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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/second-draft-doldrums).

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

**John August:** My name is John August.

**Craig:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** Craig, you did a great job with that.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve heard it 198 times.

**John:** Yes. So it’s big episode 199. It’s near the bicentennial, I guess we’d call it?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can call it centennial for things that aren’t years, so sure.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s exciting. It would have been really embarrassing had I — I didn’t practice, I swear. I gave a talk about some general creative topics at this very interesting place called Bricksburg. Are you familiar with Bricksburg?

**John:** I’m not at all. Tell me what this is.

**Craig:** It’s the LEGO Movie headquarters.

**John:** Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing.

**Craig:** So they have all these artists and everybody and the woman who introduced me mentioned that I did the podcast with you and she said, “And this podcast about screenwriting,” and then there was this artist sitting there sort of to my left who just mouthed, “And things that are interesting to screenwriters.”

So, if she could get it, I’m pretty sure I could get it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** You did a fantastic job. Yeah, I wanted to mix things up for this next to the 200th episode show. And so I threw this at you and you just caught that ball and you ran with it. So, well done, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, my whole thing is I’m not a big planner, but I like saying yes to stuff.

**John:** Fantastic. Today on the show we are going to talk about ageism in Hollywood. We’re going to talk about unsung heroes. And finding your way out of the woods on a draft of your script.

But first we need to talk about the 200th episode which is coming up next week, which seems impossible.

**Craig:** I know. So, 200 episodes is a lot. And when I put it into years, that’s where I start to actually feel kind of shocked. Because I don’t —

**John:** We’ve been doing this a long time.

**Craig:** We’ve been doing it for over four years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t feel like that to me.

**John:** It doesn’t to me either.

**Craig:** But yet we have been. We’re going to hit like, what do you think we’re going to hit, like 10,000? [laughs] When do we stop?

**John:** I don’t know. The technologies will change. Things will move on. It was weird cutting last week’s episode, we did the centennial episode, and so I was recutting the 100th episode just popping in every once and awhile to offer some perspective. And it felt really recent, but it was 100 episodes ago, which is just crazy.

**Craig:** I know. I know. It’s just nuts. Well, it will be fun. So, where did end up on that? Are you going to do a Google Hangout kind of thing?

**John:** So, we’ll do something like a Google Hangout. So it will either be a Google Hangout officially, or it will be something through Mixlr, which is the live streaming thing we’ve done before. Regardless, whatever it is, we will announce a few days ahead of time, so follow us on Twitter and the website and we’ll tell you what we are doing for the live show. In fact, I might even cut it into this episode if we know what the details are. But it will be you and me and hopefully Aline. We’ll be hanging out. We’ll be here at our offices. And we will just do our show, but we’ll do it live for everyone to hear.

We’ll do it in the evening so it can be sort of after you’ve come home from work. You can listen to us and we’ll have Stuart or somebody else on hand so you can tweet in your questions and we can answer and be with you live in the room as we do it.

**Craig:** Maybe we can have a segment like maybe Stuart do stuff, and then people just send in things and he has to do them.

**John:** Yeah. That’s pretty much what daily life is like for Stuart. So, it would be good.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, I’m looking forward to that.

**John:** I’m looking forward to it as well. So, let’s get onto today’s work. A bit of follow up here. This is just as we were about to start recording, Deadline had a story about Mr. Holmes. Did you see this?

**Craig:** I did see it. Not only did I see it. I even read the filing.

**John:** I read the filing, too. In a previous episode we talked about the Gravity lawsuit and this is Tess Gerritsen’s claim that the movie Gravity was really based on her book. This is similar, but different. This is a filing from the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle saying that the new Sherlock Holmes movie, Mr. Holmes, infringes upon the copyright in some of the later works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

And we’ll see what happens. Craig, what was your initial assessment based on reading through the filing?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, it’s sort of a fascinating thing. The idea here is that this new movie is based on a novel. The novel uses the character of Sherlock Holmes. It’s about Sherlock Holmes. But, I like most people, was under the impression that Sherlock Holmes at this point was entirely in the public domain.

It may actually be entirely in the public domain in England. So, what happens is copyright length is different from country to country. The United States has actually amended copyright length a number of times and always in favor of intellectual property rights holders.

So, I’m not sure what the situation is. But the deal is that the last ten Holmes works by Arthur Conan Doyle are not yet in public domain. The copyright has not lapsed. The copyright is controlled by the estate. It is intellectual property. What they’re alleging is that the screenwriter of the movie, who was the writer of the novel that the movie is based on, essentially infringed on the copyright of that protected stuff.

And so I looked through the complaint and I took a look at their areas of comparison and I must say I found their complaint formidable.

**John:** Interesting. I read it much more briefly than you did, so I sort of skimmed through those little sections where they talked about those things. It reminded me a bit of an arbitration claim. I don’t know if you felt the same way, too. It felt to me like an overwritten arbitration claim where they’re trying to say like, “Well, in this book, in this Arthur Conan Doyle short story he says this, and in the book he writes this.” And the movie is apparently similar, because they don’t officially have access to the movie yet, I don’t believe. So I think they’re claiming that it’s similar enough, that the same things infringe across this boundary between what the book was and what the movie was. Interesting that they didn’t go after the book when the book was published, because theoretically if the book infringed, they could have gone after the book.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They did not. The thing that gives me pause and makes me wonder if they’re going to have any success in this is that apparently they’ve tried to do the same sorts of things to other Sherlock Holmes works and have not succeeded. And they’ve had those cases thrown out.

So, I’ll be interested to see whether the fact that this is apparently focusing on a portion of the fictional character’s life that was written about in those last ten stories, who knows.

As a writer, I find it incredibly frustrating and challenging that really esoteric details about like, well, in the early Sherlock Holmes stories he doesn’t like dogs, and in the later Sherlock Holmes stories he likes dogs, so therefore this movie infringes upon our intellectual property. Well, you’re being impossible, people.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was not compelling. A couple of things. One, they don’t really need to see the movie. If the movie is based on the book, then the movie is part of an extension of rights from the book. So, there’s sort of an original sin they’re alleging there. And then all derivative works from that theoretically tainted work are now part of the whole tainted property.

I want to read very briefly two sections that they cite here. This is where I stopped and went, oh, that’s not good. So, first I’m going to read this very short paragraph from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story Blanched Soldier, which is one of the copyrighted stories.

“Perhaps I’ve invited this persecution since I have often had occasion to point out to him,” meaning Watson, “how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures. Try it yourself, Holmes, he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in a way as may interest the reader.”

Okay, that was Conan Doyle. Now, this is what Cohen, I can’t remember his first name here, but Mr. Cohen, the author of the novel, this is what he wrote in the novel.

“During the years in which John was inclined to write about our many experiences together, I regarded his skillful if somewhat limited depictions as exceedingly overwrought. At times, I decried his pandering to popular tastes and asked that he be more mindful of facts and figures. In turn, my old friend and biographer urged me to write an account of my own. If you imagine I’ve done an injustice to our cases, I recall him saying on at least one occasion, I suggest you try it yourself, Sherlock. The results showed me that even a truthful account must be presented in a manner which should entertain the reader.”

That’s pretty close.

**John:** I agree. They’re talking about the same kind of thing. It’s not close enough that it feels like plagiarism to me, because he’s not using the same words. He’s expressing this overall same idea and the fact that it’s about the same underlying character could make that troubling.

The only way that it could be legally troubling is if you believe that this character and his work are still fully under copyright and that is a murky situation in the US and overseas and every other market.

Further complicating this is the claim in this lawsuit over the Sherlock Holmes trademark. And trademark is a completely separate legal creation where they’re trying to basically trademark the name Sherlock Holmes. I don’t know the degree to which they’re going to be successful in using the trademark defense of Sherlock Holmes as a thing.

But I can tell you that it is a real challenge that you run into sometimes as a person adapting things. Tarzan is a trademark. And it is really frustrating that the underlying works of Tarzan are public domain and yet you can’t say the word Tarzan.

**Craig:** Yeah. Trademark is a very murky area. I mean, to be honest, even this notion — I mean, you mentioned plagiarism. Plagiarism is a term of art. Obviously every court hopes for those slam dunk cases where it’s a simple case of cut and paste. But that’s rarely what goes on.

When, for instance, journalists uncover plagiarism, usually it is in the form of a slight rephrasing and really an intentional rephrasing of somebody else’s work. So, for here, for instance, the last line is, “I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as my interest the reader.”

And Cohen writes, “The results showed me that even a truthful account must be presented in a manner which should entertain the reader.” He’s copying there, I believe. I’m not a judge; but I believe he’s copying the work here. The entire paragraph is about the same thing. It’s about Sherlock Holmes saying to his chronicler, “Won’t you please stop embellishing and stick to the facts.” And then the chronicler says, “Well, you try it sometime. It’s hard.” And then he says, “I did try it, and yeah, I realized that sometimes you got to glam it up.”

So, here was an area where what happens now is essentially a judge or jury, I don’t know how these things work.

**John:** A judge in New Mexico, of all places.

**Craig:** Oh, a judge in New Mexico is going to have to make a decision. And it’s a decision that will be informed by dramaturgical experts, I’m sure. And there’s going to be some brouhaha here. But this complaint, I will say, at the very least provides some concrete evidence, whereas the Gravity one was just — felt like it was throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping bits of it stuck.

**John:** Yeah. So, we will follow this as it shakes its way through. I think the interesting take home for screenwriters is a character you might assume is in the public domain like Sherlock Holmes, because lord knows there’ve been a zillion versions of Sherlock Holmes, is not entirely in the public domain and that can come back to haunt you.

And in the case of this one paragraph that Craig is citing, this one paragraph might be enough to hang this whole weird lawsuit on.

**Craig:** It could. And I must say in conclusion here that I feel so bad for Bill Condon who is a very nice guy and a fantastic filmmaker and couldn’t have possibly known. I mean, you know, he was making a movie based on a book. And obviously then there’s this whole other process to make a movie. I can’t imagine that he knew that there was this landmine buried in there somewhere, or at least a potential landmine. But what happens in legal cases is that people get enjoined, which is one of the nastiest words in the English language.

Well, I’m suing this guy, but you were vaguely involved. I’m enjoining you. Now you’re getting sued, too. That sucks.

**John:** It does suck. I would also say beyond the legal decision that will come out of this, I think the greater/broader picture is looking at sort of what it is that’s happening with copyright in these days. So the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate can sue over this really honestly esoteric bit from this tiny slice of the Sherlock Holmes character that exists in still copyright-protected work is really troubling. And that this character who is 99% public domain can still stay 1% protected and that 1% can be something that can be financially beneficial to people who had nothing to do with the actual creation of the work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not the intention of copyright. And it is a very frustrating time to live in. And I think it could lead to some of the kinds of trollery we’ve seen in intellectual property in the computer sphere as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a pretty staunch supporter of intellectual property rights. And I’m not much of a copy-fighter at all. In this case, I agree, this feels cheap. It just feels cheap. I don’t like it. And they may win. Or win, you know, there will be a settlement. But, I don’t like it so much.

Here’s what I do like, though.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** A little second bit of follow up for us, sort of follow up. I received a letter from a doctor, Dr. Ryan Dadasovich, M.D., who works at Yale New Haven Health, something or another. [laughs] Northeast Medical Group. And that’s in Connecticut. And he sent me this letter and said, “Craig, I know you’ve been taking umbrage for years. But I’m worried you were obtaining it illegally. Internet umbrage can be, quite frankly, dangerous. I’ve included a prescription you could fill at your local pharmacy, a safe and FDA-approved source. If questioned by the police or authorities for any reason you can show them your legal prescription. I think the XR formula will be most effective to sustain you. Good luck.”

And he did, in fact, give me a proper prescription. I get Umbrage XR 500mg. Take one a day. I get two refills, which is nice. I now have a piece of his — I don’t think I could do anything with this, but thank you Dr. Dadasovich. That’s super nice. Can you snort this? Is this snortable?

**John:** I’m sure you could. I think it would be incredibly dangerous. I think the thing I would question is whether in taking umbrage, Craig may have too much umbrage. And so really do you need to provide more supplements for Craig who takes umbrage relatively frequently on the show, or me who sometimes doesn’t take enough umbrage. So, it’s a question of like what is the proper amount of umbrage you need to have in your daily life, or in your daily diet.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, obviously that’s different for people and I’ve built up quite a tolerance. I feel like Dr. Ryan is sort of like, hey man, whatever you need to get up on your feet and do your show. I’m like Judy Garland now. People are just shoving pills in my mouth. Go to bed, wake up, sing. Go to sleep. This is great.

**John:** It’s a good life.

**Craig:** Anyway, thank you Dr. Dadasovich.

**John:** That’s very, very nice of him to send that through. So, previously on the show, back when we did our dirty episode, which is sort of two-part episode, we had Rebel Wilson come on and she was just amazing. And she continues to be just amazing. And she was in this little movie that did some business called Pitch Perfect 2.

**Craig:** Just a touch of business.

**John:** Just a touch of business. Just, you know, a huge blockbuster. A sequel to blow off all sequels. So, congratulations to Rebel Wilson. But then you put in the show notes here about something I wasn’t even aware of, another article had come out. So, talk us through it.

**Craig:** So, apparently what happened is over in Australia there was a bit of brouhaha where the press figured out through their pressy ways that Rebel Wilson, who was according to IMDb is 29 years old, is not 29 years old. In fact, she’s 35 years old. And Rebel Wilson isn’t her name. Her actual name is Melanie Elizabeth Bownds. And that Rebel Wilson was not brought up by Bogan parents, meaning sort of Australian white trash parents, but in fact perfectly fine middle class parents that were not Bogans. And that it was all just sort of a made up thing.

And, you know, over here in America I think we all looked at each other and went, what, who cares. Like that’s what everyone does. We all know that Tom Cruise is Tom Mapother. Nobody cares. It doesn’t matter.

And lie about your age, I mean. So, women in Hollywood, particularly actors, are damned if they don’t lie about their age, and now apparently they’re damned if they do lie about their age. You know who lied about her age? Mae West. This is not new.

But what I found so interesting was Rebel’s response. So, she said, in response to the investigative journalism she wrote, “OMG, I’m actually a 100-year-old mermaid formally known as CC Chalice. Thanks shady Australian press for your tall poppy syndrome.” And tall poppy syndrome was something she discussed with us when she did our show. And sure enough, here’s the proof.

**John:** Yeah. I think what outrages me the most about the whole situation is that we’re calling it investigatory journalism, like there was some great secret being kept and hidden. There really wasn’t. And so I think it’s well known throughout town that Rebel, we knew her real age, and we knew sort of what that was. Entertainment Weekly had published her real age back I think when the first movie came out.

So, it’s not like there was some great secret. So, to portray it as like this big revelation about who this person is just crazy. I think it also speaks to this weird thing we’re insisting upon our celebrities these days is that they have to be 100% authentic, but also 100% untouchable gods that are completely incapable of being wrong in any way. So, it’s this weird bundle of expectations we put on our celebrities that I don’t think is at all justified. And certainly it’s not borne by history in terms of like what we do to create our movie star actors.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really stupid. I mean, this is — investigative journalism? It was neither investigative nor journalism. This is, I mean, truly file under who cares.

Maggie Gyllenhaal had a sort of an interesting parallel moment to this this week when she mentioned in an interview that she’s 37 years old and she was told recently that she was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55 years old. And when I read that, I’ll tell you, I had two reactions. My first reaction was, yup, I believe that. And my second reaction was, man, that’s awful.

And I just thought it was interesting that “yup I believe that” came so quickly, because it seemed, yup, I totally believe that that happened. I can hear it happening. It fits everything I see about casting in movies where aging male stars are constantly paired with women who frankly are their daughter’s ages. And now these people are going after Rebel Wilson.

Hey, here’s something to report. Want to report something? How about this. Rebel Wilson is a woman in her 30s who is completely convincing as a college student.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** So, this whole discussion made me think back to Riley Weston. I don’t know if you really remember Riley Weston.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I do. I do.

**John:** That was back in 1998. She was a staff writer and an actress on the TV show Felicity. And I remember it very distinctly because I was doing my own TV show the same time this was all coming out.

So, Riley Weston, she was sort of hailed as this wunderkind for like being this great writer who could really speak with the voice of an 18-year-old because she was so young. And then it came out that she wasn’t that young at all. And she was actually in her 30s. And she just seemed really, really young.

So, in the show notes I’m going to link to two things that talk about it, her Wikipedia entry, but also this Entertainment Weekly article from ’98, and the URL for it is funny. It was Riley Weston Fooled Us All About Her Age. And they’re essentially taking umbrage for like how dare you make us think that you are younger than you were.

You know, in the case of someone who is a politician, someone who is running for office, someone who we have to rely on them telling the absolute god’s honest truth for us to trust them to do their job, I can see sort of how this could be a big deal. But I find myself going back in time to this 1998 Riley Weston thing and saying, “What were we doing? Why we running her out of town for allowing us to misbelieve her age?” And that is incredibly frustrating to me.

**Craig:** I mean, the one thing about Riley Weston that I recall is that she was kind of promoting herself via publicity. And, okay, when you sort of make a publicity point, a self-promotional point about something that turns out to be not true, I think there’s a fair reaction there to say, hey, you were using us, you know.

But in general, Hollywood is an illusion business. Our job, our industry, is to create entertaining and interesting lies. Charlie Sheen is Emilio Estevez’s brother. They are both Estevez. Nobody cares that he’s Charlie Sheen. Nobody cares that Martin Sheen is not Martin Estevez. It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what anyone’s real name is. I know what Elton John’s real name is, because I’m a dork, so I know it’s Reginald Dwight. But I don’t care.

**John:** What you’re talking about really is branding. And so both Elton John and Rebel Wilson and Charlie Sheen have chosen like this is what my — this is the person I want to present myself to the world is this person with this name. And that is a choice a person should be able to make. And so Rebel Wilson changing her name to Rebel Wilson, well that name fits the woman who came to talk on the show much better than whatever her born name was.

Just like John August fits me much better than my born name, which is German.

**Craig:** That’s right. Your name isn’t John — oh my god. Someone get the Australian press.

**John:** Ha-ha. They’ll correct everybody. But this last week I also encountered this actor. So we were both waiting for a meeting over at Sony and I knew him through a friend. And so we were talking and he was saying that he was going in for casting on something, I think Marc Cherry show, and Marc Cherry said like, “Wait, I didn’t know that was you.” And it’s because his agents had sent him in under like his — so he has a normal Anglo name, but his mother was Latina, and so they started using his mother’s Latina name to send him in for casting so he could get roles that were going to Latino actors. And he’s like, that’s crazy, that’s not my name. Nobody knows me when you send me in as this name.

But they’re trying to create an expectation. And they’re trying to essentially rebrand him so that he could get cast in those Latino roles. And that’s, again, it’s the illusion that we’re creating. It used to be back in the time of Rita Hayworth they were trying to de-Latinize somebody, and now we’re trying to Latinize them.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And this is what people do. Actors in particular, their stock and trade is to pretend to be somebody else. So, oh my god — I mean, this is the dumbest thing. I think it is tall poppy syndrome. I think this is absolutely just a general resentment of somebody that’s doing well. So, boo Australians, hooray Rebel Wilson. That’s what I say.

**John:** Two other examples that sort of came up that I wanted to talk through with you and to get your perspective on, sort of where you stand with them right now. First off, James Frey, and A Million Little Pieces. So, James Frey if you remember wrote this book which is supposedly a memoir of drug addiction that was a huge bestseller. It was supposed to become a movie and then it came out that some of the details in the book did not actually pan out. He had not been arrested for the things he said he’d been arrested for.

The book was ultimately pulled. It was moved from nonfiction to fiction. Lots of stuff happened. Craig, where do you land on a James Frey situation as a memoir theoretically?

**Craig:** Very scornful of James Frey. I think that the difference is this. When you create a piece and you present under the auspices of trust, and you say that this is a true story of my life, and I want you to learn from it and feel things about me because of it. And it turns out that you have invented it, that is just flat out manipulative lying.

That is different than changing your name because you like a different name. That’s different than changing your age because you want to try and get some parts. You’re not asking for public trust there, at all. You’re just doing something because it might help you get some jobs and you’re not hurting anyone.

When James Frey writes an account of his drug addiction and is trying to use it to inspire other people and then it turns out that he made it up, yeah, that’s hurting people and it’s violating public trust.

**John:** So, let us imagine a situation in which Rebel Wilson wrote a bestseller comedy thing, the same way that Lena Dunham would, same way that Tina Fey or Amy Poehler did, and she were claiming her Bogan parents and all that stuff. Would that push you through to the level of Rebel you betrayed us?

**Craig:** Yeah. If Rebel Wilson wrote a book and talked about — and it wasn’t about pure comedy — but rather talking about the hardships of growing up in poverty or with parents who didn’t fit into society and how that affected her as a child, absolutely, that would be a violation of trust. I can’t imagine she would ever do it.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think that what you’re talking to is sort of the social contract we make with celebrities, that it’s a different than the social contract we make with writers. And the social contract we make with writers where like we’re reading their books and they’re telling us their own personal story is that you’re going to tell us the truth. And that I’m going to invest in you to tell you the truth.

The social contract we make with celebrities is basically you are going to be great in this movie and you are going to perform this weird Kabuki thing we do at press junkets. And we are going to pretend like everything is happy and good because that’s sort of what we do. And that’s a reasonable deal we’ve made with celebrities that some celebrities are delighted to do, and some celebrities hate.

Some of the folks who do the Marvel movies hate doing that dance. I don’t know if you saw that really uncomfortable interview with Robert Downey, Jr.

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Where he walked out. And like god bless you Robert Downey, Jr. I totally understand why you’re upset because that guy was breaking the contract of like what movie publicity is supposed to be doing. You don’t sit down to talk to Robert Downey, Jr. about Iron Man and then like let’s drag up terrible things from your past. That’s not the performance that’s happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, the press junket people I think 98% of them understand their function, which is to help sell a movie. So, they’re helping Robert Downey, Jr. sell a movie, and Robert Downey, Jr. is helping them sell clicks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Occasionally 2% of them start to get this thought that maybe they’re Woodward or Bernstein, which they’re not. [laughs] Because they wouldn’t be at a press junket if they were. And then they go a little wonky and in a sense it’s very self-serving because suddenly they’re the story. But it never works for them.

Here’s the interesting thing. Robert Downey, Jr. is still famous. That guy has been forgotten already.

**John:** Yes. The last hypothetical I want to throw out to you to get your opinion on. So, there’s a friend who I went to college with and he is also a screenwriter, but he came to Hollywood later than I did, and so had another career and then he came to Hollywood. He looks younger than me. And he sort of comes off as younger as me, I think partly because he has a writing partner who is younger. And so they’re perceived as being a team and everyone thinks of him as being quite a lot younger.

And so when we talk to people, it’s never actually sort of officially said, but it’s sort of like implied like, hey, maybe don’t say we went to college together because that ages me up. And that was never said, but that was sort of kind of implied. So, I find myself saying like, “Oh, we went to the same college rather than we went to college together,” because that would automatically put him in his 40s and people don’t think he’s in his 40s at all.

Is that fair to allow people to misassume your age?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. If you — I mean, I’ve never had any perceived value attached to my age at any point. I’ve never thought that anybody would give a damn. And I still don’t think so. But, for people who do, if they prefer to be thought of as a certain age and people are thinking of them as that age, I don’t care.

I know there’s a very big time writer-director out there who lies about his age. And I know he lies about his age, for sure. I wouldn’t say anything. I don’t care. I don’t know why he does it. It’s kind of stupid. So, you know, I don’t necessarily respect non-actors who lie about their age, because I think that’s kind of ridiculous and narcissistic because they’re not trying to get parts. You know what I mean?

But whatever. I mean, there’s worse things to do. It doesn’t bother me.

**John:** I’ll close with one little example that happened at a lunch. This is many years ago. And I was talking to a producer and she described a project. And I was like, oh, that sounds really interesting. And she’s like, “Oh yeah, we’re looking for a younger writer for that.” I was 30 at the time. [laughs]

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And really what she meant was she meant newer. She meant less expensive.

**Craig:** Cheaper.

**John:** Cheaper. Cheaper is really what she meant. She meant like a baby writer. But the word she said was younger. And there was some degree to which that was true. And there is a degree to which being the young person in the room can be really helpful. It was very helpful for me when I was going out for meetings after Go because I was like, oh, I was the guy who could be hired to write these teenage things, or these younger things. I was a guy who could get a show set up at the WB at the time. So, my comparative youth was an advantage.

I’m always mindful of the fact that youth is one of the qualities that you can be bringing into any discussion that can be useful. Because when you don’t have experience, youth might be another useful thing to offer.

**Craig:** I’ve been in a race to get old my whole life. I like getting old.

**John:** Basically you want to get to the appropriate age for your level of crankiness and umbrage.

**Craig:** That’s right. I want to get to an appropriate age where I don’t have to wear pants. Yeah. I’m just running. I’m running towards a future where all food is soft and pants are loose.

**John:** It sounds like a wonderful future.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m going to have a scooter.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Ooh, I can’t wait.

**John:** You put the next topic on the list and it deals with a screenwriter who has been working for quite a long time, and so a good transition between ageism and a guy who’s flourishing and quite late into his career.

**Craig:** So, I thought we could have a new feature. I don’t know how frequently we can do it, but unsung screenwriting heroes of Hollywood. So, what if I told you that there was a director. And the director directed the following movies. Karate Kid. A Walk in the Clouds. Fifth Element. Transporter. And Taken. One director did all those movies. I’m thinking you would know that director. That would be kind of a big name.

**John:** Yes. And because I recognize those last three credits I would say like, wow, Luc Besson directed Karate Kid?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I would say, yes, that is a very notable list of credits.

**Craig:** It’s Luc Besson-like. Well, one writer wrote all of those movies. Robert Kamen has been doing what we do since 1981. He wrote the movie Taps. Did you ever see Taps?

**John:** I saw Taps.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, he wrote the movie. That was his first credit in 1981. And then came The Karate Kid, which obviously was a seminal work. And then A Walk in the Clouds, Fifth Element, Transporter, Taken. And what is so remarkable about him, and I’ve never met him. I don’t know him. But I’m fascinated by his career because first of all the — his ability to be relevant is just remarkable.

It’s not only that he wrote Karate Kid back when you and I were teenagers and captured that time perfectly. But Taken is culturally relevant. So, this is somebody who has remained culturally relevant for decades. That is harder than it sounds.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And he’s done it across genres. And I just find his career fascinating. And always, by the way, here’s another thing I love about this guy. He never drifted off into let’s call it kind of indie la-la ville. He’s still writing good genre popcorn theater-filling movies. I love that.

**John:** How did he come into your radar, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, the truth is I — sometimes I go on a little click hole expedition. And for some reason I found myself fiddling about with The Fifth Element. I happen to love The Fifth Element. I’m just a big Fifth Element nut.

And when I was looking at the screenwriter’s name, I felt like, wait, wait, wait, wait, I feel like — that’s not the guy that wrote Karate Kid? That can’t be, because they’re totally different movies. And they were from different times. So then I went, and yup, it’s him. And then I looked at his list of credits and my jaw dropped. Just dropped. I couldn’t believe.

Robert Kamen is a name that everyone should know. They should know that name like they know Luc Besson or they know Steven Spielberg for that matter. He’s an incredibly influential filmmaker. And I do think of screenwriters as filmmakers. And so Robert Kamen, you are the inaugural unsung screenwriting hero of Hollywood.

**John:** I think it’s a great first choice because I kind of half recognized it. I recognize like, oh, I’ve seen that name, but I couldn’t tell you what the credits where. But I was trying to figure out like why don’t know his name better. And some theories, which I’d love to talk through with you.

First off, he doesn’t seem to work — he doesn’t seem to live and work in Hollywood. So, looking up the stuff I could find online, it seems like he lives in New York and in Sonoma where he owns a winery. So, he’s not in our circle, so we’re not seeing him sort of at the usual watering holes. So that might be part of it?

**Craig:** I think so. Sure. And I guess that when you write movies like he has, and god knows how many moves he’s written on that he doesn’t have credit on, that plus all the residuals from these things. Yeah, you own a winery. That sounds about right.

**John:** A second thing I was thinking about is because so many of his more recent credits have been with one director, you tend to sort of forget that he — you forget about him as an individual. So, you just lump him in with his director. And you don’t think about him as being an individual person.

The same way that a writer who might work with Ang Lee consistently, you don’t think about them as the individual writer. You think of them as being Ang Lee’s person. Is that possible?

**Craig:** Well, it is possible. And that’s something that for instance Ruth —

**John:** Ruth Jhabvala.

**Craig:** Exactly. Ruth Jhabvala kind of struggled in the shadow a little bit of Merchant Ivory. And maybe she liked being in the shadow. You know, not every writer particularly wants the spotlight or notoriety. And perhaps Mr. Kamen is that way. But I think it’s incumbent upon people who care about movies and filmmakers for them to know who is actually doing the work here. And so he deserves plenty of attention from those of us who care.

**John:** Very good. Next time we are over at your house playing D&D, I think we should get a bottle of his wine and drink it.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Done. Next topic is also your topic. And you have this listed on the outline as finding your new home, but it seems to me based on the things we have in here that it’s really talking about what happens when you kind of get lost with a script. Is that what I’m feeling?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit like when you’re homeless in your own project. So, there’s this thing that happens where you create a movie on paper. You write your screenplay. And that’s a home. You don’t hand it to somebody until you feel like, okay, this is whole and done, at least for now, and I’m safe with it.

And then you hand it to people, and they read it, and then there’s a collaboration that ensues. And you get notes and thoughts and things and you write a new draft. But in the writing of the new draft, you end up at a place and you’re not sure it’s right. The problem is though that you’ve drifted far enough away from your first script that you don’t feel like you could go back to that at all. You start to think that’s not right either.

So, suddenly I’m like a person that’s sold my house and bought a new one, but the new one is not built yet. I’m outside and it’s raining. And that’s a very scary feeling because essentially you begin to be lost in your own project and disconnected from your own movie. Have you ever felt that?

**John:** Oh my god, yes. And so I think maybe the reason you brought this up because you and I might both be at those kind of moments, or recently experienced that, where you turn in a draft and then you do the revisions. And most of the things you’re happy with, but it’s not your initial vision of what it was. And you’re not sure that some stuff is working, that some stuff is not working. You’re trying to make sure all the pieces fit together and they fit together in a real and meaningful way. And you don’t know how to feel about something.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a weird feeling to look at your own script and think, “I don’t know this. Who are you?” You know, it’s like waking up next to your wife or your husband and not recognizing their face. It’s distressing.

And so you’re right. It’s certainly — I feel it every time, by the way, I’m in a second draft. Every single time. Without fail.

And so I wanted to talk through some possible strategies for dealing with this feeling when it happens because it can be debilitating. So, first, the simplest of all things is take a break. And we have kind of an unparalleled ability as writers to take breaks without anyone knowing. You don’t have to call people and say I’m taking a week off. Take a week off. Just don’t think about it for an entire week. Don’t do anything related to it for an entire week. If you don’t want to write anything else, don’t write anything else for a week. Take a week off.

And then when you come back, hopefully some of the panic and concern has been flushed out and you can get a cleaner look at what you actually have.

The second thing that might help is to read it out loud, which we talk about all the time, but reading things out loud will start to snap things into view a little bit. Reading out loud reminds you that you will one day be on a set. And it will one day be a movie. And you may find that it’s actually working better than you think.

I also recommend at this point sharing it with a friend. And the friend is hopefully somebody that you think understands how to read your work and help you, which isn’t everybody. So, you have to kind of figure out who that friend is.

**John:** And you need to actually set up the expectation with that friend properly. I have a friend who sometimes reads my stuff and she will quite candidly ask, “Do you want me to tell you that it’s great, or do you want me to find the mistakes?” And those are equally valid things. And I think at this point you’re asking for the please tell me it’s great, and problems too, but mostly I need you to tell me that I’m not crazy and this is worth my time.

**Craig:** Well, and that brings me to this fourth strategy which is to actively seek praise. Praise, in general, is underrated. I think everybody that grows up in our business and the business of developing screenplays is trained by their higher ups to avoid praise and to instead drill down into what’s not working, because frankly in a bloodless sort of way that probably is the most efficient way to get towards fixes.

But, praise is really important because what praise does is it helps you, the writer, understand what is working. And what is working, frankly, is more likely to get to you to more is working stuff, than hearing about what isn’t working.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, you want to seek praise. And there is nothing wrong with saying to somebody, listen, I want you to read the script and feel free to be honest with things that aren’t working, but I need you also to be vehement about the things that are working. That will help me. And when you give people permission to do that, they do it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s very encouraging.

**John:** I was just on a phone call with a friend right before we started recording this and I was talking through this pilot that he wrote. And there were things that were great about it and things that weren’t great about it. And luckily, thank god, there were things that were great about it. And so I could say in a really very true, real way, “I love where this gets to. I love the tone you’re able to find. You were able to create this really unique special thing. I think you can find ways to do that throughout the whole rest of the script. And if you’re up for it, let’s talk through ways we can get more of what’s working so well there to be working throughout the rest of this.”

It ends up being a much better conversation when you can tell somebody you’re awesome. This part is great. And I think you can do this same kind of stuff for the whole script.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Exactly. When you get a series of “I don’t like this” you begin to feel stupid. You begin to feel like nothing you do is any good. And you also begin to extrapolate to say, oh, and they’re leaving out a bunch — they basically hate everything.

When people zero in on something and say this was wonderful, let me tell you why it was wonderful, let me tell you how it made me feel, that will embolden you to think about those moments and think about why those moments are working as opposed to other moments. It’s very important. Not many people do this instinctively.

And I would urge those of you who listen to us who are development executives, studio executive and producers, to really make this part of your deal. Not because you’re there to make writers feel good. But because you’re there to actually make the script better. Believe it or not, that will make the script better.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And in general, when you’re lost, you have to remind yourself that when you can’t see things, you can’t see them. And then you do see them. There is an impatience there. You think, well, if I really strain, I’ll see it. No. You’ll see it when you see it. Things are never as good as you think. And things are never as bad as you think. So, take heart in that. And remember that you’ve been out in the rain before. And then the new house is finished and you go inside.

**John:** I do encounter this experience on almost every second draft. And sort of a second draft ennui where there’s this real gap between what it was I initially set out to create and what I’m looking at on the page right now. And I’m trying to figure out what the movie wants to be next. And so the suggestions you’re offering I think are all really valid ways of getting you to think about the movie that it’s becoming, rather than the movie that it was.

And praise from smart people is part of it. Hearing it out loud is part of it. And it’s also reminding yourself what’s no longer there, but what is also new about this new draft and what is going to be exciting about this new pass.

And also you won’t know this until you’ve done a couple of these, but reminding yourself that this is the process. That feeling this way about your second draft is the same way you’re going to like want to kill yourself after you see the first cut of a movie.

It’s the same way that the first day of production will be overwhelming. Those are all just real things that are just part of the nature of the process. And to allow yourself to feel them.

In recent things I’ve been though, I’ve gotten a couple of those emails where just sort of I point out the problems, things like let’s fix these things. And I have to remind myself that they’re singling out these things because they’re small things they think they can address rather than spending 45 minutes to tell me all the stuff that they loved. But if, I don’t know, I just feel like great producers and great studio executives find the time to tell you what is terrific so that you can be inspired to do more stuff for them.

I know when I’m giving notes to somebody, I always try to look for those highlights of this is why this is worthwhile. This is why you should pay attention to the rest of my notes, because I really did read it, and I really did understand what you were going for in this moment. And this one really succeeded.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you tell people that this is something I like, then the writer is going to think to themselves, okay, there is — this person does get me. This isn’t a situation where there’s nothing I could write that would make them happy. There is something I write that makes them happy. What is that thing?

And a lot of times, I think everybody, writers and note-givers will sort of say let’s skip past the formalities of I like this, and I like this. I don’t need anyone to say, oh, I really like this, or I really like this. What I need them is to stop and go, no, this right here I loved. I loved this. I don’t need — hopefully there’s more than one, you know, but if you love something, you tell me because I need to know. Because that’s going to help me.

**John:** Craig, do you think that some of the reasons why they might be reluctant to tell you those things is because they know from experience that those things might get cut, those things might change, or their opinion might shift on those? Are they protecting themselves by not telling you that they love something?

**Craig:** Maybe. If there is a psychological resistance to it, I suspect it may be connected more to a fear that they will be demotivating you. They think, well, if I tell you that I loved something, you’ll just start to think that you’re great. And you don’t need my help and you don’t have to change anything. The writer that development executives and producers fear the most is the “I’m okay/you’re not okay” writer. The one who thinks that I wrote it, therefore it’s great. Screw you. So, they’re hesitant to tell you they loved something because they’re afraid that then you’ll say to them, well, the same person that wrote that thing you loved wrote this thing, and so you should just defer to me.

In fact, that’s just not how we work. And I think if they really put their minds to this, they’ll understand we’re not looking for empty praise. If you say, “I love this,” that means nothing to me. If you say, “I love this, now let me tell you why,” then it does, because now we are talking about the script. We’re talking about how the machine is working. And it’s very crucial for us to understand what is working. More crucial I think than not.

**John:** And the process of understanding what is working sometimes really is a process of interrogation, of really figuring out like what it is that’s not happening in the other person’s head that is happening in your head.

So, last Sunday before we were playing D&D, I was talking to Chris Morgan about this note that I got that I just fundamentally didn’t understand. And I started to sort of rehearse my sort of defense of the way things currently were in the script. And Chris, who has been through this rodeo so many times, said, “You know what? Just call the guy and just ask him what it really means and see if there’s something that’s sort of in the middle that could work out right.”

And so I had that conversation and it ended up being so much better than I had anticipated because it was literally just what I had on the page, partly because of trims I’d made to try to tighten stuff up, the intention had gotten lost in his read. And so it was a matter of restoring some things that could make the scene be about what I really mean the scene to be about, rather than what he was reading the scene to be about. And that can be useful.

**Craig:** Not only is it useful, but I think that is the stuff in which positive development relationships grow. They give us notes and then we leave and they go back to their office and think, “They’re not going to do any of that. And I’m still responsible for what they turn in.”

When you call and you say, “I don’t understand this. Let’s talk about this,” they think, oh good, you were listening. I’m happy to explain this.

**John:** That’s part of the reason why I think the screenwriter’s job is so unique and weird and different. Because I was trying to think about what the equivalent would be for a novelist. And so a novelist would have an editor and the two of them would have a discussion about this moment, this scene, this line. Sort of what’s going on in this section of the book. And they would have a relationship and a discussion, but ultimately the novelist is not bound to do whatever the editor says. It’s just, you know, this would be my suggestion, but take it or leave it.

It’s not a take it or leave it with screenwriting. That executive, that producer, that director ultimately can say yes or no and can make some changes that may not be the changes you want to make, or the thing can proceed to the next stage or not proceed to the next stage, or proceed with you or without you in ways that’s so different from other forms of fiction writing.

And that’s part of the reason why a person could be a terrific novelist but just not actually have the social skills to manage that relationship.

**Craig:** Social skills and psychic strength. You know, novelists are creating the end product and we’re not. And so part of what happens is you become incredibly aware that you have shifted your job description from creator to protector. Now, you have to figure out how to safeguard the stuff that matters the most through this gauntlet of other people’s opinions and other people’s authority.

And it is doable, but it is not doable perfectly. It’s simply not. And that’s even if you are the director and writer. Even if you’re the director, the budget will get you. Or the studio will get you. Or an actor will get you. Something — it will rain on the wrong day. Something is going to get you.

So, you can put aside your visions of purity and instead engage in that notion of how do I protect all the way through here. How do I keep as many of these eggs, you know, to carry them to full term? That’s kind of what’s going on.

**John:** Yeah. And the wisdom role that you have to make here is that in trying to protect my script, am I actually protecting the movie, or am I really just protecting my self-esteem? Am I protecting my ability to believe myself as being the guy who wrote this script which is so, so good, or am I really looking out for what the final product is and what’s going to make it to the screen?

And every one of those decisions is going to be tough. And so part of my discussion with Chris was I don’t know whether maybe the note is right and I’m just being stubborn and not seeing that the note is right. What do I do? And the answer was to have the conversation and in this one case it was the right choice to make.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I’m glad that that worked out.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our One Cool Things. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** All right. I’m sort of continuing a theme here of One Cool Thing that will happen one day. I saw this trailer for a new game that I don’t know if it’s going to be a mobile app or desktop only. I’m not sure yet. My guess is mobile, as well as desktop. It’s called Oxenfree and it’s from a company called Night School Studio.

And it appears to be on the one hand kind of a straight up adventure puzzle kind of deal where some characters that it looks like they’re high school students are hanging out on some island as part of like a high school getaway bit and then crazy stuff happens. And from the trailer I kind of get the feeling that it’s going to be a little bit like sort of that standard puzzle thing of, okay, I’ve got to get my guy from here to there. What do I do? What do I press? And what do I move? But what’s so interesting about it is the dialogue is really good. I mean, it’s written in a way where you could tell they cared, that the characters are vibrant and the dialogue is on point. It’s well acted.

There’s also appears from the trailer to be an interesting dynamic to interactions where most of the characters are answering per a script, but occasionally you have choices where you can select what your answer is. And I assume that would influence how the people respond to you. Maybe not go so far as to influence how the game goes. I mean, this is the way video games are. They are trying to disguise the fact that you are on rails, but I really loved this trailer. I can’t wait to play this game.

So, hopefully it’s a cool thing.

**John:** It’s a gorgeous trailer. I clicked through the link when you put it in the show notes and it really is just terrific looking. And I agree that the dynamic, you know, Dragon Age and lots of other games have done that thing where you get to choose what your answer is back to things, but very cleverly like just having the little thought bubbles and you get to pick which little speech bubble you want to pick for your answer seems like a really clever dynamic.

So, I’m curious to see what this will become as well.

**Craig:** Excellent. And what about you?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is the TV show Silicon Valley, which I may have already harped about how much I love the show, but this last week’s episode, which by the time this airs will be two weeks ago, was particularly spectacular over this one moment that was so incredibly well crafted. And it was well set up throughout the run of the episode, but just so brilliantly done.

So, it’s two of the character, Dinesh and Gilfoyle are trying to figure out whether to tell this really annoying douchebag character that his son is actually going to kill him. And they make this SWOT board which is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats for this very Silicon Valley way of trying to make a decision. And the cards they put up on there for Let Blaine Die are so hilarious. And the degree to which you have to pause the show to read them, I’m going to put a link in the show notes that shows you all the cards that are up on that board.

But it was such an incredibly well structured episode, but also that scene and that moment and every card that’s up on that board, and then within that scene, the structure of the scene, of like they could just let the guy walk out and that would be hilarious, but at just the right moment they reveal to this character that these guys are considering letting him, basically plotting murder, which was just geniusly handled.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love the show. Alec Berg, who is the head writer, kind of Mike Judge’s right hand man on that show is one of my best friends in the world. And so I’ve been kind of following along his Silicon Valley trials and tribulations. I mean, it’s a tough show to make. But, you know, that show — so the whole thing with the Let Blaine Die, and it kind of reminded me a little bit of the way last season’s finale was structured with the —

**John:** End to middle out.

**Craig:** Tip to tip. It’s very Alec. Alec with his former writing partner, I guess they still collaborate on some things, Berg, Schaffer, Mandel, they ran Seinfeld sort of in the latter series of its run. And Seinfeld was always — the episodes were kind of masterclasses in recursive plotting. You know, that in the end every episode was a callback to itself. That’s the kind of way they worked. And that the end would kind of go, oh look, the thing from the beginning is paying off. It’s a Rube Goldberg plot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then Alec and Jeff and Dave did Curb Your Enthusiasm and it’s the same deal. And now, Silicon Valley doesn’t always work that way, but in this case it did, and it was very Alec. It was just a very Alec thing. I loved it.

I particularly loved Dinesh and Gilfoyle, god, they’re just great. Those characters are awesome. So, Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr are just spectacular in those parts. I would honestly watch those two characters talking about anything for 12 hours. It would make me so happy. But my favorite character on the show has to be Jared.

**John:** He’s so good.

**Craig:** Zach Woods.

**John:** So, I mean, it’s a variation on a kind of character that we saw him do in the American version of The Office, and yet he is so needy and yet so sweet, and so trying to be the den mother to this group and yet keeps getting batted down in a way that’s just fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, like the character, so Zach Woods, this character that he’s playing, first of all, Jared isn’t even his name. The character’s actual name is Donald, but somebody called him Jared once and it stuck because he just felt like he didn’t want to disturb them.

So, Jared is the answer to this question. How nice can a person be? Jared is in fact I think what Jesus Christ would be like if he were alive and working in Silicon Valley. [laughs] That’s basically what he is. He’s Jesus. He’s awesome.

And when he’s — oh my god, his face. Ah, his face. I just want to hug him.

**John:** He does crushed so well.

**Craig:** Crushed and sort of hopeful also.

**John:** Absolutely. He’s a puppy who just got scolded but really thinks that maybe you’ll let him hop up on the lap.

**Craig:** Yeah. Silicon Valley is the best. If you’re not watching it, you’re stupid. Honestly, you’re just dumb.

**John:** That is our show this week. Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. I’m not sure who did the outro this week, but if you have an outro that you would like to send in for us, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. Send us a link to the SoundCloud. It would be fantastic way to do it.

ask@johnaugust.com is also a great place to send questions, those longer questions. Little short things we can answer on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on iTunes. So, if you’re listening to this show on the John August Blog, that’s fantastic, but it would also be great if you can subscribe to us on iTunes, because that helps people find the show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Leave us a comment while you’re there. We got some really nice comments this last week, so thank you for those people who did that.

**Craig:** Oh good. Thanks.

**John:** We have an app. And that app is also found through the App Store. You can find it both in the Apple iOS App Store and on the Google Play Store. That lets you get to all of the back episodes as well. Back to episode one.

Next week we will back with a 200th episode. We will record it live in some capacity. It might be audio. It might be video. We might have Aline. We might not have Aline. But we will figure out how we’re going to do it. And you should follow us on Twitter and we will give you ample warning that we are going to be doing the show. It will be sometime in the evening, so it will be post-work. And you can hear us do the show live and read some questions. It should be fun.

The police in the background are coming to arrest Craig Mazin, so we should probably wrap it up.

**Craig:** You know, I did it again.

**John:** And we have promised at some point that we will do a bonus episode that is nothing but all the sirens that have come after Craig. Because at least I would say five minutes of every week’s episode has to be trimmed for sirens.

**Craig:** Trimmed for Sirens, title of my biography.

**John:** It’s going to be good. It fits really well with the umbrage theme.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John, you too. Bye.

Links:

* Follow [@johnaugust](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [@clmazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for details on the 200th episode live stream
* [Deadline on the Mr. Holmes lawsuit](http://deadline.com/2015/05/mr-holmes-lawsuit-arthur-conan-doyle-estate-sues-bill-condon-1201431854/), and [the filing itself](https://pmcdeadline2.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/mr-holmes-conan-doyle-estate-infringment-lawsuit-wm.pdf)
* [How Hollywood Taught Rebel Wilson To Lie About Her Age](http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/how-hollywood-taught-rebel-wilson-to-lie-about-her-age?bffb&utm_term=4ldqpgz#.psOGAW3W5A)
* [Scriptnotes, 182: The One with Rebel Wilson and Dan Savage](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-rebel-wilson-and-dan-savage)
* [Maggie Gyllenhaal Was Told She Was ‘Too Old’ to Play 55-Year Old’s Lover](http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/maggie-gyllenhaal-too-old-lover-1201502936/)
* [Riley Weston on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riley_Weston) and [Entertainment Weekly](http://www.ew.com/article/1998/10/30/riley-weston-fooled-us-all-about-her-age)
* [James Frey on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Frey)
* Robert Mark Kamen [on IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0436543/), and in [Script Mag](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/interviews-features/interview-robert-mark-kamen-2) and [Wine Searcher](http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2015/01/q-a-robert-mark-kamen-kamen-estate)
* [Oxenfree from Night School Studio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGwz4ovskx4)
* [Silicon Valley: Read every card on the Let Blaine Die SWOT board](http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/15/silicon-valley-read-let-blaine-die-swot-board)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Travis Newton ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is episode 197 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig just opened up a Diet Coke. I could hear it. It sounded delicious.

Craig: It’s so good. I just read an interesting article somebody was writing about diet soda. Because, you know, ah, so good. Because, you know, it’s very —

John: Controversial?

Craig: Fashionable. I mean, is it controversial? I think people are trying to make it controversial but certainly fashionable is how I’d put it. Say, “Oh, god, aspartame in diet soda.” Yeah, actually, you know, one of the most studied substances in the human body is at this point aspartame and artificial sweeteners.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. The science is fairly clear like as clear as clear gets. And I know people are going tweet me and say, “Wah, wah, wah.” That’s what it’s going to sound like, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.”

John: Yeah. That is, and we actually have a filter that we built through the email that whenever one of those comes in it just goes “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s like the Peanuts teacher.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

John: It’s just a trombone with a little mute in there.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You know, going back and forth.

Craig: Yeah, when people talk about, you know, how GMOs are bad for you. All I hear is wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Yeah, because it feels good, man.

John: But I will tell you that that Diet Coke while not necessarily bad for you —

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: Would be incredibly bad for me if I were to drink this right now. Because we’re recording this at 4:30 PM on a Friday. If I were to have a Diet Coke after 3 PM, I would have a panic attack.

Craig: Oh.

John: It would feel like a heart attack. And then I would convince myself that I was having a heart attack and I would be driven to the emergency room.

Craig: Mm-hmm. Of course, you might be having a heart attack.

John: That’s the thing.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I’m in my 40s now. It’s actually reasonable that I could be having a heart attack. But when I was in my 20s, when I was like 22 and this happened the very first time —

Craig: Yeah.

John: I’m like, “Oh, my god, I’m having a heart attack,” and so I went to the emergency room. And they’re like, “You’re not having a heart attack. But when this happens again, you still have to come back,” so.

Craig: Yeah. That’s the problem with panic attacks. They are very similar. You must be very sensitive to caffeine.

John: I am. So I can’t — after about 2:30 PM I should not have caffeine at all.

Craig: I love caffeine.

John: Oh, it’s good, good substance.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Today on the podcast, we are going to answer a single question. We’ll attempt to answer a single question, “How do bad movies get made?”

Craig: I would have no idea!

John: So that’s our sole topic for the day but we have some follow up to get into first. First off, last week we asked, “Hey, should we make more of those USB drives that have all the episodes of Scriptnotes on them like when we cross 200? Is that a thing we should do?” And the answer was a resounding yes. So at some point after the 200th episode, we will have USB drives for sale that will have the entirety of Scriptnotes on them so you can hold them for after, you know, Armageddon comes.

Craig: Yeah.

John: You could still hold on to Scriptnotes.

Craig: I don’t need one. But I can see why people would want one.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I’m gratified that they do.

John: Yeah, it’s nice.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Second bit of follow up. We asked in the last episode about a 200th episode kind of Google Hangout thing where we would attempt to do a live video feed for the show and there was an enthusiastic response for that and some suggestions. So we are thankful for everybody who suggested ways to do it or places to do it. We are sorting through that now but people can just generally anticipate for three weeks from now for episode 200, we will attempt to do some sort of live video thing. And so, we would attempt to do it at a time where at least people on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States are awake and could enjoy us talking about things, perhaps in a Google Hangout kind of situation.

Craig: That are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Yes. And we don’t know which guest we might have on that kind of show. A person who we need to have on the show very soon is Aline Brosh McKenna because her show just got picked up.

Craig: What? Wait, what show? What?

John: Yeah. You haven’t been following the news?

Craig: I don’t follow news.

John: So Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the show that she did with Rachel Bloom.

Craig: Yeah.

John: They did that for Showtime and it didn’t get picked up at Showtime. And so we’re like, well, that’s just terrible. And then suddenly, yesterday, we’re recording this on Friday, so Thursday, it was announced that the CW is picking it up.

Craig: Well, how about that. So it’s —

John: Yeah.

Craig: A second life. Well, that’s fantastic. We should definitely have — it’s been too long. We should have her on. There’s all sorts of people I want to have on the show. You know, I want to have Rian Johnson on the show. I want to have Chris Miller from Lord Miller. Not that — I love Phil Lord too but Chris said yeah, so.

John: Well, yeah, Chris Miller is just better than Phil Lord in almost every way.

Craig: Oh, don’t. Poor, Phil — Phil Lord is wonder.

John: Phil Lord is absolutely fine for being Phil Lord. But Chris Miller is Chris Miller.

Craig: Chris Miller is Chris Miller.

John: It’s like Derek Haas and Michael Brandt.

Craig: Oh.

John: Like, you know, they’re both lovely.

Craig: [laughs]

John: But —

Craig: Well, you see, you know, Derek is one of my best friends in the world. And so it’s not fair. I just don’t know Michael that well.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, you know, it’s like, “What’s that name for the Baxter?”

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know they used to call the Baxter, the guy in the romantic comedy that has the girl but isn’t supposed to be with the girl. And her heroes —

John: Adult [woman role].

Craig: Yeah, and her hero is supposed to get the girl away from the Baxter, somehow Michael Brandt has become the Baxter. But actually Michael Brandt is very cool. Knows more about wine than anyone I’ve ever met.

John: Yes.

Craig: He’s a wine genius. I want Megan Amram to come on our show.

John: Oh, god, she’s so funny.

Craig: So funny. And you know what? I might as well just say, somebody that has agreed to be on our show and will be on our show is Katie Dippold who wrote The Heat and is writing the upcoming Ghostbusters re-jiggering.

John: Mm-hmm. Starring our best bud, Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Starring our girl Melissa. And that’s pretty good.

John: Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Craig: Actually, right there, that’s a hell of a list.

John: While we’re talking fantasy list, I should just get it off the chest. I really would love to have Shonda Rhimes on the show. Shonda, I know from way back in film school. But Shonda is busy running a television empire. So at some point I would love to have her come on the show. So if somebody who is close to Shonda, might would just like nudge her and say, “By the way, John August who lives down the street would love to have you on the show.” I would love to have Shonda Rhimes on the show.

Craig: I don’t know anything about the Shonda-verse. I mean, I know her shows, but you know, I don’t — because I don’t watch TV, so I don’t know the Shonda verse. But certainly she is a titan of the industry and speaking of other showrunners that I do know that actually I could call up, Jenji Kohan.

John: Oh, my god, of course.

Craig: Who’s hysterical.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Should get her on the show.

John: Yeah. These are all great suggestions, Craig.

Craig: Oh, you know, who else we should get on the show?

John: Yes.

Craig: Glen Mazzara.

John: Yeah, and who was supposed to be on the show like about six months ago.

Craig: I know and is the best. There are so many people we have to get on the show.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I can’t believe we wasted an entire show on Ryan Knighton. [laughs]

John: [laughs] Ryan Knighton was fantastic.

Craig: He was.

John: Ryan Knighton who listens to the show the day it comes out.

Craig: I know. [laughs]

John: So right now he’s like, “Oh, yeah, screw you guys.”

Craig: Well, that’s — I did that for Ryan Knighton of course. Of course, we actually got a tweet back. I don’t know if you saw it from Chris O’Dowd. [laughs] Did you see that?

John: [laughs] Yes, Chris O’Dowd. But did Chris O’Dowd say that he looked nothing like him or agreed that he did look something like him?

Craig: He sort of just jumped into the fray in general to point out that somebody had said that Ryan Knighton and Chris O’Dowd were similar sort of from the nose down and I said, “Yes, they both have a jaw.” And Chris O’Dowd jumped into the fray to say that sometimes he even has two chins.

John: Well, that’s good. That’s an honest, true assessment of sometimes people’s physical realities.

Craig: [laughs] That was the most John August thing you’ve ever said.

John: [laughs]

Craig: [laughs] That was — if you guys want to know what it’s like if you take John August and boil him down to a delicious reduction —

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: It was that sentence.

John: All right, I’ll take it.

Craig: It was gorgeous.

John: The other thing I’m really known for is segues. Like talking about —

Craig: Oh, man.

John: Our 200 episodes and really our favorite episodes out of those 200. We asked last week what people’s favorite episodes were and we got just a shot-gun full of very different answers about what things were the best.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But they broke it down in sort of general categories. And so, some people love the craft episodes. Some people love our interviews. Some people love when we go deep on one movie. And there were, you know, a few other sort of recent hits which I think you would anticipate it if there’s a recency bias that people who listen to the show religiously, they’re going to think more about the ones they heard more recently than the ones from way back in the day.

Craig: Right.

John: But we will put together a list of some of our favorites and as we hit the 200, we will go through and highlight those as well.

Craig: I should mention that I did get a text from America’s favorite unpronounceable comedian Mike Birbiglia who said his vote for favorite episode for listener’s guide — is that — I don’t know. Is that what we’re calling it? Listener’s guide?

John: Yeah, listener’s guide.

Craig: Listener’s guide. The Conflict episode and the Directing episode.

John: Great.

Craig: He said Conflict episode is a three-peat for me. You should make a YouTube how-to video of it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which I’m going to —

John: We’ll never do.

Craig: I’m just saying no to right now. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: Yeah, I’m going to say no, Mike Birbiglia.

John: That’s so much work.

Craig: No.

John: So, way back in the day I used to do these YouTube videos where it was like a screencast and I would start with a scene and sort of rewrite the scene and sort of talk through sort of why I was rewriting the scene like word by word, sentence by sentence. And people loved them. And I said like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll do more of them.” But the truth is they’re so incredibly exhausting to do that I just don’t know if I’ll ever get back to doing more of those.

Craig: I truly love the wonderful isolation tank of podcast DO.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, it’s just nice. I don’t have to worry about anything.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I don’t even have to wear clothing if I don’t want to.

John: Yeah, he’s been naked most of this time.

Craig: Well, I’m naked all of the time under my clothes.

John: Yeah, sometimes he’s smoking. We never quite know what Craig is doing in his office in Pasadena while we’re recording the show.

Craig: Occasionally I’m cleaning fish.

John: Yeah, that does happen. Occasionally a cleaning woman walks by and takes the fish cuts away.

Craig: Correct.

John: Correct. The only last bit of business before we get to the topic at hand, One Hit Kill, which is the game we are launching. By the time you listen to this podcast it very well might have launched. So we’re launching, we anticipate, on Tuesday, the 12th and if you are interested in card games or things that smash into other things you will probably enjoy this card game. So just go to onehitkillgame.com or search Kickstarter for us because hopefully by the time you’re listening to this, we are up there in the world for you to back and pledge. And Craig now is fully converted to the world —

Craig: No, no, no.

John: Of crowd funding.

Craig: No, no, no. I would love to be included in the “we” on that but I am not part of the “we”.

John: Oh, he’s not part of this thing at all.

Craig: Yeah, I can’t —

John: Oh, lord, no.

Craig: I claim zero credit.

John: Yes, so when I say “we” I mean the people who work for me and my side of the company.

Craig: On the other hand, I also claim zero blame.

John: Yeah, true.

Craig: Yeah.

John: That’s the lovely thing about being sort of not involved.

Craig: Not my fault. Not my fault.

John: Not your fault.

Craig: Boy, there is a segue softball for you. Not my fault.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about movies that don’t work out. So Nima Yousefi who works for me phrased this question at lunch, “Hey, why don’t you talk about why they make bad movies?” And I was like, well, you know what, we never really framed the conversation around that but that’s a totally valid question.

Craig: Yeah, from the mouth of babes.

John: Yes. So let’s talk about this issue. And I guess we have to start by defining our terms. What do we even mean by bad? And, you know, we could talk about movies that are just genuinely terrible. They get bad critical review. They get bad audience reviews or like the very low consensus in general of the quality of the movie. But often we talk about the movies being flops because they just didn’t connect at the box office.

So, when I say bad movie, Craig, which of those kind of categories are you thinking about?

Craig: I never think about the box office honestly because I’ve seen some wonderful movies that people just didn’t go to see at the box office. I’ve seen some massive box office hits that I just didn’t like.

John: Yeah.

Craig: When I — honestly, when I think about a bad movie and I have a very limited definition. I’ll stipulate that upfront. I think about a movie that I don’t like at all.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I just don’t like it. It was bad for me. That’s sort of a thing on the end. And there are movies that are seemingly bad for everyone.

John: Yeah. I think that’s really, I think, what we should probably try to focus on is like the movies that just like, “Well, that just didn’t work.”

Craig: Right.

John: Because there’s certainly movies that are tremendously successful that I just can’t ever watch and I just don’t like and I don’t get.

Craig: Right.

John: But clearly somebody really loved that movie. So you can’t sort of definitely say like, “Oh, that didn’t work.” But there’s many movies that just don’t work and you sometimes scratch your head, saying, like, “How did that movie happen?”

Today, let’s talk through how those movies happen.

Craig: How do things go wrong? And it’s true that sometimes through the lens of time we will see that things that weren’t working actually were working. They just weren’t working in the right time.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They were ahead of their time. And it seems like a crazy thing to say. It sounds pompous. And sometimes the movies that are ahead of their time are low-brow culture.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But they foreshadowed something and they may have been rough around the edges. They may have been startling or shocking. Did you see by the way, there’s this wonderful video out there on the Internet about the genius of the first follower? Have you seen this video?

John: No. Tell me this.

Craig: So, it’s a guy narrating a simple video of a crowd at some sort of outdoor music festival. And the video is just of this small area of the crowd, mostly people sitting on a lawn. And one guy is dancing like a lunatic, all by himself. He’s all alone and he’s the kind of person that people would look at go, “Wow, what a freak.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: This is the leader. He is the brave leader who does something on his own for the first time. He doesn’t care if other people are doing it with him. And after about a minute of this, one dude just comes running in out of nowhere and starts dancing along with that guy and learning his dance and dancing with him. And other people see this and the second guy sort of gesturing back at his friends like, “Come on.” And now three or four people come to dance with the guy.

Now there’s about five people dancing. Then about, now people see a group of people dancing. And so a bunch of people were like, “Oh, yeah, cool. People dancing, I like to be a part of a group of people dancing.” And within 30 seconds, it goes from two people to five people to ten people to what seems like everyone, like hundreds of people all doing this.

And the point that the guy made was the leader is an interesting person but it’s the first follower who is the bravest and the first follower who is the most important. Sometimes with movies, the leader comes out and gets crushed.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s the first follower that kind of reaps the reward. So in time we may look back at that first, that first crazy guy dancing on the lawn and go, “Actually, you’re good.”

John: You know, thinking back through my own movies, a movie that I’m not especially happy with is the second Charlie’s Angels. And I was at some screening some place about a completely different movie and this guy in the audience came up and said, “Hey, I just want to let you know, I really love Full Throttle.” I’m like, “Wow, really, you really love it?” He’s like, “Yeah. It was like so much of an improvement over the first movie.” I’m like, “You’re the only person on earth who thinks that.”

And he said — he basically was a first follower. He’s like, the way it kind of made no sense and it just kind of came jumping from thing to thing, I thought it was like really avant-garde and sort of just — he had his whole theory at that that was deliberate in a certain way.

Craig: [laughs]

John: And —

Craig: Yeah.

John: And so, in some ways, I do kind of — I get that and there might be things you just love about something that is not necessarily the inherent qualities that the even creators were attempting to do but you might love something for a certain reason and sometimes the movies that are not great end up having a great influence.

If you look at some of the Grindhouse classics you wouldn’t say that those are great movies but they’ve had —

Craig: Right.

John: A tremendous influence on Tarantino but also a lot of other filmmakers.

Craig: That’s a great example of the first follower. Tarantino will get knocked around a little bit by some people that say, “Well, you know, all the great moments that you love in Pulp Fiction have been cribbed from other movies.” Yeah, but he’s the first follower. He knew to crib those. Where other people were just laughing at them because, frankly, a lot of those moments are from movies that are bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re just not well done.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But he was the first follower.

John: It was their lack of artistry that made them sort of incredibly exciting and sort of incredibly —

Craig: Or maybe they had one wonderful moment and then a lot of junk.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know.

John: Sometimes a movie cannot work because it was ahead of its time. And sometimes a movie just happens to be behind its time. And like, you know, while you were shooting the movie like, well, this is really current and then by the time it comes out, well, this is clumsily outdated.

Craig: Right.

John: So things involving technology often don’t age well and sometimes that aging process happens before they’re even out in the movie theatres. Sometimes that’s, you know, about computer technology, about hackers, about sort of anything related to the Internet. The Sandra Bullock movie The Net, The Web, the whatever —

Craig: Right.

John: I remember that coming out and it’s like, “Oh, wow, this movie is at least six months too late. This is not at all sort of what this world is.” The other challenge can be like you’re — there was a fad and that fad has now passed and now you seem just incredibly laughably out of date because no one is doing the Lambada anymore or skateboarding is not about gleaning the cube anymore. There’s just reasons why that moment has passed and now you’re still trying to hit those notes.

Craig: Like, if you were, say, dumb enough to make some sort of compendium spoof movie, at the end, long past perhaps the end of that trend.

John: Well, that’s just ridiculously bad actually.

Craig: No one would do that.

John: No one would ever do that.

Craig: That would be stupid.

John: But let’s talk about those, you know, some movies are just inherently bad ideas. And some, you know, you wouldn’t necessarily know that at that time but there are some movies, you’ll just look at them, it’s like, well, that was just never going to work. I don’t understand why you really thought a movie about talking baloney was going to be the thing that people wanted to see or like, you know, a romantic comedy about talking baloney was something that people wanted to see. And yet somehow it made it through all of these levels. Maybe we can dig in to sort of why sometimes something that looks on its surface like a bad idea makes it through.

Craig: Well, it’s hard to know that it’s a bad idea occasionally.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Sometimes you’re hit with an idea as a member of the audience, right. You see a trailer. You see something. And you look and you go, “That’s just an inherently bad idea because I don’t even know what it is.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: For instance, why would I watch a movie about talking baloney? But every now and then something comes along like that and everybody just goes, “Yup, love that.”

John: Yep.

Craig: “That thing. I love the talking baloney movie.” Sharknado was like —

John: Yes.

Craig: You know, now granted Sharknado was a goof, you know. But sometimes there are ideas that are such outliers you can’t tell if they’re an outlier bad or an outlier good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They are just off. And you will have to find out if it’s off good or off bad.

John: Yeah. You won’t know. And sometimes those ideas get forced into the universe because of, you know, reasons that aren’t completely clear from the trailer or from the movie you’re actually watching. So sometimes there’s an incredibly powerful person behind it or a group of people behind it who say like, “You know what? We somehow for some reason trust that this thing could breakthrough, this thing could work.” And that could be a really powerful director. It could be a powerful producer. It could be a studio head who says, like, “No, no, I really think that the world needs, you know, a talking baloney movie because it’s going to be like the talking dog movies, but people love food and therefore we’re just going to do it.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: And sometimes a charismatic person or a powerful person can push that movie into existence, hire the people to do it and that movie now exists even though it’s not a good idea maybe on a fundamental level.

Craig: I’ll give you an example from my career.

John: Right.

Craig: I seem to have a lot of them. Very early on I had a writing partner and we did our first movie. And as that movie was in post or something like that, our managers came to us and said, “Look, Dimension Films wants to make a movie with Marlon Wayans and we need ideas for Marlon Wayans. So come and sit down and just pitch us ideas for Marlon Wayans.” We said okay. And we were very young and, you know, had basically written one thing and got paid for it. We were trying to make career as a screenwriter. So important person saying important person wants a movie with important person, let’s go sit and come up with some ideas. So we sat there for an afternoon. We came up with a bunch of log lines for the kinds of comedies they were making then, character-driven Jim Carrey-ish comedies.

And we came in and we just pitched them all one after another. And they picked the weirdest one. [laughs] They just said, “That one.” And they all agreed. “That one. And we’re making it.”

John: And, Craig, was the “that one” because they could picture the poster? What was it that singled that one out?

Craig: I don’t know. So the idea was a man only has four of his five senses at any given time but the missing one keeps switching. So, at some point he’s blind. At some point he’s deaf. At some point he can’t speak. At some point he can’t feel. It was a very strange idea but they all just got excited. They thought, this is exactly what the world needs and we said, “Oh, okay.” And they’re like, “Here’s a bunch of money. Go start writing it and you need to write it now because he has a thing on a schedule and we’re going to shoot it,” and we did it. And they were like, “Great.” And then they made it

John: [laughs]

Craig: But I remember very clearly —

John: And then it won an Oscar, right?

Craig: It didn’t. It didn’t. I do remember I was walking with my writing partner Greg and we were talking about, we had, you know, gotten paid to do this and we were figuring out how to write the script and we were just discussing it on a walk. And then he turned to me and he goes, “You think they’ll ever make this?” And I said, “Never in a million years will they make this. This is just a dumb idea.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: Well, they did make it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And the whole time we were like, “Wait. At some point, someone’s going to stop this, right?” [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: And the crazy thing is we got to the first test screening and I thought, “This is where it’ll stop.” And the test, it was through the roof. It scored great. The audience loved it. And I was still like, “But it’s not — ”

John: But —

Craig: No one’s stopping this? [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: And then eventually the audience stopped it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this on the show. But at some point in your career, you must have been pitched or been advised to pitch on Clipped over — a Brian Grazer project.

Craig: Yes.

John: A Brian Grazer project at Imagine.

Craig: Of course.

John: So this project, I’d kind of love for it to made at this point because I think almost every screenwriter I’ve ever met has had this brought up to him or her, which is a project that Brian Grazer initiated and I think some scripts have been written for it. And it involves a man who gets a paperclip stuck in his brain or like up his nose and like it touches his brain. And I think that’s the entire premise.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And I think it’s gone in a gazillion different directions but that’s the premise. And so, you’ll go into one of these general meetings and they’ll say like, “Oh, and we also have Clipped and like we’re really excited to make this movie.” And you’re like, “Well, but, tell me about it.” It’s like, a man gets a paperclip stuck up his brain. And it’s like, “Okay.”

Craig: Right. Rob Schneider is a Carrot.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. And that, there is this thing that happens where powerful people get an idea that they can’t let go of.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And everybody, at some point or another, has an idiosyncratic attraction to an idea that few others do. I do. We all do. But the difference is, if you run a big studio that’s making a lot of money for another big studio, you get to constantly impose your idiosyncratic obsession at everyone.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So when they have these meetings and they say, “Well, we have something we’re really excited about,” they’re not excited about it. They hate it. [laughs]

John: Yeah.

Craig: They just know that their boss is. And there have been movies — someone should make a list of these. Movies that seemingly everyone in the Writers Guild has been hired to work on at some point or another, like Stretch Armstrong is —

John: Yeah. Yesterday we were talking about Bob the Musical which really I think everyone has worked on.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a good list of movies that have done nothing but generate dues for the Writers Guild [laughs] and will never actually get made.

John: Well, I think Taylor Lautner at some point got like a big payday for doing Stretch Armstrong, which of course never happened.

Craig: Stretch Armstrong, at this point, the story that somebody should make is the story of trying to make Stretch Armstrong. The movie will refuse to be made at all times. And no matter how close you get, it will not be made. It’s a remarkable story.

John: Circling back to Lord and Miller, I think one of the things we need to blame them for whenever we get them on the show is —

Craig: Boo.

John: The tremendous success of The Lego Movie means that anybody who has like any piece of this like random IP can genuinely say like, “Well, look at The Lego Movie. They had nothing and then they made something amazing.” So, you know, Stretch Armstrong is at least a character.

Craig: Right. So then you want to say, “Actually, no, The Lego Movie had Batman.” [laughs]

John: That’s absolutely true.

Craig: Yeah. No, The Lego Movie had Batman and it had Abraham Lincoln. It had all sorts of cool stuff. But I imagine that Chris and Phil have no idea. When you are involved in the thing that people are copying, you generally aren’t the person that knows about it that much, you know. I mean, I got sent a bunch of Hangover-y type stuff, but when The Hangover was kind of doing its thing, everybody was basically like, “It’s Hangover but blank. It’s Hangover with this. It’s Hangover with that.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I don’t think Chris and Phil know [laughs] how much it’s Lego Movie is going on out there.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which, by the way, is another reason why bad movies happen, because studios tend to play follow the leader.

John: So I want to talk about this IP thing because that becomes an issue as well, is that let’s say you have a big piece of property. Let’s say you’re Hasbro and you have a big piece of property and you say like, “You know what, I think there’s a movie here. Look at The Lego Movie. I will give you, studio, the opportunity to make this movie but the clock is ticking.”

Craig: Right.

John: And you and I have both encountered many situations where they say like, “Listen, we have to make this movie by this time or else we’ll lose the rights to X, Y, or Z.”

Craig: Yes.

John: And Battleship was apparently that situation by many accounts. They had this title that they really liked. They wanted to make a movie called Battleship and it got rushed. It got rushed to make that movie. Similar thing happened with Spider-Man. So Sony had the rights to make Spider-Man movies.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But they had to keep making Spider-Man movies. If they stopped making them for a period of time, the rights would revert back to Marvel. So that’s a trap often with IP is there’s a clock attached to it.

Craig: Yeah. There is this thing in economics called the Concorde Fallacy. When they were building the Concorde, they said, “Well, it makes sense because we’ve done the numbers and it’s going to cost $700 million to build this plane but we believe at that cost, we will be able to at least break even.” And everybody said okay. And they spent about $300 million and went, “All right, actually, it’s going to cost $1.4 billion and we’re never going to be able to make money on it.” And someone said, “Yeah, but what are we supposed to do? Just stop and just have nothing to show for our $300 million? Of course not. Let’s keep going and build it.”

John: And let’s keep going and build it sometimes had paid off incredibly well in the movie business. And classically, Titanic, hugely over budget.

Craig: Right.

John: And could have just been a complete whiff and a miss, and instead became, for the time, the biggest movie in history.

Craig: That’s right.

John: And Cameron beat himself again after that with Avatar. So sometimes, those crazy bets really do pay off. Again, another crazy bet was The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, like basically betting the entire studio on these three films working, and it worked. So sometimes those are good choices. In the case of Battleship, it didn’t work out well for most of these people.

Craig: And that, by the way, is another answer to Nima’s question. Why do bad movies happen? Because everybody’s hoping that it’ll work.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And everybody looks at history and goes, well, you know, Fox sold off international on Titanic to Paramount because they were afraid that they had a flop on their hands with Titanic. Well, they shouldn’t have done it. Fox also let George Lucas keep merchandising and sequel rights in order to have him put money in on the budget or however it worked on Star Wars because they were frightened of that project as well. Well, are we going to be brave like Star Wars and Titanic or are we going to be scared, you know?

Well, the problem is, if you act like your movie is a big hit, it will come back to bite you if it’s not, so you actually can’t say ahead of time, one way or the other, which of the narratives is the appropriate one.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You might as well cite no narratives. You might as well just admit you can’t predict it, don’t tell me about the outliers on either side, let’s just deal with what we have. But a lot of times people are kind of clinging to outlier hopes.

John: Well, it’s like they’re playing poker and they’re really hoping they can fill an inside straight. And rarely are they going to be able to fill that inside straight, but the cost of folding is so high. Essentially, you’re in for so much and if you try to cancel a movie — like you can, theoretically, like, you know what, we’re $20 million in this movie, we still have another eight weeks of shooting, it’s going to cost us so much money, we’re just going to pull the plug.

That’s happened. I can think maybe five times in my Hollywood experience have I seen a move just actually get the plug pulled on it because kind of worse than a flop is just like burning a bunch of money and having nothing to show for it.

Craig: Yeah. This is why gambling is addictive for so many people. It’s entirely about the rush of beating the odds. And frankly, the movie business is, in part, about the rush of beating the odds. The odds are stacked against you to be hired. The odds are stacked against your movie to be green-lit. The odds are stacked against your movie to do well.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So when you beat it, you’re now chasing that rush all the time. The other thing that studios have to deal with, and this is another reason why bad movies do get made, is they have a pipeline. And the pipeline is this big infrastructure of salaries and offices and materials that exist to put movies out into the world. If you don’t have movies to put out in the world, you’re paying all those people lots and lots of money for nothing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So they must fill their pipeline. They must make a certain number of movies. And if they don’t, they have failed as executives. They failed. You can’t go to your board and say, “I actually only found three movies I liked, so we only made three.” No. You were tasked to make 15 movies. If you couldn’t find the other 13, it’s your fault. Much better to say, “I made 15 movies. These should have worked.” Better to swing more than to take pitches.

John: Absolutely. So, a couple of weeks ago, I went and saw a very early cut of a film that a friend of ours is directing. And it was a great early cut. It’s going to be a really good movie. But I didn’t know anything about the history of the film. So I was like, oh, who’s — because it was over at like one of the nearby studio lots and I said like, “Oh, who’s releasing this?” He’s like, “Oh, it’s actually this company that they’ve put out their own slate and they’re going to release it themselves.” I’m like, “That is fascinating. And that will probably end in tears.”

I hope it doesn’t end in tears but it’s so challenging to try to become a new studio because how are you going to hold all those talented people from movie to movie to movie to release this thing? It’s just an incredibly difficult job. And that’s why I have sympathy for studio executives because they are trying to make sure that they can keep everyone continuously employed and also still make the best movies at the same time. And those aren’t necessarily perfectly aligning goals.

Craig: Yeah. That’s right. Sometimes when you want something, you have to get into business with somebody and take a bunch of stuff you don’t want.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Which, of course, ironically, is the same model that the studios then turn around and foist upon the theaters.

John: Yeah.

Craig: If you want Avengers, you also have to take this stinker.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, if you want to be in business with Brad Pitt’s company or you want to be in business with Scott Rudin or you want to be in business with Neil Moritz, you’re hoping that you get, you know, their big awesome stuff, you might also get the other stuff. You never know. And you might need to take both to kind of make it all work. Sometimes movies will be made to keep people happy.

John: Yeah, absolutely. It keeps your relationship with a major actor happy. It keeps your relationship with a prolific producer happy. If you let this director direct this one film in hopes that she will also direct this other one. You basically make a twofer deal that, you know, we will do this one that we don’t genuinely believe in and you’ll get this other one.

And classically, some directors and some producers had put films where they basically say, “Over the course of my contract, I am allowed to come to you with a project and you can pass but I can still say, uh-uh, you’re making it for up to this budget.” And that has rarely ended well for the people involved.

Craig: Yeah. You know, a lot of the let’s say, we’ll call them privileges that people had are gone. The business has changed in such a way that these perks have disappeared because everybody got burned and because the corporate control has become that much more scrutinizing. The problem with things like put movies where you can say, “No, no. You have to make this movie,” is they have to make it. And I’ve found in my life in all aspects, forcing people to do something doesn’t work out in any situation, even if it’s good for them.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Unless they’re children, it doesn’t work. You want people to actually want to do something with you.

John: Absolutely. So we were talking before about some bad ideas that become movies. But sometimes you start with a really good idea. And sometimes even at the marketing or kind of deep within that movie you can see like, “There’s a good idea there but it didn’t work.” And so let’s talk about some of those things that happened to those good ideas that ended up resulting in bad movies.

So, start with the director. Sometimes just the wrong director was hired or a theoretically good director who just made weird choices that did not end up serving the film. And you and I both have been involved in projects where like, wow, with a different director, that could have worked out so much better than it did work out right here.

Craig: Yeah. This is the eternal lament of the screenwriter, if only for the director. And it’s a little unfair in the sense that when the director works out, we go, “See, they did what we told them to do in the script.”

John: Obvious.

Craig: And great. And when it doesn’t, “Ah, the director.” The truth is that all movies are impacted dramatically by so many of the director’s decisions. And when a movie works, you have to give the director an enormous amount of credit. And then when a movie fails, you have to give the director an enormous amount of blame. It’s a high-risk/high reward gig.

The mismatch of director and material, more often than not, is the thing that sinks a movie. They have a vision and the vision is competing with the material. They are trying to make a different movie. And what happens is everybody else is hanging on saying, “Well, the reason we hired you in the first place, the reason we’re spending all this money is because this feeling we had about a different vision. So we’ll just keep tugging you this way and the director will keep tugging that way.” And then you end up with this mush.

John: Yeah. You’re somewhere in the middle and that’s never where you want to end up.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, almost as commonly as the director being the wrong person, it’s a star being the wrong person. And it’s not hard to think of examples of, “That was a great idea for a movie. That was not the person to star in this film.” And, you know, either that person was miscast in the sense of like you were making a comedy and that person is just inherently not funny. Or you don’t fundamentally believe the chemistry between these people that you’ve put up on screen together.

And that is terrible when it happens because you’ve wasted all of this time and money and energy on something that people just fundamentally don’t buy into.

Craig: Yeah. There’s two kinds of miscasting. There’s the kind where the director, again, simply doesn’t see a problem. They have a vision that is completely incompatible with the material and with the people now that they’ve placed in the position of performing the parts.

The other kind of miscasting is the studio forcing something. I’m not sure which one is more common. I can say this. I remember seeing a poster for The Truman Show before I knew anything about it and I thought, “So that’s miscast.” [laughs] Why is Peter Weir making that movie with that guy? It’s just miscast.

Awesome movie. My favorite Jim Carrey performance by far. Loved it. And it totally worked. Peter Weir is a master of casting, I would argue. His casting instincts are extraordinary. And he’s also cast people that I haven’t liked in other things and I’ve loved them in his movies. But then there are times where you go, “Why is that person in that movie?” That just feels like, “Well, it’s a movie star, so that’ll work, right?”

John: No.

Craig: No, it won’t.

John: No, it will not. It’s a real thing. And a good thought exercise is to imagine some of your favorite films and then imagine who their second choice was in that role, and it’s just not fundamentally the same movie. Indiana Jones, classically, it’s very hard to imagine that character not being Harrison Ford, of the films that we’ve seen him in.

And it doesn’t mean that he made the movie, you know, that movie was written and directed with, you know, incredible, intense care but there’s something right about him in that spot. And they were very smart in their casting to see him and say, “Oh, that is the guy who should do that.”

Craig: But he was not the first choice.

John: He was not the first choice. Wasn’t it Tom Selleck?

Craig: Tom Selleck.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Tom Selleck couldn’t do it ultimately because they wouldn’t let him out, schedule-wise, for enough time from Magnum, P.I.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And, you know, that’s just —

John: And Tom Selleck would’ve been fine. He’s a talented actor, certainly. But I don’t think, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the iconic movie with him in it.

Craig: You know, here’s the thing. Who knows?

John: Who knows?

Craig: Who knows?

John: We could be wrong.

Craig: You just don’t know. Like people start with an idea of who the star is and then the craziest things happen. You know, Jeff Conaway was supposed to be the start of Taxi.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, he got top billing and everything. Just didn’t work out that way.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Rob Lowe was supposed to be the star of The West Wing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Or West Wing, sorry. And it just didn’t work out that way.

John: Yeah, but that’s the luxury of television. In television, you can go episode by episode and sort of see what’s working and you can change along the way. A feature is like a TV show that you shoot exactly one episode of.

Craig: That’s right.

John: And you won’t know. And the cameras will be put away and you’ll be out there in the world and you won’t know. So you won’t know if you’ve made Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and you’ve created a huge star or you’ve made like a really creepy movie about a guy who hires a hooker but it’s trying to be funny.

Craig: Yeah. It’s sort of like the entertainment version of the nature and nurture situation. Television allows you to nurture something.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And you can impact it and affect it environmentally and change it as you need to. Movies are entirely about nature. I am putting some DNA together, clapping my hands, walking away. Hope to God I did it right [laughs] because that’s it. It is what it is.

John: But sometimes you can change things. And part of the way you change things is by, you know, editing the movie together, showing it to an audience and then making changes based on what the audience tells you. And I think you and I have both encountered suggestions from the audience that the studio will be very excited about that you know are like just the worst ideas imaginable.

And sometimes the studio will say yes because they want the audience to be happy and they’ll make choices that hurt the movie but might bump up the needle a tiny bit.

Craig: So, the idea of chasing a score was I think more prominent. In a strange way, I see it less and less now. You think you’d see it more and more. As studios become more corporate, they would adhere more to some kind of empirical evidence-based system of quality rather than trusting instincts. But the score has failed them so many times, so many times, that they are now smart enough, I think, to know score, shmore.

How did it play in the room? Let’s just feel the room. And then when people talk to us, let’s think about why they’re saying what they’re saying. Because they also have experienced where they didn’t do what the 25 people in the focus group said. “Oh, you should totally do this and this and this.” They listened, they heard the movie, they went back, they made the changes that they felt were right.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Came back to a new audience and it killed.

John: Yup. And so I don’t want to sort of denigrate all audience testing because it is a crucial part of sort of knowing what movie you actually made and how it plays to audiences. Seth Rogen camp I know is very well known for putting the video cameras in the theatre so they can actually go back to the tape and see, “Ah-ha, you thought this was funny but there’s actually no laugh. It’s not actually a joke.”

Craig: For comedy, I’m a huge believer on that and I know Todd Phillips does it for all of his movies. All the movies I did with David Zucker, we did it, because frankly, there’s a ton of debate in an editing room about, “No, people loved that.” “No, they didn’t.” “No, they didn’t.”

So all right, let’s go to the video tape. And then you can watch it. But the other great thing about watching that night vision video of the audience is you can see them getting bored, you can see them leaning forward because they’re into it. There are things that they do silently that are informative that you cannot see from the back of their heads.

John: Absolutely true.

Craig: So it’s really important to see and feel your movie with an audience. And you’re right, there are opportunities to “save a movie,” but only if the movie is savable. There’s a difference between this a good movie gone wrong and this is a bad movie.

John: Another framework I want to look at is sometimes a movie is mismarketed. And it’s not just that the trailer is wrong or the advertising is wrong, but literally, this was meant to be a tiny art film and now you’re trying to push it out to 2,000 screens and it cannot connect with that audience in that way. And I think we’ve all encountered films that got of pushed way beyond where they should have been and they suffered for it. They suffered from that expectation of like, “Oh, this was meant to be a giant crowd pleaser.” But no, it’s actually a movie that’s going to play really well at a festival. It was never designed to be going so big and so wide. You set this weird expectation by opening a certain way.

Craig: Yeah.

John: The same thing happens with the images you’re showing in your trailers, images you’re showing in commercials. If you’re selling something as, you know, a feel good comedy but it’s actually about suicide, you’re going to hit blowback and that’s going to hurt you down the road.

Craig: Yeah. I feel like there are two oppositional errors that occur with marketing. On the one hand, you have the filmmakers who feel a way about their movie and insist that the marketing reflect it. “I made a dark treatise blah, blah, blah. You’re trivializing it with this ridiculous ad. I need you to sell the movie I made.” And they do and everybody goes, nope. So that’s one kind. But the oppositional error to that is the marketing team says, “You know, our testing shows that blah, blah, blah in this segment and so forth, we’re going to sell this movie as a romantic comedy even though it’s not.”

And even putting aside the phenomenon of “I thought I was getting this, but I went to the movie and got that,” people don’t even go because they smell something wrong from the start. It seems synthetic. It seems like they’re forcing something that isn’t right. And these two kinds of errors occur all the time and it’s a discussion that frankly filmmakers and marketing executives need to have very early or else there’s trouble.

John: You will find that directors and screenwriters and the creative people on a movie don’t enjoy having this early marketing discussion because they feel like marketing is going to try to influence the movie they make. Well, they are to the degree that marketing is going to try to influence you to make a movie that they can actually market it.

And if they don’t understand how to market your film, you’re going to suffer down the road. So it’s eating your broccoli, go in and take that meeting and really talk through what it is you’re trying to do and what it’s trying to feel like. So you can be on something like the same page.

You know, when things work really well, sometimes, you know — this actually happened on Go — they cut a trailer that was actually really good. It helped inform us about our movie. It’s like, “Oh, I get what that movie feels like.” Actually, even better example is the first Charlie’s Angels because we were floundering and we were in a cut and we just didn’t know where we were. And then the good folks at Columbia or whatever trailer house they used, cut a really great trailer for it and like got us really excited. It’s like, “Oh, let’s make the movie that goes with that trailer.” And we knew that we had that movie in there? And that helped provide us some focus.

Craig: Yeah. There are unfortunately some movies that are wonderful and they are unsellable in a traditional way.

John: Yeah.

Craig: One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride. It’s probably one of everyone’s favorite movie. In a world without The Princess Bride, it’s hard to sell the Princess Bride. And in fact, they really struggled. The Princess Bride in 1987 opened to a $4.5 million which is not that great. And it ended up making $30 million which in 1987 just wasn’t that great.

Now, that of course, retrospectively has become a beloved classic and I fear the day that they reboot it. But really hard to sell because ultimately what made The Princess Bride great was that gestalt of the experience. It was one of those movies where you just needed to kind of see it. Another movie that I love is Time Bandits. I think Time Bandits is brilliant. And Terry Gilliam in particular has made a career of unsellable great movies.

John: Yeah, 12 Monkeys, yeah.

Craig: Unsellable, great movie. Baron Munchausen, unsellable, great movie. Time Bandits, unsellable, great movie.

John: Yeah. You know, I remember seeing Time Bandits in the theater and I think it was just one of those summer movie series when I was a kid in school. And so I had no idea what it was. But it was like, “Wait, this is a movie that exists in the world?” It was just so crazy pants.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I loved it.

Craig: It was mind blowing to me. And it was just so — I still and I will always for the span of my life, the dwindling span of my life, I will never forget the feeling I had when the dwarves started pushing on that kid’s bedroom wall and the wall started moving —

John: Yeah.

Craig: And became this crazy hallway through time. My little brain went, “What?”

John: What? It was an acid trip before acid.

Craig: I was. I mean, God, Gilliam, what a genius.

John: Yeah.

Craig: What a genius.

John: So before we go too deep into the, “Oh, it’s actually a good movie,” let’s do sort of cycle back through and say like, “You know what, sometimes movies just are bad.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: And we have to acknowledge that there are movies that are just — they’re just not good. And they flop because they’re terrible. And the take home I want everyone to have is that while you’re making them, you probably didn’t know they were terrible. I would also want everyone to know that it takes just as much work to make a bad movie as a good movie, like sometimes even more work because whatever happened that caused that bad movie to exist in the world was probably really challenging and painful for the people involved.

No one showed up on the first day and said like, “Let’s make a terrible movie.” They really thought they were making something good. They thought they were swinging for the fences. They thought they were taking a brave dare, a risk that was going to pay off, and it didn’t.

And so we need to make sure that we don’t slam the bad movie so hard that no one tries to take any risks. And I kind of have a worry that’s what’s happening overall as an industry right now, is that we are making safer and safer bets, you know, expensive bets but safer bets on the films that will do okay kind of no matter what.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I don’t know if you feel the same way.

Craig: I do. I mean the fear of the bad movie isn’t a fear so much of just losing money, it’s a fear of how traumatic the process is in your attempt to save it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: When critics say this movie is lazy, that’s the stupidest thing any critic can say. The least lazy movies are the bad ones.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There is nothing easier than taking a very healthy baby home from the hospital. Well, there is a lot of things easier, but in the world of babies, healthy baby is the easiest baby. The hard baby is the one that’s sick because that one is stressful and requires resources and time and anxiety and sometimes cannot be saved and there’s terrible grief and you’re working crazy hours through while you’re also suffering and you’re thinking to yourself, I’m now working around the clock on something that can only be bad.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I’m trying to get it from, “Oh my god, that’s the worst thing ever to merely bad.”

John: Yeah. We’ve both had conversations where, you know, under the code of silence we say like, “I’m trying to bring this from like a D to a B-.”

Craig: Right.

John: And you know, there’s not an A to be found, but you’re trying to make it up to just a salvageable level where you can at least see the intention behind it. The good moments are highlighted and you’ve gotten through the bad moments as painlessly as possible.

Craig: Yes. There is a misconception among many people that study film, because they are consumers of completed products, that movies are excreted whole from a mind. This is not at all true ever. All movies are like cars that are being built while you’re driving them.

John: Yup.

Craig: All of them. And every good movie is a compendium both of intentional smart choices and unintentional happy accidents. Every bad movie similarly is a compendium of bad choices and bad accidents. And when you’re on one of those cars and you know basically now the idea is can we build this enough so that when we crash [laughs] we don’t die, we’re just trying to maybe get hurt —

John: Yeah.

Craig: It is absolutely brutal. So from the studio side of things, there is a tendency to give a certain kind of direction to all films in which you’re aiming for the middle.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Unfortunately, in your desire to avoid negative outcomes, you begin to create negative outcomes.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because pushing things towards the middle definitely can reduce the risk of a bad outlier but it also reduces the risk of a good outlier.

John: You look at, you know, Pirates of the Caribbean. You look at, you know, the choice to let Johnny Depp go in that crazy way with his character, that was a risky thing. And while you’re watching it, in dailies, you’re like this doesn’t make any sense. This is going to end poorly for everyone. And yet, it was just fantastic.

You look at The Matrix, and while you’re getting the dailies of The Matrix, you’re like, “What? What is this?” Like people just flying around on wires? This makes no sense. And even though you read the script, I’m sure you’re watching those dailies come in and saying like I don’t know what we’re going to do here.

And until you had a trailer or some sort of cut together piece to show like, “Oh, that’s what this feels like,” you were, you know, panicked, I’m sure.

Craig: Yeah. I mean very famously Disney executives saw the initial dailies from Pirates of the Caribbean and they saw an unrecognizable movie star with gold teeth in his mouth and he was sort of swishing about. And they went bananas. And essentially what they were told by a very powerful producer was, tough. Now, that paid off. Later on —

John: Yeah.

Craig: Johnny, they got dailies where Johnny Depp was in white face wearing a dead bird in his hat and they probably looked at each other and said, “Oh, let’s not freak out.” I mean [laughs] the last time we freaked out, we were totally wrong.

John: We have the same director.

Craig: Right.

John: We have the same actor.

Craig: Right.

John: We’ve got a big title. Everything’s going to be fine.

Craig: Well, that’s life, you know.

John: That’s life.

Craig: That’s life. I mean I guess one argument could be, “Hey, Goldman’s Law as true as ever. No one knows anything, so you might as well not worry about anything and just lean back and hope,” right? I mean I think most people in the movie business think they’re playing poker when really they’re playing roulette.

They think they have some kind of strategic edge, some way of — some predictable path to victory. Yeah, it’s basically a big wheel and a ball is bouncing around, for a lot of people. There are some filmmakers who seem to defy that. But most filmmakers have had at least one Waterloo.

John: Yeah, it’s going to happen. Craig, I thought that was a terrific analogy to end it on, that the roulette is the truth behind it. The question of why do bad movies get made? Because it’s ultimately kind of random. And there’s going to be wonderful successes but there’s going to be some disasters along the way.

Craig: There will be disasters along the way. Alas.

John: Alas. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a YouTube video series, so Craig won’t watch it because he doesn’t like YouTube.

Craig: Oh, I love YouTube.

John: Oh, okay. But in the start of the program, you said you didn’t watch YouTube things.

Craig: I did?

John: Oh, you said you wouldn’t want to make a YouTube thing I guess.

Craig: Yeah, I know. I don’t want to — yeah, no, never.

John: Yeah. And I honestly would not want to make something as sophisticated as this thing. But God bless the people who do this. So it’s called Cash Course, so John Green who wrote The Fault in Our Stars is involved with the whole thing and behind it and bless you for doing this.

But the one I want to point people to because listeners to our show would be fascinated by this, I hope, is an explanation about copyright, exceptions, and fair use by Stan Muller. And it’s really well done. It’s animated and sort of talks through, you know, in course of a daily life, you’re going to violate copyrights so many times. In most cases, no one will ever come after you but they theoretically could. And so then it talks through what fair use is, the current state of how you can get away with fair use. And it’s just a really smart explanation of copyright and fair use.

But the whole series is great. And there are things about astronomy and world history and U.S. history. So I highly recommend it and I intend to stick my daughter in front of these videos at some point.

Craig: That’s great. You know, I’m a big copyright nerd, so I love that they’re doing that. And people tend to not understand a lot of that. There are so many misconceptions about how that all works. And one of the big misconceptions is that it’s binary like that is a violation or not a violation. Yeah, but then there are violations that have damages and violations that damage no one. And so at that point, there’s really, what’s the problem?

John: Yeah.

Craig: So there’s all sorts of interesting things about that. So great. Good recommendation. My One Cool Things is maybe a cool thing that may be happening. There is a rumor and it feels pretty good to me that at the next E3 convention, that’s the big video game convention, here in Los Angeles, I believe, there will be a 20 to 30-minute demo behind closed doors of the upcoming game, Fallout 4. Did you play the Fallout series, John?

John: I did play the Fallout series. I enjoy it.

Craig: It’s great. So Fallout is from Bethesda, the folks that also do The Elder Scrolls series. And this is basically, they are kind of the same game. Elder Scrolls is a quest based solo adventuring game that takes place in an epic fantasy setting. And Fallout is a quest based solo adventuring game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, basically kind of the same thing. And they’re great if you love stories and narratives. It’s really, really addictive and fun. They tend to be huge games that are well crafted.

And it’s time, it feels like it’s time. So the release schedule from these two, they sort of alternate between them. Elder Scrolls 4 came out in 2006, Fallout 3 came out in 2008. Two years later, Fallout: New Vegas which was a very big expansion pack of Fallout 3. One year later, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Now, it’s been four years.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Now, during that four years, they did release their multiplayer online.

John: Yeah, The Elder Scrolls, the one where Rawson Thurber runs around and kills people.

Craig: Correct, exactly, but not right now because he’s directing a movie. But when he’s not directing a movie, Rawson runs around killing people in the world of Tamriel. But that’s kind of what they’ve been doing. So, I think I’ll say that was their kind of two-year thing because I do believe that came out in 2013, 2014.

John: But what if they’re doing nothing? What if they’re like sitting around and just like, you know, vaping this whole time?

Craig: It’s possible. I would be super angry. I’d just be so, so angry.

John: You owed me a game!

Craig: Well, you know, no, I feel like I — I mean [laughs] I remember when I got — when Skyrim came out, and I finally got it in the mail, I sat down, I put the CD in my Xbox and I went, “Ah, let’s begin.”

John: So good.

Craig: Let’s begin. This will be — I get to go away from my planet and go somewhere I would much rather be. [laughs]

John: [laughs] A post-apocalyptic wasteland? That’s a telling reveal into Craig’s soul.

Craig: Well, in Skyrim, it was a snowy, snowy fantasy wasteland —

John: Oh, that’s true.

Craig: Strewn with dragons. But yeah, my terrible post-apocalyptic wasteland awaits me. I think it’s time. I think they’re going to be announcing it. I’m hoping that — my guess is it will be probably Christmas or a little after Christmas.

John: Actually, before Christmas if they can possibly do it. But the triple A console games, they really do like to sell those for Christmas.

Craig: They try. They definitely try. So with Skyrim, they did release it on November 11, 2011, 11-11-11. What I’m scared is about is they’ll go yeah, that’s what we’re going to do so we’re just going to basically take another year and a half and I’m going to be sad.

John: So out of our 50,000 weekly listeners, I just have a feeling that somebody works at Bethesda. So if you are that person who works at Bethesda and you’re like, you know what, I want to whisper something to Craig’s ear or invite him to a secret closed demo in E3, I think you should write in to ask@august.com and let me forward to Craig because Craig never checks the email.

Craig: [laughs] I can’t check the email. You don’t give me the password.

John: We don’t give Craig the password. It would be so dangerous. I only forward him the really nice emails. And the really nice email from Bethesda saying, “Oh you know what, you should come check out the new thing we’re building.” That would be great.

Craig: Hey, it’s like we do have a podcast, people listen to us, right? So let me come see this thing.

John: Because lord knows that game they’re making will not be successful without —

Craig: No. Not with our 50,000 listeners. [laughs] It will never happen.

John: Meanwhile, I’m making a game that won’t even play the demo for yet.

Craig: I’ll play it. [laughs]

John: You’ll play it. I’m going to send you a link to the Kickstarter page after this so you can see what we did because it looks, it turned out really well.

Craig: The thing is like I have this discussion with my son all the time. And as I’m having it, I know that I’m just as bad if not worse. Like look, it’s better to like — if you’re really into Pokemon video game, it would be better for you to actually, like, let’s transition you to just like the cards and stuff so that it’s reading and not just video game stuff. But I also am guilty.

John: [laughs] Guilty.

Craig: Guilty.

John: Craig’s does read. I see him reading through his Dungeons and Dragons manuals at every session.

Craig: Oh yes.

John: He loves to read.

Craig: I do love reading that.

John: He also loves to read your comments on our podcasts, so if you would like to leave a comment about this show or any show, the great place to do it is to leave us a review on iTunes because we actually do look at those and those are terrific and they help other people find us. While you’re on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app which just got updated, so it should not get frozen like midway through an episode anymore, which happened to some people, so sorry about that.

We also look at the comments on Facebook. And so people left some good suggestions on Facebook for things for our 200th and for USB drives, so thank you for that. The short little bits of nuggets for Craig, you can send to @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel as always.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli who’s also busy doing the score for our video for this, so thank you Matthew for all your hard work. As we quickly approach our 200th episode, I would ask you who would you love to have be on the show as a guest? I can’t promise you it will happen on the 200th, but we talked about our thoughts, but if you have any thoughts for somebody you’d love to see come on the show, always let us know those.

And Craig, thank you so much for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: All right. Have a great weekend.

Craig: You too, bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Aspartame on Wikipedia
• CW Picks Up ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ As Hourlong Series on Deadline
• John’s Screencasts on Entering a scene, Writing better action, and Writing better scene description
• One Hit Kill launches today on Kickstarter
• First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy
• Rob Schneider Is A Carrot
• Copyright, Exceptions, and Fair Use: Crash Course Intellectual Property
• Fallout 4 Rumor Puts Reveal at Bethesda’s E3 Conference on IGN
• Outro by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)