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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/poking-the-bear).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 194 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, on the last episode we promised that this would be a really big show this week. And we will not fulfill that promise.

**Craig:** No. Well, it is a big show because we have a lot to talk about and it’s all good stuff, but the big thing that we were really excited about we’re kind of pushing down and episode or two. Look, here’s the best news of all: I think people are going to listen to this episode. They’re going to go, whoa, you mean that’s a B for these guys? That’s an A plus for everybody else.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re going to raise the bar even higher for that episode that we pitched and promised but didn’t actually deliver this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We will.

**John:** Yeah, we will, eventually. Last week on the show I told you about a special screening of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder that’s happening this week and it’s happening this Saturday, the 25th, at 5pm. If you are a WGA member you can RSVP for it. And if you do, you will get to see me speak with Bruce Joel Rubin, the writer of both of those movies, at a Q&A between those two films. So, if you want to come see that and you’re a WGA member, there is a special link in the show notes you can follow for that and RSVP.

There’s a pretty good chance that they may open up some seats for everybody else who is not a WGA member, so if you follow me on Twitter, @johnaugust, I will let you know if it becomes available for everybody else. And that’s it for the news.

**Craig:** Nice viewing experience there at the Writers Guild Theater. And Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, just not only two good movies, but just entertaining movies.

**John:** Absolutely. We didn’t do a special episode about Jacob’s Ladder, but we could do one.

**Craig:** We could.

**John:** And, of course, we have the episode about Ghost. You can go back to and listen if you want to get up to speed with your Ghost experience.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Craig, did you see in the news that the Writers Guild East added some new members?

**Craig:** I did. They went and organized, that’s our union term for bringing people in an employment situation under the fold of the union and under the fold of the union agreement. They organized writers at Gawker, the website notable for gawkery. Whatever they do over there.

**John:** Or for commenting on things in culture, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re kind of a gossip — they’re a gossip website. I mean, let’s face it.

**John:** Gossipy, yeah.

**Craig:** Sort of a junkie gossip website. But that’s okay. Sometimes you’re in a junkie gossip mood.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And occasionally Gawker — in that Internet way they defy their own brand. Sometimes they do remarkable stuff actually. So, they kind of —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** They hit extremes of god, and wow, very cool, as do we all. What’s interesting about this is that this is not audio visual and I think this may be the first time that anyone who does not do an audio visual job has been organized into the guild. I could be wrong, but I think this may be it.

**John:** So let’s talk about this, because we think of the Writers Guild representing film and TV writers and sort of people who make fiction stuff for screens is what I sort of think about. But we do have some journalists who are part of the Writers Guild. There’s a few little bits of things that are not what we think about as being Hollywood in the Writers Guild. And this is a new direction.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, the Writers Guild does represent some writers for news broadcasts in Los Angeles and back east, mostly back east. Some radio news as well. But it’s always been audio/visual. And whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

This is new. Now, on the one hand, you know, I’m fine. Look, the East — the East is the East. One day I’ll do a whole thing about the East and how they drive me crazy. But there’s nothing to complain about here. I mean, I think anybody that works a writing job that can be afforded union protections, salary, minimums, credit protections, pension and health, those are good things. I hope they get all of those things. And since they are working as work-for-hire, it makes sense.

Is there a downside? No. It’s just that there’s no larger upside for the union. You know, when the union talks about organizing, the idea ultimately is that you should be organizing, there are two basic strategies. One strategy is organize massive quantities of workers so that you can use your total strength as leverage for individual contract negotiations. Like, SCIU.

**John:** Yeah, that service workers union is incredibly powerful and huge.

**Craig:** Enormous. And they have — if you said well what’s a service worker? Anybody from a janitor to a nurse. I mean, they’ve got — it’s just an enormous range of types of employees and types of work situations with god knows how many contracts. I mean, I can’t even imagine how many contracts they negotiate on a rolling basis.

The Writers Guild has always been the other kind which is to organize a specialized group of people who do something rare and because you essentially control the rare employees that people want, you have leverage to bargain on their behalf. And that’s SAG essential, the SAG/AFTRA version, definitely the DGA version, definitely the Writers Guild version.

The East seems to be kind of dabbling with this other version, which is fine. I don’t think they’ll ever accrue massive quantities in such a way that it would kind of sway industries, but it’s good for those writers. So, I guess the winners are those writers.

**John:** I would hope so. I definitely see what you’re saying though in terms of there’s the model of going really big and sort of getting as many people into the fold as possible, but you risk losing focus. And in the times where I’ve had conversations with Writers Guild members who are working in TV journalism, it is just such a different world that I worry sometimes that we’re not able to adequately represent their special needs and concerns. You know, on a daily basis they’re not facing the same kinds of things we’re facing.

So, the useful thing about having a guild be so focused on one specific thing is we can keep our eye on that ball and nothing gets sort of dropped. and I worry that in trying to get more people involved with the guild, you’re going to lose that kind of focus.

**Craig:** You’re right to be worried about that. The way that the West and East break things out, as you know, because you’re on the negotiating committee frequently, the West takes negotiation point on the big contract for film and television writers — the film and television writers making primetime TV shows, writing movies, and so on and so forth. Cable shows, too.

The East takes point on news contract negotiations primarily. They do have a culture of this on their end of things. It’s preferable, if you’re choice is I work at Gawker and my choice is no union or the Writers Guild East, no question. The Writers Guild East will — should be at least better for you.

But what would be better still would be joining a union that actually represents a lot of shops like Gawker. And that is not the WGAe. Nor, will it ever be.

**John:** Yeah. Being naïve, I don’t know that there is any union organization that really is representing these kinds of writers right now. And I think there’s a case to be made for — right now it’s Gawker, but there’s certainly companies that are making things that are more like what we normally do. So you look at BuzzFeed with the video stuff they’re doing. You look at Maker Studios or any of these places that are doing video design for the Internet, some of those places are in this murky middle where it’s very much more like our TV kind of model.

And when we do the big negotiations for the big contract, whenever we’re dealing with our major studio partners, the web stuff that they’re doing, that’s always a concern for sort of we want to be covered when we’re doing that. But these little indie shops, maybe you start covering more of those writers and getting them the pension, health, welfare, everything else they should have.

**Craig:** Yeah. The tricky part is you would probably need to create a separate contract. So, here in this case, they don’t even have a contract. What they’ve gotten essentially is approval from those writers to represent them. And now they’re going to negotiate a contract with the company. By the way, that may not work. I mean, that’s the other thing. But hopefully it does. I would be surprised if it didn’t.

For us on our end, when you look at something like BuzzFeed, it is a non-union shop. It’s a massive non-union shop. Most of this stuff out there now is non-union. Everybody’s been trained to work non-union. So, it’s harder and harder to organize those places. If we do organize them, we will need to create a new contract.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what the Writers Guild is particularly good at is enforcing one contract that blankets one industry. What the Internet is really good at is defying that. So, you can’t find a contract that both BuzzFeed and Gawker and HuffPo, and some other major provider, that they’re all going to agree to the way that Fox, Sony… — Frankly, the situation that we have almost can’t ever happen again.

The situation we have with the studios, which is why I’m always keen to preserve it, I think, for as long as it’s preservable. But, you know, for the Gawker writers, I think this is a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing. And I hope that the Writers Guild East does a good job on their behalf.

**John:** Sounds good. So, for the bulk of our podcast today, we are going to be talking some follow up about the previous episode and the credits situation. So, we did a long podcast last week about how credit is determined for writing feature films. And so we had a bunch of questions from listeners who wanted to know more stuff, or had specific situations, so we’ll try to address those questions and concerns. We’re going to talk about Writer X, who is a mysterious figure who showed up on the scene to annoy Craig mostly.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s true.

**John:** And we’ll talk about sort of the role of anonymity and sort of authority in that space. We’re going to look at this sort of weird email we got from somebody about this iFilm group and what appears to be sort of a really shady situation. And we don’t know anything too specific about his one company, but sort of general patterns to watch out for if someone says they are interested in your script. Well, let’s make sure they really are a real person. And, finally, we’re going to take a look at the GLAAD inclusion report, which is basically the gay and lesbian group that looks at media portrayals of gays, lesbians, and transgender people in movies and how they felt we did this year, or this past year in 2014, and how we could do better. So, we’ve got plenty of show this week.

**Craig:** So much show. Let’s dive in.

**John:** All right. So, let’s start with follow up on our credits episode. So, we’ll start with a really simple one. Somebody on Twitter wrote me to ask, “Being an arbiter seems like a lot of work. Do arbiters get paid?”

**Craig:** Yes. We get paid $400,000 per arbitration. [laughs]

**John:** Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

**Craig:** It would be so wonderful.

**John:** Everyone would line up to do it.

**Craig:** I know. No, in fact, we get zero dollars.

**John:** Yes, we get zero dollars. So that’s another reason why it’s a huge commitment, because that’s money you’re not making doing your writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There has been discussion about should we have professional paid arbiters, and there’s logic for that and logic against that, and we won’t get into it, but it’s a source of great controversy.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re basically — it’s the jury system. Essentially you’re a citizen of the United States, that comes with a bunch of benefits. One of the costs is you got to show up every now and then and do your part.

**John:** But jurors do get paid. Not much.

**Craig:** Well, in that case it’s not at all like the jury system. Scratch that. It’s so much worse. Not like the jury system was great anyway.

**John:** It’s the worst thing ever. And also like being a juror is not that much work. It’s tedious, but it’s not that much work. Being an arbiter is a lot of hard work. There’s a lot of reading involved and thinking.

**Craig:** I’ve clearly never been a juror.

Joe from — I just like saying Rancho Cucamonga — Rancho Cucamonga writes, “A script I co-wrote is tentatively going into production this summer and I fear the issue of credit is going to be a problem. This is a non-union, privately-funded indie movie, so I know I’m completely at the mercy of how the co-writer, who is also the movie’s director and executive producer, will assign credit. But I’m curious to know where I would stand if I were in the guild.” Good use of subjunctive.

“The script originated with the co-writer/director/executive producer as a simple log line and an extremely vague outline, about a dozen general plot points with virtually no details to any of them. I took it from there and fleshed out a more detailed outline. Then I came up with character names, their jobs, the settings, the subplots, all the supporting characters, and changed the ending. We worked off of that outline and we’re each happily sharing screenplay credit, but he made it pretty clear to me that he doesn’t think I should share story credit.

“He came up with the original idea and the structure, but I really came up with everything else. Should I share credit or is he right to claim that for himself?”

**John:** So, first, Joe, congratulations on your movie hopefully going into production. I hope it turns out really, really well. Your situation is sort of why you would love to have a Writers Guild contract for your movie, so that these things could be determined correctly and fairly. You have very little leverage in this situation, so you’re going to probably take the credit that you receive, which will be the shared screenplay credit and that’s how it’s going to be. And unfortunately that’s how it is for most of the film producing world.

Most of the film producing world doesn’t have the equivalent of our Writers Guild to figure out who the credited writer should be. And it is that sort of horse trading kind of nonsense that you’re experiencing right now. Craig, do you have any advice for Joe?

**Craig:** Well, no, because you’re right, and he’s acknowledging there’s really nothing he can do. I guess his question is “but is this right?” And, frankly, unless we read the material, we have no way of telling you if it’s right or not. I mean, what you’re saying is that you contributed to story. That in and of itself does not automatically qualify you for story credit. You would need to show per the Writers Guild arbitration a significant contribution to story.

And that, of course, is a term of art and interpretation.

**John:** So, let’s pretend that we are two of the three arbiters who receive this. Let’s pretend it goes to WGA arbitration. The kinds of things we’d be looking at when we’re determining story credit is we would be looking at written material. So, probably first piece of written material we’d get was this original sort of beat — whatever this co-writer/director came up with. And if it really is as vague as he says, and it’s 12 bullet points and a vague sort of premise of things.

You would look at this thing and if there really were no character names and there were no sort of details about who these people were and what was going on and sort of how the story progressed, maybe Joe could make a good case for sharing story credit. What would you be looking for for figuring out story credit?

**Craig:** Well, right off the bat he says he has a fleshed out outline that he did. So, now he has an outline. And outlines are by definition story material. They do not contribute to screenplay. They contribute solely to story. Sometimes I think to myself one of the ways you can determine what’s what is could this go in an outline, or would it need to be part of a screenplay. The fact that he invented a bunch of characters and a bunch of subplots, the fact that he changed the narrative, the basic narrative of the ending, these are all things that do contribute significantly to story.

From what he’s describing, if I believe everything he says, then of course, yes, he should share story credit. If he’s a little delusional, and it happens to the best of us, maybe not. But, given the situation that he’s in, I think there’s really no purpose in fighting over it. There are no residuals. It is at this point it’s essentially a question of vanity and fairness. Right? It’s both things.

Well, let’s discard vanity and let’s unfortunately just acknowledge that this is what happens. When you take the money to write a non-union project, you are in part taking money to absorb a certain systemic unfairness and this may be one of those.

**John:** So, our friend Howard Rodman would be upset with us if we didn’t mention the fact that there is an indie contract for the WGA. And in the future, if in this kind of scenario, you might look into whether that indie contract would be useful for you in the situation.

I cannot recall the details, whether arbitration is a thing you get with that indie contract or not, but it does give you certain protections down the road. It does give you the ability to have a little bit more control over your work than you might otherwise have. So, it would be something for a writer like Joe to look at in the future.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next?

**John:** Will Eisner’s Ghost writes, “The opening title sequence for Netflix’s Daredevil reads ‘Created by Drew Goddard.’ It seems strange for Goddard to take this credit when he’s simply adapting preexisting characters and preexisting plots. I’ve noticed very little in terms of actual content creation, but direct plot and character adaptation.

“Frank Darabont took a ‘Developed by’ credit when he put together The Walking Dead. And Dexter’s opening credits are ‘Developed for television by James Manos, Jr.,’ then ‘Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.’ My question is that if enough of the creation of the plot and characters was done for Marvel comics as a work-for-hire, and then directly adapted by Netflix, might these comic book writers protest the WGA credits for Daredevil TV show? Even if they are not WGA writers and the work was done for another medium?”

Craig, what’s your take on this kind of credit situation?

**Craig:** Well, to be fair, I consider myself a feature film credits expert. I do not know much about television credits, so I can’t tell you exactly what the rules are that govern the created by credit versus the developed by credit, and how they do source material credits. What I can tell you is that the comic book writers of Daredevil have absolutely no standing to protest any WGA credits. They are not WGA members. They did not contribute material under a WGA contract to this television show.

The copyright for Daredevil is owned by Marvel. Marvel obviously made an agreement with Netflix. That agreement included a licensing of the material. And I presume a provision that the source material be acknowledged. But beyond that, no, the comic book writers unfortunately have no say. Just as, by the way, you and I have no say if they take — you know, we have some separated rights as part of our deal, which comic book writers don’t. But generally speaking when we write a movie for a studio, they get to do with it whatever they want, and we don’t really have much of a say at all.

**John:** Yeah. So, it is important, that distinction that all the rights to Daredevil, that is a copyright controlled by Marvel. And so when those writers who were writing stuff for Daredevil, everything they did, 100 percent of that gets owned by Marvel. And so when it comes time to make it into a TV show, that whole bundle of rights, it’s as if the author is Marvel, not that the author is the individual writers underneath that. And so Marvel gets to say what the source material is.

In terms of whether it should be created by or developed by, there are specific rules in the WGA contract about what that language is supposed to be, but it’s also a negotiated thing as well. And I’ve seen developed by on certain properties, and created by on other properties. And I cannot honestly tell you why some are one thing, and some are another thing.

I remember the old Lois & Clark TV show was the first time I saw the Developed by credit, but there’s been other cases where a similar kind of situation would have a Created by credit. So, I don’t know the specifics of Drew Goddard’s case.

**Craig:** All right. Well we did as best as we could with that, Will Eisner’s Ghost. We had something here from Jake. He says, “I began working on a project several years ago with a friend of mine. We did not get very far in the writing stage, just had a few of the basic plot points worked out, and some character notes. Since then, that friend and I had some problems and do not speak anymore.” Ooh, this is getting good.

**John:** I actually cut out one sentence here.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** I cut out one sentence that talked about sort of like how the friend was really lazy.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I guess it’s back in, isn’t it? Cause the problem was laziness. Jake continues, “Recently, I’ve picked that project we were working on back up. I’ve made great progress.” Boy, do we get this all the time. “I’ve made great progress and I am currently past the outline and now actually on a first draft. I’m worried, though, that if this script gets produced he will have problems with not being involved anymore. I’m willing to negotiate some credit, I suppose, but don’t really know what those credits should be. Neither of us are WGA members yet, so this question isn’t so much about arbitration yet as it is about ethics. So, what do you think?”

Well, John, what do you think?

**John:** I think this is an incredibly common situation. And you are best served by having the conversation now if possible. You might be even better served by writing something else, because it could just be a really uncomfortable thing down the road.

I think it would be amazing if Jake actually ended up being the co-writer and director from the previous — the Joe from Rancho Cucamonga example. At one time I want to have like both sides of this conversation of the same thing.

**Craig:** That would be nice.

**John:** Like this guy says he should get story credit and he’s completely insane. This happens a lot where you’re sort of sitting around and you’re spitballing something and you’re like, yeah, let’s write this together, and then you kind of start, and you kind of stop.

I can think of at least a dozen examples of this happening among my friends. And in every circumstance the best situation would be to have the conversation right at the very start about how you’re going to do it and just write up an agreement between the two of you. No one ever does that, and so the next best solution I think would be to have the conversation now. The third best solution is to write something else or write something so different that it’s not recognizably the same idea. Craig, what’s your thought?

**Craig:** Well, I think that Jake is correct that it is about ethics, but what he’s leaving out is that it’s also about the law. Because he did in fact work on material with somebody else. They co-authored stuff. He may say that it’s some basic plot points and some character notes, but it’s stuff. That person owns the share of copyright on that stuff.

What Jake is doing now is creating a derivative work based on somebody else’s stuff. That is no bueno. If you go and you sell it, then what’s going to happen is your friend that you don’t talk with is going to get a lawyer and the lawyer is going to say, no, you actually can’t sell anything without us and we could scotch the whole thing, or hold you up for a bunch of money. Either way, you’ve wandered down a fairly treacherous path here, Jake.

And John is absolutely right. You must talk to him now and you must set an agreement now. And he should be included in some compensatory manner if you do sell it. But he also needs to kind of waive other interests in it. In other words, you want to be free and clear.

**John:** You do. And I’ve been in other situations where writing teams have broken up and what they’ll do is they’ll just sort of pick the projects and like each of them gets one of the two projects, or they’ll divide everything in half so that they don’t get weirdly entangled this way. Like the things that they were thinking about writing but they never really got started, they’ll make a list and actually divide those things up just to make things clear and safe and not crazy.

Since this was apparently the only thing you worked on with this person, you don’t have that ability to say like, hey, why don’t you take this idea and let me take this idea, and we’ll all call it even and be happy. You probably don’t have that, so you have that conversation and you say, hey look, do you remember that thing we were talking about writing? I think I have some really good ideas for it and I want to be able to do that. Are you cool with that? And if you are cool with that, can we just write something down agreeing on that? And the minute you say write something down, your friend’s barriers will go up. But, maybe you get through it.

**Craig:** Well I think then if I were Jake’s attorney I would say, listen, what we’re going for here is to get him to release all claims on this material. In order to release all claims on the material and to assign full and complete copyright to you, he’s going to need something in return, otherwise he’s a goof. So, what you promise in return is some percentage of any money that you make off of the project. And you can limit it in various ways, up to a certain amount, or so on and so forth, but that’s what a negotiation is.

Essentially what we’re talking about, Jake, is buying him out. And you don’t have to buy him out with money upfront. You can buy him out with a promise of some piece of money should you get anything. But you really can’t go forward without handling this now, because you are doing something that is both ethically wrong and legally untenable.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know that he’s doing anything ethically wrong yet. I mean, I think thinking through and figuring out what something could be is a natural function of a writer. It’s trying to sell it or trying to represent it as your own would be ethically wrong.

**Craig:** Well yeah. Precisely. I mean, I guess that that’s — I’m presuming. Yeah, if he writes it and puts in a drawer, sure, no harm/no foul.

**John:** Danny writes, “I have a question regarding where ghostwriting fits within the credits system. Obviously the term implies that no credit will be given, but who makes that decision? Is the WGA cool with that practice? And I guess more broadly, how prevalent is ghostwriting within the industry?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s an interesting question. There isn’t a lot of ghostwriting the way we think of it in terms of novels and so forth where Pete Rose writes a book about playing for the Reds, but we know that he didn’t write it. [laughs] Some guy wrote it and took a bunch of money and just let Pete Rose say I wrote it.

Far more common in our industry is a bunch of people openly work on something and then one of them is assigned credit. There are times when individuals don’t want credit. I’ve worked on things where part of the deal was I don’t want credit for this. I’m not doing it for credit, it’s not the kind of movie that I think I should have my name on, or I deserve to have my name on. Or, I’ve done a job where I knew the people who I was rewriting briefly and I frankly just didn’t want to get into a thing with them, because I like them. So, in those cases you can say as a writer I’m requesting that I don’t receive credit, and the Writers Guild and the arbiters tend to honor this, unless it seems extraordinarily fishy, no problem.

There are pseudonyms where you can write something under a name that isn’t your own. Those are subject to some rules. For starters, you have the right to use a pseudonym if you make under I think it’s $250,000 for the project. If you make over that amount, you don’t have the right to use one. You have to ask. You have to ask the studio for permission. And we can understand why that exists, because sometimes they want to say “From the writer of so-and-so,” or they want to say award season voters, look, we got this guy to write this thing.

There are times, I have heard of situations where writers are paid to write something and then they do what we call farm it out. They turn around, they hand the job to somebody else who truly works in the ghostwriting way, writes the material. Then the writer who has been hired kind of does it a once over, or blesses it, and then sends it in as his or her own work.

I’ve heard of this. I’ve never actually seen it happen. There’s no concrete examples I’ve ever been shown of it happening. Personally, I find that notion to be odious, to the extreme. But I guess that would be the breadth of ghostwriting in our business.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to initially sort of dismiss this question altogether saying like ghostwriting doesn’t really exist. And it’s not a term you actually hear. Like ghostwriting is something you think about with books. It’s not a thing you think about with movies, partly because we have a whole credit system and there’s a reason why people are credited as writers.

But that last scenario you described is a real thing and whenever you hear about it happening you’re like, whoa, that’s crazy. And I actually haven’t heard about it for quite some time. But there was sort of a legend of an A-list screenwriter who apparently did have a team of people who wrote with him or all together and they would do a first pass and he would clean it up. And it always felt really, really weird and gross and fishy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not a secret. It’s Ron Bass and he talked about it at length. Ron was a lawyer prior to becoming a screenwriter. And when he became screenwriter, he hired a lot of people as essentially interns, writing assistants, writing — I don’t know what you’d call them. And he would give them assignments and he would give them assignments on things that he was writing, but the idea being and now I’ll collect it and now I will run it through my typewriter and so when it comes out it’s my work.

And he was open about it and I think that in part was why it wasn’t unethical. Nobody that paid Ron Bass money didn’t know that this was part of how he worked. And for the time that he was working constantly in the business, people appreciated the work, so everything was fine.

It’s — I’ve heard of a couple of people though that do this quietly. And the idea is, okay, as writers we know it’s a little bit of feast or famine. Sometimes it’s frustrating when you hit one of those feast patches and you take a job and then somebody calls you up five days later and says I’ll give you twice as much for this. And you think, oh well, I would sort of — I could see myself writing that, but I can’t because I’m writing this. Oh, I know, I’ll take the money, [laughs], and I’ll turn around and I’ll pay some tiny pittance of it to desperate writers who want a shot. And they’ll understand it’s a ghostwriting situation. And then I’ll get all that money.

Well, great, except boo. That’s not cool. I mean, what we have is our name. We are representing that this is our work. And, frankly, if you do that, you’re going to sink your own ship pretty quickly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s your reputation.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a different thing than I know writers who are sort of in that feast period who will be approached with something and say like I cannot do it, but I will oversee another writer doing something, and where they’re not coming in as — or basically they’ll team up with somebody to do it, like somebody who has a little bit more time on their plate. That I totally get. But what you’re describing, that sort of shady like someone else is actually doing it feels not only kind of unethical, but is actually probably in violation of the contract that they signed.

**Craig:** Oh, clearly.

**John:** Because the contract that they signed with whatever studio said that you will actually do this work. And for them to farm it out to somebody else is not going to be kosher.

**Craig:** 100 percent. It is a violation of your contract, both your legal contract, and your personal contract that you are going to do the work. When writers are supervising other writers, those writers are hired as the writers. They are participating writers. They are the ones who are up for credit. They’re acknowledged. Everything is above board. Essentially the screenwriter acts like a producer in that circumstance and that’s absolutely fine.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** All right. We got one more here. Stephen Lancellotti writes, “I just listened to the credits podcast a week after IFC Midnight released a poster for my movie, The Harvest. I’m now curious, is my name supposed to be on the poster in the same font size as the director? Probably won’t make a stink about it, but just wanted to know for the future.” And we’ll include a link to the poster which makes a very big deal of — it says The Harvest, and then underneath a Film by John McNaughton. And then tiny type for everybody else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If this is a Writers Guild movie, I don’t think that’s okay.

**John:** I don’t think it’s okay either. I think if you’re crediting the director in that larger type size, I think you have to credit the writer in the same size type. I think it’s a problem.

**Craig:** I think you do. I think you do. So, but the rules are arcane. There are all sorts of little twisty bitsies. You know, maybe if it’s a promotional thing, or if it’s prior to credits being fixed, or maybe if it’s home video as opposed — I don’t know all the ins and outs. But —

**John:** That’s what I was thinking, too. I think there might be a special case for home video versus theatrical.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think Stephen has a valid point. But he also has a movie, so congratulations on your movie existing in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. You know, you can call up the guild and just ask them the question and they’ll walk you through it. I mean, I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t a guild gig, then all bets are off. They can do whatever they want.

**John:** Yeah. But you know, Craig, someone who might have the answer to this question because this person knows a lot about sort of how writing works is, well, I say it’s a he but it could be a woman. Because it’s Writer X. Writer X is a brand new person who has just shown up on the scene thanks to a blog post on the Final Draft website.

And this got tweeted at us on Thursday or Friday, and it’s just delightful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I’m going to read just a little bit of it because we’ll read the sort of preamble and then we can get into a discussion about what Writer X is saying. So, this is me as Writer X. Okay?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “Hi, I’m Writer X. I’m a working screenwriter in Hollywood. Within the past five years I’ve been represented by two of the top talent agencies in town. I broke into the business with a spec. It got on the Black List and eventually became one of those elusive million dollar spec sales. Afterwards, I sold another spec, but that one only for half a million.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Still, it’s not a bad quote for someone just starting out. In addition to my spec sales, I’ve made successful pitches to two major studios. One of those pitches I did with an A-list director. We pitched it to the president of Universal Pictures. I’ve also nabbed several writing assignments with pretty much all the major studios and a number of A-list production companies. And I sold two TV pilots to two different networks.

“A-list actors and directors have been attached to my work. I’m collaborated with them.” It really does say I’m collaborated with them.

**Craig:** And I’m collaborated with them. [laughs] Wow.

**John:** “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff. Guess what I was doing before I became a professional screenwriter? I was a dishwasher.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, I mean, I think we should maybe just stop doing the podcast because we’ve just been knocked off our perch.

**Craig:** We’ve been knocked off our perch. I mean, this person, what a life they lead. [laughs] It just sounds so awesome. I mean, they’re —

**John:** It does sound awesome.

**Craig:** They are collaborated with them. I love that “I’ve been in the homes of the rich and famous and seen some pretty crazy stuff.” This is so exciting. Who put this forth? Oh, Final Draft. Okay.

So, how did this get received on Twitter, John? [laughs]

**John:** I think people loved it. I think among all the screenwriters I talked with, everyone loved every bit of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. The —

**John:** But maybe for the wrong reason.

**Craig:** Right. There was I think a 100 percent consistent reaction of absolute disgust for so many reasons. I mean, to start with, the boasting tone of this is kind of excruciating. There is this kind of writing that people do when they’re talking to people who want to break into something where they really casually rattle off this long list of wonderful things that have happened to them, just incredible things, and then they end up by saying, “And by the way, I was just like you.” Ooh, good sales pitch.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, if we could have gotten Tom Cruise and his Magnolia character to do this introduction, that would have been fantastic. Because you can sort of see him with a little mic and just like talking a little bit hyper and energized and the boom, like I was a dishwasher. I was just like you.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s pretty obnoxious. Well, it’s BS.

So, the first question is: is this person real? Or is this the marketing department? I honestly hope it’s just the marketing department inventing someone as a come on sales pitch because if it’s a real person, I’m embarrassed for that person. I’m embarrassed for them. And, frankly, I’m not angry at them because if they’re real, I feel like they’ve been hornswoggled and bamboozled. I blame Final Draft, because they must be getting compensated for this.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t understand the angle from anyone’s point of view.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I was looking at this from Final Draft’s point of view, and like well is this all a marketing department thing? But if it is the marketing department, it’s just so odd because it’s not on their front page at all. And I guess people only know about it because it was in some release that Final Draft put out, or some email that Final Draft put out. But even the URL for it is really strange.

So, the actual URL to get you there, it’s FinalDraft/ —

**Craig:** Discover/Videos. Yeah, it’s under a videos thing, even though it’s not a video. Like they’ve really buried it.

**John:** It’s buried. And it’s in a folder for Final Draft Writer App for the iPad/meet Writer X.

**Craig:** It’s almost like they were like, you know what, we’re going to be viral man. I

**John:** Yeah, maybe they wanted people to discover this.

**Craig:** It’s a hidden thing. Yeah. Well, we discovered it. That’s the bad news.

**John:** We discovered it.

**Craig:** So, putting aside Writer X, if Writer X exists, I would urge you, Madam or Sir, to reconsider this. This isn’t what you should be doing with your time. It’s not, frankly, what professionals do. We really don’t talk that way, for good reason. It’s obnoxious. And if you’re taking money from Final Draft, I don’t understand why since you’ve sold a script for a million and then sold another thing for half a million, and you’ve nabbed several writing assignments with all of the major studios, and a number of A-list production companies. You seem to be doing great, so you don’t need this money.

So then the question is well what’s in this for Final Draft, why are they doing this? And it really comes down to the nature of this kind of pitch, which is very common and you’ll see it in real estate a lot where somebody who is just soaking in prosperity comes on your television set and says to you, you poor retch at home, “I used to be just like you, but then I discovered the secret. And If you share my secrets, you too will be rags to riches.”

And what’s so insidious about this is that they’re going to give you some baloney secrets. I mean, in this case one of them is apparently Writer X is going to tell us what screenwriters are supposed to wear.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That there’s these secret, what is it? The secret dress code?

**John:** The secret wardrobe?

**Craig:** A secret dress code of writers, which is insane.

**John:** I’ve written about the secret dress code and what I’ve always said before is the writer should be the worst dressed person in the room, but that’s one sentence. That’s not —

**Craig:** It’s also, it’s not a secret. [laughs] It’s just you’ve already put it out there for free.

So, they’ll give you all the — yeah, it’s the unspoken dress code. Guess what? It’s been spoken. And then how to decipher the Labyrinthine language in Hollywood. For example, “If a studio exec just reads your first draft and tells you the writing is great, you think that’s good, well it’s not.” Uh, sometimes it is. Sometimes they say the writing is great and then they make the movie because the writing is great.

“Are you familiar with the phrases too broad or character’s arc? Well, you will be.” Oh, lord.

So, they’re dolling out these things that are either stuff everybody already knows, or just things that aren’t true. But what’s behind all of it, of course, is, oh, and naturally you’ll want to write on Final Draft. I mean, you’ll want to spend the whatever it costs now, $150 or $200.

**John:** Yeah. So, there’s no sales pitch in any of this so far. And so it’s the promise of like this is the first of like a regular series of columns. I would be surprised if there’s a second column, but it’s mean to be that this is going to be a bunch of columns coming through. And maybe eventually there’s supposed to be like some sort of Final Draft sales message, or it’s just supposed to be content that’s getting you to the Final Draft site. Or lend some authority to the Final Draft site.

But it’s a weird, gross kind of authority, or it’s not even authority. It’s trying to trade anonymity for secret or sort of like, you know, insider knowledge that no one wants you to have. But we want you to have the information. There’s nothing — there’s no secret information to have.

**Craig:** There is no secret information to have, but that ruins the promise. That ruins the hook.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** There’s this sect of evangelical Christianity called Prosperity Theology, which is all about preachers telling their congregation if you follow the bible the way I explain it, you’ll get rich. But not rich in spirit. [laughs] You’ll actually have money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On TV, I’m a big infomercial nut, so I’m sure some people out there remember Tom Vu. Tom Vu was a bus boy, see, same thing, who made millions.

**John:** A bus boy!

**Craig:** He made millions starting from nothing in real estate. Went on to be sued by his former investors. And then there was Don Lapre, the high school dropout. “I’m a high school dropout who learned the secrets of making money and now I want to share them with you.” And he was arrested, charged with fraud, and committed suicide in jail, which I hope doesn’t happen to Writer X or Final Draft, but you know, when you’re kind of playing in the same field as those guys, you got to stop and ask what are you doing here. For those of you who come across this stuff, just continually ask why.

Why is this here? Why does any company that’s looking for money out of my wallet, why do they need me to believe that for instance there are places that screenwriters should hang out. No, there ain’t. Not one. There is no one special secret place where screenwriters go and money falls from the sky and your scripts get better. No. It’s all baloney, right?

So, rags to riches stories are scam bait, 100 percent of the time. Secrets I’ve learned and will now share with you, scam bait, 100 percent of the time.

**John:** Yeah. I bet you could just sort of build a regular expression matching pattern and sort of search the Internet for that and you would find that invariably that is a scammy sort of come on and proposition. Like any time that you see that phraseology used together, there’s something bad and dangerous around there.

I was thinking about this from the perspective of this guy/this woman who is writing this and sort of what made them say yes, because I don’t get it. Like if we’re taking this at his or her word, that all this true, this guy has a million and a half in his pocket and has these writing assignments, I mean, unless there’s an extra punch line is like “and then I lost it all to drugs,” then I’m interested. Then I’m intrigued. But that doesn’t seem to be the situation here. So, what is the appeal of writing this column? And why not write it under your own name or write it some place that’s not on the Final Draft website?

I just fundamentally don’t get it. And that’s a strange thing to me.

**Craig:** Well, it’s so safe to do this. You know, you and I have used our own name forever and we are really among the very few. Most writers just don’t want the unwanted attention of jerks and there are jerks out there.

**John:** Yeah, there are.

**Craig:** And a lot of writers are nervous that if they say things under their own name that there are going to be reprisals from studios and so forth, and you and I have just never — we’ve never had that problem. And I also feel like we made calculations early on that we frankly weren’t going to be saying anything that should get us into trouble with somebody. And if it did, that’s not somebody we want to work with.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Everybody, I think, has a desire somewhere in them to want to be the sage on the mountain dolling out brilliant advice so that everybody can gather around. Okay, so here’s a rule, [laughs] baseball has the 5-10 rule. The 5-10 rule says if you’ve been with the same team for five consecutive years and you’ve been a Major League player for ten years or more, then you can’t be traded without your consent. 5-10 rule.

I like a 5-10 rule. You can be the sage on the mountain after five credits, or ten years of steady work.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Until you get the five credits, or the ten years of steady work, please do not doll out advice like the sage on the mountain. And, by the way, when you finally do get that stuff, don’t actually be the sage on the mountain. You and I, I don’t think either one of us feels like gurus or anything. It’s ridiculous. We’re just guys trying to do this gig and help people. So, you know, don’t.

**John:** You know, well what’s weird is I looked at all of Writer X’s boasting, and Writer X has not gotten a movie made. And that is a fundamental sort of flaw there in the sense of, you know, you look at the 5-10 rule, like well Writer X has zero credits. And so in many ways it’s back to sort of everyone else who is just writing about how to be a screenwriter. It’s like, well, this is where you’re at so far. And I think, you know, if you and I were to sit down with this Writer X and talk with him or her about what that journey has been so far, I bet there really is some interesting stuff to learn about what it’s like being on the Black List, what it’s like having those initial meetings. The things you’ve learned and done.

But doing it under this veil of anonymity, like you’re suddenly Julia Phillips and like you’re writing a tell-all memoir about Hollywood is just crazy-pants.

**Craig:** It’s particular crazy-pants when you’re using it to humble-brag or brag-brag, unhumble-brag. You know, you and I, we don’t talk about how much money we make. We don’t talk about who bought our pitches. We don’t talk about who we sat in a room with. And we don’t talk about that stuff because it’s gross. It’s just gross.

How will that help anyone else? You know, the people that are baiting a hook are making you jealous of them so that you want to be like them so that you can spend money towards them and something, right? Well, we don’t want your money. We just want you to be you.

You don’t need Writer X. You don’t need Final Draft, now more than ever. You don’t need the secret place, the dress code. You don’t need anything other than your talent, your hard work, a unique point of view, a passion, that’s what’s real.

Sorry, no pill for your weight loss today.

**John:** No, I’m sorry.

I just wanted to close on this topic of anonymity because I look at some of the Twitter accounts I follow, and I’ll follow like Mystery Creative Executive or Anonymous Production Assistant, and I find those things really interesting because in some ways they’re telling truth about little specific things that happen in their life. And they’re not trying to give you advice, but they’re just like articulating what it’s like to be in that place.

And there are in some cases really good reasons for their anonymity, because if they told you more about who they were, they would lose their job. And so that I totally get. And there’s a long tradition of that sort of anonymity. Like, look at the Federalist papers. Like those Fathers of the American Revolution, they didn’t sign their names to all those little pamphlets, but they were trying to sort of rally people to a cause or to explain what it’s like and what their opinion was, and that’s a great, wonderful, protected thing.

I don’t feel this at all here. I don’t feel like there’s any sort of call to action other than sort of like, hey, look at me how great I am. There’s no sort of insight here that is worth my putting up with your anonymity there. Everything that this person said in that initial column, if I knew their name I’d think, well, you sound like kind of a jerk, and kind of like a boastful jerk.

And it’s not making me feel any better about the advice you’re giving. It’s just frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s why they didn’t use their name. I mean, there’s nothing that this person said warrants anonymity. [laughs] Nothing. Right?

The only benefit that anonymity provides them, other than making them sound better than they are, is shielding them from direct vitriol. And shielding them from people calling them out directly and saying, what? For instance, I know this person and they didn’t do all that. Or, I know this person, and I don’t like their scripts. Or, I know this person, they’re cool, but what do they do — why are they telling people that there’s a dress code? There isn’t.

You know, and then it’s about you. You know, you and I are accountable for what we say. This woman or man — not so much. So, don’t listen to people that aren’t accountable. You can listen to them, but, you know, take it with a grain of salt, because they’re not accountable.

I mean, that’s why I love that Rachael Prior who used to be Mystery Brit Executive came out of the closet, so to speak, segue coming, and revealed that she was in fact Rachael Prior, an executive at Big Talk Productions, which is a very reputable British production company that’s co-run by Edgar Wright. It’s a real company and she’s a real person and they make real movies. And she finally said, you know what, I think it’s okay. I think I can actually just be me. So, I like that.

**John:** That’s been the new trend, is not anonymity, but actually like owning your words. A lovely idea.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** All right, next on the docket of things that will enrage Craig. This was an email we got from a woman named Esther who writes, “A friend reached out to be for advice after getting a real scammy looking email from someone claiming to want to buy his script. Apparently these are going around and a lot of young writers are paying to get the ‘special report’ so their script can be bought, only to realize it was a scam by a company that offers script coverage for dollars.”

And we’ll link to other people who are writing about this same situation. So, this is the email exchange that went back and forth. This writer received an email from James Cole. Do you want to be James Cole?

**Craig:** I’m be James Cole, sure. I have recently reviewed your film script and as head of development for iFilm, I am interested in acquiring your screenplay with a view to producing the film in the near future. iFilm is currently tasked to produce a number of films with our partners/investors. Please let me know if you would be interested in selling the rights and optioning your script.

**John:** So the friend got this email and said, sure, yeah maybe, I’m interested. Tell me more. And this is what the guy said.

**Craig:** Great. In that case we can escalate your script up to our investors, but we would need an independent FR script report attached to. If you get this professionally done by a script editor, we will arrange rights options which are negotiable around £25,000. If you’re unfamiliar with script editors, I can recommend some.

**John:** So, do you want to guess who he might recommend?

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to guess he’s going to recommend a company called Bentley Marks.

**John:** And so, Craig, you did some detective work on Bentley Marks. So what did you find out about Bentley Marks?

**Craig:** Well, to back up for a second, a bunch of people have gotten these letters, not just Esther’s friend. Apparently, this company iFilm sent a bunch of these letters to people whose scripts they found at various levels of success through festivals and websites that host these things. Some of the scripts were quite old. And so they all say, yeah, we want an FR script report. By the way, I guess it stands for Film Ready. There is no such thing.

But then the company says, but you know, we’re not going to give you this money and we won’t give you your lottery winnings from Nigeria unless you pay for the report. But, here, use this company Bentley Marx.

So, Bentley Marx, a company that I’ve never heard of, and for good reason, seems to be located in Dubai. But if you take a look at the registry information for their domain name, they are registered to a James Hore who is at 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair, London.

If you look at iFilmGroup.com, their domain is registered to James Colby, 43 Berkeley Square, Mayfair London. Huh. What is 43 Berkeley Square? Is it some massive complex that could possibly hold two different companies? No, it’s a virtual office service. That address is sold by a company called West One business in the UK and the idea is you pay them a monthly fee and they host this address that looks like it’s a real place and then they just forward it to your personal home, this way your company looks real as opposed to something you’re doing out of your basement, or whatever they call a basement in London. I don’t know what they call it.

**John:** Or a basement in Dubai. Or wherever this is actually.

**Craig:** Precisely. And the funny thing is like Bentley Marks, they have an address in Dubai. It’s not really — they’re not — they’re registered to the same — they’re the same people! The point is this scam is obvious. Right? I mean, as far as I can tell, unless I’m missing something here, they troll the Internet for screenplays. They send an email to that person saying we might make this, but you got to pay this other company some money. I don’t know what it would be, $150 or so for notes. And that money goes right into their pocket. And if 20 people bite on this a month, and they’re charging even $100 a pop, well all right. Now we’ve got, what is that, $2,000 a month? Not bad.

**John:** Yeah, some money.

**Craig:** It’s some money. Point being, this is not at all cool. And I have no problem, if I’ve gotten wrong, iFilm, come on the show and explain yourselves. But this certainly sounds like baloney to me.

The actual iFilm Group website does feature some movies that they have either produced or going to produce. They are not what you would think of as mainstream releases. They do look very much like direct to video, B2C kind of movies. Let’s see if we can find some titles of what iFilm Group is working on these days. They’ve got Fatal Insomnia.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the worst kind of insomnia.

**Craig:** The worst kind. They have Dark Rage 2. I don’t know if they have Dark Rage 1. And they have Exorcism. And then one of the strangest titles of movies ever, Internal. It’s just called Internal. Uh, I don’t think that too many of you have caught Fatal Insomnia.

So this is rough. I hate seeing stuff like this. It’s just really, really lame and —

**John:** We often knock against people who are trying to scam young writers saying like I’ll teach you the secrets of writing or, you know, buy my book and stuff. But this is like you are representing yourself as somebody who is going to buy their script, which is sort of the fantasy for a lot of first time writers. Like someone wants to buy and produce my screenplay and make it into a movie. And then it ends up being one of these sort of scammy not really real companies.

That’s just a shame. And even the name iFilm, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. So, there was a company called iFilm, but it’s been defunct for quite a long time. So, they’re trading on sort of like half memory of like I kind of think I remember iFilm, sort of. And, yeah, there kind of was a company that became, it was like an MTV Network that became Spike. There was a history to that name, so it sounds kind of legit and kind of real, but this is not legit or real. And it feels bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s also ridiculous on its face. A company is calling you and saying we’re interested in giving you £25,000 for the rights to your screenplay, but we need somebody else to tell us if it’s any good. What? How does that make any sense at all?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I honestly would be surprised, no, I take that back. I would not be surprised if somebody fell for this, because every year somebody falls for the Nigerian lottery scam. Every year.

**John:** Every year.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it seems. This just feels like a scam. And if we’ve gotten the facts wrong, happy to hear from the people at iFilm Group. But certainly on the face of it, it does feel like they’re doing something scammy and unethical and for shame.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, have you ever been scammed or has someone tried to do like a physical scam on you? Because last time I was in Paris for the first time, someone actually tried to do the gypsy ring scam/trick.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** It was actually fascinating. And so it happened and it’s like, oh, that must be a thing. And so I went back to the hotel and Google and was like, oh, that’s a whole thing. And that guy did exactly that act. And so this is sort of what happened. I was jet lagged, so I was just walking around Paris early in the morning. And this guy said like, oh excuse me, sir, you dropped something. And I was like, no, I didn’t.

He’s like, no, here is a ring. And he had this little gold ring he’d found. And he’s like, oh here, just take it. I don’t want it. Like, no, no, you take it, it’s fine. And I was like I don’t want it, goodbye, thank you. Because I just sensed that something was wrong. But so on the Internet, I read sort of what the rest of that story goes, and essentially there’s a whole plot that sort of happens where they get you to take the ring and it’s like, oh, but we’ll split the money, or this — and it becomes this long conversation. And you essentially have to pay this person to go away.

And so the only solution to it is just to never touch the ring and to go away. And the ring itself, sometimes it starts as a pretty good ring that you can tell it’s actually pretty good, and then it’s sleight of handed to like a cheaper brass ring. Most of the time it’s just a brass ring and it’s a way to start them talking to you.

Other times it can result in pick-pocketing and other things, but it was fascinating to see this thing happening right in front of my face. And in some ways this email had the same kind of markers of this scammy thing about to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I’ve never — that’s not happened to me. I think I just look mean. I look like a real problem. You know, [laughs] like —

**John:** Yeah, you do look like trouble. People cut a wide berth around you.

**Craig:** I kind of do. I look like trouble. I look like the kind of person whose not only going to not take the ring, but lose his mind and do something crazy. I’m just not worth it. I’m the kind of guy that’s not worth it. I just have that look. I have resty angry face.

**John:** [laughs] Our final big topic today, GLAAD released a report about the 2014 movies. And so GLAAD is the organization in the US that takes a look at media portrays of gay, lesbian, transgender people in films and in TV programs and tries to advocate for better inclusion and awareness of those issues.

And so for 2014 they looked at all of the releases by the major studios. There were 114 movies they looked at. And they do statistics year after year showing sort of like how many gay men are portrayed, how many lesbians, how many bisexuals. Sort of what the nature of those portrayals were. And in no year is it especially good. In some years there’s better portrayals versus worse portrayals.

This is the first year I sort of looked closer at it and they actually break it down by studio and they sort of articulate what exactly they are seeing and what the trends are that they are noticing.

So, I will send you to the report. I’m not going to sort of summarize it for you. But they had this interesting thing called the Vito Russo test, which was based on the Bechdel test which we talked about before on the podcast. So, the Bechdel test is a way of looking at how women are portrayed in films. And so it’s asking like three simple questions about sort of how a given movie is portraying its women and then you either pass or fail the Bechdel test.

The Vito Russo test is a similar kind of structure. And it’s pretty straightforward. So the film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. So, does it do that? If so, that character must not be solely or predominately defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity — i.e., they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight and non-transgender characters from one another.

So, it’s like if it’s a gay character, they can’t only be gay. They have to be some other function.

The LGBT character must be tied to the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they’re not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authentic, or perhaps most commonly set up a punch line. The character should matter, which is an interesting way of looking at inclusion and sort of inclusion that counts for something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we’ll send you to this report. They break it down by studio, which is kind of interesting, and within the studios, the sort of indie arms of some of those studios as well. So, Craig, what did you take from looking at this?

**Craig:** Well, the numbers are seemingly better than they used to be, I guess. I didn’t love the way they arranged the — I wish that the studio content had been broken out better, because you had to click on each individual studio and I just got tired of doing that.

But in general it seems like things are getting a bit better, not for transgender characters, but for gay men in particular seem to be — most of the inclusive films, let’s see, 17.5% of the big studio releases contain characters identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s not a bad number.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You know, I mean if you’re sort of going by general population, I mean, the percentage of the population that’s gay is a very hard thing to pin down because of lying, [laughs] but 17.5% doesn’t seem terrible.

**John:** It doesn’t seem terrible. But if you actually look through the individual reports, you realize that they’re being very inclusive about who they’re sort of folding into that. So, like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie counts as being gay because Ian McKellen is gay.

**Craig:** What? But that’s not — he’s not gay. We don’t know that. He never said anything about men or women in that movie.

**John:** Yeah. So honestly very minor gayness is enough sort of to count for this. So that’s a thing to keep in mind when you look at that number.

**Craig:** That’s strange.

**John:** It’s inflated.

**Craig:** It’s odd that they would inflate that number. You would think that it would be in their interest to be as accurate and parsimonious as possible with handing out that. Well, regardless, what’s interesting to me as a writer is maybe less the numbers than in the way the portrayals have occurred and how they have changed over time. Because it doesn’t help anybody if 80% of movies feature gay characters and it’s pejorative or negative portrayals.

There has been a remarkable evolution I think over the last ten years, some in the last three years. I just think the evolution of the portrayal of gay people in popular culture has just been moving so rapidly and in a very good way. In drama, traditionally being gay was associated with tragedy, being ill-fated or twisted somehow, or the fake lesbians to just make men happy, or the gay guy who was the girl’s best friend.

And interesting that the Vito Russo test sort of calls this point out that often homosexuality was considered remarkable and determinative in and of itself. That if you’re a gay character in a movie, that’s your character. Gay character. [laughs] Rather, meaning that has so much more significance than straight character. There’s no character that’s defined by their straightness. That I feel has been changing pretty dramatically, no pun intended. What do you think?

**John:** I think so, too. You know, you look at both in the dramas and the comedies, you see more characters who you can identify as being gay or lesbian, and it’s not being made a big deal of it, which is great. I think there’s a lag in feature films versus television. And I think television was faster because television moves faster. And television is usually much more reflective of the current state of culture and films by their long development process tend to be lagging a few years behind.

One of the real challenges though is that on television you’re seeing characters over a long period of time, so if a character is gay, you have more time to actually experience that and sort of see the richness of their life. In a film, you know, that third lieutenant could be gay, but if there’s no reason to actually know that, there’s no scene that’s going to get that to you, that information may never come out.

And so you’re going to be — gays sometimes are going to be less visible in feature films just because there’s no opportunity to actually see that they’re gay or to sort of identify them as being gay because there’s not a point to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Versus other minority portrayals, where you can visibly see like, oh, well there is a Pacific Islander and that person exists in the world. You can just spot that. And so sometimes it’s harder to spot gays in feature films because there is no scene in which they have the ability to identify as gay.

**Craig:** Yeah. If a gay character doesn’t have a love story in a movie, then you might not know, but I think an awareness now that there are certain non-romantic signifiers that we have all the time. Characters leave their home and there’s a wife who is a day player, has no line, waving goodbye.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There is a woman at work who has a photo on her desk of her and her husband. You know, these things I think are well worth considering as we kind of go through. And in a way it helps make the movie realer, because that’s the way life is now. It wasn’t that way ten years ago. It simply wasn’t. Now it’s different.

And movies should keep up with the world around them. So, that’s something that’s worth considering as we go through as writers. Comedy is a whole other area, because in comedy for so long, and really up to I would say just a couple of years ago even, gay was considered in and of itself funny. And I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Anybody that works in comedy, anybody, including gay comedians would find this inherent comedy in being gay, even if they were gay-friendly or gay positive.

The thing is, it’s not funny anymore. It’s just not. Now, there’s a question. Should it ever have been funny? That’s a hard question, because the thing about comedy is funny is what people laugh at. Funny doesn’t really have a morality to it. What has a morality is morality. Comedy kind of follows social mores.

So, you can watch the Friar Roasts from the ’70s, they’re on YouTube. And there will be race and gay humor in those that just make you wince. Forget not funny, you actually go, “Ooh, god.” All the people on the dais are going bananas. People in the audience going bananas. Roasts today, there is still a ton of race and gay humor, but it turns on bravery and defiance. In a weird way the joke of the race and the gay humor is, oh my god, look, they’re being bad on purpose, in front of each other, and in a way that sort of signifies how confident they are as people of color, as gay people, or as straight people around people of color, or gay people.

But I guarantee you in — I don’t know how long it’s going to be — maybe five years, maybe two, maybe 20, I don’t know, that too will one day make us all wince. I think that comedy basically echoes the world and it always will, which is one of the reason why comedies often don’t hold up, but comedians have to kind of go where the funny is.

**John:** Yeah, comedy so often it’s finding those moments of friction in the real world, like those things that are sort of you dare not really quite talk about, and like finding a way to talk about those things, but then the conversation moves on. And if you’re still trying to talk about that, like oh no, that’s not funny anymore, that’s just really uncomfortable and weird.

And so I agree with you. You look at some movies that were genuinely funny back in the day and there are moments that make you wince because it wasn’t political correctness or anything else, it’s just like that’s just not a thing that could be funny anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Now, there are really interesting cases where I think you can look at something now and laugh at it in a different way. When Airplane! came out in 1980, Stephen Stucker who played the flamboyantly gay — I don’t know what you call it, the air traffic control tower guy, I don’t know what his actual — you know, they were all up there and the air traffic controller guy. And he was hysterical and everybody loved him. And they were laughing in part because, oh my god, that guy is so gay. Look, the gayest of gays. But when you watch him now, and Stephen by the way was a member of the Kentucky Fried Theater with David, and Jerry, and Jim, and had kind of come up with them, when you watch it now it’s still really funny, but you’re not laughing at him, you’re laughing with him. He’s just remarkably witty. The fact that he’s gay is so no longer what’s funny. What’s funny is specifically what he’s doing. It’s actually — I think there is a gay comic sensibility and it is as broad as straight comic sensibility, but there is this — it’s a subset. There’s a thing there. And he does it so brilliantly.

So, there are times where these portrayals can last and actually the way we find them funny changes. But there is the idea that, oh my god, I kissed a dude. No, that’s not funny anymore.

**John:** It really isn’t funny anymore. And rape culture is not funny anymore, either. That idea like, oh, you’re going to go to prison and you’re going to get raped. It’s like, ooh, man, that’s just really uncomfortable. So, both that gay panic and sort of gay rape panic are not funny anymore.

There was a period of time that Saturday Night Live went through, and I think Janeane Garofalo talked about it when she left the show, where like every episode there was some sort of like alien anal probe rape joke. And it was really weird and uncomfortable. And thank goodness we moved past that.

And now the joke would be trying to make that joke. I mean, like it would be — it’s lucky that you sort of get to a place where like you can comment on that as a joke type.

Recently they had a commercial where it was some sort of anti-depressant for parents when your kid is acting super, super gay. And it was right at that uncomfortable level of like, ooh, but like the commercial was making it really clear that like it’s not the kid’s fault. You just have to get over it.

**Craig:** Right. That worked.

**John:** That worked, because it was understanding what the pain was underneath there, and what the uncomfortable feeling was, and sort of leaning into it in the right way. So, I would argue that you’re never trying to — you can’t stop making jokes that involve gay people. You just have to find ways to sort of use them in comedy that is appropriate for today and also hopefully for the next five years. You don’t know what ten years is going to be.

**Craig:** And this is why comedy is hard, because sometimes go out on a ledge where you need to live as a comedian, and they fail. And when they fail, especially now in our culture now, everyone goes insane. And Patton Oswalt has spoken a lot about this on Twitter and elsewhere in his lengthy protracted war of words with Salon, which Salon tends to act like the Internet’s schoolmarm.

And his point was, you know, comedy is supposed to be dangerous and occasionally when you do it you’re going to miss. You know, you’re throwing knives, you will occasionally miss and hit something you weren’t supposed to hit, or hit it the wrong way. And that’s part of the gig. That’s part of the occupational hazard of being a comedian. But we do know that you have to — as comedians, the really good ones, they’re listening all the time, really carefully.

Louis C.K. does not do some of the material that he used to do, because it’s not funny anymore. You know, there was a time when all of America loved The Honeymooners, men and women loved The Honeymooners. And the catchphrase was Bang Zoom. The catchphrase was “I’m going to beat you, Alice.” That was the joke. It’s just not funny anymore. A lot of times white people will say, “Why is it that black people get to stand up in a comedy club and make fun of white people, but if white people stand up and make fun of black people, everybody goes crazy.”

Here’s why: it’s not funny, that’s why. It’s just not funny. Just go where the funny is and be aware that it changes. So, I hope that GLAAD, I like that they concentrate on general numbers, but I also like that they’re starting to look at context, because to me that’s really where things are going to change. And I think about it now. I never thought about it. Never, never, never, never. Ten years ago, I’ll be totally honest, I never thought about it whatsoever. Wasn’t a problem. I think about it all the time now, because it’s right to. It seems like what I ought to bed doing.

**John:** Yes. I think we all ought to be doing it as well. And we should also do our One Cool Things, because it’s been a long show so far. So, I will start with my One Cool Thing. This week is Rage Quitting, and it’s this article by Chi Luu, it’s looking at this new kind of term that’s sprung up in the last few years. Words like rage quitting, ugly crying, stress cooking, humble bragging, which we used earlier this podcast, angry cleaning. It’s that construction where you take two things and jam them together. And it’s a weird construction because the first word is almost always negative and the second word is an activity.

And so you get what it means, and so like you know rage quitting is a thing. I’m storming out of this job all of a sudden. Stress cooking, ugly crying, we get what these things mean. But they’re sort of a new way of forming things. And I just love when language finds ways to sort of create new terms for things. And concepts that can exist only because we’re jamming these two words together in this sort of accepted way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Hate watching, isn’t that one of them?

**John:** Hate watching, absolutely. The perfect thing. And so that first word is always negative, and you don’t talk about joy cooking. I think you could do that, but you don’t. It’s always a negative that leads into the verb. So I thought it was really fun. And the article also talks about some of the other sort of ways we create new terms, like adding holic to things, so like, you know, I’m a workaholic or whatever, adding holic as an idea.

A thon, so a podcastathon, we understand that it’s something that goes on for a long time.

Mc, as a sort of shortening down of things, or a cheap version of things, so like a McJob, not being a real thing. So, I just love when people are describing new words and especially when people are describing the way we create new words. So I will point you to this article.

**Craig:** I wish there was something called Workahol, where you could just —

**John:** I’m going to drink a fifth of Workahol.

**Craig:** Workahol. And I got so much done. I’m a workaholic, but I do get a lot done. My One Cool Thing was briefly alluded to way back in episode 150 by somebody who was writing in, but I’ve had some personal experience with it now so I thought I would mention it here on the show. It’s called Kano. And it’s for children. It’s a computer kit. And the idea is that your child can actually build their own computer. Don’t go crazy, it’s not quite your MacBook Pro, but it’s sort of like a Lego-ized version of a computer with circuit board, and a container, and connect ribbons and so forth.

And it comes with this wonderful little instructional guide that helps you put it all together. And it’s actually kind of cool. It runs on Raspberry Pi. And you can hook it up to your TV with an HDMI cable. And it’s got little games and things, but more importantly it also has the ability to instruct you on programming. You can learn to code. You can make games. It’s very cool.

And it’s a little pricey.

**John:** Did you build it or you just saw it in action?

**Craig:** I didn’t build it. My daughter built it. So, she’s ten, and she just sat down — she’s a self-starter. She just sat down and did it. She built it. She was super crazy excited. And when we hooked it up and we saw text scrolling as Raspberry Pi loaded up, she just jumped up and down for 30 seconds, which it took because this is not a fast computer. But she was so excited.

So, it’s great for kids who like building and like technology like my daughter does. And it’s a little pricey. It’s $150 at Amazon. But, I suspect maybe you might be able to find it a little cheaper if you went on eBay or something like that. It doesn’t need to necessarily be brand new.

If you have a kid who is into this sort of thing, it’s a nice place to look. So, that’s Kano. And their website is Kano.me.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. So, if you would like to write to me or Craig with your thoughts on things, the place for those longer things like we read today is ask@johnaugust.com. Little short things are great on Twitter. So, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

If you follow me this week, I may be having an announcement about the Ghost special screening, if we open it up to the general public. Right now it’s only for Writers Guild people. But if you are Writers Guild and want to come, you should RSVP for that. We are on iTunes. So, you can search for us on Scriptnotes and you can leave us a review while you’re there. It’s fantastic if you would do that.

We also have an app. We have the Scriptnotes app. You can download that and listen to all the back episodes going all the way back to episode one. Scriptnotes.net is the place you sign up for all those back episodes. It’s $1.99 a month. And our show this week is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week, another great outro by Matthew Chilelli. And, Craig, I will see you next week.

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

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [RSVP here for the April 25 WGAw screenings of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, featuring a Q+A with Bruce Joel Rubin moderated by John August](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=229), and [follow John on Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) where he will let you know if tickets are released for non-WGA members
* [Gawker Media Editorial Staff Welcomed by WGAe](http://www.thewrap.com/writers-guild-of-america-east-welcomes-gawker-media-editorial-staff/)
* [Scriptnotes, 193: How writing credits work](http://johnaugust.com/2015/how-writing-credits-work)
* LA Times on [Ron Bass and his in-house team](http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/10/entertainment/ca-20955)
* The poster for [The Harvest](http://www.screenrelish.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/the-harvest-poster.jpg)
* [Meet Writer X](http://www.finaldraft.com/discover/videos/final-draft-writer-app-for-the-ipad/meet-writer-x)
* [The not-so-well-dressed screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2004/the-not-so-well-dressed-screenwriter) from johnaugust.com
* [Tom Vu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vu) and [Don Lapre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lapre) on Wikipedia
* [Stage32 discussion on iFilm Group](https://www.stage32.com/lounge/screenwriting/iFilm-Group-iFilm-Ltd)
* [The Paris Gold Ring Scam](http://www.everywhereist.com/the-paris-gold-ring-scam/)
* [GLAAD’s 2015 Studio Responsibility Index](http://www.glaad.org/sri/2015/overview)
* [More on Internet Neologisms: Rage Quitting is a Thing](http://daily.jstor.org/more-on-internet-neologisms-rage-quitting-is-a-thing/) by Chi Luu
* [Kano is a computer you build and code yourself](http://www.kano.me/kit)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/you-cant-train-a-cobra-to-do-that).

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

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

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

Today’s episode, we will talk about last week’s episode, follow-up on K.C. Scott’s This Is Working and what people had to say about it and what more we now know about K.C. Scott, also known as Kurt. We’re going to talk about craftsmanship. We will talk about camera direction. We will answer two listener questions.

But first, we have some news. We have things that happened in the town that we need to talk to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s been a busy, busy week. This is a jam-packed show, by the way.

**John:** It’s a lot of different things. But that’s sometimes a good mark of an episode. Lots of different things to talk about.

**Craig:** I think strap in, guys, because this one’s going to be cray cray.

**John:** I don’t know if this is going to be a long topic or a short topic. CAA lost several of their agents to United Talent Agency, UTA. And, Craig, does it matter?

**Craig:** For us? I mean, for feature writers, I would say not at all. Not at all. For television writers, possibly because, you know, in television they do all this packaging. But even then I’m not sure that the packaging of shows is exclusive to their clients. I don’t even know how that works. I mean, I find frankly that my interest in the who’s getting fired, who’s going where is essentially at a zero. It’s never been that high.

When Amy Pascal got fired and then there was the, “Who’s going to take over? And, oh, it’s Tom Rothman,” it was like everybody was talking about this at lunch. I couldn’t have cared less. Adam Goodman got fired. I don’t care. Somebody has replaced him. I don’t care. I’m just over here doing my job, you know.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. The only thing Craig does really care about when it comes time to talk about firing and agents is Craig wants to fire your agent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** It’s really Craig’s favorite thing in the world to do.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, I am here for you at a very reasonable rate for $500. I’ll get on the phone and fire your agent for you.

**John:** You know, that’s actually kind of a great little sideline business.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig would do a fantastic job. He would just call up the person and say like, “You have this client? He’s not your client anymore.” The client doesn’t have to explain why. It’s just done, move on.

**Craig:** Yeah. The strategy is when they pick up the phone, you say, “Hi. So listen, I’m going to get right to it. I’m letting you go.” So, in the case if I were firing your agent for you, I’d call him up and say, “Hi. So just let me get right to it. John August is letting you go. You’re no longer his agent. Let me just briefly tell you why but the decision is final.” Now you’ve cut the — there’s no wind in their sails. They’ve got nothing. And the best part is if this becomes a real business, then they’ll know just because I’m calling them, they’ll know. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. They will never return your calls.

**Craig:** Literally. It’s like give me $500, I will log a call to your agent and that will be all it takes. I won’t even say a word.

**John:** It’s all done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think Craig would need to have a little bit of a pre-interview where he was like — so his little checklist where he would just like you know he marks off, like, “Which are the reasons why we’re firing him? Okay, great. All done. All set.”

**Craig:** Great. Yeah. It’s a web form, honestly. Just fill up my web form. I don’t need to hear your sob stories about why. Just check off these things. And then, you know, when they give you a comment box but it’s like, “Okay, you can describe anything else you think we need to know but you have 200 characters.” We’re telling you we don’t care. That’s why we’re limiting you to 200 characters.

**John:** We’re telling you it doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** We’re telling you we’re not going to read it. But go ahead, if it makes you feel better.

**John:** We’re creating new businesses even as we speak. Franklin Leonard has The Black List, you’re basically The Dead List.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Just tell us which agent you want to fire, it’s done.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m The Kill List.

**John:** So we initially recorded the podcast on a Thursday and right here on the podcast is where we talked about the death of Scripped.com which was just a breaking story at that point. That next day, on Friday, we recorded a whole interview with the co-owner of Scripped.com which became a special episode on Saturday. So most of what was in this portion of the podcast is no longer relevant.

But I wanted to save one little conversation Craig and I had about how you keep multiple backups of things even if you are doing stuff on your own computer. So this is a portion of what we talked about originally on the podcast on Thursday.

And I’m also probably a little too reliant on Dropbox. The other thing I would take sort of personally is that all of my stuff, you know, that I’m working on currently, you know, it’s on Dropbox. So granted Dropbox is both local and it’s in the cloud, but I probably rely a little bit too much on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’m glad you brought that up. First of all, I’m in the same boat. I have the scripts and because you and I got started around the same time, I would imagine we had the same technological issues. Because when I look back, for instance, at my initial work, you know, way, way back when. So like RocketMan, so that was the first movie I did. Well, when I look at the files for that, which I have, they are unopenable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m looking at files like — and I think they were Final Draft 2 files that now show up as exec files. [laughs] The system has no idea what to do, even the Microsoft Word files are no longer openable. And we’re talking about like for instance this one that I’m looking at here was created November 1st, 1996. It’s gone, you know. However, because everybody now moves with this, we know, okay, if there’s a format change we kind of change our files along with the formats. I think we’ve probably gotten past that.

My worry is this Dropbox worry because like you, that’s how I do my work. I have everything locally but it’s synced to Dropbox. Well, I know if I go into Dropbox and I delete a file there, it deletes on my local drive. Well, let’s say there was a problem at Dropbox and instead of everything just going kaput, somebody went in and just started deleting stuff.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s gone, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So that brings me to my next point. Well, I’m going to put this out there for our listeners. How can I essentially double sync backup my stuff? Wouldn’t it be great if I could — on my hard drive, I’m writing something and it knows to sync it both with Dropbox and save with Google Drive, so I’m double backed.

**John:** Yeah. So in some future world in which this podcast has advertising, one of the very, very common advertisers who is always advertising on podcasts are services like Backblaze. And what they do is basically they make a copy of your hard drive and they store it in the cloud. That would take care of your situation in this case. So anything that’s ever on your hard drive is also in the cloud. You can download it back off the cloud.

**Craig:** By the way, how sick would it be if this was in fact our first ad? How insidious of us.

**John:** [laughs] It would be incredibly insidious.

**Craig:** It would be so insidious.

**John:** And we guarantee you it is not our first ad.

**Craig:** It’s not. We are not being paid for this. But it’s called Backblaze? Well, they should advertise with us because I’m going to go check them out now.

**John:** So if you’re listening to some of the tech podcasts, they’re a common sponsor. And there’s another company, or several other companies that do similar kinds of things. So that would be a solution for that type of scenario.

What I do realistically is I do backup from one hard drive to another hard drive. And I try to do that weekly, which isn’t really enough. But that would at least give you a snapshot of where you were at. And that’s been fine for sort of our stuff.

There’s also kind of lazy backup because sometimes I’m sending stuff to Stuart. And so in those emails back and forth to me and Stuart, that’s a way I could find some of those files. Again, nowhere close to perfect.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, you know, helpful.

**Craig:** Helpful, yeah. Well, I used to have a Time Machine, you know, where you would save all of your stuff on that. They just never worked very well. I just found Apple’s Time Machine —

**John:** They would never work great for me either.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I don’t know if they’ve gotten better at that or if there’s some other solution. Because I think actually and, you know, buying some cheap-o external hard drive that’s — I mean, now you can get a terabyte for what, $20 or something stupid? And just having that and doing some kind of regular backup to that is probably a good idea.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But god, I mean —

**John:** Especially for the working folder, the thing you’re actually working on most commonly, that’s the one you really want to make sure you’re keeping a good clone of.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now I wanted to also back up to what you were talking about with, you know, you have these old files, these old Final Draft files, these old Microsoft Word files that you can’t open. That was really one of the big motivations behind Fountain which is this plain text file format we have is that it is just text. So you will never get stuck with that with a Fountain file because you’ll always be able to open it. As long as there’s something that can open any text document, you know, you’ll be able to get to that stuff that’s in those files.

**Craig:** Can you get to it if you’re using Final Draft, John?

**John:** You could get to it using Final Draft. Final Draft can actually import Fountain just fine.

**Craig:** Oh, they can?

**John:** They didn’t mean to. It just happens that they can.

**Craig:** [laughs] But they’re hard at work to see if they can undo it.

**John:** I will say that the good folks at Final Draft who obviously we have had some disagreements, they have engaged on some level to Fountain. They really can kind of import it. It’s not a deliberate thing on their side but we sort of designed the format in a way that Final Draft could just get it also. So it is helpful on those fronts.

And I would say also Highland, the other app we make, we don’t ever advertise that we can open old Final Draft files. But if you have an old Final Draft file that you can’t get to open or even open in Final Draft, if you change the extension to FDR and throw it on Highland, Highland will take a sledgehammer to it and smash it and try to put it back together. And so that’s a thing you might also try with those very old files.

**Craig:** Even something from 1996?

**John:** Even something from 1996.

**Craig:** Wow. Okay.

**John:** Mr. Nima Yousefi, our coder, is very clever and he will smash things up and he will try to put it together.

**Craig:** He is clever. I’ve looked in his clever eyes.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s the thing. If I’m sitting here worrying about Dropbox and Google, you should definitely be worrying about anybody else. I mean, I can’t imagine Google in particular, I just don’t — essentially, it’s like when they talk about earthquake insurance in California.

So earthquake insurance in California is regulated because basically no insurance company wanted to ever give anybody an earthquake insurance in the States and you have to. And here’s what it is. It’s called the FAIR Plan. And the FAIR Plan is you pay a whole bunch of money every year and then if there’s an earthquake, they will take care of damage to your structure. But after you pay a 20% premium, that is 20% of the value of the home.

**John:** Yeah. It’s huge.

**Craig:** You know, and so what I was always told is, “You know, if the earthquake’s that bad, you got bigger problems than insurance. Like, basically everything is gone.”

**John:** Yeah. That’s what I was always told about, especially land in Los Angeles is that the land itself is what’s worth money, as to your point, the structure isn’t. So the structure will be destroyed but the land is still the land. And the earthquake is not going to destroy the land probably.

**Craig:** Probably. [laughs] Exactly. But it’s the same idea like —

**John:** Anyway, you’ll be dead. It will be totally fine.

**Craig:** You’ll be dead. But if Google goes down, I think it’s essentially Mad Max follows that. Yeah.

**John:** [laughs] By the way, how good is the new Mad Max trailer?

**Craig:** It’s actually concerning to me because I loved it. But what concerned me was, “Oh, no. Now this is the thing.” Like it’s how they keep figuring out in the food industry to jam more calories into a thing and more flavor into a thing. This is the most engineered — it’s crack. They made crack, right?

**John:** They made crack.

**Craig:** Like Guardians of the Galaxy, they’re, “Stop drinking coffee. We have this new thing called cocaine and you can freebase it. It’s freebasing cocaine.” And now Mad Max it’s like, “No, no, no. We mixed it with baking powder and we cooked it into a thing and now it’s crack.” It’s scary. I just worry that this is the thing everyone’s going to chase because that movie is going to open huge and it should. It should.

**John:** It should. So our good friend Kelly Marcel had some hand in it. I don’t know if she’ll ever want to come on the show and talk about what her involvement was. But it sounded just like madness to make it. It’s been in post for forever and I’m just so excited that it looks like it’s so good.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I understand why it would have been in post forever. Everything looks like a processed shot. Processed shot, I sound like an old man. Everything looks like a VFX shot.

**John:** But it wasn’t effects. So that’s the whole magical thing about it. So like most of what you see, they actually did. So all those cars flipping and everything going nuts, that all actually really happened. So except where like the giant —

**Craig:** Well, yeah. No, that is happening.

**John:** Except for the giant storm.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Apparently, it’s like crazy real.

**Craig:** But everything looks like something needed to be done in post. In other words, yeah, we definitely shot that car doing that but there’s going to be things we have to paint out. Or the whole background world needs to be painted in. Or it just seemed like — I don’t know, it just seemed like there was a lot of work.

**John:** They were in Namibia for forever making that movie. So I was excited to see what they did.

**Craig:** Sick. It looks sick.

**John:** It looks so good. Our next bit of news news. So last week we recorded the episode and I almost mentioned it on the episode last week but I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to launch. So Writer Emergency Pack which was the little deck of cards for writers when you get in a jam and you sort of get stuck. It was a Kickstarter we did back at the end of last year. They’re now finally available in stores. So you can find them at WriterEmergency.com. You can find them at the John August Store. You can also find them on Amazon. So just search for Writer Emergency Pack and we are there on Amazon.

So I wrote a Kickstarter update where I talked through sort of the whole process of how you actually put things on the store in Amazon and how you ship things out because it was crazy. It took me three months to sort of put it all together. Like literally just clicking the buy button in the John August Store, there’s like six different companies involved to like make that transaction happen, which has just been nuts.

But it’s actually working. And people are buying them and people like them. So they are available and out there in the world. So if you missed the Kickstarter and you want one, you can now go get one for yourself.

**Craig:** Spectacular. If it’s on Amazon.com, can I get it through Fresh Delivery? Will it show up in the morning before I wake up?

**John:** I don’t think it will show up with Fresh Delivery. But you can get Prime Delivery.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So you can get that sort of sweet ass Prime Delivery even the next day delivery. So that’s pretty good.

**Craig:** Prime is gorgeous.

**John:** So, before, we were talking about like sort of stealth advertising and whether we want to do advertising. This is a perfect chance for us to test whether advertising will be annoying on this podcast if we were to add it.

So let me try to do this properly. Our practice sponsor this week is Writer Emergency Pack, an illustrated deck of useful ideas for writers to help you get unstuck. Last year, it was the most backed card project in Kickstarter history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now it’s available for anyone to buy. It makes a great gift for writers, which I suspect is pretty much anyone listening to this podcast.

You can find Writer Emergency Pack on Amazon. Just search for Writer Emergency. But we have a special offer for Scriptnotes listeners. Go to WriterEmergency.com and click the buy button to buy it on the John August Store. When you check out, use the special promo code Scriptnotes to save 10% on your order and help us figure out whether our listeners will actually use promo codes.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So our thanks to Writer Emergency Pack for helping to practice sponsor our show this week.

**Craig:** I mean, my character in the advertisements is going to be Golly Gee guy. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. I didn’t know that was possible. [laughs]

**Craig:** What? Save $10? No, I’m still on Backblaze over here. And we’re not getting paid for that at all.

**John:** So last week we talked about K.C. Scott’s script, This Is Working. And I just loved that conversation. I went back and listened to the episode. I was just delighted with it. Have you listened to it again?

**Craig:** I listened to it and I thought it was really good. And we did get a lot of really good feedback. People seemed to want this some more. They, you know, “Do it every week.” Well, no. Look, you can’t have your birthday every week, you know. This kind of thing or when we break down a whole movie, it’s actually work. And we have our own work. So —

**John:** And it’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** Yeah. We already have jobs. So that’s something that we will do not quite as frequently as many of you would hope. But I was really encouraged by all the positive feedback. And I thought it was particularly good to have Franklin on because it was nice that we had that other perspective, the non-screenwriter perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So we got a lot of great comments on Facebook and Twitter. So thank you all for sharing your thoughts.

It was also fun. A couple of people wrote in, like before the episode, saying like, “These are my thoughts.” Like one woman did her sort of breakdown analysis of where she thought the work was and her notes on it before the episode aired. And she was right on. So it was great to see that there was excitement and consensus about it.

So, yeah, I would love to do this again too. I think it’s not going to be a very often thing because it is a lot of work. But it was really a fun challenge.

And Kurt, K.C. Scott, was just fantastic. So I wanted to share a little bit more about the emails we had back and forth after the episode aired. So, a little more detail about Kurt.

He writes, “I’m married. We’re expecting our first child in August. I spent most of my career in progressive politics and now I do research for a labor union. I’ve been writing for a while, a mix of short fiction and sports blogging mostly until three years ago when I began writing feature length specs. TV is intriguing but my passion is film.”

And that was a question, like is he a TV person or is he a film person? And he says he’s a film person.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “As my screenwriter career goes, I’m willing to be patient but also aggressive, whether that means flying to LA for meetings or taking time off from my day job for assignments. With a child on the way, economic security means something to me. But both my wife and I are on-board with this, so whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

“As far as travel to LA goes, the good thing about my job is that I’m there once a month for work. We have an office in Commerce City, plus I get to bank Southwest miles, and I have a Southwest credit card, and buddies will put me up if I need to stay for a few days. I’m working every angle to cut costs, no choice really.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that. You definitely want to cut costs. People sometimes feel like they need to invest in a new place to make it seem real. It’s that syndrome of, “I’m starting a business, so I’m going to spend a ton of money to make that business look like a real business. And now, I just need customers.” Well, with screenwriting, you don’t need to spend anything. So if you have to come, if you have to travel to LA, you know, and you don’t have a lot of money or you have people that are relying on you, like a child on the way, then I just always advise to be as cheap as you can.

Just be cheap. Spend nothing. Spend as little as possible. There’s no value in — and by the way, no romance in being the person who is putting hotel rooms on credit cards because you want to feel better about yourself.

**John:** Yeah. What I loved about Kurt’s follow-up email there was that he’s both all in but he’s not sort of like all in. He’s not, you know, “Oh, I’m going to quit everything. I’m going to move to LA and start over, start fresh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, I think you have a moment where you can do that right after college, where like there’s really you have no commitments to anything. So like, “Well, why not? You got to start somewhere, why not start there.”

So here’s a guy who has a kid on the way. He has a pretty good job in Oakland. He’d love to become a screenwriter, but he’s doing exactly the right things. He’s sort of iterating. This wasn’t the first thing he wrote. He’s written a bunch. He’s sort of built up his experience he sort of has. By the time he shows up in LA, he’ll have some sort of screenwriting capital. He has stuff he can show. He has a plan for what he wants to do next.

But he’s also being smart. And he’s not like getting himself a fancy apartment on the west side. He’s like going to sleep on some couches, and take those meetings, and get stuff started. And I think that’s going to be a key to success for Kurt.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. So I actually was talking to a friend of the podcast, Mike Birbiglia, today, or as I call him, Mike Burorgaberbium. And he listened to that podcast and really enjoyed it. And he said, “I bet this guy’s phone is going to start ringing now.”

Now, I wasn’t sure because, you know, he’s got to rewrite his script and people are going to want to read the script, and eventually he’ll put it online at The Black List. But what do you think? Do you think his phone is going to start ringing?

**John:** Well, his phone would have literally started ringing because his phone number was on the cover page originally.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And I emailed him saying like, “Hey, do you really want your phone number there?” He’s like, “Yeah, maybe let’s take that off.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So he sent a cleaner version that has his phone number off of it. But I hope that he would be getting some direct emails from folks who liked it and folks who want to pursue him. If I were a junior agent, not just in a big agency but really kind of any agency or a manager, I would say, “This guy seems like he sort of meets the criteria of like he’s a really good writer and he’s really smart and seems to get it.” These are the things you want if you’re an agent or a manager.

So I think a month from now, let’s follow up with him and see —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll reach out to him and sort of what is happening next for him.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess we’ll find out if anybody listens to this show.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see. So the thing I appreciate I think most about Kurt’s work is that he had good craftsmanship. Like the work was good on the page, but he also seemed to be approaching it from the right perspective. And over the spring break, I read a book that kind of reminded me of the same idea. It’s this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, and I’ll have a link for it at the show notes.

But what I liked about it was he was reframing this argument about sort of, “What do you want to do with your life?” Rather than saying like, “Oh, you should follow your passion. Like there’s a dream job out there, you just have to find your dream job,” he said, “Instead, what you need to do is figure out what is it that you are good at by just doing it and seeing how it all sort of works out.” So saying like some people will make themselves miserable by switching from job to job or like they’ll get stuck in sort of the hard part of it and never realize there’s a place beyond that they’re trying to push to.

And what I liked about what Kurt was doing was he was at it every day and he was clearly focusing on getting the best things he can written and not trying to pursue screenwriting as a sort of lottery career, the sort of this dream of winning it. At no point in our conversations does Kurt ever bring up the idea of like, “Oh, you know what, I thought I’d write this script and sell it for a bunch of money and then be a screenwriter.” That’s never been part of the conversation.

**Craig:** No. I mean, he’s doing that thing that I talk about where you take your plan A and make a plan B, take your plan B, make a plan A. My guess is that he’s probably pretty darn good at his job. And even if that job is in terms of his long-term view, plan B, if his plan A is be a screenwriter, he’s probably made that plan B job as plan A.

He shows up on time, he does his work, he thinks, he applies himself, he has energy, he supports a family, helps support a family. And then he also does this, which is how I think it should be done. I love this advice about follow your passion being flawed.

It’s a little bit like saying, “Look, if you want to have a marriage that lasts your whole life, follow your passion. When you meet somebody and your heart is pounding and you’re sweating and you have that like rush, that chemical rush of just falling head over heels, that’s it, get married that day.” No. That’s not what love is. That’s just infatuation, right? Love is the product of the work. It’s the product of the commitment.

**John:** Yeah. Falling head over heels, that is, you know, lust and attraction. And it’s wonderful. And there’s a reason why we have so many great things written about that. But that’s not marriage.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Marriage is, you know, the getting up and doing it again every single day. And so figuring out how you can be good at being married is like how you can be good at being in any kind of career. It’s like how do you make the situation that you’re in as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean settling for a bad situation.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It means looking for what it is about the situation that you can work on it and sort of continuously kind of get better at.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And thinking back to sort of all of our friends who have become screenwriters and trying to find unifying themes, because so often the knock becomes, “Oh, well, you had this access, you had these sort of magical things that happened.” You know what, some of those things are true, and some of those things were luck, and some of those things were, you know, starting on, you know, second base.

But some of it is also just the constant practice. And when you sit down to write, that first 10 minutes for me is generally kind of awful. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, if I can push through to 15 minutes, then I’ll be done.” And then I’ve written an hour. It’s the same thing with finishing that first script, and then finishing the second script, and then finishing the third script.

No one that I know sold their first script. No one sold the first thing they ever wrote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if that is the standard, then people are going to start their career and be disappointed and look for reasons that aren’t their own reasons about why it didn’t happen.

In this book that I was talking about, the Cal Newport book, he talks about the difference between people who were in like a high school band and the people who — you know, like a high school rock band and the people who became big musical stars. And it tends to be people who were just disciplined about practicing.

They were looking at every day how can I get better. They were looking at like how can I have fun. They were looking at how can I do this really hard work and be better at it for having done the really hard work.

And I think that sometimes we don’t, especially in screenwriting, we never see that really hard work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we just assume like, “Oh, it must have been easy for them.” And in most cases, it wasn’t easy at all.

**Craig:** That’s right. A lot of this is about shedding our romantic understanding of what success is, our romantic understanding of what it means to be a professional, and our romantic understanding of what passion is all about. What he says here is the better you get at something, the more it becomes a passion, a true passion.

When we are children, we fall in love with things and we do them for a month or two and then we stop. And you have a daughter, I’m sure you’ve seen her go through these phases where she becomes obsessed with something. And then —

**John:** Oh, yeah. Rainbow looms. Oh my God, like she could not get enough rainbow looms and making these little elastic bracelets. And then suddenly she never wants to look at it again.

**Craig:** That’s right. My son was obsessed with rocks for five months. I have a drawer full of these rocks. [laughs] But he don’t look at the rocks anymore. But that’s normal. That’s part of growing up.

What I see sometimes in a distressing way in people who are recent college graduates is that they’re still doing it. And the mistake that they’re making is they’re mistaking initial excitement and novelty and the romance of the what-can-be for something that’s real. What is real is the day-after-day work that exists when the novelty is long gone.

There is nothing new about writing a screenplay for you or for me in a sense. But because we are professionals and we practice and we try and get better, we are inspired to do better. There is something beyond the rush of the novelty. There is a true professional joy, I think. And that just requires commitment.

**John:** So I’m just speculating here. But I’m looking at sort of other people who work in our industry. So you look at agents. And so you’d never just become a talent agent. There’s a whole hierarchy you go through.

And so you start in the mail room, and you work your way up to a desk where you’re answering the phone for an agent, and then you might become a junior agent, and you might finally have clients of your own. That training ground, those initial steps are terrible. And they’re sort of deliberately terrible. And it is not to punish anybody, but just so you can actually see from the ground up this is how it all works, this is how it all fits together.

And so if somebody bails on it saying like, “I hated being in the mail room,” well, okay, you hated being in the mail room but that really wasn’t what you were trying to do anyway. That wasn’t what being an agent was. That was just the initial thing. And if you can push through it, if you can look for like what are the ways in being in the mail room that I can figure stuff out, you are the person who’s going to move ahead.

I remember having an internship at Universal, the summer between my two years at Stark Program, and I had the most boring job. I was the intern below three assistants to the head of physical production at Universal. And there was literally nothing for me to do but like file a couple of papers every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But one of the things I recognized I could do is there was this moment, like there were 10 minutes after lunch where my boss, Donna, was sort of in a happy place.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so during that happy place, I’d go —

**Craig:** [laughs] You mean drunk?

**John:** [laughs] She was just sort of like sedated. Like there were like no crises for like just a little while.

**Craig:** Oh, I thought she just had like a three martini lunch or something.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve told you some great stories from that summer.

But one of the things I recognized is I’m filing all these papers and there’s all these budgets. At that time they were shooting Greedy and The Flintstones and a few other movies. And I was reading through all the budgets because the budgets are in front of me, I’m going to read them.

And if I saw things I didn’t understand, I could ask her like two questions. I could ask her those two questions. And if they were smart questions, she would say like, “Well, that was actually a good question.” Like she could see that I was actually paying attention and was moving forward. I was getting something out of this. And that helped me there and it got me a better internship at the end of the summer.

**Craig:** What’s interesting is that these other job paths in Hollywood will quickly burn out, I think, the dilettantes. You can say you want to be a filmmaker, you direct a film, you go through that exhaustion and that misery, you come out the other end, and you don’t want to do it anymore, I understand. And if you do, you do.

Working at an agency, working at a studio, there is that long military march through the ranks. But not so with screenwriting. It’s the one gig. It’s like the — I guess, acting, a little bit, too. Acting and screenwriting, you could just keep banging your head against that wall for a while.

**John:** But here’s where I think there is an opportunity for writers. And maybe this is part of the reason why television has gotten so much better. If you look at television, there is that system where you work your way up through. So, yes, you’ve gone off and you’ve written your own specs and people are hiring you based on material you’ve written before, but there’s also people who get hired on as writers’ assistants or get hired on as sort of the script coordinators, the ones who are like sort of around the writers all the time but are not actually being allowed to write the scripts.

And those are the jobs in which if you can show that you are a smart person, that you’re adding value, that you are getting your job and understanding how to push beyond past it, that’s a real opportunity.

I have friends who are on the fourth season of a TV show and they are remarkably capable. And because they’ve been capable, they’ve been given more and more responsibilities in terms of like not just being on the set, but like shadowing the director and getting to do things that a writer in their position wouldn’t normally get to do. Because they have not only done their job well, but they’ve recognized, “You know what, I see what this next thing is and I can ask those smart questions and I can be trusted to do those next things.”

**Craig:** We don’t have that in features, obviously.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But what’s interesting is you’re describing somebody that seems remarkably free of a sense of entitlement. And that is a lot of what the problem is. When we say chase your dream, when someone says, “I’m going to keep chasing my dream because it’s my dream and I believe in it and I know that it’s what I’m supposed to do,” what I hear is “I’m entitled to this. I’m entitled to it. I’m just going to keep chasing because I’m supposed to have it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re not supposed to have anything. You get what you earn. And there are remarkable stories of people with extraordinary talent who squander it because they’re just waiting for somebody to give them something. And of course there are people who have no talent who are also waiting.

And, you know, when you talk about that TV room, it sounds to me like none of those people got there and said, “Well, look, just privately, I’m smarter and better at this than the people that are my bosses. So, you know, I’m going to wait for them to realize that.” Okay. [laughs] Good luck. Good luck.

**John:** This all reminds me of like sort of the final thing that Cal Newport’s book points out called “The Law of Remarkability” which says, “For a project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.”

And this thing, it makes me think back to Kurt’s script because, you know, we’re talking about sort of in the preamble to it, we’re talking about how scripts get passed around and how the Black List formed. And that really is something like you need something that you think is so good that you comment on it to other people. And, you know, the network of Hollywood is set up in such a way that things can get passed around. There’s a venue for it.

So if Kurt was just writing his scripts in Oakland and never showed them to anyone, there would be nothing for anyone to remark about. There wouldn’t be any sort of venue for that to be happening in. So by sharing it with us, but also sharing it in screenwriting competitions or blcklst.com or other places, sending it out there in the world, it gives people a chance to talk about, “You know what? This is really good.”

**Craig:** Well, I like that second point. It must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking. And part of what that says to me is that the venue has to be authentic. It has to be valid and meaningful because in general in Hollywood and I think in every business, people remark on things that have been given some sort of imprimatur. Somebody that they trust has said, “I like this.”

So the Black List service essentially is that, right? It’s a venue that was designed to be trusted by the people that remark about things.

I think that what we do with our Three Page Challenge, we’re trusted I think. So hopefully, people will see our opinions as trustworthy. And it doesn’t mean they have to like what Kurt did. But what it means is that they’re going to take it seriously.

It’s also my problem with a lot of the contests and pitch fests and all the stuff that go on because what they’re doing is they’re selling themselves as a legitimate venue when they aren’t really compelling. You’ll see people say things like, “Well, you know, I was a quarter finalist at the, you know, blah blah blah contest.”

And I’ll think no one cares. No one cares if you win that contest. I think they care about Nicholl. I think they care about Austin, the, “Oh, I was selected as a top ten pitch at the pitch fest blah blah blah.” Nobody cares. No one cares.

And so, you know, the endless refrain of caveat emptor on this podcast, when people tell you, “Give us money because we’re going to offer you a legitimate venue that real professionals are watching,” almost always that’s not true. Because they watch very little. Frankly, if they watch even one venue, that’s more than most of their co-workers.

So I think the blcklst.com, Nicholl, Austin, that’s — I don’t know. Any other ones?

**John:** I don’t know if there’s any ones that are meaningful enough that I can recommend them.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But this also reminds me of what your advice was to Malcolm Spellman and Tim Talbott when they came to with Balls Out. They were writing as The Robotard 8000. They came through with this crazy script.

And I think you recognized two things. First off, that it was remarkable enough that people would talk about it because it was just outrageous and it had a compelling thing, it had hooks to it that people could talk about which is great. Second, you said, “You know what? Put it up on the web. Put it up on the Internet. Let people see it and let people talk about it and let it get it out there in the world because it is, you know, special and remarkable.”

And so not to worry about selling this as a spec script but letting people see what this thing was. And so I think you had both of these instincts from the start.

**Craig:** Well, that one was an interesting case because I felt — I wasn’t thinking in terms of venue but trying to put it into context of what Cal Newport has written with his book. That seemed to me like they should create their own venue, that their whole, their entire aesthetic was, “We’re not like anything you’ve ever seen. We’re not called what you think, we don’t write what you think. So we’re going to create our own thing.”

And they did and the website that they made, so their own venue featured — is it Gamera? Was that the turtle? [laughs] It looks like it was a turtle.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** It was like a huge monster turtle swinging on a gymnastics thing. It was so bizarre and just right. And then from there, they got picked up to the Black List, not the service, but the actual annual Black List. And they made the annual Black List. So that was the second level of legitimacy.

And curiously enough, we just did a reading of that script, Balls Out, for the Black List and it’s on a podcast that’s coming up. And so I did the narration. But really good actors read the parts including Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas. So you should check that out. It came out really well, I thought.

**John:** Craig Mazin is recommending another podcast. So something unusual is happening —

**Craig:** I don’t know the name of it. [laughs] So I feel like I’m still okay.

**John:** Stuart will research the name and we’ll put a link in the show notes so you can find —

**Craig:** It’s going to be on a thing —

**John:** Craig’s narration for Balls Out. Do you get to say filthy words?

**Craig:** Oh, my God. There were a few of those where I just thought, “Well, if people complain, I’ll just say I was reading what I was handed.”

**John:** So Craig also wrote up some great bits of advice on the outline that I thought were terrific. So this is camera directions for screenwriters. Craig, talk us through what words screenwriters should be using if they’re using camera directions in their script.

**Craig:** Well, I thought this was only fair. I mean, here we are, we’re the guys saying, “Oh, ignore these people with their stupid rules. Like never put camera directions in scripts.” But it’s not fair. I don’t think for us to say, “No, no. Go ahead and do it,” if we don’t talk about how you should do it. And this all comes under the general title, “You can’t pan up.”

So I’ll see this in scripts all the time, “Pan up to find.” Okay, so let’s just talk about some of these terms and what they mean. None of them, the mistakes that you could make with this are going to ruin your screenplay. Don’t get me wrong. If you write a terrific script, nobody will care. But some of these things are just binary, they’re right or wrong.

So panning. You can’t pan up. A pan is essentially the camera version of shaking your head no. The camera is on a spot and it doesn’t go up or down. It hinges left and right. The opposite of that is tilting. You can tilt up and down. That’s the camera equivalent of nodding yes, right? So sometimes you want to tilt up or tilt down.

But just think about in your mind a head moving no or a head moving yes. Think about how that means the camera’s moving in relation to what’s in front of you. A lot of times, that’s not really what you want. What you really want to do is keep the camera pointing forward in a certain horizontal way, but moving the entire camera to the left or right or up or down.

So in that case, what you want to talk about is move right or move left. You can also say dolly right or dolly left if you want. And then for forward and backwards, you can say push in, pull out. By the way, dolly right and dolly left, those aren’t technically right either. You’re supposed to dolly forward and dolly back, and truck right and truck left. But trucking is a weird term that nobody uses really.

**John:** Yeah. No one ever says truck.

**Craig:** Right. So I think dolly is okay there. Sometimes I will see this mistake, people will say, “Zoom in on.” And I think, “Well, do you mean zoom in or do you mean push in?” So two very different things. John, I’m sure you know this.

**John:** Yeah, if you’re making a ’70s paranoia thriller, then yes, zooming in is absolutely correct. But rarely we call that a zoom. You know, there might be some case where you really want that effect of, you know, the zoom, or you want sort of the vertigo zoom. You know, if that really is appropriate to your moment, call it out. But that’s rarely — what’s called a dolly zoom, that’s often what that’s referred to.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a dolly zoom.

**John:** If that really is appropriate, that’s fine. Go and do it. But most cases, you know, you are moving in, you are, you know, revealing. A lot of these things I find in my own script, I will say, “Move to reveal.” That way, I’m not saying it has to be a dolly or a pan or whatever else. It’s just like the camera does something to show us something we did not see before.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. You’re not there so you’re not sure if it’s going to be right or left or back or forth. But the point is move the camera to reveal something.

So when you’re pushing in, you’re moving the whole camera forward. And that means that everything in the screen starts to — you get closer to everything sort of at the same time.

A zoom is a lens. On a zoom, the camera doesn’t move at all. Instead, the camera operator is turning a lens and changing the focal length of the lenses they turn. So what happens is it’s almost like you’re blowing up the image. Rather than moving, you’re blowing it up.

So if you want to see an example of zoom in — Quentin Tarantino will still use them to ironic effect in Kill Bill when the Bride shows up to train with Pai Mei, he does lots of zooms on Pai Mei’s face because he’s — the whole thing, I mean, even the film has been treated so it’s supposed to look like it’s a ’70s karate movie. So that’s a zoom. You generally aren’t going to be zooming.

If you want the camera to go up or down without tilting, right, then you could talk about booming up or camera rises or crane up or crane down or boom down.

And then let’s talk about some angles. There are times when you want to be looking down on something and there are times when you want to be looking up at something. You can say we look down on or we look up at. Or you can also say high angle on, low angle. Low angle means you’re down low looking up. High angle, you’re up high looking down.

**John:** If you ever get confused just think a giant is high. What would a giant be looking at? A dwarf is low, what would a dwarf be looking up at? That’s the difference between high angle and low angle.

Again, you’re not likely to have to call these out very often. I mean, it would be a very specific case that really needs to be in the script if you’re going to be using either one of those.

**Craig:** Well, that brings me to the cardinal sin of camera direction. And the cardinal sin of camera direction in your screenplay is not, “Don’t use camera direction…” The cardinal sin — that’s my impression of these idiots. The cardinal sin of — “Give me money now.” The cardinal sin of camera direction is unmotivated camera direction.

Unmotivated camera direction is a bad thing to do when you’re making a movie, as a director, as a cinematographer, you don’t move the camera pointlessly. You want to move it for a reason, right? Okay, what’s your reason? Maybe your reason is just to create a feeling. Maybe your reason is to see something specific.

As a screenwriter, you want to make sure that if you’re calling out a specific camera move or angle, it’s for a purpose. Ask these questions, why does the camera need to move? Why do I have to see what it is showing me? What information do I learn from what it showing me? And through those, the answers to those questions, you will have intentional motivated camera direction.

**John:** Absolutely true. And I was thinking back to recent things I’ve written. And in Scary Stories there’s a moment where a character leaves the room and we stay behind the room. The camera turns around and very slowly creeps in on something. That’s the definition of intentionality. It’s like there’s nothing making us look over in that direction so the choice to do that makes it really clear something very big and unsettling is about to happen and be ready for it. That’s motivation. But so I have to write all that stuff into the script.

But in most cases, you’re not going to do that at all. And so it’s not going to matter to me whether something’s a two shot or a single shot or how we’re dollying or how we’re moving through these things.

Sometimes, you want to call out a general style for how things are supposed to feel. And so there’s moments in the script that definitely have a different feel. And I would talk about sort of like there were times I would say sort of very loose documentary style footage. That’s great, but rarely am I calling out stuff otherwise.

**Craig:** Yeah. So in the script I’m writing now, there are two characters who are scared to go somewhere. They’re scared to cross something. And they decide the only way they’re going to be able to do it is if they do it together. And so they sort of push themselves together and start walking slowly.

And then I call out a shot on their feet to see how close their feet are kind of and how trembly they are. You know, look, you can watch movies and see a shot like that and go, “Oh, you know what? It’s nice to occasionally look at the feet. That’s cool.” Not good enough. Why am I looking at feet? What am I learning from the feet? I need to know.

So unmotivated camera direction is just like unmotivated dialogue or action. Don’t talk to me if I don’t need to hear the words or they don’t mean a damn thing. And don’t show me something that doesn’t mean anything.

So that stuff needs to be built in. But if you have a moment where you know why you want to do it and you know what the audience is going to get out of it, here’s a sense of what the vocabulary is so you don’t write pan up.

**John:** Don’t write pan up. Never write pan up.

**Craig:** You can’t pan up.

**John:** So on the topics of the words on the page, Dave wrote in with question. He’s writing, “My protagonist is traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood. For my scene headings, should it be as generic as EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD — DAY and EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD- TODAY? Or do I need to be more specific?” Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I think you need to be much more specific than that. First of all, there’s no such thing as neighborhood. Even if you were in one neighborhood, I wouldn’t write neighborhood. That means nothing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is a vanilla pudding description. So I want to know where he is. You need to define my space. EXT. BLANKETY..WILLIAMSTOWN — DAY , a da-da-da kind of place. Fine. He crosses out of Williamstown into EXT, da-da-da, a new kind of place. Here’s what it’s like.”

No, of course I need to know. Neighborhood is, that’s like EXT. BUILDING.

**John:** Absolutely. Or INT. ROOM.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What is a room? I have no idea what a room is. So what Craig is pointing out is that you’d probably have both in your scene header something that encapsulates the idea of what the place is, so a name for like it’s Williamstown. And then the first time that you are there, you’re giving us a sense of flavor of what this thing feels like. The next time we see Williamstown, we’re like, “Oh, it’s that neighborhood.” But you have to be really specific in those scene headers so we know what it is we’re looking at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t want it over describe in the scene header. Don’t throw us 15 words in the scene header. But just give it a name so that once we — so that sticks in our head. And it may be a very good idea to make sure you’re not naming two different locations really similar things. So if you have Williamsport and Williamstown, we won’t be able to tell the difference.

**Craig:** Correct. Now, if you have a situation where your character is on a bus or a train and the ideas is they’re traveling rapidly through, you know, from place to place or it’s montagey, you can shorthand it because we’ll never know, we’re never going to be there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So we don’t know the name and we don’t need to know the name and we could just say, you know Jim looks out of a train as it passes through, you know, urban blight, suburban blah, blah, gentrification, whatever. Describe, give me a flavor of it. So just think to yourself, some locations scout has to go out and figure this out. Where am I sending them? They need to know. You know, neighborhood 1 and neighborhood 2 tells nobody anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** 100% agree. Next question, Brian writes, “I’ve written an animated pilot script and I’m wondering if I should denote anywhere in the script that it is in fact animated. I made the mistake at an early table read of not indicating this and most of the notes I received assumed it was live action. Like, ‘It would be impossible to make,’ or, ‘You can’t train a cobra to do that,’ et cetera.”

**Craig:** [laughs] You can’t train a cobra to speak.

**John:** “As my script is now getting in the hands of agents, producers and et cetera, I’m wondering if there’s anything I should add in the script itself to make it clear to the reader immediately that we’re talking about a cartoon to avoid any confusion?” What would you do Craig?

**Craig:** Very simply. Let’s say the title of this were, you know, John the Cobra, then I would say John the Cobra an animated pilot by Brian, right? Just put it right on the title page, put the word animated pilot and this way no one will even get to page one without knowing it’s animated. I mean, yes, for sure, I think you’ve got to just call it out.

**John:** I think you got to call it out too. But I’ve had this actually happen to me. There’s a project I wrote recently, you know, I say recently, three years ago, and people who read it were like, “Oh yeah, so this is animated, right?” “Like no, no, no, I really mean for this to be live action.” They’re like, “Oh.” And it’s like, “Oh, I really should have told you that before I had you spend, you know, 90 minutes reading the script.” So, that’s also a great case for whatever we’re going to call the intermediary page between the title page and the first page.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you have something to talk about like this is the animation style that it’s going for, that’s the perfect place to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but no, you need to make that clear. You can’t train a cobra to do that.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** That cobra is having a discussion with a rat. [laughs] How do we do that?

**John:** But Craig, could you train cobra to fight polio?

**Craig:** No, but I’ll tell you what. You can train polio to fight glioblastoma multiforme and that is my One Cool Thing. Look, it’s like now Segue Man has gotten a sidekick? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely, Segue Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Segue Boy.

**John:** Transition Boy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m Transition Boy. My parents died in a fire.

**John:** Transition Boy started as Transition Girl but —

**Craig:** Yeah exactly, transition — no, then I’ll be Post Transition Girl. So I’m Transition Boy.

**John:** Transitioning Boy.

**Craig:** I’m Transitioned Boy. Anyway, so here’s my One Cool Thing. Polio, so here’s a crazy idea, take a disease that used to kill and paralyze millions of people and was finally eradicated by vaccines and use it to treat glioblastoma multiforme. Glioblastoma multiforme is pretty much the worst diagnosis you can get from a neurologist.

**John:** I don’t know what it is. So tell me what that is.

**Craig:** Glioblastoma multiforme is a kind of brain tumor. It is malignant, it is incredibly aggressive and it essentially becomes inoperable. And here’s why — it’s operable. It’s very operable, but pointlessly operable. Because what happens is they’ll go and they’ll take out as much of it as they can. But it’s impossible to get 100% of it. So they can literally remove 99% of this glioblastoma multiforme tumor and the tiny remaining cancer cells will just go bonkers again. It is incredibly aggressive.

And the deal with glioblastoma multiforme is that if you were diagnosed with this, you’re looking at anywhere from four months to four years. Nobody makes it past five years, period, the end. This is terminal. And it is super bad. And that’s with surgery and radiation and chemo. And the chemo, they say, will give you maybe two months. I mean, it’s the worst.

Well, so [laughs] a group of brilliant people have come up with this idea and it’s showing early promise. It’s not perfect yet but it’s showing early promise. What they’ve done is they have engineered poliovirus. They’ve taken poliovirus and they’ve genetically altered it. So, if you are afraid of genetically modified organisms, I’m so sorry, they’re wonderful. And they actually spliced it with some genetic code from the common cold. One of the things about polio is that it’s really good at replicating itself.

Well, this polio isn’t so good at replicating itself but what it does do is it attaches to these very specific receptors on the cancer cells themselves and starts to destroy the cancer cells without infecting healthy cells. It’s kind of brilliant. It is incredibly painstaking. They have to figure out exactly how much to put in. They have to surgically implant it in there. Then they’ve got to wait. And essentially what happens is the polio isn’t really killing the cancer cells because it’s a weakened poliovirus anyway. What the polio is doing is turning the cancer cells which normally exist like ninjas that the good guys can’t see and they’re basically shining a light on them, so that the immune system which normally cannot tell that the cancer cell is bad, now sees, “Oh my God, it’s polio”.

And it goes rushing in to kill the cancer cells and they’ve had some initial very positive results, not perfect yet by any stretch. But this could be a big deal as in they could, if this is refined, this could actually cure a number of — and it seems to have already cured a few people and this was an incurable disease so that’s just a remarkable breakthrough and I hope that it pays off in the way that they’re thinking it eventually will.

**John:** Yeah, I hope it works well. I just have this real flashback to Emma Thompson at the very start of I Am Legend. And it has one of the best intros to a movie I’ve ever seen. It’s basically this CNN interview with Emma Thompson and she’s like — so the interviewer says like, “So you’ve cured cancer?” It’s like, “Yes, we’ve cured cancer,” and then smash cut to the end of civilization and basically they genetically modified something that became the disease that killed everybody.

**Craig:** Well, this is where Hollywood makes me angry because it’s easy for us — that’s a great way to get into a movie and it is. The problem is that what is narratively convenient for us is actually damaging the credibility of really good science. Because in truth, that’s not what we should be scared of. What we should be scared of is glioblastoma multiforme, not these fascinating treatments to cure it.

So, yes, ever since War of the Worlds, I mean we’ve always dreaded the virus, you now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now, we dread vaccines, or at least some idiots do. Because we’ve been taught that science is messing with the primal forces of nature. Yeah, well, that’s how we got aspirin and that’s how we got Advil and that’s why don’t all die when we’re 40. So I’m entirely in favor of these things.

And by the way, if you read about this polio treatment of glioblastoma, you’ll see that it was subject to some of the most rigorous controls by the federal government. And they were really careful.

**John:** Oh, I could imagine why.

**Craig:** Yeah, they were really —

**John:** It’s polio.

**Craig:** It’s polio, you know, so they were really, really careful. And they did a spectacular job. So, here’s hoping.

**John:** Hurray. My One Cool Thing is the resolution of a lawsuit about Three’s Company and an Off-Broadway play called 3C which was a parody of Three’s Company or a very specific satire based around Three’s Company.

So what happened is a federal judge in New York, her name was Loretta A. Preska of the U.S. District Court, a rule that the play 3C did not violate the copyright of Three’s Company. So, it’s a complicated situation, so essentially there was this Off-Broadway production of this play called 3C and it was essentially a parody of Three’s Company.

And from what I understand, I never saw it but it was happening in the same time we were doing Big Fish, is — so basically all of the constructs of Three’s Company, so like the set and the basic characters and sort of what their situation was and played it as if they were all really real. So like what if Jack Tripper really were gay and were around all these sort of homophobic insults. And like what if all this leering and all the stuff this happened sort of around him.

And so it was a very pointed thing. And it got sort of mixed reviews. But it also got a lot of concern by the copyright holders. So it’s a company called DLT Entertainment owns the copyright, owns the rights to remake Three’s Company. And they said, “Uh-uh-uh.” And they filed a cease and desist.

And so this playwright was stuck in this weird situation where the play closed. And he couldn’t publish the play, he couldn’t find other stages for the play, he couldn’t do anything because there was this specter that this other company might come after him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, he went and sued them and basically this is the first rule and it says, you know what, this was fair use. This was a fair way to sort of take this existing property and, you know, satirize it the same way that an SNL sketch can satirize Scandal or any other sort of popular cultural thing. So, I thought it was really fascinating. I could feel for both sides of the situation as a person who might create the thing that gets parodied. Like, “Well, at what point do I have the opportunity to sort to say like, ‘You can’t do that, that’s my thing?'”

**Craig:** Well, pretty much no point. I mean, that’s fair use. It’s pretty clear about the parody exception and then the Supreme Court expanded that concept as well to include what it meant to parody public figures.

As somebody that did parody, you know, we wouldn’t have been able to do a thing if we didn’t have that fair us. I mean we were copying things down to – when and we did the — here’s how close we were. We, in Scary Movie 4, part of the parody was the movie Saw. So, we recreated the bathroom, the iconic bathroom from Saw. And we did it so well that when they went back I think and made another Saw, they used part of our set.

Because people buy sets back and forth from each other all the time. And I think we even had part of their set when we made ours. So the key is, is there any chance that people are going to confuse these two things? There’s no chance that people are going to go see the play that you just described and think, “Ah, this is Three’s Company but on stage.” No, it’s not. It’s clearly not. It’s clearly parody and I’m not surprised. I don’t like it when people try and get heavy-handed about copyright stuff because I do believe in copyright. And I do believe in the rights of intellectual property holders.

So, when they truly are bullies, I think it weakens the general cause because there are people out there who want everything to be free all the time, you know. And I’m not one of those people. So, I’m glad that this prevailed. I presume it’s going to stay this way because it just sounds like a classic case of fair use to me.

**John:** I agree. It sounds like fair use. But part of the reason why I want to bring it up is because if you were this playwright, you know, he was correct and was ultimately vindicated but this is two years where he has not had the ability to actually show his play to anybody.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so just as a warning that if you’re going to walk into dangerous waters, you might ultimately be right. You might have the law on your side, that won’t necessarily help you for a period of time until you get those decisions back.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, you know, he would much rather not have had to file a lawsuit and then be able to make other plays and he wasn’t be able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And some of these cases, unfortunately the way the law is set up, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. What we found was that if you ask a company for the right to parody a product by let’s say, “Can we please use your logo to parody you?” And they say no, it starts to fall out of fair use because you’ve essentially demonstrated that you didn’t think it was fair use. So, you kind of just proceed like it is fair use.

And then they come after you and then you go, “Oh, what? Well, fair use.” And you usually win. But you’re right, this is the cost of doing business. And this is why in general, you’re better off with somebody big behind you when somebody big comes after you. Obviously, that isn’t always possible.

**John:** Yeah. So it was pro bono representation in this case. So thank you to whoever lawyers who stepped on his behalf.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** That is our show this week. So you can respond to me or to Craig on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We also have a Facebook page which we sometimes check and we actually looked at some of the things on Facebook this week. So you can find us at Facebook/Scriptnotes. We’re on iTunes. You can find us there, just search for Scriptnotes. That’s where you can subscribe and listen to all the episodes. You can also leave us a comment. We look at those comments as well. If you are on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app that is available for iOS, for iPad and for iPhone. That’s where you can also get to all the back episodes of the show.

The service is called Scriptnotes.net. That gets you back to episode one, all the way back to the beginning of this very show where we didn’t know how to do any of this stuff.

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It has an outro by a very talented listener, but we haven’t decided which one yet. So, if you are a listener who has an outro for our show, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to it. And that’s also where you can send your questions, like the two questions we answered today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you would like to buy a Writer Emergency Pack, you can go to the store@johnaugust.com or just writeremergency.com and click the links there. The special code this week, and it’s actually good for this whole month, is Scriptnotes and that will give you 10% off your orders.

**Craig:** 10%!

**John:** 10%. That’s savings.

**Craig:** It’s all that guy. 10%? Wow.

**John:** That’s unbelievable.

**Craig:** Tell me more.

**John:** And we will be back next week. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Okay, bye.

Links:

* The LA Times on [the CAA to UTA exodus, and CAA’s resulting lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-takeaways-caa-lawsuit-uta-20150403-story.html)
* [Scriptnotes, 191: The Deal with Scripped.com](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-scripped-com)
* [Backblaze](https://www.backblaze.com/) and [CrashPlan](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/) online backup services
* [Fountain](http://fountain.io/) is future proof
* [Mad Max: Fury Road trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8)
* [Writer Emergency Packs are available now](http://writeremergency.com/) (use the code “scriptnotes” at checkout on the John August Store for 10% off through May 1st)
* Writer Emergency Kickstarter update on [how online retail works](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck/posts/1182012)
* [Scriptnotes, 190: This Is Working](http://johnaugust.com/2015/this-is-working)
* [So Good They Can’t Ignore You](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), by Cal Newport
* [The Robotard 8000](http://www.therobotard8000.com/Robotard_Main/Main.html)
* [Announcing The Black List Table Reads](http://blog.blcklst.com/2015/04/announcing-the-black-list-table-reads/)
* Forbes on [Duke’s Polio Virus Trial Against Glioblastoma](http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2015/03/30/60-minutes-covers-dukes-polio-virus-clinical-trial-against-glioblastoma/)
* [Play Reimagining ‘Three’s Company’ Wins Case](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/theater/play-reimagining-threes-company-wins-case.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0&referrer=) from The New York Times
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener JT Butler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))