we’re having the– yes, absolutely.

Craig: Yes, I got to get on this right away.

John: I’m a big believer in, you’re making a feast, you’re cooking all the entrees, the sides, buy dessert. Desserts are delicious.

Craig: Oh, yes. No one’s upset with you when you show up with dessert.

John: You’re not going to be able to top that pie.

Craig: Melissa just texted me. Thank you, Melissa. We have gotten one of those cakes.

Julia: Oh, from Tom Cruise?

Melissa: I don’t know if it was from Tom, but it was from Dones.

John: All right. We have live updates. Craig’s wife, Melissa, is here. She reports that that cake was actually eaten in the Mason household.

Craig: Did I like it?

Melissa: It was delicious.

Craig: Of course it was. Well, that’s a little insight into how my life goes. I’m like, “I’m alone.” And I’m the only one here that ate it.

John: Yes. Ashley Nicole Black, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Ashley: Yes. I may have shared this on the pod before, but I’m on a board of a charity called Letters to Santa. It is Christmas time. Every year, we raise a bunch of money and we buy kids their Christmas presents, but we also give grants of substantial amounts of money to their families. We also did letters to Altadena after the fires. Our idea is that the solution to poverty is money, so we just give people money.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: We’re going to send some money to the charity. Yes.

Ashley: You can go to letterscharity.org and just donate money if you want to do that. Then closer to Christmas time, I will be posting wishlists of the kids. There’s nothing more pleasurable than having a glass of wine and buying a kid you’ve never met a bike. It’s the absolute best. Follow me, I’ll be posting those wish lists, and you can buy kids their presents if you want.

Craig: You’re a good person.

John: That’s a good person.

Ashley: It’s the one thing.

Craig: It’s a big thing though.

Ashley: Then I’m just walking through the streets, sticking out my foot, and tripping people.

John: Ashley and Nicole Black, we should all follow you on Instagram, which is where I follow you, and because we both follow the same person on Instagram, I can see when you’ve liked a post. We need to talk about Simon Sits.

Ashley: Oh, my gosh.

John: We’re both going to start crying now.

Ashley: I cry every morning now.

John: This is a woman who basically fosters dogs and has the most charming stories, but then she adopts them away. You’re like, but what’s going to happen?

Ashley: Oh, no. Then I follow those dogs. I now follow those dogs in all their new homes. Everybody’s doing great.

John: Everyone’s doing great. Simon himself has a disorder, but it’s hopefully going to be okay. Craig, what do you have for a wonderful thing?

Craig: I’m going to go with a little nerdery.

John: I love it.

Craig: This fall/winter, as I often do, I am working with some friends to solve Puzzle Boat, I think it’s Puzzle Boat 12, which is put out through Panda Magazine. If you love very hard puzzles, go subscribe. One of the puzzles referenced something called Day of the Tentacle. There we go, dork. Okay. You’re my kind of nerd. I actually was not familiar with it because when I was growing up, I didn’t have a PC. I just had Macs. There were a world of games that were just PC only, the pixely games that I missed out on. One of them was called Day of the Tentacle. It was published by Lucas Arts, sort of by the same team that was famous for Monkey Island and so forth.

Well, turns out you can play Day of the Tentacle now on everything, including your iPad. Writers Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert, Gary Winick. It is adorable. It’s a lovely concept that involves you three different friends who are sent into three different time periods, who can send stuff back and forth to each other through their little time thing. It’s dork funny, nerd funny, which I love. It actually looks really good. I think they updated the graphics for the iOS version. If you’re looking for something, I don’t know, probably costs like $6 or something like that, and you like that kind of point and click classic ’90s adventure, check out Day of the Tentacle.

[applause]

John: My one cool thing is actually the very back page of the Scriptnotes book that you all have in your hands right now, which is the thank you page. So often you read through a book and there’s the thank yous at the end and you’re like, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they did. We try to be very specific about who these people were and the work they did that made the Scriptnotes book possible.

That, of course, starts with our incredible producers over the years who not only made the show happen, but also got our transcripts together, which without the transcripts there was never going to be a book. The whole team at Crown was fantastic from buying the book in the first place, but getting it through all the stages of production and getting it into your hands.
Jody Reimer, who sold the book for us, is incredible. We had just amazing people the whole time through. Including our audience the whole time through. If we didn’t have people who were writing in every week and providing questions for us to answer, letting us know that it was actually worthwhile for us to be doing this for 15 years, there wouldn’t be a book either. That’s why I think the final thank you is really to our whole audience for making Scriptnotes possible.

Craig: Without you, we’re nothing.

John: Thank you very much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you very much. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our intro or our outro this week. Thank you to Raven up in the booth, Mary, Dax, Brenna, Dan, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you, Pamela Christlieb, Patty Lombard, and everyone at Chevalier’s Books, our official bookseller for this event.

Chevalier’s Books is on Larchmont, and we signed some extra books. If you’re listening to this podcast at home and you’re like, man, I wish I had a signed book, they have some there at the large font location of Chevalier’s Books. Thank you to Matt Inman, Mary Motes, everyone at Crown Publishing for making tonight possible. Thank you to Julia Turner and Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

John: Who out here is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Any premium subscribers? A little over a hand. Thank you so very much. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. Thank you all very much for coming out this afternoon for our live show. Thank you.

Craig: Thanks, folks. Have a great Sunday.

[Bonus Segment]

John: We have an audience full of people who may have some questions here. We’re going to bring down a little microphone or raise some house lights, and I’ll answer a couple questions from our listeners now. If you want to ask a question, let’s have you line up in this isle here.

Ashley: These people got up fast. These questions are burning.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name and what your question is?

Jonathan: Hi, my name is Jonathan. My question is, if you’re working on a script that overall is serious in tone, say like a grounded action thriller, but you have an opportunity to inject some humor into a scene, how do you use your internal barometer to know when you’re keeping it engaging and realistic versus when it’s overall messing up the tone of the overall project?

John: It’s a great time to also bring up the observation that we don’t make comedies anymore, but all the movies are funny. Everything has to be funny, but we just don’t actually make comedies anymore. The Marvel movies are full of comedy, but they’re not supposed to be comedies. Craig, what’s your instinct when you have, there’s an opportunity for a comedy moment, but it’s not the overall nature of the–

Craig: Ideally, if it’s the sort of thing that someone’s going to say something that’s funny, you want that person, that actual character to be witty enough or naive enough or proud enough or whatever their specific characteristic is to actually say that thing. The worst situation is what I just call quipping, where people are just constantly quipping at each other, and nobody believes that.

Things that emerge naturally that make you laugh, that’s a good sign. If you’re manufacturing it and there’s some sweat coming down your head because you’re trying to figure out how to engineer the plumbing, probably not a good situation.

John: Our next question.

Santiago: Thank you. My name is Santiago. I teach filmmaking to high school students. Going back to what you guys were saying about AI, I’m sorry, everyone. I guess part of my job is to introduce these students as they’re learning how, from script writing all the way to editing and the full production, how to involve technology and everything in their work and I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on that because as it changes, it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about.

John: Santiago, thank you for the question. Thank you for teaching. Teaching is great. You obviously have students who want to learn about film and filmmaking, and the technologies will keep changing. I think there’s that uncomfortable line between where you’re using the tool that helps you do the thing, like an online editing software, that’s not cheating.
If it’s generating scenes or cutting scenes for you, that feels like, oh, are you really learning how something works? That’s the uncomfortable thing.

Craig: You know how we had to learn how to add and multiply, then they gave us calculators? If you just start with the calculator, you are missing some fundamental education. Maybe, considering I’m sure that Santiago, your students are very interested in using these things, to use them in a way where you can talk about after they used it, what pleased them? How did this thing deliver what they hoped it would, and how did it fail to deliver what they hoped it would?

What could they do that would, in their hearts, be better than what this thing did, so that you can put it in some context?

Ashley: I would say no. I taught for a long time before I started doing this. For me, one of the jobs as a teacher is to create space to be uncomfortable because learning is so uncomfortable. Writing a bad script is so uncomfortable. Wanting to do good acting and then watching the tape back and finding out you’re trash is so uncomfortable, but that’s part of the learning process.

You can’t become a better writer until you’ve written a lot of bad scripts and you’ve sat in the discomfort of the distance between the movie you see in your mind and the movie you’re currently able to create. If the idea of AI is that it’s going to close that distance, then where is the learning if you’re not sitting in that space?

[applause]

Ashley: The feeling of like, oh, I can perfectly picture this moment in my mind. I have to figure out how to write it properly, I have to figure out how to describe it to all the department heads properly, I have to figure out how to make it work on the bodies of the actors who are their own individual people. Gosh, I wish I could just push a button and get the scene out of my brain.

That’s the work. The work is all of that communication. I would err on the side of–

John: What Ashley said is exactly right. Hopefully, you’re teaching your students how to write a scene, which is what she’s describing, and not a prompt. It is so hard, it’s uncomfortable when you’re having conversations, but the things that we’re talking about in the book and in this podcast are about, well, who is in it? What is the conflict? What are they trying to do? Those things are not AI-able things.

Those things are great discussions to have and then figure out what tools you need to actually use to generate anything out of that. The scene is still the crux of everything.

Ashley: There’s also the discoveries of the process. We’re shooting a scene, and two of the actors went to walk out the door at the same time and bumped into each other. It was so funny. Then it just informed the annoyance these characters have with each other. It’s like a moment that you discover that changes the scene because you’re doing the process of doing it.

John: A question.

Katie: Hi. My name is Katie and because things have been too peaceful, I have a question about critique and film criticism. I wanted to know your thoughts on the difference or the line between criticism and analysis. If film criticism brings out, maybe evokes more personal feelings than other genres like books or just anything else that involves empathy and projecting yourself onto the script.

I was wondering if there were any parameters that could help maybe delineate where those lines between analysis and critique comes into play, just like journalism and yellow journalism. Is there a way that we could delineate between opinion and critique or analysis?

John: Great. Thank you, Katie. Some of what you’re asking there is my instinct was, oh, I need to try to make peace and sort this all out and define, oh, no, you really have more overlap and agreement between things. I’m going to see if I can do a little of this. Analysis, someone who’s taking, oh, let’s look at the films of the ‘90s and what the patterns are that emerged from that.

Who were the filmmakers and where things go to versus a thumbs up or thumbs down on this movie. Craig, I think you feel– is that analysis worthwhile potentially?

Craig: Certainly. I’m curious to hear what you think about this because in my mind, under your question, I wonder if there’s this sub-question of how do we delineate what you guys do, which is what I would call thoughtful, qualified analysis/critique versus other people who just saw a movie, hated it [onomatopoeia].

Julia: The sound effects are very crucial, I think, there. I think all good criticism is analysis, contains analysis and interpretation and judgment. To be making art today and have the possibility that Wesley Morris at the New York Times might look at it and think about it, he is such an extraordinary critic and you should listen to his new podcast, Cannonball, which is excellent.

It seems much more fun to make art with that potential wise, deep, empathetic, generous, knowledgeable, interpretive audience in mind. To me, all good criticism contains analysis and soul. I think maybe Craig’s just reading the wrong stuff. I think thumbs up-thumbs down, here we are in the Coliseum, everybody go kill that guy, that’s not criticism to me.

Craig: Literally, the most famous film critics did that. Literally.

Julia: Okay, but when we go see– Yes, that was the schtick for their show to get an audience, but if you go back and read all of Ebert’s old reviews, we can argue about Pauline Kael later, I’m not a particular Kael stan, but when we go see stuff at the Arrow or the New Beverly, to go back and read the contemporary reviews, often from Ebert himself because he wrote about everything, it’s so fun.

It’s fun because sometimes he’s really brilliant and smart. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have gotten it and it isn’t that useful. Nobody bats 1,000 and you get a sense of how it landed at the moment. It’s also a record of how the stuff was received. That criticism of the past is valuable to me and so is the criticism of today.

John: Thank you for your question.

Ashley: Thank you.

John: I’ll take one last question here. What is your question?
O’Neill: Hi, my name’s O’Neill. I have ADHD, not the fun kind, but the kind that’s very debilitating. My mind moves a million miles per second, but I write very slowly. I’m about a page a day-er. My question for you is how should I manage all of these thoughts when my physical typing limitations are so slow?

Craig: Okay, we have something for you and it’s called learning how to type. Now, that in and of itself may be an arduous task, particularly if you have a debility or a neurological disorder, but learning how to type will speed you up dramatically because I also think fast and I type fast. I think if I could not type, it would be a real problem for me.

I feel the pain. Learning how to type is worth it. There are a gazillion ways to do it online. It will be uncomfortable. The learning will be uncomfortable.

Ashley: Oh, no. You get a Mavis Beacon who says she taught me good.

Craig: By the way, you know that she doesn’t exist, right?

Ashley: I know. They don’t teach kids to type anymore.

Craig: No. There is no Mavis Beacon. They invented Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: Oh, I know.

Craig: I didn’t know that. I believed in Mavis Beacon forever and then he told me and I was like, oh my God, and what else are you going to take away from me?

Ashley: Will you guys make the Mavis Beacon movie?

Craig: There’s no Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: There’s a documentary.

John: Crucial IP that’s being underserved.

Craig: See, by the way, whatever works for you, it will be annoying and frustrating. Give yourself because it’s magic. When it finally starts happening, you can’t believe it. It’s magic and it will make a huge difference for you.

John: I fully endorse the typing of it all. We did a Reddit AMA yesterday and we were answering a ton of questions. Craig was typing as fast as he could, but I could answer faster because I was dictating. The dictation software has gotten really good right now. It’s worth trying it. Again, it’s uncomfortable at the start because you feel like I’m talking to myself and Drew’s hearing me talk to my computer a lot.

For things like emails and stuff like that, it’s much faster. I can’t use it for real screenwriting, but for getting all that shit out of your head and onto a screen, it’s really good. It’s good for generating material, but also just silencing some of that noise could also be really helpful for you.

Craig: Which do you use?

John: The one I’m using right now is called Aqua Notes. It’s Aqua Voice.

Craig: They’re listening to our voice. They know.

John: I’ve been trying to Google it myself.

Ashley: That’s a level of fandom that is frankly a little scary.

Craig: Also dissapointing like Aqua.

John: I think it’s worth– in addition to typing, because I think typing is really important software to help just get stuff out of your head. It’s going to be really helpful as well.

Ashley: I would say also, do you outline? For me, because I have ADHD also, I do so much writing before I start writing. All that stuff that’s in my head, I just write it all down in a Notes app, anywhere, just to get it out of my head and then outline. Then it’s like you’re just getting more and more specific up to the point of actually writing the script.

Then I think also it’s working with your brain the way it works. Sometimes I write the punchline before the setup. I was in a writer’s room once where I was up on the screen. They were like, “Did you just write the punchline first?” I was like, yes, that’s how my brain works, so I have to get it out in time.

I think instead of feeling like you have to start at the beginning of the first scene and work your way through the script, write what you know, write the punchline, write the last line of the scene if that’s what you have, and feel free to go back and fill in.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you for the great questions.

Links:

• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Julia Turner
• Ashley Nicole Black on Instagram
• Arlo Finch series
• Slate Culture Gabfest
• Episode 516 – 10 Year Anniversary
• Dynasty Typewriter
• Bad Monkey
• The Tom Cruise coconut cake from Doan’s Bakery
• Letters to Santa
• @simonsits on Instagram
• Day of the Tentacle
• Chevalier’s Books
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Mathew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, today’s episode is a flashback to when we were at the Austin Film Festival this year in 2025. We did another Three Page Challenge. This was at the church in Austin. It was a great crowd and we had just a really great time doing it. We love doing a Three Page Challenge where we can have those participants come up on stage with us and talk through what they were doing.

Craig: Yes, it was great. They did a great job. Anybody who agrees to do this is very brave. Anybody who agrees to do this live in front of a lot of people under the watchful eyes of Jesus is particularly brave. Thumbs up to these three. They were very courageous and I hope that we help them as we try.

John: As always, if you want to read along with these samples, you can pause this and we’ll have links in the show notes to the PDF. You can read those PDFs before we get into it. Before you do that, Craig, today, the day this episode drops, the Scriptnotes book is out in the world in physical form, in hardcover.

Craig: Oh my God, this is it.

John: It is. Apparently, Australia is not till January 4th, but the rest of the world gets it today. The audiobook, we had Graham Rowat on recently to talk through, narrate an audiobook. Please, if you have the book and it comes to you, post on Instagram, post on TikTok, tag Scriptnotes Podcast and we will repost you. We will hype you up. I will hype you up. If you do so, we can also send you the bonus chapter that we sent to all the pre-orders. If you haven’t gotten that yet, Drew can send that to you, because I’m just so excited that the book is finally out there in the world.

Craig: Yes. I got to say, if you waited, I get it. Now you got to actually start thinking about Christmas gifts for your stupid friends. This is a great Christmas gift for your stupid friends.

John: 100%.

Craig: You should go to a party and everyone should give each other this big orange book. It just smells like Christmas. I love it.

John: Also, if you have parents who can never figure out what to get you, just get yourself the Scriptnotes book and bill them. It’s $33.

Craig: Exactly. They’ll be thrilled that it’s under $5,000. They’ll be so happy.

John: Exactly. Absolutely. With all the tuition you’ve saved them, it makes it absolutely completely worthwhile.

Craig: Bingo.

John: Enjoy this trip back to the Austin Film Festival and our live Three Page Challenge. For our premium listeners, stick around because we will have some bonus questions from that session where we answered questions from the audience that were actually really good. We had good questions overall at Austin. Enjoy.

[music]

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is a Three Page Challenge for Scriptnotes. For folks who are not aware, every once in a while, we ask our listeners if they would like to send in the first three pages of their screenplay, of their pilot, and we will talk about it on the air. It’s a very brave thing for people to do because we’re honest with our criticism. We’re not harsh, but we’re very honest.

Craig: I’m a little harsh.

John: You’re a little harsh. Drew, who’s our producer, diligently reads through all the entries and picks ones that he thinks will be good to talk about on the air. Sometimes they’re the best, but sometimes they’re the things with the most interesting stuff to talk about.

That’s really an example of what we have here today because we asked, specifically, people who were going to be coming to AFF if we could look at the first three pages of their script. A bunch of people sent through their samples, which is really nice. What’s great about doing it here at Austin is that we can then bring the person up and actually talk to them about the script they wrote.

Craig: Which forces us to be even more concerned about being harsh, and yet, I will do it.

John: We’ll try to be honest. You can find these samples, PDFs, at johnaugust.com. It’s the first blog post you’re going to see there. You can open these up, and so you can read along with us as we’re looking at these samples. Some of what we’re talking about is literally how it’s laid out on the page, so some stuff is– We’re going to be talking story and character and everything else, but it’s also what it looks like, what it feels like. Craig, talk to me about the Three Page Challenge, because the idea of three pages came from stuff you were doing.

Craig: Yes. There was a theory that I had, that you could probably tell if a script was going to be theoretically good or absolutely never good from reading three pages. The truth is, you learn a lot in three pages. There are fundamental things that we see people do well, and there are fundamental things that we see people not doing well.

If the three pages aren’t working in and of themselves, it doesn’t mean that it’s not fixable. Everything’s fixable, and we’re all working and constantly revising and doing things and getting better. This focus that we put on these is the way it works in the business. This is a good colonoscopy.

John: The first three pages are really the first impression. As we’ve had guests on the show who are showrunners who are looking to staff a room or producers or agents or managers, we talk to them about, “You get a script, how far are you reading into it?” Some will say, “Oh, the first 10 pages,” but a lot of people will say the first three or four pages. You get a sense of, does this person have a voice that’s interesting and I want to keep following? They’re looking for an excuse to set the script down. If those first three pages give them that excuse, they might set the script down.

Craig: They’ll take it.

John: They’ll take it.

Craig: It’s been really interesting over the years to see how some of these do grab you. It’s like there’s this thing that happens where your eyeballs– Sometimes words are sticky. Your eyeballs stick on them and it’s good. Then sometimes the pages are slippery and your eyes just– Part of the question is, why do these things happen?

John: I’m also contractually obligated to tell you that we’ve been doing the show for 14 years. We’ve come to the Austin Film Festival for 11 years. It’s the first year we’re here to hype up our book. We have a book coming out December 2nd.

The Scriptnotes book is basically a collection, a compendium of everything we’ve talked about over the course of 11 years about screenwriting, intercut with chapters from many of the amazing guests we’ve had on the show. Show of hands, who in this room has already pre-ordered the book? That’s a good number. Thank you very much for that.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Last night at the live show, I was strongly urging people to pre-order the book. Craig, do you remember the reasons why people need to pre-order the book rather than just getting it on December 2nd?

Craig: As I recall, what you said is that pre-orders are how bookstores know whether or not they should stock the book, whether libraries know whether they should have the book available for lending, and also in theory, it’s how bestseller lists are put together. You aim much higher than I do.

John: The reality is that bestseller lists are based on first week sales, but all the pre-orders are counted as the first week sales. If we can get a big number for that, it’s fantastic. Our publisher at Crown sent an email saying, “A month out, it’s looking good.” As we all know, good is–

Craig: Yes. As the people who wrote these will find out, good is not great.

John: No, good is not great. If you’re enjoying the Scriptnotes Podcast, if you’re enjoying what we’re doing today, and you want to pre-order the book, we would much appreciate it because it’s going to be a good resource for you all the times. We have a podcast you can listen to every week, but this is a podcast in book form, which is good and useful. Let us tackle our first Three Page Challenge.

Craig: Let’s dig in.

John: Our first Three Page Challenge is called Ancient Grains. It is by–

Craig: Michael Warnecke.

John: Michael Warnecke. Great. We have a synopsis here. “In a barn, on a barren field with starving animals, a group of drunk teens accidentally knock over a space heater, burning down a barn and killing all the animals inside. We then cut to those same teens standing before the town in the village center being reprimanded by a man named Faucher for using ‘ancient machines.’

As punishment, he sentences the teens to being blinded. As they force the teens to drink a poison, Ruth marches forward and begs Faucher not to blind both of her sons, as she’ll have no one left to work the farm. Faucher agrees and forces Ruth to choose which of her children will be blinded. When she finally does, her other son cries in anguish as he’s forced to drink the poison. Ruth bitterly thanks Faucher and the weeping parents gather their blinded children.” That’s what happens at the first three pages here. Craig, talk to us about this. This is some sort of post-apocalyptic situation. It seems like we’re in the future-

Craig: It could be.

John: -but there’s old technologies.

Craig: It could be. It could be some super culty, hyper Amish sort of thing. A lot of times we’ll get into the granularity of how people have actually written this out, but I want to start with a big logic question. In this scenario, teens are partying in a barn and they’ve got the space heater. Side note, I didn’t feel cold, so the space heater didn’t feel super motivated. We want to make sure if a space heater is important, show that it’s cold outside.

Then they get caught because they burned the thing down and they get blinded. It seems like they’re all very aware, because it surely has happened before, that the punishment for using new machinery is getting blinded. They seem really fine as they’re using the space heater. If the punishment for using a space heater is getting blinded, I’d probably just put a coat on.

The thing is, what do they need to use? How can we show that it is something that they absolutely needed to use to get to something they really wanted, knowing what the risk was, and then they get caught? That feels stronger to me.

John: I’m excited to have Michael here because so often we’re doing this on the podcast, and we really don’t have a good sense of what the whole script is or what this is leading to. We can ask Michael when he comes up, why starting here? What is it about this scenario that is the best way to get into what his story is?

We don’t have a clear sense about the story. We’re seeing a mother having to make a terrible choice between her two sons at the end of the three pages. We as the reader don’t know, is Ruth really an important character? Is this high official an important character that’s going to be coming back? It feels like we’re establishing the feel of the world, but I don’t have a good sense of quite what the movie is yet. I’m glad to be able to talk to Michael about this.

Craig: The idea that you’re going to go down the line of these teenagers, and each one of them has to drink the stuff knowing full well that it’ll make them blind. Again, slight logic point. Not sure how you can instantly go blind from drinking something, but let’s just say you can. That’s terrifying if I weren’t asking a lot of questions.

One thing to consider is that this scene maybe happens too soon. If you are in a community and you know what the rules are right up front, and you also see that, weirdly, a couple of people are blind, more than you would imagine would be blind in a small group, and that’s an interesting– that’s curious. Then these kids get together and say, “We’re going to do this and break the rules.” Now I’m invested because I understand the rules. Then I see, oh, the punishment is they made these kids blind.

What happens here is there’s a lot of stuff that happens really fast. Then on top of it, we have Sophie’s Choice occurring. It’s always tricky when you have Sophie’s Choice because Sophie’s Choice did Sophie’s Choice. When a mother has to choose between two kids, it can feel a little bit familiar in that regard. This may be a case where what we often prescribe, which is get into it faster, we might want to delay this and get into it slower.

John: I would agree, too. Let’s focus in on how we’re encountering what is here on the page and talk about what’s working on the page and what we need to amplify or rearrange to make this work a little bit better. I think my biggest macro concern of what I was actually seeing on the page is things felt vague.

In this second block where we’re in this ramshackle barn, there’s a group of teens, but they’re not differentiated. There’s seven of them, but I don’t know what’s the split of male and female. Who are they? What are they like? Ultimately, two of these kids are going to become important because they’re Ruth’s sons, but they’re not distinguished in this first scene. We’re not following them separately or better.

It’s described as they are doing typical teenage things. Well, you got to be specific here. We need to see what exactly they’re doing and how the space heater fits into all of this. The fact that we don’t have any dialogue, we don’t have any specific actions for them, we don’t have a sense of– There’s probably not music playing if there’s nothing else, but what is actually happening in here feels important. Right now, it just reads as being very vague.

The people in here, they’re not even uppercase to let us know that they’re someone we need to follow. They don’t have names. This is a real challenge. That’s coming off of an establishing shot, which is just showing us that it is bleak and barren fields, even the weeds seem to struggle. We have scrawny cows poking at the dirt for food, and then we’re moving into dusk. We’re getting a lot of vague setup that’s not being very specific to where we’re encountering this story.

Craig: A lot of things happen very quickly. Normally, efficiency is terrific, but sometimes it can come with a cost. Here, I think we do have a cost because we see that the world is barren. There isn’t much food. There’s a pasture that’s blighted. The cows are skinny. When you see skinny cows, it’s trouble.

John: Bad stuff.

Craig: Then we hear laughter, and we meet all these kids who don’t seem to realize that they’re living in a world without food and people that can blind them. There’s this confusion that immediately happens. Then John’s absolutely right. For instance, the heater tips over and a burlap bag catches fire. No one notices. Now, this is exciting. Fire is exciting to shoot on film. What happens here is that little flicker spreads to surround hay and blossoms. Someone grabs a stable blanket, like a horse blanket.

John: Who is someone? Someone is not a great term for this.

Craig: Someone grabs a blanket, tosses it onto the flames, but it’s already too late. What was everybody else doing? Is there panic? Is there fear? Does somebody freeze? Is somebody trying to be a hero? Fire. Do you know how many meetings you have to have if you’re going to have fire? Oh my God. It’s got to be worth it. You’ve got to figure out exactly where everyone is relative to it. I think here it just feels a little abrupt.

John: We’re coming off the barn is going to burn down. This is at dusk. Then we’re cutting to village center, day. We’re not cutting to, or there’s not a transition to. This is a big change in where we were versus where we’re going to.
For the reader, that’s where you put a transition line in there. It could be literally transition to, colon, or cut to, just to get a sense of, this was the big panorama we were seeing of the barn burning. Probably smash cut to the village the next day or however many days later, and we’re up on this stage where this Faucher is going through, “This is the process that’s going to happen to these teens.” I guess they’re all culpable equally. That’s a thing that is also worthy to be addressed.

Craig: I guess because they were all benefiting from the heater. We do talk a lot about transitions and how to use our medium visually to get from one scene to the next. Here’s something that you generally want to avoid. We go from this visual, “The startled teens watch in horror as fire engulfs the barn.” That’s dusk.

Then the next thing is day. The next day, “These teens now stand in a row.” That’s a hard thing to cut from. From those teens to those teens, it’s going to be a bit jarring.
If you went from those teens to close up of a jug of liquid and we hear sniffling and we hear the creek and somebody breathing and then we reveal these kids are now on their knees or something, then there’s a reveal. You want to always think in terms of big to small, alive to object, loud to quiet. Contrasts are what help us get between places.

John: Make that cut. As we come to this stage where Faucher’s going to give his speech, we hear that members of the community, many of whom are weeping, are gathered there. Members of the community, I don’t know how many. Is it five people? Is it 50 people? I don’t have a sense of the scale. Because this is all new to us, we really want to know how large is this group. It’s going to feel very different if it’s 100 people or if it’s five people.

Next, we’re going to meet Ruth, who is the mother of two of these boys. Again, we don’t know these boys specifically. We don’t know what they’re like. We don’t know which one’s older, which one’s younger. It feels like they should have names. Most crucially, Ruth is going to be doing a lot of talking here and we don’t get anything about her. We do get an age. We get 36, but we don’t have a sense of what kind of woman she is.

Craig: Wardrobe, hair, makeup. What is she wearing? Is she dirty? Do they have makeup? Is she tired? Hair, because honestly, it’s a huge thing. What is their hair like? Bedraggled, dirty?

John: All we’re going to know about her is that she’s a member of this community and she’s the boys’ mother, but because we don’t know anything about the boys, we don’t know anything about Ruth specifically, it’s really tough.

I guess a question we’ll ask Michael when he gets up here is, how important is it that we have all the other seven teens there also? Right now, they’re extras. They’re featured extras who are going to be drinking this poison and reacting, but it’s really about these two boys. If they are the instigators, they should be the ones who are taking the punishment there.

Craig: One thing that happens here is these other kids are getting blinded and mom, Ruth, is just worried about her two kids. I think the other people in the community might be like, “Hey, Ruth, did you not notice that Dylan just got turned blind? That’s my kid. What about my kid?”

They’re in a village center. Describe the village. What is in the village? We do not know anything. There is no further description of the village beyond the fact that there’s an elevated wood platform where these kids are standing, waiting to be blinded.

John: As we wrap up this analysis here, I do like the idea of quickly getting to a Sophie’s Choice. It is a Sophie’s Choice, but if I knew who these two boys were and the– Our first exposure to Ruth is this mother having to make this choice. That’s really compelling if I already got a better sense of what this world is like and who she is in it. I think we could probably get to here in not many more pages than this, but we’re just very rushed to get to where we are right now.

Craig: Setup. Some good logic questions. Let’s ask ourselves, truly, how would this go? If you were a kid living in this town and you knew what the deal is, what would lead you to violate the rules, et cetera?

John: Because Michael’s actually here, we can ask him these questions. Michael, please come on up.

Craig: Come on up.

[applause]

Nice to meet you.

John: Thank you so much for sending in your pages. It’s really great to have you here to be able to talk to.

Michael: Good for another 10 years then.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You don’t have to do that again for another 10 years.

John: Michael, we’re only reading three pages, but have you written the whole thing? What’s actually happening in this world?

Michael: Yes, sure. I’ve completed a first draft. I’m in the process of doing a rewrite right now. I chose to open the script with introducing the antagonist and try to establish the rules of this world where they have very harsh rules, where human life isn’t valued the same way, and the punishment’s very high. The only person that’s really important long-term is Faucher. The others are more just stand-ins for the rules of this world.

Craig: Okay. Now we have a perspective question. We like to talk about, whose perspective is this scene from? If he is the important one, there’s also a world where this begins with, we meet a guy, and he’s standing there looking at the ruins of a barn, and he finds what caused it, a heater, and who was here and who was it.

Then he goes, and then he metes out justice. We would go, “Oh, God, this guy that we were identifying with is a nightmare,” because the perspective here feels like it’s mom. Depending on who is important, we have to think about how we want to go in and whose shoulder is the camera over, if that makes sense.

John: That’s so helpful to know that this is meant to introduce him as the villain antagonist at the very start, because a lot of the choices you’re making make so much more sense knowing that now. The reason why the teens are non-descript and we don’t care and individualize them is because they are not the focus. The challenge is, reading through these pages, it looked like the camera was aimed at them rather than Faucher who is the person we really want to be exploring here. Craig’s suggestion is a good way to do it where we’re really encountering this world and entering this world from his point of view and him dealing with the aftermath of this rather than the setup of this.

Craig: Character. I would love to know, does this guy enjoy this? Does he like pouring this liquid down their throats? Is he a sadist?

Michael: No. He has a perspective that’s been informed by his own life where someone very close to him died because of exposure to an old technology that ended up killing his daughter. I don’t get into it a lot in the story because I don’t want to go off on the rails on this direction. There’s a religious order that’s developed where technology is banned and they have a hold of the power structure.

Craig: Got it. In a circumstance like that, what I want to see is humanity first. This is a man whose grief has damaged him and he is trying to keep people safe. He’s trying to keep them from dying. When he administers this, people beat their children out of rage. People also hit their children out of this measured, “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.”

I personally never hit my kids. You don’t need to. You just have to have a very stern voice. That said, I would love to see what he’s feeling. If he is a father and somebody that had a child and he’s doing this to children, does this hurt his soul to do, and he’s just that– He has to? These are the questions that I have about him as a person. Villains who are human are always more interesting.

John: A question we asked about weather and cold and this kind of stuff, where is this set for you? If you were to shoot this tomorrow, where would this be set?

Michael: The idea is that this takes place maybe 400 or 500 years in the future in rural Wisconsin.

John: That feels right. Again, the dusting of snow or something else like that might also help us there get a sense of the specificity of this place, because right now it’s just reading as post-apocalyptic anywhere. Grounding in a place could really help us out.

Craig: A little something about the apocalypse. One thing that you get to do, it’s fun when you’re doing something apocalyptic, is show what’s left over that has been grown over, abandoned, things that used to be valuable to us that mean nothing now.

Wisconsin, a lot of farms, tons of farms. Maybe in 400, 500 years, most of them have fallen apart, burnt down, whatever. Then I want to see that. I also want to see, in the distance, there’s a mobile sign. There was something.

John: A water tower.

Craig: The world has not been scraped clean. It just stopped. When things stop, nobody really goes around cleaning it up. Vehicles, planes, all that good stuff. Think about the opportunities that you have there.

John: Michael, thank you so much for sending this in.

Michael: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.

Craig: Thank you. That wasn’t too bad. I think it wasn’t too bad. He’s probably like, “Jesus.” All right, sorry, I’m going to church.

John: Lightning bolts come down. The next script we’re going to be talking about is High North by Teddy Johnson. Teddy, raise your hand if you’re out here.

Craig: There, Teddy.

John: Thank you very much for sending this through. Here is what’s happening in these three pages. “A black cargo ship drifts in the ice of the Arctic Circle. A Coast Guard ship attempts to make contact with the cargo ship, but when there’s no answer, Captain Alamos and three other officers board the dark and seemingly empty cargo ship.

Inside, they find dozens of dead bodies, all frostbitten black and decomposing. One shackled corpse holding a stuffed polar bear startles the men when it springs to life and screams at them, while begging them not to take us back, before an officer knocks him out with a flashlight. When he does, hundreds more corpses are discovered. The next sequence begins with a montage of news footage on unrest over skyrocketing energy costs.” That’s where we are at the bottom of three pages.

Craig: Okay. I love a good scary thing set in an Arctic area.

John: I love the Arctic setting. I’ll say cover page looks great. The only thing I would ask for is a date. A date on a cover page is just a thing you look for and to see how recent it is. Everything else here, flawless and great.

Craig: You can always lie about the date.

John: Yes, just make it more recent. Craig, talk to us about your exposure here. Really, we should talk about what kind of scene this is, because it’s very classically a setup. It’s a cold open.

Craig: This is a good, old-fashioned cold open. The job really is, how do I do this scene in a way that hasn’t been done before? I’m not sure this gets to that. It is somewhat following the formula, but it does the formula fairly well. A couple of things that stopped me as I was going through, there’s lots of good visuals here.

John: There are.

Craig: Sometimes people are talking when they wouldn’t normally talk. I think there’s just a lot of extra dialogue we don’t need. It’s scarier when it’s quieter. Generally, when people work together, they don’t need to talk unless it’s important, especially in a situation like this, which is pretty grim.

They get into this room and there’s this big reveal, which is the big reveal. Dead bodies, dozen or so, men all ages, ethnicities, floor awash in a GRAYISH SLURRY. Now, GRAYISH SLURRY is capitalized. It’s the Arctic. Everything’s frozen.

John: Yes, so why is it not frozen?

Craig: Why is it a slurry?

John: That may be important.

Craig: It might be, but then I want to know more about the GRAYISH SLURRY. I want them to note that there’s a– Nobody seems to care about the liquid that’s not frozen. If it is frozen, I still want them to– if it’s important to me, it should be important to them. They’re looking around.

John: Yes, agreed.

Craig: Then a guy trips over a corpse, which is actually awesome. I love that.

John: We should say that you hear a thump before this and our attention turns to it.

Craig: So we get a little jump scare.

John: Love it.

Craig: Great. Then the captain looks at him and goes, “We good?” The guy says, “Yes, fine.” Then he looks at something else and goes, “What the hell is this?” If one of your underlings trips over a corpse and you turn back and you see that, you’re just glaring, and he’s like– it’s undermining the vibe you want to get.

I got pretty confused. I’m curious to see what you thought about this. When they get to a teenager and he’s gripping a polar bear in his fist and they’re all like, “Hmm,” and Captain Alamos says, “Call the medic. Though I doubt we’ll–” as if to say, “Maybe this kid’s alive,” and then, ah, the kid’s alive.

John: Part of your reason for your confusion is, he’s identified as a teen, but then the dialogue is for shackled man, and so I was thinking, “Wait, is this the same person?” I’m looking for teen in the dialogue.

Craig: Yes. It seemed to me, jump scare wise, we all know it’s coming, but I think that they would just be like, “Wow, this is sad. We’re going to have to report this.” Mundane sort of stuff. One of them touches the polar bear and then the guy– Again, the dialogue felt a little bit, I don’t know, low stakes kind of talking, as if you weren’t in a room full of frozen bodies. That’s totally really what I want to see if we can achieve here, but the scenario was fun.

John: Yes. You’re reading through the three pages and you get what this setup is. I understood why I saw that, that it was setting this thing up, and then as we get to the news footage, I was like, “Okay, this is all going to be related. I can see how these two things can plausibly fit together.”

Let’s talk about the very opening here. Right now, we’re starting with Super, 157 miles north of the Arctic Circle, “A black cargo ship drifts amid cracked tapestry of ice,” but then in the next block, it’s unusual, flat, no bridge, no flag and listing on its side. That belongs up with the description of the ship in that first section. Right now, it’s after Captain Alamos, so you think it’s part of his description, because it’s really what he’s seeing. What I’m saying is, I have no idea if Captain Alamos is a man or is a woman. I have no idea what the age is.

Craig: True.

John: This is probably a disposable character, but give us something to anchor our–

Craig: Casting people have to cast somebody. They’re like, “Help.”

John: “Help us. Help us,” desperately. That’s why giving him or her a first name and just some sense of what kind of person this is, is a godsend. It helps everybody in production, but also just a reader to form some image in our head. Is it a Sam Neill that I’m looking at?

Craig: Also, USS Healy, what kind of boat is that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: We don’t know.

John: These are things we’ll want to know, so we get a sense of what kind of space we’re in for this. We’re going from the big ship onto a small craft, navigating the ice-strewn waters. Tell us how this feels. Give me a line to put me in this space because I don’t know how cold this is. I don’t know what this is actually really like.

Craig: I don’t know how close are we to them. Is it a motorized boat? Are we looking at the outrigger? Are we looking at an oar? Are we looking at this guy’s face shivering? I want to feel all that because it’s such an evocative idea, this boat clacking its way through these chunks of ice that are floating in water. I think you’re absolutely right, by the way, to get the description of the boat together, and then I would actually put the Super after that.

John: I would agree.

Craig: Let us look at some stuff, wonder where we are, and then you give us 157 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

John: On page two, things are just feeling a little too empty. It’s a little bit of a stock scene. We can fill in some details ourselves, but give us a little bit more about what the inside of the ship feels like. What does it sound like, if the boat is listing? You’ve said that it’s sloping. That’s a great detail.

It’s the whole thing. Is it canted so you’re having to walk up slopes? That could be cool. Do you hear it creaking? Is ice banging against it? All these things are suspenseful and will create the mood you probably are looking for here.

The officer trips on a corpse. That is a guy who is singled out and he needs to be uppercased because he’s going to be saying a line or– This needs to be singled out as a person who is useful. Tell us something about him or her so we get some sense of what the dynamic is.

Craig: This is a choice. The shackled man/teen yells in French. Now, if the idea is that the people he’s speaking French to don’t speak French and it doesn’t seem like they do, they seem like Americans, it might be better to just put this in French so that we understand that they don’t understand. You’re not going to be subtitling it because it’s more like he’s alive is the point and later we’ll find out what he said.

John: Either choice could work. You could subtitle it, but if it is subtitled, then I’d say put it in subtitle so we know what the intention is behind that.

Craig: It’s hard to subtitle a jump scare moment. It’s really hard. It feels like what’s scary is that this guy is suddenly alive and he’s curiously speaking French and he’s holding a polar bear, all good mysteries, so might as well just keep them mysterious.

John: Yes, keep them mysterious, but we don’t have to leave it as mystery because we have Teddy right here. Teddy, come on up and let’s talk about this. Teddy, tell us about this script. Is the whole thing written? Is it just these three pages? What have you written of this?

Teddy: This has been through a few drafts. It’s all written. The main reason I thought I’d toss this into the mix here was because this opening is brand new and it was based on notes I got from a random blacklist reviewer and also a friend of mine who occasionally reads my stuff.

They both had a similar note about the previous opening, which was actually just the news montage thing. Then later on, 10, 11 pages in, they mentioned this ghost ship that’s disappeared in the Arctic. They were like, “That seems cool. Why don’t you play with that?” I played with that and that’s what you’re looking at.

John: Great.

Craig: That’s good advice. I think the opening with the ghost ship almost always works. 50% of the time, or is it 100% of the time?

John: Of the characters we meet in this opening, are any of them important? This is just setting up the world, correct?

Teddy: This is all set up. We never see any of these people– That’s not technically true, but they’re not– None of these people are the antagonists or protagonists. That all comes on page four.

John: Are we guessing the tone right, that this a– To me, this feels like a scary world-threatening thing is happening. Is that correct?

Teddy: The vibe here, I think the idea is this is a dated comp, but like Three Days of the Condor, paranoid government conspiracy thriller. That’s what we’re aiming at. I realized that the ghost ship jump scare thing might seem a little bit too much.

John: From a horror movie?

Teddy: Yes. It’s not a horror movie. Like I said, I know that’s a dated comp, but that’s the vibe we’re looking for.

Craig: I can see that completely. Yes, this feels like the sort of thing that Tony Scott would have done an incredible job with.

John: Exactly, yes.

Craig: Yes, rest in peace.

John: As you were sitting in the audience and we’re talking through your pages–

Craig: How much did you hate it?

John: How much, like, “Oh my God, I’m so angry.” Did they make sense? Were we misreading things you were intending to do?

Teddy: No, you keyed in on, I would say, three or four things that I’ve also gone back and forth on. For example, the kid versus the shackled man. We’re obviously going to discover, why is there a ghost ship with a bunch of people shackled in the middle of the Arctic Circle? That’s the big mystery we’re going to resolve.

I don’t know why I changed– I went back and forth on the person who wakes up and does the jump scare thing. Why is it a boy? There’s a reason why there’s all these different ages of men in this ship and all different ethnicities. I think that was a place where I was just going fast.

Again, it was the second time I wrote this opening. I think I got caught off on the consistency there. Also, this is a personal thing, but I just try to write very spare. I see why you would want to describe Captain Alamos, give it an adjective, something. Also, I just want to move fast through the first thing.

John: I want to underline, I really liked that it was moving quickly. There were times where I felt like you could have even moved a little more quickly. They’re circling the boat and there’s a ladder bolted to the side. I don’t even need the ladder bolt on the side as long as I see them climbing off the ladder on to the deck. You could probably do some things even a little bit faster than that because as an audience and as readers, we have a sense of what you’re doing and that this is compelling quickly and we want to get on that boat.

Craig: I think you did a really good job. This should be spare. It doesn’t take many words to go, “She’s 40, weathered, tired, cold.” That’s it. It’s barely anything. It just helps us fill it in because honestly, in my head, he turned into like– you know the boat guy from Tintin with the beard and the corn? That’s what he was in my head. He literally was Captain whatever his name was.

Speaker: Captain Haddock.

Craig: Yes, Captain Haddock, which is not what you wanted.

Teddy: No, that’s not the vibe.

Craig: Speaking of consistency, tell us about this GRAYISH SLURRY.

Teddy: Again, I have gone back and forth on, do we draw more attention to that or not? What that GRAYISH SLURRY is is hyper relevant to the ultimate story. Again, one of the things that I’m trying to do over the course of the script is just build an incredible sense of mystery that builds a huge reveal. I didn’t want to go into that too much because at this point–

Craig: This is all it says, “Floor awash in a GRAYISH SLURRY.” No one comments on it, which means no one’s looking at it, which means the camera’s– If he walks in and we hear squish and he looks down and he’s confused because in this room of ice and everything, there’s this stuff that isn’t solid, that is weird and melted, and then he moves on, I’m like, “Okay, well, that’s relevant.” Otherwise, it’s just going to be a GRAYISH SLURRY no one will notice.

Teddy: Yes. Sorry. No, I live in fear of more than two lines of description and narrative.

Craig: Do not. They’re to give you a Kathryn Bigelow script where it’s 12 lines in a row.

John: Absolutely. A thing we often talk about in Three Page Challenges is how things feel on the page. It’s how much white space there is on the page. I’ll say in these pages, it’s very spare and the paragraphs are short. It invites you to read down the page and actually read every word on the page. You can break things up a little bit more. The extra few words or sentences we’re asking in a few places, I really don’t think will slow your read, and will just anchor people, make them feel like, “Oh, I’m glad I read that because I understand this moment, this beat, this visual better.”

Craig: Yes. Three lines is– you can start worrying after three. Two is a little severe.

Teddy: I appreciate the permission.

Craig: I’m rolling with that. Permission granted.

John: Teddy, you’ve written a couple drafts of this script. How many other scripts have you written?

Teddy: This is the third or fourth feature script I’ve written.

John: Has it gotten easier or harder with each script?

Teddy: I don’t know that it ever gets easier. I think I just am more comfortable with just messing stuff up and iterating and trying and just going. You go a little bit faster because you know– That’s all. I wouldn’t say it’s easier. You just fail faster.

John: That’s a crucial thing Teddy has learned. Nicely done.

Craig: Just describe my career.

John: Teddy, thank you very much for doing this. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Teddy.

John: All right.

Craig: Zeroing in on number three.

John: Number three. All right. Number three is Tall Poppies by Becca Hurd. “A woman named Teddi sits at a pub in Sydney, Australia during a rowdy Australian football game. She buys a pub-branded T-shirt and, pretending to be an employee, tells a group of customers they need one of their cars moved. The customers are too wrapped up in the football game, so she offers to move the car for them. Teddi takes the man’s keys and drives off and away.

We are then acquainted with the oceanside town of Edith Beach where Zoe, in her early 30s, Indian Australian, and muscular, surfs with her dog, Rosie, on the front of her surfboard. We then see Zoe working at her food truck. That’s what we’ve accomplished in three pages of Tall Poppies.

Craig: Fun cover page.

John: A fun cover page. Let’s hold on to show the audience because they may not be able to see it on their smartphone.

Craig: I’m not sure they’re going to be able to see that either.

John: It has a nice typeface for Tall Poppies, which is good and so distinctive. There’s a gun shooting a flower. It says, “Pilot, written by Becca Hurd.” It’s good for us to know that this is a pilot, not a feature. It has her email address, which is perfect. It has the date. I love everything on this cover page.

Craig: No, it’s grabby. Also, the other stuff is like, “Oh, it has to be all courier.” No, it doesn’t. We don’t care. Nobody cares. I really enjoyed this. What I particularly enjoyed was that I was confused until I got it, which was great. Now, there are a couple of things that, early, probably was not good confusion. Interior, The Waddle Seat Hotel, Sydney night.

Now, when I think of the interior of a hotel, I don’t think of a rowdy bar full of sports watchers. Here is, having just come back from Sydney, Australia, hotel means bar, and it’s confusing in Sydney, but it’s actually true. Everything is. This would be a problem because we’re not in Sydney, so you’re going to have to do a little bit of tailoring there just for Americans, so that they don’t-

John: Honestly, if we scratch out the word hotel, the Waddle Seat, we would get it as a bar.

Craig: We would get it. Here she is, small, unassuming, and she’s alone, which is terrific. The first thing we see is that she’s not really there. We’re looking at a woman with her eyes closed, and we’re hearing beautiful violin. Then as we pull out, we realize she’s in this bedlam, and she’s in her own head. This is very evocative, and I can do it. If I had to direct this, I could direct it. I know what to do. That’s super helpful. I love the way the sound comes in.

I have really one question. I honestly have one question, and that is, her plan relies on something that I’m not sure is a reliable thing, even much, because she’s like, “Hey, can you move your car?” I think a lot of people would be like, “Okay.” It’s a little bit of a stretch to think, hey, they’re going to give me their keys and let me move the car for them.

John: I bought it. I feel like she, Teddy, was making, it was a reach, but also felt like I was impressed by her, and then she pulled it off. I bought it the course of this movie. There’s refrigerated logic like, wait, would you actually do that? It worked for me in the moment really well.

One thing, I liked how this all started on the page. This all reads really well. There’s a good variation of paragraph sizes. One thing I would ask, though, here’s how we’re starting. We’re in close on Teddy, eyes closed. All we hear is beautiful violin. As we zoom out, we see that she sits at a pub high top. Two paragraphs later, we’re seeing Teddy is small, I’m assuming she wears a cast on her left hand. That’s information that goes back up in that top part, so we can see that, because it’s not new information when we’re seeing that there.

Then as we’re, you’re saying, zooming out, it’s really pulling out or whatever you want to say here. Teddy’s not given an age. I’d love an age, tell us an age. Tell an age, that she’s small and I’m assuming-

Craig: I mean, even bloke with a mullet gets an age.

John: Yes, see?

Craig: All we hear is beautiful violin. Yes, beautiful violin music or beautiful classical violin music. Something that’s telling us specifically what it is that we’re hearing, because I really like everything that’s happening here. I just want it to be a little brighter here.

The other thing I did notice is that we’re doing her pronoun a lot with actually not using her name. Look at the cases where you’re saying she, and see if there’s some places where you want to put Teddy back in there, so it’s just top of our mind who this is that we’re talking about. I believed most of the guys with the football game. I believed the sports bar space, the main guy we’re talking to, his name is Mase, M-A-S-E. I was wondering whether if we’re going to meet him again, we might meet him again, but I didn’t know at the moment whether it was important or not.

This is more of a question for you because we can’t ask you, because he’s given sort of individual thing rather than just being placeholder person. He’s given an actual character name.

Craig: If there was any way for us to see her making a choice as to which person to prey upon, now she’s sort of going for a car first, I think, instead of a person. That also is a little tricky because if she’s like, “Hey, who has this?” and somebody who’s just not that drunk is like, “I do.” Now what do you do? There’s just still a little bit of, I just want to think through the con artist logic because con artists, I’m not suggesting she’s, but somebody who’s committing con artistry, they’re always in control. They always are one step ahead. They’re the magicians who have the backup plan in case you pick the wrong card. I just want to get that feeling.

Then, when we shift away, good news is I wanted to stay with her, so that’s always good, but we get to this other place, then it’s connected through with her drive, and we meet an entirely different person who has a dog on her surfboard. This was adorable. We meet this cool person. She’s got a dog on her surfboard, she’s surfing. This is cool. A little bit earlier, an old man pulls his lazy dog along the sidewalk. That’s two dogs right in a row, and I want to keep my dog special. Then, after we see her surfing with her dog, she’s in the counter of her food truck. That was a little bit of a gear grind for me.

John: It was a gear grind for me, too. Part of it is that we see Teddy driving away. This is night as she’s driving away, and then we’re coming to dusk. There’s not a transition put here between these two things, but I think our natural assumption is we’re going to keep following Teddy, and we’re going to see Teddy the next day. Instead, we’re meeting a whole new character doing a whole new thing, which can absolutely work, but it was just a weird vibe for me. I couldn’t tell who I was supposed to be following. I keep expecting, Teddy has to meet this new character, Rosie, very soon.

Craig: I’m sure she will.

John: She will. It’s only three pages.

Craig: They may already know each other.

John: You like the dog on the surfboard. The dog on the surfboard felt a little dizzy for me.

Craig: I guess my question is, and we’ll find out, can dogs do that?

John: I’m sure dogs do that.

Craig: Because if a dog can do it-

John: That’s just a sore, I think. I think it really do it.

Craig: – then you can do it. If they can do it, then it’ll look like it’s doing it. You’re going to have to find a dog that can actually do it. I think maybe all we really needed here was to see her getting out of the water. He’s going, and she’s dragging your surfboard. The next thing we see is a food truck, and she’s walking up and unlocking it. Then, the next thing is, and so we go, okay, that’s her job, she goes there.

John: That’s her thing. It’s her truck.

Craig: Yes.

John: The last thing I want us to talk about is, at the end of the bar sequence, The Waddell Seat, the last line she says is, “I’ll sort you boys some free ones when I get back.” I wanted to cut that line, and then you pay it off where later on, it’s like, she gives some free ones. Okay, if you want to hold on that line, great. It does work, but if you could cut that line and find a different way for this guy, Mace, to be asking, like, “Hey, this girl has my keys. Where’s the blonde girl with my keys?” Like, “Which blonde girl?” would be another way to do it. Because I think you have a better out of that first scene without that extra line.

Craig: Yes, it’s a little bit tricky because we know that she won. I guess the thing is, do we even care about this drunk guy finding out that he got swindled? He got swindled. Unless he matters.

John: He may matter.

Craig: That’s the thing. He may matter, we don’t know.

John: Becca, could you please come up?

Craig: Come on.

[applause]

All right, tell us about Tall Poppies. What have we got here?

Becca: This is sort of an Australian nod to Thelma and Louise, but gayer.

[laughter]

Craig: Good. Why not? Gayer.

Becca: It’s two women who don’t currently know each other. They meet each other in the pilot. Then incidentally, they kill a man together. He’s a bikeym he’s in a bikey gang. They end up going on the run together. They have bikeys after them. They both are running from their past, so their past is chasing them as well. They start to fall in love with each other as they fall into a heroin empire.

[laughter]

Craig: Oh, and it’s poppies.

John: That’s Tall Poppy.

Craig: Poppies.

Becca: It’s Tall Poppy, yes.

Craig: Tall poppy syndrome.

John: For folks who don’t know Tall Poppy Syndrome is a down-under situation where they cut you down if you get too big. If you get too successful, they cut you down. Rebel Wilson was on, and we were talking about Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Craig: Tall poppy.

John: This is all really fun. Tonally, when I said that the dog on the surfboard felt Disney to it, is it comedic? What is the thing you’re going for? Is it cute?

Becca: My tonal comp would be Killing Eve. It’s a 60-minute crime drama, but there’s some comedy in there.

Craig: Now that I know what’s going on, when you have a movie, and there are some great ones, it’s funny. For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind after you described the Thelma and Louise and all the rest of it was White Men Can’t Jump, where you meet two people. One of them hasn’t dealt with the other one yet, but they’re going to. Then, there’s the joining of con artists, just people on the run, falling in love, bromances, or romances.

When you do meet that second person, so much of what that scene has to be is, this is a different person than that person because you want the contrast. You want to go from somebody impeccably neat to somebody who’s a slob. It doesn’t have to be that broad, but your choice of what to do next does have to feel like, oh, these two people, I would like to see what happens if they get stuck together for a bit, if that makes sense.

John: The woman she’s going on the run with, ultimately, is this other–

Craig: Zoe.

Becca: Yes.

John: We don’t have an extra page to get to know her better, but tell us more about her and what their interaction is. Because last night on Scriveners Live, we were talking about relationships. Different characters need different things out of a relationship. What is the nature of their relationship?

Becca: Zoe is actually Laws. This is an alias. She comes from a criminal family. They are the biggest legal growers of poppies in Australia. Australia actually does grow a lot of poppies, but they also have an underground heroin industry as well. She’s trying to get away from her family, so she’s changed her name and is just in this beach town, nomadic life, surfing. Teddy is running away from an abusive relationship.

Craig: Now, here’s what I get. Teddy has no problem doing something that’s criminal. She’s actually rather good at it. It’s not a violent thing, so we love her for it. Now, Zoe is running from a criminal past. What I kind of want in some way or another is to meet somebody who is very definitely not breaking the law. Because she knows that she would get in trouble. She doesn’t want to get back on a radar. How you imply that, there’s a thousand ways. I don’t know if you agree with this, but the surfing itself only tells us that she surfs and that her dog is awesome. It’s not telling me any little tiny thing about her that may make me go, oh, these two might not like each other, or these two might be, we were talking about planes, trains, and automobiles, Steve Martin and John Candy, an odd couple of some sort.

You’re good. You’re a good writer. You laid these out great. You could see it. You could hear it. I love the way you sound. There were transitions. The good news is you can do it. This is what we do when we can do it. Just do it.

John: Becca, question for you. Is Mace going to come back?

Becca: He’s not.

John: He’s not going to come back. You understand the note that it feels like he’s a more important character than he is because he’s given a name and because he’s given a recall scene. Giving him a generic descriptor would probably help.

Becca: My one question, actually, for that is because I have another character refer to him like, “Oy, Mace, she’s talking to you.” Do you have to use the name?

Craig: You kind of don’t. In a situation like this, what you can do is you can say, mullet bloke, and then whatever. What is that?

John: Moustache.

Craig: Undercut bloke. Just two different haircuts. The fact that one of them says the other one’s name doesn’t really matter. This is great. It was just cinematic. I was watching it and it was having fun, so really good.

John: Becca, I was talking to you at the opening night party. We did this here, but you actually had a script that was also here in competition?

Becca: Yes, and I found out today that it won.

John: Congratulations.

[applause]

Craig: I saw that happen. She’s not lying. I was there.

John: What was that script? That’s not this script that we read. It’s a different thing.

Becca: That is not the script. No, that’s a feature called The Other Side of 25. It’s about a young stand-up comic in Chicago who becomes the surrogate for her older sister.

Craig: I’m not surprised. You can do this. Keep doing it. It’s going well. Congratulations. I was happy to see you win, and I was happy to see you here with these three pages.

Becca: Great.

John: Becca, thank you so much.

Becca: Thank you so much. Thank you.

John: We have a little boilerplate here. The Scriptnotes, all of Scriptnotes, is produced by Drew Marquardt, who’s here. Drew is the person who reads all these three-page challenges. Drew Marquardt, you’re the best. This show will also be edited by Matthew Chilleli, who’s our incredible editor. We want to thank Emily Locke and everyone here at Austin Film Festival. This has been a fantastic festival this year. Thank you to our room sponsors, all our volunteers, incredible.

Who here in this room is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Oh, we’ve got some hands here.

Craig: Oh, thank you, guys.

John: Every week, we do an episode for everyone in the whole wide world. We also do a bonus segment for our premium members. Thank you for the premium members, because they keep the lights on. A final check, who in this room has ordered the Scriptnotes book? [chuckles] All right. I need to sell those books. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Let’s try to get three or four questions. If people have questions about the kinds of things we talked about on the page here today, we can also ask general Script Note-y kind of answers of questions. If you have a question, raise your hand. I’ll call on you, and I’ll repeat the question. Right here.

Member of Audience 1: You were talking a little bit about how many lines, there’s too many lines. You’re talking about transitions. You’re talking about dressing the characters and things like that. I guess my question is, I know what scene heading is and things like that, but how do I know that my script looks right?

John: I think the thing that we come back to again and again on the Script Notes is that we will keep reading long paragraphs if it feels like it’s worth our time. If we’re engaged and those words are pulling us through, we’ll do it. Sometimes you turn a page, and it’s like a dense block of text, and you’re like, oh, God, I have to commit to this long paragraph. That’s why small paragraphs, short paragraphs, three lines, four lines, two lines, are great. Breaking them up, it feels so good because it invites you to come down the page.

The best advice I can really give you is you need to read a bunch of screenplays, a bunch of produced screenplays to see what they actually look like on the page. We make a weekend read, which every week we have a whole bunch of really good published scripts that we put up in there. Read those.
What other general advice would we offer?

Craig: Like anything else, you get better at it as you do it. You get a sense for these things as you approach your mythical 10,000 hours and so forth. Right off the bat, you probably don’t know until you do. Some people will get there quicker than others. That’s just the way it goes with everything.

Guitar, painting, writing screenplays, there’s certain innate stuff. Give yourself a break and make sure that you understand you’re going to grow and get there. It’s not possible for you to have the same innate sense of how a page should feel, and where you should slow, and where you should speed compared to people that have been doing it for 30 years. Give yourself time to grow.

John: The other thing, over time, you’ll internalize rules, but also just a sense of how things feel on the page, and you’ll develop a voice that is uniquely your voice. Craig and I were talking last night, there’s things, I think this was backstage, there are scripts that we wrote, and it’s like 10 years later you read it, it’s like, I know I wrote this, I don’t remember a damn thing about it, but it feels like me. Ultimately, your stuff will feel like you because you just make certain choices, you just do certain things on the page, and that only comes with just doing a lot of work.

It’s sitting down in the chair every day and writing, and writing a lot. It’s, yes, you’re going to go back through and refine and revise, but also you’re going to write new things, so you can get the sense of, what does it feel like when I write action? What does it feel like when I’m writing an intense dialogue scene? Those are the experiences that get the words feeling better on the page.

Another question I see right there. All right, I’m repeating here. Here with some students, what three things we really want to see in those first three pages, Craig?

Craig: The first is inspiration, creativity. I always think of the first five pages, but three, it doesn’t matter, are absolutely precious. You can do anything there because you are, as we’re in church, as the prime mover, began everything. That is the moment where you set it all in motion, and the moment you set it in motion, your choices begin to narrow, narrow until you reach the end when the thing that had to happen happens. Those first three pages, show creativity, surprise me.

You know. You’ve all seen movies, you’ve all seen TV shows. What have I not seen that I can then use in service of something that is somewhat conventional, that is a story that then connects to all of us? Inspiration slash creativity, give me somebody that I know I’m supposed to be identifying with, even if it turns out to be the bad guy and I have to change, that’s fine, but give me somebody that I’m connected to and make sure that something happens. One thing, doesn’t have to be the inciting incident, but it’s got to be something that helps me learn about the world, the characters, a relationship, something.

John: In those first three pages, I want to know what world I’m in. The setting, sure, but what kind of movie am I in? That’s the sense of, it’s the tone, it’s the feeling of. I want to feel that I’m watching a movie or watching a TV show, and that means I should hopefully forget that I’m reading something. I should feel like I’m seeing it, I’m feeling myself in it. Those are crucial things. That I’m with an actual person because we have to know who those people are. It doesn’t have to be our hero necessarily. Sometimes you start with somebody else, but that there’s anchored, interesting people that I’m curious about because what it comes down to is we could set down the script at any time, but if I’m curious, I’m going to keep reading the rest.

The thing we often talk about on Three Page Challenge is, was I curious to read page four? That’s ultimately what it is. Can you just keep pulling me along into the story? Great question. Thank you.

Another question out there. Somebody, I want to know something. Right here in front.

Member of Audience 2: Since you’re talking about character descriptions and even just being really quick with them, do you have any words of advice for or against if you use a really popular actor as a way to get me to the description, or do you think it’s not a good idea?

John: If you refer to a popular person, yes or no. Craig, what’s your instinct there?

Craig: You can. I’ve never done it. It’s probably best to say sort of like or ish. You don’t want to go, it’s Brad Pitt. If you don’t have Brad Pitt, stop reading. I do think it’s a little bit of a cheat. It feels a little bit sloppy. Rather than building a human for me, you’re asking me to just put the human I already know into that. You’re robbing me of a chance to build my Captain Haddock in my head.

John: I would agree with you. One of the real challenges is if you’re aiming for Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington, the minute you say that, every other actor is going to be like, “I don’t want to take Denzel Washington’s leftovers.” I don’t think I’ve ever done it, but if you have a character who models themselves after some famous person, that might be a way to do it, like sees herself as Taylor Swift. That could be a way to do it, but it’s unlikely to be the thing.

Just figure out what is it about the actual actor or person or personality that you can find words to describe that evokes that feeling is the best way to do it.

Another question right here.

Their question is, in dramas, you obviously want to establish something that’s gripping right in those first three pages, the opening setup. What is the equivalent thing we’re looking for in a comedy?

Craig: Funny.

[laughter]

John: We got to laugh.

Craig: There’s also tone. For comedies, we all have a general sense in our head of the different kinds. I want to know which kind I’m in, and I want something funny to happen, and I want it to involve the person that I am going to care about or get to know. That’s really it. In comedies, we often think about, rather than the first three pages, we think about what’s the opening bit.

I watched the opening of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective the other day. I don’t know why, I just did. The entire opening, it’s all under credits. It’s an open credit sequence. He is pretending to be a UPS package deliverer, and he’s got a package and it says fragile, and he is kicking it down the street. He’s throwing it against walls. He’s walking like Jim Carrey does, and eventually gets to this guy’s door and smashes it a few times. You get a sense like, okay, this is the bit. I’m learning about what kind of comedy this is and who I’m supposed to be identifying with.

It’s pretty comedic. You get to actually be somewhat formulaic. Unfortunately, you have to also be funny, so it’s such a problem.

John: In a comedy, you have to land something in those first pages, and really, you need a setup and a laugh that really nails it and that lets us know what kind of comedy this is. In your description of that, I get the tone of what that comedy is, and that’s going to be our expectation for everything after that. It needs to really establish, these are the kinds of jokes we’re going to see in this, but not those kinds of jokes, and that’s a tough thing to do.

There are a lot of really, really funny people in the world and really funny writers, but they have different lanes, and they couldn’t write the same thing. Nora Ephron is not writing Ace Ventura. I love her to death, but she would not have written Ace Ventura.

Craig: I wouldn’t say I love her to death, I mean, she is dead.

John: I know. I can still love her. I love her deeply.

Craig: You continue to love her as she is.

John: Absolutely. I love her after death. She’s great. A question over there.

[laughter]

Great. Let me restate this. She says she’s a very visual person, and she can see everything in the scene, but she’s having a hard time sometimes translating everything she’s seeing down to, these are the words that are going to create the same vision for the reader, and that’s our job.

Craig: That’s the job.

John: That’s the hardest thing about it.

Craig: That’s the job. Now, the good news is you can see it. A lot of people can’t. You can. That’s a huge advantage. Now, be a camera. Rather than just thinking about it all at once, be a camera and think about what the slices that you’re looking at. How close are you, how far are you, and why? In short, be a director. Think about where the camera should be, and think about what you want the Member of Audience to see and feel in that moment, or smell or hear. Then, you might start to be able to relay to us something that helps us recreate it as you want us to see it. It’s very important.

If I’m describing this room, and I know everything in it, I still need to go, I’m going to start on, actually, it says, “Pure as a pearl and as perfect.” If I start on those words, that’s intentional, that means something, and then I cut to somebody who’s eating a tuna sandwich and spilling it on their lap back there, not at all pure as a pearl and perfect, and I understand why. Then, I can see, oh, behind that person, there’s this huge room, and there’s the vault.

You begin to think the order, how you reveal it, what, why, all those good questions. The fact that you can see it is great. Now you just have to actually weirdly decide how to show us less.

John: My answer is probably a little bit different. I’ve written a bunch of screenplays, but I’ve also written books. The great thing about writing a novel is that you are in a space, and you can talk about anything. You can move through time within a paragraph, characters can smell things, you can get inside characters’ heads. In both cases, writing a chapter of a book or writing a scene for a movie, I’m landing myself in their space and I’m seeing what’s around you. At the same time, I’m now in a movie, sitting back, and I’m putting myself in a movie theater watching this thing.

That’s what Craig is saying about being a camera. It’s like, what I’m actually seeing on screen at a time, and that is probably where you need to focus next is, if I was watching this sitting in a theater, what would I be seeing on screen? What things would be coming to me? Because the camera is attention, and where is it directing the reader’s attention, which will ultimately become the camera.

Craig: I think that’s a great final question. Thank you. Thank you all.

Links:

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