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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/disaster-porn-and-spelling-things-out).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 103 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, three things I want to talk about today.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** First off something you suggested which was this interview that Damon Lindelof did about big movie stakes and story gravity which I thought was great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to talk about this idea of spelling things out in dialogue, which is a thing that you sort of face at every stage in your career. And so let’s talk about what that actually means when someone tells you that they want to spell stuff out.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And, finally, I want to talk about — as we talk about movies, why do we never read stories about what went right? We sort of only read stories about what went wrong. And sort of what that is and maybe how would fix it.

**Craig:** In my bones I believe this is going to be an excellent podcast.

**John:** I hope so, too. I’m a little better prepared for this podcast than I am for some, so I’m eager to get into this.

**Craig:** I am equally as unprepared for this as I am for all.

**John:** Yes, but sometimes you just wing it, and winging it is sort of the Craig Mazin way.

**Craig:** I’m more of a jazz podcast kind of guy. Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** [laughs] Your variations on a basic theme.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** First, sticking with our basic themes, there is always some housekeeping and sometimes some follow up. Some housekeeping: we’ve sold quite a few of those 100 episode Scriptnotes USB flash drive thingies. So, basically if you have an interest in previous episodes of the show and you like maybe caught up with us in the eighties and would like all those first episodes, you can now buy them all on one little USB drive that you can stick in your computer and listen to — 100 hours of me and Craig talking through the things that I’ve carefully thought through and Craig has improvised.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a lot of haphazard, off-the-cuff theories and opinions.

**John:** We are taking orders for these little drives. They cost $20 apiece. We’re taking orders through this Friday. And then we’ll ship them two weeks later. So, if you would like one of these buy one now because I’m not sure we’re going to make any extra ones, so it’s good for you to buy them if you would like to buy them.

**Craig:** You’re like when Disney puts out the animated movie and says, “And this is it. For the last time ever…”

**John:** Yes. It’s your only chance to buy Pocahontas…

**Craig:** Ever!

**John:** …on DVD. That would maybe be okay. Or Song of the South which they never even actually release.

**Craig:** Song of the South, just as a side note, is watchable on YouTube.

**John:** How nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, the entire thing. And, you know, just as a side note again, I watched it because, you know, it’s a big part of Disney history.

**John:** Yeah, Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I was sort of curious to see if Disney was being a little fuss budgety about just pretending it didn’t exist anymore. And the answer is, no, it’s incredibly racist. [laughs] It’s so much worse than I could have imagined.

**John:** Okay, while we’re side-barring here, speaking about incredibly racist, have you seen Pinocchio, not Pinocchio, blah, Peter Pan? Have you seen Disney’s Peter Pan recently?

**Craig:** Recently, no, but I have yes.

**John:** “And it makes the red man red.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I know, it’s bad.

**John:** It’s bad.

**Craig:** It’s bad.

**John:** And that movie is out there in the world.

**Craig:** It is. Yeah, but the thing is it’s animated and there are humans in this movie, [laughs], that are being forced to portray… — It’s just bad.

**John:** It’s the Aunt Jemima problem.

**Craig:** It’s super bad. It’s no good.

**John:** So, let us return from our sidebar. Do you think our sidebar was on the left hand column or the right column?

**Craig:** I instinctively imagine sidebars on the right, but I’m Jewish and we tend to do right to left.

**John:** Okay. Let’s slide back left then and a common question about these little USB flash drives were selling — are the Three Page Challenge PDFs on them? Yes, they are.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, again, if a nuclear apocalypse happens and we’re all wiped out, or maybe zombies — it could be anything that actually wipes out all of humanity and our ability to access the internet, if you had one of these little drives and some sort of computer that was capable of reading them, like a laptop that you’re powering through some sort of pedal bicycle in a kind of Gilligan’s Island scenario, you would still be able to listen to all of them and be able to follow along on the Three Page Challenge which is I think really important as we’re rebuilding civilization that you have access to not just our words of advice but the words on the page that you can see why we were giving the notes we were giving about these Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** I don’t know where it would fall on the hierarchy of goals, but certainly it would be probably between procuring food and medicine.

**John:** Yeah, I mean the shelter — the hierarchy needs is shelter, shelter and safety, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually, I think food and water first.

**John:** Yeah, okay.

**Craig:** Then shelter. Then podcast. And then belonging.

**John:** Yeah. A sense of community. A sense of place.

**Craig:** Yeah, Maslow put our podcast somewhere in the hierarchy. I just can’t remember specifically where.

**John:** Yeah, it’s tough. We’ll ask her onto the show at some point to talk about it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Maslow is a she, isn’t it?

**Craig:** I believe it’s a he.

**John:** I could be wrong. Oh, I’m thinking of stages of grief. That’s a she.

**Craig:** That is a she. That’s what’s her face? That’s Kübler-Ross.

**John:** Absolutely. So, if we could only introduce Kübler-Ross to Maslow and have them combine things, put them together in a merger scenario would be fantastic.

**Craig:** They could discuss their hierarchies and steps all day long.

**John:** Very good. Another bit of follow up. At the same time we are selling these little USB drives, we’re selling off the very few remaining Scriptnotes t-shirts we have left. They’re almost all gone. Almost all of the normal sizes are gone. But if you are small person you’re going to find yourself in luck because as we’re recording this podcast the smaller sizes are what we have a lot of. And like one or two stray extra large extra-larges, or extra extra-larges.

That’s confusing. I’m not saying extra-extra-large. We have one or two extra —

**Craig:** Additional, you mean? You have one or two additional extra-larges.

**John:** Additional would have been the right word to choose for that because otherwise it was confusing. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Thank you. A very good writer there.

**Craig:** There. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] That one example, Craig. You have been tremendous help on this podcast.

**Craig:** At last.

**John:** Several people have written in saying you should sell other stuff, you should sell mouse pads, you should sell hats. Uh, no we shouldn’t.

**Craig:** Slow down folks.

**John:** I have learned a tremendous amount about the shipping of physical goods through this exercise, and I like to learn new things. And so I feel if at any point we decide to sell more t-shirts, or now we’re selling these USB drives, we’re better at it than we were four weeks ago. But it’s certainly not our goal. Our goal is to make movies and to some degree apps. It is not to sell t-shirts. T-shirts are just a fun little side thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, no mugs. No mugs for you.

**John:** No mugs for us. We have a bit of follow up. Last episode we talked about Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund investor who is telling Sony you have to split off Sony Entertainment and Sony Entertainment is going underwater because of these two big tanked movies. And George Clooney yelled at him and there was all that brouhaha.

A bit of follow up, a listener in Japan name Stevie — Stevie in Japan wrote: “Although George Clooney brings up valid points, Loeb’s actual aim of suggesting spinning off Sony Entertainment from the parent is to maximize the advantages of Sony Entertainment. It’s not that Sony Entertainment is unsuccessful, it’s that the parent company is unsuccessful. He describes Sony Entertainment as a hidden gem and that the Sony parent is relying on it for much of its profit. The other very successful arm is Sony Financial, I think. He suggests a breakup because the parent company is limiting the scope of what Sony Entertainment can do and has made it impossible for Sony Entertainment to be an alternative to the iStores or iTunes, and Netflix.”

**Craig:** Uh…no. [laughs] That’s not what he said.

**John:** Well, basically this is sort of the Japanese perspective. Let me get to the second paragraph. “Of course, Loeb could be playing Gordon Gekko and everyone. He supposes that Sony is undervalued and its breakup values much higher than the listed value. But his comments about the fundamental differences in the business culture between the parent and Sony Entertainment have gotten a lot of press here in Japan.”

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** So, Stevie is telling us how it is being portrayed in Japan where Sony is, of course, a very big and important company.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s been a big subject in Japan ever since Sony bought Columbia and wrote of $3-point-something billion as part of its overinvestment.

**John:** My recollection is Sony bought it from Coca-Cola. Didn’t they own Columbia at that point?

**Craig:** No, I think…I read that book Hit and Run. I don’t remember who… — I think they were just their own company, I think.

**John:** Maybe. Anyway. Since we recorded the previous podcast the Sony board unanimously rejected Loeb’s idea of doing the spinoff and sort of wrote a very detailed letter to Mr. Loeb saying, “Thank you but no thank you for your suggestion.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then Loeb gave this interview with Variety, which coincidentally he owns a piece of.

**Craig:** Eh!

**John:** And so this is what Loeb wrote. “‘Notwithstanding the fact that the media likes to create a stir, I admire Mr. Clooney’s passion for Sony and his loyalty to Sony and his friends there,’ said Loeb, suggesting that he and Clooney share ‘a common goal’ and that ‘a more disciplined company with better allocation of capital means less mess money spent on bureaucracy and more investment in motion picture.'”

“We are all aligned for intelligent investment and creative content. I believe our interests are aligned in a way he probably doesn’t realize.”

Eh.

**Craig:** Yeah. Congrats on spinning your stupid statement that was either stupid or transparently manipulative. Either way, yeah, you know, we’re not necessarily financial geniuses here in Hollywood but we’re really good at words. And, no, you need a rewrite.

**John:** So, I think it fundamentally comes down to the question of is he really looking to improve Sony Pictures or is he doing what financial people do which is look at, “Can I make money by breaking this thing apart? Can I make money by gluing it back together?”

And there’s a long tradition of that in all corporations, but especially I think Hollywood corporations. You look at what’s happened with MGM and the travails of MGM over the years, essentially it’s been bought and sold, sometimes by the same people, multiple times within a decade. And so they’ll split off the library because it’s worth more separately. “Oh, no, let’s glue it back together because it’s worth more together.”

That’s just what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah, they will do that with companies that are vulnerable to that sort of thing. But you don’t see it at the big, long-standing stable companies that seem very allergic to the idea of fragmenting any part. If anything they want to consolidate everything. So, when you and I entered the business studios didn’t own networks. And now every network is owned by a studio. The consolidation is the name of the day.

This guy, I think what it really comes down to is he doesn’t really care about movies. He cares about whatever is going to lead his stock to be worth more and so he’s attempting to insert himself into a creative discussion about what movies will make more money because he thinks he knows the answer. And Clooney’s response, which was correct, is you don’t know the answer. And if you just shut up and let us do the movies that we do, you’ll be fine. You’ll be better off than if we listen to you. But unfortunately the people that make decisions have to listen to you, so would you please shut up?

**John:** Yes. I think that is a good summary of what Mr. Clooney said.

Speaking of Sony specifically, Sony is a hardware manufacturer that also owns a content business. And there would seem to be natural synergies there, but I don’t know that we’ve actually seen evidence of tremendously great synergies there. Not in music, not in movies. It’s one of those things like, well, this should work better together, and so far it really hasn’t worked better together.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only company that seems to truly capitalize on synergy — a terrible word that was invented a decade ago — is Disney. And Disney capitalizes on it because they’re the only entertainment company that actually has a brand, a significant meaningful brand to the consumer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I understand when they take a property that they have at a theme park and they convert it into a motion picture and then convert it back into a television show and merchandise and a cruise experience, this all makes sense because Disney means something to the consumer. But Universal doesn’t mean anything to the consumer, and certainly Sony doesn’t.

**John:** And hardware has not been a Disney strength, either. People don’t remember that Disney actually tried to make phones and they also made like an ESPN phone. And those did not work well.

**Craig:** Right. Precisely. Yeah, because it’s not really — the Disney brand is connected to an experience. A family experience where parents and children can share an experience together in a safe way that doesn’t totally bore the parents to death and delights children.

**John:** Yes. And Sony is not that yet.

**Craig:** No, and never will be, because Sony — even when the marketplace was such that content needed to be played on devices, you know, in a way that they don’t, because even your laptop now can play this content. You don’t need a device. But everybody had Walkman and remember the Watchman. But the problem is that those devices rely on content, not Sony content, all content.

So, for device manufacturers, in fact, the broadness of application is the key, not synergy. Anti-synergy. Standards basically.

**John:** Standards help. All right, let’s go to today’s new business. First off was this article that you had said, “Ooh, we should talk about,” and I agree that we should talk about. So, there’s an article by Scott Brown, which was in both Vulture and in New York Magazine, the article headline was “Star Script Doctor Damon Lindelof Explains the New Rules of Blockbuster Screenwriting.”

And, Craig, why don’t you give me the highlights of this because this was your impetus.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, this is, I guess, one in a series of 14 billion articles that have come out in the last three weeks about Hollywood falling apart, even though it’s not. But it was unique because Damon who actually writes a lot of these movies is pointing out something that for a change is true and relevant.

What he’s saying is the problem with the bigness of movies isn’t what people think. What everyone else has been saying is the problem is financial, that the movies cost too much, and so if they if they don’t succeed they crater the studio and then the studio can’t make little movies, or they can’t make this kind of movie, or they’re going to drive the audience away.

And his point is none of that is in fact relevant or even true. His point is that the problem with the bigness factor is that it’s necessarily infecting, irrevocably infecting the way the stories for those movies must be written.

**John:** Here’s a quote from what he says in the article. “Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world. And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world — you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it and, again, I make no excuses, I’m just saying you kind of have to start there.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** So, basically by saying like we are going to make a big giant tent pole movie, by its nature we’ve come to expect that the stakes in a big giant tent pole movie have to be sort of save the world stakes. And so to try to do anything that is not that gets met with huge resistance and fear quite early on in the development process. And through successive iteration will scale bigger, and bigger, and bigger until sometimes these movies are kind of absurd.

**Craig:** And when we say that the audience is feeling fatigued because they’ve seen a succession of movies this summer that have destroyed cities or chunks of the planet. The problem isn’t that “Hollywood has run out of ideas,” which you often hear. The problem is that the concepts of the movie require it. And I don’t think people understand this. When you’re a screenwriter you have to write within certain parameters.

Forget budget. I’m talking about creative parameters. If you had me a concept and say, “The concept is five of the world’s most powerful superheroes ban together and form a team to fight a threat,” creatively that threat must be enormous. One of the people on my little team is literally a god, and the other one is so strong that he can throw tanks. So, obviously the threat needs to be formidable or there’s no drama.

Well, what’s formidable? Somebody that’s even more powerful than they. And, well, what would that person do, rob a bank? No. The threat therefore must be concomitant with the hero’s and the heroism. And that’s what’s going on here. So, you know, for me when I read this I just though, first of all, I thought it was important that Damon did it. I was really glad that he did it because he is part of the machine of these kinds of movies in a very important way. But also in a smart way I think Damon kind of issued his own memo to Hollywood on behalf of all of us who are writing movies saying, “How about we become aware that this is a thing creatively so that we don’t just keep doing it blindly? At least if you’re going to make me do it, you acknowledge that you’re doing it.”

**John:** Yeah. Well, what’s happened is that there’s an escalation which is sort of natural where, you know, you were talking about the assemblage of super heroes. And Damon actually calls this out and says, “The Avengers aren’t going to save Guam. They’re going to have to save the world.” And so they can’t have a small challenge. They have to have a huge challenge because you’ve made these things so bad.

It’s also a challenge of sequels in that you feel this pressure to have to top yourself over what you did last time. So, whatever the big set piece was in this last movie, it has to be bigger than that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, in the most recent Star Trek movie, the first Star Trek movie actually had more planets being blown up than the current one, but he says, “Did we have to have a gigantic Starship crash into San Francisco? I’ll never know. But it felt like it did.” And that was the issue of audiences approach these kind of big tent pole movies with a set of expectations. And one of those expectations for better or worse has been that big stuff needs to blow up. Big things have to be destroyed.

**Craig:** And that is leading us to an almost pornographic celebration of big stuff from a creative point of view, because the movies begin to stack up against each other. And there is a fear that you’re simply going to disappoint people if you blow up a smaller city than a big city. If I had just watched New York explode, it just seems like a little bit of a dramatic letdown to watch Portland explode. But, the truth is, I think, that we are collectively as an audience quite a long way from that day when we sat down in a theater, saw Jurassic Park, and went, “Oh my god!”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Look, there are dinosaurs!” Right? We don’t have that anymore because we’ve seen it a lot now. We have become comfortable with the spectacle of impossibility. So, admittedly when I saw Pacific Rim on one level I thought, “Wow,” and on the level I thought, “Eh.”

You know? Okay, so, I get it. Yup, that is quite an accomplishment to show huge robots fighting enormous monsters, but on the other level, not enough.

**John:** I want to step back and look at some of our earlier blockbusters and figure out sort of if we can track where this pattern came from. I’ll start with Star Wars because Star Wars I think about as this classic hero story, this boy rises up and sort of has to learn who he really is and that destiny and he would restore balance in the force. But it does end up with blowing up the Death Star. And it does have that expectation of like that really big thing has to blow up and our hero has to do it. And if we don’t see the destruction of something giant at the end of that movie it wouldn’t be as rewarding.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** I go to Indiana Jones and the end of Indiana Jones you have Indy and Marion, they’re tied there. So, he wants to save the girl, but it’s also you’ve got the Nazis and you know if the Nazis get this thing it’s going to be really, really bad.

**Craig:** But you don’t see anything other than about 14 Nazis dying.

**John:** Yeah, on a soundstage.

**Craig:** Right. On a soundstage. And even with the Death Star exploding, what you didn’t see, I mean, the sort of shocking moment of Star Wars is when they blow up Alderaan, you know, when they blow up a planet. But even that in a way what you didn’t get was what you get now where you’re on the ground and you see people vaporized and the buildings flittering —

To me, the moment I always think of is Terminator 2. To me Terminator 2 is the movie that sort of said, “Hey everyone, I’m so far beyond you. Look what I’m doing. And I’m going to blow up Los Angeles with a nuclear bomb. And I’m going to have this guy be liquid metal. And I’m going to do all this stuff. And I’m going to visually blow your minds.”

**John:** Yeah. But you also brought up Jurassic Park. And what I think is interesting about Jurassic Park is the dinosaurs don’t leave the island. And the goal of the heroes in Jurassic Park is not to stop the dinosaurs from taking over the world. It’s to survive.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those stakes are very small and relatable and wonderful. And that’s a hugely successful movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, by creating a world in which there never was the expectation that they had to stop the dinosaurs from taking over the world, you’re able to keep those stakes really intense for the characters you actually know and care about and not have to destroy the pier. But then, of course, in Jurassic Park 2 you do destroy the pier.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I mean, look, what happens is as size escalates there is a certain antiseptic nature to the whole thing. Because on some level we understand none of it is real which is the death of drama.

I remember watching the Star Wars prequel, the first prequel, and the movie concludes with a fight between CGI creatures and CGI robots. And I just couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t possibly feel anything. But, I think sometimes of the ending of the first X-Men movie. And that was very smartly done because even though in a sense the world was at stake because there was one of those silly movie gatherings of luminaries, and there was a beam that was going to turn them all into mutants and therefore the world would sort of head towards mutant-ville, it was all focused through the pain of a little girl and this unloved man who had formed a bond with her.

So, the managed to be both big and small. And I think if you can be big and small it’s okay. But if it just is about size, you got a problem.

**John:** Damon is also an interesting person to be talking about this issue with because of course he and Drew Goddard and Chris McQuarrie came onboard World War Z. And the third act of World War Z was originally huge. It was this giant battle in Red Square.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it was apparently not what the movie wanted to be. And Damon in the article says that had he come in to write the first draft of it and had been the writer who got it into production he would have written that version.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** He would have written the version that was big at the end because you write big things for the end. What they discovered is that you stopped caring about Brad Pitt’s character in it and that what you really wanted was to see Brad Pitt succeed in a small, and relatable, and human way. So, all of the stuff in the end of that movie from the plane flight on, all the stuff at the CDC lab is small. And it’s contained and it’s very thriller personal stakes. And that it movie ended up working for, god bless it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked it. And I particularly enjoyed the ending because I felt that once I had gotten through the sequence in Israel which was enormous that the movie itself was a little microcosm of what’s gone on this summer. Well, we just had this insane scene in the middle of the movie, I guess we’ll have to end really insane. At that point it’s so insane you just lose connection with it.

So they went the opposite way when they reconceived the ending and it worked great. And Damon is right; if you, or I, or anybody had come in, our instinct of course is you’re making a movie called World War Z. The climax needs to be WORLD WAR Z, not Laboratory Z.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it turns out Laboratory Z was a little more human and more relatable and there is a good lesson contained in there.

**John:** Yeah. You would never have set out to write the movie with that ending because a lot of the stuff should not work — I’m going to go back and say I don’t think the ending is fantastic. I think the ending is good for what the movie needs to do. But, the idea that you would end up in a lab with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and that’s going to be the end of your movie is not the idea you would set out to write. You would never set out to write that script that way.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** You would have found some way to make it more relatable to characters we’ve actually seen longer. But, it was a good, salvaged shot.

**Craig:** Well, if somebody had come to you and said, “Listen, I’ve been to the future and I know that you can — the audience can only withstand one massive sequence in this move. Go ahead and write it now. You would save that for the ending probably.

**John:** You would.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s move onto our second topic today which is the idea of spelling things out. So, this was sort of generated by a question that came in through the mailbag, but also based on a meeting I had this week with a studio about this book property to adapt. And it was an interesting difference between this is a book and there are certain things that are on the page in the book that work really well and certain things that felt a little forced because you’re just reading the same words again and again. There are like terms given to certain groups that made me feel like, “Oh no, I’m reading a very obvious parable about something.”

And so in doing it for the movie version I wouldn’t have to be so literal about that, which was going to be really useful. But an issue that we as screenwriters face on every script throughout our careers is how much information do we have to have characters say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or speak aloud so the audience will be able to follow along with what’s going on in the story. So, a lot of times we call this exposition, or if we have a character who is doing it too much we call him a plot-bot. But it can also be more subtle. So, I want to give you some examples of some more subtle things that happen.

You need to get out a specific thing about a character’s background. So, if you need to know that a character is a nuclear physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. Sometimes you find yourself having to get that spoken so a character actually hears that. Sometimes you need world background — why there’s a giant wall of ice in the north. Or, sometimes you need to make it clear to the audience what the limit of the character’s knowledge is, like, “I never actually saw my father die,” so you know what the boundaries are of what this character really does know and what you as the audience know that the character doesn’t know.

So, I want to talk about spelling things out and, Craig, how we make decisions about what needs to come out of a character’s mouth and what we could just let the audience figure out for themselves.

**Craig:** Well, part of the game is to figure a way to give the audience all the clues they need to solve the mystery. And every little one of these expository moments can be viewed as a mystery. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometime a guy a walks in and he flashes a badge and says, “Lieutenant Smithers, LAPD.” That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But sometimes you want somebody to convey information naturally because the two people in the scene know each other and probably know this information already. It’s just that we in the audience don’t. That’s where we start to feel that weird tension. And that’s where we find the clumsy exposition where people start sentences with, “As you know…” And we hate that.

So, the game is let’s seed in little clues that the audience can kind of put together either sub-textually or even if it’s just a visual thing that’s happening and have fun with that so we can do it in a way that is satisfying for them. They feel engaged. However, as a producer said to me just a couple weeks ago, sometimes you have to spell it out more in the script because people are reading it. And if they miss it because they’re not watching the movie and experiencing the puzzle the way it’s intended then they’re not going to enjoy the script as much. Good point.

**John:** Yeah. An example being like do we understand that the character has registered that thing we just saw in the movie? And so sometimes, visually watching the thing, oh, we clocked that he saw that and knows what’s going on. Sometimes in a script you will actually have to have him say or acknowledge that he saw something so that we know that he saw it and that can be frustrating.

An earlier point you made though I think is worth sort of underlining is that we have conflicting goals. We don’t want the audience to miss something important, yet at the same time every scene needs to be about what the actual characters in the scene want to do and are trying to do. And so if you try to wedge something in there that isn’t what the characters would naturally be talking about, that’s going to feel forced. And so finding that balance is really tough.

So, what you say about like a character introducing his name and showing his badge, well I believe that actually could happen in the real world so that I would totally accept and buy that. But no character wants to suddenly reveal that he was fired from his job for gambling. That’s just not a natural thing that’s going to come out. Unless you very specifically construct a scene so that he has to get that information out, which may work fine. But if the whole purpose of that scene is to get that piece of information out, then that character probably isn’t moving the story ahead in the way that the character would want to move the story ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these moments, even when you’re scripting them, you can turn them to your advantage by essentially crafting them as little pieces of surprise. So, I’m thinking of The Ring. There is a moment where you suddenly are surprised by the fact that this man we’ve been watching and this boy who have had these weird encounters that have been mute and silent are father and son.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if it’s a surprise you’re actually allowed to be kind of overt about it because you’re fooling the audience and then pleasing them with this sense of suspense followed by surprise. But even within a scene, a man and a woman are in an office, they’re talking, and you know that it’s important to your story that they’re married, but you certainly don’t want to have somebody walk in and say, “Hi sweetheart, how are you? You’re my wife. Now let’s discuss business.”

So, there’s two lawyers arguing over something and they finish arguing and then they get up and then she kisses him on the mouth and says, “Pick up dog food on the way home.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just find ways to do that, but, you know, there are moments. I will say that my tendency always is to provide as little as possible and I never get the note, “You’ve spelled it out too much.” I often get the note, “You should spell out it more.” And my response to that note is always, “But did you know?” Because a lot of times producers or just people reading a script will presume that they’re the only smart one. And that’s not in fact the case.

**John:** Some other techniques which I’m not going to say are good or bad for getting this information out, but you will see them used and used effectively can help you. Have a character who is a proxy for the audience who knows as little as the audience knows.

And so Jurassic Park is a good example of this. We have to explain how dinosaur cloning works. And so David Koepp writes this terrific sequence in which the characters are shown this little movie that explains how dinosaurs are cloned. It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s good, and it tells us everything we need to know.

The only reason that works is because we have characters who are coming into the environment with the same amount of information that we have. And so the new person into the world is often a conduit for getting all this information out. You’ll see this in TV pilots where it’s someone’s first day on the job and they’re being shown around and this is how it all works.

It’s kind of a clichéd scene, so if you can find a new way to spin it, you’re going to be better off. But it is a way of letting us sort of in to what this environment is and what the situation is.

It doesn’t have to be like a person who is brand new into the world. It might be like the “Hey, how are you,” first time they’re ever meeting, but a person who is not normally part of that world. So, someone else who is, you know, the sister who has come into this thing. I’m thinking about like Homeland where Carrie’s sister is a way of getting out information about how the agency actually really works because she’s not actually part of the agency normally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finding those sort of proxy characters for the audience can be a useful tool for doing it. But it’s tough and, you know, as you’re constructing your scenes, as you’re looking at the big outline either on the whiteboard or on the cards, you have to always be mindful of what will the audience know at this point. What is the audience expecting to happen next? And is there a way that you can use the audience’s expectation to sort of fill in those gaps?

If the audience expects that like, “Oh, I think they might be married,” then you have to give them a little thing to sort of prove that they’re married. And you don’t have to have this whole long explanation.

**Craig:** That’s right. And similarly if you feel like the fact that they’re married is something that the audience is too easily onto, then go the other way and then surprise. Always be surprising. In a way your relationship with the audience is a little bit like a judo match. They bring a certain weight of expectation to the experience of watching a movie. And your job is to use that weight against them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** They like being thrown to the mat, basically.

**John:** Well, what I would say about expectation is that audiences are always going to have an expectation. They’re going to have expectations about genre. They’re going to have expectations about characters. Expectation about the kind of movie this is that they’re watching. And most of the time you want to meet their expectations, or hopefully exceed their expectations. But make them feel smart. Make them feel like, “Oh, I got it. I’m with it, I got it. I think it’s going to happen. Oh, and it happened. Oh, and it happened, that’s great.”

And then if they’re with you that way then you can pull the rug out from under them every once and awhile and surprise them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you surprise them every scene they’re going to stop trusting you. So, you have to sort of balance those two things of making the audience feel really smart and also making the audience feel rewarded for closely watching.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** So, how do we, I don’t know, how do we advise people to talk about exposition then? What kinds of things do you think you have to have a character say? Can you think of any examples of things that characters need to speak aloud?

**Craig:** You mean exposition that sort of requires that sort of thing?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so. I think ultimately there’s a visual way to do anything, or a conversational way. Two other people can comment on another person. There are moments, though, where you want them to say it out loud.

**John:** Yes. And an example I think of is when they articulate what the plan is for how they’re going to do something. You love to actually hear what the plan is so that if everything goes right you know what to look for. So, they’re laying out the roadmap ahead. And usually that’s a reasonable thing to do because the characters would need to do that. They would actually need to articulate what the plan is supposed to be.

You have to find the right moment to do it, because if they’re in the middle of it and then they’re suddenly talking through all this stuff that they should have talked about five minutes ago, that’s frustrating. But if going into something you see what the plan is supposed to be, that’s generally helpful and I believe that when I see it in a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even then, though, if you watch Ocean’s Eleven you’ll see that Ted Griffin gives you only pieces of the plan. So, he actually again is kind of judo-ing the audience. He’s spelling it out overtly to make you feel like you just heard what the plan is. But you haven’t.

**John:** Well, what he’s done is he’s giving you little markers to show these are components of the plan. And then when you, you know, “We’re going to need a very limber guy” It’s like, well why do you need a very limber guy? We’re not going to tell you now, but now we know like, okay, we should look for that really limber Asian guy.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And then when we see him again, “Oh, okay, that was part of the plan.”

**Craig:** But he also leaves out huge chunks like — spoiler alert — we’re going to build a fake version of the vault and we’re going to film ourselves robbing the fake vault on a soundstage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then we are going to play SWAT team guys who come in and he’s literally going to call us and we’re going to rob the bank after he thinks he’s been robbed when he hasn’t been robbed. That’s just simply not articulated in the plan.

**John:** Because if it were fully articulated all the suspense of–

**Craig:** Movie over. [laughs]

**John:** Movie over, yeah. Like, you know, will it go? According to that, the plan was too detailed.

**Craig:** And that’s why I think even when you’re spelling out a plan, don’t spell out everything. Just give us what we need to know but don’t be afraid to cheat a little bit. I mean, stylistically that’s the beauty of editing. You don’t know that the camera was there for the entire conversation. Obviously it wasn’t.

**John:** Let’s move onto our final topic of the day. This is about what went right. And so this actually is based on an email interview I did with Scott Brown who is the same guy who wrote the Damon Lindelof article. So, he was interviewing me to talk about sort of the summer’s movies and sort of what went wrong. And so I sort of challenged him back to say, yeah, okay, I get why you’re writing this article, sort of. But I also never see the articles about what went right.

And so it feels like it’s become the air duct of entertainment journalism is we just keep writing the same story. We keep writing the same story of like, you know, movies cost too much, ticket prices are too high, everything used to be better back when, and Hollywood is doomed. We keep writing that same story. And the story we always write though is what went wrong and we never actually write the stories about what went right.

And, honestly, a small exception to that is World War Z which is one of the few stories you’ll read in the popular entertainment press about like this presumed disaster sort of righted itself. But I think the only reason we’re reading about it is because it was supposed to be a disaster.

**Craig:** And we’re reading about it because they wrote about it and they were wrong. The amazing thing is they create this thing that simply is unrelated to the movie itself. They didn’t see the movie. They’re just creating this thing — oh, there’s trouble, we hear there’s trouble, there’s supposedly trouble, it’s a disaster because we believe it’s a disaster and now we’re saying it’s a disaster so it’s a disaster. And we just read other people saying it’s a disaster, so let’s repeat that it’s a disaster.

And then a news story comes along. Wow! How about that? It’s not a disaster. That’s an interesting story. No, it’s actually not. All you needed to do was not write the first story and then you wouldn’t have to write the second story. You’re now writing stories to answer your own stories. It’s gross.

And similarly this pattern of, well, what went wrong? Uh, I don’t know, the same thing that always goes wrong: some of the movies don’t work. I mean, hasn’t this happened every summer since the beginning of movies?

**John:** Well, I think we’re treating failure as an exception rater than failure as sort of like the normal state of things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s the wild successes that are the exceptions. It’s the things didn’t go as well as we’d sort of hoped they would go is the norm actually. And when they go just a little bit wrong, they still make money. When they go really wrong, then they lose money. But failure is kind of the normal state for what this is. And we don’t ever want to acknowledge that.

So, I think back to the R-rated comedies of the summer. And the R-rated comedies of the summer did really well.

**Craig:** And continue to.

**John:** Hangover 3 did great. The Heat did great. We’re the Millers is doing really well. And I don’t think we’re going to see stories about how amazing these movies did because that’s not a doomsday scenario. There’s nothing —

**Craig:** It’s boring, yeah. It’s boring. People, you know, give them dirty laundry. So, let’s just refer to the book of Don Henley here. That’s what interests people. If it bleeds it leads. And in the entertainment journalism version of that is if it fails it sells. I had to do like a southern accent to make the run.

**John:** Or you can make sails like a sail boat.

**Craig:** Right. If it fails it sails. Exactly. So, you know, and of course underlying all of it is the fact that the chattering classes have a contempt for Hollywood and popular fare anyway. They have a contempt for movie studios. They love movie stars who speak their mind in concordance with the chattering class topics.

But, they hate Hollywood studios and they hate big Hollywood movies and they hate popcorn movies. And so this is fun for them. They delight in it. They get angry when a lot of these movies do well, frankly. They get confused. They’re still wondering why people showed up for the second Pirates movie, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that’s what sort of fuels a lot of it is a general sense of resentment and bad faith combined with a delight in the thought that Hollywood would collapse under its own weight and return to what they believe the ’70s were, the worship of the ’70s, or as I like to put it, the worship of 2% of the movies that were made in the ’70s.

**John:** Yes, it’s that golden age fallacy of all the movies when I was young were amazing because I only remember the good movies when I was young. And you didn’t see the other 97% which were not.

**Craig:** Endless crap. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Specifically this summer there is a lot of talk about, oh, the sequels aren’t working or it’s all sequels and there’s this whole problem. And yet Fast & the Furious did tremendously well.

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** And I don’t see anybody talking about that now.

**Craig:** Or Iron Man 3.

**John:** Or Iron Man 3. Another huge hit.

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** You don’t see people talking about that now. They’re only talking about like these last couple of movies that didn’t work or like there are no movie stars left. Well, okay, fine, but maybe that’s because you’re sort of only talking about the movie stars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even if you go back to Damon Lindelof and World War Z or –there are a few writers whose names are actually sort of mentioned in relation to their movie, so Joss Whedon is, J.J. Abrams is, Sorkin, Lindelof. I think the only reason you see their names mentioned is because we already knew who they were. We already knew who Damon Lindelof was because of Lost. And that’s the reason why you see his name brought up so often in relation to World War Z and not Drew Goddard or Chris McQuarrie who are just not the profile of Damon Lindelof.

**Craig:** Well, and also Damon chose to talk to Vanity Fair when they did their big article and Chris and Drew didn’t. And so that was part of it, too. And also Damon is kind of an interesting public figure. He’s made a public figure of himself because he likes engaging the media on his movies, for better or for worse. And so they feel like now that’s somebody they can — they’re very simple. I mean, the media’s understanding of how Hollywood works is a child’s understanding of how it works.

**John:** Yeah. But here’s where I’m trying to get to with the point of these sort of star writers is that I really think that’s a carryover from television, is that I think ten years ago we started to notice who TV showrunners were. We started to notice who Aaron Sorkin was, who Shonda Rhimes was, you know, Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams — showrunners.

And so we started to see their names in popular entertainment press. And now that some of those people have moved into movies, if we see that they’re associated with a movie, we assume that they are the showrunner of that movie. And so therefore we want to talk to that person as if they are the showrunner of the movie. And as we talked about before with Screenwriters Plus, sometimes they kind of are a little bit more of a showrunner. They’re doing more than just writing the movie. They’re producing in a meaningful way.

But we associate them strongly with a movie because we actually already knew who they were. You look at Fast & the Furious 6, Chris Morgan wrote that. You never see anything written about Chris Morgan writing that. Look at The Heat, Katie Dippold, I’ve seen nothing about her and that was one of the biggest movies of the year. And that is singularly her movie.

We see writing about these writers because they were already famous. It’s the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Because they already are famous, anything they touch that does really well or doesn’t do well, they’re going to get more press about it.

**Craig:** And ultimately the attention is irrelevant. The attention that we get and the attention that directors get is dwarfed by the attention the actors get. I don’t — I know the media is into it, but, you know, I mean, Brad Pitt and Melissa McCarthy are names on the tips of everyone’s tongue, not necessarily Damon Lindelof or, I don’t know.

**John:** Here’s where I disagree when you say it doesn’t matter. I think it does matter for the perception of what a screenwriter does and what a screenwriter’s responsibilities are. Because I’ve long maintained and even — I don’t think statistically I can prove this, but you will see that every great movie just happened and every bad movie had a bad script. And every bad movie had a bad writer kind of behind it.

And I think that’s become sort of the narrative. Like if a movie doesn’t do well, it’s because of the script. And if a movie does great, you never hear about the script. You only hear about how good that actor was in it, as if they sort of made up all their lines themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, That’s true. And I don’t know — I guess all I can say is that for me it’s — there’s nothing wrong with, even toiling in obscurity and success and being called out in failure, if along with that the people that make decisions about how movies are made don’t care. That’s the big one. And I don’t know if they do. I don’t think studios really care that Damon gets — that they blame Prometheus on Damon Lindelof. They don’t appear to care at all.

**John:** They don’t care at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I come back to that showrunner idea, and I think maybe the closest we really have in the feature world for showrunners has been the writer-director. And you look at the people who have been making interesting movies the last couple years, I look at Rian Johnson who is that guy. He’s the writer-director. You look at Chris Nolan, who even if he doesn’t write everything himself, is very intensely involved in the very genesis of the idea. That’s who — I feel like that’s who we need to spotlight if we’re going to get people to pay attention to the good contributions of writing to movies.

**Craig:** In the end I think that you have more faith in the media righting their ship and doing a good job of reporting on this stuff than I do. I just think they’re dopes. Of course, the feeling is mutual. [laughs] So, there you go.

**John:** There you go.

I think it’s time for some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo!

**John:** Woo! I can go first or second. Your choice.

**Craig:** You know me, I remain passive.

**John:** All right. I will go first. So, my One Cool Thing this week is kind of self-serving but it’s also hopefully generous for our listeners.

So, I am in New York for 11 weeks to get Big Fish, the Broadway version of Big Fish up on the stage and out into the world, which is very exciting. It’s been a very long nine years to get to this point.

So, back in April we did our run in Chicago which was exhausting and fun, but one of the most things about it was I had a bunch of listeners come to see the show. So, I had a couple hundred people who came over the four week run, which was great.

And part of the reason we were able to get those people there is because I asked the producers to give me a promo code so they could get discounts.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I went back to the producers and said like, hey, for Broadway can we do this? And they said, “Eh, maybe, maybe, sure, sure.”

So, I said for Chicago I could only get the discount on the balcony seats and that theater was huge and those balcony seats were a very long way from the stage. So, I asked could we get like for all the seats in the house and they said, “Okay, sure, we can do that.” And not only for Ticketmaster but actually at the box office.

So, now if you would like to come see Big Fish during its first month of previews, you can do so for quite a lot less. Big Fish starts previews on September 5, 9/5. And so for the orchestra seats and for the first part of the balcony, the mezzanine, it’s half-off basically.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So, $74 versus $150.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** If you want a little bit further back in the balcony, it’s about a third off the price. So, it’s $52 for those seats.

**Craig:** That doesn’t make any sense. If you’re giving them good seats for $75, don’t save the $23 or whatever.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re probably better off getting the 74. I think you kind of want to be on the floor. Although, so now having actually been in the Neil Simon Theater. It’s so much different than our Chicago theater. Our Chicago theater was huge.

**Craig:** Broadway theaters are small.

**John:** They are small. And so by seats the Neil Simon Theater is about a third smaller than the Oriental Theater is. But by actual volume it feels like half the size because it’s just crammed so much tighter together.

**Craig:** Yeah, everything — but I like being level with the show. It’s that looking down on the show that bugs me.

**John:** Yes. So, I will say that the first row of balcony in New York is probably better than the best seats were in Chicago, which is kind of amazing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, you won’t get a bad seat in this house because it’s nice and small. If you want to come see the show, get tickets because they will at some point not be available. September 5 is first performance. You can go to Ticketmaster Big Fish Broadway if you want to do it online. If you want to come by the theater box office, that is at the Neil Simon Theater on 52nd. The promo code, I believe, is SCRIPT. I will correct this in the podcast if it is not SCRIPT. But that should be the one that gets you your discount.

So, we officially open October 5, or October 6, which is a month after our previews. At that point all the ticket prices go up like ten bucks, but for that first week you can still come and see us. So, please come.

**Craig:** I was spending some time yesterday with Aline and she and I — we’re figuring out how to get out there to see.

**John:** Very nice. I would love to have there.

**Craig:** The previews are — I mean, are you still tweaking, or is this really just about tech previews?

**John:** Previews are still tweaking. The luxury of having four weeks in Chicago is we could do a lot of tweaking. And so the show is I think honestly a lot better. And better in ways that I would never have been able to anticipate if we had gone straight to Broadway. Because there are things you recognize. It’s like as if someone said to you, Craig, like, “Hey, we just had a test screening for The Hangover. Do you want to go back and reshoot? Anything you want to reshoot? Anything you want to do, go for it.”

**Craig:** Yeah, ooh.

**John:** By god, you would love that chance. And so that’s what we’ve had the chance to do. So, we did some tweaking while we were in Chicago, stuff we could do on stage during our limited afternoon rehearsals. But over the summer there were bigger things we wanted to change around and move. We have new songs. We have new ways that stuff works. And that’s great.

**Craig:** But I’m not going to see a greatly different show in previews than I would once it has its official — ?

**John:** No. It will be the same show. It’ll be nicely put together and worth every penny.

**Craig:** Great. Plus I get to sit next to the creator of the show, the author of the book.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s pretty cool.

**John:** And next to Aline Brosh McKenna which is honestly sometimes more rewarding.

**Craig:** Always rewarding.

**John:** What I will say, whether you’re coming with the special promo code or jut some other time coming to see the show before opening, send an email to Stuart and let him know that you’re coming. Because if I have a chance to find I will find you. The lobby is so much smaller in this theater than the old one, but I will somehow track you down.

**Craig:** I love New York. It’s tiny. I mean, it’s a big city and it’s a tiny city. Great. I’m looking forward to it. I’m really excited for this. And I’ve just got a good feeling, you know? I’ve got a good feeling.

I don’t look at reviews, as you know. I just have a good feeling about the show. I feel like you’ve done it the right way. You have a great, great partner in Lippa. He’s so talented. And I like that you guys didn’t just like jump from a really tiny — sometimes shows go from — I saw a show recently that went from La Jolla to Broadway. It just seemed a little kooky.

I like that you were in Chicago. I mean, you’ve got a great cast. It just feels like everything is right.

**John:** I think everything is right. And one of the things I’m sort of trying to emotionally prepare myself for is like everything can be right and we could run for ten weeks, or ten years.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And some of that is just out of my hands.

What is strange — and this is my last sort of plug for the show — with a movie, like if you don’t see a movie, well you can catch it on DVD. If you don’t see this show while it’s on stage in Broadway, you may never sort of get the chance to see it, or at least not see it with the A-level team and cast because this is sort of the one chance. And we hope to be running for fifteen years like wicked. But realistically that’s probably not going to happen. So, come see the show as soon as you can.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. Well, I’m very excited. And I’m hoping that I can time it so that I can see the show with Seth Rudetsky, my best friend Seth Rudetsky, but I suspect that Seth sees every show like in the first week.

**John:** Yeah, he probably sees opening week.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll make him go see it again with me. How about that?

**John:** Yeah, do it.

**Craig:** Okay. Terrific.

So, my One Cool Thing is a person. I had a really interesting day yesterday. The producer Lindsay Doran had this fascinating gathering of people at a home in Hermosa Beach. And the whole day was really just a discussion of creativity and it was led in part by this brilliant man named Marty Seligman who basically there are chapters about him in psych textbooks.

He famously coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the nature of depression. And his new thing lately is creativity and questioning whether or not we can teach creativity, enhance creativity in people. It’s an interesting line of inquiry. And so we had this day where we all just talked. And there were very cool people there. Aline was there. Lord and Miller, the guys who did the terrific 21 Jump Street and also Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Really cool guys. Jen Celotta who is a former showrunner of The Office. Just neat people like that.

But the person that made me the happiest was a guy I didn’t even know. His name is David Kwong and he’s a very unassuming guy, just sort of sitting there. I didn’t know who he was. And he got up to talk about what he did. And he’s a magician. And I thought, okay, that’s cool. I like magicians. They’re impressive. And he was super impressive. I mean, his tricks were remarkable. He did a bunch of close-up magic for us, it was great.

That aside, I’ve seen awesome magicians before. It’s great, but it doesn’t change my world. No, what made me fall in love with this man was that he is a huge crossword puzzle guy. And in fact he has written a number of crossword puzzles for the New York Times. And I don’t know if you know this but I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.

**John:** I can believe that. It’s not surprising to me. I didn’t know it, but it’s not surprising.

**Craig:** Every day. I am a crossword puzzle connoisseur. I only do the New York Times crossword puzzles. And I love them. And, in fact, he mentioned — he started to describe a Sunday puzzle he did and I stopped him. I’m like, “I did it. I know exactly what you’re talking about. It was great.” It was an amazing Sunday —

So, the Sunday Times crossword puzzles have themes and a lot of times, there’s always some sort of gimmick. And sometimes they’re simple gimmicks like word play gimmicks. And sometimes they’re more involved. And he created one that was so brilliant. The theme was basically, it referred to Mad Magazine. And in the end you did a fold in.

**John:** Ah!

**Craig:** And I like the Mad Magazine fold-ins to create answers to certain starred clues. It was really smart. I was just very inventive and I love that. So, I got super excited. However, what’s so cool and we’re going to put a link to it is that he does a particular trick that isn’t even a trick. Well, it’s a trick, but god, it’s so amazing.

In part of his show what he does is first he does a deal where he fans the deck and he has somebody pick a card. He doesn’t see it. They show it to the audience. They put it back in the deck and he puts the deck away. He moves onto a bunch of other stuff.

Then, he does this bit where he creates a crossword puzzle right in front of you using words that the audience is suggesting, which is already remarkable. To create a crossword puzzle is a very complicated thing.

Well, he starts with this 15×15 grid and he follows the rules of American crosswords which is that all words must be three letters or more. It has to be rotationally symmetric in terms of where the black boxes go. There can’t be too many black boxes. They can’t be clumped together in any particular way. So, all these rules.

And the thought of just creating on the fly a crossword puzzle from random things people are shouting out is amazing. He does it and then when he’s done, as if that weren’t impressive enough, he has embedded the card —

**John:** The card, yeah.

**Craig:** Running diagonally through the puzzle. And it’s just mind-blowing. And the truth is, the only trick part is that he knows what card that person picked. The other stuff isn’t a trick. It’s just a fascinating Rain Man like ability to manipulate words in a way that is just awesome to me. Awesome.

So, his name is David Kwong. He does magic shows around… — I believe he does a standing once a month appointment at the Soho Club here in Los Angeles. Brilliant guy. Super nice guy. Check out this video of what he does. It’s astonishing.

**John:** That sounds great. Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

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

**John:** And I’ll talk to you again next week.

**Craig:** Awesome. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* Scriptnotes First 100 Episodes flash drives [are available until Friday, 8/16](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* Daniel Loeb’s [Variety interview](http://variety.com/2013/film/news/exclusive-interview-daniel-loeb-vows-to-end-sony-spinoff-quest-at-least-for-now-1200572856/)
* Vulture: [Star Script Doctor Damon Lindelof Explains the New Rules of Blockbuster Screenwriting](http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/script-doctor-damon-lindelof-on-blockbuster-screenwriting.html)
* Use discount code SCRIPT for a deal on select [Big Fish on Broadway tickets](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/) (And be sure to [tweet](https://twitter.com/stuartfriedel) or [email](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) Stuart and let him know when you’ll be there)
* David Kwong’s [crossword puzzle magic](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1VPUZDr-fY) will blow your mind
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Bryan Duke

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/long-movies-producer-credits-and-price-fixing).

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** Et cet épisode 98 de Scriptnotes, un podcast pour les scénaristes et les choses qui sont intéressants pour les scénaristes.

Craig, comment ça va?

**Craig:** Bien. Eh…[laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** My French is really good when I read it. I’m terrible at speaking French.

**John:** I’m not especially good at speaking French, either. I’m a good French reader, usually, because you get your Latin roots, you can sort of make it all work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But conversation is challenging, which is challenging for me this week because I’m in Paris. And so I’m in Paris here with my family on vacation. And most of the time I get to speak English because my family speaks English. But when we were around my husband’s friends who speak French, I can follow the conversation if I dedicate every brain cell, but then it comes my turn to speak and I just sound like a third grader.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I lock up. And it’s funny; I have enough where sometimes I can start conversations. So, when my wife and I were in French Polynesia, I could start a conversation with a waiter and my accent is all right. And then I would know, like instead of saying “oui” you oftentimes say “ouais,” which is like yup, or yeah, or ouais.

**John:** D’accord.

**Craig:** And then they think, “Oh, look, he speaks French, and then they really gear it up. And then I’m like, “Non, non, non. Si tu parles plus lentement, peut-être je te comprends.” [laughs]

**John:** What I have found to be the most fun and challenging scenario is whenever we go traveling overseas we do the little Pimsleur courses first, the little audio-only courses that are really good for like just the very basic like, “Hey, hello, how are you? I need help with this thing,” kind of stuff. And they’re completely audio. And you get a really good accent off of them because you’re not messed up at all by reading or trying to figure out how things are supposed to be written down. You’re just speaking.

So, I’ve done that for Mandarin Chinese. I have done it for Japanese. I’ve done it for a few other languages. And Korean was impossible. Like no one can actually speak Korean. I’m amazed that anyone can speak Korean.

But, I can do it for both Japanese and Mandarin. And I sound really convincing for about three sentences. And so someone will go back to me at full speed. I’m like, no, no, no, I really do not speak your language. I can just fake it.

**Craig:** Right. I was just lying. [laughs]

**John:** It’s just all a lie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I suckered you in and now I’ve got nothing.

**John:** Nope. But we have a lot today, because we have a lot of things that happened in the news and then we want to answer some questions that came in over the transom. So, let’s get started.

**Craig:** Great. Let’s do it!

**John:** The things I want to talk about today. First is two things in the news. Apple lost its first round in this federal lawsuit about price fixing. And I want to talk about not that so much, but what it actually means for Hollywood and sort of the business of what we do.

The Producers Guild reach a new agreement with the studios on credits for feature films and for television.

**Craig:** Producers, right?

**John:** Producers, not writers. Producers.

And, finally, there are a couple articles recently about how movies seem to have gotten so long and whether that’s a thing that can be rectified. And sort of where long movies come from. Let’s do that.

**Craig:** Let’s dive in.

**John:** First just some housekeeping, though, some Scriptnotes business. If you bought a t-shirt, it’s probably in your hands. If it’s not in your hands then you should email Stuart at orders@johnaugust.com. And Stuart, who is the person who mans that desk, will figure out where your shirt is, because most of the shirts — I think all of the shirts have been shipped out into the world.

**Craig:** I’m wearing my blue, soft shirt right now.

**John:** Is it nice?

**Craig:** It’s so soft.

**John:** It’s really truly soft.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** And so we had promised like the softest shirt known to mankind. And I actually emailed out to everybody who ordered the blue shirt, because we ended up switching from one model to another model, but it’s a really, really soft shirt; it’s just a shirt that I preferred to the one that Stuart had picked.

There were some questions and confusion about the Golden Ticket. So, the Golden Ticket is when we sent out all these shirts we had these postcards in them and on one postcard, this was actually your idea, Craig, so I’m crediting and blaming you for this.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We handwrote, you and I handwrote saying, “This is the Golden Ticket. If you have this ticket and this secret magic word, email us and we will give you your special prize.”

**Craig:** And has anyone claimed the prize?

**John:** No one has claimed the prize. But a lot of people have written into Stuart saying like, “I think I got the Golden Ticket because I got a special card in my…”

**Craig:** NO!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, you’re not special, snowflake. Everyone got a card. There’s only person out there, and you know… — You know how businesses will do these rebate things where you buy something and it’s a rebate and all you have to do is mail it in. And they do that on purpose because they know no one will ever mail it in. I feel like the person who gets the Golden Ticket won’t even realize and they’re just going to chuck it.

**John:** Yeah. It’s entirely possible that that happened. Because we didn’t keep track of it. Truly, we just like stuffed things in envelopes and we never flipped them back over.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** And now Craig is drinking a beer.

**Craig:** No, it’s a Diet Dr. Pepper.

**John:** That’s his drink of choice. I can actually hear you pouring it into a glass. Are you pouring it into a glass?

**Craig:** No. No, that was a bus. [laughs] Listen, there’s a lot of noise here and you have to learn to discern the subtle difference between city bus and liquid hitting a glass.

**John:** It’s tough. I’m not good with those kind of skills.

**Craig:** Oh, god, that’s good Diet Dr. Pepper.

**John:** And so we’ll make sure we have some of those on hand for you for the live 100th Episode on July 25th in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Now, a bunch of people have asked, say like, “I didn’t get a ticket. How do I get a ticket? Can I please get a ticket?” We’re not at this point planning to release another block of tickets. But what we do know is that there will be some standby tickets available. And so like there will be an opportunity to line up and just come join us.

We will be tweeting about that the day before, so follow me or Craig on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. He’s @clmazin. And when we know what the scoop is we will tell you the scoop. There are only a certain number of people that can fit into that space, but we intend to get as many people who want to come see our show into that space as possible.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Cool. Let’s talk about some things. So, first off, this is a federal lawsuit that happened. This was Federal US government against Apple. And so originally it was the US government against Apple and a bunch of publishers, but the publishers all settled out. And so Apple was like the last man standing there.

And this was a federal lawsuit and the judge, Denise Cote, ruled that Apple conspired with five major publishers to raise the retail price of eBooks. So, the actual opinion that came out, this was yesterday as we’re recording this, was 160 pages. I’m not going to try to like summarize the summaries I’ve read. But it comes down to the question of by whether offering the publishers a chance to set the prices on the books, Apple effectively raised the prices for the whole eBook industry.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And she said, “Yeah, they did.”

**Craig:** It’s a very strange case to me, honestly.

**John:** It’s bizarre.

**Craig:** Yeah, what instigated it was Amazon. Amazon started selling eBooks, essentially is what it comes down to — eBooks. They started selling eBooks at $9.99, even if the price that Amazon was paying to the publishers for the books was greater than $9.99. And the reason they were doing that is classic loss-leader stuff: create a business, become the monopoly in that space, and then go ahead and raise the prices later once you’ve got everybody dialed in to using, I mean, really it’s about driving the Kindle. And it’s just about driving traffic to Amazon.

Amazon, to me, that’s the dangerous area is when you look at Amazon and their monopolistic practices. Apple comes along and says, “Well, we want to sell books, too.” And the book industry, it’s very industry. The book industry had a very interesting reaction to Amazon, because let’s say I sell a book to Amazon and the wholesale price to Amazon is $12. And Amazon turns around and sells it for $9.99. What do I care? I got my $12.

I think their general feeling was that Amazon was just setting them all up for a fall sooner or later, and in general driving down the prices of books isn’t a good thing.

**John:** Absolutely. And, also, look at the publisher’s perspective. They would rather you maybe buy that $25 hardcover book.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They don’t want the mental price point of books to be set at such a low thing that they can’t keep charging $20 for a book.

**Craig:** Right. So, Apple comes to them and they’re like, “Oh, good, finally. Somebody is going to do this a different way.” And initially I guess Apple was like, “We’ll do what Amazon does.” And the booksellers said, “How about something else? How about we use what’s called the Agency Model? Which is essentially how app sales work, where basically we set the price on our end. You just take a cut. You take a percentage.”

And Apple said, fine, let’s do that. Where they seem to have run into trouble is that they wanted to safeguard against basically being stuck selling a book for $15 when Amazon was selling the same book for $9.99. So, they got some deal where — I don’t even understand how they worked this out — but basically there were price tiers. It gets really confusing.

**John:** They created both price tiers and a most favored nation status where they had the option to sell for whatever the lowest existing price was for something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And her argument, the judge’s argument, is that you combine these tiers, the most favored nations and the fact that you’re basically simultaneously dealing with all these publishers that de facto by making this deal the publishers were going to go back to Amazon and say, “Okay, now you’re going to take this new business model,” and the prices were going to go up. The prices did, in fact, go up across the board.

**Craig:** That’s what they did, right. They went back to Amazon and Amazon took that deal. But, I don’t understand how that’s Apple’s fault?

**John:** Well, Apple, I think, makes the very compelling argument that there was essentially no way they could enter this marketplace without coming into it basically exactly this situation. Any other entrance into what was essentially already a monopolistic situation was going to run into this area. Because if you try to do anything different you’re going to change the pricing because the pricing was bizarre. The pricing was not normal and so it’s not that you’re anti-competitive. You were trying to compete and by competing you were raising prices.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically, you know, Amazon legally can get away with selling books for $1 if they feel like it. But the second Apple basically says, “Hey publishers, let’s all get together and agree on a structure together,” that is seen as a collusive behavior, I guess. And that’s where she argues they violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

**John:** Yeah. So, the publishers clearly had already gotten together in ways and that was really, even before Apple had gotten involved, they had gotten together and had conversations which were suspect. But they settled those out without admitting any fault. So, Apple is the only person left standing here. And they’re the ones who are going to have to defend themselves at this next level. And apparently what I’ve read about this, these cases often go to appeal. This could go to the Supreme Court. So, this is not the final round on this.

And so in the show notes at johnaugust.com for this episode I will put two good articles, I thought, that sort of talked through the bigger issues at play in this specific case. So, Adam C. Engst wrote a really good piece for TidBits. And Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote a bigger piece at Fortune that explains what the appeal might be.

What I thought would be interesting for us to talk about though is sort of what ways is this analogous to what happens in studio business and in what ways is it not really applicable. Because if I look at the publishers, you look at the five big publishers that control most of the bestsellers. That seems pretty analogous to our big studio system, is that we have these big giant corporations that produce most of our film and television work.

What is different is there is nothing like an Amazon. There is not one place that is so… — There is not one retailer that is so dominant that you have to bend to their whims. At times there has been. I feel like Walmart probably was at a certain point where it didn’t have the majority of control but it had such a huge footprint that you had to sort of bow to them. But, I think it’s interesting to think about because we as a business would love to be able to control price for our DVDs.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we can’t.

**Craig:** We can’t. Movie tickets are set by the theaters. And they basically, they don’t collude. They essentially look at what people are selling tickets for down the street and they adjust. Movie ticket prices vary all across the country.

When it comes to things like DVDs and stuff like that, the retailers set prices. There’s always a manufactured, a retail price that’s recommended, I would imagine. But the companies don’t fix those.

What came to mind for me was Netflix, because I was talking to a friend of mine who is retired now, but he used to be pretty high up in home video at one of the studios. And he said Netflix essentially is dumping product out there. It’s dumping these rentals out there for two bucks, or something like that. And essentially undermining the value of the libraries.

And I said, [laughs], so very naively, I said, “Well, why don’t the studios just get together and tell them you can’t do that anymore?” And he said, “That’s against the law.”

**John:** That’s against the law.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the problem. The studios can’t get together and say to Netflix, “We’re not letting you do that anymore. We’re going to…” You can’t even say, “We’re not going to give you our movies anymore” as a group.

So, then the problem is, well, if one studio does it, then the other ones are like, “Good. Less competition.” [laughs] Do you know what I mean? It’s like this is the problem. The studios can’t collude to protect their shared greedy interests. So, you have this kind of weird game theory problem of the commons, so to speak.

**John:** Let’s take a little history trip backwards. Because the studios have been involved in antitrust classically and that was back in the days of theaters. And so the studious used to be vertically integrated companies where they not only made movies but they exhibited movies and they used to own theaters. And I’m always going to blank out on the name of the thing that busted that up, but essentially the studios had to divest themselves of movie theaters.

And so movie theaters, the exhibitors who are sort of the equivalent of the retail sellers of movies, cannot be owned by the major studios. And that was a decision that was made.

If you look at broadcast, there classically were distinctions between making television and being able to broadcast television.

**Craig:** Fin-syn.

**John:** Yeah, fin-syn. To some degree there still is. There is some degree you can only own a certain number of broadcast outlets in certain markets, but that has changed over the time, too.

Where the money is now, though, is in video. And so it’s in being able to sell somebody a physical product, those discs. That’s why there have been concerns about like Redbox, when Redbox was a big worry, those vending machines that were dispensing DVDs as rentals that was driving down the prices or driving down the ability of studios to sell those things for purchase because people were just renting them for so super cheap.

Where I think it’s probably most applicable to this Apple lawsuit is in the digital purchase and digital — I guess really digital purchase of movies. Because when you’re dealing with a physical product, that physical product can be resold. There’s markets you’re never going to be able to control. And the same thing happened with books, too. Used book stores aren’t publisher’s favorite things, but they can’t really control that.

When you’re dealing with a digital good, so like that digital purchase of a movie, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to be much harder for the studio to set the price. And it’s conceivable that someone like an Amazon could come in and say, “Okay, we’ll buy your movie from the studio for $2 a copy, but we’re going to sell it for $1.” And the studios would not be delighted by that, at all.

**Craig:** No. I think for awhile the studios were talking about a joint venture where they would have some sort of collective Netflix service that they would own and control. I’m not sure they’re allowed to do that. I’m not sure the five studios can get together and create one company through which they distribute everything digitally. I think that might be antitrust.

I don’t know enough about it. All I know is that they’re in a total panic. And they keep trying, like they take little tiptoes at light the UltraViolet. And I just think they’ve got a real problem. And the law doesn’t help.

**John:** The law doesn’t help, because the law does not help protect against the race to the bottom which is what I think they’re most worried about.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And in the race to the bottom is that the prices will keep falling as low as they can possibly fall. And especially in digital goods, there seems to be like no bottom there. Movies are also, and TV shows, are also confounded by the fact that I don’t think piracy was a big issue in eBooks, because there weren’t really eBooks as piracy kicked in. And then there was Kindle.

I may naively be assuming that piracy isn’t a big issue with eBooks, but it certainly is a very big issue for movies and TV shows. And so ultimately they’re not only competing against Amazon, and Amazon is charging $0.99 for your show, and you wish they would charge $5 for your show; you’re dealing with the people who are selling it for zero dollars.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so it’s a challenging situation for the studios. Now, what the possible solutions could be? You look at HBO, what they do with HBO GO. They control their channel. They control like literally the thing they make, how you actually get it in your home. That’s very useful.

Sony tried to do the same thing with Crackle. We’ll see if that works at all.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There may be some ways in which the studios can control the pipeline better for their product and not have to rely on the Netflix’s and the iTunes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure. When I look at the landscape, I don’t see what the way out is other than literally rewriting the law, which happens. And every now and then you’ll see these big clashes between large companies, one of which is saying we need this to protect our business, and the other industry group is saying this is against the spirit of the internet and it is anti-freedom.

Everybody is lying. Well, I’m sorry, the companies that are saying, “We’re against this because it’s ant-freedom.” They’re lying. They’re against it because it’s going to hurt their bottom line. And when I watch the debate over internet neutrality and SOPA and PIPA and all the rest, and I’m watching Google insisting loudly that they’re the defenders of freedom. I’m like, oh please. Please! You don’t like what this would do to your bottom line. That’s it. Simple, right, so.

There will be — this will end up in congress sooner or later the way that copyright law seems to keep going in the favor of the studios and IP owners. But, I’m not sure we can put the toothpaste in this particular tube.

**John:** Yes. What I would say though as writers, we are going to be watching carefully to see how that toothpaste can be restored to some degree, or at least like not all the toothpaste squeezed out, because without home video there is no residuals. And without residuals the career of screenwriting is much more difficult to maintain.

**Craig:** For sure. There is no residuals, or there are greatly reduced residuals, and then beyond that the studios themselves have to pull back on the amount of films they make and the kind of films they make which reduces employment. It is a vicious cycle. It’s a bad, bad thing.

So, hopefully, I don’t know. Hopefully we can figure it out. Probably not. [laughs] I’m not too sanguine on this one.

**John:** See, I’m the one in Paris and you’re the one who’s like clearly depressed.

**Craig:** [French accent] I don’t know what to do. Life is shit.

**John:** Let’s segue to maybe happier news. I think it’s happier news. This is the Producers Guild announced this week they had reached an agreement with all the major studios.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Which I’m glad you’re excited, too, because I think it’s a good idea. This is essentially what’s going to happen. The Producers Guild has negotiated separately, must importantly note separately, with all of the studios in order to reach what’s sort of an official credit for the producers on films.

And what the system will set up is that a film, or a TV show, can be taken to the Producers Guild. The Producers Guild will certify who actually deserves — in the case of a film, the producer credit. Who deserves the executive producer credit. And those individuals will have a p.g.a. after their name, to certify that they are the person who actually did the work.

And what is the work? Well, the code attaches specific weights to specific functions. And from the press release it says, “35% for development. 20% for preproduction. 20% for production. And 25% for post-production and marketing.” And it also includes the job descriptions, the guidelines, the rules intended to help you resolve credit disputes. And so hopefully those “Produced by” credit blocks will mean something.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Now, what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t keep a studio from giving somebody a producer credit.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There can be producer credits, and that’s still the studio’s domain, but in order to have that p.g.a. after a producer’s name, it has to have gone through the producer’s arbitration process.

**Craig:** Yeah. Thank god for this. First of all, the Producers Guild is not actually a union. That’s the first thing we should point out. They’re not a labor union. They’re not recognized by the federal government. They are not a collection of employees who bargain as a unit for employment. That’s not what they do. They’re just using the word “guild” because, you know, the Directors Guild. It’s Hollywood. Everybody likes to just use the same word as everybody else.

And that’s why they had to kind of negotiate this individually because there is no management group, like for instance, we negotiate with the AMPTP.

I love that they’re doing this. It’s so funny to me that they basically stole the Writers Guild credit arbitration system of percentages, which we all loathe, but it is sort of the best of all bad possible versions of how to do these sorts of things. Because the truth is, just like we do with writing credits, it’s kind of an “I know it when I see it.”

On a movie, you all know, you go to the theater and you see these scrolls of names sometimes of producers, executive producers, co-producers, associate producers. What is the producer even doing and who is it? Well, finally, those of us who work in movies, there is a producer. There is one. There is one. That’s the guy or the woman. That’s it.

And it would be sure nice for those people who do all that work, I would think, to be able to say, “Yeah, yeah, it’s me. I’m the one.”

And, do you know why I really like it, John?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I really like it for the opposite. I like knowing who wasn’t the producer. [laughs] Because, man, and this is good for us as writers. There are so many people saying, “Oh, I produced this. I produced that.” Did you? Did you? I see you have a credit. I don’t know what that means.

If you have a writing credit, I know what that means. It means the Writers Guild said, “Yeah, you authored this movie in part in whole.” But I don’t know what your producer credit means. There’s 12 of you on this thing. Only one of you really did it, so it sure would be nice to know who the real producer is. For that reason alone I think it’s spectacular.

**John:** I think it’s good, too. I would also wonder if over the course of a few years, and as it becomes more commonplace, some people stop asking for that credit because they know they’re not going to get the stamp of approval. And it’s going to be sort of weird to have your name on there and everyone will know that you didn’t really actually produce that movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I thought it was also interesting how they broke up the allotments of sort of how much you had to do in order to get your credit. So, 35% for development. That’s a lot. That means you’re the person who came onboard early on, either reading the script or hiring the writer, working with the writer, getting the script up to the place where it could be green lit.

20% for preproduction, which is all the stuff leading up to getting cast, getting everything put together so you can actually budget, so you can actually make a movie. Only 20% for production, which is, I think, interesting, but also reasonable. Production is a huge Magilla monster, but it’s not all that is involved in making a movie.

**Craig:** I think they capped that in particular because they don’t like this notion of there’s been a credit bleed with UPMs and so called line producers who are now grabbing onto producer titles. And they don’t like that. I don’t blame them.

**John:** And then 25% for post-production and marketing. Post-production I can totally see. Marketing is an incredibility important producer function that the challenge will be of course that the producer credits are going to be determined before all that marketing is done. So, the producer is also involved in sort of like home video decisions and all those other things which are not going to be sort of factored into this part of it. But that’s the best you’re going to do in a perfect situation.

But I think it’s a terrific first step. I think it’s going to be a huge help in sort of knocking down some of the over-proliferation of credits in features and in television as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s going to be nice to know. And it just makes me grumpy when I see a lot of these names. It makes me grumpy when people overstate what they did on a movie. And I very much hope that what you’re suggesting does come true. That out of sheer embarrassment people just stop taking a credit that frankly is not reflective of what they’ve done.

**John:** Yes. Next, let’s talk about movies and long movies. So, this is an article that got sent to me that I thought was interesting, that pointed out that most — have you seen The Lone Ranger?

**Craig:** Haven’t seen it yet, no.

**John:** I haven’t seen it, either. I’ve been in France. Most of the reviews, there have been mixed reviews for The Lone Ranger, but almost every single review says that it’s too long. And it’s interesting because even some movies that got good reviews, it seems to be a common refrain, like, “That movie was just too long.” Like the last Batman.

**Craig:** “It’s too long. It’s too long,” they say. [laughs]

**John:** That last Batman was too long.

**Craig:** Was it? I liked it.

**John:** You liked it? I thought it was too long. I thought by the time we got to the sixth act I was ready for it to be done.

**Craig:** Hold on. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put my umbrage in a jar and save it. And when you’re done I’m going to kick the jar over. [laughs]

**John:** That’s great. I can sort of anticipate what your umbrage will be, that like if a movie is working it is never too long.

**Craig:** Well, how about this? How about the people who are complaining about movies that are too long have to see every freaking movie. That’s their job. Of course they think the movies are too long.

**John:** No, I think audiences think the movie is too long though, too.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I’ve got some numbers to run by you about that.

**John:** All right, great. This article, and this is one by Alex Mayyasi on Priceonomics, was also speculating on the fact of like why are movies so long, because when you really consider that the 75-minute romantic comedy sells for the same ticket price as the 2.5-hour blockbuster.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there is some truth to that. It is sort of weird that we charge the same price no matter what it is. And so there should be economic incentive to make the shortest thing that will satisfy the customer, because they now have to spend anymore than you have to do.

Of course, we actually understand that the way you make movies is the movies you actually sort of first arrive at are vastly longer than the movies you actually release. And so you can say like, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have shot all that stuff that wasn’t going to be in the movie.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Well, yes, but you didn’t know what that stuff was.

**Craig:** That would be a neat trick!

**John:** That was the problem. Yeah. It’s the equivalent of like, you know, “Well, you should only develop the products that you’re actually going to release.” Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, of course.

**John:** Or like, you know, “Maybe we should only build the cars that we can sell.”

**Craig:** “Don’t invest in stocks that are going to go down. That just makes no sense.”

**John:** It doesn’t make any sense at all. People have been doing it wrong for all this time.

**Craig:** They’re just doing it wrong.

**John:** So, what I liked about the article is it was asking sort of the right naïve questions about sort of what is up with our movies and why we tend to make these really long movies. And is there a reason to start looking at the length of movies? Partly because, as writers, we’re often held to contracts that say like, “Your script can be no more than 120 pages.”

Directors are held to these contracts that say like, “Your movie can be no more than two hours long.” So, the directors aren’t really held to that contract. And the more powerful you are as a director, the longer your movie will tend to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not sure where this is coming from. I remember a time in the ’90s where people were complaining that movies were too short and that they were becoming junkie. And that the movies of the ’70s were routinely two hours, 2.5 hours. I don’t know what the running time of The Godfather is. It’s over two hours.

**John:** Yeah. It’s long.

**Craig:** And way, way back there were really long movies. I don’t, you know, this, the article that you sent me, the essay that you sent me, takes a lot of guesses. None of them seem very compelling to me. The one that seems least compelling is Peter Travers’, who I generally find remarkably uncompelling. He says, “Hollywood studios believe movies are weighed by the pound when it comes to Academy thinking. If it ain’t long, it ain’t winning. Stupid, I know, since The Artist and The King’s Speech weren’t long. But ever since Gone With the Wind and Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia, continuing through Titanic, Braveheart, Gladiator, and Lord of the Rings, they think Oscar will not take any epic seriously if it’s under two hours.”

That’s just stupid. That’s a stupid comment. First of all, nobody, nobody in Hollywood, ever thinks about Gone With the Wind, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, ever. Just so we’re clear about that. Ever.

Second of all, when they’re making movies they want people to show up. The reason movies are long aren’t because of Oscars. Check what the grosses are on The Artist and compare it to what the grosses are on, I don’t know, Ted. That’s not what it’s about.

It’s hard for these people to understand this. The reason some movies are long is because the filmmakers made a movie that that was that long. And every single movie you see in a theater has been tested in front of audience. Every single movie has been tested twice, three times, four times. And in all those tests, one of the first questions they ask the audience was, “Did it seem too long? Did it seem too short? Did it move too fast, too slow? Was it just right?”

We talk about pacing and length all the time. Well, if you make a movie and the movie is two hours long, and people say, “Yeah, actually, that was a great length.” Well, then, that’s that. Then we’re fine. And it’s not a problem. It’s just not a problem.

I personally don’t see that there’s this horrible thing happening where movies are too long. I think if we ask ourselves why are movies the length they are, it’s because the people who are making them want them to be that length. And the numbers that I pulled — a couple of numbers I want to run by you.

First of all, The Lone Ranger is an example of a movie where people start going, “Oh good, here’s a movie that we can all talk about why everything has gone wrong. And let’s draw lessons.”

So, one criticism made it into every review. The Lone Ranger is too long. The Lone Ranger had a running time of 149 minutes. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dean Man’s Chest had a running time of 151 minutes. Made like a billion dollars. The first Pirates, if you say, “Well, that was a sequel,” had a running time of 136 minutes. So, do you really think that that 12 minutes was why The Lone Ranger, why people didn’t show up to The Lone Ranger? Do you think anybody said, “I’m not going to go to The Lone Ranger this weekend because it’s 12 minutes longer than the movie that we all went to?”

Of course not. It has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it. And the best example I can give of length, because I believe that there are some movies that you want to be short, like god, our spoof movies were like 70 minutes, because how much of that crap can you take, right? [laughs]

But, if you are allowed…

**John:** Who writes those things anyway?

**Craig:** Those spoof movies?

**John:** I mean, whoever writes those kind of movies should just be taken out and shot.

**Craig:** Shot!

**John:** They do no good for anybody.

**Craig:** That’s right. And their families should be shot. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** I think we should round them all up.

**Craig:** They should be shot. But, one thing that I think is going on is that storytelling is becoming a little more complicated. Not in the strict sense of narrative, but rather what the audience appreciates. You can see it on television. The complexity of narrative in television series has just quadrupled, quintupled, whatever you want to call it. Go ahead and watch Breaking Bad, or The Wire, or The Sopranos and see how frankly complicated the narrative gets. Look at Game of Thrones. How many characters? They need the time, right? We become used to an expansion of time.

So, take the case of Pixar. Pixar’s first movie, Toy Story, was 77 minutes long. I’m going to run it in order now from Toy Story through Cars. So, Toy Story: A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, here are the running times: 77, 96, 92, 92, 100, 116, 117.

**John:** They’ve crept up.

**Craig:** They’ve crept up because they have more that they want to do. It’s fine. I don’t WALL-E to be 60 minutes. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** I do largely agree with you, obviously. I feel like there’s a reason why movies are a certain length. And part of the reason why we make certain movies and make certain movies at a certain length is because we want to differentiate them from what you would see in a one-hour television show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes movies need to be bigger because they are bigger. They are something that you could not possibly put on a small screen. And that’s a reason why, but also it speaks to the genres of movies that we’re making right now and why I think it’s much harder to make the simple little romantic comedy that we used to be able to make because simple little romantic comedies are now a half-hour single camera comedy and they’re not a feature film.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s just sort of what we’re doing right now. So, yes. And I also really do sympathize with The Lone Ranger just because it becomes the punching bag for whatever we want to say about movies right now. And so, you could say like, “Oh, it failed because it was this or that,” or because Johnny Depp has fallen off the star map.

Or, because it was a giant western, it probably made more than any other western ever did in its opening weekend. It’s just the expectations on it were so high that it was not possible to reach those expectations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I would also sympathize on The Lone Ranger because nobody didn’t show up the first weekend because of its length. As you said, it’s like, you don’t know what the movie is until you see the movie. And you certainly don’t know that the movie is as long as it is before you see the movie.

**Craig:** When movies, big movies, don’t work, there is an explosion of punditry that is nauseating to me. As if we could somehow control this. As if by expressing the right analysis we can prevent this from ever happening again, or perhaps hold the idiots that would wander down that path again up to ridicule. Nonsense.

Go ahead and explain to me why things work. Go ahead and explain to me why things don’t work. And all I can do is look back at you and say, “Shut up. You don’t know. You don’t know.” There is a magic to these things when they work. And there is this weird creepy anti-magic when they don’t. And in the end here’s why it doesn’t work: people just didn’t like it. Not the genre. Not the actor. Not the length. Not the 3D. Not the time of the year. It just didn’t work!

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That’s it. Stop writing articles. Geez, man. Everyone’s got write an article to try and explain this. You can’t. Stop it. Stop it! [laughs]

**John:** I agree. I loved The Heat. And I’m so happy that it did so well, but if it hadn’t done so well, if say a disaster had happened that weekend, you know, somewhere in the world, and people didn’t go to the movie theaters, people would have tried to write the articles on sort of why female buddy comedies can’t work.

And the fact that it did work, they’re not really writing those articles saying, “Hey, there’s a whole new genre of everything.” No, they’re taking that as just an aberration. Like, oh, there’s that one. So, yes, that’s happening.

**Craig:** It’s sick.

**John:** Because they’re always looking for the faults that they can point out rather than this is hooray for this success.

**Craig:** You know, John, it’s as if the people that write these articles are inherently miserable.

**John:** [laughs] It is possible.

**Craig:** It is possible.

**John:** We have a listener question that I want to get to. “As Scriptnotes has a following, I wonder — ” this is from Sam, by the way. “As Scriptnotes has a following, I wonder how visible you guys are to writers, producers, and executives within the industry. Do you know if they discuss topics you cover on any given week? I ask because the podcast is influencing me, but it can’t change much outside of what I put on the page. My hope would be that players working within the film industry listen to Scriptnotes and say, ‘Ah-ha!’ and change for the better, or at least a little bit.”

Craig, do you think we are making any difference in the film and television industry?

**Craig:** Oh my god. Probably not. [laughs] I mean, I think that if we are making a difference it’s with writers. I do know a lot of writers, a lot of professional writers listen to our podcast, which is very gratifying to me. And I hope that they are a little more enabled to go about their day and protect their work and improve their work because of something we’ve said. But, I can’t, in all humility, I can’t say that we do or don’t. I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t think we have a big influence in the industry overall. And I would say that because I don’t think people who are not writers really listen to our show very often.

Like my agent listens to the show most times, but not all the time. I think junior people would be more likely to listen to our show than sort of the senior people, just because they’re people who might listen to podcasts overall.

Writers who are on TV shows, I know quite a few of them listen to the show. That’s terrific. That’s wonderful. So, if in any way we’re sort of providing a voice and commentary to what they’re feeling and experiencing in their daily lives, I think that’s useful. I don’t know that it necessarily changes anything. I think it may change their individual behaviors and I guess collectively changing individual behaviors or attitudes could have a bigger impact, but I don’t think we have any sort of large scale impact in sort of how things overall work.

**Craig:** I’m okay with that. If maybe all we get out of this is that when you and I are in our sixties, the people running studios will look at us fondly. [laughs] We were part of their childhood.

**John:**[laughs] Absolutely.

**Craig:** And give us a job.

**John:** Remember way back when. We’ll be like one of those vintage commercials you see on YouTube for like those toys that you sort of half remember. It’s like, oh, that really was a thing.

**Craig:** That’s right! “You know you were born if the 2000s if you remember this.”

**John:** Oh. That little tank that you could put in the little code for like what sequence of moves you wanted it to make.

**Craig:** I remember that.

**John:** That was great. And Merlin.

**Craig:** I just see some guys like, “Hey, can I ask you? Why did you hire John August?”

“I was this Scriptnotes fan. I don’t know, man. I was a Scriptnotes fan. Whatever.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. “Worst decision I ever made was hiring him to do that adaptation of Smurfs 4.”

**Craig:** Smurfs 4!

**John:** Smurfs 4.

**Craig:** You’re not going to be able to get that.

**John:** I blanking out on what the name of The Smurfs is in France, but it’s completely different. It’s a completely different word.

**Craig:** Right. Because it comes from, is it…

**John:** Belgium.

**Craig:** …Belgium, man. It’s like Schnarfin or something like that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s something more like the Schnarfin kind of word here.

But as we were riding our Velibs around today. So, we’ve been riding the free bikes, the Velibs, which are just amazing. But we passed a total gas station that had ads for Smurfs 2. But they do the same thing they do in English where it’s like, you know, “What the Smurf?” But, of course, it’s whatever the other crazy French word is for it.

And so it was just so absurd we had to document it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And take care of that.

**Craig:** Schmurfen? Schlarfen?

**John:** Schlarfen. Schlarfen sounds about right.

**Craig:** Is it Schlarfen? I’m going to look it up.

**John:** Yeah. Whatever it is, it’s fantastic and just as absurd as Smurf is.

**Craig:** I guess if I Google “French Smurf.”

**John:** God, it could be porn.

**Craig:** No, I have it on safe search, because I don’t want. It’s Schtroumpfs.

**John:** Yeah. Schtroumpfs.

**Craig:** What the Schtroumpfs?

**John:** What the Schtroumpfs?

**Craig:** Why couldn’t we handle Schtroumpfs here in the United States?

**John:** Ah, Smurf is actually a better word in English.

**Craig:** Mm. You might be onto something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Schtroumpfs.

**John:** So, I’m ready for my One Cool Thing, which is what I actually just spoiled the reveal on, which is the Velib. Which, if you come to Paris, you need to check out the Velib which are the rental bikes that you can get here which are, it’s the perfect combination of sort of my environmental geekery and my true nerd data geekery in that you have these bikes which you can rent for up to half an hour for free.

You punch the little code. You disconnect it from this automated rack. And you get to ride around the city. And when you’re done you can pop it into any other rack and it is there for the next person to use.

It’s not perfect. And so sometimes you will find a bike and you will get on it and you will realize that this seat is broken, or that it is just not a functional bike in the way that you would like a functional bike to be. And then you have to swap it back out again.

I first rode these bikes when I was here with a group of screenwriters, Film France had flown over a group of screenwriters including Derek Haas and John Lee Hancock and some other fun writers. And showed us all around. And on that trip five years ago they had just started the Velib program. And so I took my first bike out and had a terrifying ride around, literally across a bridge, down a street, and across another bridge, and back to the rack, because the city was not very well set up for bikes.

The city has gotten much better set up for bikes. And so there are now actually bike lanes. And if you are a tourist visiting the city it is one of the most ideal ways to sort of see what Paris is like. I would highly recommend.

**Craig:** It sounds great.

**John:** Very good. And there are actually apps now that will help you figure out where the stations are, how many bikes are available, if there is space at the rack to return you bike, which is one of the big frustrations and challenges is that sometimes you’ll reach a rack and actually there’s no place to check your bike in. And so therefore you’re looking for one.

**Craig:** Oh, so there’s three of you and there’s only two spots, which must be so annoying.

**John:** It is quite annoying. That does happen. So, I would encourage you if you’re coming to Paris to check that out. If you are going to London you should check out the equivalent system there which I think Barclays runs it. New York has Citi Bike.

It is a good thing. I don’t know that Los Angeles will ever really be able to do it, because we’re just so spread out. Like the stations would be like 20 miles apart.

**Craig:** Los Angeles has the deal where you can just get BMWs. They’re in a rack. BMW 3 Series are in racks.

**John:** Well, I don’t know if you know this, Craig, but they actually have Auto Leap here which is the car equivalent. So, they have these racks of like four little mini cars. They are luxury cars. And so literally you check them out and you can drive them around and check them back in.

**Craig:** That’s cute. I like that.

**John:** It’s cute.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is absolutely on theme with yours. I’ve been very good about not talking about Tesla stuff every week, even though I want to. But…

**John:** The Tesla is Craig’s amazing car, which is the best car in the world.

**Craig:** It is the best car in the world. That’s a fact. That has now been verified. It’s objective. It’s a fact. Science has indicated it so. [laughs]

So, Tesla has this interesting network called Superchargers, which I’m sure you guys have heard of, maybe. I’m sure maybe. You’re driving around in your Tesla and you want to go on a long trip and they’re putting in these free Supercharging stations where you pull in and you plug in to their charging station. It’s free. And it actually uses direct current to the battery which is like mainlining heroin to a battery.

And you can charge your Tesla from zero to 250 miles in something like a half an hour. So, you plug in, you go eat lunch, you come back, you’ve got another 250 miles. And they are rolling them out, I mean, their plan by 2014 is that they’re everywhere, but for now there is one in Barstow, so I can go back and forth to Vegas if I want. And there’s a string of them between LA and San Francisco, so you can go up and down as you wish.

But, there’s a little bit of a tradeoff there. It’s free, but you have to wait a little bit. You have to wait a half an hour. Okay, fine. What if you don’t have a half an hour? What if you’re on your way, you hit the Supercharging station, you’re down and you got to get a move?

So, they’re installing these battery swapping stations. Have you seen this video?

**John:** Oh my god, no. I have to see this. Send a link.

**Craig:** It’s the coolest! I will send a link. So, now your option is free half an hour or pay something like $60 and in two minutes you’re on your way. It’s sick. So, it’s like filling up with gas at that point, economically.

**John:** So, I don’t understand. Is the battery in the Tesla really that self-contained that they can just take the whole thing out and put it back in?

**Craig:** Yes! So, when they constructed this thing they built it specifically with this in mind. They just didn’t have the swapping technology dialed in yet. But now they’re starting to install them. You roll up on this thing that’s like an oil change. You roll up, but underneath is like an opening. And you say on your little touch screen, yeah, I want to swap my battery and it’s going to cost sixty bucks.

These things come up and unrivet your battery, pull it down, move it aside, save it for you. That’s your battery. Okay? You’re going to be able to get it back later. And then they put up a fresh battery, screw it into place, and you’re off. And they showed in this video they were able to battery swap two Tesla Model S’s in the time it took one Audi to fill up a gas tank completely. It’s that fast. It’s nuts.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And the idea is that then on your way back you pull in and you get your battery back. It’s crazy. And infrastructurally, whether or not this becomes a thing, all I can say is you have to give Tesla credit for consistently pushing us all forward. It’s like there’s just this push from them that is undeniable. The way that Apple used to push computing forward. Even when it was a little clunky. Even when System 7 would freeze a lot. They’re pushing it. They’re always pushing. And I love it.

So, it’s a very Cool Thing. We’ll put a link to the video on the website. And just marvel at it. I marvel.

**John:** I really wish the Tesla Supercharging stations had a giant Tesla coil that was arcing and sort of sparking the whole time.

**Craig:** That would be cool.

**John:** Because that would make me want to go to it.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** It would also be kind of great if like when you drive up, like everything just goes into black and white. Maybe they can tint your windows in a certain way so you feel like you’re in some sort of like big giant mad scientist movie. That would be awesome.

**Craig:** I also would like it if the Supercharging stations were hooked into the grid in such a way that as you charge your car the city around you just went dark.

**John:** Ha! That would be lovely.

I also just think, like, god, all those batteries just feels, in one location, feels really dangerous.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m glad you brought that up. It would be, accept Tesla has put an enormous amount of technology into the way they constructed their batteries. There’s this problem with batteries essentially called runaway discharge, I think, or something like that, which is both a gynecological problem and also an issue with batteries. [laughs]

I’m sorry. So, in the case of a battery, because the Tesla battery is really an array of like, I don’t know, something like 500 little tiny batteries. And if one of them starts to discharge it can like trigger this chain reaction, and then there’s a fire, and it’s this whole thing.

Well, the way they designed it, all the batteries are essentially isolated from each other and then the whole thing appears to be coated in some sort of spectacular foam absorbing, whatever. The point is there hasn’t been one incident since the Model S has been on the road. Not one. The batteries appear to be remarkably safe.

**John:** Hooray! Great. So, a link to Craig’s video, and to articles about the Velib, and everything else we talked about on the show today will be at johnaugust.com/podcast, which is where you can always find the links to our show notes.

If you are listening to us through something that is not iTunes, it would be great if you went to iTunes and subscribed to us so we know how many people are subscribing to us. And if you’re there subscribing to us, you might as well leave a comment, because we love to read those.

Craig, last episode I pitched that if someone wanted to write us a new outro we would be doing an exhibition of people’s submissions for an outro for our show, which is the music that plays us out. So, the intro is [hums], and so I said, go crazy, go nuts. Do something exciting that can show your talents as a composer of music.

And so we have our first one today. And, Craig, it’s kind of amazing.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** Yes. So, this is by Matthew Chilelli, who apparently lives in Los Angeles. He sent us this thing. He said it’s a “John Williams take on the Scriptnotes theme.”

**Craig:** It’s so cool. It’s really good.

**John:** And I think it’s just great.

**Craig:** Good work, Matthew. I love it.

**John:** So, Matthew, thank you very much for sending this through. If you want to send in your own outro theme, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. Ideally send us like a link to a SoundCloud or something, because otherwise we’re going to get choked with mp3s. But, we’d love to hear your take on it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [TidBITS](http://tidbits.com/article/13912) on the Apple eBooks price fixing suit, and [Fortune](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/07/10/apple-ebook-verdict-appeal/)’s article on the same
* [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/business/media/new-designation-signifies-i-was-really-a-producer-of-this-film.html?_r=1&) on the PGA’s new mark, and the [PGA](http://www.producersguild.org/blogpost/923036/164597/The-Producers-Mark–What-it-means-where-it-comes-from-and-how-you-can-get-it) on what it is and how you get it
* [Why are Hollywood movies so long?](http://priceonomics.com/why-are-hollywood-movies-so-long/)
* [Velib](http://en.velib.paris.fr/) bike sharing in Paris
* Tesla [battery swap](http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap) is worth watching
* [Send us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) a link to your downloadable Scriptnotes outro