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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/one-handed-movie-heroes).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 210 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we will be talking about one-handed movie heroes, the last things you should do before handing in a script, and we will look at three new Three Page Challenges. A big show.

**Craig:** I would say so. I mean, maybe too big.

**John:** Maybe too big. We’ll try to compress it into the space allotted by the infinite boundaries of the Internet.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** See, you don’t listen to any other podcasts but some podcasts have been known to go on for like three hours.

**Craig:** Well, that’s crazy. That’s just dumb.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who wants that?

**John:** Although, I will say that when we were first talking about doing this podcast, there were other screenwriter friends who said like, “Yeah, you know what, maybe like limit it to 20 minutes.” I can’t even imagine this as a 20-minute podcast.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine any podcast. [laughs] That’s the God’s honest truth. People say, “Hey, I listen to your show,” and I think, “That’s awesome.” But then quietly to myself I think, “Why do you listen to podcasts?”

**John:** Yeah, because they’re wonderful.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Podcasts are delightful. Craig, what do you do on planes when you’re on like a long plane trip?

**Craig:** I do the crossword puzzle. I usually have some sort of iPad game that I play. I’ll read a book and then I try and do a little writing.

**John:** When you are in your car, when you’re in your Tesla driving from your house way out in La Cañada to, say, Sony, what do you listen to in the car?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I don’t go to Sony. Too far.

**John:** That’s true. [laughs]

**Craig:** But I generally listen to music, oftentimes Broadway.

**John:** I can imagine that. On Sirius do you listen to Broadway?

**Craig:** I love Seth Rudetsky on Sirius/XM. In fact, Seth Rudetsky, it’ll be too late when this show comes out, but he will have been in town and I’m going to go see him at Largo.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** He’s my favorite.

**John:** Oh, he’s wonderful. All right, let’s get to our topics for today. So this was a thing that occurred to me just this morning. And it was based on a conversation I’d had last week or the week before with a person I’m going to call the Polish director, who’s not in fact a Polish director, but I said that I would refer to this person as the Polish director.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So I was having a conversation with the Polish director and she asked about this character and sort of what this character was trying to do at this moment, what his goals were, and what the character thought about the situation. And I responded from the character’s perspective saying like, “Well, on one hand, he’s thinking this but on the other hand, he’s also aware of this situation.”

And as I was saying that, I started to make a realization about a crucial thing that is different about movie characters and actual real life people in that me as a real life person, I can have complicated, complex views that embody different opinions simultaneously. A movie hero doesn’t.

And I recognized I was sort of wrong in trying to describe on one hand and on the other hand for this hero because there wasn’t going to be space for this hero to have these interesting, conflicting views or to express them. That in a movie, a hero kind of needs to be able to have one thing.

And if I wanted to make a movie that had these complicated views, I probably needed to split those views among two characters that could actually have a dialogue rather than try to have them embodied in one character.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think that you’re arguing that a character can’t have some sort of internal conflict over something.

**John:** Oh, no, not a bit.

**Craig:** [laughs] We’re not really interested in these hyper rational characters who can rationally see both sides of an issue and then try and find some sort of reasonable middle ground consensus. [laughs] We like that in, say, our local city planner but not so much in a movie hero. You’re absolutely right.

Part of it has to do with what actors do best. And what actors do best is portray a singular intention. Now, that singular intention may be one that causes them anguish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sophie’s Choice, she has to make a choice. It’s an anguished choice. Her intention ultimately is to save a child. It’s just that it hurts, you know.

**John:** I would say most movies involve characters making a choice and decisions. Sometimes both decisions have a cost associated with them. They’re working through those costs but that’s a different thing than having sort of this morally complex way of approaching a situation or scenario.

Like a lot of times, if you’re wrestling with something, you need to wrestle with somebody. And in movies, you generally don’t see one character wrestling with him or herself for a long period of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. The movie can be ambiguous.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So the movie can refuse to take a position on something. But the way it refuses to take a position on something is by presenting different characters who have a position, who make their cases well.

**John:** So I would say that this is a thing that is true about movies but it’s not necessarily true about other art forms or other literary art forms. So there are plays in which characters have complicated simultaneously divergent opinions. I was thinking about John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in that, our lead character, she’s grappling with the issues of to what degree does she pursue or hold back from this allegation of childhood sexual abuse. And the play is ambiguous but her reaction to it is similarly ambiguous in a way that is not commonly found in movies.

And of course, books have all the time in the world. Books have the ability to have introspection. So you can go into a character’s head and really explore these complicated feelings that the characters could honestly have. That’s very challenging to do in a movie.

**Craig:** It is. And Doubt is a terrific example because in a way, what that play is about is the difficulty of being the two-handed thinker. Everyone in that play, and there’s not many characters — you have a priest who is accused of something and has perhaps been accused of in the past as well. You have a young boy. You have the boy’s mother. And then you have this nun.

And the boy, the priest, and the mother are presenting points of view that inspire doubt. And the nun has none of it. Oh, and I’m sorry, she has her — there’s a younger nun.

**John:** There’s the assistant, yeah.

**Craig:** Right. Everyone is kind of saying this is morally weird territory we’re in. And we’re afraid that we’re going to make the wrong choice because it’s difficult. And she doesn’t see it that way. She is clear, clear, clear, clear, clear until the very, very end when she breaks down and says, “I have doubt.”

And for a nun to say I have doubt, I mean, obviously it’s profoundly about faith itself. But it shows that the notion that a movie character can’t have a clean point of view on a topic is so disruptive to them that it’s a breakdown. It’s not something that you’d want to watch a character just carrying around for a whole movie because they would be a ditherer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we don’t want people dithering. We want them doing, and then perhaps being confronted with the cost of not dithering.

**John:** Yeah. In looking at other media and sort of how they’re able to deal with these things, musicals have, again, introspection. So you look at Into the Woods and the Cinderella character, she’s on the steps of the palace and her song on the steps of the palace, she’s wrestling with this like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. On some levels I’m attracted, on some levels I’m repulsed.”

These are true human emotions that are very challenging to get out of a character without a song that lets us get inside her head. And she can be simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by this possibility, scared of herself, scared of her feelings. These are really difficult things for a movie hero without songs to communicate.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m experiencing the gift of this right now because I’ve started breaking a story for this movie musical and I have to retrain the way I think because normally a huge part of the job is externalizing what is internal. And here, that would be a failure. If you have something internal, that’s an opportunity. And you get to reveal it. And that’s exciting.

So it’s just a retraining process, you know. You have to think in a way that you don’t normally think for movies because you want to be inside someone’s head. And when you’re in their head, you want them to be conflicted and you want them to be two hands or three or five because that’s what makes the song interesting.

**John:** Exactly. So contrast this with, you know, an Aaron Sorkin movie. Classically, you will see these different points of view but they’re embodied by different characters who hold on to their one point of view incredibly strongly and articulate their single point of view with great authority and with tremendous conviction.

So you see very few characters in Sorkin’s screenplays where like, “I don’t know how I feel about this.” It’s like, no, that’s not a Sorkin screenplay. It’s a very different perspective on how they’re approaching the reality of their world.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think you’re right that Sorkin does it in a very demonstrable way. But in practically every movie, what you’re looking at is somebody who thinks a certain thing. They may be resisting. And oftentimes, they are resisting a truth. And so what they are articulating is the opposite of what the bravest version of themselves would do.

So for instance, in A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise has a certain core of bravery that says stand up for justice at any cost. And he’s running from that as fast as he can. His whole life he’s been running from that as fast as he can. And at long last, in the way the story unfolds, he finally decides to run at it.

But if you think about it, all he’s done is switch the needle on the compass. He was always hurdling steadily in a direction.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that is very typical for practically every movie character.

**John:** I’d agree. Because you’re with these characters for a short period of time, you don’t have the opportunity to look inside their heads or to see them grow and change over a long period of time, over seasons of a show, and become a different thing. They have to sort of be the thing, to some degree, that they’re going to be at the end of the story that has to be embodied in them at the start of that.

You have to have a way to go from what I saw there to where the story is going to take me. You’re on a very short journey with them. And so a character who is wrestling internally with these things that can’t be externalized, who’s trying to hold two competing ideas simultaneously, you’re going to have a very difficult time exposing what’s going on inside their head for these things.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** But this internal wrestling is a thing that a real person like me deals with all the time. And so I was looking through what are some issues which I have complicated, overlapping, contrasting beliefs about things.

So if you look at, you know, pretty much any political topic. So from GMOs to abortion to the balance between religious liberty and civil process, there are shades of gray in there. I’m not an absolutist about any of these things. And you kind of don’t want your politicians to be so absolutist about these things because they have to be able to deal with the subtle realities of what those things are.

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately, this is where movies have hurt culture. And I guess to let movies off the hook a little bit, our natural human obsession with narrative has hurt culture, because we can’t handle it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We want the certainty that a good story gives us. This is right and this is wrong. These are good people, these are the bad people. And in movies, you don’t end with a, “Gee, I wonder. You know, everybody’s got an interesting point and there is no clear path to action.” You know, that’s a bad narrative.

In politics, they have cannily seized the tool of narrative to advance their own agenda. And they do. They do regularly everything. Everything from politicians on both sides of the aisle is pushed through a narrative filter. And it is destroying our government’s ability to behave like intelligent, rational adults in a world that does not conform to the rules of narrative. The whole point of narrative is to give us relief from a world that doesn’t conform to narrative.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And so you look at a candidate like Donald Trump who is in some ways the manifestation of a movie hero who has absolute certainty that everything he’s saying is exactly the truth and that this is the way that the world is constructed. And so he will say exactly what he’s thinking at that moment. And you can definitely see why it’s attractive to people but why it’s also a challenging thing to envision in an elected political official.

**Craig:** And he’s not even running for President, he’s just running because he’s telling a story. He just likes being on TV. I assume that we all know, right? Don’t we all know what’s going on? [laughs] Don’t we get it? I mean, who doesn’t get the joke?

**John:** Yeah, but I think we’re, to some degrees, horrified and fascinated that we’re living in the reality in which like, “Oh, but yeah, but really? No, really?” And so it feels like we’re living inside this Onion story and we’re like, “Oh, but we’re going to realize it’s a joke at some point.”

**Craig:** But we can’t possibly proclaim our innocence here or our surprise. When we live in a culture where there are TV shows in which actual human beings compete to marry a stranger and a world in which Donald Trump himself gathers celebrities together and has them fight over nonsense and fires them one by one, that is the narrativization of reality. And so we escape from reality through narrative.

And now, we like narrative so much we want to change reality to conform to narrative. Well, reality will not change. Reality will always be anti-narrative. Like I remember when we went through the strike in 2007 and the years leading up to it, in 2005 and ’06, Ted Elliott and I would talk about this thing we called screenwriter bleedthrough where writers in particular were susceptible to thinking about reality in narrative terms.

And in narrative terms, the Writers Guild wins. We’re the underdogs, you know. I mean, the bosses don’t — they shouldn’t win that fight, right? We come from behind, we win the day, we claim a victory. But the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn about narrative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At all. And just believing that you should win and being the underdog doesn’t mean a damn thing.

**John:** So I don’t have a solution here. I just wanted to sort of share my observation that in some cases, a thing I was trying to do to make this character feel real to me was not in the best service of this movie. And yet, the greater macro point is I think the frustration that because it is so challenging to have heroic characters who have to deal with subtle complexities and sort of the give and take of reality, I think we can sometimes negatively steer our popular culture in a way that believes that like any sort of ambiguity, any sort of compromise is a failure.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question. I mean, between the rise of television and then the kind of pervasive nature of narrative in our culture and then reality television which further confuses these things, it gets harder and harder to put up with the bad storytelling of the world. And so we try and deny it.

But the truth is that bad storytelling is irrelevant to good outcomes in the world. Well, that’s my soap box for the day.

**John:** [laughs] What a depressing start to the podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go on to something that’s we’re on much firmer ground. And so this is a topic I’m going to call last looks.

So when you are making a movie or a TV show, you’ll hear a call from the first ADs saying, “Last looks,” which means we are just about to start filming this shot, this scene. If anyone has any last things they need to do, do it quickly because we’re about to start rolling. And so this is when the hair and makeup people race in and do one last little touchup on the actor. This is when the final tweaks are done on the lights and everyone starts to clear the sets.

So I want to talk about last looks for the screenwriter which are, what are those last things you do on a script before you send it out to someone else to read.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s such a great topic because if you’re doing it right, you should be panicked while you’re doing it that you’re going to forget something. I mean, for me, it starts by printing the script out on paper because your last looks at the paper will be far more accurate then they will as you’re scrolling blithely by on the screen.

**John:** Yeah. So the things I’m taking a look for when I’m about to turn in something is I’m looking at like, if there is a header, like a header because there are colored pages or there’s other changes, is the header correct. Do I have the right date in there? Do I have the right draft in there? Because that’s one of those easy things to sort of overlook as you’re doing the work. It’s like, “Oh, I never changed the date on that thing.”

Also, I’m checking the date on the title page, making sure all the stuff on the title page is actually accurately reflecting what’s going on there because especially if you’re working in Final Draft, the title page is a whole separate document, essentially, so you’re not really looking at that. And it’s very easy to create the PDF and send it through without having looked at like, “Oh, crap, I never changed the date on the title page.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ve made that mistake.

**Craig:** Certainly if you’re in production, the amount of things that you have to keep your eye on expands quite a bit. So you want to make sure that your pages make sense, that you haven’t somehow managed to put some blank C page in there that you don’t need. You want to make sure that your revision level is correct, that you didn’t accidentally continue to make revisions in the old revision which is a disaster. So there’s also the first looks, you know, making sure you do that stuff right, making sure you didn’t mess up your scene numbers, check it against another draft. And then check that title page really carefully.

And I wish I could say that I rarely catch mistakes, I catch mistakes all the time.

**John:** All the time.

**Craig:** And I have to say that I feel like I’m one of the few writers that really cares about this stuff because I will see messes all the time. And, you know, nothing is more bothersome to a production. And what they’ll do is they’ll just take the script away from you, essentially. And they’ll be in charge of the script.

And I hate that. I want to be in charge of the script because it’s my script. But there’s a responsibility that goes with that to understand how it works. You’ve got to learn how it works if you’re in production.

**John:** So on the 200th episode, if you’re curious about that, we did talk through a lot about the fears and challenges of production and color pages and sort of the nightmare scenarios of like, “Oh, no, I started typing with revisions on or off and things got screwy.” So let’s talk about sort of like any normal draft you’re sending through to the studios like just a development pass.

One of the things I’ve noticed sometimes is it will switch to the wrong Courier at a certain point. So I use Courier Prime for everything. But if I’m copying and pasting from something else, every once in a while, old Courier will show up there. And sometimes kind of hard to see when you’re going back and forth. But it’s enough different that I don’t like for that to happen.

So a quick thing I like to do, if I’ve not used any other fonts throughout the whole document, there’s no reason why I had any special character in there, any sort of weird things, I will do a select all and choose Courier Prime again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just to make sure that it all got through with the right typeface. Classically, what I used to do and I do a little bit less now but especially if I’m really mindful of the page count and that I’m worried that someone is going to perceive this as being too long, if there’s going to be an issue, I will go through and do like one last check for widows and orphans.

So, widows are classically those little bits of text — they’re basically the first line on a new page. If it’s just a word or a few words, that’s a widow. And you can often find ways to pull that to the previous page.

An orphan is the last little bit of text below a text block. So let’s say you have some dialogue and there’s one line that just has one word on it. You can often find ways without rewriting just by nudging a margin, doing something to pull that one word up.

And it seems like, well, you’re only saving one line. But because these documents are so long, saving one or two or three lines early on in the script can suddenly pull a whole page out of your script.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a ripple effect. Mostly, I do this because I want certain things to end in a certain way on the page. So if there’s a line that I — I don’t want to break up, you know, a big reveal, like there’s a set up moment, a thing and then — so someone says, “Wait a second. I know who stole it.” And someone says, “Who?” And then I turn the page and the first person says, “You.”

Oh, well, I want that [laughs] — I’m interrupting a rhythm, a moment, you know. So I’m mostly concerned about that stuff. I mean, yeah, I don’t like the orphan thing either with one little word sticking at the end. I’ll just fix that as a matter, of course. And I do get kind of obsessive about — and I also have a thing like I really, as much as I can, I try to not break up dialogue speeches across a page break.

**John:** Yeah. So the software we’re using will look for ways to fit as much as possible onto a page. And that’s good. And most of the times, it does a pretty smart job with it. If you have a scene description that’s a couple of lines long, if it has to break the scene description, it will break it at the period. It will break it at the sentence rather than like put a half a sentence on one page and half a sentence on the next page. That’s a good thing.

It’ll do the same stuff with dialogue. But if you can avoid that break, all the better because you’ve kept those lines together for a reason. And if you can keep them together, you know, rather than having them break across a page break, all the better.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to ruin your script but it’s really just about, “Hey, I’d like you to read this the way I intended it to be read.”

**John:** Craig, do you do spell check anymore? I find I basically have stopped using spell check.

**Craig:** I do as a very one final, final thing. Generally speaking, I know how to spell and I’m a good typer and I’m reading my stuff over a lot, so I’ll catch almost every little dinky thing. But every now and then, it’ll find something. So I do it at the very, very end.

**John:** Yeah. And one last thing I do, and I’ve talked about this on previous shows, I went from two spaces after the period to a single space after the period. And so if there’s any question in my head that I may have accidentally put two spaces after periods, I’ll do a global find and replace. I’ll search for period space, space and I’ll change that to period space. And that compresses those all down to single spaces if there are any of those out there.

**Craig:** Welcome to the right way of doing things.

**John:** Yes. So I converted, you know, eight years ago but every once in a while, something will still get off or for whatever reason an extra space gets in there and just it’s better that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So those are some last looks and maybe we’ll notice some of these issues as we look through the Three Pages that people have sent in.

So if you’re new to the podcast, every once in a while, we will do a Three Page Challenge. And what we do is we invite people to send in their pages, the first three pages of their script, their pilot, whatever. And Stuart looks through all of them and picks a couple of them for us to look at on the air.

So if you’re interested in sending through your pages, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there are instructions about how you do that and how you attach your files. If you would like to read through these samples with us, you can go to the show notes at johnaugust.com and there are links to the PDFs so you can read along with us and see what we are talking about when we talk about these pages and samples.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Stuart picked these and we don’t influence his decisions at all ahead of time. We don’t tell him what we’re looking for. He just picks three. So I’ll start with The Hitchcock Murders by Andy Maycock. So let me give you a quick summary of what’s happening here.

So we open on “Black: The RATTLE and PUNCH of a manual typewriter”. There’s a narrator who speaks who says, “The first thing you oughta know, it’s all fiction.” We’re in the Hollywood Hills, it’s dusk, it’s 1953. The narrator keeps talking about the Hollywood Dream as we meet David Morgan, a young studio executive who drops a cigarette to the ground. There’s a movie camera whirring away on a tripod in the dying bushes. There’s a single gunshot, birds fly away, and Morgan’s body lands in the scrub, blood pooling under his head.

The camera catches and pings, out of film, still aimed at the body, a thin layer of smoke. The narration finishes. We smash cut to the inside of a movie theater, same time period. The crowd is watching Kiss Me, Kate. It’s a 3D movie. The characters we’re meeting here are Lyle Tabbins who is a would-be heartthrob and his date, Veronica, with starlet-raven hair and short dressy Audrey Hepburn gloves. She likes the movie, he’s not so much a fan.

Leaving the theater, Tabbins says he has someplace to be, he’s not going to be able to go on with their date. But he says, “No, no, there’s no other woman for me. Takes all my effort just to be no good to you.” She leaves off. This is Christmas Eve 1953, the title tells us. Tabbins goes back into the movie theater lobby, talks to Rosalind, the cigarette girl. And he says to her, “You’re awfully quiet.” “The Creep’s still calling me.” “Wife probably kicked him out.” And we leave with their dialogue, their conversation at the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** All right. So, Andy, good job. There’s a lot to like here. And overall, I think the good news is when I read this, I felt like I was reading a real movie script. It didn’t seem like an amateur movie script. Things, the pages look right, there’s a good balance of action and dialogue. And character, character, character. So I’m getting a lot from your characters.

And also, interesting, in these three pages, a lot happens, which I like. It means that you’ve written tightly. So let’s just quickly go through some of the things that were good and maybe some things that you need to think about.

We hear, it begins with the sound of a typewriter and then a Zippo opening and flaring and closing, which is very “Ooh, ahh”. And then a narrator speaks and right here, we’re getting a little sense of, you know, that you, Andy, like you’re trying to kind of give us that noir feeling through your action, which I think is okay because the script is clearly stylized to be noir, so it’s okay to say, “His voice long marinated in bourbon and Pall Malls.” Pall Malls, a particularly appropriate cigarette for that.

Now, the narrator begins talking here. And he says, “First thing you oughta know, it’s all fiction.” Okay, that’s provocative. We then go to the Hollywood Hills and he continues talking about the Hollywood Dream. And it’s good voiceover. Then this man appears, he is a young studio executive, he drops a cigarette to the ground. I like, “But not for long.” Good. You’re confident. You don’t care that I know that he’s going to die. It doesn’t matter.

And then he says, the character, this guy, David Morgan says, “Guess I believe it now,” to no one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But there is a camera whirring away which, theoretically, he’s put there to film his own death. Then the narrator continues talking to you and the audience about the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast, referencing gun powder. And then Morgan kills himself in a kind of a nice romantic way in terms of the description, you know. “His fingers spread wide, empty and pleading.”

So, look, the good news is you know how to write, you understand words. I don’t understand what this voiceover is actually doing for you here.

**John:** Yeah. I got really confused here. I got confused to the degree to which Morgan is responding to the voiceover. Is Morgan hearing the voiceover? I got really lost in this first section. I’m about to get lost again.

So I thought it was all provocative. I thought it created a good world. And yet, I didn’t know what I was supposed to know at this point.

**Craig:** I mean, what I took it as is that the narrator is talking generically to us and the audience about whether or not you should believe success stories. Morgan says something to himself that kind of thematically echoes what the voiceover is saying. And then the voiceover continues.

That’s not a good idea because it’s going to create that confusion. My bigger issue is while I liked what the narrator was saying, I know for sure that this scene would work really well if nobody had any narration whatsoever. And that instead of the kind of super stylized opening, we began with this valley, we had this guy setting up a camera and starting it filming and then walking out there and then saying, “Guess I believe it now,” which we would be like, “What? Who are you talking to?” And then he killed himself, “Whoa.”

Okay, that would work better to me than this version with the voiceover.

**John:** Yeah. I think there was aspects of just too many things happening simultaneously. So we’re having to deal with like, okay, there’s a camera running, what is the camera supposed to be filming, was the camera already going, do I need to be worried about there’s somebody else in the scene, you had this voiceover. It seems like he’s talking back to the voiceover. It just felt like there’s too much being thrown at me all at once.

And I agree with you, I don’t even think you necessarily need Morgan’s line of dialogue, too. I think if that’s just a silent scene where like this guy sort of takes one last look, camera is running and then he kills himself, that’s provocative.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the other option is get rid of that Morgan line. So you kind of can have one or the other but not both, I think, because it doesn’t work. Then we go to a movie theater and now we’re kind of that iconic shot of an audience, a 1950s audience and their 3D glasses. I like the description of Lyle Tabbins, “A square-jawed would-be heartthrob in a shirt and tie.”

I actually learn a lot just from that. And I think “would-be heartthrob”, it’s sort of like, I don’t know, I got something from that description. He seems a bit grumpy. And then it’s after the movie, he’s with his date, Veronica. And he essentially puts her in a car. She has this sort of vampy, noirish way of talking. “Well, don’t leave me home all alone on Christmas. I don’t know what I’ll do, nothing to unwrap.” You know, okay, I like that, you know. It feels right.

And then he kind of sends her on her way. It says, “SUPER: Christmas Eve, 1953.” Well, she just said, “Don’t leave me home all alone on Christmas,” and the slug line said 1953 earlier, so I don’t know, just maybe not repeat that. Also, we should know that it’s period. I don’t know if 1953 the specific year is important, let me know. But the movie is going to be telling me this is in the ’50s. I don’t know if we need that super.

He goes back into the theater and does in fact, it seems like there is another girl here, Rosalind. And they have an interesting past. It seems like they have this relationship, I can’t quite tell if they’re lovers or not, but she’s obviously been dating a married man who has beaten her in the past. And Tabbins, apparently, had gotten revenge on her behalf by punching him in the face.

All decent noir stuff. And I kind of liked the way it was going back and forth. I picked up what was going on, at least I think I did. So it was enjoyable. I mean, I don’t know how much of this movie I could take but that has nothing to do with Andy. That’s just my taste. You know, like neo noirs are tough.

**John:** So I got really lost in the cut from the guy’s death to the movie theater because I think because I saw a camera running, I assumed that what they were watching was somehow related to the thing I had just seen. And the smash cut to I think partly influenced my confusion there. But I had to go through it like three times to make sure like, wait, no, so they weren’t watching the scene that was there.

If the very first image I’d gotten was a Kiss Me, Kate image that makes it very clear that it’s not this moment I just saw, that would have helped me here. So right now in the scene description, “The crowd, in their red-and-blue 3D glasses, squeals as Ann Miller tosses her red glove in their direction during her production number in Kiss Me, Kate.”

If I had started on Ann Miller tosses a glove, then I would know like, okay, I’m not watching that same movie. I’m not watching the scene that just happened. And what I saw before wasn’t a scene in a movie. And I immediately kind of went there I think partly because I had been thrown off with like there’s a narrator but people seem to be able to talk to the narrator. I didn’t quite know what the rules of this movie were.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So that’s what was tripping me up. So literally, if the first image was not the movie theater audience but was what we were seeing on screen, I would have known what was happening here a little bit faster.

I thought these are great names for these characters.

**Craig:** Yeah, I like them.

**John:** So Veronica, Lyle Tabbins, we get to Rosalind. It’s like they’re all very specific period names that make me feel like, okay, we’re in this space.

And the other, again, specificity, we say this every time, but her camelhair coat, a tray of smokes, a pinup figure, blonde hair cascading over one eye, these are all details that make me feel like, “Oh, I know what this movie is supposed to look like and feel like.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And so, again, I’m not a huge neo noir person. That’s not sort of my genre but I feel what this movie is wanting to be. And that’s a very good thing to be at three pages in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, this might just be noir, you know. Like I don’t even know if it’s neo noir. But I agree. I thought that, look, the big headline for me is that Andy can write and he seems to understand how to tell a story visually.

Like everyone, and especially with noir which is notoriously subtextual and detail-oriented, hard to follow — I remember when I saw The Maltese Falcon, I was like 15 and I was like, “All right, let me watch that again now because I don’t know what the hell just happened. [laughs] Like, why is that a fake and what happened?”

But it is remarkable to me how often when you and I discuss these three pages, so many of our problems come down to clarity. And that’s a big wrestling match for the writer because they don’t want to be on the nose. But then they don’t want to be confusing. It’s a tough one. So, you know, adjusting that balance is the name of the game. But overall, very promising.

**John:** Two episodes ago, we had Alice on and she was the person who worked doing audio descriptions for the blind. And we were talking about that ambiguity. And I was thinking about that as I was looking through that scene in the script where he’s looking over the valley and there’s the narrator and he has the gun. And that came up as like, “Well, what would she actually say? And would she actually know what she’s supposed to be interpreting at that moment about whether he’s answering back or not answering back,” you know, in some ways thinking about like, how she would describe it might be a useful way of figuring out like, “Am I being clear enough here about what my intention is?”

**Craig:** Right. I’m with you 100% on that.

**John:** Cool. Our next one. Do you want to read this one?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I’ll do Time Heist. I’m debating whether I should do a prologue or an epilogue on this. I’m going to go prologue.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So Time Heist, as you might imagine, is about people traveling in time and stealing things. I’m guessing and you’ll see and I’m right. I just got pitched this idea. [laughs] So I just got pitched this idea about somebody — so I just want to say, Brian, I swear to God, I’m not stealing your idea. I don’t know if I’m going to do it. I probably won’t. But just in case, you should know, the idea of time heisting is I mean of course, time bandits already established that that idea is an idea. But I just wanted you to be aware that someone had spoken to me about it. Okay.

**John:** So here’s what he can take a good sign is that people who are actually making movies think that that is a world of movie that should be made.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so good job.

**Craig:** Good job. Okay, so let’s summarize. We are in the German countryside, 1945, night. And a armored Nazi cargo truck is heading down the road. Half asleep Nazi soldier at the wheel. His superior is napping away in the passenger seat.

Behind the Nazi cargo truck, a military jeep appears but its headlights are not on. And at the wheel of that jeep is Kristof Wexler, 30, also in a Nazi uniform. And he speeds up closing the gap between the two trucks.

Underneath the truck, we see a flicker of light and then we reveal that that is Blake Gardner, 30s, charming and confident. Holding a small propane torch. He’s under the truck like on a dolly, strapped to the undercarriage of the truck.

And although he is dressed in 1940s fatigues, he’s wearing this futuristic time piece on his wrist. So he begins cutting into the bottom of the truck with his torch. Then Blake begins talking to somebody in his earpiece and we reveal that he’s talking to Dr. Nicholas Halligan, 30 — everyone is exactly 30. Tweed coat and glasses. And Dr. Halligan is in a parked Volkswagen Beetle on the side of the road. He’s studying charts and documents and he’s warning them, 90 seconds until impact.

Unfortunately, Blake drops his torch because the truck hits a pothole. Halligan hears about this and says, “You have to abort.” But Blake has a better idea. Even though there’s only 45 seconds left, he starts moving down the undercarriage of the Nazi cargo truck towards the front. And then before we find out what he does, another truck is heading barreling toward them from the other direction. Those are the first three pages of Time Heist.

**John:** Time Heist. You get what is supposed to be happening here. I was able to follow the general flow of the action. So there’s a guy underneath the truck. He’s trying to get into the truck. Something goes wrong. He’s going to have to change his plans, but he’s going to stick with it and go through it. This is a movie hero doing movie hero kind of things.

I had a weird thing. I am curious whether this happened for you too. We’re on dirt road. It’s established that we’re on a dirt road. And then the minute we got to the dolly underneath the truck. I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t work.” The dolly under the truck feels like such a modern slick paved road kind of thing. I was having a hard time visualizing like, “Wait, how was this all going to necessarily work?”

The reveal that this people are — you know, he’s a time traveler because he has this sort of glowing watch. Well, okay. But it felt like a lot to suppose the audience is going to be with you about what that information means when they see this glowing watch on him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It felt like it’s supposing things of the audience that I didn’t necessarily know you could count on happening properly.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, the fact is it’s announcing the concept in a time when I’m not sure you want to the audience to know what the concept is. I mean, let’s just start with this. Since somebody mentioned this movie idea [laughs] to me, I mean this is not how I would do it. To me, if you’re going to do a time heist movie, you start with a heist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a time period. And they are — so three guys are stealing something out of the back of some Nazi truck. And we don’t know — time doesn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever but —

**John:** Because nothing involving time travel is important at the time that this is revealed.

**Craig:** That’s right. And they should get caught. In fact, they should almost — when they get caught, they should be totally unconcerned with being caught because once they’re locked up in the paddy wagon, they know the timer is going to go off and they’re just going to go sucked back through time again. I mean, one way or another, you’ve got to introduce the concept to the audience like it’s its own character.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t just plop it on them and go, “Well, they’re going to know it’s about time because it’s called Time Heist, so let’s just start with, you know, them going through time and heisting.” No. I mean you need to build, you know, build to your concept.

**John:** So let’s take this exact same action sequence and look at ways so we can implement this idea. So this guy is trying to break into a truck. That’s great. You don’t need to be a time traveler to do that. So he’s going to do this, something goes wrong, he has a propane torch. Even though he’s a time traveler, he still apparently has sort of like old fashioned kind of tools. He doesn’t have like a laser cutter.

So he has his propane torch. He’s trying to get in there. We don’t know anything about time travel so far. This goes wrong. We could still say like you got 90 seconds, like, no I can do it. We believe there’s 90 seconds because maybe there’s — they know that there’s an intervention coming or they had the road block or something. He gets up in. Again, we saw the movie is called Time Heist. So it’s not going to be a surprise that our hero ultimately becomes revealed as a time traveler.

The potential for surprise is that the driver of this other car or van is also a time traveler, that there’s something else going on that’s an actual level of surprise. So I think there are moments you can get to it. I kind of push back that the first reveal that our hero is a time traveler, that the villains are time travelers until it’s a really interesting, crucial, make or break moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to think about how to delight people, tease them and surprise them. And you just can’t dump stuff in their lap like that, you know. The description of the action — I was able to follow it pretty well. Got a little lost around exterior side of the road, continuous to parked Volkswagen Beetle. And then interior VW Beetle. Because you’re not separate — you know, I like to separate my slug lines with an extra line break above it. And I also like to bold them.

But you don’t. That’s fine. Except when you have a parked Volkswagen Beetle on all caps, now I got this like three lines in a row of a lot of all caps and then, I’m sorry, four because of Dr. Nicholas Halligan. That’s a block of four all caps. And I got a little skimmy on that, which I think is a natural thing.

I’m a little concerned that the stunt that’s going on with the truck is exactly out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in which your hero is trapped underneath a Nazi truck and is moving towards the front of it by going under the undercarriage. So I don’t love that.

**John:** I just feel like that overall climbing under truck has become the new air duct. And we just see it so often and, you know, we saw it in the most recent Mad Max as well. I just don’t know that’s going to be our best friend for action sequences for a while.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. And let’s put it this way. It’s never going to be your best friend in a spec script. You know, if a director — if you guys are making a movie and a director says, “Oh my god, I have this amazing way of doing the old under the truck trick,” sure. But, you know, that’s not the case here.

I’m going to call out just an odd — so look, not everyone can be 30. I think 30s is fine. But it’s like a weird thing that everyone is exactly 30. Dr. Nicholas Halligan has an odd way of talking.

**John:** He does.

**Craig:** “What is the matter?” And then he says, “That settles it. We must abort.” ‘We must abort’ and ‘What is the matter?’ are a little robotic.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe he’s a robot.

**Craig:** Oh, maybe he’s a robot.

**John:** That would be fun.

**Craig:** That would actually be awesome. I don’t think he is, though.

**John:** No. It would not be so good if he were. Craig, did you watch the show Voyagers! growing up?

**Craig:** I did watch Voyagers!

**John:** I love that show.

**Craig:** With Jon-Erik Hexum.

**John:** They had a little time piece. Got to get back in time.

**Craig:** In fact, hold on a second, I’m going to try and pull the name of the kid. It’s Jon-Erick Hexum — and I feel like the kid’s last name was like Peluce or something.

**John:** Yeah, it was some Italian name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like Lorenzo or something.

**Craig:** I think it was — I don’t know, Peluce, that doesn’t sound right — but maybe it is. Yeah, no, I love that show. And that’s just the whole genre. There’s that. There was Sliders. There was —

**John:** Quantum Leap.

**Craig:** Quantum Leap. Exactly. I mean so this is all very familiar territory. All the more reason to really think like a magician.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, magicians understand how to misdirect and they understand the value of surprise. And you just want to do that as much as possible particularly in a movie where you have the benefit of this huge high concept.

**John:** Yeah. Meeno Peluce was the character.

**Craig:** My God, I was pretty — Peluce. Yeah, okay.

**John:** Nicely done. Meeno is a great name also.

**Craig:** Meeno, I know. And poor Jon-Erik Hexum.

**John:** Jon-Erik Hexum, so sexy, so dead.

**Craig:** So dead. Do you know what his last words were? This isn’t even a joke. His last words were, “I wonder if this will hurt.” Because you know how he died, right?

**John:** Yeah, he was firing what he thought was a blank and —

**Craig:** It was a blank.

**John:** Oh, it was a blank.

**Craig:** It was a blank.

**John:** You can’t fire a blank into your temple because it will actually shatter your bone and —

**Craig:** Yeah, because there’s a concussive force that comes out of it that basically is like being punched really, really, really — it’s like basically being hit in the head with a hammer at full force. So yeah, you’re going to die. I mean — and so, “I wonder if this will hurt.” It did hurt.

**John:** It did. It was terrible.

**Craig:** Bummer. Poor Jon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Erik.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Hexum. So we have one more to go. You want to read this one?

**John:** I’ll do this one. So this last one comes from Len Anderson IV. It’s titled One White Flint North. The tile page includes address, phone number. But not his actual address and phone number. So that might be a thing —

**Craig:** I did try calling him. I tried dialing phone number.

**John:** And it’s weird because you think like, you do the thing where on the keyboard like you dialed the P and the H and the —

**Craig:** Guess what? Worked.

**John:** It worked. Actually, it’s so amazing that we got to him.

**Craig:** Got to him. I’m actually going to hang out with him tonight at address.

**John:** [laughs] All right. We open in the teaser. So this looks like a TV pilot. Over black, tactical ops radio jabber. We are following a truck. It’s semi-modified, tire pressure status, GPS, it’s a high-tech truck. The driver is 35. Hands at ten and two. And next to him is Brent Voss, 28, a SWAT team member. They’re scanning the landscape. They ain’t hauling Frosted Flakes.

They are talking on the radio. They’re communicating with their team. And so we see the other people who are watching this truck as they move. So we’re on I-15 in California. There’s a helicopter tracking them from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the team lead, Brendan Burks is watching them, communicating through to Rachel who is at the ops center for NRC.

There are wall screens. They are going through all the technical stuff of like tracking this truck as it moves down – -there’s a convoy of three vehicles, light Interstate traffic.

Rachel Alvarez, 35, is the NRC Securities and Safeguards Department. She’s given the go ahead to move on ahead. And there’s chatter back and forth between the different team members as they are moving with the truck down the road. That’s honestly kind of all that happens in these three pages.

**Craig:** Yes, all right. Well, let’s get into it, Len. [laughs] I like to call these tough guy quipping movies because that’s basically what’s going on. Tough guys are all quipping. So let’s start. I mean there’s perfectly good opening visual. Although, I wasn’t sure how we were supposed to tumble to face. So it says, “A SINGLE FLOWER waves in the wind — WIDER: shoulder of an INTERSTATE FREEWAY — A BLACK SEDAN whizzes by — move with the breeze, tumble to face — the grill of a SEMI TRUCK.” So the camera is tumbling to face? I don’t know how that works exactly. Unless we’re on the dandelion cam. So that was just weird to me. But okay.

Then we go into this truck. And it says, modified. Duress button. Tire pressure status. GPS track. Now, I read that like three times. So I’m like, okay, modified is an adjective. And then duress button is one of the things that they’ve modified in there. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to know it’s a duress button. Does it say duress over it? Because I think it’s just going to be a button.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what am I looking at? I’m looking at a button? And then it says tire pressure status. Most cars have that now. GPS track, every car has that. So I wasn’t really sure like how am I supposed to know that this is a special truck other than that there’s a button? Okay. Button.

We have the driver who’s wearing a flight suit, okay. And then there’s a guy next to him in SWAT team gear. Fine. Got it. And then the radio crackles. Brent chimes in, “Checkpoint Chargers.” Now, no one said anything to him. So all that happened was there’s some static and then he decided that that was meaningful static and then talked to somebody.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he says to the driver, “Just like rehearsal. Another Sunday driver heading to grandma’s house.” And my reaction to that is to say, “No.”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You can’t do this stuff. We are in 2015. This stuff was old in 1986. This is like Golan-Globus dialogue. You can’t do it. People don’t talk like this. We now live in a time when we see military movies that are hyper realistic.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they are practically like journalists embedding themselves, right? The movies are like embedding themselves in a fictionalized world of soldiers. And they are very real. There’s an enormous attention to detail because everybody knows what fake is now. Everybody.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this is it. That is fake. Okay, then we come back to this flatbed trailer. It says black rubber covers the cargo, which in this case [laughs], it’s a nuclear waste cask.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How do I know? Because isn’t the black rubber covering it? And then it says an orange cylinder, capped with three feet of rubber on each end. Is that underneath the other rubber? Or is the black rubber covering the ends?

And then it says 8,000 pounds of concrete. Orange concrete? I don’t understand. It’s impenetrable. I would have no way of knowing that because a pamphlet hasn’t been handed to the audience. See, so much information that just isn’t possible to get. Like is it a duress button. Who am I talking to on the radio? Is it impenetrable? What’s inside of it? How the hell would we know any of that?

**John:** We wouldn’t. So let’s take a step back and look at this clearly on page four, God, I hope on page four, something is going to go horribly wrong. And someone is going to interrupt this convoy. And bad stuff is going to happen. And it was unfortunate it didn’t happen before now. But that’s where we’re at.

But let’s take a look at if you are starting a movie with the truck and before the bad guys approached, your first three pages are so precious and so to only have truck set up and not to actually get to know about your characters feels like a real mistake. Or at least to not have something to tell us what is special about your world or what’s at stake, really honestly what the cargo is that you’re holding feels like a real challenge.

**Craig:** It does. And there are all sorts of ways to get into this. And maybe the best way is this, I don’t know, to just start with them on a truck talking. But it felt like, again, we were just dumping the premise in people’s laps. And there was no sense of surprise or discovery to be had. You know, there was no cleverness to it. It’s just we’re in a truck with nuclear waste.

Then, oh boy, okay, now, this whole thing here, now they’re in some kind of like a datacenter, this is the Jason Bourne datacenter. Let’s just call it that, the Jason Bourne datacenter for an international monitoring of objects. They’re in it. I don’t necessarily believe that such a thing exists. Maybe it does. I doubt it.

**John:** Well, I bet it does within the TV series that he is describing because I think I need to remember that this is meant to be a pilot for a TV show. And so within this world, I wouldn’t be surprised if this headquarters is a crucial thing. And some of these characters we’re meeting are crucial people involved here.

But I haven’t been convinced by the end of page three that, “Oh, wow, this is going to be a cool world of people I want to see.”

**Craig:** I agree. We have an ops assistant saying, “Copy Chargers.” So I believe he is responding to Brent who said, “Checkpoint Chargers.” So Checkpoint Chargers is in the middle of page one. Copy Chargers is in the middle of page two. So that’s quite a long pause before he decides to answer.

And then he says to no one in particular, Chester — maybe Chester saying to the ops assistant or maybe saying it to the guy on the radio, “Welcome to the show.” What show? I mean, come on. You want to say welcome to the show. It better be some sort of bad ass thing like you’re, you know, I don’t know, Seal Team 6 or something. I just don’t buy it.

**John:** So let’s try to envision what this pilot might actually be about and sort of what is going to be happening over the course of this. So let’s say that this is the team that deals with emergency nuclear situations. I’m just going to spitball and guess here. And so maybe this ops center becomes a crucial thing.

Then it’s actually great and fine to start in a truck and then we move to the ops center. But what we’re doing in the ops center should probably be a better indication of sort of like normal daily life, but also be giving us character information about who’s sort of in charge of what things, what is the normal sort of daily activity going to be like? Are there any sort of like character details or character runner jokes that we’re starting to set up here that makes us feel like everyone is expecting this to go okay, but also have a plan for if things go poorly. Then I’m engaged and I’m leaning in.

Also, by the end of page three, I need to feel some threat and some stakes, like I need to know that the bad guys are going to be picking up. Or I need to see like that motorcycle revving behind the billboard, the whatever that’s going to be happening here.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like the opening sequence needs to justify why the central premise of the show should happen. I don’t want them to already be in place and doing stuff and then something extraordinary happens. I want to see why some new group is necessary to monitor these things. I want to see something go wrong because of inattention or because of a bad guy or whatever it is, but it could have been prevented if. It’s why I still think like the opening scene of WarGames, one of the best opening scenes in history — do you remember the opening scene in WarGames?

**John:** I don’t remember WarGames at all, so —

**Craig:** WarGames opens with two guys in a missile silo. And they’re just chitchatting. And then they get a little thing. It’s like, “Oh, probably another test.” And they get the message and it’s not a test. It’s the launch codes.

And there’s a younger guy and an older guy. And the younger guy is like, “Oh my God, this is really happening.” And the older guy is like, “Calm down. It’s okay. I’m just going to call.” And the phone is not working I think because they automatically shut it down in case of launch codes. And this is it, it’s really happening.

So they both put their keys in. And on the count of three, they have to turn their keys. And on the count of three, the young guy turns his key, but the old guy, it’s just his hand is on the key, he can’t turn it. He just can’t do it.

And the younger guy says, “Turn your key, sir.” And the guy doesn’t. And then the younger guy pulls out a gun and aims it at the old guy and says, “Turn your key.” And then we go, boom, cuts to black. And then WarGames, we’re like, “Oh my God, what the hell just happened?”

Then you see a scene where all these generals are meeting in NORAD and they’re saying, “Well, we ran kind of like a special test where we gave everybody real codes that we knew wouldn’t actually work to see how many of them would actually do it if they thought it was real. And it turns out that like 38% of them did not launch, which is why we need a new system where we don’t rely on human beings to make those decisions.

And you’re like, “Yes.” You just figured out how to justify this ridiculous concept that [laughs] a computer is going to be in charge of our nuclear weapons. And I believed it. So this show needs to do that. It needs to justify why there should be a show about monitoring trucks with nuclear waste.

**John:** Now, I’m putting that assumption on the show. So it is entirely possible that this is actually a serialized show rather than a procedural show that it’s actually, we’re going to follow this nuclear waste as it gets transported around the world. It can be possible that I’m completely wrong of what the intention was here.

But I would just say like my reading of these first three pages and what this action sequence seems to be setting up, feels like that kind of thing. So if that’s not the intention, you need to pull me out of that intention probably quicker.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if our sympathy is actually going to lie with the people who are stealing it, then I need to see those people before now.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** If our sympathy is going to be with like ordinary pedestrians or ordinary sort of people in the world, then maybe you are in a car with a family bickering and like this giant convoy moves past, like “What the hell is that truck?” And one of them says like, “Oh I think that’s, crap, like that’s nuclear waste, like they’re hauling stuff.” And like, oh, now I have this information. And I’m ready for things to go horribly wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s also just talk about characters. I’m going to read some lines here. Brent says, “Just like rehearsal. Another Sunday driver heading to grandma’s house.” Chester says, “Welcome to the show.” Then Rachel is described as “Doesn’t have time for Twitter. She’s just good.” And Casey Stack is described as “Former army, deals with PTSD on his own dime.”

Well, my goodness. Everybody is just so damn cool, aren’t they? I mean I — ugh, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, no. They’re caricatures. They’re not characters.

**John:** Yeah. That’s why you’re paid the big bucks, which it says on page three.

**Craig:** Yeah, she says that she goes — and they’re having this thing that we’ve seen a million times of two people doing, you know, scary military stuff that would freak us out having this, you know, very mundane conversation. You’re not sticking me with an after action report on this on. That’s why you’re paid the big bucks.

So, you know, this feels very ’80s. It feels like ’80s. It feels really broad. And not intentionally broad. So I think you have to really ask yourself these following questions. What is the kind of show that you’re trying to do that’s like on the air right now? Where would it fit like if you could have a, you know, a show come on and then your show come on. What would be a good match?

Ask yourself, would these characters fly on that show? You have to earn your premise. You can’t just dump it on us and say, “Yeah, see? Nuclear waste is the problem and we have the team to solve it.” No. Make me believe that it’s a problem. And then answer the problem with your show.

And I think you got to also comb through the writing here and look for things that are ambiguous or confusing like this are covered, but we can see them. Things are impenetrable, we have no idea. A button means a thing, but it’s just a button. You know what I mean?

**John:** The other thing I want to say is that, if you’re writing this as a spec pilot, your intention probably is not that this gets produced, but this is as a writing sample. This just shows like, “Oh, I can write a really good episode of a one-hour TV show.” And so this hopefully something you’re writing in order to be staffed. And that is a great good thing to be doing.

And even people who are currently staffed on TV shows will continue to write spec pilots just for those reasons so they can get staffed on other shows, they can show the different kinds of things that they can write.

But as you’re writing these, yes, you’re looking at the TV landscape, you’re looking at sort of what shows could be on the air, where this could fit. But you’re not going for the lowest common denominator like, “Well, it’s better than that worst show that somehow made it on to the air.” It actually has to be great because the people who are staffing these TV shows are reading 100 scripts to try to fill their staff.

And so they’re going to respond to things that are like innovative and great and smart and brilliant and somehow manage to feel like TV, but better than TV. And so anything that feels like this, honestly, that feels like it’s just kind of going through the motions is not going to result in a happy outcome.

**Craig:** Yeah. And look, Len, I know I just beat you up there. And I do apologize if that came off as harsh. And I know you probably don’t feel particularly good. But just know this. Through that process, you are now part of our brother and sisterhood. This is what we all go through. And we’ve all been there before. I’ve been on the other end of this many, many, many, many, many times. And don’t get discouraged by that. Take a week off from it. [laughs] Then take it to heart and start again.

**John:** To me if felt like it’s somebody who is for the first time learning the form and the format and learning how to communicate things they see in their head on the page. And so they’re trying to write the kind of sequences that they used to seeing. And not realizing that the kind of stuff that’s in here, not only is it really familiar, but it would done much more quickly and efficiently in an actual script.

And so reading a bunch more really good action scripts would probably be a great start. Reading more TV pilots will be a great start, too.

**Craig:** I concur.

**John:** Cool. I want to want thank all three of our people for writing in with their samples and letting us talk about them on the air. And everybody else who has sent things through, even if we haven’t talked about it, you are all very brave people because you never know which scripts Stuart is going to pick.

Again, if you would like to send in one of these Three Page Challenges, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there’s the instructions for how you send those things to us to read. So again, thank you to these people for being so brave.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you to everybody who sends these in. And, you know, yeah, God, you’re braver than I am.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is a simple little article by Caroline Moss about Logan Paul. Craig, do you know who Logan Paul is?

**Craig:** I read the article, so I do.

**John:** Awesome. Craig did his homework. Logan Paul is a star on Vine. And if you don’t know what Vine is, it’s little six second clips. Twitter bought the company. And what I found so fascinating about it — because he can come off poorly depending on how you read the article. But I was thinking about how, if you were to read a profile of Will Smith or Mark Wahlberg at the time where there were just trying to break through, they would probably sound a lot like Logan Paul’s thing. So that’s not saying that he is going to break through and become some giant success. But he has the kind of ambition that I associate with some people who became famous later on.

So it’s so fascinating to be a star in a nascent medium and to be grappling with the kinds of things that he is now facing.

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting phenomenon that has emerged. There is a wall between new media — I’ll call it new media independent stardom and traditional stardom. So do you know who PewDiePie is?

**John:** Of course, PewDiePie, a YouTube star.

**Craig:** Right, great. So PewDiePie makes millions and millions of dollars a year. And he is famous the world over. But no one is going to put PewDiePie in a movie. And I don’t think they’re going to give PewDiePie his TV show and not that he would want it anyway, he is doing pretty well on his own. Because it doesn’t feel like that’s what it’s about. That fame is a different fame.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we look at movie stars and television stars, we’re looking for people to occupy hero spaces. And those are certain kinds of people. And they’re not always beautiful people or strong people. They come in all shapes and sizes. But they occupy hero spaces.

The new media independent star occupies a traditional space. They are like us. That’s the point. And we just happen to like what they’re doing. So it is interesting to see what’s going on here. The piece was a little side-eye-ish towards him. I thought, you know, they kind of — they didn’t make him look too good in that segment about him and his acting class where basically the article said, “He’s not acting very well nor is he taking direction very well. But he still thinks he did a great job.”

And you have to kind of take it with a grain of salt because it’s the reporter’s point of view. That’s probably not a good thing.

**John:** But I thought she was actually more generous with him about the song he’s trying to do and how hard he’s working in a way that I thought was refreshing because so often, you see like, you know, “Well, why does PewDiePie make $12 million a year?” Or “Why does this guy have all these fans?” It’s like, “Well, they’re actually working really hard.”

And so I found it nice to see that the things that seem like casual one off flippant things were actually a lot of planning, a lot of work to try to make them happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, these guys — I’m the last person in the world to do the, “Well, why is that guy making all that money for stupid Vines or videos about video games and…” Well, you know what, I believe in the marketplace. If they’re making millions of dollars a year, they’re doing something right. Obviously, they’re connecting with a huge audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And yeah, those Vines actually look really complicated. There’s another guy that does them, a similar kind of deal.

**John:** Yeah. Avery Monson does these really — I’ll link in to some of his stuff, too — these really complicated visual illusions that are —

**Craig:** That must be who I’m thinking of. Is he Asian?

**John:** I don’t think so.

**Craig:** There’s an Asian guy, Asian-American guy who does them. And they’re awesome. So anyway, yeah, no these guys deserve their stardom. The question is, can it crossover? I don’t know. I don’t know. My One Cool Thing this week, another Twitter suggestion is called Thync, spelled T-H-Y-N-C. Haha, like Thync, Thync.

So I mean [laughs] if this thing works, I’m so tempted to get it. I might just get it. So it essentially is a device that you put on your head [laughs] —

**John:** It looks amazing, Craig. I just loaded up the site.

**Craig:** It does look amazing. It’s like, it’s very Star Wars. It looks like a Lobot sort of thing. And it essentially sends wave forms through your skin into your brain.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And essentially it’s a frequency. They’re just using frequency outputs. And in fact, that is a legitimate thing. People do this for muscles a lot, you know, you’ve heard of like tense devices and things like that, electricity and so on and so forth.

What they are saying is that this device, actually there’s two modes. One which is to calm you down. And the other one is to essentially stimulate you into a state of non-anxious alertness. Naturally, my BS detector went straight up. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Naturally. But they published a paper and I read the paper. And if the data is correct, it kind of works. There is a strongly statistically significant difference between the placebo control which I thought they did well and their device. And they have a quote on their page talking about blurbs from a professor at the City College of New York, Neural Engineering, brain stimulation and medical device design, Dr. Marom Bikson.

So then I went I’m like still like [laughs], so I looked around for some reviews and a couple of people have reviewed it and they said, “Yeah, it works.”

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** So should I try it?

**John:** You should absolutely try it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Craig, you got to spend that money.

**Craig:** I got to spend that money.

**John:** So a similar or kind of related thing, I have the Muse headset, which is a sort of meditation kind of thing. Like basically it’s tracking your I want to say brain energy, but that’s a really poor way of phrasing it. But it has an app that goes with it and you’re able to sort of like calm yourself down and you could actually measure sort of like as you’re calming yourself down. And you can change the pitch of things. And you can feel these birds standing on your shoulder.

And it’s impressive, but it one of those things where I used it like four times and like I haven’t touched in a long time. I’ll be curious what your experience is with this and whether you find it useful enough that you’re using it often or you use a little bit and then it goes into that same drawer with your Google Glasses.

**Craig:** Oh, the Google Glasses, what a piece of crap.

**John:** Well, but I think it’s good that you helped keep that company in business because they’re a struggling startup.

**Craig:** It’s a Kickstarter.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That was a great show.

**John:** That was a good show. So thank you very much. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth who has done some of our best outros. So thank you for sending in this one.

If you have an outro to send in, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send in questions about things we talked about on the show. Short things are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

As always, you can find us on iTunes. You can download the podcast there. You can also leave us a review which is lovely. If you would like to get a USB drive with all 200 episodes — the first 200 episodes of the show, those should be in the store now, hopefully, by the time you get this podcast. And you can go to store.johnaugust.com. USB drives are $20 and have all of the episodes of the show including the dirty episodes which is always fun.

And that’s our show for this week.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

* Today is the final day to [submit your Fall 2015 Scriptnotes shirt design](http://johnaugust.com/shirt)
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* Three Pages by [Len Anderson IV](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/LenAndersonIV.pdf)
* [Logan Paul has conquered the internet, but he can’t figure out how to conquer the world](http://www.techinsider.io/vine-star-logan-paul-profile-2015-7) by Caroline Moss
* [Avery Monsen](https://vine.co/AveryMonsen) on Vine
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-to-not-be-a-jerk).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 209 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we will be talking about how critic quotes get massaged to be used as advertising blurbs, how not to be a screenwriting jerk, and why movies are almost never late.

But first, we have some follow-up. Craig, in the episode we talked about reshoots, we mentioned the reshoots on World War Z and you tweeted a link that I thought was really great.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this was an article that came out actually just ahead of the movie’s release. And it caused quite a bit of consternation. And frankly, I was a bit shocked by how many people were willing to speak to Vanity Fair. They did a pretty in-depth take on what had gone wrong, at least what had gone wrong as far as they could tell.

And, you know, I’m always going on about how terrible entertainment journalism is. This was an example of actual journalism about entertainment, which is a different thing. And so they spoke with Marc Forster, the director. They didn’t speak with Brad Pitt but they did speak with Damon Lindelof who came in to do a lot of work along Drew Goddard. Chris McQuarrie did a lot of work as well, although he did not agree to talk to Vanity Fair about it. They spoke with the studio, they spoke with producers. And you got a kind of a picture of what went wrong.

And it’s interesting, I guess the advanced bad buzz about that movie was “The director and the actor aren’t talking and they hate each other and no one knows what they’re doing and the movie sucks.” And what it really came down to was script problems. It was just the ending was wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a script problem.

**John:** And that wasn’t the fault of, you know, the original writers of the movie. It was an intention that didn’t actually work when it was time to make it as a movie. And so they shot a whole different ending that didn’t end up becoming the movie they wanted it to be.

**Craig:** It does seem like, if you can find some blame in the what went wrong, it probably was with the good old development process where they try to jam disparate writers together with disparate voices and disparate viewpoints on the material and they got something of a feathered fish there at the end that just didn’t work.

And, you know, sometimes, like we were saying, when you come in, I mean, you and I have both been in situations where we’ve come in to a movie that is completed and is in trouble, and people look at us and say, “Well, what do we do to fix this?” And the fact that you can come in and see everything as a whole and then point to spots and go, “That doesn’t belong with the whole,” you just have this enormous creative advantage over anyone else who’s been slogging through the woods. You actually can see the forest.

And not to take anything away from Damon or Drew or Chris, they were the beneficiaries of that perspective. That said, they also pulled off a really great ending, as did Marc Forster, as did Brad Pitt, as did the whole production. Yes, there are things in the article about how they went wildly over budget and all the rest of it. Yeah, but that happens.

I mean, it was huge movie and interestingly enough, the article sort of says, “Boy, this thing is going to have to make like $400 million to make its money back.” And it went on to make close to 600 at the Box Office.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I think all told, well, here, the proof is in the pudding, they’re making a World War Z 2. What else do you need to know?

**John:** What I think is so interesting about this situation of World War Z is that the temptation I think was to always make the ending bigger, that it had to grow to become something larger and larger. And so the ending apparently they shot was really huge. And that wasn’t what the movie ultimately wanted. The movie wanted to sort of get small.

And so the ending of the actual World War Z movie becomes much more isolated, that they go into that lab. It’s much more sort of a single man and a single decision. It’s so interesting that it was such a completely different scale of ending, although it made it a success.

**Craig:** Yeah. One thing that the trio of writers that came on to work on that third act picked up on so smartly was that scale is often unemotional by definition. The world or a city is not a question of individual emotion. It’s a question of external stakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what they did with the ending, the retool of the ending was they reduced the stakes down, the immediate stakes at least to “I have to walk through a wing full of zombies in a small cramped building.” But what it really came down to is, “I have a theory and I’m going to put it to the test. And if I’m wrong, I’m never going to see my family again and their daddy and their husband is going to die.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And suddenly, the emotional stakes were enormous. And that’s why it worked.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, boy, there is a lesson there that gets missed [laughs] over and over and over.

**John:** I will say that even in situations that haven’t been reshoots on movies but where I’ve come in to do a rewrite before a production, a lot of my job has been simplification, is that the script over the course of development has gotten much more complicated. And there’s been like layer upon layer upon layer added to things. A lot of times, my job is to really kind of find the through line and get rid of the stuff that is not going to be probably part of the final movie and to sort of simplify things down to what is the core idea of this movie.

Am I always right? No, I’m not. But it looks like this was a situation where that rewrite happened after it was shot. And that they pulled it off is so remarkable.

**Craig:** Yeah. They really did. I mean, I didn’t use that word “cruft” once to describe that sort of like “So clear away the cruft.” I mean, unfortunately, when you have a situation where the developers have more natural authority in a development process than a writer, the risk of cruft is enormously high. You’ve got maybe a rookie writer or a relatively new writer and then you got a lot of big players in the game, big producers, big studio, big actor.

By the way, I don’t think that was the case with World War Z but in over a time, I’ve noticed that this trend occurs. The writer essentially doesn’t have the ability to keep the invaders out of the castle. And you end up with a script that is riddled with other people’s ideas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’ve said this before, sometimes they’re good ideas but it doesn’t matter. Either the movie is of a whole or it’s not. And I would rather a script where there were mistakes that were consistent with what was good than a script that was a collection of interesting ideas that have nothing to do with each other and are disparate voices.

So when you come in [laughs], I think a lot of times what happens is we come in, we sit in this room and we just start going down a list of stuff that we have to get rid of. And a lot of people in the room sort of uncomfortably begin nodding because they know that they are partly or often largely to blame.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But you got to kind of say it. And there’s a dance we do. I’m not pointing fingers and no one’s to blame. And everybody kind of goes, “Yeah, no one’s to blame.” And then you move forward.

**John:** Yeah. You sort of pretend that this document just landed there somehow magically, that there wasn’t a history before it got into the room.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s right.

**John:** On my job, when I first approach one of those meetings, is to talk about the things I love because so often, they’re so bogged down in what’s not working and sort of all their fears and doubts and insecurities that for me to say, “By the way guys, this is really good. Like these sections are working so, so well. And let’s protect what’s working great. And then, you know, look at the rest of the stuff.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jane Espenson once, I think on one of our Christmas shows, I asked her about certain terms. And she had a term called “laying down plastic” which is you put down plastic underneath the script sort of. So as you do all the brutal cuts, nothing else gets sort of damaged in the cutting, and the hacking, and the retooling and refashioning.

And so part of my job is to sort of point out where we need to put down some plastic and not destroy what’s already really good in the script.

**Craig:** It’s very good advice, I think, for any writer going into that situation, a rewrite situation which means things have gone well for you so far in your career. Now people are calling you to say, “Hey, we’re so interested in the way you write that we think you might be able to fix something that we don’t know how to fix.”

There’s that old term “script doctor” which I hate because it just, it romanticizes something that doesn’t deserve romanticization. But part of it is accurate in that you do need to think like a doctor and you need to recognize that the script is like a patient. And you don’t walk into the waiting room where the family is and say, “Oh, my god, okay. Oh, my god. Well, I’ve looked at him.” And they’re like, “What?”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “I mean, I think that he’s probably, I mean, we’re probably going to have to take the finger off.” And they’re like, “What? Oh, that’s it?” Right?

So you have to gauge what you’re doing. That said, I actually was in one of these sort of moments. A movie had been shot, finished and was then screened for a few screenwriters to sort of say like, “We think we have a problem. How bad is the problem? We think maybe it just needs some comedy.” And Damon Lindelof and I were both part of the group. And I think [laughs] we all walked out of there thinking, “Yeah, let’s not talk about comedy. That would sort of be like do we need Botox?”

This person’s bleeding out [laughs]. Like forget sort of the outpatient clinic. Let’s go to ER, let’s go to OR, let’s start stabilizing, you know. And we were honest about it because there’s no sense in throwing, sprinkling some jokes on something that is, at its core, seriously sick. And in that case, it ended up working out. I mean, neither of us worked on it. Then we sort of like collectively put together a plan or some theories and then, you know, they went and sort of did the work, but interesting.

**John:** We’re going to circle back and talk about tact and discretion and those topics as we get to our discussion of how not to be a jerk as a screenwriter. The second bit of follow-up I wanted to get to was maybe three or four episodes ago we talked about Stretch Armstrong.

We just, in passing, we said, “Oh, somebody should write a book about the attempts to make a Stretch Armstrong movie,” because you and I both in probably our entire Hollywood careers, that project has been out there somewhere. It’s like the only project I can think of that had both Danny DeVito attached to it and Taylor Lautner attached to it at different points.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So someone wrote in asking like, “Hey, well, maybe I should write the book on it.” And actually then sent us the link to a Hollywood Reporter article by Thomas Golianopoulos which does an oral history of the Stretch Armstrong project. So I’ll put up that link into the show notes as well because it’s just fascinating to hear people talk through their experiences trying to make a Stretch Armstrong movie. A piece of IP that seems fascinating but also like, “Are you really going to make that movie?”

**Craig:** I thought it was a great article. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that article, but my former writing partner, Greg Erb, is quoted throughout and they do reference the work that Greg and I did on it. And it’s funny because at the time, we were very young. I mean, I think I was, I want to say I was like 26 years old. I had just written I think one movie for Disney. This was sort of like our follow-up project was, “Here, we’ll give you this, you know, [laughs] this wonderful golden goose. All you have to do is wait for the egg.”

And I remember that we did our job, and we thought we did a good job, and everyone seemed to like it. And then suddenly, it was gone. And we just never understood why. And at the time I just thought, “Well, maybe we didn’t do that good of a job or maybe that’s just Hollywood. I mean, they must know what they’re doing.”

And then I read this thing and I think Matt Bearman or Bernie Goldmann, one of them said, “Yeah, we should have just made that one.” And, you know, it’s funny because in truth, they shouldn’t have. I actually [laughs] disagree. I don’t think they should have made that, the script that we wrote because, you know, I don’t think any of those scripts were ever going to work. The idea just isn’t calling for a movie.

That said, if they had made our version, it probably would’ve been a fine family outing from Disney and they would have sold many VHSs. But it was fascinating to sort of look back through the lens of time and see like how after, I don’t know, now it’s been like 15 years or, geez, longer, you know, almost 20, and everybody could be a honest and just go, “Yeah, yeah. We screwed up.”

**John:** Yup. I had a flashback to this this past week where I got a Google news alert and it had my name on it for Bob the Musical which they are still in development on at Disney. And so I had done a pass of that so many years ago. And it’s one of those things, I think it’s like a Stretch Armstrong and there’s fundamentally like, “Oh, I can see the trailer for that, so I can see why you’re continuing to pursue it.” But they’re still developing it. They’re still trying to make a movie out of this concept about a guy who wakes up into a musical.

**Craig:** Well, I still think I would see that movie if somebody figures it out.

**John:** Yeah, exactly, so that’s why they keep developing it. So we’ll have links in the show notes to both the Laura Holson article for Vanity Fair and this Thomas article with the oral history of Stretch Armstrong.

But to get to today’s new topics, there was a great rant I thought by A.A. Dowd and The A.V. Club this week. And since we’re not going to have the disclaimer about swearing in the show, no, I did not say you’re — what does he actually say? “No, I didn’t call your ‘blanky’ movie a ‘comedic masterstroke’.” And I thought it was a great chance to talk about sort of, you know, the realities of how you use quotes from critics in advertisements because obviously we see like, you know, just two words taken out of random.

And like well, how are they picking those two words, do the critics have approval of those words? So here is what he actually wrote about the movie released called Accidental Love. It was originally called Nailed. It’s one of those movies that sat on the shelf for a very long time.

So he wrote, “To be fair to whoever refashioned Accidental Love from the abandoned scraps of Nailed, there’s little reason to believe that the ideal untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.” So out of that paragraph, they took the words comedic masterstroke [laughs] and put it in quotes and put his name by it.

**Craig:** [Laughs] Good. I love it. I love it.

**John:** You know, to the degree I have sympathy for critics, it’s when their words are taken so wildly out of context and then, of course, I’ve seen my own work taken wildly out of context as well.

**Craig:** Oh, sure. I mean, look, it’s not ethical. It’s not something that people should do. That said, I can’t help but giggle at the thought of critics confronted with the reality of what the movie business thinks of them. Because, you know, I’ve often wondered, if there are a whole bunch of movies that probably don’t need critics, why do they even send things to critics? Why not just not let them see it, you know, and then they’ll see it whatever opening weekend. Why do they go through all this?

And the reason they go through this is because they’re looking for, basically, advertising. They’re looking for free advertising. They’re looking for a way to continue to hoodwink, although we call it marketing, hoodwink the public into seeing something through the use of critics’ remarks.

Now, here’s the thing. You don’t have to scratch the surface very deeply to see what studios think of critics because [laughs] if they thought that critics were valid, then they would also then put the negative things on. I mean, in other words, they don’t say like, “Well, unfortunately, this movie was not reviewed well, but you should still see it. We believe in it.”

No. They don’t care what critics think. They’re just using the good stuff as they can, hypocritically, to try and fool people into seeing their movie as if the critic’s point of view is relevant to the audience’s point of view. It’s all a con.

And of course, the critics are sitting there going, “Well, hey, no, you misquoted me.” “Oh, I’m sorry. But did you not know that this was really the only upshot of what you did?” I mean, in the end, that is the only upshot. That’s what happens. I mean, when we’re talking about large movies, they can’t make or break a movie. They can’t. We see it time and time again.

So with that in mind, especially now when everyone feels so, I don’t know, post facto with criticism because, you know, people go to see a movie Thursday at midnight and start tweeting about it right away, I think that this is really the only sign that these reviews existed. Either we’ve combined you into a slurry and here’s the percentage number which is rather high, or it’s a comedic masterstroke. They shouldn’t do that. They really shouldn’t. But it makes me giggle.

**John:** So there’s actually two periods in time which you sort of see this “action” happening. One is at the first release and one is at the home video release. And in this case, this was the home video release. And this is for a movie that most people have no idea existed.

So I think the marketers, in this case, it was a distributor for Canada, desperately needed to have something that they could say that said like, “It’s a comedy. “And so they were looking for something they could say like, “Let’s look through all the reviews and somebody who says it’s a comedy [laughs] because it is not entirely clear that it’s a comedy.” And so they found this thing and it’s like, “Oh, let’s just do it.”

But, Craig, I’m curious whether you’ve had this experience where you’ve seen cuts of TV spots for your movie and they have those sort of slugs in there for the quotes that are going to go in there. Have you seen that before?

**Craig:** They used to do way more of those. They actually don’t do many of those anymore because they realized that they don’t work [laughs], which is another thing that makes me giggle. You’re right. Like when you’re trying to sell a product on a shelf, putting some signifier on it like, “This is chocolate and peanut butter, not vanilla and mint,” it’s good for people to know what they’re buying.

But in TV ads, they used to do these spots all the time. Sometimes they’d even have testimonial spots where people would come out of a movie theatre going, “I laughed, I cried, I ran the gamut of emotions.” They don’t do it anymore because it doesn’t work. They really don’t work.

But, yes, back in the day, they used to make these spots and they would put slugs in. And then even when I was doing this back in 1994 at Disney, we would make these 30-second review spots and hold slugs and then we would get, usually it was advanced press like you’d get some long lead stuff often from International.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you’d start slotting in their comments. We never did anything that was this outrageous. Sometimes you would kind of fudge a little bit with the old dot, dot, dot method. A…brilliant…movie. [laughs]

**John:** What I’ve seen in terms of the pre-cut ads is when they sort of need the quotes for tempo. So it’s like, “Bum, bum, outrageous. Bum, bum, crazy. Bum, bum, the best thing he’s done since, you know, it’s sort of like or like bigger than Jaws or something like that.” So they need those sort of like, you know, things to build so they’re looking for that single word that sort of gets you to the next point. But, you know, even with Big Fish — the movie to some degree, but also the Broadway Show. Broadway Shows are incredibly review driven, and so we needed to have those review quotes because they’re literally like on the door of the Neil Simon Theatre.

It’s like a huge, important thing. And so our New York Times review was not good, but there were things that are good in The New York Times review. And so you have this — these review quotes that sort of talk about the things they praised about the show and sort of obviously don’t mention the things they didn’t like about the show. And that it’s this weird dance you play. And I think it’s — in Broadway, it’s even sort of more cloistered and more sort of screwed up because of how small the community is that the relationship between the reviewer and success for the show is so deeply coupled.

In the case of A.A. Dowd here, you know, he’s frustrated that his quotes got used. But like, it’s not going to hurt him personally.

**Craig:** No. No. Nobody — I mean, ultimately. And I apologize to A.A. Dowd, but he’s not going to make or break a movie. It could have been anybody. They could have literally put anything on there. They could have just had one of their kids review it for their high school newspaper and put that on. I mean, it just didn’t matter.

Broadway, you’re right. It’s very different. And of course, you can — if you’re good at reading these things, you can sort of suss out like who’s fudging, like, you know. Like, “John Smith…really impresses.” Oh, is that the best thing?

**John:** [laughs] Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that the best thing in the review? I’m going to guess that wasn’t a great review, you know. Broadway is fascinating to me because Ben Brantley, the critic for The New York Times, is kind of incredibly powerful. He’s actually — I’m just — I am immediately fearful of any system where one individual has that much influence.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s scary to me. And I don’t think it makes sense. And I’m not taking anything away from Ben Brantley, his point of view, his taste, whether, you know, how often he is correct, in terms of what shows work for the audience and what shows don’t. It’s just more like, shouldn’t there be two Ben Brantleys? Just in case. Like, shouldn’t there be a fail safe? In case he just happens to not like a thing that other people would really love?

**John:** It’s also fascinating because in the theater world, sometimes, for some outlets, the same person who writes about the show is the reviewer ultimately. In other cases, they’re completely separate people. And so, you know, does that person have history back story? Did that person interview you before they saw the show? Or is that person coming in cold, like a food critic, and just seeing this thing that you’re serving up to him or her.

And it’s a very different experience. We could probably have, you know, a whole one hour podcast about what is screwed up and is fascinating and is just crazy about Broadway.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then, we would never release it because it would hurt both of our careers.

**Craig:** It would hurt our careers.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It would absolutely destroy our careers. And you know, again, just for the record, I love Ben Brantley.

**John:** Oh, just — maybe just the best person on earth. Yeah. Good stuff.

**Craig:** No, actually, I don’t know anything about him and I’ve never had a Broadway show so, I can’t — I mean, I just — just the idea. I mean, in theory, it’s just the theory of one person having that much influence is — that makes me nervous.

**John:** Yeah. I think, my — in the podcast, we will never record about Broadway. I think, what I found fascinating about it is because it is such a small and such an insular community, all the things that happen in small, insular communities, definitely happened there. And if you could magically transform things so that Broadway wasn’t the ultimate goal of all live theater —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Then I think you could — through diversity, you’d find more strength. But that’s not the system that we are in, so we have to adjust to the system that we are in.

**Craig:** Alas.

**John:** Alas. So let’s turn to our next topic. You put this on the document as behaving like a pro. We talked about professionalism a couple of weeks ago. I would rephrase this as like, how not to be a jerk. Is that a fair assessment of what you’re going for here?

**Craig:** I think so, basically. Yeah, I mean, how not to be a jerk, maybe how to not be douche bucket.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. Is that going push us though?

**John:** Yeah, how to avoid douche behavior. No, I think douche is fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think how to not be douche bucket. How to avoid douche behavior. How to just — how to avoid people looking at things you say or write and wrinkling their nose and going, “Oh, god.”

**John:** Yeah. Or giving you a little side eye.

**Craig:** Little bit of side eye. And I should say that this is something that I’ve been sort of thinking about for a while — long time. This is not some kind of subtweety, quiet reference to any individual person, whatsoever. So please don’t take it that way. You know, this isn’t like blind item stuff. It’s not. This is stuff I’ve seen people do over the last 20 years, in all forms. And it’s not just like, “Oh, whatever happened yesterday on Twitter.” So please don’t take it that way.

**John:** Yeah. And I think, as I’m looking through your list, a lot of what you’re describing, I would say are best practices. It’s just if you could sort of sit somebody down who is about to have their first movie come out —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These are the kinds of things you would tell him or her to make sure that no one was going to watch you throw them off a cliff.

**Craig:** Yeah. In a lot of fields, there is a — I think a responsible and positive culture of veterans instructing rookies. And sometimes, it gets bad. Sometimes, it’s more about hazing and it’s — and that’s awful. But in the good versions of it, it’s like, “Hey, rook. Come here. Let me tell you how we expect you to behave. And let me tell you how we would expect you to not behave. This is the kind of stuff that we think of as classy and positive and accruing to the benefit of all of us. And this is the kind of behavior that we think gives us all kind of a black eye.” So it’s a little bit of that. This is like, “So, hey, gather around — gather around the podcast, rookies, and let’s go through some do’s and don’ts.”

**John:** Get us started, Craig.

**Craig:** All right. Again, because it’s a culture that I think exists in sports and in other fields of work, in almost all of these fields, when we talk about being a pro or being classy, what we’re talking about is a few things. First, when it comes to praise, let praise come from other people. It’s really not going to do you any good to explain to other people how good you are. [laughs]

Just let other people say that. And they will or they won’t. But either way, let it come from other people. Also, given that we’re on a team of some kind, if we’ve written a movie, be gracious to the other people on the team. That doesn’t mean that you have to like the other people on the team. That doesn’t mean that the other people on the team are — perhaps have contributed in an equal manner to you. It just means be gracious because it costs nothing.

And kind of snippiness towards other people, kind of begins to become petty. I understand what it satisfies, at times, if you feel slighted or injured by another person or you feel like maybe somebody else is getting too much attention. I get the desire to grab the mic back, but just don’t be Kanye, you know.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say that, sometimes, your silence can be very, very loud. And so, if someone says like, “Wow. You know, actor Y is just phenomenal. I can’t believe it. You must feel so lucky that he was in your movie.” And you know that he was just an incredible jerk. And so, if you say nothing, or you just like sort of twiddle your thumbs, that’s subtweeting. That’s basically sort of like, you know, you’re calling him out by just saying nothing. So you practice the nice things, sort of like, “Yes, he’s immensely talented.” Or like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “We were so lucky to have him in this movie.” It’s like, “You know, I see the kind of things he does and it’s fantastic.” So, as I’m saying this, people are probably going through all old footage where I’ve said these things about some actors who I didn’t like. But that’s reality. That’s the game we play. And so you —

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And just the same way you kind of hope that they will actually mention you at some point. You mention them when the time comes up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’ll see this is, you know — it’s a famous scene in Bull Durham where they go through this. I mean, in baseball, some pitcher hits you and you think it’s intentional and there’s a ruckus. After the game, the reporter say, you know, “What did you think of him?” “You know what? You know, he’s a great competitor. And I think sometimes out there people get a little worked up. I mean, I don’t — did he throw me on purpose? I don’t — it doesn’t really matter. I’m good, you know. I just — I’m just trying to play the game as hard as I can and, you know, try and help the team win.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s no point in going further because all it’s going to do is just generate prurient nonsense. [laughs]

**John:** Well, circling back to the article about World War Z, none of those people were throwing each other under the bus.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They were just talking about realistically this is what happened. And it’s sort of you know — even in situations where I’ve had horrible experiences with other people, I will talk to you privately about it, but publicly, I will always be sort of like, “You know what? It was a war we all fought together.” Even like Charlie’s Angels, the first Charlie’s Angels, was notoriously sort of a challenging movie to shoot. But I often describe Charlie’s Angels being like, “Yeah, you know what? I describe it like the monster. You know, every day, somebody was the monster. Some days, I was the monster. And we just had to fight the monster. And that’s just how we made the movie. And I’m so happy with how it turned out.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I won’t say a bad word ever in public about any actor, writer, or director, or producer I’ve worked with. I just won’t. I just don’t know what the point is. It’s not going to — what is it going to do? Change their behaviors? Is it going to make my life better? So just, you know, in general, if you can, be gracious.

And that connects to taking the high road whenever possible because there are times when other people aren’t gracious to you. And if somebody should say something or imply something and they are part of our world, in terms of public response, if you can, just take the high road. It’s like the most obvious, blatant technique in the world, and yet it works 100% of the time.

**John:** Yeah. So, when the actor says, “Oh, yeah. We improved everything.” You respond like, “We’re so lucky to have such amazingly talented actors in the movie.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, and you could like, if somebody asks — like, I’ve had this question come up constantly. Any interview I did for the Hangover movies, they’re like, “How much — you know, the guys were talking about how they kind of came up with that moment. And how much of the script is scripted? And how much is improv?” I’m like, “You know what, that was a great moment. And there are those moments in the movie where they do kind of just go and invent their thing. You know, we try and keep the script the focus of the day. We always get the script. There are moments where, as a team, we all agree, ‘Let’s just do the script.’ And then there are moments, as a team, where we realize we have opportunities to let these guys kind of expand.”

You know, it’s like, how hard is that? And the thing is, 98% of the time, I mean it. I’m not being disingenuous. I’m not being manipulative. I mean what the high road is saying. There are the 2% of the time where I don’t, but I take it anyway because it’s a better way to live. It accrues to your benefit. This is all cost benefit analysis stuff. It really is.

Similarly, if there is a dispute that somebody else starts or that exists, if you can possibly do so, keep it private.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can confront somebody over the things they say. I mean I had a situation many, many years ago where I won’t even get — I won’t say who. See?

**John:** That discretion, yeah.

**Craig:** I won’t say who. But it was a he. And he said very insulting, stupid, and factually incorrect things about me and in a somewhat public forum. And I addressed it privately. It’s as simple as that because in my mind, yes, that was a public. So that was public. And then there’s no response on my end publicly but I’m okay with that because the truth is it’s forgotten. You know, my new rule is if you get in trouble on the Internet and you’re Rachel Dolezal or whatever. Just go away for two weeks, you’ll be fine. Two weeks later, you’re okay.

And nobody noticed. You notice more than anyone else. Keep it private whenever possible. Now, there are times when that’s not possible. So there are times when people behave terribly. They are abusive. They are cruel. They are discriminatory. There’s behaviors that people can exhibit and inflict that frankly should be called out. But if that’s the case, and I’ve never done it, the test I have is, okay, if I’m going to say tweet about something like that, then I follow this rule, am I willing to call a newspaper about it rule.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So in the old days, you’d have to pick up the phone [laughs] dial up Variety and say, “I have a story. Blah, blah, blah, put his hands on me and pushed me against the wall. And got violent and threatened my life.” Yeah, okay. So they would probably write an article about that. If you can’t pass that test in your mind, then probably you should be going towards the high road or keeping the dispute private method.

**John:** Yeah. So I would also stress that there’s different levels of private and public. And so there’s private where it’s just like just you and the other individual involved. There’s private in the sense that it’s just the core team. And so if there’s a dispute, you keep it within the production and keep it within the people who really need to be involved. Sometimes your reps or sometimes, you know, the other folks who are directly part of this scenario. Very rarely do you need to get up to the level of Twitter which is the entire world. And we see people, you know, subtweeting at each other. And you see like the spat between Taylor Swift and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was Rihanna. Katy Perry was in it as well. It’s just like you’re not helping anybody there. And so I don’t understand why you would necessarily want to do that because — I’m not saying that you should, you know, keep everything secret or if there are real terrible things or if there are crimes being committed, you have to deal with those things. But just putting somebody on blast for something that is not going to help you in the long run doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Subtweeting is just the 2015 word for passive-aggressive behavior. I mean, that’s all it is. It’s passive-aggressive. And passive-aggressive behavior is self-defeating 100% of the time. Subtweeting will never accomplish anything. It just won’t. What you’re really doing is trying to get the benefit of attacking somebody without the cost of being accountable to your own words.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And no one respects it really. The only people who like it are people who were just chasing dirt and don’t care about you. They’re just interested in dirt. They just love negativity. Well, good luck with that group.

**John:** Also, I think when you see people who are subtweeting, I feel it’s largely because they don’t have a conception of themselves independently of their public persona. And so if their public persona is not commenting on this, they feel like they are, you know, not being true to themselves. And that’s maybe a situation where they should be examining what is their relationship with social media.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true. And that’s a thing. I think another aspect of subtweeting is that it is — and I understand this. It’s sort of a regression tactic. You’re going back to childhood and you’re basically crying in the hopes that people will come and hug you.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And I understand that. Everybody wants comfort, but I would much rather somebody just say, “Listen, I’ve had one of those days where I’ve kind of been attacked and I feel sad and I’m bummed out. And everyone give me a hug.” That’s fine. You know, that’s okay because you’re just being honest. But if you say, “Well, for the fourth time in a row, I’ve realized that a certain somebody who runs a certain production company is a certain jerk.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay. So then, what are you doing? Rallying the troops to go, “Well, hey, man, you’re awesome. Don’t let anyone get you down. Is it so and so? He’s no good.” No, that’s not going to help.

**John:** That’s not going to help. So everything that we’re talking about so far I think really applies to everybody in all fields. So just to recap what this basic guideline was was let praise come from other people, be gracious. Take the high road when possible and keep private disputes private as much as possible.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But let’s focus on what it means for screenwriters. So if you’re a screenwriter with your first film coming out, what should you be doing?

**Craig:** Well, the first rule and this one works elsewhere because it comes from elsewhere. Act like you’ve been there before. And that’s a hard one for people because they haven’t been there before. And everybody gets really excited. I mean if you have a movie coming out, that’s exciting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s attached to a ton of romantic notions. It’s attached to a dream. It’s attached to all these aspirations. You are deriving an enormous amount of identity from that thing which frankly you shouldn’t.

And so it’s understandable that you will get giddy and maybe a little self-congratulatory and a little nuts. And you might go overboard. And listen, anybody who blames you for going a little nuts on your first real movie is being a jerk. But if you can just temper yourself and remember act like you’ve been there before. Because when the second and third, and fourth, and fifth movie comes around, you will have been there before. And at that point, you will have no excuse. [laughs] So just calm down and don’t go bananas patting yourself on the back in public over anything that you’re doing anymore than would you would imagine a kind of steady, confident, veteran, professional would do.

**John:** So, Craig, when you and I had our first movies come out, the only way we could speak to the press or speak to the world was through kind of official channels. So it was through the press junkets that the movie studio set up. It was through interviews that our publicists might have set up. So we had to sort of go through proper channels to do that.

If you have a movie coming out in 2015, 2016, you are suddenly out on all those social media channels yourself. And so you can tweet about your movie. You can say things. You can be showing photos on Instagram from premiere or from the set. And that creates a very different relationship between the screenwriter, the production, and the people releasing the movie, and the press I guess, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that four-sided relationship is so different than what it was before. And I don’t know that we necessarily have it all figured out in terms of what the best practices are. You know, basically, how often should you retweet when someone says something great about the movie?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** Well, you know, sometimes but not too much.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you always have to ask yourself, like, “Will this be perceived as boasting or will this be perceived as sort of, you know, being proud of your work?” Are you reminding them that this thing exists, are you letting them know that it’s getting good reception? Or are you just showing off?

**Craig:** And it’s tough. I mean, the one simple way of looking at it is, “Am I promoting a movie or am I promoting myself?” Because if you’re promoting the movie, I think all behavior is appropriate. That’s the idea of promotion, you know, is getting people to go see something. It’s a little tricky when you’re involved. But we don’t think of it as tricky when actors are involved. They go on talk shows, that’s part of their gig, and they promote the movie.

They promote the movie when they don’t like the movie. They promote the movie when they do like the movie. They promote the movie when they haven’t even seen the movie. It’s literally written into their job contracts. It’s their gig.

It’s not written into ours. And traditionally, screenwriters have been essentially invisible and silent during the promotional process. So on the plus side, we have this amazing opportunity now, at last, to be visible. On the down side, we don’t [laughs] have a ton of experience doing this, right? An actor, a steady working movie star does, what, three movies a year?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Three promotional cycles a year, year after year after year. The best and most consistent feature film writers are looking at one movie every two years, I’d say, on the average. And only in the last five years have we had a reliable source of promotional avenue for ourselves. So we’re not necessarily great at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You got to think about it. And you do have to think, “Am I promoting a movie or am I promoting myself?” And if you don’t have a lot of followers, then what are you trying to do? Really whip up those 5,000 people to go see the movie? It’s, you know, so you do. You have to find a balance. You don’t want to be perceived as boasting.

And there are some things that you can do that are going to trip everyone’s boast alarm and clearly bring you far afield from, say, promoting a movie.

**John:** So what are some things that are going to — if you were to see them show up in your feed, you’d be like, “Uh, uh, uh.” You know, that’s where you send the private DM saying like, “Cool it on this.”

**Craig:** Right. I mean, four big ones. Money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’ve never seen anybody literally go on and say, “Oh, I got paid blah, blah, blah for this.” However, I have seen people say things like, “You know, you’d think that if I — ” and again, this is no one specific. “You think if, you know, if they pay me seven figures that they’d care about what I write,” okay, well, don’t say that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just boasting. Comments about your awesome agents. “Well, you know, I had a great meeting today at CAA. Everyone’s, you know, excited about blah.” Okay.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh, good for you, you’re represented at CAA. Complaining about how much work you have. Sometimes I feel like that’s something that I have tiptoed towards [laughs] because I was really like, “Oh, my god, this is not good. I’m in a bunch of trouble here.” And then I stopped and went, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. That’s just going to come off terrible.”

Because most people who read these things either want to be screenwriters or they’re just starting and their problem isn’t, “Oh, my god, too much work.” Shut up. You know, so thank God I’ve never made that mistake. Because, look, you can suffer from that too much work syndrome but no one wants to hear it. No one.

**John:** Yeah. I think before you send any tweet that sort of implies like, “Oh, my god, I’m working too much,” you have to really look at sort of how that could come across to the other side. I guess it’s every tweet you have to sort of look at how can this be misinterpreted. There are tweets, you know, I think that are totally valid about like, “My brain is melting. You know, I have 14 scenes to write before tomorrow.”

**Craig:** That’s fine.

**John:** Basically, it’s the same thing about like any kind of joke. Like a joke in which you seem like the idiot in the joke is probably a good joke. But the joke in which it seems like the other person is an idiot is not, you know, the same.

**Craig:** I agree. Yeah, like how much work I have to do on a script is always fair game because everybody has that experience. How many projects I have going on, nobody wants to hear that. Similarly, nobody really wants to hear your name dropping. Yes, good for you, you know a famous person, you know. Like I don’t need to know that you had lunch with Ridley today or whatever, you know, or [laughs] I don’t know who.

Like the worst is when you’re like, you know, “Had an amazing meeting with Tom. You know, we’re going to find something to do together.” And you’re like, “Oh, are you going to make me ask you if it’s Hanks or Cruise, you jerk?” That’s the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The worst. I mean, we can talk about people we know, but only when it’s relevant [laughs] and the point isn’t “look at me”.

**John:** Yup. All the stuff that we’re talking about here is so important for screenwriters who are doing this once, maybe twice a year. There’s a whole other category of writers who are doing this every week, during sometimes in the season where they have TV shows on the air and they are asked by the studios and networks to live-tweet their shows. And so I have friends who work on these TV shows and they are supposed to live-tweet their episodes when they come up.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a whole different thing. And if you are in the situation, you will get a set of instructions from the studio, from the network, and from the showrunner about what you’re supposed to be doing and how you’re supposed to be doing it. The frustration and the challenge is, to what degree are you an employee writing on your job versus being your own public persona self.

And if you are live-tweeting your show on this Twitter channel, to what degree can you also post other random stuff that isn’t about that show that could become controversial? It makes it really challenging to know, are the people following me because I write on Castle or are they following me because I am myself? And that is a weird situation that we put writers in.

**Craig:** It’s a very strange situation. And you’re right. It’s a wonderful exception to call out here. So anyone that is a creator of, say, a network television show or a cable show, they’re required to be very present and very active on Twitter in promotion of the show. And so, you know, like Derek Haas live-tweets episodes all the time, has his fans do like ask me five questions. That’s all promoting the show. Not only is it legal but it’s just smart.

And the truth is, I have no problem with the idea that writers are now actively involved in that because I think that it gives us that much more visibility and control over the outcome so that, you know, we can improve our own bottom line. The more people who watch, the better off it is for us as creators of television.

And this is something that actors have always done. And they don’t get paid to promote. I mean, you get paid to act and you will also promote, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is more like when you’re not — I think we’re talking about people that aren’t involved in something like that.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. Now, I want to make sure that I’m not scaring people away from tweeting about the work they’re doing because I think, you know, sharing what you’ve done is actually a great important thing that social media is really good at.

Casper Kelly tweeted out about an episode of his show, Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, and I didn’t realize that was his show. And so I watched the episode. It was genuinely genius. And so that a good situation where like, well, it’s a good thing he tweeted that. It’s a good thing I followed it because otherwise I would not have seen the show and not have known that it’s really good, so.

**Craig:** He’s promoting the show.

**John:** He’s promoting the show.

**Craig:** He’s promoting the show. It’s actually a great example because in the middle of the madness over Too Many Cooks, Casper Kelly never ever once behaved in a way that made me go, “Uh, douchebucket.” He was classy, he had a sense of humor about himself, he had an appropriate humility without seeming like he was fake. And yet also was able to kind of share some of the joy of what was going on with that. It was just really well done.

And it’s a weird thing to say in an episode where we’re kind of trying to teach people but I almost feel like, “Geez, maybe this isn’t teachable. Maybe it’s just something people know.” I hope it’s teachable.

**John:** I think it’s teachable. Let’s try to wrap this up with talking about what your actual goals should be when you are in a situation where you are promoting something where you needed to talk about your work. What are you trying to convey?

**Craig:** I mean, I hope that, as a group, we can appear confident, we can appear positively passionate, not negatively passionate, that we can show some self-awareness, that we can recognize that we are one of the key partners in a process that involved multiple people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And above all, that we can be collegial and respectful to our fellow writers, if at all possible. That doesn’t mean you have to like what they’re doing. And maybe I’m just old school grumpy dude, but in my blood, I believe it’s just not professional to run down fellow writers, unless they have really, like, blatantly been asking for it. You know what I mean?

**John:** And so in many ways, I would never go after a writer for their writing. I would go after them for behavior that is, I think, dangerous or inappropriate in the business. And so, yeah, you know, be cool. Be a colleague. Be a cheerleader and a champion of writers wherever possible.

The last thing I would add in terms of what you need to promote when you’re talking about a project is just be grateful. So, acknowledge that you have the luxury of being able to write this thing and see it get made. And for all the troubles and all the flaws and all of the shouting matches and everything else, it is remarkable that you had the opportunity to get a movie made.

And so, gratefulness at every step of the process is important, too. For everyone who is sitting across from you at a press junket, for everyone who is following you on Twitter, for everyone who’s asking you that question about the movie, be grateful. If someone is taking the time to send you a tweet saying, “I love the movie,” send the tweet back saying thanks. It’s not much.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not much but it’s just common courtesy, you know. It’s just being a decent person. And I just look at it in terms of my relationship with my fellow writers, I just think, whatever shoes a writer is in, I’ll be in those shoes soon enough.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Or I’ve already been in them. So they don’t need me kicking them in the jaw, you know. If I have a friend and their movie comes out and it bombs and critics hate it and everyone on Twitter is ripping it to shreds, or even if they’re not my friend. Even if it’s somebody I hate, it’s somebody I hate and their movie is crap and it bombs and no one likes it in the whole world and they’re all talking about how this person is going to get run out of Hollywood on a rail and it’s a Schadenfreude, a dream come true, I don’t say anything because that’s not going to get me anywhere.

**John:** Nope, not a bit.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** We’re going to close up with one question. Jenny writes in to ask, “Your discussion of reshoots got me wondering. I’ve noticed that movies set release dates very early and then nearly always hit those unless the movies just gets canceled. As someone who’s a bit of an outsider, it seems strange to me that a creative process like making a movie could be predicted so well. Is there a large buffer factored in or is the actual production down to a science? By comparison, I work in a software where it’s difficult to actually predict what will be completed in two weeks.”

**Craig:** Sure. It’s a great question.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The answer is it’s down to kind of a science. They know when they green light a movie, they take — they break the script down and in breaking it down, they determine primarily, number one thing first, how many days will it take to shoot this? And there can be a little bit of a negotiation between the director and the producer and the studio. But in the end, everybody just kind of goes, “Yeah, that seems appropriate. Okay, its’ going to take 50 days to shoot, so that’s this many weeks.”

Now, how many weeks will we need to prep. Everybody kind of agrees based on the elements of the movie, either there’s a lot of effects or there’s no effects or this or that, will need say three months to prep, standard amount.

Good. So we have three months of prep. We have, let’s say, three months of shooting. And now, how long will it take us to go through post? Well, they basically say a movie like this generally posts in this amount of time. And then we’re going to give ourselves a little bit of a buffer because we know that marketing needs some things here and there. And then we’re going to put the movie out here.

So with rare exception, there is enough time to get the movie done. There are times where you are in a jam and you’re actually backing out of the release date and you are just go, go, go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’ve been in those and those are the worst.

**John:** Those are the worst. So I would say, Craig is right, is that there’s a lot of expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge about how to make movies and sort of like what the process of making a movie is like. Even though every movie is different, every movie is largely the same in terms of the technical things that need to get done.

But what I would say — and something that’s probably very familiar to anybody who makes anything is it does ultimately come down to a pick two scenario where you have to choose between speed, quality, and money. And in Hollywood, we basically always end up optimizing for speed because we have to hit those release dates. It’s almost never worth it for us to push the release dates back because we’ve already booked commercials, we’ve already started running things. So we’ll spend as money as it takes to get the movie finished or we will cut back on the quality of the movie in order to hit that release date.

So that’s the reality. It’s like, you know, when you see movies go wildly over budget, a lot of times it is because they had to rush through visual effects or had to rush through these things to get stuff to happen. Or movies aren’t maybe as good as they could possibly be. Well, if it had an extra six months of post, they probably could have made that movie better, but they didn’t.

The challenge I will say, overall, is — Craig starts his discussion saying like, “Okay, we have the script. We’re breaking it down. We’re doing all that stuff.” Increasingly, we are slotting movies based on like just a title and like that’s going to come out in 2018 on this weekend. And that becomes the real problem because we don’t know what the movie actually is. We just know it’s the title of the movie and we have these people kind of tentatively attached. But we don’t have a script, we don’t have anything.

And those are the movies to watch out for because they will tend to become problem stories.

**Craig:** They can. Sometimes what happens is the studio will start with — they might not even start with a release date. They might start with an actor’s availability. You have a big movie star. Let’s just take Tom Cruise for instance. You have Tom Cruise, he’s constantly working. He likes the idea of this topic. He wants to do that movie. He wants it to be with this director and this writer. The director and the writer are both interested in doing it. Tom Cruise is available in exactly one-and-a-half years. He has a slot in one-and-a-half years.

You need to be ready to shoot when that slot hits because they’ve made him a deal. And he’s locked in for that slot. They bought that slot. It’s happening. They’re paying him. You’re making the movie. Let’s go. And these things do happen. And hopefully, they happen in a way where you don’t feel like you’re completely up against the wall. But it can get gnarly. I mean, the worst I ever had, the worst, was Scary Movie 3. Bob Weinstein —

**John:** He’s a villain of so many of your stories.

**Craig:** He really is. And that’s like one guy like I have no problem throwing him under the bus because whatever, he’s Bob Weinstein. It’s like everyone knows — he knows, if he were here, he would agree. [laughs]

**John:** He’s an indestructible counter bus.

**Craig:** He really is. He’s an indestructible counter bus. So Bob Weinstein had — he had made two of the Scary Movies with the Wayanses. He wanted to make a third. And they asked him for too much money in his opinion. And he said, “No.” And he got rid of them. They went on to make their own spoof movies somewhere else. And he became truly obsessed with the idea that we had to beat the Wayans brothers to market with our own spoof movie. And when I say our, I had no idea this was going on. [laughs]

**John:** Awesome.

**Craig:** I was working on an adaptation of Harvey, the Mary Chase play.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So when he called me, he’s like, “Here’s the situation. You are going to write this movie. And David Zucker is going to direct this movie. And it’s going to come out. And I have the date and it’s coming out on October 23rd,” I think it was.

And when he called me, it was December 1st, I believe. So I met David Zucker on December 2nd. And all we knew was we have to make a movie and it was in theaters on October 23rd.

**John:** That’s really fast.

**Craig:** That is. I don’t think you can make a wide release studio film faster than we made that. And man, it showed. I mean there are some stuff in there that I love and then I’m like, “Oh boy.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s what happens. [laughs] I mean it was — it was bananas. Bananas.

**John:** Just to wrap up this topic. I will say that movies do get pushed probably more often than you think. So if you go into any big studio conference room, they will have on a giant board these magnetic tiles that show all the movies from all the different studios and sort of tracking forward three years in many cases.

And every week, some of those movies are going to be pushed around and moved to different slots. But it’s not, they weren’t so locked down before. You only hear about the release dates for like the giant Marvel movies and like those aren’t going to change likely because they have toy deals and so many other things.

But the other randoms like sort of like the Russell Crowe thriller, well, that could shift six months and nobody kind of knew when it was supposed to come out. So I will say that sometimes things get moved around, but rarely is it because the movie is not ready. It’s more likely because the competition is not good around it. There’s some other competitive reason why they don’t want to go out on that week.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. See, the Marvel movies and those big tent poles, when they land on a spot, what they’re saying is, “Get out of my spot, right? No one wants to go up against Avengers 3. Okay. So we’re picking the weekend and we’re telling everybody else, ‘Don’t go up against Avengers 3 if you have your own. If you have Batman whatever, don’t put it there.'”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So those things start to occupy spaces and cannot be contested by certain kinds of movies. If you have a certain kind of movie and suddenly you got squashed by that thing. When you think, “Oh, this is not counter programming [laughs] for the Avengers at all,” you’ve got to move.

And, you know, look, I got caught up with that whole thing, not personally. I mean I had nothing to do with the decisions, but somewhat infamously, The Hangover Part III came out the same weekend as Fast and Furious 6. And everybody was like, “That didn’t really make sense.”

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And it didn’t. [laughs] I mean they both did okay that opening week, but —

**John:** But they both took a haircut that they didn’t necessarily need to take.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think we took more of a haircut than they did.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, look, the movie ended up making $100 million, whatever. But it probably would have worked better on a — but sometimes it’s like, you know what, sometimes you’re rewarded for the aggressive move. That world of picking dates for distribution is nightmarish. I don’t understand any of that stuff. It’s scary to me.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t envy the people whose job it is to do that, to defend that. Not good.

**Craig:** Not good.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. So for my One Cool Things, I have two related pieces of video, both on YouTube. What I love about them is they’re both showing the early versions of things that are now really familiar.

So the first is Vacation, the song Vacation by the Textones, which is before — a group that existed before the Go-Go’s. And so they had some of the same members, but was the pre-Go-Go’s version. And so some of the lyrics are different. The chorus is different. But in this video, you can see them. You can hear the song. And it’s like, “Oh, that’s Vacation but it’s not quite Vacation. It’s Vacation before it was Vacation.” So I loved it because it’s familiar but unfamiliar at the same time.

Likewise, Madonna’s Vogue video, shot by David Fincher, is one of the best videos probably ever made. And we’re so familiar with really kind of every shot in it. This is a 30-minute video that is basically — they call it the B-Roll, but it’s really all of the dailies of Vogue. And so it’s all the setups and sort of the multiple takes of all the setups.

And you start to recognize like, “Oh, yeah, like there were small little flubs there and there’s a reason why you did another take of that one.” And that everything that is so perfect about the video wouldn’t have been quite so perfect if they had settled for that first take or that fifth take. And so it’s just a great way of seeing what you actually would have gotten if you had actually sat down and watched the dailies on things.

And so when Craig and I are making movies, a lot of times we see the dailies. So we see like the five takes of that guy answering the phone. And we’ll have a sense of which ones work. This is an example of what that’s like for a music video.

**Craig:** Maybe that’s why David Fincher now famously will do like 100 takes of things. It’s the lesson of Vogue.

**John:** It’s the lesson of Vogue. So this is how it all started, how it all went very, very wrong.

**Craig:** Vogue. Okay. So my One Cool Thing this week was a recommendation from one of our Twitter followers. And I loved it. It’s a guy on YouTube named Smooth McGroove. And I said to my son, Jack, I’m like, “Hey Jack, you know, who is Smooth McGroove is?” He’s like, “Yeah.” Like, “Idiot.” [laughs] “Of course, I do.”

So Smooth McGroove is awesome. He’s a guy that does a cappella versions of famous video game songs and they’re all instrumental songs. So he does that thing where he’ll like tile himself. Like he’ll do a nine tile of himself and he’s got a nine-part harmony going on. Well, you know, maybe it’s five-part harmony and then four of the other voices are doing like, you know, beat boxes or something like that to add flavor.

But he does these incredibly good, like really good renditions of these awesome, a lot in Nintendo stuff, like a lot of Zelda and Super Mario. And it’s so cool. I just love — I mean I watched like eight of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s so good. He’s really, really good. So check out Smooth McGroove. If you like a cappella and you like classic video gaming, Smooth McGroove.

**John:** Fantastic. When you first said that name, I was worried it’s going to be like a Sexy Craig thing. So I’m happy it was a cappella because Sexy Craig is not an a cappella fan.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig likes everything.

**John:** Our show this week was produced by Stuart Friedel, as always. Our editing is by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Kim Atle. If you have an idea for an outro for our shows, something that uses the [hums theme] you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send in questions like the question we answered from Jenny today.

On Twitter, we are @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you are on iTunes, please stop by and leave us a review because those help us out a lot and help other people find the show. There, you can also download the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to all the back catalog shows.

Many people have written in saying, “Hey, I missed the 200 episode USB drives.” So we’re going to make a make a few more of those. So they’re not quite in the store yet, but I will let you know when they are back up in the store, so you can purchase them and listen to all 200 episodes of our show up to this point.

Craig, thank you so much for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. See you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Submit your Fall 2015 Scriptnotes shirt design](http://johnaugust.com/shirt) by August 11
* Vanity Fair [on World War Z reshoots](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/06/brad-pitt-world-war-z-drama)
* The Hollywood Reporter on [Mel Gibson, Taylor Lautner and the 20-Year Effort to Make a ‘Stretch Armstrong’ Movie](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mel-gibson-taylor-lautner-20-585619)
* [No, I didn’t call your shitty movie a “comedic masterstroke”](http://www.avclub.com/article/no-i-didnt-call-your-shitty-movie-comedic-masterst-221227) by A.A. Dowd
* [Vacation](https://www.youtube.com/embed/GawVyj-XXrQ) by the Textones
* Madonna’s [Vogue, B-Roll and Outtakes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=anRNX_TUbPo&app=desktop)
* [Smooth McGroove](https://www.youtube.com/user/SmoothMcGroove) on YouTube
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Kim Atle ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))