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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/selling-without-selling-out).

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

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

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

So, Craig, last night at 1:30 in the morning my phone rang.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So what do you do when your phone rings in the middle of the night?

**Craig:** Well, I have to answer this hypothetically because I turn all my ringers off at night. But if the ringer were on and it rang at 1:30, I would definitely answer the phone.

**John:** Yeah, because there’s never good news at that time of the night so you’re going to have to deal with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Something is going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the phone rings. It wasn’t my cell phone which is always downstairs. It was my house phone, so I pick it up and it is a wrong number.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Or if it’s not a wrong number, because the guy on the other end sounded just as confused as I was. So it could have been somebody who actually just like was being a dick and just called two random numbers and connected them.

**Craig:** Oh, you can do that? Oh, when you put the phones together?

**John:** Yeah, or I think you use like three-way call to people.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s actually kind of brilliant. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Kind of love that guy. [laughs]

**John:** A whole new kind of terrible pranking —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For awful people.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** So anyway, so it’s 1:30 in the morning. I’m wide awake suddenly now. And so my brain is sort of stewing and ruminating. But the best thing happened. So this product that I’ve been sort of thinking about for quite a long time and I haven’t really started writing because there was a thing that I couldn’t figure out about it, I suddenly figured it out like 1:30 in the morning.

**Craig:** That’s the way it works. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So I was up until 4:30 in the morning sort of actually —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Working it all through.

**Craig:** Is this all a way for you to say that this is going to be a terrible podcast where you’re super sleepy?

**John:** No. I’ve had a lot of coffee. It’s going to be either one of those podcasts where I’m super sleepy or I’m a little bit too wired.

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** So we’ll see how it all goes.

**Craig:** Very exciting.

**John:** But if three years from now you see a movie that I’ve written where one of the key plot points is she’s looking for her phone that she lost, that came from last night.

**Craig:** That was last night.

**John:** Everyone was part of the genesis of that moment.

**Craig:** You know that they say that generally speaking that we are at our most creative neurologically in the very beginning of the day when we wake up and at the very end when we’re going to bed. So there are days where I actually just wait, and then as I’m going to bed I’d start thinking then in that kind of weird middle-dreamy place. And it is amazing how often in that little place you will figure out things.

**John:** Yeah. That’s our liminal state between fully awake and asleep.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Today on the podcast we’re going to be answering a whole bunch of questions. People write in with questions, sometimes on Twitter we can get to them right away and we answer right when they send us their question. But sometimes people send in longer questions to ask@johnaugust.com. We have a whole bunch saved up and we are going to get through those today. So you’re ready, Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. Well, let’s start with some follow up because one of them is from this guy James Topham who writes, “I hope you don’t mind, but as an alumnus of the Three Page Challenge, I thought I’d drop you a line to let you know how I’ve got on since your kind feedback.” His script was the one with the killer robots in the desert called Proving Ground and I kind of vaguely remember that. Do you remember that, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t but I like everything that he said, so. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. I like that he likes us. So —

**Craig:** I like that he likes me. Yeah, so I’m going to say that it doesn’t matter if I remembered or not.

**John:** It’s true. “Last year the script went out to a number of producers in LA and here in the UK with your notes faithfully executed of course. I flew stateside for a week to do a whole series of generals and met some great people. Since then I’ve been talking with some producers here. And the last couple of weeks I have sold my first feature pitch.” Congratulations, James.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** “It’s a micro-budget horror but on the slate of a great company but I want to say thank you for your direct feedback and for all the advice in the podcast for the last couple of years. For those of us remote from LA and support networks out there, the show provides such a resource to aid our understanding of the craft and gives me hope that there’s a slim chance of forging a career. So thank you.”

**Craig:** What a great — that’s fantastic. I mean, you know, the whole purpose of the Three Page Challenge was really just to help focus people on some of the very practical things that we deal with when we’re putting together a scene and so it was never really meant to be promotional in any way but I kind of love that that’s sort of what happened here. First of all, I love that we were right [laughs] because we really liked it apparently. And the company that he’s sold his pitch to is a very good company, it’s a top notch, A-list production company here in town.

So obviously, we’re brilliant, that’s really the point. I mean, I understand that James is proud of what’s happened to him but I think what he’s saying is, “Once again, John and Craig, you are brilliant.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s see if we can be brilliant today for other folks. So —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Here are some questions people wrote in with. We’ll get through as many of them as we can.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we have to start with Lynette Oliver because how can we not start with Lynette Oliver.

**Craig:** Lynette, she’s my favorite.

**John:** Craig, why don’t you read Lynette’s question —

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Because she will like that.

**Craig:** Yes, she will.

Lynette writes, “Recently, Craig was part of a Twitter conversation that basically ended with the advice to write query letters to get representation or get your script to somebody rather than just relying on The Black List site, my preferred method before this conversation. I definitely want to do the proper research before querying. My question is how does one do that research? InkTip, IMDbPro, some other subscription service? I’m a good researcher and in this case I have no idea where to begin, what listings I can trust since everyone and their Hollywood insider dog wants to take money from people like me in exchange for ‘access.'”

What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I don’t know people who’ve gotten agents through or managers through query letters but I know it does happen. So what she’s really asking is, “How do you find it? Who is the person who you should even sort of bother sending out that email to, sending that, you know, reaching out to because who do you know who’s real and who’s not real.” I think, it’s, you know, paradoxically, there’s more, just better research than there ever was before, so you can actually just look stuff up on the Internet in ways that you couldn’t and you can see what people’s credits are. But there’s just so many names that it’s just kind of overwhelming. Craig, where would you start if you were Lynette?

**Craig:** Well, I’m a little confused because the question implies that I gave the advice to write query letters rather than just relying on The Black List site and maybe I did but if so I’m recanting it because I actually don’t really think much of query letters. I know that people are constantly talking about query letters. My whole problem with query letters is that they’re kind of self-selecting. The people that answer query letters are precisely the people that you don’t want answering your query letter.

The better people don’t answer query letters because they don’t have to and that’s what’s so good about The Black List is that it allows the better buyers and the more reputable and powerful buyers to access your material. That aside, you’re right. I mean, I assume that query letters must have worked at least once or twice or people would finally stop unless it’s some kind of cargo cult.

I don’t know anything about InkTip. I can’t imagine there’s much of a point in spending money on a subscription service other than, I mean, The Black List is the only one that I think actually has gotten results as far as I can tell, So…

**John:** Yeah. I mean, there’s probably some bias just in that we know, you know, we know Franklin, and we know people who have gone through The Black List and so therefore there is a confirmation bias that’s sort of inherent to that.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Where it really comes down to is a push versus pull. And query letters are a way of like pushing your script out into the world and saying like, “Hey, please look at this thing.” And maybe that’s effective sometimes, but everyone I know who’s gotten agents or gotten managers it’s been a pull situation where that agent or manager has asked to read something because someone else has said, “This is really good,” or they found this through a competition, they somehow came up across this writer, this idea, and they wanted to read it. And most the people I know who’ve gotten representation recently, it’s been that situation.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, a writer who I was working with recently who I just had lunch with just last week, he did the more classic thing where he was working at a desk at an agency, was able to get himself on as a writer’s production assistant on a TV show and they noticed that he seemed good in competent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they asked to read his stuff and that got him started and that got him that whole process beginning. That’s much more typical than the sending out a query letter to the world.

**Craig:** I absolutely agree and let’s remind ourselves that these services, all of them, simply didn’t exist, say, I don’t know, 15 years ago or all the way back 19 years ago when you and I got started and somehow still people were discovered and hired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they are not necessarily. You know, I’ve always, you and I have been fairly consistent on this that what a lot of these services are doing is essentially charging you a fee for dipping your toe into the pool as opposed to jumping in.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And that is attractive for people who prefer that method. The problem of course is that it’s simply not as effective out of a general population. Of course, none of those general statistics apply to the outliers and, of course, it is the outliers that tend to do well no matter what the restrictions are. So, I don’t know if that answers the question but it’s certainly complicated and long-winded enough. I think, [laughs], I think I did that part right.

**John:** The only last sort of data point I’ll give is as I mentor to five writers who are sort of new WGA members. And one of them Jonathan Stokes, I don’t think will be upset to hear his name in the podcast to say that he wrote a ton of scripts and nobody would read them. And so he had this whole trunk full of scripts and then he finally wrote a script that someone through various means read and was like, “Oh, this is really good. You’re a good writer.” And that went on The Black List, like the list of best scripts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then he suddenly had this other trunk full of scripts and like they’ve all just sort of sold and been out there because he was a really good writer. It just took awhile for people to notice that he was a really good writer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the awesome part of it. Actually, more consistent to the real story of how these things happen then I wrote a query letter to exactly the right person who is looking for it and therefore said, “Yes, I will represent you.”

**Craig:** You know, that also brings another thing to mind that I think we’ve talked about before. Most of the services that are available are, I guess, sort of wide net averaging services, you know, so people will evaluate your script and give you a general rating.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But, we don’t achieve success through general ratings. We are again about the outlier scores. So we’re about the Russian judge that gives you the 10 instead of the eight that everybody else got.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** That’s the person that’s going to buy your script. More importantly, in Hollywood typically what happens is people follow passion. So when one person gets very passionate about a certain screenwriter’s screenplay and people respect that person, they just presume they ought to be passionate about that writer as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, it’s all led by the outliers both on the talent side and on the acquisition side.

**John:** Yeah. What I don’t want this to sound like is a recipe for, well, just do nothing and somehow magically it’ll all come to be. You have to put your script out there in a way that people can find it and that people can talk about it and then discover that it’s good.

So, you know, there’s a middle ground between spending six hours a day sending out query letters and sticking everything in the trunk and then not letting anybody read it. We sort of really encourage people to let people, you know, have people read your scripts because that’s the only way people are going to find that you’re a good writer.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes I feel like the query letter thing becomes a job onto its self. You know, people send query letters, then they feel the need to send the follow-up query letters, and then the follow up to the follow ups and how long should I just wait before I follow up and it never ends.

**John:** It’s also weird that we call them query letters when they’ve got to be emails at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, they’re emails and they’re not, what are they, what’s the question?

**John:** Yeah. “Hey, would you read my script?”

**Craig:** Right. They’re not query letters. They’re sales letters.

**John:** Yeah, to sound good.

**Craig:** By the way, that’s how everyone views them too. They’re basically spam. It’s sales spam.

**John:** Yeah, speaking of it. This last week we did a press release that we had to push out to the world for the new Bronson Watermarker and so I was writing and rewriting this press release and I just hated it so much because it was so incredibly boring.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** But it kind of needed to be boring because I could look and see like, well, what is the net result of this press releases on all the sites that end up running these press releases, and they’re kind of boring. And so I had to do kind of exactly what Lynette is describing which is like figuring out like, “Who was it worth reaching out too? What is right address? Do I find the person’s name that I can send this to so it’s not just going into a general tips ad or whatever line?” And that never really stops.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. It’s just, it’s too much.

**John:** It’s too much.

**Craig:** It’s too much.

**John:** Ryan from Singapore writes:

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I understand your writing process starts with cranking out a large number of pages very rapidly. How sloppy is too sloppy for a first draft? Do you force yourself not to think about it and go with your gut even if things don’t make total sense? What about refining what you’ve written? Is it something you only do once you completed the script start to finish?”

So there’s two kind of things that we’re talking about here. Some writers talk about the vomit draft which is sort of just like everything as fast as you can, get it down on the page. I don’t do that as much as I do barricade myself and handwrite something so I can go back and rewrite it. But in both cases, I think sloppiness is a fair question.

Craig, what is your barometer for sloppiness?

**Craig:** Yeah, well, I don’t do any of this. I don’t crank out a large number of pages very rapidly and I definitely try and write my first draft as if it was going to be shot.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I know it’s not going to be shot but I should have said as if it were going to be shot.

**John:** Yeah. Subjunctive is your friend.

**Craig:** Subjunctive. I know it’s not going to be and I know that I am going to have to refine and refine and refine and rewrite and rewrite. Nonetheless, I am not writing something just to say, “Look at me, I made it to the end. I’m writing something that reads like a movie.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** It’s going to help and more than anything, first of all, it requires you to work harder which is important because that’s work you need to do. If you don’t do it now, you’re going to have to do it later, might as well try to do it now. I find it very difficult to write things that don’t, like he says, “Go with your gut even if things don’t make total sense.” Well, if they don’t make total sense then maybe there’s, A, a problem with your gut. Or, if your gut is correct and you just haven’t figured out the one part, unfortunately everything that’s built on top of that will suffer from the foundation not making sense.

You’ll start to lose some unity to the piece and I want the people that are reading it to be able to give me the best feedback possible which I think they can only do if it reads like a movie. So, I’m actually very careful about how, I mean, The Huntsman, by the way, that’s an example. So on The Huntsman, I wrote one draft and I wrote it as if they were going to shoot it and they’re going to… — Well, I mean, you know, they got Frank Darabont to do it, so if I had just done a sloppy draft, I think everybody would have said, “Now, can you do it for real?” You know?

**John:** Yeah. I can see Ryan’s point here in that sometimes perfectionism can be a trap. And so, you can go through and sort of diddle with every scene so carefully that it’s like pristine and precise that you never actually get the whole thing done. But I think I’m much more in your camp where I always write a scene, even if I’m handwriting a scene that I still have to type up, I write it as if what if I never get the chance to go back and fix it?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I always write it as if this has to be able to be shot and I won’t let anything go in the script that doesn’t feel like it could be shot. All the time knowing that I’m going to go back and do another pass through there, things are going to be improved just by a second look at things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I definitely write sort of for the final version of things. Where sloppy can be your good friend is if you’re just trying to figure stuff out about who the characters are, what they are, I’m a big fan of writing off the page and writing a bunch of scenes that you know are not going to be in the movie but just to get the characters talking.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Figure out what their voices are like. And that’s an absolutely fair and valid process. And that’s kind of a thing where just kind of being stream of consciousness can be a really smart move because you get to hear what those characters’ voices are, what the world is like, just it’s, you know, it’s just getting your mind in a more fluid place. That is totally valid. But when it comes time for your real scenes, don’t shove crappy scenes into your script because they’ll be there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, ultimately this is our job is to write a movie and to write scenes that feel like scenes and have harmony and expression and theme and character and purpose and all that stuff. I mean that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. When I hear that people are doing vomit drafts or just chucking stuff down a page, I feel like they’re trying to figure out the plot through writing screenplay pages which is a terrible way of figuring out a plot anyway.

So, yeah, I, like you, I get to be as sloppy and as verbose as I want to be when I’m writing down notes and doing my index cards and redoing my index cards, all that stuff. But if you write your screenplay carefully, I guess is how I would say it, just sort of do it with attention and care and craft. I mean, I typically, you know, on a decent day I can write three pages. And while that may not seem like a lot to the vomit draft people, I’m sure it isn’t, in six weeks I will have a screenplay no matter what.

**John:** So there are days that I will do 17 pages, 21 pages early in the process. But those are good pages but those, and it’s also because I’m writing like 12 hours a day. I’m literally on sort of a lockdown just doing it —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And not out of a panic-fear situation but a genuine sort of mania and love for this thing that I’m doing. So honestly, my 1:30 in the morning phone call got this movie figured out in a way that I probably will go off and barricade myself and do some of those giant page days.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’re not all going to be like that. And at the same time, like those pages I write will hopefully be really good. They’ll hopefully be the kinds of scenes I want to have in the final movie. They’re not going to be, you know, approximations of them. They should be shootable scenes. We’ll see.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Next one, you?

**Craig:** All right, yeah. So we’ve got Laura in London and she writes, “I’m a UK writer. My first pilot is set in the UK has some interest from a US producer with a first-look deal at a big network. I have two producers already attached, both with a proven track record in film but not television. The US producer made some great stuff in the ’90s and not much since and has offered to option the script with a view to taking it out to cable. However, he wants to bring in a more established US writer to write a US version of the pilot. So my question is threefold. One…”

Oh boy, this is a complicated question, hope you’re taking notes.

“One, once I sign the option, what are my rights as the series creator? Obviously, it might go absolutely nowhere, but in the unlikely event it does go to pilot and get picked up, will I get to be in the writer’s room? Will I get to write an episode of my own idea?”

**John:** Let’s stop there and just sort of address her questions one at a time.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Once you sign that option, there’s no magic contract about how these are supposed to always work. And so you have, you know, as we often say in the show, you control everything now because you control everything. And so you can dictate some of those terms about what’s going to be happening in that room, what the relationship is going to be like with another showrunner that they have brought in. You can say no and sometimes you may want to say no.

**Craig:** I agree. And I’m going to read, let me just jam the next two through because I think they kind of all connect together.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** So that was the first one. Number two, “Is this a step forward in my career? My goal is to be a working screenwriter and I would love to be based in the US in the future. So is this a step in that direction or should I write a US version myself, try my luck elsewhere? Three, the neurotic bit; he wants another writer. I know this script’s not a total steamer.” I guess that’s a —

**John:** A bad thing.

**Craig:** Local. That’s local custom. Yeah, so a steamer’s a bad thing. “And the script’s not a total steamer. It has won and been a finalist in a few writing comps, I’d give it a B minus at least. But still, I get that I’m new, untested and British, but there are plenty of shows on now that have newbie writers teamed with experienced showrunners. So what does him passing my script really mean and how it will be viewed?”

And to me, this is all, I guess, Laura, this is all leading to me picking out what your instinct is in the way you’ve even set this up and are asking the question. I think you know the answer to all of these questions. I think what you’re saying is, “This isn’t right, is it? This isn’t a good idea, is it? This isn’t going to help me, is it? This isn’t what I want, is it?” And it seems to me like the answer is, no, it’s not.

I mean, look, you’ve written a pilot and you have producers, I assume they’re UK producers, and somebody in America who perhaps is getting a little long in the tooth likes the idea of it but wants to hire people that he’s comfortable with and make it over here in the US. I don’t really see how that helps you one bit. And I’m not sure would you be the series creator? Do you want to be the creator for a series you have nothing to do with that isn’t like your show at all? I don’t know. I don’t —

**John:** I think you’re taking the most pessimistic view of what the end result of this will be.

**Craig:** Shocker.

**John:** Because let’s also remember most TV shows don’t happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s an entirely possible situation here as well. So —

**Craig:** Wait, that’s the optimistic? The optimistic view is that the show never even happens? [laughs]

**John:** I would say that in TV, you go into TV knowing that a show not getting picked up, a show not running, like failure is not the same kind of failure in TV as it is in features. And so getting anywhere down the path to progress is considered success.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So a couple of things that I’d talk to Laura about. First off, there was a WGA panel I did with Kelly Marcel a couple episodes ago, we’ll put a link in the show notes, where Kelly talked about her experience on Terra Nova which actually sounds kind of similar in that here’s a British writer —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Who’s come in who got partnered up with people she didn’t necessarily believe in.

**Craig:** It’s eerily similar, yeah, although the people that she was paired up with were not like some guy that made some great stuff in the ’90s. It was Steven Spielberg.

**John:** No, no, they were big.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, he’s made some good stuff in the ’90s and other decades, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** But I would encourage you to listen to that and listen to her experience about it because it was really hard for her to walk away from that but she ultimately realized she needed to walk away from that. But I would also say, look at what the upsides of what happened with Kelly because of her decision to at least pursue with the process partway. She got to meet a bunch of folks in Los Angeles. She had a reason to be in Los Angeles and to be in rooms talking about her writing. And that could be a good thing even with this producer situation you have here.

So if their option is saying you are meeting with the American writer, you’re going in and you’re talking to US television, at least you’re suddenly now in the rooms with those people who are reading your script and thinking like, oh, here is a British writer with an interesting voice. That is a positive step in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say that Laura picks out the key to success here when she says there are plenty of shows on now that have newbie writers teamed with experienced showrunners.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And I think that since she controls this property completely, it is fair to say to this producer, “If you want this and you want to put a different writer on it, then I have to be paired with that writer and I’m going to be working with that writer on it and that’s that or you don’t have it.” And at least then you’re buying your way into an experience. And if it goes terribly south, then like Kelly, you can walk.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But at least you took your shot, your name is on it in a meaningful way, and you got involved and learned, you know, along the way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You really have to look at… — The worst outcome here is that this guy takes your thing, puts somebody else on it, they make something else that has no resemblance to what you wanted to do and it’s on the air and you had nothing to do with it. Or they take your thing, it does resemble what you did and you have nothing to do with it and you get no credit for it either. That would be terrible, so yeah.

**John:** It would be terrible but, again, the lesson we often come back to in Scriptnotes is that a writer is not one script.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so if she wants to have a career as a screenwriter working in Los Angeles, this may be a way to get her closer to that dream even if this project itself doesn’t work out magnificently.

**Craig:** Yeah, you just don’t want to have to beg your way into your own writing room, that’s all.

**John:** I completely agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** John writes, “I am a college grad with degrees in psych and communications with no family obligations. Here’s my concern. I’m a practicing full-blown Mormon.”

**Craig:** Hello!

**John:** “I support marriage equality and I believe I differ from most of the negative stereotypes associated. That being said, I don’t swear, I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I feel like that would be found out quite quickly even if I attempted to keep it on the down low.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “My concern is that given my faith’s very overt stance, will it hurt my chances? Lord Umbrage” — that’s you Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, yes.

**John:** “I will say that if I write a great script, that’s all that will matter. But I worry that my particular subgroup will be bearing the burdens of Orson Scott Card and others for quite some time.” So what’s our advice for John?

**Craig:** “Turn it off like a light switch. Just go click…” Um, you don’t have to worry about this, John.

**John:** I don’t have to be worry about this at all.

**Craig:** Not even one iota. Look, Orson Scott Card isn’t just somebody who is a Mormon, he is outspokenly against the idea of marriage equality. He’s made it a big huge thing and he also has a lot of other very strongly held political beliefs that he’s pushed out there in an overt way. This town has all sorts of folks ranging up and down various religious axes. If you don’t make a big deal out of it, then I really don’t see what the problem is. You know, I live in La CaÒada. We actually have quite a decent sized Mormon population there, so like two families. [laughs] That’s a Mormon joke.

No, no, there’s a lot of Mormon families and they are lovely people. And frankly, I’ve known people in my town eight or nine years and then my wife would say, “You know that they’re Mormon?” I had no idea, had no idea. I mean, it’s not like they’re not walking around with a big M sign. You know that. I think it’s great that you support marriage equality and this won’t cause you any trouble.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, you will find so many people who don’t drink or do drugs who are essentially Mormon in all but faith all around you. You’ll find there’s actually a ton of Mormons that you wouldn’t realize that they are Mormons working in the industry anyway. But also, I feel like it’s, I don’t know, I want to say, wow, like white people creating problems for themselves.

**Craig:** [laughs] White people.

**John:** Only in the sense that like, here’s John writing in and saying like, “Oh, I’m coming in with this giant handicap being a Mormon.” It’s like that’s crazy. Like if you want to come in with, you know, issues that are going to make it more challenging for you to start, that’s like the least issue you could possibly imagine.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I agree.

**John:** So right now I bet there’s a whole bunch of sort of like, you know, black women writers who are going, “Who is this person and why is he complaining?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, I understand because the truth is, he’s not here and I think that he’s receiving a kind of view of Hollywood as a politically monolithic place that rejects Christianity, religion. It rejects conservative ideologies and all that stuff. And look, there have been times when people have been outspoken about things and, but this will not be an issue for you. By the way, don’t drink and don’t do drugs, go ahead and meet half of Hollywood that’s in a recovery program.

So when you don’t accept a drink in a bar, people will just assume you’re a recovering alcoholic and that’ll be cool. [laughs] I don’t…this is not.. — By the way, I know a lot of Mormons in Hollywood too and every Mormon I have met who works in the film or television business, as far as I can tell, they’re all gay. Gay, well, gay ex-Mormons.

**John:** Yeah, gay ex-Mormons.

**Craig:** Gay ex-Mormons. A lot of gay ex-Mormons.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question comes from Thomas in Charlotte, North Carolina. “A friend of mine has talent representation at CAA. I’m a writer-director, and the friend introduced me to his agent for the purpose of having her forward my resume/work to her literary rep colleagues. A few weeks later, she told me that one particularly literary agent at CAA would meet me “for coffee.” I live in the Southeast but make frequent trips to Los Angeles, so I’m currently in the process of trying to schedule said coffee meeting for this month.

“This is my first meeting of this nature with an agent. What sort of weight or expectations should I be putting on this meeting? Is it a significant first step, is actual landing representation still a ways off? What should I do at this coffee to make sure it’s the right step?”

**Craig:** Coffees are great ways to meet with people without feeling like you’re trapped necessarily in a long lunch or that you’re not torpedoing the middle of your day.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** But in a sense, they work as a proper meeting. And I never put any weight or any expectation on any meeting ever in my life.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you sit down with this person, you should have some things in mind that you want to get answers to, you can have questions. The worst thing that happens when I sit down with people is that they’re boring.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They have nothing to say. They can’t hold up their end of the conversation. They have no questions or interesting things about them. So be prepared to talk about yourself, have questions and don’t be shy about saying, “Listen, the next step for me is representation. What do you advise here? I need to kind of get this thing going.” But more than anything, you should be your impressive interesting self.

**John:** 100%. Coffees are fantastic because it’s such a flexible definition of what it’s supposed to be. So it could be 10 minutes, it could be half an hour.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It doesn’t have to be more than that and it’s fine whatever that duration is. If I were Thomas coming into this coffee meeting, I would be able to talk about the things that you’ve done, the things you’re looking at doing, and the questions about sort of, you know, this is what I’m planning to do for my next step. What do you think? What would you advice? And about representation, exactly what Craig phrased it as is basically what would you want to see that would convince you to represent a writer-director in my situation?

Be able to talk about some of the other clients there, clients who are similar to sort of what you’re doing or it doesn’t even necessarily need to be a CAA client but you could point to, you know, recent successful writer-directors who’ve made smart choices and just be able to talk about them. They want to see that you’re not a crazy person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They want to see that you kind of get how things work and that you have an interesting voice, that you’re somebody they could imagine putting you in a room with an executive and that executive will say, “Oh, yeah, the guy seems really cool.”

**Craig:** Right. I mean, passion, all the things that work when you’re meeting somebody for the first time on a date, these are the things that work in these situations. I mean, agents in particular look at us, they evaluate us, not just by the material but by our appearance and I don’t mean to say “Oh, this is a really hot guy.” It’s more about does this person look like a weirdo, do they look presentable?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And also by the way we come off, you know, are you passionate, are you funny, are you interesting, are you smart? They really like smart people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they’ve had, if you are a kind of just middle of the road, bland person, what do they need you for, you know? That’s not a prescription to go nuts. I’m just saying, you know, you just don’t want to be boring more than anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

All right, Justin from Vancouver writes, “I was wondering if doing Scriptnotes has changed how studio executives and producers treat the two of you when in meetings. It is easier to have your opinions be taken seriously because they know you and your personalities from the podcast. Have you gotten work?” I feel like we’ve gotten this question before. “Have you gotten work because of the podcast?” John, have you gone from an A writer to an A++ writer because of Scriptnotes?

**John:** I know. I honestly feel very few of the people I work with on a daily basis know the podcast exists, at least at the big executive and studio producer level.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of there. I do think that on the assistant level, people listen a lot. I mean, occasionally, an executive will mention to me that they listen. But no, it seems like the stuff that gets you work is the stuff that always got you work. They like your script and/or your last movie was a hit, et voila. [laughs]

**John:** Et voila.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s really, no, nobody takes me more seriously because of Scriptnotes, no. It would be cool if they did.

**John:** I think it will be interesting 10 years from now as this generation of assistants rises up —

**Craig:** Ah. Yes.

**John:** And replaces their forefathers. Will they look at us with affection and hire us when we’re no longer, you know —

**Craig:** Right. When we’re gum in their food.

**John:** Yeah, when we are no longer young and in our 40s, but the creaky old men in their 50s.

**Craig:** The grumpy, yeah, grumpy, “Yeah, yeah, I did the Scriptnotes. I also wrote movies.” [laughs] Yes, you know —

**John:** So really, this is an investment in our future.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is like a pension. It’s like an IRA. We’re just throwing money, well, I hope that that works one day, but no, for now, Justin, no, not at all.

**John:** So, Nicolai writes what’s sort of a long question but he kind of perfectly described one of my frustrations with certain screenwriting software, so I’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “I’m desperate to switch to a sleeker, no filler screenwriting app. So why can’t I buy Highland on my Android devices?” That’s a simple question, because we don’t make it for Android because we don’t know how to make it for Android. “But I recently tried unshackling myself from Movie Magic in favor of Fade In, but I stuck with Movie Magic purely because it requires the fewest amount of key strokes to type a script.

“The most basic example: in Movie Magic, hitting tab always brings up a new dialogue line whether from a proceeding line or scene direction. Hitting enter always begins a new slug line/scene description. But with Fade In, hitting tab creates another parenthetical within dialogue which I try to avoid anyway or a line break even within a block of dialogue. The results, ending your line of dialogue requires two key strokes, enter/tab plus tab, whereas Movie Magic only needs one. It’s a tiny difference that adds up to a huge drag over five to 10 pages. How does Highland deal with this controversial issue and why won’t you let me give you my money? Thanks.”

So, again, Highland is Highland. Highland’s the app we make and it’s very sort of minimalist and stripped down. But what he describes about sort of like you’re in a box, you’re in dialogue and you’re moving from character to thing and you’re hitting different keys to move to the next point. It can get really annoying and you get to have a muscle memory for how a certain app does it. And I’m sure you found that too, Craig, is that you’re now using Fade In —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As your main screenwriting app. And so you’re totally used to it, right?

**Craig:** I don’t even know what he’s describing. In Fade In, I write a character name and then I hit return and I’m in dialogue. I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I don’t see any difference between that and the way Movie Magic works whatsoever. I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** Yeah, the issue of —

**Craig:** Maybe he’s hitting tab when he should be hitting enter, I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that Movie Magic does that I really like is when you’re in dialogue if you hit an open parentheses, it moves you into a parenthetical with the theory being how often do you actually want to have a parentheses in your dialogue.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I always thought that was very smart. But, look, if you are incredibly fastidious about key strokes and, again, I don’t know that he’s correct here but regardless, then I think a stripped down version of things would be perfect for you. If you are like most people and the extra key strokes become invisible to your process, then it’s not a problem. But I honestly don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** So I made a video about writing in Fountain and one of the points I made in that, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, but one of the points I made to it is that as you’re writing in the sort of more traditional screenwriting app, so Fade In, Final Draft, Movie Magic, you’re constantly thinking about sort of what element is what element. And so you’re always hitting those extra keys to sort of move and that becomes character name and there’s a parenthetical underneath it, and now you’re in your dialogue.

And it is a small tax that you’re placing on your writing to do that. And so one of the advantages in writing all in the left-hand margin, the way you can in a plain text editor or you can in Highland or Slugline is that you don’t have to think about that. The word processor, the text editor is doing that for you. So you’re just putting in the words and it is smart enough to figure out what those words would end up being. So that’s the thing. So the kind of situation he describes where he gets stuck in the wrong element can’t happen in Fountain because you’re never actually changing those elements consciously.

**Craig:** Right. For me, I think that because I’ve been using what I’ll call a formatted format for so long, I mean, I started on Final Draft, then I went to Movie Magic, and now I’m in Fade In. That process is invisible to my brain.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think if you start on Fountain, then you would — that’s what you would want and the other method would be very cumbersome. So it is about what you’re used to, to some extent. And there’s no right or wrong here. I guess, I would say to Nicolai, if you, I don’t know. Oh, because he doesn’t have Highland on his Android devices. Why is he writing on an Android device? What is this guy doing?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m starting to get angry. Why are you writing on your phone? Now I’m like David Lynch. “Watching movies on your phone, watching movies on a fucking phone.” [laughs] He’s the best. I mean, why are you writing a script on a phone? Get out of here.

**John:** While we’re talking about screenwriting software, what is your feeling about like auto complete and Smart-Type? Do you like it when a character name fills itself in —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Or does it drive you crazy?

**Craig:** No, I do like it a lot. And I like it for two reasons. One, because particularly when I’m writing a scene where there are two people having a conversation, it does flow beautifully. And two, it confronts me when I’ve created characters with similar first letters or the same first letters, I should say, because then sometimes I get the wrong one or it gives me that stupid menu. So that I do like quite a bit.

**John:** Yeah, I do like Smart-Type when it makes sure that I’m spelling the character’s name the same way every time because that can be a huge problem.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** When there’s five ways you could spell it and now you’re spelling it the one way. What always drives me crazy with Smart-Type lists is when it really wants to fill in sort of the wrong character’s name. For me what always happens is I’ll have a situation where you have like two characters talking at the same time, so like Sandra/Laura.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, yes.

**John:** And then like, ugh, so then you have to manually go through and delete that Sandra/Laura so it doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** That’s right. That is the one thing that is very annoying and you do have to go to your Smart-Type list and blow that one out because for whatever reason, it defaults to the long one. You know what, I’m going to have to talk to Kent at Fade In and tell him to default to the shorter one in those circumstances.

**John:** Yeah, that’s probably a good solution.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it is.

**John:** We’re making software better on this very podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’m not writing it on my phone. [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to let you take the Iceland question.

**Craig:** Yes. Erlinger, oh god, I get the best, I don’t know how to do the Iceland accent. Is Björk from Iceland?

**John:** She is?

**Craig:** She is so cool.

**John:** The coolest.

**Craig:** You know, I was listening in my car the other day and I was just, I had my phone on random songs and Human Behavior came up.

**John:** A great song.

**Craig:** It’s so weird. And when you listen, yeah. It just doesn’t follow [laughs] any kind of normal song structure, melodic structure and yet it totally does in its own way. What a cool, that lady is cool.

**John:** So I saw Björk with the Sugarcubes at Red Rocks in Colorado.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And it was one of my favorite concerts ever.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Human behavior — if you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever…” Okay, so Erlinger from Iceland writes, “I’m a long time listener and a big fan of the show from Iceland but based in New York. And I wanted to ask you about credit when it comes to treatments in actual screenwriting. It was reported recently that Shane Black would be directing the new Predator movie and that his old Monster Squad buddy, Fred Dekker, would be writing the script based on Black’s treatment.” Very exciting news by the way says, Erlinger.

“And I started wondering how does that work credit-wise. Will Shane Black, an accomplished screenwriter with a very specific style be credited as a writer on the movie or just have a Story by credit?” Oh, there’s so much about this question that makes me angry.

**John:** Yeah, I knew it would be the perfect question for you, Craig.

**Craig:** It’s not your fault, Erlinger. I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the universe. Let me just boil down the part that infuriates me. Will Shane Black be credited as a writer on the movie or just have a Story by credit?

Story by is writing.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** Story by is writing credit. It is, there is story credit and there is screenplay credit. Story credit, the credit that, Erlinger, you are sort of implying isn’t really writing credit, is the credit to which separated rights are attached. In many ways, it’s the more important credit. So in this case, if a screenwriter is writing a script based on another screenwriter’s treatment, then a couple of things happen.

First, the screenplay automatically moves out of original screenplay mode into non-original screenplay mode. In this case, it would have been anyway because it’s a remake or a sequel. And if this were the only writing arrangement, so Shane Black writes a treatment, Fred Dekker writes the screenplay, they shoot the movie, then in fact the credits would read, Story by Shane Black, Screenplay by Fred Dekker, and both would receive a writing credit.

**John:** Yes. Now, it’s entirely possible that Fred Dekker would also receive a shared story credit if his screenplay contributed tremendous story elements that are not present in Shane Black’s script. Shane Black directing this doesn’t change the nature of the story by credit. The only thing that it will cause is that because he is a production executive on it because he’s directing it, it would go through arbitration automatically. It would have to happen.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is one other potential. And that is, if it’s a remake, well, I’m assuming this is a remake.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay, in the case of a remake, a couple of interesting things. First, simply writing a treatment doesn’t guarantee you a story credit because if your treatment isn’t sufficiently or significantly different from the story of the first movie then you won’t get story credit and you know who will? The writer, the credited writer of the first movie.

So the credited writers of the first movie become participating writers in the remake, they become writer A in fact. So a lot of interesting, tricky little things going on there. But I think more importantly then the specifics of the question here is just for me to remind everybody that Story by is a writing credit.

**John:** Yes. A zillion years ago, I was in the discussions to do a Predator movie and did not proceed with it. But I love Predator as a franchise. I think Shane Black will do an amazing job.

**Craig:** Predator is a fascinating movie because it came out at a time when a lot of movies like that were coming out. There was a Schwarzenegger era.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you had a bunch of guys in that movie that were sort of that steroidal ’80s action film. You know, Carl Weathers was in there. So it was a bit of, you know, some Rocky guys. Jesse Ventura was from wrestling, and of course, Schwarzenegger. And so I remember when I saw the ads I thought, okay, I’ll go see this because, hell, if I saw Commando, I should see this, right, I mean —

**John:** Totally

**Craig:** I basically, you know, I’ll go see whatever this guy does. And it was a great example of when you walk into a movie theater and say that was so much better than it had to be.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. It didn’t have to be that good at all. I mean, I still to this day, time makes everything better.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At the time, I remember thinking, I’m sorry, did Arnold Schwarzenegger just outrun a nuclear explosion? Did he just dive in front of a nuclear explosion and land in a ditch and he’s okay now?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at that time I just thought that was insulting. Now, of course, it feels somehow brilliant. Time has made it brilliant. It’s made it an audacious choice.

**John:** [laughs] Well, he didn’t go into a refrigerator. So there wasn’t that.

**Craig:** Yes, he did not go into a refrigerator. They literally, they dispensed with any kind of lead lined box.

**John:** Arnold Schwarzenegger is his own refrigerator.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. He just, you know what, it’s that scene we’d seen a million times where somebody runs and then as something explodes in the background they dive away and they did it this time but with a nuclear explosion, with a mushroom cloud.

**John:** I haven’t seen the movie in a zillion years. I remember watching it the first time on VHS over at my friend Matt’s house at like a slumber party and so we watched that and Purple Rain and other stuff, but loving it. My recollection of the movie is that after a certain point, it becomes essentially a silent film because it’s basically a two-hander between Schwarzenegger and Predator.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And none of them is talking which is just kind of great.

**Craig:** It turns out that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a far better silent film actor than he is a talking film actor. And you can see that in The Terminator.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because in The Terminator, he says, you know, “Are you Sarah Connor?” It’s only four lines, you know. “I’ll be back.” He’s a great silent actor.

**John:** “Fuck you, asshole.”

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. He’s got a great silent actor face. He’s all physical. The more he talks, the less well it tends to go. So, of course, we made him the governor of a state. How stupid. How stupid are we? I don’t care what your politics are. How do you make that guy a governor? What? And then Jesse Ventura became governor. Two governors in that movie. From Predator.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why isn’t Carl Weathers a governor? What’s he —

**John:** In an alternate universe, Carl Weathers is the president.

**Craig:** Carl Weathers. President Weathers.

**John:** Oh, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so great. Oh, I love it.

**John:** Is Carl Weathers Action Jackson?

**Craig:** You know he was. Action, Action Jackson.

**John:** So Craig, let’s wrap up questions with my question to you.

**Craig:** There was a guy, a friend of mine went to a movie. And it was an action movie, but it was not Action Jackson. And there was a kid sitting in front of him, 14-year-old kid. And every time some action happened, and this was about a year after Action Jackson came out, every time any action occurred in the movie, the kid would go, “Action, Action Jackson.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] And it was incredibly annoying. But then by the end of the movie, it became better than the movie.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Action.

**John:** So Craig, my question for you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** How was Dungeon World?

**Craig:** Oh, Dungeon World was great. So we had talked about the fact that we were going to play Dungeon World and it was your One Cool Thing before we played Dungeon World.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** And our Dungeon World Group was a great group. We had Phil Hay of Ride Along and many other wonderful films.

**John:** R.I.P.D.

**Craig:** Clash of the Titans.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We had Chris Morgan of The Fastest and Furious franchise. We had Michael Gilvary who writes on Chicago Fire. We had Malcolm Spellman. He’s written the, what was the family movie, the family…it was at Fox.

**John:** Yeah, and now I forget the name of it.

**Craig:** The something Family Wedding.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But he’s also currently working on a television show, Lee Daniels’ new television show called Empire. He’s on that. This is a great group and myself and you.

**John:** We had played over four nights I think.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think it was four crazy nights. And you were the Dungeon Master and whipped together a fantastic story with a great twist ending. It was such a good ending that my character was strongly contemplating suicide.

**John:** You know you hit a good point in the story where a character’s reasonable choice might just be to kill himself.

**Craig:** That’s right. But I thought it ran exactly the way it was supposed to go. You had the basic bones of a story. So there was a back story that connected to the end. There was a destination, some goal posts along the way, and there was one key artifact.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then we kind of put it all together as a story as we went, you know. And with you guiding us, that’s exactly how it was supposed to happen. And there was a lot of deaths. Chris Morgan and I were the only characters to survive and even our survival was ironic and Twilight Zoney, a little Monkey’s Paw-ish.

**John:** It was a Monkey’s Paw. I found Dungeon World mostly pretty good. So for people who aren’t familiar with what Dungeon World is versus Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeon World is an attempt to make an incredibly stripped down version of a game like Dungeons and Dragons where you’ll be rolling two six-sided dice. It’s much more about the conversation and talking back and forth rather than looking up charts and doing that kind of stuff.

And one of the goals is that the players themselves should have much more responsibility for the storytelling. And that’s where I thought you guys really stepped up. And it’s also nice that you have like, you know, five screenwriters doing it. But you guys found some really great interplay between your characters and sort of I could let you roll with things and most of the times it was really good. For each night of play, I would create sort of two encounters and then let you guys figure out how you were going to get through them.

**Craig:** Yeah, to me the most fun really was in the way the characters interacted and how they solidified and became certain types. I think of all the character interplay, I guess my favorite of all that was when Malcolm’s character, Big Luther, continually harangued Michael Gilvary’s character, he’s ranger character, Patty, for attempting to shoot arrows through animated skeletons.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just a terrible choice.

**John:** It was a terrible choice. And that was the first night and he never gave up on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, he really never, yeah. And I like that Patty in his kind of depressive Eeyorish way kept saying, “That could have worked.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s pretty great. But I also liked the interplay, my character was definitely the Loki of the group and sort of a selfish, liar. And he was a thief, so he’s all about, you know, profit. And Phil Hay’s character, Reynard, was the pompous, sanctimonious cleric. And those two guys hated each other. It was great.

**John:** Yeah. So one of the smart things about Dungeon World was you start with this concept of bonds and so as you’re figuring out your character, as you’re figuring out what their bonds are and sort of what their relationship is with each other. And it reminded me of a similar dynamic when we were playing Fiasco with Kelly Marcel, is that before you start the whole process, you figure out the relationships between the characters and then you figure out the characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that was really helpful because I remember playing D&D growing up. It was so much about like which character class you are and what the plus was on your sword.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it wasn’t about the story. And this, to its credit, was very much about the story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was very, it’s funny actually, I was looking, because, you know, you and I are now talking about continuing on with you as a player and us doing a campaign in the new Dungeons and Dragons, the fifth edition which is on its way out. And I was looking, just reading a little bit and I thought, you know, I’m really interested in creating a character that’s the wrong race for the class.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I just think that would be a cool way to begin, you know, because the truth is, yeah, does it hurt you a little bit statistically in the beginning? I suppose. But, you know, by the time you get to level whatever, who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just more interesting.

**John:** It is. If I had an overall criticism of Dungeon World, I felt that it was so stripped down at times that when you actually got to fighting things, it became really hard to figure out when should you roll again. And so, you know, if Luther is fighting this guy over here, how often should you be getting back to Luther and having Luther try to attack this thing and roll his dice versus the results.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that was sort of a mess. And that was me not being especially, you know, great with the structure and the rules of it all, but it didn’t seem to scale especially well to the five of us. And so the lack of initiative which is basically a system for going through and figuring out who’s turn it was to do something got to be a bit of a problem.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll see how it goes with this next thing, but I had a great time regardless. And I’m looking forward to the next. And mostly because my wife hates it. She doesn’t hate it like, she’s not angry at it, it just more like, “Oh God.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re going to nerd, I literally put it in my calendar which she can see, I write down Nerd Fest.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. So Craig, what have you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is not a repeat, although, it might sound like a repeat. It’s David Kwong who I’ve talked about before. But today, right now, on Friday the 11th of July, his TED Talk is up and available and we’ll have a link in the show notes to that. It’s a great example of what he does.

So in the TED Talk, he talks about the idea that we are all hardwired to solve and he even talks about some scientific research with infants. And then he does a trick, and the trick has a component that involves that day’s crossword puzzle. It’s very intricate, it’s very meta. David always figures out how to be meta and the meta on top of meta and meta on top of meta on top of meta. It’s a great trick, I don’t know how he does it. It’s brilliant. You should all check it out. And the best news of all it’s I think like a 13-minute video.

**John:** Yeah. So actually I haven’t seen the TED talk as final, the final version of it, but I got to see a rehearsal for it over at Aline Brosh McKenna’s house several months before he did it. And it’s great and he’s super smart. And just this last week, my daughter came home from summer camp and she wanted to show me a card trick and it was a mess, it didn’t work at all. And so like, I went on YouTube and like, “Let me show you David Kwong doing a real card trick.” And it was terrific. And there’s actually one YouTube clip where he actually shows you how to do a very simple card trick that would impress most people at parties.

**Craig:** That’s such a great father-daughter moment for you. “Oh, that’s terrible, sweetheart. Here, let me show you the best guy.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “This is the guy who’s the best in the world. You’ll never be as good as him.” Behold, behold, have I crushed every ounce of passion out of you for this? Good. Good. You be a screenwriter like your father!”

**John:** To be fair, she had actually gone with me over to see David’s rehearsal so she knew who he was.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So it wasn’t just like… — He was fantastic. But it was actually a good father-daughter moment where she asked me, “Papa, why do you know so many famous people?”

**Craig:** Aw. Because daddy is special.

**John:** Daddy is special.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is actually related to last week’s —

**Craig:** Wait, she calls you —

**John:** Procrastination talk.

**Craig:** She calls you Papa?

**John:** I’m Papa.

**Craig:** She calls you Papa? That’s so German, I love it.

**John:** Well, we’re a two-dad family so —

**Craig:** I know, but see to me it I would just be dad and dad. But papa, or papa is, whatever. Let’s say, okay fine, you want two different dad type names, but papa is so wonderfully old school. It’s so Little House on the Prairie.

**John:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** Papa.

**John:** Papa.

**Craig:** Papa. Why, Papa?

**John:** But of course whenever she really just wants something, she doesn’t care who it is that gets her the thing, she’ll go, “Daddy, Papa.”

**Craig:** Oh, I like that.

**John:** It’s like one thing like, I don’t care who does it. Just one of you do this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, one of you —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Guys. Hey guys.”

**John:** Guys.

**Craig:** “Guys. Guys, I need a thing.”

**John:** My One Cool Thing is related to last week’s procrastination topic and it’s how I actually came upon those procrastination articles was I was in a deep click hole researching the Fermi paradox, which you’re probably familiar with.

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** So the simple way of stating the Fermi paradox is that if you assume that the Earth is not special, the Earth is mediocre in terms of places in the universe, that our solar system isn’t special, that our Earth, our planet is not that special in terms of its possibility of existing. If you look at it that way, there should be tremendous numbers of civilizations out there across the universe, across the galaxy. And our galaxy is actually fairly old, so there should be some younger ones out there that would have progressed to the point where those civilizations should have been be able find us or at least done something that we can see. But when we look out into the galaxy we don’t see any other civilizations. So the Fermi paradox is basically, where is everybody?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it turns out there’s some really good explanations about, you know, why we may not be seeing other people and it could be everything from the universe, the times spans are just too huge, the distances are just too huge. It could be that there’s, the most troubling article I went through is that there may just be some filters and there may be some filters that sort of prevent civilizations from progressing beyond a certain point to where you would actually leave your home planet and travel across the wide empty spaces. So a really interesting thing. I’ll put three articles in the show notes this week.

**Craig:** It is interesting. There’s a lot of possible explanations. I have to say that I’ve always been the sort of person who wondered where all these people were and why aren’t they contacting us. And then I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about this thing. I don’t know if I mentioned on the show before. He was talking about how we all wish to meet an alien intelligence and we always presume that when we meet them they’ll be basically like us.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But he says, you know, we share something like 99% of our genetic material with chimpanzees. And the genetic material in that last 1% is that’s the difference, that’s why we are as smart as we are compared to a chimp. What if the people that we meet improbably are 99% is similar to us. That’s how similar they are to us. But unfortunately that 1% difference makes us as chimps to them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We wouldn’t even understand what they’re saying and we would be like children to them.

**John:** Well, I think of the different possibilities with Fermi paradox, my default answer to this point is that version of we’re asking the wrong question because essentially when you get to be so advanced that you could travel across the galaxy, there’s suddenly something else that’s much more appealing to do. And so —

**Craig:** I see.

**John:** One of the ways they described that as beings is like if you were building a freeway and you pass by an anthill, you wouldn’t care about the ants on the anthill. And it’s very possible that’s we’re just the ants in the anthill. And we’re not even really aware of the freeway that’s being built.

One last bit of news on my side, I’m hiring somebody. I’m actually hiring a new employee.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s very possible that someone listening to this podcast is that right employee for Quote-Unquote Films, Quote-Unquote Apps, my app development company that makes Highland and Weekend Read and Bronson. We are hiring a full time position, a UI designer. Somebody who’s really good at designing interfaces for apps both on the Mac and on iOS. We’d love somebody who is a combination of good design skills but also coding ability. We want somebody who can actually build things in Xcode. So if you are that person, there is a job posting on johnaugust.com and you should send in your resume because you might be exactly the right person.

Other bit of news and announcements, we have the first 150 episodes of Scriptnotes are now packed onto those little USB drives. So if you are a latecomer to the show and want to get caught up, that’s an easy way to get all those back episodes. So if you go to store.johnaugust.com you can buy that little USB drive that has all 150 episodes of the show, both in AAC format and mp3 format. So you can see where it all began.

**Craig:** How much does that cost?

**John:** It’s a really reasonable question. And I don’t know, I think they’re $19.

**Craig:** Okay. So what is a year of tuition at the worst film school cost?

**John:** Oh, God, I don’t know, $10,000?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s minimum. That’s 10 grand for the worst experience.

**John:** The worst.

**Craig:** The worst. And then upwards of what, 30, 40 for like an NYU or USC?

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we’re —

**John:** Yeah, USC has got to be 40 or 45.

**Craig:** Right. And so you said we were $19,000 for this?

**John:** [laughs] No, just $19.

**Craig:** What? $19?

**John:** Move that decimal point.

**Craig:** Oh my, that’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t buy it.

**John:** So it’s a reasonable thing to buy, if you want to buy that. Another choice if you want to go all the back episodes is you can got to scriptnotes.net and if you sign in there, if you get a premium membership there, it’s $2 a month. And that gives you access to all the back catalog. There’s an app that you can use to listen to that back catalog. There’s also occasionally we have some bonus episodes and you can find stuff in there too. So that’s another choice. $2 as opposed to $20,000, if it makes sense for you, go for it.

**Craig:** No, $2,000 a month is way better than —

**John:** Yeah, it’s way better.

**Craig:** Yeah, way better.

**John:** Oh God, if we charge $2,000 a month that would be crazy.

**Craig:** We would just need one person.

**John:** We can do one person.

**Craig:** And we would finally cover our bills.

**John:** One student at $2,000 a month.

**Craig:** We, as always, run at a loss.

**John:** We do run at a loss. Proud of that loss.

**Craig:** Proud, that’s our pledge to you.

**John:** If you have question for Craig Mazin, you should write him at @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. These longer questions like we answered today on the podcast, write your email to ask@johnaugust.com. If you’re on iTunes, click subscribe so that people know that you’re subscribed to this and leave us a comment while you’re there, that’s always nice too.

Podcast is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** The editor is Matthew Chilelli who will have his work cut out for him this week. And we love outros. And so we’re not sure which outro we’re going to use this week. But if you are a person who writes music and you would like to write an outro for our show, go to johnaugust.com/outros, I’m guessing that’s the URL. And you’ll listen to many great examples of previous people who’ve done outros and you should write us an outro and send us a link because we would love to feature it on the end of our show.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** And so I’ll also say this is our first time ever trying to do a live broadcast, the live stream online. It kind of worked.

**Craig:** What did our people in the chat room, what are they saying?

**John:** People say —

**Craig:** Boo?

**John:**”John and Craig, great show. Thanks. Do you have time to take some questions from the people in the live audience?”

**Craig:** Oh, we should have done that. That would that have made —

**John:** Well, because we didn’t do it, but maybe next time we’ll try it again.

**Craig:** Your answer to we should have done that is, oh, we should have done it but we didn’t do it. That’s the answer. Why we didn’t do it? Because we didn’t do it. But I hope you people in the chat room see what I’m working with here.

**John:** So maybe at some point in the future we will do another one of these live-ish kind of shows. We should probably do them at night if we’re going to do them because —

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. For sure.

**John:** People are going to be at work. But we will try to do another one of these, is at mixlr.com, M-I-X-L-R.com/scriptnotes is where we live-streamed this and it seemed to kind of work.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** So maybe we’ll do that again.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I did a lot of preparation and research into this. So I’m glad that my whole system of doing the live podcast… — Never mind, I don’t do anything. Everyone knows it. I’m useless.

**John:** Craig Mazin, you host a great podcast and it’s all we could ever ask of you to do.

**Craig:** Right, that is in fact all you could ask of me because I have no other skills. [laughs] All right. Thank you, John.

**John:** Craig, thanks. Have great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** And thanks everyone in the chat room.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes, 76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), with Three Pages by James Topham
* Scriptnotes, 115: [Back to Austin with Rian Johnson and Kelly Marcel](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* David Lynch [on the iPhone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0)
* Björk, [Human Behavior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCGveA39VYA)
* [Dungeon World](http://www.dungeon-world.com/)
* Scriptnotes, 142: [The Angeles Crest Fiasco](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-angeles-crest-fiasco)
* [Action Jackson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AvMn2Vh0fQ) trailer
* David Kwong at TED2014: [Two nerdy obsessions meet — and it’s magic](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_kwong_two_nerdy_obsessions_meet_and_it_s_magic)
* The Fermi paradox on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox), [Wait But Why](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html) and [Praxtime](http://praxtime.com/2013/11/25/sagan-syndrome-pay-heed-to-biologists-about-et/)
* Neil deGrasse Tyson [on chimps, humans and aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ro9aebFZhM)
* John is [hiring a new UI designer](http://johnaugust.com/2014/hiring-a-ui-designer)
* Our USB drives [now have the first 150 episodes](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-100-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* Archives are also [available on scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* This episode was broadcast live on [Mixlr](http://mixlr.com/scriptnotes/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jeff Harms ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies).

**Disclaimer:** Hey, this is John. Today’s audio was recorded in two separate sessions and Craig’s microphone was terrible during part of it, so just apologies for that. We got it fixed. If you hear the follow up section, Craig sounds much better, and healthier, and fuller of life, and that’s because we got his microphone all fixed up. So, sorry about that. And enjoy today’s episode.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 151 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, completely different environment for me here. I am sitting atop a mountain here at the Sundance Resort. I’m here for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And so it’s very much like how we normally talk over Skype, but just I’m in a very different place geographically.

**Craig:** Mentally, emotionally. Well, you sound great. You know, I was invited once to go do the Sundance Lab and then I had to cancel it because I was stuck in production. And then they never asked me back. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s sad.

**Craig:** I’m thinking that maybe they just got… — I mean, it wasn’t like I canceled at the last minute. I canceled months in advance, but yeah, I think that that probably was it. That sealed my fate.

**John:** Yeah, you get the one shot.

I’ve been an advisor here since 2000 was my first year up here as an advisor. So, in ’99 I had, my movie Go was playing at the Sundance Film Festival and the next year they asked me up to be an advisor. What I didn’t tell them is that I’d actually applied to come to the labs before with a previous script and they had not even considered. I’d been rejected. So, I was never a fellow. I was only an advisor.

But, this process is great and I’ve talked about this on the show before, but they bring up a bunch of filmmakers who are working on their first or second features and in the summer session they are shooting some scenes just on video to sort of practice what it feels like to shoot scenes out of their movie. But they also have these five days where they’re talking with other screenwriters. And we’re reading their scripts and offering suggestions, but more importantly just an extra set of brains to help figure out how they’re going to tell their story. And it’s a great process.

**Craig:** I saw the picture online. Is that Howard Rodman lurking there in the background?

**John:** Howard Rodman is a fixture at the labs. He came up here the first year that I came up here. And this year he’s actually — he oversees all the advisors for this process.

**Craig:** He’s terrific. I’ve gone and spoken to his graduate class at USC a number of times.

**John:** He’s salt of the earth. A great guy.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Today on the podcast, you suggested some topics, and I suggested some topics, and I think we’ve got a good show here for you. So, we’re going to talk about secrets and lies. We’re going to talk about the things that characters are concealing from each other, sometimes concealing from the reader. We’re going to talk about subjectivity and sort of the experience of how a character within a scene perceives information.

Based on all my reading up here, I have seven suggestions for how to pick character names so that people can understand which character is which. And then a reader had sent in a scene and then also the three pages that became that scene, which we thought were fascinating, so we’re going to talk about his three pages and the scene that he actually shot and what we can learn from seeing those two things. We’ll answer a question about following up after a meeting, so it’s going to be a busy show.

So, on the topic of follow up we have some follow up — on an earlier podcast we talked about Aereo, which was a service in New York City and a few other places that led people record live broadcast TV on these little tiny antennas and then stream that video that they recorded to their devices, their iPhones, their computers, wherever else they were. And this was a Supreme Court case, so the networks were suing Aereo saying that what they were doing was a violation of the Copyright Act. And the Supreme Court decided this week. And come down with a 6-3 decision in favor of the networks, saying that this was, in fact, a copyright violation.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, so it’s an interesting thing. Aereo’s argument was essentially this: that they’re not really doing anything. This is all about broadcast network. So, broadcast networks send their content out over the public airwaves. And anyone in the public can receive it through an antenna, if they so choose, and then watch it in the privacy of their home.

Of course, now almost everybody is on, you know, uses cable to receive broadcast networks which in and of itself is relevant to this case. But, what Aereo essentially said was our service, all our service is really just a whole big bunch of antennas. They had like 10,000 tiny little dime-sized antennas. And the way the product worked is you would pay them a subscription fee and then if you wanted to watch, say, Big Bang Theory you would just say, “I want to watch Big Bang Theory,” you would send that to their servers, their servers would tune one of those individual antennas to Big Bang Theory —

**John:** And specifically your antenna, because essentially you’re renting one specific antenna.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s just yours. Exactly. So, that one specific antenna would pick up the free broadcast signal of Big Bang Theory and then it would take that signal, put it onto a hard drive. It would essentially make a copy. And it would make a specific copy for each person that requested it. And then it would start streaming that copy with a slight lag behind the actual air time of a few seconds.

You could either watch it streaming at that point where you’d be essentially watching the broadcast signal a few seconds behind the actual broadcast signal. Or, you could time shift it and just watch it later as if it were a DVR. So, their argument was essentially we’re not doing anything other than simply allowing people to use one of our fancy antennas and nothing more.

**John:** But, they didn’t win. That argument did not go over. And six of the justices said, well, you know what you’re doing actually feels more like cable TV.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I thought the decision was interesting because they kind of just said that. It’s like it’s sort of irrelevant how you’re doing it. The net result is sort of like cable TV and congress has previously decided that cable companies if they want to carry broadcast channels have to pay the networks and probably I think local people, too, in order to carry those signals.

**Craig:** This is an interesting area where I think a lot of powerful people’s desires intersect.

**John:** And also I think consumer’s desires. Consumer’s desire not just for cheaper access to broadcast television, or sort of better access to broadcast television, but just convenience. And Aereo was genuinely convenient and it was a useful thing for people. And so when you take that away there’s going to be some pushback on that as well.

It doesn’t necessarily by the way mean that Aereo has to go away. Aereo went into this saying that there was no Plan B, but of course their Plan B could essentially just do what cable companies do and negotiate terms for coverage on what they’re doing.

**Craig:** I don’t see what the Plan B is. Their entire business model was essentially built around a gimmick, a trick. And I do think frankly at its heart what they were doing was wrong. And I do think it was more than just ethically wrong. I agree with the court here. I think they were flouting the law. The law may, you know, I don’t know if every specific word was there to cover it. I mean, the law was written in ’76 I believe. Basically they were — I think they were breaking that law.

**John:** A second bit of follow up. We had a great shout-out from the people at the Slate Culture Gabfest, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens endorsed us as one of their cool things, that’s their equivalent of a One Cool Thing on their podcast this week. So, I just want to return the favor and say how much I enjoy the Slate Culture Gabfest which I listen to every week.

Craig, how did you even find out about it because you don’t listen to any podcasts at all?

**Craig:** Yeah, I didn’t realize there were other podcasts other than this one. I thought we were it. But somebody sent me a tweet about it and so I clicked on it because I so very often read anything positive about me in Slate. [laughs] And so I listened to that section of the podcast and they were both very complimentary and it was nice to hear that.

I mean, my favorite thing was when they were both done talking about it, the third person with them, a gentleman, there was like a pause and then he kind of John August-ed them, you know, where sometimes I’ll say something and then there’s a pause and you’re like, “So anyway…” [laughs]

**John:** He segued right out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. He was like I’m bored with your Scriptnotes talk. So, I’m not going to talk about that guy. I like the people that like the podcast.

**John:** I love the people who love the podcast.

**Craig:** So we were talking on Twitter about maybe doing a crossover.

**John:** Which would be so much fun. The Nerdist crossover was fun.

**Craig:** It was.

**John:** It’s good. We’ll make it happen.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** All right. On to today’s topics, so Craig what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts?

**Craig:** Well, I’m working on a movie right now that is essentially it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits you — I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I mean, I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story.

For this kind of movie I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit the answer is any one of these people could have done it.

And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them.

But as I started to think about this, I realized in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters — we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose or there’s not enough subtext,” in a weird way I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people and those people aren’t lying.

They’re writing truth-tellers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find.

**John:** I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation, why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better I will in fact grow up and whether I get you or not I will be a better person.”

[Yawns] Movie over. You know? Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic or sympathetic reasons.

So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly and then throughout the course of the movie go about and achieve them.

One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional movies of all time. You know, we’ll see sometimes in comedies shine a — hang a lantern on it. If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story just go for it and embrace it and people feel like it’s intentional.

**John:** Yeah. Call it out to the audience so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire, and the movie begins with a man who in a moment of frustration writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing he actually thinks he should or could do.

As a result of writing that manifesto he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.

That’s how strong self-delusion is, even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it.

**John:** Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about sort of how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc it means they have a self-delusion.

Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go.

**John:** Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses, it’s acting the part of the hero but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, in fact that can start to give you a clue as to what — everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them.

**John:** But they’re normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way and they’re forced to find a new identity.

**Craig:** Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to — why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control.

**John:** Well, I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would you even have — would there even be a person left underneath there? I think of so many cases are personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications.

**Craig:** That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you, you know, you can improve your life and know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility. To truly 100% know yourself, I mean, let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem?

**John:** I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for everyday. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the — and he wrote this I believe in the ’80s. This brilliant kind of mindboggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic in ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel.

And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is for any given system of mathematics, you know, in math I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules and you can proof that it is true and that’s important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** What his theorem said was there are — for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mindboggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest.

But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that are brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character.

**John:** And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away sort of everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative, I’ll put a link in, too, Datura, I may be pronouncing it wrong.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** But you know that drug?

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** It apparently just lays you completely bare and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny. When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies.

**Craig:** Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. When we talk about — see, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like it’s important that your hero face obstacles. Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions.

Like I remember I took a philosophy class in college and the professor asked a question. it’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth? [laughs] Then you go, huh, I guess I should probably think about that. Well, why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles — the obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard.

**John:** All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers?

**Craig:** So, that’s the first and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option.

**John:** So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people to either protect what they have or protect the things they love.

**Craig:** Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom. He’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level.

**John:** Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself, is that he’s attempting to — the only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself in the sense that if you don’t do it then you feel inept as a father. You know, that you’ve somehow failed. That this is something he needs to do for his son.

In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love of course. And they also keep the audience guess, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human things.

So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also, too, is a thief.

These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important.

**John:** When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he’s also — he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare.

There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so they have to do so with some skill. And therefore as a writer you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know. I mean, one of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities.

**John:** I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing. And when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters where they’re being manipulated as well.

**Craig:** Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it and you knew that there were seven things you had to get and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.”

But he doesn’t tell them.

**John:** You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end so it is the punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m sure there decisions and he probably went back and forth about like, well, if we revealed a little bit earlier then we could see, we would have the tension about will he get caught. And this was the decision like, nope, the whole movie has to be set up to this point.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering.

But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is.

So, the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just remarkable, I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was kind of very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma.

**John:** It made you almost sympathetic for a moment.

**Craig:** It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar.

**John:** Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write because for the most part we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally — god help us — we will run into these people.

**John:** I worked for a person — I worked for one of those people.

**Craig:** There you go. And part of the problem is they’re so good that you don’t really know for awhile what’s happening. And then eventually it becomes clear and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually doing… — You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that, frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction.

The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir, these characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, my god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest, whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally Bogart sends you up the river.

But, liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them. That they are going to take over.

**John:** It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw, I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain.

**Craig:** Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that.

Well, what does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow.

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

**Craig:** Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But, because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny. I mean —

**John:** But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us, you came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him, and then cuts his throat. [laughs]

And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job.” [laughs] Because that’s the only — that’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure, awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world, you know?

**John:** Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to — he’s challenging. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately they’re supposed to be opaque and you just can’t know them.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s not a human — there literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But, they will infect your movie and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head.

And by all means if you run into one of these people —

**John:** Run away.

**Craig:** Go the other way.

**John:** The classic advice, and I’m trying to remember who originally said this, but the advice to young psychiatrists was if in your first meeting your patient talks about how awful their previous therapist was and how all these things — run away, because that person is probably a psychopath. There are people who are just — you’re just going to fall into their deep well and you’re never going to figure a way out of it.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. You know, it’s funny, Dennis Palumbo told me that when he sits down with a client for the first time, the first question he asks is have you had therapy before and can you tell me about that experience. All we’ve done now is we’ve given the chaotic liars a way to wiggle out of that.

**John:** Absolutely. They’ll say about how incredibly helpful it was and the skills they used. And it was really life-changing. They just need a little tune up.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then they crawl inside you and devour you from the inside.

**John:** Oh, yes, that’s never a good thing. So, let’s recap what we talked about with liars, because I think it’s really, really useful. So, liars who are self-deception, which is probably true to every character in your script. There’s going to be some aspect of self-deception.

Manipulative liars — manipulative liars who are lying to protect something, or manipulative liars, what was your second case of manipulative liars?

**Craig:** Or trying to gain something.

**John:** Exactly. So, protection or gain. And then finally the, I mean, what did you call it, the sociopathic liar?

**Craig:** Chaotic, pathological.

**John:** Pathological, yeah, where they can’t stop lying and they will lie for any reason. It’s like kleptomania. They don’t need that pack of gum, but they have to take that pack of gum.

**Craig:** That’s right, lying even to mess themselves up.

**John:** So, I had a boss who, when he got bored, this is pre-internet, when he got bored in the afternoon he would just call someone at Variety or Hollywood Reporter and just make up a lie about another project or another person, just to stir shit up.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow! Blech.

**John:** Yuck. And you just don’t want to be around that for long.

**Craig:** No, that’s, Geez-Louise.

**John:** One of my favorite things to do at dinners here is to tell our terrible Hollywood stories about people who are just completely awful to us. And really you sort of collect them like little badges, like that was an awful thing but I’m so glad that happened because now I have a story about that.

**Craig:** It’s true. At some point the tragedy finally has enough time and then it becomes funny. But, oh gosh, in the middle of this stuff it can really just scramble you up. And that’s why we have to — writing is actually a way to maybe pop the balloon a little bit, because it’s fun. Look, it was fun for me to write Leslie Chow because he just didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything. He loved it. He was so excited to die, or for you to die, or for something to happen. Everything is funny. Everything.

**John:** Yeah. Hilarious.

**Craig:** Yeah, if a lion bit off his arm he would laugh and then he would tell the lion to choke on the arm and then he would laugh as the lion choked on the arm. He wouldn’t care.

**John:** Wouldn’t care.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s nuts.

**John:** So, one of the writers I’ve gotten to meet up here at Sundance is Chris Terrio. Have you ever met him before?

**Craig:** No, I haven’t. But I enjoyed his movie.

**John:** Yeah, so he wrote Argo which is a great film. And so we screened it last night here and he did a Q&A afterwards. And one of the points he brought up which was really fascinating and I hadn’t really considered it in the way that he framed it. So, he was talking about a scene in which Ben Affleck’s character is driving and then it’s going to cut to news footage of talking about the Iranian hostages. And so it’s existing news footage. And in the edit Ben Affleck was driving and then it cuts to the news footage and he was pushing really hard for the way he had it in the script, which was a pre-lap, is that the Walter Cronkite or whoever is talking while Ben Affleck is driving and then we finally go to the news footage.

And that seems like a very small distinction. Like it’s sort of really when does the sound start. But his point was that by starting the sound while you’re with Ben Affleck’s character, you’re creating the experience of subjectivity. And what we’re about to see feels like it’s inside Ben Affleck’s mind. It feels like it’s that character thinking about it. It’s a way to sort of verbalize thoughts. It feels like it’s running around in his head. And then when we actually go to it we still feel like we’re with Ben Affleck’s experience.

Probably that music is also taking us through. It’s a way of letting that clip happen not just as a thing that happens. It’s inside Ben Affleck’s head. And that experience of subjectivity is really interesting and it makes me feel much better about how often I tend to use pre-lap in my scripts to explain that something is start — like a sound is starting, and dialogue is often starting before we get into that next scene. It’s anticipating the cut.

**Craig:** I love that. First of all, we’ve done a long discussion about transitions. I mean, it’s just generally a nicer, smoother transition. But I love that observation because, again, we want to try and have the audience do as much work for us as possible. They appreciate that. The bad feeling is when you feel like the spoon is entering your mouth and you already know what that food is and then, yup, it’s that food.

And so see the news report and then you show him in the car, well that was just a news report scene that feel like “and now a moment in the movie where we have to tell you stuff. And now here’s Ben Affleck driving.” But instead, simply by pre-lapping, showing him in the car and then completing the news report, by simply putting that sound and that image in parallel, the movie stops teaching us something and is now telling us that this is an experience that Ben Affleck has had. Either he heard this news report before. I mean, he’s not hearing it right now.

But the movie is essentially implying he knows this and that changes everything because then it’s about him and as Chris points out his subjectivity and his experience. This, by the way, is a great example of what I call the new screenwriter, who not only thinks like a filmmaker, but is involved.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that he can help the director and the producer towards these things because we actually are pretty freaking good at this. And I love the way that the movie business has opened up to the new screenwriter because the new screenwriter provides moments like that, which are great.

**John:** Sure. What’s also I think crucial about the sense of the pre-lap and the overlap is that it’s taking these things that are two scenes and made them one scene. It’s joined them so that they are fused together as one element. So, you look at like, oh, that’s when he was thinking about this, rather than that was him driving in his car. This is information about the hostage crisis. So, as you look at your own scripts, I think it’s important to really figure out how much information that you’re giving us can you find a way that it’s meaningful to the character who is giving us the information, or that the movie is giving you information. How can you put that in the subjective experience of one of the characters so you’re not just telling us?

And there are many examples of doing that, but it’s really thinking about who is the interesting person to be seeing these events through and how do you experience the movie? How do you find a place holder for who the audience is in this movie?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good example of how sometimes a problem can lead to a solution. You’re sometimes stuck with something that has to happen but it feel clunky. And oftentimes if you sit back and look at it you realize it’s actually not a problem at all. It’s a benefit.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It is clunky to simply show Walter Cronkite talking about stuff. And then it’s even more clunky to show the shoe leather of Ben Affleck driving in a car.

**John:** One thing, Argo is worth a rewatch. And one of the things you recognize they do really brilliantly is they insert the news footage clips in ways that are very smart. And oftentimes they’re playing on TVs in scenes in ways that are meaningful. Or one of the great examples is a cross-cut between the hostage woman talking about why they’ve taken the hostages and the table-reading of the Argo script. And so you have this really funny moment at this table read of this ridiculous cut intercut with this announcement of the hostages.

And by being able to do both things at once, that’s sort of the key to the tone of the movie is that it’s both a big Hollywood movie about big Hollywood movies and there’s real stakes in terms of these people’s lives.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anytime you can kind of take two things that maybe separately would be a little flat or a little empty or a little thin and layer them together. Yeah, there are times of course where you know that the dramatic focus is such that you don’t want to do that, you don’t want to get noisy, but one thing that I know about screenwriters is that those things are intentional and they’re purposeful. When he says, “No, it should be pre-lap and like this,” that’s not just a random… — I mean, look, for good screenwriters it’s not some random bit of technique. There’s a purpose.

And I like the fact that people are open to hearing what that purpose is, especially when they’re excellent filmmakers, which in this case Ben Affleck is a very, very good director.

**John:** Agreed. So, this last week I’ve had a chance to work with five different filmmakers and read five scripts. And I don’t read as many scripts as I used to. I used to read a ton of scripts, and now I tend to read what I’m writing, or read a few things that friends send through. So, when you look at five scripts over the course of a couple days you notice some patterns, and one of the patterns I noticed is that sometimes people are not making the best choices for naming characters.

And so while we were sitting in a meeting and people were talking about other stuff, I wrote up my seven suggestions for character names. So, I want to sort of share those with you.

My first suggestion we’ve talked about on the podcast before is pick different first letters for character’s names. So, if you have a character named John, you can’t have a Jim, or a James, or a Jackson. There should be one character named with a J. That’s a pretty good basic rule of thumb. Don’t double up. And you’re not likely to have 26 characters who really need names, so you’re going to be fine.

Helpful — pick a different number of characters in names. So, if you have a character named Tom and a character named Ben and they’re both talking a lot, people on the page they sort of skim down and scan and they notice different lengths of names. So, Tom and Ben, they’re going to get confused in people’s heads. So, you’re better off with a Tom and a Benjamin and keeping them straight than a Tom and a Ben.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Not only should names have different first letters, but they should also sound different. Because I think you actually do in some ways sound out those words you’re seeing in your head. So, if you have a character named Gene, G-E-N-E, and a character named John, you’re going to get those confused. They can sort of blur together. So, if you have a soft G sound and a J sound, those can blur together. So, if you can avoid that, that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Try to avoid names that are semantically similar. So, if you have a character named Rose, don’t have a character named Tulip, because we’re going to get them confused. Because we thought flower and that’s all we’ll remember. Oh, it’s the girl with the name of the flower. Oh shit, which one is it?

**Craig:** Yeah, and the world suddenly seems so weirdly small that there are two people with flower names.

**John:** Absolutely. As much as you can, try to avoid gender ambiguity in names. So, names like Robin, Carrie, Kim, depending on the language, can get really confusing, especially if that’s not a character we see very often. So, if it’s been 20 pages and Carrie shows up again, you’re like, wait, is that a man or a woman, and then you start searching for pronouns to figure out who it is. That’s not your friend.

**Craig:** Unless you need the guy to be named Sandy.

**John:** Sandy. Sandy is perfect.

Use diverse names. And so people are not likely to confuse Bill and Sangeet, but they will confuse Bill and John. So, not only does using diverse help the reader out, but it also makes your world a little bit bigger. And hopefully signals to the casting directors and everybody else involved in the movie, hey, let’s look beyond just the five white guys for this movie. Sangeet is your friend.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And last point, which I think we talked about on the podcast before, often it’s best to not name your day players. So, if a character only appears in one scene and that character’s function is clear, you might be much better off with Hotel Clerk than giving that person a name. Save names for people who actually need names.

**Craig:** That’s right. The only exception I would say to that is if you know that you want to actually get somebody really good in for the day. So, when we say day player we don’t just mean somebody that’s there for one day. We just mean basically a glorified extra and I’m sorry to insult people that are day players, but typically when I think of day player I think of the waitress who comes over and says, “What’ll it be?” As opposed to a cameo, because that’s somebody you do want to name.

**John:** Absolutely. A cameo is totally worth it, because the cameo is probably going to be a character who actually has some weight and substance and is really chancing the scene, is going to have a character — it’s meant to pull focus.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And if the character isn’t meant to take focus, don’t give them a name.

**Craig:** Precisely. And you’re going to have a hard time getting a good actor to do your cameo when their role is Cop. A name would be helpful. The one area — I love these. These are all correct. And I follow these all the time and I think about names all the time. The one thing I would say though is there are occasionally points where you can play around with names and break these rules if there’s a point.

And the example I always think of is Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood is a man named William Money. And the Sherriff that he goes up against played by Gene Hackman is Little Bill. So, there’s a William, and a Bill, and a Little Bill at that, and there’s a point to that.

**John:** But I’m trying to remember the Unforgiven script, because it’s been a long time since I read it, but when characters have dialogue, isn’t William Money called Money in his —

**Craig:** No, he’s called Will all the time by Morgan Freeman.

**John:** So, Will all the time. Okay. Is Hackman’s character called Bill?

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s called Little Bill or Bill. Yeah, Will and Bill. They are meant to be two sides of a coin. It’s clearly a thing going on there.

**John:** All right. Part of the reason why I think this actually matters is to remember that when people are seeing the movie, they don’t see character’s names, they don’t see how things are spelled. So, there are things which watching movie people aren’t going to get confused. It’s just that on the page we don’t have faces, and so all we have are those names. Let’s try to keep those names clear.

When you’re casting the movie, you’re going to try not to cast people who look too much like each other so people don’t get confused. So, don’t cast names in a script that are too confusing, too similar.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** All right. Our next thing, a reader wrote in and it’s actually a writer who I think comes from the videogame world and it turns out actually is represented by, has an agent who is a friend of mine, so he’s actually a working legit writer. But he sent through these three pages and said like, “Oh, and I actually shot this as a scene.” And I was like that’s really cool.

So, I thought it was a good example of so often we take a look at these three pages and we always think about what the movie could be like. Here this guy shot the scene and I think it’s really interesting. So, the guy’s name is Rob Yescombe. I hope I pronounced that right, Rob. The scene is called A Gun, so if you want to read along with us there will be a PDF attached in the show notes.

So, our scene starts in the marshlands of rural England. It’s 1352 AD in Birmingham, England. Marshy wet grass. There’s three people riding. There’s Tilton, who is 35 in a Friar’s robe, Roland who is stocky and drunk, and Durwin, who is unkempt and slack-jawed. They’re all in their thirties. Durwin says like, “There it is. It’s just what I said it was,” and it’s this tree that’s been burnt in the middle of this marshland and it’s sort of unusual for a tree, what caught on fire, and the Friar says, “Did you light it on fire? Tell me, honestly if you set it on fire.”

“No, no, God did it.” And as they’re investigating the tree, the drunk guy falls down in the water. He comes up and he’s found something and it is a 2013 Colt M45 Close Quarters Combat Pistol, with a silencer screwed tight onto the barrel. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I actually watched — I did it wrong, I did it backwards.

**John:** That’s fine. We’ll forgive you this once.

**Craig:** I watched the video, then I read the pages. But the thing, it’s funny, basically the things that I liked about the little movie were exactly the things I liked about these pages. And the one thing that bothered me about half the movie was exactly what bothers me on the page. So, in that sense everything went according to plan.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And but in terms of the pages I think these are very well written. And there’s the one interesting difference that I would say between the pages and the movie other than like they’re not riding on horses because it’s hard to get horses, is that on page three when there’s the reveal of the gun, it’s a half page of careful sort of drawn out reveal of the gun, which is appropriate I think. When you’re reading you want to make a big deal of something and he made a big deal of it here.

Obviously in the movie it happens, but that’s the difference between audio visual and text. So, it’s okay to play a little bit of a trick with the text here to get that and then not go super — like for instance, here’s a mistake that gets made all the time in a screenplay and it’s made here. He pulls a large brown lump, something caked in soggy grass roots and soaking clay. And then I’ll just skip ahead. Tilton watches. Something shimmers.

They’re not going to shimmer. It can’t shimmer. It’s all covered in mud and it’s a gray day. But that’s okay. Because it’s happening ping — we’re getting the vibe of it, you know. We don’t care that when we actually see it it’s not shimmering. What we like right is that it’s a gun.

So, I thought it was very —

**John:** I thought that they were good pages. And it very much to me felt like in a weird way like the setup for — like the teaser for like an X-Files, like a medieval X-Files.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s a possible thing and then you cut to opening credits and then you get back into the investigation and what’s actually really happened here. I like almost everything on the page. His use of semi-colons drove me a little bit crazy. Semi-colons are really useful in the rare cases where you really need them. And in the first case, in none of these cases where he was really using them in a way that semi-colons are best for which is where you have to join two independent — two thoughts that could be their own sentence but they’re much better joined together.

And in these cases they weren’t independent clauses. They were just things. Commas would have done the job.

**Craig:** Commas or dashes.

**John:** Yeah. Or periods.

**Craig:** Or periods.

**John:** But I really enjoyed it. So, the joy and the sort of special bonus we have is that there’s actually — he’s filmed this. And I suspect this was a filmed version just to show as a demo, to sort of show what it might feel like. And so there’s a link in the show notes also for his YouTube clip on it.

And so some of the changes you will notice is here in the script there are horses, in the movie they’re just walking. Walking is honestly kind of great.

He picked a really great location. It’s really just marshy, and muddy, and gross, and terrible.

**Craig:** And that one great tree, I mean, the focus of this thing is this tree that supposedly was burning impossibly. And there’s just one tree in the middle nowhere. It’s kind of great.

**John:** Which is great. Some of the challenges, I found — the tree is really great in wide shots. And then when we’re getting close I had a harder time understanding that it was burned. Some of the stuff about that the tree was on fire didn’t play as well in the video as I got it on the script. I think some of it was just shooting. Like we spent too long talking about the tree before we saw the burnt tree, to me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another thing which was a challenge is no one says anything about the footprint. And when I first watched the video I didn’t see the footprint at all.

**Craig:** Oh, I saw it. I saw the footprint.

**John:** You saw it clear?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**John:** All right. I didn’t see it. But on the whole I thought it was just really a terrifically well done thing. And it’s the kind of thing we talk about our listeners doing is don’t just write pages. Try shooting some things. And you learn a lot by trying to film something.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, you learn a lot and you also impress people. I mean, I watched it and I thought well this guy can do this.

**John:** He can do this.

**Craig:** Which is great. He had a sense of composition.

**John:** He had a good sense of music. He had a good sense of tone.

**Craig:** Yeah, a good sense of music and tone. The three pages already told me he could do it because he understood how to create a mystery with dialogue. We don’t need to know what they’re talking about until we know what they’re talking about. And even then we don’t need to know what the hell is going on. The point is that they’re confused.

We get that Tilton, who is the —

**John:** Friar.

**Craig:** I’ll call him Friar. He already has knowledge these other two don’t. Clearly he knows — he may not know exactly what this means, but he knows something, because he’s just looking at it differently than they are. And that’s something that you can pull out of this and then pull out of the movie, which is great.

The one thing that I think the movie didn’t do as well as the pages was pacing. The pages moved at a certain pace. And the short film I think was a bit too languid. I think it could be paced up just a little bit. It got a little draggedy.

**John:** The one thing I was missing was, so Durwin is the person who apparently saw this tree burning, but if this is really the first introduction to any of this I wanted Durwin to say what he saw. And so if he describes like, you know, I was coming back from this and I saw it, bright as day, burning. That would actually paint in my mind what this looked like before it went out.

When you see a tree that’s been burned, we don’t know the context of how this guy saw it, what it looked like. That would actually be really helpful to me.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, I mean, he’s saying, “See? Just as I said.” But it’s not just as he said.

**John:** Yes. So, if that conversation happened beforehand, better to just put that in the scene here itself.

**Craig:** I think that’s right. The other thing that I want to point out is that the drunk is just too drunk. He’s goofy drunk. He was goofy drunk on the page. And he’s goofy drunk in the short. And I’m not criticizing the actor. I think the actor did what was here on the page. I think it’s a page problem.

I always have a problem with unrealistic drinking on screen. I just struggle with people that can just drink what appears to be the equivalent of six glasses of wine in the course of a minute and a half. Frankly, then their talking is either way too slurry to be useful or interesting, or far too articulate for their mental state. I’m not sure why they’re that drunk. I don’t know why they need to be. This didn’t seem to call for that much constant drinking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, maybe one purposeful swig? But it’s funny, even when I brought up Unforgiven, there’s this wonderful scene in Unforgiven where William Money has returned with the Schofield Kid, from killing the guys that there was the bounty on. And he doesn’t know exactly where Ned is at this point because they’ve split up. And one of the prostitutes from the town is riding up slowly with their money. And while she’s riding this kid is talking about how it’s the first time he ever killed somebody. And he’s obviously just distraught.

And the whole time he’s drinking from this bottle of whiskey. [laughs] And he drinks what would probably kill you, I think, you know? I mean, it’s so much drinking. I’m just like, oh my god, slow down. How are you even talking?

**John:** Yes. It’s because he was drinking iced tea and not —

**Craig:** Well, yes. But then in my mind I think, well, maybe in the Old West they just watered that stuff down. I don’t know. You know, because it’s so corny and old fashioned. Like men in movies used to be able to drink, like even Raiders of the Lost Ark which is an homage to all those serials, I mean, that drinking contest with Marion and that guy, they each had like 14 shots or something. [laughs] They would be in the hospital.

I know, I’m Jewish, so I think any amount of drinking is like, “Oh my god, how did they drink that much?”

**John:** Yeah, somehow up here at Sundance, the second year that I was up here, Tiger Williams who is another advisor up here, wrote Menace II Society, he and I got into a drinking contest. And we drank so much tequila. And he says that we had like 27 shots, which is of course actually impossible.

**Craig:** Impossible.

**John:** Like we would be dead.

**Craig:** Dead. Yeah.

**John:** We would be dead. And yet he maintains this to be true. I just know it was far, far, far, far, far too much tequila. And it was both a wonderful evening and a tremendous mistake. So, it [crosstalk] heavy drinking.

**Craig:** How bad was the aftermath?

**John:** So I never threw up. I have not thrown up sixth grade. I don’t know that my body can actually physically throw up. I tried to throw up. It was like that bad that I was trying to get it out of my system.

So, I got back to my room after that and I packed up. So, it was like two in the morning and the vans were going to take us to the airport at like seven in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** It’s like I cannot go to sleep because I might not wake up. And so I just had to stay up all night and just ride it through. It was bad.

**Craig:** Oh my god. That’s terrible. Listen, you’re German, so I think that there’s a certain ethnic capacity for drinking. I’m not saying all Germans can drink, but they’re more likely to be able to drink than a Jew. If I have, honestly, more than four drinks, I’m in a bad place. I do. I puke. And I have a terrible headache. And I’m just in bed the next day and I’m miserable. I just can’t do it.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** It’s probably a good thing.

**John:** That’s probably a good thing. It keeps you from —

**Craig:** But, boy, I’ll tell you what, man. I could eat cake. Ah!

**John:** Mm, cake is good. So, maybe you have built in genetic Antabuse. So, like drinking past a certain point kicks you into your sick mode.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I’m on that thing that they give you. Isn’t there a pill that they can give you?

**John:** That’s what I said. Antabuse.

**Craig:** That’s what it’s called? I didn’t know that’s what it was. Yeah. That’s the thing that killed Keith Moon.

**John:** I didn’t know that.

**Craig:** Yeah, he was on that, and then he decided to go crazy and drink anyway. Keith Moon.

**John:** Oh, it’s like the people who get their stomach stapled and then figure out ways to manipulate the gastric band and stuff so that they can still eat all the stuff they want to eat.

**Craig:** That’s kind of awesome. How do they do that? Just milkshakes?

**John:** No, what you do is, I was talking with a woman who did that. And she was like, “Yeah, so if I try to eat a bunch of potato chips I couldn’t. But if I just let them dissolve in my mouth, then I can swallow them.” It’s like, oh my god.

**Craig:** That’s not the point!

**John:** That’s not the point.

We have one question we wanted to get to. So, this is Jonathan who wrote in. He said, “I just graduated from film school at the AFI where at the end of the program we go through a pitch fest. I sent out some scripts to interested parties, a few of whom were interested but passed for a wide range of reasons. My question is this. After someone passed on your script, is there a good way to keep in touch with those managers and agents to submit future scripts without feeling like I’m nagging them to death? Keep in mind that some of the agents and managers I’ve had meetings with and some of them I have not.”

So, if someone has expressed interest but then passes, do you think there is a way to sort of keep that relationship alive?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t know that there is either.

**Craig:** No. There is no relationship. Let’s just be honest about that. There is no relationship. There are many grades of no. So, there’s pass, or “I love it, it’s not right for us, but I’d love to see something else from you.”

**John:** Yeah, if they say that — let’s say that happens, because that’s actually the right case where you do need to figure out a way to follow up.

**Craig:** Right. They’re asking you to. They’ll let you know if they want to hear from you again.

**John:** So, what is a way that Jonathan could follow up with that person who said like, “But we’d love to see something else.” How often should he reach out? What should he do? What is your advice, Craig?

**Craig:** I mean, if somebody says I’d like to keep in touch with you and see what else you have. Send them what else you have. If you don’t have anything else say, “Great. I’m working on something like this. I will send it to you when I’m done.” And then just reference, make sure when you do, reference your prior conversation.

**John:** Yeah, so they remember.

**Craig:** So that they’ll remember, because they won’t. But if somebody says, “I’m sorry, I listened to your pitch or your material and it’s not for me,” there is no fire to rekindle.

**John:** Agree.

**Craig:** This is the girl at the bar has said, “No thank you. I have a boyfriend.” Return to your seat, like a gentleman.

**John:** So, in those situations where follow up is invited, I would say that the threshold of time for me is probably eight weeks, or two months. If more time than that has passed, I may just kind of forget about you and may forget that I ever liked you.

So, if there’s not something immediate to show them right after that, at least lob in an email — thank god email exists, because we had to do some of this before there was email. Lob an email saying like, “Hey, it was fantastic meeting you. Like you said, I’ll certainly send you this next thing when I’m ready to show it to people. Thank you so much.” That email to sort of like put that pin in there is great. But that doesn’t buy you a year. That buys you kind of like two months.

**Craig:** Right. And just understand that any email that doesn’t include some sort of actionable content is garbage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s just garbage emails. Nobody wants to get emails like, “Hey, just checking in. How are you doing? Just letting you know I’m still working on it.” Nobody cares.

**John:** No one cares.

**Craig:** Nobody cares. Send me a script, or shut up.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s basically the deal.

**John:** So, that first email though can be a thank you.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s the only thing I will say. A thank you email can just sort of like — it’s that one time you can put a pin in it.

**Craig:** And don’t vamp. You know, everybody out there vamps. You and I get emails from people where they’ve decided this email is their shot to prove to us how smart or clever or funny or what a wonderful grasp of vocabulary they have. Don’t vamp.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Just the facts, ma’am.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Be polite. Be a gentleman. Be a gentle woman. Be a professional. Professional-professional. Act like you’ve been there. All the usual.

**John:** All the usuals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** What is yours?

**Craig:** I got this from someone on Twitter. Love this. I like, just about everybody, really, really hate the click-bait stuff out there. You know, this video shows something and what happens next will blow your mind. All this stuff.

Or even the things that are like, you know, news used to like — the headline used to tell you the story and then you would go further. Now like a particular — like for instance, here is a news headline at ABC, “Police: Burglars signed into victim’s Facebook. It’s what he forgot to do that got him caught.”

**John:** Oh man.

**Craig:** That’s a headline. Right? That’s a click-bait headline. You’re like, “What did he forget to do?” So, there’s a Twitter account called @SavedYouAClick. And all this guy or woman does is read this nonsense and then even their format is great. The answer to the click-bait question, and then what the headline is. So, for instance, the one I just read you, @SavedYouAClick writes, “Forgot to log out.” Retweet @ABC: Police: Burglar signed into victim’s Facebook. But it’s what he forgot to do that got him caught.

So, every single one of these things leads with the answer. He spoils every — and some of them are really funny. I like this one. And I’ll read the answer second just because it’s more fun that way over the air. Retweet @PostPolitics: What Google Trends tells you about who will win an election. And the answer is “Nothing.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That’s awesome.

**Craig:** “Is America better at treating cancer than Europe? Statistically yes.” It’s the greatest thing. You never have to deal with stupid headlines again. So, I love this. I’m following @SavedYouAClick. I love @SavedYouAClick.

Oh, and you know, it says on their page that the tweets are by a gentleman named Jake Beckman.

**John:** Oh, now we know.

**Craig:** So, Jake Beckman, thank you for this most excellent service.

**John:** If you enjoy that Twitter feed then you should also probably The Onion’s new spinoff site called the Clickhole where they create stories for just those , really just parodies of those kinds of stories.

**Craig:** Is that a Twitter account or a website?

**John:** It’s a website. So, Clickhole, we’ll have a link to it in the show notes. It has those kind of hyperbolic headlines but also slide shows. And so it’s like, you know, “Reasons I’m glad I’m an American.”

**Craig:** I know! [laughs]

**John:** And so you’re clicking through, you’re clicking through, and then like slide number five is Gary Sinise. It keeps going. And like slide number 9 is Gary Sinise.

**Craig:** I mean, these are, it’s just — god, I hate the media so much. Like “Dr. Nancy, NBC News, on what makes the horrifying Ebola outbreak so deadline.” And @SavedYouAClick, “Very contagious.” [laughs] This guy is the best. I’m sorry, Jake Beckman, you’re the best. I love it.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is actually kind of related. It’s this book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, by Jordan Ellenberg. And it’s a great book on sort of popular mathematics and really a lot of what he talks about is these kind of stories where there’s these really misleading facts or sort of misleading charts or graphs or numbers that maybe not even deliberately but sort of play into our misassumptions about how math works and how the world works.

And so there’s not formulas in it. It’s really about what it’s like, the simple but fascinating things that happen in math and sort of how they affect us in our daily life.

A good example in the chapter I read last night, he talks about there was like this obesity study that was published that says like, you now, by 2048 all Americans will be obese. And it’s like, well, that’s very, very unlikely. But what makes it especially unlikely in the same report they talk about how African American men, their obesity is increasing at a slower rate, so they won’t all be obese until 2072.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** Of course, the inherent flaw here is that African American men are also all Americans, so which is it? Are all —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If the African American men aren’t going to be fat by then, but all Americans are going to be fat by then, it’s actually an impossible thing. So, that was his example to talk about limits and sort of like how things approach boundaries. But it’s really just a terrific book and so I think many of our readers would — listeners would really enjoy reading it.

**Craig:** That sounds great.

**John:** So, if you’d like to have more information about the things we talked about on the show today, you can click through the show notes. They’re at either johnaugust.com where you may be listening to this, or at scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the stuff. So, we have links to many of the things we talked about, including Craig’s Twitter feed, and Datura, and all these other —

**Craig:** Oh, god, Datura. Never, please — please understand this for anybody listening to this who is some sort of pharmacological adventurist.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Never do it. I mean, there’s a website where they basically collect first person accounts of taking drugs of all kinds, legal and illegal, and so on and so forth. And that section is one of the most horrifying things you’ll ever read. Never, ever, ever, ever do that. Ever. Please.

**John:** Ever. No, don’t. Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Never do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** But what you should do is if you have something to say to Craig or me, you can send to us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We also love comments on iTunes. So, if you find Scriptnotes in iTunes and click and leave us a comment, that helps other people find our show as well. And we sometimes read those and it’s really nice. You could leave us a rating, too. That’s also great. And subscribe while you’re there, because you may be listening to this on the website or something, but also if you subscribe then that helps us go up the charts and more people find our show.

The last 20 episodes of Scriptnotes are always available on iTunes. The back catalog is available through scriptnotes.net and on our apps. We have an app for iOS and an app for Android. If you’d like to subscribe to those premium back episodes and some bonus content as well, that’s $1.99 a month. A bargain.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** A bargain!

**Craig:** Two dollars a month. It’s a bargain. And to reiterate to people, we do not profit from this show.

**John:** We are a money-losing venture.

**Craig:** We are a money-losing venture.

**John:** Through and through.

**Craig:** We are proud of being a money-losing venture. If you could help us lose a little less money, that would be awesome.

**John:** That would just be terrific.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be great?

**John:** It would be great.

**Craig:** But, hey, you know what, if you don’t, it’s also okay. [laughs]

**John:** It’s all good. If you have a longer question like the one that Jonathan asked today you can write ask@johnaugust.com and we will try to read some of those on the air. And thanks. And thanks Robert Yescombe for sending through that clip and the pages. That was really cool.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m going to get you a gift. I’m going to send you Gödel, Escher, Bach. I think you’re going to love it.

**John:** I’m sure I’ll love it.

**Craig:** I would love for people to… — God, that’s a gift. If you haven’t read that book and if you’re a left-brainy kind of person and you love artificial intelligence, and math, and art, and recursion, and brain-scrambly stuff —

**John:** Oh, is the Escher in there like MC Escher?

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** Okay. So, it’s all fitting together. I thought it was one person named Gödel Escher Bach.

**Craig:** No, no, no. It’s Gödel, Escher, and Bach.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** The Eternal Golden Braid. By the way, that’s what it’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. And notice that that’s EGB, also for Escher, Gödel, Bach. It’s going to scramble your mind. Great book.

**John:** Love it. Craig, thank you so much. Talk to you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

Links:

* [Sundance Screenwriters Lab](https://www.sundance.org/programs/screenwriters-lab/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 131: [Procrastination and Pageorexia](http://johnaugust.com/2014/procrastination-and-pageorexia)
* The [Aereo lawsuit](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2014/02/14/aereo-vs-the-broadcasters-six.html?page=all) on Upstart
* The Supreme Court’s [Aereo decision](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-461_l537.pdf)
* Wikipedia on [cable television](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television)
* [Slate Culture Gabfest “Summer Strut 2014” Edition](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/06/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_the_fosters_brooklyn_s_industrial_signs_and_the.html)
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
* [Pre-lap](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-pre-lap/) on Screenwriting.io
* [Three Pages by Rob Yescombe](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AGunSCENEEXTRACT.pdf), and [the scene on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOgHNw0AbhU)
* [Datura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_stramonium) on Wikipedia
* [@SavedYouAClick](https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick) on Twitter
* [Clickhole](http://www.clickhole.com/) by The Onion
* [How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594205221/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Jordan Ellenberg
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Regis Duffy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))