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

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

**John:** And this Episode 288 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at what screenwriters can learn from figures in the news and what I learned from going through the copy editing process on my book. Plus, we’ll be answering listener questions about moving to Los Angeles and whether to use a pen name.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Craig, this last week something the first time happened to me here in Paris. I got sick. I got a cold. And my question for you is, when you get a cold, when you get sick, do you keep writing, or do you just stop?

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** Because I had this debate on Monday whether I should try to work through it or just call it a day and play videogames. What do you do when you get sick?

**Craig:** I wish that I were the kind of person who could learn any lesson from my own past. I am not. I am as stubborn as a mule. When I get sick, every single time I say, “Not a problem. Keep going. Keep going.” And then I just find myself suddenly feeling tunnel vision-y and confused. And I just go, OK, apparently it’s time for bed. I’m the guy that still thinks that when a doctor says you need lots of rest that he’s just joking. [laughs] He’s a goof, right?

**John:** Well, you look at what we do, and we’re not working construction. And we’re not working in public service jobs, like a waiter who is going to get other people sick, so I feel like I’m at home, so why don’t I just keep working? But on Monday I realized like I was so sick that I could do real damage to this script. I just worried that I could actually make things noticeably worse by trying to work on it. And so I mostly just kind of vegged around. And then there was one new scene to write, and I could write that sort of by itself. I could sort of like lay there and shiver and think through the scene. And I wrote that one.

**Craig:** Aw. Poor John.

**John:** I got over my cold, but I almost like asked on Twitter, because I couldn’t trust my own judgment, so I was going to run a Twitter poll to say, “This is how I feel. Should I work today or just play videogames?”

**Craig:** Actually, that’s my theory about why it’s hard for us to do this, and why we don’t trust our own judgment, is because when we were children the only time that we ever made a determination about our own health was when we decided to fake being sick. Otherwise, somebody would say, “You’re sick.” And we would go, “Yeah, seriously. It feels terrible.” Right? But otherwise it’s like, ah, I really don’t want to go to school today. I’m kind of on the bubble. Let me wave the thermometer by the lightbulb and stay home.

And so I think that carries through to adulthood. I just always feel like I’m just – I don’t know – goldbricking, as the old folks used to say.

**John:** Yeah. I worry that I’m faking it. You know what, I probably could work on that scene. But I don’t want to work on that scene. Because procrastination in an illness are similar kind of symptoms. I just don’t want to do that. Almost anything else would feel better than working on that scene right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I love that you thought you would get good answers on Twitter, because I wish to god I could have, I don’t know, organized some response so that you put that up there and suddenly it’s like 98% of people think I should work.

**John:** All right man. I’ll do it.

**Craig:** OK. Twitter told me.

**John:** OK. Twitter told me to.

Twitter told you something as well this past week. There’s some follow up on last week’s episode where we were talking about Hollywood falling apart. What was the follow up here?

**Craig:** So Twitter user Nick Webber pointed out that I was incorrect when I said that Napster showed up in the early ‘90s. It did not. It showed up in 1999. I don’t know what kind of brain fever was raging through my head there. And I understand that Mike August also pointed out how wrong I was, hopefully to his great joy.

**John:** Yes. Mike, my husband, is very, very good about when things happened. And I’m not. I just have no skill at that at all. So like you could say, “Oh, you know, back in the caveman days, in the 1400s,” I would – I mean, it all just kind of blurs together for me. So there’s the past, there’s a future, it’s all kind of the same. I’m so much in the moment, Craig. I’m right here, right now. That’s all I worry about.

**Craig:** Love it. I’m all about the future, man.

**John:** You are?

**Craig:** Future Craig.

**John:** What is Future Craig most excited about?

**Craig:** Oh, Future Craig is, well, Future Craig actually – if Future Craig comes true, Future Craig could have some really cool news for everybody very, very soon, career-wise news.

**John:** Yeah, that’s good.

**Craig:** But Future Craig could also be curled up in a ball crying, which is usually what Future Craig ends up doing.

**John:** I’ve noticed over the last few months that Future John has been much more nervous about making predictions about projects because you have enough movies made, enough of things happen, and you sort of know that there’s a bunch of bumps coming. And so you don’t know when they’re going to come, so when I talk with my team about like, oh, these are the things. But there’s a very likely chance that this will just not happen at all. It’s because, you know, I’ve just been through this – it’s not my first rodeo. I’ve been thrown from the horse enough times.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. It always hurts, but it does hurt less than it used to. If you get thrown off the horse at your first rodeo, I presume you think, “Well, this is it. I’m just going to be thrown off my horse over, and over, and over.” But, you know, then you have a few successful rodeos, and I’m not sure how that’s defined exactly in the rodeo world. Like how do you win the rodeo? Can you win a rodeo?

**John:** There’s judging. There’s the amount of time you stay on the horse. There’s things you do.

**Craig:** Yes, time.

**John:** The Bucking Bronco.

**Craig:** That’s right. There was a movie, it was called 8 Seconds. Do you remember it?

**John:** It was called 8 Seconds. Yeah.

**Craig:** With the guy from 90210.

**John:** Luke Perry.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** What new TV show, what hot new TV show is Luke Perry starring in right now?

**Craig:** Um….you’re asking me?

**John:** This is my thing where I stump you on current events in popular culture.

**Craig:** Luke Perry is currently starring on – it’s called Mummy Dad.

**John:** No, but that would be great. Mummy Dad would be great. Because he’s both a mummy and a dad?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** It’s a great title. I mean, that’s going to show up on Nick. I feel like that’s going to show up on Nick next year.

**John:** 100%. Luke Perry is playing Archie’s dad in Riverdale.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** The CW show.

**Craig:** And that’s sort of like the gothic David Lynch take on Riverdale?

**John:** Yes. Craig, really good. See, you got that part.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I love – did you know that I love Archie comics? Did you know this?

**John:** I had no idea that you loved Archie comics. So tell me about Archie comics. I don’t get Archie comics at all, so give me the one-minute pitch for Archie.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, by the way, this is why I will never watch this show because it’s not – it’s an alternate take. I want the real take. I want real Archie. So, my sister and I, we lived in a fairly small house. And we had to share a bathroom. And I had no reading material in the bathroom whatsoever. My sister would pile the bathroom high with Archie Comics Digest, which would include Archie, and then there was Betty and Veronica.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Then there were some that were just Jughead based.

**John:** Wow, just Jughead.

**Craig:** Just Jughead. But, you know, and on occasion you’d get a little special one like a Dalton issue, who is always great, or Moose and Midge. Big Ethel. Here comes Principal Weatherbee. I know all of them. Mrs. Grundy. I know them all.

I know their last names. [laughs] Just kind of crazy. And so I would read them. It was either that or reading her Seventeen Magazine. And after two issues of Seventeen Magazine, you realize every Seventeen Magazine has two articles. One article is How to Look Sexy. And the other article is Don’t Have Sex. It’s the worst magazine ever. They should just call it, you know, Mind-F Magazine.

But regardless, I would just the Archie Comics. So I have read thousands of them.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Thousands.

**John:** I’ve never read a single Archie comic somehow. And so just through popular culture I knew just Archie, Betty and Veronica, and Jughead. I knew that those were four of the characters.

**Craig:** Well, you know Reggie, right? You know Reggie Mantle?

**John:** I have no idea who Reggie is.

**Craig:** So, Archie Andrews, Better Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle, Jughead Jones.

**John:** Yeah, that makes sense.

**Craig:** Moose – ooh, I’m missing his last name. I’m not an A plus on Archie trivia. But, yeah, Reggie was the jerk.

**John:** OK, yeah.

**Craig:** He was Archie’s competition.

**John:** So it’s a TV show on the CW. So if you want to watch that show, you can watch that show and see Luke Perry there. A long way back around. So, usually we start with our leading topics and we get to our questions and we sort of rush through them. I was wondering if today we might want to start with our questions and really focus on them to begin with.

**Craig:** John, you know, that if you ask something my answer to you is yes. Always.

**John:** Our first question comes from Dorian in Tempe. And he wrote in with audio, so let’s take a listen.

Dorian: Hey John and Craig. My wife and I are having trouble deciding when we should move to LA. She’s a preschool teacher and I’m on my last semester of film school studying screenwriting. Because of the school year and her contract, we have to choose between moving in July of this year or moving out in January of 2018. So I guess my real question is should we wait until the winter before staffing season, or should we just move out as soon as possible? Yours in perpetual umbrage and grace, Dorian Chin. PS, hi Godwin.

**John:** All right, so Dorian, first off, welcome to Los Angeles whenever you do come. You need to decide July or November of next year, or January of next year.

**Craig:** January, yeah.

**John:** I say now. I think you’re honestly better showing up now, because people always say like, “Oh, I’ll move right before staffing season,” but it takes a while to get your bearings. I think you should just come now if you can.

**Craig:** Oh, Dorian, this is one of those days when you reach out to the people that you think are wise and they don’t help you at all. Because I don’t agree with John.

**John:** All right. Great.

**Craig:** I think you should – if your wife is working and earning money, and it sounds like you are not, because you are in film school, you should make as much money as you can before you get out here. You can start writing now. You can start working on spec scripts that you could then lob at studios, but I would always err on the side of saving up as much as you can. Unless your wife is able to line up a new job in LA. If she can, then of course you would come out here as soon as you can. And I would strongly urge that you consider that. This town is punishing to the unemployed. And you can presume that even if you are a fantastic writer, and I hope you are, there will be a break in period at a minimum. So, just make sure that you guys are financially secure. That’s the most important thing. I don’t want you and your wife to end up like so many couples do when money trouble happens.

So, my advice isn’t necessarily different than John’s. It’s just, I guess, a different angle.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with Craig that Tempe is probably a much cheaper place to live than Los Angeles, but there are preschool teachers in Los Angeles just as there are in Tempe. Dorian can get a job in Los Angeles. Dorian can probably get a job that’s more interesting or relevant to filmmaking in LA than he can in Tempe. So, usually if people are like just out of college, like if they were a senior in college and they just graduated I’d say move to Los Angeles immediately, because you’re used to being able to go someplace to live cheaply and just get started.

Now that you’re already married, you don’t have any kids yet, this might be a great time to do it, but yes, you always have to be mindful of your finances. But if you’re going to wait, waiting till January isn’t necessarily a better way anyway, because you don’t know that your situation is going to be any more stable or grounded in January than now. I’d say move.

**Craig:** All right. Well, just, Dorian, if your wife kicks you out, you know who to blame. It’s not me. I was your friend to the end.

All right, our next question is from Stuart in Minnesota who writes, “In the upcoming months I intend to submit my television pilot to a number of competitions to make my first foray into the business. These contests don’t let you put a name on the script itself, but the submission forms require a full name. Makes sense. However, I do not want my legal name attached to my script. I have a pen name that is only slightly different from my legal name, same first name, different last name. So as far as I can tell, registering my script with the WGA requires my full legal name. If I submit my script to contests under my pen name, am I running any legal risks or conflicts because it does not match up with my legal name? Should I just bite the bullet and submit under my legal name to avoid confusion? Should I just change my name legally to avoid all this hassle?”

Well, John, you changed your name legally. What do you think about all of this?

**John:** I changed my name legally. So, August was not my original last name. My original last name was an unpronounceable German name. And I changed before I moved out to Los Angeles, partly kind of for this reason, because I didn’t want the first 15 seconds of every conversation being correcting how people mispronounced my unpronounceable German last name. And also just for ease. Like John August is just a very easy name. And that’s been really useful.

So, Stuart in Minnesota, if you really intend to use this other name, not just for your work but in life, yeah, you could change your name legally. It’s not a bad thing to do. I’ve very much enjoyed having a simple name for my life. It’s been really good.

But, you don’t have to do that for a pen name. And a lot of people write under different names than their actual legal names. I cannot imagine that for this screenwriting competition the difference between your pen name and your legal name is going to be a factor. I wouldn’t let that freak you out. Use your pen name. Use whatever name you want to be identified as as a writer. Down the road at some point, you may need to file some paperwork. Do something to make it clear that this is your pen name. There is a WGA process for making clear what your pen name is. But that’s not really where you’re at right now.

For this form, for this competition, just use whatever name you think you want to be as a writer and send it in and win the competition.

**Craig:** Yeah. This isn’t really a problem, Stuart. I mean, let’s say your given name, the one that you didn’t want to use, your legal name was Stuart Smith. There are a million Stuart Smiths. Right? So people don’t care so much about the actual words of your name. That’s why we have Social Security numbers and addresses and other things that identify us. If you register your script with the US Copyright Office, which I should say is preferable to registering it with the WGA, I believe you do have to give a Social Security number or some other identifier – driver’s license number, passport number, and your address. I guess you’re concerned that maybe somebody that has your real name or your pseudonym would say, “That was my script because it’s my name.” That’s not the way the world works. I wouldn’t worry about it right now. The only issue really is later down the line, business wise, professionally, what do you actually want to call yourself? Call yourself that. But no legal issues now.

**John:** We’ve talked about the registering your script in previous episodes, so we’ll try to find a link to that episode. The really short version of this is people always freak out about registering the script with the WGA. That’s just a simple registration service. It’s not an ironclad contract. It’s no sort of like guarantee. It’s just a way of proving that at a certain point you wrote this thing.

What Craig says about registering with the US Copyright Office, the reason you do that is because it provides greater protections in case someone does infringe on your copyright. A lot of writers do neither of the above and it’s also fine and good. If you do register with the WGA, don’t put that registration number on your script, because it’s a dead giveaway that you are a brand new writer who is not versed in the ways of the business.

**Craig:** Dead giveaway. Do you listen to the Schmoyoho guys? The Songify this guys?

**John:** I don’t what that is.

**Craig:** You know the Songify this guys?

**John:** Oh, of course, the Songify people, yeah.

**Craig:** They’re the best.

**John:** They do Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt song as well.

**Craig:** That’s right. Or was that song in their style? I don’t know if they did it. I’m sure they did. We’ll check it out. The Gregory Brothers. Great guys. They have an excellent one – Dead Giveaway. It’s one of my favorites. Dead Giveaway. So good. I love those guys. And girl. They are guys and girl.

**John:** They’re fantastic. All right, let’s get to our main topics for the day. First up, Presidential Spokesperson Kellyanne Conway seems like a fictional character, but her real life way of speaking offers some fascinating insight for screenwriters. And a really good counterexample to some of the points we made in our episode a few weeks ago about dialogue. So, this is my true confession. Because I’ve been living here in France, I don’t see cable news. And because I don’t see cable news, I never actually saw her speak. I was only sort of familiar with Kate McKinnon’s impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live. And I love Kate McKinnon. She’s brilliant. But it wasn’t until I saw a clip of Kellyanne Conway where I was like, oh no, she’s actually a very different thing from what Kate McKinnon is doing.

Kellyanne Conway, she’s the Trump spokesperson, but she’s the spinner. And I had never actually sort of known what spinning was until I saw her do this thing. And it’s like, wow, that was kind of amazing. Spinning is actually a really good way of describing because it was like those talented acrobats who can spin a bunch of plates while walking on a wire. I just sort of couldn’t believe she was doing it and making it seem not effortless but like it was just a fascinating thing to watch.

So, I wanted to find the clip of the thing that I had seen, and I couldn’t quite find it. But go online and look at how she speaks because it’s really just a fascinating thing she’s able to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really instructive, too. Again, we’re just taking the politics out of it. If you’re writing a character who needs to evade someone’s interrogation, she has so many methods of evasion. They’re all evasive. And they are designed to make the evasion portion of the response as short as possible, and then the offensive part to redefine and refocus the conversation the longest part. So, she is – and all of these people to some extent – they are a master of, some of them call it pivoting, some of them call it spinning. Sidestepping very quickly and then attacking. It is an amazing thing to watch.

**John:** Yeah. And the thing I noticed in this clip, and this was before I read this article we’re going to link to, is that she could listen for the words the person was saying to her, and use those words in a completely different context and make it seem like she was answering the question when she really wasn’t answering the question at all.

So, a really great write up of sort of what Kellyanne Conway does specifically is by Lili Loofbourow. And so I’m going to put a link to this in the show notes. She’s writing for The Week. And she defines some of the terms that she sort of sees Kellyanne Conway doing. She talks about Agenda Mad Libs, Faux Frankness, Impatience Signaling, which is both a verbal thing, but also how she carries herself. When the other person is going on too long, she sort of shrugs her shoulders and like, oh, we’ve got to get on with it. It’s a way of sort of taking away that person’s power. Downgrading Confrontation to Repartee.

**Craig:** That’s the best.

**John:** It’s like, no, we’re just chatting. Sexisming, which is basically making it seem like it’s a sexist attack when she’s being pushed too hard. Ice Queening. Mothersplaining. Schoolmarming. Cool Girling.

I really urge you to check out sort of how Loofbourow defines these terms, because they’re so specific and so clever. And they feel accurate to the ways in which Kellyanne Conway is able to apply the different techniques to sort of escape from all these things. It’s like a Houdini way of getting out of an argument. It’s really quite ingenious.

**Craig:** It is. And I think it’s really valuable for screenwriters because it cuts to – I mean, this article in particular that analyzes her cuts to the underlying psychology and subtext of the words we use. And this woman is doing it on a very high level. Kellyanne Conway does it on a very high level. And so, for instance, Imply Bad Faith. And this goes a little bit back to our dialogue discussion about those connecting words. When she is responding to George Stephanopoulos, she says the following, “And you know full well that President Trump and his family are complying with all of the ethical rules, everything they need to do to step away from his business and be a fulltime president.”

Now, the second part of that is not true. Sort of factually. But the first part, the key part, the part for screenwriters to really carefully look at is, “And you know full well that Trump.” And what the author here, Lili, what Lili Loofbourow – what a great name, Loofbourow – what Lili Loofbourow points out about this Imply Bad Faith, she says, “Note how gently this implies that Stephanopoulos has in some unspecified way mislead the public on the point to follow. And the implication in “and you know full well” is I’ll tolerate your unfairness, but not your dishonesty. That is a brilliant amount of stuff to shove under this little tiny cluster of words. Instead of saying, “Trump, blah, blah, blah,” to say, “And you know full well.” There is this wonderful dialogue undermining of the person, as if to say everything you’ve said you know is a lie and we all know it’s a lie, too.

And then you follow it with your own lie. It’s brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant screenwriting. That’s what makes scenes sing, you know?

**John:** It is. And what I also think it keys into, which we talked a lot about in the dialogue episode, is that the point of dialogue is to change the other character’s, what’s happening in the other character’s head. You’re trying to create a change of mental state in the other character’s head. But when you see these two talking heads talking, they’re really not trying to change each other. They’re really both trying to communicate to the person watching them. And so they have to pretend as if they’re having a conversation with this other person, but they’re really trying to have a conversation – their point of influence is the person watching the conversation.

And that’s what they’re trying to do these sort of emotional signals for is to say like, no, listen to what I want you to feel. This is what you want. This is what I’m trying to get you to understand. Not the intellectual words, but the feeling behind what I’m saying here.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when I say, “You know full well,” it’s like that other guy, he’s being dishonest. He’s being emotionally dishonest and we all see this, right? It’s really quite ingenious.

**Craig:** It is. There’s another use for this in a strange way. Kellyanne Conway says these things obviously intentionally. She knows what she’s doing. It’s her job. It’s why she’s paid. But, if you imagine people saying these things earnestly, you have a very funny character.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There’s a great line from the first Hangover where Ed Helms says to Zach Galifianakis, “You are literally too stupid to insult.” And Zach says, “Thank you.”

So, here’s one. It’s called the Walkback. This is another one that Lili describes here. The day after an interview aired with a straightforward response, the White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns. The day after that, Conway annihilated its usefulness with this. “On taxes, answers and repeated questions are same from campaign. POTUS is under audit and will not release until that is completed.”

Now, what’s amazing is that she’s saying, B, yesterday we said A, today we’re saying not A, and the answers are the same. But by saying the answers are the same, you have confused everything. And if you have a character that literally can’t see that those answers are different, that’s a funny character.

**John:** Yeah. It’s great. And so looking back at our dialogue episode, we talked about sort of how important it is for characters to listen and there’s a very special thing that’s happening here. It’s like she’s listening enough that she can gather up the material she needs in order to say basically her monologue back. And so it has the aspect of a conversation, but not really – it’s not really fully a dialogue. It’s really sort of two intercepting monologues.

And that can work if one of the characters is trying to do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The challenge comes if too many characters are trying to do that. And so Kellyanne Conway does sort of feel like a Sorkin-y kind of character. Like one who is so hyper-verbal and able to keep spinning things. But you can only have a certain number of those people in a scene, otherwise there’s no one to be able to hit the ball back to her. It’s like she has to have someone to keep throwing her stuff, because it just won’t work.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I mean, what this says, the act of spinning or verbal evasion is essentially it’s cheating. You are cheating at the game of conversation. You are willfully violating conversational conventions. You are dismissing from the start the purpose of good faith conversation in order to achieve something. You can’t – it’s no fun watching a game where two people are cheating. It’s interesting watching a game where one person is cheating and the other one is trying to hold them to the rules. And that’s what these interviews are like with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But in a screenplay and in a scene, you can have one person cheating. And I think it’s also important to note that if somebody is inveterate conversational cheater in your screenplay, the audience will draw a conclusion that they are sociopathic. You have to be aware of that. I mean, sociopathic behavior is not limited to killing people. Most sociopaths don’t do that at all. But conversational good faith is one of those things that indicates that you have a certain moral character or pro-social point of view. And a repeated violation of those rules is the opposite.

**John:** Absolutely. And what I think is important to note is that by all accounts the Kellyanne Conway we see during one of these interviews is not the Kellyanne Conway in the green room beforehand. And apparently she’s incredibly charming and incredibly nice and gracious during those moments. And so that’s part of the reason why she’s able to keep getting invited back.

And so it’s maybe worth thinking about your own characters is there a performance version of them and then a backstage version of them? And the performance version of them may have some of these characteristics that you wouldn’t be able to stand that character for the whole time, but if you can see behind the curtain and see what they’re able to do when sort of no one is watching.

Some of George Clooney’s characters have this trait where they are so on and then you can see what they’re really like when they’re not in that full glare of the lights. It can be a really nice contrast to see the two sides of that person.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that is certainly another place to go with somebody like this, which is to reveal to the audience their conscience. I mean, we hope – look, I think all of us hope, and that’s partly why Kate McKinnon’s impression of her is so endearing – we hope that Kellyanne Conway at home in private thinks to herself, “Oh god.”

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** “Ugh. I hope this changes, because this is very, very hard and I don’t like doing it. I believe in this guy,” I don’t know why she does, “but I believe in this guy, I believe in the program. It’s just that I am in a terrible position each day and I hope that changes.” You hope that that’s the case.

**John:** So, we’ve talked about sort of Sorkin characters, and you can imagine this in sort of a Sorkin world. But as I was looking at sort of the things that she’s doing, I got to thinking of another show that has a tremendous amount of like really rich dialogue which is Game of Thrones. And yet there’s not – I don’t see characters like Kellyanne Conway in the Game of Thrones situation. And I feel like in most of the talkie-talkie-talkie scenes I see in Game of Thrones, there is a listening happening. There’s always a sense of because you said this, this is the way I can respond. It’s never that sense of like I’m just going to plow through with my point. But do you feel that, too?

**Craig:** Oh completely.

**John:** Are there moments in Game of Thrones that are more Sorkin-y? I’m trying to remember, I’m thinking back to – because there’s some true sociopaths in Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I mean, I don’t see them doing quite this.

**Craig:** Well, no, they don’t do this. The sociopaths usually just reveal their sociopathian quiet moments to another person as a fact and then try and explain to that person their point of view. The most notable example is Littlefinger’s speech to Varys, I think it’s at the end of Season 2. I’m not that good on seasons. Where Varys is saying to him, “Look, what’s going on here, you’re doing bad things that are going to cause trouble and that will lead to chaos. And chaos is a pit.” And Littlefinger says, “No, chaos is a ladder.”

**John:** “It’s a ladder.”

**Craig:** And then he goes on this speech about how he sees chaos. And you realize, oh my god, this dude is definitely a sociopath. And he’s definitely scary. But what he’s saying has merit. It’s the ugly truth. I don’t know if the guys discussed it with us when we did our live show with Dan and Dave, but at some point I remember them saying that when they wrote their first season, because it was their first time doing television, they were short. Their episodes were too short. And they had to go back and shoot a bunch of padding scenes. And those padding scenes inevitably for cost purposes had to be two people talking in a room. And they said those are some of the best scenes of the series, because these characters would fence with each other, going back to our dialogue discussion – not at the viewer, but with each other. And it was very much about a little fight. And you always felt at the end – I always feel at the end of a Game of Thrones scene where two people are talking that one person has won. And that’s wonderful.

**John:** Yeah. It is a wonderful thing. All right, so that’s Kellyanne Conway. I just thought it was a terrific article. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And obviously we could spend the rest of the hour talking Melissa McCarthy’s brilliant performance as Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live.

**Craig:** Oh god. She’s the greatest.

**John:** But I think it’s been discussed enough. But like it’s so remarkable to see someone I’ve known and loved for so long just have a moment in the spotlight there and just steal that moment and smash that moment and just make it the best moment of the week.

**Craig:** Isn’t it just the best part of it is that Hollywood really is not a place where the good guys win. You know? Sometimes, but most of the time bad people do. She is the best person. It’s so – it’s so nice to be able to root for somebody who just can’t not win. She wins every time. And I root for her every time because she deserves it. She’s just wonderful. And, god, was that good. Oh, so good.

**John:** Yeah. So our second big topic is words and specifically the words I encountered as I was going through the copy edit on Arlo Finch. So, longtime listeners will know that I sold my first middle grade fiction book. It is a fantasy book called Arlo Finch that will be coming out March 2018, hopefully.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And I just went through the process of I turned in the book, we went through the notes with the editor, so three passes with that. Just went through the copy edit. And the copy edit is the stage that screenwriters never encounter. So a copy edit is when the manuscript goes into a different editor who goes through it word by word, line by line, checking not just for mistakes but also for little idiosyncrasies of grammar, timeline checking. It was like an autopsy of your book.

And it was overwhelming but also really cool to do. So, two weeks ago I had to sort of go through and look at this Microsoft Word document where she had marked up all of her questions and changes and notes. And what I had anticipated, and this is common, is that in this Word document she will actually just change the things she wants to change.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** And then if I want to not change that, I have to mark it as Stet, which is Latin for like leave it the way it was. And then it goes back to the previous version. And so as screenwriters we’re never used to sort of like our script is taken away and they get redone by somebody. That just doesn’t happen. So as a screenwriter, a script supervisor might go through and mark stuff up for her purposes, but it’s never sort of taken away from us. And this sort of got taken away. And so then I had to go through and really look at all of her changes and see which ones I agreed with and which ones I didn’t agree with.

It was a really scary but kind of cool experience.

**Craig:** That’s remarkable. And I assume that many times when she made a change, you didn’t accept the change, nor did you stet it. You came up with your own twist?

**John:** There were quite a few times where there was a third way. Where I could definitely see what her objection was and I would word it a different way, or I’d find a way through it. A lot of times she was catching things like, you know, two pages I ago I had used this unusual verb and it just felt like too soon to use that verb again. I so appreciated her doing that, because especially in a book there’s just so many words that it’s so easy to get lost in them. And she was good about not getting lost.

But I wanted to talk about some of the things that were sort of unique for me coming into it as a screenwriter because there’s just things that I never encounter in our normal screenwriting profession. The biggest thing, of course, with writing a book is this is all written in the past. And so screenwriting is a present tense form. We use the past when we’re in dialogue, sometimes, like characters can speak in the past tense, but everything else in the script is the present tense. And so to write a book that was in the past tense, I was like, oh well, it’s just in the simple past. But you’re actually using two kinds of past. You’re using the simple past and you’re using the past perfect.

And figuring out the split between those two was not as straightforward as I would have guessed. You tend to use the past perfect when you’re pushing things further back in the past. So, if the present of the scene is in the simple past, then if I need to indicate something that happened before that moment, I go into like he had walked home that time. But within the course of a sentence, you might be using both forms. It was a really strange thing.

And particularly where when you start doing contractions.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So like he’d done this, as you speak you often drop off that D. But you need to put that D there for writing. So it was so many of the mistakes I was making were because I had sort of left off the D of the past perfect.

**Craig:** Well, it makes sense. I mean, you’ve been doing one kind of writing for so long. It’s not that you don’t know how to write prose, but we have a certain writing mind. And when you get into that writing mind, it’s only natural that you would – certain of these things would just feel unnatural. And some mistakes are going to be made.

It’s a wonderful thing to have an editor there whose job is to catch those things. I have someone who works with me and that’s her job, largely, is, well, to listen to me blather and write down notes, but then also when she reads things she works like an editor. Every writer should have an editor. The sad thing about screenwriters is we don’t have editors. We have, well, we have what we have, don’t we? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So I’m very lucky to have Godwin. So Godwin reads everything I write. And so he proofreads stuff. But it’s a different thing than proofreading. Proofreading, like I leave out words all the time, so he’s always catching that kind of stuff. But this was a very fussy kind of thing. So, here’s an example of sort of the ambiguity that would become a problem at points. Take this sentence: On Wednesday, Carole had emailed the entire office about the party, but she mistyped the date.

Is that OK? Or, do I need to say, “But she had mistyped the date?” Or I could say, “She’d mistyped the date.” Was it OK the first time, or did I need to put in the–?

**Craig:** I would prefer, I think both of those would be acceptable because I would understand them. But I would prefer that the verbs would agree and both would be in the had form.

**John:** Yep. And I think that would generally be my preference, too. But listen to the difference in this version. So rather than saying mistyped, let’s say mistook. So, “On Wednesday, Carole had emailed the entire office about the party, but she mistook the date.” Or, “On Wednesday, Carole had emailed the entire office about the party, but she had mistaken the date.”

So, that’s one of those situations where because mistook and had mistaken are so clearly different, the sentence really feels very different. Like you notice that change so much more dramatically.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And those are tricky things. I mean, I assume that ultimately the name of the game is clarity, so that no one is confused.

**John:** Yep. The other things I ended up going through a lot about where the Oxford comma. I’m not an Oxford comma person.

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Yeah, you’re an Oxford comma person, aren’t you?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, here’s the thing is I’m entirely a fan of Oxford commas when it clarifies situations that could be ambiguous, but it ends up being a lot of extra commas in places where you don’t need them. Particularly I find if I have three characters in a sentence doing something, it ends up being like one extra comma in there that becomes just really frustrating and annoying.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that if you’re talking about subjects of sentences, then I don’t even know if the Oxford comma applies there. So if we said, George, Alice, and Jim went to the mall, I would not put George-comma-Alice-comma-and Jim went to the mall.

**John:** Oh, but the copy editor would put a comma there.

**Craig:** Yeah. So to me I reserve my Oxford commas for the objects or the ends of lists. I would not put them in the subjects because I actually want to imply a conjoined action.

**John:** Yeah. Which makes sense to me, too. So there were a lot of situations where that, where I had to go through and Stet those kind of things and have an overall discussion about commas. But here is another thing which if find I had never encountered before. So, Craig, I’m going to give you a sentence, please tell me what word you’re going to use.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So there’s an object in the distance. You’re moving in a direction that will bring you to that object. You are headed ____ that object.

**Craig:** Toward.

**John:** All right. I would absolutely say “towards.” I’ve said towards my entire life.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so Toward and Towards are – you are an east coast person, I’m a Colorado person. It’s a Colorado book. Everyone is saying towards in my book. But I had to go through and there were like 17 times where I had to go through and Stet the Towards back to Toward.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My whole family says towards. I called my mom to ask her what she said. I double checked.

**Craig:** Fascinating.

**John:** There’s other words that are just, they’re on the cusp. And so what I found very useful was to do – Google has what’s called an Ngram Viewer which will show you amazingly all the books that they’ve scanned and they can check by year what word is more commonly used. So you can compare two words.

So, knelt versus kneeled. Which one is preferred right now? Craig?

**Craig:** I would use knelt.

**John:** Knelt is still preferred. Kneeled is catching up quick.

**Craig:** Really? Interesting. OK.

**John:** How about the difference between each other and one another?

**Craig:** They sent messages to each other. They sent message to one another. I would go each other.

**John:** OK. And do you know what the “rule” is between the two choices?

**Craig:** Well, I’m trying to think. They kissed each other. They spoke between one another. I would put one another as the object of a preposition.

**John:** No. So the difference is supposed to be each other is two people, one another is more than two people.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Oh, so if three people are in a polyamorous relationship, they kissed one another.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It’s all about kissing with Craig.

**Craig:** OK. Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Which do you think is preferred right now: clearer or more clear?

**Craig:** Clearer.

**John:** You’re correct. Weaved or wove?

**Craig:** Ooh, he weaved a tale, he wove a tale? I would say wove.

**John:** So, I actually had a debate about this. Weaved is a different word than wove. So, it turns out there are two verbs, one is to weave cloth. One is to sway back and forth. They are similar in all their forms, except wove is for cloth, weaved is for swaying back and forth.

**Craig:** Now, which one would you use for in my little example was a tale, a story, I weaved a tale/I wove a tale? I would say wove.

**John:** Wove. Because you’re making something out of it.

**Craig:** Got it. OK. That’s fine there. There you go.

**John:** Further/farther? What’s the distinction between further and farther?

**Craig:** Those are question of distance, like actual physical or measurable quantity versus quality. So–

**John:** The monster opened its jaw – which?

**Craig:** Further.

**John:** All right. But that’s a measurable distance.

**Craig:** Yeah, but the opening of the jaw feels unmeasurable to me. No, farther. Farther. You’re right. It’s farther. It’s farther.

**John:** I’m very much a farther is for distances on the ground. So, I’m going for farther–

**Craig:** Yeah, but I think if he opened his mouth I would say he opened it farther than the monster next to him. Further would be, yeah, more conceptual.

**John:** Weirdly, I would agree with you. If you’re comparing two things, one is farther. But the beast opened its mouth–

**Craig:** Further. Yeah.

**John:** The usage I was using or it, further seemed to make a lot more sense than farther in that case.

Our last one which came up is less and fewer. So, tell us the rule about less and fewer.

**Craig:** Stannis Baratheon’s favorite. That’s my favorite is when he corrects–

**John:** That’s right, it was in Game of Thrones. Circling back.

**Craig:** Fewer. Less and fewer. Fewer is used when you have a specific quantity. Less is, again, a case of quality. So you are less likely to do something. There are two fewer people in this line than that line. Three items or fewer, not three items or less.

**John:** Ah, but we’ll see. Which is the correct one for this sentence? It was one less drawer to open? It was one fewer drawer to open?

**Craig:** It was one fewer drawer to open. Well, it depends. Depends. If you’re talking about three drawers, and then someone says, “You only have to open two.” You would say it is one fewer drawer to open. Drawer to open. Drawer, by the way, is a New York thing.

If you were saying, “Ugh, I got to clean out my house and I have to go through all these drawers.” And someone said, “Well, we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of them,” then you could say, “OK, it was one less drawer to open,” because it’s more of a quality of drawer opening. So it’s ambiguous there.

**John:** It’s actually not as ambiguous, because less is for a single object. So, it’s only one. So it is a single object, if that makes sense. The best answer is that there’s no good answer and you will always be marked wrong, whichever choice you make. And so that was a case where I ultimately had to rewrite the sentence, because there was not going to be a way to write that sentence that a school librarian would not say that’s the wrong word.

**Craig:** The only way to win is not to play.

**John:** That is absolutely true. So, that was my adventure in copy editing. It was mostly fun. It was so much more exhausting than I imagined it would be. I thought like when I got the document back like, oh, this will take an hour or two. It was like six, seven hours of work going through it bit by bit.

**Craig:** I kind of think I would love to do that job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What fun.

**John:** It would be fun to do on a book you like, but I can’t imagine having to do it on a book you hated. I was a script reader for TriStar for a year. And so my job would be I would be assigned two scripts, I would take them home. I would read the scripts. I would write up coverage. And then I’d bring them back and I’d just do that every day.

And every once and a while you’d read like a really good script and like, man, I really enjoyed this, I really got it, I was excited to do it. But then sometimes you’re reading a script and you’re like five pages in and like I have no idea what’s happening, I don’t want to do this. And there’s another 115 pages. And then I have to write up notes on this. And that’s when I can imagine being a copy editor on something you just despise is just like, ugh.

**Craig:** I get it completely. Although there is something at least, look, when you’re script reading you have to summarize it, so you’re regurgitating it, which hurts when it stinks. And then you have to make a recommendation about it, so you’re critiquing it, which never feels good when you don’t like things. At least if you’re copy editing books, it’s like, well, I can just focus in on grammar, sentence structure, verb complementing, repeated words, you know, the usual stuff.

**John:** Anyway, that was my venture in copy editing. A thing that most screenwriters will never encounter, but it was a good experience.

**Craig:** Sounds like fun.

**John:** So it has come time for our One Cool Things, Craig. Do you want to start off?

**Craig:** Sure. My One Cool Thing this week comes from Chris Sparling, guest of the show, friend of the show Chris Sparling, screenwriter, filmmaker. And he wrote and said, “I wanted to pass something along to you guys to consider for your next One Cool Thing.” Considered and approved. “As it is a powerful and timely initiative that would benefit from the added exposure.” And now, John, the added exposure.

Chris Sparling’s wife has Type 1 Diabetes. So, for those of you who don’t know the difference, Type 1 diabetes is essential congenital diabetes. You’re born with it. It appears usually when you’re a child. In this case, with Chris’s wife, she was diagnosed when she was seven. It’s unlike Type 2 diabetes which comes generally when you’re an adult and largely is connected to poor diet and being overweight, so it’s not a lifestyle thing, it’s a genetic condition.

She’s very active in terms of advocacy and several years ago helped launch the Spare-A-Rose Campaign in association with the International Diabetes Federation. So, the way this works is pretty simple. On Valentine’s Day, people go out, they buy roses. Buy one fewer rose. Not one less rose. I agree with him here. It should be one fewer rose, no matter what your copy editor says. Buy one fewer rose this Valentine’s Day and donate the value of that flower to a child living with diabetes in a less resourced country. And again, less, properly used there.

So, I mean, that’s a wonderful idea. Because diabetes is a terrible, terrible situation for anybody. It reeks all sorts of havoc on the body. It is difficult for people in power countries to manage it because, I mean, the best way to manage diabetes in a child often involves not just insulin but an insulin pump that is connected into the body. There’s maintenance and expense.

So, please would you consider this folks? You don’t have to actually buy one fewer rose. You can buy one extra rose, or take the money for one extra rose and donate it. And so go to sparearose.org and we will put a link in the show notes. It’s something I plan on doing. It seems like a terrific cause. And I don’t know what the price of one rose is. Six buck? Seven bucks? I don’t know. It can make a huge difference to a child. So, Chris Sparling, great idea. That is absolutely One Cool Thing. And we’re happy to support it.

**John:** Very nice. My One Cool Thing is Eurostar Snap. So, Eurostar is, of course, the train between Paris and London. The one that goes underneath the English Channel. It is great and I love it. And it takes you right from the center of Paris to the center of London. The challenge with Eurostar is it’s not often all that cheap. And sometimes you can buy cheaper tickets on the planes between the outskirts of Paris and the outskirts of London.

So, what Eurostar Snap is, it’s a way to buy cheaper tickets on Eurostar. So, down to like 25 pounds each, which is great. So, with Eurostar Snap, you get to pick your day and whether it’s morning or night, but you don’t get to pick exactly what train you’re going to be on. If you’re flexible, like if you’re coming to visit for a general sense, you’re not there for a specific business meeting, it can be a really great way to sort of get between Paris and London.

You have to book seven days in advance. They only tell you what your train is 48 hours in advance. But for a lot of people it makes sense. So, if you’re coming to one of the cities, I definitely recommend you try Eurostar Snap. If it sounds interesting, it is snap.eurostar.com.

**Craig:** There you go. See, it’s either you save a child’s life, or you get a slightly cheaper train ticket. This isn’t a competition. Both things are cool. [laughs]

**John:** You can do both things.

**Craig:** Both things. Oh, Jerk Craig. Actually Jerk Craig is just Craig, right?

**John:** Jerk Craig is the real Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, just Craig, yeah.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Panic Episode. If you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, you can send us a link at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the two we answered today. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s the place for all the short questions that you have about little things. And we both answered quite a few little screenwriting questions this week. So, write to us on that.

**Craig:** It works.

**John:** We like to see that. We have a Facebook page that Godwin updates and I occasionally check out. So you can leave notes for us there if you’d like to. We are, of course, also on iTunes. That’s where you can download the most recent episodes. You can leave us a comment. We love those. It’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app. There’s also one on the Google app store. For getting to all those back episodes – it’s the only way to get back to our first 287 episodes.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Woo. 287 episodes. You’ll find transcripts for this show and all shows at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the full show notes for the things we talked about.

And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Riverdale Promo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekHpQRGo8TI)
* [Kellyanne Conway](http://theweek.com/articles/675240/how-kellyanne-conway-became-greatest-spin-doctor-modern-american-history)
* [Google Ngram viewer for toward, towards](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=toward%2Ctowards&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=16&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctoward%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctowards%3B%2Cc0)
* [Spare-A-Rose Campaign](https://lifeforachildusa.org/sparearose/)
* [Eurostar Snap](https://snap.eurostar.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by The Arbitrary Jukebox Experiment ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_288.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 287 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing the end of the film industry, unique character voices, and some things I learned going through the process of copy editing. Plus, we will answer those listener questions that have been sitting in the inbox for far too long.

**Craig:** Far too long.

**John:** Far too long. But we have some follow up. We have exciting follow up. The kind of follow up I love, because I love babies.

**Craig:** Aw, babies.

**John:** Aw. So, a few episodes ago we had Kelly Marcel on to help us with a Three Page Challenge. She told us on that show that she was expecting a baby with Mr. Steve Zissis, who is another Scriptnotes guest. That baby was born. So, pretty damn excited that we have a new Scriptnotes listener. The first Scriptnotes guest joint project baby.

**Craig:** Right. The Scriptnotes Baby essentially.

**John:** It is the Scriptnotes Baby. I mean, I think they were both guests. They now have a baby. I’ll let people do the math themselves.

**Craig:** It’s a Scriptnotes Baby.

**John:** Yeah. An interesting thing about this baby. Do you know this baby’s name?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Yes. It’s not named Craig. It’s not named Mazin. What is its name?

**Craig:** First of all, we don’t really know that. We know what we’ve been told, OK?

**John:** All right. Yeah. The official story, yeah.

**Craig:** But the baby’s first name is Gus. It’s Gus.

**John:** And that’s short for what?

**Craig:** For Gustave.

**John:** No, the baby’s official name is August. So–

**Craig:** That’s not – I don’t.

**John:** You know what? August did not used to be such a common name. I think it’s an increasingly common name. And, again, I don’t want to take credit for that. But I have to say like it wasn’t common, now it is common. My profile has risen. I let people draw their own conclusions.

**Craig:** This is Boasty John.

**John:** The worst version of Boasty John.

**Craig:** The worst version of Boasty John.

**John:** I mostly just want to thank and congratulate. I don’t want to thank them.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think we should thank them. No, no, no. Let’s thank them.

**John:** Thank them for being wonderful guests. And mostly I just want to congratulate Kelly and Steve on their new baby.

**Craig:** I like the idea that this is follow up. Because it’s not really. If we’re going to be technical, it’s follow up to them having sex as far as I can tell. That’s what babies are.

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** And in follow up news, a baby was born as a result of sex. Steve, here’s a great thing. So, I always think about first names and last names together. I mean, we do this all the time when we’re writing. We’re so obsessive about names.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So Gus Zissis has more S-Zissis sounds in there. Gus Zissis sounds like a killer from the future.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Gus Zissis.

**John:** Good choices.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This last week we had two episodes. One of the episodes was a little mini episode I did with Nima Yousefi about his experience as an Iranian refugee. A listener wrote in with a great link to a blog series called Their Story is Our Story. So, if you liked Nima’s story, there are a lot more stories that are sort of like Nima’s.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s really well put together. So, I would encourage people to check out Their Story is Our Story. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Fantastic. See, that’s follow up.

**John:** That’s truly follow up, because it just happened in an episode and now I’m talking about it. This is also follow up. So, a previous episode, like last week, we talked about those little marker words that sort of indicate that you are paying attention. And so in Madrid when I was there, in Spanish you often hear Vale which is basically OK. It’s just sort of an acknowledgment yes word.

A listener pointed my attention to a Spanish short film directed by Alejandro Amenábar called Vale which is actually delightful. And it wasn’t only at the very end of this delightful short film I realized it was actually a beer commercial.

**Craig:** D’oh!

**John:** But it’s a really well done beer commercial. So I will point you to the video for that. It’s quite well done. It stars Dakota Johnson. My question for you, Craig, Mazin, who is Dakota Johnson?

**Craig:** Watch what I do now? Watch how I blow your mind. Dakota Johnson is, A, the star of 50 Shades or Darker of Grey. And she is the daughter of Don Johnson and another person, as people are, like Gus Zissis. Sure.

**John:** Isn’t it Melanie Griffith? I’m actually not sure if that’s true. But, Dakota Johnson has a very special relationship with a previous Scriptnotes guest. That is my challenge for you. Who is that Scriptnotes guest that she has a special relationship with?

**Craig:** Well, Kelly Marcel is one of the writers of 50 Shades of Grey. Is that it?

**John:** Well, Kelly Marcel, is the writer of 50 Shades of Grey, but there is another screenwriter guest who she has an incredibly direct relationship with.

**Craig:** Dakota Johnson used to be married to Derek Haas.

**John:** That is not correct.

**Craig:** No. Oh. Sorry. I thought that was true.

**John:** This is going to be really embarrassing when I tell you this. So, are you ready?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Dakota Johnson played Kate in Ben & Kate, a show created by Dana Fox. She played essentially Dana Fox’s equivalent character in Ben & Kate. Not only that, she was the star of the movie that Dana produced and wrote, called How To Be Single, that Dana was on the show to talk about.

**Craig:** Yeah. You think I’m embarrassed by this? First of all, I don’t watch television, so not embarrassed at all. And second of all, I didn’t see her movie. I have no problem telling people I didn’t see – I feel like I’m now shielded completely from any negative feelings about this because people know that basically I just spend all day writing and playing video games and just it’s the saddest thing. It’s so sad.

**John:** It’s a lovely life.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last bit of follow up is about the Amazing Live Sea Monkeys.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Thank god. We’re finally through to the Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. So, Craig Good, a listener, pointed this out. Craig Good, he might actually be named for you. That’s a possibility.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Good.

**Craig:** Yeah, like Good Craig.

**John:** It’s like the good version of you.

**Craig:** [laughs] All Craigs are the good version – everybody is a good version of me, because I am the worst version of me.

**John:** Yeah, you’re the best version of the Craig Mazin we love. He wrote in to point out that the puppeteer filmmakers that I mentioned who were co-creators of the show, it’s pronounced Chiodo, no Chiodo, but more importantly they’re also the people behind Killer Clowns from Outer Space, which is a cult classic. Which I’ve never seen, but is a cult classic, and I recognize the title.

**Craig:** Was Dakota Johnson in that?

**John:** She could have been in that. Craig would never know.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m happy to believe it. If you tell me it’s true.

**John:** Let’s get on to our main topic for this week, because I think it’s a pretty important topic. It’s going to be the end of Scriptnotes, basically, I think, because Hollywood is over.

**Craig:** Hollywood is done.

**John:** Which is – it’s done.

**Craig:** Nothing left to talk about really, right?

**John:** So, we’re going to center our conversation around an article that appeared in the most recent Vanity Fair titled Why Hollywood as we know it is already over. But hopefully we’re going to bridge out sort of beyond the article to talk about this kind of article. This article is written by Nick Bilton, who I actually know. So this is sort of my preamble to say that I like Nick. I think Nick is a really good writer. I’ve enjoyed a lot of things he’s written. And I talked to him originally about a book he wrote about Twitter, which I thought was really good.

I don’t think this piece is good. And Craig thinks this is also not good. So, we’re going to be sort of picking this piece apart sort of as a premise and as some details. But I want to make sure we’re able to circle around about the question of like well what if he’s right, or what if in a general sense it really is going to collapse. And what signs should we look for when it does collapse.

If you get exhausted with us just ripping apart this article, stick around, because I want to look for how we might find out if the premise of the article could be true.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** How do you want to start, Craig?

**Craig:** We’ll obviously have a link in the show notes, so you folks can read along with this. Let’s just talk first, if we could, about this kind of article. This article comes out every year. Every year.

**John:** Multiple times in the year, but especially–

**Craig:** Seasonal.

**John:** Yeah. But I mean, I’ve read a version of this article for the last 20 years.

**Craig:** Correct. So, very famously Lorne Michaels once said that every season of Saturday Night Live some brilliant television critic issues a review entitled Saturday Night Dead. And it has now been running for 31 years. And no sign of stopping. In fact, it seems more popular than ever.

The death knell of Hollywood has been sounded repeatedly really since television, I think, was created. And it seems like people take different tacks on why it’s no good, and will go away, and it’s all over, and that’s the end of that. In general, I think people do like writing articles like this because they’re very provocative. And ultimately they are low-risk/high-reward.

No one will remember your fake false prediction about something ending when it doesn’t end. But everybody will go rushing headlong back towards you to say, “Oh my god, this guy saw it coming,” when in fact just on average someone just guessing will “see it coming.”

So, you see this a lot. It is ultimately sensational journalism designed to provoke and feed into a general desire to see things fall apart. We do have this in our hearts, this weird rooting for things to collapse.

**John:** Yeah. I think we’re also at a very unique moment in American history right now where we are seeing some institutions that you thought like, oh, that could never fall apart, seem to be falling apart.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s natural to sort of say, well, Hollywood will fall apart. And, again, it could. But I don’t think it’s going to fall apart for the reasons that Nick Bilton does. So let’s start with the article itself and sort of how he gets us into this, which is that he’s visiting a TV show that’s shooting. He’s in a discussion with the screenwriter on the set. There is a raindrop on an actor’s shoulder. And the screenwriter brushes it off. And the wardrobe supervisor or the person responsible for that actor rushes over saying like, “No, no, don’t do that. That’s my job.”

So, that is sort of the premise that he’s introducing us to the current Hollywood world with.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, this is a terrible anecdote. Horrendous, really. The anecdote makes the following points. Creating film and television is incredibly inefficient because while he’s talking to a screenwriter about how inefficient things are, there are 200 members of the crew who are milling about – I’m just quoting from the article – “milling about in various capacities, checking on lighting or setting up tents, but mainly futzing with their smartphones, passing time, or nibbling on snacks from the craft service tents.”

Let’s start there, shall we?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s be… – A person who is not working in film and television visiting a set, I think that’s honestly kind what you would see. And if you don’t sort of know what everyone’s job is, you might see that and say like, “Oh, why aren’t people working?” I would argue that if you were to go into a Silicon Valley startup and see people sitting at their desks, you might have sort of the same question. Like, what are they actually doing? They’re maybe typing something, but are they really working? And sometimes if you look at a film set you might say like those folks aren’t working. They are working.

**Craig:** Yeah. So film production is not like a typical factory plant where everybody is working. After they clock in, then they get their lunch break, then they go back to work. Nor is it like working in retail. The way films are made, you need a lot of different people who are able to do different things. But, the nature of the crew is that it’s a lot of people, none of whom are always needed, but all of whom are sometimes needed.

It’s just the way film production is. It goes in ways. Like a little bit of a military campaign. When you are engaging in a military effort, not everybody does their job at once. When you are on a football team, half the team is on the bench, the other half is on the field. Are the people on the bench just sitting around, futzing?

So, when you’re turning lights around, the grips and the electricians are working. And when you’re shooting, hair and makeup are working. And when you’re blocking out a scene, you have your ADs and you have the cinematographer, and then you have set-dec, and you have props people coming in and getting approvals. Sometimes they’re on the truck. They’re ordering stuff for the next day.

The truth is, if you don’t understand how film production works, then you might think, “Oh, this seems inefficient.” What’s remarkable to me about articles like this is that the author never stops to ask, “Hmm, do I understand how this works? Is it really just – is the easy observation that it’s all just bizarrely bloated in some kind of crazy way possibly true?” If we were to put a camera in Nick Bilton’s office and just run that 24/7 for a week, I wonder how much work we would see happening, and how much other stuff?

**John:** Yeah. It would be challenging to see. So, let’s look at – he segues from this scene of a film set, to talking about other industries that were disrupted. So, let’s quickly go through some of the other industries that have been disrupted and sort of what the fair analogies are and the unfair analogies.

Let’s start with the music industry. Obviously there was a massive disruption in the music industry. Recorded music sort of fell apart. And the so the profits that you used to come into the recording industry are not there anymore. It’s a very different industry, obviously, but that was the one that was sort of most directly hit by mp3s, piracy. It all fell apart.

To a lesser degree, you see what happened in the newspaper industry. You saw book publishing. Other industries where disruption sort of upended everything. But the music industry is probably the most direct one, so let’s take a look at that first.

**Craig:** Well, the music industry was disrupted in this fashion in the ‘90s. We’re talking about 25 years ago now. I think Napster was, and Limewire, and all these sites – I mean, remember Limewire? These were around in the early ‘90s. And I think everybody watching what that did to the music industry naturally said, “How long will it be before the television and film industry falls to the same fate?”

And really the only thing that seemed to be limiting it was just bandwidth capacity and sizes of hard drives, which probably within six years had reached the place where it could happen. And it has not happened. And they keep talking about this like this is the mistake that old people make. Sorry, Nick. I assume – even if he’s my age, he’s old. We think that because we clearly remember this happening that it’s going to happen again right around the corner. That is a quarter of a century ago. And it has not happened.

Why? Huge difference between the way the music industry works and the way our industry works. The music industry was never developing work because music is not massively collaborative. The only collaboration you find in music really is between maybe a producer and an artist, or four or five people in a band. But the truth is, one person with a guitar can make a hit song. The music industry was always about finding those people, the way that indie companies find movies at festivals, and then supporting their work financially like patrons, and then advertising and distributing the work, which is the only apt comparison to the way Hollywood functions for television and film.

It has never been true and it never will be true about movies and shows that one person or two people or four people can do it. In fact, it takes armies of people. The very armies that this guy thinks might not be necessary, but are, to make these shows happen. And so we are simply in a different position. If this industry around us went the way of the music industry, there just wouldn’t be the content. But we know that that’s not true for music. It’s odd to me that the question isn’t why hasn’t this happened to film, rather than the statement clearly this will happen to film.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It was what I wanted to hit next. And we don’t have time for it today, but let’s try to circle back in a future episode basically why has film and television not fallen apart to piracy the way we always kind of thought it might, because there really is not a fundamental difference in terms of technology of why a television series can still be viable now, even though there is rampant piracy, and we know about Game of Thrones. There’s rampant piracy. And yet it hasn’t happened. So, to predict that it’s going to happen seems naïve.

Moving on through the article, he talks about “Hollywood these days seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption. Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content. Its labor is costly. And margins are shrinking.” Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t agree. First of all, I don’t know what he means by Hollywood exactly. He never quite defines that terms. What is that? When I first showed up in Los Angeles in 1992, in the era of Napster, somewhat optimistically, defying all the predictions of disaster, I remember driving through Hollywood. Actually seeing Hollywood for the first time and going, “Wait, what? This is a slum. There’s nothing here. There’s just a bunch of warehouses and a couple of post-production facilities and graffiti and shambling heroin addicts.”

Hollywood, I don’t know exactly what it means. Yes, audiences prefer on-demand content in one sense. I think they prefer it over the traditional way of delivering television series, which was you get one once a week for 22 weeks. You have to wait. There are commercials inside of the episode that you have to wait. Of course they prefer that. They don’t seem to prefer on-demand content when it comes to movies. At all. That’s just a fact.

But the larger question, I mean, margins are shrinking. We’ll have to take a look at his data on that. But, why is Netflix not Hollywood in his definition? When Netflix employs the same crews, and the same writers, and the same actors, and the same directors, using the same methods that he’s decrying here, to make their shows. How is Scott Frank’s upcoming western miniseries that employed hundreds of people and big Hollywood stars, and he’s a big Hollywood writer-director, for Netflix, how is that – and a big budget – how is that not Hollywood?

**John:** Yeah. So we talked about disruption, and clearly you can look at Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, they are disrupting the model of standard television. But they’re disrupting it in very kind of conventional ways. They didn’t find a new cheaper way to make television. They just made really expensive television, and made money making really expensive television. So, it’s a weird kind of disruption.

Classically, you wouldn’t think of disruption as like, oh, you’ve changed the distribution model, you’ve changed – we’re able to make things for like a quarter of the cost. That’s not actually happened. And over the years I’ve seen experiments with like we’re going to see if we can do this kind of movie for a million dollars rather than $10 million. And they do one of those and it tanks. There’s kind of a reason why things cost what they cost. I don’t sort of buy the overall “it looks like it should be disrupted, so therefore it will be disrupted” argument.

But let’s do take a look at some numbers, because one of the things he cites in here, and actually I did tweet at him to ask where he got this number, and I haven’t heard back as we’re recording this, so if I do get the answer I will edit this in here. But he writes that, “Movie theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion.”

So, again, I don’t know what his source was for tickets sold, but for what I saw, 2016 had 1.3 billion tickets sold domestically. 1998, which is 19 years ago, had 1.4 billion. So, it’s lower, but it’s like a point of a billion. So, it’s not like a huge falloff.

I looked at the MPAA statistics, so for 2015, which was the last year I could find them, admissions or tickets sold were 1.32 billion. And average tickets sold per person increased 4%. That means that two-thirds of North Americans saw at least one movie in the theater, which is a 2% increase over moviegoers from 2014. So, that’s actually a pretty amazing statistic that it says two-thirds, actually 69% of North Americans saw at least one movie in the theater. That’s kind of huge.

**Craig:** It’s enormous. And when you see movie theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, that is classic misinformation. If it’s down to a 19-year low, but it’s down by, like you said, some tiny amount, that’s not particularly meaningful. Nor does his 19-year low take into account what was going on inside those 19 years. So, in 1998, 1.44 billion tickets sold. In 2003, 1.52 billion tickets sold. So, I don’t quite see where he’s coming from here. In 1997, total inflation adjusted box office was $11.6 billion. And in 2016, it $11.25 billion. That seems remarkably stable for an industry that he is suggesting is in some kind of freefall.

I generally do not like these kinds of sensational statistics manipulation because it makes me start to question the motivation here, which I don’t think is evil or malicious as much as over-zealous in support of a grabby click-bait headline.

**John:** Yeah. And obviously writers don’t pick their headlines, and so a lot of what he’s describing here can be sort of charitably taken as this is sort of the experience of sort of what it feels like here. And as a tech person coming in and seeing this stuff, he sees these patterns which are classically setup for Silicon Valley disruption. But what I find so fascinating is the Silicon Valley money from Amazon, from Netflix, they’re spending the same money. They’re changing some things, but they’re actually still spending all the money to make the big, expensive prestige things.

You look at the kinds of series they’re doing. You look at the kinds of money they’re spending. It’s not actually different.

**Craig:** It’s not. And by the way, this is not for lack of trying to disrupt. That’s the other thing that’s really important to understand. Amazon, we did an episode about this a number of years ago. When Amazon came into this world of content creation, they absolutely wanted to disrupt it. In fact, their entire model was based on the presumption that is being stated in this article. That Hollywood system was inefficient, clumsy, unnecessarily cumbersome. And that by disrupting it and going straight to content creators and then crowd-sourcing the material and crowd-editing it that they would arrive at much better work, essentially kind of Ubering their way around a taxi cab industry. And they failed not big, but disastrously, to the point where they have just forgotten about that whole thing completely. That was just a complete whiff.

And they failed for all the reasons we suggested they would. So, believe me, they would. Oh my god, would they have disrupted us by now if they could.

**John:** I don’t think they’re going to. And part of it is also you have to understand the economics of things are not sort of what you might anticipate. He talks about a modest episode of a television show could cost $3 million to shoot and produce. By comparison, the typical startup in Silicon Valley will raise that much for a team of engineers and servers for two years. It feels like a very faulty analogy considering that $3 million you’re spending on that television episode is immediately profitable.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because of foreign right sales, that $3 million you’ve spent, you’ve already made it back. Like by the time it airs, you’ve made your money back. So the return on investment on that $3 million is really good. And I think that’s part of my frustration is you see people investing new money in Hollywood all the time, including these tech people, because it’s genuinely profitable.

**Craig:** Right. That’s the strange paradox at the heart of this. He’s saying that Hollywood is going to be disrupted by Silicon Valley, and yet Silicon Valley keeps giving money to Hollywood. Right? So, you could take that $3 million if you really want to be efficient and just buy bean pickers. You could buy, I don’t know, 10,000 bean pickers in how many bean fields. It’s not the way this works. It’s a dumb comparison.

And here’s the other thing. People routinely make the mistake of applying classic ROI analysis, return on investment analysis, to Hollywood, forgetting one very important thing: that people don’t want to just be in the entertainment business because of the business part. There’s that old saying, you know, it’s not show fun, it’s show business. This is show business. Yes, but the flip side of that is it’s show business, not business-business, not money business. Show business.

You and I could make more money doing something else. If everybody simply went towards what was the most efficient way to make money, then I guess, yes, we would all be hedge fund managers, or I don’t know. But even the business people, the suits, that are in our business want to be in our business because they’re drawn to the show. To the glamour. And the celebrity. And the artistic experience. And the notion of creating culture as opposed to a slightly more feature-laden spreadsheet. And that’s why Silicon Valley is so fascinated by Hollywood. They can say it’s because they need content for all their new delivery systems, but in the end content is fascinating. And a lot of this other stuff like how to maximize server load is not.

**John:** It’s not. It’s fascinating for certain people, and god bless the people for whom that is fascinating and they get paid well by Google. Let’s bring this a little closer to home and back to screenwriting. Because he talks about if you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s very close to the a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like, yes, that could happen. We looked at the first scripts sort of written by an AI program starring Thomas Middleditch. It was not fantastic.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do I believe that that kind of stuff will get better? I do believe that kind of stuff will get better. Do I believe it’s going to replace our expectations of screenwriters writing scripts? I do not believe that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It falls into a line of sort of Amazon’s model in terms of crowd-sourcing things. Or the kind of inevitable A/B testing that’s done on the tech side, which has the equivalence in our focus group being in Hollywood. They are processes. They are processes that don’t necessarily lend themselves to great works of art.

And I think a thing which may be easy to overlook from a distance is that this isn’t like sort of what color should the links be on Google’s home page, which they can test for. It’s like is this movie working? Is this movie going to be the one that’s going to bring a billion dollars in? That’s not the kind of thing you can actually sort of test for. It actually has to be good. And there’s a qualitative versus a quantitative thing that’s very hard to sort of hit to. You have to get filmmakers and a vision behind that for those things to work.

**Craig:** Well, they keep trying. We will discover every year or so another one of these companies that believes they’ve found an algorithm, and they haven’t. I love sentences like, “If you can give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.” Oh, OK. Well, I can’t wait for that day. Here’s what we know about that wonderful day. Aaron Sorkin has to exist first. Aaron Sorkin has to write a screenplay first. This is the kind of thing that people say at a cocktail party and you just go, “You know what, I have to excuse myself to the bathroom,” because I can’t talk to this person anymore. They’re out of their minds.

It’s not that I’m one of these people that thinks stupidly that computers aren’t going to become smarter, and smarter, and smarter. We’re fascinated by this. We talked about this remarkable leap forward that Google took with translation. But they only were able to do that by feeding enormous amounts of data, meaning language, into that computer, and then having the computer parse through all of this stuff.

And you can’t do that with movies. You’ll just end up, I mean, what’s the point? We’ve tested this with everyone on the planet and we’ve come up with the perfect version. Great. They already saw it. It doesn’t matter. What if computers could write Vanity Fair articles? What if computers could make Michelin Star worthy food? What if robots could play baseball? Putting “what if” in front of a prediction adds exactly zero credibility to it. It’s just provocation for provocation sake. And in particular, when you’re talking about movies, what we crave as an audience and as humans is the new. Computers are really good at copying what’s happened before, right?

When we say that Google translation has made a huge leap forward, what we’re saying is they’re catching up to what humans have already done with translation work. They’re not translating hither to untranslated languages. But with movies, we want new. We’re always looking for cultural disruption. Computers will not be able to do that. That’s not what they do. We do that.

**John:** Yeah. You look at the progress in AI, and it’s always really good at solving games. And so translation you can think of as a game. Like are you getting the right result? And so computers just this last week kicked ass at poker, and they were able to do poker really well, and that was a huge breakthrough. The thing is, there’s not a perfect answer in terms of like what is the right movie. Because you can have the right movie. I’ve seen the right movie. And then I’ve been in like three-hour arguments with producers and studio executives over the right movie that’s already finished and they keep wanting to change things.

There’s not going to be a place where you get to like this is the perfect movie. This is the best movie it can possibly be. There’s always going to be opinions. And there aren’t opinions in poker. It’s clear who won.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you don’t have a clear winner in this. But, let’s do that dangerous “what if” and let’s ask the question of what if he’s right, or what if essentially even if he’s wrong on some of the details, he’s right in saying that Hollywood as we know it is going to end, or it’s going to collapse, it’s going to fall, there’s going to be some reckoning coming. What should we look for if that is going to happen?

**Craig:** Well, you would start to see major studios with names that have great brand awareness shutting down completely. I think if you saw Warner Bros or Universal or Fox or Columbia, Disney, just say we’re out of the business of making television shows and movies, that would be a huge sign. And I think one of those things would have to happen while also not being replaced by some equivalent. So, it’s not like Circuit City goes out of business because Best Buy is just doing the same job but better. But rather we’ve just lost something, the way that brick and mortar stores are disappearing. We know that Sears is disappearing. Best Buy is gone. Circuit City is gone. That’s a sign.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you saw a lack of investment, basically money was not chasing Hollywood anymore, that would be a sign that they’re saying like, “OK, we don’t believe we’re going to be able to get our money out of this investment.” And we are not seeing that now.

So, I’m not saying that the money spigots will always be flowing at sort of maximum volume, but I’m still seeing a lot of money coming into Hollywood. You’re seeing a lot of Silicon Valley money coming into Hollywood. And that is considered pretty smart money. They must have a reason why they’re trying to do this.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** I would also take a look at sort of movie theaters themselves. And we didn’t sort of hit on this part of the article, but it’s always that question of like will the big screen experience persist, because you know television, yes, got disrupted, but when you think of movies they’ve actually been very much the same experience for the past 100 years. You go into a big room with a bunch of other people. The lights go down. And on a big screen in front of you, you see a story being told, about two hours long, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you’re seeing it with this big group of people and they’re all having sort of the same communal experience. The lights come on, and you leave.

Weirdly, that has not changed that much. The theaters have gotten better. The projectors have gotten better. We no longer show film. But it’s the same basic experience. And will that go away? I guess it could? There could be a situation where VR goggles are so much better than the experience of being in that theater that it goes away to some degree. But I think there still will be a social aspect of going out to the movies that persists.

But if we see that the big exhibitors go away, like if money goes away from the AMC theaters, the Carmikes, and all those, then maybe that’s a sign that the big screen movie business – it’s days are numbered.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there is some concern there. There’s a realistic concern about the exhibition business, which I think he is confounding here with Hollywood. Hollywood is not in the exhibition business. Hollywood is in the content creation business. And the distribution and advertising business. But it is forbidden by law, and he acknowledges this in the article, it’s forbidden by law to also then control the exhibition business, which is movie theaters.

Movie theaters have been in trouble for a long time. And they’ve been in trouble for a long time because in part they’re being squeezed in all sorts of ways. And you can see that because they pass along those squeezings to you in the form of $20 cup-full of popcorn. And yet, with all the complaints that people have about movie theaters, and concessions, they still go. We know that. We just talked about the ticket buying practices.

Hollywood continues to try and figure out ways to get around the one price fits all model. And they are constantly butting heads with the exhibitors over that one. Hollywood would love to be able to charge $25 a ticket for a Star Wars movie, which they know people would pay, and the exhibitors are terrified of that because those people are not going to then also spend $25 on Goobers.

So, there’s struggles there. And the movie theaters are struggling. So far we have not seen any kind of wholesale shuttering of those facilities. I don’t think VR is going to – VR to me is completely irrelevant. Has nothing to do with watching a movie. All of us are quite addicted to watching things projected on flat things. Children, too. Where things have changed is when you look at the iPad and little videos of babies trying to touch and swipe magazine pages because they think they can interact with it.

But, no, VR to me feels like a trap, frankly. It just feels like a gimmick.

**John:** I’m going to disagree with you on VR. I think VR actually probably will become something amazing, but I think it’s a mistake to sort of assume that it’s going to replace movies. I think it’s going to be its own thing. And I think trying to make it be something it’s not is foolish. It’s going to become its own special and probably amazing art form.

But the same way that videogames are not replacing television. They are different things.

**Craig:** I actually agree with that. I mean to say that I think it’s a gimmick when it comes to movies.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But I agree with you that the applications are pretty remarkable for other things.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s skip ahead to questions, because I worry that we’re not going to get to questions if we just don’t tackle these.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we’ve been punting these down the line, week after week.

**John:** So I feel bad for Jessica. Would you read Jessica’s question for us?

**Craig:** Sure, Jessica from New York – oh – asks, “I am writing a feature loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale The Red Shoes.” Which, by the way, John, have you ever read The Red Shoes?

**John:** I’ve read The Red Shoes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s horrifying. Hans Christian Andersen, boy was he a dark dude. Anyway.

**John:** Yeah, well we talked about The Little Mermaid and what the original ending of The Little Mermaid was, which was incredibly dark.

**Craig:** And that’s nothing compared to The Red Shoes, where you dance until you’re dead. OK. So, “I’m writing a feature loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale The Red Shoes. Since this is in public domain, I know that I’m good to go. However, The Red Shoes was also a novel written in 2013 by John Stewart Wynne. I haven’t read the book, but I have read the summary. The novel is based in New York, like my story, and addresses similar themes. While I know that my take on this folktale will be entirely different as far as plot, I worry there will be some inevitable similarities. Would I ever have a potential legal issue with the author of this novel if my screenplay were optioned or purchased?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** So, here’s the place where we remind you that we are not lawyers, so we’re only going to give you our opinions that are not legal opinions. I would say that there’s always a chance that someone could come to you and say like, “Hey, that’s my thing, The Red Shoes, which was set here and was an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s whatever.” And then it could be a thing. And you just don’t know it’s going to be a thing. But if you’re paralyzed by that worry now, don’t be.

I would say write your great script, write your great movie, and don’t worry about this other thing. I think you are smart not to have read the other thing. I mean, I mean you did write into a podcast where we’re talking about it, so this wouldn’t be great for a future lawsuit.

There’s no project you could conceive of writing that would not have some other thing out there that could theoretically sue you. So, to be paralyzed by it now is foolish.

**Craig:** I agree. I’ll even go one step further. There is an entire world of precedent for different works based on the same underlying public domain properties. There have been god knows how many versions of bible stories alone. So, right off the bat, you’re talking about a novel that’s based on something else and you’re basing something on that same thing. So, similarities are inevitable, and the similarities in theory would be ones that are related to the underlying material which is accessible to everyone because it’s in public domain.

More importantly, you actually would I have potential legal issue if my screenplay were optioned or purchased? No, because the people purchasing your screenplay, forget option because they haven’t bought anything, but purchase, they are going to do their due diligence and make sure that you haven’t stepped on anyone’s toes, which you’re not doing. You’re not infringing. You’re not plagiarizing. And at that point, part of your contract is that you’re indemnified.

So, if somebody does sue, then the studios just handle them. And they do. They sue and as John and I have pointed out many, many times, seems like every week we hear about somebody suing, and every never we hear about somebody winning.

**John:** Write your script, Jessica. Just write it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our next question comes from Tully Archer. Let’s listen to what she had to say.

Tully Archer: We’ve all read bad scripts, some of them just shockingly, horribly bad scripts, but I sort of cheerily assume that there’s almost always something promising in there. Some cool idea, or interesting phrasing that we can point to to say this script could be good. It just needs work. However, have you ever read something or interacted with someone where you came away thinking, wow, this person will not make it? If so, what was it? What was the thing? Is there something that when you see it you recognize it as that thing that spells irrefutable doom for the screenwriter in questions? Thanks again. You guys are awesome.

**John:** So, Craig, any signals of inevitable doom as you’ve interacted with other writers?

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, we all have had that experience. I think there is weirdly a kind of freedom that is attached to that experience because you don’t particularly have to worry about hurting that person’s feelings. Life is going to patiently explain to them that this is not for them.

Sometimes these people are deeply delusional. What I tend to pick up on immediately is a series of writing mistakes to the exclusion of anything good. Every possible way you could succeed has been foreclosed. And all you have is bad description, bad characters or nonexistent characters. Really that’s more than anything is just they’re not even there. So the characters aren’t characters. The dialogue isn’t dialogue. The action doesn’t seem to be happening. The place where you are doesn’t seem to be real. Everything is just off completely. And at that point, you could try and explain to the tone deaf person why they’re not going to be a professional singer, but really you could just say, unfortunately, sometimes what I’ll do is, “I just stopped reading at page 10. I had a whole bunch issues, I’m happy to tell you why. But I’m probably not the person that this script was meant for. I just am not connecting with your writing.”

And then you move on because it doesn’t matter. They stink.

**John:** Yeah. So now if Craig tells you that, that he didn’t connect with the writing, he doesn’t think that you have a shot.

**Craig:** I don’t read anybody else’s stuff anymore. [laughs] I’m out of that.

**John:** Yeah. I have similar experience about reading through a script and they just fundamentally don’t get it. And especially if like, oh, this is my third script and like I’m reading through and it’s like, no, this person doesn’t understand sort of what a screenplay actually is. There’s a weird thing where it’s like nothing actually clicks. And you flip a page and it’s like you’re in a whole new movie, or you flip a page and it’s like you’re just reading the same scene again and again. There’s just nothing to it. It’s just empty.

So, that’s the experience on the page. Sometimes I’ll be talking with somebody and they’ll be describing the movies they want to make, or how they want to work in Hollywood, and sometimes they’re just brand new, and they’re naïve, and they don’t sort of know what it is. But sometimes they just have a fundamental misunderstanding of what movies are. Or what television is. And I can’t talk them through all of that. And so I can say, oh, we make a podcast about it. Maybe you want to listen.

But there’s people who don’t seem to fundamentally understand not even the business but the creative endeavor of trying to write for film and television. That it’s a lot. And some people just kind of don’t get it. And you can see that they just don’t get it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know you’re in bad shape when you read a few pages and you think what this person needs to do is find one of the most formulaic, basic, by the numbers, copycat movies out there, and read the script for that. They’re not even there yet. They don’t know the alphabet. Never fun.

**John:** It sounds like, oh, there’s a gleeful sort of – oh, this person just doesn’t get it. No, it’s actually upsetting when I encounter that. Especially when they’re really genuinely nice people.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Because you’re rooting for them. You want them to succeed. But you also want to somehow be able to tell them I don’t think this is going to work for you for these reasons. And I’ve never been the guy who can sort of say that.

**Craig:** Very few people are. You know? If you’re on a television show, and that’s your character that’s fine. You could be Simon Cowell. I always admired that. But in life, there’s really not much of an upside to that. One time I did tell somebody this is not for you. And they took it very poorly. It was probably about 15 years ago. They are not currently a professional screenwriter.

**John:** I have had the experience of like there’s the people who are actually genuine good writers, but they’re not good at the whole thing. Like they’re good at certain parts of writing movies. And I feel like you need to find a writing partner who is good at the rest of this stuff. Because you clearly have some great skills. You’re really good at dialogue, but you can’t sort of do everything else right. And you don’t seem to have a good grasp of how you should act in a meeting and that kind of stuff. Those are the people who kind of frustrate me most, because I can see the right circumstances and the right combination of elements they could write something brilliant. But, it’s not going to be me who is going to be able to get them there.

That’s honestly sort of the heartbreaking situation. I have friends who I definitely sense could do it with just like the right combination of things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the truth is if you ask what is sadder, a kid who believes he should be, or whose one dream is to be a major league baseball player, but just can’t make his own high school team, or a triple A player who is almost good enough, but not. It’s just triple A player is sadder.

**John:** it is sadder. It’s a strange thing. To be so close and not get it. To go to the Olympics and not make it to the medals round.

**Craig:** Right. Really, you’re so much better than so many people, it’s just that you’re not good enough. That’s rough. Yeah. Well, but happily that’s not what this question was about.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not this question. The obvious people.

**Craig:** Complete ding-a-lings. Oh, we have another question from New York. This is New York day.

**John:** You can take it.

**Craig:** All right. Alyssa in New York asks, “I’m writing a script where a character is interviewing another character who does not speak English, with a translator acting as a go between. Basically she asks the question, the translator translates it, the woman answers, and the translator translates her response. How do I show this in a script? Do I need to write all the lines twice and indicate that one time they’re in a different language? Or can I just write in an action line Woman talks and then have a line with just the translator saying what was said?”

How would you handle that, John?

**John:** There are multiple ways to do it. When Aline was on the show, she was talking about her French ladies script that had a bit of this where they had to switch back and forth between languages. And she described it basically there would be lines in French when they needed to be in French, but mostly everything was in English. And I think English is genuinely your friend here. So just stick with the translator in English as much as reasonable or possible. There may be cases where if the person who is speaking the foreign language is actually the more important character, I would probably give them the dialogue header. Like put their character name and then in italics or something else put what they’re actually saying, so that we get the vibe of like this is all being translated in real time. But it’s clear that we’re looking at the person and not the translator who is doing the speaking.

**Craig:** Yes. Years and years ago I was working on a script and I made the mistake of having people say something in their language, and then underneath putting the translation. And Scott Frank almost killed me. He almost slit my throat over it. Because it’s unwieldy. And ultimately you don’t get any credit for saying, look, I know words.

So, in a situation like this, especially when you’re talking about repeated, and as a conversation, not just one or two lines, I would probably describe the situation. So, Alyssa is asking questions and Jean-Pierre is answering and Jean-Pierre’s translator is serving as the go between. And then when it’s Jean-Pierre’s time to talk I might say Jean-Pierre/Translator and then put his dialogue in italics.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s probably what I would do.

**John:** That’s a smart way to do it. And, again, if Jean-Pierre is the more important character, then Jean-Pierre, just give him the lines and just say woman talks in scene description. But that’s probably not going to be the case in the story you’re describing. But I would say just basically never do your own translation work in the script. You’re just burning page and you’re burning the reader’s attention. Because the reader doesn’t want to read those two lines in different languages.

**Craig:** And god forbid Scott Frank ever picks it up.

**John:** Oh my god. It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** And when he wants to cut your throat, he uses script paper. He uses three-hole punch. So it’s like he’s paper cutting your throat open.

**John:** Well, he’s an expert. He really knows how to do all this stuff. He’s done all those violent movies. And he’s learned some ways.

**Craig:** A thousand ways to kill you.

**John:** It’s really good. So, Craig, we’re at the point of the show where we have two more topics that we didn’t get to, so rather than try to cram those topics in, we’ll save them for next week’s show. So, next week we will talk about, oh, there’s good stuff with Kellyanne Conway here. There’s good stuff I learned from my copy editing experience. But they’re kind of evergreen, so we will get back to those next week. It was important that we answered these questions this time.

And so important that we get to our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is incredibly self-centered. I was reading through the comment thread on IMDb about my movie Go.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** I would generally not do this, but someone had pointed me towards it saying like have you seen this thread. And I’m like, OK. And so this thread was started by a user asking this question. “Did anyone else notice that even though the film was shot in 1999, and focused on young people, that no mobile phones appeared in the phone? Unless I missed something, it seems like this was a deliberate decision by the makers of the film. I like the choice.” And there’s an edit here saying that the strip club sort of seems to have a car phone, but it doesn’t explain why no other characters in the movie use a mobile when they clearly had the opportunity.

So, Craig, what is your answer? Why do characters not use mobile phones in Go?

**Craig:** I’m going to guess it’s because that would have ended the movie in about 40 seconds?

**John:** No. Weirdly it isn’t. Because most cases in screenwriters and cell phones, I did a whole presentation on screenwriters and cell phones and how cell phones are the death of screenwriting. But it actually wasn’t that. People assume that like, oh, mobile phones were common in 1999, but they actually need to wind the clock back.

So, the movie came out in ’99. The movie was shot in ’98 and it was written in ’97. At the point in 1997 when I wrote the script, these characters would not have had mobile phones. And it’s so hard to remember back in that time, or if you weren’t born at that time, to know that people didn’t always have mobile phones. And these characters would not have had mobile phones and that’s why they’re using pagers.

What I found so great about this thread, though, it goes on for 13 pages. So, hundreds of people wrote in with their theories about why there were not cell phones in Go. So, I found it delightful. I love when people obsess about things that I actually know the answer to. So, it was fun.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** It was nice.

**Craig:** It’s that moment in Annie Hall where you get to be, “Don’t you wish life were always like this?”

**John:** Yeah. It’s like that. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is the much needed resurgence of journalism. Talking about disruption and industries falling apart, much like the music industry, the newspaper industry was absolutely blown apart by the emergence of online media and suddenly overnight their profit base, which was essentially subscriptions to their print versions, disappeared. And they struggled greatly.

And yet now we find ourselves in desperate need of them. Which must be very nice for them to know. It turns out that we need these people to say the truth. And to question people if they feel that those people aren’t speaking the truth. So, what I would like all of you to consider, regardless of your politics, is to actually subscribe to a reputable periodical. There are disreputable periodicals to the left and the right of the political spectrum. But I’m going to list five here that sort of run the gamut from middle left to middle right: The New York Times, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times.

These are excellent periodicals that do investigative journalism. They have slightly different points of views. But more importantly, they are experiencing a moment now where everyone says we need you because we’re drowning in nonsense. We live in a time when a presidential spokesperson goes on TV and decries a massacre that literally never happened. And within minutes people will start tweeting about this. And televised news is terrific in its own way. But only publications can really dig down into the, wait, why did she say that? What is that about? What did she mistake it for? What does this mean? You don’t get that from television.

From television you just get people yammering at each other. So, considering subscribing to one or more of these publications.

**John:** I subscribe to three of these publications. And going back to this notion of disruption, I think podcasts have clearly disrupted some of the traditional media landscape, but what I’ve been so happy to see is The New York Times really stepping up its podcast game. So this past week they started The Daily which is a 15-minute podcast. Incredibly well produced daily podcast that’s looking at one or two stories in depth. So, it’s great to see these venerable institutions like The New York Times really embracing how they can tell their stories now. So, I really do urge people to subscribe to one of these or another great publication of your choice.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. So as always, it was produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Malcolm Nygard. Thank you, Malcolm. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions, I’m on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Some people left some really nice comments about Nima’s episode, so thank you for that. If you want to find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also search for Scriptnotes Podcast to find our app, which is right now the only way to get to all of our back episodes, as you’re walking around. It’s $1.99 a month for all those back episodes. You can sign up at Scriptnotes.net.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, about four days after the episode airs. And that’s it. So thanks so much, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next time John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes Extra: [A Refugee Story](http://johnaugust.com/2017/a-refugee-story)
* [Their Story is Our Story](https://tsosrefugees.org)
* [Vale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlQiwcsV9Q)
* [Hollywood is already over](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/why-hollywood-as-we-know-it-is-already-over)
* [MPAA Statistics](http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2015_Final.pdf)
* [IMDb is shutting down its message boards](https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/05/imdb-shuts-down-message-boards/)
* [Go IMDb Thread](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139239/board/flat/99293237?p=1)
* [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/)
* [Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Malcolm Nygard ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_287.mp3).