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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/everyman-vs-superman).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode has Three Page Challenges in it that use some F-words, so if you’re listening to this in the car, there’s a very good chance we will end up using some of those F-words in the podcast. So, just standard issue warning for explicit language. Thanks.

Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 202 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m in Vancouver Canada. You’re in La Cañada. So, in some ways we are straddling the border, but also in the same semantic space.

**Craig:** Yeah. La Cañada is the sister city to all of Canada. I love Vancouver.

**John:** One tiny little village in California. One giant country that is very close to the US border.

**Craig:** It’s massive. What are you doing up there?

**John:** Just vacation. Just a week’s vacation.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like it.

**John:** We picked one of the weeks of the year in which Vancouver is absolutely stunningly beautiful and sunny and it’s been terrific. So, I tweeted and you probably saw this tweet. I jumped off a bridge, which was quite fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I saw it and I think you’re out of your mind.

**John:** Yes. I am insane, but it was actually tremendously fun. And it was because my whole family, or actually four people in my family decided, hey, let’s do it. And so I said, you know what, that’s a really good idea. We should do it. So even my nine-year-old daughter did it, which was again, questionable parenting if anything had gone wrong. But because everything went really right, it was empowering for her as a young woman who could take charge of her destiny and jump off bridges.

**Craig:** You know, it’s not. It’s not empowering. It’s sick. I don’t understand why you would do it. I don’t understand why she did it. I don’t understand why anyone does that. This bungee jumping thing — anything jumping, bungee jumping, jumping out of a plane, jumping — base —

**John:** Jumping on a trampoline.

**Craig:** Base jumping. Jumping off of a couch. [laughs] But you know, here’s the thing, I do believe that there’s some kind of genetic thing where some people appreciate that feeling of falling and other people hate it. And I’m definitely in the hate it camp.

My daughter is — she loves it. She loves rollercoasters and all that stuff. I can’t. And my son is like me. We can’t. You know, that feeling I’m talking about right?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s that feeling of being completely out of control, but at the same time knowing intellectually that nothing bad can actually happen to me.

**Craig:** I’m not talking about the psychological. I’m talking about the physiological feeling. Do you not get that sensation?

**John:** Oh, I absolutely get that sensation. But also I know that the endorphin rush that happens after is also tremendously great. So, I’m looking past that terrible moment to the great moment.

**Craig:** A couple years ago I was in Florida with my in-laws. We were having dinner and my wife’s grandmother, who is still alive, god bless her. Even though I think she’s 97 now. So she was about 95. We’re all sitting there eating dinner and this topic comes up, the topic of falling and that feeling.

And my mother-in-law said where do you feel that feeling. And I said it’s in the pit of my stomach. And we were all talking about where it was. And then my wife said, Gamma, because that’s what she calls her grandma. “Gamma, where do you feel that feeling?” And she looked up from her baked fish and she said, “In my clitoris.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It was the greatest moment of my life.

**John:** And I have a suspicion that because of that she enjoyed the feeling of falling. I hope she enjoyed the feeling of falling.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] She wasn’t actually a big fan of it. No, because not all clitoris feelings are good feelings. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris, I guess. But when a 95-year-old woman refers to her clitoris in any context, it’s spectacular.

**John:** Craig, we’ve just found a title for this week’s episode. There’s good clitoris and bad clitoris. It won’t be controversial at all.

**Craig:** No, no. Twitter won’t erupt.

**John:** Not a bit. So while the title of today’s episode might be about the clitoris, the actual topics we’ll be discussing today really have nothing to do with female genital health. We’ll be looking at three Three Page Challenges. We’ll be looking at a system for writing your screenplay that must work because the guy gave a Ted Talk. We’ll look at everyday heroes. We’ll look at what happens when a union threatens to sue a filmmaker.

But first, we have follow up. Craig?

**Craig:** Just a touch of follow up. I heard from a couple of writers on Telltale Software’s Game of Thrones app, because that was my One Cool Thing last week. And I did leave one name off, Zach Schiff Abrams who actually ran the writing room early on when they were breaking the story. They were very happy to be called out on the podcast. So, I just wanted to make sure that we acknowledged Zach because he was obviously a big part of the development of that product.

**John:** Craig, I played the first two episodes of it on this trip. I played one on the plane. I played one last night. They really are just phenomenally well done. So, a great recommendation from you, but really just a great experience for anybody who is jonesing for a little bit extra Game of Thrones in their lives.

I really want to make some House Forrester like t-shirts. I want like a House Forrester team shirt because I’m really rooting for the Forresters. And I just feel like more bad things are going to happen to them.

**Craig:** I mean, even Jesus is like, come on. Come on, you’re being a little hard on those people.

**John:** Now, Craig, have you gone back and made different choices along the way? Because for people who didn’t follow the last episode, these Game of Thrones games done by Telltale games, they’re sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure where you get to make choices along the way. They’re more sophisticated than the simple book kind of choices, but you can kind of make some choices that are going to affect the plot, but you also get the chance to rewind and make some different choices if you want to.

Have you just stuck with the original choices, or did you go back and change anything along the way?

**Craig:** I’ve stuck with my original choices. I suspect now that I’ve played through four of these things that it’s really the allusion of choice.

**John:** I think you’re right.

**Craig:** They carry over some things. They’ll say things like, well, you did do blanket-blank. But those things really still are contained within the rails of the story. The big things that happen, you cannot avoid happening.

**John:** I was curious whether the song the girl sings — this is not a spoiler at all — the song the girl sings incorporates some of these specific events that you did or didn’t — it was generic enough, so we’ll see.

**Craig:** No, I think that song actually is a good example of how your choices do impact things, because it’s those areas where they go, okay, we’ll reward you and make you feel like your choices matter. But your choices don’t matter. [laughs] Not really. You’re really just watching TV. You’re just watching a side series of Game of Thrones. That’s the way I feel about it. I think they’ve just done a great job.

**John:** So, while that game may be slightly on rails, this guy has a system that can break you out of your rails. This is a system for writing a screenplay quickly and, Craig, this is your entry to the Workflowy, so tell us about this guy and why we should maybe stop the podcast right now.

**Craig:** Well, someone on Twitter who just likes winding up — I mean, that’s what’s happened now. I get it. People go, “Oh, this will make him crazy.” And they’re right. I’m not complicated. They sent me a link to a website called FAST Screenplay. Fastscreenplay.com. And the gentleman who runs Fastscreenplay.com, Jeff Bollow, gave a Ted Talk, well, it’s a TEDx Talk —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Dockland, which I think is —

**John:** It’s Australia.

**Craig:** Australia.

**John:** And so he’s not Australian though. That’s a fascinating thing. I kept waiting for an Australian accent and it never came.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t understand the deal with TEDx. The deal with TEDx is pretty much anybody who can write the word Ted on a banner and stick it behind them gets to give a TEDx talk? I don’t understand any of it. Anyway, I went over to this website and I just got infuriated.

And here’s the thing. So, look, he’s selling a system. It’s the same old come on that we’ve read in a million different ways, in a million different places. He’s got a system to help you write a screenplay. It’s a system to help you write a screenplay that reads fast and eventually if you master his system you can write fast. Obviously, the system is not good enough to get him to sell screenplays for millions of dollars apiece. He would prefer to just take your money. Always interesting.

And you get this lifetime membership. Lifetime membership for a limited time only, $600. What?! And that regular price is $1,300. But, you know, it’s a special right now because it’s celebrating the release of his Ted Talk. But here’s the thing, all right, so whatever, it’s baloney, of course. I mean, he says things like, “FAST Screenplay is a yearlong step-by-step professional screenplay development system worth over $30,000.” Uh, yeah, if you also get like a Kia with it or —

[laughs] I mean, I don’t — how do you come up with that number? And then he says it’s designed to replace a three-year university program and ten years’ worth of real world, hands-on skills and insights, which as you know are incredibly quantifiable.

It includes over 1 million words of content. Oh boy. That must mean it’s good.

But here’s the thing that really snagged me in my little umbrage gland and started squeezing it. He says, “Please note FAST Screenplay is entirely not-for-profit. Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system, which is why we keep our price so low.” What the hell does that mean?

**John:** It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** So, of course, I immediately went, wait a second. Not-for-profit, that’s not just a phrase. That is a status. That’s a tax status here in the United States. It is an IRS tax status. So, I started looking to see, well, what is this company? Well, according to their website, FAST Screenplay is trademarked and copyright by Embryo Films in Sydney, Australia. Embryo Films seems to be just a — seems to be a for-profit film production company that is turn owed by another media company of some sort.

I see no information indicating that they have any kind of tax exempt status as a non-profit or not-for-profit corporation. But also if it’s not-for-profit, why are you charging anyone anything? Why don’t you just put it out there?

**John:** There’s a subtle distinction between not-for-profit and unprofitable. And there are many businesses that are unprofitable, but not actually not-for-profit. It’s an important distinction that seems to be really swept under the rug here.

I found the site and his whole video kind of fascinating. And I had to sort of keep skimming through the video because it was just so empty and vacuous and it’s just like a bunch of buzz words strung together in a way that had the qualities of human speech without actually having any content.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And the site is very much the same thing, too. But, honestly, you could switch out the word screenplay for almost anything else on any page and it could be about like investing in real estate, or how to do almost anything. So, it felt like there was a template kind of behind the whole thing.

That said, I thought it was all really well executed template stuff. And so I found myself sort of fascinated and repulsed by him as an individual and what he was trying to do. And as a character I found him kind of fascinating. As a person who is trying to take money from screenwriters, I found him, of course, just to be horrible.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is a new twist on the generic horribleness of these sorts of people and these sorts of ventures. And it’s the, oh, we’re not-for-profit. Does that mean — do they pay themselves salaries? Like what do they do with all of this money if they’re not for profit? Is it to run this website? That can’t cost that much. I mean, each person is giving them hundreds of dollars, even if you just go month-to-month, which is an option.

A three-month subscription is $300. That’s their minimum, as far as I can tell on their website. So, everyone is giving them somewhere between $300 to $1,300. What are they doing with all that money?

Are they paying themselves salaries and so that’s why it’s not-for-profit? None of this makes any sense. I don’t know what this sentence means. “Every dollar that comes in is poured right back into the system.” What?

**John:** Well he says very clearly, “Our goal is not to make money off writers. It’s to generate screenplays which we can turn into films and lift the overall quality of screenwriting to empower individual voices and visions around the world.” Parenthetical, it’s the “variety of imagination that expands our thinking.”

**Craig:** What the hell does that mean?

**John:** I don’t know what it means. But I found it all kind of just amazing, as if some sort of bizarre AB tested kind of system developed the perfect like I’m going to get money off of screenwriters system.

**Craig:** I think you’re actually onto something. This really does feel like a brilliant application of a standard get rich quick template. That you could plug in real estate or investment or work from home or penis enlargement, or any of these things, and lay it out like this and it would work.

I’m just baffled.

**John:** So, here is why — I’m trying to always play my devil’s advocate. Like, well, what if he really is sincere, and what if he truly believes what he’s saying. And on some level he might truly believe what he’s saying. But if his overall goal is to improve the lot of writers and to do the things he’s saying in these dreamy kind of speeches, there are many other ways to do that. And there are many sources he should be looking for those screenplays rather than trying to create a new class of brilliant screenwriters from scratch.

That’s the part that feels so incredibly disingenuous. He’s saying like, oh, I searched throughout Australia and could not find any good screenplays, so I must now make more screenwriters. That I just don’t believe on any level.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. If he doesn’t care about profit and he wants to help screenwriters and he has this brilliant system that will transform you into a genius, just publish it on the web for free.

**John:** That would be great. You could either do that, or you could fund the very needy Australian screenwriters who have things they want to make, and they cannot make them in Australia because it’s challenging to make films in Australia. That would be another great way to do that.

**Craig:** I just — I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired.

**John:** Let’s switch to a happier topic. This is another great suggestion from Craig Mazin. It’s an article by Jordan Crucchiola called Bring Back Everyday Heroes. It ran in Wired Magazine. And it’s talking about the nature of heroes in our movies and how they have literally gotten bigger. And as the movies have gotten bigger, literally the men in these movies have gotten so much bigger in a way that is strange and perhaps dangerous. Craig, take it.

**Craig:** Well, every now and then you come across an article that says something that you think is immediately obvious and yet no one has pointed it out yet in this kind of way. And this was one of those articles. So, Jordan Crucchiola, I’m going to go with the standard Italian pronunciation, I don’t know if that’s right. So, what he says basically is that we used to have a certain kind of American action hero, a male American action hero who at least physically was roughly like the average guy.

He uses the example of Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt Russell, he’s in decent shape. You know, he’s not overweight, but maybe he had gone to the gym a bit. There’s not a ton of muscles there. And that’s kind of the point. But now he says take a look at the evolution of Hugh Jackman from the first X-Men movie, where he played Wolverine, to now. And it’s astonishing.

I mean, truly astonishing. It’s like looking at the before and after pictures of Barry Bonds when he was playing as a rookie for the Pirates and he looked like he was basically 170 pounds soaking wet. And then eventually after all the ‘roids and the HGH, he was like the Incredible Hulk. It’s a very similar thing when you look at Hugh Jackman’s body. And I don’t know if there’s any kind of chemical shenanigans. I just think it’s insane amount of working out.

And what he says, at least the point he’s making, is this isn’t just a superficial issue. It’s actually affecting stories, and that’s what really fascinated me because the truth is when an actor has a certain physicality it limits or it certainly influences the choices you make about that character.

**John:** Exactly. So, a lot of times you’ll be writing a character who is supposed to be like the ordinary guy next door. So, an ordinary man forced into extraordinary circumstances. But the Rock isn’t an ordinary person. He is sort of by definition special from the very beginning. And the characters who we are seeing in these kinds of movies these days are these just larger than life and sort of impossible people. So, you don’t have the Kurt Russells as your action heroes. You don’t even have the Keanu Reeves as action heroes. You have these super human gods.

He does single out like some movies really call for gods. So you look at Captain America, well I mean he’s Chris Evans because he’s supposed to be this sort of larger than life character. He’s like this ordinary man who got transformed. That’s great. Or you have Thor. And Thor is supposed to be a god. Great. Chris Hemsworth is perfect for that.

But you have these other people that are supposed to be just kind of normal folks. You end up casting the Rock in it, suddenly you have to change the backstory to make some reason why that person is in this movie right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s what I think silently goes on when I see a character who is just an amazing physical specimen. A certain amount of drama is immediately diminished. Here are some things that I think can’t be true about that character. They can’t be lazy. They can’t be unmotivated. They can’t be undisciplined. They can’t be depressed. They can’t be resigned to life. They can’t even be uncool, because it’s essentially impossible to become that freaking awesome if you’re held back in all of these other ways. And so you start to lose dimensions of that character. You also start to lose a certain amount of risk.

So, when you look at The Terminator, obviously Arnold Schwarzenegger is supposed to be massive because he’s this possible robot. But playing against him you had Michael Biehn who basically was like a 165 pound guy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that made it better, you know. I mean, you don’t want — and eventually you could see how those movies then turned into bigger against bigger. You know, we had what you’d call great everyday heroes. Harrison Ford, who kind of elevated fear as the epitome of heroism. All of his characters were always afraid. And that made them more believable. Charles Bronson was skinny but super angry, which I thought was really cool. Steve McQueen sort of embodied whatever the non-physical dimensions of a classic masculinity are. And then you had Sean Connery who was all about charm and confidence instead of brawn.

You see the difference between Sean Connery’s body and Daniel Craig’s body. It’s not even close.

**John:** Absolutely. You look at Harrison in Indiana Jones. Now we would make Indiana Jones with Chris Pratt who has also transformed from schlubby guy into super-hot guy and sort of action star big muscle guy. And that changes the nature of that character.

Now, it would be a question of when Chris Pratt plays that character, is he going to keep this new Chris Pratt body, or is he going to go back to an ordinary size? I don’t know. But it does change our approach to that character if he’s already the biggest guy in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, is this the worst thing in the world? No. There’s still actors that portray a kind of an everyman sense. But there is a dark side to this. For every article about the latest fashion for women or the latest fad diet for women, there are three articles saying this is not good for women and for girls.

But these things that are happening now in movies I think are probably also not good for boys and for men. And there’s some interesting — I started looking around, some interesting statistics. Over the last three decades, the percentage of men that said they had body image concerns has gone from 15% to 43%, which is a rate comparable to those currently found in women.

And when you look at what they call the muscularity of ideal male body representations, from 1979 to the 1990s it went way high. And is currently still way, way up there. I think it’s not great for boys to look up to the heroes and see these absolutely impossible to achieve bodies. I mean, they’re not impossible to achieve. Well, from where I’m sitting they are.

**John:** So, here we’re taking a look at how male heroes have become sort of giant and larger than life. In many ways I’d say that women in movies have always been sort of these impossible to achieve ideals. They’re always like they’re a great cook and yet they’re hot in the sack and they’re stunningly beautiful and they can do all these things. Women are always supposed to be perfect.

And in some ways we’re maybe falling into the same trap with our male characters where what you said before, if that guy is that ripped he can’t be lazy. By his nature he couldn’t be sort of the slack off. I just worry that we’re going to end up with these characters who are so perfect from the beginning that they’re not going to have any journey to go on.

You know, you look at Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. We talked about Michael Biehn, but Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator, she’s just an ordinary woman. She’s not — there’s nothing special about her. She’s a waitress. And then because she’s ordinary, she’s really fragile. And then in the second movie she can become hardened and tough because of the events of the first movie. And she can be ripped in that movie and that was a great transformation. That was a change.

Now, I just worry that she’s going to have to be sort of jacked from the very start and that’s not the same kind of movie. That’s not the same kind of experience.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s a little bit of the superhero-ization of human characters. I think for a lot of these actors, they realize that in Hollywood today the apex of our business and the apex of how you are employed as an actor is to be a very popular superhero. And so you have to have a certain kind of body.

And the problem is that you have that body while you’re making that movie and other movies. And you can’t stop, because there’s going to be four action man movies and you have to be jacked up for all four. So, looks like when you’re doing the other movies in between, you’re going to also have to be jacked up. And that’s becoming an issue.

**John:** It’s limiting the kinds of movies you can make. I was trying to think of some movies that wouldn’t be possible to make because we don’t have the right people anymore. Like kind of any movie that Burt Reynolds was in. You know, you don’t make Smokey and the Bandit kind of because I don’t know who we stick in Smokey and the Bandit who is that sort of — maybe you just go with like the guy who stayed schlubby. Maybe go with like a Josh Gad kind of character because there’s just no other choice to make that.

Or the counter example, you look at Melissa McCarthy in Spy this last weekend, a huge hit. And maybe that was in some ways a reaction to everything we’ve been forced by like what a hero is supposed to look like. And that’s maybe the reason why Melissa has become this force in popular culture is because she’s not representing all those other ideals.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, she is one of the few women onscreen that represents that what a good third or more of American women actually look like and are ignored. And whereas no men are ignored. I mean, there’s an actor I can look at for every male body type onscreen, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep an eye on — it’s like well what we did to women and what we’ve always done to women onscreen is wrong, and now we’re starting to do it to guys.

So, how about we don’t do it to either men or women. [laughs] That would be nice, right? There is one interesting thing I noted was the casting of Paul Rudd as Ant Man which reminded me very much of when they cast Michael Keaton as Batman. And I thought, oh, you know, yeah. Like, that’s a regular person. Like the whole point of a superhero movie is that you are wearing a suit that makes you awesome, or that you have some sort of particular kind of training or attitude that makes you awesome. You don’t necessarily need to be massively jacked up. You can be a little bit more representative of a wish fulfillment.

**John:** I would say if you look at the Iron Man movies as they tracked across, I think they’ve focused much less and less on Robert Downey, Jr.’s physical health over the course of them. You know, you don’t shirtless shots of Robert Downey Jr. anymore. And maybe that’s great. Maybe that’s okay.

But, again, that’s a character who has a suit of armor, so therefore doesn’t have to be, I don’t know, doesn’t have to be ripped and doesn’t have to rely on his own physicality. And it would be great to see more movies with heroes who are relying on their physicality and its ordinary person physicality rather than sort of super seven days at the gym physicality.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** So, how do we fix this, Craig? We can’t just point out the problem without correcting the problem.

**Craig:** I think that these problems are always fixed the same way. A hit movie comes out that shoes a different possibility. So, every movie Melissa McCarthy makes is that movie right now. I mean, she has failed to fail. From Bridesmaids through to Spy, every movie she’s starred in has been a hit. Every single one. And she has this extraordinary fan base that is very broad and very deep and that’s a testament to her. And I think that’s opening a lot of eyes. That’s the way Hollywood works. They just respect money. They don’t actually have any real belief system. I think people think they do.

They don’t. Their only belief system is what will put money in my pocket. So, I’m hoping — I’m actually rooting for Ant Man. I was really rooting for it when I knew that Edgar Wright was doing it, but I’m still going to give this one its fair shot because it does seem like an everyman kind of deal. That’s the only thing that’s going to help.

**John:** I agree. And I think as we find heroes who aren’t the classic — the sort of new ideal of this sort of Superman thing, we just need to sort of point that out and make sure that people are aware that this is a good thing that we’re doing this.

The upcoming Fantastic Four, Miles Teller is in that. And Miles Teller isn’t a giant, ripped guy. Maybe that will work, and maybe that will be another sort of indication that there’s not just one type of person we stick in these kinds of movies. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the better test are the guys like the Wolverines. Because, you know, Mr. Fantastic is supposed to be like a slender, stretchy kind of guy. It’s the brawlers, you know. The Kurt Russell used to kick butt and he didn’t need to be massive.

**John:** Where is our Roadhouse going to come from?

**Craig:** Exactly. Although he was really cut in that movie.

**John:** It’s tough. So, while we’re figuring out who should star in the next Roadhouse, Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA are working to make sure that we don’t see another aspect of the film industry portrayed. This is a lawsuit. Craig, talk us through this.

**Craig:** Oh boy. What a mess this is. So, a woman named Amy Berg has directed a documentary about the sexual abuse of child actors in Hollywood. The film is called An Open Secret. And it is currently platforming right now. I suspect like most documentaries it will not have a big theatrical life. It will mostly exist on video on demand.

And I have not seen the documentary, although it is about a topic that is sorely needed to be aired out. There is a legitimate issue that’s been going on for years and years about the sexual abuse of child actors. And one of the people that she interviewed was a gentleman named Michael Harrah who is a, or was a, manager of child actors and a former child actor himself who had been a longtime member of the SAG Young Performers Committee which he co-founded in 1975 and chaired from 2001 to 2003.

And when she sat down to interview him at SAG I believe she confronted him with the fact that this guy Joey Coleman, who was a former client of Michael Harrah’s, is accusing him essentially of making advances toward him. Having him sleep in Mr. Harrah’s bed. Mr. Harrah touching him in a way that he did not want. And when — since Michael Harrah apparently acknowledged that he might have done something unwanted. He said in the interview, “That was something unwanted I shouldn’t have done. And there’s no way you can undo that, but it is certainly something I shouldn’t have done.” Yikes.

Okay. Well, that’s not good. But here’s a really ridiculous outcome of this. SAG, feeling somehow like they’re being tarred with this brush because this guy is being presented as somebody who sat on a SAG committee and created a SAG committee, which he did, SAG has now threatened to sue Ms. Berg and is attempting to block her film because they do not want any references to SAG, SAG/AFTRA, or any SAG/AFTRA committees to be included in any portions of the documentary.

Then, they claim they didn’t do that. But they did. This is just terrible behavior by the union in my opinion.

**John:** So, we don’t have any more information about the actual nature of the allegations of the actual abuse way back there. So, this is just us talking about sort of what is the function of a union in sort of threatening a filmmaker for essentially defaming the union or saying anything untoward about the union or making sort of allegations about the union.

You can understand an organization trying to protect itself, but this felt like really tone deaf in terms of what they were trying to do. If you are a union representing actors, you want to embrace the idea of filmmakers tackling difficult subjects and try to sort of come to clarity. You want to sort of publicly state it is our goal to protect all actors. Like that’s the first thing you should probably be doing, rather than sort of coming after saying don’t dare use our logo in your film.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, here’s the deal. From what I understand from this article, Miss Berg’s film does not accuse SAG/AFTRA institutionally of any crime. What she’s saying is that somebody who was a co-founder and member of their committee, the Young Performers Committee, seems to be admitting, at least on tape, to very questionable behavior at best. And at worst, child molestation.

And SAG’s reaction just seems really, really out of whack. And I think sometimes unions do stuff like this because there is a certain amount of paranoia and monomania as a cultural default. They are so used to the fight that they fight with the companies that they go into this defensive stance where anything that is “not good for us” will therefore weaken us at the bargaining table and be bad for actors. Anything. So there is this closing of ranks when bad news arrives and I just think it was a huge mistake, huge mistake. And I would ask anyone over there that’s involved in this decision to think twice, thrice, and quadrice, because this is not what you want to be doing as a union, threatening to sue a director for a film that frankly is getting to the heart of something that’s hurting your members.

**John:** It very much feels like the memo went to the wrong department. And if the memo had gone to the public relations department, they would have had a response to it which would have been maybe the correct response. But instead it goes to the legal department and the legal department does what legal departments do. They respond in legalistic kind of ways. And they don’t necessarily have a good sense of how something will play out in the broader world. And that really feels like what happened here is that if your first instinct is, well, we have to threaten a lawsuit because that’s what we do, that’s not going to necessarily be the right outcome here.

So, again, that speaks to leadership and sort of who you put in charge to sort of make these decisions about how you handle situations that come up.

If I were SAG, if I were running SAG, and lord knows I would never want to run SAG/AFTRA, but if I were running that I would look at this as a really good test case for when bad stuff happens, how are we going to make the decision about who should handle it and the ways we should handle it. And this was just really bungled.

**Craig:** It’s bungled. And I think you’ll see a little bit of what they call the Streisand effect. Where very famously years ago somebody found out where Barbra Streisand lived and put her address and a link to — a Google Earth photo of her home on the Internet on some small unattended corner of the Internet. She found out, went crazy, sued, and suddenly everybody knew where she lived. [laughs] And everybody saw her house. And I think that SAG/AFTRA is just making this so much worse because now when I hear about Miss Berg’s movie I immediately think, oh yeah, that’s the one that SAG/AFTRA is suing her over. That’s crazy.

What a bad decision. Bad decision. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. So, no good SAG/AFTRA. Big mistake.

**John:** All right. Now we get to go to some good things. We get to look at three Three Page Challenges. So, it’s been a while since we’ve done this. God, maybe ten episodes. But if you’re new to the show, every once and awhile we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their pilot of a TV show and we look through them on the air.

So, if you would like to look through these pages with us, you can find links to the PDFs at johnaugust.com. Just search for this episode and Stuart will put the links in there. You will also find them on Weekend Read if you are on the iPhone and want to download them on there.

So, we have three of these. Thank you to everybody who submitted them. If you would like to submit your own scripts to be looked at for the Three Page Challenge, just those first three pages can be sent to johnaugust.com/threepage, and that is where you will find instructions for sending us your three pages so that we can look through them on the air.

We get about 100 a week or something, and Stuart has to go through all of them. So, if we don’t get to yours that’s because of just sheer numbers. It’s not because we don’t individually like you or love your writing. Stuart tries to pick a representative sample of what we get in and sometimes the best of what we get in, but sometimes just things that have interesting things to talk about. And I felt like all three of these Three Page Challenges had really interesting things that people can learn from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, which of these should we hit first?

**Craig:** Well I’m holding Get One Free in my hand by Zach Kaplan.

**John:** Let’s do it. Do you want to — ?

**Craig:** Summarize this?

**John:** Yeah, recap that for us.

**Craig:** All right. I’ll give you a little recap. So, Get One Free, written by Zach Kaplan. It opens on black and a voiceover, a man that we’ll know as Sadler is talking about how even in suicide brand loyalty matters. And then we fade in on a convenience store where Mr. Sadler is buying a pack of cigarettes from a low key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, Barry. And he identifies that his brand is Camel Crush. And then while Barry goes to get his cigarettes, Sadler looks around and imagines different kinds of people and the different kinds of cigarettes that they buy and smoke. And in voiceover comments about how blue collar types smoke Marlboro Reds and sorority girls smoke lights. And housewives smoke Parliaments. And depressed 65-year-old men smoke L&Ms.

And then at last he gets his cigarettes. He goes out into the parking lot, sees four teenager skateboarders, teenage skateboarders around his car. And they ask him if he could buy them some cigarettes. And that’s essentially our three pages.

**John:** Absolutely. So, this reminded me a bit of, because this had the nature of a character who is in the scene and we also had his voiceover through a lot of it, it reminded me a bit of Fight Club in that sense of where you have sort of the narration of the moment in addition to the things happening within the scenes.

If I had a frustration, it’s that while the voiceover felt like it was happening in its own space and was sort of its own movie, the actual action happening onscreen wasn’t that compelling in our first three pages. It was a lot of just standing there, waiting around, looking at things. So, I felt a little under-excited about Sadler, our hero, based on what he was doing. Basically the only information I had was this ongoing voiceover from him and it wasn’t giving me a great sense of who he really was, or why should we be looking for what he does on page four.

That was sort of my first instincts here. The actual writing of the voiceover about sort of the different kinds of cigarettes, sure, I totally get that. But in some ways it felt like it would be a more interesting Tumblr post than a voiceover setup for what we’re seeing right here on the screen.

Craig, what was your instinct?

**Craig:** Similar. I thought that it was — first of all, I’m not one of these people that has a voiceover problem. You know, we hear this all the time, “Don’t start your script with voiceover, blah, blah, blah.”

No, go ahead. It’s good. I like it. I thought it was a mistake to start the voiceover where he did. So, Zach has the voiceover begin over black. That little speech that he does there is disconnected from any visuals so unless it’s something a little epic and poetic and specifically expository like say the beginning of Lord of the Rings, it’s just going to feel a bit of a mistake to hear just that much talking over darkness. Also, it’s not necessarily.

Because we’re going to go back and we’re going to have voiceover in a bit, I’d rather just open with a guy buying a pack of cigarettes. And the man says what kind and he goes, “Oh, I’m sorry Camel Crush.” And then he begins to think about what he just said and about brands. That would be more interesting to me. I would actually just recommend cutting that first chuck of VO.

A little bit of a problem for me, I actually got a lot I thought about who this guy was from his VO. He seems nihilistic. He seems too cool for school. He seems bored with life. He’s got that tone of a person who observes without feeling like he’s part of humanity.

A little bit of a problem is I don’t actually believe what he’s saying here. I don’t believe what he’s saying about these brands. There’s a little bit of a facts not in evidence. He’s telling me that plastic surgery infused housewives in their 40s are all about the Parliaments. Are they?

And if they are, who cares? I mean, there’s a little bit of a who cares factor to that. When he goes outside and these kids ask him to buy them cigarettes, it ends really well. I like this. There’s a certain wit here. The kids ask to buy cigarettes and then they hand him a $5 bill and the kid says, “Here’s five bucks. Wait, haven’t I seen you on TV,” which is interesting. He must have been on TV.

Sadler says, “No. And you can take those five bucks and buy a time machine, because it’s not 19-fucking-95.” And that’s really smart.

So, I think that Zach has a really good sense of how people talk. He’s got an interesting rhythm. I think he’s trying to be cinematic here which is cool. The content may be, I don’t know, I’m interested. I’m curious to see where it goes. This may be the wrong topic for a good writer. Because it feels a little forced, but it may also work out pretty smartly.

**John:** So, I agree with you about the voiceover and that by starting the voiceover over black, it makes it feel like that is the framing for the entire movie. But the voiceover speech is just about the cigarette thing. And I can’t believe that the whole movie is going to be about brands and cigarettes. So, by starting it within the scene I think you’re going to make a stronger case for here’s a guy and now we’re going to hear his voiceover while he’s waiting for his cigarettes. That’s going to probably get us better started on this specific thread of who he is.

Because there is so much voiceover and it feels like this is a thing he’s going to do throughout the script, that it’s not just going to be the situation where there’s some voiceover at the very start and then it goes away for a lot of it, and there’s also going to be situations in which Sadler is going to both be talking within a scene and when he’s going to be voiceover-ing, I would consider putting all of Sadler’s voiceover in italics just to make it really simple and clear to the reader which things are being said to a character and which things are being said just to the audience.

An example is on page three. “The kids turn to him, nervous. ‘Hey man, um…can you buy us a pack?’ ‘Welcome to the team.'” That’s a voiceover and I think it’s great that that’s in voiceover, but it would be very easy to skip over that voiceover little tag because you just become blind to it. So, sticking in italics might help us realize that the moment didn’t stop. We just had a line of voiceover there.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a really good idea. Plus, there is a little bit of a formatting — I’m going to call it a mistake.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It’s not a killer, but he’s putting VO in a parenthetical where the so-called Riley’s go, like thoughtfully. He’s putting it under the character name. Typically what we do is put a (VO) in parenthesis next to the character name. So, it would say, SADLER (VO) on one line, and then his VO.

**John:** Most people would call that a character extension. So, if it’s a parenthetical, something that’s in parenthesis right after the character’s name, that would usually be voiceover, OS, or OC for off-camera. Sometimes I’ll do that for On-Radio, just to be clear it’s a different kind of speech but it’s not talking about the delivery of the line, or not clarifying sort of the action that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Especially in a script where, you’re right, I think your suspicion that there’s going to be a lot voiceover is correct. You’re actually going to save a lot of space.

**John:** Yeah. Helpful.

**Craig:** It’s a ton of lines, yeah, that you’re just wasting there.

**John:** I had a bit of an issue with the shopkeeper. “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him. Sadler stares at the cigarettes.” So, you call this guy Barry, but is Barry going to keep coming back? Because it felt weird to me that we’re giving this guy such a specific name, a name that doesn’t really fit a 50-year-old Indian man description. And so I have to keep track of these two names. And Barry and Sandler for some reason feel kind of similar.

So, by the time I saw Barry again, I was like, wait, who’s Barry? I had to go back to figure out that it was the shopkeeper. If it’s not an important character, I would maybe just keep him shopkeeper if we’re not going to be circling back to see him again. How did you feel about that?

**Craig:** I agree. There are a couple issues here on Barry. One is that, yeah, you’re right, if he’s not a recurring character, call him Clerk I think would be fine.

I wasn’t quite sure why he was so hostile. It seemed like a pointless hostility unless they have a preexisting relationship which doesn’t appear to be the case, because Barry doesn’t know what his brand is.

Also, if you look at this paragraph, this is something that I see a lot and I would make a suggestion here, Zach. “SADLER, 35, slightly hipster-ish, dirty blonde hair, stands dead-eyed in front of the counter.” And then I would do the line of dialogue. “Sadler: Can I get a pack of smokes?” Then say, “A low-key paranoid Indian man in his 50s, BARRY, tends to him.” “What kind?”

Because when you do it all at once is happening is I am imagining, when I read action I’m imagining it happening. What I’m imagining happening the way you’ve written it, Zach, is a guy standing there and another guy is tending to him. I don’t know how that means. I just feel like two people are staring at each other and then finally someone says, “Can I get a pack of smokes,” which I don’t think is what you —

**John:** I agree with you there. Splitting that up is going to make that read a lot more clearly. So, page three is where I had the most issues with action lines and figuring out the best way to arrange our sentences to get the effect across. So, “EXT. PARKING LOT – SOON AFTER Sadler’s walking to his car, but he sees a group of four adolescent, skateboarding degenerates around his car.” In this sentence we’re using the word car twice, which isn’t awful, but isn’t maybe the best we could do.

We also need to capitalize FOUR ADOLESCENT SKATEBOARDING DEGENERATES or some part of that to indicate that these are actually people.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’d capitalize DEGENERATES.

**John:** I would agree. That’s the best choice. And I’d write around one of the cars, just because it’s more important that as Sadler is walking out he sees a group of four adolescent skateboarding degenerates around his car. Just get rid of the second car. Repeating a word within a sentence without effect is not your best choice.

Next paragraph down, two paragraphs down, “Sadler takes a few steps back, unsure, then keeps walking toward his car.” It’s mean to be a character moment, but by keeping it all as one sentence you sort of lost the flow. So, if you broke that into two sentences, “Sadler stops, unsure. Stills himself. Continues walking towards his car.” Breaking that was two separate things makes those actions you can actually play. As one sentence it’s like I don’t know where it began or where it ended.

**Craig:** I think that beat is clashing with what’s going on anyway. I mean, what I took from that was that he was nervous that these kids were there to beat him up, or rip him off, or something. But in fact the kids themselves are nervous because they want cigarettes. They’re waiting for this guy to come out so they can ask him for cigarettes. If you see a bunch of nervous kids around your car, you’re not nervous. I think he probably should just say, “Can I help you guys with something?” and we could skip this beat.

Remember, in a movie we’re going to have to watch this guy stop, see them, take a step back, then walk towards them. Then “Can I help you guys with something?” It just feels like it’s going to get cut. It’s not informing what’s going on.

**John:** I agree with you. So, Craig, what’s your verdict after three pages here?

**Craig:** My verdict is that Zach has some skill and I like the way he writes. I like his dialogue. I thought that he’s — and there’s an interesting. I will say I’m particularly pleased with the fact that he’s clearly writing about something, even if the voiceover at the top is perhaps out of place. The notion of brand and what brand means for yourself as you are self-harming is interesting.

I don’t know where it goes. I don’t know what the point is yet. I just like that there’s going to be a point, hopefully. So, it’s ambitious. I don’t know if any of it works out well. But, no, I was pleased.

**John:** I would agree with you. I’m curious enough to see what this movie becomes, because after the end of page three I really have no good sense of where it’s going to go. You have a sort of nihilistic hero and we don’t know sort of what the next step is for this movie. So, I think I would get to page ten and if it was — I’d hope by page ten to know what kind of movie I was in.

The last thing I would say is most people who send in Three Page Challenges put some sort of contact information on the front page. Just a generally good idea to put an email address or some way that people could get ahold of you if they love your pages. Zach didn’t have one. But if you are sending this in, it’s useful, because you want people to like this and reach out to you to tell you that you’re a great writer. So, put some sort of contact information on your title page.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Great. Our next script is called Not Dark Yet, by RM Weatherly. And RM is a woman. Stuart confirmed this for us. It is a script written in Courier Prime, so therefore it’s already about three steps ahead.

**Craig:** Oh lord.

**John:** Oh lord. Let me give a summary of this. So, we start in a well-ordered street of cookie-cutter McMansions. Just outside this neighborhood we see Damon Carol in his 30s who is standing over a dead body. He’s in his pajamas. He has his dog. And he’s come across a body. And he’s really not freaked out by it. He sort of kicks it with his foot. It reacts a little bit.

He tells the dog, “No, no. We won’t call the police yet. The police are sleeping. We’ll wait till they wake up.” And he convinces his dog to leave.

Next we’re in a diner in the morning. And we see our guy, who is evidently a detective, talking with a potential client. Her name is Eva. And they’re talking about her hiring him to do some recon on her husband who might be having an affair with somebody. She’s not convinced that he is having an affair. It’s sort of more idle curiosity. And they talk about sort of that there aren’t many detectives left in his line of work in this area.

So, that is where we’re at at the end of three pages. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of confusion in this for me. And so I was working hard to try and figure things out. And failed in spots. I think I succeeded in some spots. But let’s talk content first. The contrast of the cookie-cutter McMansion neighborhood, wealthy suburb, to a forest — now it says just outside the town. I have no idea how we’re supposed to know that it’s a forest just outside the town, unless we see the forest from the suburb and then cut to the forest.

And then we see Damon Carol who is there with his dog. He’s wearing matching monogram pajamas under an overcoat. He’s staring at this corpse. He’s at ease.

Okay, interesting. Fine. He touches the body with his foot, then cringes as the corpse has a phantom reaction. I don’t think that’s how corpses work. There is some sort of stuff like that shortly after death. But not like when you’re in the forest and somebody touches you with your foot, you’re not going to sit up. And even if you did, Damon should freak out because — and then realize that it’s phantom reaction.

He then says to his dog, “I thought I smelled something.” Now, I don’t know if that’s “I thought I smelled something,” or “I thought I smelled something.” I don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** It feels like it’s in the wrong place. I got really tripped up by that line, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was so confused by it and I even thought like, wait, is this one of those things where the corpse has evacuating its bowels? I literally had no idea what the hell was going on that point.

Then, some headlights approach and he covers the body up. It says, “Suddenly, at the sight of HEADLIGHTS approaching in the distance, Damon picks up debris to create a leafy sheet over the body.” Well, he’s certainly speedy, isn’t he? This is a car driving by, and he’s going to cover a body with leaves before the car gets past him? I don’t think so. That didn’t work.

Then, he says, “We’re going to come back.” And he says to his dog, “The po-lice don’t get in till 7.” At this point I’m like, okay, wait, so that’s sort of like an African American dialectic affectation. Is he black? And the name Damon is a pretty common name for black men. So is he black? I don’t know, because no one is telling me. But am I supposed to know from that? Or is that just an errant hyphen?

**John:** Is it affectation? Is that some weird way that he’s talking for an affect?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** We have no idea. We don’t have enough information about him to know what the hell is going on.

**Craig:** Right. So, at this point, now I understand the point of a scene like that is to create mystery, but there’s a fine line between mystery and confusion. I need to know that I’m not supposed to know things. I can’t think I’m supposed to know things but I don’t. That’s confusion.

So, okay, we get to this diner. Now, this is an interesting conversation. This woman, and all we know about her is that she’s robust and big-boned. I don’t know what that means exactly. Does that mean fat? Does that mean tall? Does that mean fat and tall? Big-boned is a euphemism, that’s sort of a meaningless euphemism. Regardless, there’s an interesting dynamic here. This is where I started to perk up.

Essentially this woman is saying, I got from this conversation that he was a detective. And I got from what her comments were is that the detective business is sort of done. He’s the only detective around because there isn’t really any crime around here. And then she suggests that she will hire him to tail her husband because he might be up to something. And you know what? She’ll even pay him double. And at that point Damon realizes she doesn’t suspect her husband at all. She’s taking pity on him. She’s essentially trumping up a job to pay him.

Now, that’s interesting. But it came out all wonky. It’s a good dynamic. It’s a good subtext to arrive at. The problem is I only determine that from the action lines. I don’t think I get it from the dialogue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so it’s wonky. It’s off.

**John:** I agree it’s wonky and it’s off. And I actually had a challenge with that whole diner scene because the line that leads into right now is, “Are you alone?” And then we cut to a diner. And so my natural story brain goes like, oh, whoever is asking that question must be the person who is like seating him at a table, or something like that.

So, I read Eva as a waitress the first time through. And it wasn’t until I got to the end of page three that Damon motions for the waitress for another cup of coffee and I realized like, oh wait, they’re sitting at the same table. And I didn’t catch that here. Because there’s nothing that indicates that they’re sitting at the same table. All we hear is “The voice belongs to a robust, big-boned EVA KEYS, in her late 40s. Damon takes a sip of coffee, considering his answer before speaking, but Eva has a mill of questions. She continues:”

So, I didn’t get that they were sitting alone at a booth. I didn’t know anything about the space. And so I just made the wrong assumption based on the prelap getting me into here.

I got confused a lot, too. And let’s talk about the nature of the setting. The suburb and then the forest. Right now, RM, she has Wealth Suburb — Night and then Ext. Forest — Continuous. Continuous isn’t really the right choice here. Continuous is if it literally is a continuation of the same action. And that’s not where we are. So, just give Night here. So, we’re traveling to a new place, put the city lights in the distance if you want to. Do something to let us know where we are in relation to that previous place you set up.

I’m not convinced that cookie-cutter McMansions is going to make sense for this character ultimately with the conversation we have later on, but regardless, if the forest needs to be near, show us where the city is and tell us that it’s important.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. You’ve touched on something important. What Eva and Damon are discussing essentially is that he’s the only private eye that’s left. And he says, “That’s right. Damon Carol, the only one in the book.” And I don’t like lines like that where somebody clearly announces their name so the audience knows. There’s better ways to do that.

But, why would there be any private eyes in a McMansion suburb? That’s not where private eyes are. Why would anybody be surprised that there’s only one left? Frankly, they should be surprised that there’s one at all.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It just doesn’t make sense.

**John:** If it were like a dying town, if it were a Cincinnati or like something that used to have private eyes and they all left because everybody left, that would be great. Or if it was some sort of like it was a boom town that people moved on from, that would be great.

I like the idea of the last detective left in a town. That’s a great idea for a character. And I sense that this Damon guy could be really fascinating. And I’m projecting forward, but I’m guessing the reason he hides this body is so that he can actually discover it later when the police are there and get credit for it. He has a whole game plan. But I’m not getting it through the scenes that I’m actually seeing on the page.

So, even this thing about the phantom reaction. I have a sense that RM has an idea in her head of what that reaction is. Describe it. Be specific rather than just say a phantom reaction, because I don’t know what that is. Does it shit itself? Does it pass gas? Does something pop? Is there spontaneous spasm? Anything would be great. But phantom reaction, I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to make a suggestion, RM, too. I’ve been thinking about this diner scene. The idea that someone is hiring a private eye out of pity is really interesting. I think the scene would probably work better, and I don’t know if this ruins the story or not, if he’s sitting in a booth with this woman and he’s saying, “Are you ready?”

And she says, “Yes, I’m ready.”

And he opens up a folder and he shows pictures of her husband. And he says, “I’ve tracked him here, I’ve tracked him there. I’ve checked his texts and all the rest of it, and this is where he’s been going.” And he shows her. And it’s — he’s going to the library.

And she’s like, “Oh, so he’s not cheating on me?”

And that’s when Damon leans back and says, “No, he’s not cheating you. And that’s when I decided to follow you.” And then he shows pictures of her and how she, or texts that she called him and said, “Look, just do this, the guy needs the work.”

In other words, let him be a real detective to the point where he detects using his detective skills that this was a pity hire. Which is — because I want to know that he had to find out, that he didn’t immediately know it, but that there was that moment of sickening realization that somebody is giving you a handout. Like you thought you had a real job and it turns out to just be pity. That’s awful. So, find a way to demonstrate that a little more dramatically and with a little more surprise for the audience.

**John:** Agreed. You’re also describing a scene that has changes over the course of it. Where we approach the scene with one bit of information, we approach it with everything we know about detectives, and so therefore the next thing is that the detective is going to show us that the man is having an affair. Oh, but the surprise is that he’s not having an affair. The second surprise is that you actually hired me out of pity and the scene can build and change.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So, that’s what you’re going for. And I think particularly in an early moment when you’re establishing a character, showing that they’re competent is important information. I suspect that you’re going to want Damon to be competent. Demonstrating that they are in dire straits through their competence would be interesting, too.

So, anyway, I think there’s a lot of work that needs to happen there. And really do take this to heart, RM, that mystery is good, confusion is bad.

**John:** Agreed. We were talking about sort of the dialogue scene, but let’s also back up to the discovery of the body scene, which I think should play as a completely silent scene. I don’t think there’s any reason for a guy to talk to his dog. It feels forced to talk to your dog.

But, that moment of suspense where he’s like is he going to be able to cover up this body in time, give us some real — give us some time there. Give us some sentences to describe the sort of growing — the headlights getting closer. He’s trying to cover it up. He’s trying to find the right kind of leaves to go over it. The dog keeps knocking the leaves off it, like you know, there’s moments of suspense, or comedy, or something else there that’s going to be fascinating and we’re going to watch it because it’s such an odd choice to like find a body and then try to cover it up.

That could be great. And we could be with him in suspense and knowing will that car see him. Will that car stop? Will there by anything strange happening? Is he going to wave to the driver as it goes past? There could be something really great there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And maybe just so that you have the time to play that moment, don’t make it a car. Make it a couple on a date going through the woods.

**John:** Someone on a bike, nice and slow.

**Craig:** Yeah. Something. You got to think about real time. This is where screenwriters — it’s normal, we do it all the time. We compress time and space in our minds with such ease, but we forget that somebody at some point is going to be out in a freaking woods at two in the morning going, wait, ugh, the car has to be going like one mile an hour. We won’t even be able to see it until it’s there.

We need all this time for him to do all this stuff. It’s just never going to work. You got to think ahead to those moments. Those are the worst moments where you just think, oh, who cares. The audience. They care.

All right. Well, why don’t we move on to our third Three Page Challenge? This one is called Youth on Fire by Olufemi S. Sowemimo. And I’m going to summarize this as best I can, [laughs], because this is —

**John:** This is where you’re earning your big bucks today, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to get a good paycheck out of this. We begin, again, with voiceover over darkness. Someone named Castor saying, “It takes three things to start a fire.” We then are in a college lecture classroom at night. We see two people in the center of the rooms, Sarafina Wyngaard, 19 and beautiful, drenched in some sort of viscous yellow goop. And holding on to her a beaten man, Castor Pollack, 22, and geek-nouveau.

Around them in the room there appears there’s been some kind of huge fight in here. And all of this yellow goop is everywhere. It’s on the walls. It’s coming down into puddles on the floor.

Outside the window, there’s smoke and fire, a college campus set ablaze. Sarafina is holding a Bic lighter in her hand, twirling it around. And so Castor in voiceover says, “It takes three things to start a fire. Oxygen.” Then we cut to a burn ward. He says, a different voice, male voice, Ken, says, “Heat.” And we see a burned figure on a bed with oxygen tanks. And then we go to a grassy field and we hear Sarafina in voiceover saying, “Fuel,” and we see two silhouettes making love, a burning gazebo directly behind them, casting their intertwined shadows.

Then we cut to a city street and an angry mob of teens and twentysomethings fighting with police, overwhelming them. And in voiceover, “All it takes to set it off is a spark.” Sarafina, back in the classroom, places her thumb on the lighter. And before it sparks we cut to black. And then we fade in on Arizona Institute of Technology, AIT Campus Day. It’s apparently finals day and Congrats Graduates.

There is a large bear. This is the school mascot. He’s on his hind legs and a placard says the AIT Great Bear. And a distressed student comes out of the building and he looks at his final exam, it’s terrible, he’s gotten a terrible grade. And he freaks out and starts attacking the bear, yelling at the bear about how upset he is and how much he hates school. And while he’s doing that, Castor in voiceover talks about how school basically screws everybody.

And that’s —

**John:** That’s our three pages.

**Craig:** That’s a lot in three pages.

**John:** It’s a lot in three pages. So, I love movies that start with provocative imagery and gives us a sense of sort of the flash forward of where is this all going to get to. And so that’s very much what he’s doing here is setting sort of some moment from probably quite late in the story where this couple is together, something terrible has happened, the school is on fire. There’s yellow goop for some reason. These provocative images invite us to ask questions and therefore we are intrigued to get the answers to those questions, and therefore we’ll keep watching the movie.

The challenge I face is that I got just really lost and I lost some faith in this movie’s ability to make me want to follow all the way to those answers. Especially when we got into this student who comes out and has all his interactions with the bear. That’s where I was like I don’t — I didn’t feel confident that I was in good storytelling hands based on the things that we’re happening, and especially in that last page.

Craig, where were you at with this?

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. I mean, so, look, lots of good things to talk about here. Olufemi has a terrific sense of how to create a mental image with text. And that, boy, that’s a big part of our job. And so I saw everything on the first page and a half. There was a hundred things going on. I saw it all. And that’s great. And I was really interested. And I understood that there was a mystery there. I wasn’t confused.

I was fascinated. And it was so interesting. I think that voiceover wise, you’re going to run into trouble moving voiceover like this between three voices because in particular I don’t think anyone is going to know that Castor and Ken are different people. Male voices, even when they’re different men, will often sound the same if there’s a continuity of voiceover like that. Particularly when we’re not seeing a different voice. And we don’t. There’s a burned figure on a bed. So, that’s a little bit tricky.

I thought the order, oxygen, heat, and fuel, was wrong, because we start with a lighter, then we go to oxygen, then we go to fuel. So I thought it should have been heat, oxygen, fuel.

But I was so like, oh my god, this is crazy. What — how — and I understood that I was definitely going for another Stuart special, [laughs], where we open at the end of a movie and then go to the beginning. And that’s because Stuart loves that. Don’t keep doing it just to make Stuart pick your scripts. But then, oh man, did it fall off the rails. And the reason it fell off the rails was tone. Tone, tone, tone.

So, the first page and a half is dark, and moody, and poetic. I mean, the character’s name on page one, and I don’t love things like this.

**John:** Sarafina and Castor.

**Craig:** Well, and also Castor — his name is — where is page one. Castor Pollack. Which is sort of a hammy reference to Castor and Pollux, the Roman twins. You know, all right, fine. He went to school, I get it. But the tone is mood and poetic and visual.

Then when we get to this scene, where the student, the first thing he does is yell at this bear and says, “Fuck you, rape bear. Screwed me right up the ass, you stupid bear. You like that? Did you like it, huh?” This — I’m like, wait, wait, it’s like I started watching Fight Club and then I cut to black and then the next scene I’m watching Neighbors.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s going on? I was so confused. And then Castor’s voiceover seems completely irrelevant because all we’re really watching is a student freak out and Castor’s voiceover saying, “Students freak out.” This did not work.

**John:** It didn’t work at all. And I lost a sense of where this voiceover could be connected to. So, if you’re giving me these provocative images and you have a voiceover that’s sort of establishing like, you know, to make a fire you need heat, fuel, and oxygen. Like, I get what that is. That’s like a movie telling itself. But then to have that voiceover and have multiple voiceover empowered people feeding me more stuff just made me frustrated and sort of confused about what was going on.

But I really want to talk about the stressed student, because what he’s doing is so crazy cartoonish, but even the setup feels really strange and sort of not specific to our shared understanding of how college campuses work.

**Craig:** Wait, you didn’t buy that his final exam was graded instantly? [laughs]

**John:** So, his final exam, and “red marks cover the page like battle wounds. Nonsense. Absurd. You can go do better, etc. Up top a score of 13 out of 50.” We have the macro lens out for that, because we’re reading a lot apparently. If we see this guy freak out, we’re going to get why he’s freaking out. And this felt like the kind of scene that should have taken place entirely without him talking or without anyone else talking. And so if you want to do some cartoonish things, don’t also have him say cartoonish things. You can have him take cartoonish actions or like, you know, get fucked by the bear, or sort of do that stuff that he wants to do, just let’s not talk about. Let’s just sort of show it.

And if you want to comment on it, maybe have real characters in the scene commenting on it, because the voiceover was just not working for us.

I also want to talk about the specificity of campus. Like what is campus? Colleges are big and I don’t have a sense of where we are on this campus. I needed a little bit more scene setting, because apparently this is where most of the story is going to take place, is my guess, since we’re ending there and we’re starting here. Give us more. Tell us, are we in the main quad? Give us a sense of what kind of school this is. Because you say Arizona Institute of Technology. It’s like, am I supposed to think ASU, am I supposed to think MIT? Those are very different vibes and very different kind of feelings of what those students are like.

In general, like since we’re going to end on sort of a war scene, is this supposed to be normal days? Is the calm before the war? Show us some calm before this guy storms out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when you have a character doing something like this guy is doing where he’s mimicking being raped by the bear, no one does that on their own. It’s just simply not — at that point you’re mentally ill. That’s crazy. You would do it in front of a friend to make them understand how you felt possibly. I mean, I don’t love it at all, but you would not do it alone.

And it’s being commented on, again, by Castor, Ken, and Sarafina in voiceover. We have these three disembodied voices like a Greek chorus suddenly now talking, like having a conversation in VO. Look VO can be terrific. A conversation in VO, when we have no idea who is doing it yet, very difficult. And when the tone of the conversation is in polar opposition to the tone of what we’re looking at, you end up with a disaster.

So, this is so interesting to me because I feel like page one through 1.5 is fantastic. And page 1.5 to three is horrendous. And so I guess I would say that’s good news, because if you can make 1.5 fantastic pages, you can make 110 fantastic pages. But, something went rapidly awry.

**John:** I also want to think about what is the audience’s expectation after this kind of opening. So, when we do the flash forward opening and then we’re coming back to sort of the real start of the movie, my instinct is the first person I see, or the first person I should be focused on should be one of the important people. And so when you tell me in the script “distressed student,” and then I get a page and a half of just distressed student doing stuff, I’m thinking well is this our hero? Is this the guy I’m supposed to be focusing on? Because as a moviegoer, I would assume like, oh, this must be our main hero person. But the reason I know it’s not is because you didn’t give him a name. He’s just called Distressed Student.

So, I’m really conflicted about sort of should I be paying any attention to this guy? Is one of these other people going to step in, oh wait, they’re being voiceover, so who knows. And that’s a real frustration. Stories don’t always have to start with your hero. Obviously many great movies start with characters who are not your hero, who are sort of disposable and you never see again, but movies that start with this sort of flash forward structure and then come back to reality, I would bet 90% of them, one of the very first people you’re going to see if your hero to establish, ground you in the reality of this is the character’s journey.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. In fact, I’ll go a step further. When you start with voiceover over a tableau like this, sort of a — I imagine this is all very tableau like, these first 1.5 pages. When you come out of it, you’re close on someone. You want to be physically close on a face. I could easily see the first thing we see being Castor’s face not beaten, and we hear over his face some cry. And then we reveal that he’s looking out his window at a girl who is sitting under a banner that says Congratulations on your Finals, or Good Luck on Finals, and she’s just sobbing.

And we go, oh boy. You know, I would get that. But you’re so right. You have to come back to a face almost to understand even time wise what the hell is going on. If you’re going to play the time game, help me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Great. So, as always, I want to thank everyone who has submitted for the Three Page Challenges, especially these three people who were brave enough to have us talk about their three pages on the air. If you have your own three pages you want us to take a look at, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, and you can submit your own. If you want to read through the ones we’ve talked about, they’re on the show notes, so just johnaugust.com.

It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video that everybody on the Internet said I should watch, but I avoided watching it because it’s 15 minutes long. Now I watched it and it’s really, really good. It’s called The Fallen of World War II by Neil Halloran. And what he did is a great data visualization of —

**Craig:** It’s so cool.

**John:** It’s so good. It’s all the deaths of WWII. And sort of showing in sort of a great chart form of like how many people died from each country, both military casualties and civilian casualties. And it sort of shows you how big WWII really was and how it sort of out-scaled everything that had come before it, and really everything that’s come after it.

And so it was harrowing but it was also — ends on a surprisingly hopeful note in the sense that you recognize that since the horror of WWII we’ve not had anything approaching that in terms of death on a global scale. So, really just spectacularly well done. Just a great example of what’s possible to do with great data visualization. It also reminded me way back in episode 30 I talked about The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronical of Atrocities by Matthew White, which if you liked this visualization, I would urge you to read that book. Because what it does is it talks through sort of all of history’s great atrocities, some of which are in Halloran’s video.

But it gives you a sense of like what is the context for these great deaths that have happened in history and the kinds of things that lead to these big catastrophic events.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s great. Anytime somebody says how bad things are now, and the world is getting worse, I perversely want to punch them and make the world worse because we’re not even in the same galaxy of badness that existed in the middle of the 20th century.

When you look at Russia alone, it’s astonishing. When you think about what it means for millions of people to die, and then you think about tens of millions of people. It’s unfathomable. And there are all sorts of theories as to why it hasn’t happened since, one of which is kind of obvious, because it can’t. Everybody has nuclear weapons. You simply can’t do it anymore. You can’t have a war like that anymore. But I think also the war itself was proof that we shouldn’t have a war like that anymore.

It’s unreal. It’s just hard to fathom living on a planet and yet, you know, my parents were alive when that was happening. It’s just remarkable. Just remarkable. So, yeah, an amazing video.

My One Cool Thing is like on the other end of the spectrum. It’s on the loose end. So, I’m not a big wine guy, but any time I get a bottle or something I just want to say like, oh, is this crap or is it okay? And I think I mentioned this to you. There’s a website called CellarTracker where people can write their opinions of wine and it’s actually kind of useful because people that know about wine — and I am not one of them — will say things like, you know, this is a good wine, but don’t drink it now, drink it three years from now. Or leave this out for an hour, or just go ahead and drink it.

And they have an app now, it’s free, and one of the coolest things about it is you can take a picture of a wine label and it will search some database somewhere in the sky and show you that bottle of wine exactly from that year with all the reviews and thoughts on it. It’s so cool.

It will even give you a sense of what it should cost. So, if you’re in a store and they’re like, “This is the best and it only costs $120,” well, maybe it really only costs $50. So, very cool, and it’s free. They ask for a voluntary payment, which I have yet to do. Actually I just noticed that it said that. [laughs] I feel super ashamed. I will send my voluntary payment in. CellarTracker for iPhone and possibly for those other phones that others talk about.

**John:** Yes. The engine underlying it is the same thing that does Vimeo, which is an app I’ve used for a while. And I think it’s actually so smart because it’s a great use of like you have a limited data set. Although there’s thousands of wines in the world, there’s only thousands of wines in the world. So you can actually just digitize all of the labels out there and then figure out like these are the wines. And you can match those up to reviews of them and actually provide a useful service from that data set.

So, I thought it was just a really smart use of cellphone camera technologies, scanning, the power of the computers that are in our little pockets all the time to do it.

**Craig:** What a world!

**John:** We live in a great world. Better than WWII. So, this is all —

**Craig:** Yeah, and in WWII people were dying in the millions and now in 2015 my phone gets me drunk.

**John:** Ha-ha. And that’s our show this week. If you have something to say to Craig Mazin, you should write him on Twitter. He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you would like to leave us a review on iTunes, that would be fantastic. Just search for us there at Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can download the Scriptnotes app for your iOS device. We’re also available for Android devices on the appropriate app stores.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel who picked these Three Page Challenges. Thank you, Stuart.

Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and man, did I make his life difficult this week. We had Skype dropouts and my brain did not work very well. So, thank you, Matthew. If you have an outro for our show, we love to have great musical compositions as outros, things that incorporate the [hums], but in clever new ways. Matthew writes a lot of them, but we also have great people who have written other ones for us. So, if you have one of those outros, just send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com and we will get that into the queue.

For Craig Mazin, I’m John August. Guys, thank you so much. See you next week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye John.

Links:

* [John jumped off a bridge](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/608473352420925440)
* [FAST Screenplay’s Jeff Bollow at TEDxDocklands](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH6AyjGgcns)
* [Action Movies, Stop Taking Away Our Everyday Heroes](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/action-stars-impossible-man/) on Wired
* NEDA’s [Statistics on Males and Eating Disorders](https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics-males-and-eating-disorders)
* [SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’](http://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/) on Deadline
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Zach Kaplan](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ZachKaplan.pdf)
* Three Pages by [RM Weatherly](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RMWeatherly.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Olufemi S. Sowemimo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/OlufemiSSowemimo.pdf)
* [The Fallen of World War II](https://vimeo.com/128373915) by Neil Halloran, and [fallen.io](http://www.fallen.io/ww2/)
* The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White
* [CellarTracker](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cellartracker/id893759800?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-would-this-be-a-movie).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 201 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, our communication can open up to a whole new frontier. I can now send you my heartbeat because I have an Apple Watch just like you.

**Craig:** I mean, let’s just run down the things we could do. We can send each other heartbeats. I can draw like a dick on my phone if I want —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And I can draw a boob and send it to you.

**John:** You can send an animated Emoji kind of thing.

**Craig:** Which I actually — that we could do I think to anybody.

**John:** I think it would just come through as a normal Emoji though. I don’t think it comes —

**Craig:** No, it does.

**John:** Through as the cool animation.

**Craig:** It does. It comes through.

**John:** Does it?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. They can’t send us one but we can send anybody one of those.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s unilateral Emoji power.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. But the little like, “I’m going to draw something and blah, blah, blah,” you know, frankly, there’s no real utility in that. I don’t —

**John:** If I were a high school student, I would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I’d be drawing dicks and sending them around all the time.

**Craig:** Dicks and boobies everywhere.

**John:** That’s what it would be. So far, I’m enjoying it. You know, once I started treating it like a watch that could do extra things versus a tiny iPhone, I was much happier with it. But I found that that first hour I kept trying to do iPhone kind of things on it, it really is not an iPhone.

**Craig:** No, not at all. And that’s a very good observation. You just treat it like a watch. The truth of the matter is that 90% of the time, I’m just using it like a watch where I check the time. I like the fact that it — I don’t know what face you’re using, but the way I’ve got mine designed, I’ve got just a standard analog face. I’ve got a little digital time as well. I’ve got the date and day. And then at the bottom, a little summary of what the next event is coming up, you know, on my calendar.

**John:** I suspect you and I are both using the utility face.

**Craig:** I think I am using the utility face, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Apparently, it’s the most common face used by Apple Watch users.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But I use the same thing. And in my upper left corner I have little circles that fill in for my activity. And I enjoy that as a concept. I’ve been a little bit frustrated that I have a very hard time getting the move circle to fill in all the way. And I think my humblebrag for this will be that my heart rate is really, really low. My resting heart rate is really, really low. And so things that I think should count as movement, my heart rate doesn’t go up high enough that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually really working at it.

**Craig:** You know, I was wondering —

**John:** So that’s my only frustration.

**Craig:** The heart rate thing is a little, I don’t know. I’m a little suspicious of it. Well, actually, geez, god, my heart rate is ridiculously low, too. 61.

**John:** Yeah, I’m 60.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** But maybe that’s because we’re so calm whenever we’re doing the podcast.

**Craig:** Because we don’t move, man. Let’s just face it. [laughs]

**John:** We don’t.

**Craig:** Just real lazy —

**John:** This podcast, we will not be moving whatsoever but we will be discussing some topics and doing a whole new kind of featuring segment which I thought up this week and I hope will be fun. This week, we’re going to take a look at three stories in the news and look at them from a screenwriter’s perspective saying, how would these be movies?

And so we’re going to look at the FIFA scandal. We will look at the Large Hadron Collider and we’re going to look at the situation with Laura Kipnis and the Title IX Investigations and sort of that whole issue of sexual conduct on campus.

So we’re not actually going to reach any conclusions about them as the actual news stories, but we’ll look at them as how do you make this into a movie, which is most of what screenwriters do is try to think about how something could be a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that, actually, as an exercise, is very much like what we’re doing all the time when we sit down with producers or executives. At some point, someone will say something like, “Hey, you know, we’ve been thinking about making a movie about FIFA.” Or, “Hey, we’ve been thinking — you know, my boss, insert famous person here, is just obsessed with origami. How do we make an origami movie?” And you’re constantly being asked to take something and narrativize it. Well, let’s see how we do with these.

**John:** Yeah. So this will be our first experiment in narrativization with three news stories. And then we’re going to take a look at the advice of “follow your passion” or “do what you love” and to the degree with which that applies to writers and screenwriters but to the degree with which it could be damaging advice overall. So we will get into that. And Professor Craig has a bunch of stuff in the Workflowy for us to talk through about that.

So it should be a fun new kind of episode.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see. I like to hold my applause.

**John:** You’re setting expectations low.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Mazin specialty.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it could be a disaster.

**John:** But it could be fun.

**Craig:** But, look, it’s free. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I mean, come on.

**John:** All right, let’s get into this. So we’re going to talk about each of these issues. We’ll sort of do a quick summary of what actually is happening, in case you’re listening to this six months after the fact and you don’t remember what the story was.

But then I want to take a look at this from — maybe spend the first little bit of it talking about like, well, what kind of movie in general are we talking about making, what’s the genre, what sort of general type of move would this be. Look at the characters, look at what the storyline might be, and also answer the real question like, “Would anybody make that movie?” So let’s start with FIFA.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So FIFA was a big scandal this last week. Do you want to summarize it? Should I summarize it? What do you think?

**Craig:** You know, there’s not that much to say. I mean, FIFA is the international organization that supervises football, you know, what the rest of the world calls football, soccer. And they control the World Cup. They also control what city gets the World Cup. And that’s a bit like the Olympics. Cities bid for it, they compete heavily for it because it’s good for your economy to have, you know. God knows how many people filing into your country to watch the World Cup.

And unfortunately, what that means is that there’s the opportunity and possibility of corruption because you have FIFA officials that are in possession of a decision. And lots of other countries want them to decide for them. So you could see how it’s like, “Oh, hey, take this briefcase of money.” “Oh, hey, why don’t you have a free whatever and give it to us?” And I think frankly, the rest of the world had resigned itself to FIFA’s steady, consistent corruption.

**John:** Until about 10 days ago when it suddenly changed.

**Craig:** It suddenly changed.

**John:** So what happened is this was in Zurich and a bunch of plain-clothed police officers came in and arrested and then later indicted a bunch of FIFA officials and other marketing officials for essentially kickbacks and bribes. This was all at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice. And so, it was suddenly, you know, sort of out in the open. And at the time, Sepp Blatter who runs FIFA, claimed the responsibility. He has the best name.

As we get into like the storytelling of it at all, like Sepp Blatter is just too impossibly great —

**Craig:** [laughs] Sepp Blatter, I mean, they’ve got to just put that into the new Star Wars movies.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** Darth Blatter? Come on.

**John:** [laughs] So he was initially sort of like not publicly part of the investigation, like he wasn’t sort of indicted in this first round. He won the election as Head of FIFA two days later. And then after another few days, he resigned from it because it was clear that he was going to be ensnared in the investigation. His words though were, “The mandate does not seem to be supported by everybody in the world of football,” in his hastily arranged news conference in Zurich. “FIFA needs a profound restructuring.”

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. FIFA needs a restructuring, all right. I mean, good lord. I mean, we’re not supposed to comment on the news story itself. We just want to make a movie out of this somehow.

**John:** We do. And so as I was thinking about what kind of movie this would be, one of the details that came up which I found so fascinating is the structure of FIFA which tends I think to lend itself to some of this corruption is that each — it’s not even countries, but each sort of locality who has a team gets to have a vote on where the World Cup is being held.

And so you can have these tiny little island countries that have as much of a vote as Germany or France does on where these things are being held. And so because you have these little countries and one official of this little country having so much power in how this is being done, they’re very prone to bribery. And also, I found the possibility for that little guy from Bora Bora being ensnared in this whole thing potentially fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s definitely one way to go is to just say, “Let’s take the villains of FIFA and let’s make an underdog movie here.” So, a little country wants the World Cup and they love soccer, and there’s no chance they’re ever going to get it, but they pick their aging soccer hero. They sort of say, “Hey, leave this charge and give our kids something to think of.” And he gets caught up and swept up. And then there’s probably a woman that he’s falling in love with. And he goes. And he basically gets screwed over by these evil guys. And so, he fights back.

And, you know, they end up playing the World Cup on big floating platforms in the Pacific Ocean because they’re French Polynesia or something.

**John:** So what you’re describing is sort of falling into the sports movie overall genre. So there’s things like there’s aspects of Cool Runnings. That Matt Damon, South African football movie, or rugby movie, which also involved Morgan Freeman as a backdrop for telling the larger story of Nelson Mandela. There’s definitely all of that stuff because you have this cinematic game that you can watch. There’s actually sport. There’s action happening right there.

The other way I was thinking about doing this was sort of the Coen Brothers comedy, which is that you have these larger than life characters doing this sort of absurd thing and taking money for, you know, soda contracts. And there’s some kind of great black comedy to be made about what that life is like.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. So we’re talking about genre here and in a weird way what happens is you start to go right to, well, what’s this about, you know. And in the first instance we have this broad comedy. And what it’s about is, you know, what most things are always about. The underdog wins.

And then a darker comedy or a Coen Brothers style comedy is really about the Byzantine Kafkaesque nature of the world. FIFA and its nonsense becomes a stand-in for, you know, the mythological maze that the hero would find himself in. And those can be fascinating and really funny. The collision of different nationalities you could see lending itself to some fun there as well.

You know, where of course the other way to go is to take it just head-on. And say, “Okay, well, let’s just deal with how can we make a political thriller about this.” There’s probably not any violence, but people have become accustomed to sort of the unwinding of international things if it’s done with some real drama.

There is an interesting theme here that I think could be explored in a movie like that. One thing that came out of this whole thing that I found fascinating was that in a time when most of the world, and particularly Europe where so much of football mania is centered, has lost its love for the United States. There was this remarkable outpouring of appreciation. It was like the old days where people went, “Here come the Yanks. Good for them. Finally, they’re going to come and clean this up. And hurray for them. And you know what, they may not love football the way we do, but they saved us. They’ve saved our beloved sport.” That’s interesting to me.

**John:** The kind of movie you’re describing makes me think of Syriana or Michael Clayton in that they’re taking it straight on. They’re sort of trying to peel back the layers and really looking at what’s happening underneath this thing.

And like they’re also dipping into what we consider the villain’s point of view at times. I think of the scene in Michael Clayton where she’s like hiding in the bathroom stall making a phone call. There’s some really great tension to be found there.

But I would also question whether, you know, there’s not obvious like people being murdered in the streets in this kind of movie. But if you look at the situation in Qatar, which Qatar was awarded the World Cup, and there’s real concerns that, you know, essentially the slave labor that’s going to be building the stadiums in Qatar would result in many, many deaths. So there’s ways you could probably frame this as a real human cost to this kind of corruption and scandal.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in doing so, you find why it matters to people. So the question is, forget who’s going to go see this, who’s going to make it, right? Because the who’s going to make it involves who’s going to go see it.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** And people that are going to be spending $30 million, $40 million or $50 million a movie, what they want to know is, well, what ultimately draws me to this if I don’t care about soccer or even if I do but I’ve read the story and I get it. And what draws people to all these things is some kind of human drama, whether it’s the simple comedy drama of the spirit of the underdog or if it’s something about a repressed underclass in the dark side of a happy sport. Something, we have to find that thing to connect through.
I actually think that you could make a really interesting movie about this. My instinct, if I were running a studio, would not be to make the sunny comedy version because that feels a bit played out. And I think that this is too — frankly, it’s too interesting. The fun version of that is Cool Runnings where it’s about kind of a very minor sport and minor country. And the comedy is the fun part. My instinct here would be to go head on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would go head on and Syriana with this thing. I guess, ultimately, what I’d be trying to find in it is a path for America to become what it once was. Not the world’s policeman, but the world’s best example. And use that as the sort of joy at the end of this.

**John:** So what you’re describing I think could be a really cool movie. And it reminds me of Zero Dark Thirty. So Zero Dark Thirty, you’re trying to take on the assassination of Osama Bin Laden but, like, what is the actual human story you’re trying to tell within that? And so they decided to focus in on the single woman. We’re seeing this from her perspective as she’s trying to do this mission. So finding who that relatable U.S. person is or whose journey we’re going to follow and whose struggle we’re going to follow trying to make this happen could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s take a look at who some of these characters are we’re going to encounter. Obviously Sepp Blatter is just, come on, just phenomenal.

**Craig:** Sepp Blatter.

**John:** So we have Loretta Lynch who’s the U.S. Attorney General who is pushing this investigation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She is certainly a possibility. But I have a hunch that there’s some other man or woman who really led the charge and said, “You know what, I think we can get them on RICO charges,” which is normally how you would bring down the Mafia. I think if you could frame this story in a way like the same kinds like, you know, The Untouchables or the same way you could sort of frame these Mafia stories, you might be able to frame it from — use that as a framework for what kind of a movie this is.

This is like the U.S. taking down the Mafia. That may be a way in to sort of both how we’re going to describe the movie internally, about what kind of movie we’re trying to make. But also you’re thinking about what kind of movie are you ultimately going to need to try to market when you put it out there in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is where you come up with these little moments that help people understand. And by the way, you’re exactly right. You can’t make Loretta Lynch, our U.S. Attorney General, the hero of the story because she’s simply too big and too public. It’s like making the President the hero. That was kind of my problem with, you know, the White House Down, Olympic Fallen movies because the President doesn’t punch people. He’s too big. He’s not real, you know. He’s not real to me.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. Unless you’re literally making Air Force One which like you so deliberately constrain it down. Like, well, it has to be the President.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s not this movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not this movie. So you do want somebody that we feel accessible to, somebody that we can identify with. But there’s that moment where they’re in a room and the person is saying, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to bring them up on RICO charges.” And someone else says, “Okay, when you say them, let’s just run down who you’re talking about. These 17 countries, these following people, none of whom we have jurisdiction over, all of whom are bribing these people to not give us evidence, we can’t go here and we can’t go here. These people hate us, and these people hate us. And you want to bring them all down on a RICO charge within two months?” And the person says, “That’s right.”

And you start to get a sense of what this movie is about.

**John:** You know, the other movie this is reminding me of is Erin Brockovich because you might have an outsider who’s come in to say like, “This is what’s happening. This is what needs to be done.” So even if he or she doesn’t have the expertise to do exactly the thing that needs to be done, they have to convince someone who does have that power to do it. And the way they do that is the compelling human story of how we are getting to this place.

So then the issue becomes, how do you set up your competing themes of like whatever this individual journey is versus what FIFA is doing overall and what soccer is like. You know, how do you combine the ideas of like that kid playing soccer, your own kid playing soccer on the field and this giant sports machine that is corrupt and is employing slave labor in a faraway place. How do you make that all fit into one movie, that’s your struggle.

**Craig:** That is. And, you know, my instinct would be that the person involved here actually doesn’t understand soccer at all. They don’t play it, their kids don’t play it. They are as American as American gets, in fact, which is a part of their problem.

For instance, I could see a character who had been working in the state department for a while and working in an area where frankly every time they try to do something that “helped,” they hurt, which is kind of the story of the post 9/11 United States. Every time we try and fix things, we seem to make them worse.

And this person is consumed by this. And they seize upon this that the thing that no one is looking at. And they say, “Wait a second. If you pull the lid off of this, you start to see how many people are really being hurt, this is the kind of thing we should be doing. We shouldn’t necessarily be droning every time we have a problem. Maybe this is what we should be doing, going after the rich and corrupt who are, in the name of capitalism and a good show, are hurting a lot of people. That’s the way we used to be.”

And then it becomes about that person redeeming themselves and maybe giving us all a little bit of a glimpse of how we could be better.

**John:** Something you just touched on there is that by having this person be an outsider to the world of soccer and maybe even outside to the world of how FIFA works, by having your hero be that outsider, you give the movie and the audience a chance to learn with the hero how stuff fits together. And you also get the ability to teach the audience what is important and what is not important about this world you’re introducing them to, because you’re not going to need to teach them all the rules of soccer. That’s not going to be important to your movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re going to be able to teach them how this bigger game works. And so, as I’m throwing out other examples of movies. You think of Moneyball. And Moneyball, it didn’t just teach you how to like hit the ball, it needed to talk to you through about sort of this is what trading is like. This is how you put a team together. This is the structure of this world. And having your hero be the outsider to this could be really, really useful.

**Craig:** Yeah. And as you mentioned, Moneyball, you were psychically connecting to something I was already thinking when you talked about how the audience goes in on this outsider path with their hero. And that is that you’re creating an opportunity for great relationship. Somebody that’s bought in to help you navigate that world. So you don’t know anything about soccer. And you don’t come from that world. And you have this idealistic view of what you can accomplish.

And they pair you with somebody that isn’t a crusader or government official but knows a whole bunch about soccer and the soccer world. That’s a great odd couple pairing. And watching those two people help each other, the cynic makes it clear to the idealist what they’re really up against. And the idealist reignites a little bit of a candle of hope in the cynic. That’s classic stuff. But you’re always looking to create characters that need other people. Or else, your movie is going to get super lonely.

**John:** Yeah. The thing we need to always remind ourselves is when you put all FIFA overweight there on the shelf and just look at it from whoever we pick as our hero, what is going to be her journey through this movie. And how are we going to find the moments of triumph and failure along the way. How are we going to get to that place where all hope is lost? Where do we get to that darkest night? And how are we going to structure the story so that character could have those moments, because that’s what would let it be a story about a person rather than a story about a scandal that we just sort of fundamentally don’t care about. That’s honestly the challenge with most of these movies that are based on real life events is trying to find a way that you can have — you can really chart a hero through this whole thing.

You look at what Aaron Sorkin did with The Social Network, which is still one of my favorite movies. It was so smart in creating a character in Mark Zuckerberg who wasn’t the real Mark Zuckerberg but allowed a character to have progress in the journey and to have these ups, these downs, and to really articulate the frustrations in really smart ways. That’s what you’re going to be able to find with this story is how do you find a character who it can be about them and not be about soccer?

**Craig:** Every movie ultimately must be about people. We simply don’t watch fictional movies, even dramatizations of real things for the events themselves. That’s why we watch documentaries. And even in documentaries, they make it about people. Otherwise, it’s a textbook. It’s just your history textbook on film. It’s a news reel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You have to make it about people. That’s how we connect to everything. So Sorkin looks at Facebook. And he says, here’s a man that started Facebook. Facebook is so that you can make friends. This man doesn’t seem to have any friends. Good. Let me start there. That’s a good place to start. Really good place to start.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go on to our next big news topic. This is only sort of halfway news because it’s existed for a while, but this last week they reignited some stuff and upped the energy on the things. We’re going to talk about The Large Hadron Collider. So for people who are not scientifically oriented, The Large Hadron Collider is this giant ring, this particle accelerator built on the border of France and Switzerland. It’s run by CERN, the organization for nuclear research in Europe.

There’s 10,000 scientists, it’s a tunnel 27 kilometers circumference. And what they’re looking for are supper symmetric particles. It’s really trying to understand the fabric of the universe. It’s trying to understand dark matter, trying to understand the very first moments after the Big Bang. It was incredibly expensive. It was incredibly controversial when it was getting made. There’s always been sort of this background worry about like well what if we sort of break something in the universe by trying to build this thing. So let’s just take a look at here’s The Large Hadron Collider. What is the movie there?

**Craig:** Well, you’ve got some possibilities. You could, again, let’s just start with the real easy one. Straight ahead, it’s a drama about whether we’re going to find this or not. I think that would probably be pretty boring.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** When we talk about movies where people are pursuing specific scientific breakthroughs The Imitation Game or Beautiful Mind, it’s really about the individuals and their interesting personal struggles whether it’s with being a homosexual at a time when it’s illegal or whether it’s having schizophrenia. In and of itself, this probably straight ahead will be — no one will care. So then of course, you go let’s fling ourselves the other way into science fiction, right? Okay. Science fiction tends to come in two flavors. It comes in the hopeful flavor or the be careful flavor. My guess is that this would probably fall under the be careful flavor of science fiction.

**John:** Do talk through both versions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So let’s start with the pessimistic, but let’s also talk the optimistic version.

**Craig:** All right. So optimism, we’ve got this wonderful thing. And if we do it, perhaps, we get — I could see, well, geez, I don’t know how to make it optimistic, because the truth is what happen is you’re guessing about things like what do you, you know, do you find heaven?

**John:** I was going more towards Jodie Foster in Contact where essentially you, you know, by building this thing, you’re able to understand some fundamental mystery. And therefore either travel to a different place, have communication with the new species. I was also thinking back to in Star Trek lore there is the prime directive which is basically non-interference with other cultures. But The Federation will reach out when a civilization has reached a certain point. So in one of the movies, I guess this First Contact, Zefram Cochrane builds the first warp drive. And therefore The Federation reaches out and says, “Oh, hey, Earth. There’s other life out there.” And that’s how Earth joins The Federation.

So I think there’s a possibility for essentially by basically knocking on the door by building this particle accelerator thing, somehow, a higher civilization reaches out to us. The conflict of the movie is do you trust them, do you not trust them? Is it Escape from Witch Mountain? Like what is the — that’s not giving me sort of what the story is, but that might be the background for what it is. Like an optimistic future that’s there. Tomorrowland is a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Contact, I love Contact. And one of the things that Contact did was it posed a problem. It imposed a problem. It imposed a question. What do you do if you are contacted by someone else? But in this concept, we are doing the meddling. We are meddling with the ultimate stuff of the universe. And so it feels — my instinct is that when we meddle with things willy-nilly that if the result is something good, it’s less satisfying dramatically.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s as if we push the first domino that went all the way around through a Rube Goldberg device and gave us a nice cookie. When we push that domino, I want stuff to go bad. And then I want us to continue our Star Trek analogy here, it’s like Q. Q shows up in one episode. They say, “Oh, you know, we’ve got things figured out. We’re not scared anymore. We know what we’re doing.” He says, “Oh, really? You have no idea what’s out there?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we can deal with it. We’re cool. We’re the Enterprise.”

So he just flings them into deep, deep, deep space where they encounter the Borg for the first time. And they lose. And then he brings them back and says, “You see, stuff out there, it ain’t any good.” So I could see something here where when it works at first, it seems like they just did a thing. And there’s no problem. But then, some weird things start happening. A little bit like what was the Joel Schumacher movie where they would almost die?

**John:** Flatliners.

**Craig:** Flatliners.

**John:** I love Flatliners.

**Craig:** I love Flatliners. In Flatliners, same thing, they’re meddling with science. They’re trying to see how long they could be “dead” before they can be brought back to life. And as a result of their experiment, weird things start happening to them. They start witnessing people from their past, people that are interacting with them. And ultimately, it turns into kind of a supernatural morality tale about making peace with your past.

But I can see a similar kind of thing happening here where it’s almost as if Neo was a scientist and flipped a thing on and then starts to see The Matrix without anybody explaining to him what The Matrix is. Perhaps also they turned it on and it summons — it essentially draws attention to us. And bad people come.

**John:** Yes. And so, the version of bad people come could be the incredible $100 million, or at this point $400 million movie version. Or it could be something more like Primer, which is you know, again sort of experimenting with scientific things and the danger of sort of unleashing that but done on a very small scale.

I also want to throw out the option of like, well, what if it’s not a science fiction genre at all? So what is this as a romantic comedy? So I was thinking like what, you know, is there a way that we can take thematically the idea of like things coming together and clashing together and build a romantic comedy out of that? Like what is it like if these scientists fall in love? What could we do with this ring idea that this is sort of a giant tunnel and that there might be something really fun to do with using this as a backdrop rather than having it be the actual center of the story? What would that be?

**Craig:** Yeah. For instance, I could see a story where two scientists work on this project. And there’s something wrong between them. And they turn on the switch, they achieve success. And in achieving success, it becomes clear that they’ve caused a problem. And there’s going to be essentially there’s a certain amount of time that’s going to go by and then the universe will collapse.

They’ve got three days. And they’re the only two that know about it. They’re the only two that figured it out. Everybody else thinks it’s great. And so, you have this romantic comedy where everybody in the world is just going about their day, but two people know for sure the world is going to end in 72 hours.

And what do they do with that time? That would be very interesting. Of course, you’d probably not want to destroy the world at the end of the 72 hours. Perhaps they figure out a way. Perhaps one of them has to sacrifice himself or perhaps they can just fall in love. But there’s something really fun about the idea of two people, you know, because they’ve — I’ve seen this movie where there’s apocalyptic movies and the world is going to end and so people fall in love, but everybody is doing it. I kind of like that only two people know about it, and they’re like should we tell people? Why? What for if we can’t stop it?

**John:** Yeah. And there’s also that uncertainty principle maybe like essentially you don’t know what’s going to happen. So they know that there’s like a 50% chance that the world is going to end. So like, you know, there’s a 42.1% chance that the whole universe will implode in 48 hours. Do you tell people? Do you not tell people? That’s an interesting question because you could sort of ruin the world by telling them. But of course, you want people, you know. It’s an interesting ethical question.

What you’re describing is the high concept romantic comedy. I feel like there’s a low concept romantic comedy that could also be fun just because it’s a comedy set in a world I have not seen before. I’ve seen a lot of comedies set in higher education. I’ve seen comedies set in other work places, but it’s such a weirdly specific workplace that it’s locked down, it’s scientific. Everyone there is probably on Craig’s favorite thing, somewhere on the spectrum. And that could be really great.

And so to see the normal kind of bureaucracy happen but in a scientific way, and there’s always sort of weird safety protocols to be able to make those thematic observations about the difference between physics and chemistry, you know, and sort of like what that means for in a romantic sense or in sort of an emotional sense.

There could be some really interesting stuff to do there. So it doesn’t feel like a Nancy Meyers comedy. But I could see Nora Ephron making a great comedy set in this kind of world, or I could have imagined her making a comedy set in this kind of world where you have these characters who have really strongly held beliefs that are going to naturally come into conflict.

**Craig:** That’s also some nice thematic stuff there about people that are working on a project in which the pursuit of truth at any cost is the name of the game. And extending that theme to interpersonal relationships can be pretty interesting too.

**John:** Yeah. So if we get Marc Webb in there, Aline writes the script, sold.

**Craig:** Sold.

**John:** Let’s talk about the reality though of trying to make this movie. So I can completely imagine, I’m sure there are at least a hundred spec scripts out there that involve a science fiction thriller, aliens arriving kind of thing, about the Hadron Collider —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It just has to be out there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m sure it is. Again, if I were running a studio, I would not make that movie. I don’t think it’s specific or interesting enough. It just feels like we’re taking a phrase from the news that maybe 2% of Americans know about and just trumping up yet another, you know, effects laden aliens getting angry at some people. I wouldn’t make that movie.

**John:** I agree with you. I wouldn’t make it. If I were a studio, I wouldn’t make this smaller, smarter, primer version because I wouldn’t know how to release it. But if I were a filmmaker who made that smaller, smarter Primer version and took it to Sundance, I could see that being a big hit at Sundance. I could see that the indie version thriller of that happening.

I think the romantic comedy version could sell with the right package. And that it would be a really good pitch or it would be a script. It wouldn’t be just like a, “Oh, we have this lark of an idea.” No, you would really need to pitch that whole thing through.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m not sure there’s enough there to really support it. I don’t love this one, you know, it just feels — you know, what you want to avoid — basically this is the problem is that everything ultimately gets narrowed through this lens of marketing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** While it’s annoying and perhaps creatively odious, it is realistic, because in the end, people are going to go, “Oh, it’s a comedy about two people falling in love and they are like super nerdy scientists. Okay, so it’s like The Big Bang Theory, but a movie.” And it’s going to be hard to make that feel special just on the basis of the fact that they’re working at the thing, you know. I don’t know, it’s a tough one.

**John:** It’s a tough one too. I think in some ways, the sharper version of your high concept like because super collider there’s an additional sort of world effect might help you out there too. And it might lend itself to like, “Oh, I can see what the casting is like on that.” You look at Pixels, the movie coming out, like that’s a really, really, really high concepts comedy pitch, but like if you say like, “Yes, I can see what that is, I can see what the trailer is, go for it,” I have a hunch that if you and/or Todd Phillips had an idea for a comedy set in the Large Hadron Collider and you can go in and pitch that and set that up, and people would be excited to try to make that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean to be honest, I think if Todd, forgive me, if Todd Phillips has a pitch about a blind squirrel and a bucket, they’re going to buy it, too, because everybody just believes in him and they have been richly rewarded for believing in him. But I suspect that if there is a — for instance, if you took the high concept comedy of two people, two rivals, scientific rivals who both arrive at the same conclusion, they’ve never agreed with each other ever. The one time they agree with each other, nobody else agrees with them and that is that they figured out that the world is going to end in three days, that’s interesting.

So in a way, I guess what I’m saying is the Hadron Collider part of it is probably a minor thing. If it’s going to be part of a romantic comedy, it’s a minor thing the way that where the man and the woman work is sort of a minor thing in a romantic comedy. Like what was it, The Wedding Planner?

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** She’s a wedding planner, I get that, haha, wedding planner, but she’s never married, well. But in the end, that’s not really — it’s not even that important. What’s important is the relationship she has with Matthew McConaughey. I think in What Women Want, Mel Gibson was an advertising guy, so there was a little bit of thing of like, ah-ha, he thinks he knows what women want because he’s in advertising, but doesn’t really know. Okay, fine. But once you get that out of the way, it comes down to the relationship.

**John:** Yeah, the upcoming movie with Bill Hader and Amy Schumer, he is like a sports doctors and she has to write a profile on him. That’s just the conceit to get you started. But that’s not going to be what the bulk of the movie is like. I would say, probably most romantic comedies, the essential premise is just there to get the first 30 pages going and does not become a very important part of the rest of the story.

**Craig:** No, because —

**John:** Usually.

**Craig:** Not really an important part of romance. I mean what you do for your job, I mean, it’s just the way romance works. That may be how you meet somebody, maybe what initially attracts you to somebody. But after the first three or four dates and the first five fights, it’s not about any of that anymore. So in that case here, I think to the Hadron Collider would essentially act as a McGuffin for romance.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you. All right, our third and final possible movie that we’ll talk through, this is all about the two articles and the articles written about the articles by and about Laura Kipnis and her situation, so challenging to talk through this and not getting lost in the weeds of the specific stories and specific allegations. But essentially, Laura Kipnis is a professor. She writes a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education, called Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. That’s right, I should say academe, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s academe.

**John:** Academe. So a little background, just one paragraph from this article so you get a flavor of what it is. “When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims. Back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t have my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.”

And so in this article, she talks about the relationship between professors and students and how that used to be kind of common. And now that’s become criminalized or at least frowned upon, maybe sort of outlawed on campuses. And it has created some really terrible, awkward situations and has changed the nature of academe by its existence. So that was her initial article.

And then in the follow-up to that, she was investigated under Title IX complaints by her university. And so this is what sort of happened here. She writes that, “I wouldn’t be informed about the substance of the complaints until I met with the investigators. Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term ‘kangaroo court’ came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.”

So essentially, from this initial article, one of the people who had accused a professor and the situation was sort of described vaguely in the original article had brought up charges against her saying that this was retaliation and it was just a giant mess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Craig, this is thrown on your lap saying like, you know, a producer says, Lindsay Doran says, “Hey, you know what, I think there might be a movie about either specifically this Laura Kipnis situation or the nature of sexual politics on campus and professors.” What do we do with this? What is the shape of this kind of movie?

**Craig:** [laughs] Run. Well —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You’ve got some choices here. And the first choice you have to make is, “Am I taking a position or not?” There are movies that are designed to thought provoke. They are carefully crafted to make you think. And there will be some villains, there will be some heroes. But everybody will be imperfect. And you will not feel good at the end of it, necessarily. And sometimes those movies are brilliant. And you’ve got Rashomon as the granddaddy, but there are just — there’s a long tradition in literature of what you’d call the nobody wins, nobody loses, everybody’s human. That’s certainly one way to go.

The other way to go is to take a position here. And the obvious position I think to take is that a professor who, by the way, seems to have been a longstanding well-established feminist is now somehow getting caught by a mob that perhaps she feels she might even be complicit in having created in the first place.

And so then you get into the human politics of what happens when disempowered people get power as a group, the trampling of individual rights and how we have to weigh individual rights against social justice. And it gets really messy.

Here’s my problem. My problem with this is that I don’t see where the dramatic victory is for anyone to make this into a movie because what makes this interesting is your unique perspective on it as a person. You may have a general tendency towards individual rights and liberties. You may have a general tendency towards social justice. And you may work very hard to try and balance both. I hope that you do like I do.

But it’s too intellectual, frankly. It doesn’t feel like a movie is the proper treatment of this. I feel like, frankly, the proper treatment of this is discussion in public space. Sometimes these things resist drama. I feel it would be a bit leaden and could turn into sort of a lecturey kind of vibe. So, you know, I’m a little worried about this one.

**John:** I’m worried about this one, too. My first instinct is that it feels like a play because it feels like you might want to actually do this with a limited number of characters in sort of an enclosed space with long scenes where you’re really digging and talking through those kind of things.

And as we’re talking — if you heard me typing — I was trying to find the name of this play that it reminds me of, which is a professor and a student who are having this relationship. And it’s unclear, it’s sort of deliberately unclear sort of where the boundaries of this relationship are. Actually, now that I think about there’s probably four plays that are sort of the same territory. There’s a Theresa Rebeck play is one of them, but there’s an older one I was thinking about, too.

A play might be a really good vehicle for talking through this. You talked about Rashomon. You know, in some ways, our TV series tend to be our Rashomon right now where you can revisit certain scenes and sort of see them from different perspectives.

What I also liked about what you should, though, is that mob mentality. And the degree to which this in some way is an intellectual zombie movie, where it’s like once the zombies are after you, there’s essentially nowhere to hide. There’s no safe place.

And I think it’s a really interesting commentary on the universe we live in right now where outrage is enough. And so the sort of presumption not of guilt, but that in her article Kipnis talks about this woman who was identified as a survivor rather than accuser and sort of what the boundary and the differences between, you know, being accused of something and that thing actually having existed.

And so whether a person could call themselves a survivor of a situation that you’re not even sure actually happened. So there’s all sorts of really interesting questions, really challenging to pit them as a movie, though.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I love the idea about a play, by the way. It does feel like a play. The problem with the movie is you’re right, your tendency is to say, “Well, this is a kind of a zombie movie. It’s about an intellectual mob.” But the problem is that when you say any intellectual group is a mob or any philosophical group is a mob, you have demonized them.

And the truth is I’m not sure that anybody wants to see people that are very upset about sexual assaults or abuse on campus be demonized. Because the truth is I think most people who are concerned about this do not move en masse as some sort of unthinking mob ready to burn down anybody that looks at them askance. What we tend to do when we make these movies is pick on ideologies that we have all socially decided are just Wrong with a capital W. So occasionally, somebody will make a movie about, say, McCarthyism. We’ve all decided that’s no good. So that will be a good intellectual zombie movie.

**John:** Or if we’re making a McCarthyism movie, we might make it, though, in a different context. So we might make The Crucible which is about McCarthyism.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it can be about witches.

**Craig:** Right. So we all agree that the Salem witch trials were bad. [laughs] We all agree that McCarthyism is bad. Now, The Crucible was particularly relevant because of when it was written. And it was a clearly a commentary in something that was part of the culture. If you make a movie about the Red Scare now, you’re just being boring because it’s been done too well too many times. It is frankly no longer relevant.

If you made a movie today about how a lot of people in Germany got together and became Nazis and did terrible things, while I’m sure it would have value, but probably it’s too late. We’ve well established how that works. We’ve made those zombie movies already.

In this case, I don’t think that we can yet agree what the nature of this mob is if it even is a mob or if this is just the loud voices of certain people, for instance, in this case what’s happening to Professor Kipnis seems to be the result of one or two people making complaints that must be followed-up by law. Well, if that doesn’t quite qualify, you — I think the real villain is probably academic bureaucracy but it may also just be bureaucracy in general or maybe where the law fails to encompass common sense, but none of it feels like I want to watch a movie of it. I don’t want to see that unfolding cinematically.

**John:** Yeah. So thinking back to The Blind Side, and so you look at John Lee Hancock’s movie. What was interesting is late in the story sort of the NCAA challenge comes out. And so there ends up becoming an investigation. By the time that becomes an important part of the story, we already love all the characters because — and the story wasn’t fundamentally about that thing. So when that stuff comes out, when the investigation comes out, we have a strong rooting interest in one side and we believe what they are saying.

In this movie, and the reason why I still think I wonder if it’s a play rather than a movie which we might be more comfortable with the ambiguity is there’s going to be some central incident about whether this person was rightly or wrongly accused. And our expectation of the movie is like we want to have an answer for that. And we want to feel good about the answer for that. And I don’t know that we’re ever going to come to that place in this movie.

We talked about Erin Brockovich when we were talking about the FIFA scandal. And if Erin Brockovich, if we were ambiguous at the end about sort of whether she was right or whether she was wrong, that would not be a successful movie. That’s not the kind of movie we paid our $8.50 at that time to go see.

**Craig:** Yeah. You don’t want to watch a social crusader crusade against something that at the end the movie says, “Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad.” It’s not satisfying for you hero. The play that I was thinking of, when you said play, I immediately thought of — I don’t know if you ever saw Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deavere Smith.

**John:** I never saw it.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so good. So Anna Deavere Smith is a playwright. But in this particular play, what she did was she interviewed dozens of people about the Los Angeles riots, the 1992 riots. And some of the people were public figures like Daryl Gates who was the Chief of Police at the time and some people were just, you know, people who were there watching on the corner. Reginald Denny, for instance, the guy, the poor guy who got dragged out of his truck and beaten nearly to death.

And what she did was she then performed their monologues, verbatim, as them. One woman. Fascinating. And you got such a remarkable understanding of how an event gets dispersed by all these completely different point of view. Totally dispersed. And you walk away thinking, anybody that tells you that they understand the LA riots is nuts because you can’t. And so I could easily see a play like that where you approach this thing and at the point of it all was, everybody who is sure, sure, sure of their point of view is nuts because you can’t really wrap your mind around something this complicated. It defies you.

**John:** So as you were talking, I was Googling, and I found the name of the play that I was thinking about, which is Oleanna. It’s a David Mamet play.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It became a movie as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s the power struggle between a university professor and his female student who accuses him of sexual exploitation. That’s one of the things underlying that. I think what’s potentially different about this as a story is the second level thing where it’s, you know, you aren’t even involved in this initial act, you’re not even trying to determine whether this sexual event happened, but rather even talking about it is creating the situation. And that someone’s hurt feelings is in some ways more important than academic freedom. A really interesting idea, but challenging to do as a movie.

**Craig:** It’s just not cinematic. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthy. It is worthy. Frankly, it’s too worthy. It’s too serious and too complicated to be portrayed cinematically. We use cinema just in a different way than that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would much — I think eventually, you could come to it. But right now, I think smart people need to debate this in good faith and not through fictionalization.

**John:** So I say, book or play for this right now. Movie, when it becomes a giant hit.

**Craig:** Concur.

**John:** Concur. Let’s talk about your topic there, Craig. Do what you love. Do you love doing this podcast, Craig?

**Craig:** I do love doing this podcast. I do.

**John:** Aw, I do too.

**Craig:** I love doing this podcast. And notably, it is not my career.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s this interesting essay, I guess you call it essay, in Slate. I guess we’re sort of friends of Slate now, aren’t we?

**John:** We’re friends of Slate, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s called In The Name of Love. Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers. By Miya Tokumitsu. And what Miya says is that this mantra of do what you love disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege. It’s a sign of socioeconomic class. She says, “Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow Do What You Love as career advice upon those covetous of her success.”

So what’s she’s saying is it’s a little bit of the you are born on third, you didn’t hit a triple. So when you’re born on third, why are you shouting down to the batter, hit a triple?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there’s this other flipside of it, which is that most people do not do what they “love”. They do a job to support themselves and their family. They may be interested in their job. They may be good at their job. They may show great care and attention to their job. But do they love it? Probably not.

**John:** Are they even doing a job that anyone could love?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She points out like, you know, is anyone going to love washing diapers? No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No one is going to love washing diapers.

**Craig:** No, no one is going to love washing diapers. So then the question is, well, is this whole do what you love thing devaluing the experience of those people? And the answer I think, frankly, is yes. I think that there is a very useful argument to say to people, not do what love, and love what you do. But whatever you do, also, find some time to do what you love. Don’t expect to be paid for that. Don’t expect that to be your career. It may be. It may very well be. But if you love singing, make sure you take some time in your life to sing. Do not think that if you don’t sing professionally, that you have somehow failed to chase your passion. You have not failed.

**John:** So way back in episode 192, I brought up this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. And he was talking about the same sort of thing, but he was talking about it from the other perspective.

So Tokumitsu was writing about how this do what you love, follow your passion advice is impossible for a large swath of the population. Newport is looking at even the people who it could theoretically be possible for, it ends up becoming this trap of impossible expectations. So anyone who theoretically was born on third base who is not loving their work will just keep switching careers and switching careers and switching things like, “What am I doing wrong that I don’t love this thing that I’m doing?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Newport’s argument is that you can’t do what you love until you know how to do it. And that’s so much of loving something, loving the work has to be being good at it. And so the initial part of any new career is usually a grind. It’s usually terrible. And I certainly found that with writing, too. Like those first scripts to write were kind of brutal to write. But then I got much better at it and now I love being a screenwriter. But it doesn’t mean I necessarily love the process of writing.

**Craig:** Right. Well —

**John:** And I think we can create really unrealistic expectations by putting up a big banner saying to do what you love.

**Craig:** The problem is right there in the word love, which people simply misunderstand. You and I both have been married a long time. The excitement, the headiness, the intoxication that we felt when we first met our spouses, that’s not sustainable. If you sustain that overtime, you have some kind of mental problem. And [laughs] you won’t be able to live your life because, you know, falling in love really is a version of insanity. Love, proper love, is the result of the commitment. It’s a result of the long time, the agreement that you will be with someone. It becomes its own reward. And it is different, it is more complicated, and less dopaminergic, if I may, than —

**John:** I like you using those words.

**Craig:** Thank you. Than that instant love, right? That passion, that excitement. I don’t have intoxicating love for screenwriting. I have an old guy with his old wife love of screenwriting. And what I know about that is that that’s not about passion. It is about other things. It is about a compulsion to do a thing. It’s about a safety that I find in doing a thing. It’s about a certain kind of control over something, a working towards a mastery of something, even though you cannot attain it.

It’s also about an inherent will to power, which is a very Nietzschean term. It basically means I want to affect the world. I want to do something and change something out there, which is true, by the way, for everyone that does anything, even the diaper washers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a wonderful video online, we’ll link to it in the show notes, of some men that are building a bridge in Switzerland. And this bridge is essentially going across this massive valley between these two communities. It’s a footbridge. It is 270 meters long. So for those of you who don’t know about meters —

**John:** We’ll say yards.

**Craig:** We’ll say yards [laughs], exactly. It’s nearly three football fields long. They had to build this thing — well, imagine, how are you going to build a footbridge over 300 yards of space hanging over thousands of feet into a gorge? Well, they just decided they would do it. Did they love what they did? I don’t know if they loved it, but they were compelled. And the work itself was its own reward. Some of those men did nothing but hammer boards into place. But they were part of it.

So I say to people, forget about doing what you love and loving what you do. Look at work as its own reward. There is an honor to labor and to service. There is an honor to earning a day’s pay and taking care of yourself and supporting other people. And remember this, if you do have creative passions or any passion for which no one is willing to give you money, then look at the work that you are paid for as an opportunity to create some freedom and some space for you to do those other things that you do love. Make your uncompensated passions possible.

**John:** Absolutely. So that means, you know, treating your day job as a day job that lets you have a night life and a chance to create, you know, amazing things that are not part of that work life. Some of the best writing I did early in my career was working a really mindless job at Universal filing papers. And I came home every night and had my brain free to write things. And that was exactly the right job for me at the time.

**Craig:** Look at J.K. Rowling who conceived of and wrote the Harry Potter series or at least the initial book while she was a single mom, unemployed, and trying to make ends meet on the dole, you know. And you don’t necessarily have the circumstances that you want when you’re creating things or when you are following your passion. And if no one had ever liked her book and no one had ever bought her book, she still would have — that would have been an exercising of a passion for her of a kind. And that is its own reward.

**John:** Agreed. Circling back to your, you know, why do we engage in artistic pursuit, quite early on in the podcast, you singled out Jiro Dreams of Sushi which is exactly that kind of sustained artistic pursuit over the course of decades to try to perfect something. And so does he love sushi, does he love fish? I don’t know. But he really values the work he’s doing. And that is his reward. He doesn’t want to call in sick any day. He doesn’t want to have anyone else run his restaurant because he is doing the thing that he does. And that is his life is trying to perfect the making and delivery of sushi.

So that’s another way to look at sort of the why you keep doing something even if it’s not necessarily financially valuable.

**Craig:** It’s hard for us sometimes to think that we’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be rich. We’re going to go through life and we’re never going to be famous. We’re going to go through life and we’ll never be the boss. Well, that is true for almost everyone. So the question is, how do you let go of that and find a different way to define your own happiness and satisfaction?

I would suggest that when you let go of that demand, you are probably that much more likely to achieve that demand. But you may not. And so I think that we have to stop telling each other, “Hey, man, you know what? I know you drive a cab but you really want to be a rock star, so quit.” We got to stop saying stupid crap like that. It’s just dumb. And frankly, it’s —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** It demeans people who do actually value and care for any job that they do. In my mind, if you work and you’re paid, you are an honorable person doing an honorable thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Oh, so I’m a little late to this. John, have you played or are you familiar with Telltale Games, their Game of Thrones mobile game?

**John:** I’m not familiar with the Game of Thrones game. I see it here in the Workflowy, so tell me about it.

**Craig:** So Telltale Games, I think they may also be the people behind The Walking Dead games. I’m not sure. I should —

**John:** Yeah. I know they do those.

**Craig:** Okay, great. So basically, they are story-based games. They come in episodes. They have released four episodes of a six-episode season. Each one takes about an hour to play through. And basically you’re following an episode of Game of Thrones that they have made with their own characters. And occasionally, you make context-based decisions. So people put you in a tough spot and you have to decide, am I going to punch this guy or am I going to try and create favor with him. So it’s all that sort of thing.

It’s done really well. I have to give them an enormous amount of credit. They pretty much got almost everything right. I love that they made a story-based game for a story-based property. I love that they created new events in the game that integrate into show events occasionally sort of the way that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, you know, like it’s that kind of, “Okay, so we’re going to have a discussion.” Meanwhile, in the background, we see the pigeons flying out of the pie and we know that’s Joffrey’s wedding and he’s about to die.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** But we’re over here in a different place. [laughs] So that part is great. There are some cameos from established characters. You’ll see Tyrion and Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. But most of the characters are new characters that they’ve created. And they’re really good. They’re really good characters.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** They’ve created a whole new house, House Forrester, that is in a really bad situation. There are shocking deaths, which is appropriate for Game of Thrones. Moral quandaries abound. But I think more than anything, the reason I love playing, and I’ve run out of episodes and I’m waiting for Episode 5 is they did such a good job of emotionally investing you in the heroes. They really beat the crap out of their heroes. And the villains are the worst. I mean, they’re actually worse, frankly, than like Joffrey. [laughs] They’re the worst.

**John:** [laughs] That’s great.

**Craig:** And you just desperately want to see them dead. So it gets so much right. A couple of things it doesn’t quite do great, occasionally, there’s fighting. Not frequently. I think three or four times an episode you’ll have to do a little fight. And the fighting is a QuickTime event-based fighting. You’re familiar with that concept in video games?

**John:** I hate those.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s like —

**John:** It’s Tempo-based, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s basically you watch something and then suddenly it tells you “Tap here,” “Swipe Here”. And you do it and then fine, whatever. But frankly, I’m not watching it for the fighting, so I don’t care about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The facial graphics kind of run the gamut from awesome like Jon Snow really looks like Jon Snow, to “Oh, no.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I got to say Tyrion, poor Peter Dinklage, he honestly looks like Peter Dinklage after a fire and his face was reconstructed by a —

**John:** Yeah, but from memory.

**Craig:** Yeah [laughs].

**John:** Like someone who met him once like trying to put his face back together.

**Craig:** From memory and they didn’t have good tools or an education.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just his face is absolutely horrifying. He looks like Peter Dinklage wearing a Peter Dinklage mask. It’s just terrible. But I did want to cite, because we are screenwriters and we love writers out there, the people that I think are most responsible for the success of this game are the writers. And these are the ones that I found on the Internet, so forgive me if I left any names out.

Andrew Grant, Nicole Martinez, Meghan Thornton, Brad Kane, Dan Martin, John Dombrow, and Joshua Rubin. So, congratulations. You’ve all done an excellent job. I’m very excited to play the next episode. I think it’s 20 bucks to get all six, which is a lot of game play. Or you can get individuals ones I think for five bucks or something like that.

**John:** And do you play it on the computer or on the iPad?

**Craig:** iPad.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** And is this the Brad Kane that we know?

**Craig:** Do we know a Brad Kane?

**John:** Don’t we know the Brad Kane who’s the voice of A Whole New World?

**Craig:** Oh, my god. Is it? Is it that Brad Kane?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. It just says Brad Kane. But, yeah, you’re right. Bradley Caleb Kane. Well, how about that? I wonder if it is him.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s —

**Craig:** I mean, it’s kind of a common name but it might in fact be him. So if it is, awesome job, dude.

**John:** Yeah, the singing voice of Aladdin.

**Craig:** He was the singing voice of Aladdin and a screenwriter, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. My One Cool Thing is actually a blog post but also a series of discussions and one of those rare times where the comment thread is actually worth reading through. It’s a post by Tyler Cowen who’s looking at the question of, “If you traveled back into the past, what could you trade for present gain?” So essentially, if you were to have a time machine that you could go back in the past, what should you take with you from the past to bring to the present that would be valuable?

And which is sort of the inverse of a lot of these question. Usually it’s like, “Oh, if I could travel back in time with an iPhone, I would be like the richest person alive or I would have stock knowledge.” So what can you take from the past?

And one of the obvious choices like, “Oh, I’ll take a piece of art.” But then of course the problem becomes that piece of art wouldn’t exist in the timeline from the past. It wouldn’t have value, it can be perceived as a forgery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It wouldn’t carbon date right. So there were a lot of really interesting ideas. Like honestly one of the best suggestions in there is just to go back and find an original edition of a comic book and put it and seal it and so therefore the reason why it’s pristine is because it’s actually new to you. But interesting thought. And as we were talking through all of these ideas about like, how would you make a movie out of that, this feels like one of those like, “Oh, is that a movie idea?” Like people who are traveling back and sort of trying to do arbitrage on things they could take from the past.

**Craig:** Right. So like not time cops but time robbers.

**John:** Yeah. Time bandits.

**Craig:** Time bandits. The thing that pops into my mind probably would be stock certificates, you know, like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like get a whole bunch of stock certificates, just buy a whole bunch of stock certificates in, I don’t know, Johnson & Johnson or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, those would have appreciated dramatically by the time I get back. I could certainly see that.

**John:** Yeah. But again, the challenge becomes, if there’s any question of authenticity, any sort of dating on things would be an issue. But that probably is not going to be an issue with stocks.

**Craig:** Well, no, they’re real, that’s the thing. I mean —

**John:** They are real but they wouldn’t be old enough is the issue. It’s like, I guess the artwork is the thing that you could really tell like this Grecian urn —

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** It’s only like five days old rather than, you know, 5,000 years old.

**Craig:** I guess. But I don’t know, that’s an interesting — like they wouldn’t be weathered or something?

**John:** Exactly. I mean, or literally carbon dating would not show them right.

**Craig:** Oh, well, yeah, I doubt anybody would carbon date your stock certificates but —

**John:** Yeah, they wouldn’t. That’s too recent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good thought.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s something.

**John:** It’s something. It’s always something. That is our show for this week. If you would like to subscribe to this show, you should go to iTunes and click the subscribe button. And you should also leave us a comment. Maybe it’s a little rating, would be lovely because that helps people find our show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** While you’re on iTunes, you could get the Scriptnotes app which gives you access to all 200 and now one episodes of the show, dating all the way back to the very beginning. Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for this service that gets you all the back episodes.

There will be USB drives with all 200 episodes on them. So if you are debating about where to save your money and spend it later on, next week or the week after, we’ll have details about where you can get those USB drives. Craig signed them.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** Craig and I both signed them in a way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You will see our thanks on every drive.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And edited by Matthew Chilelli. I’m not sure who did the outro this week, but I bet it will be swell. You can find out who did the Outro by going to see the show notes which are at johnaugust.com. We have show notes and transcripts for every episode of the podcast.

If you would like to ask a question of Craig Mazin, you should write to him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. And that is our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, see you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [A timeline on the FIFA scandal](http://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-fifa-scandal-timeline-20150603-story.html)
* [Large Hadron Collider turns on ‘data tap’](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32976838), and the [Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider)
* Star Trek’s [Prime Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive) and [Zefram Cochrane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane) on Wikipedia
* [Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe](http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia/190351/) by Laura Kipnis
* [Title IX Investigation Opened Against Female Northwestern Professor Over Column, Tweet](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/05/29/laura_kipnis_title_ix_investigation_feminism_political_correctness_controversy.html)
* [In the Name of Love](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html)
* [“Carasc” Tibetan Bridge](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUw3Fpqyaw)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Cal Newport
* [Game of Thrones by Telltale Games](https://www.telltalegames.com/gameofthrones/)
* [Traveling back into the past to trade for present gain](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/traveling-back-into-the-past-to-trade-for-present-gain.html) by Tyler Cowen
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))