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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/yes-screenwriting-is-actually-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 150 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I’m back from vacation. I’m ready, I’m rested. I feel like I’m ready to do a big show because we’ve got a lot of stuff to get through today.

**Craig:** Normally when people say they’re ready and rested, you also expect them to say, I’m ready, tanned, and rested, but there was no chance you were going to be tanned.

**John:** I’m paler than I began.

**Craig:** Wow. How does that even work?

**John:** It’s difficult but it’s a process of heavy sunscreen application. So we went down to visit Southern Colorado. We went to the Great Sand Dunes. We went to Mesa Verde. We went to Four Corners which is probably the most useless sort of monument you could possibly imagine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An arbitrary place where four states come together.

**Craig:** Yeah, the four states with the — yeah, because they’re drawn on longitude and latitude, those borders.

**John:** Those borders.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes. But arbitrary really.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course, but you did the thing where you’re like I’m in one state, I’m in another state, I’m in —

**John:** Yeah. My daughter did a backbend, so she was in all four states at once.

**Craig:** That was featured in a Breaking Bad episode.

**John:** Oh, how nice.

Speaking of Breaking Bad, a friend of ours who directed two of the best episodes of Breaking Bad apparently is going to direct these movies. So he finally got some work. I think it’s really good news.

**Craig:** Yeah. He is — there’s a… — God, I cannot remember the name of it. It’s a science fiction thing like a trilogy or something and then there was another trilogy. There are just too many of them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But for whatever reason, you know how it is, they just can’t stop making derivative sequels, crappy derivative sequels, so they’re making more of them. And he’s —

**John:** And they had to go to a foreign director to do it now. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Right. They had to go to a Swedish guy as well. He’s not even doing the first of the next bunch of them.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** He’s only doing the second of the next bunch.

**John:** Yeah, he’s doing the sequels to the knock offs.

**Craig:** I mean, god, his name is Rian Johnson.

**John:** He was a guest on the show. I remember him. He was really nice.

**Craig:** And this franchise that he’s doing is Star Wars. Star Wars.

**John:** With an S at the end, right?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Star Wars, not Star War, Star Wars.

**Craig:** Well, maybe a Z, I don’t know.

**John:** Oh, I like that a lot.

**Craig:** Star Warz.

**John:** But I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of toys and things like that.

**Craig:** Oh, garbage. Hollywood garbage.

**John:** Yeah. But, you know, all the same, I’m just really delighted for Rian because this is a kid who he’s put in the hours. He’s made some television, he’s made some short films. He did some videos.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think it’s great that they’re taking a chance on this newbie —

**Craig:** Give him a shot. And you know what, look, everybody has to start somewhere. So if you start doing the second of a series of Star Wars films, ideally you’ll learn and, you know, I’d love to see what comes next. I guess that’s what you can take —

**John:** Absolutely. I think in a few years he may be ready to make some real movies. So congratulations, Rian Johnson. And I think it’s going to be — I’m looking forward to seeing what you make.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That actually segues really well to our first bit of follow up, which is Rob Norman wrote in about remakes and reboots which we talked about two episodes ago. And Rob writes, “I wonder if a remake uses the same laws of storytelling, whereas a reboot changes how the story is told drastically. For example, 21 Jump Street not only changed formats, it also changed genres from police procedural to meta-comedy.

“At the core of Star Trek, there were always this chin-scratching philosophical quandaries, lots of standing around debating issues. J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek feels a lot more like Indiana Jones than anything Gene Roddenberry every built. But from Robocop to Robocop, what changed? A few details in the narrative were updated. The actors are different but the tone is the same. Spider-Man to Amazing Spider-Man seems very familiar. It wasn’t really rebooted. A few what’s are different, but the how is the same.

“A remake might be the story and the world stays the same, details change, an old movie is updated. A reboot is going back to the original premise and doing a page one rewrite of the franchise. The story mechanisms are replaced with something completely different.”

That’s Rob’s description of remake versus reboot.

**Craig:** I’ll buy that too. I mean the last definition was a pretty good one. This definition is a pretty good one. I’m not sure there’s that much value in determining what these nonsense words mean anyway. They’re mostly for bloggers and entertainment journalists to bandy about as they attempt to draw clicks to their website. But, yeah, that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. I think rebooting, basically you’re going in a new direction. This is like, all that stuff existed and that’s over there. And this is a new way that we are forging forward. I thought 21 Jump Street was actually an interesting example to bring up because I saw 22 Jump Street over the weekend. I really enjoyed it. Have you seen it yet, Craig?

**Craig:** I haven’t.

**John:** Oh, you should see it.

**Craig:** I know. It’s on my list.

**John:** Yeah, it’s quite good and quite interesting in the way that they, he describes it as a meta-comedy. They go really meta in it in ways that you think are going to be dangerous. Because usually when a movie tries to be too self-aware that it’s a movie, you’re sort of like navel-gazing and yet it does it just geniusly.

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

**John:** Cool. A second bit of follow-up. We talked about something like this on the show before, but Charles Forman is a developer who’s been working with stuff in the Fountain. And he came up with this new product for Mac called Storyboard Fountain. And it’s a lot like kind of what Craig had always wanted or described, which is the ability to sort of shift back and forth between your script and the storyboards for your script. And his, in fact, is a drawing tool. So you work on it with a tablet and you’re drawing with the script, you know, right there in the same frame.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It seems really, really cool. So that was a great product demo. So I’m going to steer people there —

**Craig:** I wish, I wish, like I’m so bad at drawing that I can’t even draw stick figures properly. I remember I would work with storyboard artists and I would say, well, this is kind of what I’m thinking about and they would get it. You know, they’d understand, okay, I see. You want behind him, you want over his shoulder with him sort of blown out in frame and then this stuff is in the deep background. But when they looked at my stick figure drawings, they honestly looked at me like I was sick. There was something wrong with me.

**John:** So the last couple of weeks, I’ve been storyboarding this really complicated project. And so I’ve had a guy, Simone, who’s been in the office a lot doing this stuff. And so we’ve been talking through things. It’s always interesting talking with somebody who’s so much better at something than you are. And so you shouldn’t even try to — I just don’t pick up a pencil when I talk to him about it anymore.

But what I found is really useful is to use real things around me to sort of describe what the shot is and sort of use my fingers as the camera. So like, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here. And he can draw that beautifully. But if I try to do it, it’s just, it’s disastrous.

**Craig:** It’s funny, John, that your instinct when talking to somebody who is better at something than you is to defer to some extent to them. Whereas, if say the thing that you were really good at was screenwriting, the people that talk to us so frequently fail —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** — to defer. In fact, they don’t see any mystery in what we do at all.

**John:** Uh-uh. A monkey could do that.

**Craig:** A monkey could do it. Anyway, the only reason they don’t do it is just because they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just too hard to — it’s so much typing. But I know what to say.

**John:** Oh, you do, absolutely. It’s just a matter of putting particular words down on the page and sort of like, you know, making it all work right there. Basically, it’s how to use Final Draft is really 90% of screenwriting.

**Craig:** 90% of it. My favorite phrase that idiots use is it just needs to be put into writing. [laughs] I love that. Like I have the story, I know what it is, it just, somebody just needs to put it into writing. What does that mean? It just needs to be put into writing. It’s like a doctor. Like, listen, I know that you’re sick. I just need to put you into health and you’ll be fine. That’s all. I don’t have to do it. Somebody could do it. Anybody can be a doctor. You just have to put somebody into health. I know what the problem is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Could you just put me into health? You —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** D’oh! Oh boy.

**John:** Oh boy. Well, you may want to hold on to some of that anger because you have an important Halloween task which is that you need to play Steve Ballmer for Halloween.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And one of our listeners, Cynthia Closkey sent me a link to a comedian impressionist named Jim Meskimen who I had seen on other shows before but I’ve never seen this YouTube video where he talks through like how to do an impression and basically how he breaks things down.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And this is very important to me because I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to do my Tim Cook so I can be Tim Cook to your Steve Ballmer. And it’s a very clever video because it was not about sort of the technical details, it’s about sort of looking at the world from their perspective and figuring out how they sort of move their mouths and sort of how they project things much more so than trying to match that sound with that sound.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very clever —

**Craig:** It was. I mean, when you listen to Tim Cook, I mean the first thing you’ll notice probably is the drawl because he has a Southern drawl. But he drags his words. It’s really amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It really looks beautiful in your hand. He’s got that long thing on certain vowels, you know. Like those things… — But I really liked what this guy said about the forceful nature, the plosives, as it were, of speech. And, you know, a good — being able to be an impressionist is a helpful thing I would think as a screenwriter because we are doing impressions of other human beings when we’re writing. We’re doing impressions of multiple other human beings talking to each other.

It’s kind of high level mimicry. And so where does the specificity come from? And I think a lot of new screenwriters will go to things that are very textual: long words, complete sentences as opposed to short words, and slang or whatever have you. But even thinking about the forcefulness of the way a sentence emerges will bleed into the dialogue in a way that people will pick up on. They just will. And it’s not so heavy-handed.

**John:** Yeah. Your example of plosiveness, like the example he gives is like if you have popcorn in your mouth, how far would the popcorn fly when you do it. And he distinguishes between Kevin Spacey, who keeps everything very close to himself, versus a Paul Giamatti who we think of as being this bursting, bursting, bursting out.

That’s why as you’re writing characters, you know, you shouldn’t get stuck on one actor for a role. But if you have an actor in your head as you’re writing a role, it can be very helpful to see like, would this actually make sense coming out of his lips? Like can I believe an actor, one actor would say all these things this way and that can be really helpful to get the voice consistent even if it’s not the actor you end up casting in the end.

**Craig:** I don’t really know what the point is in writing a character if you don’t have an actor in mind. I really don’t, because you’re just cheating yourself. Have somebody. It doesn’t have to be anybody that you would ever even cast. Maybe it’s an actor that wouldn’t attract a single ticket buyer. But the specificity, I think, is just so critical.

**John:** Yeah. If we say specificity three more times in this podcast we’ll get some sort of special prize.

**Craig:** Specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity.

**John:** All right, nicely done. I will say that one of my great joys in my writing career is I got to do three days’ work on a movie that starred Christopher Walken. And so I got to write dialogue that Christopher Walken would say.

**Craig:** Walken dialogue.

**John:** And it’s just such a unique joy to have somebody whose voice you can already hear in your head so clearly and specifically as you’re putting those words down. You pick words that you would never pick for any other actor because it’ll just be so amazing when he says them.

**Craig:** And Walken’s thing also is there’s either , you know, it’s not that there’s no punctuation. It’s that the punctuation is random. So commas and periods will appear randomly in a brick of dialogue without any actual relation to syntax.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which I think is —

**John:** Well, he’ll put them in. He will take the dialogue and he will pencil them in where he’s going to do them. It’s planned.

**Craig:** It’s planned but it just , you know, he’ll —

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** [Walken impersonation] He’ll pencil them in where he’s planning to do them. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s so weird.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** It’s wonderful. And like question marks instead of periods and it just… — But, look, at some point, it’s, I don’t know. I don’t want to, it’s just so weird like he’s — Christopher Walken has almost become like Al Pacino, a guy that seems to be doing impressions of people that do impressions of him.

**John:** Yeah. And so I know there are movies that he doesn’t do the Christopher Walken of it all and I just haven’t seen them because people want him to do Christopher Walken I guess.

**Craig:** The early ones. If you go way back —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** — to the early days you’ll see —

**John:** Totally different person.

**Craig:** You’ll see , yeah, smooth Christopher Walken. Yeah.

**John:** A final bit of follow-up. Giovanni wrote in. Giovanni from Turin, Italy writes, “In episode 146, you talked about Hopscotch and how it would be awesome to have something similar that works with Minecraft. I’m just writing in to say there actually is. It’s called Kano. And it’s basically a computer that kids can build and they program in it with code blocks for a number of applications and games. Minecraft is one of them. Craig would be happy to know it was funded mainly through Kickstarter.”

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** “Since I’m writing in, I will also say that as an aspiring videogame writer, I find it very interesting when you talk about games and their narratives. Would you ever consider having a videogame screenwriter or somebody who worked in videogames like Gary Whitta or such on the show?”

No. Absolutely no. Gary Whitta? Never.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, not Whitta.

**John:** Oh yeah, anybody but Whitta.

**Craig:** Anybody but Whitta. That’s actually a great name for the podcast. I mean if we ever want to change it, it could just be called anybody but Whitta.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a guy I met recently. I believe his name is Jesse Stern and he’s written a number of the Call of Duty games. Goyer has worked on some of those as well. But Jesse Stern I think is primarily a videogame writer. And I actually think that it would be great to speak to somebody like that. And we love Gary Whitta, but Gary’s a screenwriter who also writes some videogames. But this guy is like way deeper and more about that world and it would be — I would love to talk to them. I mean, it’s a fascinating area.

The Writers Guild, you know, continues to make fluttering whimpery noises about trying to organize videogame writers. I don’t see any coherent strategy.

**John:** So you actually, if you’re a WGA member, you could actually get a WGA contract writing on a videogame.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They’re not eager to give it to you but you can possibly get it. And it establishes some things, some minimums, some benefits that you would not otherwise get if you were not doing that, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you were being paid, you know, enough you could qualify for pension and health. The problem is that the payment for many of the positions is very low. So many of the large companies are either located overseas where we have no jurisdiction or they are Walmart-ian in their anti —

I mean, look, the whole, we’ve discussed this before, the entire Silicon Valley world is just brutally anti-union. And, or I’ll call it the technology world because I know that some of these places aren’t just, you know, but yeah, it’s a massive uphill climb.

**John:** Yeah, it is. But, Gary, what I should say is actually a very, very nice person. So, I’m slagging on him just because we adore him. And Gary Whitta’s actually writing one of the Star Wars movies. That’s one of the things that’s actually announced, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s doing one of those spinoff movies. So there’s going to be the three, I guess you’d call them canonical sequels. J. J. Abrams is doing the first of them, then Rian and then an unknown third director. And Gary is doing one of these standalone movies. I think there’s going to be another one as well. There may even be two. You know, it’s funny —

**John:** It’s an exciting time.

**Craig:** I was talking to a producer today about it and he’s like, “Is there, how many Star Wars movies are going to come out?” And I said, you know what man, they can’t make enough. I honestly believe that Disney can’t lose money on them. It doesn’t matter because if the third prequel, by that point we’d had enough evidence. [laughs] If the third prequel made a ton of money and it did —

**John:** It did.

**Craig:** Every single one of these things is going to be massive and of course there’s the dragon’s tail of merchandising and theme parks and all the rest. We are going to find out just how big a movie can be when this first Star Wars comes out.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Exciting.

**Craig:** It’s going to redefine big.

**John:** All right. Topics for today. Three big topics that we have marked out. First is Trinity Syndrome. Second is sitcoms at conflict. And the third is the question of is screenwriting actually writing. So let’s spin the big wheel and start with Trinity Syndrome.

**Craig:** [Mimics the Price is Right wheel spin]

**John:** Oh, you went over a dollar.

Tasha Robinson writing for The Dissolve is writing about what she calls Trinity Syndrome which is that your strong female characters in many of these movies, it’s like, great you have this “strong female character” who actually doesn’t do anything significant in the plot and she points out How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example of this, Lego Movie as an example of this, and the most recent Lord Of The Rings movies as an example of that. Where you have a woman who is incredibly competent and can do a lot of great things, and then she doesn’t do anything.

Craig, what did you think of Tasha’s article and her points?

**Craig:** I thought, I was almost all the way there with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that she’s pointing out something that’s absolutely true that making a female character “strong” oftentimes is a weak-sauce substitute for making them actually human and fleshed out. Of her examples, the one that I thought was probably the weakest was The Lego Movie because she was basically, she was parodying the strong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, the hero of that movie is called The One. You know, The Chosen One. And so obviously they’re kind of parodying The Matrix there as they were parodying a billion things.

But the only thing I wanted to point out I guess to nuance really is that when you ask the question, why is this happening, to some extent I think you can say it’s because the people that are making these movies are sort of casually sexist. But I also want to point out that many times in these sorts of movies the male characters who aren’t The One or The Hero are also just as thin and pointless.

**John:** I think that’s a really good point because essentially the way movies tend to work, the way sort of action movies tend to work is you have your hero protagonist and then you have everybody else. And in that everybody else, those are hopefully good entertaining funny characters or dramatic characters, but none of them are going to be as integral as the hero is or if there’s a villain, the villain is going to be. So any person, any character in the movie who’s not the hero or the principal villain is going to feel a little bit secondary and can feel a little bit sort of weak-sauce. If they’re just there to sort of give advice or to help the hero out for a bit but don’t have an integral story function in their own right.

**Craig:** Right. So there are movies that have relationships. And Lindsay Doran has a really good talk that she does about this. There are movies where characters have a task to do: save the world, blow up a building, become the one, whatever. And they do it. And along the way they experience a relationship with another person. And in the end they get that relationship together almost as a reward for having done the task of the movie.

Then there are other movies where really the relationship is the reward, rather the relationship is the purpose. It’s the journey, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you have movies that kind of hybridize it where you can feel that there’s equal weight to these things. So for instance, Tasha mentions Edge of Tomorrow where the goal, which is to save the world, seems basically on par with this other goal which is to figure out this relationship with this woman that is the key to understanding how to save the world. In a lot of the movies that she talks about, for instance The Matrix, which I think is brilliant and I actually want, I think that The Matrix is a movie that we should do an episode on.

**John:** Oh, we absolutely should.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s just gorgeously structured. What is the — where’s the dimension to Morpheus? He might as well have a flowy beard and be sitting on a mountain. He is just the wise old man. And absolutely Trinity is the trinity. [laughs] And the villain’s the villain. He’s the rat. The rat’s the rat. The only character in The Matrix that is an actual human who has anything interesting to say that isn’t the one is the oracle —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Who is a woman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I agree that strong female character syndrome isn’t ideal in one sense, but I would argue that really what we’re kind of talking about is broad weak character syndrome.

**John:** Yeah. Tasha offers a couple of points and basically a checklist of things to ask yourself when you’re looking at the characters in a movie. So some of them include: “After being introduced to your strong female character, they fail to do anything fundamentally significant to the outcome of the plot or anything at all.” And that’s a thing you do see where this woman is established as being incredibly competent. I think back to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and I think it’s Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, she’s like in disguise at the start she says she’s a great sword fighter and then she never does sword fighting —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Is that right?

**Craig:** She mostly just gets threatened to be raped which is number two.

**John:** Exactly. “If she does something to significantly affect the plot, is it mostly getting raped, beaten, or killed to motivate the male hero, or deciding to have sex or not have sex with, agreeing to date, deciding to break up with the male hero, or nagging the male hero into growing up, or nagging him to stop being so heroic. Basically, does she only exist to service the male hero’s needs, development or motivations?”

But this gets into what we’ve just talked about is that if in a lot of these movies there’s one main person and if that main person is the dude and she is the female character, you have to look for what else it is that she can do, what other functions she can have.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** If it’s a movie that has like essentially one person driving the story, it doesn’t matter if that secondary character is male or female. It’s going to feel extra.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because the protagonist is the protagonist. Therefore, every other character exists to service their needs, development and motivation, all of them. I mean, listen, I think that I did a good job in Identity Thief of having a female character who was not a typical female character and who didn’t fall into any of the pitfalls that I think are listed here. And yet she does help the protagonist’s needs, development, and motivation like any other character must in a movie because that’s what the non-protagonists must do or else they don’t belong in a movie.

**John:** Well, but fundamentally Identity Thief is a dual protagonist movie where they’re causing each other to change.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s true. I always felt that he was the primary protagonist because I think he had the most — I think he had the most central problem.

**John:** Yeah, and she was the obstacle to overcome.

**Craig:** In many ways, yes. In many ways, yeah.

**John:** And I would say back to my movies, you know, Go certainly doesn’t have a strong female character problem. You have, you know, Ronna is incredibly competent but she’s the protagonist also. Things are changing because of her. But Charlie’s Angels, we had a luxury of, we have the three women, so there’s not — they’re driving the story. They’re doing those kinds of things themselves.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think I want to go back to your defense of Lego Movie and sort of the parody of Trinity Syndrome in that because my recollection of The Lego Movie is the Wyldstyle character, the Elizabeth Banks character, she really wants to be the one and she’s really frustrated that she’s not the one.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so I think she vocalizes the frustration that I think Tasha Robinson is describing. It’s like, why am I the secondary person? Look how competent I am. Why am I not the person being put in charge here?

**Craig:** That’s how, you know, it’s a natural thing to want to spoof when you see The Matrix because The Matrix begins with Trinity. The story begins with Trinity doing things that we cannot believe. I mean we know that she’s in a building somewhere and the cops show up and an agent says, you know, what’s going on and they say, oh we sent our cops in there. They probably already arrested her. And the agent turns around and says, they’re already dead. And then we watch her just be awesome.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So a natural thing you want to spoof is why is that guy the one? He is just a guy, like why? And that’s a great thing to — I guess my point of being that I thought it was unfair for Tasha to pick on that character because that character is kind of on her side, I think, is the point.

**John:** So what solutions can we offer or what sort of recommendations can we offer someone who is worried that they have a character who is just basically strong female character syndrome? What hope do we offer them?

**Craig:** Well, I think that there’s a list here of some trope-y things that people do with women that are starting to become really annoying because, you know, what happens… — When we look at characters, there are certain things that we see immediately and then there’s all the stuff on the inside. But if you look at race, gender, and sexuality, I can come up with a whole bunch of trope-y things for race and sexuality that just don’t work anymore because they’re kind of insulting. They’re getting in the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s time to start doing that for, it’s long past time to start doing that for gender. So for instance, Tasha points out some very good tropes that you don’t want to do. “Could your strong female character be seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it to help a male hero?” Is — I love this one — “Is a fundamental point of your plot that your strong female character is the strongest, smartest, meanest, toughest or most experienced character in the story until the protagonist arrives?” And that, by the way, is something you see in Raiders of the Lost Ark which we both love.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** But Marion is like awesome. She owns a bar. She out-drinks some huge, you know, Himalayan man and then immediately she’s into screamy-me-me, you know, damsel in distress, but just like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because Indy’s there. “Does the male character enter the story as a bumbling screw-up but then spend the whole movie rapidly evolving past her while she stays entirely static and even cheers him on. We’ll call that Rene Russo in Tin Cup. It’s nice if she’s hyper cool but does she only start off that way so a male hero will look even cooler by comparison when he rescues or surpasses her?”

We see that all the time. I mean, she’s making real — these are really good tropes you just want to avoid because we’ve seen them forever and they’re frankly starting to accumulate into a morass of fairly insulting points of view on women. We can just calm down about the gender roles quite a bit, you know.

**John:** The challenge though is like this is a list of don’t do’s. And so what are some proactive steps you can take to make sure that the female characters in your story are going to have, I don’t know, that they’re not going to fall into this syndrome? And I would say that it’s making sure that, track the story from that character’s point of view, the female character’s point of view, and what would the story be like if the hero hadn’t shown up there.

And so ask yourself the question I think they ask in The Lego Movie which is, well, why isn’t she the hero, and find interesting answers for that. Find interesting things for her to do that don’t fall into these tropes, like find interesting reasons for her to make the plot move forward. Have her take assertive actions that change the nature of the plot. And create conflict with the protagonist that’s not just sort of bumbling romantic tension or whatever you want to do or just like, you know, I’m more competent than you are. Have some real stakes there.

One of my frustrations is that women in movies never seem to make ethical choices. They sort of seem beyond it and —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So have that be a fact and have some flaws, have some real issues there so that it’s a three-dimensional character regardless. It can also be really helpful to just look the character irrespective of gender and what is that character’s motivation and how would you write this character if you were writing it as a man and look at all the choices and decisions that the male characters would make and then ask yourself, are you making those same of kinds of choices with the character as a woman.

**Craig:** Yeah. For me from a practical positive standpoint, I think that when you write a character who is a woman, you need to consider that she is a woman. You have to understand women as you understand men. I don’t think, by the way, that men have any better understanding of men than they do of women. I think people have understandings of themselves and barely at that. We misunderstand members of our own gender aplenty.

But you want to write a woman and you want to consider that gender as part of her identity. But the thing that I would suggest avoiding at least in the beginning, unless it’s integral to the story, is an immediate dose of sexual politics, sexual interplay, romance. Hold off. Hold off. Make this character alive and full and complete without that. Because what happens all too often is the romance substitutes for substance. And in The Matrix, you see it. In the end, Trinity’s character is a soldier who is defined by her blind faith love in Keanu Reeves —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who does not deserve it until the very end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that I think is where things — I mean, by the way, in that movie, it works. But that movie’s already —

**John:** In a lot of movies it works. I mean —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the reason why these tropes are there is because it’s been successful and —

**Craig:** That’s right. But I think that we’ve moved on is the point. And we’re starting to see different kinds of relationships occurring. You know, thinking about a brother… — It’s funny, Aline McKenna when she saw Identity Thief, she said, “One thing I really enjoyed about the movie was that it was a man and woman together and it wasn’t about romance or sex, and it was just watching a man and a woman become friends and you never get to see that in a movie.” And it’s true. You never get to see that in a movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s why it’s funny. In Edge of Tomorrow, I didn’t want them to — have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t seen it yet. Sorry.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I was going to do a spoiler.

**John:** Right. Don’t spoil it for me. I do want to see it.

**Craig:** I’m not going to spoil it.

**John:** Doug Liman directed it.

**Craig:** Doug Liman did direct it, absolutely, the director of Go. I’ll just say that for much of it, for most of it, for the great bulk of it I was watching two people become friends. And I really enjoyed that.

**John:** It’s a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** All right, speaking of friends, we’re going to talk about an article by Todd VanDerWerff in the AV Club where he says that friendship is killing sitcoms.

**Craig:** God, you are on fire with the segues today, by the way.

**John:** Thank you very much. Sometimes I’m just in a segue mode. I hop on my little two-wheeled scooter and I just go.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** On top of the segue, I may have brought this up on the show before, it’s a word that I was using and never really knew how it was written. It’s the most disturbingly written word. S-E-G-U-E.

**Craig:** That’s right. Seg. It looks like “Seague.”

**John:** Yeah, I assumed that that word was a short version of the longer word that actually was segue. I thought it was just supposed to be segue, but it’s really segue.

**Craig:** Segue. Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** Todd’s point is that modern sitcoms, and by sitcoms he doesn’t mean just three cameras, but basically half hour comedies on television, have been hurt by the nature of just people hanging out. And so the kinds of shows he’s talking about include Happy Endings, Cougar Town, How I Met Your Mother, even Modern Family. I think Modern Family is a bit of a stretch. New Girl, recent seasons of New Girl, in that essentially the show can be sometimes paralyzed by the characters getting along too well, by the characters hanging out. And when they just hang out the tension in the scenes naturally just sort of dissipates and your motivation for staying engaged and for really watching falls apart.

Craig, what did you think of the article?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s a pretty good observation. I generally agree with his assessment that comedy requires conflict and that the best sitcoms were built around conflict. Although the one that I kind of picked out was Cheers, because while Sam and Diane had a will they/won’t they, that conflict was kind of confined to them. That sitcom to me sort of defined the hang out.

In fact, I’ll go one step backwards. Taxi really for me was the first great hang out show. Yes, Louie is in conflict with them, but really they’re not all in conflict with each other. The point of that show was that they were all in the same boat and desperate to help each other through their misery. And so now that I’m thinking about it, [laughs], I’m not really sure I agree with what he’s saying.

**John:** I will say that you look at Cheers, and so even after Sam and Diane, when Diane left, they brought in the Kirstie Alley to basically be that central conflict again. Fundamentally these two characters will not get along. And she wouldn’t get along with Carla. She wouldn’t get along with sort of everyone else in the show. To a large degree Frasier I think was brought in to — when Frasier Crane was on Cheers, he was brought in to be sort of a force to be angry against or to be frustrated with.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Then when we segue that off to Frasier, that whole show is built on conflict, about basically the one-upmanship between Frasier and his brother, the dad looking to have both of them.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So, that’s a great show, and it’s a great show partly because of its conflict.

The reason why I didn’t find Modern Family to be the best example of that is I feel like they do find clever conflicts in there sort of constantly. So, most of the plots are conflicts between two of that extended family members.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, he kind of lays this all at the feet of Friends. But, Friends has all the same kind of conflict that he’s talking about. Rachel and Ross, and who loves who, and the love kept switching around and there was a baby, and people were going to get married, and then they weren’t going to get married. There was lots of conflict there. Tons of it.

**John:** One of my favorite episodes of Friends is the one where Ross — it’s a bottle episode where Ross is trying to get everyone to come to this event and basically like the clock is ticking and he’s trying to get everyone actually dressed so they will actually leave so they can leave the apartment on time. And everyone just sort of like gangs up against him in fun ways.

And that’s the nature of what conflict is. And so often if you’re looking at why a scene doesn’t work it’s because the central conflict of the scene is not clear. It’s not clear — you may understand what the two characters want, but they’re not being put against each other in ways that are going to create some sparks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, every sitcom, I mean the “sit” part is conflict.

**John:** Yes. Situational.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, every episode will have conflict. In terms of the DNA of the show, the idea of baking conflict in between the characters is a good one. And I think, for instance, Friends did that. I mean, we knew from the start that Ross was pining away for Rachel and she wasn’t into him. The will they/won’t they just went on, and on, and on.

And, I don’t know, it says “the show ran Ross and Rachel into the ground.” I guess, yeah, I don’t know.

**John:** [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I don’t know. I’m not really sure. I’ve got to be honest with you. I think Todd VanDerWerff wrote a very — he wrote this well, it’s well thought out. I’m not sure if this topic, frankly, deserves this much thought. It doesn’t seem —

**John:** I think it’s worth pointing out that sitcoms, comedy thrives on conflict. And that when conflict dissipates it can be more challenging to actually find the conflict. So, two of the shows he singles out are New Girl and — I took of the “The” this time. I said New Girl the way the show actually is.

**Craig:** That’s right. New Girl.

**John:** New Girl. And Parks and Rec. And I think you can make valid cases for both of these shows in that New Girl I think the writing is terrific, I love the actors, but this last season there’s not been a lot of conflict between the individual characters. You know, Schmidt is — do you watch New Girl?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So, the Schmidt character can be horrible, and yet you still like him. But with the central couple actually becoming a couple and then falling apart, it has had less inherent conflict then it could otherwise be. And so they do just tend to hang out a lot.

Parks and Rec is another great show with a fantastic cast, but Ron Swanson who was sort of the Alec Baldwin 30 Rock character who was always like the stern person you couldn’t convince to get onto your side has become more lovable and because of that it’s harder to find the real conflict between the different characters. They brought on Billy Eichner who is just sort of a firecracker who sort of sets everybody off, but it’s more loud than actual conflict.

**Craig:** You know what I think is missing from sitcoms?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** And if I were to write a sitcom today, which I’m not gonna —

**John:** What would you do?

**Craig:** I am a huge fan of Laverne and Shirley. I love Laverne and Shirley. And one thing that Laverne and Shirley did so well was physical comedy. They managed to do incredible physical comedy within the confining format of a sitcom. And it’s really hard to do because, I mean, physical comedy can be dangerous. And being funny doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re physically capable of doing a lot of these things. Plus, you can’t use stunt people. Plus, you’re doing it on a locked down set like a living room. And they managed to do the most incredible — and I just love how physical they were. And you never see that on sitcoms anymore.

I would love to see a sitcom with adults being physical. I love physical comedy. I’ve always loved physical comedy.

**John:** I would say Modern Family does that some. I mean, granted it’s not a three-camera.

**Craig:** It’s single-camera. Right.

**John:** It’s single-camera, so they can do more sophisticated things sometimes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But there have been some really good physical comedy moments where they’ve —

**Craig:** I’ll give you that one. I’ll give you that one. That’s true.

**John:** Modern Family is a great show. So, I think we’re going to leave it at good to point out that conflict is central to shows. I don’t know that we agree with some of his specific examples or points, but yay conflict. And I think it’s a useful thing as people are writing — if you’re writing a comedy pilot, your fundamental question should be what is the conflict. What is the conflict of these scenes? And not only are my characters saying funny things, but are they saying funny things that is exploring the conflict within those scenes.

**Craig:** Correctamundo. Silicon Valley does it very well, by the way.

**John:** It does it very, very well. You have great empathy almost all the characters, and yet they are pretty much always in conflict with each other.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This will be a quick one, I’m sure. This was Richard Brody writing for The New Yorker. The headline wasn’t provocative at all. It says Screenwriting Isn’t Writing.

**Craig:** Eh. Meh.

**John:** Yeah, nothing hyperbolic about that at all. So, the article is talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner to some degree and their Hollywood careers. And it’s based on an article that Ken LaZebnik did in Written By, which is an excerpt from his longer book, where they’re talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s frustrations writing for Hollywood and that he was really trying to write as if screenwriting was an art form and Brody’s point is that it isn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, where to begin with this? First of all, let’s just — I just love — the article falls under the heading “The Front Row: Notes on the Cinema,” by Richard Brody. And then there is his bearded, bespectacled cartoon face and above it, of course, the sneering, [laughs] 1800s monocle hoisting New Yorker icon. They both seem so similar to me.

This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read, which is saying something. Because it’s obvious that Richard Brody is very intelligent. He knows how to put sentences together. I think that he strikes me as one of these people that’s been raised in a pod inside of an academy and has never actually seen the world or tasted or touched things. He’s just read about it in The New Yorker.

This is dumb. Where to begin with how dumb it is? First of all, if you’re going to discuss whether or not screenwriting is writing, let’s not maybe limit it to F. Scott Fitzgerald, [laughs], which is just like — so, yes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a brilliant novelist. He was a brilliant novelist of a time that was 80 or so years ago. And he attempted because he was unfortunately not great with money and not great with alcohol and not great with lots of things attempted to make some money in Hollywood writing screenplays the way that many great authors like Clifford Odets did.

And he just didn’t get it. And it wasn’t that screenwriting wasn’t writing, it was that he just wasn’t giving these people what they wanted. And I think of Barton Fink. “It’s a Wallace Beery picture. Write a Wallace Beery picture.”That doesn’t mean that writing a Wallace Beery picture isn’t writing, nor does it mean that everything is a Wallace Beery picture.

Interestingly, in his article about how screenwriting isn’t writing and F. Scott Fitzgerald is proof of it, he has this quote from a book about how Fitzgerald embraced screenwriting as a new art form.

**John:** This is the quote. “Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the ‘merchants’ more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience.”

**Craig:** Right. So, there it is. That’s my point. I agree with Fitzgerald one hundred percent. And I don’t agree with Richard Brody. And I have to say, and again, Faulkner — this guy apparently has, I don’t know, maybe he was hermetically sealed in some sort of cryogenic crypt back in 1958 because it seems like the most recent reference he has is Faulkner’s 1955 film Land of the Pharaohs, because it’s more easy to then go backwards to discuss popular touchstones like Tiger Shark from 1933, ’32.

This is my real problem with this. It is absurd prima facie, forget — putting aside the fact that somebody who doesn’t do a thing is deciding whether or not it’s another thing. I don’t — I don’t like reading How To sex guides from eunuchs. But really I think what upsets me about this is that it’s dishonest. This entire essay is dishonest. It’s a lie. Richard Brody knows it’s a lie. He came up with a title that he thought would get a lot of clicks because he was feeling lonely or something. There is no way this man is dumb enough to believe the argument he’s put here.

**John:** So, I’m not going to stand up for a huge defense of him, but when I clicked through that headline I was like well that’s just absurd, that’s ridiculous. And then I remembered the fact that often the writer of an article does not choose his headline. And so it’s very possible that someone else put that headline on.

And so I’m trying to push past the headline to look at this as what was the point of the essay. And I think if you look at the point of the essay as Fitzgerald, he was really trying to be a screenwriter. He was really trying to do art in screenwriting, and failed at it. Brody’s point seems to be like, well, it was a foolish game anyway because you can’t look at screenwriting as being real writing.

**Craig:** I’ve got to push back here because in his essay, not the headline, in his essay he writes, “In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting is writing mistake.”

**John:** Yes. I think I said that. I think I got to the point that the headline may seem much more categorical than that one sentence does. He’s, yes, saying that Fitzgerald, this was this one situation. Without that Fitzgerald framing he has no point whatsoever. I’m stating this badly.

But where I think this still falls apart is that I think there’s an implicit idea that there is real writing, sort of like “real writing,” and the question is what is real writing. Obviously this article from The New Yorker isn’t real writing. Is a short story real writing? What is real writing.

And I think his definition of what writing is basically a novel of a certain size. And that’s absurd.

**Craig:** I guess. I can’t even tell. I mean, this is so sloppily done. If you’re going to drop a bomb like screenwriting isn’t writing, you’d better sit down and do your homework here. And you better be able to explain to me why Paddy Chayefsky didn’t write Network, and you better explain to me why The Godfather wasn’t written, and Groundhog Day wasn’t written. And, I don’t know, I mean, it’s just insane.

**John:** Well, later in the article he talks about the collaboration. And collaboration in a sense of like a sort of pejorative sense. Like, well, you were working with a director on the project, so you can’t really say that you wrote it, basically saying there is no sense of authorship.

And if collaboration is his definition of what makes something not writing, then the theater can’t be writing either. Shakespeare can’t be writing because he was writing for people. He was writing with people, with theater troupes in mind to try to make this thing happen.

**Craig:** And editors — book editors are omnipresent.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it makes it — basically if screenwriting isn’t writing, then almost nothing really could be writing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, look, it is true that screenwriting is unique in the world of writing in that it is not meant to be read by the audience. It is rather meant to be translated into another art form. However —

**John:** Well, playwriting is the same thing, too.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. Playwriting is the same thing. You’re right. I’ve always said that doesn’t mean it’s not writing. It’s absolute — in fact, when you think about what is required to make a movie and you realize how much is leaning on the screenplay, it becomes almost super writing. It becomes über writing. And I’m not talking about quality here, because listen, if writing a novel of a certain length is writing to Richard Brody, there are good novels and bad novels, there are good movies and bad movies, good scripts, bad scripts. But, of course it’s writing.

I can’t even believe we’re talking about it. It’s dishonest, John. This is dishonest. He can’t believe this. It’s such a poorly written article that cites a bunch of things cherry picked from the first half of the 20th Century. It makes no sense. It’s sloppy. It’s sloppy. Richard Brody, you are sloppy.

**John:** If we were Richard Brody’s editor and we needed to rewrite this piece, I think I would start with a different headline, “Movies aren’t novels.”

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And I would focus on the fact that Fitzgerald had frustrations trying to adapt, you know, he had frustrations moving from a career as a novelist to a career as a screenwriter, a transition which would seem kind of natural, but it’s not natural because not only is the form different, but the profession which we talk about on the show, the profession is vastly different.

The profession is about pitching and meeting with people and incorporating ideas and notes and getting along with folks in ways that is so different from what a novelist has to do.

**Craig:** Yes. And maybe Richard Brody loves F. Scott Fitzgerald so much that he has to rationalize his failure, Fitzgerald’s failure, by blaming it on screenwriting itself. I love F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. But listen, there are amazing novelists who can’t write screenplays at all. That’s why so many great novelists don’t adapt their own pieces into screenplays. And there’s so many incredible screenwriters who couldn’t write a novel to save their lives.

They are two different things. It is possible that one of the great novelists in history simply wasn’t very good at writing screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. It’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** But that doesn’t mean that screenwriting therefore needs to be indicted as non-writing. Oh my god, he cannot believe this.

**John:** Shakespeare, by the way, was a terrible novelist. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Shakespeare’s novels, but they’re awful. They’re so awful that they’ve been buried and no one has ever read them.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** Ah-ha! We have some questions in the mail bag, so let’s get to them. Michael writes in. “Now that I’ve been working for a few years on about a half dozen projects,” first off, Michael, congratulations. You’ve been working on a half dozen projects.

**Craig:** Yes, well done.

**John:** “I’ve experienced something strange about the process of making deals and starting to work on a project. Here is what happens. I sell a pitch or get hired for an open writing assignment and my lawyer negotiates with the studio’s business affairs about the headline deal points, how many steps, how much per step, etc. Everyone agrees, and then the studios and producers start moving forward. We have the commencement meeting and I’m expected to start writing. All good, except I don’t have a signed contract as my lawyer and studio’s business affairs will probably be working on the nitty gritty details for about three or four months.

“Multiple times I’ve finished a first draft before receiving a contract. Now, this has never really been a big problem because it all works out in the end, but is this normal? Despite my team’s assurances that everything is good, it’s hard not to have fears about everything falling apart. What do you guys do? Do you start writing when the deal is ‘closed,’ or when you actually sign a contract?”

**Craig:** Great question.

**John:** It’s a great question.

**Craig:** Excellent question.

**John:** Craig, what do you actually do in practice, because I’m curious.

**Craig:** In practice, I start — assuming that I have all the information I need, that there isn’t a particular meeting that I need to have to sort of figure out what we’re all going to do, when the deal is closed and my availability is —

**John:** That’s a phone call that says it’s closed.

**Craig:** Yeah. A phone call says it’s closed and my availability is appropriate, so I’m not finishing up another thing, I start working. There are two levels to contracts. The first is a deal memo, which often goes along with a certificate of authorship. And that is a way, if the lawyers feel like it’s going to take quite some time to work up a long form contract with all the little annoying details like how much you get paid per week if you’re in a medium sized city on location, they’ll come up with this certificate of authorship that basically says this is what you’re going to get paid.

And you’re basically saying, yes, I’m going to write this and, yes, you guys will have the copyright on what I write, because it’s a work for hire, yada yada.

And that oftentimes is enough to release commencement payment. However, there have been times where the contract has taken forever. Now, you should be paid, by the way. You don’t want to not be paid.

**John:** That’s a fundamental aspect.

**Craig:** Yes. The very first movie that I ever was hired to do, this is exactly what happened. So, we were told to start writing. We had a deal. The deal closed. And then — it was Disney at the time took months and months to get the paperwork done. And we called up our lawyer, my writing partner and I, and we said we’re done, what do we do? We haven’t been paid, and they haven’t finished this contract. And he said do not turn it in. That’s the most important thing. The day you turn it in you’ve lost your leverage to get the contract done.

So, he called them and said, they’re done, so, A, how embarrassing for you. B, they’re not turning it in until this is signed. And I think two days later it was done.

**John:** Yeah, so that standard advice is how I’ve worked through most of my situations. Really honesty, and I think the official WGA policy is that you’re not supposed to start writing until you have papers signed. But in practice that rarely happens.

**Craig:** That’s right. And papers signed — or you’ve been paid.

**John:** And that’s the thing. Being paid tends to be the proxy for having the contracts done because being paid means that the person employing you believes that the contracts will get done and believes that there will actually — the deal will close. And so there’s the danger, I guess, the possibility that you’re paid to start writing, you start writing, and the contract never closes and you’re in this weird limbo about do you have to get the money back, do you give them the script, sort of what is all that stuff. But, you still have the leverage of having the script and they still hopefully want the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard of a situation where the long form wasn’t worked out.

**John:** Yeah. I have heard of some things, and occasionally if you’re adapting anything you need to be very specific and very pointed about the underlying rights. Because I have been in situations where, oh, this is great, this is swell, and we’re going to do stuff. And then it became clear that the underlying rights were actually much more complicated.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, even if I started writing, there’s a possibility that they weren’t going to really close those underlying rights and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** They should have been paying me, but they did pay me, and then it became clear like I’m writing this thing that we may never be able to make.

**Craig:** Be able to make. And so the one area of the big document that you’re looking at, one important one to concentrate on is what they call conditions precedent. So, there are certain conditions that have to be met in order for the contract to be valid. Some of them are obvious like you have to be who you say you are and a citizen and a Writers Guild member and la-da-da.

Some of them are things specific to your deal. We have to have the rights to this project and there has to be creative approval before commencement from this particular person. And you need to know what those terms are so that you know where you stand.

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should really go through a whole contract, but the frustrating thing I often find — and this is worse when I started and it’s become a little bit better, at least for me, but they’ll ask you to have things notarized or have some sort of like certification that you are a US citizen, all this stuff, and it just feels like stalling.

I don’t believe they actually really need it. I think they’re basically just, you know, burning some time so they can not finish closing the deal.

**Craig:** There’s some quote somewhere that says something like never ascribe malice to that which can be explained by incompetence.

**John:** Yes. I get that.

**Craig:** I think that a lot of times it’s simply by the time it gets down to that stuff there’s a person in a cubicle who has a stack of these things and a job. And the job is get W2, I-9, C forms from these employees and they go and dutifully execute those orders.

**John:** Yeah. But that same person or the person in the cubicle next to them also has the checks that are going out, and some reason like those checks won’t go out until pointed phone calls are made and suddenly those checks start flowing.

**Craig:** I find that the departments of all corporations that involve incoming and out-coming checks are just the worst. [laughs] And you could say, yeah, because they don’t want to spend money. But they don’t even seem to want to take money either. That whole world, you know, as bad as screenwriting can be sometimes, I’m glad I don’t work in the incoming/out-going check business. I’m not cut out for it.

**John:** So, my very first job, How to Eat Fried Worms, was over at Universal. And for a time I was dating a guy who was an assistant at Universal. I’m not even sure who he worked for. But he said like, “Oh, your check crossed my desk today.” I’m like, oh, that is just really, really awkward that you know that I have a check for X thousand dollars crossing your desk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It just feels kind of odd. And I guess I had to buy dinner that night.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, I mean, your check crossed… — What does that even mean, by the way?

**John:** Well, it basically means that like his boss had to sign the check or something and so —

**Craig:** Oh, I see, I see. So, it’s on his desk, he sees it. Listen, people know everything. That’s the truth. Everything. They know everything.

**John:** Everything.

**Craig:** There’s no secrets.

**John:** There are no secrets. Thomas in London writes —

**Craig:** [British accent] Hello!

**John:** [British accent] Hello! “I’m an aspiring writer and I’ve been given a little bit of attention for a script on the Black List, the paid site, the year-end hit list. I received this email from someone a few days ago. The email is, ‘My name is blank, and I’ve been an executive producer in feature films in Los Angeles for the last eight years or so working at this studio and this production company. Anyway, I read your script, the title of the script, and I was curious if you had an agent in the states. To be totally transparent, I’m always looking for unrepresented talent to recommend to high level agents so they keep me at the top of their callback lists. Please let me know.'”

So, Thomas writes —

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god.

**John:** “As a total newbie to Hollywood dealings, I don’t know if this is normal. Do producers recommend un-repped writers to agents purely as a back-scratching tactic? I don’t see anything dodgy in what he’s offering and it’s very kind of him to want to help me, even if he does get something out of it. Craig, what do you think of this situation?”

**Craig:** I don’t think that is normal. I’m kind of stumped by this. I mean, first of all, it’s such a Willy Loman thing to say, you know. Like, “Listen, I’ve done a lot of things, I’m not doing anything now. But, oh golly gee, I’d love to take your script to somebody so that he might call me back one day about something else.” What?

I mean, yeah, I guess, look Thomas, I don’t see how it would hurt.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t see how it would hurt, either. I guess I’m trying to look at it from this producer’s point of view is that he’s trying to establish some sort of relationship with you vaguely, kind of establish with you. He doesn’t feel like he can get your movie made, but he thinks you’re a good writer, so this is a way of him saying that I think you’re a really good writer. He could say that and say like, hey, we should have a meeting next time you’re in town. That might be a good way to do it.

I guess he’s genuinely asking whether you have an agent because he doesn’t want to recommend the script to a certain agent unless that person is already represented because then he looks kind of foolish.

But I’ll say it’s weird that this guy is an executive producer because this kind of reaching out would happen much more at like a very junior level. And so basically says like, “Hey, I read your script. I want to give it to my boss. Do you have — tell me what the deal is with the script. Do you have an agent? Is there a manager? I want to know that it’s actually available.”

That kind of thing I think would happen all the time.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look. Everything is in past tense here, so I’m not sure if this individual still is working anywhere, but what I just found surprising was the transparency was completely unnecessary. I mean, you just say, “Listen, I really liked your script. I’m not really in the marketplace to buy or produce things, but I do know a ton of agents. If you don’t have an agent I’d be happy to pass this along to some of the ones that I know.”

**John:** Yeah. That would be a better way to phrase what he was doing right there.

**Craig:** “To keep me at the top of their callback lists?” What?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** What?! That’s cray. That’s cray.

**John:** That’s cray.

**Craig:** Thomas, that means crazy.

**John:** Yeah. That may not have crossed the pond.

**Craig:** It hasn’t.

**John:** I will say in general that sense of like recommending a script to somebody else to prove that you have good taste is a thing that happens a lot and so you want to sort of establish like, listen, I found this person, this person has good — this is a good writer. I’m the person who brought them to you, therefore I have good taste. The reason that I got my first agent was because a friend had read my script, gave it to his boss who liked it, who recommended me to his agent.

So, that happens a lot. So, that can be a good thing. You should accept those offers when they come. It just — the nature of his email was a little bit weird.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know, I don’t see anything terribly awful about it. No.

**John:** And it’s why Franklin has the Black List site so that random people who can be helpful to you can read your script. So, I guess it’s a success in that way.

**Craig:** I think maybe just if you write back just be clear that you have no problem with this person forwarding your script to any agent that you think would be good. As long as you guys are clear that there is not — this doesn’t imply anything, any relationship, any professional relationship between you and this person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s all. You just don’t want to suddenly have this guy on your movie.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Julie writes,”There is a YA novel that I would like to adapt. I am an acquaintance of the author and contacted her to see if her book has been optioned. She expressed interest in my idea of writing a TV pilot, however, she contacted her literary agent and was told that the film rep has been pitching the book for TV the last two years. From that information it doesn’t seem the book has been optioned or has a screenwriter attached.

“How do I continue to express interest in the project to her and the film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany the pitch?”

So, in this situation it’s a little bit weird, like you’re saying it doesn’t appear that it’s been options. Like, either — it’s a binary condition. Either it’s been optioned or it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like it hasn’t been optioned. It sounds like no one has bit on this property yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, if you have a good take on it and you want to basically spec the TV pilot, that’s a thing you and your friend can figure out. It doesn’t have to be especially complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, listen. You say how do I continue to express interest in the project to her and her film agent and convince them to give me a shot in writing the pilot to accompany their pitch — you just do it. You just say, “I’m interested in writing the pilot to accompany this pitch and you should option it to me.” And option it for a buck or whatever and give me a shot here.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they can decide if they want to do that or not. But it doesn’t — I mean, I don’t know why they wouldn’t because nobody wants this thing as just in the form that they’ve been offering it.

**John:** Totally true.

All right, let’s get to our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is a movie that is out this weekend and this past weekend it debuted in Los Angeles and New York. It’s called Coherence. It’s written and directed by — I don’t even remember his name now — James Ward Byrkit, with a story by Byrkit and Alex Manugian, who is an actor in the movie as well. Another actor in the movie is our friend Lorene Scafaria who is awesome. She’s the writer and director of cool movies. And she’s an actress in this movie. She was also an actress in my movie The Nines.

And if you liked my movie, The Nines, you will probably like Coherence because it’s one of those mind trip movies like The Nines or like Primer where everything is not quite what it seems. And it gets very paranoid because of what’s really going on. So, I really enjoyed. I saw it at a screening about three weeks ago and highly recommend it to people who like that kind of movie.

**Craig:** Excellent. Is it available in theatres only, or…?

**John:** Right now it’s only in theaters. I’m sure that it will have a Video On Demand soon, so I think the rest of the world will see it soon, so I’ll give a follow up when it’s available for everyone else in the world.

**Craig:** I’ve been hearing a lot about it actually. A lot of buzz.

**John:** A lot of buzz.

**Craig:** A lot of buzz. My One Cool Thing is a website that I go to all the time to check on things and it’s called Quackwatch.

**John:** Ooh, I’m excited about Quackwatch. I hope I know what it is.

**Craig:** “Quackwatch.com, your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions operated by Stephen Barrett, M.D.”

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** They are also associated with the National Council Against Health Fraud and with Bioethics Watch. And they are spectacular. They — listen, you know me, I am a scientist. I am a medical scientist in my mind. And I really, really, really get crazy about the nonsense that’s put out there. Anti-intellectual nonsense. And Quackwatch is just incredible.

They’re kind of the Snopes for terrible —

**John:** I was going to bring up Snopes. That sounds right.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re the Snopes of bad health advice and they also — they will chase down individuals, they are fearless. They chase down websites. Laboratories that are notorious for fraudulent results that are telling you what you want to hear. Obviously they’ve always been on the forefront of the nonsense anti-vaccination.

Can I just say, if you’re anti-vaccine, just stop listening to the podcast.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We don’t want you. I don’t want you. I don’t know about John. I don’t want you. Unsubscribe. Get out of here. There’s now a Pertussis epidemic in California —

**John:** I know. I know. It’s ridiculous. A disease that should have been completely wiped out.

**Craig:** Wiped out. Wiped out. Well, because Pertussis is unique. See, there is no true herd immunity for Pertussis because we actually all carry it around. What the vaccine does is prevent us from getting symptoms. But we carry it around. And you can’t vaccinate newborn infants until they’re a certain age. So, in that time we’re just getting babies sick. And you know who’s getting them sick? Their parents.

**John:** Parents.

**Craig:** Their parents. Because they haven’t been vaccinated!

**John:** Or they were vaccinated as kids and the vaccine wears off and —

**Craig:** And it wears off and you need to get booster shots. Or they haven’t vaccinated their other children in the house. The whole idea is since there’s no herd immunity, the key with Pertussis is what they call cocooning because the baby mostly stays in the house for the first six months. That’s why they tell you, hey, don’t really take the baby to Chuck-E-Cheese when he’s three months old.

So, you’re in the house with people who have been vaccinated and therefore have much less viral load. And particularly aren’t coughing and spewing it out at you. But if your five-year-old snot-nosed unvaccinated kid is sneezing Pertussis at your three-month-old baby, oh, that is. The umbrage level right now. I got red alert. [laughs] I’m at red alert.

**John:** So, but it’s not just babies. That’s the thing. It’s clearly incredibly dangerous for babies, but like I have an adult friend, you know, a friend in his late forties who got Pertussis. I was like, well, he — who gets whooping cough these days?

He got it because the vaccine wears off and it’s out there in the world now. It’s becoming more common in the ways that should never have been more common. And he was knocked on his ass for weeks.

**Craig:** That’s right. And by the way, he gets knocked on his ass for weeks and that’s bad. But I’m angry at him for not getting a booster. And, on top of that, if he comes in contact with anybody who is immune-compromised, like somebody who has AIDS symptoms, or if he comes in contact with the elderly who have compromised immunity. He’s going to get them sick. And they could die. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, it’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ugh.

**John:** That’s maddening, but the things like measles which really were supposed to be done.

**Craig:** Ugh, measles.

**John:** That’s just, ugh.

**Craig:** It’s mindboggling. And, really, I want somebody to tweet angrily to me about this one. This ain’t She-Hulk. I will come out, [laughs], I will come out guns blazing. I will go monkey. I will go insane.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** God, this was a good show.

**John:** It was a good show. We got through a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** I umbraged out. It’s been a long time, and I went crazy I think three times. [laughs]

**John:** Totally reasonable choices every time.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** If you would like to leave a comment for me or for Craig, you can reach us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. He is @clmazin. You can also leave a comment on iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. That’s a perfect place to subscribe to Scriptnotes, but you can also leave a comment there. And when you leave a comment or subscribe it actually boosts us up in the ratings there and more people can find us, so that’s always lovely when that happens.

The most recent 20 episodes of Scriptnotes you will always find on iTunes. The back episodes, the whole back catalog the first 130 episodes you can find at Scriptnotes.net. You can also find them on the iPhone at the iOS app and the Android app. Just search for Scriptnotes in the App Store and you will find that there. And through there you can get the back episodes, it’s called the premium subscription, that gives you all the back episodes, and every once and awhile we’ll have like a bonus episode that is sort of like Scriptnotes but not really Scriptnotes, things like interviews with people or stuff like that.

So, if you want to support us that way, you’re welcome to do that. It’s only $1.99 a month, so it’s not like vaccine money or anything like that.

**Craig:** No, no! And it doesn’t have Thimerosal in it. “Oh god! Ooh, I don’t understand science or chemistry. Argh! I believe in ghosts.”

**John:** If you have a longer question like some of the ones we read today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com and we try to get through as many questions as we can. It’s also a good place to write if you have follow up on things we talked about that is bigger than what we can talk about in a tweet, but tweets are sort of preferred because we can get to them right away.

And I think that is our show this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the end of what I think is the number one podcast for the non-writing art form of screenwriting.

**John:** Perfect. Craig, thank you very much.

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

Links:

* Vulture with [Everything You Need to Know About Episode VIII Director, Rian Johnson](http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/who-is-new-star-wars-viii-director-rian-johnson.html)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 115: [Back to Austin with Rian Johnson and Kelly Marcel](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-back-to-austin-with-rian-johnson-and-kelly-marcel)
* [Storyboard Fountain](http://storyboardfountain.com/) from Charles Forman and Chris Smoak
* The [first](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoJggcl3M7M), [second](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8EVGl2KEgk), [third](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAqbZCOIK0) and [fourth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snoDfhUObhA) videos in Jim Meskimen’s How To Do Impressions series
* This is [Kano](http://kano.me/)
* [We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome](http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/) by Tasha Robinson
* [Sitcoms are being strangled by a lack of conflict](http://www.avclub.com/article/sitcoms-are-being-strangled-lack-conflict-204453) by Todd VanDerWerff
* [Screenwriting isn’t writing](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/screenwriting-isnt-writing.html) by Richard Brody
* Ken LaZebnik’s [The Red Light at the End of the Dock](http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=211039#{“page”:20,”issue_id”:211039}) from WrittenBy
* James Ward Byrkit’s [Coherence](http://coherencethemovie.com/) is in theaters now
* [Quackwatch](http://www.quackwatch.com/) is your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/from-debussy-to-vod).

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

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

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

Craig, how are you today?

**Craig:** Really good. Really good. Super good, John. You’re going to have to constrain my exuberance.

**John:** I won’t even ask why. Or should I ask why?

**Craig:** Because, it’s kind of a bounce back day. You ever have a week where you felt a little low, felt a little blue, wasn’t really sure why? And then you have your bounce back day where everything is like, oh yeah, that’s right — I’m not going to be sort of glum for the rest of my life.

**John:** Oh, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice.

**John:** So, welcome to the podcast where Craig Mazin is rapidly cycling bipolar.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah! It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo!

**John:** Well, today you’ll hear bipolar Craig talk about remakes versus reboots, classical music and how it relates to screenwriting. We’re going to talk about the future of the Three Page Challenge, and we’ll also be talking with Scott Tobias of The Dissolve about an article he wrote on Video On Demand and the sort of mysterious finances behind it.

So, it’s a busy show. Like most of our shows, it’s a pretty full show.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty full show. Before we get started with the pretty full show, a couple things, one, could we just talk about bipolar for a second? Everybody misuses this term.

**John:** Okay. Tell me about it.

**Craig:** Everybody thinks that bipolar is like, oh, I’m really moody and one day I’m this and one day I’m that, and I’m up and I’m down. Actual bipolar disease is fairly rare and it’s very, very serious. I was talking about this with a psychologist the other day, in fact. And real bipolar individuals have very often very severe clinical depression that lasts for a long time, not like a day, or two days, or a week, but a long time.

Then they shift into a different area, a different section where they become manic. And manic isn’t like really up and, hey, hey, hey, and kind of like cokey. Mania is closer to schizophrenia. They start to believe that they could bike across the ocean and that they could build a skyscraper with their hands. It’s a very serious mental disease. And I think sometimes people use bipolar when they really mean moody. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, so I do apologize for being a little dismissive of your feelings there and overextending the bipolar diagnosis to what is probably normal moodiness.

**Craig:** No, no, you don’t have to apologize to me. I just like talking about mental illness because it fascinates me. And I think, you know, because I do meet people who are like, “Oh, well he’s a little bipolar.” And I’m like let me stop you there. No one is a little bipolar. That’s like saying, well, he’s a little psychotic. Is he or is he not hallucinating? [laughs] You know, it’s one or the other.

Okay, so that was one thing. Bigger follow up was that I totally blew it last week. We were talking about Edgar Wright and his budgets and I mentioned that I thought that the budget for Hot Fuzz was something like $40 million. I wasn’t even close on that one. It was actually more like $16 million U.S. And so I do apologize; that was totally wrong.

Frankly, I’m even more impressed with that movie now that I know that he was able to do it with that budget. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** All right. I have some follow up as well. Last week we talked about — we gave some advice to Jason about whether he should spec a new screenplay over the summer or if he should chase some assignments. And weirdly we did a thing which I try not to do which is we offer those as like the two alternatives when really of course there are many other alternatives.

And one of the alternatives that people wrote in suggesting was, you know, the third choice is he could make something. And he could find a way, like, write something that he could shoot or do something else that is — so he’s not just having another script sitting there, but has something else as a sample to show — something he could shoot. And I think that’s actually a really good suggestion.

And so we don’t know about this guy who wrote in, whether he has aspirations about being a director, but if he does the summer is a good time to shoot something and always be looking for what is the next step you want to take to get you to your overall goals which maybe are being a screenwriter, but maybe they’re being a writer-director. So, do more stuff is a good suggestion.

**Craig:** Yeah. If he has something lying around that he loves, that he’s written, he can go shoot that. If he doesn’t, better to take a little time to write first. Get it in good shape, then go shoot. I’m not a big fan of just sort of ad hoc shooting.

**John:** Yeah. But in general I try to always catch myself when I’m trying to decide between two choices because whenever it looks like there are two choices, the first thing you should ask yourself is like are there other choices I’m not considering.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And in this case we were looking at just those two things and that wasn’t the full picture.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like drinking, for instance. Just —

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Just drink.

**John:** A good solution for most of life’s problems.

**Craig:** Right. Just drink it away.

**John:** Jake wrote in to say, “I was listening to your podcast today and thinking about watermarking and how difficult it is to keep a script secure. I wanted to share with you what we did on my first screenplay which sold a couple months ago.”

Well, congratulations that it sold. “To keep the script ultra secure we created 20 different versions of the script, each with tiny subtle differences in the script.”

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “Mainly these were words, all in uppercase or underlined. Our writing style uses these anyway, so it didn’t look out of place. Then we created a spreadsheet with these changes marked. Example, like this word is in uppercase on page three and then gently let the recipient know that there were changes but not what the changes were.

“Who knows if this ever stopped the script from getting leaked, but it made it very difficult to get past a watermark.”

This is a totally valid thing and it’s not the first time I’ve heard of this. Have you ever done that, Craig?

**Craig:** No, I mean, what’s better about that than watermarking, other than that watermarking is ugly?

**John:** Yeah. So, it gets rid of like the visible watermark and if someone does disseminate you can tell which draft leaked. Basically you could tell who leaked it very easily based on like that word was different.

And it’s something I’ve seen other people do. And so it’s certainly a valid technique. It’s a giant pain in the ass to do it, but it might be a valid way to do it. So, in his situation this was a script that they were sending out to — a spec that they were sending out to specific buyers and I think they wanted to make sure that only those buyers were seeing it and that it wasn’t getting passed around too quickly too soon.

And for that reason it might have been a good choice to do it.

**Craig:** I guess. I mean, I still think a watermark does that same exact thing. I don’t mind watermarking.

**John:** I don’t really mind watermarking either. I make a program called Bronson Watermarker, so I really don’t mind it that much.

When we talked, in the new Bronson Watermarker we have this thing called Finger Printing. And when we were first developing the feature, what he described, what Jake described was really kind of what we were thinking about doing is basically we would make small changes to certain words. Like we’d substitute out the number one character for a lowercase L on a certain page. And we’d give you a little sheet that showed you what we did. The challenge is when you’re talking about a real PDF, we would have to break open the PDF in order to like insert that one little character. And it would just very likely ruin the script by doing that. You would ruin something, you’d knock of pages or things like that. So, we didn’t end up doing it.

So, our finger printing feature inserts invisible watermarks that stick with a file but don’t actually change any of the words on the page.

**Craig:** Oh. There’s a simplicity, and ease, and general industry acceptance for watermarking. This is a version of watermarking that’s less visually intrusive, but really cumbersome to manage on the other end. I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t love it. I mean, it works. I just don’t love it.

**John:** All right. Let’s see if you’re going to love this. So, Ben wrote in, it’s our first new topic. He wrote in saying, “Okay, here’s a matter of some sort of Aspergery semantics. Reboot versus remake? To me, you remake a singular film and you reboot a franchise. Stargate can be rebooted because the TV series has continuity. You reboot or reset the continuity like a computer. There’s no real continuity to Cliffhanger, though. It was a one-shot story. So, it’s a remake of Cliffhanger, not a reboot. I believe the industry lingo does not make this distinction, but I want to. It’s been driving me nuts for years.”

Craig, where do you stand on reboot versus remake? Because I will tell you that I had never really thought about it but I do use them slightly differently. So, talk to me.

**Craig:** I actually never really understood my own distinction until now. I think… — Who wrote this question in?

**John:** This was Ben.

**Craig:** Ben, I think, is absolutely right. I think it’s actually kind of brilliant. He’s exactly right because a remake is a remake of — that’s how I think of a remake — they had a film and then they remade it. But when a movie has spooled itself into sequels, then when you’re starting the thing all over again with a fresh tone, a thing that can generate its own sequels within its own carved out universe, that does feel like a reboot. That’s what I think reboot is. Yeah, I think he’s totally right.

**John:** I think he’s totally right. If you think about Batman Begins, Batman Begins is clearly a reboot. You can’t think of that as being a remake of Tim Burton’s Batman.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s madness to think about that. It’s a reboot. And so some of the other things I would add into the idea of a reboot is that you are approaching an existing property with a really kind of brand new idea. It’s a new take on something, so it’s not just you’re updating necessarily, but it’s a real kind of re-thinking of what it is.

That’s why the new Star Trek franchise really is genuinely a reboot because it acknowledges the continuity of the old series and moves forward in a way that is completely different. And so the same kinds of characters are there, but they serve different functions. It really is, you know, it’s its own new thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a couple of times where it’s a little thinky because, for instance, let’s take a look at the new Karate Kid. So, there were multiple Karate Kids.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they decided to start it again with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. And is that a reboot? Well, I saw that movie and it kind of felt more like a remake to me.

**John:** It feels like a remake also to me.

**Craig:** Because it really closely hued to the first story. Obviously they reset it in a place, but they really followed that story and the main beats from that. They didn’t actually reboot. I mean, he’s write to say it’s sort of like when you restart a franchise because what is a reboot? There’s something that’s been running in a sequence and then you’re restarting. And all of the sequencing should be gone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you’re starting fresh again with a new thing. So, I thought like, okay, if — and I believe, have they made a second Karate Kid in this new version?

**John:** They haven’t.

**Craig:** Oh, they haven’t. Okay. Then I think of that as a remake, even though it is in fact a remake of a movie that is part of a franchise. But, generally speaking, yes, I think he’s right — rebooting comes from restarting something that is a franchise.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re right.

**Craig:** I think he’s right.

**John:** I think we’re all right. I think, Ben, that is an important distinction and it’s not just Aspergers. I think we should be more careful in our choice of words.

**Craig:** Well, that may in fact be Aspergers. Listen, Aspergers obviously comes with enormous benefits.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And this is one of them. I mean, a really particular way of drilling into what language is. He’s right. I would — look, do you not have Aspergers just a little?

**John:** Oh, everyone needs a little whiff of Aspergers, I think, just to get through the day.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** But here’s the thing though, again, we should back up to our bipolar thing. I think we end up being too flippant with a diagnosis just because it’s fun and convenient. So, to say like he’s a little bit Aspergers is like, no, he’s just actually like methodical and cares about things.

**Craig:** Maybe. I mean, the whole thing about Aspergers is that it is — it’s like sort of definitionally mild.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess there is something to be said of, oh, he’s got severe Aspergers, but wouldn’t that just be autism? I don’t know. That’s where I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s just go way off into the deep here. The same thing though can be said about like a whiff of many kinds of mental — I don’t want to say mental illness — but conditions that are negative when they’re too strong can be positive when they are mild.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** And so even what we’re talking about with mania or depression to some degree, those can be useful things to certain people and certain circumstances. And so the people who often get a tremendous amount done, if you were to really step back and say like, okay, they were a little bit manic but like they weren’t trying to bicycle across the ocean. Instead they were trying to build a remarkable business and they succeeded in building that remarkable business.

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** Yeah. The people who just won’t stop at anything. There’s a relentlessness that’s crucial.

**Craig:** The psycho-pathological mania is less about super energetic and more about being delusional. But the point — the point is that I’m not flippant about Aspergers because I feel like most of my friends are — we didn’t have it. When you and I were kids we didn’t have that, right?

**John:** No, we didn’t have that.

**Craig:** Most of my friends would have been it. I would have been it, I think. [laughs] I think, to some extent. You know, I’ve never met somebody who had Aspergers who I thought, oh god, I’ve got to get away from this person — they have Aspergers. You know?

I think it actually can be… — Well, have you ever heard this theory that autism is an expression of what they call extreme male brain. Male Brain Syndrome.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** There’s a whole study of the gender differences in the brain itself and what testosterone does to the brain. And there are clear differences between male and female brains. But when you take the general male syndrome in extremists you can end up with autism. Of course, this doesn’t explain why some girls have autism. It’s a very confusing area of research.

Anyway, we’re not a podcast about any of that.

**John:** We’re not a podcast about that. The only last point I will say though is you’re saying, you know, with mania comes — you have this image of delusion or delusions of grandeur. But there’s a really fine line between delusions of grandeur and vision. And sometimes you have to have a little bit of delusion in order to do impossible things.

And many of the best directors I’ve worked with have just a little bit of that delusion and they have a little bit of that sort of — that unstoppability that is what lets them sort of keep pushing through on hour 17 and not sort of worry about the world around them. So, I’m just saying in the business that we’re in, you’re likely to encounter people who have conditions which could almost fit into the DSM and yet are tremendously successful in part because of that.

**Craig:** No, I’ve never actually met anybody that does what we do for a living that is — that doesn’t have something. [laughs] Honestly, I do. We are —

**John:** [laughs] No, it’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** We are not normal people. And you feel it most notably when you travel away and go home because it’s a funeral or something and you’re suddenly — there’s nobody there that works in the arts and you realize that you’re the freak.

**John:** Yeah. When you’re around the normals you’re like, oh no.

**Craig:** Civilians.

**John:** Yeah, like, man.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re the weird one. That’s why, you know, like my son is really into drama at school, and musicals and stuff. And it makes me so happy because he’s with the freaks, like daddy. Just like daddy.

**John:** My daughter has taken her summer vacation and she’s writing a play she’s decided. And so her play is called True Blood. It’s like, really?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But she doesn’t know there’s another thing called True Blood. She’s like, “That’s a great title.” It’s like, okay…

**Craig:** Well, yes it is. It is actually —

**John:** It’s a really good title.

**Craig:** Good instincts.

**John:** Yeah. And I suspect that whatever she ends up writing will make more sense than the very late seasons of True Blood.

**Craig:** You know, I stopped watching True Blood because I just, I mean, my wife and I used to watch it early on, but somewhere in there — I hate saying “jumped the shark.” I don’t know what happened, but it just got crazy.

**John:** It got really super crazy. And, you know, their last season is coming up and I will watch the last season because I’m a completist. I was the person who watched every episode of many shows that never sort of made it through. And so I will watch it because I’m a completist and I think it’s a tremendously talented cast and it’s so difficult to make that show, so I have nothing but full love and respect for everybody on board with that show.

But, it did just get like crazy town.

**Craig:** Yeah, at some point I’m like, wait a second. What?!

**John:** What?!

**Craig:** I just did a lot of that, “What?!” My wife would say, “Shut up!”

**John:** So, our next topic is one you proposed and honestly I think it fits in very well because classical music, many of the people who have made the iconic classical music would have a little bit of a whiff of something not quite right about them.

**Craig:** Or a lot of a whiff. So, I was thinking about this because I don’t know if there is a particularly strong overlap between people who write and people who appreciate classical music, and the truth is I’m not — I’m not what you’d call a classical music buff. In fact, I’m going to give a couple of examples today that reveal that fully.

But, there are certain kinds of classical music that I think are really helpful for us as we think about what it means to create narrative in a let’s say — in a way that is separate from text. As writers, we are soaking in text and we are tasked with creating a lot of things that aren’t meant to exist in words with words. We have a weird gig. We’re attempting to capture emotions and feelings. We are attempting to inspire suspense and fear and joy and relief. And our ultimate goal is to do so with light and with sound. And we can’t use any of it. All we can use are words.

But music I find is analogous in that regard because they have sound, but for certain kinds of classical music you can start to see a narrative in your head, only with sound, and no words at all.

So, a couple examples I want to give. And, look, the early classical music, baroque, or the true classical period I don’t think is as useful for us in this regard. It’s beautiful music, but it’s very structured.

**John:** Yeah. You need to get into the romantic era and —

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Where it really kicks in I think for our purposes for fun stuff is the romantic era, which by the way is what I think influences almost all of the classical scoring that you see in movies today, whether we’re talking about Tchaikovsky or Wagner, that kind of feeling.

So, I wanted to talk about a couple pieces that are so common it would almost be hackneyed, but if you just sit down and listen to them now as an exercise I think it might be useful to you. One is the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. And the other is Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. And, they are both self-contained pieces somewhere around, what, 18 to 22 minutes, somewhere in that zone? And what I love about them is that they are telling stories just with music and you can start to detect it.

And you can see all of these tools in there that I think we should be thinking about when we’re writing. First of all, they have nice, long first acts. And they are clearly broken into acts. And in those nice, long first acts they are relaxed and they’re introducing themes. And those themes are for me analogous to characters. And as they do that they then begin to build. And as we — you know, one thing that we’re constantly dealing with when we’re writing is we’re building to things. And then we’re coming back down. And we’re building, and we’re coming back down, right?

We think of a movie as three acts and a climax, but really it’s a build and a climax, a build and a climax. It’s movies within movies within movies. It’s very fractal. And I think it’s the same way with these pieces. There are builds, crescendos, and then diminuendos, and in the builds there is tension and you can start to feel how tension works on a right brain level when you listen to this stuff.

Similarly, you can feel how the release of tension works, the importance of silence, and the saying of nothing. The competing themes, you can see how they bandy with each other and one gets the upper hand and then the other gets the upper hand. And then, of course, you start to see that one of them is winning. You start to feel like there is a hero in this. 1812 Overture is a great example because it’s about a war.

**John:** Yeah. And it feels like it’s about a war. And it feels like it’s about the dark scary moments of it, and also victory at the end of it.

**Craig:** Right. For instance, at the end of the 1812 Overture there is this moment that’s, I mean, textbook romantic orchestration. Tchaikovsky has this long descending chromatic action from the stings. [hums] And that goes on, and on, and on, and on.

Now, what do you think that is?

**John:** I think it’s the flag falling, isn’t it?

**Craig:** Well, essentially it’s the retreat of the French. They’re running away. And it’s so great because it’s done over and over and it’s beautiful. In and of itself you actually start to feel bad for them, you know, even though they’ve lost. But it’s emotional. We know that, again, this is the episode about neurology. For a typical right-handed person, because we don’t discuss those left-handed freaks on this show — no, actually left handers have an amazing advantage over us, we right handers. But for the typical crippled right hander, the left side of the brain controls speech, writing, language, vocabulary, grammar, all the stuff that we use. The right side is the music side. And I think that music is a great way to integrate the two.

**John:** So, when you talked about themes, like [hums], like you described that as being a character which I think is absolutely valid and true. You see a character reoccur. But it’s also an idea. And a theme can be, as we’re talking about screenplays, that theme can be expressed, or that idea can be expressed by multiple characters. And you can also think about that theme being expressed by multiple instruments in a piece.

And so you might here that theme being played by the woodwinds in the middle of the range, but then you hear it suddenly up on the flutes. And then you hear it very low on the bassoons. And that is something that also happens in our screenplays where different characters are expressing the same idea and you sort of see that idea being spread among multiple characters.

And so when your screenplay is really cooking, every person feels like they have a distinct voice, they have a distinct tone. You can hear sort of what a flute sounds like, but then you hear that flute expressing an idea that is key to the overall piece.

And so basically it is spread virally from one instrument to another instrument, from one character to another character. When things are working really well, that happens, and that is fantastic. And it feels like it sort of had to happen. Like everything was leading up to this next thing, was leading up to that next thing. And two themes combined become a new theme. That’s how lovers connect in your story. Those two things you wouldn’t think would necessarily fit together somehow magically, beautifully fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can see that perfectly at the end of Rhapsody in Blue where the two major themes come together and mesh perfectly. Rhapsody in Blue is far less of a literal, character-based discussion and is more about a setting. It’s about a city. It’s about the vibrance of a city and the clanging madness and beauty that are contained within the hustle and bustle of New York.

And that also is really valuable for us as we write our characters and we create our scenes. So often I think we are tempted to exclude the world save for the people in it, but the world is what we’re going to see. And I think movies that capture an entire scenario are the most successful.

And you look at Lawrence of Arabia, a story about Lawrence of Arabia. What you see — the beauty, the sweeping beauty of it is just astonishing, and so much of why that movie is a joy to watch and experience in its highs and lows. And, again, not surprisingly, if somebody said to me you could bring back one composer from the dead to score movies I would say Tchaikovsky.

**John:** Yeah. He’s a genius.

**Craig:** He’s amazing.

**John:** Another piece that I would recommend people listen to for that sense of like progression and arc is Ravel’s Boléro. The classically [hums] — that’s basically it. And then there’s one counter theme, [hums].

**Craig:** [hums] And then people rioted.

**John:** Yes. And it just keeps rising and rising and rising. And you’re thinking like, well, this can’t just keep going, but it’s going to keep going. And it actually keeps sort of reinventing itself until it becomes just triumphant at the end.

So, it’s that thing that could start incredibly slowly and build into sort of a giant fire. And great writing can do that same thing where it seems so simple and it becomes this sort of sweeping romantic statement based on its escalation.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. In the Hall of the Mountain King is another famous version of that kind of sustained melody that just builds, and builds, and builds until you go nuts.

**John:** Great. So, this was fun. It’s fun to talk about classical music on a podcast about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why not?

**John:** We should. We totally should.

**Craig:** Come on, people.

**John:** So, a thing I want to talk about next is Three Page Challenge. So, occasionally on the podcast we will do a Three Page Challenge. We will invite people to send in their three pages of their screenplay. We will take a look at them. We will talk though the things we thought worked fantastic and the things we thought could be better. And we’ve enjoyed doing it. It’s been sort of a thing about our podcast for quite a long time.

We did a Three Page Challenge at the live show and for that one we opened it up so people could vote on it and people could see what all the things were. We’ve reopened that submission process, so if you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can submit your script. You can click a link and attach your file and send it through.

And for now that’s what we’re doing. But, someone brought up and I thought it was a really good point, that it’s sort of weird that we talk about the Three Page Challenge and then we also talk about how we need to move past the idea of pages as being the defining unit of a screenplay.

**Craig:** It is weird.

**John:** It is weird. So, I asked Stuart to go through this last cohort of scripts and in the next Highland, in the Highland that comes out next week we added a word count feature. So, I had him take all of the Three Page Challenges and just do a word count on all of them.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And figure out, so how many words do you think is average for three pages? Do you have any sense?

**Craig:** Oh my…I would say 300.

**John:** It’s actually 600. It’s more than you would think. So, 616 about. And so I want to propose to you and to see, just talk it through on the air, what if it was like a 600-Word Challenge rather than a Three Page Challenge? How would that change things?

**Craig:** Ah, it would just replace one arbitrary measurement with another.

**John:** Yeah, it would.

**Craig:** I mean, I wonder if we — it’s kind of an interesting experiment. What if we said to people it’s a One Sequence Challenge?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And so instead of feeling like you can’t finish your sequence, send us a sequence. A sequence could be one page long, it could be two pages. It could be four pages. We will limit the sequence in some length just so that we don’t have to read too much. You could use words if you like because, again, we hate pages.

What if we said it’s a One Sequence Challenge?

**John:** Perhaps. That might be the way to do it. And we might provide very clear metrics so we can maybe read or not read certain things if they seem like they’re excessively long or, you know.

**Craig:** The other thing we could do is if somebody sends a One Sequence Challenge in, we could stop reading where the sequence ends. [laughs] In other words, if somebody thought that their sequence was longer than it was we go, no, here is where we stopped because that’s the end of your sequence.

**John:** Maybe so. So, we’ll think about the right way to do this. One theory I had, one idea I had which, again, is like really easy to think about and actually a pain in the ass to build — you probably aren’t familiar with it, but there’s a site called Code Pen. And what you can do there is you put up snippets of code and CSS and sort of show cool little things, animations you’ve made, and stuff like that.

Something like that might actually be the right way to do it where people are essentially just pasting in their script, it shows it nicely formatted, and everyone can see it. And then we can decide out of there which ones to do.

Because right now it’s essentially an email process. You’re clicking submit and it’s going to this black box that Stuart looks at.

**Craig:** Oh, Stuart’s brilliant filing system.

**John:** Yes. So, Stuart’s filing system has improved.

**Craig:** Oh really? Did you yell at Stuart?

**John:** I don’t yell at Stuart.

**Craig:** Did you give him like bad disappointed John talk?

**John:** [laughs] I asked ways that we could do better.

**Craig:** Ah! [laughs] Poor Stuart!

**John:** I inquired in a very positive way how we could do better.

**Craig:** “Stuart, let us have a discussion.”

**John:** So, maybe there’s a public way that we could have them all up there and some sort of authentication so you know sort of who it is that you’re actually talking with.

**Craig:** I’m game for anything. I don’t know if people have concerns about putting their stuff out there in public for everybody to see.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know either.

**Craig:** But, you know —

**John:** But, actually everyone who submitted to the Three Page Challenge for the live show, they seemed delighted to have their stuff out there. So.

**Craig:** And, again, it’s one sequence.

**John:** It’s one sequence. That’s the thing. Maybe people shouldn’t be so worried.

**Craig:** I don’t think people should ever be worried, personally. But, that’s me. I’m carefree because I’m on a bounce back week.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Catch me next week, I’m going to just be grim.

**John:** So, now, I think it’s time we should talk to our guest on the show today. It’s Mr. Scott Tobias.

**Craig:** Great. So, Scott Tobias is the editor of The Dissolve, a film website. Before that he was a film reviewer and writer for the AV Club. Scott Tobias, welcome.

**Scott Tobias:** Oh, thanks for having me.

**John:** And you are recording from Chicago, so thank you, all the way from the Windy City joining us on the show.

**Scott:** That’s not a problem.

**John:** So, the reason why I wanted to talk to you is you had a post this last week titled The Hidden World of Video On Demand Profits. And we love to talk about great articles, but it’s so hard to recap an article on the podcast, so it would be so great if you could talk us through why you wrote this post and sort of what you found or what motivated you to write it.

**Scott:** Sure. Well, one of the things about running a website, I mean, the site is a little under one year old. And we want to try to cover the waterfront and we want to cover everything that comes out. And we want to figure out how people are — what people are watching and how people are watching it, which means that you have to kind of grapple with video on demand. And it’s been a real challenge for us, you know, sometimes just to even find the movies that we want to review, but also, you know, it’s kind of a dark world.

You have a lot of viewers who are migrating to video on demand, who are watching new movies this way, particularly independent movies, or specifically independent movies. And you sense that the ground beneath your feet is shifting really dramatically. There’s no actual — it can’t be quantified. You can only speak in generalities about it because there are no actual figures that are given for movies that are released on video on demand like there are for movies that are released theatrically.

**John:** So, it’s certainly a growing trend. I had a movie in 2007 called The Nines and we debuted at Sundance. We came out, had our sort of hand stamped theatrically, and then many, many months later we showed up on video. And that was sort of the last year that happened. The next year you had the Magnolias and those companies coming in.

And when they would buy one of these independent movies they would put it in theaters and on video on demand simultaneous, or increasingly it’s on video on demand first and then it’s showing up in theaters even sometimes a month later.

**Scott:** Yes.

**John:** So, how do you make the choice of which movies to cover and which movies to not cover? What is you process at The Dissolve?

**Scott:** Well, we try to cover everything that we can. If something is released theatrically, commercially in New York or other cities for an extended run of a week or more we cover it. VOD can be a little bit — if it’s VOD-only that can be a little bit shaky here. One thing we do, we have been doing that other publications haven’t done as much is that if a movie that say Magnolia releases on VOD first and then in theaters, we review it at the first window on VOD and then later in theaters. So, that’s kind of our approach to it.

But, you know, it changes. Again, we’re really trying to figure out how to best serve our readers and really what we end up doing with VOD before theatrical is review it for VOD first. And then when it cycles back around to theaters then we’ll run the review. Like this new Ti West movie, The Sacrament, was on VOD a month ago and it opened in theaters on Friday. So, we reran the review yesterday.

**John:** Now, are these movies making money, because that’s actually one of the tricky things to figure out is classically you sort of had a sense of how well a movie did based on how much money it made at the box office. As you point out in the article, it’s very hard to know how much a movie like Blue Ruin is actually making. In the article you say that it grossed $32,000 on seven screens in its opening weekend, which isn’t amazing. It’s maybe fine, but it’s not amazing, yet it had already been out on VOD, so you really have no good sense of whether that was a great showing for that or a bad showing for that.

**Scott:** Yeah, I mean, that one was day and days, which means it was released simultaneously in theaters and on VOD. And that was kind of, as I put in the article, it was sort of the canary and the coal mine for me because I’ve been sort of eyeing how independent genre films specifically have done in theaters.

And, you know, if you actually just look at the numbers you think these types of movies are not viable in theaters. These movies aren’t making any money at all. I mean, Blue Ruin is a film that had every possible advantage. It was a real sensation at Cannes where it was picked up by The Weinstein Company which released it through Radius-TWC which is their VOD/theatrical . It played at virtually every festival. The reviews were excellent. I mean, it was a film that was pretty much the chief buzz magnet when I was at Toronto last year and there was a lot of anticipation for it.

But then, you know, when it’s released theatrically these numbers are pretty weak. I think it maybe made $4,000 or so per screen, something like that, which is not that great. And I’m sure looking at what it’s made so far theatrically which I think is somewhere in the range of about $225,000 or something, that’s probably well less than what was paid for it.

But my suspicion is that it did very well on VOD, but it’s just a suspicion. I can’t know for sure. And that’s really kind of at the heart of the piece is that we really guess that these films are successful but we can’t know because we’re just not getting a clear picture.

**Craig:** Well, I want to talk a little bit about who the “we” is, because obviously the distributors know. They’re the ones who are collecting the money. On some level the creative guilds will know because we have residuals based on internet sales and internet rentals. And while we, at least conditionally rely on the studios to send us our fair share, the three guilds do something called a tri-guild audit fairly regularly where they go through the books to make sure that in fact we’re getting our fair share.

So, I guess one question I have for you is if the writers and the directors and the actors know, and the studios know, who else needs to know? In other words, why is it important that you guys know?

**Scott:** Actually, let me fire one question back to you, just as a point of clarification. Does this include films that are released not by a major studio but by Magnolia or by Film Buff or by really smaller distributors than that? I mean, do they know?

**Craig:** It depends. Like I said, the guilds will have a mechanism in place. So, if a movie is done non-union, which is different than independent because there are a lot of independent films that are done union, at least for the writers and the directors, sometimes not for the actors. But one component will at least be guild. And then somebody on some other side other than the company will know.

But if your point is that there are small companies that are operating outside of the auspices of the guild who can be shady about their reporting of box office or of — I would imagine those companies could also be just as shady about their reporting of video. In other words, I mean, my question is — I guess here’s my real question: is it something that you are most interested in because you think that how a movie does financially is of public interest value, or are you concerned about protecting the artists and making sure that they get taken care of? Or both?

**Scott:** I think it’s just about knowledge, you know, about getting a sense of what the landscape is like. I’m not personally much of a box office tracker. It’s not my — whatever interest I have in that has to do with, well, maybe if a movie is successful more movies like it will get made. But, I think we’re at such a critical juncture right now, for all of film really, just that transition to the digital age is so dramatic. It’s very dark, this understanding of this particular realm because nothing is disclosed.

So, I don’t know if that helps answer your question or not, but —

**John:** I would actually step in and say that I’m always curious about how a movie did largely because whether a movie is a success or a failure, you have some sense of is it perceived as a success or a failure. And in the case of Blue Ruin it’s very hard to know how we’re supposed to feel about it. So, if you as a journalist writing about, do you write about this that, you know, is it considered a success or not a success? And it’s very hard to know when you don’t have any of that information. And it’s all sort of hidden away.

I’m not saying that you’re necessarily going to get that information, but it’s harder to know how to feel about it. I think it’s also harder for other filmmakers to have a sense of what is normal and have a sense of what the expectations are.

I remember there was a time back in like the early ’90s probably, late ’80s/early ’90s where you had — if you made a gay film that was below a certain budget you could bank on making about $2 million theatrically. And there was just sort of a template for that. And it feels like without any of these numbers it’s really hard to know what the template is.

Now, certainly sales agents probably know what the template is. Distributors probably know what the template is. But that indie filmmaker really may have no sense of what the template is and what’s a good deal or what is the right amount of money to spend on something.

**Scott:** That’s a really good point. And actually it’s a point that was made by this producer named Travis Stevens who has done a lot of indie genre films, including his film Cheap Thrills that came out earlier this year. And he posted my article on Facebook and there was kind of a discussion between himself and a bunch of other indie filmmakers. And his point was that about when he deals with filmmakers a lot of his job is about managing expectations because they don’t — it’s very hard to make money and it’s hard to know. And my sense also, anecdotally, is that a lot of filmmakers really don’t know how well their films are doing when they’re released on VOD.

I think there are actually some pretty good motives for not only hiding failures on VOD but hiding successes. I mean, how much does it serve unless they absolutely have to tell a filmmaker how well a film is doing on VOD. Does it really serve them to say anything?

**John:** I can tell you from personal experience that I have zero idea how The Nines is really doing on VOD. So, we get these residual statements, but to try to go through and actually audit that and figure out what the dollars I’m making off of VOD is really, really tough. And, it is true.

Now, Craig, you were saying that residuals will show us some sense of how the VOD is doing, but what happens when you are doing day and date? Is that video considered first release, or is that video considered real true video?

**Craig:** It’s not considered part of the primary theatrical exposition. And, you know, this is an area where I suspect we’re going to be fighting some fights one day.

Right now the profit, or let’s put profit aside, the gross receipts that are not included for residuals and so are not considered ancillary are primary theatrical — exhibition I should be saying — exposition is an entirely different thing — exhibition and also curiously planes. For whatever reason when they run movies on planes they consider that part of the primary exhibition.

But, all video on demand of all sorts is not considered primary. We do get a percentage of that. So, if it’s sold on iTunes or if it’s run on HBO or pay per view on cable then we do get a percentage of that. There’s the wild west of exhibition and then there’s kind of the big city. And in the big city it’s still a problem, by the way. And you’re absolutely right that the companies have every reason to want to keep every number quiet. They don’t want anyone to know that they’ve made a lot of money. They don’t want anyone to know they’ve lost a lot of money because it will probably save them money in the long run to keep those cards close to their vest.

What this has unfortunately done is created a cottage industry of rubbernecking where people are very curious and there’s an enormous amount of speculation about movies that appear to have lost a ton of money. Similarly, there is a weird kind of fetishization of movies that appear to have made a lot of money, when in fact a lot of the reportage doesn’t include things that impact what the actual money really is.

We tend to over-dramatize money that’s earned here in the United States. We tend to underplay the variable cost of marketing which can be enormous.

And, beyond all that, my personal opinion is I just wish the entire discussion would go away because I don’t think it has anything to do with our appreciation of movies. I don’t care how much a movie has made. As a person who likes watching movies, I don’t care whether it’s lost money or made money. I just like it or I don’t. I just want to be able to enjoy the movie without feeling like… — It’s funny, a lot of the people who love movies and wish that they would not be commodities talk about movies constantly as commodities.

That said, there is a real problem for people who are in the wild west who don’t have access to a collective bargaining agency that is going to audit things for them. They are simply at the mercy of companies that collectively have a less than stellar reputation when it comes to full disclosure and honesty.

**John:** Yeah. I would just push back a little bit on what you just said Craig. I want to make sure that this industry is actually viable. And I want to know the general question of like is it viable to be launching day and date and video on demand as a filmmaker, as a writer. Is this is a thing that is good and profitable for people? I think that macro question is really important.

So, while I agree with like, you know, individual film by film judging success or failure isn’t as important. I do want to know whether overall this is a good thing that’s going to continue because I have friends who are making these movies that are coming out day and date on video on demand and I want to know that it’s going to work for them.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** And I don’t yet.

**Craig:** I agree. And I guess my point is by the time the news ends up on a blog, it’s probably too late because the people who know — the canaries in the coal mine will be the people who are spending the money. The first sign that this will be a profitable method will be the emergence of people with money asking to fund movies following this method. And the converse is also true: if that dries up, then we’ll know that in fact the money isn’t there. The money is the answer.

People simply — the kinds of people who invest in these things talk to the kinds of people who invest in these things and we will know very quickly what the real margins are.

But, you know, look, I’m all for some kind of transparency for the artists because we are making money off of this. I’ve never been particularly interested in the — there is a slight… — I don’t know. Look, maybe you disagree as a journalist, but I feel like there’s a slightly prurient aspect to the interest in how much money a movie makes or loses.

**Scott:** Oh, I completely agree with that actually. I’m not someone who writes about box office terribly much. And I agree about the whole rubbernecking aspect of it. But at the same time, viability is important and kind of getting a sense overall sort of the macro landscape is important.

One of the big concerns that I had was about specifically is indie genre filmmaking, but the other concern has to do with independent cinema period, because it seems to me like they’re the ones that are really suffering as a result of this migration because we may not be able to see the numbers for VOD, but we can see vastly diminished numbers for theatrical, for indie theatrical.

So, all of these indie theaters that have spent tens of thousands of dollars to convert from 35mm to digital are now in a position to where they’re on sort of the losing end of the whole thing, right?

I mean, and really the only reason I think that this was able back in the first place is because Magnolia Pictures bought Landmark. Right? So, the chief obstacle running movies day and date which would have been theater owners, when you buy the biggest indie theater company there is you just blow that obstacle right — you run it right over. And I am concerned with places like Music Box here in Chicago or Brattle in Boston or all of these other indie theaters that are really taking it on the chin because VOD, day before date, day and date VOD is just siphoning away all their viewers.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s absolutely correct. The theater experience is already under pretty savage attack and you can see how the theaters are attempting to pivot in the newly popular word from Silicon Valley — pivot, pivot, pivot — they’re pivoting. They’re trying a lot of different things. Independent film cinema is, I think, doomed. I just don’t see it lasting because the distribution of independent film is almost certainly going to go exclusively to a direct distribution model.

It’s very expensive to rent a movie theater. It’s just really expensive. And the most people you could fit into most of those theaters is much smaller than the amount of people you need to start to make sense out of that unless you think your movie is going to actually play there like Rocky Horror Picture Show over and over and over. But those days are gone.

And I think that that’s unfortunately a doomed business and it’s regrettable because I believe that there is something fundamental to the communal aspect of watching a film. And I’m concerned that it’s just going to go away, particularly if distributors are allowed to start purchasing these movie theaters because they’re just going to do different kinds of things with them. I mean, it was against the law for a long time to do that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. Well, Scott, you watch a lot more movies than we do, so I’m curious whether there’s any one or two or three movies you would recommend to our listeners that they should definitely try to check out this summer that they may not have heard of.

**Scott:** Well, you know, sure. Well, I mean, for one you couldn’t continue, you know, Blue Ruin is right there. It’s available to you and I would completely recommend checking that out if you’re a fan of sort of indie genre films as I am. It’s very much — it has kind of an early Coen Brothers vibe to it. Very Blood Simple-ish.

Another film that I really have been championing that’s still in theaters, not on VOD, is The Immigrant, which is written and directed by James Gray who did films like Two Lovers and Little Odessa and We Own the Night and this sort of thing. It’s got Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix. It’s an immigration story set I the early ’20s and it’s very classically filmed in a way that very few films are. And it’s really gorgeous and it’s been terribly mistreated by The Weinstein Company who just have completely dumped it despite —

**Craig:** That’s weird.

**Scott:** A lot of critics like — I know, it’s so out of character for them.

**Craig:** I know. I just don’t — that’s so surprising.

**Scott:** I know. And they’re doing the same thing with this film I’m really excited about by Bong Joon-ho, this great Korean director, called Snowpiercer.

**Craig:** Well, that story is even crazier what they did.

**Scott:** Yeah, they’ve been fighting with him forever and his cut incredibly is going to be the one that people see. So, I don’t know if they’re going to have trouble seeing it, which tends to be their response when they lose a fight is to just completely dump it like they did with Dead Man back in the day. But I’m really excited about that one. I haven’t seen it, but I think he’s one of the best filmmakers around.

**John:** Great. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

**Scott:** Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you, Scott.

**John:** All right. Bye.

And, Craig, it’s that time. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing this week. In keeping with our musical theme, it’s a song that I love. It is I think maybe the best opening song of any Broadway musical. And I know that this is going to invite criticism because there are some great, great show openers out there. There’s Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof and there’s Ragtime from Ragtime. There’s just some great opening songs.

But my favorite opening song is one of the oddest I think songs out there in a mainstream Broadway musical and that’s maybe why I love it so much. It’s called Life Is and it is the first song from Zorba, the musical. And in the original Broadway Cast — and I strongly recommend that that would be the version that you listen — it’s sung by Chorus and Leader. Leader is the woman who’s singing, mainly singing the song. The woman who played the part in the original cast I believe is Lorraine Serabian. A gorgeous voice.

But what I love about it so much is the lyrics. The idea is that you open on a scene and some folks are arguing about what life is. And they have all these silly theories, analogies about what life is, and then she shuts them all up. It’s very funny. She shuts them up. And she says, “I’ll tell you. Life is what you do while you’re waiting to do. This is how the time goes by.”

And it’s this remarkable song about embracing the absurdity and pointlessness of life. And it’s beautiful. I mean, really beautiful. And it builds. It has a great crescendo that goes to a total dead stop and then a rebuild at the end. The melody is perfect. The singing is insane and outrageous. I love this song. I’ve always loved this song. And I strongly recommend you take a listen.

**John:** I will take a listen. I’ve never heard it. I don’t know anything about Zorba the Greek. So, I will enjoy it.

How would you say it functions in the show in terms of setting up what the actual show is going to be? Or is it just a great song by itself?

**Craig:** Well, it is a great song by itself. But it introduces the audience to the idea that there is kind of a chorus. This is a little bit of a Greek drama where there’s a chorus and also provides people with a sense that this is not going to be a standard story. Zorba the Greek is very much a philosophical musing of people living during a time of crisis, and war, and misery. And about finding joy within that. And it’s very Greek. It’s very Greek. The kind of love of melancholy and catastrophe which are two wonderful Greek words, I think it’s just instructing the audience to buckle in. There’s going to be a little philosophy tonight. Not a ton, but a little bit. And that this is not going to be a feel good musical where Curly gets the girl at the end, you know ?

It’s a little different. And I did read when I was looking around to find — because I didn’t know the name of the woman who originated the part, and I believe it’s Lorraine Serabian, gorgeous voice. I guess when they did a revival — not a reboot but a remake —

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Craig:** One Broadway of Zorba that they changed that opening lyric to “Life is what you do…” They changed it and they watered it down so it isn’t “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” They made it softer and not quite as harsh as that.

But it’s not harsh. It’s true. It’s true. [laughs] Yeah, because that’s the [sings] “only choice you’ve come..” Oh, it’s great, great song. Love it. Anyway, check it out.

**John:** I will check it out. My One Cool Thing is, I bet you could predict this, so this last week was the World Wide Developers Conference for Apple.

**Craig:** “Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers!”

**John:** And what’s weird about your “Developers. Developers. Developers,” I had a vague memory of it, but Ryan Nelson in the office pulled up the video and showed us like, oh my god, Craig was spot on.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Steve Ballmer, wow.

**Craig:** He went absolutely insane. “Developers. Developers. Developers.” You saw that his heart stopped a few times when he did that, right?

**John:** It’s amazing.

**Craig:** John, I so thought of you when I was watching that video because, aside from the fact that you got a shout-out, which is awesome, then the reaction of the crowd when Craig Federighi announced what I’m sure you’re One Cool Thing is, it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So, the One Cool Thing for me is Swift which is the new programming language that’s underlying all of Apple’s technologies now. And previously on the podcast I swear I had One Cool Things about Coffee Script which is like the JavaScript variant that I love so much. And I had sort of dreamed that, oh, at one point Apple will embrace something like Coffee Script to actually do the coding of the language because it’s just so much more elegant and it fits my brain so much better than Objective C does.

And suddenly they just did. And it’s so odd that like I’m living in a universe where this is suddenly a thing you can do now. So, if you are a developer or have interest in becoming a developer, if you download the developer’s kit and play around with Swift, there’s a little playground feature where you sort of type on the left hand side and it shows you the results on the right hand side. It’s just remarkably elegant. And if you’re a person who has done any programming in JavaScript, or Python, or Ruby, or any of the modern scripting languages, you will immediately see how it works. It’s just incredibly straight forward. And the fact that you can now use that to program sort of fundamental apps is great.

The fact that it’s actually faster than the current languages is great. So, it’s a wonderful time for us. As a place that makes apps it forces some decisions about like, well, do we rewrite Highland entirely in Swift. And, perhaps we do so that we don’t end up with sort of the Final Draft 9 situation where we have a technical debt to payoff. And yet it’s a big choice to do all that.

**Craig:** You know, speaking of Final Draft —

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** It’s not like the fact that they have some legacy issues, some coding debt in there, that couldn’t possibly be impacting their bottom line. For instance, there’s still probably, if you were to compare say, I don’t know, Final Draft for iOS compared to like, I don’t know, Highland, I would imagine that Final Draft crushes Highland.

**John:** Final Draft sells for a lot more than Highland does. So, Final Draft sells for $199 and Highland this last week was $15. It’s normally $30. And so in grosses, yes, traditionally Final Draft does beat Highland.

**Craig:** But. But —

**John:** But this last week we actually beat them.

**Craig:** Ooh!

**John:** Which was remarkable. Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow! Holler!

**John:** For a brief moment we actually overtook them which was remarkable. So, again, it’s probably not the usual situation. We were on sale. So, I don’t want abundant enthusiasm to sort of cloud the reality of this.

**Craig:** I am over-exuberant now.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I am Alan Greenspan over-exuberant. I’m irrationally exuberant. [laughs]

**John:** So, it’s been nice that people have taken the opportunity to try out Highland and that’s fantastic. And that there are alternatives out there. So, it’s been great to sort of see that happen this last week.

We had the launch of Bronson and we had Highland and we had Weekend Read and they were all on sale for this last week. And I lot of people checked them out. The interesting thing is when you sell more apps you have more technical support issues, and that’s just sort of natural. Because if you’re going to get — if 10 percent of your users are going to have some problem, when you have a tremendous number more people installing your apps you’re going to have more people with problems. And so the one thing we had to do this last week was really change our tech support thing because basically we’d been using email before.

So, someone would write in and Nima would write back and that was all fine because Nima could do that. But it got to be so much more that we actually had to dig in and actually set up a whole tech support system so that we can track tickets and do all that stuff. And it feels like we’re a legitimate company.

**Craig:** You guys are like a real company now. I mean, are you — are you making a ton of money off of this?

**John:** We’re not making a ton of money. So, honestly, our goal is to make it so that it’s profitable for Nima and Ryan to be employed. [laughs] That’s not actually a very high bar and we’re just clearing that.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s good.

**John:** So, we’re not a company of 40 people. We’re a company of four people. And I don’t really count me or Stuart because we’re here anyway.

**Craig:** Right. And Stuart’s not exactly a person. He’s —

**John:** Well, Stuart is really an idea.

**Craig:** Stuart is an idea.

**John:** Stuart, he’s a philosophy.

**Craig:** [sings] “Stuart is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” She has this great accent. “This is how the time goes by..” Ooh, it’s such… — Anyway, congratulations for being mentioned on the WWDC. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

My favorite moment of the whole thing was when Craig Federighi said, “What if we could have all of the power or all the things of Objective C without the baggage of C?” And in the audience there was like a [gasps], “Ooh! Ooh!”

**John:** [gasps] “It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening!”

**Craig:** Right. And I was sitting there like, “What does that even mean?” I had no idea what they were talking about. But it was exciting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Without the baggage of…” That guy is cool by the way. You get the feeling that guy is going to run the whole show, don’t you?

**John:** Yeah. It was weird because I felt like in the first segment I was like — all I could think of was, wow, he seems like — he’s got the hair and he sort of seems like the soccer dad, sort of like the slick soccer dad kind of thing. But then he’s out there for so much that I ended up kind of loving him by the end of the presentation.

**Craig:** Well, he was sort of the breakout star of the last version of these things. And you could tell, like, Apple is so smart. They’re just like put out the guy that’s cool. But he also like obviously knows his stuff because he’s the head of engineering. Is that right?

**John:** He’s the head of software.

**Craig:** Software, okay. So, he really knows his stuff. But most importantly he’s a Craig.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we’re all pretty good.

**John:** So, Craig, I think we’re committing to this idea that for Halloween you’re going to go as Ballmer and I’m going to have to learn how to — I’m going to get the gray wig, the silver wig and I’ll be Tim Cook and it’s going to be amazing.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. I’ve got to practice getting my voice real high. His voice is up here!

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Oh my god. “How much for the phone — a phone is not a very good email device, so enterprises just won’t want to use it. It’s the most expensive phone in the world after subsidies. Okay, I mean…” God, that guy. Every time he talks. You’ve seen the video of him saying that iPhone, “No, nobody is going to like iPhone. ”

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Every time it’s amazing.

**John:** I’ve been trying to practice my Tim Cook and it’s actually rally hard because it’s an Alabama accent, but it’s like, it’s a slow Alabama accent and it’s really hard to hit the vowels the way he hits them.

**Craig:** I don’t even know where I would begin, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Fortunately we’ve got months ahead of us. And if worse comes to worse we still have the dialogue coach from Big Fish and she can just come in and give me a shake.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then you and I can show up at Hollywood Halloween parties. Doing that and no one will know who the hell we are.

**John:** [laughs] No, I think we should just go down Hollywood Boulevard and just be, that would just be our thing. We could be like those panhandlers on Hollywood Boulevard except we’re Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m okay with that. I still think in that crowd no one will know who the hell we are.

**John:** Oh, they won’t, and I think that’s more the fun of it. They won’t know —

**Craig:** That’s like amazing. It’s like the biggest celebration of the gay community in West Hollywood and you are there dressed as the most powerful gay man in the world and nobody will know who you are.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Classic.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** It’s good stuff.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you for a fun show, John.

**John:** Our usual boilerplate here at the end. If you like the show and are listening to the show on a device that listens to podcasts you might want to go to iTunes and look up Scriptnotes and actually subscribe because that would be a great place to subscribe to our show.

While you’re there you can leave a comment. That’s always fantastic. While you’re there you can also download the Scriptnotes app. The Scriptnotes app is there available for Android and for iOS devices. With the Scriptnotes app you can also download — you can subscribe to the premium features which gets you all the back episodes. So, this is episode 148. So, there are 147 previous episodes you’ve missed. So, that’s great and that’s fun.

If you would like to send a note to me or to Craig, on Twitter is best. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you have a longer email-y kind of thing, email it to ask@johnaugust.com.

Our outro this week is by Robin Karlsson. Robin, thank you for writing this.

Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. Or, the idea of Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** [laughs] The show is produced by the idea of Stuart Friedel. Oh, it’s so great.

**John:** And so edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. And thank you again to Scott Tobias for being on the show.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you, Scott.

**John:** It’s very nice to have a guest. And we’ll see you again next week.

**Craig:** See you next week. Bye.

**John:** All right. Bye.

Links:

* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson) is available now
* [Romantic-era classical music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_music) on Wikipedia
* Tchaikovsky’s [1812 Overture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbxgYlcNxE8), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_Overture)
* Gershwin’s [Rhapsody in Blue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_Blue)
* Ravel’s [Boléro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4wb11w0ZHQ), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bol%C3%A9ro)
* Grieg’s [In the Hall of the Mountain King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLp_Hh6DKWc), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hall_of_the_Mountain_King)
* The [new Three Page Challenge submissions page](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) is now taking submissions
* The Dissolve’s [Scott Tobias](http://thedissolve.com/authors/scottt/)
* Scott’s article, [The hidden world of Video On Demand profits](http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/594-the-hidden-world-of-video-on-demand-profits/) from The Dissolve
* WGA’s [Residuals Survival Guide](http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=133)
* [Blue Ruin](http://blueruinmovie.com/), a film by Jeremy Saulnier
* James Gray’s [The Immigrant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immigrant_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* Bong Joon-ho’s [Snowpiercer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer) on Wikipedia
* [Life Is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRb9Elttns) from Zorba
* Introducing [Swift](https://developer.apple.com/swift/)
* John’s [mention at WWDC](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/473597039016546305)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* Apple’s [Craig Federighi](https://www.apple.com/pr/bios/craig-federighi.html)
* Steve Ballmer [on the impending release of the iPhone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Robin Karlsson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))