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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/stranger-things-and-other-things).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 266 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we will be looking at the Netflix series Stranger Things and the writing choices that made it work so well. The WGA elections are upon us again, so Craig will tell you who to vote for. Finally, we will be tackling four recent articles in the news and asking our favorite question: how would this be a movie?

For the first time, all the stories we’re looking at come from listener suggestions, so thank you.

And, Craig, we’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back. You are currently in Europa.

**John:** I’m in Europe.

**Craig:** We are now separated by how many hours? Nine?

**John:** Nine hours. So it is nine in the morning as you’re recording this. It is 6PM as I’m recording this. I guess that’s our first bit of follow up. At the last episode, I was about to get on a plane to Paris. And I didn’t chicken out. I did it. So I’m now here. I’ve been here 10 days. It’s all going really well.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. And you at 6PM and me at 9AM, we should be roughly the same amount of tired.

**John:** It should be. I’m about ready for some dinner, and then some winding down, and heading into bed. And you’ve got a whole day ahead of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also probably ready for wine and a wind me down. I like to wake up and immediately start winding down.

**John:** One of the things I found challenging about being in Paris this time is usually when I’m here it’s vacation, so like, sure, let’s have wine at lunch. Sure, let’s have ice cream every day. And actually living here, that’s not a sustainable lifestyle, at least for me. So, I’m having to learn how to pace myself. And what living in Paris John is like versus vacationing in Paris John.

**Craig:** God, you know, I never thought of that. But it’s true. You’re in a different country and you think, all right, well, it’s the weekend. Let’s go do four things until we’re deadbeat. Eat way too much. And then have somebody clean our room. Nah. That ain’t happening.

**John:** Exactly. There’s none of that. I’ve had to learn how to do very basic Parisian things, like go to IKEA to buy the desk I need that I’m recording this podcast at. I’ll be sure to include a photo in the show notes of the desk setup I got, because I had to buy a children’s desk, because all of the desks are too big. I could only use a child’s desk in this apartment.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Your little, little child’s desk.

**John:** I’m a little child.

**Craig:** Is it the [Sturmfuhrer]? Is it the–? No, what is it called?

**John:** It’s the Pahl desk. It’s the P-A-H-L, but with a circumflex – not a circumflex, the two dots above the A. The Pahl desk is what I have.

**Craig:** Pahl.

**John:** So, you know, I had to go shopping for school supplies. I’ve had to do lots of really normal Parisian things.

**Craig:** And how are you doing language wise? Are you hanging in there?

**John:** I’m getting by. It’s slowly coming back to me. So, I can get by in French, I’m just not a natural French speaker. And so the goal is to be able to sort of answer back more smoothly as people talk to me. But people can speak at me full speed and I can usually understand what they’re saying.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. For folks who are kind of familiar with Paris, there are all the Arrondissements, which are sort of confusing. They’re laid out like a snail. The easiest way to think about where I am in the city is you know how you see those tourist photos of people near the Eiffel Tower. There’s like a great big lawn and they’re usually taking a photo where it looks like they’re pinching the Eiffel Tower or plucking the Eiffel Tower through forced perspective. You know all those really annoying photos?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I live right near where all those people take those annoying photos. So, that’s who I see every morning as I cut through the park.

**Craig:** Every morning you see Tower pinchers?

**John:** I see Tower pinchers.

**Craig:** God. You start yelling at them out your window now.

**John:** Tourists!

**Craig:** Go back to your country! Swine!

**John:** Swine!

**Craig:** Because, you know, French people speak English, but with a French accent. I don’t know if you knew that? That’s what French is. It’s accented English. Yeah.

**John:** Very true. Well, actually, you know the British accent is just American English and they just change a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. They make it silly.

**John:** They make it silly. Yeah.

Two episodes ago we had Peter Dodd on, the UTA agent. And he said that agents read the Nicholls finalists, but they don’t necessarily read the semifinalists and quarter-finalists. And he said there are thousands and thousands of semifinalists. Greg Beal from the Academy wrote in and sort of gave us the real numbers. So, here’s the actual numbers of how many semifinalists there are.

So, he said, “In a single year, the most Nicholls semifinalist scripts ever was 140.” Which is a lot of scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “That means in the history of the competition there’s approximately 3,000 screenplays that have been semifinalists but were never finalists.” So, considering that some writers might have had two scripts, that’s at least 2,000, 2,500 people who can say like I was a Nicholls semifinalist. So that’s a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** But he also sent a list of the people who were the semifinalist but not the finalist, and there’s some really good names on that list. So, I thought we would end on an inspiring note and say who some of those people are. Names like Michael Arndt. Ava DuVernay. Mark Fergus. Vince Gilligan. Gavin Hood. David Levine. Damon Lindelof. Josh Marston. Melissa Rosenberg. John Spaihts. Frank Spotnitz. Meredith Stiehm.

So there’s a lot of really great writers who were semifinalists but not finalists. So, that’s encouraging.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the implication – I don’t think Peter’s implication was if you don’t become a Nicholls finalist, and you only are a semifinalist, you’re never getting an agent. I think his implication was you’re probably not getting an agent because of the Nicholls. The script may find its way to him some other way. Or, you may write another script that is more attractive that people find you via. But, you know, our general thesis in that discussion that contests are perhaps overrated and the notion that writers have that contests are their ticket to the big time is probably more of a myth than a reality.

**John:** I think there’s also a correlation versus causation thing here. The fact that those writers who I listed there were finalists, well, that was because they were really good writers. And they were successful because they were really good writers. But, being a semifinalist was not the cause of them becoming successful. It was a correlation because they were already really good writers.

**Craig:** That is the rule that is overarching all of this stuff. Because, in the end, if you’re good enough to be a finalist, you don’t need to be a finalist. You’re good enough to be a finalist. It’s one of those things. Somehow or another the good should be borne out. And the cream should rise. And great scripts will be found. So, I guess the advice to people is to think, you know, everything good that might happen because of this script will happen because of this script. I am not trying to use this script to have something else happen. And that’s the thing that makes the good things happen.

**John:** Yeah. The good writing is the good writing. That is the ticket.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** We had a question from Andrew in Maryland. And so he was good enough to send in some audio. So, let’s take a listen to what he asked about that episode.

Andrew: Hi John and Craig. I’ve been a faithful listener since the early days of Scriptnotes and have always found the podcast entertaining and extremely helpful. However, I was deeply discouraged by two episodes – the One with the Agent, and Sheep Crossing Roads. It seems you’re saying there is really no hope for those of us who love screenwriting but live in other parts of the country and world.

I have a hunch the burning questions on the minds of your listeners not in LA are what does this mean for us. If we can’t move to LA, do we just hang up our spurs and write novels? I have a young family, so it’s not feasible for me to move to LA anytime soon. Should we even bother pressing toward our goals of becoming career screenwriters? I would love to know what you think we should do, if anything. Your faithful listener, Andrew from Maryland.

**Craig:** Well, this is a question we get all the time. And the answer, Andrew, is no. We’re not saying there is really no hope. We’re saying there is little hope. But then again, there’s little hope for people here. [laughs] You know? I mean, the deal is, I think I’ve said this before, if it’s a million-to-one shot in Los Angeles, and it’s five times worse in Maryland, then it’s a five million-to-one shot in Maryland. Those are all terrible odds.

So, you know, the problem of course is you have to think that you’re the one in the X million. And then do what’s best. But, it’s tough. We can’t sugarcoat reality here. It’s tough.

**John:** I wonder though if there’s a reality that we don’t actually appreciate, because we just haven’t found the writers who have actually broken in from outside the system. So, we have so many people who listen to the show, including working professional writers. I’m wondering how many of them actually broke in from some place outside.

So, basically they were Andrew from Maryland, and they wrote a script that somehow got the attention of people here. And now they’re working as a screenwriter or as a TV writer. So, if you’re listening to this and you are a working writer who started someplace else and got it all to work sort of from Andrew’s situation, could you please write us and let us know. Because we’d like to talk to you. I don’t know a lot of writers who have had that situation, but it must happen. So, write in to us. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll try to get your story out there. Because I really feel for Andrew.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do, too. I would say if you are in New York, excuse yourself from this exercise. That doesn’t count. But the only one I know of is Diablo. I don’t know anybody else that kind of just shot in here from a non-New York or California, or Southern California location.

**John:** Yeah. Gary Whitta doesn’t live in Los Angeles, but I think he might have been living in town when he started working.

**Craig:** You know what? Let’s also excuse London. That’s a great point. Because London has its own industry, and they make their own films. So, I would say, because we do get a lot of London writers who come over here because they initially work on London productions.

**John:** Like Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Right. Like Kelly Marcel. Well, there’s a ton of them. I mean, Tess Morris. And Kelly Marcel. And Gary Whitta, I assume, is a London guy, because he sounds Londony to me.

So London doesn’t count. New York doesn’t count. I’m going to accept every other place in the world.

**John:** Great. So we’d love to hear your stories if you have been able to start a writing career in film or television from someplace other than Los Angeles, New York, or London. Write in. Let us know. Because we could be wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re often wrong. We love to be wrong.

**Craig:** I mean, John is often wrong. I don’t recall ever.

**John:** Yeah. We cut something out of this segment just now.

**Craig:** John was literally wrong seconds ago. [laughs]

**John:** One thing I’m not wrong about is Stranger Things, which is a terrific show on Netflix.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Even in France, I am Segue Man. I’m l’homme de Segue.

**Craig:** L’homme de Segue. [laughs] Stranger Things, so, so much fun. Who doesn’t like this show? Nobody doesn’t like Stranger Things.

**John:** I found one person on Twitter who I follow who doesn’t like it. And he could be wrong. Craig, I was just so happy you watched it, because I watched it a couple weeks ago and I thought, well, Craig won’t watch it because Craig watches nothing. And then you surprised me by watching it.

**Craig:** Well, my wife said, “You’re going to watch this show now.” And I said, OK. That usually works. When the boss tells me to watch, I watch. And, frankly, what’s great about my position vis-à-vis watching TV is to me TV is the greatest medium of all time because I only watch the absolute best of shows. That’s it.

I’ve seen Breaking Bad. I’ve seen Stranger Things. And Game of Thrones. That’s what TV is to me. It’s an amazing machine.

**John:** It must be so intimidating when you try to do television yourself, because you assume that everything on TV–

**Craig:** How is that possible?

**John:** –if you turn on any random channel, it’s going to be just a masterpiece.

**Craig:** Actually, I weirdly assume that television is nothing but advertisements and then Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones. How else do they fill their day?

So I was talking to Mike Birbiglia the other day, and I said you’ve got to watch Stranger Things. Because, you know, and I hate telling people watch a show, because I know how I feel when people tell me to watch a show. And that’s basically angry.

But it goes down so smooth. It’s like drinking chocolate milk. It’s just, fooop, it’s in you. It’s so easy to watch. So easy to watch.

**John:** Now, there’s a good chance that some of our listeners have not watched the show yet. So, what we’re going to do is Godwin, when he listens to this episode, he will note the timecode of when we start hitting spoilers and then he will give you a timecode for when we’re done. So you can just read in the show notes about what you should skip to.

Obviously we have chapter breaks, but if you’re listening to this on a player that doesn’t have chapter breaks he’ll also give you the timecode so you can jump to the next segment if you don’t want any spoilers.

But I think on the whole we’re probably not going to go too spoiler heavy. We’re mostly just going to celebrate the things it did really well.

We could talk about the casting. We could talk about the production design. The terrific direction by the Duffer Brothers. And Shawn Levy who also stepped up and did a great job as well. But I really want to focus on the writing, because what I thought was so remarkable about the show is it took this premise, which to me felt like if we could have a Stephen King book, or an early Steven Spielberg movie, and do it as an eight-hour show, what would that feel like. And they pulled it off so geniusly. They were able to take that idea for a story and break it out over eight episodes in a way that didn’t feel tedious or padded. I was just really impressed by how they managed the control of information, the reveals of character details. It just all felt like it was of one piece. And so it was smartly done.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how much planning went into it. And this is a good lesson for anyone writing anything. I do think certainly for people writing films. But when you look at these limited series, an eight run series like this, it’s just a long movie is what it is, right, broken up into bits.

And what they did so wonderfully was carefully ration out information in such a way that you never felt under-informed, nor were you ever over-informed. You just wanted more. And that is a tricky balance to strike.

**John:** One of the other realizations I had is that this show, because it was dumped all as a block, you got to see all the episodes in one sitting if you wanted to. There wasn’t that week-to-week fan engine of curiosity or theories about who this character was or what was really going on. I think they knew from the start, because they were doing this for Netflix, that a person might watch the whole thing all at once. And they built it in a way that was rewarding if you were to watch it all at once, and didn’t feel like it was a show that you had to watch one week at a time.

**Craig:** I actually loved the fact that it didn’t come out one week at a time. Maybe a little counterintuitive, but because you may think from an executive point of view, a Netflix point of view, we have a problem here: if we dump all eight episodes of the show out, and this is a mystery, with multiple reveals throughout, what’s going to happen after day one when people just go online and start saying, “Here’s what happened. Here’s how it ended.”

In fact, in today’s culture, I feel the opposite is true. I feel that people respect that and don’t do that anymore. What they don’t respect, however, is the time in between time-lapsed episodes. So, if you do release an episode once a week in the traditional way, between your Sunday and Sunday, you have a week of people going bananas online attempting to explain things and guess.

So it’s like watching a movie with somebody next to you constantly whispering saying, “I think I know what’s going to happen. I think that that means this. I think that this is going to happen.” And you just want to kill them. And I don’t like that over-analysis, the interstitial over-analysis that goes on. So I love that this thing just went bloop and nobody had a chance to post endlessly long, boring theories about what you were about to see.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s take a look at what might have been on their whiteboard as they were mapping out these eight episodes. We obviously don’t have time to dig into the individual things on each individual episode, but what are the big macro notes as they were figuring out who the characters were, what was going to be revealed about each character in which episode, and sort of how the flow of the eight-episode season was going to work.

So, we start with episode one. The whole thing centers around the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers. And so Will Byers is obviously a key character. His mother is a key character. His brother is a key character. His best friends are key characters. And so we’re going to need to establish all of them.

We need to establish all of them. We need to establish the town. We need to establish the sheriff who is going to investigating his disappearance. That he’s not just a functional investigator, but he’s actually a flawed hero kind of character himself. And then there’s one other family that’s going to be very important. And so it’s his best friend, and his best friend’s sister. The family to some degree we’ll get to see. Am I leaving anybody else out of that initial sort of tableau?

**Craig:** The only other thing that you get early on is they establish a villain. They establish something dangerous and murderous that we can’t see. And they establish a bad guy with very stark white hair.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s also in the first episode that we meet the girl we’ll come to know as Elle. We first meet her on the run. She goes and she sneaks into a diner. She meets the owner, a guy named Benny, who seems like he’s going to be a useful, important, sympathetic character. He gets killed off very gruesomely. Let’s you know this is the kind of show where people will die suddenly. And that her life is in real danger.

By the end of the first episode, we’ve connected Elle with the boys. And we’ve pretty much established what the show is going to be like. That the engine of the show is the girl and the boys, the cops, Joyce, the mother played by Winona Ryder, searching for her son, and the bad guys.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what they’ve done is set up a bunch of questions. These are good burning questions, but we’re not overdosed on them. Question, what is in that laboratory? Question, what is the dangerous thing that kills a scientist in the laboratory? Question, it seems like that’s the thing that came after young Will Byers, but instead of killing him, young Will Byers just vanishes. Where did he go? Why would it do that?

And, lastly, the strange little girl, who we presume probably comes from the same lab, I guess, this girl doesn’t talk, and she seems somewhat traumatized. What’s the deal? All great questions. And not too many. Not not enough.

**John:** Exactly. And I thought it was very important that they show you that, you know what, we’re going to connect threads. This is not going to be one of those shows where people are going to be working in parallel forever. The girl is going to meet the boys by the end of episode one. And it feels, OK, you see what the shape of this is going to be by the end of episode one.

You get a sense of what the series is going to feel like. So, episode two, Barb – who is everyone’s favorite character – she is Nancy’s best friend. I should have explained that this is essentially a John Hughes movie that’s happening kind of in one frame of this. And it’s about her virginity. It’s all very kind of classically ’80s teen stuff, played pretty straight, although I would say some of that stuff goes a little broader in a kind of fun way.

But Barb is just this amazing character who disappears at the end of episode two. Joyce sees something climbing through the walls. This is where the supernatural things have started to intrude into our world. And so it clearly isn’t just the mystery of the disappeared boy. This is something that’s going to keep going on, and people are going to keep being in danger from these supernatural forces.

**Craig:** Right. And, again, for every bit – and this is what these guys are really good at – every time they gave us answer, they would then give us another question.

So, they give us an answer about this girl, Eleven. One answer is that, yes, she is from the hospital, and yes, bad people are chasing her, and no, she’s not a bad person. She’s a good person. But we also learn that she can move things with her mind. How? And yet still more questions. And she gives, I think, the boys the ultimate question at the end of this episode when she attempts to explain to them where Will is.

And she does it by taking – silently, no words – she shows that – they are all on their little Dungeons & Dragons game board. And then she flips the board over, puts Will on the back of the board, and puts him near a monster.

So, that’s a ton of questions. What the hell does that mean, right? But it was great. We learned a lot. And then they’re like, uh-huh, did you enjoy that information? Here comes more questions. Same thing with Barb. Barb vanishes. We get a little bit of information. There is some blood involved. And then she’s gone again. And someone has taken a picture – Will’s brother has taken a picture. So there’s a little bit of evidence now of something. And we also have this wonderful story of a mother who we all believe, and no one else believes, and that’s always just fun, you know. That’s just fun tension for us.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things so crucial here is as an audience we are basically caught up with the characters. So, Eleven obviously has more information than we do. The bad guys have more information than we do. But everybody else is basically where we’re at. In some cases we have more information because we’ve seen multiple perspectives on things. But we’re never given a lot more information than what the characters themselves have. And I think that’s part of the reason why we can relate so well to the characters because we understand their confusion and frustration because we are confused, too.

We’re really wondering what’s happened. We’re wondering whether Winona Ryder is crazy. We’re wondering what the next best thing is to do.

The boys are great, but they’re also cocky and confident in a way that really helps propel the story. And I feel like other probably older, more rational characters, might have taken a step back and really looked at it more objectively. I love that they just went for it. And because they were kids, they just plowed right ahead.

**Craig:** That’s the gift here. And it’s a great writing lesson. When you have something that’s a problem, you can easily convert into an asset. It’s a problem like to say, well, a policeman or a 30-year-old will look at this in a certain way and just grab this girl by the shoulders and say I’m going to have you now explain to me carefully.

But they don’t want that, so they use 12-year-old boys, who are Labrador puppies. And that’s so much more fun. Similarly, you have a moment in this episode where we see a flashback from Elle where she is remembering her past life with this white-haired villain character played by Matthew Modine. And he’s having her thrown into a little solitary confinement cell. We don’t know why. We don’t know why she’s having just that little scrap of a memory. We don’t know why she won’t speak.

But you know what we do know? She’s clearly been traumatized. And so they’ve taken this problem – why isn’t this person telling us everything she knows – and made it an asset. She’s traumatized. She can’t. It’s very smart.

**John:** Plowing episode, episode three, we see Joyce communicating with Will, but also Will’s body is found, which was a big shocker. That was sort of a – if this were a week-to-week episode kind of series, you would be stunned by that having happened. At the end of the episode, his body is pulled from the lake. After watching that episode, we took a break. We didn’t watch it anymore until the next night. And I thought for a while like, oh, so I guess he really is dead and maybe it’s a ghost. I mean, it really does change your perspective on the things you’ve seen up to that point, because you’re expecting like, oh, well, they’re going to find him somehow because he is somewhere. His spirit is somewhere. They’ll find him. His body will somehow come back.

And the answer is no.

**Craig:** This was the only thing where I stumbled a little bit because at this point in the show they have setup Elle as a kind of moral and informational authority. She’s right always. And she has superpowers and she’s been there. And she’s already told them he’s not dead.

So, the part of the show I liked the least was the character of the three boys, it was the skeptic character, because there was no damn reason for him to be skeptical. Once she closed a door with her mind, yeah, I’m in. I’m in. You clearly know what you’re talking about. And the fact that she literally got them to hear Will’s voice very briefly through a walkie-talkie and similarly Will’s mother is experiencing a kind of communication with Will through lights, which is really beautiful and interesting. So, I never believe for a second that that was actually Will’s body.

And I was shocked that even one of the boys believed for a second that that was Will’s body. Regardless, we have certainly more questions. Even if you don’t believe that that’s Will’s body, and I never did, why is there a fake Will’s body in the lake? [laughs] That, to me, is a really good question. And if the obvious answer is because people want to fool you into thinking he’s dead, the question is but why. So then they know where he is. We also – we get an answer to Elle. That this man put her in – that flashback – he put her in solitary confinement because she refused to use her powers to hurt a cat.

But what comes out of that, which is so – then this other question is why is he making her hurt a cat? And why does she call him Papa? And what is going on? You know, you want to know. And what is the extent of her power?

That’s the other thing that’s so interesting, you know.

And then, lastly, the creature who has made little hints that maybe he could come into our world, now very clearly is showing that it can come into our world. And so there is now the question of the threat will this happen again.

**John:** Yep. I was a huge fan of both Alias and Lost. They were great shows. I watched every episode of both. But one of the challenges those shows had is because they were longer series, and because they had to go on for multiple seasons and the creators didn’t even know how long they were going to be going on in some cases, the mysteries, the little things they would seed, you weren’t sure when they would pay off or if they would pay off.

Going into this series that was eight episodes long, I could see things like Will’s body, is that really a fake body. What’s going on here? And I knew like, you know what, it’s eight episodes. I have a strong hunch that it’s going to pay off. And I think I gave the creators a little extra pass on some things because I knew that they only had eight episodes and that there was a plan for it.

I always felt confident that they knew both where the whole series was going, but also how they were going to structure the information within the episodes. And that’s a very tough thing is how do you make this one hour really enjoyable, but also be a great puzzle piece for the whole eight episodes.

**Craig:** 100%. And, you know, look, I like the genre of serialized mystery. I really do. But when it isn’t closed ended, it inevitably turns bad. I loved Twin Peaks. I loved it. But at some point it became clear that they were in a space where they were not writing backwards from an ending. And that’s a dangerous thing, because theoretically you’ve lost all sense of unity. And a mystery, unlike other serialized shows, like action shows, cop shows, procedurals, a mystery has an ending. And so it is a dangerous thing to write an open-ended mystery.

You eventually will run afoul of setups that don’t pay off. It’s inevitable. And so, yes, I would not have started watching this if I didn’t know that it had an end. Wouldn’t have done it.

**John:** Once you know who killed Laura Palmer, there’s no reason to keep watching Twin Peaks. It’s not entirely true, but you can’t frame Twin Peaks as who killed Laura Palmer and expect us to watch after you’ve revealed the answer to who killed Laura Palmer, or sort of a murky half-answer to who killed Laura Palmer.

**Craig:** It’s like listening to a song, and the song has this interesting build, and there’s going to be a reveal. I’m listening to the Pina Colada song. And what’s going on? He’s taking out a personal ad. He’s going to cheat on his wife. He’s going to meet her in a bar. And she walks in and IT’S HIS WIFE. But, what if it weren’t? What if it’s like, well, and she didn’t show up, so I’m going to try a different thing. And now I’m going to try to meet another lady. And this song is never going to end.

No! End. [laughs] End. You know? And that’s the problem. Twin Peaks, once Laura Palmer’s murder is revealed, you begin to realize they’re vamping. This show has now turned into vamping. And nobody wants to watch vamping. Nobody. Unless you’re going to like an improv show, and then give me a three-minute sketch and get off the stage.

**John:** Yeah. Challenging. There will be a new series of Twin Peaks coming on Netflix soon. So, we’ll see if they’ve learned that lesson.

**Craig:** I hope they have.

**John:** All right. Quickly powering through, episode four, the boys really contact Will, so that’s the radio episode. We connect Nancy with the monster through Jonathan. And that’s the first time you feel like, oh, these different characters who aren’t really interacting about the monster, everyone is starting to have the same kind of information about things.

It’s also where we reveal that the body was fake. And so you can sort of feel like, OK, all of these threads are coming together in the way that a Stephen King novel, like those threads would start to come together, like in The Stand, or these things where you’ve been following these separate people doing their separate things. Now everyone is starting to understand that they have a common enemy, and they’re coming together.

That continues in episode five. That’s where Hopper sees what’s going on. We establish the geography of our world and the other world and how one is the shadow of the other.

We see Nancy cross over. And we also see Elle in the depravation tank in the flashback. And you see like, oh, that’s how she does her thing and establishing that’s probably how the monster got in.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you start to see an acceleration of answers here. Episode four isn’t really giving us too much new information, other than that Will is definitely alive, and that body is definitely a fake. So episode four was a little bit of a holding pattern, although it did have some fun character stuff with Elle and the boys. Because, remember also, while they’re telling the story of information and mystery, they’re telling a love story between Elle and Mike.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And it’s an adorable love story. They also in episode four, they begin to relieve you of some of the burden of frustration. It’s a small town. There are six or seven characters. All of them know things that would help the other one, and they’re not talking, which is normal to create tension. But at some point you can’t keep it up. And in this episode they say no more of that; let’s start connecting our dots together. That really happens in episode five where everyone is sort of now becoming one big team.

But what’s great about episode five is it also gives you a huge answer. And that answer is what the hell is this other place? We don’t quite know until they very clearly show Nancy actually entering it, and then coming out. And then we go, oh, I get it. It is like upside-down our world. I get it now. I get exactly what’s going on.

And all the way back in episode two when she flipped that board over and stuck his little figure on the back of the board, that was actually incredibly accurate.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So, you’ve gotten all of these really interesting bits of news, and you also now can position Elle’s origin story. We know that she has these powers. We know that she started by being used by the military to listen to spies. Now she’s going to be helping to kill spies. But while she’s in that zone, right, she was never meant to contact this creature. She was just traveling this other dimension to help spy, but while she’s in there she discovers this bad, bad thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that bad, bad thing follows her out. So, in episode six we learn more backstory on Elle. We learn about how she came to be. We learn why she calls the man because Papa, because her real mother was part of this secret government program. They did acid and tried to do sort of psychic experiments. She was pregnant with Elle during that time. So, this man who she calls Papa probably raised her. And that is all very, very troubling.

So, it’s not just a name she’s given him. She actually sort of does see him as a father figure. If I have a qualm with sort of how some stuff played out, there was opportunity to see some real affection between the father and the daughter figure, and it was never there. And I don’t know if they just sort of ran out of time, or they decided it was not a thing they wanted to see. But I didn’t have a sense of Frankenstein’s love for his monster, or any of that really manifested through the end of the show. Do you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I totally agree. And part of it is that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Elle, is such an extraordinary actor that she was frankly more convincing than everybody else at any given time. When she’s crying out to Matthew Modine, our villain, and crying for his saying Papa, like please don’t hurt me and put me in, you know, don’t punish me, I believed that it was the anguish of a child not to someone that she was scared of, but somebody that she loved.

And I needed – I’m so with you – I would have loved to have seen that he had some of that for her. And instead you mostly just get that he’s kind of a stock government sociopath. And I would love if he’s – the implication is he’s no longer with us, but if he does return in season two, that’s something I would love to see explored.

**John:** I agree with you. If I have any other fantasy wishes for a scene that wasn’t able to fit in here, Winona Ryder I think is terrific in the show, but she has to play sort of one emotion, and she gets to dial it between nine and 11, which is sort of the panic/anguish of a mother who has lost her kid. If she had a flashback, had some other moment to give us some other flavor of who she was. If they’d given us a little bit of whatever her and Hops relationship was back in the past, that would have been fantastic. Because I missed seeing another flavor of Joyce, who in this show only gets to be panicked mother.

**Craig:** True. But I will give Winona Ryder all the credit in the world. What a difficult task. You have to be basically completely strung out and realistic as a woman whose son is gone and who everyone is telling you is dead, and yet you believe he’s not dead. You deny the fact you’re going crazy. You’re talking to him through your lights. You’re crying all the time. And I believed her. And that was amazing.

I could easily see that in the second season she kind of goes through a Sarah Connor transformation. Like Sarah Connor in Terminator was basically damsel in distress. Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 is transformed by the experience of Terminator 1 into this ultimate hard-ass warrior, which I love.

**John:** Yeah. I think I just wanted Winona Ryder to have her Emmy reel. And I wanted one more scene for her Emmy reel there, which would have been great.

**Craig:** Well, she’s got some good ones. I’ll tell you the one that I would put in, which I loved. It’s such a little scene, but she goes to the store where she works. We’ve never seen her actually working her job. She just goes there, confronts her boss–

**John:** And takes stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. She needs two weeks advanced pay. And she needs a telephone. And she needs a pack of Camels. I mean, that was great. So well done.

**John:** All right. So episode six, we got our backstory. Episode seven is where everybody comes together. So essentially all these characters who have been in different spaces, they’re now all under literally one roof. We’re in the gym. They’re building this giant bathtub thing so that Elle can float and find where the missing boy is. It was nice.

It was a thing that you sensed needed to happen at some point. Like everybody had to get together and be working together to do things. And there was still conflict between the different characters. Each of them had some slightly different agendas, but they were all generally on the same page.

We also could really feel the ticking clock that the bad guys were out there and they were going to find them sooner or later. So, everything was coming to a head.

**Craig:** Yeah. And good writing lesson here. When you need to create obstacles for your characters, try and create them out of elements of the world that you have organically put in there that nobody would expect would then become an obstacle.

So for instance, we have these flashbacks where we’re seeing how Elle first contacts this other dimension and a monster. And to do that, they’re putting her in this isolation tank. And we don’t really understand why, although it seems pretty quickly like, OK, it helps her concentrate and it helps her access her full power. How smart then for them later to say, oh, if we’re going to win the day, we need to reproduce that with her as good people so that it becomes this fascinating obstacle that no other show would have ever had.

We need to fill a bathtub up with water and salt. And how do we do it. How much salt do we need? And where are we going to do this? Very, very smart. It’s a really good lesson, I think, to take the things that you have, that only you have, and turn them to your advantage.

**John:** Yeah. Being specific rather than being generic. And then finally we get to our eighth episode. And the series has basically promised this from the start. We will go in and we will save the boy. And so Hopper and Joyce go in to save Will Byers. And it’s all cool. It’s all actually really well done. And so we have the tension of them being in this other world, whether they’ll get to the son in time. We have all the bad guys in the real world. We have the monster crossing over to face the boys. You knew that had to happen, but you weren’t quite sure how it would look, or where it would take place.

I mean, the boys at the very first episode, they’re fighting this monster. And now they’re fighting the monster for real. So it was nice to see it all coming together.

**Craig:** Here’s where all of our big spoilers are. It was not at all surprising to me that she sacrificed herself to destroy the monster and save Mike and the boys. That seemed inevitable from the start. I love my Christ figures so much, so when I see one walk into a movie I think, well, you’ll be dead. And that’s fine. Although, of course, in Stranger Things fashion, you get all of these answers. And the day is done, and then more questions are raised at the end to tease you ahead for the second season.

Maybe she’s not dead. And maybe Will Byers isn’t exactly OK. And the good questions to keep us posted for it.

Now, it’s interesting, when I watched it, it didn’t seem to me like a series that needed to continue with those characters, by the way. I could easily see a second season where it’s an entirely different story with different people.

**John:** And they haven’t promised one thing or the other, have they? So, there’s no guarantee they’re coming back.

**Craig:** They have implied, actually, so let’s talk about Barb for a second. So, Barb, the perfectly pitched friend character, the Jiminy Cricket character for Nancy, who’s saying don’t sleep with the boy just because he’s cool – and accurate. She disappears. She’s discovered to be dead on the other side, so that’s sort of the stakes for Will. That helps us know that Will is in legitimate jeopardy on the other side.

That’s really all that ever happened with her. Her mom answers the phone at one point. We never see the mom again. People on the Internet were a little upset. I mean, hold on to your hats everyone: the Internet got upset. Because they felt that she had gotten a short shrift.

Some of the anger came from the corner of gender/queer politics. That she was probably gay and another gay character died. Although, I don’t see why they thought that, just because of her haircut? I mean, I didn’t get that jump. I mean, look, from a writing point of view, Barb existed so that we understood that Will Byers could die. That’s why she existed as a character. But they did say that they heard some of the criticisms about Barb and that Barb would get some kind of justice in season two, which implies a continuity here, yes?

**John:** Not necessarily. It could be a more metaphorical justice. Like basically the bad things that were done to her will be avenged. Or that maybe Nancy will go out there and take down the bad guys. So we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** I leave it to them. But let’s talk about what’s next for them, because I don’t know the development process on Stranger Things, the first season, but I suspect they pitched the pilot. At some point they wrote up a document that was sort of what we were describing. It’s basically the talk through what happens episode by episode. And I’ve had to do those kind of outlines. Craig, you probably had to do the same kind of thing for the HBO show you’re doing, right?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so the kinds of things we’re talking about today, really the broad strokes about what’s happening in a given episode, after you sell a series you’re going to be writing up that document. And that’s the kind of thing you’re going to be talking about with the people who are writing the checks for your show about what’s going to happen in given episodes. And sometimes there’s negotiation. I don’t know sort of what degree they had to wrestle over what things were going to be happening in which given episodes.

But those documents exist before there are ever scripts. And so they’re very important places for planning the big broad strokes of the story. And I thought in those broad strokes documents, I don’t know if they’ll ever be published, they were really good.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I would love to see their show bible. We call it a show bible. Because inevitably things change. I mean, it’s funny. I’m in the process right now of conforming my – so I’ve written two episodes of the HBO thing. And they’ve asked me to kind of go back now and make changes to the bible to reflect how things changed in those first two episodes, because as they’re talking to other broadcasting partners, they just want all the materials to match up. And things do change. And I’d be fascinated to see where they kind of deviated from their plan, their initial plan.

But I suspect that the big points, in concrete. Have to be, or else I’m not sure how you survive writing a show like this.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. So if you skipped over our discussion of Stranger Things, please go back and listen to it when you’ve had a chance to watch the show, because we thought it was great. But now let’s get to the WGA election. And Craig will tell you who you should vote for.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll do my best here. This is what we call an off-year election, so no officer candidates this year. It’s just board members. We’re losing a bunch of incumbents, a bunch of good incumbents. I’m sorry to say we’re losing some feature writers. We may soon find ourselves with a board of directors that has no feature writers on it. It’s just horrifying to me.

Regardless, here’s who is running. Matthew Weiner of Mad Men fame. Glen Mazzara of Walking Dead fame. Zoanne Clack, who is medical doctor and a big TV writer. Jonathan Fernandez, who is an incumbent. Chip Johannessen, who is incumbent. Marjorie David is an incumbent. Courtney Ellinger, I’m not familiar with. Ligiah – I think it’s Ligiah Villalobos who interviewed me and Chris Morgan one evening at the Writers Guild. I can’t remember what it was about. Ali LeRoi, who is a big television writer. And Patric Verrone, evergreen Patric Verrone.

Look, some of these people I don’t know. But I figure probably the better thing is to say who I do know and who I definitely support. I definitely support Glen Mazzara. Glen is fantastic. I can’t believe he hasn’t been on the board yet. He’s hugely active in the Guild. He’s incredibly active in the showrunner’s training program, which is of vital importance. He is a great guy. He is super active in diversity efforts at the Guild. And he’s a practical, smart dude who listens. I love Glen. I love, love Glen. He’s terrific. So, please do vote for Glen.

I don’t know Zoanne Clack, but she’s a medical doctor and I just feel like people that – unless they are–

**John:** You know who else is a medical doctor?

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Dr. Ben Carson is a medical doctor.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I get it. But, see, she’s never said anything cuckoo like Ben Carson. And I’ve got a good feeling about her. Medical doctor. Also, it just seems like she does seem to have approval from a wide swath of people in the Guild. So, I am supporting Zoanne Clack.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Jonathan Fernandez, incumbent, terrific guy. Very, very pragmatic, again. Good and moderate and smart. We should absolutely get Jonathan Fernandez back on the board.

**John:** So I know Jonathan Fernandez from the picketing group. Back at the last strike, he was part of my picketing group. We picketed in front of Paramount Pictures. Every morning at like 5:30 in the morning. And so it was a small group of us and he was one of them. And since that strike he’s been sort of my go to person to ask questions about like, hey, what’s really going on here with these issues in the Guild. He’s very smart about younger writers and sort of the struggle of actually bringing home enough money that you can afford to be a writer. And so he has TV experience, feature experience. He seems like a great choice to get back on that board.

**Craig:** For sure. I can’t really speak to any of the other ones. That doesn’t mean they would be good or bad. Except for Patric Verrone. And Patric Verrone actually finished in ninth place in the last election. So, theoretically he should have been not elected. But one of the people who won an office position was Aaron Mendelsohn who was a board member. So there was a board member vacancy which meant they took and filled that position with the ninth vote getter, which was Patric Verrone.

I want to point out how extraordinary this is. Patric Verrone was the two-term president of the Writers Guild and he is so un-liked that he couldn’t finish in the top eight of board member elections last year. There’s a reason for that. He is a very, very smart guy. He is completely misguided on Guild politics. He has always been completely misguided on Guild politics.

He has one gear. And that gear is in moderation as a virtue. And Patric Verrone’s time is over. It should stay over. And he should find something else to do. So don’t vote for Patric Verrone.

**John:** Craig, I will guarantee you that I will not vote for Patric Verrone. So, if you are a WGA member, you got an email this last week that invited you to cast your ballots. So, do cast your ballot. It is important.

What Craig was saying is that this is an off-cycle election, so this is not the election where we also elect the president and do all of those other things. But these are quite important decisions you’re going to be making, because these are the people who are going to be taking us into this next negotiating cycle. So they’re not the negotiating committee, but they’ll be setting some of the agenda for going into that, so it’s important because it’s always important. And let’s pick some good people this year.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s important, too, that we have voices on the board who are actual voices. My experience on the board and my experience since in dealing with board members is that nine times out of ten board members do what they’re told to do. They’re told to do by the officers and they’re told to do by the executive director. And they have unanimous votes. And what they quickly become is large, boisterous discussion group that spends an hour or two yammering about stuff and then voting as they’re told. And we don’t want that.

We actually want a group that probably doesn’t spend as much time yammering to hear themselves speak, but also doesn’t rubber stamp things. We want thoughtful, independent, specific voices who are setting policy for our union.

**John:** I would agree with you. So, Craig, I’m looking at our recording time and it’s clear that we are not going to be able to get through these How Would this be a Movie. So what I propose to do is there are four different things we were going to talk through. And since we know what they are, let’s do that for our next episode. And we can actually put the links to these things in this week’s episode so people will see what they are, and they can read ahead.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And actually know what they are. So the four things we want to talk about, first is Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise. It’s a story by Joseph Curtis writing for Male Online. It’s about Dr. James Barry. And, no spoilers, but Dr. James Barry had a very interesting life. And that was a submission by listener Craig Mazin, who occasionally listens to the episodes.

**Craig:** Rarely.

**John:** The second one is The Perfect Mom, submitted by Brett Thomas in Sacramento. It tells the story of Gypsy, this girl with a litany of debilitating diseases. An incredibly inspirational story of a mother and a daughter who really struggled against a million possible odds. And the community that supported them. And, wow, things go dark. Things go very, very dark.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, the story we’re going to have you read is by Michelle Dean writing for BuzzFeed. Our third one was submitted by Rachael Speal. It’s about an amateur sleuth. This is 12-year-old Jessica Maple. Her home was burglarized, but this pre-teen took it upon herself to find the scoundrels and bring them to justice. So, we’ll give you an article that is from ABC News that you could look at for that.

The final one, and it’s maybe kind of good that we’re pushing this back, because new pieces are still coming out and I haven’t read all of it, was submitted by Phil Hay who is a screenwriter friend of ours. One of the writers of The Invitation who was on a previous episode. This is called Revenge in Irvine. It’s a series of stories in The Los Angeles Times about a PTA mom and drugs and accusations. And it seems just great. It seems like a Desperate Housewives kind of story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wild. Yeah, this guy, Christopher Goffard, is the writer. And I think he’s done four segments so far, and maybe two more coming out. I’m not sure.

**John:** So by the time we’re recording our next episode, maybe everything will be out and we can discuss the whole thing.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** I thought it was just fantastic. So, we’ll have those up for next week we’ll discuss them. So if you want to read ahead, go read ahead.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** All right, time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is oddly related to something we discussed. It is Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he wrote the Laura Palmer’s Theme for Twin Peaks. It’s so great. The music for Twin Peaks is so incredibly important for Twin Peaks. So it’s Angelo Badalamenti sitting at his piano with David Lynch as David Lynch is basically trying to evoke this feeling in him and Angelo Badalamenti is creating the music that matches that feeling.

It’s just a great description of the process for trying to create any piece of art, especially a piece of collaborative art. So, I really loved it. How he worked with composers. It’s one of those really strange things where you’re trying to describe something that you can’t really describe, so you end up using a lot of poetry, a lot of just imagery to try to evoke something. And yet it’s the responsibility of the composer to make that be music. And it worked out so brilliantly here.

So, I recommend everybody watch this.

**Craig:** Such a great theme. I mean, that theme song does so much to help you watch the episode that comes after it. The Game of Thrones theme song has a similar thing. It just puts you in a certain place, in a certain mood. There aren’t a lot of themes that do that for me for television shows. But, I mean, look Twin Peaks came out when you and I were in college and I can still, you know, I can hear it.

So, awesome. That’s excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be HD 164595? Now, HD 164595 is a star. And it is kind of flipping people out a little bit, because it may be the first time that we’ve actually picked up a signal from space that may not be natural, but rather alien-made.

So, this is our Contact movie story here. And so what they’ve done is they’ve found these particular kinds of spikes of signals that seem like they could be artificial. And it happens to be the case that this star is very much like our sun. It’s really close to the size of our sun, so it seems like maybe it’s in that Goldilocks zone for a nearby planet.

And so they’re now pointing all their stuff at it. Pointing all their stuff at this thing.

Now, to put some – to put a little damper on it. There is one possibility that this is not at all extraterrestrial. One of the things that’s concerning is that the frequency matches military frequencies. So, what we may be picking up is ourselves and we may be picking up some classified military signals from some satellites bouncing back that we just didn’t know were there. And, of course, no one is going to tell them.

But, I don’t know, because the thing is the Russians picked this up first, and now we are looking at it. If it’s not the Russians, and it’s not us, maybe it’s an alien.

**John:** It could be. Now, in the past when they found these strange signals, sometimes it became part of a revelation of other things out there in the universe. My understanding is like pulsars or quasars, one of those, like we thought at first that signal is too regular, too perfect, that must be the alien contact. But it turns out like, oh no, there’s actually these rotating stars that do cool things.

So, if nothing else it’s worthwhile to explore interesting things to see what’s there. Same situation with that star where it looks like there’s stuff circling it that could be something that people built.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tabby’s Star.

**John:** It may be nothing, but it shows us that there’s something we don’t understand about how stuff around stars can form. And so that’s useful to pointing out telescopes out as well.

**Craig:** They did say that if it is artificial, that it is of such a nature that this would be a very, very advanced civilization, because of the strength and the type of signal that it is. So, I’m always reminded of this thing that Neil deGrasse Tyson once said. He said that on our planet we have, I think, 99% genetic overlap with chimpanzees. And so it’s that 1% that make us so much smarter than chimpanzees and account for everything that we’ve done to our planet and all of our technology that chimpanzees don’t do. And if we meet an alien species and they’re just 1% different than us, which is really close, but their 1% is to us that we are to the chimpanzees, we have a problem. [laughs]

So, you know, hopefully they’re nice, if they are real.

**John:** Well, I think the encouraging thing is as a world we function very well together, because we have very sensible leaders who really think through about all the possible repercussions of every action. And so I’m sure we would be completely reasonable and act in a very unified manner about these kind of situations.

**Craig:** What we’re going to do is we’re going to build a wall. And these people from HD 164595, they’re sending rapists. They’re sending murderers. We’re going to build a wall, folks. It’s going to be the greatest wall. And they’re going to pay for it. [laughs]

**John:** Totally going to pay for it. With their advanced technologies, they can pay for it.

**Craig:** That’s right. From 94 light years away, they’re going to Venmo us a payment for the wall.

**John:** Yep. It’s going to be nice.

So that’s our show this week. Hey, it worked.

**Craig:** It worked!

**John:** All the way across the ocean and the whole US, we recorded the episode. The show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from John Venable, and oh, it’s a good one.

So, if you have an outro you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the great place to send your experiences if you are a working writer in film or television who started someplace else and actually was able to start a career not living in LA, New York, or London. We’d love to hear from you.

But we’d also like to answer your questions like the question we answered at the head of the show. So, send those to ask@johnaugust.com.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find the show notes for this episode, including how to skip over the Stranger Things information at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about three or four days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the Scriptnotes USB drive and on the Scriptnotes app which is in the App Store. So, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Have a great week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [John’s desk in Paris](http://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JohnsDesk.jpg)
* [The Nicholl Fellowships](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl)
* [Stranger Things Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY)
* [WGA Election](http://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/2016/2016-final-board-candidates-announced)
* [Florence Nightingale and The Woman in Disguise – suggested by Craig Mazin](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3750328/Top-army-doctor-told-Florence-Nightingale-performed-successful-caesarian-hiding-amazing-secret-WOMAN-disguise.html#ixzz4ISGE4GUd)
* [The Perfect Mom – suggested by Brett Thomas in Sacramento](https://www.buzzfeed.com/michelledean/dee-dee-wanted-her-daughter-to-be-sick-gypsy-wanted-her-mom?utm_term=.taGexxnz2n#.hsy0PPR1WR)
* [Amateur Sleuth – suggested by Rachael Speal](http://abcnews.go.com/US/jessica-maple-atlanta-girl-12-solves-robbery-police/story?id=14341277)
* [Revenge in Irvine – suggested by Phil Hay](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-framed/)
* [Angelo Badalamenti on writing “Laura Palmer’s Theme”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgXLEM8MhJo&app=desktop)
* [HD 164595](http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/30/health/seti-signal-hd-164595-alien-civilization/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John Venable ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_266.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/sheep-crossing-roads).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 265 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we are going to be discussing obstacles, those things your characters hate but desperately need. We’ll also be doing some follow-up on previous episodes and answering a bunch of listener questions.

So, Craig, we should come clean, we are recording this before I actually hop on the plane to Paris. And so while I may sound tired and jetlagged, it’s just because I’m tired and jetlagged from packing, not from actually traveling halfway across the world.

**Craig:** This is theoretically the last podcast for about a year where one of us isn’t absurdly exhausted.

**John:** Yes. We have not quite figured out how we’re going to manage the schedule issue. We’re recording this on Skype, like we always do, so that won’t change at all. What will change is that one of us is going to be either about to go to bed, or waking up very early.

So, Craig, you’re happy to get up at like seven in the morning, right?

**Craig:** I’m going to go ahead and offer myself for the late shift, John.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** I would prefer that greatly.

**John:** All right. So, Craig will be burning the midnight oil and I will be bright eyed and croissant’d in the morning as we record these future episodes.

But, the episode that aired last week, which we actually recorded yesterday, was the episode with Peter Dodd, the agent, and I thought it was just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was thrilled. I don’t know Peter. And I’ve never dealt with him professionally, so it was a total question mark on my end, plus you know me, I just immediately assume that everyone is terrible. So how delightful it was to meet him on the air and he did a fantastic job I thought. Not only of elaborating on how you become an agent and what an agent, but he was very specific in answering questions that I think people are constantly asking and getting the wrong answers to.

So, he was great. We should have him back again. I could easily see him joining us for a live episode where people can ask him questions, because I think they’d be fascinated by this sort of thing.

**John:** But then they’d rush the stage, and that would be bad.

**Craig:** We will surround him with your staff, each of them holding a pugil stick.

**John:** Indeed. We’ll surround him with managers, so that the agent can escape. So, what I thought was great about having him on is that we can say certain things, but they’re not necessarily true – not that they’re not true, but you would not necessarily believe them. But when an actual says, “No, I don’t care about that,” then you can take heart that like agents don’t really care about that.

He reminded people not to worry about log lines. So, maybe log lines are important for a competition, but no agent cares about log lines. Or query letters. He doesn’t sign people off of query letters. I mean, there are whole workshops on how to craft the perfect query letter. Does not work on him. Not a bit.

**Craig:** And those workshops, are they free?

**John:** I don’t think those are free workshops. I think those are highly paid workshops where people are burning their money unnecessarily.

**Craig:** Garbage. Garbage.

**John:** I was talking with my own agent today, David Kramer, and told him that Peter Dodd had done a fantastic job. And he was mentioning that there’s one person who emails him every single day with a new subject heading about this new script he’s working on. It’s like the same person emails every day. And so then David Kramer went up to see Jeremy Zimmer, and Jeremy Zimmer said like, “Oh, that guys’ really persistent. He emails me every day also.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And they laughed. But they don’t read the emails. They just delete the emails, which is what Peter Dodd does, too. That’s not an effective way of getting anyone to read your script.

**Craig:** No. I thought it was particularly interesting to hear from him that he basically signs people through recommendations. And, again, I want to reiterate how clear the culture is – for me at least, and I’m sure it is for you – on our side of the business where it’s not like your job as an aspiring writer is to convince someone to represent you. That you’ve got to really make them see and make a great argument for it.

No, no, hardly that at all. The only way they’re ever going to represent you is if they’re in a position where they want you so much, they’re trying to convince you.

**John:** Yeah, I thought it was so great when he was talking about how he will call like on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon if he just read something that he loves, and he will hunt that person down. He will Facebook stalk them. He won’t like bother to try to go back to the original person and get the contact information. He will find that person and call them and tell them that he loved the script, because everyone loves to get that call.

And so I think so often writers are trying to chase down an agent. Well, in the real world, and this is actually what I found, a lot of times the agent is chasing you down. And that’s a scenario you really want to be in.

**Craig:** It’s kind of the only one that results in success. Because there are a million people trying to get representation, trying to make a sale, trying to get a job, and it’s not possible for anyone I think on the other side of the equation to succumb to things like, well, long, carefully thought out, well-argued debates about why you should or shouldn’t take on someone.

It’s entirely about saying, “I must have this person.” And then they find you.

**John:** And what they’re responding to, it was very clear from what he is talking about with his reads, is by page 30 he wants to know does this person have a voice. He kind of doesn’t really care that much about the story, or the plot. He’s looking at this as a thing, maybe he can sell this one item, but he’s more like is this a fascinating writer who I’m going to be able to market to the town and get hired to do other things. That’s what he’s looking for. He’s looking for a brilliant voice, not a competent pusher-around of words.

And that can be dispiriting, but it can also be encouraging, because it lets you know that, yes, there a zillion people trying to do what you’re trying to do, but if you are brilliant at it, there’s a good shot that he will see that and respond to it.

**Craig:** We always said, well, it’s not so big of a deal or a problem if you write an original screenplay and it doesn’t fit into a category or an easy genre, and it isn’t seemingly the kind of movie that studios are making, because they’ll read your script and think, “OK, you’re a really good writer. Now let’s hire you to write what we do want to make.” We always thought of that as a “see, it’s not so bad.” In fact, apparently that’s the only thing they want.

They only want writers who are original and fascinating and unique. They’re not really looking to sell anyone’s screenplay. They’re looking to get you hired.

**John:** On our last Three Page Challenge, one of the scripts we had, it was a long title that involved Huck Finn. And we weren’t so enraptured with the writing of it, but we were intrigued by the title of it because it was the kind of title which suggested that the writer might have the kind of voice that would be clutter-busting, would be distinctive. That a person would remember and that you could sort of understand why they were recommending you read this script.

That’s sort of what we’re talking about. So just the 19th version of Die Hard in-a-something is not going to be the thing that’s going to get Peter Dodd excited about signing you. And that’s the reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also why so many of these people that take your money to instruct you on how to writer screenplays and formulas and structures and all of this nonsense, all they’re doing is pushing your work towards some mushy middle, where it can be viewed as an acceptable replicable of a screenplay.

No one needs you for that. No one. They would much rather that you write something fascinating and greatly imperfect than something that is very well-structured and tight and boring.

**John:** Absolutely true.

Now, we learn things on these podcasts, too, and the thing that was so striking to me is he said that 80% of his clients had managers, which was a much bigger percentage than I would have guessed. But, again, you and I are from a generation that didn’t have managers, at least didn’t keep managers. And his people do.

And so it was interesting watching his reaction as he raised issues about managers, because he clearly – they’re part of his world, they can be really good, they can be really frustrating. I think he would encourage you not to look at a manager as a second agent, but really like what is the manager bringing to the table. And it seemed like some of the best managers he was dealing with could really help writers focus their writing, just deliver the best possible script. And if that’s a function that you can find in a manager, maybe that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** That’s true. I’m never going to be the person who says there’s no such thing as a good manager because I know some of them. They are good. The ones that I like tend to be more like producers than managers, and they tend to work at the large management firms.

But, I guess the existential question I would ask, if I could, to the agent and management community is if we’ve gone from a place where no writers had managers to 80% of writers have managers, can you tell me, honestly, that things have gotten better for screenwriters? Because it sure seems like they’ve gotten worse. So, life and the business has gotten worse for screenwriters, but at least they get to spend another 10% of the dwindling money they make.

**John:** Yeah. That is a real concern. And was that function that the managers are performing, was no one doing that function before? Or, were agents performing that function? Were producers doing that function? Who was doing that job before? Or is it a job that needs to be done? Apparently now it is a job that enough people feel like needs to be done. It’s just – it’s a real good question about making sure you’re paying that 10% to someone else who really deserves it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The last thing I thought was good for him to be able to answer for us is do competitions matter. And he said winning the Nicholl Fellowship is great. You should do that. You should be a Nicholls finalist. But they don’t really gather together and discuss all the other award winners or certainly not the quarter finalists.

So, while that may be a way that somebody could notice your script, it’s not the way that agents actually find your script. And so maybe that’s a way that someone else who could send something to an agent might find your script, but it does not feel like that should be a focus of a lot of aspiring screenwriters’ time and ambition.

**Craig:** Much to the chagrin of the people marketing these contests. But while some of them are probably run by good people, and maybe some of them are run by people that have terrific taste, in the end all of the chatter and traffic and Sturm und Drang about what competitions to enter and how they’re run and how high your finish – all noise. It doesn’t matter. Nobody cares who wins the Blue Cat. Nobody cares who wins Austin, apparently. Nobody cares who almost wins the Nicholl. They care about one thing, sort of. Right?

And when he said “care about,” what he really said was, “We’ll read those.”

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s all he really said. He didn’t say, “Oh, you’re getting an agent.” He said, “We’ll read them.” Because in the end, they’ll decide. OK, well, I’m glad the Nicholl’s people thought that this was one of the top ten of all the ones they get. Doesn’t mean we’re going to represent that person.

**John:** So here’s where I think it’s going to be frustrating to aspiring writers who are not living in Los Angeles is that a competition or a query letter, those were all those things that a person who was living in Boise could say like, “Oh, that’s a way that I can get someone to read my script. How I can get my foot in the door. How things can get started.” Whereas it sounds like what Peter Dodd is saying is that the stuff he’s reading is coming from recommendations from people who are in this business. And generally they’re probably reading people’s scripts that they actually met.

So they’re reading like that intern who worked there. Or they’re reading that person that they knew from someplace that they might have read something as a favor and found that it was really good. It seems like it’s going to be harder to get your script read by anybody in this town if you’re not kind of in this town. Which is why I think we’ve always been upfront about this is a town, sort of like how Nashville is for songwriting. Hollywood is the town you’re in when you’re trying to make movies.

And if that’s really your ambition, coming here and getting those sort of entry-level jobs and meeting a bunch of people who are trying to do the same thing you’re going to do is really important. Probably much more important than if you’re going off to write a book someplace. Because there are novelists who live all across the country. There’s no one central hub for being a novelist. But, for being a screenwriter, this is it.

**Craig:** We sometimes want to ignore the obvious, because it’s so discouraging. But here’s an obvious point: nobody becomes a screenwriter from outside Los Angeles. Now, you can say, well, that’s not exactly true. It happens here and there. And, yes, that’s a fact. But when I say nobody I mean virtually no one. And the virtually no one thing, you don’t want a business plan for yourself that hinges upon you being the exception to the virtual rule.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry. This is depressing, and yet also inspiring just because he could provide the real answers that we can sort of only talk about in abstract. Also, I thought it was interesting, he said 80% of what he really is gauging about a client is based on what he read. And while the in person part of it is important, it’s not usually what’s going to make or break it. And so having a great interview, having a great sit-down with him is not going to convince you that you are a writer he should represent. He’s looking at the material.

**Craig:** Yeah. You love it, I’m sure, as an agent when you find somebody who is writing terrific material and then is fun to be with in a room. You know that person is going to work. But we both know lots of terrific writers who probably aren’t great in a room. I mean, Ted Elliott always said that he and Terry were just the worst, always, from the beginning. Just not very good in a room. Didn’t seem to slow them down one bit.

**John:** They did just great. All right, let’s reach back two weeks to the episode we did about frequently asked questions about screenwriting. And that was centered around this 81-page PDF that we put out, which is based on Screenwriting.io. A bunch of really basic questions about screenwriting answered mostly by Stuart Friedel. And we looked at a couple of the questions in there.

A couple thousand people have downloaded that PDF now, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And one of the nice things about it being a PDF is we will update it and we will make corrections. There’s lots of typos that people found. So thank you for sending in those typo corrections.

We’ll also update some of the answers. Like Craig had some different better answers for certain things, and so we’ll be updating the PDF and sending out the updates to anybody who downloaded it. So, thank you for downloading it and thank you for sending in those corrections.

But I also think we need to make sure we give an extra big thank you to Stuart Friedel who actually wrote most of those things. And I think if you look back through the transcripts, he got sort of the short shrift of the episode as we were talking through really the heroic work he did on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a professional short-shrifter. Stuart did a great job, as he has done with all things we have asked him to do. And it’s – some of these things people are just going to argue over, well, what is a high concept idea. Hey, everybody can debate that till the end of time. And you know I just like to argue. But it’s actually kind of remarkable that he did all of that.

I don’t really know how Stuart did all of those things.

**John:** Yeah. Stuart did a lot. Basically, I would just tell Stuart like do this thing, and like a machine he would just keep doing it. And so I would sort of forget about Screenwriting.io for months at a time, and then like, oh my gosh, there’s another 60 answers in there. And that’s Stuart. So that’s remarkable.

**Craig:** It could have been tragic. If you had asked him to do something that you didn’t intend for him to do, at length. And then just forgot to have him stop.

**John:** Well, classically that’s how AI leads to oblivion. They’ll create a machine, they’ll build AI for it to say like just keep signing this autograph until whenever. And the AI will say, “OK, my job, the goal of the universe is to sign this autograph onto these baseballs, like these fake baseballs, or something.” And so then it will build other machines to keep doing that until the whole world is just a bunch of fake baseball autograph machines.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. But I’m thinking Stuart probably had a little more agency than that.

**John:** I think he had a lot more agency than that. So, anyway, I want to make sure that we give proper shout-outs to Stuart for actually doing all of that stuff. And so the book only exists because Stuart did it. So, thank you, Stuart.

**Craig:** He remains our hero. Even in absentia.

**John:** Indeed. That’s very noise.

Many people’s hero is Aaron Sorkin. And four or five episodes ago we talked about this Masterclass that Aaron Sorkin is teaching online. It is a series of I think 35 videos. They’re like five minutes long. That are talking through screenwriting.

So, we looked at it. We looked at the promo video. We said, “Hey, if anyone out there is actually going to listen to it, or watch it, tell us what it’s like, because we’re never going to watch it.”

And one of our listeners did that. His name is Rawson Thurber. And he is, in fact, a frequent guest on the podcast. He is an accomplished writer-director. Most recent credit is Central Intelligence. He’s also a fan of Aaron Sorkin, and so I sat down with him and asked him what he thought of the videos.

So, Rawson, tell us what it was like.

Rawson Thurber: It was a walk down memory lane. I really enjoyed it. If you like Aaron Sorkin, like I do – I’m a huge, huge fan – it was super pleasant. It’s five hours cut into 35 bite size episodes, I guess, for lack of a better term. And highly enjoyable. Highly enjoyable. If you like Aaron Sorkin. If you like anecdotes. I guess if you kind of want to get a glimpse into what a writer’s room on a television show might be like. If you don’t know anything about that, that might be helpful.

If you are trying to learn screenwriting, it almost has zero value as an instructive tool. You could pick any five episodes of Scriptnotes at random and be three times as well off in terms of your knowledge.

**John:** When I saw the promo videos, there were other students who were in the class. And so do you get to know them? Do you see samples? What are they up to?

Rawson: Yeah. There are five other writers. Young writers. I think they selected the group out of various graduate screenwriting programs. I think most of them USC, but I’m not sure on that. There’s a section in which each of them brought in ten pages of either a feature script or a television show that they’re working on. And the table reads it and discusses it. Although they only read the first couple pages, and then it kind of fades out and fades back up and they start talking about the pages that they read.

There is a PDF you can print out, so you can read along. You know, it was hard not to draw a comparison or a parallel between the Three Page Challenges that you and Craig do. The one thing Sorkin does talk about a lot is the tenets of his writing, which is intention and obstacle. That every scene has to have an intention, a clear intention, and an obstacle to achieving that intention. Which I think that is really super helpful.

Yes, it’s a founding principle and a driving force, but it’s also kind of esoteric.

**John:** So it’s billed as a Masterclass. Do you think it’s maybe more intended for people who have maybe written a script or two and have some experience?

Rawson: Oh, that’s a good point. I never thought of that. I guess I imagined it was called Masterclass because a master is teaching it, as opposed to it is a graduate level program. OK. So, then if you know screenwriting, if you’ve written a few screenplays, if you’ve maybe even been hired on something, or paid for your work, it’s really enjoyable and fun. But if you already are kind of at a “master level” or needing to sort of attain that level, I don’t think there’s anything in here that you don’t already know, or wouldn’t have already sort of messed up enough to figure out on your own.

Maybe there’s a sweet spot where you kind of have done it, but you’re still moonlighting a little bit, and you’ve read a few books, and you’ve written a few screenplays. And, yeah, there might be some value there.

So, just to be clear though, it is really enjoyable. It’s valuable in that I really liked – I watched all 35. I learned some fun stuff about, you know, behind the scenes on The West Wing, and how Sorkin does it, which is kind of interesting, right, because if you think of one of the best baseball players of all time, Willie Mays, like great hitter, great player, I don’t think he was a great coach. Like just because you can do it doesn’t mean you’re the best instructor.

It’s a bit of a feathered fish, I think.

**John:** So, Rawson liked it, basically.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not surprised. It is Aaron Sorkin. He is a genius and one of the first ballot hall of famers of what we do.

**John:** And so one of the things Rawson focused on there was how Sorkin wanted to approach every scene characters have an intention and an obstacle. So I thought we would steal that little bit from Sorkin and really focus in on what we mean by obstacles. And how obstacles help us shape not just scenes but the entire movies that we’re trying to write.

**Craig:** And how did we miss this? I don’t understand. We’ve spoken about intention four million times, and somehow we forgot obstacles.

**John:** Well, we’ve talked about obstacles in a lot of episodes. So I did a Google search of previous transcripts, and so we bring obstacles, and especially in terms of conflict, and I think that’s a really good way to look at it. Because conflict is what drives scenes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it’s really obstacles are the structure on which you hang conflict. If you just have conflict without a visible obstacle, then it’s just people bickering at each other. The obstacle is really that thing is preventing the hero from going from where they are right now to what their goal is.

Obstacles can be physical. They can be emotional. They can be mental. They can be just other narrative devices. But there’s got to be something that keeps it from being a straight line from, hey, we are going to stop these terrorists to like, oh, we caught the terrorists. There have to be obstacles along the way. And I thought we dig into sort of what kinds of obstacles there are out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good idea. Because I don’t know if people ever really think about these things. You know, what would happen if you took obstacles out. Well, what happens if you take obstacles out is you have your day, today, for most people. I mean, we don’t really deal with obstacles through our day. The obstacles that we do deal with we actually work very hard to build pads around them.

That’s why the coffee machine was invented, so that you didn’t have the obstacle of making the coffee in the morning. So, in our lives we’re constantly trying to avoid obstacles. Which is why our stories require them, because our stories are only interesting because they’re not what our lives are.

And young writers or new writers are constantly being told to throw obstacles in there. Well, sure, but how? And what? And why?

**John:** Exactly. So, obstacles can be both the big sort of macro issue, so the thing that is sort of the point of the movie. The hero has to get past this thing in order to achieve his or her goal. But a lot of times you’re really talking about the obstacle within a scene. And so the scene starts and there has to be thing that needs to be accomplished for the scene to be over. There’s something the hero needs to overcome in order to get to the next moment.

But sometimes you can break it even smaller, and the obstacle is like how do I convince this person of the next thing. The obstacle could be a very small little thing. How do I get this person to see what it is I’m trying to do? How do I like pick this little lock without them seeing me? What’s weird is they’re all sort of the same thing. Whether you’re looking at the little micro thing, or the big thing, it is what in this moment is stopping the hero from taking the easy way through this path.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the real answer, the answer every single time, no matter what your situation is, is you, the writer, are the obstacle because you are thinking very carefully about what the worst situation would be here. It doesn’t have to be the worst as in the most calamitous, but rather the most dramatically deserving.

If I want to slow Shawna down, I can slow her down all sorts of ways. I can have a truck drive by and some stuff falls off of it. That’s not what she deserves, though. That’s not what she needs. Because Shawna must be punished by the drama gods for her failures as a character. And so you begin to think about how to craft the world and the circumstances you have in such a way that the obstacles that are put in front of your character are suiting them, challenging them in an extraordinary way, and hopefully also changing them. That would be nice.

**John:** Yeah. We always talk about world-building as being sort of this big metaphorical like fantastical land, so it’s J.R.R. Tolkien. Like you’re building this whole constructed universe. But really even in stories that are taking place in present day normal life, the screenwriter is doing a tremendous amount of world-building to create a structure around that character to make it challenging. You’re basically putting in obstacles. You’re essentially building the puzzles for the escape room that this character is going to have to go through in order to make this an exciting adventure for us to be following, because otherwise they would just float right through it.

And so sometimes those obstacles are physical. You’re literally preventing them from going to the next place. Sometimes those obstacles are characters. They are characters who are either in direct opposition or are just hindering in some way. It could be the clingy girlfriend who is lovely but is not letting the character do what he needs to do in the moment.

They can be the meddlesome sister-in-law. They can be the principal in any sort of like high school movie. Those are the characters we’re used to seeing as obstacles. But so often the character themselves is the obstacle. There’s something about the character that is preventing them from doing the thing they need to be able to do. It could be a fear, it could be a phobia. It could be something the character himself is not even quite aware of that he needs to learn he has a problem in himself so he can overcome it. There’s something about that character that is making this much more difficult for him than it would be for any other character in the situation.

**Craig:** Well there you go. So, it’s tailor-made, in a sense, and you should just keep thinking as you are engaging in the “I must create obstacles for my character exercise” how to tailor make your obstacles for that character. And, ideally what you’ll find is that the obstacles that are tailor-made for your character also provide opportunities for your character in success. That’s what we want. We don’t really care if a character has to get something and a pipe bursts and so they have to spend some time mopping up water. Because there’s no opportunity for real success there. Anyone can mop up the water. It’s just annoying.

So, you’re tailoring your obstacles so that they are particularly challenging for this character for some reason or another, and then by definition once they are overcome, particularly rewarding.

**John:** Exactly. So ideally the obstacle should be related to something the character has done, or the character is partially responsible for having constructed the obstacle. So an example I can think of from my own movies, in the first part of Go Ronna is trying to pull off this very small drug deal. Well, why is she trying to do that? Well, she’s about to get evicted. So, essentially all she needs to do is make a couple hundred dollars. That’s her only real need. And she can do that any number of ways. But she has this sort of clever idea of like, oh, I could try to pull off this really tiny drug deal. And so her first obstacles are her friends who are trying to convince her it’s not a good idea. She’s able to kind of win them over. She ends up sort of leaving Katie Holmes behind as kind of a hostage until she gets back with the money.

She ends up falling into the wrong trap for this drug deal that goes sort of awry. Her best friend, who she’s relying on, ends up taking a bunch of the ecstasy. All sorts of things end up unfolding, but they unfold because she started the chain of events. And she was so cocky, in a way, about her ability to do this thing that she’s set off this whole chain of events and has to figure a way out of them.

The obstacles are created by her initially and then they feel natural to the world. If I threw in a mountain lion, that would not be a natural obstacle. But throwing in the kinds of characters and kinds of situations that believably could exist within this universe, those feel like honest obstacles.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I call those kinds “self-inflicted wounds,” because that’s basically – and good characters are constantly self-inflicting wounds. And those are very real obstacles. We never question whether or not they are tailor-made for our hero, because it’s our hero that’s creating them in the first place. How could they not be tailor-made?

We all understand that when we wound ourselves we’re doing it for some deep-seeded reason. There is a broken thought process going on, but there’s certainly no lack of intention. So, self-inflicted wounds are great. Another kind of obstacle that I like to think about are ironic obstacles. And they’re ironic because the circumstance seems so outlandish and odd for the character, and yet that’s what makes them interesting.

In my sheep movie, my movie about detective sheep, at some point they realize they have to leave the meadow, which they’ve never left in their lives, and go into the town to start gathering clues. But to do that, they have to cross the road. And it turns out that that is horrifying for sheep. It’s something they’ve never, ever contemplated the world beyond that road suddenly – it’s agoraphobia to the maximum.

So, their great obstacle is taking ten free steps across some dirt path. But, we understand why. It’s made clear why that’s a real obstacle. And so when they do it, you have the ironic enjoyment of watching people do something that should have been easy to do, but clearly wasn’t.

**John:** Absolutely. So, again, you’re matching specificity to, you know, the nature of the characters, and therefore it’s a good obstacle for them. And so, yeah, an obstacle doesn’t have to be the same obstacle for any normal character. Like, crossing the road would not be an obstacle for Batman, but it’s completely appropriate for the characters you’re describing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s something to think about that the nature of an obstacle itself, play with it. You know, there’s nothing wrong with playing with it. If I had taken that road and made it a slightly dangerous road, or a road with lots of things in it that make hooves hard to go through, that wouldn’t have been good. That just would have been like, yeah, no, I can see why any – that’s not surprising to me. And that’s another thing you want to try and do with your obstacles is make them surprising, because that’s where we find delight, I think, as an audience.

**John:** The other thing I want to make sure people understand is that an obstacle doesn’t necessarily mean the main villain of your story. If you look at Ripley in Aliens, so obviously she’s going to face Mother Alien there at the end, but the obstacles are all of the roadblocks that are thrown in her way. She has Newt, they’re about to go off, and then Newt is snatched away. She falls through. And she has to decide whether she’s going to go to the jump ship and go back up to the big ship in the sky, or is she going to go after Newt.

And so she has to make a choice. Choices are always good. Choices are an obstacle. They’re forcing her to choose between two options. And then she has to find a way down to her, and then all the way back up. And there are structural obstacles put in there both structural not just narratively, but literally like she has to get the elevators to work, and the elevators won’t work. She has to figure out how she’s going to find her. There are all these things that are being put in there that feel very natural to the world of Aliens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s great that you mentioned that she has to make a choice. Because choices can be obstacles, particularly when they’re dilemmas. This is, Sophie’s Choice, you know, talk about an obstacle that a character has to face at some point.

Dilemmas are terrific because they feel like proper obstacles. If it’s a choice that isn’t quite so torturous, then again, probably not that big of an obstacle.

**John:** Yeah. So, is there any sort of bigger box we can put around obstacles? I think it’s just that when you’re conceiving a story, you really have to conceive of the story in terms of the obstacles. Obviously, you’re going to have a character, you’re going to have a world and a situation, but quite early on you have to figure out what is the thing that they’re going to have to overcome. Because if it’s just a young woman’s journey of self-discovery, well, there’s no obstacles there. But, if it is a – once you get into the specifics of what is it that she needs to overcome. What are the obstacles that are going to prevent her from having that moment of self-discovery? What are the obstacles that are going to keep her from pursuing her dream of ballet? Then you can start to figure out what your actual story is.

Until you know what those obstacles are, you sort of have nothing. And that is the reality of trying to create a cinematic narrative.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we have a choice. Some people start with a character and some kind of dramatic/thematic problem. Other people start with an idea. If you start with a thematic problem of, say, a parent who is clinging too hard to their child, then you may ask yourself what would be some obstacles best suited for that. And really what I’m saying is what would be the meanest thing we can do to that person.

But, you could also say we had this idea for a fish who has to find his son and his son is lost in the ocean. OK. So now that I have an obstacle, who is that obstacle the worst for? Either way, however you’re working it, you have to think about your obstacles in context of character. And your character in context with obstacles. So that the obstacles that you put in your movie aren’t merely roadblocks or inconveniences, but rather direct challenges to that character’s state of mind, emotional state, status quo, everything. And obstacles that exist in such a way that when they are overcome, we understand that some kind of dramatic uplift has been achieved.

**John:** Yeah. Your point about Nemo is great, because a fish lost in the ocean, that’s a huge, great, big idea. But it’s all the little small detours along the way, all the little challenges, the little obstacles of how you’re going to get to that next step, and how he’s going to get a little bit closer and what’s going to happen next – those are the obstacles that you spend months in front of a whiteboard trying to figure out and go through multiple revisions. That underlying idea, that was a great sort of general obstacle, but it’s the specifics, it’s what’s going to happen beat by beat and how is it overcoming each of these obstacles going to really change those characters and make it feel like we are moving forward as a character and not just moving forward towards a destination.

**Craig:** Et voila.

**John:** Et voila. All right, let’s get to some questions from listeners. Our first question comes from Matthew Gentile who sent us audio. So, let’s listen to his question.

Question: I’ve written a script for an ultra-low budget feature that I’m directing and producing. The story was in part inspired by a true anecdote I heard over a year ago from a couple friends in the industry. This anecdote inspired me to write a feature script and now functions as a pivotal part in the third act. I recently learned, however, a high profile book has just been published with said anecdote in it. While the script and story has evolved since I heard this anecdote, there are some key elements that still bear resemblance to what I heard and what happened.

The film as of now is not being billed as based on a true story or inspired by true events. And I did register my script with the WGA almost a year before this book’s copyright. However, I wanted to ask you your opinion on what happens if you use a story someone told you in passing about someone and then that someone’s story becomes published. Is it public domain if it’s out there? Can someone claim to have the rights to that? What would you do if something like this happened to a script you were writing? Thank you.

**John:** Craig, what do you think? What would you do if something like that happened?

**Craig:** Well, something that is a fact that happens in life is not property that an individual can possess. What somebody can possess is their written version of it. Somebody can say, “Look, this is my telling of this anecdote, so you can’t just start lifting phrases and sentences and things from it.” But I suspect that Matthew is going to be just fine, however, this is an area where, as always, you need to be listening to the LawyerNotes podcast and getting legal advice from lawyers.

Even if you are on the safest of technical grounds, you always have to be aware that our justice system is not as simple as that. And if a studio wants to restrain you, they can make your life difficult. So, my guess is you’re in fine shape, but you should talk to an attorney.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re going to be fine as well. So, an anecdote is sort of a weird thing to describe, because like how big is an anecdote. I can think of many examples in my life of like, oh, this little story I heard. That’s not really a story in the sense that there’s a plot, there’s a character, and a whole thing that happens. It’s just like, no, oh, the ice cream shop blew up and that was so strange. That’s not a protectable element. Like an ice cream shop blowing up is not a thing.

So, Craig is covering the legal side of it. And sometimes there’s a legal issue, but most times there’s not really a legal issue. More often, though, there’s sort of an ethical issue. And what happens a lot is – you heard this anecdote from friends – and you need to make sure that they weren’t planning on using that anecdote in anything.

An example, again, from Go is my friend Tom told me about he was working at a hotel and the hotel room caught on fire. And like that’s so strange that this hotel room caught on fire. And he told me the whole scenario. And it’s like, well, that’s kind of great, and I didn’t need anything else from his story but the sense of his hotel room caught on fire and sort of what he did as a manager when his hotel room caught on fire, that was great.

And so when I wrote the scene in Go where Simon is having sex with the two women and the hotel room catches on fire and he doesn’t even notice it, I thought like, man, I hope Tom is not planning on using a hotel room catching on fire, because I’m going to feel really crappy if I’m taking his bit.

And so I emailed him, or I think this is even pre-email. So I called him and said like, hey, were you planning on using a hotel room on fire as of your scenes, because I don’t want to step on that. And he’s like, no, no, no, no, that’s fine, it’s good.

And there’s been a couple things in my life where I’ve been at a place with other writers and something has happened. And we’ve had to have sort of a discussion of like is anyone planning on using that, because that’s a great little moment.

**Craig:** [laughs] Who gets this?

**John:** There’s a great episode of Riki Lindhome’s show, Garfunkel and Oats, where she’s starting to date this guy who is also a writer, and something comes up and he like basically takes her joke as a tweet and like tweets it out. And that’s crappy. You got to be really mindful of that.

And so I’m less concerned about Matthew’s question as a legal question and more sort of as an ethical question. Let’s make sure you’re not taking something that someone else really wrote and was planning on using themselves.

**Craig:** You know what we’re doing, Matthew? We’re helping you keep your friends, OK? I mean, come on. All right, we got a question from John from the UK. And he asks, or writes in, “I was interested in the discussion you had about the John Carpenter court case and the implications it had for an individual screenwriter. Let’s say you sell an original script to a studio. If another party claimed you had infringed copyright on a released film like Carpenter is claiming here, could you personally be found liable for the case?” Very good question.

John, what is your answer to this excellent question?

**John:** So, I will tell you that when you are selling your script, you’re going to be signing a bunch of legal documents. And one of those legal documents will be saying like I did not steal this from anybody. And they do that to sort of help protect themselves.

At the same time, you know, it can be really murky. I can’t promise you that they would never come after you, but I can promise you that it’s not a common scenario. Craig, you know more about this than I do. What is the thing that you’re signing when you sell that script?

**Craig:** You’re signing simultaneously two of the strangest comments, separately not strange, together bizarre. On the one hand, you are absolutely warranting that this is entirely your work. So, just as you said, you’re not ripping anybody off. Anything that you are writing for them, or any literary material you are selling to them is wholly yours and not pilfered from anyone else.

At the same time, you are saying, “But, the studio is the author.” So, I swear to god I’m the author, but I’m not the author.

Now, the studio as part of the deal will indemnify you, the writer, from lawsuits presuming that you haven’t ripped somebody off. So, you know, in the case of – I can’t remember which of the Hangovers, some nut job sued and said we had stolen his life story, which still cracks me up. I didn’t have to pay anything to defend myself. The studio sent – I never even had to do a deposition or anything, because it was a ridiculous case. But the studio handled that. They indemnify you.

In the specific question here, John, my guess is that if the concern is that there’s another movie out there that you have somehow infringed upon, the studio would know about that movie. And the studio would have made the determination at this point that the story you’re writing does not infringe upon that.

**John:** Here’s an example I can imagine, though. Like let’s say that John wrote this script and he was really ripping off this Korean film that no one had ever seen. Like he was just wholesale ripping it off, because I can imagine a scenario in which the studio buying it had no idea that he stole it. That’s a grim scenario. I don’t know what would happen there.

**Craig:** Well, I think in that case the studio would probably hold the writer in breach of contract, and rightfully so. The studio would probably not have to indemnify the writer from lawsuit, because the writer had breached the contract. The studio would attempt to collect damages from the writer. It would be very, very bad.

What you’re talking about is fraud. I mean, that’s fraud. You’re taking something that someone else wrote and then turning around and selling it to someone else for money. Fraud.

**John:** Yeah. So what I think would become the murky middle terrible case there is the thing where like you’re really just riffing on a genre, or you’re riffing on a kind of film. And somebody comes who says, “No, no, that’s quoting my film. That’s really a reference to my film.” The way that Tarantino really is quoting a lot of other films. And if somebody came after him and said, “No, no, you stole my movie there,” that’s a challenge. And I’m sure those cases are out there. I’m just not aware of which ones they are.

But, yeah, you’ve got to be really mindful that if you’re referencing something, reference it in a way that is not going to feel like you’re stealing it. And that’s easy to say and sometimes hard to do.

**Craig:** And be as transparent as you can with the person that’s giving you money. There’s nothing wrong with saying to them, “Listen, before we all do this, here are a bunch of things you need to know. So let’s all have a discussion. Make sure that we collectively don’t get into any trouble here.” Which is perfectly valid. And they now have fair warning. And they can make their own determination about whether they feel that it’s a gray area, or something that they’re happy to defend.

The goal for you is to be honest, to not surprise anybody with any malfeasance, and to therefore protect that clause that says I’m not responsible for the legal defense of the work that you have now said you are the legal author of.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s do a simple question. Joe writes, “Can you be a member of both the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild? Do you have to choose one? Is it advisable to choose one over the other? I believe for the Academy voting you have to pick only branch to belong to.”

**Craig:** Joe, let me unconfuse you here. It is not a question of can you be a member of both the WGA and the DGA. If you meet the membership requirements for either one, you must become a member of either one. So, I’m a member of the WGA. I am a member of the DGA. I’m a member of SAG/AFTRA. I am a member of IATSE. Because in various cases and in various capacities I met their requirements and therefore was compelled to join those unions.

It is a very different situation than a non-union voting body like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. That is a club, essentially. And a club can set whatever rules they want, but the unions that you’re describing are not clubs. They’re federally chartered unions and they follow federal labor law.

**John:** Absolutely. So I can tell you about the Academy Awards club. The Academy has a writer’s branch and it has a director’s branch. And in the Academy you are a member of exactly one branch. And so that is why sometimes you’ll see a person who is in the writer’s branch, but they’re also a director, or they’re directors but they’re also writers. That’s because they had to pick one branch to join. Essentially, one branch invited them to join. They said yes. And then from that point forward they are always in that branch. And so that’s how it works.

So like Julie Delpy, for example, is in the writer’s branch rather than the actor’s branch because she was a writer on Before Sunrise and that was what got her into the Academy.

**Craig:** And it makes sense because you don’t want individuals to have more than one vote.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** So, I get that completely. James asks, “Would you ever write the action line ‘John doesn’t react’?” I feel like that action line happens to me in every podcast. “My gut tells me no, as this is a non-action action line. But how else would you describe it when a character does not react to something that any other normal person would react to? An example would be if an alien bursts from someone’s stomach, most people would react. But how would you write it if they didn’t?”

**John:** So no reaction is a reaction. It’s absolutely fine to say John doesn’t react. It’s a scene description. It’s saying – the function of scene description is describing what a character is doing or what an audience would see on the screen. So, no reaction is a reaction.

**Craig:** No question. Action line is a misnomer. It doesn’t mean Action. It means Not Dialogue. It means stuff you’re seeing, but not hearing. So, yes, not reacting is absolutely appropriate for it. Let’s call it a description line, and I think that probably would make this a lot easier of a discussion.

If you have somebody who is making, or you as a writer, making a point of having a character not react where other people would, you might even want to say, “Oddly, John doesn’t react. Doesn’t even seem to care.” You can make a moment out of it, so people really get the intention there, as opposed to sort of a passing minor, oh, okay, well, is that important that he didn’t react?

But, no, no question. Not doing something, if it is meaningful not doing something, put it in there.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this video analysis of Gillian Flynn’s screenplay for Gone Girl, which I’ve never actually read the screenplay of it. I’ve read the book, but never read the screenplay. But he sort of shows what the actual stuff looks like on the page. And she actually does a great job with scene description. And she uses colons a lot to indicate those ways that characters are interacting with eye lines. And it’s a great version of sort of how you show someone not reacting to something.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I love that part of screenwriting personally. That’s my favorite part is storytelling in the description line, which is probably why I get so angry when these ding-a-lings and know-nothings and frauds keep telling people “don’t direct inside your script.” No, go ahead. Direct inside your script. I want to see everything.

It’s insane to suggest to anyone that the only thing screenwriters are allowed to convey are the spoken word and action. No. ridiculous.

**John:** Kate Powers writes, “Craig, when are you going to do another one of those WGA Finances for Screenwriters talks at the Guild?” She also says, “Also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, starting listening as an assistant, got bumped to staff writer on Rectify. Now on a Sony Crackle show. Scriptnotes has been invaluable to me every step along the way. Thank you so much. Also, I effen loved Duly Noted.”

**Craig:** I’m struggling to remember the first time I did a WGA Finances for Screenwriters talk.

**John:** Didn’t you? I kind of thought you did.

**Craig:** Did I?

**John:** Or was it part of like an overall panel? Did you go in to like new screenwriters?

**Craig:** It may have been. I mean, I do a talk about how to survive the psychological turmoil of development. I do that once a year, typically. I don’t remember doing one on finances.

**John:** Maybe she was hallucinating. Or maybe she misremembered. I think you would do a great job for a talk on finances. What would be your three bullet points for new Guild members about their finances?

**Craig:** Well, bullet point number one: save. Save as much as you can save.

Bullet point number two: if you are incorporated, which you will be if you’re earning above a certain amount of money, you have to prepare for your tax bill, which will come due all in one big swift hurrah. They’re not withholding taxes from you and it’s very easy to fall into the trap of spending money that is not actually yours to spend.

And then third, I would strongly recommend to any writer to learn how to use Quicken. Because there are a lot of writers, most big writers I know employ people to handle their finances for them. Not investments and things like that, but I’m saying paying bills and making payments on things, and dealing with the health fund, you know, and sending in forms. Not me.

I’m not paying 1% of my income for that. Hell no. I can do it myself on Quicken and it takes me an hour a week. So, those would be my three big bullet points.

**John:** That’s great. I do pay somebody. I don’t pay them 1%. One-hour a week is worth more than it costs me to pay that person. So, that’s why I end up doing that.

**Craig:** I love my one hour. It’s so relaxing.

**John:** Oh, so you like that stuff.

**Craig:** It feels good.

**John:** I can’t agree more about saving. The thing which is so hard to understand is when you first start making money as a writer you’re like, wow, I have some money. This is crazy that I’m actually being paid to do what I love. But, that won’t always be there, and there will be ups and there will be downs. So, you need to have a great big rainy day fund, if possible. But also really be thinking about your retirement, because you’re not going to be doing this forever. And while there is a pension, it’s not going to be adequate. So, you’ve got to save money.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, you may not get your pension. You have to be vested to get it, which means you need I think five years of pension earnings before they’ll let you get a dime. That’s not coming until you’re sixty-something anyway.

You’re absolutely right. The benefits for saving for retirement go beyond just saving and not spending. That’s also money that you get a terrific tax break on. Anything that you can do to reduce your taxation, which is going to be very high as a screenwriter, is helpful to you and your family.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a media post by Sara Benincasa.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** Which she answers this anonymous question, “Why did you gain so much weight?” And what I love about her answer, and it’s a long post, she really goes for it. She really explains out her boyfriend who was deployed overseas in the army and then her switch to a different antidepressant and how that caused some weight gain. And she really sort of explains all the steps of how she put on weight. And the whole time it’s very, very funny. She’s a really very funny writer.

But what I love about it is throughout the whole thing she’s sort of like apologizing for being heavy, like it’s this horrible thing that she’s inflicting upon the world by being heavy. And the punchline is that she comes to Hollywood, she expects to have the worst issues with weight and such, and she does great. And so she sets up with Diablo Cody and Red Hour and she gets a lot of work done. And she does really well.

And, again, she’s constantly in her head apologizing for her weight. Like how do they not notice that I’m heavy? And it’s a good reminder that so often the things that we think are problems about ourselves are really just things we are creating in ourselves. We’re sort of creating people’s expectations about what we’re supposed to be like, and what we’re supposed to be doing. And when you sort of get past those, and just do your work, sometimes that work is rewarded in wonderful ways. So, it was a great essay. I know a lot of people have shared it. So, by the time this episode comes out, it will probably have won the Pulitzer in media.

But it’s just a great post.

**Craig:** I loved it, too. I loved it. It was so fearless. And that’s the thing. Basically everyone that gets wrapped up in these things, some idiot sends you an anonymous question like this. And really it may not be what they’re hoping for, but the worst outcome is you get scared. You get scared that people are seeing you a certain way. You get scared that you’re too this, or too that.

She’s so not scared, or even when she is scared, she’s OK to talk about being scared. So, to me, there was just this wonderful bravery to everything. And she also linked to a video piece she did that’s even braver than what she wrote. I mean, really just like I’m so impressed with her and kind of want to – I would be OK with maybe a 20th of her courage. Because I have none. [laughs] So, I’ll take – a 20th seems like it’s a fair ask. I’m not being greedy there.

I’m saying courage is a zero sum game. She would have to be reduced down by 1/20th. But I would take 1/20th of her courage. It would a big improvement for me. So, highly recommend that as well.

My One Cool Thing is coming up in, well, I don’t know when this – well, probably around when this is airing. August 30th or something like that, Nuka World! The final and presumably largest DLC for Fallout 4 will be available. And it looks awesome. It looks so great.

So, you get to explore the post-apocalyptic ruins of a horrible theme park that was built by the Nuke World Company to celebrate their products. It looks awesome.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** So we’ll include a link to the trailer. You need Fallout 4 to play it, but you should have gotten Fallout 4. That’s my feeling.

**John:** Yeah, it was a previously One Cool Thing. So, people are way behind if they’re not doing it. I did not play Fallout 4. I did play the Fallout iPad game, the thing where you’re like managing the little – it was like the SIMS.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, the shelter.

**John:** And it was fun. And then it got really, really tedious. But it was fun for a while. And I do enjoy all the little details in their world that build so well together.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those guys are great. I mean, that whole company is fantastic. The two video game companies that I always perk up when I hear their names are Naughty Dog, which did The Last of Us, and the Unchartered Games, and the folks at Bethesda.

**John:** Yeah. They’re talented.

**Craig:** They’re just really good. And they also do Elder Scrolls. So, awesome.

**John:** Hooray. That’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. We are edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. If you have an outro for us, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions like the ones we answered. You can also reach us on Twitter for shorter questions. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You’ll find the show on iTunes. If you leave us a review there, those are wonderful. And I actually read through them and they were just delightful. So, thank you for that. That’s also where we have the Scriptnotes app where you can download the back episodes all the way back to Episode 1. You can also find those at Scriptnotes.net. And on the USB drive we sell, which has all 250 episodes. Those are at the store, so you can get those.

That’s it. So, Craig, next time I speak with you I’ll actually be in Paris. And we will be tired.

**Craig:** You’re going to be tired, man. I’m going to be freaking awesome.

**John:** That’s going to be great. You’ll be sober, I hope.

**Craig:** Uh…bon voyage. [laughs]

**John:** It’ll be the first time for anything. So.

**Craig:** I’ve never done this drunk.

**John:** I’ve never done this drunk either. Well, I’ve done it with a glass and a half of wine at our live show.

**Craig:** That’s perfect. We want that.

**John:** You got to be a little loosened up. But, no, not drunk-drunk.

**Craig:** Well, there’s a first for everything. Maybe when you’re over there we’ll do it. I’m actually looking forward to it. I think something wonderful will come out of this.

**John:** Which would be great. Craig, I will see you next week.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes, 264: [The One With the Agent](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-agent)
* [The 100 Most Frequently Asked Questions about Screenwriting](http://screenwriting.io/)
* [Rawson Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/) on IMDB
* [Aaron Sorkin’s Masterclass](https://www.masterclass.com/classes/aaron-sorkin-teaches-screenwriting#/)
* [Gone Girl Screenplay Analysis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3lFPW4E1o)
* [Sara Benincasa: Why Am I So Fat?](https://medium.com/@SaraJBenincasa/why-am-i-so-fat-91564fc3a0c7#.3jie47ls8)
* [Nuka World! ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIneiOpuS2M)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_265.mp3).